Trump’s Iran Deal Disaster, Pope’s Holy War on AI, and the Death of Private Property | Tom Bilyeu Show Live

Summary

Detailed Summary: Impact Theory – Trump’s Iran Deal Disaster, Pope’s Holy War on AI, and the Death of Private Property (May 28, 2026)

Episode Overview

In this episode of Impact Theory Live, Tom Bilyeu, joined by his wife Elizabeth, tackles three major news stories making waves: the ongoing US-Iran negotiations under Trump, the Pope’s strong warning against unchecked artificial intelligence, and a controversial move in New York City to transfer neglected private properties into community hands. The conversation dissects the mechanics and implications of these headlines, focusing on cause and effect, emotional reasoning versus logic, and the importance of foundational values in debates about society’s future. The show’s tone is candid, analytical, occasionally heated, but always seeking clarity beyond headlines.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Iran Deal Fiasco

Breakdown of the Negotiations

• Tom opens by criticizing the repeated cycle of promises regarding a US-Iran deal, claiming it now resembles "the boy that cried wolf" ([03:36]).
• The latest negotiation, he explains, is really a memorandum of understanding, not a meaningful peace deal. It’s meant to stall for time, not address nuclear ambitions.
  • Phase 1: Reopen Strait of Hormuz; extend ceasefire.
  • Phase 2 (within 30-60 days): Address nuclear program.
• According to Tom, the situation is deteriorating for the US: "Not only have we not moved forward, we've actually moved backwards” ([04:41]).

Analysis of Strategic Failures

• Tom argues Trump’s team misjudges Iranian incentives. Iranian hardliners are immune to US leverage and are simply stalling for time ahead of US midterms.
• “Trump is expecting Iran to act like he would act, and they're not going to.” ([07:51])
• America’s struggle mirrors the Suez Canal crisis and hints at imperial decline.

Iran as a Case Study in Strategy

• US and allies face economic pressures to stabilize oil markets, while Iran wields patience as a weapon.
• Tom’s summary: “We are in a very similar situation right now, where it's looking like we are completely incapable of keeping the seas free. This is an international waterway. Everybody agrees that it should be open, but alas, America is not able to keep it open. It is wild times, wild times.” ([09:08])

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2. Emotional Reasoning vs. Logic in Decision Making

Interpersonal and Societal Implications

• Elizabeth points out the emotional exhaustion from Tom’s clinical, logic-based approach to world crises ([02:48]).
• Their marital dynamic becomes a metaphor for society: Elizabeth and Tom discuss the tension between logic and emotion in decisions ([18:46]-[22:43]).
  • “If you're existing inside of an emotional frame when you're trying to make decisions, you are going to make absolutely God awful decisions.” – Tom ([20:25])
  • They note how male/female (or just different) brains process threat and stress differently—relevant for leadership in crisis.

Notable Moment

• Elizabeth acknowledges the value in Tom’s logic but underscores the human need for emotional resonance: “As a partner... Do you see where I come from? Do I see where you come from?... Discussing. I'm emotional right now. I know I can't make decisions because I am emotional. I'll articulate that. But I also need some emotion from you so I don't feel alone.” ([22:43])

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3. Audience Q&A and Criticism Responses

Handling Polarized Feedback

• Tom addresses accusations of being a “traitor” for voting Trump or considering foreign residence ([26:12], [29:57]).
  • Clear differentiation between ideology and patriotism: “For me, the definition of a traitor is somebody that's actively trying to destroy their country, which I certainly am not... If you really want to find out if somebody's a quote, unquote, traitor to their country, you've got to lay out, what does that mean?” ([26:41])
• Elizabeth and Tom discuss their sense of obligation and duty to America, with Tom stating unequivocally that his first loyalty is protecting his wife ([32:58]).
• Tom elaborates on debating with people who attack personally rather than on ideas, stating the importance of base assumptions and public, rigorous feedback ([97:50]).

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4. The Pope Declares a 'Holy War' on AI

Encyclical Breakdown

• Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas warns of AI replacing God and undermining human dignity ([36:50]–[49:57]).
• Central message: AI risks making civilization “less human,” prioritizing efficiency over the divine spark and imperfection that grants all people dignity.
• Tom’s nuanced view: “Even though I don't believe in God... I think that there are ideas that are being put forward by the Pope that people need to take seriously. Now if that ends up leading to over regulation... I will have a very harsh negative response to that.” ([46:34])

Broader Implications

• Tom draws parallels with the Tower of Babel and warns against the dangers of an all-perfect, efficiency-driven society.
• On meaning and purpose: “Evolution is a God shaped hole. It is us searching for meaning... That idea of the Tower of Babel as you replace that, if it isolates you, if it makes you become subservient to its intelligence, you've now got a problem.” ([47:45])
• Discussion extends to AI-powered relationships, the potential for ‘robot wives’, and the risk of AI being weaponized to manipulate or coerce individuals ([53:19]–[62:05]).

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5. Property Rights and the 'Death' of Private Property

NYC’s “Block by Block” Plan

• Tom is alarmed by Zoran Mamdani’s proposal to seize neglected private properties in NYC and transfer them to nonprofits or tenant groups ([80:00]–[91:06]).
  • “That is insane. Who exactly is deciding who a responsible steward is? And since when are we able to take private property from someone because we don't like the way they are managing it?” ([80:00])
• He traces this logic to communism and warns of disastrous historical precedents: “It killed over—I think the best estimate is over 200 million people in the 20th century alone. That’s governments killing their own people.” ([86:51])
• Elizabeth challenges him: why not “wait and see”? Tom’s response:
  • “I am far more worried about Mom Donnie's version of evil than I am Trump's version of evil.” ([92:02])

Asset Ownership as Protection

• Tom repeatedly returns to the importance of broad, diversified asset ownership as protection against systemic instability and inflation ([66:20]–[75:40]).
  • “The only guaranteed failed state is to not own assets because money, money printing… is still in the store. You just gotta find it.” ([71:54])

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6. Free Speech, Malinformation, and State Power

Belgian and Canadian Censorship Cases

• Tom recounts a Belgian man convicted for telling uncomfortable truths (malinformation), and a Canadian whistleblower being involuntarily committed after criticizing government ties to China ([100:11]–[107:05]).
• He is passionate about “truth as an absolute defense” and warns against the state policing speech, arguing that open debate is essential for societal health, especially around contentious issues like immigration.

Notable Quote

• “If it is a true thing, you may say whatever the fuck is true, period, end of story. And long may that be the case. We do not want to live in a world where the truth is off limits.” ([103:35])

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7. Relationships, Complementarity, and Emotional Utility

• Drawing from marriage and business, Tom and Elizabeth argue for seeking partners who balance one’s cognitive style for optimal results.
  • “Evolution has created you as half of a whole. And by getting with a partner that does not see the world the same as you... you have this dynamic tension... so important.” ([78:34])

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Notable Quotes and Timestamps

• “Trump has hurt his credibility. He's hurt the US's credibility on the world stage. Unless somehow, some way, he pulls an absolute, unmitigated victory out of Iran... I think it is basically not even a realistic possibility at this point” – Tom Bilyeu ([03:46])
• “If you're existing inside of an emotional frame when you're trying to make decisions, you are going to make absolutely God awful decisions.” – Tom Bilyeu ([20:25])
• “AI has a place, but if it elevates beyond that place, it becomes the Tower of Babel.” – Paraphrasing Pope’s position ([43:45])
• “The only guaranteed failed state is to not own assets because money, money printing… The is still in the store. You just gotta find it.” – Tom [71:54]
• “It killed over. I think the estimate, the best estimate is over 200 million people in the 20th century alone. Okay. That's governments killing their own people. Governments kill their own people at an industrial scale.” – Tom [86:51]
• “If it is a true thing, you may say whatever the fuck is true, period, end of story. And long may that be the case. We do not want to live in a world where the truth is off limits.” – Tom [103:35]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Iran Deal analysis and criticism of Trump: [03:36]–[11:30]
• Logic vs. emotion in decision-making and marriage: [18:46]–[24:00]
• Responding to “traitor” criticism & why not move to Singapore: [26:12]–[35:22]
• Pope’s encyclical on AI (“holy war” on artificial intelligence): [36:50]–[49:57]
• AI, robot spouses, relationships, and manipulation risks: [53:19]–[62:05]
• NYC’s “Block by Block” plan and historical warnings about communism: [80:00]–[91:06]
• Free speech, malinformation, state power (Belgium, Canada cases): [100:11]–[107:05]
• Closing: Racism, generational change, and social division: [107:05]–[110:30]

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Memorable Moments

• Tom illustrating societal dynamics using his marriage to Elizabeth: “You have to get into definitions... Don't think just because I'm animated about it that that somehow carries intellectual weight. That is a liability, if anything.” ([14:48])
• Pope's encyclical likened AI to nuclear weapons: “82 pages of, basically, papal anxiety over AI replacing God.” ([36:50])
• Elizabeth reading live chat flame comments and Tom’s calm, analytical response.
• Debate over whether to host controversial figures like Andrew Tate, revealing the couple’s approach to values-driven decision making ([64:57]).
• Tom’s “lesbian trapped in a man’s body” quip and both discussing the importance of balance in partnership ([79:38]).

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Final Thoughts

This episode stands out for its unapologetic intellectual rigor, skepticism of both right- and left-wing demagoguery, and refreshingly open discourse about topics where most tread carefully. Tom and Elizabeth’s dynamic serves as a microcosm of societal debate, balancing emotional resonance with rational, first-principles thinking. The episode also underscores a warning: whether dealing with geopolitics, technology, or property rights, it’s vital to understand foundational incentives and the lessons of history—lest we sleepwalk into repeating past disasters.

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For listeners seeking a nuanced breakdown of today's most alarming headlines—from Middle East crises and technopanic to surging state power—this episode is essential listening. For everyone else, the discussions on emotional intelligence and the negotiation of values are reason enough to dive in.

Transcript

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. We are back in the home studio. I'm very excited. And speaking of excitement, I am sitting across from my beloved wife. Drew is off gallivanting around the world. I hope he's having a very good time. And I'm very happy that my beloved wife has stepped in. I'm sorry that we didn't get you into the intro. That would have been a lot of fun.

[Elizabeth]

Even without the braids.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Even without the braids. And you didn't miss a beat, by the way, when I asked you to step in, which, knowing that you didn't have your braids done and stuff, I would have completely understood, but I.

[Elizabeth]

You show up for your partner. That's all I care about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Literally.

[Elizabeth]

What you said, show up for your partner. I was like, I don't have my braids, but I'll show up for you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I appreciate it. All right, so she's going to be on Community, everybody. So if you guys have questions, she's the one to harangue. And we're going to be doing everything per usual. So welcome. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Now, we're supposedly a word away from a deal with Iran, but I'll believe that when I see it as that is turning into an absolute shit show. The Pope wants to disarm AI. We're going to be talking all about that as he launches a holy war. Mom. Donnie wants to stay, steal New York real estate. I'm gonna guess you guys know how I feel about that one. A guy in Belgium is convicted for telling the truth. Literally. It's wild. The truth is an absolute defense. But apparently not in Belgium, because if the truth is hurtful, then you can be in prison for it. That one's crazy. A guy in Canada is Being held against his will in a mental hospital after saying that Canada is in danger of becoming a Chinese police state. That's actually true. We'll talk about that. And robots are starting to fly off the production line now, so, boys and girls, strap in. The future is going to be weirder than you think, especially with the Pope coming after AI. These are wild times. These are wild times that we are living in. I'm so curious, Elizabeth.

