← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
If you're ready to cut through the noise and explore the facts that are shaping people's lives today, then I'm excited you're joining me because we're diving headfirst into the raw and unfiltered truths of what is going on in society with the incredible Patrick Bet David. We're tackling some hot button issues like what Patrick sees as crumbling societal values, why big names like Elon Musk are fleeing California, and why Patrick believes we need to challenge the politically correct culture that is stifling real progress. So please welcome Patrick Bet David. My intuition is that a recession is inevitable, but the market can remain crazy longer than you can remain solvent. Whatever the quote is, why hasn't it happened yet? And how do you think about. Because obviously you have similar concerns that I have. Only the paranoid survive. But how do we turn paranoia into an action plan?
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Patrick Bet-David
Yeah. So everything is right now about mapping out different possibilities. So, for example, if we're right now in a conference room and we got bored to write on, we would write on you and I would write down and we'd say, okay, World War III takes place. What do you think of the chances of this taking place? Ray Dalio says 50%.
- [02:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [02:18]
Patrick Bet-David
Okay. A Jamie Dimon says this is the most dangerous times we've had in America in decades. Okay, cool. So if World War III happens, what happens to the economy? Who's going to be the parties involved? Are we going to be involved purely through proxy or is there going to be attack here? Then you write down the possibilities. Okay, if this happens, what are you going to do? If this Happens. What are you going to do then next? What happens if unemployment all of a sudden goes to 7%, 6%? What happens if inflation goes down? What happens if Powell starts lowering rates back down to 5, 4%? Holy shit. That's, that's going to be crazy. What happened? So you got to write all of these different scenarios down, but here's a couple things that we have to be thinking about and you said, which was fascinating. One, so credit card debt, highest it's ever been. You know what's the craziest thing about credit card debt being being the highest it's ever been? Tam, the average interest rate on credit card is the highest it's ever been.
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Tom Bilyeu
Jesus.
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Patrick Bet-David
Forget about the debt. So people are worried about the debt. So imagine the interest rates in the last five years has gone like this to 23% or the average is 23% on credit card. You know what 23% means? That means the debt doubles about two and a half years. That's like loan shark, that's loan shark. Three years, your debt is doubling. Right, but that's what we got right now, credit cards. Okay, so our debt is record breaking. The forgiveness for your loan, school loan is gone. So now you have to start paying for it. That's 3, $400 a month that people are expecting, I think October, November, starting then. Let's set that part aside. Go to the corporations you were talking about that are borrowing money this year. Their interest payment on corporation. That borrowed money is going to end up being around $530 billion. Just interest. Oh my God. Next year it's going to 730. Next year it's going to 1.1 trillion. In the next five years it's going between 1.3 to $1.5 trillion. Just on the corporate debt that we're talking about, by the way. Next part, car payment, a credit. No one's affected. Good credit. They're making the credit payments on time mortgages. We're not saying anything crazy with people with bad credit not making payments. We're still good car payments in subprime, they're seeing a spike in defaults where people are now making car payments. The first sign you're seeing on what's taking place, no problem. Let's go to the next one. That's the scariest one. US has $33 trillion of debt. Worst it's ever been. The highest it's ever been, no problem. What does that really mean? No, I can really figure it out. Here's what it means of the money that we have about 8 trillion of it. The rates are going to recalibrate and we're going to have to have new rates that we're going every single time. The rates go up one point, just one point for the US government. Our interest payments, Tom, increases by $320 billion. So imagine we raise rates by three points, just interest. It's a trillion dollars more per year. If it's 6%, $2 trillion more per year. That's that. Then. Last thing that I'll just kind of get you to be thinking about. So anytime you want to know if the economy is back to normal, go to Vegas. If Vegas is humming okay, we're good. And always, whenever you go to Vegas, talk to cab drivers and talk to the drivers who are doing Uber, always ask, how's conventions doing? How are you seeing with traffic? Are you noticing things canceling? No, this has been crazy for us the last three months. Everything's good. But if they start seeing a downturn, they're typically an indicator of what's to come. Transportation industry. We consult for a lot of transportation companies at Bedevic Consulting, one of my friends, I'm about to go meet with them right after this. Their construction company does very well. We have these three clients that we have who are doing transportation. Two of them are doing 100 million, 80 million a year. Numbers are down 40, 50%. One of them is doing a billion a year. Their revenue is down 70%. So let's actually talk about transportation. Why would transportation be down 70%? Aren't Walmart, Amazon companies ordering stuff to ship it from here to there? Why would that be lowering? What do they know that we don't know? Again, these are people who have data to insider stuff that we can sit there and say, these are great indicators. When you're studying these things on what's going on, does this mean recession is going to come here? Like I told you earlier when we were talking, my bigger fear is a reverse market crash which Venezuela just went through, which all of a sudden the rates get lowered and Dow and S P goes. And dow goes from 33, 40, 45, 50, 55, 60 just goes voom.
- [07:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that just the dollar losing its purchasing power?
- [07:29]
Patrick Bet-David
Yes, exactly. That's what happens. The more we're printing, like for example, a Michael Jordan card years ago at BGS nine and a half sold for $78,000. I was like, oh my God, that's crazy. But then all of a sudden, all of these boxes kept entering the marketplace of 1986 FLIR. So guys started buying These things. And they were sending more to get graded at Beckett and PSA. The more they got cards graded, that $78,000 card, BGS nine and a half became a $60,000 card, $50,000 card, $40,000 card, $30,000 card. You can probably buy BGS nine and a half today for $20,000, $25,000. Okay, so the inventory increases. The more we print money, the more you print dollars and it's more accessible. The less it's valued, the less it's worth. So these are some things that's going on today. So, you know, like I, you, you sit there and you're like, okay, so does this mean guys are not going to make a lot of money? No, no. You're going to see the first trillionaire in the next 24 months. Because none of this is going to affect the guys at the top. None of it. This printing money. Every time they print money, the guys at the top make more money. If there's anybody that should be against printing money, it's low and middle income families. If there's anybody that should be against printing money is them. If there's anybody that's for printing money, guess who it is. The guys at the top. Why? Because the poor in middle America can't keep money. They spend it. And when they spend it, what do they buy? A product owned by somebody in The S&P 500 or other people who have businesses. Money flows up. They can keep printing money all they want. So when low and middle income families are like, look at these guys, all they care about is themselves. Let that bill pass for $2.7 trillion. You simply look at them and you say, you have no clue how money works. You have no idea how money works. Guess What? Let's print $10 trillion. Rich are okay with it. You ain't gonna get the rich complaining about printing $10 trillion or $5 trillion. BlackRock's gonna be like, all right, cool. We're at 8 to $10 trillion of money in our ETFs and we're buying up a bunch of different companies. We're buying up all these properties today. Right now it's gonna be nothing. But in the next few years, you have to go through us and we dictate the market and we're gonna own it all. And what are you gonna do about it? You know, this, these are, these are a lot of different moving parts that is going on to me. And again, for me, the, the idea of middle America not being able to make the money they need to make to be able to afford a house, send their kids to school, live in a nice place, enjoy some of their dreams, maybe not the biggest ones, but some of their dreams are going to become a reality. Middle America is getting smaller and smaller and smaller every single time we print money.
- [10:22]
Tom Bilyeu
For people that don't understand the mechanisms of printing money, it goes like this. You are, you have to have a mechanism by which you put this new money that you created out of thin air by fiat. Literally just saying it now exists. You have to put it into the system. The way it's put into the system is by buying assets. Because typically low and middle income people don't buy assets. They buy products. Like you were saying then they aren't beneficiary of that unless there are stimulation checks. Now those, they will get sent directly to them. So there are ways to put it in their pocket. But what you're effectively doing is socializing losses. So you are spreading the loss out across everybody. Because while I get it that because I own assets, I'm going to be disproportionately either protected or actually gain. The gain isn't real. And so it's really, I'm looking at, the price is going up and it makes me feel like, oh, I really did something, but in the end, I didn't. In the end, it just, my dollar buys less. And so it takes more dollars to buy the same thing. Because nothing fundamentally happened. The business that I own a piece of did not become more productive and therefore can actually generate more by adding more value to the world. So once you understand that, like I actually, as a wealthy person do complain when people print money because I'm like, hey, there is a point at which you break everything because the money is just going to hyperinflate. And it isn't only going to be the stock market that goes up, it's going to be the cost of bread and gas and taking your family to a movie and all of that. And so look, I'm conflicted. In fact, Patrick bet David, you're going to educate me here. I'm conflicted about money printing because the only reason I got into doing financial content and quite frankly, learning about financial content or finance in general was because of COVID When Covid happened, this was me not being very far out from having worked at Quest. And I had a thousand employees in the inner cities. And I was like, they're all going to get obliterated. I'll be fine. I'll still be rich on the other side of this. But they're going to get wiped out. Because I didn't know money printing, I didn't know that they were going to socialize losses. And in doing that, that actually kept us from going into something that probably should have been worse than the Great Depression. And they money printed their way out of it and we ended up being okay because it was spread across a lot of people. Now I hate that I was taxed without, without it being acknowledged as a tax. And I feel that I've paid an inordinate amount of money. But if that's what stops everybody from going into a horrendous depression, I don't know, I don't know that it was a bad idea. But, but I know that it, because I am such a student of Ray Dalio, I know that governments, once they start money printing, they can't stop. And every time in human history that has been used as a tool, it's used until it breaks. Until it breaks, every time without exception. And that typically as it's racing towards breaking, I think it's what, eight out of the last 14 times it's ended up in a hot war. So usually as the debt, the big debt cycle. Go watch Ray Dalio's video. As the big debt cycle comes to an end and money's inflating away to nothing, debt is completely out of control. Nobody can make their payments. Everybody's defaulting. You have to have a complete reset of the wealth, which is I think why everybody calls this the great reset or the big reset or whatever. Because we are actually stopping, we are forestalling catastrophe right now by printing. But we are only forestalling it. And nobody, I've had a lot of people on the show, nobody can tell me how you pull out of this death spiral other than austerity. And no one's going to do fucking austerity.
