← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Boots On The Ground? The Iran War Is Spiraling And America Has No Exit Plan | The Tom Bilyeu Show LIVE
01:07:15
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- [00:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Mom, can you tell me a story?
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Commercial Announcer
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Tom Bilyeu
Was she brave?
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She was tired mostly. But she went to Carvana.com and found a great car at a great price. No secret treasure map required.
- [00:12]
Tom Bilyeu
Did you have to fight a dragon?
- [00:13]
Commercial Announcer
Nope. She bought it 100% online from her bed, actually.
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Tom Bilyeu
Was it scary?
- [00:18]
Commercial Announcer
Honey, it was as unscary as car buying could be.
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Tom Bilyeu
Did the car have a sunroof?
- [00:22]
Commercial Announcer
It did, actually.
- [00:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, good story.
- [00:24]
Commercial Announcer
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- [01:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome, everybody, to another Tom Bilyeu show live. Boy, oh, boy, there is plenty going on in the world today. I'm excited that you guys are joining me. Thank you, by the way, for the birthday wishes in the chat. I appreciate it very much. And we're going to make sure that this is a special day for us all and it lives up to all the hype. All right. A ground invasion seems more likely by the day as Marines are told to make sure they're ready should they get deployment orders. We'll talk a lot about that. The UAE has seized somewhere between $30 billion and $50 billion in Iranian assets and put Iran on notice that they will lead the Middle east and join in the military confrontation if needed. We'll see what that looks like. The massive no Kings protests over the weekend were filled. This one triggered me, boys and girls. They were filled with communist flags and chance for a communist revolution. Strap in when we get to that one. These are wild times that we are living in. And I think right now everybody has to understand that what's going on with the Iranian war is really getting more complicated by the day. And it's looking more and more likely that the US Is going to put boots on the ground in Iran. Now if we do that, America's reputation and Trump's entire presidency is going to hinge on how it turns out. Now I don't think anybody should be entirely a consequentialist, meaning that you're just thinking about how things turn out. However, if you're going to try to think well through how the world ought to be, you have to think about outcomes. And one of my biggest beefs with the world entirely is, is that people don't take into consideration in this era where things are going so good. And in the west, for the most part, people can just assume that everything is going to be stable and fine. People stop looking at outcomes and we end up in situations where we are hyper funding the Department of Education, as one example. And yet our test scores are stagnant or in some cases getting worse, and we just shrug our shoulders. Or here in California, where we're spending ungodly amounts of money on the homeless population and it just keeps getting bigger. Same thing in New York. And so we do things that feel good, but they don't necessarily have the outcomes that we're expecting. You need to look at the outcomes. Never is that going to be more important than looking at the outcomes that we're getting in the war with Iran. So we are here and we're in this whether we want to be or not at this point. And while it's true that some things do indeed look darkest before the dawn, sometimes things also look darkest right before they implode into a fiery ball of death. And which way Iran is going to go right now is completely unknown. And I think people are acting way too much like this is a. Either a guaranteed success or a guaranteed failure, depending on which side of the aisle that you're on. Be skeptical of anybody who is purporting to see this clearly. They know exactly how this is going to play out. The reality is we don't. This could end up being glorious. It could end up finally bringing stability to the region, allowing that region to make the transition from basically 100% reliance on oil, moving into a far more modern economy, getting the Abraham Accords to really be all across that region, which would be extraordinary not just for them, but for the world. They've already begun collecting such a massive amount of the capital available in the world. So much of it that's funding the US Is actually in the uae, is where all of that starts. And so we've got this incredible opportunity to transition away from just that, just oil money, all the terrorism that has come along with that, and move over into something that is far more integrated, where we're looking at the world through an economic lens instead, instead of A more theocratic lens. It's weird to me that we're proving that monarchies are somehow more peaceful than a theocratic dictatorship. But nonetheless, this moment in history brought to you by that reality. And so it is possible that on the other side of having gone after Iran, having begun to tear apart their military infrastructure, taking out an entire layer or two of of their military personnel could lead to that outcome. But it could also lead to a shit show the likes of which we have never seen before. And as we look at the buildup of troops and our troops being given the notices that they might be going in, everybody needs to be incredibly skeptical of how this is going to play out. Now, I like to believe that we've gotten a lot smarter since Iraq and Afghanistan. But wars are easy to start and they are hard as hell to get out of. And once you're in a ground war, this is where all bets are going to be off. You are at massive risk of getting into a mess where the only outcomes are bad. And that's the thing that I worry about at this phase of where we're at, is that there just is no good way to get out of this, that we're going to be put in a position where we either go whole hog, we post up. And while we're still not nation building, we have agendas in the region that requires that we control physical assets on the ground. And if there is no uprising from the Iranian people and we have to hold certain assets there on the ground, we're going to find ourselves in a situation where this is a protracted war, not because we're trying to nation build or because we're trying to win hearts and minds. But that's just what you have to do if you don't have popular support of the people on the ground. And you have to maintain control of that structure. And at a minimum, we're going to have to control the Strait of Hormuz. So that's the thing that we need to be watching out for. And with all of that as the backdrop, the Pentagon is drawing up plans right now to seize Kharg Island. Whether they move on it or not is a totally different question. But Carg island is the facility that processes 90% of Iran's oil exports. It's just one island. And nine out of every 10 barrels that Iran sells to the world is right there coming out of that island. So when you look at juicy targets that we might be going