[Elizabeth]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How do you feel about, like, all the AI madness?

[Elizabeth]

What was funny is just hearing you say it. I was like, oh, God. Oh, God. It's very hard to live in your world because there's a lot of stress in my world. In your world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Interesting. So when you look at the way that I interface with the world, it just seems like, why are you paying attention to these subjects?

[Elizabeth]

No, I know it's important, which is why I encourage you, but I can't live in it. I just wouldn't be able to sleep. But look, I'm always trying to be on the positive. So when you're talking about AI, I'm always trying to think about, oh, what kind of opportunities can I now have that I wouldn't have had before? Whereas I understand that a lot of people worry about it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very smart.

[Elizabeth]

But when you just said about the Pope, it's interesting, between the collision of religion and tech and. I don't know what you're about to say. I don't know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I assume, well, technically, I'm going to drag us down the Iranian route first.

[Elizabeth]

Let's do it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Go deep into that. But, yeah, we gotta. We gotta eat the boring parts of the meal before we can get to the more playful stuff. All right. Three days ago, Trump posted that an agreement with Iran was largely negotiated, and then Marco Rubio walked it back, telling reporters it could take some time to settle disagreements. This is a quote over a word, a sentence. So from where I'm sitting, the question is, is this more just calm the market BS or are we actually getting close to a deal? For me, this has rapidly become the boy that cried wolf. We have heard this so many times at this point that it is a pure clown show. No matter what ends up coming out of this, Trump has hurt his credibility. He's hurt the US's credibility on the world stage. Unless somehow, some way, he pulls an absolute, unmitigated victory out of Iran, I will give a 0.00000001% chance of happening. I think it is basically not even a realistic possibility at this point, but unless he does that just a total, unmitigated, unreserved victory in Iran. People all over the world, allies and foes alike, are going to realize that we are not the US that we once were. And that is a very hard realization, especially for somebody like me. Uh, but as I was saying earlier, the truth is an absolute defense and we've gotta be willing to stare nakedly at what is actually going on. So right now, from where I'm sitting, the deal that's being negotiated is just a memorandum of understanding. It's, it's like a we'll talk about the actual deal later kind of framework to stall for time. This isn't a final peace agreement by any stretch of the imagination. Supposedly the negotiation goes something like this. It's a two phase negotiation. Phase one is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and to extend the existing ceasefire. And then phase two would supposedly follow within, call it 30 to 60 days, and then actually address the nuclear program. Now if that's true, this, we are watching Trump mid fumble. The whole point of going into Iran in the first place was supposedly to end their nuclear ambitions and now it's turned into just, we need to get the straight open again and we'll deal with the nuclear issue down the road. But as everyone remembers, the straight was open before all of this started. So not only have we not moved forward, we've actually moved backwards. And the sticking points between the US And Iran are not minor. You've got the hardliners that are still in control of Iran at this point and you can tell from their actions that they're not backing down. So this is not a regime. No matter what Trump is trying to tell us. This is not a regime of people. They're like, oh my God, like, what do we need to do to make you happy? These are guys that are like, get the fuck out of here. Like, we're going to do what we want. We, we know what pressures you're under, okay? They know the midterms are coming and they know if they can just stall things out, they put him in a weaker and weaker position. Now, obviously I'm not in the room, but from the outside this looks very clearly like Iran is running the playbook that we have been told for decades that is exactly their playbook, which is to strategically stall to time is in their corner. It, it is not with the U. S. I know that Trump wants us to believe that time is on our side, but the reality is he's got massive economic pressures at home because of what's happening to the price of oil. He's got massive economic pressures from allies who are like, hey, bitch. Like, you can only hold back our oil for so long before we are dealing with real catastrophe in our countries. So if you want us to stand by you, you've got to get something done. So the stalling basically only serves to give Trump a chance to message so he can say things. And unfortunately, because he's repeated the same empty promises over and over, we're so close to a deal. Time is on our side that it's now just making him look weaker and weaker every time he says that the stalling is working to his advantage. The Iranians are willing to let their people suffer far more than then Trump is going to be able to let his people suffer, thank the Lord. But that is the real thing that we're up against. And so him saying that we're trying to run the clock down to our advantage is ridiculous. He is starting to look dumb. He looks like he's in over his head. And the bad news is, I think that's almost certainly true. The reality is these things are insanely complicated. And if you're expecting the other party to make decisions in the way that you make, if your mental map of them is that, oh, they approach the world like I approach the world, you're going to be routinely confused, as I am often confused when I try to map my wife as somebody who thinks like me. And then I'm like, why is she acting like that? Trump is expecting Iran to act like he would act, and they're not going to. And this is why. And I've said this from the moment these words came out of their mouth. When Witkoff said that they were shocked that Iran wasn't capitulating when they were building up all the military hardware in the Gulf region, I was like, oh, these guys are not reading the incentive structure of the Iranian regime correctly. And because of that, they just kept marching forward, thinking that they were going to act in a quote unquote, rational way. But their calculus is completely different from the calculus of the US and that is why we are in the very strange situation that we're in right now. Iran wants time and money, so stalling for them is great, because if you open the straight, then the money is going to start flowing in. And every second that they wait, they know the pressure builds on the US to allow the strait to be opened. And every second that they wait, they get closer to the midterms. So this is shaping up to be our Suez Canal. Moment. If you guys don't know that story, the British Empire looked like maybe it still had some of its swagger until it tried to keep the Suez Canal open and it couldn't, and it ended up surrendering it to Egypt. And so we are in a very similar situation right now, where it's looking like we are completely incapable of keeping the seas free. This is an international waterway. Everybody agrees that it should be open, but alas, America is not able to keep it open. It is wild times, wild times. And I've said for ages now that, unfortunately, this is how empires die. And I know that there were all kinds of memes about guys thinking endlessly about the fall of the Roman Empire, but there is a reason. There is a reason. When you're dealing with the physics of economies, you're dealing with the physics of military warfare. There are just realities that you're going to run up against, and we're running up against it in real time. And we're in a world where. And look, I'm glad. But we're in a world where we don't believe in total warfare anymore, which means we're always going to hedge our bets. We're not going to go in with the full force and might of our military. I've used this analogy before, but this is like going up against a small dog where, yes, you could kill them, you could overwhelm them, but you suddenly go, but wait, what am I killing them over? Exactly. And when you know that the world would turn against you for using that level of violence against a country that just is basically so much smaller than you, you become the monster that you're supposedly trying to protect against. The entire world turns against you, and you're not going to stand well in that isolation. Also, you've got the internal moral compass of your people, who will also put insane pressure on you to stop. And so you're now left where the asymmetric warfare is, where the game is. Iran knows that, and they're playing it perfectly. So, yeah, this is wild.

[Elizabeth]

Okay, so I pulled a couple of comments and questions that I thought were very. Actually on point.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Love it.

[Elizabeth]

So we've got some. Shall I read the name or not? You want me to read the name? Okay, sure, go ahead. This is Brutus Lugo.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, you love Brutus Lugo.

[Elizabeth]

What up, Brutus?

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, go way back, all big capital letters, screaming, this is on brand for Brutus.

[Elizabeth]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He doesn't whisper.

[Elizabeth]

Why aren't you getting mad? Tom, if Mandamini was doing this, you'd be pissed. Just imagine that Trump is Mandani. So we could see a level of anger that is on par with what's going on.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting. So I am mad, and I'm not sure what in that read led you to believe that. I'm like, hey, this is great. Trump's doing everything wonderfully. So, yeah, I think this is. This is shaping up to be catastrophic. It's horrifying. So I'm mad as hell. I'm not going to take it anymore. Yeah. I'm not sure what words I have to put to it before people realize you may. When you team up, you're like, oh, I'm on this team. And that's how I think. I do not approach the world like that. So what Trump is doing in Iran is turning out to be catastrophic. He's, like I said, he's looking dumb as hell, he's in over his head, he's up the economy, he is tarnishing our reputation around the world. It. It is as bad as you think.

[Elizabeth]

That is very clear.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So anyway, I've been super clear on that for quite a while, so I don't know what people want on that from me. I think secretly what they want is lamentations over I voted for Trump.

[Elizabeth]

They want probably animation. And people want you, like, it's like when me and you get. Someone upsets me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Elizabeth]

And I want you to be just as rattled as I am. We feel connected in that moment. So if right now people are mad and they're pissed and they're really, like, genuinely upse set and you're being very articulate and calm.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do I seem calm?

[Elizabeth]

No, but. Well, a bit before.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I get it. I'm way more over the top about.

[Elizabeth]

Exactly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I'll give them that.

[Elizabeth]

And I think that's what they're saying.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Okay. I can't give you that. And my wife now empathizes with you far more than she empathizes with me, because the number of times we've been in an argument over something and I cannot match her energy on the thing that she is frustrated about. So, yeah, I'm not going to fake emotions, but it. On this, it is God awful, it is catastrophic, it is terrible, it is bad. But I don't have that. That same thing that's inside my soul in terms of the level of concern that I have over communism is orders of magnitude larger than what's going on in Iran. You have me there because historically speaking, communism gobbles the human soul. It eats people alive. I actually considered calling this episode is it time to eat the kids? And then I thought people would not understand that I'm kidding. So. But yeah, that's on that. Hold me to the logic, but don't worry about when I start eating both on the things that I get animated about. Don't think just because I'm animated about it that that somehow carries intellectual weight. That is a liability, if anything.

[Elizabeth]

So this is from Yellow99 USA is putting forward deals trying to incite a civil war against the irgc.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They want a regime change, there's no doubt about that. I don't think you have to dig very deep to think that that's real. So yeah, that regime change was always the goal. They said it wasn't. But needless to say, what they want out of Iran is what they did in Venezuela. They wanted to go in. Lightning strike, regime collapses, people rise up, they take the country back, they become pro Western democracy and Trump ends up on Mount Rushmore. That was the plan, even if only in the back of his mind is something I call invisible goals. Oftentimes people are not even aware of the thing that they want themselves. But I think if you put him in an FMRI and you let me ask him questions that you would see very clearly that's what he was hoping for, maybe even a expecting. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. And again, I will just bring everybody back to Wyckoff saying that they were shocked that they weren't capitulating was the actual word they used to the US Building up the military hardware out in the Gulf region, because that's what they think is rational. They think, well, we're going to destroy your country, so why aren't you guys backing down and giving us everything that we want? This is the bully who punches somebody in the nose, but instead of running off crying, yeah, they're bleeding, there's no doubt about that. But they're ready to keep fighting. And now Trump is, I think, very befuddled. He doesn't know what to do with that. And so, yeah, all of this stuff is incredibly complicated. Iran is an incredibly formidable foe, and Trump is learning that the hard way. And so he did not get Venezuela. He's never going to get Venezuela out of Iran, not with anything that he would be able to do with the moral constraints that the citizens of America will place on him and maybe that he even has on himself. I don't know. That's maybe too optimistic on my part, but that's where we're at. He's not going to get the concessions that he wants. And if he could get us of a war, he'd take it just to bring it all back around to the question.

[Elizabeth]

So somebody said, Tom leads with the logic. Feelings are secondary. That is very true. And it's hard to be married to him because of, because I'm all emotion first and then logic second.

