← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Supreme Court Smacks Trump’s Tariffs, Prince Andrews Arrest An Elite Cover-Ups & Aliens Revealed? | The Tom Bilyeu Show Live
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- [00:00]
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Tom Dillw
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Tom Dillw show live. We are. We've got a lot of talk, lot to talk about today. Prince Andrew, he got arrested, then released again. There's no charges yet, but at least we can say that the Epstein arrest counter has incremented to one. All right. It's better than nothing. I hope you guys are ready to talk about aliens. This is. This is getting. This is getting really interesting, actually. And I'm not like a big alien guy, but when. When you have to distract from the Epstein files, Drew, you pull out all the big guns.
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Drew
Trump is in the deep, dark recesses of the White House. Like aliens. I gave him the JFK files. I'm running out of files to release. I'm running out of things to give them.
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Tom Dillw
He's like knocking on doors. Excuse me, do you have anything that might distract the Americans files out here? Right.
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Drew
No, the sex chambers is next. Oh, man. Come on, guys.
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Tom Dillw
It is wild. It's so blatant. And that is the part that I find absolutely amusing. Amusing in Certainly a gallows humor kind of way. But like, I don't know what else to do with that. Like we've talked about forever, like, hey, if ever the like world is in trouble and they need to unite and get everybody pointed in the same direction to make sure that nobody's paying attention, whatever it is that they want them to stop paying attention to, they. They're going to announce aliens. And literally right on cue, as the Trump administration is like, you got what you're gonna get. We're not releasing anything else. Sorry, kids, but we've got aliens. Oh my God. Okay, so I'm gonna take the bait. I'm gonna go in all alien things.
- [03:04]
Drew
That's a distraction. We have to talk about the thing first. Cause Prince Andrew getting arrested, that's where we're gonna start. But we're gonna get to the aliens, so we're gonna get there. But yes, I hope so.
- [03:12]
Tom Dillw
All right, well, if you guys wanna talk about Andrew, the former Prince of England, he was arrested yesterday smack bang on his 66th birthday. So happy birthday to him. He was arrested on suspicion of misconduct in public office, which sounds kind of weak, but we're going to get into in a minute. It's maybe not as weak as it sounds. This is all due to his relationship to the horrifying Epstein saga. I know all of you guys have been paying attention to that. He was one of the early names to get called out. Trump has actually been calling him out for years. A clip was resurfacing of Trump saying, yeah, the island was a cesspool. And just ask Prince Andrew. So the odds that he was more involved in that than your average bear is probably very high. And so we'll see how that comes out. But the irony is this is a bit like Al Capone going down for taxes. So what he's being charged with is very different than what you would expect. He was held for 11 hours. He was questioned by detectives and then ultimately released under investigation, as they say. Now, so far he actually hasn't been charged with a crime. So none of us should get too excited just yet. For now, he is just under investigation. And while many are rightly decrying this as both a far more minor charge than they would expect, given the seriousness of the allegations, it does at least increment the Epstein files arrest counter from 0 to 1. I don't want to blow past that. Things may be going more slowly than any of us want, but they are still going. And I think that they're going in large part because we Live in the age of hypervelocity of information. It is just ever present. And as long as we absolutely refuse to allow us to be censored en masse like we were during the 2020 Covid era, if we actually stand up for our rights here, this is going to be a common occurrence. I think this is going to be something that we see become a standard part of life where we are actually able to hold people to account that trying to bury things, trying to sweep it under the rug, trying to get us to go pay attention to something else, it just doesn't work. People are able to connect dots that previously they were not able to and be able to get people to pay attention to specifics. And so fingers crossed that this continues to go somewhere that is productive. Um, also interesting, this is the first arrest of a senior British royal in nearly 400 years. That's good. Um, it's. Maybe you can get caught up in the distressing fact that it's been 400 years. Cause I can pretty much guarantee you it's not been 400 years since people have done something wrong. But it does show that the age of information is going to make some of the old structures just impossible to maintain. All right. The specific thing that got Andrew arrested were emails found in the Epstein files that appear to show him forwarding confidential UK trade reports directly to Jeffrey Epstein. Which is crazy how like take Jeffrey Epstein as a class of person and not just as a single individual, and you begin to understand why this is so unnerving. You've got people all over in these governments that have a thing that they want. Maybe it's access to money, maybe it's access to power, or very distressingly, access to sexual access to underage people. And in exchange for that access, they are willing to trade governmental secrets, willing to debase themselves. I mean, it's really, really wild. Now, while all of this supposedly was happening while Andrew was serving as Britain's special trade envoy, making it that much more unnerving, one email showed him sending the information five minutes after he received it. You presumably only do that if you've got like a pre standing workflow of just reflexively sending things like that to Epstein. So Lord only knows how many things have yet to come to light that he has done. So we'll see. The police searched his Royal Lodge in Windsor, his former residence, his current home on the Sandringham Estate. The National Police Chief's Counsel gave the home office a 30 minute heads up that they were gonna be making the now misconduct in public Office is a. Is a common law offense in England, but it really does cover, like, serious things. So they're calling it willful abuse or neglect of public responsibilities, but the maximum sentence is life imprisonment. Now, I doubt that that's what we're going to see, but it is. Despite the sort of underplayed name, this is a pretty serious charge and the potential punishment is extreme. So we'll see how this plays out. Now, for context, this isn't a procedural slap on the wrist, which is honestly what I thought it was when I first heard the name of the charge. So it is far more serious than that. This is the charge that the Crown Prosecution reserves for cases where the public official knowingly betrayed the trust of their position. So it's like edging up towards, not necessarily treason, but it's got those kind of vibes. So King Charles responded within hours