
Tom Bilyeu and Producer Drew dive into escalating global conflicts, the disruptive impact of AI on jobs—especially for women—and the controversial policies shaping America's economic and political future.
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Tom Bilyeu
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing
Drew
for selling the car.
Tom Bilyeu
I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable.
Drew
Okay, I accepted the offer.
Tom Bilyeu
They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya. So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu show live. I'm excited to have you guys here with us today. We have got an action packed day today. Given all the stuff that's going on, especially in AI, it's pretty wild. And don't worry, we'll also be getting into plenty of the Iranian Trump news. And speaking of which, Trump does not like Iran's response to his proposal one little bit and Netanyahu is assuring the world that, that there's still work to be done. So my question is, are hostilities going to resume under the banner of the new, I believe they're calling it Project Freedom. Is this Trump just looking for a reset to the 60 day clock? We're going to talk about that and more. Putin is saying that the war in Ukraine may be almost over. I thought for sure that was a typo. I had no idea that that was even possibly on the bingo card for this year. So that's interesting. Be very curious to see how that plays out. The commencement speaker. The AI commencement speaker. If you guys didn't see, it was pretty interesting seeing the crowd boo her as she made statements talking about AI being the new industrial Revolution. Young people are not excited about AI and what it is going to bring and I think we have a nice big reckoning to deal with there. Speaking of reckoning, Spencer Pratt had an attack ad aimed at him here in LA and it lets you know exactly where the energy is on the left. They want bigger and bigger government. I am very eager to have this conversation. As you guys might imagine, female dominated corporate positions are more susceptible to AI replacement, according to new analysis that's coming out and that's causing quite a stir. Online battle droids and Rosie the Robot from the Jetsons are now both real. If you guys haven't seen that footage, it is insane. And wealthy streamer Pokimane has gone viral for saying wealthy people are good, but the ultra wealthy, somehow they are magically bad. All that and more today on the Tom Villeu Show Live. Drew, welcome. You've been hit by the cold bug. So if anybody is wondering why you sound like you have a cold, that is exactly why it hit me. But you showed up.
Drew
I'm getting through. I'm getting through the other side. I'm rolling down. It's hilarious, though. I've been watching this commencement speaker for the last 10 minutes now, just on a loop. It's just funny. Cause she hits kind of the meme of just like, wait, did I strike a nerve? Like, I don't understand what he said.
Tom Bilyeu
Why she's so surprised.
Drew
Yeah. As well. So this is for the audience to see it.
Tom Bilyeu
The rise of artificial intelligence. Is the next Industrial Revolution true?
Drew
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Who's she looking at?
Drew
Cone without doing it. Let's go away.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. I struck a chord. May I finish? She's so uneasy there, man. Oh, I hope you guys are watching it. Like the finger tap on the thing.
Drew
Yeah. You can tell.
Tom Bilyeu
It's like, oh, we're trying to regroup.
Drew
This is one of those things. We talk about it. It's fun. We talk about the breakthroughs, we talk about the new LLMs. But as a new graduate, I don't know if you're as excited because you're walking into this workforce that is quite literally being torn apart in real time.
Tom Bilyeu
No. Even with 50 years of life looking at this one, it makes it so hard to look into the future and understand where things are going when you're able to plan. Like, so I come out of film school and I'm looking at how to break into the industry, and it's just a wall of confusion. And that already was very startling. But if you had said, not only do you not know how to break into the industry, but the industry might not exist, or it won't exist in the way that you think of it now in the next, like, three. Three years. That's a level of unnerving where you just go, have I just wasted the last, you know, however many 15, 16 years of my life? And so I am not at all surprised that graduates are on a knife's edge with this. And the reality is that if she's right and AI becomes the next Industrial Revolution, this is where people need to understand what actually happened with the Industrial Revolution. It was a brutal, tumultuous time of people getting replaced, having put their life on one trajectory and then having that completely upended. It ate two generations of people that were unable to make a pivot. So it's not only You. But it's oftentimes your kids, and it's not until your grandkids come along that they're able to take advantage of that and that you can see that play out in the Industrial revolution, the great electrification and the Internet. So it's like when this stuff plays out, it really is disruptive and not for a short period of time. So while I think ironically, the young people will be the people that will adjust the easiest, it's people that are, say, north of 35ish. They're really gonna struggle because they have so much invested in their lives, debt that they're carrying. Their job has to go well. They're not at the beginning of their career where they're not married, they don't have kids, and they haven't yet built up well. Some of them will have with college debt, but they haven't got as much of the yoke of responsibility that a lot of people that are north of 35 have. And so they'll adjust. But I get why they would boo a sentiment like that. And I'm extremely surprised why she's surprised.