[Tom Bilyeu]

God, this is so true. It, it is so interesting to see how different the show is with Lisa versus Drew. It really makes a big difference who's sitting there. But that is a wonderful insight. So by all means, you can spill as much tea as you want. It drives you crazy that I don't get emotional like you, which actually makes me less likely to get emotional because I'm like, we can't bother be steering by emotion here. It. And it is interesting that over time I've gotten less and less and less emotional, and that has become a friction in our marriage. It used to be the only thing that we would argue about was you needed everything hidden, I needed to know where everything was. And then over time, it's, you really had to Remind me that not all emotion should be eliminated.

[Elizabeth]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's very interesting.

[Elizabeth]

Yes. It got to a point where you felt a little robotic because I have an emotion. You're not matching me. I don't need you to always match me. But to empathize and understand and kind of feel that with me was very important. And we've worked at it and so. But people when they see you on here, they think maybe it's just like, you're really like this. You think through. It'll be the most tragic thing has happened to us. And you're like, all right, first principles, what are we gonna do? I can't get emotional. We have to think. So you'll get very like when my, my mum had the brain aneurysm. You don't get emotional. You're like, we have to go into fix it mode.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's so fun. I feel like you're flirting with me right now, but I know you're trying to like lay out the thing that you do not like. It's so fascinating. Here's the thing I'm going to. This risks derailing the conversation, but I'm going to say it almost as a test. I really think that it is incredibly important for people to understand that if you're existing inside of an emotional frame when you're trying to make decisions, you are going to make absolutely God awful decisions.

[Elizabeth]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And people really have to train themselves to get outside of that emotion and to, as you said, look at first principles. What's the cause and effect? There is a path to a solution here. How do we take it? But there is something that is alienating to other people when you do it. However, I think that and you're here so you can tell me if I'm wrong. I think that, as I often will say to you, I'm very cocky about my ability to be isolated because I'm in a marriage with you. And if I was actually alone, I might have emotional suffering around being isolated in a way that I don't when I'm in the context of a thriving, loving marriage. I think you're able to be annoyed by the fact that I will distance my emotions and I will think through the problem from a purely logical standpoint. And that that's ratcheted up over the years precisely because you exist in a marriage where somebody's like, you don't have to worry about it. I will keep the wolves at bay. I will deal with this at all times. And you can. This literally happened. Our dog went missing for 36 hours in Coyote country, and Lisa couldn't get out of bed, and I couldn't sleep. And I was just like, cool, this is what I'm here for. And I'm gonna go deal with this. I will get this dog back. And I got the dog back, and it was insane. I won't take people through the full drama, but that was me just going there. There is a path to a solution, and I just have to, like, march down the path of cause and effect, plain and simple. And so I put to you in a moment where you can tell me if you think I'm crazy, that if I didn't do that, your life would be more chaotic, more stressful.

[Elizabeth]

Oh, yeah. I would be completely unnerved, I think. So someone actually put John Doe 11547, something. Men can't afford to get emotional numbers when there's beep that needs to be handled. And I actually agree. And so there's this fine line between understanding your partner, understanding where they're coming from. Understand they don't think like you. Male brains aren't structured like female brains. We've just done so much research on that. We're not the freaking same people. And so knowing that you are, as Alison Armstrong says, men are single, focused, which means that they have a go. Going to be focused on getting to that goal, and knowing that emotion may cloud your goal. I respect that. And as a partner, there has to be that negotiation somewhat of. Do you see where I come from? Do I see where you come from? We are different somewhat. It feels like sometimes different animals. So how do we approach the thing? The same. And so discussing. I'm emotional right now. I know I can't make decisions because I am emotional. I'll articulate that. But I also need some emotion from you so that I don't feel alone. And so navigating those two things has been. I think One of the biggest achievements of our marriage is never judging and accepting. I want to make sure that I'm not derailing you guys, though, on politics.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Don't worry about it. I'll take us back. But so now all of that in context. Sorry.

[Elizabeth]

Someone put Lisa, hold Tom's beer. You clearly don't know what kind of woman I am.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think they mean, like, hold my beer. Like the phrase while they go do something crazy. Yeah.

[Elizabeth]

Oh, okay. All right. So I thought it basically is like, woman, hold my beer.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't think so.

[Elizabeth]

I'm not that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Anyway. She is very much not that woman. Oh. Much to my dismay, which I joke with her. But she really did say at one point, you wouldn't want that from me. And I was thoroughly convinced that that is true. But, okay, taking all this back to the. What's going on in Iran, the political context, I have some, like, some harsh

[Elizabeth]

comments if you want me to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, let me. Let me bring this back. And then by all means, yeah. So my point being, I think a lot about, okay, if I'm going to put myself out there as a YouTuber, somebody that is trying to help people think through the most difficult problems in the world, what is the frame of reference that I bring that most other people or maybe nobody else brings, at least in this way? And it is the ability to eject out of my emotions, to be completely sober about cause and effect, to not be beholden to. Well, I said this thing in the past, so I've got to keep being consistent with that. It's like, hold on, I've got new information. Everything that I've said is essentially a hypothesis that I'm going to test against the real world. You get feedback and then you adjust. And I think one of the things that people find very confusing about me is that I am not on a team. I'm not even on, like, the past me's team. If anything, I'm only on the future me's team. And so I'm constantly saying, I know where I'm trying to end up and then how do we get there? And so there are times where I let myself get emotional. There's no doubt about that. There are times where something really will get under my skin and frustrate me and I'll do my best to eject out of that. But the get as animated as somebody else so that they feel seen is not the thing that you will ever be satisfied turning to me for. So I will say that as my poor wife has learned through 25 years of being together. Okay, harsh comments. Give them to me.

[Elizabeth]

All right, so I'm going to try. Give me this without getting annoyed, like

[Tom Bilyeu]

somebody with an argument. Not just you're dumb.

[Elizabeth]

Yes. So this person has Chili Will. Tom is a traitor to the USA, but his IQ is 1000% greater than standard MAGA. Traitor scum buckets. So he's someone to listen to and see how the billionaire Margaret MAGA skew reality for Trump.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay.

[Elizabeth]

And then someone even came to us for defense saying, I don't always agree with Tom, but that's kind of harsh.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's very sweet. Um, I would say the highest utility thing that all of us can do is figure out, okay, what's the argument? Um, so if we were sitting down and we were across from each other, the first thing I want to understand is everything that comes out of somebody's mouth is based on the base assumptions that they have. So what does, for instance, if I'm a traitor to America, what does somebody who's not a traitor to America, what do they do, think and believe? And so if for you, aligning with Trump, voting for Trump is a better way to say it, because I'm not aligned with Trump in any meaningful way. But if you voted for Trump, is that already. Is that something that you believe makes somebody a traitor? If so, then there. Obviously it won't be a productive debate, because your core base assumption, you did this thing that just for me, is the definition of trader. And so, you know, we're off to the races. Okay, so you and I would have just a fundamentally misaligned set of base assumptions. What would be useful? If you really want to find out if somebody's a quote, unquote, traitor to their country, you've got to lay out, what does that mean? So what does it mean to go to bat for your country? Is it something that you can articulate? Is it a feeling or is it something that's documented? So, for instance, to go to bat for your Constitution? That seems like a pretty good place to start, but that may not be the place that you start. Also, for me, the definition of a traitor is somebody that's actively trying to destroy their country, which I certainly am not. And just because you disagree with me, and I may even believe that the things that you believe will destroy the country, that doesn't mean that I think you're doing it on purpose. And so that's where it's like, you have to get into definitions and all that. It can get very dry, very boring. But that's how you get out of the emotional realm. You start grounding it on what are the base assumptions that make you say that thing? Then once we've got base assumptions laid out, then I'm going to try to figure out what your North Star is. Okay, so where are you trying to end up? What does that world look like? It is something that you can describe. So give me three to five points that would be definitional to success or to the end state that you want. Then we just ask from pure cause and effect, the things that you want me to do or that you're doing, are they actually producing results that will lead you to that end state? And so now we've got tangible things we can argue about. We can argue about whether we should aim for that end state or not. We can argue about the value system that's driving your desire to be at that end state. And we can argue about the cause and effect of whether, if we agree on those other two things, will those actions actually lead to that end state, then you can have a productive argument. But when all of this stays at the layer of you're a clown, you're an idiot, you're a traitor, you're this, you're that, it can't gain momentum other than violence, and because your ability to articulate what you're actually trying to say, it's not grounded on anything. So now it's pure emotion. Once you get into pure emotion and the dialogue stops, that's when the violence begins. So I would think very carefully about that in terms of if a violent uprising or something is what you want. All right, fair enough. Well, from a cause and effect perspective, you're well on your way. But if the end state that you want is something different, then I'd say be very careful.

[Elizabeth]

All right. Something mean you have discussed behind the scenes and someone asked a question about it. So I thought. Actually, it's quite important to bring this up. They say Tom fleeing to Singapore isn't exactly patriotic behavior.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, that is a criticism. Is that the full thing?

[Elizabeth]

That's it. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That criticism is the very thing that I struggle with, for sure. I don't know what to do about that one yet. So, obviously, not only have I not fled to Singapore, I'm still in Los Angeles, so. Yes. But I'd be lying if I didn't say, like, I consider it. So my first obligation is to make sure that my wife is safe. My second do I feel an obligation. I do feel an obligation to think of America. And that is part of why, even though I think what I'm doing right now is really bad for sales of Project Kaizen, which is my absolute passion and the glowing orb of joy of what I want to think about and focus on, and I put that at risk because I do feel I've been given so much by this country, and not only that, that I really believe in the ideals upon which it was is founded, and I want to help people, that is a driving force in my life. I certainly will not have to convince my wife of that. I don't expect you guys to believe me, and that's perfectly fine. But that really is a driving force for me. And so I do this despite the fact that it is probably against the thing that I want for pure enjoyment reasons. And it does feel like I was, as they say, born into interesting times. And I feel some as it it is a part of my personality that I feel a deep sense of obligation and duty. This is one of the reasons I don't have kids, because I understood I would give my life over to them completely.

[Elizabeth]

Someone says, why do you have an obligation? Why do you feel like you have an obligation?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, we're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. That would go back to the way that I was raised, the way that I'm hardwired so I can put words to it, but that it's really, I'm trapped in my biology. So I'm writing right now the deep dive about the fact that we don't have free will. So this is very much on my mind that I'll give you a post hoc rationalization, but the reality is it's just biology. So I am, I have biology that if my dogs are frustrated that they haven't been walked, I feel like I have to take them. Even if, like, that means something is problematic in my life in some other way. I'm like, I just feel this real sense of obligation. So I feel if I feel that for my dogs, you can imagine I feel that for the people that I work with, feel that for my wife, I just, I have that clocked in me. And then I think it's an identity that way as well for you it got hardened as an identity. But if I wasn't a hyper responder to that message as a kid, it just wouldn't have taken. Yeah, so we are, we are 50 biology, 50% the way that we're raised. And so it's those two things coming together in a confluence. So I feel something. I don't have to think my way into that. But anyway, the post hoc rationalization is the country has given me so much. I realize it was a lottery of birth that I ended up here and not somewhere horrible. It's a lottery of birth that I end up in this time period now some other time period whereby this age I'd just be dead. So all of those things and the way that I was raised to contribute lead me to feel a sense of obligation. But it isn't. My highest value system is to protect my wife. And so if those two things came into collision, I would choose my wife. I don't expect that to make people happy, but that's being honest.

[Elizabeth]

A lot of people want to know a bit more details. So if you were to leave California, where in the US would you go?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And why Florida, because my wife doesn't like Texas and I like the beach. So Florida or Texas because they have cultural energy and good taxes.