of hearing about this. His statement said that he learned of the rest with, quote, unquote, the deepest concern, and that the quote, unquote law must take its course. Now, if you guys know much about him, assuming that you can believe what you see in the Crown, he's always been that King Charles has always been the guy on the outside of the family, the one that like, never quite fit in. So it is very interesting to see him be quite willing to distance himself from the family. You can read what he is saying in his announcement is basically, don't look at me, I'm not saving this guy. And that tracks. Charles had already stripped Andrew of his titles and royal duties and Andrew has been living at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate after being pushed out of the Royal Lodge. So the family has been all too happy to see the fall from grace happen in pull in full public view. And so we'll see. Doesn't appear to be over yet. The Giuffre family released a statement. The siblings of Virginia Giuffre, who accused Andrew of sexual abuse when she was underage and who died by suicide in 2025. I was literally going to say we should probably put that in air quotes. Suicide at last. So this is their statement at last. Today, our broken hearts have been lifted at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty. Spencer Kuvan, an attorney for multiple Epstein victims, said the arrest may finally restore some faith to those who believe justice was unreachable. Now, where I land on all of this is that there's no reason to believe that this is actually going to lead to a conviction. We don't even have a charge yet. This is good. It feels like a step in the right direction, but I'm still not convinced that we're going to really untangle the rat's nest. I don't know that anybody is officially on record as saying this, but there have been enough rumors of people coming out, Trump among them, that if we pursue all of this all the way, that basically everybody, not everybody, but so many people at the highest levels of not just the US Government, but all over the world are involved, that it would just unwind everything. And so there is this sense that, do we trade stability? Do we ask people to accept that they need to bury their heads in the sand again? And going back to James Burnham, this was like the very question he was putting forward in his book the Machiavellians Defenders of Freedom, is that in an era where information is this readily available, that ultimately it's destabilizing to a society, and that it might simply not be possible to allow people to have so many fractured narratives about what's going on. So I find that incredibly distressing. And if we accept that, I think we're going to be in a much worse position. So my take on all this is you do have to keep pressing forward. You do have to keep prosecuting, you do have to keep unwinding all of this. You have to follow it where it goes, because you may to some extent have to accept that this. That the vast majority of the current crop of elites just slowly disappear. Some will go to prison, some will be disgraced, and you ultimately replace it with the next generation. That will be kept in check, quite frankly, because they just know that in this age, there's no hiding it under the rug. And so you'll get more people that simply refuse to be around these people to go to these kinds of parties. And so they don't get sucked in, they don't get into the kompromat of it all. There is a theory that goes something like this, basically, hey, you want to be a part of this club? We're going to do crazy shit. We're going to talk completely openly about how the world really works in terms of power structures. But I can't ever have you ratting on me. And so I'm going to need something really bad on you. I think it is a very distressing sign that one of the more universal things that you can reach for is giving people access to underage sex. Like, I can forgive the money thing. Money is extremely high utility. But, Jesus, it really does seem like there's a distressingly High percentage of people that are willing to say, yeah, cool, I'll take access to the underage sex thing in exchange for all of this. And so that ends up being the compromise that they have on everybody. And so I think people are just going to realize, like, it's not worth it, man. So that's my hope. But that is going to require that we keep pushing and that whether this takes a year, two years, five years, whatever, that you just keep going, you keep going, and that we have the stomach to face it even when it sort of loses a sex appeal, of being that thing that really gets people juiced up and everybody wants to talk about it just quietly in the background. It's got to be a thing that the government just sees all the way through. It's going to destroy legacies. That is what it is. And ultimately, all of us have to have our eye on the prize, which is the ability to build a stable government that has narratives that are born of contact with truth and debate. And so, yes, I am arguing for a world where we completely disregard the concept of mal information and that we accept, barring things that are classified for national security reasons, which would be a very small amount of things, but barring that, there is nothing that can't be known. So if we believe it to be true, we can and will present it, and we will debate those ideas in public and they will stand on their merit. When we get into the alien saying, we're going to talk about an idea that to me seemed so absurd before it was proven experimentally that I just never would have been able to accept it, and yet even that ends up being proven true. So the amount of humility that we have to have in the face of what we think we know, so when people from on high tell you that thing is unknowable, or they tell you, hey, we know that this thing is true, and therefore everybody else is spreading misinformation. When I say you need to respond to that with a level of aggression that would make an MMA fighter blush, I mean it, man. Like, we really cannot tolerate people telling us that there are things that we can't talk about. We just can't. And I don't expect that to be a popular thing in practice, but that needs to be like, you want to start talking about things you would fight for, hills you would die on. That would be one of them. People use information to control you. They do not use it to set you free. So ultimately, that's going to be for all of us. And this is going to be a litmus test for us, the public, as to whether or not we let this go away. Please don't. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.
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- [15:55]
Tom Dillw
Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
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Drew
Former Prince Andrew gave us this gem yesterday on the COVID of the Sun. Yeah, he looks good.
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Tom Dillw
They have gone out of their way to make that kid look terrible.
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Drew
Yeah, he did it. He did it. He's gonna be regulated to some villa in east, some villa in West Europe and suffer quote, unquote. Same thing that they did to Napoleon. Like, yes, you could never come back to France. Enjoy your island. And he was all sad and I was like, I don't fool.
