Can Trump & Costco Fix Healthcare? Shocking Moves, AI Monopoly Wars & America’s Identity Crisis | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Summary

Podcast Summary:

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode: Can Trump & Costco Fix Healthcare? Shocking Moves, AI Monopoly Wars & America’s Identity Crisis
Date: December 5, 2025
Host: Tom Bilyeu (with Drew and team)

Episode Overview

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu and co-host Drew dissect major headlines surrounding U.S. healthcare reform (including unexpected proposals from Trump and Rand Paul), the rapid disruption in higher education recruiting, and the cutthroat AI arms race. The discussion expands into America’s identity crisis, with reflections on culture, competition, and the dangers of monopolies. The episode is direct, animated, and peppered with personal stories and hard-hitting opinions.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Trump, Rand Paul, & Costco: Radical Healthcare Proposals

Timestamps: 00:54–13:06

• Rand Paul reached out to Trump about revisiting association health plans, enabling Americans to buy collective insurance (e.g., via Costco, Amazon, or Sam’s Club), aiming to lower premiums and expand access.

• Drew notes the real U.S. insurance problem and the bipartisan frustration:

  "Whether you love ACA, hate ACA, there is an insurance problem." (02:55)

• Tom’s Take:

  • Competition should not be removed from healthcare—more competitors drive down costs and increase innovation.
  • His “most controversial belief”:

    "People have to be allowed to fail. People have to be allowed to die of a horrible disease. And once you understand that genetics plays a brutal role in your life, nobody can help you with that. And that's a very sad and tragic thing." (03:13)

  • Suggests tying insurance rates to biometric health to incentivize healthier living; those with poor lifestyle choices shouldn't “drag down” those living healthily.
  • Critiques employer-based health insurance as “stupid” and “resentment against entrepreneurs.” (05:40)
  • Calls for allowing companies to create plans for “killer shape” individuals, independent of employers.
  • Makes exceptions for unavoidable genetic disease but dismisses arguments about “food deserts” for type 2 diabetes.
  • Frames Americans’ reluctance to “let people fail” as a cultural sticking point.

On Comparing the U.S. to Other Countries

• Drew: U.S. population and diversity make Nordic comparisons simplistic and misleading. (07:47)

• Tom:

  • America’s identity is built on risk-takers, explorers, and self-reliance.
  • Nordic countries, he claims, are homogenous, heavily taxed, stifle innovation, and have “managed decline.” He values U.S./China/UAE’s ambition to “play big.”
  • Warns that widespread entitlements are unsustainable:

    "The biggest thing you are going to have to give up, because it's the only way to balance the budgets, is entitlements." (11:28)

• Will Healthcare Actually Be Fixed?

  • Tom is “bizarrely encouraged” by new ideas, especially when tangible cost reduction becomes a political imperative:

    "He can either make them more money or reduce their costs or both. So this is way more interesting to me..." (12:06)

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2. The College Question: Palantir’s Move & the Degeneration of Higher Ed

Timestamps: 16:44–22:54

• Context: Palantir is hiring high school graduates, challenging the necessity of college.
• Drew: Discusses his daughter’s future, questioning the “college is a must” indoctrination versus practical skills, side hustles, and content creation.
• Tom:
  • Go to college only if it means zero (or truly negligible) debt.
  • College is wonderful socially and developmentally, but “the debt is the problem” (19:53).
  • American policy allowed non-dischargeable student loans and uncompetitive tuitions.
  • In the “age of AI and the Internet,” you can learn anything online.
  • Apprenticeships/internships with high-level practitioners are the most efficient path for most practical careers.

Memorable quote:

"Going to college and then not using your degree doesn't matter in the slightest. Going to college and getting a degree that you could never possibly use to...pay off your loan is pure insanity." (21:07)
"If you know what you want to do, go do that thing. You will learn very, very quickly." (22:54)

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3. AI Monopoly Wars: Altman’s “Code Red” & the Specter of Google

Timestamps: 23:20–32:02; 36:37–46:30

• Drew: Sam Altman (OpenAI) issued a “code red” after Google’s Gemini 3 launched, threatening ChatGPT’s dominance; Gemini’s usage spikes while ChatGPT’s drops.

• The Real Stakes:

  • Google’s infinite resources allow them to offer Gemini free until competitors go bankrupt—a typical monopolistic strategy.
  • Quote:

    "Gemini winning ensures zero profitability for all... Google will force every other player into an endless sea of red ink by keeping its model free until they bleed out, and then it will monetize once its monopoly is secure." (24:58)

  • Tom: Monopolies ruin customer experience post-victory; only government regulations can preserve competition.
  • Draws the parallel to Apple’s “ecosystem lock-in.”
  • Market dynamics will disrupt even current giants (e.g., Nvidia) as new players, especially from China, enter.
  • On AI profit/loss:

    "As consumers, I get it, as shareholders, why, you'd be traumatized. But as consumers, do we give a fuck? No, we do not. Like, we want the coolest, cheapest thing..." (27:50)

• Algorithmic Price-fixing:

  • AI-driven algorithms may independently result in identical prices among competitors, mimicking collusion without actual human coordination.
  • Tom:

    "It doesn't take human collusion to get to that answer. If everything is done on algorithms, this is like trading algorithms..." (31:26)

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4. The Implications of an AI-Driven Future

Timestamps: 36:37–46:30

• Tom’s AI Predictions:
  • AI will make daily life hyper-optimized (“your toilet is going to read your microbiome...”), gradually curing once-lethal diseases.
  • However, every gain will also “rob you of your humanity.” Work, meaning, purpose—these will be deeply disrupted.
  • The loss of traditional productive roles will likely cause mass malaise, mental health crises, and numbing with drugs, entertainment, or violence.
  • Ultimate trajectory: after a turbulent 10–20 years, a world of abundance and “four life choices”:
    1. Drug-induced numbing.
    2. Hardcore pursuits (like moving to Mars).
    3. Return to nature/simplicity (e.g., farming).
    4. Living in AI-crafted simulation worlds.

Memorable quote:

"For every awesome thing that AI adds, it will, for the people that are already adults, strip something away. And that is going to be hard. And so there's going to be a 10 to 20 year period where we just completely disrupt meaning and purpose and that will have dire consequences..." (40:31)
"Once you strip humans of meaning and purpose, how far do we derail? And I think the answer is pretty far. So it's gonna get weird before we get to the other side." (43:33)

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5. Social/Cultural Tension: Political Blame, Economic Pessimism, and the Need for a Common Enemy

Timestamps: 46:34–54:58

• Audience Q&A triggers discussion on rallying national unity via “common enemies” (historically religious, national, or cultural).
• Tom: Believes America’s fiscal issues are not being addressed seriously—politicians prefer “printing money” and promising “free things” to buy votes.
• Discussion of Arthur Laffer (Laffer Curve) and the limits/tension in contemporary economic optimism.

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6. Academic Culture Wars: The OU Gender Studies Grading Controversy

Timestamps: 56:50–62:49

• Incident Recap: Student failed a gender studies essay (grade: zero) after citing the Bible to argue against eliminating gender roles; the teacher, who is transgender, deemed the work offensive.
• Tom’s Analysis:
  • Both the student and instructor acted “stupidly,” choosing confrontation over strategic engagement.
  • Draws on his wife’s (Lisa) experience in art school:

    "Getting good grades is a game. You have to understand what the teacher believes is worthy of a good grade and then do that thing..." (58:39)

  • Grading zero for non-empirical citation is valid, but "the odds that the merits of something with complete sentences is a zero is basically zero." (60:28)
  • Systemic failures are less critical in the long run than the ability to gain meaningful skills and solve valuable problems.