- [14:22]
Patrick Bet-David
Yeah, well, I mean Ray, when he did that one video, if you've never seen that one video, it's like 32 minutes where he explains the history of money and finance and what's going on. If you bad boy, it's got like 20 or 30 million views. Very few 32 minute finance videos are going to have that many because everybody must watch it. But, but yeah. So how can you fix this thing? Well, the, the question, my question would be, is it a. How do you fix this thing in a year? No one's going to know how to fix it because it's not going to happen. How do you address this and make progress towards, you know, getting better? That over a 20 year span, okay? Now we're talking 40 year span. Even better. Then you have to forecast and see what solutions are going to be needed the next 20, 30, 40 years. The problem with America today is the following. Here's one of the problems with America, which by the way is a beautiful thing, but it's also a problem. Whoever that gets elected. We have cyclical cycles, okay? You got Carter gets elected, then it's Reagan senior, then you have Clinton, then you have Bush, then you have Obama, then you have Trump, then you have Biden. So Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican, Democrat. So every time you do this, every eight years, the system is like changing. So cycles are changing. Whatever you're doing is changing. So you can't really consistently build on a philosophy over a 20 year period. Because in America, you, you can't put a 20 year plan in place. There is no such thing as a 20 year plan in America. Because whoever's the next guy that's going to come take your job is going to say, no, we're not building that wall. No, we're not going to do that. No, we're going to cut those benefits. No, we're going to add these benefits. No, we are going to spend more money. No, we are going to do that. No, we are going to leave this war. No, we are going to get into this war. These things. The complexity of what we're asking about is challenging because no one leader is going to run for 20 years. We just don't have that. Okay.
- [16:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Would you want it
- [16:21]
Patrick Bet-David
in a way, when it comes down to the economy? Yes, I would want it selfishly for me and you, because we're alive today. Is it good for America long term? Absolutely not. Okay. Absolutely not. Because if that one person's a shitty person that gets into office for 20 years, this thing's gone, it's destroyed. Okay? So at least this allows us to not be able to go super extreme because you have to get it through Congress and Senate and it's already complicated enough to do that. But to fix this thing, you're never going to have both sides agree philosophically, economically on what they're going to be doing over a 20 year Spanish. Tired of overpaying with DirecTV?
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Patrick Bet-David
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- [17:57]
Patrick Bet-David
All right, let's go to the next side that we're talking about. While all this stuff is going on, you have the war right now with China and India that is also taking place with iPhones are now being made in India. You can now get iPhones where on the back of it it says made in India first time. Not made in China. It says made in India. Really? Guess who blocked TikTok in their country, India. Guess who's blocked 100 apps of China? India. India is not afraid of China. Now why does China not like India? Why do they always, behind closed doors talk shit, yet at the same time they're part of brics. You got Brazil, you got Russia, you got India, you know, you got China. And I think it's South Africa. That's part of the bricks, right? Okay. So they're part of the same thing. But there's also a way of, you know, competing. The reason why I like India a lot and I think India is going to play a very important role here is because India has seen how China negotiated with us and they realized we're not doing that. But India's also seen the mistakes China made with the one child rule and over expansion and what's going on with a lot of these properties that they build out in cities that looks like just like Paris. I don't know if you've seen the city they build in China. It's a city. Everything Paris has, it has. It looks identical to Paris. If you Google this kind of architecture, if I tell you, if I show you the picture, you would think it's Paris. They spend billions of their own money to build a city replicating exactly Paris. That's what China did. Okay, wow. So we're talking about, you know, the whole everything, everything they have, they have a sh. Elise. Same exact model that they have over there. Exactly. When you see the pictures, like when we're done, I can't wait for you to see these pictures, to see what that looks like. So China over expanded very Quickly, India's watching China. They had their one child, one child policy. The average age of a Chinese right now is 38.4 years old. India is 27, 28. Okay. India's IIT Institute is producing incredible engineers. Many companies here will hire Indian engineers, and they're rock stars, better than MIT in many cases. So I think India is very important for the next 20, 30, 40 years. Very important. As long as India is there, China's going to hate it. They're not going to like it. The fact that Tim Cook right now has got a very hard job. I think Tim Cook in a span of four weeks, lost $350 billion of valuation for Apple in four weeks. $350 billion. Okay. One, because iPhone 15 didn't do what they expected it to do. Two, because China is now giving them a hard time because China is their number one market of iPhones they sell. Now China's sitting there saying, wait a minute, we sell more iPhones in this country than anywhere else. Yet you're giving our business to India. Who the hell do you think you are? Right, then on the back end, the real war that's taking place is the semiconductor chips. And there's different levels to the semiconductor chips that's being built. And China is specialized in the cheapest kind to make, the easiest kind to make, where some countries have specialized on the tough kinds to make when it comes on to semiconductor chips. This is why China can't stand Taiwan being there. This is why China wants Taiwan, because Taiwan specializes in building the extremely technical semiconductor chips that the rest of the world uses. And then there's complete other aspects to this that you can get even deeper on. So Taiwan's going to play a very important role. You know, we can't have a Russia, Ukraine or a, you know, Israel, Palestine, Gaza, Armenia, Aeran, Turkey. We can't have that taking place with Taiwan. Taiwan needs to stay separate. That needs to stay protected. How we do that, I don't know how we're going to do that. We're getting involved in one too many wars. But if Taiwan stays free and China relies on them because China destroyed the world during COVID Absolutely destroyed. We realize 80% of medications being built there, 80% of the technology that we need is being built there. They controlled everything. Car pricing, used prices went up 50%. Like, what are you talking about? You mean to tell me I bought this car for $90,000? It's used, you're willing to pay me $130,000? Yes. Are you serious? Yes. Why? We don't have chips to make cars. Are you kidding me? No. Rolexes. They were making Rolexes for 18 months. They didn't have equipment to make Rolexes. You go to a Rolex shop. They had one watch. Like, what do you have? We only have one watch. Can I order Rolex? No, we're 12 months. You're not going to get. Are you serious? Yes. Nothing. This is what was going on at Rolex store. So again, the stuff that gets me optimistic is India, is Taiwan, is. We're committed to the semiconductor business here. The things that concern me is China is Erdogan wanting to be involved in the Israeli war Because most people don't realize the most powerful military in the Middle east is not Israel. Israel is powerful, But Israel has 300,000 soldiers, of which I think 150 is reserved. Turkey has nearly 400 active 350,000 active soldiers. The number one military in the Middle East, If Turkey gets involved, you know, so we have all these dead things that we're looking at, obviously the military industrial complex, which Eisenhower talked about, where be careful with these companies like Raytheon and Boeing and General Dynamics and these guys that are making a lot of money when there's wars, we have to be careful with that taking place. We have to be very careful with that one that's taking place. But, yeah, it's very complicated, very complex. Ray Dalio says a depression could be possibly around the corner. A lot of these guys are fearing what is taking place today. Michael Burry shorted the s and P500 $1.6 billion of his client's money. And now he did it in a way where, you know, you're kind of protected. But still, he's not optimistic about the S&P 500. What it's going to be doing one too many moving parts for us to sit there. What will happen? The rich are still going to get rich. The innovators are still going to find a way to, you know, win. The people who learn how to use AI on their side, they're going to advance and excel even more. The acceleration and the disparity between the rich and the poor is going to get wider and wider and wider. Why? Because most people are going to spend majority of their lives on Instagram, on YouTube, on TikTok. They're not going to learn a new skill set. They're not studying AI right now. They're not studying technology right now. They're not learning new skill sets right now. Harvard did an article, Harvard Business Review did an article saying to stay competitive right now, every 18 months, you have 10 new skill sets to learn as an executive. It wasn't like that. It used to be 10 new skill set every five years. Now we have to learn 10 new skill sets every 18 months. How the hell do we keep up? So, so that. This is the part where, you know, we talk about the only. The paranoid survival. Like right now you have to be looking at this shit's out there. What part of it do I control? What part of it do I have no control over? If not a billionaire or a hectare or a Deca millionaire, man, I got to figure out a way to increase my market value or else I'm going to get crushed. You're going to. Over the next 10, 20 years, if you're going to spend more time on Netflix, more time watching all these shows, more time playing all these games, more time watching all these TikTok, Instagram, if you're going to spend more time on that than building value for yourself and learning new skill sets, yes, the market's not going to favor you the next 18 to 36 months. But if you do that, fortunately for that community, they're going to be okay. This doesn't mean a recession is still not coming though.
- [25:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so let's start pulling apart some of the issues. So the geopolitical part of this comes down to, is there something that we can do to position ourselves? You were talking earlier about we create a matrix and it's like, okay, do we go to war? How bad is it? Like, all the different scenarios and we run through them. So but let's sort of put the pieces on the table. We have global conflict, and that's going to do what it's going to do. And we need to think about what the plan of attack is there or how we position ourselves. Well, we have the debt crisis, which is just probably the thing that weighs the heaviest. On my mind. It seems the most inevitable. And because it's so in plain sight and not at all sexy, but nobody's freaking out, that one makes me the most nervous because you can just run the math and it seems inevitable that things have to break for that to work. You've got the, what we'll call the cold war of manufacturing and where that's going. Apple, China, India, all competing. But ultimately, how do people begin to actually put together a battle plan? So one of the, you, you had a really good video about advice for young men. And one of the things that you said was you need to be aware of what's going on. And I really woke up to that at the beginning of COVID Covid was a grand moment where it's like, look behind the curtain, there's wizard of Oz. And I began to see how things were actually happening. That was very revelatory. And just as if you want to be an entrepreneur, the ironic advice that I'm going to give you is you need to learn about the body. Because if you can get control of your body, if you can change your physique, you're going to find discipline, consistency, you're going to see that it really adds up to an actual transformation. And you can apply all of that to business ones or yeah, to business. To anything really. Once you begin to understand how the world actually works now, you can begin to position yourself to weather any storm. But you really do have to understand how the pieces move around the chessboard, how you're being manipulated. And I don't. It certainly has not then provided me a sense of clairvoyance and oh, I know exactly what to do. But I feel like it makes me ask a better caliber of question. To me, the caliber of question right now is what is the position someone should be working themselves into? So I'll paint the picture that I think and then tell me if you disagree, if there's a better thing. Okay, Number one, I think because only the paranoid survive, there's actually two things you need to be paranoid about right now. Paranoia. Number one is you can pull out of the market too soon and miss real opportunities. And since no one is going to be able to accurately forecast the timing you, you have to be thoughtful about that. So one strategy might be just that. You dollar cost average in every day, make sure that you have a certain amount of savings so that you're not going to find yourself in a panic situation. And as Morgan Housel said, the whole purpose of having cash in a bull market is to make sure that you don't have a for sale in a bear market. Now, I thought that was a really wise way. So what I'm going to present to people is there's so many variables on the table and I don't know how they're going to go. I just want you to be in a position where optionality. So we're going to optimize for options. To do that, you're going to want to be largely in cash and index funds, which is not going to sound sexy. And when I say cash, I'm talking money market. Treasury bills, something like that.