- [16:25]
Tom Dillw
He still came back, though. He couldn't help himself, dude. That's the very interesting thing is we are both the shout and the echo. And it is very hard for people to tolerate if you have that kind of personality of I'm doing things and thinking things and there's nobody for me to like, share that with to then get that feedback on. I think about that a lot with myself. Like, how much of my life is predicated on me wanting to make sure that the things I do, quote, unquote, matter. I am really driven by that. And it's a weird quirk of the human psyche that we like disappearing into the middle of the woods. A lot of people say they want to do it and then we realize that it is considered inhumane to isolate people. People just don't do isolation well. So, like, even I talk a big game about I can like, I actually thrive on isolation. But I remind myself, I thrive on isolation when I'm married and I have a company. Would I actually thrive on isolation if I were truly by myself? So imagine going from being a prince, treated royally when you go places, you're adorned and people greet you, literally like royalty. And then you, you know, whether you have a nice house or not, you end up going somewhere where no one gives a fuck about you. You are a pariah no one wants to hear from you that that is psychologically damaging. Now, for the country, that's not going to be enough for the world. We need to see this guy in a prison if he's guilty, obviously. While my layman's view from the outside is that, whoa, there's a lot of smoke here, I still want justice to run its course. I do not want to turn this into some sort of vigilante thing where people take it into their own hands, because that turns on you very, very fast. Um, but I think that, man, guilty people need to get locked up. Yeah, that's the long and the short.
- [18:28]
Drew
Vinnie from the PBD podcast threw up this tweet, the connections in this one interview. So Virginia Giuffre, who you just talked about, reveals that Epstein trafficked her to Andrew. She's then hit by a bus, then commits suicide. The interviewer, that's Nancy Guthrie's daughter, who everybody's, like, looking for. Her mother gets kidnapped and is still being held for ransom. And then today, Prince Andrew was arrested. So these kind of the dominoes falling.
- [18:53]
Tom Dillw
This is so crazy. This is so crazy. And this is. Oh, man. There's just enough, like, plausible deniability that it just keeps going.
- [19:07]
Drew
It's. It's. It's close enough to be weird and far enough to be like, well, you know. Yeah, like that shoulder shrink. But it's. It's interesting. We have some breaking news, but I definitely want to hit this alien thing first and then we'll jump into it. But the Supreme Court's. The Supreme Court's tariff decision just dropped. Yeah, it was not good for Trump. So, yes, we could go in there. It's going to be a bit of a longer read.
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Tom Dillw
All right.
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Drew
But I want to close the loop on the aliens thing first.
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Tom Dillw
All right, but brace yourselves, everybody. That. That we've been waiting on this season. This is going to have some real consequences. Okay, uh, before we get to that, though, I think talking about the aliens is important, and it's going to be pretty crazy, because yesterday, President Trump literally posted on True Social that he's going to give us the aliens. We can't get any more of the Epstein files, but we get the aliens, so it's better than nothing. He said he's going to direct the Pentagon and other federal agencies to begin identifying and releasing government files related to. And this is a direct, quote, alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified Aerial phenomena, and Unidentified Flying Objects. He said it was based on, quote, unquote, tremendous interest from us.
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Drew
The Public.
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Tom Dillw
Now, I'm going to take the bait and I'm going to tell you why. In 2022, three physicists won the Nobel Prize for proving experimentally the single most scandalous fact that is literally ever been revealed about the universe. I still can't believe we all just keep going about our daily lives after this revelation. Through a series of experiments spanning decades, scientists demonstrated that the universe is not locally real. Real meaning objects have definitive properties whether you're looking at them or not. Local meaning things can only be influenced by their immediate surroundings. The Nobel committee confirmed that the experiments show that neither of those things is true. To put it bluntly, this means the universe at least behaves like a simulation running somewhere on a computer. Let me say that again. They have experimentally proven that it at least seems like the universe behaves like a simulation running on a computer somewhere. Okay? It means that if no one is looking at the moon, it actually is not there. I always expect, like, fireworks or something to happen when I say that. Like, this is so wild. The Nobel Prize winning experiments showed that two particles can be entangled, linked such that measuring one instantly determines determines the behavior of the other, even if they're on opposite sides of the universe. There's no signal, there's no delay. And the key word is determined. It's caused by measuring one of them causes the behavior of the other. Now, when this was first posed as a theory, because this showed up in Einstein's own math, Einstein just stroked out. He refused to believe it and mocked it, calling it spooky action at a distance. And what we have found is that apparently the universe cares very little about what Einstein was prepared to believe. Now, I say all of this in the context of aliens because clearly the universe does not work the way that most people think it does. So it'd be beyond stupid to say that we know aliens do or don't exist, or that we know that they have or haven't visited us. Our universe behaves like a video game running on a computer somewhere. So I'm going to open my mind that life may not be the life simulator that I thought it was, and maybe this is an action RPG and shit is about to get really weird. And apparently Obama thinks the same thing. He said on a podcast recently, the aliens are real. He later clarified that he meant, statistically speaking, the universe is so vast that odds are that there's life out there and that he personally saw no evidence of contact during his presidency. And now Trump has accused Obama of leaking classified information when he said that and Trump was saying, oh, I might declassify the files to get him out of trouble. This is all political theater. When a reporter asked Trump directly whether he'd seen evidence of non human visitors, his answer was I don't know if they're real or not. Now the odds that this is all political theater is basically 100%. The odds that it's designed or at least timed right now to distract us from the Epstein files, in my opinion, borders on 100%. But let's run through just some of the aliens are real claims that have come from reasonably credible voices. In the last call it decade, a man named David Grush, a 14 year intelligence officer who worked for the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency at a level equivalent to a full bird colonel, sat before the House Oversight Committee and tested under oath about alien technology. He was the co lead for UAP analysis and served as his agency's representative to the Pentagon's Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. So this is a career intelligence professor who filed a