Drew
It's one of those things, though. This is something that we were talking about, but we haven't necessarily seen anything been enacted. So data centers are kind of on the chopping block now. We see some.
Tom Bilyeu
Many people are having negative response. Not in my backyard kind of thing.
Drew
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like seeing sentiment bubbling up. But we haven't seen anything actually happen. No legislation, nothing that has been sweeping. So to tell a young person, is it simply just hurry up and wait or you'll be okay? Once we get to the other side of this, I don't know what those timelines are. How. What would you tell? Like the. The recent graduate who was booing like,
Tom Bilyeu
okay, so if it's like she tags out and she's like, okay, Tom, you step in here and give a speech. Yeah, Here it is impromptu, but I'll tell you, if she tagged me in, I'm not going to be tapping on the podium. I'm going to say to everybody out there, I have wonderful news for you. You are in complete control of your life. Your life is going to be a reflection of your choices. You are facing a very daunting enemy. And that enemy is a world that is changing so fast, it is nearly impossible to predict the future. Anytime that you're in that scenario, you want to maximize your optionality. So focus on skill acquisition. The reality is none of us can see the future. We may all get replaced by AI That's Entirely possible. But for now, that's just a what if science fiction novel. What you do know today is that people that are using AI are going to massively out compete the people that don't use AI. So you have been born into a world where humans have become the ultimate apex predator because of our ability to adapt. So your job right now is to make sure that you can adapt. Now, a big part of this is going to be you have to minimize your debt. And so if you're already in debt, that is going to be the biggest thing you have to focus on. On. Do not keep making that problem worse by taking on more and more debt. Live below your means. Get a job. Prove your value by leveraging AI. Climb the corporate ladder. It became very apparent to me in my early 20s that you could drop me in at the bottom of any company and I could work my way up. The same is true for all of you. Do not be the person that is whining and crying about how the world is changing. Just win. The rules of the game are what the rules of the game are. Don't spend all your time trying to change the rules. That is going to be what most people do. And they will get eaten by the wave of AI. You, on the other hand, my dear people sitting in this audience today are going to retain control of your life. You're going to acquire skills like a fiend and you're going to outperform all the old people who have gotten so calcified in their thinking that they will be easy to demolish. So go forth and prosper.
Drew
There it is. We need to. He's available for bookings, everybody. If anybody needs an improper speech, that's the man.
Tom Bilyeu
When the audience gives you the unexpected result, you can take me and I got you. Gotcha.
Drew
It's one of those things I was like, that sounded good and I need the hoorah. Rah. But it does seem like if I'm a young graduate, I don't have anywhere to go. It's just cloud and fog.
Tom Bilyeu
And the bad news is they will hate my speech more than they hated hers. And I've been at this long enough to know how strangely people actually respond when you're talking to the masses. If I can get an audience that has self selected into the way that I view the world, it'll go well. But the audience at large is disgusted by my it's all your fault rhetoric. Yeah, and I say that. I get it. It's provocative. I say it to trigger people. But I'm Actually just trying to get people to understand if you make a different choice, you will get a different outcome. And the goal here is to figure out what things do I need to do in order to get the outcome that I want. And we are living now in a time that is so intellectually poisonous that my main goal of being in front of a camera is just to give people an alternate reality. One of the incredible joy of personal responsibility, of being like, oh, I just have to out compete people that are going to spend all their time lobbying government. They want bigger government, they want handouts, all that. And I just have to say that I want to be super strong. Remember, everybody, is this actually in the Bible, pray not for a lighter load, but instead pray for stronger shoulders. Or is that just something that came later? It's so dope, I wish it were in the Bible because this for sure, for sure is the thing that if you want your life to go well, pray not for a lighter load. Instead, pray for stronger shoulders and more aptly, hit the gym and get stronger shoulders, literally and figuratively. And the reality that you can outperform those around you is so startling that once you start going down that path, it's like, wait, it was really this easy? Now you'll pay an extraordinary price of time and effort and persistence and consistency and all that, to be sure, but it starts paying off fast, man. Like, this is not something where it only pays off in 10 years or 20 years. It will start paying off immediately. So, yeah, if I could get people to have a historical context on what happens when you have this kind of transformation, it is absolutely brutal for those that do not adapt. Therefore, you must adapt. What is adaptation? It means learning the skills that are relevant today. And if those skills stop being relevant in two weeks, then you relearn the next thing, and you relearn the next thing. And even if AI really does take over and it becomes better than us at everything, you want to be the last person standing at your job or whatever. So, yeah, that is the focus now. It's not a popular message today, but remember, I'm speaking to the 2%. That's it.