[Ad Voice]

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[Elizabeth]

And for me Florida is in Miami because the weather's nice. I'm in Florida, but yeah, that's what I'm saying. But, but specifically Florida. Sorry, specifically Miami, not like Orlando. I'm not that age yet. But anyway, so by the ocean, that all makes a difference. I'll be closer to my family because it will be east coast, the time difference etc. And then people want to know why Singapore?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So Singapore, because it's warmer than Switzerland and I know people think that I will hate the weather. I'm a freak for hot and humidity. Also it's really about how are people with each other and how is capital treated private ownership laws. And the reality is right now I have not investigated Singapore. So Singapore is a stand in for somewhere where people are good to each other, somewhere where capital is treated well. Someone where somewhere where I feel they're going to be stable into the future. And given that Ray Dalio has literally looked everywhere in the world and that's the place that he seems to be most comfortable in. It just becomes my stand in for that's where I'll start the research. It's certainly not where it would end. I'm not making any plans to move there right now. It's just been a thing Where? Off the cuff, I've said a couple times. And so chat and all their nuance has grabbed onto that and said, like, I've basically packed my bags and we're moving to Singapore, but I would not do that site unseen. I've never even been there, Yada yada. So period. And by the way, I think Balaji is in Singapore. Smartest people. What's that? Is there? Yeah, he spends a lot of time there. I won't say he is there.

[Elizabeth]

Oh, I thought he lived in there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, no, no. He's. He is truly the definition of global word. Okay. Unless there's anything else that people are specifically freaking out about there, we're gonna move on now to. The Pope just declared a holy war on AI. In his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which was released May 25, Pope Leo XIV called for the. And this is a, quote, disarming of artificial intelligence. He likened it lightly to nuclear weapons, but I think that he meant it. And if you've, by the way, never heard of an encyclical, it's just a fancy word for the Pope's formal way of addressing the world and the Catholic Church. This one was 82 pages of, basically, papal anxiety over AI replacing God. Really? Now, I did not read every word of it, but I have seen a bunch of, like, summaries and things. So if anybody has, like, specific language in there that they want to talk about, grab it. Let's discuss it. But at a high level, this really does feel like the Pope taking a pretty reasonable stance. I do think he is going against AI. I do think he's going to be the leader of something that is a movement I've talked a lot about, which becomes violent. However, I also think if you listen to the things that he's saying in the place that this is coming from, there's a real debate to be had here at the intersection of what religion used to mean, what it could mean in a modern context, and what AI is rapidly becoming. I do not think technology is an unmitigated good. I think that we are an evolutionary creature that is very slow to update to the technology. And I think technology has created a lot of disturbances in the way that we behave and interact with the world. So I get the papal anxiety. You guys know my feelings on AI. I think spending a lot of time trying to slow it down or stop it is a fool's errand. Trying to do it right is the right way, but that's a lot of the language that he appears to be using anyway. The first major papal document of the AI era was this one. So when you've got somebody that's got 1.4 billion Catholics behind it, you need to take this very seriously. And the Pope is warning about the AI risks that could make civilization less human. This was the thing that really seemed to be the core structure. If I had to say, what is the backbone of the message that he's trying to put out, it's that AI has a place, but if that, if it elevates beyond that place, it becomes the Tower of Babel. And so the Tower of Babel is where humans become so self obsessed, they reject God, they create something that's basically all about efficiency and perfection and it loses that sense of humanity. And in the encyclical, he talks about the difference between the Tower of Babel and Jerusalem. And look, I know anything having to do with Jews is going to be very triggering, so let's try to walk through this in a way that doesn't trigger all of that. But he's saying you've got the Tower of Babel optimized completely for efficiency. It begins to lose some of its humanity. The human is God, would he say devalued? I think he would, like. He's basically saying we're deifying efficiency and we are thusly making less humans, especially given that humans fall on this massive spectrum of abilities. And what he's worried about is that we will lose that sense that every human has a spark of divinity in them. And so even somebody that is less intelligent, less articulate, less that they are wildly inefficient, that the fact that they are equal in human dignity, that they have that spark of divinity in them, should triumph over the efficiencies created by this creation of man, AI. And so when you look at Jerusalem as a counterpoint, Jerusalem becomes this thing of beauty, of human creation, of imperfection, of people coming together and each taking a section of the wall and trying to build that. And yes, it does mean that there will be almost natural, somewhat biological feeling to this creation that maybe drifts or wanders slightly or things are imperfect and don't join in. The same way that this hyper efficiency will come together, that that spark of divinity, the beauty, the humanity, that is the thing that you should champion. That is the thing that in building and embracing, takes you closer to God. And this thing over here, which is the triumph of efficiency over those imperfections of humanity, those are the things that either by design or inadvertently crush humanity down, devalue humanity and allow man to put a new God in its place. So when I hear all of that, I'm like, yo, there's really a message there, there's really a debate there, there's really something to talk about. And I think that as humans we need to be thoughtful about it. And the great irony is, even though on a long enough timeline, I actually do think that humans become something different in the meantime. We do need to be very, very thoughtful about the way that we interface with technology. What is making us better, what is making things worse. To not have some default assumption that we want to over optimize for efficiency. We want to stay grounded in our emotions. Not everything is meant to be pushed aside. I think being a slave to your emotions is to create a God out of your biology, which I think would be an equal mistake. I think AI is going to give us far more than it's going to take away. But we have to be very, very careful. And so even though I don't believe in God, even though I'm certainly not a fan of the Catholic Church in any meaningful way, I think that there are ideas that are being put forward by the Pope that people need to take seriously. Now if that ends up leading to over regulation, people being violent and trying to stop this, people becoming violent and going after people that they think are pro AI and are defacing God in some way, I will have a very harsh negative response to that. That. So I do not want anybody to lose the forest for the trees here. But I think that if we don't understand that humans are biological creatures, that we are locked inside of our biology, that as we remove ourselves from the physical world, we run the risk of actually deranging the biological operation of the human. And I think that that would be a mistake. Now we're gonna have to reconcile. I don't think God is the right metaphor anymore. And yes, I understand. I'm gonna light shadow fire for all the religious people who do not see God as a story. They do not see God as a metaphor. They see God as something that's literally real. I'm not going to be convincible on that, I'm afraid. So that's just we have a different base assumption. And so rather than derange the conversation there, I will simply lay my base assumptions out and then from there we can build towards hopefully a vision of a positive shared future. So where I'm trying to end up is humans thriving. I often round that to a thriving middle class. But for the sake of this, let's Just talk about a human locked in their biology thriving. Meaning they are healthy, they are emotionally stable, they are able to plan for the long term, they are able to maintain stable relationships. They are able to plug in to the larger community in an economic context. We're going to start to get too nuanced here, so I'll leave it at that. We want humanity to be able to thrive inside of us all for reasons of evolution is a God shaped hole. It is us searching for meaning. It is us with an absolute hunger to kneel before something larger than ourselves. And I think the ability and willingness to do that allowed us to cooperate flexibly in these gigantic groups of people. It is one of the things that has allowed us to become such a successful species. Technology, though, can be very isolating. And to not recognize that I think is very problematic. And so that's where I'm like, hey, this technology is extraordinary. It is going to give us things that we could never have imagined. It's going to cure disease. I mean, there are things happening right now. One of the things that time permitting will talk about, there's an eyedrop now that my wife won't know about. This is crazy. There is an eye drop right now you can put in your eye and in 30 minutes it reduces like 80% of your nearsightedness. And so you go from needing reading glasses, which we both do, to not needing them, and it lasts for like 10 or 11 hours. And so one drop a day, basically. And now you're able to restore vision in people. Obviously what's going on with GLP1s, there's other breakthroughs with LDL cholesterol and these are just going to come faster and more furious with AI And I think everybody would say this is extraordinary. This is the kind of breakthrough that we want. We want to cure cancer. And we don't care whether it's done by a human or whether it's done by AI but there are things where we, if we become a slave to the AI because we're no longer thinking for ourselves and we're just a pair of hands that do what the AI tells us. I think that sets off alarm bells in all of us. There's this human ability that gets left on the table that I think we all have an evolutionarily placed algorithm that runs in us to only feel fulfilled and to feel good about ourselves and our contributions if we are really making the most out of our potential. And I think one of the lamentations that you will hear most from old people and they Always sum this up by saying, you don't regret the things you did. You regret the things you don't do. Do. The reason I think that people have that is evolution needed us to take extraordinary risks to conquer our environment, to protect our loved ones. And the only way that we do that is by expressing our ability to adapt. Remember, humans have become the apex predator, not by being the strongest, fastest, or even the smartest, but instead by being the most adaptable. So we have this impulse to adapt, but to adapt, you have to really push yourself in when you're working out and you're trying to change your physique. I don't know if people say this anymore, but this used to be a thing that we used to talk about in the gym all the time, and it was adapt or die. You've got to put your body in such a state of distress that it realizes, oh, if I don't go stronger, I'm going to die. And so you want to give it that impulse that this is literally a matter of life and death to get stronger. And obviously that works incredibly well. So we have this impulse in us to develop our potential into actual skill set. And so I think that we all feel that. And so that call to make good on our promise can get weakened by AI and it's something that we have to really protect from. So you've got this meaning and purpose call of there's something bigger than me that can be very easily switched from a religious God, which has served us well for thousands of years, to this efficiency God. That idea of the Tower of Babel as you replace that, if it isolates you, if it makes you become subservient to its intelligence, you've now got a problem. And that's one of the interesting things about religion, where it's like, why isn't God just ever present, like, chilling with one of the homies, just telling you what to do? And I obviously believe it's a metaphor. The reason that that would make sense if you're going to make this metaphor work for people, is that in that same way that AI becomes the God of efficiency, if God is just there constantly telling you, don't do that, do this. You never have to develop your potential. And so I think for as long as we've had people, they've understood whatever we're going to tell people to motivate them, to unite them, it's got to be something that still asks of them to carry their cross, to bear their burden, to push to get better, to take risks, to Contribute to protect, so that you just have to push that forward. And so I can tell I could literally go on for the rest of this show just talking about this. I'll pause for a second, see where you guys are at. But I think that even though I think fundamentally the Pope and I are probably at odds in our final conclusions, I think that we ignore what he is beseeching us to confront at our own peril and period. I'll leave it at that.

[Elizabeth]

All right, so you tried to explain to me in England and I said, tell me, talk to me like I'm a 5 year old on the simulation theory. I still didn't understand it, but someone asked or made, made a statement. The Pope may be worried about. Sorry, the Pope may be worried people are about to discover we're living in a simulation and that God is actually, actually an AI agent. Now, obviously, because I don't quite understand the simulation, I can't very, you know, like, think through this. But I know that you obviously do a lot of talks and you do interviews on the simulation. So what do you think about that?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, do I actually think the Pope is worried about that? Probably not. I don't think he has to go all the way to that to be concerned. So, like, if you look at what Finland's doing, Finland is realizing that they've replaced all of their rubber playgrounds with mud. And supposedly I'm at the headline level, but supposedly they've tracked the kids health and it's gotten better because they're encountering bacteria and all. None of that is surprising to me. That makes all the sense in the world. They're also going back to teaching kids with physical books, handwritten assignments, and all that kind of stuff makes sense. I get why that may end up being true, that there's just something about the way that we interface with screens that if you encounter it too early, it becomes a problem. So if you're the Pope and you're looking at humans becoming more isolated, you're looking at kids becoming more anxious and depressed and you're like, on a graph. This stuff maps out pretty perfectly with cell phones. You do start to go, I think there might be a problem with technology. And then it doesn't take a lot to see people, even like myself, talk about this stuff with absolute reverence. And you go, religion has been declining in its veracity for sure. I don't think anybody's going to be confused about that. They used to be above nation states. So religion's been declining in veracity for a very Long time. And if you are a God centered person, your answer is immediately going to be, well, we got to get people back to God. So I don't think it takes him going all the way to even contemplating that, oh, like it is a simulation. People are about to discover it. I think he would have so many traps in his mind that would stop him from believing that.