formal whistleblower complaint through the intelligence community Inspector General. Under oath, Grusch told Congress he had been informed through his official duties of a multi decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse engineering program. He said the US Government possesses craft of non human origin. He said he interviewed over 40 witnesses with direct knowledge of these programs over a four year period. When asked directly whether the government had recovered non human biologics from crash sites, he said yes. The Pentagon has denied all of this of course. But Grush wasn't alone at that hearing. Sitting next to him was retired Navy Commander David Fravor, a Top gun graduate and 18 year combat veteran who commanded the Black Aces Strike Fighter Squadron. And on November 14th of 2004, Fravor was flying an FA18 Super Hornet off the coast of San Diego when the USS Princeton's advanced radar detected objects descending 80,000ft in less than a second. That's a lot. Like a lot a lot. Fravor was sent to investigate. What he found was a smooth white wingless object about 40ft long, shaped like a Tic Tac, hovering above churning water. It had no visual visual propulsion, no wings, no exhaust. When Fravor descended toward it, the object mirrored his movements and accelerated and vanished less than a minute later. It was detected on radar 60 miles away. That's so crazy. In this written statement to Congress, Fravor said the object was far superior to anything that we had at the time, have today, or are even looking to develop in the next 10 plus years. The third witness was Ryan Graves, a former Navy FA18 pilot who reported that his squadron encountered unknown objects on an almost daily basis during training missions off the East coast between 2014 and 2015. All three men called for better reporting systems and reduced stigma around UAP encounters. Now, I want to be very careful here. None of this is proven. Grush himself has not publicly produced physical evidence. He says he has photographs, documents, and classified testimony that he shared with the Inspector General. But none of that has been made public, at least not yet. But this could be the kind of thing that Trump actually ends up releasing if he's serious about declassifying this stuff. If he does, it could be. I mean, it could alter our perception of the universe for sure. It could begin to show how advanced some of the technology that we now have access to really is. Or it could just all be smoke and mirrors. We will see. Skeptics have rightly pointed out that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And so far, we just don't have any of it. But this is why so many people want these files released. Then Senator Marco Rubio, who was vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, confirmed that people with firsthand knowledge have come forward to his committee as well. And in late 2025, Federal Reserve governor of all people, Lisa Cook, named UAP related aerospace developments as one of the areas of strategic interest that she's monitoring. These aren't fringe people. These are sitting senators, intelligence committee leaders, people in deep in the field of economics, decorated military officers making statements of under oath and proposing legislation. So either a significant number of otherwise very credible people across the US Government have completely lost their minds, or something is actually being hidden. And that brings me back to the Nobel Prize. If the universe does not work the way that we believe it does, I would love to see what we can learn from these files. If particles influence each other instantly across impossible distances, I'd love to see whether technology that we've encountered can show stuff like that. But to me, the odds are very long that there will be much in these files. If we're not able to track a global conspiracy to sex traffic children here on Earth, how the hell could we really be tracking interstellar aliens? But we'll see. I vacillate between being just incredibly intrigued by what could be going on here and extremely cynical about this being timed around the Epstein files and them really trying everything they can to get us to stop paying attention. We'll see.
- [28:59]
Drew
Somebody said the illegal aliens are coming to. The aliens are coming to California so they can get free health care. There you go.
- [29:05]
Tom Dillw
And vote. Let's not Lose sight of that, Drew taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.
- [29:19]
Drew
All right, this tariff thing is breaking. This is a report. CNN confirmed it. NBC News. Shout out to my NBC News homies. The justices divided 63 held that Trump's aggressive approach to tariffs on products entering the United States from across the world was not permitted under a 1977 law called the International Emergency Economics Power Act, IEEPA. The ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was joined by three liberal judges and two fellow conservatives, Justice Neil Gorsch and Amy Coney Barrett. In this majority. This was very interesting. So three conservatives, three liberal justices, and then the other three justices, also conservative Justice Clarence Brett and Samuel Alito, all said yes for it. The president asserts the extraordinary power to unilaterally impose tariffs of unlimited amount, duration and scope, Roberts wrote. But the president, the Trump administration points to no stature in which Congress has previously said that the language in the IEEPA could apply to tariffs. He added, as such, we hold that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. It is a rare setback for the administration. At the Supreme Court, which has a 6:3 conservative majority since Trump began his second term in January, they gave him the blessing on deporting people, even to other people's countries. And then this is, I think, the first L he actually publicly took this.
- [30:37]
Tom Dillw
This is more than just an L. Like, this is a very big deal that if what what they have just said is that, that what he did was unconstitutional. And now companies are going to go after him hard and they're going to sue the life out of this administration for the damages that they perceive will have been done. And so the unwinding of all of the money that's been collected via the tariffs. Whoa. So this is one where there's no doubt that the administration will have some other trick up their sleeve, like, oh, okay, we' not doing it because of the IEP A whatever it is, we're doing it because of. And then insert thing. I cannot fathom that they're going to back off of tariffs given the catastrophe that would be unwinding them just from a pure economic standpoint. And then also it's given him so much leverage in negotiations internationally. The odds that he stops doing it again are vanishingly small. But now you're like in constitutional crisis territory where it's like, okay, if he skirts around that and goes somewhere else and then that has to work its way through the system again, first of all, you exacerbate the problem of him collecting more and more tariff revenue, which then open if. Then whatever other thing he tries gets shut down again. Now you've got both periods of time of collecting these tariffs that you're just going to get sued to death over. So, man, this, this one is a really big deal. This is. This is a meteorite strike. And so we have to find out whether they've got a legitimate thing that they're going to try to go down but. Or if it just seems blatantly obvious to everybody that this is him just saying, I don't care about the Supreme Court. And if you've got a president saying, I don't care about the Supreme Court, you have a constitutional crisis, man, like this, hey, let's wait and see what happens. But this is. This is big.