Drew
That's all we can do.
Tom Bilyeu
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Drew
All right, let's jump over to our Kalshi Trade of the Week. Shout out to Kalshi. Thank you for sponsoring another live we're looking at the U.S. iran nuclear deal right now. 58% of traders think that there will have a deal done by the end before 2027, by the end of the year. 34% and declining said it was before August9. 35% in declining said before September. So it seems like we're going to get a deal in Iran eventually, but it's not quite here yet. And this is on the news of Trump just rejected Iran's latest peace proposal. What's your over under on when we'll get a deal in Iran?
Tom Bilyeu
I think we'd have to really say what we consider a deal. If we're saying a deal where the US and the world are in a better position now than they were before all of this started, I don't know that you get there so in that way right now. And I always leave the caveat, it could be darkest before the dawn. But the reality is I think Trump is up against having to withdraw without getting what he wants. So will this come to a conclusion? Obviously. Will we make it out of 2027 without a conclusion? I can't imagine it. But I think that we're going to linger in this sort of weird in between land for quite some time. So that's just the hard truth of it. It is very easy for Iran to keep running an asymmetric warfare game. So just fucking things up in the Strait of Hormuz enough that they put the world in a position where the world would rather pay $2 million per shipment then do what they're doing now. I think that if in the end we stay in that kind of situation, what the messaging that's going to stick for Trump is that the strait was open before you got involved. The nuclear proliferation that you were concerned about with Iran was not as imminent as you would lead us to believe. And so you have egg all over your face. If he is unable to get allies on board, unable to get the strait open and ends up attacking a bunch of civilian infrastructure in and the Iranian people never rise up. It is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe. The US Will look weak. It will become clear to many people that despite having a gigantic military that we're burning through our weaponry very fast, far faster than we're able to replace it. We are not the World War II America that we once were. That you can through asymmetric warfare, cause major heartburn, whether it's for the US or for China, that these big countries are only going to be as formidable as they are willing to wage total warfare? We in the US Certainly do not have the appetite for total warfare. So we'll find out if China has the appetite for total warfare or if they even need to do it. But, yeah. So the US Tried to run a Venezuelan playbook on Iran and it didn't work. I don't see any signs of it working. So, yeah, again, depending on what your definition is of get out of this, I'll be surprised. With every passing day, I become more certain that we exit because we must, because there's so much political pressure on Trump to exit, but that we end up with a Middle east that is far more destabilized than when we came in.
Drew
You said total war with China. We're talking about, like, proxy, right?