after with boots on the ground, that's going to be one you're Going to hear people talk a lot about also securing the shoreline so that we can stop them from launching their, the Navy boats that they have that are like hidden inside of the tunnels that they would be able to drop mines, attack ships and just continue to make it effectively such that the Strait of Hormuz is closed. So we'll see. The Washington Post cited multiple U. S Officials saying that this buildup is happening, that we are drawing up the plans right now. The plan stops short of a, of a full scale invasion. But what is being discussed is special operations raids, conventional infantry operations along Iran's coast specifically, obviously what we're talking about with the Strait of Hormuz plus the potential to get control of Kharg island to the goal would be to clear out all of Iran's missile batteries that can threaten commercial shipping and choke off Iran's oil economy simultaneously. Also to make sure that they can't launch the fast boats that carry missile launchers, that carry mines. All of that, to get all of that out and all of the hardware that the U.S. would need to do this is already moving. The USS Tripoli, an American class amphibious assault ship carrying 3,500 troops arrived in the Middle East. Already. The 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit is on board the 82nd Airborne. We talked about that on Friday. That's the Army's designated rapid response force. They're also confirmed deployed to the region. You've got letters being handed out to more Marines saying, hey, make sure that your gear is ready to go should the order come in. Now, Trump hasn't greenlit any of this yet, but as he stated over and over and over, they are trying to keep their options open. And the Pentagon is ex echoing that, talking about maximum optionality. So we'll see. Trump himself told reporters that he was not going to be putting troops anywhere, but obviously that was whatever, nine or ten days ago. Things have changed since then. But Rubio said on Friday that the U.S. can achieve its objectives without ground forces. We'll see if that ends up being true. So a lot of mixed messaging. When you think about the way that Trump has behaved in these situations before, he's going to say one thing, he's going going to do another. Which by the way, when you're in war, that is just the way that things go. You're going to send mixed messages to people. You are not trying to be consistent. You were trying to confuse your enemy. But that's creating a lot of weird backlash here in the US So while speculation has to be taken with a massive lump of salt. Multiple officials have told Axios the final blow framing is real, meaning that Trump is trying to build up the options, getting some sort of like strategic strike groups in place so that they can try to develop war ending leverage. Trump obviously doesn't want the war to expand. The question is going to be, given that the enemy is always going to have the ability to have a vote in this, will we end up in that situation anyway? Now the crazy part is that Israel is saying that at least it's being reported that Israel is saying if the US does put troops on the ground that they would not do that. And so that is a pretty interesting twist. I was certainly surprised by that. So we'll see. Now I think it would be unwise for Trump to put boots on the ground as well. So it just becomes a question of what is the exit ramp. Trump is not communicating any of this to the American people in a fashion that I think is very useful. We'll get into the no Kings Day parades, but man, whether you're on board with that, whether you're concerned about the fact that they're funded or not, there is plenty of reason to be traumatized by what Trump is doing and to have the kind of pushback that we're seeing. So I think Trump has to be very careful that if we start seeing a rapid uptick in the loss of American lives, which right now sit at what, 13, 15 if you count the two people that died of non military causes, but 13 people directly killed, plus over 330, I think people injured. You start getting footage of US soldiers being chased by drones in Iran. You get one video of an American soldier that was killed being drugged through the streets of Iran, boys and girls, it will be game over for the US's appetite to continue this. So this is one where we need to be exceedingly cautious. Now Iran is going to bluster. They're saying things like, we're waiting for American soldiers to enter on the ground so that we can set them. This is all a quote ablaze. Now what that means exactly, who knows? But of course they're going to do everything they can to kill every last person that we put on the ground there. So nobody should be confused about that. Now the question is, is this just Trump getting completely overextended that he thinks that every turn that Iran is going to back down? I am still haunted by Steve Witkoff's phrase. When we were sending all the buildup of the troops into the region and Wyckoff was saying, I just expected them to Capitulate, or I'm surprised that they didn't capitulate. And I feel like that's a lot of what we're seeing play out, is we think that the Iranians are just going to back down as we put more and more force in front of them. But the reality is this is an existential fight, so where are they going to go? Besson has been talking about people fleeing, sending money out that, you know, the rats, quote, unquote, are fleeing the ship. Not so sure that's true. So sending out the money is probably far more likely that they are trying to diversify to make sure that everything isn't stuck there, that they have access, regardless of what ends up happening. We'll talk a little bit later about the UAE beginning to freeze some of Iran's assets. So I imagine a lot of that movement, rather than being they're all about to just bail, is about them keeping their options open. And so I don't think that this is going to be as simple as people want it to be. And we got to watch out for that.
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Chat Moderator
A lot of the chat is talking about how last week you were saying that, oh, Trump's not going to do boots on the ground. There's no way he would do that. And then you are also talking about, you know, he's got plans, even though if we don't know them, they're a little chaotic. He still knows what he's doing today, you know, a week.
- [14:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Chat Moderator
Yeah. Did I misconstrue?
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Tom Bilyeu
Play the clip where I say Trump knows what he's doing?
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Chat Moderator
Well, I guess the way you were describing it felt more like. And tell me if I'm misconstruing, it felt more like maybe not he knows what he's doing, but he is aware of the actions he's taking. And taking this once like he has a plan.
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Tom Bilyeu
Wait, okay. Yes.
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Commercial Announcer
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
The, the odds that he has a plan are exactly 100.
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Chat Moderator
So there's no feel that way, because I think that's what chat's asking right now.
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Tom Bilyeu
Of course.