- [29:07]
Patrick Bet-David
Five points right now.
- [29:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Yep. Which is fucking amazing. Yep. All day Every day. I'll take it. Now would not be the time, in my opinion, to invest in anything where you're not just an absolute complete expert, where you have so much disproportionate knowledge that, that you're able to really recognize a deal when you see it. So I've heard you talk a lot about some commercial real estate stuff that you're looking at because you know things are going to go on sale. You, oddly enough, I still find this so fascinating. You really understand the baseball card market, so you'll know a deal when you see a deal. So it's like that to me. Optionality, cash only. Investing either sort of blindly in index stocks, not just completely removing yourself because you could miss, you know, it could be six months, a year before, two years before this is who, who knows. We really can't predict it, but that we are in a time of such volatility that if you are not taking every step with sort of maximum paranoia, you're making a mistake. So that's. I'm sure if somebody were here, they'd have a lot of questions for that. But that's my rough guidance to myself.
- [30:10]
Patrick Bet-David
I think that was fantastic. I think it was fantastic and we're very aligned. Look, I mean, here's, here's also the thing, right? Like where you're sitting there watching some of these guys sitting on a lot of cash. Why are they sitting on a lot of cash? Are they sitting on a lot of cash in case shit hits the fan? Is that what they're doing? Or they're just kind of sitting on a lot of cash, wondering? I don't really know what's going. When I say people, I mean Berkshire Hathaway, I mean, these guys have a lot of cash. Right now they're sitting on the table and maybe they're not buying value stocks yet because they don't yet believe value stocks are here. Berkshire Hathaway, okay, if you're not in this business, if you're not in the business of investments, financial advisor, broker, day trader. Don't play around. Do not play around and get crazy about it. Crypto. A lot of people got into crypto and nft and that was not their world. They didn't know about it. They lost a lot of money. I mean, a couple guys made $90 million, but the people that bought their stuff lost $89 million. But they got their money. There's a lot of guys that made the money in NFTs, but it was a gamble for everybody. And everybody's like, oh, My God. But I believe it. And all this other stuff. Okay, great. It's pretty crazy. You know, what about this and what about that now does that mean NFTs are going away? Absolutely not. My kids still buy stuff on Roblox and skins and all that. There's an element of it that is not going to go away, guaranteed. Is there 95% of NFTs that are not coming back? Yes, probably some of them are going to be gone. Again, my opinion, I have interest in things I know about and I'm interested in like right now. You know, I'm looking at stuff the card market got destroyed. The last six months destroyed. Guys are sitting on big cards. They were thinking they're going to make a lot of money on it. They're not right now. Okay, Cars that would have sold for $2 million two years ago are selling for $400,000 today. But they're going to end up selling for that value. They're not going away because it's art. It's non duplicatable assets. You can't duplicate these pieces. Especially if it's things that are very few of. Okay, so if one of one, they're not going to go away. Art. Jamie Dimon's got a $900 million art collection. Why Dave, Dana White is telling me about a picture he has in his office. He showed me this yesterday that he paid $200,000 for it. That picture is probably worth 8 to 10 million dollars today. Art money. In art being made. Again, non duplicatable assets are very, very valuable. Whatever. There's few of very valuable. But only touch it if you know a lot about it. If you don't, don't even get close to it. If you know nothing about crypto, don't even get close to it. Don't get too crazy about oh my God, I'm hearing, you know, bitcoin's gonna go to 100,000, it may go to 500,000. But don't do it because you're guessing cause somebody else said it. Do it because you've done a lot of due diligence in it. So if you don't want to have that kind of a risk tolerance indexing is the way to go to play it safe. Now, to the small community of crazies that have an itch and a tolerance for madness, okay, this isn't everybody. This is some. When you have a certain amount of money, I'm talking to my Goldman guy, he comes in, we're having our conversation. He says, hey, here's what I think we can do with this amount of money. I said, okay, what about it? He says, here's a strategy we can use the next 90 days. I said, okay. I said, do you have any questions for me? He says, I got one question for you. Are you okay if in the next six months we lose $55 million in this? What a great question. Just straight up, I'm like, no, I'm not okay with this. It's a big nut. He says, no problem, totally get it. Then we can't go the way that this is one of the options we can go on because what do you think are the chances of a World War iii happen next 6 to 12 months? I don't know, man. I don't know if I'm at 50%, but I'm at 10%. Well, 10 is pretty high. Yeah, I agree. Okay, if that happens, how bad is it going to be? You know, like during COVID dow went to 18,000. I don't know if you remember for that minute that dow went to 18,000. Everybody's like, holy shit, what's going on? But very quickly went back to 32,000. So it recovered very quickly. Okay, so what does this mean if you think a possibility of craziness is going to happen? That you keep cash and it happens you can buy in dollar cost average? Okay, yes. You think you're that brilliant that you can time it? Historically, very few people have been able to do it and those who did got purely lucky. Do you want to be part of that camp? Because most people, historically, what happened to them, they missed being in the market on the five best days and missing those five best days ended up costing them the difference between making 13% over a 20 year period to making 7.8%. Correct. And that's a lot of money, by the way, between those two. So if that's not the world you want to play, don't do it. Don't at all do it. For me, the game we're playing is a different game. The game is there's going to be a lot of assets for sale the next couple years. Okay? And if you've made the right choices and you have cash and some of these assets don't perform the next couple years, there's the opportunity to pick up assets, there's the opportunity to pick up small businesses. I'm talking to a guy who runs a, you know, a business that they're doing 34 million a year. And I said, how many companies are there in the marketplace that you could buy Right now that are between five to $10 million. There's at least eight. How many of them can't stand you? One of them, we never talk. I said, okay. The other seven, how many of them love you? Three of them. Do the OR4 know you? They know of me, but we don't have a relationship. Get it close to them as soon as possible. Make the following phone call. He said, what? I tell these guys, this is what the call sounds like. Hey, John, listen, we're both in the same industry. How's business? And you'll know by their answer how it's doing. You're going to say, oh, great. Unlike XYZ, we did 32% last month over last year, period. Okay, great. Guess what? That's not who you want to talk to. Next call, you got six more left. Okay. Hey, Larry, how are things? Oh, yeah, I mean, look, I mean, some areas we're doing good. Some areas. Why? What's going on? Did somebody tell you something? Okay, boom. Check. What's the conversation, Larry? Here's what's going on. The reason why I'm calling you. We're getting calls from guys in our space and some of them are not doing as well as they thought they were going to do. And they're about to run out of cash. And they're calling us because we have access to certain relationships and contracts and technology that they want to take advantage of. I thought just to give you a call because we're within the same space. Are you in a place right now where you want to entertain possibility of a partnership where we can help you with our company or no, If. No. Listen, I'm not going to impose, but if you are, maybe we can have that conversation. Five second pause. You know, about nine months ago I would have told you to go to hell. But, yeah, maybe we can talk. Perfect. When do you want to come to the office? Or would you like us to come to your office? Would it be okay if we first met at a coffee shop away from everybody? No problem. Let's do that. Then he goes, sit down. What's going on? Look, man, I don't know if I want to do. Because I heard this and I heard that and I heard this. I don't want to be ripped off and I don't want to be this and I don't want to be that, bro. Let's just see what we can do with the numbers. If we can't, great. If we can, we'll support you. Go do your thing. Then the conversation starts. So there's different levels right now in the marketplace. If you have cash, a lot of IT companies are going to be for sale the next 3, 612 months, and there's going to be a lot of opportunities for you to increase your market share within the industry. If not, you're somebody that doesn't have a very high risk tolerance. Do not screw around the next 612 months thinking you are Nostradamus and you can predict the future because the market's going to destroy you. It's undefeated.
- [38:08]
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- [38:38]
Tom Bilyeu
The real power is because it's not enough just to be strong. It's not enough to be violent. You really do have to be able to calculate it. I saw the interview with Jared Kushner on Lex Friedman, and Kushner said that Trump always liked to leave people with a 10% chance that he might nuke them, which is horrible. I say it with a smirk because I get the showmanship of it. But there is something to the unpredictability, the. No, the belief that that person is dangerous and that it is merely strategy that keeps them in check. There is something to that. And at. At that level, to pretend that that isn't real is to set yourself up for disaster. In fact, I'd like to introduce my favorite Thomas Sowell quote, which my audience will have heard me say a gazillion times. The last 50 years have been marked by exchanging what worked for what sounds good. And that feels like a lot of the policies, a lot of the ways that we talk about young men, toxic masculinity, all of that is. It sounds nice. It would be nice if we lived in a world where everybody could just be kind and gentle, but we don't. And so you wear thin the armor of civilization when you teach men to be weak.
- [40:00]
Patrick Bet-David
You know how in families there's typically the one person everybody fears and respects when they die? There's chaos. And all of a sudden, you know, one person is taking advantage of this person or that person. My mother, her family had some money. The moment her parents died, one of her family members took over all the Money, and he abused everybody else. He says, you're not going to get it. I have it now. But when mom and dad were alive, he couldn't do that. The moment they died, he bullied everybody from the money that he got. That money was supposed to go to a few people. He took it all, and he gave crumbs to people, and he became that dictator. You're lucky I'm giving you this kind of money. No, no, that was their money. But because the parents didn't put anything on paper, he stole it from everybody. And he could do that. What's the moral of the story? When that alpha, when that leader is not present, bullies show up, you know, so. So for us, again, like, this is a very chaotic time. I don't know when this is going to be released, you know, whether it's one war or the other war or this or that. We're. We're one or two people away of being offended of World War III getting started. You know, you got 16 million to 18 million people died World War I, you know, 60 million on two. Third one. If we go at this trajectory, it could be 200 million. The. The. The job that we have collectively is to try to do whatever we can to turn down the temperature, not increase it. You know, if. If you and your wife get into an argument and you call me and you say, you won't believe what she said. My job isn't to say she said that, Tom. Oh, dude. If she would have said that to me, it's done. Are you kidding me? Doesn't she realize how amazing you are, how lucky she is to have you? Instead, it's to say, tom, come on, bro. She loves you, and you know you love her. She's partly right, bro. I'm gonna take her side. How could you say something like that? You're not on my side. You're on her side. Probably on this one end, but I'm telling you privately, I'd go back and try to make this work. Screw you, Pat. Totally get it, bro. Let me know if you want to talk later. You get off the phone. I have a job, and it's called Doug Diffuse, unify, and be the glue. We don't have a lot of Dougs around the world today. We have division today. We have divisiveness today, so. But if there's that one strong personality, leader of the free world, a Churchill, a Reagan, a person you don't want to mess with, the world is typically a safe place.
