Are We Losing What Makes America Great? Mindset, Prosperity, and Political Division

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Are We Losing What Makes America Great? Mindset, Prosperity, and Political Division
Date: July 6, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Guests: Andrew Press, Spencer Pratt, Mamdani (via featured speech)

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Episode Overview

This special July 4th-themed episode explores the growing polarization in American culture, examining opposing visions of America's history, identity, and future. Tom Bilyeu, joined by COO Andrew Press, analyzes a controversial Independence Day speech by DSA politician Zohran Mamdani and contrasts it with a passionate patriotic retort by Spencer Pratt. The discussion weaves through foundational questions: What makes America exceptional? Is American prosperity sustainable? How is political and economic rhetoric shaping the country's mindset, especially among youth?

The episode unpacks the psychological and narrative battles underpinning societal trends, with a critical focus on the changing national character, economic participation, political victimhood, and the fight over America’s historical narrative.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Competing Narratives of American History

• Dueling July 4th Speeches: Tom sets up the core theme: two radically different visions for America displayed over July 4th, each proposing a different historical reading and path forward ([02:46]).

• Mamdani's Framing: Mamdani begins his speech with imagery of bondage and squalor for new arrivals to America, emphasizing the nation’s history of oppression, yet notes that people continued to come for opportunity ([05:34], [09:44]).

• Interpretation Matters: Tom argues that history can be told in a way that acknowledges America's flaws while celebrating its overcoming of them:

  “What you choose to focus on, about our history with slavery, you can do the, ooh, just we're really bad people… Or you can do the we are a country that said we're willing to sacrifice the ultimate thing any of us can sacrifice, which is our lives, to put an end to this…” ([07:00])

• Resilience & Mindset: Tom draws a parallel between early immigrants’ experiences and the creation of the American mindset, focusing on the entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit required to survive and thrive in a hostile new land ([16:00]):

  “It is the ultimate episode of Minecraft on Hard mode. You fucking die. That's it. It is game over, man. If you don't get the crops, you are toast.” ([17:14])

2. Individual Mindset and Prosperity

• Self-Governance as Core: Tom reiterates that America’s founding was an experiment in self-governance, skeptical of concentrated government power, with freedom as both the goal and the means ([22:30]).

• Freedom vs. Redistribution: Contrasts the original narrative of America—risk, reward, and self-responsibility—with emerging political narratives prioritizing redistribution and social safety nets ([30:49], [35:17]).

• Social Assistance & Entitlement: Tom criticizes the rise of entitlement and long-term dependency on social programs, linking it to a breakdown in resilience and the entrepreneurial mindset that he believes built America. He highlights:

  “We are not wired to have everything given to us. It builds a mental map of the world that things come easily, that we are owed things.” ([32:43])

3. The Battle for History and Mindset

• Rewriting vs. Erasing History: Spencer Pratt’s response speech is analyzed, emphasizing the human need for historical attachment. Pratt warns:

  “Erasing history is how you demoralize people, how you unmoor them and detach them from their society so you can take it from them and rewrite it in your image.” ([51:32])

• The Power of Nostalgia: Pratt likens history to personal memory in a home, warning that deliberate targeting of "bad memories" is a path toward totalitarian cultural engineering ([54:01]).

• Comparison to Communist Regimes: Both host and Pratt connect these trends to the tactics of Maoist China and the Soviet Union, warning of the dangers of ideological "clean slates":

  “Mao destroyed what he called the four olds: old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. If you call them old it makes them sound bad. … If you don’t understand history, it is very easy for somebody to co-opt that...” ([54:01]-[56:19])

4. Economic Realities and Labor Force Participation

• Alarming Data: Tom notes new labor force participation statistics, highlighting historic declines and arguing they reflect a dangerous erosion of work ethic and personal responsibility ([71:54]).

• Rise of Victimhood & Disability Claims: Tom and Palmer Luckey’s comment highlight surging disability claims, critiquing the societal shift from “shame” as a motivator to system gaming ([72:38], [74:00]).

  “People used to avoid certain self-interested behaviors to avoid shame. … Now, 38% of Stanford students claim to be disabled … SSI disability payments have gone up 400% in a single generation.” (Palmer Luckey via Tom, [74:00])

• Personal Story: Tom recounts how personal shame motivated him to action in his own life, connecting individual responsibility to the health of the national character ([77:00]-[79:00]).

5. Political Victimhood & Division

• Victim Hood as Political Currency: The discussion turns to how both left and right now lean heavily on victim narratives—left through oppression/oppressor frameworks, right through language of being "forgotten" by elites ([86:44], [89:27]).

  “Resentment is so natural to the human condition … if I’m a politician and I say ‘I’m going to give you free things and you have every right to be aggrieved…’ it’s catnip for the human psyche.” ([86:44])

• Populist Moments & Economic Insecurity: Tom asserts that lasting populist divisions are fueled by real economic anxiety; improving economic conditions is essential for restoring “the center” in American politics ([93:41]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Competing American Narratives

“Which one of those you lean on tells me a lot about what's going on inside your mind. … Do you identify America as the bad guys who did the thing that everybody else in the world was doing? Or do you identify Americans as the people that fought back against it, paid an extraordinary price to make sure that it ended?” — Tom Bilyeu ([07:00])

On Mindset and Opportunity

“These opportunities are not given, they are won. … If you want something in life, you've got to be willing to fight for it, you've got to say, this is the thing that I want to do, and I'm going to pursue it with everything that I've got.”— Tom Bilyeu ([26:42])

On The Danger of Erasing the Past

“The Communist always attacks your history. … If the communist wishes to take your home, he must first destroy your memory of it so he can erase your attachment to it and demoralize you.” — Spencer Pratt ([51:32]-[54:01])

On Individual Responsibility

“No one’s coming to save me. That is a mantra in my life that will serve anybody who adopts it well, but very few people adopt it now.” — Tom Bilyeu ([76:00])

“Personal responsibility is the greatest drug in the world. Once you go, ‘I am not getting the result in my life that I want, and I control my life’… your life changes.” — Tom Bilyeu ([77:30])

On Populism and Radicalization

“Populism is, the economy breaks, people become insecure … No one will stay scared forever. So they'll transmute that into … ‘I’m tired of being afraid, so I'm going to become the monster.’” — Tom Bilyeu ([92:05])

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Important Timestamps

• 02:46: Introduction to the episode's themes; overview of the dueling Fourth of July messages.
• 05:34: Mamdani’s emphasis on oppression in the American immigrant experience.
• 09:44: Competing narratives about slavery, founding ideals, and the evolution of American identity.
• 16:00: Tom’s “Minecraft on hard mode” analogy for early settlers’ mindset.
• 22:30: Reflection on the dangers of big government versus America’s founding on individual freedom.
• 30:49: On immigration as a means to take advantage of opportunity versus to receive entitlements.
• 35:17: The role of ideology in controlling collective mindset; references to Lenin and Stalin.
• 51:32: Spencer Pratt’s warning about rewriting history and erasing collective memory.
• 54:01: The dangers of purging the past—a direct parallel drawn to Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
• 74:00: Tom and Palmer Luckey on the rise of disability claims and the loss of shame as a social corrective.
• 77:00: Tom’s personal story about how shame motivated his own transformation.
• 86:44: Analysis of the political use of victimhood and its psychological seduction.
• 92:05: Economic anxiety as the root of populist division and radical sentiment.

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Tone and Language

Tom employs direct, sometimes irreverent language to challenge both mainstream and emerging narratives. His style is accessible yet forceful, oscillating between storytelling, rhetorical question, and blunt assertion (“No one’s coming to save me. That is a mantra...” “[Freedom] is not what Mamdani and the DSA have on offer.”). Spencer Pratt’s response leans heavily into patriotic fervor and emotional analogy, while Mamdani’s speech is described as poetic and aspirational, though sharply criticized for emphasizing shame over achievement.

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Conclusion

This episode is a deep dive into the ideological tug-of-war over what America is, was, and should be. Tom Bilyeu foregrounds the critical role of self-narrative, economic reality, and mindset as both individual and collective determinants of national success. In the face of divisive rhetoric and policy battles, he calls for Americans to choose the narrative that most empowers them—one that values personal responsibility, celebrates hard-won achievement, and refuses to surrender the historic and psychological ground on which prosperity is built.

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For listeners eager to understand the stakes in current U.S. culture wars—beyond headlines and talking points—this discussion offers a candid, unvarnished exploration of history, psychology, policy, and the very soul of America.

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on the scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house and hand you a check?