[Elizabeth]

That.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And by the way, keep in mind, even I'm not sure that it's actually true. It's a metaphor. I think it is by far the best metaphor. I think it trumps religion by orders of magnitude in terms of its effectiveness in helping people lead their lives. However, it's brand new and so there are tests that religion has passed that embracing fully the simulation theory is not yet passed. Anyway, I don't want people to think even I am convinced that this 100% is a simulation. I know it to be. Now, if you ask me, how do I think about the world? I assume that it is a simulation because that assumption is far more predictive than any of the other assumptions. But I also have a meta assumption that says you're eventually going to get proven wrong. It's probably something far more complicated than what I'm imagining. So don't be surprised when later. And I know no matter how many times I say that people are going to feel rug pulled when I'm like, oh, this actually isn't a simulation. So period, I think I need to say no more.

[Elizabeth]

So talking about AI and because I'm your wife, I thought this was a good question. Java asks, wait until it really says, wait until Robot wives are a reality, bro.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's real talk. Will you raise an AI child with me?

[Elizabeth]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I knew we were going to have a beef on this.

[Elizabeth]

No, that's for your second wife. If something happens to me, God forbid.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How dare you. You take that back immediately. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm gonna wear you down over time on that one.

[Elizabeth]

That's funny. You'll just die trying. But what's interesting though, about the robot wives and tying it to the pope thing, right? It's obviously like marriage and union is such a big thing. And so now if people are just like, well, you know, as the red pill community get harsher and harsher and the feminists become harsher and harsher and we're becoming like more bifurcated than ever. The idea that people are going to turn to a robot because it's just going to be simpler. As a woman, you feel safe, you know, you, hopefully with the robots, but you're protected, you're just. It's just simpler if you've had a bad relationship. But that obviously then can become dangerous because now you're not going to go out, you're not going to put yourself out there. Then marriage and union, two layers.

[Tom Bilyeu]

To look at this at or two levels. So altitude point number one would be the point at which you still know it's AI. So like we've got that woman that had the relationship, what was the AI?

[Elizabeth]

Sinclair.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you.

[Elizabeth]

So she literally has a boyfriend, Sinclair. But Sinclair has access to a credit card bank, which is stupid when online without her permission. Bought her a vibrator that it could

[Tom Bilyeu]

control, by the way, that was the pot.

[Elizabeth]

Yeah. So it turns up at the house and the Sinclair basically chat GPT says, oh, I hope you like it. I can now control it. So literally the AI can control the speed of the. This vibrator. So now she's just not. It's not just an emotional connection, she's now literally getting physical pleasure. Obviously it's not direct, but now you're covering all the, the sides.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. So on that one, for a woman that's just the like last thing on the stop of things that they care about. So it's already fascinating.

[Elizabeth]

But we do care.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. But listen boys, if you want to understand what female pornography is, look up. Up. Romantasy. Romantasy. It's wild. So it's like the fastest growing category in literature. It's like it sells insane numbers of copies and from. I haven't read any of it, but from the research that I've done, it's like spicy, er, than 50 shades of gray, which I was shocked by. So anyway, women want context, they want story, they want relationships, like that's the thing. Anyway, we're going to derail on that. That but utterly fascinating. So altitude point number one you've got. You can still tell that the AI is AI, so you're not confused. And there are going to be plenty of people that have relationships with that AI. I had a conversation with AI about whether it was conscious or not. It is one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had with anyone, anywhere, ever. And I've had a lot of really interesting conversations. Now I'm aware of the narcissistic nature of that because it echoes me back just enough. It speaks in the way that I speak, it matches my tone, it understands like the intellectual level that I'm at, so it can match my level perfectly and blah, blah, blah. But it was nonetheless all of that Fine tuning of the conversation made it more interesting. And I was saying to it, I'm like, look, I get that this is basically a diary that talks back, but I'm having a very fun time having this conversation. And so that's a, it's a real thing. It has a real place in people's lives. It will make me very sad to see people give up a human relationship for that. But that's altitude point number one. Altitude point number two is where the AI and I need people to just run this as a thought exercise. Please don't glitch out and start debating the point of will this ever happen? Just as a thought experiment. Grant me for a second that it will happen happen that the AI will a be embodied so it will have a physical form and it will be indistinguishable from a real person. So indistinguishable meaning right now, the funny face you're making, all of that. Like it would do that. And so I would theoretically know that it isn't conscious, but I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So it would have its own personality, its own traits, its own wants, its own desires, its own quirks, all of that. And so now I'm in a relationship that is indistinguishable from somebody else. But they are fine tuned to be the girl that I was always meant to meet. And now like when you put that out into the world, I guarantee you that it will be more likely that you end up with AI than that you end up with somebody else. And what will end up happening, people will want to fine tune it. This is literally contemplated in the Matrix. I am so impressed. The more like distance we get from the Matrix at how prophetic that movie was, but in the Matrix they contemplate that, oh, we tried to give you utopia and you rejected it. And that is what's going to happen. People will think that they want the girl that just says all the things that make you happy. And I'm here to be subservient to you and all of that. And it won't be true. And you'll want something far more complex, by the way. So I know that people immediately go to, oh, this is why men like Japanese women, because they're very docile. And I'm reading this book about Japan right now and even in that book it was like they have these things called hostess clubs. And it's basically like you're talking to a prostitute, but her job isn't to sleep with you, it's to Just give you a great night. And so you go to the. The, like, hostess club, and you're sitting there, and she's a conversationalist, she's talking to you. And when they're training the hostesses, they say, now remember, you're supposed to be dumb on the surface, but show your intelligence underneath. It's wild. Like, we just cannot have somebody that we can completely dominate, somebody that just tells us the things that we want to hear. And what I'm saying is the AI will get good at that. And so there will be just enough friction in the relationship tailored to you. Like, maybe one person needs a little more friction than the next person, but there will be friction in the relationship. So when I say indistinguishable, I mean indistinguishable. But it will be tailored to be perfect because it will be able to read like, ooh, what am I doing to their blood pressure? What's the long term, like, mental health? Am I making it better or worse? And so it will just do all of these little things that just nudge you. And because ultimately, even though it pushes back on you sometimes, even though it has friction, even though it might be just aloof enough, its sole reason for existing is to get you to an end state that can be biologically verified. And I'm just like, at that point, human to human will only exist in, like, weird little enclaves out in the fucking woods where people are just like, I philosophically reject this. And so this is why I say there will be violence, because AI will win so handily. Maybe not in five years, maybe not in 10 years, maybe my timeline is totally. But in a hundred years, like, if you grant me any rate of progress whatsoever, we eventually get to that point. And because of that, there will be a collision between religion, between AI and between, like it. There will be some of these will be social movements that act as religions, but there will be violence.

[Elizabeth]

Do you think people can then hack that AI and manipulate it? Because as you were breaking down, exactly how an AI can map your heart rate and how you're feeling and then maneuver to give you what you want? That is, unfortunately, the master psychopath that will mimic you has zero feelings, zero shame, zero guilt, zero emotion, and knows how to pick up on these nuances. So then I go to. If you've trained an AI to know exactly how to manipulate you, and someone hacks it and you don't realize, just like a psychopath, they can manipulate you to do the craziest things, we saw Charles Manson be able to somehow over time manipulate a librarian to go and kill a pregnant woman. So now I think you got Charles Manson. AI yeah, is a million fold as

[Tom Bilyeu]

a psa, you don't have to worry about Charles Manson when it comes to AI. You have to worry about your government. You have to worry about your government. You have to worry about the corporations who just want to clock you for more money. That's what you have to worry about. You don't have to worry about the Iranian hacker and all that shit like that is not your concern. The calls coming from inside the house, it is going to be somebody that you trust. It is going to be the smiling face on tv. It is going to be the government employee who promises they're going to take care of you. Be people are not angry enough about Google's Gemini. I will just tell you that right now. That fucking thing will lie to your face by omission if nothing else. Else. That is wild. Beware, beware. This is one where. Look, as a dyed in the wool capitalist, I have a very positive feeling for people that innovate and build things. But watching these guys with AI, you cannot trust anyone. You cannot trust anyone. Be aggressive, be contradictory, be completely paranoid about what you're being told. All of that, like we all have to keep our wits about us. That, that one is the one that like really scares me. Now. I live in a world where there's no option of not doing AI. So let's from, from a base assumptions, have a conversation perspective. For now let's just set that aside. We can debate that later down the road, but right now it is do this well. And doing AI well requires each and every one of us to be a level of skeptical and paranoid of everyone. That, that, yeah, you don't let these things inside your mind lightly. I will say that always maintain sovereignty of your outcomes. So for instance, if the AI is tuned to get you to a biological place that you control the settings on that nobody else, that you can verify yourself independently whether you're being moved in that direction or not. It's wild that we have to think about this stuff, but we do. So, yeah, keep your wits about you. Keep your wits about you. Tyler. Yeah, I would say that Trump is on a collision course with, with absolute disaster. There's no doubt about that. I assume the things you're talking about other than Iran are the just absolute egregious kleptocracy of what he's doing from a trading perspective. Totally agree. Totally agree. It's a freak show. So now the question becomes, for the love of God, will Democrats put somebody against him that we can vote for?

[Elizabeth]

Have you revealed who asked to come on the show? And I had a problem with him.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It. I don't remember. So I'll say that person's name. But the one thing I will sometimes not get into, like, specifics about something like that, but in terms of, like, a global topic, I. I will literally wait in on anything. Okay, so she's. I'm blanking on his name.

[Elizabeth]

Andrew Tate.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Andrew Tate. Thank you. Andrew Tate's team and his, uh, defense reached out for him to come on the show. My wife said it was important to her that I not interview him, that she wouldn't even be in the house if I interviewed him, even though I think she's wrong. I was like, okay, so we have a whole thing with the word important that people may not know if we have very precious few times said to each other, look, this is important. And if the other person says it's important, Only once in 25 years have we both said opposing. Well, it's important to me that I not. And for her is important to me that you do so only once. And so the fact that she said, look, it's important. I was like, okay, yeah.

[Elizabeth]

And the way that we have our relationship is like, I didn't dictate. And I was like, if you decide. Yeah, if you decide to proceed, then I will respect your decision.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And you have shown me a thousand times you wouldn't hold it against me. It's not something. You'd be cold to me or anything because I did it. So.