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Chat Moderator
Do you think at this point in time, he still has a plan with everything going on? Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
So this is the whole thing that I'm trying to get people to differentiate. I think that people end up with this low resolution way that they're thinking through the problem. And what I was beseeching you guys to think about on Friday, if you are taking your thought process up to, Trump is just flailing about and he has no plan, okay, that's not going to get you very far because the odds that that is true are effectively zero. It is way more likely that he has a plan, that he's got incredibly smart people, well informed people that are around him, giving him all the details and they are still at hyper risk of making a never ending string of horrifically bad decisions. So now what we want to do is say, okay, this isn't about not having a plan, this is about where is the breakdown in their thinking occurring, if it's occurring. Right, because one, we still don't know how this is going to play out. So the if you're trying to map my thinking mine is there is great uncertainty right now in the world and the uncertainty index by the way, just hit an all time high. So that I think everybody agrees with. But the way that I am mapping this situation is by going in, launching the offensive. Everything became uncertain. And if it was going to play out like Venezuela, it would have already played out like Venezuela. It's clearly not going to be that. So if the original strategy was, hey, this is going to be like Venezuela, Venezuela was really a dry run for Iran, let's go in, do the same thing. We think that the Iranian people are going to rise up and there's a pretty big reason to think that that was going to happen. We think they're going to rise up, we just need to weaken the military infrastructure. They're going to come in, rise up, take their country back. This is going to be amazing. Okay, that's, that's not lacking a plan. That's just you were wrong and it didn't play out that way. And so now it's like as you begin to build a mental model, if you go, asshole, President had no plan, you're already going in the wrong direction. The right thing is President had a plan, he was wrong. Now it's like, oh dear President, whoever is advising you, no matter how smart, no matter how well informed, there is something that you guys are not tracking. Now another option is this is playing out roughly. We thought that there were five major ways that this could go. This is one of the five, and we have contingency plans for that. Okay, so now it's not necessarily that you're watching something play out that they didn't think would happen and they may have a whole set of contingency plans that now they're just executing against. But what you have to watch is the pachinko ball bouncing on all these possible elements, all these branching possible futures and where does it become where now all of the remaining options are fucking horrific. And that's the thing that I want people to start war gaming out. Because the second you terminate in a. I know what's happening here. You stop thinking forward. You just go, this is what it is. This is. Okay, you're going to hear me later talk about all the communism and all that stuff and I'm going to present it to you as if I'm at my most certain. When I'm at my most certain, I'm running an entire algorithm in my brain that says you're at your most at risk because you are so convinced you're right about this that you're likely to be blind to something that will knock you off guard. So then I'm going to run a whole, like, research campaign in my own life to figure out what am I missing. So what I'm trying to model for you guys because it's so high utility. And certainly what I hope that you guys are doing in your own life is, is say, okay, there isn't just one simple narrative. Trump dumb. It's on the board. Maybe Trump's just dumb. Maybe he has completely surrounded himself with sycophants and maybe we are now in like a Xi like or a Putin like situation where Trump has so purged everybody that would tell him the truth that that really is our blind spot and it's just going to be a never ending string of blind decisions. That is a possible thing in the matrix of what's happening now. It doesn't strike me as the most likely, but that's largely emotion. It's me just trying to watch the situation and see how things are playing out. Does this feel like people that are going off randomly have cocked. It does not. It just feels like somebody who's making decisions that would not be the decisions I would make. But I don't have the information that they have. Okay, so what we ought to be, in my opinion, trying to do to preserve maximum utility in terms of our ability to read the future is, is to map this as if people are making decisions that they believe are rational. And this is where I go all the time. When you watch people debate and they end up like slinging insults at each other. Like, I don't know if you guys are watching the Megyn Kelly, Mark Levin thing where now it's, he's calling her Deep Throat, she's calling him micropenis. Like, this shit is wild instead. Because that's where debates go instead. You always want to map back to somebody's base assumptions in their mind. They are almost Certainly moving off of logic. Now the question is, are they moving off of emotional logic, where emotions make dots feel like they connect that don't actually connect, or are they moving off of erroneous base assumptions, but if you believe that thing, then their actions make all the sense in the world, or do we not have enough information and we cannot tell that their base assumptions are actually highly likely to be correct? And this is just an incredibly tenuous moment that we have to navigate our way through. There's no way for us to know which of those things is true. This is where we have to wait and watch how things play out. But the more that you can sort of go down the different paths and say what would be the indications that were path is path A? Trump is just completely blind. He has nothing but sycophants. Right? What would that look like? Are there signs that we can see? What would the other path, erroneous based assumptions, what would that look like? And then over here, right based assumptions, and we just don't have enough information. For me, my gut instinct, but again, it's just feelings. And so I'm trying to track this to see what actual information I can get to figure out which one of these to double down on. But my actual one is that Trump has a base assumption that's erroneous. That is American military might is so advanced that we're going to be able to prosecute this entire war from the air and that we won't have to go on the ground, but that if we do have to go on the ground, we're going to overwhelm them and we're going to continue to use that overwhelming military might. And I think that he believes his base is strong enough that they'll support him through it. And I think he's wrong about most of that. I think asymmetric warfare is the thing that we have to pay attention to here. I'm not getting enough vibes that there's going to be an uprising inside of Iran and they're going to take their country back, I think that when they killed the 31,000 plus people that that just put an end to that. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about a problem that is hiding in plain sight. You're using AI for everything now. You better be work, questions, ideas, you're testing, trips you're planning, and every single conversation is being stored, analyzed and used to build a profile on you. That's where Duck AI comes in. It's a new product from DuckDuckGo, the company that's been protecting privacy online since 2008. You go to Duck AI and you can chat privately with the same AIs you might already be using, like ChatGPT or Claude. And your data stays yours, not theirs. Your conversations are not used for tracking, training or even profiling you. There's no account required, no subscriptions required. 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- [25:25]
Chat Moderator
A lot of people have been saying, is it possible for Iran to rise up against their own government when they are being relentlessly bombed?
- [25:33]
Tom Bilyeu
So that's the question that's on the table right now, is, okay, are we seeing evidence that they don't have the appetite to go and try to take their country back? Or has the US Made it clear, hey, now is not the time. We're still doing the campaign. You guys need to chill. That one is so ripe for propaganda that I just immediately, and this is just my mental map of the world. I so believe I'm being lied to all the time by politicians. I so believe that politicians will take the story, the narrative over facts on the ground that I look at this and go, okay, I've been told from the beginning this is a three to four week endeavor. We're in week five, okay? So already their ability to predict the duration of this war is inaccurate. So at Impact Theory, we give each other dots. The idea of dots is to try to see patterns emerge in people's skill set, their behavior. Any one dot doesn't matter. But as a pattern emerges, that's where you're like, okay. That's what that person is actually like. So I think that we can see building in this confrontation that the timelines are off, that the administration is not able to judge how long this is actually going to take. So we've had one miss. So we know that they're not bang on, or it's possible. The read is they're just going to lie to us. But if they're going to lie to us, then I throw out everything that they said, including that we're not going to do a ground invasion. So that one becomes more sort of worldview destabilizing. So it's better to stay with the thing that I can anchor off of very strongly, which is they're not good at timelines. Okay? So then the question becomes, why aren't they good at timelines if they're not good at timelines because the enemy is more pernicious than we expected, which I think is true. Then it becomes, okay, if you were to leave now and you left Iran in a state of disarray, would the situation be better or worse than when you went in? It would be worse. Is that political suicide for Trump? Yes, it is. Based on that, my mental model goes, Trump isn't going to back out. So I've Got he's not good at the timelines. Enemy is stronger than he was expecting them to be. And now it's political suicide for him to back out. So he can't back out. There's obviously more. The UAE now is talking very spicy. They're seizing assets. They're saying they'll get involved in the military angle if they have to. Obviously Israel is under a real ticking clock. Netanyahu has to hold elections by October, so there's going to be a ton of pressure for him to deliver incredible results by that period. Otherwise he also goes to jail. So you've got two leaders, which is crazy, I cannot believe we're here, but you've got two leaders that are facing that reality that they may end up going to jail for this. So it is going to be a very strange situation.