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Drew
I want to jump back into the article. The decision does not affect all of Trump's tariffs, leaving in place ones he imposed on steel and aluminum using different laws. But it upends the tariffs in two categories, one in country by country, or reciprocal tariffs, which range from 34% for China to 10% baseline for the rest of the world. That was the tariff bingo day. The Other is a 25% tariff imposed on some goods from Canada, China and Mexico for what the administration said was to fill their curb the flow of fentanyl. So the Canada, China and Mexico under the fentanyl clause are able to be upheld. These other ones, the reciprocal ones, would be struck down. And to your point, companies that had to pay tariffs may be able to seek a refund from the Treasury Department and hundreds have already sued.
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Tom Dillw
Yeah, bro, this is gonna get messy. This is gonna get messy.
- [33:28]
Drew
It's interesting to me, though, because I'm looking at it from an international perspective, because he was using this as leverage. Let's make a deal with the Ukraine and Russia War or I'll impose a tariff on you. I need the Europe to pay more to NATO or I'll oppose a tariff on you. Yes, and now that he kind of loses that card, that weakens his negotiation power in the next rounds of elections. If I'm one of these foreign companies that pay the reciprocal tariff, I'm suing. I'm coming back and want to renegotiate. So it seems like he's going to have to do everything over again.
- [33:56]
Tom Dillw
So here's my gut instinct. You're going to have two things playing out in parallel. He's going to find other ways to tariff. People say he's got the problem that he has on everything historical where he's going to have to figure out how you deal with. Can we just say, okay, well, those tariffs still count, but they count under this other regulation. Or no, they can't. You can't just move them like that. You said you were doing it for this reason and that was unconstitutional and so bad on you. But that still doesn't stop from moving forward and saying, oh, cool, so what you've given me is like, if this is a war powers or whatever, stop Fentanyl, whatever. That got classified as. As you're saying that one's good. Yeah, cool. Then I'm just going to find a way to do things like that to all these other countries, but I am not going to stop tariffing that. That is my prediction. Now, this is one of those strong convictions very loosely held. I. I'm going to say what I think is going to happen partly so I can see how well I'm mapping Trump. My instinct is he is not going to relinquish financial controls over other countries from a negotiating standpoint. So he is going to find some way to have the same cudgel just under a different name. What exactly he ends up finding that I don't know. I'm not a constitutional scholar, I'm not in these rooms. I have no idea what they're going to do, but he's going to find something. I will be utterly shocked. The only way that you're really going to be able to defang Trump if you don't like the way that he's going about things, is to flip the Senate and, or the House. Like, if he loses at the midterms, they impeach him, then it's game over. Failing that, like, if he wins at the midterms, he's going to find another path to this. So it really comes down to a question. Do the American people want the executive branch and then specifically Trump as the wielder of the executive branch? But they, they do well to think of this as policy, not as just Trump. Do they want the executive branch to be able to use tax effectively as a weapon against other governments? And it's an interesting question because traditionally the executive can do a lot more internationally than they can do domestically. You more or less go, okay, the executive branch. Ah, like, we can't fucking babysit everything. So Senate, Congress, we're going to deal with things that affect us domestically. And then you do. It's not like whatever you want, but you do with much lighter restrictions what you Want internationally.
- [36:31]
Drew
Yeah.
- [36:32]
Tom Dillw
So I could see something that ended up settling out where it's like, first of all, we're never going to call it a tax because that gets muddy from a constitutional perspective. But you've got like broader authority to act outside of the country. But things that are domestic, you can't touch that. So then it will become a debate about whether we're going to consider tariffs domestic or international. Because as people will be right to point out it, when you tariff somebody, it's the importer within your own borders that ends up paying that. So now it becomes, how do we define tariff? Is it a domestic tax or is it best understood as an international tax? He'll probably lose that given what they've just said. So then it becomes, okay, what is the thing that you can do? Like, is there a new thing that isn't a traditional tariff where you are directly imposing the fee on the, the outgoing shipment? I don't know. I. I don't know if that's possible. There's a reason that it doesn't exist currently. There's a reason everybody does it, I imagine, just for reasons of collection. But you could certainly stop things at the border and then say this, this payment has to come from them. You could do that. But yeah, this is going to get weird. So that is my bet is that Trump is going to find a way to keep doing this because he can't give up that leverage.
- [37:55]
Drew
And it's interesting. To your point, he probably has a team of lawyers spinning something up to get out of its finesse.
- [38:00]
Tom Dillw
No, probably they've already done it guaranteed.
- [38:03]
Drew
But even so, to your point of international versus domestic, he has the power to impose sanctions on people. And so we're seeing increased sanctions on Russia, we've seen increased sanctions on Iran, Venezuela, stuff like that. So I would almost put tariff in the sanction category. So maybe it's just to their point, the definition, if you would go under another law instead of the ieepa, if it's the ABCDF now with this law, I could do it.