[Andrew Press]

No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday and welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. Things are going to be a little bit different today. I am joined by somebody new. We introduced you to him last week. This is my business partner, COO Andrew Press. Welcome to the show. It is going to be a big one, boys and girls, because boy, did a lot happen this weekend. Mamdani gave a very divisive July 4th speech that attempts to reframe American history. Going to be taking a very close look at that one. Former Democrat staffer, sort of volunteer for Elizabeth Warren, but nonetheless a part of American politics. Young woman now says the Ayatollah Khomeini was the greatest anti imperialist leader of her life. We're going to talk about the pipeline that is taking American youth, making them very friendly towards anti American sentiments. The UK government is pushing for a takeover of the YouTube algorithm through to direct traffic where they want it. Boy, do I hope you can imagine how I feel about that. One new labor force participation data comes out. It's pretty shocking. We're gonna go over that. The backlash against Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey is reaching an absolute fever pitch. Wish Ryan was here today to talk about that. I have a feeling we will see things a little bit differently. I wanna know what you guys think though, so can't wait to talk about that. And there's a growing World cup controversy involving the US that is threatening to overshadow our campaign. I don't know if you guys have been paying attention to the World cup, but this one has been wild here in Los Angeles. Watching the battle between England and Mexico last night was pretty wild. There were. I don't know what that sound effect was meant to convey, but hey, enjoy it everybody. It's been a wild time. It has been a wild time. It was an incredible fourth of July weekend, but we are definitely in a battle for the soul of the nation. The consequences to this one are actually going to be pretty massive. I don't think people are really paying enough attention. Maybe you guys are, and that's why you're here. But when I really think about what has changed in the character of our country over the last 20 or 30 years, it's been pretty dramatic. And these kinds of shifts in culture play out in ways. Ultimately, they end up being economic, and so the consequences end up being quite catastrophic. When you get this one wrong, not. No one is going to be surprised to hear that. I think the message that's being put out by the Democratic Socialists of America is literally violently going in the wrong direction if what you want is a thriving middle class. But if you didn't see the video that was put out this weekend by Mamdani, it really is a sight to behold, because there has never been a more evident take on the division here in America than what we saw play out this Fourth of July weekend. We had dueling visions of the country on full display. We had two videos being put forward that put forward diametrically opposed views of what America is, how we should think about who we are, what it means to be an American, where we're going, or maybe more importantly, where we should want to go. The first one was put forward by Mamdani, and then the other one came from a very unlikely spokesperson here in Los Angeles. We'll get to that one in a second. But first I want to talk about Mamdani's vision of America. It is one of guilt. It is one of shame. He comes to us as an outsider who believes that he can see what's going wrong and that he can fix it. And the first thing he mentioned that new arrivals, historically to New York saw were men prepared to take them into bondage and testaments that were rife with squalor. Those were the first two things that he wanted us to know what it was like to roll up on the shores of America. But don't take it from me. Let's hear it directly from him. Gentlemen, if you would play that clip.

[Mamdani]

Good morning, my fellow Americans. Season after season, year after year, the tides have come in and out of New York.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm sure there's plenty of volume.

[Mamdani]

Please. Long before the name New York had ever been spoken, Lenape dugouts crossed these currents. It was on these waters that tall masts crested the horizon, captained by explorers like Verrazano and Hudson, after whom we've named our bridges and rivers. And ever since, ships full of travelers weary from long journeys have passed through the Narrows.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So one of the things that's going to be sitting in the back of this whole speech that he never addresses is why? Because he's going to paint a picture of America as a pretty bad place, but people still come. And the one thing he never puts his finger on is, why would they do that? Why, if this place is so horrible? And the first thing you're going to hear him say it in a second, the first thing that you see is people looking to take you into bondage. Obviously, speaking of slaves, that's a different story. But if you've got this nation that is so problematic, so rife with squalor, why do people keep coming? Because keep coming, they do. All right, play.

[Mamdani]

When those passengers lifted their heads to glimpse what lies just beyond the waves, what did they see? They saw land lush and teeming with life. They saw men waiting at the docks to take them into bondage. They saw tenements rife with squalor.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, first of all, as a percentage of the amount of people that were brought to America or the percentage of people that came to America, the percentage that came as slaves, obviously, is ridiculously small as a total percentage. We'll set that aside. We'll set aside the actual economic impact of that. Obviously a massive tragedy. And as we retell ourselves the story of America, you can lean on one of two narratives. Narrative number one is, America's a horrible, very bad place. We had slavery as if that were somehow unique to America and not something that was seen the world over. That's one way. And that America was built on the back of slavery. That's the 1619 Project. Or you can tell the story that. And by the way, obviously, that history is real. The other way you can tell it is, hey, we founded this country on ideals that were so powerful and so married to Christianity, which becomes this sort of morality supercharger that pushes people to interpret the Constitution in a certain way, to look at the realities of slavery in a certain way and realize that it's inhumane and we have to move away from it. We obviously spend tons of blood and treasure to overcome slavery and get on the other side of that. And you can look at the heroism of that and say, despite the fact that slavery existed for God knows how many thousands of years all over the world, that we were one of the early countries that pushed back against us, England gets to take ultimate credit. They really were the first people to say, all right, this is an abomination. We have to abolish it and fought very hard against it. But the US obviously fought a civil war largely over that, not entirely over that. And you can certainly do a problematic reading of us, the US Civil War, from that perspective. I've talked about it before here. But what you choose to focus on, about our history with slavery, you can do the, ooh, just we're really bad people. We had slavery. Or you can do the we are a country. That said, we're willing to sacrifice the ultimate thing any of us can sacrifice, which is our lives, to put an end to this and to be grateful that we are a part of that. To be grateful that the way the founding documents were set up, that it was moving us constantly to this more perfect union, to giving everybody equal rights in a way that still some places in the world do not have, which is absolutely fucking wild, but nonetheless is true. And so which one of those you lean on tells me a lot about what's going on inside your mind. Again, you don't have to pretend that slavery didn't exist, but what story you tell yourself. Do you identify America as the bad guys who did the thing that everybody else in the world was doing? Or do you identify Americans as the people that fought back against it, paid an extraordinary price to make sure that. That it ended? They're both there for you. And so anybody that reaches into that bag of history and pulls out that we're the bad people, that is a choice. And it is a choice that. Not even just Mom, Donnie, that Leninists, Marxists, people that have that worldview, that is the marble that they reach for, because it is the marble that allows you to take control. Because if people can't look backwards and ground themselves in something that is optimistic and hopeful, the only thing they can do is look forward, look outward, look beyond these shores, look beyond their current identity to find something else that offers them that positive vision of themselves. We've got a story coming up later about exactly that, about people ejecting out of the American identity of old into something new. That I will say is going to end up being completely destructive. But we'll talk about that when we get to it. All right, back to my man here.

[Mamdani]

With activity, steam and smoke rising, a city on the move. They saw a towering monument to freedom, her torch glowing worldwide welcome. They saw New York City. They saw America Tomorrow. Our nation marks 250 years since we declared our independence.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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Between when we were sending people over from all over the world, but primarily from England, France, Spain over to America to begin building actual established cities. And it that period that creates the American mythos that ends up getting France giving us the Statue of Liberty with the famous plaque. We've been at this for a long time. By the time we get that plaque. America was established in a period of time where it was just monarchies and dictatorships as far as the eye could see. And people were willing to take a shot to get on a boat and face. It's like a third of the people that got on the boat died. Imagine getting on a plane knowing that a third of you are going to die before you get to America. And by the way, those are the averages, which means some ships were just lost, everybody died. And people were so traumatized where they were and so optimistic about where they were going that they were willing to face those odds. And then when you arrived on the shores we within a year for sure, you are going to have to face the realities of a brutal east coast winter where up to in some colonies, 80% of people were just going to die in that first winter. It was so grueling and so difficult. So imagine the kind of person that comes across and faces that, okay, these weren't Americans, these were the people that would become Americans. So this isn't me like clapping myself on the back, like, look at America. This is me talking about a thing that is true for a subset of humans the world over. What I call the foreign born American. Now, the foreign born American, to me as I mean it is somebody who is entrepreneurially minded, meaning they want a shot. They think that they can do something. Other people have historically been stopping them where they are. That bad societal structure has been tripping them up and fucking them up. So they're willing to face the hardships of coming to a country that has absolutely no social safety net whatsoever. Okay? That is the hardscrabble fight that these people, largely from Europe, but these people had to face when they were coming to America. That is some gangster shit. And when you hear the telling of America and you pick up the tale when we're already a country, that's already some wild shit, you are already setting aside countless generations of people that had to build something from nothing.

[Spencer Pratt]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is the ultimate episode of or Game of Minecraft on Hard mode. You fucking die. That's it. It is game over, man. If you don't get the crops, you are toast. If the zombies roll up, that's it. There's nothing else. And that stock of human is what this country is built on. And so when you talk about the land of opportunity and people were willing to overlook the squalor and people were willing to look beyond how difficult things were going to be, if you don't talk about that, if you don't make that a part of the DNA of this country, then you are missing something in the human psyche that makes America so interesting, which makes America the thing I want to get back to. I love that immigrants want to come to America, but if it's, well, you guys have the best social safety net. Hard pass for me. If it's, listen, I'm not looking for a handout. I want my shot. All right, now we've got something. But this is going to come down to the story that we tell ourselves, all right?

[Mamdani]

Play of a grand experiment in self governance. An experiment so audacious that some in 1776 doubted it would last more than a few years, let alone a quarter of a millennium. From Lexington to Los Angeles, Selma to Seneca Falls, Morrisania to Midwood, Americans will come together for a day, just as we do each year. Families will gather around the grill. Fireworks will fill the night sky. This will be no ordinary day of celebration. 250 years presents a rare opportunity for more than 340 million people to turn Together, both towards one another and towards ourselves, to take measure of who we are as a nation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You don't take measure of who we are. That just isn't how history, in terms of how we tell it to ourselves, works. We're going to decide who we are. When I was on my mindset arc, this was the thing I was always trying to get people to understand. You decide what your passion is. You decide who you are, you decide what you're going to do with your suffering. All of it is a choice. There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Now, that doesn't mean that people don't suffer. They do. They suffer tremendously. But all of that suffering is happening inside of your mind. And once you understand that, you can unlock gears in your life and ability to perform, to do something that is absolutely extraordinary. I lament anybody that. Look, I'm not into sports in any big way, but I. Every four years, I get very into the World cup partly because of that. Watching momentum, momentum shift on a pitch. Nothing has changed. The. The training, their abilities, it's all the same. But you can see the energy drain out of somebody as something will happen on the field of play that makes them question themselves, doubt themselves, just get into a psychologically different place and they start playing differently. They start running less hard or harder, taking bigger chances because something has shifted in their minds. If you've ever noticed how a hydration break or a halftime can change the dynamic on the field when physically, all of their gifts are already there before the game started, what's going on? It is the coach giving them a different and hopefully better strategy. It's the players switching their mindset. That's why sports forever will remain an obsession for so many people is you see the psychology control what happens on the pitch. And what I know is going to be the battle in the coming years playing out in the political arena is that it is a battle for the psychology, especially of young people. And this is something that you and I were texting about over the weekend is for me like that this movement in my life is all about that. There are three ways that I'm trying to interface with the world in terms of their psychology, trying to help entrepreneurs, because that's exactly how you build America. We need more people building things that the world wants. Doing this show to help adults think through the hardest problems that we're going to face. And then Kaizen is aimed at kids and how they view themselves and what's possible for them. But it's all psychology. It's all psychology. It's trying to get into people's heads to get them to play a little bit harder, to see themselves as somebody that can overcome adversity. And that, that is the soul of America, whether you live here or not. That's the beacon to the rest of the world.