- [42:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that is it. It is maybe a balanced Place where the level of danger that is always ready to pop off is currently held at bay. But I think the. The reason that that cycle works, where strong men make good times, good times make weak men, so on and so forth works is because when things are good, the seed of its own instability is present because of that loop. And I don't know that there's any way to escape it. It's one of the things that makes this so predictable.
- [43:03]
Patrick Bet-David
I agree.
- [43:04]
Tom Bilyeu
Now, Churchill is a fascinating character. In fact, this will be fun because I never get anybody that can talk about Churchill. I absolutely am just blown away by Churchill. And you can say what you want. And did he have his flaws? Of course he did. But this is a guy that felt he had let his country down in a military. This is World War I. He makes a mistake leading the Navy, and he says, okay, I know exactly how to come back from this. I'm going to. Even though he could have just gone back to England, he says, no, put me on the front line. And so he goes to the front line and he said other people didn't want to walk with him on the night patrols because he would just talk out loud. And they're like, bro, we're going to get shot. Like, what are you doing? And he. He said to his mother, I have such a need to earn a reputation for physical courage that I'll basically do anything. And so he stays on the front line multiple times, narrowly escapes getting killed, sees countless people die around him, and said to himself, okay, now, after. I forget how long, but it was a long time. Again, all voluntary. He's like, now I've earned my way back to Parliament, and he goes back to England and re. Engages in government life. And I just thought, whoa. Like, I'm not even saying I could do it, but I am saying I admire it. And I'm saying that men ought to have that kind of courage. And that to me, we've had 70 years where we really on our own soil, where we have not had to face violence and danger. I'm not taking anything away from the men and women that have served overseas, obviously, but there's something that still let our country's psyche be lulled into the sense that we don't need men standing on the wall protecting us. And that worries me.
- [45:00]
Patrick Bet-David
Military, meaning we don't need a military?
- [45:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, basically. I mean, so I was quoting the line from A Few Good Men where he's like, men like me. And the thing is, I hope what we are supposed to take away from that is that he's a complicated character and yes, some of the things he did were despicable, but he's also right. And that's what keeps him from being caricature is you, you are asking people to risk being shot. You're asking them to kill other people. I mean it, it is horrific. Horrific. And there is, there is an evolutionary seed inside, certainly inside the male brain that makes that very possible.
- [45:45]
Patrick Bet-David
You know, if, if there's anything like any man that wants to earn, forget about, you know, should I go become r. Go have a six pack, Should I be in shape? Should I do this? If you pursue anything, if you earn moral authority, you're going to have a lot of self respect. You'll have self respect in a way, you lead your wife and your kids, you'll have self respect in the companies you lead and you'll have self respect in a community. Does this mean you're going to be a billionaire? Not necessarily. Doesn't mean you're going to be a millionaire. Not necessarily. But if you earn the right and you have that moral authority, there's something to earning that, that takes years, that doesn't happen overnight. When you're telling the story with Churchill. There's something to it. There's something to, you know, a guy setting the pace from the front. There's something to earning the right. You know, there's something to. This is why for me, with the voting system that we have, I think our voting system is totally screwed up in America. A couple areas of it, I'm not a fan of it because for me I, I would much rather have a 16 year old kid who has a job working at McDonald's, who made 20 grand last year and paid $3,000 in taxes. I want him to vote over the 25 year old bum living with his mom and dad, not going to school, not getting a degree, not doing anything for him to vote. I don't want this guy to vote. I want to hear from this 16 year old kid, let this guy vote. Our system is too much of yeah, here you go. Yeah, here you go. Now earn the right to vote. Once you earn the right to vote. Well, just by being an American, don't I earn the right to vote? I totally get it, but you got to have some. You like pull your little red wagon. How are you going to contribute to society while that you're discriminating against? Dude, I'm from Iran. I was born in Iran, half Armenian, half assyrian. I'm a 1.8 GPA kid. I'm a welfare kid. I'm not a kid. That came up here was going to be something, but I wanted to come back and earn the right to say, hey, I want to earn this respect that America gave to me. I want to go do my part. I think we have to go more towards that in our house, our kids. You know, everybody's talking right now about having a phone. I don't know how many articles I've read that the more you delay your kids getting a phone, the more happier they're going to be. By the way, parents, if you're watching this, do yourself a favor and go watch the movie Disconnect. Disconnect. I don't have a phone to see who's the actor, but one of the guys is the. I don't know if you've seen this movie or not. Disconnect is Bateman. What's his name? Is it Jason Bateman? Is that his first name?
- [48:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Certainly is.
- [48:10]
Patrick Bet-David
So the guy, is that from Horrible Boss Bosses?
- [48:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes.
- [48:13]
Patrick Bet-David
Okay, so that guy. This movie Disconnect is a story about a boy who. 12, 13, 14 year old kid goes to school. There's a girl he likes. These two bullies knows he likes the girl. They create a Facebook profile with the girl's picture. Befriend everybody in high school thinking that's the girl, but it's not. She DMs him on Facebook in the movie, this is 11 years ago, 2012. And says, hey, please don't tell anybody, but I really like you. I'm shy. I don't want to tell others, but I like the way you're. Oh my go, I've loved you D. And they're going back and forth. She says, I'll show you mine if I. If you show me yours. But it's the two boys. So the boys send a picture of somebody else they got from a porn site. He opens it. So he sends it. And then she says, but I want to see your face in it as well. So he does. The next day he goes to school, everybody's laughing at him because those two bullies took the picture, spread it around the school. Then the boy runs away, comes home, is in his room listening to heavy metal music, is trying to hang himself. Daughter or sister walks in, prevents it from happening and saves his life. And then they have to figure out how this happened because the parents weren't involved. There's so many different things going right now in society that we have to, we have to be aware of people earning stuff. Phones are dangerous today that you know Kids are picking up on what can happen to them. If you do, you have to educate them. If you do, you have to hold them accountable. If you do, you have to watch and see what's going on. But in our family, everything starts with earning the currency. In our house. I've talked about this God knows how many times. It's reading. You read, you earn the right. The more you read, the more you can ask for. If your grades are solid, you get to ask for more. If it's not, you don't. And people say, pat, how could you have standards like that when you had a 1 point GPA? What does that have to do with anything? I didn't have those standards. I simply grew up in a house that nobody cared what my grades were. There was never an expectation of me doing anything my grade. So guess what? I'm going to rise up to the standards or whatever it is. As a 14, 15, 16 year old, there was no standards. So I was left alone. In our house, there is standards, there is expectation. You got to perform to it. You do, you get more. So America started off as earning. We got away from that because earn is now another one of these curse words that people don't like to talk about. How could you say something like that? How could you say something like that? All you care about is money. All you care about is this. No, man. I cared about you being proud of the contribution you're making to society. Because the more proud you are of the contribution you're making to society, the safer the place is going to be. The less you contribute to society, the more bitter you're going to be feeling like everybody owes you something and then you could do something very bad to everybody else. So, yes, I think we need to go back to earning. Like when you're telling the story of Churchill, to have that moral authority.
- [51:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Mm. It's very interesting to me. There's something super telling in the fact that people ask you, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, how can you ask them to keep their grades up when you didn't keep your grades up? Because that reveals their value system. Now, I have a feeling that their value system, they've never taken the time to lay it out. And I think one of the biggest problems when I think about, okay, what's ailing men? How do we get them back on track? It's what is your value system? What do you, how do you believe a man ought to be? Write it out. Then at least we have something that we can actually talk about. When somebody says, how can you do that you didn't have good grades. What they're going for, I assume, is fairness. The second your primary focus is on fairness, now we have a problem. So the reality is, of course, life isn't fair. And I don't mean that in any sort of cheeky way. It's just if you're trying to optimize for fairness, you're setting people up to try to say the game is always going to be controlled, go out there, you're going to be fine. And then they're going to get into a fight. And I don't mean a literal fight, but they're going to get into a fight for their business, a fight for a promotion, whatever, and it isn't going to play out fairly. And if in that moment they're emotionally devastated because they've been taught that everything revolves around fairness, they're going to be in trouble. If on the other hand, we, and this is very specifically what Tom Billy wants, people optimizing for what is effective. So you have to have a goal. You have to know what your goal is, what am I aiming at? And then you're going to judge everything by whether or not it's effective. Did it actually get me towards my goal? Now I'm going to assume that your goal is honorable. If it's not, then we already have a problem. But assuming that your goal is honorable, now you can just. Is believing this, doing this, whatever, is it going to move me towards my goal? If yes, I'm going to do it. If not, then I'm not. Do you know Jeffrey Canada? Oh, Jesus. I've got to meet somebody that can help me get this guy on the show. I've been trying and trying and trying and I have no idea that he will agree with me on anything. However, he has created the most effective school for kids. So he, he will go into an underserved area and in the same building that the school is already being run at and they're delivering kids that are like three years below in reading and graduating levels is absolutely atrocious. He'll go into the same building with the same kids, randomly select students. So it's not even like a merit based anything. Randomly select students and then put them into a merit based based school system. And now it's like, are you following our discipline rules? Are you doing your homework? Are you getting your grades, like all of that? And if you do, you stay and if you don't, you're out, dude. The outcome, by being regimented, by being disciplined, by saying you are going to live up to these standards. And of course, I'm sure they do it in a way that gets the kids excited. The kids aren't like, oh, man, like, I have to pay attention. It's like, hey, if you learn this stuff, you can control your life. You can get out of this neighborhood, you can go on to do whatever the hell you want. And that kind of. Because, again, I. I need to interview this guy to make sure my breakdown Jeffrey Canada, to make sure my understanding of what he's done is accurate. But from what I can tell, a big part of what he's doing is sidestepping the. The unions. And so if he's got a bad teacher, bye. Like, you have to be good, you have to be performant. And so they just churn out graduates at, like, an insane rate. It's startling. And remember, these are the same kids that, before they got moved in, were failing. Just abject failures. They do it in the same building. It's absolutely bananas. And that, to me, says, especially at that age, structure, discipline, the right value set, and helping people tap into. I. I have no reason to believe he would use these words. These are now my words and my interpretation of this, that when you can show somebody how to generate ferocity in a controlled manner. Oh, now you've got something. Now you've got something. But most people can't find that gear.