- [38:24]
Tom Dillw
And he just going to be something like that. It's an interesting thing to say that they'll turn to sanctions. They might. It's interesting. Sanctions have a weird ring, like a
- [38:36]
Drew
connotation to it type thing.
- [38:37]
Tom Dillw
Yeah. Like in terms of how the international community would respond to that. But yeah. Could I see him doing that? Absolutely.
- [38:46]
Drew
Yeah.
- [38:47]
Tom Dillw
So we'll see. Man, this, this is big. This is really big. I. When they kept delaying and kept delaying and kept delaying, I thought for sure they Were trying to find a path to y. Because it's so obviously like tax. And he does not. The executive branch does not have the right to do that.
- [39:04]
Drew
Yeah.
- [39:04]
Tom Dillw
So I was like, they're delaying because they're trying to find that path to. Yes. Now, you might be able to read this as by dividing it and saying it only applies to these tariffs and not these tariffs that they're trying to help him find a path. We'll see.
- [39:23]
Drew
Now, looking at it from, like, the 30,000 point view, if he would have went to Congress, a Congress that he controls, a House that he controls, yes, it would have got mugged up. Yes, it probably would have got porked up, but he probably would have been able to avoid a lot of this calamity. It wouldn't have worked.
- [39:38]
Tom Dillw
Nope. Because of the filibuster. So the way that it works, basically, to pass legislation, you don't need a simple majority. You need. Because of these procedural rules that allow them to stop at. From getting to a vote. That's the crazy thing. And it's one of those where I'm like, God, it's been like this for a long time. So do I really want to break something? I think there. It's good that there's friction, but it. It is questionable because when you actually have a majority in the Senate and the House and you still can't pass legislation, that is a little weird. But I always try to remind myself when people are like, if Mom, Donnie was able to pass every law that he wanted to pass, oh, my God, I would be mortified. If AOC was able to pass anything she wanted, if Bernie was able to pass anything that he wanted, I would be mortified. I would be so terrified for the health of the middle class that I would be so glad that you. You could use the filibuster to stop them from being morons. So that's why I'm, like, very slow to say, like, yeah, you should get rid of the filibuster. But the filibuster would put him in a position where, if you look at the SAVE act, the save act has 84 approval from just Americans, and yet it's not going to pass because they're going to filibuster it. So it never would. He doesn't have that kind of support on tariffs, first of all, not. Not from either side of the aisle. So it would have been stopped. He knew that, which is why he's been doing everything by fiat, and just like, yeah, I'm just gonna go do this. So it's it's tough right now. He has not shown enough receipts for people to be seal clapping for him and being like, yeah, we should get rid of, like, ignore the Supreme Court. And like, don't worry about the friction in the House and Senate. Like, just get rid of all that and let me just ram through my agenda. If he was posting bigger wins, he could probably get the American people on his side. But right now, this is one of those things where it's the whole idea of it's darkest before dawn that, like, just to talk in video game code terms for a second, when you're trying to change something, you first have to destabilize the code of what you're working on. And so everything starts breaking, there's bugs everywhere, and you're like, God, did we just walk ourselves backwards? But by doing that, you can fundamentally re architect the way that the game works. And so on the other side of it, it's like, oh my God, this is so much better. I'm so glad that we took this six months to like, really do that deep and terrifying work. But in that, like, period where you don't know if it's going to pay off, it is it. It could just be a crash and burn. It could have been a waste of time and you were better off not touching it. And that's where we're at. We don't know that the things that he's doing are actually going to work. So a lot of people are saying they're going to invest in America. A lot of people are saying that they're bringing manufact manufacturing back, which would have a very substantive impact on jobs, the right kind of jobs. It would allow us to break our reliance on a, an adversary when it comes to our key pipelines. But we don't know that it's going to work. So, yeah. So because of that, I default to. You have the three branches of government for a reason, adhere to what they say. That's precisely what they're there for. And you take your L's and you find a new, more conservative strategy.
- [43:12]
Drew
I want to bring this up in context of the midterms because I'm going to be honest, if we're looking at Trump's like, scoreboard right now, there are some things that he thought would be slam dunks. They turned out to be base hits. There were some things, I know I mixed that analogy, but there's some things that he thought was going to knock it out the park and it didn't. Right. And then now you have Nick Fuentes tweeting this and then Candace retweeting so they can squash their beef to similar to agree on hating Trump. Fuentes said if Trump brings us to war in Iran, you can forget about 2026 and you can forget about a ticket with Vance or Ruby on 2028. This is literally Iraq 2.0. The GOP has utterly and completely betrayed America First. Then Candace retweeted, this is true and when it happens, they'll blame me and Tucker Carlson somehow. So there is this like scrutiny of the Republican Party, the energy, the energy around the fringes, the energy around the non traditional Republicans that we can always count on. This new kind of energy that's coming in, they're starting to lose that Sec. The Andrew Schultz are pulling back, the Dave Smiths are pulling back. A lot of these. I'm a libertarian, but I think Trump is a better deal. Those people are starting to take a step back now and then now he just lost this tariff battle. I can't quantifiably look back over the last year, year and a half and say, okay, Trump did this one thing right, because even with mass deportations, it was, I want to say their final count now was 3 million with self deportations, but who knows what numbers they're using at this point. But it seems like he hasn't necessarily caught his stride. If Trump called you late night, was like, hey Tom, I'm messing up, I need, I need like a story. How would you think he spins it? How do you think he lands his plane? How do you think he gets Republicans excited again after these quote unquote losses that they've been taking so far?