[Mamdani]

Here at City Hall. As I sit behind George Washington's desk alongside new Americans who came to this country, I cannot see all of America. But like so many who came before, I can see New York City. The city I see today looks very different than the one that greeted George Washington in July of 1776. Our city simmered under the yoke of oppression. The British had imposed a colonial rule so repressive that 250 years ago, 80 miles south, a small group of newspaper editors, farmers and soldiers signed their names on a document declaring truths that feel self evident now but were revolutionary then.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it is wild to me to hear somebody who is a socialist say that the colonial rule of the Brits was so repressive that we fought back. This will be an example where if you look at what actually happened, it was a level of taxation without representation that is so mild by today's tax standards that I can't believe somebody who wants more tax dollars can say with a straight face that that was a repressive government compared to what we have now. Now this is a, unfortunately a both sides problem. Nobody right now in America is focused on more freedom, smaller government, but that is actually the founding principle of America. Remember the founding fathers were paranoid about humans clamoring for power and they understood that anybody who clamors for power, they are likely to bend towards tyranny. That was the whole thing. Okay? This idea of America is an experiment in self governance. America was an experiment. And could you construct your government in such a way that you didn't need the oppressive, top down crushing force of a monarchy or an oppressive government in order to build something high functioning. What they leaned on was freedom. Small government, being able to decentralize decision making, pushing it down to the individual, let people make their own decisions. That idea that there is a spark of divinity in each of us, cool. The right level of analysis is the individual. If there's something that's important to them, let them take care of it. If there's something that they want to create and bring to the world, let them do that. It was freedom to live life as you saw fit. Which is also part of the reason why we decentralized down to the states, because we wanted the states to Be like, yeah, I think this is the right way to do insert whatever that thing is. Now at this point we have 50 different of those experiments and within there you should be still pushing it down to the individual. Now I think we've completely lost the plot on that. I think that we have been successful for so long that people think that prosperity is just a natural force. It just happens. Nothing could be further from the truth. And the very thing that I'm trying to orient people towards, that will not happen by accident. The American experiment was basically fear government. That's why the first thing in the Bill of Rights is the freedom of speech. You've got to be able to say what you think is true. The second one is get a fucking gun. So that if people try to take these rights from you that you can fight back. I understand that's very controversial, but it certainly gives you an indication of what the founding fathers were concerned about. They were concerned about a tyrannical government. So when a socialist, who by the way, is all about more government, bigger government, nanny state, we are going to take the wealth that's being generated and we're going to redistribute it as we see fit. That shit is wild.

[Mamdani]

Nation still strives to fulfill. The British did not take it well. War broke out and that August, as the largest battle of the Revolutionary War unfolded in Brooklyn, batteries on Governor's island took aim at British ships anchored just offshore. We were outgunned, we were outmanned, and we were soundly defeated. After only a few months, it appeared our fledgling attempt at democracy was on the precipice of collapse. But that night, with the moon overhead, thousands of our soldiers silently climbed into ferries and flat bottomed boats.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This story, by the way, is incredible.

[Mamdani]

Read the the Continental armies survived to fight another day. Independence may have been declared in Philadelphia, but it was rescued in New York City. George Washington was the last to leave Brooklyn. As he waited at the river's edge, the sun beginning its rise, he would have looked out over New York City's waters and seen what so many have seen in the 250 years since. An opportunity to begin anew. Those opportunities, like everything in New York City, are not given. They are won.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That I love. So these opportunities are not given, they are won. Now listen, say what you will about the dsa, these kids are playing to win, that is for sure. And I very much agree with what he said there. These opportunities are not given. They are one. If you want something in life, you've got to be willing to fight for it, you've got to say, this is the thing that I want to do, and I'm going to pursue it with everything that I've got. And on that, we can definitely agree. And that's something that we are not imbuing in our kids anymore. We are imbuing a sense of victimhood, entitlement, and not trying to get them to see that working hard builds character. Resilience is the only thing that is ever going to save you.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

You.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And if you're looking for the government, of all things, to save you, you are in a very dark time indeed. We need to each see ourselves as the governing body.

[Spencer Pratt]

We.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We are the people who elect the officials. We have to think about this stuff. We have to be engaged in everything that we're fighting for. But, man, if we don't get people to understand that nothing is nothing should be just a handout. Everything should be cool. This, you've got your shot. Now what are you going to do with it?

[Mamdani]

8, 11 years after new York outlawed slavery, a recently emancipated black man by the name of James Weeks sought to begin anew as well and to help hundreds of others do the same. He bought property in Brooklyn, won himself the right to vote, and sold lots to others newly freed. When they landed in New York harbor, they knew they had something waiting for them that they had never had before.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you want to know about one of the most incredible stories to come out of slavery, you've got to look into Booker T. Washington. It is extraordinary. I don't know when or how this guy became controversial. It is absolute madness to me. What he realized was, all right, no one's coming to save us. We've got all kinds of racism. We're no longer enslaved, but there's still so much racism in the South. So what we're going to do is we're going to build a school for blacks. And when I say we're going to build a school, I mean we're going to build the school. And to do that, we're going to need bricks. And so I'm going to teach the students of this school how to make bricks so that nobody can stop us from building this thing. And they got so good at building bricks that they became one of, if not the number one supplier, which they may have actually been the number one supplier, but. But one of the major suppliers of bricks in the region, the students at a fucking school. That is so breathtaking. You can get so good at something that people can't stop you from Doing it. So you want to build a school, get so good at making the bricks of which the school is made that nobody can stop you. And then you're so good at it that people want to buy it from you. It's extraordinary. It is an undertold story. I can't. I have to imagine young people today a have either never heard of. Heard of Booker T. Washington, or they have some sort of negative sense, like there's something bad there. I don't know what it is, but I think he's a bad guy. That is crazy. Read the stories, like the firsthand accounts of Booker T. Washington. Absolute insanity. So incredible. What an amazing part of America's history still stands today.

[Mamdani]

A living, breathing testament to what we know America to be. A place each of us has the power to make. The harbor was busy those years as ships poured in from around the world. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants arrived with stomachs aching from a famine manufactured by imperial cruelty. Chinese sailors settled in what is today Chinatown. Millions more traveled under the Statue of Liberty and through Ellis Island. Jewish people escaping pogroms, Italians fleeing poverty, Syrians seeking economic opportunity. Each of these new arrivals peered through portholes onto a city that was changing as fast as the nation. They saw merchants peddling their wares on the docks, streets being laid out on a grid, buildings rising into the clouds. They could not yet see the nativism they would face, the jobs they would be refused, the landlords who would not rent to them, and the abject labor and living conditions.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So here's the thing. I doubt that many people were surprised, given that this is the way that the world works, that you're going to face discrimination. These are people that were fleeing the repression of their own countries and going somewhere where I doubt it's possible, but I doubt they came here thinking that it was going to be some grand utopia. So it is a far more interesting. And it gives the people who showed up far more agency rather than painting a picture of them being these just naive yokels that roll up on the shores and are like, wait, people are being mean to me. It's far more interesting to think of them as people that understood precisely what they were going to be facing and still were like, yo, I will take the quandary that is freedom because it is not some unmitigated easy street. It's going to be hard as hell. It's far more interesting to think of them as people that knew what they were facing, knew that the ride on the boat was going to be tough, that the Arrival was going to be tough, especially if they didn't know anybody, that they were going to have to figure things out. And they were willing to face all of that anyway. And that lets you know how potent of a siren song freedom is. Freedom, okay, this is not what Mamdani and the DSA have on offer. Freedom is not the thing that they are offering you. What they want to offer you is redistribution. Literally the antithesis of freedom. Now I will put forward, I get why people want to have some sort of social safety net where it's like, all right, it's kind of like when I think about an llc, it's one of the greatest inventions ever. It is one of the things that has given us modern prosperity. And what an LLC did was it said, all right, the way that the economy is set up, only rich people start companies because if your company fails, you're personally liable for everything. And so if you started a company, you could end up in debt for the rest of your life. And so people were just like, yo, I don't have the money for that. And so rich people would do it because it's like, all right, I'm only going to put 10% of my net worth at risk if this fails. Cool, I can wipe it all out and I'm still wealthy. And so that's exactly how you get the just insane setup that you had in England where the wealthy owned everything and then everybody else was a peasant. But England was the one that came up with the llc and it had this insanely cool knock on effect of people going, oh man, I can now wash my hands of this failure and I can start something again without being personally crushed under the debt of that failure. I can take the things that I learned and build something new. That to me is an incredible kind of policy based safety net where it's like, listen, we understand that that means that some people are gonna lose that they can't turn to you in your future success and say, you owe me for the old thing. Okay? So those people are just never going to get paid back. And that is a kind of safety net. I think that's absolutely brilliant and the results of that speak for themselves. But when you offer just naked handouts to people, I think you break something in the human psyche. We are not wired to have everything given to us. It builds a mental map of the world that things come easily, that we are owed things. And so now instead of fighting for your shot of get out of my way, give me freedom or give me death, don't tread on me. That whole thing just like, give me the fucking space to win or lose on my own merits. Now we say, hey, all of this prosperity, it's a natural law, and you need to give me my peace. I'm being kept out of my peace of this thing of nature, which of course just isn't true. And this is exactly how you break the engine of prosperity. And we are going to have to learn to think through this. Now, if a socialist goes, yeah, this is not anything natural at all. This is entrepreneurs building things and creating prosperity, and it is right and just to take from them and give to other people.