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7. The Crisis of Purpose, Isolation, and Gender Roles

Timestamps: 69:42–75:53

• Drew reads a comment: “Real relationships suck now. Fewer friends, fewer romantic ones...” citing isolation and the problematic trajectory for lonely men.
• Tom:
  • Agrees, noting society is “smoothing the edges” of all friction, convenience is undermining camaraderie, brotherhood, and meaning.
  • Modern men and women are misunderstanding each other’s core motivational wiring.
  • On men’s ambition and sacrifice:

    "If you want to view yourself as a proxy, fine. That would be a mistake. But I am doing. I have to do all of this for someone, and I am doing this for you...if you want to view it otherwise, we're going to have a problem." (74:31)

  • Stresses the importance of embracing differences, rather than blurring them, in sustaining relationships and personal fulfillment.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Healthcare Competition:

  "How have we allowed our government to remove competition from anything, let alone healthcare?" — Tom Bilyeu (03:03)

• On Social Safety Nets:

  "If you don't care about any of that, great, go immigrate to a Nordic country, get the fuck out of America, which is a totally different vibe. I do not want to see America become Europe. Europe is managed decline." — Tom (09:41)

• On College Debt:

  "If she has to take on debt to go to college, it's a mistake." — Tom (17:58)

• On Monopoly Dynamics in AI:

  "This is the cutthroat world of monopolistic behavior. This is why you have to protect yourself from monopolies at the government level..." — Tom (25:27)

• On Meaning and AI Optimized Life:

  "Everything that AI gets better at will, rob you of your humanity. And it is going to be psychologically devastating." — Tom (39:03)

• On Male-Female Motivation:

  "Stop wanting men to be women and women to be men. Like, cherish the other person for the fact that they are different." — Tom (75:31)

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:54–13:06: Healthcare reform, Trump/Rand Paul/Costco proposal, philosophical discussion on competition, incentives, and genetic vs lifestyle health.
• 16:44–22:54: Palantir, apprenticeship vs college, crisis of educational debt.
• 23:20–32:02: AI race, market disruption, monopoly risks, algorithmic pricing.
• 36:37–46:30: Long-term AI/tech future, meaning crisis, societal disruption.
• 46:34–54:58: National/political cohesion, economic standoffs, Arthur Laffer.
• 56:50–62:49: The OU essay, academic cancel culture, how to “play the game.”
• 69:42–75:53: Relationships, isolation, gender roles, personal philosophy.

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Takeaways

• Healthcare needs more competition, not less, even if that means allowing companies—and individuals—to fail.
• The real enemy in higher education is debt, not the concept of college itself.
• AI monopolies are a serious risk; only government can ensure lasting competition for consumer benefit.
• The coming AI revolution will deliver amazing advances, but at a deep cost to our sense of meaning, purpose, and social fabric.
• Societal fragmentation, male-female misunderstanding, and collective loneliness may well define the coming era—unless individuals and policy-makers adapt.

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Overall Tone & Style:
Unfiltered, provocative, and unashamedly opinionated, with a focus on incentives, hard realities, and the cost of cultural comfort. Tom and Drew exchange personal anecdotes, rapid-fire analysis, and big-picture patterns in politics, tech, and culture.

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For Listeners:
This episode shines for those seeking insight on AI, U.S. economic-cultural crises, and high-level debate on the incentives and tradeoffs at the heart of today’s news cycle. Even without listening, you can grasp not just the facts—but the worldview on why those facts matter.

Transcript

[Drew]

Time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another Tom Bilyeu show live. I love doing these. I'm so glad you guys are here. Thank you for joining us. Rand Paul and Trump are working on a way for Americans to possibly get health care through Costco. Palantir is hiring high school grads who are skipping college. And Sam Altman has called a code red as Google and others are coming for that AI Crown. Drew, welcome and good morning to you.

[Drew]

Good morning, man. I'm excited.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wonderful to have you as always behind the camera. We've got G, we've got Eric. Gentlemen, how are we doing? Eric's on the move here. Not sure what's going on, but it's like when you see the guys in the backfield start running like, wait a second, was that.

[Drew]

It was.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, Drew, the world refuses to chill out. It's getting crazy out here.

[Drew]

Rand Paul, who we just talked about, was condemning Trump for the Venezuela boat strikes. He was one of his loudest opposition against the Epstein files, which got approved. We still haven't seen him, though.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's a good point, Drew. So far, you're undefeated.

[Drew]

Now we're talking about boats. All of a sudden, all of a sudden we care about Venezuela.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Every time I think we're going to.

[Drew]

Get him, Drew is going to be wrong.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then nonetheless, there it is.

[Drew]

But Trump shared a text between Rand Paul that said, I know we've been at odds recently, but in your first term, you signed an executive order to legalize association health plans that allow individuals to buy collectively health insurance via Costco, Amazon or Sam's Club. This collaboration brought us together and still holds the promise of lowering insurance premiums. It did not succeed because of Democrats ag, Attorney generals fighting it in court. We could pass it in Congress today, with your help, it costs nothing and simply changes labor law to allow people to buy insurance at a group from realtors, retailers. Let me know if this is something you might want to partner on. Rank. There is an insurance problem in America. Whether you love aca, hate aca, there is an insurance problem. I think now people are starting to throw ideas together. I know you haven't done the deep dive on this yet. I do think that this sounds good and this could be on the path of something more positive. What's your initial reaction when you kind.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Of hear about how have we allowed our government to remove competition from anything, let alone healthcare? So you a thousand percent want people competing for your business. And here's what, here's what I think is the problem. And this is. I'm not sure if people track this as my most controversial belief. This is my most controversial belief. People have to be allowed to fail. People have to be allowed to die of a horrible disease. And once you understand that genetics plays a brutal role in your life, nobody can help you with that. And that's a very sad and tragic thing.

But if you want to get cheap insurance, good health care, you've got to let those companies go. But how are you living your life, man? You've got to let them take your blood pressure, all of that. Like, do a physical on you, get some biometric data so that if you're living life clean and healthy and all of that, that your rate should be super low. And then what you're going to get is all of a sudden people don't bullshit themselves about what diet or sleep protocol works. It's like your insurance rates are tied to how physically fit are you, dude. If Kaizen is successful, and for people asking, it's a video game that I'm building, if Kaizen is successful one day, this will not be within years of launch, but one day I want players to be able to play on hardcore mode. And in hardcore mode, we upload your biometric data from like your ring and stuff like that. And your character reflects your actual health. And so now you can influence the character by what you do in the game and in real life. If you can gamify something like that all of a sudden, like getting more sleep, reducing my stress eating in a more healthy fashion is driving the cost down, dude. Now I'm not being drugged down by all the people that are making terrible life choices and the people out there are not being drugged down by the choices I'm making. It's like, let me run this game. Let me see how well I can do and let me take advantage of that. The only way you're gonna get there is if you let these healthcare companies compete. And so a healthcare company very much should be able to come into existence that says, hey, you're gonna give me a lot of data that you might not otherwise wanna give me. And I've had to go through this, okay. As when you get. It's called DNO insurance, like, or key man insurance, I think is actually when I had to get it. So back at Quest, we had key man insurance out on me. And so I had to go through this insane physical. I'm talking like they were checking for skin cancer. They were checking every fucking biometric, taking.

Blood pressure, like all of it, right? To see, like, is this guy going to be here or not? Because we're not going to give you key man insurance that he might die only to find out that he's got a disease. So I've already had to face this down, so whatever. But now if I can go through all of that, I should have the option and this company can come up and create these incredible plans for people that are in killer shape. And I can then drive my cost down and offer the same things to my employees. This is awesome. And not being tied just to your employer. Employer, which is stupid. And I really believe all this like make the employer do it thing, that's resentment against entrepreneurs and is not logical in any way, shape or form. Your retirement shouldn't be coming from your job, especially not now where people stay at a company for like 18 months. It's all stupid. What they're doing now with kids and giving them the.

The investment plan. I'm so excited. So this is awesome. More competition. You have to accept that for some people it's going to be a rough ride. And if we want to do something where it's like there are provisions for like if somebody has a genetic disease that we. You can't like preclude them from that. Cool. But if you've got type 2 diabetes, bro, that is not only is that controllable, that's controllable by what you don't do. So you don't even have to like go eat it erewhon. You just have to not eat the horrible shit. And because I know so much about diet, no one is going to be able to convince me. But Tom, there are food deserts. I don't give a fuck. This is about what you don't eat. And so it is. You can not be a type 2 diabetic and poor as fuck of this I assure you. So yeah, that that argument is stupid. So. But people in America, this is why I say this is my most controversial belief. People in America are not ready to see other people fail and be like, oh fuck, like that person is really having a bad time because they can't get their fucking diet together.

[Drew]

Yeah. And I keep hearing like conflicting things in the chat of like, well, other countries have figured it out. Why can't we figure it out? Things like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Would you like an answer?