Tom Bilyeu
Well, no, I'm saying. So you're breaking into spheres of influence. The US Is going to run the Western Hemisphere. We thought we were going to do something that wasn't just geographically based and was going to be okay. We are where capital is. So we're going to have our hemisphere, the greater Western Hemisphere, and we're going Greater North America, I think, is what they're calling it. And we're going to have this capital where the capital is rising. We're going to have the best relationship. We're going to go in, we're going to slap Iran around, We're going to let our GCC partners know where the place you want to be. We can knock these guys down. The only thing that you were really worried about, normalize relationships with Israel. It's just a new day. And honestly, I love the idea of that new day, given how much capital is pouring out of the GCC nations now with all of this, they're going to have to redirect that to their own protection. I think when they told the US that we couldn't use their airspace, Saudi, and I believe it's Kuwait, when that happened, I realized, oh, they don't think the US can protect them. And so that means all that money that was theoretically going to flood into US Markets is actually going to have to stay to a large degree in the home region. They're going to have to build up their own defenses. They're going to have to deal with now a more aggressive Iran. And so I think Trump can lop that node off in terms of his vision of the future. So he will be able to extract himself. But they are going to be like, dude, just think of what this says to our allies. Think of what it says to China in terms of our ability to stop them from taking Taiwan. They're going to be like, get the fuck out of here. You don't have the political will to stop this. There's no universe in which you guys are going to come fuck with us. So we're going to build this up. We're going to go in, we're going to try to take Taiwan via not diplomatic but administrative means, where they get their people more and more in power with every day people in Taiwan that actually want to unify with China and then they just start choking them off from a blockade perspective and say, you know this, we are reunifying in 2027. That's what it is. And then if the US signals any hesitation, then it's just game over. So, yeah, this will have ramifications.
Drew
I want to drill down into the cash again, the Kelsey trade again, because they have a specific language for what a yes agreement is. Because I think we are in a. The sentiment looks bad, but we can still get a deal on the table. So according to this, if the United States has agreed to sign or accepted a new Iran US nuclear deal, and that's a ceasefire agreement, that is a proposal that checks all the boxes. I know we were talking about 14,
Tom Bilyeu
I think, technically, just as. We just accept.
Drew
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
So it's like, how much can they get us to slide?
Drew
So it's one of those things. We might accept a deal, but then that sentiment might still very much be prevalent. We might start rolling back from the Middle east, but I don't know if the UAE is going to get back on our side and stuff like that. So a deal getting done is different than how people feel about the deal and the sentiment and trust that they have in the US for sure.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So to speak specifically to this, yes, I would say you have something by the end of 2027, you have something. But for me, you have something by the midterms. Like, if he's still caught in this quagmire by the midterms, it is game over for the Republicans to hold the House and the Senate. So I think on that, his massive amount of pressure is there far more than the end of the year. Like, once he's on the other side of the midterms, it doesn't matter anymore.
Drew
Nice. And then as far as, like, the sentiment and stuff like that, do you think that that's just going to take A little bit more time to build that, get that rapport again with the IRGC nations and things like that. So that way they are on our side.
Tom Bilyeu
Well, just to pull things out. So GC is specifically the Islamic Republican Guard Corps or whatever in Iran, but the GCC nations.
Drew
Excuse me.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, so getting the GCC nations back on our side, if this goes poorly, I don't think that happens in any. It will be decades where we'll have to see how things play out, see how they normalize, see what the US's position is. Because if that happens, let's say that this is a total shit show. It does not resolve in any way that is positive to the us. Trump loses the midterms for sure. Then you have a very long shot Republican hold of the White house in what, 28. So then I think that becomes, you might have a total reset at that point where maybe they could go in, but I wouldn't expect that. I don't think that's their focus. For whatever reason that I don't fully understand, the Democrats are way friendlier to Iran than they are say to Saudi Arabia. Like I remember the whole fist bump thing with Biden. I mean, it's just so weird. So assuming that that whole thing holds, the economic play in the Middle east, poof, is gone. And then we have been bad to you. Conciliatory moves will almost certainly be made by the Democrats. So I would expect them to lift sanctions on Iran and things like that. So I think then that becomes a very different play in the Middle East. So there I'll say I can make predictions, but I feel my crystal ball is very hazy at that point. That one feels like all bets are off kind of thing and we need to see how things settle out. And if that happens, I have to imagine that we shift our focus to China pretty immediately because Trump will want to let go of, of the catastrophic failure that this will have been if he can't bring it all around. Like, imagine if he walks out where they're like, we're diluting some of our nuclear material so that we can only make seven instead of 11 bombs. If he walks out with a deal like that, it, it will be read even by his, his most die hard people will propagandize for him, but even by people that had been on his team up until that point, they'll be like, nah, like this is a pretty big failure.
Drew
Let's go jump over to 60 minutes where Bibi sat down and talked about his perspective of what's left to do. In the Iran war. Is the war with Iran over? And if it isn't, who will decide when it is?