[Mamdani]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now we're at least having a real argument where the rubber meets the road. We can talk about what our value system is. We can look at the chain of cause and effect. But right now, what we're battling with the DSA is just out and out propaganda. I've got some clips today showing the DSA in their own words. This is going to be a recurring theme on this show. I want you guys to hear them speak for themselves. Because the way that Leninist Marxism works, remember Lenin was the guy. Lenin or

[Mamdani]

God?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why do I always blank on the far more successfully horrific person who succeeded him? Stalin. Thank you. So it was either Lenin or Stalin. I think it was Lenin that said, if you give me a single generation of kids, I can change the country. Because what he knew is exactly what I'm talking about here, that you control the frame of reference. You control what they look at, you control what they see. If you control what people look at, you control what they think about. If you control what they're thinking about and then inject your own interpretation, now you control what they think about and what they think full stop. And because he knew how effective that was, he made that now very famous statement. That is the battle that we're fighting here. This is a propaganda war. It's so wild. So, anyway, I'm going to do my part to fight against this. All right, let them go a little bit longer, and then we're going to move on to the retort they would withstand.

[Mamdani]

But no matter how much smog hung over the harbor, they still saw an opportunity to begin anew over the years that followed. Despite laws enacted by the federal government to bar their entry, despite sweatshop fires that killed hundreds of women, despite riots aimed at their very existence, immigrants made homes here in New York City. And they helped to make New York City that legacy of every generation of Americans insisting that the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness extends to them too is no relic of the past. It carried millions of black Americans north during the Great Migration. It drew hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans to New York City after the Second World War. It invited countless others from the West Indies and South Asia and West Africa and across the world. And it is what brought my family to the city when I was seven years old.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Call 1-800-GRAINGER click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Okay, so we've got to talk about the idea of what brought people to our shores then versus bringing people to our shores now. He keeps saying start anew. This it wasn't about starting anew, it was about getting your shot. So it was I can go build something in America because there isn't the class system that exists in the uk. So I can move up, I can move down same. If you're in a monarchy, if you're not part of the noble class, you're never going to be able to get into the noble class. And so they wanted to go somewhere where we didn't have all of that structural limitation that was rife basically everywhere other than America. So these were people that were coming to take their shots. They weren't going to be getting a handout. They were going to have to fight through some of the things that he listed. People. When you are fighting for limited resources, you tend to tribe up. And so what that forced on early immigrants to America was what I'll call an entrepreneurial mentality. You got here, you realized you weren't getting anything for free. And so now you have to interface with cause and effect. It's like, how am I actually going to get ahead here? One of the ways you get ahead is by ingratiating yourself with the populace. And so we had a melting pot. It was, I can run one strategy of only selling to people in my neighborhood, which of course is where a lot of people start. But then if you wanted to scale, you had to find a way to start speaking to a broader and broader audience audience. And that not anything intrinsic to the people that came to America weren't unusual in that. Like, oh, I just want to love everybody. They were as tribalistic as anybody. That. That is just true of the human animal. It's what I call school of fish. We are always going to group up with people that look like us. It is so evolutionarily ingrained in us to do that. That's where people are going to start. But we have a neocortex, and that allows us to go, I want to scale up my business. I want to do better. I want my kids to do better than I'm doing. How do I. And you do that? By broadening out your sense of who's in your community. And that creation of the melting pot is one of the things that made New York great. It's one of the things that made America great. And now we're going back in the opposite direction. Everybody's talking about fucking race all the time, making it worse. Everybody's being pushed into a tribe, making it worse. And we're not getting that melting pot effect because so many people, dude, the number in New York is something like 40% of New Yorkers are on social assistance of some kind. So the very thing that was meant to be like, oh, whoops, you're in a rough time, you need a couple months of assistance, you're going to get back on your feet and you're going. It's now just a permanent state of affairs. And so that causes people to tribe up because it's like, well, I want to make sure that my tribe gets more dollars. If you don't believe me, watch how Somalis talk about Somalia. It Is wild. It is as if they are not here to integrate into America. Anyway, I don't have clips of that to show today, so I'll leave that for another day. But that kind of stuff is crazy, where people are really, like, doubling down on their group, staying within their group, trying to create voting blocks to make sure that they get resources for their group. Because this isn't about creating something. This is about redistribution, which is just a totally different fight. So he does this real sly bit of sleight of hand there with saying, okay, people of old were doing it, and that's why we're doing it. These are two very different universes. Now, I don't know his family or why exactly they came to America precisely, but I would imagine it goes something like this. America is still the land of opportunity, certainly on a comparative basis. And so this is the place you come if you really want to try something. His parents have been very successful, from what I understand, and were already successful. The Indian diaspora is to Uganda. People are really going to love this. The Indian diaspora is to Uganda what the white South Africans are to South Africa. So they are a wild minority, an absolute fraction of the population, but they own the vast majority of the economics. And so, hey, you can talk about colonizers, all that, but to their credit, they left that to come to America. But it's a very different time period now. Coming here is a much, much, much, much, much, much lower risk than it used to be

[Mamdani]

by boat. Although we saw the Statue of Liberty from the window of the plane, even from the air, we could make out

[Tom Bilyeu]

the promise of America first class, the

[Mamdani]

promise of the beautiful, patriotic work of rendering America, year after year, a little more faithful to its founding ideals. There is a term so often used to describe our nation and those who have shaped it. American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism, that conventional wisdom tells us makes our freedom a little more free, is how we dug the Erie Canal and irrigated the west, is why children in faraway lands grow up dreaming of one day moving here. And yet the irony is that the story of America has so often been written by those who were told by others with power and influence and wealth that they were anything but exceptional.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is going to be the last thing that we're going to cover here, and then we're going to move on to the retort. So American exceptionalism, whatever definition we're going to give that is going to matter tremendously. The thing that has made America exceptional is that we interface with cause and effect. We have focused so aggressively on freedom that we have created an entrepreneurial class the likes of which the world has never seen. You don't have to go farther than looking at how many billion dollar companies are created here versus anywhere else. Now, if you immediately think a billion dollar company is somehow corrupt, then the following words aren't going to make any sense to you. And unfortunately, you are mismapping the reality of how somebody creates a company like that. So in days of old, the only way to get wealthy was through conquest. And so the wealthy got wealthier. If you wanted more, you went into another country and you took it by force. Now, largely thanks to the LLC and this idea that you can build something and if it fails, you can get out from under that, try again. If that fails, try again. And your reputation ultimately is the thing that follows you. And so if you're doing people dirty in those failures, then you're not going to get another chance. People aren't going to fund you. But if you have integrity and you're good at what you do, then odds are that you're going to be able to find capital. Now, the thing that nobody wants to face that believes in socialism is that humans, it's not unique to America. Humans are incentivized to do things because they can make their own life better and the lives of their kids better. But how do they do that? They do that by building something that people want more than they want their money. And by building a successful company that forces you to innovate like crazy on the product, that forces you to innovate like crazy on your supply chains, your manufacturing processes. Because out of selfishness, you are trying to get more resources for you, for your company, for both. And so you're constantly looking for ways to optimize. And so the world over, entrepreneurially minded people look at America and say, I want to go there. So this is why I say, I love me some immigrants, but I want a type of immigrant that is coming to create opportunity and not take advantage of the opportunities that have already been created. So we should want people from all over the world, the best and the brightest, the hardest working, the most industrious. We should want those people to come here and continue to create more opportunities and for America to be this unique place that collects those people. And between freedom and the fact that it used to be so difficult to be successful, I mean, they used to say about New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And so the people that made it there were truly the most exceptional people. We as A country are like the World cup of entrepreneurs. You come here and it's like, damn, it is hard to make it into the game. But if you can compete against the best of the best of the best that have been collected over hundreds of years from around the world, then you really are one of the most exceptional people anywhere. And that is how Americans became exceptional, by leaning on freedom, by creating a place where you could get rich or you could get poor, man, it was going to come down to whether or not you were good. From that, we were able to do things like dig the Erie Canal and do some of the most extraordinary things that any country anywhere ever has done. But it comes down to that interface with, okay, we're not going to tell you from the top down how this should play out. We're going to give you guys the freedoms to decide, and a bunch of you are going to take it in the teeth. You're going to get kicked in the face over and over and over. And we say, that is what it is, man. If you want to step out onto the playing field, then you're going to have to take those lumps. And honestly, the stats are gnarly. 90% of companies fail to make a million dollars, 94% fail to make $10 million in revenue. That's not even profit. That's just revenue. So you could effectively say 94% of all companies fail. And yet people do it over and over and over. And the survivorship bias of that is the very thing that makes Americans exceptional. And there's one other thing we have to understand. Even though I think this is under assault right now in a big way, Americans celebrate success. And because we celebrate success, people grow up wanting to try that thing. They want to be one of the people that are celebrated. They want to get great at running a business. And so you'll see not only people in America, but you see people the world over go, I want to get good at this thing. And then I want to come to America and I want to do it here. Because it's going to be the place that I can get access to capital. It's going to be the place that, from a policy perspective, is the best place to start a company anywhere on planet Earth. So you put those two things together, we celebrate the right thing. It's getting weakened. But historically, we have celebrated the right thing. And I still think from a comparative standpoint, more than any other country, we celebrate the people that succeed that do something incredible. Instead of being jealous or bitter, we're just like, damn, that is extraordinary. There are plenty of entrepreneurs that have accomplished far more than me. I'm inspired by it because I choose to be. I choose to be inspired by it. Instead of being like, oh, damn, I'm never going to be able to succeed at that level, I just go, fuck, that's so inspiring. Like, how much more can I get out of myself? Can I work harder? Can I work smarter? Can I do both? And when you can inspire that in people, you get the kind of upward trajectory that we have in America. Okay. He goes on to say more stuff. It's all the same bullshit. It's. We should be ashamed of what comes in our past. There's lingering in the background that this was always about just immigrants wholesale. No differentiation between people that come to live off of the system versus people that want to contribute to it, aren't looking for a handout, want to build something extraordinary. Now, of all people, Spencer Pratt has a banger take. Not only does he intimate. Not intimate, he says outright, the manipulation that Mamdani and the DSA are specifically running from. They're trying to rewrite your history. And be very careful. Do not let this happen. He hits that bang out of the park, but also just captures that spirit of what it means to be American. I hope that you guys have access to your screens right now and can take a look. Watch the images that he shows. There is something so hilarious about the cultural fabric of post World War II America. It is a sight to behold. There is something that is very Murican about all the imagery that he chooses. Because if you're only listening, you're not going to see any of it. You really will miss out on some of the fun of all of this. All right, so check out Spencer Pratt responding to Mamdani.