- [28:25]
Chat Moderator
Taking this now more to the level of average American citizens, if we do boots on the ground, it's no secret prices have gone up. My tank of gas costs more than the new Pokemon game. There's threats of nuclear war potentially from UN like advisors stepping down. What can we do as American citizens to practically prepare for the inevitability of boots on the ground and the cost effects that will come with it on like food, gas, etc.
- [28:50]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, so this is going to depend entirely where people are in their own economic situation. But hopefully you have plenty, let's call it three to six months of savings on hand. This may make it harder for people to extend that, but right now I'm not expecting there to be in the US any sort of long term massive increase in the cost of oil. But if this really gets out of hand, then we're going to be in trouble. Now the reason that I think that here in the US is we're energy independent because we have a oil and gas infrastructure that is largely private. They will respond to the economic incentives and be able to at least locally keep the prices reasonable. Now, how intertwined we are with the global market, I would actually have to do more research to up my confidence in that. Oil is the closest thing to being truly inflationary in the sense that if oil prices do go up and they stay up, then you'll find yourself in a position where it will seem like this is just a purely inflationary event. The reason I say seem like is inflation is an actual thing. You inflate the money supply. This isn't that. But this undergirds so many things. Our entire modern way of life is predicated on cheap oil that if that number continues to climb and we're not able to solve some of these problems in terms of the straight of Hormuz and getting the oil flowing again. And this goes on three, six, nine months, Jesus, God forbid longer, that really will start to feel truly inflationary. At which point it all hell will break loose. Because already people on the underside of the K shaped economy are having so much trouble making ends meet that you'll see things like the new King's protest just continue to rise. But what individuals should do is cut back on their expenses, sock away as much money as they can for rainy day. And there is no magic solution for that. And it is a level of discipline that most people are not prepared to do. So many Americans live on credit that it becomes very hard to do because you have interest payments that you're going to have to make one way or the other. Um, so yeah, it is a very tricky situation. There's no doubt about that.
- [31:02]
Chat Moderator
Boots on the ground. There is kind of a prediction that if we do that, it is most likely going to make us lose this war. Right. Are you in that same mindset when you were playing, I guess, the game theory of this all, or do you think there is a potential we in air quotes win coming out of potential boots on the ground of Kharg island specifically.
- [31:20]
Tom Bilyeu
But there's certainly an avenue where putting boots on the ground has a benefit. My concern is that the odds of that strike me as very low. It feels like to me, from where I'm sitting, with what we know, with timelines dragging on, with the American appetite for boots on the ground being extraordinarily low, with the things that Trump said about no new wars, that in the middle of that, unless it's like, hey, last night a lightning strike happened, we went in, we got this, we're back out, there's no more troops on the ground and we don't even hear about it until it's already over and successful. If we just hear there are now boots on the ground in Iran, you are going to see a real problem emerge. I think it will be suicide for the Republican Party en masse. And we're already seeing in these special elections that people are flipping seats that have historically been going to Republicans turning Democrats. So yeah, I think boots on the ground is going to be a, a very massive political problem. There's no two ways about that.
- [32:28]
Chat Moderator
Do you think in any capacity he loses his own base? Because right now I believe the percentage is like 90 to 99% approval in the MAGA base specifically, not all.
- [32:38]
Tom Bilyeu
So when you look at the Republican base, if you can believe the studies that are coming out or the polls that are coming out, the Republican base is largely like 60, 70% identifying as mega. And of people in mega, at least as of like a week ago, you were at like 95% approval. I think at one point they clocked it at 100% approval. That's a little hard to believe. So I think that he certainly does have support from his base, but there is a growing divide in the Republican Party and there is a just absolute cacophony of voices that are rising up that are saying that, yeah, this is a hard pass for them. So I do think that he will lose his base. If you've got video footage coming out of American soldiers dying, if you've got that number ticking up, people are just going to say the obvious thing, that we're in a much worse position now than we were before the war on Iran started. And that's where I say to some extent, you have to be looking at the consequences of this stuff. Not just the intent, not just the fact that the world doesn't want a nuclear armed Iran, which is all true. At the end of the day, if what comes out of it is oil prices skyrocket, American lives are being lost, the Iranian people are way worse off than they were going into this. We're striking civilian infrastructure. I mean, Trump himself put out a true social saying that he was going to be willing to strike potentially desalinization plants, which would be insane. So you put all of that together and this would be, I think, a catastrophic implosion of his presidency. I think he will get flipped at the midterms hard. I think that they will then impeach him and it will be an absolute witch hunt for the rest of his life to put him in prison.
- [34:34]
Chat Moderator
I guess we'll need like three more no Kings protests to, to actually start making the difference, but that's not going to help.