- [55:00]
Patrick Bet-David
Yeah, that's pretty wild. But at the same time, I'm not surprised, right? I'm not surprised where a, you know, Bill Walton, who's a hippie, goes into a system that they have with ucla, and he comes in with his beard and his long hair, and he says, hey, John Wooden says, go get a haircut and then come back, you got to shave your beard and you got to cut your hair or else you're not playing. He said, I'm not getting a haircut. No problem. You ain't playing. So what are you talking about? Listen, kid, I know you're the number one pick in the country today because you're the best center in America today. You're not going to play for this team. He says, I got on my bike when I cut my beard, when I cut my hair, came back, and I think they ended up winning the champion national championship, one or two of them. But when John Wooden died, I was at the Ronald Reagan Library in ucla. I think it's one of those in. In la, and one of my friends, Dudley Rutherford, is there, and we're in the waiting room. We're having a conversation about to make a Big decision in my life. This has got to be. I could even tell you today it's got to be between June to September of 2009, when Reagan. That has to be around those. When John Wooden died. And no, it's at. Yeah, it's somewhere around that season anyways, maybe a couple years after that. So I'm sitting there and I'm just watching former UCLA players. 6, 7, 6, 8, 69 showing up, coming down the elevator, they're crying. Leaving, coming on the elevator, they're crying. Here's a man that impacted their lives. If you ever read books on him, his pyramid of success and things that he did. Fascinating. This guy lived up to 99 years old because of how many people's lives he changed. But what we don't want as a young man, as a young boy, that person that discipline us, eventually ends up being exactly a woman. I'll give you one here, depending on the levels of audacity from the kid. I'm 18 years old, I'm in the Army. We're just talking about the sound of flight here. And myself and three other kids, we're from New York, Louisiana. We're all acting like we're tough guys. We're not tough guys, but we're acting like we're tough guys. Like that story you were talking about earlier. You use a certain phrase that, hey, you know, they're loud, but it's not really. They're not going to do anything. We're thinking, we're gangsters, we're tough guys. All this stuff. We're fighting each other in the laundry room, hitting each other, all this stuff. We don't have a clue what we're doing with fighting. We just have a lot of testosterone, but we're not listening to this guy, Drill Sergeant Green. One day he asks us to get into the Humvee. He said, I'm gonna take you guys to a place. Get in there. We get in there, no problem. We're driving to the back. 40, 30 minutes. 40 minutes. We've never been here before. He goes into a place, it's not on the road.
- [57:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Cool.
- [57:45]
Patrick Bet-David
Pulls up, gets out. It's not saying anything to us. Picture a guy that moves slowly, like Bruce Lee. Okay? Think about when he's not fighting. He's just moving like that. Takes his jacket off, his BDU's, takes his hat off, takes his dog tag off. And he says, who wants to go first? We're like, what do you mean? So who wants to go first? I said, dross arm. What are you talking About. He says if we fight here, no one will ever know, but we're going to fight. Who wants to go first? He's five, eight. Okay. We're all big guys, all right, but we have no clue what this guy's background is. But he's very confident. So one by one by one, we go in there casually. One by one by one, he beats the living out of us. Except he's got one rule. Doesn't hit us anything up here, Everything is here. We're all on the ground begging him to stop. He took it to levels where he knew we were going to be able to do PT the next day, but not to the point where the public's going to know what just took place and then we're done. He says, okay, you sure you guys are tough guys? No, drill sergeant. You guys going to be good moving forward? Yes, Drill Sergeant. You guys are gangsters? No, drill sergeant. We're privates. Get in the homie. Let's go back. We got on a Humvee. We went back. Let me tell you, I wish they would have recorded it. There's a picture of me standing next to him with me and my dad. You could tell in that picture who ran the show. You could tell who was the alpha. He was the alpha. You know what? That 18 year old kid, Nita, that 18 year old Patrick, that's exactly what he needed. I needed order. He was the first guy I faced that I couldn't get away with everything I was doing. He wasn't afraid of me. He put me in my place. Boys need that. God knows how many boys. Because let's just say that doesn't happen in my life. We're not having this conversation today. Let's just say I'm just like a regular guy. I don't get that discipline from somebody that challenges me. And he doesn't care from parents, got a divorce. He doesn't care where I'm from. He has no sympathy for me. He's trying to lead me. That's his job, to make sure soldiers are solid. So when war happens, somebody like me is going to be able to stand up to the enemy. But today that would never fly. Today he'd go to jail. Today he'd be written about all over the place. Today they would make a movie about him. And I would get a call from Disney saying it's so unfortunate that he discriminated against you, that you are Iranian, Armenian, Assyrian, and you're brown. That's why he did that. That we should go sue the army and we should make a movie about this and turn him to be a villain. He was not a villain. He was a leader. He. He. He made the world a better place by checking me very quickly at 18 years old. So as you're telling these stories and you're going through Jeffrey Canada, maybe his approach is a different approach. Maybe he's not going to use the approach that Drill Sergeant Green used with us. But at the same time, we need more people. Like, I don't know who he is. I don't know his standards. But based on who you're telling me, a guy like that, we need more men like that in America.
- [60:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I'm with you. So how do we get going back in the right direction? In fact, talk to me about the military. So what's your confidence level in our current military?
- [60:56]
Patrick Bet-David
You know, there's certain things that I talk to my boys about that I don't want my wife around, and she doesn't want to be around. I said, babe, this is between me and them. You can't be here right now. I gotta talk to these guys, and I will talk to them, okay? And she respects it, and we do our thing. We got a couple rules in the house. I don't give the girls papa's. They don't get paw pows.
- [61:24]
Tom Bilyeu
What are you saying?
- [61:25]
Patrick Bet-David
Pow pows.
- [61:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Pow pows.
- [61:26]
Patrick Bet-David
That's what we call in our house. It's called pow pows. They don't get spanking. They don't get anything. The boys, it's a different story. They don't get it anymore, but they know what can come and when. I need to talk to these boys to put them in their place. I have to have the conversation privately. What's the point if you've never been in the military, if you've never been to war? You have no understanding of what it takes to prepare somebody to defend. You have no idea what it takes to get somebody to defend. You've never done that before. So what does it mean in war when the other guy's trying to kill you? There is no. Hey, man, do you have your mask on? Because, Covid, it could spread. Hey, before we fight, did you take the vaccine? Because I can't fight you if you didn't take the vaccine. Hey, before we fight, what's your DI score in Russia? What's. What's the ESG score? You guys have? All good. You guys. You guys good or. Because we can't. It's inappropriate. Hey, what kind of weapons you guys use? Are these going to make the Climate dirty the bomb. How are you not worried about the climate? How dare you have a weapon like this? So before you shoot us, let's check to see if that weapon you're using is climate friendly. That doesn't exist. When a war takes place. When a war takes place, the other guy has one thing in mind. Either surrender or I'm killing you. That's what happens in war. So how do you psychologically prepare somebody for that? Well, maybe we should just prevent people from going to war. Totally agree. I'm not for it. I'm glad we didn't have it for a few years. Just all of a sudden when we don't have fear, respect and admiration for leader in America, we have more wars. Okay? Everybody thought the last three years were going to be friendly and peaceful and we were all going to get along. Forget about us getting on in America. The world can't get along the last three years. Right. So how do we get back to it? We get back to it by the following manner. You got 50 employees here, give or take, based on what people told me. And you build a good business and you're doing very well. Okay, how many times, Tom, Matter of fact, let me ask a question a different way. How many people, including Quest, including all the businesses you've ran, how many people have you hired, personal employees that you personally have hired?
- [63:55]
Tom Bilyeu
I've interviewed 1500 people.
- [63:57]
Patrick Bet-David
Okay.
- [63:58]
Tom Bilyeu
More now, because that's the one. I clocked that stat. It was like five years ago. But so, yeah, I've interviewed 1500. I've had 3000 employees. I was involved in hiring probably 30% of them directly.
- [64:09]
Patrick Bet-David
Fantastic. You were the COO or whatever role you have, CMO or CEO, I think one of those roles, president. Okay, so president has one of the hardest jobs because you're the COO and you're your apps, your data, your all of that stuff. Okay, how many HR managers have you interviewed?
- [64:25]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, Jesus. Interviewed probably 25.
- [64:30]
Patrick Bet-David
Okay, so watch this. How many have you hired or have you had?
- [64:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Four.