[Drew]

I'll go say, I feel like we underestimate the 350 million people population because you keep comparing us to a country with 5 million white people. Like it's, it's a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You also are comparing us to small countries that don't give a fuck about being America. So America has a character. Remember America was, ooh, I'm a guy in England, I'm a guy in Ireland, I'm a guy in wherever. China, Japan, insert country here who feels tyrannized by my king, my emperor, whatever. And I would rather go to a place with an 80% kill rate than stay here because I'm going to be in the 20%. That's America. Okay. Imagine the kind of person that that attracts. Very disciplined, very hardcore, very what we would now say entrepreneurial. They believe that they're going to be able to figure it out. They are willing to face down death like it it is. Read about Theodore Roosevelt who believed in basically Goggins type shit before there was a Goggins. And so Roosevelt grows up sickly and very weak. People used to make fun of him for being small. What's his response? He starts working out. Dude, working out. No one worked out in the 1800s. What are you even talking about? But this guy got tired of being sick and so he ends up putting himself through like this physical misery because he's like, my body is not going to be the boss of me no fucking way. That's America, man. And so we attracted people like that. And for 170, 180, 90 years, ish, that we celebrated that motherfucker. And then.

We started getting very prosperous, wanting to take care of more and more people, which I get and I love. But you have to look at the realities of, of what that does. Show me the incentives. I will show you the outcome. And so if we're willing to get back to America is hardcore, then yeah, we're going to be giving up some of the welfare statey stuff that you see in the Nordic Countries, which is always what people are talking about. Remember, the Nordic countries are not only small, as you pointed out, not only homogenous, or at least they were, but they also tax the life out of everyone in the country. They do not care about innovation. They lag way behind America and innovation way behind. They are never going to be a meaningful player on the international stage. And if you don't care about any of that, great, go immigrate to a Nordic country, get the fuck out of America, which is a totally different vibe. I do not want to see America become Europe. Europe is managed decline. Europe is, I know you used to do cool shit, but what have you done lately? That's Europe, okay? Europe is fucking falling apart. They have no identity. They are not hardcore at all, in my opinion. They are not interesting in the least. I want to see the people who are really trying to play. China is really here to play. I've got mad respect for China, obviously. I want to see America return to her glory. The UAE is here to play like they're not around. So I want to see, I want to be one of the countries that's here to play. And so you're going to give some things up. And the biggest thing you are going to have to give up because it's the only way to balance the budgets is entitlements.

[Drew]

We're not getting around that. We're not getting around that. Social Security, Y, Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, all that.

Yeah. Do you think we're actually going to fix health care?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm bizarrely encouraged by all the stuff that I see like that. So if Trump fears he won't get elected unless he makes life better for the middle class, then we really might, because he's going to have to make more money for them, which is going to be very hard, certainly attempting some of the right things.

And he, he can either make them more money or reduce their costs or both. And so this feels like him going, I'm trying to make them more money, but that's going to be very hard. So let me see if I can reduce meaningfully their costs. And so this is way more interesting to me than going, all right, we have a terrible health, health care system. It's very expensive because we're fucking morons. And we've created a situation where the drug companies are making money hand over fist. Look at their prices since Obamacare went into place. It is wild. So look at who's winning. The healthcare companies. That's bad. So instead of going, we're just going to keep giving them more money. This is so crazy. It's so dumb. It's so economically illiterate. Instead of doing that, we're going to introduce competition, and I, Trump, am going to start negotiating the way that Europe negotiates, which is as one block. And we're going to like, get these to give us the best price. Yeah, I'm here for that.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. We'll get back to the show in a moment. But first, let's talk about the most expensive mistake you can make in business. Most business owners waste weeks posting jobs, drowning in unqualified resumes, hoping someone, somewhere decent applies. But that's backwards. You do not wait for talent. You hunt it. LinkedIn jobs change the game with their new AI assistant. It filters candid based on your exact criteria. No junk, no time wasted, just qualified matches. Then it suggests 25 top candidates daily, people already on LinkedIn who fit your role. You invite them directly. No waiting, no hoping. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30% more likely to stay for at least a year compared to the leading competitor. That is a huge deal. When every hire counts, that means everything. Post your job for [e-mail] impact theory, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com impacttheory to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Thanks to HomeServe for sponsoring this episode. Here in Southern California, we've been hammered with rain recently. When weather changes fast, your home gets tested. The problem is, most people think their homeowner's insurance has them covered. But it doesn't. Last time we had a leak. I Wish I had HomeServe to get someone to help fix it immediately. HomeServe is like a subscription to your home. For as little as $4.99 a month, HomeServe manages repair plans that cover the critical systems Insurance leaves out. When a repair hits, you're not scrambling to find a contractor in a panic, you call HomeServe's 24. 7 hotline, and they connect you with their trusted national network of 2,600 local contractors. Help protect your home systems and your wallet with HomeServe against covered repairs, plans start at just 499amonth. Go to HomeServe.com to find the plan that's right for you. Again, that's HomeServe.com not available everywhere. Most plans range between $4.99 to $11.99 a month. Your first year terms apply on covered repairs. Let's talk about why AI implementations fail so often. Everyone is rushing to adopt AI, but garbage in is always going to equal garbage out. Your AI is only as smart as your D data. With NetSuite by Oracle, you can put AI to work. Today, NetSuite is the number one AI Cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It is a unified suite that brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into a single source of truth. That connected data is what makes your AI smarter. So it doesn't just guess, it actually knows. Right now, get our free business guide demystifying [e-mail] theory. The guide is free to use at netsuite.com theory. Again, that's netsuite.com theory.

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Drew]

All right, jumping over into this. Palantir thinks college might be a waste, so it's hiring high school grads. This is very interesting to me, and I'm like I said, I have a high school and now I'm currently dealing with it. I do not. My daughter, I love her to death. She doesn't want to be a anthropopic surgeon. She doesn't want to be a forensic accountant. She doesn't want to be a biomedical engineer. I feel like she doesn't need to go to college. And I'm, like, starting to kind of really not necessarily push that on her, but at the same time, it's like, okay, she really. She's obnoxiously good at makeup at a young age. That doesn't make sense. Like, she does her, like, mom's makeup, she does her aunt's makeup, and she's, you know, 14. So it's one of those things where it's like, well, you can make a side hustle from that, make a makeup brand. So I'm already like, okay, we could get you make some content around it. You get it. You could get a TikTok check, or you could have your own clients and you can build up and you can make a makeup studio. So it's like we can do all these things that will make you have a sustainable living for yourself that you won't need to have to pay $140,000 a year for. But I do feel like I'm so indoctrinated on College is 13th grade that you have to go to college. But I feel like maybe the tides are turning on that. What's your kind of Gut check on that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If she can go to college without taking on debt, send her to college. And then if she doesn't like it, she can bounce. If she has to take on debt to go to college, it's a mistake. So, I mean, look, quantity of debt, of course matters. Taken on $1,000 a year, whatever. Not a big deal. But, yeah, if she's gonna go even with double digits in debt, it's probably a bad idea.

[Drew]

And so with Plant Palantir now saying that they're recruiting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm sorry, I didn't mean double digits. I mean 10k or more.

[Drew]

Yeah. Palantir now saying they're recruiting high school grads, skipping the whole internship. You have to get a fellowship, thing like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Peter Thiel has been encouraging people to do this for a long time. I don't know for how long, but like 10 years.

[Drew]

Wow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's offered a grant. I think it used to be only one person a year, but he offered a grant for anybody that was willing to skip college. So you basically had to have gotten accepted probably to an Ivy League and then reject it in order to take that. That grant. So, yeah, this is. Given Palantir's connections, I think Peter Thiel's on the board or an investor, but all those guys are connected to Peter for sure. Given that, I'm not at all surprised by this. And yeah, I mean, listen, dude, did Leonardo da Vinci go to college? No, he did not. What did he do? He worked with another artist. And so we used to do these apprenticeships and Benjamin Franklin, same thing. Apprentice. Like, it's. If I had to do it all over again, I would have been so much better off being an apprentice. Oh, my God. Now, knowing how I learn, that would have been way better for me. Way, way, way better for me.