- [34:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So the, the problem is, what's going on with the no Kings protests is really, really, it is revealing something that's happening to the social fabric of this country that I am extremely concerned about. And the truth of the matter is that because of the K shaped economy, because of the long march through the institutions, we are in a position now where the culture of America is completely decaying and we have moved into a new phase where there's no longer a national identity of what America is, what it looks like, what it should be. And because of that, we are now, obviously, we've been talking for a Long time about the fact that we are in a hyper polarized populist moment. But all of this stuff is beginning to play out where you have people on the streets at these no Kings protests, actually chanting for a communist revolution. Now, this is people that clearly do not understand what it is that they're calling for. They don't understand why we've ended up in the situation that we've ended up in, and therefore they don't know how to get out of it. And this is the part that I lament is we're in a situation where the bankers have been so successful in convincing us that modern monetary theory is a good path forward, that we are now permanently creating essentially a caste system in America. And the great irony is there is a way out of this, but the way out of it forces people to confront austerity. And people are just not prepared to do that. And so, as I've gone down the road of learning about how the economy actually works, like the actual plumbing of the economy, the physics of money, it really is difficult to see how we pull ourselves out of this. And it becomes very easy to see why countries almost always end in bloodshed. And in these times where you get the level of toxic inequality that we have right now. And the reason is that the economy is hard to understand. And I know that I, I've said this before, but you can explain the economy very quickly, you just can't explain the economy very easily. And once the more real your explanation of the economy, the more confusing it gets. And so people just shut their brains off. And so they just go, rich people bad, poor people good. And the long march to the institutions was the indoctrination of, or the indoctrination of multiple generations of people to begin to view themselves through the lens of identity and what your identity is, you as the victim, giving up your power, viewing everything as this sort of battle with the institutions and power structures, instead of realizing that you yourself individually can get better, you can get stronger, you can become more powerful. And we've completely lost that narrative. And so you have this terrifying collision that is people no longer believe that they can claw their way to the top, which was the very thing that made America great. And people have no historical context for what communism really is. Over the weekend, the no Kings protests were massive, as far as I can tell. And we can talk later about the funding and all of that, and I think all of that is real. But I think it would be an absolute mistake to look at the no Kings protests and think anything Other than there is a lot of reason to distrust what Trump is doing. There's a lot of reasons to hate the ways that he's going about governing. And I think it's pretty clear that Trump is somebody that wants more power in the hands of the executive, not less. And that should scare everybody. But the thing that scares me infinitely more is that morons were loose in the streets. Waving communist flags to protest Trump, chanting that we needed a communist revolution, and working to ensure that neither Trump nor any other president ever gets king like powers is a very good thing. But waving a communist flag while doing it is like fundraising for KFC while screaming, all chickens should be free. It is the literal height of stupidity. It, it's actually stupid. It's nonsensical. The two things are completely incompatible. And we've, we've been living in this weird world where, and I understand people have tried to stop down and say, we need to talk about this, but queers for Palestine, okay, that's. It's incompatible. Communists for more equality is incompatible. Communists for human flourishing is incompatible. And so when I see people look at a K shaped economy and become absolutely enraged, I'm right there with them. I'm equally enraged when I see the solution that they put forward, which is more communism. Then I'm just like, this person is fucking stupid. Communism requires guns, murder and mass scale oppression to stay in place. Guns, murder, and mass scale oppression. That's the only way. People are worried that Trump wants to turn the US Presidency into a dictatorship. And I love the people who are paranoid about that and we should never let that happen. But if you're at a rally to protect women and you start waving a Ted Bundy flag around, I'm going to get very fucking suspicious of what your motives are. You're either irredeemably retarded or you are evil. Either of those options completely counts you out. Now, I blame some of this problem on the fact that the protesters are being funded by people within an agenda. We'll get to more on that in a second. But I also blame this on the fact that people have simply not been taught the horrors of communism. The flags they're waving around with a hammer and sickle that was first adopted by Vladimir Lenin in the USSR and made famous by his psychopathic successor, Joseph Stalin. Now, if we're going to glorify and idolize them, why don't we take a look at what it actually took to keep communism in place in the real world? Now, I get that people have this vision of what Communism is going to be. And it's going to be everybody on an equal playing field. It's going to be nobody's a victim. And finally these evil capitalist assholes are going to get their comeuppance. But the reality is there was the Red Terror, okay? This is what it takes to keep Communism in place. We know, because this is what actually happened. The Red Terror. The Soviet police executed tens of thousands within months of coming into power. The Tambov rebellion suppression was used by Lenin. He ordered poison gas to be deployed against Russian peasants who were resisting. Guess what? Grain confiscation. Then because that rebellion was crushed down, there was a famine of 1921 through 22 that caused. It was caused directly by the forced grain seizures that those people were murdered that were trying to stop. Five million people died because communism is so good. Let's not forget the Gulag prison system. The scale of the Gulags was staggering. The total prisoners that historians estimate were locked away and tortured is roughly 20 million people. There was the Kronstadt uprising that got crushed down in 1921 when the people who launched the Bolshevik Revolution, they stood up, finally demanding free speech, because they were like, this is not what we did the Bolshevik Revolution for. We thought things were supposed to get better. Things are getting aggressively worse. So when they stood up, the Red army slaughtered them. And hopefully. That one sounds familiar for anybody that's been paying attention to what's going on in Iran. Then there was a Ukrainian famine of 32 to 33, an engineered famine. Grain quotas were set at levels that they knew were impossible to achieve. Peasants who tried to flee were shot. Estimates range that there was a meager 3.5 to 7.5 million Ukrainians starved to death in just 12 to 18 months. People ate bark, grass, leather, and their own children. There were more, way more famines. Many, many more atrocities. Millions more dead. But let's look at China and see if they did any better. And by the way, spoiler alert, China did much better. They killed way more people. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-62, was the single greatest man made famine in human history. Mao collectivized agriculture, banned private farming, set impossible grain quotas. That's a thing that keeps repeating. And exported grain abroad while his own people starved and they were starving because Mao did all of that because he wanted to prove that socialism works. That's actually what he said during the land reform. One to two million landlords were publicly executed, often by mobs that were incited by the party. Family members were sometimes forced to watch or even participate the suppression of the counter revolutionaries. So basically, just think protesters that killed another 1 to 2 million, another, roughly 2 million were slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution, with millions more dying from exhaustion and suicide. The list goes on and on. Most conservative numbers put Mao's death toll at around 45 million, murdered and or starved to death. And we could just keep going down the list to Cambodia and beyond, but it's just more of the same. That's what the hammer and sickle represent. That's the legacy of the Communists. But people are still cheering it on, which is wild. It's like we got the message about the Nazis being bad, but somehow we didn't get the message that the Communists are bad. Even though the Nazis are weak sauce compared to the Communists. The Communists killed way more people. It is so surreal to watch what is playing out, that people can embrace that. And we don't have the same aversion to the hammer and sickle that we do to the swastika. If people were walking around waving the swastika, dude, it would be all over the news. People would be freaking out. They'd be like, what the fuck is going on? Who is funding this? This is insanity. Here's how I would advise everybody to mentally model this. There's a real movement going on. No Kings protests are real. And to map them as something that doesn't have, like, real justification, I think would be a mistake. There's plenty of reason to be marching and protesting against what Trump is doing. He's