[Spencer Pratt]

We all had to sit and watch that vile Commie mayor sit on the wrong side of our founding father's desk to try and lecture us about our own history. Notice how the Communist always attacks your history. The Communists must attack your history. Why? Because history is what anchors you. It's what makes us attached to something. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. History breeds an almost irrational attachment to things, an attachment that is more powerful than anyone can imagine. Erasing history is how you demoralize people, how you unmoor them and detach them from their society so you can take it from them and rewrite it in your image. Think of your.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The rewriting it is the. The bigger problem. And if you can just back up a couple of seconds. But the Mamdani isn't Just trying to erase our history. He's trying to rewrite our history, which I think is far more damaging. Keep that in mind. All right, back to him.

[Spencer Pratt]

What makes your home special? It's not the marble countertops or the expensive furniture or the fancy appliances. It's the memories you have there. That backyard is where we got married. That living room rug is where our son took his first step. Hey, don't touch that. That was his first teddy bear. It doesn't matter how torn and tattered that thing is. You will never get rid of it. And you will fight anyone who tries to take it away. Why? Because you have history with it. You ever buy a new home? Remember those first few months? Even the first few years there, it doesn't feel like home. It could be a million times nicer than the crappy apartment you came from, but it doesn't feel like home for a long time because you don't have history there. It's easy to knock down some walls, change the floor plan. If you have no memories to attach you to it, it's just wood and drywall. Who cares? Get rid of it. Memories make it a home. Even the bad ones. Hey, remember when dad hit his head on the rafter in the attic and we spent all night in the ER that's the avocado tree I fell out of and broke my first bone. Isn't it weird how even the bad memories make us cherish a place? It's not like we long for those bad times. But bad times are part of what makes us stronger, a part of what makes us who we are. How can you resent those memories without fundamentally resenting who you are? History is so important to humans that even bad memories anchor us to our home. And that's what the communist always starts with the bad memories. Oh, we can get rid of that little story. We can knock down that statue. We can change the name of that street. That's a bad memory from our history. You don't want that memory hanging around. You're not a bigot, right? And slowly but surely, this wall comes down. Then that wall gets sledgehammered. The rafter where dad hit his head, that's gone. The rug where your son took his first step, that's gone. The gash in the wood floor where you stomped the glass on your wedding ceremony, that's gone and replaced with shiny vinyl planks. And now you've got a brand new home with no memories. Now what do you care what they do with it? Do you care what color they paint the walls? Nah, do whatever you want, I don't care. I have no attachment to it. I have no memories with that. You love your home because of the memories you have there. And that's why the communists always must destroy your memories, destroy your history. If the communist wishes to take your home, he must first destroy your memory of it so he can erase your attachment to it and demoralize you. Mao destroyed what he called the four olds. Old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. If you call them old it makes them sound bad. You don't want that old thing, get rid of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Somehow in the west writ large, we have underplayed what happened in with socialism and communism to the point that people can now straight faced be have been raised in middle America and consider themselves a socialist or a communist again. DSA coming in their own words here shortly. And the crazy thing is that you, you people freak out, rightly people rightly freak out if you were to say, oh, I'm pro Hitler, I'm pro the Nazis. The Nazis ain't got nothing on Mao. Mao killed so many more people. Stalin killed so many more people. It is wild that somehow these guys have gotten a pass. This is one of those things I find absolutely infuriating. I had, you'll even hear now people by the way talk positively about Genghis Khan, which is crazy. You want to talk about mass murder, so be careful. If you don't understand history, it is very easy for somebody to co opt that and tell you oh, this is really what this stood for, this idea of the 4 olds. Mao went through a cultural revolution. He literally was like okay, cool, you know what we're going to do? You guys are clinging to the past too much. You have a sense of history with what it means to be Chinese. I can't have that. I need you guys to get on board the communist train. And so to do that I am literally going to have students beat their teachers to death. I'm going to have kids. They really did that. I'm going to have kids get their parents brought into reeducation camps, beaten, flogged in public. It is so crazy the way that he just said the thing and was like, we're going to actively rewrite your history. These things terminate in a horrific deadly place. And the bad news is if you point that out, even though it's psychotically clear, remember China killed. Low estimate. Low estimate is 45 million people. That's the low estimate. So China kills 45 million people with this ideology and yet today you've Got people that are like, yeah, no, this is great. What the problem is, it is so crazy. All right, back to him here to cherish your history.

[Spencer Pratt]

We crave learning about our history, where we came from, who our ancestors were. That's human. But communism is an evil anti human religion, so it must destroy what makes us human. The communist destroys your history so he can take your home and rebuild it in his image. That's why it's your patriotic duty to celebrate today unashamed. It's okay to love America. Not only is it okay to love America, it's necessary to love America. We are the only bulwark against tyranny on this earth. When Europe descends into madness time and time again, it's our sons who cross the oceans to fight and die for freedom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's something that I don't understand about Mom Donnie specifically. Okay, so you're Mom Donnie's parents and you're like, you know what? America's broken, but so is Uganda, motherfucker. So if you're already living in Uganda, why not fix Ugan Uganda instead of saying, you know what America needs, America needs us to fix it. That's where you're going to get into Their vision of America is okay, Uganda is not nearly important enough on the international stage. So I'm going to go to America and I'm going to show them how to fix it. And the wild, wild thing is this is where we're going to get into immigration. And the one of the ways that you can take a place over, as the Jews have shown us, is, is you roll up via immigration and then you end up just slowly becoming politically more important, such that you can vote in a block and lo and behold, you can take over an area running that exact playbook. And so we are going to see that from an ideological standpoint that people all over the world that have a either a just nakedly socialist or communist bent or see that that is useful are going to be flocking here so that they can take this country over. It is what wild. We have to be very careful. Remember, this is a values debate. This is not about immigration writ large. This is about what are the values that you're importing, what is the vision of America that they are trying to remake it in and what is their long term agenda. Now, increasingly they're just speaking out loud, so that helps a lot. But we're going to have to face that head on plate.

[Spencer Pratt]

We'll destroy our history and rewrite it in their image. This is Independence Day. It's not just a number on the calendar. Don't say Happy Fourth. That's commie gobbledygook.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No offense, but it sounds like some fucking commie gobbledygook.