- [64:35]
Patrick Bet-David
Okay, so did you ever have an experience when you interviewed your first HR manager where the next one, this one didn't work, it prompted you to ask two additional questions on this one that you didn't ask on this one. And on the third one, you ask better questions than the second one, and on the fourth one you ask better questions than the third one. Right. Okay, so first HR manager I'm hiring, it's like we just need somebody to do the payroll, you know, totals, you know, all this stuff and, you know, check GNA Insperity, ADP. Who do we use? And $39,000 and do this. Okay, great. Man, I'm so glad we got somebody handling all this payroll. And then, hey, we got a complaint here. 401k benefits, health insurance costs going up. Is this good? I don't know. And, okay, next one. We need a better one. We need a better one. We need a better one in Covid. Covid happens. We had a HR manager that was reactive to everything, and it's the end of the world, and it was causing everything in the office to be chaotic. I said, this is not going to work out. So I'm interviewing people, and here's how I'm interviewing people. I say, hey, Mary, just out of curiosity, let's just say in our licensing department, we have 20 employees there. One of the employees comes to you and says, I got a cough and I'm not feeling well. You tell this person to do what? Go get tested. Great. They get tested, they come back, it's positive. What do you do? What are your next three moves? Oh, send everybody home. Okay, I can't hire you. Second person comes in, and just that answer alone, I already know you're not fit for this job. Next thing I go, comes in. Licensing department has 20 employees. One of the employees comes to their cough and they're not feeling well. You send them and they get tested positive. What do you do? What do I do? Yeah. Here's what I do. I send an email to everybody in the company. I tell them such and such as Covid, if you'd like to leave, you can take a laptop and go home and work. Okay, great. Better answer, but still a little bit too much. Third person comes in for the interview. Hey, licensing department has 20 employees. One person comes to you, their coffin. They get tested positive. What do you do? I ask who in that department has been with them. If they have, I tell them they can go get tested. And then if that person's gone in the kitchen, I'd say, who else was around you when they were, you know, in the kitchen or the bathroom? Such and such. Have you shook anybody's hands? I haven't shook them. I'll go to that person and tell them that and ask them if they want to get tested. They can. And then if they bring back negative, come back to work. If not, totally get it. Okay, reasonable. We're hiring this person. So I started hiring people based on case studies. Where am I going with this? Your question is, how do we go strong like we used to? Because it's chaotic today. Here's a point. Next time you're picking a president, think about you're hiring somebody for a job and ask better questions. One of the questions we need to hire today when we're wanting to pick our president or our governor, is how they handle chaos. Based on what experience? Not based on what they've said, based on what experience. What have they gotten done? What's their biggest accomplishment? How have they helped the economy? What do you want as a president? Do you want somebody that needs other people's money when they go run for office? Because the more people's money you take and the more they give, guess what comes with that? Nobody gives $10 million and says, what? Yo, you know what? You don't owe me any favors, but here's $10 million. Don't worry about doing favors for me in your super PAC. I'll give you $100 million, but I don't want any favors from you. That doesn't work that way. They'll give $100 million and there's three favors in the back. And hey, you got to change those three laws to prevent this guy from competing with me. Any president that ever ran that needed the least money, the people of power hated. I'll give you a list of these guys. John F. Kennedy, his father funded 50, 40 or 50% of the entire thing. And then people showed up, a big number. And by the way, he said, I'm willing to spend 100% of it when he became president who hated Kennedys. It's a long list of people. Are you kidding me? The oil people, you got CIA, you got Federal Reserve. You want me to keep going? You know the story. You're a smart guy. There's a lot of people that didn't like that guy. Why? Because he didn't take money from anybody that they needed. They knew he could do it on his own. Reagan, his own financing. Okay, you go Trump, his own financing, you go Hillary Clinton, hundred percent other people's money. Biden, nearly 100% other people's money. That's a bit scary. Okay, Kennedy was a Democrat. You know, Trump is a Republican. It's not like you're talking left or right, but maybe if, like when, when you, you probably know the story with Steve Jobs, when he started Apple, when he started Pixar, right? He put $7 million of his own money into the company. Okay, we're having a meeting yesterday with, with Dana White at two hour meeting, nice meeting. And we're having a couple of the conversations about what could possibly happen. Business dealings, all this other stuff. Guy comes to you, he says, tom, we want to raise $10 million for this project we're working on. You're gonna ask. We're gonna ask probably the same questions. 80% will be the same question. 20% is going to be different. But what do you want to know so far? Who's the management team? What's their past? What's their background? What's different about this? What's their blue ocean? Do they already have a technology? Is there an mvp? What kind of results do you have? How many transactions have you knocked our app? Manect? We've done nearly ten thousand transactions a hundred thousand times. This app's been downloaded. We have revenue in the seven figure mark. So we have a number to look at it now. I come ask you for $10 million and you say, okay, what are you going to do with the $10 million? I tell you, oh, that $10 million. I'm going to take five off the table for myself and then we're going to take the other five and I'm going to give myself a $500,000. Your salary, and we're going to pay this person this. And then the last 2 million that's left, we're going to put into technology. Are you giving that $10 million?
- [70:25]
Tom Bilyeu
No.
- [70:25]
Patrick Bet-David
Now watch this. What if I come to you and I say, tom, here's a product. This is our proof. This is what we've done. This is our leadership team. Here's our salary. We're paying ourselves right now the $10 million we raised from you and your camp. I'm taking zero salary. I don't want any salary, nothing. And I don't want to take a penny off the table. We're going to take that money to put into technology. You're probably more open to the idea of entertaining this. And if I finish up with the following thing and I tell you, by the way, Tom, I have put $6.8 million of my own money into manekt. You're not going to say 6.8. Doesn't even want to take 6.8 right now. Of the money he put in the business, he's willing to do it later on. He wants to put 100% in and he doesn't want a salary and he doesn't want to change his salary in the company. You're probably going to sit there and say, what's the risk for me? There isn't. Let's talk about it. Let's get lawyers involved. Let's look at the deck, let's get deeper, et cetera, et cetera. If a president comes in and they're running and they say I'm putting XYZ amount of my own money, that kind of gets my attention. Because you're risking your own capital as well. We have to start asking what do you have involved that you could lose if this thing doesn't work out? You know, as an investor we have to look at hiring our president and our governors in that way. We've not been trained that way. We've been trained to just. He's been 30 years in public service. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, you know, 30 years in public service, we ought to give him respect as a cop. Cool. 30 years, I get it. Respect. 30 years in the military. Salute to you, sir. 30 years as a firefighter, that's a tough job. You've been 30 years as Congress. What have you done for the economy? Who's your funders? Who's giving you money? We have to ask better questions. Now. Most people don't want that conversation to be taking place. But I think our interview process of whoever we pick that come with the policies that's leading to the catastrophes we're experiencing, we have to be a little bit more selective of the presidents and the governors we choose.
- [72:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Let me ask you, do you see? Because I think one of the real, one of the real roads, maybe it's a 0.1% chance, maybe it's a 70% chance. What do you think the odds that we are already in some sort of Roman Empire like decline meaning already in it in that it will happen in the next 10 to 15 years.
- [73:01]
Patrick Bet-David
I don't know if we're there. I'm not in the doom and gloom yet. Why? Because the great thing about capitalism is. What? Here's the best thing about capitalism. Capitalism prevents you from doing stupid things because it's going to hurt your capital. Okay. When I recruited salespeople over the years I gave score. There's a scoring system in this book. Choose your enemies wisely on who you can have your running mates. 15 qualities for running mates. And you score them based on six different qualities. Okay. I would look at guys and I would say which one of the people I work with is going to give me the least amount of headaches. And here's what I learned, okay? Extremely good looking guys and girls single in their twenties gave me the biggest headaches. Why? Because everybody wanted to be with them. And testosterone levels high at that level. And guess what? They're Going to fool around. You may be high one month and kill it next month. You're dating three girls in the office. And one of my best girls who made a lot of money last year. You just broke her heart. You left her for another girl. She can no longer come to the office because she's embarrassed. And she left us to another company. So do that for about three years and then go see 17 therapists who have no clue what sales is like. Then you're going to realize I have to change my approach. Then I'm sitting there and saying, man, that guy over there is so boring. Dude, he is so boring. Nothing's exciting about him. But he went from making $500 a month selling insurance to $1000 a month three months later to making $2000 a month three months later to making$4000 a month a year later. Then he's making $6000 a month six months later. Then a year later, he's making $8000 a month. Then three and a half years later, he's making $18,000 a month. Steady, man. There's nothing about you that inspires me. But you know what? Here's what I learned. He was married and he had kids. So what's the point? He has to make it work. He has to make it work because he has to protect those two kids that he has. He has a mortgage. He has to make it work. He can't go screw around. He's married. The likelihood of him going and clubbing and partying with all the other single people and smoking and doing ecstasy is lower. So I realized I have to invest my time in people who are the most bankable, long term, stable home, stable relationship. More things to live for, more things to work hard for. More things that'll prevent you from making stupid decisions. Perfect. Now bring that into the Roman Empire following all this other stuff, okay? Jamie Dimon's not going to want to screw up what he's doing. And his legacy is going to matter to him because there's no way in the world he's going to let Sandy Weil be able to say, I told you guys, that guy failed. He was a nobody. He's not going to let that happen. And he's running the most, you know, company that every day, $7 trillion they see come in and out. J.P. morgan Chase, right? Apple, Amazon, Gates, Microsoft. These guys have assets. Are they going to let something crazy happen to it? I don't know. Musk, who is standing up against the establishment. He's not okay with what the Establishment's trying to do. And with social media, a lot of this bullshit's being exposed. Whether it's talking about ESG and what BlackRock and you know, they're trying to do, or Open Society foundation or these DEI scores, CEI scores, which California is famous for. They're getting exposed. Right. And people are talking about it. So social media is allowing us to hold people accountable. I don't know if you saw what just happened right now. This week with Supreme Court having a discussion to say social media companies cannot take anything off their websites. Whoa. This week. So censorship at the highest level. You don't have the right to take anything down. People can post whatever they want. That's crazy. If we go that direction.
- [77:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Was that a preliminary?
- [77:17]
Patrick Bet-David
Preliminary. It's not done yet. No, it's fully preliminary. You gotta look into it. Yes.
- [77:21]
Tom Bilyeu
So you got my attention.