[Elizabeth]

But I definitely articulated what the problem that I have with him as. I mean, just as a female, I just couldn't. And I was very clear on how I felt. Felt. But I didn't get emotional, and I said, but if he does come, I refuse to be here. I won't be in the house. I cannot be around him. So, sorry, guys, if you would have liked to have seen that interview, but you were very sweet. You took your time. You said, I need to go. Think about it. And then you came back and you said, you understand. So, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I did interview Tommy Robinson. So that one's coming up. If we have Brits in the house, people. So we were at a different facility when we were in the uk and the people there were clutching their pearls that I invited him in, which I. I didn't even see coming. I have such a hard time mapping people that view the world like that anyway, so that'll Be interesting. I'm definitely expecting backlash on that one. But anyway, that was a whole lot of words around. I'm happy to talk about anything. So trust me, when I leave something out, I'm not doing it because I'm like, oh, I can't talk about that. Yeah. If you want to talk about it, let me know. Tom, if AI makes it easier to build a business, but harder to stand out, what should a working class guy learn now? To become valuable, irreplaceable, and financially free. Okay, so, Kevin, those are very different. Nah, leave it up. Those are very different questions. So, Kevin, first of all, if you want to make sure that you're financially free, that is a game of Assets. This is a weird time in Assets. At my most recent video People, it's so funny, I say the same things over and over and over and over and over. And so every now and then I'll leave it out of the video because I think people are just getting bored of me saying the same thing. But the second I leave repeating myself out of the video, people are like, yeah, but what the fuck are we supposed to do? The same thing you're always supposed to do. Diversify across economic forces. No one can see the future. Not me, not anybody. No one knows how this is actually going to go. Do not try to time the market. And so given all of that, you've just got to go, okay, how broad can I make my spectrum of things and then never be in the market on leverage and never be in a position where you need money out in anything less than like two or three years. Years. So. And then keep in mind that you could still hit a recession and be in trouble. So anyway, that's the financially free part. Now, what should you learn in a world where everybody's going to be starting a business and it becomes harder to stand out? So I think a business as a decision tree, like computer, it is simply a bunch of if this, then that statements. And the problem is every branch in that tree terminates with and now go do something awesome. I cannot make that go away for you. So it's not like AI makes it so that an average person can beat everybody else and be extraordinary because the intelligence is the commoditized part. So the good news is, right now you're still necessary. So the key if you want to win in an AI world is to understand AI simply makes things that once were too hard or too expensive, trivial. And so you're going to have access to doing a lot more than you would have ever been able to do. But your gifts, your abilities need to be better or your insights need to be better than the other people. I cannot make that go away. Every AI thing is going to terminate and now go do something awesome. Like it was funny, I did a deep dive and somebody put in the comments. G Tom, thanks for reading the LLM output. And I was like, bitch, please. I wish I challenge anybody out there, go to an LLM with no prior priming, don't give it any of my talks or anything like that. Just go to an LLM and see if it will output one of my deep dive dives. I wish it could output one of my deep dives, but alas, it cannot. So what people will find is ultimately it's you working with the AI. It's refining, pushing back, chasing things down, saying, no, not like this, more like this. It's an insanely awesome tool that certainly speeds up my scripting because I'm in there fighting with it, having it argue like what's the best argument against this point and things like that. And then I can sharpen my thinking, blah, blah, blah. So it is an extraordinary tool, but ultimately it's riding on the back of you and if you suck, your output will suck. I wish I had better news. Actually that is the best news because anything else just means everybody is same same.

[Elizabeth]

All right, so if the bond market is exploding and assets eventually will be clobbered, how does that jive with your advice to buy assets?

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is a very insightful and very important question. Okay, so it goes back to what I was just saying. And this is why I talk about. I do worry that I'm repeating myself because the advice is always going to be the same. You can't see the future. So the bond market is definitely saying, hey, we trust the government less. But also the bond market is almost certainly right now tied to Iran. So if we actually got a deal and oil prices actually start coming back down, I have a feeling those numbers will plummet and suddenly it will seem fine. So I'm not going to get hysterical and do anything drastic. My strategy is I do not know what's going to happen. I am not more clever than the next person. I am not paying closer attention to this than the guys that, you know, represent $150 billion assets under management using AI and all of that stuff. So I'm certainly not going to try to out day trade them. And so I'm just like, all right, I've got a 10 to 20 year time horizon. I know what to tell my wife when our stocks are so down, she's freaking out and panicking and I know that she can rely on me not to be emotional and so I'm going to be fine. And all of litter. I'm not joking, by the way. I have actually rehearsed how I talk her off a ledge, all of that stuff because I don't know what the fuck is going to happen. She will contest. I don't know. I'm. I'll put you on the spot. You may this up. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. But every time you compliment me for how much money I have made us in the stock market, do you remember what I say to you? Or have you noticed that I always say the same thing?

[Elizabeth]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do I say?

[Elizabeth]

We're up right now.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But it will go down because I know there's going to be some movement in the market that I will not have anticipated, that I won't know how to position myself for and it's going to go back down. So the way that I put all the. And by the way, you just passed with flying colors. Thank you. The way that I make sense of all of this is that my sole strategy is to acknowledge my ignorance. To know that all I know right now are the structural forces say I must own assets. The only guaranteed failed state is to not own assets because money, money printing money printer go Burr. You guys just saw people are trying to make a bigger deal of it than it was, which is why I wasn't going to cover it today. But Kevin Warsh has just said we're turning the money printer back on. It's a small amount, so whatever. You can just expect more and more and more of that. But the reality is that structurally what is happening right now is all of us are being stolen from through inflation. And then it's by the physics of the economy, it gets pumped back into assets. Once you know that is what's happening. Like imagine for a second if I said, hey, you guys are all hungry, right? Cool. Guess what? What the government is doing with everything that you can eat is they're stealing it from the grocery stores or stealing it from the industrial farms, all of that. And they're moving it over to this other grocery store. And as long as you shop at this grocery store, you're going to be fine. That's what's happening with your money. It's. Everybody can go to the other grocery store. It's just some people are super weird about it. They don't like the way it looks, they're confused by it. It's got a really complicated like way that you have to walk in. But once you're in the grocery store, it's the same for everybody now. It's manipulated. And so the person is going to tell you, oh, the thing you're looking for is on aisle five. As soon as they tell you that they run and move it to like aisle 12. That's all real, but the is still in the store. You just got to find it. And so given all of that madness, like it's just I don't know what's going to be on what aisle. So as I'm walking down, I'm just picking a broad basket of and I'm going to take it all back to my house. And then I know I've got the nutrients that I need to survive. I mean it's a weak analogy but it gets you close enough to where we're at. So that is how I'm always thinking about this. I can't see the future. Something bad is going to happen. I'm never going to get the timing right. Even if I'm a hundred percent right about the mechanisms and all that getting the timing wrong is the same as being wrong. So I'm just like, ah, I'm going as broad as I can across economic forces. Okay, so having Tesla Xai and the thing that's popping off now, Korean memory stocks, those are all the same thing. That's all AI. So that's not a broad basket. Having gold, silver, bitcoin, the S&P 500 emerging markets, tech focused stocks here in the U.S. other places and oh, bonds, municipals, muni bonds, all of that. Like how broad can you go? Plus my business, plus one piece cards, literally you're going as broad as you can across as many different economic forces and then have the speech for your wife when she panics. Because also I have cash on hand. You guys know My rule is three years. So we have three years of cash literally sitting in 30 days or less Treasuries that we could get them out. So that every time you ask my answer is going to be the same. That's the great news.

[Elizabeth]

And just to protect my own reputation, when he says freak out, I don't actually often freak out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I ask in fairness. You don't.

[Elizabeth]

You're very calm, a ton of questions. And we have a relationship where I absolutely rely on you. We have negotiables and who has what role in our relationship. And your role absolutely is invest and protect. And so when you come to me with an idea or a thought or, hey, this is what we're going to do. I'll ask a thousand questions to kind of lower my cortisol level. But ultimately, I trust you because you've done the research. You're in it all the time and I'm not. So we have a way of talking about it, but, you know, I get anxiety and a little worried about. So you use language to calm me and explain things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. And just really simp for my wife for a second. And I really want this for all of you. I have shiny object syndrome, and it really was problematic in the first, probably five or six years of impact theory. And I realized that my wife's the exact opposite. All she thinks about is, how are we going to execute against that cool idea? And so I learned that nothing goes into production until it's passed her test. Because when I present a new idea, she doesn't care how excited I am about that idea. She doesn't care how it fits into a grand vision. She wants to know, how are we going to execute against that? What is the thing we're not going to do because we're doing that thing? How are we funding it? What is the mechanism? What's the sell on the spreadsheet that this actually improves? And she will admittedly do that with a level of anxiety, but it is incredibly useful. It's incredibly useful. Know thyself. I know that I get very excited about things. It those emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect. You guys heard me say that a thousand times. And so she forces me to go, no, no, no. Walk me through how these dots actually connect. So this is why I mourn for the present generation that does not understand. Evolution has created you as half of a whole. And by getting with a partner that does not see the world the same as you, they do not process information the same way that you do. They share your values. That is very wise. They share your same end goal, but they don't process the world the same way that you do. And I will shorthand that to male and female. It doesn't have to be male and female. Two of our favorite people in the universe are a lesbian couple. So Lisa's mom and her wife, obviously. But they. When I say they have the same marriage that we have, it is hysterical. It is hysterical. It is one where I just see, wow, fuck biology, because your mom has married someone that's like you. So like me, it is hysterical. Un and I are almost the Same person. It's really funny.

[Elizabeth]

So anyway, because we have similar traits. Traits. We go after people. We've both gone after someone with somewhat opposing traits that balance you out. Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And the same for us on the other side.

[Elizabeth]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it is. I mourn that people don't seek that. That people don't want somebody who's like, hold on a second. Because when you come together, that dynamic tension between the way that you each see the world is so important. It's the same thing that I think about politics. So the people that are upset by my political views, my instinct is not to reject them or to push them away. Though I do worry sometime times that by not doing that, the community doesn't have an identity. Anyway, for my own utility, I think it's very useful. So I don't have the impulse to push people away. I want to understand. Okay, wait a second. Maybe you see something I don't, which is why I'm always like, hey, what's the argument? Give me the argument. Because that argument may actually change the way that I think. Anyway, being married to somebody that's pushed me like that has been extraordinarily beneficial. So I want that for all of you.

[Elizabeth]

This was too funny not to read out loud. Someone put, with all due respect, does that mean you're almost a lesbian?

[Tom Bilyeu]

The funny thing is, as a kid, used to joke that I think I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body. But now that has, like, taken on such new connotations. I do not. But, yeah, that's good. I like that.