Tom Bilyeu
I think it accomplished a great deal, but it's not over because there's still nuclear material, enriched uranium that has to be taken out of Iran. There is still enrichment sites that have to be dismantled. There are still proxies that Iran supports. There are ballistic missiles that they still want to produce. Now we've degraded a lot of it,
Drew
but all of that is still there and there's work to be done. How do you envision the highly enriched
Tom Bilyeu
uranium will be removed from Iran? You go in and you take it out with what?
Drew
Special forces from Israel. Special forces? The United States.
Tom Bilyeu
Well, I'm not going to talk about military means, but pause it for a sec. So a lot of chatter, whether this is real or not, a lot of chatter is saying that the whole thing where they were like, oh, one of our pilots was shot down, or two of our pilots were shot down and they had to go in and rescue them. That that was all just PR cover for a failed attempt to go in and extract the nuclear material from Isfahan. I don't know enough about like the logistics on the ground, but that seems absurd to a level that, like, I can't.
Drew
Absurd that we would try that or. Yes, dude, you have.
Tom Bilyeu
If, if what we have been told is real, and maybe it's not, but if what we've been told is actually real, that material is buried like deep. You don't run in with a couple shovels, dig it out in 25 minutes, jump back on your planes and take off. Like, that's like excavator equipment. Like, you've really got to go hard in the paint to dig that stuff out. And you're a sitting duck while you're doing it. It's not like Iran doesn't know where Isfahan is. They can just launch an attack. So if that's what happened, then I would imagine that, yes, it would make sense that that failed spectacularly and that we look like absolute morons for having tried it. So when he says that, I have to believe that what he means is not that you're running Special Forces operations, though he had a chance to say what I'm about to say and he didn't. So take it for what it's worth. But my assumption is that would only come as either you have. You resume like full blown military operations, you absolutely obliterate everything, that the only thing that Iran has left is insurgents so that they're fighting like street level that you could create a perimeter and stop them from doing it. But as long as they can launch missiles at you, like you're not going to be able to do that. They're just going to bomb their own site to try to get a big PR victory if nothing else. So that one just seems silly to me. So when he says this, I'm like, yeah, I presume you mean that either this is negotiated and so they say, fine, come in and get it and then you go in and get it, or that you are, you've established such total supremacy that you can just stroll in, take days and days and days and not have to worry about getting shot.
Drew
All right, let's let him land and plane.
Tom Bilyeu
President Trump has said to me, I want to go in there. And I think it can be done physically. That's not the problem. If you have an agreement and you go in and you take it out, why not?
Drew
That's the best way.
Tom Bilyeu
So there he did say, what if there isn't an agreement? Can you take it out by force? Well, you're going to ask me these questions, I'm going to dodge them because I'm not going to talk about our military possibilities, plans or anything of the kind.
Drew
And I'm just trying to get at
Tom Bilyeu
how long is it going to take to achieve that aim. I'm not going to give a timetable to it, but I'm going to say that's a terrifically important mission.
Drew
So this four week war getting a little bit longer? Yeah, a little bit longer.
Tom Bilyeu
Just a little.
Drew
So if you guys think you have a better read on what's happening, make sure you go check out Kalsi, use the code impact and you get $10 off your own trade. So go make this money on this board. You might as well. We have to talk about the insider trading too of Trump because they are doing reports that allegedly right now conservative estimates is it's a 3x net worth gain since he entered into office to where he is now.
Tom Bilyeu
So would you put that? I wouldn't put that in the insider trading camp. I would say probably just outright corruption. Not the insider trading is not corruption. But this gets into like the Trump phone and the crypto stuff like there it's. Oh God. They're going to be investigating this until the end of time and rightfully so. All of our politicians need to be held to account. This kind of stuff is super gross. But Trump do it doesn't seem like he's doing direct trades. Now are people inside of the administration, especially on like Kalshee and Polymarket running these insane, like, bets, like, hours before he'll make a big announcement. Yes. So that part I think we really have to. I think they even put something in front of Congress, didn't they, to make it illegal for AIDS even in the White House to be betting on all this stuff. And I think that that is incredibly important if you want to have any sort of legitimacy. Like, if we're really going to let people gamble on everything, like, you've got to put some guardrails about who's going to have insider information because it. It brings out some wild stuff. You see the guy that put a bet on temperature, and I was literally, Jesus, man. So, yeah, you've got. Yeah.