- [77:23]
Patrick Bet-David
So. So because Supreme Court is now what, five, four, right? So now it's kind of like they can impose and kind of push the envelope there. Okay. And they can protect sanity in America with some of the ways that businesses have been bullying people during. COVID Covet. What it did do, which was great. It was so awesome in one area. You know what it was? What's that quote? You know, absolute power, you know, reveals what this person's driven by. Right. You know, and, and Lincoln said, if you want to test someone's character, give him power and see what they do. Guess what? During COVID who did we give power to? Fauci, cdc, California, New York. Governors of some states had littered too much power. They were like emperors pretty much. You know, hey, if somebody in la, you see them without wearing a mask, text this word and we'll find them and da, da, da, da, da. What are you talking about? You're paying people in LA to snitch on other people? It's a part time job. What do you do for a living? I snitch. I make six grand a month. Really? Yeah. What an incredible way of making money. So during COVID if we're not oblivious and not naive, we realize what the people of power really wanted to do. And we saw that in Europe, everybody's walking around with their Covid passport and they're kind of doing this kind of stuff. Stuff. So to me, it was fantastic to really see them show their cards. Oh, this is what you're trying to do to America. We're not going to let that happen. What did that do? It got guys like Rogan to flip. I'm no longer on your side. You got Guys like Elon Musk. Oh, so you were full of shit the entire time. I thought you were trying to do something good. Got it. I'm not part of your camp. I'm going to go by Twitter. Scott Galloway. This guy's full of shit. Professor Galloway. There's no way in the world he's going to buy. He's bluffing all of you. He's fooling all of you. There's no way he's going to buy Twitter. Elon Musk bought 100% of Twitter. And now Scott Galloway on Bill Maher last week with Andrew Cuomo saying, we need to show some grace. We were wrong during COVID We were wrong during COVID Wow. I'm sorry, Professor Galloway, did you show grace? Did you show grace? Oh, now you want grace. But you never gave everybody grace. And you're this professor from New York who's had exits of a couple companies, and you've not taken salary from UC Berkeley. Respect to you. You simply go and do the work. I've seen the money you've given to Berkeley. Three and a half, $4 million. But you didn't have any grace. You didn't show people grace. So what happened now? But it was beautiful. You saw what universities were doing. Harvard got exposed during COVID No more campus. You guys got to go home. Okay, so does that mean the annual tuition is still 60,000 or is discounted to 20,000? No, no. Still 60,000. What? For what? You're not giving me food. You're not giving me a place to stay. You still want me to pay $60,000? Yes, we do. Bingo. You just showed your true colors. Beautiful. That was fantastic. Hey, we want you guys to go and work from home. Really? Yes. All right, so I'm living in New York. I'm working for XYZ Company. They're paying me 250 grand a year. I can't live normal life in New York. I'll go live in Florida, work from home. Except now I'm not paying the taxes. Oh, no, no, no, no. We don't want you to work from home.
- [80:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Why?
- [80:30]
Patrick Bet-David
Now I can work from home, from Florida. No, we want you to come back to New York now. Got it. So you screwed up the policies, but now I'm in Florida. I'm not coming back to New York because I actually love Florida, and I'm stuck here. And people from California went and worked from home in Texas, and now they're saving at 13%. Now they're not coming back. So they were like, oh, people gonna come Back. They never came back. The people never came back. So this, this empire is falling. The great equalizer, Tom, is social media. If social media sticks around and they can't silence people from sharing their thoughts and opinions, I'm not talking about people getting up there and saying, we should go do this. I'm not talking about that. I'm saying, hey, what about this? And we start questioning things. Then the people of power that reveal their cards, not everybody, but the establishment that wants to control more, the people, they're like, yeah, we're not. We're not doing that, bro. You know, what do you do if you're playing poker with somebody, okay, and you're going for the river and you didn't hit, you know, fly, you know, whatever, pick something you didn't hit. Your three of a kind, okay, you missed the river, but you got two pair. It's a jack. You got a jack, you got a jack on the board. All of a sudden you're about to bluff the guy, maybe go in 50% of what the chip is, you know, there. But one card accidentally falls on the ground and you see it, it's an ace, and there's an ace on the. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? You already know you lost. So guess what? The establishment revealed their cards and we saw it. And if we don't realize it and do something with it and they still move their agenda, it was our fault all along. But if we side and we unify and we come together saying, hey, guys, we the people, have the power. They ain't gonna push us around. We love this country. Let's fight for what makes this country great. Let's go and support what this country was great about. Let's bring it back to that. Let's be a little bit more responsible. Let's have better incentive programs. Let's expect better policies from them. Let's hold them accountable to what they say they're going to do. Now we can go in the better direction, and we encourage certain people to run and get involved in politics and office. So I don't think it's going to happen because I think on one end, capitalists, the rich people, are not going to want to lose all them, all their money. So they're eventually going to be like, yeah, I don't support what you're doing, Soros. Yeah, I don't support what you're doing. Charlie Munger said something very interesting. He says, look, I love Larry Fink, but I don't want him as my Emperor, what a thing to say. Munger. Here's a guy that's 94 years old. I don't know how old he is, but mid-90s, you're saying, hey, I respect Larry Fink, but I don't want him as an emperor. Because they know what Larry Fink's trying to do. People are not dummies, right? So those types of people, I think are going to fight each other enough. And if we keep our eyes open, this will continue to be the greatest country in the world and hopefully even better if we rise up to it. If not, the best days are behind us if we don't learn our lesson from the last three years.
- [83:29]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting, I have a slightly different take if I put my I'm paranoid hat on. So I think that at some point we started attacking the very idea of structure itself, which is how you end up getting into the gender conversation. And once you start, if it takes hold, and it's a very difficult argument to figure out how to be both compassionate and draw hard boundaries. You put lines and boundaries and one thing we didn't talk about is you create rituals that create lines that I'm no longer a child, I'm now an adult. Like, really clear demarcation points instead of like, oh, transition effortlessly anytime from anything to anything. It's one of those ideas that sounds awesome and it sounds loving and it sounds caring, but the outcome of it is to tear at the infrastructure that holds the society up. And so it's pretty interesting. This is something that Douglas Murray, who I have not ever sat down with, but I'm very familiar with his work, he's talked a lot about. Camille La Palia has talked a lot about this, that in end stage empires, they become obsessed with pulling apart the structures of the society. And it tends to manifest as a conversation around the ultimate structure, which is male, female. So this is one of those, It's a positive feedback loop. And again, I'm just wearing my paranoid hat. I'm, I'm not betting against America. I love it. I want to be here. In fact, I, I, this is going to be weird. I can't believe I'm about to say something that's going to sound political. It is not meant to be political, but I want to fly an American flag. I want to remind people that this is a beautiful country and that it's worth fighting for ideals of personal freedom, et cetera, et cetera, and that the way that we rebuild is by putting structure in place that has a metric associated with it. So we can see whether we're moving in the right direction or not. That would be the thing. So anyway, this feels like a positive feedback loop. I don't have a clear picture on how at a societal level, we unwind it, but I do understand it at the individual level and the things that we as an individual person can do to make sure that we are doing something that will be very sweet.
- [85:48]
Patrick Bet-David
You're very sweet. And here's what I mean by it. I am so confused when I hear a guy who created thousands of jobs, created a billion dollar of value for people who owned equity, that you're worried about saying, I don't want to be political about the American flag because it may offend somebody.
- [86:12]
Tom Bilyeu
No, I didn't say that.
- [86:13]
Patrick Bet-David
I know that. But what I'm saying to you is even the fact that you gave that qualification to me is. Is where I. I don't think we need to be there. Here's what I mean by that. I'm talking at this Christian school that my kids go to, and the dean. What is above a dean, Whatever the. What do they call the person that runs the school?
- [86:38]
Tom Bilyeu
I thought it was Dean.
- [86:39]
Patrick Bet-David
No, there's one other guy. There's something about it that whatever it is, the dean reports to these guys. Do you guys know what that's called or. No, not principal. It's a different name. They have form. Headmaster. Is it Headmaster? Okay, so headmaster. And he gets up there and he's giving his talk to 600 kids, and he's bringing me up Veterans Day. He's like, wow, you know, America's not perfect. And we have this and we have flaws and all this, like, peak of COVID like a year and a half ago. I'm standing there, I'm like, dude, like, where have you lived? You know, have you lived in Iran? Have you lived in other places? Like what they think about this place? And I get up and I. And I say, first of all, thank you for this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said, america is the greatest country in the world, okay? And, you know, we don't care if you're a Christian. I don't know what your faith is. We're getting along. I'm Middle Eastern, bro. You're white. Every time we're together, we get along. Best conversations when I'm talking to you. Fantastic conversation. I got so much respect for you to build what you build. Your wife came in, sweetheart gave me a hug, warm welcome. Your peers, your people here, how you're working, how you're moving. What you're doing, having a blast, creating great content, great conversations. But I do think we need to. We need to have some pride in how great of a country we live in. I think we need to sell it. I have Governor DeSantis on the podcast. Two days ago, we did an hour live podcast. He flew into the office, and it was a great conversation. He's one of the candidates that's, you know, potentially presidential candidate. And I said, can you sell America? Please sell America. And, you know, he did his best to sell America in his point of view, but I think we need to do a better job selling America, saying, selling the ideas of America. Here's what happened the last couple years about this conversation. I don't know if I'm having this conversation with Rogan or whoever I'm having to come. Maybe it was on the Rogue. Yeah, it's on the Rogan podcast. We're talking on communities that hurt America. Okay. I said one is the tolerant Christians who hurt America. They're like, it's okay. It's okay. You're either a Christian or you're not. You can say whatever you want about Muslims, but guess what Muslims are. They believe their religion. Okay? You're not going to be able to say things about their prophet. You can't go say something about Prophet Muhammad. See what happens. Go say something about Jesus. See what happens. Yeah, it's okay. He's just upset, you know. Okay, cool. All right. The other one is libertarians, because libertarians who are like, do your thing, bro. As long as you do your thing, I'm good. Do your thing. Do your thing. Do your thing. Do your thing. Do your thing. All right, now they're doing their thing with your kids. Now what do you want to do? It's too late. It's in your school. Well, no, no, no. I didn't say that. Well, I'm sorry. You said libertarian. To each his own. Well, no, no, no. That doesn't mean you come and do this to my kids. No, it's called as long as you do your thing, I'm good to do your thing. They came back and haunted you through your kids. No, I'm not cool with that. Well, then maybe. Maybe you're not really a libertarian. Maybe there's a different element to your politics that you got to really reconsider. The wealthy conservatives who raise good kids who all of a sudden have all this money, but they're afraid, God forbid it leaks, that they have an element of conservative. Oh, my God, I may lose my body. I may Lose this, I may lose that. And we won't be invited to those parties, and they're not going to like us. I'm going to go today. I'm having a conversation with Chris Cuomo. Cuomo and I have turned into very good friends. We don't agree together politically. We have a great conversation to get. I'm at his house in Sag harbor, and we have lunch and we go to his place. And all of a sudden, he surprised me with a call with Robert Downey Jr. Hey, what's up, PBD? What's up, Robert Downey? And I say, hey, kids, come see what this is. Oh, my God. It's. Imagine a reaction of kids who watch Iron man die, and they're like. Kept crying, saying, he's alive, he's alive, he's alive. Right here in the flesh. But we're having these conversations. I'm thinking to myself, did these guys know my political positions that I take? And we're getting along, it's okay. It's not the end of the world. This is what I believe in, you know? But these Republicans that conservatives that took their money and they're like, look, as long as we protect our money, just buy real estate, have some assets, but don't do anything with all this money, we have no problem. The other guys went and bought New York Times. The other guys went about WaPo, Time magazine. China owned Forbes. 95% of Forbes was owned by China. And 2021, International Woman of the Year is who? Hillary Clinton? What, she doesn't run a business? How about Oprah Winfrey? How about Sheryl Sandberg? You give it to Hillary, what does she do in business? Forbes is all business. The guy who ran Forbes, the son, the guy who started it, was his father. But the guy that ran it, that took it to the next level, he had a jet. Google this. It says Capitalist Tool. His jet on the corner. The name of the plane was Capitalist Tool. His yacht, it was a capitalist tool. The helicopter said Capitalist Tool. These are the tools a capitalist use. He had all biggest collection of those eggs. You know, the Russian eggs. There's a name for those Russian eggs. Faberge. That was estimated to be half a billion dollars.