[Drew]

But with those individual situations, I understand that for those specific people, it was better. And, you know, I went to school for engineering. I'm not using my engineering degree, so I get that. But it's one of those things of. Certain people will figure it out, but for the masses, it should be that way. Like, is this like a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is this is a debt problem? This is a debt problem. That is it. If this had become a parasitic organization of indoctrinating people into madness, I would say, yeah, college is wonderful. It's a great time to meet people. It's fun. You. You are in a structured environment, but you're on your own for the first time. Really, really wonderful. Unfortunately, we allowed, through money printing and debt, we allowed the schools to not be Competitive because the government guarantees their loans and we force students to hold those loans, they can't discharge them in bankruptcy, which is morally bankrupt. That's disgusting. And people should be absolutely outraged. So we're saddling kids with an unimaginable amount of debt, launching them into an economy that also is parasitic and that, that is a non starter. So unless you can find a college that she can go to that isn't going to saddle her in debt. It's not that college is bad. It is that this is a debt problem. So going to college and then not using your degree doesn't matter in the slightest. Going to college and getting a degree that you could never possibly use to.

Like pay off your loan is pure insanity. So yeah, that, that's just crazy. And in the age of AI and the Internet, you can literally learn anything. And I do mean anything. I'm including doctor surgery, all of that. You could learn the basics of that stuff without going to college. Now no one is going to let you operate on that without becoming a legitimate doct. But like I'm saying that, I say that not to say as a doctor, you should go perform surgery without going to school. I'm saying that if you're being charged by an institution that is acting as if things have not changed completely.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What the fuck are you doing? So my sister actually teaches doctors how to use medical equipment. And my sister does not have a medical degree, but what she's really good at is building like 3D programs, AI programs that will like explode the chest and show you you the heart and all this stuff. And so all of that exists. So we are in a fundamentally different world and colleges are a racket. So people need to be very careful.

[Drew]

Yeah. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it's not necessarily that college is a waste. It should be on one hand, apprenticeship, internship. If you can go learn a skill immediately out of high school, that's a better route. Or if you are able to do it without a burden of debt, you should do it. But if you have to take on a 40k student loan in year one, it's probably a bad.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'll say it slightly differently. Yeah, college is an option. If you can do it without debt, it's probably not the fastest way to learn. So if you're going to do college, it's probably more. I need a halfway house. Between living with my parents and every minute being accounted for and hitting the real world.

The fastest way to learn, if you know what you want to do, is to go do that thing with somebody who is ninja level at that thing. And if you do that, you will learn and grow more in a year by orders of magnitude than you will in a college. So, yeah, my advice is, if you know what you want to do, go do that thing. You will learn very, very quickly.

[Drew]

Nice. Cool. All right. This has been a title story for me. I feel like this is a much bigger deal than what the stock market is saying, what people are talking about. There's so many different conspiracy theories about what's actually happening. But let's talk about Sam Altman in this Code Red that he issued in his internal memo. So for those that don't know, when Gemini 3 came out, it fundamentally sent a chill down Sam Altman's spine and he sent an internal memo saying that he's going Code Red. The plan is to allocate more resources to improving ChatGPT, with teams concentrating on features that allow more personalized interactions. Other core priorities are talking about advancing the image generation model, Image gen, improving model behavior, strengthening leadership leaderboard competitiveness with systems like LM arena, enhancing ChatGPT speed and stability, and reducing unnecessary refusals to harmless questions. He also mentions planning to release a new reasoning model next week ahead of Google's Gemini 3. And several projects such as advertising, AI agents, and Pulse are expected to be delayed.

It's interesting because I think when it started, ChatGPT had such a big lead. I don't know if they just got lazy or what might have happened. But with Gemini 3 releasing, there was a traffic spike that a noticeable decline. For those that said, it was a 6% decline as soon as Gemini 3 and Nana Banana released to ChatGPT's traffic at the app downloads Gemini has spiked up over the last quarter. You can kind of see there was actually more active users on Gemini last month and on ChatGPT.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Whoa.

[Drew]

So it's one of those things that is ricocheting through it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Drew]

This is the big one, though, and I really want your take on this. These are from efficient market and Ross Hendricks. Gemini winning the AI race is like super bearish for the market if you think about it. Ross retweeted. This is the correct take. Gemini winning ensures zero profitability for all. For any other LLM model, Google will force every other player into an endless sea of red ink by keeping its model free until they bleed out, and then it will monetize once its monopoly is secure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's so gangster.

[Drew]

Yeah, dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is. This is the cutthroat world of monopolistic behavior. This is why you have to protect yourself from monopolies at the government level. This is one of the reasons am not a no government guy. Because there are certain players that are just going to be able to outperform the next person and they will do exactly what they're describing, build a monopoly and then everybody's fucked. And it is the worst experience ever. Because as soon as you get to the top, you stop caring about the customers. You know, they have nowhere to go and it's, it's just terrible. You really want there to be competition. Competition is the secret sauce. That's the thing that really allows the all of us to win. So the government coming in and saying, we're going to make sure that we create an environment where there's going to be competition is exactly how you want things set up. And at the same time, it's a brilliant move by Google to do exactly that. Oh, no, no, we can, we could run this at a loss. Billions of dollars of loss for years and nobody else can afford to do it. And so they're all going to tap out. This is why if people watch my deep dive, where I was talking about the AI bubble, it's like, we think we know who the players are right now. Do we don't know. It might not even be Nvidia. Like, Nvidia may be about to get just absolutely obliterated by this new Chinese company where they're building their own chips. And they may do to chip manufacturing what they just did to intercontinental ballistic missiles, dropping the cost from like $10 million to 99,000. That is a real number. So that's possible that Nvidia just gets completely blown off the map. But as consumers, I get it, as shareholders, why, you'd be traumatized. But as consumers, do we give a no? We do not. Like, we want the coolest, cheapest thing that we can get our hands on. So, yeah, we've got to make sure that the government protects us from that monopoly. And I love seeing Sam Altman respond to this and I love every time somebody calls out anthropic for trying to use regulatory capture to do exactly this, where they're like, all right, there'll be five of us. I only have to worry about these other four. Everybody else is iced out because they'll never be able to get over the regulatory burden. All of that stuff is so sinister, man. Like, it's, it's really gross. And remember, I'm a guy who's built a billion dollar company. I know what it's like to be like, I could do things that are protective. I could be in Washington lobbying these guys and trying to get things in my favor. We didn't play like that. So it's just, dude, earn your own respect. Anyway, I know that's not going to work for everybody and that's super naive, but.

I just hate that people do that. It's so gross.

[Drew]

No. Yeah. And I think the interesting thing is, to your point of Nvidia, because Nvidia stacked on top of this and I didn't even mention the 1 and 1,050,000,000 in commitments that OpenAI has, whether it's with Oracle, with SoftBank and all these other deals out on the table. Google's new model uses the Google chip. So it's another type of disruptor on that level that can break this AI stack that's kind of already existing. Somebody tweeted, I couldn't find it where. They said, like, people forget. There was Netscape, that was the first Internet browser, but then Google's the one everybody uses now. So like ChatGpt, although they were the first, they weren't necessarily the best. So at this point, now is it just, I just need to deliver a better project to win. That's the way to go.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Sure. For sure. These guys, like, there are things that people want to do. They've got to build that. And the person who your customer has effectively no loyalty. They just want the thing that does what they want it to. Like, I've forever been using ChatGPT. If Google wins and ends up being better, I don't care. Like, there are things I need the AI to do and if Gemini can do it and Chat can't, or if Gemini is roughly the same, it has a better interface or whatever, it's easier to log into. Whatever, whatever. It's like, I'm going to go use that one. So this is the world. Everybody should be competing to win over the customer. And this is how we as the consumer win. This is why we don't want Google to get a monopoly. We want there to be a bunch of people fighting to make the greatest thing ever, and then they have to continue to earn our loyalty. Think about Apple. Like, I know a lot of people are worried about getting trapped inside of the Apple ecosystem because it allows them to not continue to innovate and be the best. They're just like, listen, I know that some huge swath of humanity is never going to go well, but my iPhotos, like, how do I, how do I even migrate? So you just like iPhone, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone. Honestly, that's where I'm at right now. If it wasn't for the photos.

And.

[Drew]

Bro, that's the easiest, that's the easiest migrate.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But here's the thing, I don't want to have to think about it. So I'm just like, oh God, I'd be terrified to lose my photos, whatever. So, yeah, you want competition, Okay, I love competition.