Drew
And then meanwhile, the guy watch out for that bet on the Venezuela mission. He's one who got called to Congress and is actually going to trial now that they're trying to bring charges against him for. So it's one of those things where
Tom Bilyeu
it's like people got to be careful.
Drew
Yeah, where's that? Where's that line? Or the super bowl person who camped out of the stadium and was watching timing, timing the rehearsal and then was able to, you know, so there's stuff
Tom Bilyeu
like that I think you're going to have a hard time getting rid of because to me, that one's just being clever.
Drew
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
But because he's not influencing it. He's just learning about something. And that really is for anybody, whether you're betting or whether you are investing, you're saying, either I'm better at this thing than you or I have information you don't have. Otherwise it's pure chance and that becomes far less interesting. So, yeah, that one, like, okay, yeah, fair enough. People are going to find ways to get a leg up. But like proper insider information. Yeah. You got to protect against that.
Drew
Well, up until this month, it was there.
Tom Bilyeu
It was all outside of the U.S. right. You couldn't make deals on U.S. soil
Drew
on both Kalshi and Polymarket until recently. Right. So like, you had people then using
Tom Bilyeu
VPNs and going out of the country to do it. That's so wild. That is so wild. Yeah. This is. We are in a wild, wild west moment right now to be sure we're going to want some guardrails. Now, I'm a big believer. People should be able to do with their money whatever they want. If they want to literally light their money on fire, they should be able to light their money on fire. So I've confessed this before. I get unhinged when people act like my money is their money, like, whoa, do I have a problem with that? And this was long before I got wealthy. I just really have beef with banks acting like it's their money and it is a privilege of mine to be able to access it. Like, what are you talking about? So yeah, I think people should be able to do what they want. But we've got to put guardrails. I mean, this just gets wild way too fast. Taking a short break. But there's more impact theory after Stay tuned, study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC and for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal.
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Tom Bilyeu
Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.
Drew
All right, let's talk about the upcoming midterms because you just said Trump needs to have these things done by midterms, but there's been a lot of shaking up over the last weekend. So right now Republicans are on the verge of a double digit gain in the U.S. house seats through redistricting. This is per CNN. Somebody down here broke it down. So the plus four that was in Virginia that was slated to go live has just been struck down by the Virginia Supreme Court. But you can see Florida, Louisiana.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. Sorry. Is that because it's race based?
Drew
No, this is separate from the race.
Tom Bilyeu
So why did that one get struck down? But other ones are going through the Virginia.
Drew
Because that's from Virginia. State Supreme Court.
Tom Bilyeu
Got it. So their own state was like.
Drew
Yeah, overstate their own state. The Louisiana, Florida. And I want to say, I thought Arkansas was on here. They might have missed that one. That one is a Supreme Court one and that's the Voting Rights act as a federal institution.
Tom Bilyeu
Got it.
Drew
But I say all that to say is that if Republicans by one way or another are able to with gain power through the midterms, does that kind of free up Trump in a certain way or do you think like would that have a significant impact on how he finishes his presidency?