[Spencer Pratt]

We say Independence Day. Today we celebrate the men who reclaimed a beautiful slice of this earth and claimed it for God. For the values of freedom and rugged independence. Our history is messy. Our history is violent. Yeah, it is. And that's why we love it. We aren't cowards. We don't turn our backs on the painful memories because they make us who we are. Be proud of our country, damn it. America is the birthplace of every great invention of the last 250 years. Like literally everything. Airplanes, spaceships, Internet, telephones. As a country, we are batting a thousand. Not only is it a miracle that this radical experiment in self governance even survived past 1776, but we are the champions of the world. Be proud of that. Be proud of your history. Millions of your ancestors fought and died to preserve it. Commie mom. Donnie's ancestors never bled for this country. He has no history here, so he has no attachment to our home. He has no place to rewrite our history and lecture us about what our country stands for. So celebrate today. Show some American pride. Honor your history. Raise your flag, raise a finger and say, fuck you, communists. This is our home and you can't have it. Today we celebrate our Independence Day. God bless America.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know where he came from, man. Like, it is so wild to me that Spencer Pratt, another reality TV star, is somehow able to capture that part of the American psyche. Crying out, he obviously does not represent all of America. I'm sure there are a lot of people that hate this guy. But it is nonetheless somebody that is able to, presumably. I mean, that does not sound like somebody who is reading words that somebody else wrote. I have a feeling if he didn't write it all himself or even largely improv a lot of that, I would be very shocked. So, yeah, very interesting. But we are going to have to decide between these two visions. It is unfortunately being. It has been forced upon us by being asleep at the wheel for the last three decades or more as we've had the long march to the institutions that people that do want to see America as we see it cease to exist. They have been indoctrinating our youth extraordinarily successfully. And somehow everybody thought that, oh, these kids are going to graduate college, they're going to hit the real world and somehow all of their views are going to change. And that just isn't how it works, works. The, the age of imprint is one of, it's not as important as like your earliest years, but it's one of the most important developmental periods of your life and it is going to dictate the things that you value for the rest of your life. And so we've really got to decide what is the story that we're going to tell ourselves about ourselves. It's so interesting to me. These are phrases I used to say over and over and over in my mindset years of getting people to understand. The story that you tell yourself about yourself is all that matters. It's going to control your level of happiness, it's going to control what you do. It's going to control in many ways what you become capable of. Because if you're telling yourself a self defeating narrative, you're going to lose because it is. Everything is downstream of whether you believe you can get better or not. Everything is downstream of what you think better actually is. And so you put those two things together. Some people will eject out of the game because they don't think that they can get any better. And then other people just have a, a end goal in mind that if you get to, it terminates in something absolutely horrific. And so again, Leninism, Marxism, it's not new. It's been tried in many places the world over. And the following statements are true. In Russia, the Ukrainian farmers were killed for having more livestock. So if you had more livestock, they just killed you and took your livestock. Look up the kulaks then you have in Cambodia, you could get killed for owning a pair of glasses because that meant that you were educated and you were part of that elite. And so you had to go in China, if you, again, real stories. If you hid a bit of crust of bread because you were starving, if they found that crust of bread, or if you had grains that you were going to try to save for later, or plant seeds you were going to try to plant, they would confiscate you at times, kill you for that. I mean, it's just, it's so insane. There's a mechanistic reason which I've talked about many times, but this isn't just oh well, China became tyrannical. Oh, Cambodia became tyrannical. And if we do it here in the US it's going to be fine. What ends up happening is when you try to control everything from the top down, you make bad decisions and therefore you have to force people to comply because it's not as efficient of a system as saying, look we think we're really smart and all that, but we don't know what's actually going to work. And so we have to run the experiments. And so the way that we're going to do that is we're just going to give you guys freedom. Go do what you think is best. Most of you are going to fail, but a small number of you are going to be extraordinarily successful. And when you're running thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of experiments by letting people start companies and try different things, the odds that that 6% that actually succeed end up becoming life changing America is the answer to that. It's absolutely what happens when you have one government deciding everything from the top down. You run into trouble. Even China understands. Listen, I'm going to reserve the ultimate right to point you guys whatever I want, but I'm not going to know what exactly is going to be the right thing. So we're going to incentivize certain industries, but we're going to let you guys compete, understanding that without competition, all hope is lost. And yet here in America we're seeing this move away from competition towards pure redistribution.

[Andrew Press]

Tom?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yes.

[Andrew Press]

So, Chad, pushing back considerably, as I would hope them, that there's not enough comparison to Trump's speeches versus Mamdani's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Andrew Press]

Is this just simply one of the things that frustrates me about him is he's so eloquent. Is it just that the DSA is being represented by somebody who can speak well versus Trump representing MAGA in a way that does not deliver the message well? Or is there something more underneath this? Because Chat feels as though you're not picking Trump's rhetoric on how he's expanding his government through corruption in the same way you're picking apartment so we can

[Tom Bilyeu]

definitely talk about Trump and all the things that Trump does wrong. But I don't turn to Trump for an inspiring message about America. That's why I showed you somebody who actually does have an inspiring message about America. Oh, the great irony that it's another reality TV star, which is interesting. But yeah. So I think Trump has ejected himself out of the conversation about what the inspiring hopeful future of America is. So, yeah, that's just not the guy that I'm going to turn to to think about how do I need to think through the reality of what the American psyche needs to be. So, yeah, Trump's not the guy that's going to rally the youth. So when I'm trying to talk about what are the visions for what it means to be American that we want to put forward. He's just not the guy that captured that. Now, if people want to talk about what are the things that Trump does wrong, I've talked about it many times before. We'll talk about it many times in the future. We can certainly go through and pick apart the things that Trump is doing wrong. But right now, I want to paint a vision of the narrative that Americans should be painting for themselves. And at a minimum, while I clearly have my belief about which one is going to end in a a thriving middle class, the reality is I want people to understand what the choice is. And so, yes, Mamdani is emblematic of the energy in the far left wing of the Democrat Party. He represents where the energy is with the youth. And I don't think Trump represents the opposite. So if people do feel like Trump is putting forward a brilliant vision for what this needs to be, cool, throw forward the clips you want me to react to or whatever, and I'll happily do it. But I'll be honest, Trump wasn't even on my radar in terms of how I was going to process through what the Fourth of July is. So let that be its own indictment. But again, if people confuse me for somebody who's like, Trump is great. Let's fight for the words out of Trump's mouth. I'm not that fucking guy. So I think that Trump is. When Trump says America first, he means I'm going to do what's in Trump's best interests. And when that aligns with America, great. Like the Trump plans for kids to get ownership in American stocks. It's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. I love the most Trump making more money than God by knowing what's about to happen in the stock market. I fucking hate it. It's despicable.

[Andrew Press]

Chat's wondering what why you're spending so much time reacting to Just Mom D that the entire live is turning into a rebuttal on his speech

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This was definitely extended. It was definitely longer than even I expected it to be. But I really do think that we're in a battle for the soul of the nation and the west more broadly. I think it's going to become the single most important thing with my interests and passions that I could focus on. I interface with the economy so much. If you take the show in totality, I'm going to spend way more time in the economy than I'll spend on anything else. But yeah, today on the back of July 4th. But we've got other topics. Fear not.

[Andrew Press]

So on other Topics. And continuing on the dsa, news around Elizabeth Warren's staffer has surfaced.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, her name is Kala Walsh, boys and girls. 22 years old, raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father was an English teacher, I think at Boston University. Her mother is a writing teacher at Harvard. If I remember right, Wikipedia put her at 15. She was like Democratic wunderkind. She organized for Ed Markey, who I know effectively nothing about, but he had a Senate campaign. She volunteered for Elizabeth Warren's presidential run. Got the New York Times writing profiles of her at 16. But then she ended up joining the DSA. She wrote about them for Teen Vogue. At 17, she was invited to Cuba. She got pulled into a anti American stance. She went on solidarity brigades to Cuba in 2022 and 2023. She became co chair of the National Network on Cuba. Appeared on Chinese state media attacking Pelosi's Taiwan visit. In 2022, she quit electoral politics after Markey, the guy that she was helping run for Senate, she didn't think he was going far enough on Israel. And ultimately recently she came out and said that Ayatollah Khomeini was the best anti imperialist leader of her life. And that struck me as a very perfect example of the exact thing that we've been talking about here. So despite Andrew's best attempts to get us onto a different topic, to me this is an echo of the very same thing. What I want people to understand in this story is that what you teach your kids will determine where they go. And there is a growing cadre of people in America that hate America. I think we've talked plenty about this today so we can move on from there. But this is not me making much ado about nothing. This is really us creating a pipeline of people that are aggressively anti American. These are not people saying, hey, we got here because America was doing something special. Let's get back to that. They're saying that America is this terrible imperialistic power. Everything bad in the world is the result of American imperialism. Freedom has no place. Let's fucking get rid of it. So that shit is wild to me and is exactly why this is something that I think that we do need to think about as a society. But let's talk about the jobs report. Speaking of economics, this is fascinating. The reason that the jobs report is interesting right now is it's the labor force participation. The labor force participation in America declined. It had its biggest decline since I think like 1940. So now labor force participation is the part of the economy that I don't think People talk about nearly enough. This is crazy to me. So labor force participation is basically how many people actually are seeking work. So you've got the unemployment rate, which is I want work and I can't get it. But then they classify that differently than the people who don't want work or aren't seeking it. Now, if you're physically or mentally disabled, like legitimately, yeah, obviously that makes sense. I get why people don't count that in the unemployment numbers, but it's now being used to mask a massive shift. Again, our biggest downturn in labor force participation in what, 80 years, 90 years, something like that. So that to me tells you that people are ejecting out of the economy. And one of the ways that they're just able to eject out of the economy is that we're teaching people that the prosperity that we find in America