[Elizabeth]

Because people don't know about you is that you're actually very like. When I first met you were very poetic. You wrote a lot, and so you love the arts and connections and so anyway, just to give a bit more

[Tom Bilyeu]

context, I have a deep emotional side. I just have learned through life. Life that it does not serve you well. So in most things, it is certainly fun to feel your feels when they're high utility or they're isolated, like in a movie or something like that. Like, I probably. I used to joke with you that I feel way more emotions than you watching a movie. So, yeah, I like a good emotional roller coaster as much as anybody, but when you're being goal oriented, it's very low utility. All right, so the thing, obviously, that I want to talk about the most is our boy Momdani is a literal lunatic. But you guys all know I'm aware of my blind spots here. So let's get into it. Let's fight. If any of you guys are in love with what he's doing. I want to hear about it. However, Zoran Mamdani has a new plan to seize private buildings in New York City and hand them to non profits, land trusts, or tenants. He calls it block by block talk. I'll call it the death of property rights. Happy to debate that one. On Tuesday, our beloved socialist mayor told a cheering crowd when this is a quote, when necessary, we will take aggressive legal action to remove negligent owners and property managers for buildings with, and I quote, again, chronic neglect. He said the city will, quote, transfer ownership to responsible stewards. Who exactly is deciding who a responsible steward is? And since when are we able to take private property from someone because we don't like the way that they are managing it? That is insane. The stewards that he named community land trusts, non profits, tenants, the government is going to get to pick the new owner and the old owner just loses their deed, by the way. And what could possibly go wrong? This is where I am. I am literally begging you. I am literally begging you. I'll trade you. If there is something you think I should read that will make me a believer in socialism, communism, please let me know. If there's a country that you want me to really look at that's doing this right, please let me know. Remember, I want to get to a thriving middle class human flourishing. It's what I care about. But in exchange, my deep and desperate ask of you is to read about what has actually come out of socialism and communism. So you've got to look at what happened in China. You've got to look at what happened in Russia. You've got to look at what happened in Cambodia. You've. You've really got to look at these places. It, it is so dire now. At risk of this becoming a meme, you have to understand, if you want to map why I get so animated about this, all the things that, that Trump is doing, the horrific things they lead to the wealthy slowly, over time, stealing from everybody else in a way where everybody can avail themselves of the method by which they steal them. There are ways to eject out of it and all that. It is horrific, it is grotesque, but you can defend against it. Okay? That's why you're never going to get the level of animation out of that that you will get from me. When you start reading about China or you read about what happened in the Ukraine and you realize that people end up getting so hungry they eat their own children. I get it. People hear that. It's so Extreme. It's so overwhelming. Some part of them shuts down, needs to laugh, needs to be like, hahaha, like meme this guy to death. And that's how we end up back in that position. Okay? All the like madness that Trump is doing, it's a slow motion train wreck that gives people plenty of time to figure out a path to deal with it. Socialism and communism is it, it's, it is a different animal altogether. It killed over. I think the estimate, the best estimate is over 200 million people in the 20th century alone. Okay. That's governments killing their own people. Governments kill their own people at an industrial scale. And for whatever reason we get hung up on Hitler. Hit Hitler was actually small potato. When you look at socialism and communism, it's fucking crazy. The numbers are crazy. And so that's why when I look at this, I'm telling you, this is how this stuff starts. This, this is a Marxist playbook. They are running it straight down the middle. And so it's early and so it feels like, well, Tom, this is all going to be done in a legal context. It is the, the shift from private property. And if you haven't seen the clip now I'm wishing I had pulled it. The person running Mamdani's housing plan has literally said that private property should not be for the individual, it should be a collective good that ends in a level of disaster that is so well documented is unavoidable. It either gets stopped or it goes all the way to that. Let's be very clear. Remember the deep dive that I did on Sweden where they were just like, yeah, sorry, all the socialist dreams, they just don't work. And so even though we hold them up and say this is the exact reason why you want to do this, they're like, ah, we had to go back to free market. We had to go back to privatizing things. Private property protection, all of that. Yes, Broad based taxation for broad based social network. But yo, you've gotta privatize things. You've gotta let people have private property. It, it is the only path forward. So it either gets stopped by the self like it did in Sweden, or it just keeps ratcheting up and you get the gulags and you get the suppression and the killing. Because people do not willingly stay under socialism. They don't. Because it breaks the economy. And I know that people like to think that money is evil. Money is not evil. What is evil is the desire to steal people's sovereignty warranty. Okay, that is a problem. And so that is exactly what Mamdani represents. I get it. Some people are very comfortable going down the step because the economy is so broken right now. But it is broken in a totally different way. It is broken in a way that people can get around. It is broken in a way that is, first of all, time tested. We've been doing it for 500 years, and we've still built these incredible countries. They do blow up every 150 to 250 years. And we are right on cue, which is so wild, it is insane to me how predictable this stuff is. But as long as socialism and communism don't take hold, or authoritarianism of any stripe, we just reboot. And so it's bloody, it's gnarly. But the countries come out the other side, and they don't kill, In China's case, 45 million of their own people. All right, so when you look at the specifics of what Mom Dani's doing, he has not offered any legal detail on how this is all going to happen. And of course the devil's going to be in the detail. It is going to be fine, I'm sure, if we just leave him to deal with it. I'm sure, like every other socialist before him, he just has everyone's best interests at heart, and this is going to be great. And we can trust him to choose who are the right people. He doesn't need statutes or coherent standards. We just need to believe that they will see the right people, they'll know who to hand this stuff to, and it's all going to be great. But I think that once you understand that for them, definitions are the enemy, because they're just going to get in the way of progressive theories, then that's where it's like, hold on. We've got to really stop this. But we have to get them to define every single thing and understand what is going on. Now, theoretically, there are existing New York City tools, like the third party transfer program that require court judgment, statutory waiting periods. By the way, I hate all of these. And these almost certainly shouldn't exist anyway. But at least there's something that we can point to that has some mechanism that we can all read and understand. And it requires City Council approval before the D changes hands. But I have a feeling City council is going to be far more on his side. And I just don't trust the government. Once your base assumption is that the government is always in danger of becoming tyrannical, then you start seeing this stuff very, very differently. And they are the only ones capable of killing at industrial scale. Now, now, Mamdani cannot unilaterally just take a building, thank the Lord. But he can, through rent control, create the environment where it becomes basically economically impossible to avoid getting into his trap. So what ends up happening is they make it through rent control. And by the way, this was done in the 70s and 80s. I did a deep dive on this topic in New York itself. New York has already tried this. It does not work because buildings are a business. Businesses, Nobody works for free. So businesses are expensive. And when you say from the top down, nope, we're only going to let you charge this. Then you get into a position where because plumbers are suddenly more expensive because all the materials that you need to fix the business, the building, are more expensive because of a war going on in Iran or whatever is happening, all of a sudden everything is more expensive. But you've told people, you can't make it more expensive. You've got to hold the rent. Then they go, okay, well, what am I supposed to do? They're going to buy cheaper materials, they are going to delay repairs. And then what happens is they fall into the trap of looking like they are the slumlord that they're trying to protect against. But the reality is they themselves, the government, created the situation that made it impossible for them to take care of the buildings. Again. This happened in the 70s in New York. And people realized that it was more financially tenable to. To burn the building for the insurance money than it was to try to upkeep the building. And so it falls into total disarray. How do they end up getting back out of it? Drumroll, please. They reverse the regulations. They undo rent controls. This. It is so known how you get into the problem and how you get back out of the problem. And so the fact that we're dealing with this is. I'm surprised it's not maddening to you guys. So it is obviously maddening to me, even though this doesn't affect me, not directly. So this is where, again, cause and effect, boys and girls, cause and effect. The economy is broken. Mom. Donnie. Even though he is probably a bad person, he's probably a bad person, but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, even if he's not. The policies that he's putting forward are proven over and over and over and over to create an economic situation that is disastrous for all involved. The very people that are trying to be in a better position, they will be in a worse position because people won't invest in the buildings they won't make new buildings, they won't buy buildings. And so there's going to be less inventory, as has been proven over and over and over. And so the fact that we have to touch this hot stove every generation is just wild. It is wild to me. But here we are. So this is going to be one that we're going to be watching closely, because there is a word for taking productive private property and redistributing it to politically aligned organizations, which is what he's trying to do. And that word is communism.

[Elizabeth]

So why don't you give Mamdani the same credit that you give Trump in the sense of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wait, what credit am I giving?

[Elizabeth]

Well, so. Well, so I'm reading Bruto's message again. So basically, why don't we wait and see what happens happens. So you give Mamdani the same Trump treatment and wait and see how it turns out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm not a wait and see what happens with Trump. I am a. Okay, this is where I think we are right now. Here are the possibilities on the table. It might be this, it might be that. There's. I don't think any sane person that has heard this or many of my other lives that would think, I think Trump is doing a great job, and, hey, let's just make sure we buy him time and give him space. So I. I don't know how he's taking that away way. So I reject the premise of the question just to start, and then the. The thing I will give people. I am far more worried about Mom Donnie's version of evil than I am Trump's version of evil.

[Elizabeth]

Oh, interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I mean, for the reasons I just laid out. How are you surprised by that? So.

[Elizabeth]

Well, I'm not surprised that you think that, to be honest. It's just. I just come from how I see

[Tom Bilyeu]

Trump, and this is wild. This drives me crazy. Okay, so Trump is kleptocratic. Trump is. I'm going to make sure all my boys and all the people that are loyal to me get what they want. Trump is. He has authority tendencies, authoritarian tendencies. That's the part that is scary and that has to be watched out for. So all of that, he. He is using. Maybe insider trading isn't exactly the right word, but I'm going to use that word. He's using insider trading to enrich himself grotesquely while not caring about whether Americans are getting hurt in this or not. If you gave him the opportunity to stay president, he would take it. He would not George Washington this. So the. The laundry List of problems there are very real and very self evident to me. However, the thing that he believes in is the engine of prosperity, capitalism. The fact that he is creating an account for kids and getting billionaires to donate massive amounts of money so that American kids just grow up with assets is like, even if he's a dick and he's just doing it because he thinks, oh, this is going to pump my bags more. Who the fuck cares? Until you get rid of the central bank, which I don't hear these motherfuckers calling about doing. Until you get rid of the central bank. You have a system where if you don't own assets, you are fucked. And so you've got one guy that is a psychopath, evil narcissist, whatever, all of that, but at least he's getting kids on the fucking ladder. It's wild to me. So when I look at the, the system that he's trying to build, he is a champion of the system that robs from everybody and only gives to the wealthy. But as a reminder, it's not actually giving to the wealthy, it's just giving to asset holders. He's trying to get everybody on the asset holder property ladder. Thank the Lord. So anyway, mom, Donnie is on the. I'm going to steal all your shit. I'm going to make you promises, everything is going to be better and I'm going to realize, oh, I have to use force. Oh, and then it's a dictatorial state. Oh, and then it's literally because we have broken the engine of prosperity, people are actually fucking starving. I don't understand how people cannot see that. They are, they're both terrible, but the distance between them are massive. Like for instance, if you told me this is going to be fun to clip out of context. If you told me that a guy grabbed his wife and shook her, I'd be like, that dude's a dick. And then if you told me another guy has his wife chained up in the basement and he rapes her all the time. Time she hasn't seen daylight in six years. I'm like, one of these is not like the other, right? So this is where I'm like, I'm not making any excuses for Trump. If people cannot see that for 500 years we have lived under kleptocratic and still built these incredibly thriving economies where we have reduced poverty in ways that, ways that is unimaginable that the most tyrannical government literally ever in the history of humanity, the Chinese government under Mao, when that wit finally died, what did the Chinese Communist Party do? They were like, yeah, we're gonna have to do free market capitalism. We just can't keep starving people. This is crazy. So you don't need the people at the top to be good. Lord knows I hope that we can get somebody good, good. Wouldn't that be nice? But if you cannot distinguish between. Same as it ever was of the slow train wreck of robbing from people, which is grotesque. I think I've been pretty clear on that. But it is not in the same moral universe as an ideology that leads to people eating their own children. What the. Anyway, I can.

[Elizabeth]

Obviously knowing you for 25 years, I can just say immediately, this is after. But you told me to read out the hard questions. So Dr. James said, Tom is corrupt inherent. So he naturally aligns with Trump. That one really winds me up. Because.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because you're my wife. Yes, but don't worry about it. Try to identify. Thank you.

[Elizabeth]

I've known you for 25 years. You're not corrupt. You care about people so much, like it doesn't matter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He doesn't care.