- [44:50]
Tom Dillw
Oh, it's interesting. If he called me up and said, hey, I need a story, I need a to thread this needle, I would say don't do that. That would be the dumbest thing you could do right now. Right now what you have to be doing is you need to post wins that are visible in the data period. End of story. So put all of your focus and attention on precisely that. So what are going to be the things between now and the midterms that you can do that are actually going to yield benefits to the middle and working class Americans, and that's it. And so the bad news is that his strategy right now for that has largely been the tariffs that I'm going to have gener all this money off tariffs and I'm going to cut people checks. That would have been a winning strategy. Whether you love it or hate it, it would win people over. So Right now his focus has to be deregulation, getting businesses to actually start hiring people. So I need you to break ground. So all these people that are promising investment in the U.S. it's like, I need you breaking ground using American labor before, let's say the middle of the summer. And whatever you need to do to get that moving. Do to get that moving moving. Obviously, he needs to tread incredibly lightly with Iran. If he plays Iran right, regardless of what Candace and Nick Fuentes are saying, if he is able to go into Iran with a lightning strike, flip that regime, help stabilize the government run by the people, and show a visible move towards like real liberation, where you've seen the photos of Iran like in the 1970s and it looks like the West. And if you can get that going again, you get them talking about, oh my God, this is the greatest thing ever. We're so grateful to President Trump and the Americans and look at all these streets we've named after him. Oh, and by the way, we want to align with his policies in terms of movement of oil. And so we're not only not going to be the largest state sponsor of terrorists in the world, we're going to now be a part of a new Middle east that's moving in lockstep with the US that is making energy prices cheaper. And if he can pull that off and drive the cost of gas down, remember, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, together could, I mean, they can basically just dial the cost of energy up and down as they see fit. So if you get all of them cooperating, working together, he really now does look like the peace through strength president ends that war. If he can do that, you further weaken China's access to cheap oil. You've now got more negotiating power. If he can pull that off before April, he's in a way better position when he goes to see Xi in April. And so if he can start getting like a more amenable relationship with China as we move forward and basically begin separating ourselves there, now you can really start to do something interesting. You've got a great win at your back that Americans will at a minimum feel at the pump. And also energy costs undergird the cost of everything. So if he can keep inflation going down, and now this would be the first one where I'd say this is like narrative. But if he can get the cost of inflation going down by lowering energy costs and he can then tell the story of deflation is good when it's led by innovation. And I've basically re architected the world order In a way that's obviously benefiting not only us, but people all over. But this. When you're driving energy costs down, you're clearly America first. You are clearly trying to make things better at the most tangible way. And the one thing, dear American people, that I could focus on that I know is going to help you guys across the board is the cost of energy. And then you beat that drum over and over and over. And if you have done that and you have deregulated and the deregulation starts paying dividends and you get, Mom, Donnie continuing to be a. And so now you go, look at what I'm doing. Costs are actually coming down. Look at what they're doing. He's the spirit animal of the Democratic Party. And look at what's happening there. And then if they really continue to push both. Oh, and by the way, focus on corruption. Corruption, corruption, corruption. Start showing how much corruption is happening in Minnesota. Start showing how much corruption is happening in California. And then as all of that begins to snowball, it's like, look, I'm the guy driving energy costs down. These guys are inflating budgets to high heaven. Fraud, like, coming out the ass. Like, this is wild. These are your two choices. You really want to elect people that are spending your money that poorly while I am. Remember, look at your tax return. I'm putting money in your pocket. I am lowering costs. If he pulls that off and you've got people in Iran crying and cheering and, like, really looking like the promise that has always been like that. We're actually trying to help liberate people. And you see them coming into the 21st century under a banner of freedom and all of that. That would be the one thing. That's why I say, like, he's got all this. That's, like, completely destabilized and you don't know what's going to break where. Like, for instance, if we do a strike in Iran and it goes badly, and now we've got boots on the ground and, like, no easy way out, or we do a strike and we don't completely decapitate the government, and then they start striking back hard and they hit military bases with US personnel, US Personnel start dying, we've got boots on the ground, they're bombing the shit out of Israel. Israel launches a tactical nuke back. Now it's like a nuclear world and everybody's like, trump did all this. Holy Jesus. Done, finished, impeached. Kid is toast. So it's. Man, you gotta give him. He is gambling. The bad news is we're all the chips on the table. So it's like, we'll see. Yeah.
- [51:10]
Drew
And then things just keep kind of going bad for Trump. I don't know if you've seen this GOP number. GDP numbers were released today. So there's a couple of things. The first thing is, it's not a lot of times we look at these numbers and we see 0.1%, 0.2% declines and things like that. We think that they're worse than they actually are.
- [51:30]
Tom Dillw
Yeah. But if you were expecting three and you get 1.4. Yo, that. That is read as catastrophe.
- [51:38]
Drew
So US Q4, 2025, GDP growth slows to 1.4%, well below the expectations of 3%. They were talking in Davos. It might be 5%. Trump immediately tweeted after this that it's a Democrat shutdown that has led to the 2%. I don't have that tweet. You can take it off. So it's one of those things. He has the scapegoat of a. Our growth slowed, but we did have a government shutdown. It's their fault.
- [52:02]
Tom Dillw
Matter not matter. People are gonna go. Either I have a job and that job is paying well and I can now afford things, or it's not. Remember, this is a game of psychology. So what you're talking about now is what neurochemicals are pumping through people's brains. If the neurochemistry is like the 80s, and it was like, oh, my God, like, I can really win. I can really get ahead now. This is awesome. There's a jubilant feeling. Everybody's excited, everybody's optimistic. Keep the guy in the White House that made you feel optimistic. If the guy is not making you feel optimistic because you're just looking at your bank account and things are not going in the right direction, you're having trouble making ends meet, then it's like, well, I just need something different. So I'm certainly not going to keep voting for the guy that's left me here. Nope. You had your, you know, by then, almost two years, you didn't do enough with it. Get the out, and it will be that simple. And that is why you. You basically always get buyer's remorse.