[Spencer Pratt]

is,

[Tom Bilyeu]

it is a law of nature. It's there for anybody. And you shouldn't necessarily be worried about seeking employment. Just make sure that you're getting your slice of that natural pie. There's no reason for you to need to be able to go to work. And it was interesting. There was a tweet, in fact, I think I pulled this in the doc, if you can look for it. So Palmer Lucky. So if you just search for lucky, it should jump out. Palmer Luckey put out a tweet about this and he was basically saying. Not basically, he said, exactly, we need more shame back in America. Because what's going on is Americans are no longer, when you think about the framers of the Constitution or you think about people that put in our original safety nets that they couldn't imagine a society where people weren't trying to contribute to society, they just wanted to take from society. And so now you've got all these people that are pulling out of labor force participation either because they're, I think the. So here it is. This is his tweet. So this is Palmer Luckey. He said, we need a bit more shame. People used to avoid certain self interested behaviors to avoid shame. Private and public law and customs assumed this. Now 38% of Stanford students claim to be disabled, which is crazy. 40% of young women under 35 claim mental illness. That alone is startling. And SSI disability payments have gone up 400% in a single generation. Even if every bit of that is legitimate, which I assure you that it's not, but even if every bit of that is legitimate, that is a just like five alarm fire, that you have a problem that needs to be addressed. Palmer goes on to say, it isn't good for anybody, least of all people who actually are disabled. When everyone looks the other way. As friends and family and peers con the system with a level of shamelessness no architect of our safety net ever imagined could be possible. In America, when everyone is disabled, nobody is. So this is where I'm like, we have created these insane distortions by the radical increase in social services. Remember, in the last 10 years we have almost doubled the US budget. We've almost doubled it. Now, some of that's gone to defense. But defense is not our biggest expenditure. Interest and social programs, those are our biggest expenditures. And so the reality is that we're putting ourselves in a position where we are going to implode under the weight of the debt. That's for sure. We've got a 10 year talk, 10 year clock ticking. I think we're about year nine left at this point that if we don't change something, you're going to have to not necessarily hyperinflate your currency, but you will be forced to devalue your debt through inflation, which you can only survive if you have enough growth. It's what we did after World War II and spoiler alert, we do not currently have enough growth to do that. So right now, mechanistically, you will get crushed under the weight of your debt. There is a famous law, I forget the name of it, but any superpower that spends more on interest than they spend on defense will not be a great power for long. We now spend more on interest than we do on defense. So we've already crossed over that if we don't immediately start backing out of this, just from an economic standpoint, forget the psychological impact of all this bullshit, if we don't just mechanistically, economically get ourselves out from under this, we're going to be in trouble. But the thing that I really want people to start paying attention to and talking about is what is the psychology of somebody who is claiming disability when they're not really disabled. As somebody who struggled profoundly with anxiety for years, I know I've told this story before, but up to and including being so anxious I couldn't tell a story to my in laws. There was like five people in the room. I couldn't tell them a story because I was like out of breath. It was so fucking wild. I was like, I cannot believe I've let it get this bad. And so at that moment I did not say, ooh, I have a need to get on a disability check of some kind. I Was like, I need to fucking solve this problem. And to be honest, I did tell myself, you have. And this is how I said it to myself. And I get that other people are not going to like this, but what I said to myself was, you have allowed yourself to become mentally ill. This is fucking crazy. You've got to unwind this. And so I started working on figuring out what that fucking solution was going to be. And it was long, arduous. Largely. Changing my diet ended up being a huge part of that, which I never would have guessed going into it, meditation. I wouldn't put myself on a daily drug. I was just like, that seems like a very dangerous place from a. Do I become addicted? Are there impacts to this drug? You guys know me. I have just a general paranoia about daily drugs. Like a one off here, there. If I'm, like, really spiraling for a reason that I can't identify. And so in the early days, it was just, this is a me thing. I am making decisions that I don't yet understand that are leading me to a dark place. I need to unwind this. That's not going to be popular, but that really is the algorithm that runs in my mind. My life is an exact reflection of my choices. And so if I want a different outcome, I have to make different choices. And even though a large portion of my anxiety ended up being tied to my diet, and so you could say I could blame the food pyramid, I could blame the government for terrible regulations. Fuck all of that. I decide what I chew on. I decide what I drink. Those are my decisions. And so if I want a different outcome, I've got to first identify that that's part of my problem, and I have to be able to unwind that. And so I agree, man, personal responsibility is the greatest drug in the world. Once you go, I am not getting the result in my life that I want, and I control my life. And so, yes, there may be something out in the world that is making it harder for me to make the choices and get the outcomes that I want, but I'm not going to make excuses. And if I can just talk about the World cup again for a second. At the beginning of the match with England versus Mexico, there was all this talk about England's going to have a tough time. It is elevation, and it's really going to be tough for them to overcome that. And Ibrahim Zatlan. Forget how to say his name, but say it again. Zlatlan. Zlatan. All right, close enough. Zlatan said that champ or losers come up with excuses and champions come up with answers. And I thought, yeah, exactly. I don't give a fuck if you're at altitude. You either do the things you need to do to win or you don't, and you go home and you can console yourself with, well, it was elevation. And so we weren't as prepared. Okay, but the whole idea of looking at champions is, yeah, you're going to get some good luck, you're going to get some bad luck. What do you do with. Is only a question of the question I ask myself all the time. And now what? And now what? You're playing at elevation. This is going to be hard. And now what? You're facing racism, and now what? Like, what are you going to do? Are you going to sit and bitch? You're getting overcome by anxiety and now what? Are you going to bitch about it? Are you going to try to get the government to put you on the dole so that you don't have to go to work? No, fuck that. Like, I want to win. And yes, I'm playing a game that is making me anxious. And yes, I am telling myself a story clearly about myself that's making me anxious. I am eating things that was making me anxious. And so I had to work through each one of them to identify what it was and to get my way out from under it. But get my way out from under it, I did. Now, that doesn't mean I don't still struggle with anxiety. I do. But you find ways to deal with it. No one's coming to save me. That is a mantra in my life that will serve anybody who adopts it well, but very few people adopt it now. Is shame the right thing? I'm going to be honest. I think to some extent it is. The very thing. I used to talk about this a lot, the very thing that changed my life when I was engaged but not yet married, and I was laying in bed four to five hours a day, literally just laying in bed. I'm engaged, my fiance is going to work, and I'm laying in bed four to five hours, not working. Shame was actually what got me out of bed. I was just like, I don't like who I'm becoming. And with that crushing weight of shame, of dragging my wife to be down, of not being able to look her father in the eye because I promised him I was going to make his daughter wealthy. But I was laying in bed four hours a day. I was ashamed of myself. And that was the thing that got me out of bed. So that's not going to be popular. I know a lot of people are going to hate that, but that's real. That's real.

[Andrew Press]

Why is shame just not prevalent anymore? It seems people default to the victim mentality that it's them against the world, that they've tried, they've put in their best effort. But shame is not one of those things. The self accountability is not one of those things that I see to be prevalent today.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because we, we are NPCs Andrew. We really are automata. This is the bad news where the reality is that we respond to the ideas that we are presented with in an emotional fashion and then we follow our emotions. And if you build your self esteem around being better than other people, being right, being good, just moral, all of those things, they're incredibly fragile positions because what you're going to learn all the time is you're not good enough to accomplish the thing. There's somebody who's better than you, you have a position that isn't moral and you wake up to that fact and you realize you've been duped or you haven't thought through something well. And when your very identity is tied to I'm a good person because of I am on the right side of the Palestinian debate or whatever, now you must reject information that makes you confront maybe I had this wrong. And so that's why I've always said there's only one moment in my life that's like a line in the sand. And you can understand my life before and after it. Everything else has been like a really gradual change. But there was one moment where it was like being struck by a bolt of lightning. I was new to the game of entrepreneurship and I was fighting with the guys who were my bosses. They would later become my partners, but at the time they were just my bosses and they were much farther ahead of me in entrepreneurship. And they're what I will say, the ability to process raw data faster, they could do that just better than me. And so I always felt like, man, this is making me feel dumb and I don't like the way this feels. And so one day I was like, I've got to win this argument. Even though I knew I was wrong, there was a voice in my head screaming, you're wrong. You know you're wrong. Stop arguing. And I was like, I just couldn't do it. I couldn't lose another battle. It was too damaging to my self esteem. And so I fought and fought and fought and fought and fought. And I was obstinate and obnoxious and they probably just relent, but either way, I end up winning the argument. And so now I'm like, oh, I've just moved this company backwards. I'm telling my wife, hey, I know that you're suffering right now, but because I was so absent from our marriage because I was working so hard and I was so miserable, and I was telling her, but I'm going to make us wealthy. Just bear with me. And now I just did something that I know is moving us away from being successful. And so I had this. They leave my office. Technically, I was in a server room at that time, but that's the story for another day. And I'm in my office and I'm like, whoa, what the fuck am I doing? I clearly have competing values. There are two things that I want, but I didn't realize it. So is it that I want to feel good about myself or do I actually want to be successful? And I realized, no, I really do want to be successful. I'm not making that up. And so for a brief second, I was like, I need to give up feeling good about myself and just be successful. Thankfully, I realized that losing my self esteem would be an untenable situation. I was like, people commit suicide when they believe they'll no longer feel good about themselves. And so I was like, okay, that that's gonna lose. So I'm not gonna do that. So could I build my self esteem around something that the more I went after that, that the better my life would get. Now, unfortunately, at the time this is all happening, I did not have the book Antifragile by Nassim Taleb. But that ends up being the punchline, is I was gonna build my self esteem not around being right, but or having the right, you know, morals or anything like that. I was just going to build my self esteem around finding the right answer. And so my willingness to stare nakedly at my own inadequacies and to improve them over time would become the thing I would value myself for. And that was the line in the sand. And from that day, it wasn't always easy because you have so much emotion over being right. It feels so good. And being wrong still sucks. But by being able to set that aside quickly and go, okay, cool, I just want to find the right answer. Let me figure this out. That changed my life forever. It is the thing that ended up making me successful because I could just get better and better and better and better and better. And I was never beholden to the things that I had believed historically okay, so put that in context of your question. When people's identity is tied up in. No, I'm right and so I'm not going to listen to anything you say. That emotion of potentially being wrong is so painful that they just reject it outright. And so people end up getting trapped by the thing that they build their self esteem around. But they don't see that, they don't make the correlation. They just hide from that negative emotion, reject all contrary evidence that might push them in a different direction.