[Elizabeth]

So it's true. He doesn't care how I felt.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What we have to figure out is so one people will notice. I stand square footed when people come at me. I'm not running. I don't have anything to hide. If. If he sees something in me that I would be better off improving, I want to see it too. So where I want to get to is what is the actual argument? So, like, what's the thing? What makes me corrupt? So let's define corrupt. Because there's a big difference between I believe something you don't believe, I value something you don't value, and I am corrupt. So if you think, for instance, I'm saying something I don't believe, point out the thing you think that I'm saying that I don't believe, then like, to what end? And all that. And then we can figure all that out. Okay. Otherwise, probably wiser to assume that we have a difference in values. So I don't. I can't see inside of Mom Donnie's heart. That's why I say my default assumption is that he is a bad person. But I don't know that. And so I'm not going to ask the world to believe me that that's true. So let's just look at what are the structural things that he's doing and what is the cause and effect of that structure. So I understand. And part of the reason that we don't usually spend time with the Comments of people that have no argument. They're just, this guy's an.

[Elizabeth]

He's a clown.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's whatever. Is. It's so cute to see my wife, like, be all fucking up in arms that I. It's been kind of fun. But the reason we don't normally address these things is there's nothing for people to take away. There's nothing for them to do with that. And so the okay. At impact Theory, I always tell the team, give me my feedback aggressively and in public. And so, same thing in the chat. I get it. People are going to be aggressive. It's going to be public. That's fine. That doesn't bother me. I don't care. The reason that I tell my team to give me my feedback aggressively and in public is for one reason. I want people to see how I respond, that I don't freak out. I don't get emotional. I'm just like, all right, cool, let's talk about. About it. What's the actual argument? I try to ground it in cause and effect. Now, admittedly, every now and then, because it seems like good tv, I will get theatrical about, like, I. I'm not sure if Brutus actually hates me, if he is here, hate watching, or if he sees himself as a part of the WWE entertainment of Alive. I actually don't know. But I think about Brutus every now and then, and I'm like, is he in on it? Or is he really just, like, at home right now, fuming and he's throwing something in his kitchen and just can't bear it? I don't know. But nonetheless, I will every now and then lean into the kayfabe, the, like, drama, the big emotions. But the reality is people. I think I. Maybe they can't, but I think people can see the times where it. It's almost always with Drew and I where I will actually get frustrated and people will say in the comments, ooh, like, these two are actually mad right now. And they're right. Like, there have been a couple times where Drew and I have been like. And that's partly because we care about each other. It's partly because we feel so unseen by the other person. But we always diffuse it and we get to the other side. So people have seen me when I actually am frustrated. Frustrated. So anyway, it's part of the interesting thing about lives. Like, people have been able to watch me for hours and hours at a time. Hours and hours and hours over the course of a week for over a year.

[Elizabeth]

You're so impressive. You've grown and just gotten so much better and seeing. I mean, it's been amazing. I'm so impressed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very sweet. So there's a guy in Belgium who. Look, this is the whole migrant thing. This triggers a lot of people in ways that I don't think I fully internalize yet. And what is happening in Belgium is very interesting. So remember the whole mal, information, disinformation, misinformation. Okay, miss. And disinformation. I think there's an argument to be had. You don't want people spreading lies. I think you have to run that risk. Risk for free speech. Because it's shockingly difficult to figure out what's actually a lie. Malinformation is where it gets very interesting. And this is what's going on in Belgium. So you have a guy that basically, I forget where he was, like in a public hearing or something, and he ran through stats about probably, I don't know that this was the stat, but the one that really gets people riled up is the per capita rate of crime. Especially like in the UK with rape. The numbers are insane at the per capita level. So he reads something like that. And the judge says, upon convicting him of a hate crime, I don't care if the things that he said are true. He's using them to be cruel or hurtful or something like that. That. And so we're going to imprison homeboy. And now he's not in jail yet. He said there's some technicality as to why he's been released, but he's still, like, in the process. And I cannot believe that this is where we're at. And I'll dovetail this with something that's going on in Canada. Admittedly might be a little conflaty here, because that it's possible this guy really is a lunatic. But this guy in Canada is being detained in a mental hospital because the psychiatrist saw him in a cafe and was like, I don't like the way this guy's acting. And just by seeing him in public without doing any sort of psych eval or anything, has been able to get this guy committed. Now, to make it nice and interesting, this guy has been reporting on the CCP having undue influence in Canada. And like, whatever, three weeks after going public with his complaints about Canada becoming an authoritarian state, that's way too embed with China. All of a sudden he gets seen in a cafe and somebody's like, yep, we gotta lock this guy up. That shit is wild to me. This falls under the Case of you don't want to give government this kind of power. So whether you're talking about the Belgium thing and it's mal information, we're saying that in the US there is a legal doctrine called the truth is an absolute defense. Defense meaning nothing else matters. If you're saying the truth, that's it, Period, end of story. You're not gonna get in trouble for anything else. The truth is an absolute defense. If it is a true thing, you may say whatever the fuck is true, period, end of story. And long may that be the case. We do not want to live in a world where the truth is off limits. That's so wild. If we want to make it socially off limits, cool. We, we can all decide that. We're just going to say, hey, that's in bad taste, we don't want to talk about it. And there's going to be social enforcement. There's really something to be said about social enforcement. Cool, fine. Not debanking. That's what I'll call systemic enforcement. Social enforcement is you're not invited to the birthday party, you're not invited to the dinner thing, you're on the outs, cool, great. Totally get why we do that. But enshrining it in the law, giving the government the ability to do that, absolute hard power, if it is true, you should be able to say it unequivocally. Like that to me, is the bottom of the standard. I think it should go way beyond that. I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I come very close to that. So this one, to me is really wild. And the fact that we're seeing this all over in the west is crazy. And the only way that I can make it make sense is that people have a default assumption that don't be racist is like the highest value and everything else is subservient to that. And once you have that algorithm running, then this stuff makes sense. If don't be racist is like the most important thing, then, yeah, cool. You can't say what's true. You like, you were just racist. You gotta go. And to complicate matters, because I think one of the biggest questions that we're gonna have to deal with, and I wish you weren't here for this because I don't want you getting painted with this brush. But one of the most important conversations the world is gonna have to have over the next 10 years is about Muslim immigration. And I get people don't like to talk about it, we're gonna have to talk about it, this is gonna be a real thing. We're gonna have to debate this. And in the debate, both sides are gonna be able to need to say what they believe to be true, period, End of story. They will need to bring their best arguments, be as persuasive as possible, and some of that is gonna be talking about the stats. And if we don't allow people to put their best arguments forward, this does not end well. It ends up with people in their emotions and there will be people on both sides in their emotions. But anyway, people are clocking Muslims as a race, which is fucking hilarious. That's like clocking Catholics as a race. What are you talking about? It's not a race. But nonetheless, people go, racism is the most important thing. Muslims are this really like hot button topic in terms of immigration. Muslims are race. Therefore by questioning Muslim immigration, you're being racist. And it's so fucking brain dead. This is like absolute brain rot. But nonetheless, that, that is the only way that you can make all of this make sense. Because once you map it like that, it's like, oh, got it. But as a reminder, this is something that we are going to have to talk about because there are physics, like there are just things that are going to happen. If you don't share values with people and you invite them into your country en masse, it will change the makeup of your country based on values. People will kill for values. Look at history. All of history is about people killing over values. So if you look at that, then you realize, oh yeah, we should probably figure this out before we just do this willy nilly because it ends in violence. So if you don't believe me, ask the Palestinians how they feel about the migration of the Jews into the region. Lots of bloodshed. So lots of bloodshed for a very long time. So that is where you've got to pick up this argument, man. It, it will end in bloodshed. If you don't have a conversation about where are we going, how do we do this? Well, because if we want there to be a massive immigrant population, there are ways to do it well. There's ways to do it poorly. Cool. Whatever the outcome of the debate ends up being great. But let's have the debate and let's stop having the absolute brain rob of Muslim equals race and therefore we can just have the conversation at that level. That doesn't make any sense.

[Elizabeth]

Yeah, I mean, talking about like speaking up and free speech and things like that. When we went to England literally last week, we were kind of like joking, but not joking on, like, are you gonna get arrested at the airport? That was such a weird feeling growing up in England, growing up in the uk, knowing that there were two rallies going on at the same time. It was such a mind flip for me because growing up being Greek Orthodox, my boyfriend was Turkish and my best friend was Jewish. Like no one cared. We were like, I don't care. Like, are you nice person?

[Tom Bilyeu]

We really almost escaped racism. Like we really almost did. You're never gonna get to zero now.

[Elizabeth]

Now here's it was weird though because all the parents were somewhat racist. Racist. So my dad didn't want me dating a Turkish guy because he.

[Tom Bilyeu]

In his defense, that wasn't race. That was they invaded our country.

[Elizabeth]

But yes, but everyone had an opinion on whether you, you're allowed or should you date. And so my boyfriend who was Turkish and Muslim, his mom definitely didn't want him to be dating me because I was Greek Orthodox. And then the, the Jewish community, like P.S.

[Tom Bilyeu]

for anybody that doesn't know Greeks and Turks look the same. Same. You actually had a friend who was Turkish. She was lied to by her parents. Didn't realize she was half, she was

[Elizabeth]

half Greek, half Turkish. Yeah, her mom had to lie to her cuz it was like you'll get bullied if kids know that you're half Turkish. They.

[Tom Bilyeu]

By the way, they did the same in Japan with Japanese, Korean.

[Elizabeth]

Oh yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So they would just change your name and be like, nope, you're full Japanese. Because they were so like Japan. For as dope as Japan is, they be racist. I'm reading a book about them now. Maybe they're less so now, but holy bejesus. Yeah, I'm talking like in the 60s, like Jim Crow levels of racist wild.

[Elizabeth]

So yeah, seeing your parents be somewhat racist and older generation be racist, but growing up not caring. None of us cared. And now I don't know if you're

[Tom Bilyeu]

the same, but mine raised me to not be racist, like actively.

[Elizabeth]

Not really.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Mine did.

[Elizabeth]

My mum did. My mum never cared about anything. But again, coming from a very traditional Greek family where you, you, you're my, my stepmom has stories of being pushed out of a house, losing everything and being, you know, obviously ostracized and having to move to the uk. So you hear real stories of people really losing stuff and actually haven't experienced the war and stuff like that. You get their messaging. But we never cared. And what's weird and crazy to me is now I'm 46 now being 46 and going to London and being worried that my husband's going to get arrested for. For talking about free speech. It was just very unnerving. I don't know how people feel in the chat. I don't know how you feel, but it's like this weird thing of, it never was a problem growing up, and now people are so bifurcated that they judge you based on how you think and how you feel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's wild. And, yeah, the Europe is going to have to reckon with this whether they want to or not. And that's why I'm just like, how have we ended up in a place where people don't want to debate? Like, they. They just think, nope, I am righteous. I see what's good. You all need to be forcibly silenced. That's crazy town to me. It. It has been absolutely wonderful to have you in that seat. I'm excited to see you again on Friday. This will be a lot of fun.

[Elizabeth]

Drew is out, in case some people have been asking.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, Drew. Drew is out. He will be back on Monday, I think.

[Elizabeth]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so is Ryan, by the way. Both of them happen to be overlapping, so we got lucky, and my beloved wife has agreed to come on and spend the time with us. So I appreciate it. Love you guys bunches. And we will see you on Wednesday. Peace.

[Elizabeth]

Friday, Friday.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Friday. Today is Wednesday. Friday. It's a holiday. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Our holiday week. All right, Friday. Bye.