- [52:55]
Drew
Yeah.
- [52:56]
Tom Dillw
It's kind of crazy. It's almost guaranteed that whoever won in the primary election of the president is going to lose at the midterms. So it's just people are always have so much. Like, I remember how exciting it was when Trump won. It was like, man, we might actually get out from under all the censorship we might actually get out from under these stupid policies. Thank God we dodged the bullet of Kamala Harris. And then you start going, oh, but I caught a bullet from Trump. So it's like, well, then who am I going to vote for next? Now my thing is, for the love of God, please do not put Kamala Harris forward. Please. That would be a catastrophe. Like, just give me somebody that. Not. Just give me somebody awesome. Give me somebody who understands the economy. Give me somebody that can articulate exactly how we're going to unwind this, like, maddening process of debt accumulation. That would be amazing.
- [53:52]
Drew
Nobody knows. Time.
- [53:53]
Tom Dillw
They're not going to.
- [53:54]
Drew
Nobody knows.
- [53:54]
Tom Dillw
No, no, no, no, no. We know, we know.
- [53:57]
Drew
Nobody knows.
- [53:58]
Tom Dillw
What are you going to be able to.
- [53:59]
Drew
It's just magic numbers on the spreadsheet. That's all this is. It's all a facade. Vote for me.
- [54:06]
Tom Dillw
Do you see that the free grocery store done by Polymark is already closed.
- [54:11]
Drew
I thought it was like a pop up.
- [54:13]
Tom Dillw
It like it was, but they were like, we're gonna give. I think it was a million dollars worth of groceries away. And I was like, oh, that's a day and a half enough, like free. And then it went away and people were pissed. It's like, yeah, you need a self sustaining economic engine. In fact, I would like to just very quickly make an appeal to everybody, but especially the entrepreneurs out there. I certainly understand the drive for philanthropy, but if I could refocus you on the reason philanthropy becomes necessary is because we're saying that this is not something that people care enough about to pay money for. And when people do not care enough about something to pay money for, you already have a problem. So you want to figure out, how do I make this a self sustaining economic engine? People have somehow got this very weird notion in their heads that if something makes money, that it's a bad thing. Remember, the bad thing is that we as humans turn our time into money and we are very precious about what we then spend that money on. And so we're going to be very discerning. If you cannot win in the marketplace where people are being discerning with their money, then you have not made something of sufficient value. And so that's like just getting people to reorient around that instead of like putting up a pop up grocery store, which Poly markets very sweet, like, is a quick thing, but it's just not a solution. So it becomes like a PR beat. And I get it. I'm a marketer too, So I understand PRBs can be glorious, but it isn't a solution to the ongoing problem. And if we can find a solution to the ongoing problem via innovation, things actually get better if we just do a never ending litany of gimmicks, because it gets clicks and it makes people aware of our brand. We haven't actually done anything to make the world a better place. And so in a world where the algorithms are going to reward you for understanding the psychology and for manipulating people's neurochemistry in a brief moment, don't be that guy. Be the one that stands aside of that and says, okay, I'm going to build something that actually matters. I'm going to do the hard work of innovating. When I teach entrepreneurs, one of the things I tell them is, don't ask me how to make this easy. I want you to find the hard and lean into the hard. Do the hard thing. When you do the hard thing, that's what people are paying for. They're paying you to be the person that was like, oh, shit, this thing is really difficult. Nobody's ever done this. I'm going to go do that. This is one of the major breakthroughs that we had at Quest that changed everything in the entire, like, protein industry. We went in and said, why can't anybody make a bar that tastes like it has sugar but doesn't? We found out the answer, which is that high fructose corn syrup, because it was being subsidized by the government, allowed equipment manufacturers to assume the viscosity of your product. I know that sounds very technical, but this is the hard that you have to lean into. And so we said, instead of just going, okay, we'll add a little bit to our bars. It will make it worse metabolically, but at least it will run in the equipment. And that is quite literally what every company before us decided to do when they realized that their bar did not have the right viscosity. And, well, okay, what are we going to do? We're not going to engineer our own equipment. And at Quest, we decided we were going to engineer our own equipment. We were software guys. We didn't know anything about that. We had to lean into the hard to figure out how you engineer your own equipment. Who do you go to to even engineer your own equipment? This is all before AI, so it's not like you can just ask, chat, hey, where do I go to find out how to engineer my own equipment? We had to like, knock, knock. How do you engineer equipment? We were flying all over the world, asking people how the fuck do you make this stuff? Literally flying all over the place, wearing a hairnet, going into these random ass facilities. We would ship a pallet of our ingredients and just try to make the product on their equipment so that we could understand, like, what do we have to do? That's leaning into the hard. Find the difficult thing. Do the difficult thing. Don't just look for the PR beat.
- [58:10]
Drew
Cool.
- [58:11]
Tom Dillw
All right, everybody, thank you for being here. I am so appreciative of this community, which is growing. I think we are facing head on some of the biggest challenges of our day. And I really, really appreciate you guys being here, debating things in the comments. It. It really helps me sharpen my own thinking, and it's wonderful. And may we be a drip that ripples out into the wider world. All right, love you guys. Peace.