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. The immediate math is if they retain power in the midterms, that is an extraordinarily powerful tool for them to be able to continue to push the Trump agenda. If they're able to get a big Enough margin that you have enough loyal soldiers that you can just ram your legislation through. They'd be in a much better position than him doing everything through executive order. So yes, that, I mean that would be extremely consequential. Now I just, I beseech America to. You want, you want to do everything via a policy where you are blind to what the outcome is going to be when you do it. And so gerrymandering is a terrible idea. It does not matter if it briefly advantages you. It will be used against you on a long enough timeline. You want a system where it is just as even keel as it can possibly be across all states. And we've got to get out of this mentality of populism of our side is right and just and the other side is wrong and bad and they're going to break the country. Instead, you've got to take everything policy by policy. If somebody on the opposite aisle has a policy that is going to, to put a very fine point on it, help the middle class thrive, then we want to lean into those policies. If your team has a policy that is going to hurt the middle class, then we want to avoid those policies. Like, we've really got to find a way to think about what the outcomes of the policies are instead of just like, is this my team? Yes. Cool, I want it. Is it my team? No. Then I don't want it. Without thinking about the cause and effect. Man, that one really, really is rough. Now, of course we're all going to disagree on exactly what is going to help the middle class thrive. And I'm happy to have the debate there. And if we can just get everybody on board with when you have that thriving middle class, when people can get wealthy and they can also get poor, that you're in a good position, that you have high mobility between classes. Yay. Then we can actually start talking about what policies are actually going to get us there. We've got 250 years of history to look at policies just in this country. We can also go out to other countries, look at what are the historical knock on effects of one policy or another. But we're just not doing that. Everybody are in their fields. This is all emotional, emotional. We're going to talk about this with the AI affecting women more than it affects men. And it's like we're in such a, a female coded, like legislative approach right now where we just want everything to be equal, we want everything to be fair. It's even if you map it as coming from a place of compassion it is so divorced from the reality of cause and effect that we are paving the road to hell as fast as we can. And so we are going to have to come to some agreements about what we're trying to achieve and then literally just look at the data. So, yeah, I feel like I got an uphill battle with convincing people of that, but nonetheless, and it's only going
Drew
to get worse too, because right now we're in the middle of election season. So it's governors and mayors and state. I just got the voting info infographic of like, hey, these are the things, the new ballot initiatives that we're sending over. Are you okay with this 2% tax raise? Are you okay with this? Are you okay with that? So there's going to be a lot more of information and this stuff is coming through. So I think your point of making it a policy individual, like, separate from partisanship, I think is what we should be doing. But, you know, political ads are going to.
Tom Bilyeu
Political ads are definitely going to political ad and everybody's going to slide onto a team. But it is. How do you break out of this? So while I was on my trip, I decided, all right, like, there's got to be somebody that presents a path forward that isn't only gnashing of the teeth and lamentations about all the things that are going wrong. Which is fun and I will keep doing it, but it can't be the only thing. You've really got to paint a picture a go forward strategy. And the problem is, as each of these policies go, they are more and more problematic. And so we've somehow got to get people to balance the budget. There was recently, I think it was a billionaire. Somebody was like, I'm backing Thomas Massie for president. I'm forgetting now who. And I thought my initial reaction was like, I don't know if he has like a shot, but at the same time, like, that might need to be given that he's the only person wearing the pin about the debt. That might be the person that until I see other policies that just default, have to give backing to. So that like changing the conversation as we start moving forward onto somebody who is talking about fiscal responsibility, I think is going to be very, very important. We've really got to make that the conversation. But to get there, we have to get people to understand, like, it'll be a very simplified version of the economy, but we've really got to get people on board with that anyway. And then the next part of this is getting people to understand that the Things that sound fair end up being very unfair in the actual like implication.
Drew
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
And so I think a big part of that is going to be looking at healthcare. I want to do a deep dive across and I've started doing it behind the scenes. But looking at, okay, my thing is because I don't need my current thinking to be right. I just want to find the right answer. Like doing an audit. Okay, what are, who's winning out there? Like who has a better setup? And what are we all aiming at? And as a country, do we agree with that anymore? And so we'll have to start there. Like what as America do we want to do? So if we're going to compare ourselves, like Denmark for instance. Well, what's Denmark aiming at? Are we aiming at the same thing? So it's going to be a, it's going to taking a very complex cloud of things that people are arguing about, narrowing them down to like three to five things. Just saying, okay, as a country, here are three to five things. And then now let's debate about how we get there. But nobody's just articulating the very specifics of what are we actually trying to get achieve.
Drew
I think there's three proposals we have here. The first is the Seattle rent control thing, the California diaper free diaper giveaway, some of Spencer Pratt's initiatives that he's been doing that. So we'll do that at the bottom of the hour. But last thing from an international standpoint, Putin in good news says he thinks the Ukraine conflict is coming to an end. So Russia had victory day this weekend. That's their parade celebrating World War II. And during the press conference he said that he sees the Ukraine conflict winding down. So this seems like this is good news. There was a US led ceasefire over the weekend. There was some prisoner swaps. So directionally it seems like this is something that we would want to see more of. Right?