- [91:45]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
- [91:46]
Patrick Bet-David
This he had. He had 15 of them. His best friend was Elizabeth Taylor. Best friend for his 70th birthday party. If you've never seen this Guy's documentary, his 70th birthday party, everybody's there. You know what he gives to everybody on his birthday party? A Rolex. Who does that? This guy's a capitalist. At the core. And guess what we admired back then? Wow. Life of the rich and famous today is life of the poor and the miserables. No, we're admiring things that people are grown up to want to pursue. No, we got to edify the guys that busted their tails to build a company. We got to edify the people that are creating economy. We got to edify people that are going out there being good net positive to society. We need more Tom Bilious in America. But those three communities, and I can keep going with a couple other communities, but I'll stick to those three communities. I think they have, they have, they have, they have given others a lot of power. As a, as a guy who was an atheist for 25 years of my life in the army. I've told this story before. In the army I was invited to go to this camp with this man, 70 year old man. And you know, we were able to jump into this lake and play pool and all this stuff. But every night for one hour he had to sit down with him and listen to him read the Bible. And I would sit in the back, I'm like, dude, you can tell me about Bible all you want. Why don't you go back to Iran and see what I saw when we got bombed. Now go ahead, go see what I saw. Go see the parks I used to go to and these buildings that were torn down. When I see what's going on right now in Palestine, Israel, I live this, I the whole alarm. Taba Joe, Taba Joe. Attention, attention. Red signal means that planes have crossed the border. The enemy is here. You know what that does when I listen to this? I, I go to YouTube sometimes and listen to, to see how quickly I can go to the 8 year old kid and see it. The other day my sister sends me a picture, says, hey, this is me and you at 8 years old. You remember this? I said, okay, what's the big deal with this picture? We got a lot of pictures like this. She says, you know how you always talk about the windows? Dad used to tape look at the windows. I see the windows is the tapes from my dad. They put the tapes because when bombs would explode, they didn't want the glass to explode all over us. They wanted to stick together. That's what we did in Iran. And you know, so today when you see this whole concept of, you know, I'm at this camp in the military, you know, he gives me a Bible. He says this, my parents gave me this Bible December 24th of 1974. And son, I Think you need this more than me. I said, sir, I promise, you give it to the wrong guy. He says, just please take it from me. You need this. I said, I don't need this. Keep it. It's a gift your parents gave you. I have the Bible till today. He gives it to me. I don't read the Bible. It sits at my barracks in the Army. But I started praying three times a week, three times a day, every day. And here's how my prayer was. God, I don't believe you exist. I think it's for weak people. But if you do exist, cool. Let's see what you got. If you don't, it's going to feel good. Talking to myself anyways, cuz I know nobody in boot camp now from Iran. There's not a lot of Iranians in boot camp. So eventually that idea of having faith is what Hitler feared. He did not want people to have faith. The whole Dietrich Bonhoeffer story, if you read what he did, he didn't want people to have faith. He wanted to eliminate having faith. Does that remind you of anything? We can't pray anymore. We can't do the Pledge of Allegiance when kids go to school. Oh, but we should learn about LGBTQ stuff. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Let's take out faith and let's replace it with somebody may be gay, you may be gay, your mommy and daddy don't know. So guess what happens. Parents in Florida are saying, we don't feel comfortable because our kids want to transition and Governor Desantis doesn't allow. So we're moving to California. They're coming to your state. And people have started making decisions saying it's okay if they take these pills. Under 18 years old. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? So under 18 years old, I can't own a gun. I can't join the army. Under 16, I can't own a car. I can't have a driver's license. I can't drink alcohol, but I can change my sex. You tell me somebody who has common sense sell that to me. Over 18. Go do it. Totally get it. Under 18 in what logical manual of a group of 100 people that I can reason they could say this makes sense. There is no, none of that. It's gaslighting. So we have to sit there and listen to it and say, and by the way, I know this is off brand for you. This is not the kind of conversations you have on. You know, I don't want you to get uncomfortable, but I Am completely comfortable for me. I think we need to go back to square one. We need to go sit there. And like, I was having this conversation with a group of people who are not Christians, and I said, you got five countries to live in. Where do you want your kids to be raised? A country that's atheist. They don't believe in anything. A country that's Catholic, a country that's Muslim, A country that's this. A country that's A country that's Christian. Where do you want to raise your kids? Where do you want to raise your kids? They're like, well, probably more country that's this. Okay, why? Why? Because the values and principles are xyz. Great. No problem even. We had a debate the other day, had two Muslims and had two Christians on a podcast, and they're debating each other other, and the guy's talking about all these things. And then I said, listen, I have a lot of Muslim friends. I have great conversations. Why don't people immigrate to Muslim countries? Why do Muslims come to America? I don't know. Why do we in America have all these different denominations all over the place? Nobody cares. Why don't they move into these other places? Oh, it's purely economical. Okay. Why aren't we moving into many of these other places that economically they have a lot of oil? Why are we not doing that? Well, it's this. This. That totally get it, by the way, to the Christians who get upset and are like, well, you know, but you don't understand what Muslims are doing. And they're going to do this, and eventually they're going to run America. Of course they are. How could you say that? They're having 2.9 kids per woman, and the rest are not. Not even close. So mathematically, yes, we're eventually going to have a Muslim president, if we haven't already had one eight years ago. Now we're going to have Congress being controlled by them, and that's also Senate on the competitive side. Instead of being upset about it, why don't you start having more kids? We're not having enough kids. So the people that should be having more kids are not having enough kids. And the people that shouldn't be having kids are having way too many kids. This is also a problem that we're not talking about. So to me, we have a lot of issues. Some we can address the next three to five years, some that we can fix and make progress on the next 10 years. Some of it's going to be 20, and then some of it is what Ray Dalio talks about. And now he's talking investments. But I'm talking a cycle of 50 years that it's going to take us. But these are the types of things that we should have open dialogue about. We should be comfortable selling America. We got 53 million immigrants in America, more than any other country in the world, and it's not even close. There's a reason for it. We can ask the question why? Maybe we offer the best thing in the world and we need to protect of that and people who come here. It shouldn't be. I'm having this conversation with one guy on my podcast. I said, if an immigrant comes to America, who owes who? Does America owe immigrants something or is the immigrant owes the country something? Oh, America owes the immigrant. America doesn't owe immigrant nothing nothing. The person coming here owes America everything because they let you in. That's who owes the other person. Well, no. How could you think like that? You're thinking like what they did a hundred years ago. No, no. It's called logic. It's called logic. You're allowing me to come into your homeland and you owe me. Dude, you don't owe me. I owe you. Thank you. So how do you show gratitude? How are you going to show gratitude? So you're an immigrant now in America. How are you going to make America a better place? Like what we had before when you would go to. What's that island that you would go to and you would show what talents you're bringing and then would let you into America?
- [99:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Ellis Island.
- [99:35]
Patrick Bet-David
Ellis Island, Right. Okay. So what do you bring to the table? Nothing. I'm just excited about the benefits you guys offer. But what do you bring to the table? We need to kind of present this argument. Why should you earn the right to come to America? And what can we do to get the best immigrants coming here? What can we do to get the most educated people coming here who are from IIT graduate people? What can we get the people that are best in math that are bringing something here? These are very basic common sense conversations that the last three years, people from academia and universities have confused the hell out of kids where kids coming out of college today are questioning common sense. I had a guy that's one of my C Suite executives. Every time I would talk to him, I would say, how's your daughter doing? How's your daughter doing? How's your daughter doing? He says, breaks my heart. I said, tell me why my daughter and I were like this. I spent $200,000 sending her to this XYZ school in Illinois. Every year, my daughter hated me more. By the fourth year, she didn't even want to come back to the house. She moved to la. I said, you got to be kidding me. He says, pat, I spent $200,000 to lose my daughter. Now, here's the thing. Odds are my daughter's probably going to come back, but she may come back. At 32, I could lose 10 years of my daughter's life at this age. At this age. I will look at his face. This is a performer. This is a rock star. He's a leader. He's had multiple exits. He's a leader, successful guy, but you could see the anguish on his face. That's not cool. That's not cool. So you want me to send my kids to you and you pin them against me, and I'm the one that paid the money to go to your college? That's not okay. While you're sitting on $60 billion of money in your endowment that you can afford to pay every single student's college tuition for the next hundred years, yet you want us to pay you $60,000 per year and I stay home instead of going to your college? Yeah, you. You showed us who you are. And I. I am not going to forget it. I'm going to impose and I'm going to keep talking about this stuff. And enough people are going to sit there and say, that was an interesting conversation. You know, maybe we need to think about that. Babe, did you hear what he just said? Did you hear what she just said? And then collectively, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 years down the line, like I used to not be awakened to see what's really taking place, because my head's down building a business. I don't care about politics. I'm just simply trying to build a business. And then all of a sudden you're like, nah, man. I got four kids, an eleven, ten and a seven year old and a two year old. We got to kind of be involved. I know I went off tangent, but when you made that comment about I don't want to be political America, I think you're the prime example of what makes America great, and we need more people like you.
- [102:12]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, that's it for part one with Patrick Bet David. And if you thought that was intense, then make sure that you join me for part two, where we're going to dive into financial maneuvering, global power shifts, and the critical steps that people need to take to reclaim personal control. Until then, my friends be legendary.
- [102:31]
Grainger Hospital Procurement Announcer
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- [103:01]
Grainger Announcer
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