[Drew]

I feel like I'm team competition. But I do think that we do have this crony capitalism problem. I bring this example up as much as I can where I was trying to take a last minute flight from LA to Phoenix and I pulled up on Google. Like I pulled up all three different companies, whether it was American, Southwest, United and Delta. All four of them had the exact same price at the exact same price. And I was like, how is this possible? You guys are supposed to be competition. Somebody should at least have it $2 cheaper. So that way, that would just migrate everybody to go that way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, here's the bad news. They may not actually be colluding, but if you have an AI that's running a sophisticated algorithm that understands how to price in context of the other prices, and it's constantly querying and all the AIs are doing it, they will naturally gravitate towards the same price. So now every now and then I'm sure they'll do something crazy and it will like bump or move and then the other AIs will realize, oh, they got an advantage. So. And then they'll sort of equalize again.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it doesn't take human collusion to get to that answer. If everything is done on algorithms, this is like the trading algorithms that are being used. This is why when people are trying to day trade against algorithms, I'm just like, all right, good luck with that. So.

That'S the AI world. And so now what are people going to try to do, like regulate it? So it's like, no, your AIs can't be that efficient. Or. And they might. I mean, we regulate the AI inside of a gambling machine, so that's possible. But that strikes me as a terrible idea.

[Drew]

I bring that up because I'm saying in that example, I feel like all the prices being the same is there's a loser there because there's somebody like me that like, you know, eff it, I don't need to go no more. And I would stop versus somebody that's like, okay, if this one was $50 cheaper, I could have sold two more tickets or something. Hypothetically speaking, the reason I bring that up though is because on the AI side now what is to stop them from now saying okay to Anthropic's point, it's just gonna be me chat Gemini and Grok. That's it. It's us four and we're gonna do it deep seek meta all these other people. You guys are open source. We're not really messing with you anyway. You're for the Internet.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You are the thing that's supposed honorable. Politicians, they don't exist so nothing will stop them. When companies get big enough they us over. That's what happens. So welcome to the real world and then somebody will try to find a way to innovate. But it'll come 10 years later than it needed to. And this is why people absolutely despise crony capitalism. But until you're prepared to get money out of politics, this is the rodeo. Yeah.

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[Drew]

Man. How do you think it all pans out with the AI race?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so my real prognostication on AI goes something like this. Every day AI gets better and is a tool that is incredible. And we are beyond flabbergasted at what is possible. Things that we thought would never be possible start becoming possible. I think that you will have an AI that does things like Drew didn't know. Don't eat that. You can eat that in 20 minutes. But where your blood sugar is, if you eat that now, you're going to spill over and it's going to interrupt your Krebs cycle and it's going to be problematic. But if you wait 20 minutes, it'll be just fine. And your life from a diet perspective is going to get insane. Your toilet is going to read your microbiome and it's going to adjust your diet and all that stuff. And it's going to be a miracle. We're going to start curing diseases. It'll take 15 or 20 years, but just one by one, they'll be like HIV where it was like HIV, dude, in the 80s you were just dead. And if you're too young to know what it was really like, dude, that was terrifying. Like you were just was terrified. I didn't know how I was gonna get it. If you had HIV and somebody knew, it was like you were a pariah. Magic Johnson couldn't play basketball because it was like people were like, but wait if somebody busts his nose or something and blood, like, are other people gonna catch it? And so he had to retire, like, immediately. It was just wild. And now it's like, people just take a couple pills and it's manageable. Look, nobody wants it, but it's manageable. So it went from death sentence to manageable. It's just going to be a bunch of shit like that. Just manageable, Manageable, manageable, manageable. So that'll be wild. And everything that AI gets better at will, rob you of your humanity. And it is going to be psychologically devastating. I can already feel I'm with Kaizen. I am in a race against AI making game development irrelevant. And that's devastating. And the devastating part is I know that humans are going to do whatever is easiest, best, cheapest. And so, like, listen, I went to film school. How many movies do I watch now? Very little. Less than one a week. I used to watch one a day, do the math on this. Actually very hard to do. So I now watch maybe one a week. It's probably a little less than I probably average like 0.7 movies a week. And.

The reality is that a very meaningful time, amount of time that I would have otherwise put into watching movies goes into watching funny reels with my wife. And it's like, is it brain candy? Yeah, it's delicious and I love it. And we have a great time sitting there watching funny videos and sharing funny videos with each other. So is it better for the soul? No, but that's not what humans are optimized for. So it's like, I get it. Like, will AI video games be better? No, probably not. But they'll be fast. They'll be very easy to create. And so now I can basically play any game I want for free. It'll be so optimized to what I'm in the mood for right then and there that there'll just be like a for you page of games that are being created by the algorithm based on things that I've played. And it's like, here, try this game. And yeah, you'll play it for a bit. And then like a locust, you'll chew that one up for all of its fun and you move on to the next. And for me, that's the loss of an entire other industry. So I've already lost film. Now it's like, I'm right, I'm trying to get this game done and it will go away. And so I think all of us are going to collectively mourn the loss of the way that we have interfaced with the world, which is get really good at something that matters and contribute to the whole and the group. And we have an algorithm in our brain that will punish us if we don't do that and reward us if we do do that. And so that's very meaningful. And it drives people and oh, by the way, you do that so you can get laid. And it's like this very complex dance and it's been incredible and it's created the world that we know and it is going to go away. And so I think for every awesome thing that AI adds, it will from the people that are already adults, it will strip something away. And that is going to be hard. And so there's going to be a 10 to 20 year period where we just completely disrupt meaning and purpose and that will have dire consequences. And I think that there are going to be opioid epidemics the likes of which we have never seen. I think that there's going to be. I. My prognostication is that there will be violence of some kind, but there's also the possibility that it just numbs young men out who are the only people you ever have to worry about. And so it may, like, we may all get so sucked into the algorithms that it's. It becomes drug like and so we don't ever end up revolting or rebelling. I think society begins to fragment. And I wrote a whole comic series about this called Neon Future.

So there will be a disruptive period. And there's no way around that. On the other side of this is a world of abundance. So if you get on the other side of the 20 years, we have not completely killed ourselves, or the robots have not completely enslaved us or killed us, then you can quite literally have anything you want. And then people will only be charged with, can you play Minecraft forever without getting bored? And the answer for most people is no. Now what do I mean by that? Minecraft is the entrepreneur's game. It is for the self starters. Minecraft invites you into a world and it just says there's a set of rules.

Period. And so at night, you're going to get attacked. You can take any object and do anything you want with it. You've got to feed yourself, you can tame animals, breed animals, right? The whole set of rules. And now do whatever you want to do. Do you want to turn a mountainside into a discotheque? Go do that. You can do whatever you want. Do you want to build a house inside of a giant cave? With pink blocks, you can do that. Do whatever you want. If you can give yourself goals, then it's fun. It's unbelievable. It's greatest video game ever made for someone with my gamer archetype.

If you're a person who's like, no, no, no, I need the game to tell me exactly what to do.

[Drew]

You'Re.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Going to have a rough time because, no, you're not going to need to do anything. You're not going to need to make money. You're not going to need to acquire food. You'll literally have a device in your house that was free and you press a button and it mixes chemicals together and a robot to output food. And a robot is going to do the ordering and the delivering and the setting up.

[Drew]

It's going to be a pill at that point.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so it's going to be, well, the robot's got to make the pill, but some people have to. Some people are gonna wanna eat and all that stuff. So anyway, once you strip humans of meaning and purpose, how far do we derail? And I think the answer is pretty far. So it's gonna get weird before we get to the other side. Okay, then once we're on the other side, as I've said many times, there are four life choices. Life choice number one is that you basically become a drug addict. Life choice number two is that you put life on hard mode and you move to Mars. Life choice number three is you embrace all things. You revert to like the 90s, essentially, or you move out into the woods or whatever and you farm and you live life like that. Very natural. And then life choice number four is you live inside of simulations and you pursue whatever goal you want in the most incredible environments ever.

And I'll probably be wrong about the timeline, but given what I know about the makeup of the human mind, those are almost certainly the epics that we're going to move through.

[Drew]

You said two things that I want to dive into. The first one you said you don't have to worry about. You only have to worry about young boys. Why do you have to worry about young girls? Or, like, why are only young girls aren't violent?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So young women will savage you? Reputationally, we're living through what the quote unquote violence of women looks like. Cancel culture is a feminine phenomenon. So, yeah, that if you want to know what it looks like when women rule the world, this is it. This is that moment. I know people are going to have pushback on that.

[Drew]

But then when, when young men revolt, they're burning things down. They're breaking stuff. They're correct.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They are violent.

[Drew]

Copy. In this future utopia, when we get to the floor, what do you think crime and stuff like that is at that point?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Ooh.

Well, cyber crime is going to be the big place that that warfare really plays out.