[Andrew Press]

So why though have politicians sort of jumped onto this victim mentality? Because obviously you have someone like Mumdani.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because if you're a victim, you get to feel good about like all these bad things. I may. You have to understand the framework of oppressor and oppressed. So being a victim means that someone bad has taken advantage of you, you're a good person, you're a moral person. They actually equate weakness with morality. Once you understand the victim victimizer mentality that is necessary for Leninism, Marxism, socialism, communism, it all rides on the back of resentment. It rides on the back of a base assumption that wealth is stolen. It's not earned, it's not created out of thin air by somebody making something that people want. It's only stolen from somebody that if you are a minority or an oppressed class, that you are actually more moral than the next person. And that is stupid and wrong headed. But nonetheless, if you believe it, then all of their actions make sense beyond that, because then it's like, well, I need to feel good about myself. I need to find myself in that morally righteous category. So in what way am I victimized? Oh, I. The world has made me a victim. Pay up, sonny. And so that's where people go, you know, whether it's depression isn't a thing I need to solve, it's a thing being pushed on me from the outside world. I didn't make any decisions that put me in debt. That was the outside world doing bad things to me. I don't have any responsibility for going, oh yeah, the generations before, fuck me, but I've got to get out from under this myself. There's just none of that. It's just these are all bad people and because they're bad, I'm good. And because of that it is extremely lucrative if I'm a politician, to get you to see how you're a victim, to get you to all unify around your victimhood, to take from the people who have supposedly taken from you. Now you're this incredibly powerful voting bloc, because resentment is so natural to the human condition. On Friday, we showed the monkeys fighting over, I'm getting a cucumber for the same work. You're getting a grape. It's an evolutionary trait that we have been shaped over millennia to have that resentment. And so if I'm a politician and I say, I'm going to give you free things, and you have every right to be aggrieved, you should hate these people, you're right to feel that way. And by the way, you're the moral person, you're the good person. And so we've got to turn that righteous indignation into stopping these evil people. And it is. It is catnip for the human psyche.

[Andrew Press]

So wouldn't you say both sides are playing into that? So you have Trump and the MAGA movement playing into the fact that they're victims, they're forgotten people that Washington and the elites have left them behind, playing into their victim mentality. And then you have the other side, the DSA side, that's playing into the rich the elites have taken away from you. You're the victims as well. So are both sides not sort of leveraging the fact that everyone these days seems to feel like they're disempowered, disenfranchised?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. I think that there, if, if you want to assail the right for the things that they do, it probably isn't going to resound to, we're all disempowered, we're all victims. The left, that is definitely more their thing. If you want to assail the right, where that ends up becoming pathological is it rapidly becomes xenophobic, it becomes hyper protection, it becomes, I don't want to see progress, I want to see everything. Stay here. You get the horseshoe theory where both sides go, I just want power, power, power. And so the right, when it plays out, when you look at, like, the. How overly aggressive ice was getting, that's like the right becoming authoritarian. Trump's desire to be president king forever, that's the right again, horseshoes. You're going to recognize both sides wanting that same level of power, but they really are. The right is masculinity gone wrong. The left is femininity gone wrong. And if you think of them as energies versus it's males and females, though, it will tend that way on averages. But you just think of those different energies of compassion going wrong, personal responsibility going wrong, you'll have a much easier time mapping the pathologies. They're both dangerous, they are both likely. They're just different personality types pushed to the extremes, which is why people should want to come back to the middle. But when people try to map and say because of that horseshoe theory, they try to say these are the same phenomena, they will get very confused as to why all along the way until they retouch at the back of just complete authoritarian control. They'll be confused why the messaging is different, why it plays out different, different, why they lean on different tropes and all of that. So, yeah, I think that a far more nuanced understanding of the two different modes of pathology become useful if you actually want to unwind the problem.

[Spencer Pratt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Press]

So unwind it by fixing the economy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's how you unwind things in a populist moment. So populism is, is the economy breaks, people become insecure about where, how am I going to take care of myself and my family? That is an untenable feeling. No one will stay scared forever. And so they'll transmute that into. You actually hear this language a lot with. It's being said right now by the people on the left. But if you take someone like Stephen Miller, it's the same idea where it's okay, I'm tired of being afraid, so I'm going to become the monster. And there are people from the DSA that say this all the time. Like, if you think we're going to run and hide, we're not going to do that. We're going to make you afraid. You're going to be afraid to go down the street. And so that idea and that really you are going to find on both sides, that is the very thing where that's. You're watching in real time, somebody go, I'm not willing to feel anxious. I'm not willing to feel afraid. It feels much better to be angry. It feels much better to be afraid, aggressive. And that actually is true. And so then people transmute it to that level of aggression. And once you're there now it's on my. I'm on a team. I'm going to do whatever my team needs to make sure. Because we're fighting over this dwindling pie, which really is happening right now in certain key areas that make people feel financially insecure. And so that's what pushes them onto those teams and makes them want to fight and take from the other side. But ultimately, fixing the economy is really just designed to get us out of a populist moment. And I mean, it's. That is how people thrive. But when I say, like, it all starts with the economy. That's what I'm talking about.

[Andrew Press]

So how do we move both sides closer to the middle? I'm not saying both sides land on the middle, but there's a sense of both sides being radical. How do you shift both towards the middle?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Prosperity until prosperity, and rhetoric? Right now we have both. So because things are unprosperous, people are being pushed onto teams because there's been this long march through the institutions by the left that we have like all of this growing frame of reference about what America is about, the victimhood, about a total skepticism of capitalism, instead of being looking at the right and rightly saying, hey, wait a second, Trump is doing a form of socialism by wanting to buy into these companies. This is insane. Like, that really is insane. That really is the right variant of socialism. That really is the right betraying capitalism. And so that's where, yeah, like actually point at the real things that are going wrong. But yes, broad based growth is absolutely critical. That growth making its way to the middle class is critical. Getting out from under the debt is critical. From there, people will be responsive to a more centered message because they're not afraid anymore.

[Andrew Press]

Got it. So why is something like what's going on with DeSantis in Florida? Whether we love or hate him, Donnie's balancing the budget in New York. Why is that not getting more attention?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Part of it is, I think that it's regional. And so you get the, like PBD did, Governor's debate, it didn't do many views. Like, did half the views, maybe less than half of what his normal live does. And I was like, whoa. So that I think speaks to. This is just regional politics. Mamdani, though, does speak for the left, and that's why he's become a national figure. Also, New York is a far more relevant city than Miami. So in terms of national politics. But I do think that it is, it's really under reported what they've been able to pull off. Because when you compare what's going on in Florida to Chicago to New York, to Los Angeles or California, what you see are New York as a city has a bigger budget than Illinois as a state, which includes Chicago, and Florida as a state, which includes Miami. And you've got Florida being more fiscally responsible, reducing their taxes, spending less money and getting phenomenal results, whereas you've got New York spending more and more money and things are getting worse. By their own admission, New York, like Mamdani is rightfully saying, like, yo, you've got to like me. New York's Going to hell in a handbasket like this fucking crazy. But not pointing out that it's been democratically run for a very long period of time. So it's like clearly those policies are not working now what they'll say is, yeah, because those are establishment Democrats, you've got to go even farther left. And it's like, oh my God, like even more likely to run this into the ground. The more I look at the budget, the more it is highly questionable that you should give him any credit for quote unquote balancing the budget. It's all of these one off things, delaying pension payments, things like that, where if the economy were to slow down, he would get hit by a budget hole that would be astonishing. He's growing the deficit that he'll face himself next year. So I have to come up with bigger one time things to fill those gaps. I think about 5% of the gap got closed with quote unquote, taxing the rich. So it's like the story that he's spinning there isn't very real. It is a balanced budget, but everybody before him, since I forget the 80s, 70s or 80s, legally has to balance the budget. There is no way to not balance the budget. So him and everyone before him have balanced budget as they must by law. So nothing very interesting there. So also you could say that he got a bailout from New York State. I give him a bit of a pass for that one since a lot of the funds that he clawed back were generated in New York City anyway. And so I get that now that's there's an argument to be made there for people that just want negative Mamdani talk. I think it's better to look at is he growing the budget or shrinking the budget? He's growing it. Is there going to be a bigger deficit next year or a smaller one? It's likely to be bigger. So it's like looking at that stuff and then is he delaying payments or making the payments delaying? So it's like what are some of the things that he did head faints towards? And it was like things that touching pensions and things where people are just like absolutely outraged. His preliminary budget reduced the city's credit score and I think they bumped it back up when he actually put his real budget forward. So on that one, people don't need to make up like you don't need to make it worse than it is. Just look at what he's actually doing. He also hasn't put in most of the things that he campaigned on. So that's going to be a 2027 problem. So that'll make the budget deficit even bigger. So it's like there's plenty of real grounded things to just be like, he's causing this problem. This problem, this problem. You don't need to overhype the other things with that. Everybody help me in thanking Andrew Press. Thank you so much for joining us. And hopefully next time I'll be able to get him to argue with me on something as unfortunately, I think you and I see the world way too similarly. But a really great grateful that you showed up. Thank you man, so much. This guy is such an important part of the company here and I'm so grateful to have him. All right, We've got an AI Master Class coming up this Thursday, July 9th at 1pm Pacific. It's free, free, free, free. I'm gonna show you guys how to launch a company using AI. We've got some special bonuses for you, so make sure you sign up. You can sign up with the link in the description. All right, everybody, we'll see you Wednesday.

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