displaying a level of aggression that would make President Polk blush. Look him up. Absolutely fascinating figure who, again, consequentialist, ended up being the president to give us America that goes from sea to shining sea before it did not. And that I would not expect anybody to celebrate what Polk did, but the outcomes are incredible. And so from that perspective, I would say is worth celebration. But when you look at the protests, they are right now being amplified by big donor money and big donor money with very questionable motives. One of the founders behind the no Kings protest infrastructure is a US billionaire who lives in Shanghai, who allegedly attended Chinese Communist Party propaganda workshops. He's currently under subpoena from three separate congressional committees. His name's Neville Roy Singham, by the way, if you don't know. He sold his company for almost a billion dollars back in 2017, then moved to China, and has since allegedly routed tens of millions of dollars through shell companies and donor advised funds to American activist groups, including organizations that marched on Saturday. And there's a bunch of other groups. You've got Ford throwing in a ton of money, the Soros foundation throwing in a ton of money. There's a bunch of names. I can't remember if Reid Hoffman's in there, but there's a bunch of, like, the who's who of people that have been donating to the no Kings groups that are running them. And it's my understanding it's been roughly $300 million that have been given to the organizations. It's not directly to fund no Kings, but have been given to these organizations. Again, to dismiss the no Kings coalitions as being completely fake, I think is a mistake. I think it's a massive movement. I think all the funding in the world behind an idea that has no real cultural energy behind it is going to go nowhere. It's going to be wasted dollars. But if we don't also accept money in politics is terrible for a reason. Money supporting these protests, I think, is a bad idea. I think as a nation, we are already divided. I think that there are enemies globally that want to see us divided. And so when one of the guys that is sending a massive amount of support is somebody who clearly has the incentive to see America decline, I'm already very suspicious. And that's how I think people should be looking at this. You've got a real phenomenon, people very upset and understandably so, about what Trump is doing. And then you've got somebody that's living in Communist China that allegedly has been trained in communist propaganda tactics is helping to fund these things. So, at a minimum, this very real thing that's happening is good for our enemies. That's not ideal. And so anything that drives more division in the country I think is something we should be looking at. How do we bring people back together? I have long said that we want to find a way for us all to meet in the middle. There is just something really psychologically damaging about pushing and pushing and pushing for polarization. And like, for instance, I am absolutely. I'm legitimately worried that the push towards communism is going to tear America apart and make it impossible for us to move forward together in an intelligent fashion. But I don't go to, all right, all these idiots, they can't vote. Lock them in a closet. Somewhere I go, they're expressing a real pain, a real concern, and we have to find out what that is. Now, I will be honest. They fall into a category that I call some people need to be chased by a lion. I think much of what we see on the side of communism has to do with a string of prosperity that is so long that we really have created weak men that have time to argue about gender identity because there is no real fears to worry about other than that where we have to look only at what is actually working, what's not working. I no longer believe that simply being an entrepreneur is a panacea for politics, for reasons that I think are abundantly clear. However, I do think that the thing that happens to entrepreneurs that forces them to think in the way that I often model on the show, is you realize to make payroll, you have to be honest about what generates profitable revenue and what doesn't. Otherwise you have to start firing people or go all the way to closing your business. Rule number one of entrepreneurship is avoid a mortality event. And so you get very honest about what works and what doesn't work. And we don't see that when you've got people waving communist flags, which has failed over and over and over and over and over and over and over. I think America is in a perilous situation and this is not how I want to spend my final days in the America of old if this isn't working. And so what I'm really hoping to get people to understand is that, okay, you have cultural energy brought on by a just multiple decades long string of success that has led people to believe that you don't have to fight for prosperity. I think we have to fight tooth and nail for prosperity. I think it is very hard. I think the world is hyper unstable. I think people murder nonstop all the time. I think despots will kill their own people at scale. History has proven that over and over and over. And we need an identity as Americans in order to ground everybody around a central set of ideas. And you're not going to get that by constantly mocking and making fun of the other side or seeing yourself as being on a team. Okay? So even though it is maddening to see people wave communist flags, I think all of us have to do a good job of articulating why that's problematic. Why from a cause and cause and effect perspective, it doesn't work so that we can actually then begin to define what it means to be American. And I miss the days, by the way, when being American was something I thought of as global. So I used to refer to people as foreign born Americans. My wife was a foreign born American because to me there is an ideology that backs up America. It has nothing to do with nationality or ethnicity and it has everything to do with desiring freedom, freedom of speech, prioritizing innovation, making sure that class structure is completely fluid, that rich people can go broke and broke people can get rich. Like all of that, this was the place that you came to compete entirely on meritocracy. And that means that there is going to be a massive amount of inequality because God has seen it fit to make some people less gifted, less effective. And by the way, that God has seen fit that luck fucking matters. And if you get the timing right, ooh, buddy, you still have to be prepared. You still have to outwork people. But if the timing isn't on your side, just is what it is. So that's the America that I want to see get re prosperous. Now, I know that America has been through moments like this before. And so I try to remind myself that even though it does feel kind of dark right now, there's always a path forward. The thing that I hope you guys are here for is possible. It is possible to create a united America, to have tomorrow be a more beautiful day than today. And there's going to be plenty of messiness and all of that. We just have to know, what flag should we be waving? I vote for the American flag. I vote that we all get behind of what that stands for. And it stands for the message on the Statue of Liberty, which that's going to be a surprise to some people because most people don't understand what it actually says. Says, give me your tired, weak, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free. And it was written at a time where we did not have social safety nets. So if I were going to reword it, I would say, if you're fucking tired of being abused by a despot, come to America. There are no guarantees, but if you can build something the world wants, you can succeed on a scale that's impossible anywhere else. And we get back to attracting the best and the brightest, celebrating the best and the brightest, knowing that, yep, this is the place where people come to compete. And that means some people are going to lose and we're going to stop bailing out banks. And yep, there's going to be some rough days. There are going to be times where the stock market's just legitimately down and it's hard times. However, because of that, there are going to be days where we're building the best stuff in the world, competing at every level to better take care of the people that live here, not trying to do everything through subsidy, which doesn't work. I think we're something like 30% of all Americans are using social assistance of some kind. That is not sustainable. That is crazy town. We've got to get back to America as the place where people compete for greatness. If we can pull that off but on an even playing field. And right now we've allowed bankers to create the most disgustingly K shaped economy. I don't know if it's ever, but damn is it close. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned. Let's talk about the most expensive mistake crypto traders are making right now. 70% of US crypto traders think tax obligations only apply to centralized exchanges. If that's you, you are wrong. Unfortunately, most people do not realize every crypto to crypto trade is taxable. And for the first time ever, exchanges are now required to report your digital asset sales directly to the irs. If your records don't match theirs, you've got a problem. Sum, formerly Crypto Tax Calculator, was built specifically to solve this problem. It supports TurboTax along with over 3500 exchange wallet and crypto integrations. It handles DeFi NFTs, staking and airdrops with full support for US specific tax rules. 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- [56:18]
Commercial Announcer
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- [56:46]
Tom Bilyeu
per month Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney. Let's go get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time. New friends Gary the Snake and your last name the Snake Dream Team.