But I don't know because there will be. It will come down to what the incentives are. And if there is some incentive, even if it's just people have no meaning and purpose and so they derive that dopamine loop through destruction, then you might see people go on the attack. Forming cults and.

Marauding might be a. A poor way to think about it, but that's the first thing that comes to mind where it's like they just want to go and break things. I could certainly see that.

But it won't be.

It won't be the kind of warfare for the acquisition of resources that we see now because that just won't make sense. You'll be able to get anything you want and so the impulse will manifest as something different. Break things. This is an affront to God. So I have to stop you. It'll be something like that.

[Drew]

Got you, got you. Okay, we have a couple.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And by the way, just to let everybody know, we have to stop at 8:50 today. We have a slightly early stop.

[Drew]

Yeah, Tom, got some exciting plans this weekend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes. By the way, it's like a rumor in chat. People so want to know where you were, so it's up to you. I never tell people what you're doing.

[Drew]

Oh, I appreciate that. First Wednesday I was sick. Second one I was back home for the holiday, so I was back in Jersey with the fam.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There you go. You know, nothing crazy.

[Drew]

Nothing crazy guys. I miss you guys too though. Oh, thanks. All right, we had a couple super chats. First shout out to Mr. B saw for your 49.49.99 super chat. We appreciate you. You have indeed you, huh?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Just shout out. Yeah, 49 bucks. Legit.

[Drew]

And LeBlanc dropped a bag too. But we coming to you next. You got a couple. Mr. B. Shaw said you have inspired me to write a book on the new sovereign mortgage personal deleveraging system. And I would love to send you a link to the prologue Primer and chapter zero.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Mr. B. Shaw, that is one. I'm super honored that I've played some ridiculously small role in getting you to create something that is wonderful. The odds that I will take the time to read that given my schedule is effectively zero.

So forgive me. Love you. Thank you. But yeah, that I get people sending me books all the time. I just don't have the time.

[Drew]

Thank you for the super chat. Really appreciate it. All right, LeBlanc, number one of four, the first one. The whole securing western hemisphere is all good and all, but kind of feels like tilling the soil before empire expansion while soft collapsing global economy. Looks like repeat of Pre World War I in Iraq, but cartel instead of Taliban.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting. I doubt that that's how this is going to play out, especially not under Trump. I think that Trump wants allies and he would much rather people run their own country but do it in a way that we like. But keep in mind he's. He's doing things. This is not me saying, oh my God, this is the right way, but it is very interesting if what he's doing with Maduro is I'm going to put so much pressure on you that and I'm going to do it in full visibility of the public and I'm gonna put a bounty on your head. I want your own people to turn against you and take you down instead of like all the super secrets, CIA stuff. And I don't know if he would do that if he could get away with it. And he just realizes in this day and age he's not going to be able to pull it off. But it feels like he's like waving signs and making it as known as humanly possible. Got beef with this guy for these reasons and he needs to get the out. So he's still doing regime change, but it's a new flavor of regime change. So we'll see. I think regime change is always super dangerous, so we'll see. But I am told that Maduro rigged one of his own elections, that there is a sort of actual president that was elected and that if they can get Maduro out, that guy would presumably take power. If that's true, then this might be a less worrisome one. But regime change when brought about by external pressure does not have a good history. So we'll see what happens.

[Drew]

Understood. All right. LeBlanc, 204. He said not all. Never rally voters. World war never. Riley Never. Not all. Never rallies voters.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Where are we at here? Move your cursor so I see where.

[Drew]

You'Re at right here.

Not all. Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Never rallies.

[Drew]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No idea what that means.

[Drew]

I made it bigger. Okay. Not all. Never rally voters. World War I. Two posters didn't say not all Germans. Oh.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh.

[Drew]

Got it, Got it. Not all.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not all. Never rallies voters. Got it.

[Drew]

Unity needs One clear villain. That's why us red versus blue is exploding. No external enemy. So we become each other's monsters. Pendulum swinging back.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's interesting. Yes, I think he's right that having one clear enemy is a way better.

Marketing message. But the bad news is that I do think in America this is going to calcify pretty quickly into Muslims bad. And so that's my concern.

[Drew]

And then they went on to say it said, but you can't convince people that everything is going to get better if no perceived enemy to fight against. Ever have a family member lash out about bills. Kind of like that. No outlet equals aggression.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting.

Well, the bad news is it's very easy to go. China's the enemy. Very easy to go. Islam is the enemy. So it won't be hard if we want to pick a sequential list of enemies to go after. So, yeah, if, if we need to rally people, if politicians need to rally people, they will have no shortage of people to bang the drum about. So. Or it could, like Nick Fuentes. This thing seems to be white nationalist and you really. History says you can rally people around that, much to my dismay.

[Drew]

But to your point that you always say, though, is that this is caused by economic problem first. So is it more important to have the enemy? So that way you're distracted from the economics, or is it we just, you give you an enemy now so you can do this while we try to fix the economics in the background?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, so. Oh, God. Fix the economics. Okay. To fix the economics, we would have to do things that we're not doing. Everybody right now, Trump included, the only strategy they're running is make more money. So if Trump had any impulse to balance the budget, I would be very enthusiastic. He does not. He certainly understands the political reality that if I promise free things, that I'm more likely to get reelected. So he promises free things and he money prints till the cows come home. And he's going to try to put some of that money in people's pockets rather than pay down the debt, which is probably politically brilliant, but it is economically stupid. So I, I don't think that we're in the zone yet where people are actually going to fix the debt. This is going to be. I'm so curious to see what you guys think about the interview with Arthur Laffer. When's it coming out?

[Drew]

Next Tuesday.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so not this coming Tuesday, the one after that. Yeah, I'll be very interested for you guys to watch it. So Arth Laffer is the guy that the Laffer curve is named after the Laffer curve is that there is a breaking point where it'll be very obvious. If you charge people 100% taxes, then they just stop working. Back it off. 99, 98, 97. At some point you get to the point where people start producing again. If you go all the way down to zero, you collect no taxes, obviously. So somewhere, 1, 2, 3%, you start making money for the government. And so where is that breaking point? Okay, that's what made this guy famous. And talking to him, I was shocked at how he and I are looking at the same thing. In, in fact, one thing you will hear a lot. It'd be very ego gratifying to do a super cut of all the times guests have said, well, you're right about that. But. So no one is arguing that I'm looking at the economy in the right way. What they argue are the conclusions that I draw. And so that's where I'm like, like time is gonna tell. But Arthur and I went back and forth, back and forth, back and forth about, what does this all mean now? He looks at me and says, you're just being pessimistic. I look at him and I'm like, you're so high on hopium that I'm just like, what is happening right now? Like, he can't even ground, like, tell me the thing that's gonna happen. What is it? We're gonna grow it. Where? Like, what's the thing? What's the actual thing? Given the debt? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, Tom, the debt is definitely a problem. But don't worry, even though every other empire has fallen on the timeline that you're on, it's not going to happen this time for magical reason. So anyway, I love my time with him and I do not want to in any way, shape or form indicate.

[Drew]

That I want to talk about it, but I want you guys to see the interview.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's a good, very smart.

[Drew]

It's a good one.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It was, yeah, it was a lot of fun. But anyway, it I. No one is trying to make a meaningful attempt to fix the economy. And because of that, we are going to continue to suffer from these problems.

[Drew]

And then, last one for Leon. Nobody ever talks about post AI. The AI that can make humans farms entertaining, feed and take care of livestock, but constantly simulating in new ways to generate new data to perceive reality, which is food for the AI. Nobody ever talks about post AI. The AI could make human farms entertaining, feed and take care of livestock, but constantly stimulating in new ways to generate new data to perceive reality, which is food for the AI.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think what he's saying is basically the AI could manipulate us in ways that would be entertaining for them. It feels like the same idea that people have that humans are these. Is the universe trying to understand itself. So the. That concept of consciousness goes like this. Consciousness is ubiquitous. It is one thing. However, to understand that thing, it must take a finite, limited perspective and essentially look back at itself. I do not find that argument compelling in the slightest. But whatever. That's the argument. This feels something like that, which is the AI only understand the world by absorbing human behaviors, which is admittedly true for now, but they will very rapidly go beyond that and get into physics. Once the robots understand basic physics, I don't think they're really going to care about humans. I mean, maybe, but that strikes me as less likely. But I think what he's saying is that humans will. Could become a entertainment feed a source of data for the AIs to be like, oh, if we manipulate them like this, they'll kick off new data. What does that look like? What does it look like to make every human try to kill every other human? Things like that. He didn't say that part, but that would be one scenario where it'd be like, oh, cool, that's what it looks like. Now we understand how they react in that circumstance.

[Drew]

That's interesting. Okay. All right. I want to jump over to this OU student essay fiasco. So I'm not sure how much of the background you have on this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, I have it all, Drew. What background does the chat have?

[Drew]

Yeah, we'll dive into it. So with this, for those that don't know, a student was given a gender studies assignment, and that gender studies assignment was about. I'm trying to get the exact framing of it. Traditional gender roles about how people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. How people are perceived based on societal expectations of gender. In her essay, Ms. Samantha has argued that traditional gender roles should not be considered stereotypes. She cited the Bible to support her stance that eliminating gender in society would be detrimental because that would put people further from God's original plan for humans. She received zero points out of the 25 for the essay. Her transgender professor, Mel Curtis, said Mrs. Fulnicki failed to use empirical evidence and called parts of her essay offensive. Quote, to call an entire group of people demonic is highly offensive, especially a minoritized population. The instructor wrote an online grading platform. Now Turning Point OU is rallying to her her side and saying that, you know, she's being unjustly vilified. I do have to think that if my teacher was transgender, I probably shouldn't use the terminology at least demonic in the essay that I submit to her, but I'm like, okay, I might be too woke for this. So I wanted your opinion just before we get to the OU response, because they ended up having the teacher on leave now and all this other stuff.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Stuff.

[Drew]

But, like, what do you. What do you. What's your initial reaction to me?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is everybody being stupid? So my wife is a world class artist. I mean, absolutely, egregiously talented. And she would get in fights with her professors because they wanted her to draw in a certain way, and she didn't want to draw like that. And so her mom pulled her aside and said, cool, listen, you've got a choice. Either one is perfectly fine. But you just need to decide, do you want to get a good grade in the class or do you just want to make the art the way that you want to make it? And she said, I want to get a good grade. And her mom said, cool. Getting good grades is a game. You have to understand what the teacher believes is worthy of a good grade and then do that thing and you will get the grade. Otherwise, perfectly acceptable. If you do not care at all about your grade and make art however you want and tell the teacher to fuck right off and create the thing you want to create. And so Lisa was like, cool, I'm going to get a good grade. And so Lisa did art the way that her teachers wanted it. Absolutely hate it, and in some ways, really, really ended up kind of breaking her a little bit. And she didn't touch art for a while because it was like, I don't want to do art like that. And still to this day, I am mortified that my wife doesn't do digital art. But from me, she feels that same pressure of you're now being like, my teacher is trying to get me to do art the way you want me to do art. Fudge you. And so now I'm going to go in the exact opposite direction. So anyway, this is. This person is being obstinate. They know what it would take to get a good grade. They obviously are like, fuck this person. I'm going to say what I am here to say. Cool. You made a political statement, and you got the grade that reflects your political statement. The transgender teacher is being dumb. You know that you run the risk of creating a scene. You've now been put on leave. It's like you want to show that you can pull yourself out of the argument and really grade them on the merits. And the odds that the merits of something with complete sentences is a zero is basically zero.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if you gave them, like, a seven, and you're like, listen, this is obviously a failing grade. You don't make empirical arguments. Citing the Bible is not an acceptable way. That's a philosophy at best. At worst, it's, you know, magical thinking. And so in my class, as I've explained before, these are not acceptable sources. And so I've docu this many points for those sources. Plus, in leaning on theology or going into a value system argument, you're not. Right. Whatever. You're dancing around. So that way you're, like, actually telling me why you graded this down, but you did tell me why you graded it down, and it's because you found it offensive. And so the empirical part. Fair enough. Like that, it's just. Does that really swing us all the way to zero? No. So now both sides are, like, being obstinate and they didn't need to be. And they could completely, like, step back from their, like, emotional, like, I'm gonna get you stance. Neither of them did. And so now it is what it is. And you've got tons of people on the Internet, and I don't know if they could be trusted. I have not read the article myself that are all saying, yeah, this was worthy of a terrible grade. Fine. Fair enough. Was it worthy of a zero? That's the part where I'm like, they just made their own life difficult by.

[Drew]

Going, that's a really good point. If you would have just gave her a 4. This is not a story. Correct. But the fact that you gave her a zero, and you did that because you had that you wanted to puff your chest out. Yes. This is the University of Oklahoma statement. The University of Oklahoma takes seriously concerns involving first amendment rights, certainly including religious freedoms. Upon receiving notice from the student on the grading of an assignment, the university immediately began a full review of the situation. Is acted swiftly to address the matter. First, the college acted immediately to address the academic issue raised by the student. College leaders contracted her on the day her letter was received and have maintained regular communication throughout the process. As previously stated, a formal grade appeals process was conducted. The process results in steps to ensure no academic harm to the student from the graded assignments. Second, the student reported filing a claim of illegal discrimination based on religious beliefs to the appropriate university office. OU has a clear process for reviewing such claims and it has been activated. The graduate student instructor has been placed on administrative leave pending the finalization of this process. To ensure fanish in the process a full time professor serving as the course instructor for the remainder of the the semester. OU remains firmly committed to fairness, respect and protecting every student's rights to express sincerely held religious beliefs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All of this stuff is amusing to me. College is wonderful. It's great experience. If you can do without debt, I'm here for it. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And all that matters in life is are you good at something that will make money for somebody? If you're good at something that will make money for somebody, you will always be in a good negotiating position. You are paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of the problems you solve. If you can solve real problems, I don't care if you ate every crayon that you've ever encountered. I don't care if you wrote things like this. If you're. All of your teachers failed you, it doesn't matter. There are businesses out there that are absolutely desperate for people that can solve problems and make them money. And if you can solve problems and make them money, you're going to do just fine in life as a psa. To all the kids out there, there, that's all that matters. Get good at something. Now, if you're a fuckwit that is not good at anything, then I get why you want to have a good grade. So you can bamboozle people in an interview. But that should not be the way that people go through life. Get good at something that matters. And then part of what you have to get good at is being able to rapidly articulate and prove I'm actually good at this thing. So, man, if you can do that, the world is your oyster. But people spend so much time learning how to posture, learning how to interview, instead of. Of actually getting good at the thing. Yeah, that. That is the grand crisis of the human experience.

[Drew]

Do you have any like teacher stories, professor stories, anything like that?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I have one really good one.

[Drew]

We got time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Really good. Okay.

[Drew]

Yeah. Come on.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Give it to. Give me some. This is crazy. And I think about this a lot. So I had a friend, smartest kid that I knew back in school, really bright and ne. Literally never in trouble. This kid was so quiet, definitely on the spectrum and ended up being my best friend through high school. So this is not some random kid that I met like this. I really knew this kid. And we had this French teacher, brand new, so we're all juniors, maybe seniors. I can't remember Juniors to seniors. And we get this brand new French teacher. Never seen her before. New to the school district, whole nine. And they end up, like, really, like, disliking each other. And we all thought she was weird. And she ends up expelling him. So he's very tall. And she was doing something to really piss him off. And he was like, the nicest guy. So everyone was like. Of all the people to, like, have a beef with this kid, the smartest kid, the nice kid, the quiet kid.

[Drew]

What?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so anyway, she says something to him that really pisses him off, and she tells him to go back and sit down at his desk. Now, admittedly, he's like 6 4, and she was like 5 2. And she was standing in a way where he would have to, like, scooch past her. And so he, like, scooches past her, but looks down at her as he goes. He was trying to be a dick, there's no doubt. He doesn't say anything. He doesn't, like, flinch out of nothing. She suspends him. He then gets rejected from Columbia University because he'd been suspended. Okay, like, this is how big of an impact that ends up having on his life.

[Drew]

Life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're not going to find that out for a long time. She suspends him. So this is now, like, wait. This kid who's never done anything, never been in any kind of trouble, ever gets suspended. Everyone was like, what the. Okay, that's in the air. She. Then one day, we all hate her. Now she's a psycho. For real. Like, for real. This woman is a problem. And one day she's talking to the guy next to me, and I'm. I'm sitting at a desk, and the desk at the top has like a. Like a slight divot for you to set pencils. So I have a pencil sitting in there, and I'm twisting, twirling another pencil or pen, whatever, and it flies out of my hand, hits the pencil that's sitting in that little nested area and falls on the floor behind her. Now she's leaning over, so her ass is sticking out. We all hate this woman, think she's crazy. I'm like, the absolute last thing in the universe I'm going to do is lean down behind her ass to pick this up. She's going to have some kind of problem with it. So I just leave it there. She finishes talking to my friend. She turns around, bends down, picks up the pencil, holds it right in front of me, snaps it in half and sets it down in my tray. And I Was like, what the just happened? I was like, I have no idea what universe I'm living in right now.