- [56:58]
Commercial Announcer
New Habitats Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [57:01]
Tom Bilyeu
You can watch the record breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2 now available on Disney plus, rated PG and right now you can get Disney plus and Hulu for just 4.99amonth for three months with a special limited time offer ends March 24th. After three months, Plan Auto renews at $12.99 a month. Terms apply. Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it.
- [57:21]
Chat Moderator
Chatter w Finance and stocks said you should be a bit harder on regulations on oligarchy and the super rich.
- [57:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so for you to be saying those words, I think you map the ultra wealthy as doing something illegal and nefarious behind the scenes. I don't map them that way. So the way that I think about, I mean, let's name them the way that I think about Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, Hoffman, and throw out some other names, Soros, just to really make it nice and icky. What you have is people that understand the physics of politics, the physics of the human psyche, and the physics of money. And when you get those three things colliding, they can play the game better than anybody else. Now, regulatory capture is evil, and we should avoid it at all costs. Money in politics is evil and we should get it out immediately. Both of those things pale in comparison to the outcomes that they have created. Namely that we have a central bank that allows us to deficit spend. And because we are the world's reserve currency, we have now started abusing that privilege. And because we've been prosperous for so long in America and we no longer celebrate the the people competing on a meritocratic basis, we have lost our focus on innovation. And so we let people use regulatory capture. We are perfectly fine with deficit spending, which is the thing that makes the wealthy so wealthy. And I think people are missing that. I think that they think Elon Musk got as rich as he got because he is somehow not paying his fair share of tax when he's the largest taxpayer in human history. And also that the only reason that he generated wealth is because he built companies that people would rather have his products than their money. And because of deficit spending and inflation, money the world over is trying to hide from those effects. And the way that they hide from those effects is going into assets. And one of the best performing asset classes of the last 200 years has been the stock market. So on paper, these guys look just extraordinary what they are, even in cash terms. But they look orders of magnitude more wealthy than they actually are. And so, Ryan, at the risk of bad tv, I would really like to stop there for a minute. I want people to contend with that argument because I feel like people, they just gloss over that. And I'll restate it. The reason these guys get wealthy is because of Deficit spending. So it isn't just the evil maneuvering in the government, which they are doing, but it isn't just that. And it won't go away if you stop that. Because I don't think that. When did Elon really start to manipulate the government? Four years ago?
- [60:18]
Chat Moderator
I would say it was like 2023.
- [60:20]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, yeah. So recent history that the richest man in the world started really trying to do the manipulative bullshit that he had railed against. So he got. He became one of the wealthiest people on earth before that. So I'm not denying in any way, shape or form that it's very real that a lot of these guys do some seriously grotesque shit and let's prosecute them. Let's go. At the same time, I'm telling you, I just cannot get people to focus on your real problem. Started in 1913. And it started in 1913 because we made modern monetary theory possible. Modern monetary theory, deficit spending, money printing is the method by which you steal from the poor and working class. And I just cannot get people to zoom in on that. Gave them plenty of time to come up with their best argument.
- [61:13]
Chat Moderator
And guys, please make arguments. Don't just yell in the chat and complain. I'm not going to pick up on that. And I'm going to have to formulate things.
- [61:20]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm also fine for yelling and complaining. Give me the yelling complaints. Sure.
- [61:24]
Chat Moderator
Okay, well, most of these yelling complaints are just the tax the rich. Tax the rich oligarchy, that cool stuff.