[Drew]

She's a maniac.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so she leaves. Now we are all like the top 10 in my graduating class. So the kid that gets suspended, I don't remember if he's one or two, but he's like super high. I'm like fourth place. So we're like the. The top 10 of the graduating class. So we all go to our parents and we say, listen, this chick is unhinged.

She is not what you guys think. We. We've got to have a meeting. And so it wasn't exclusively the top 10, but most of the top 10 in our graduating class get together. Our parents come in, principal's there, French teachers there, and we all say, hey, listen, this one was crazy. And. And she's presenting herself incredibly well. And the whole time she's explaining very calmly the different things that we've done and why, like, you know, what this kid had done was a problem and how intimidated she felt. And he's very large and I'm very small. And, you know, it's very difficult to be in front of these students. And I'm new and so to feel physically threatened. And I didn't want to overreact, but obviously I have to make sure that I'm maintaining decorum in the classroom room. And so we're all like. Our hearts start racing because we're like, no, no, no, wait. This is like an alien that's wearing human skin and she's going to get away with this. And so we're there for like an hour and a half or something. And we're like, oh my God. Like, we're. We are literally packing up to leave, man. Like, people closing their binders, parents are standing up, and I'm like, hold on one second. Just one quick question. Why did you break my pencil that day? And she snaps and she goes, Mr. Bilyeu, don't you think for one second, I don't know, you were trying to kill me? And all the parents were like.

[Drew]

What?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And she was like, I know you put that pencil behind me to try to get me to trip and break my neck. And we were like, we got you, bitch. And like, everyone was like, this is who she is. And so we never saw her again in. They fired it.

[Drew]

Wow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dude, it was the craziest. I remember thinking, she's going to get away with this. This is wild. And then it all comes back to that pencil. I was like, oh, it was. It was so fantastic how she just collapsed and the mask slipped, and, like, the venomous person that we were all seeing every day came out, and I.

[Drew]

Was like, oh, that's crazy as well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Don't think I don't know. You were trying to kill me.

[Drew]

Me. That's wild. That's a good one. That's a good one. All right, we got two more slipped in. LeBlanc. Have a beautiful and wonderful day, guys. And good to see you back, drew. Oh, thanks, LeBlanc.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you.

[Drew]

And Martin, Fort Knox said, real relationships suck now. Fewer friends, fewer romantic ones. Dead cities have the shallowest folks. Lonely men may kill us all. AI takeover is second place. Everyone is. Is in their isolated silo of reality with loose bonds.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I feel for people like this, so I am Captain Isolation, but. But within the context of being married, that's always important for me to remind myself of.

But I get that most people just do not thrive in isolation. And so I do worry about that, that we're making life so convenient. It's so easy to avoid all the frictions that if anybody's ever had a killer experience in a game where you and your friends, like, you cooperated, everybody played their role, and you beat the other team. It feels so good. It is so fun. You know, if you're, like, the healer, and you're like, you're there, your buddy's down, and you got him. It's like, in the tank. Is absorbing all the bullets they're supposed to. And the guy with high dps, like, in there doing the thing like that. That is euphoric. Now imagine people in the village are starting to get hungry, and the four of you go into the woods. You don't know if you're going to live or die. And you hunt mastodon or whatever, and everybody plays a role, and you do it, you come back, and because of you guys, the village actually eats and the birth rate goes up. I mean, it's like, the level of that, like, that's what we're built for, is that kind of cooperation. And it's all a bit of a pain in the ass, and it's all very difficult. And so we've tried to, like, smooth the edges off that difficulty. We've created farming, we've created livestock, we've created grocery stores. Now it's like, we've tried, like, because all of those things are hard, and they're very dangerous, and they put you in a very precarious situation, but they also give you all the things that the Blind watchmaker has made Extraordinarily pleasurable. And that sense of camaraderie and brotherhood. Forget the romantic relationships for a second. The brotherhood, the feeling of being a part of something to play your role and to contribute meaningfully. And to know that, like, these people are eating because I did the thing. Thing like is. It's just extraordinary. And so as we move farther and farther from that, we really do run a hyper risk that we become unaligned with the algorithms running in our brain. And that's when things really. People begin to feel a profound sense of disease. This is why I think it's so important to bring manufacturing back to the US There is a certain type of person for whom that is how they're going to contribute to their family if nobody else else. And when they don't have that ability to go do a hard thing to provide meaningfully for their family, you've got a problem. There's a great show, Landman. If you're not watching it, you must watch it. A spoiler alert. So this. It's a mild spoiler, but nonetheless, this is a really key scene. I hate to do this to you. I know you're gonna have to hear it. Anybody else that's worried, you got to plug your ears there. There is a moment where a character. I'll be as vague as I can. Where a character has worked really hard, and now he's making a lot of money. And he turns to his girlfriend, and she's actually a little bit scared, and she turns to his girlfriend, and he turns to his girlfriend, and he says, I'm doing this all for you. And she is just completely confused. And I looked at my wife, and I was like, she knows this. But we've had the same. Like, Will and Jada had that big argument where he's like, I built this house for you. And she's like, you didn't build this house for me. You built it for you. And I was like, stop the fucking presses. That woman needs to understand right fucking now that he did, in fact, do that for her. Now, if that is a gift that she chooses to reject, don't be confused as to why you guys aren't in a relationship anymore. And so I was like, to Lisa, if you do not understand, if you want to view yourself as a proxy, fine. That would be a mistake. But I am doing. I have to do all of this for someone, and I am doing this for you. I get it. I can't stop myself. I am wired to work this hard. I am wired to want to climb the Next mountain. I am wired to want to slay dragons. That's who I am. I told you at the beginning of our relationship, you can ask me to give up anything, but not my ambition. I don't. I don't want to know me without my ambition. But I am going to do all of this for someone now as my wife. I am slotting you into that. I would literally die for you. I'm out here working my ass off, off for you. If you ever look at me sideways and say, like, I don't want you doing this. I don't want these things. You're not working this hard for me. We are going to have a problem. We are going to implode. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of what men are. What you, as women, have wired us to do. Now, I can't be confused about what a woman is and what you need it. I have to make sure that I'm there for you, that I can hold space for you to lament and to sit in negative pain and suffering and for me to not try to solve the problem. I get it. But if I can't give that to you, that is just as bad as you not being able to give this to me. And so in. They handle that so well. Of, like, that discrepancy where he's so befuddled by her being like, but this is not a gift that I want. He's like, wait, what? Like, I'm putting my life at risk for you, and you're reject. This is one of the ways that men and women are breaking down right now that I'm just like, oh, my God, like, you've got to map the other person. What is life like for them? Stop wanting men to be women and women to be men. Like, cherish the other person for the fact that they are different.

If people could get their heads around that, oh, Drew, life would be so much better. So my wife, if she's wise, will both praise the life out of me for how hard I work, for all of the accomplishments that I've made, and then hold fast to. She needs some other things as well, and I'm going to need to provide those to her.

[Drew]

Man, it was so fact, though.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We gotta get you out of here with that. We gotta go. You guys are amazing. Thank you guys so much for joining us. Means the world. Love you all and we'll see you next week. Most healthy habits are hard. Meal prep takes hours. Gym routines get derailed all the time. Complicated supplement regimens fall apart, often within weeks. But AG1 Next Gen is different. AG1 Next Gen delivers what your body actually needs. 75 plus vitamins and minerals, 5 clinically studied probiotic strains, plus prebiotics and superfoods. It replaces your multivitamin, probiotics and more in one simple daily drink. AG1 next gen comes in three new tropical citrus and berry all plant based flavoring with 0 added sugar, 0 artificial sweeteners, 0 erythritol. Every flavor maintains NSF certification for sport, so you know you're getting the strictest quality standards. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1 and if you use my link, you'll also get a free bottle of AG D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit, and five of the upgraded travel packs. With your first order, click the link in the show notes or just head to drink ag1.com impact to get started again. That's drinkag1.com impact.