- [61:29]
Tom Bilyeu
Cool, cool, cool. So within the framework of what we're trying to talk about, let's address that. Okay, so tax the rich oligarchy, evil. So that feels good emotionally. I like that energy. Let's hold that energy, but let's aim it at cause and effect. Okay. I hope that's fair. Right, like, if we were going to decide we're going to go beat that guy up. Right? Like we just decide that guy's evil. So we're going to get in a fight. I would hope someone pulls you aside and says, rad, rad. However, let's train in stand up. Let's make sure we have takedown defense, and let's make sure that we understand some jiu jitsu, because that leverage can be deadly. And they're trained, and so they're going to put you in a pretty gnarly situation really fast. I hope we wouldn't just gas them up and send them in, at which point they get their joints broken, they get fucking sent packing. Okay, so there's cause and effect. In reality. So when we say tax the rich, we need to be very thoughtful about what the desired outcome is. I think the real desired outcome is purely emotional and it's just punitive. And when we say tax the wealthy, we're not actually saying make life better for poor people, we're saying hurt the wealthy. And I would say don't do that, because all of the good things, even in a communist regime, end up coming from the people that can actually make money. Okay, now we could tease apart right now, but I don't think it will help us rent seeking elites and the way that they financialize and make profits. But let's set that aside for a second and let's just focus on the people actually build things, make things. So we want to tax them, hurt them, they're going to leave. Tax revenue plummets. Kathy Hochul is finding out this the hard way. Kathy Hochul realizing, oh, in my attempts to tax companies and the wealthy, the companies just leave. Okay, now for all of you that want to stand at the borders with a gun and force people to stay in, remember, they will also just stop producing. So the more you try to tax them, the reason the Laffer curve exists is that doesn't work. Right? So we can be angry, we can hate the oligarchy, but we have to have a sense of cause and effect. So how do we dismantle this? Now, anytime you want to look at where has somebody done this? Well, like if you're trying to do something, look at the country that's done this before you so that you can emulate what they did. All right, so you've got America and how it came out from under the British. Extraordinary story one arguably the most extraordinary stories on planet Earth. So partly a lot of evil shit, right? We take over the entire country, we completely genocide Native Americans, we kick out Mexicans from their own land, we kick out the Europeans and tell them, I Forget the name 44 or fight or whatever the fuck it was. The longitude line, that or latitude, I forget. But like, hey, if you guys are going to fuck around basically in the Pacific Northwest, we're just going to come fight. So they leave as well and we just end up taking all of America. Yikes, right? However, America goes on to be the most extraordinary country that the world has ever seen, responsible for the most prosperity, helping to end World War I, helping to end World War II, and then despite our many foibles, creating the most extended period of peace the world has ever seen. Okay, so that's one option we can look at that and how, you know, in our early days they were like, no central bank's not going to do it. It's absolutely terrible. We keep it at bay for over 100 years. Then in 1913 we slip for a long time. Like most empires before us, we sort of keep that bullshit at bay. And we don't do the extraordinary spending until of course we become the world's reserve currency. Then we start getting out of pocket. But really even that doesn't get too crazy until about 2000 and then it starts to really ratchet up. So tons to learn there. Then we can look at China, okay, China, really horrible. They force everybody to unify because they thought, Jesus, the, you know, whatever. 100 years of humiliation, that's plenty for us. I'm going to fucking kill anybody and everybody. I have to, to get them together. Pretty, you know, the. You have to break some eggs to make an omelet. 45 million. A lot of eggs to break. But hey, they do unify. There's no denying that. They come together. Country, cool, we're stable. But how do they stop murdering their own people? They finally go, hey, America, teach us that banking thing. They become capitalist. Let inequality just absolutely skyrocket to the point where it probably is toxic inequality. So it's like, okay, let's look at the socialists over on in the Nordic countries. People love that one. Okay, cool. They need America though. That's the problem. They don't have to spend on any of their defense. America's keeping Russia at bay. Russia super weak. USSR falls apart. America, even though you guys didn't like it, America's running military cover for everybody so that those guys can spend on their people instead of having to spend on their defense. That's about to go away. So we're about to see what that looks like on the other side of this. Also, open borders. That hasn't turned out so well for them. So you can expect a reversal there. So it's like who are we really going to model ourselves after? Super open, if you guys have an answer. But it's like history gives us some pretty messy lessons. I think we can all agree on that. But hopefully, regardless of what we end up concluding, we all see that going to cause and effect is the right place. It's all going to be trade offs. There's no like easy, straightforward free lunch theme.
- [66:34]
Chat Moderator
Sleeves says let's talk about the USA loopholes. Yes, we're better than China, but I'm not living in China, okay?
- [66:40]
Tom Bilyeu
When I teach entrepreneurs, which by the way you guys should all sign up for my entrepreneurial class. If you are worried that AI is going to give you the boot, one of the first things that I teach them is to make something called a financial model. Okay. What I'm trying to do with a financial model is show them every beat that they go through from nobody knows I exist and that I have a product all the way through. Not only do you know I exist and have a product, but you're going to pay me for it. I'm going to fulfill it. All of that. And there's like a bunch of steps, might be 20, 30 steps in that phase from I create a piece of content, 100,000 people see my piece of content. I do a call to action, I give you a lead magnet, blah, blah, blah. Okay? Countries are the same thing, right? We do things, regulations, voting, all of that. And then those have downstream consequences. So as you regulate an industry, it tends to get more expensive over time, not less. Innovation tends to dry up. You don't get more. And so like there are knowable outcomes to some of these things. But you can start modeling this out, what I want to get everybody doing instead of just saying, I don't live in China. Therefore Tom, magic wand fix problem. It's like heard. But let's start mapping out the whole sequence of events. So what? So first of all, as with entrepreneurship, always start with where you want to end up. Where are you trying to get to? So I will tell you right now, in America, the place that I'm trying to get to is a thriving middle class where there is just ease of mobility up and down. So it's easy to go up in class and it's easy to go back down. Meaning that this is a competition. So if you're the person making the right economic decisions, you will win and you will have more money than other people. If you're making poor economic decisions or God sought fit to make you stupid, you're going to be on the low part of it. It just is the way that it is. Okay, so a thriving middle class, that's how I'm always going to sum it. That that is like the closest thing you're going to get to what I'll call human flourishing. So you want people to be free, you want them to be prosperous, and you want them to be rewarded for being effective with their time. Simple enough, right? Maybe like we could boil it down even more. But thriving middle class, okay, now I know where I want to get to. Now you start looking at all of human history. You look at how things have changed. And you ask yourself, what are the things that I would put in my model of cause and effect, which is all a financial model is, what are the things that I can look at in my model of cause and effect that are going to lead me to human flourishing and so I can start listing them off? I've done it so many times, I won't do it now. But what I'm trying to get people to understand is there's a big difference between, yeah, motherfucker, stop talking about China, I don't live in China. And then getting to, I get it, I get that energy. The very thing, though, I'm trying to anchor people on is the world works from cause and effect. So what is the fucking cause and effect? Everybody bangs pots and pans, waves communist flags, marches in the streets, but nobody goes, this is where the fuck I'm trying to end up. And here are the things I'm gonna do to get there, right? So we all wish that that's what Trump was doing with the Iran war, but he can't because he's gotta, like, hide a bunch of shit. He's gotta confuse and bamboozle. And by the way, just fucking try to manage all of our expectations so that he gets reelected. So don't think that it's all good and nice. It certainly is not, but you're never going to get it there. But in terms of what we the people having this conversation, in the age of high velocity information, we can at least say, this is where I'm trying to go, this is what I think gets us there. And if we just keep coming back to that, like, if you guys attack my base assumptions, super helpful. If you guys attack because you think I'm mismapping cause and effect, meaning, Tom, that thing will not lead to that thing. Super helpful. So remember, the person who best maps cause and effect wins. And even if you just want to think economically, we win economically. Thank you guys so much. Have a wonderful day. Peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do? You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break. 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