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Anytime that you can bring a conflict to close where people are losing their life is a very good thing. Now, I don't know enough about the specifics here to know if this is Putin capitulating, which is how I read it. As far as I know, they've been in a stalemate for a very long time. So I think this is Putin just taking an off ramp. Hey, great, I love it, whatever we can get. But I don't see this as the Ukraine has actually reclaimed their territory, which would be my fantasy to obviously a sovereign nation. If those people really want to be a part of Russia, let them vote to get that. So seeing Russia, whatever, four years ago, reinstigate this engine of, well, if. Whether we think we have a reason or not, because I totally buy into the provocation theory that NATO just kept walking up closer and closer and closer to his door. I totally buy that. But at the same time, still don't want to see a sovereign nation be invaded. So it would be wonderful to see the hostilities end. But it still will be distressing if he has been able to take part of Ukraine's territory. And I have not heard anything to the contrary. So this feels like, okay, this is a frozen conflict, rather than this just drag on forever. We're going to redraw borders. And so then is it a question of he's just going to go back, regroup, and then launch another offensive moving forward? I don't know. We'll see. I need to do a lot more research there, but this one doesn't just feel like unmitigated celebration. It is great if it ends the killing. I'm all for it. Yay, total support. But it is sad moving into the era that we're moving into where countries are once again invading their neighbors because they can.
Drew
And it is one of those things where ever since I think Kiev or Crimea was the last one, and since then it was just like, okay, there hasn't been any more advances, but those territories are still now under Russian control and it's been almost a year now at that point. So it is one of those things where do you just brush your heads off if you're Zelinsky and just call, like, call your losses and say, hey, you know, we have 80% of our territory still. Let's just double down on that 80 and give up this 20.
Tom Bilyeu
Or you have to do the calculus. Your country is, is frozen in time. First of all, like, even if you're not losing, like, if you've been able to reach a stalemate, even if you're not losing, you are unable to get your economy going again. There's a level of stress that's going to be playing out within your country. And, man, you start pushing that into as many years as there and now, that can set you back an entire generation. So they've really got to be careful. And I can't imagine how many working age young men they've lost to this. So not only do you lose a generation economically, but if you don't even have the people to start spinning that engine back up, that can have massive consequences. I mean, look at what happened to Europe. They go from being the dominant global power in the world after World War I and World War II. It's like they're level of subservience to the US and Russia became extraordinary because they just got absolutely obliterated. And so they sort of gave up in many ways or lost their ability to be a major player, certainly as individuals, just that ended as an aggregate. They remain economic or they have rebuilt to being economically powerful, though they are desperately trying to squander that now. But certainly Ukraine does not want to find themselves in that position. So he's got to be running the calculus. What does it look like to get out of this? How do we stop the loss of life? How do we translate our military knowledge? Because now Russia and Ukraine are the two most knowledgeable for modern warfare on the planet, which, whether they translate that into becoming weapons manufacturers or training other countries or leveraging the knowledge to get better deals, they've got something to their advantage if they can end the war, but if they can't, in the war, man, it just one. You always run the risk if somebody does punch through. And now you've got a bigger problem on your hands. So they've got to be feeling the weight of that. So, yes, it isn't that you just like, oh, it's no big deal. This would be massive. It would require a change of their constitution, I believe, for them to let go of the territory. But nonetheless, man, the way that war works is eventually you either have a total victory, where one side literally has just killed so many people, they are so dominant that they can tell you to do whatever the hell they want, or everybody gets so fatigued and they've lost so much that they're like, they're just not willing to keep fighting anymore. And it's very possible both sides have reached that point now.
Drew
Over 2500 killed, 12,000 plus injured, a 31 increase from 2024.
Tom Bilyeu
If I was Ukraine, 2500. There's no way it's that low in just.
Drew
In 2020. Well, this is 2025, according to AI, civilian deaths. Because I was just thinking, because I remember Trump was talking about how.
Tom Bilyeu
Wait, wait, wait for. Ukraine reached an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 by late 2025. So deaths are in the six figures for sure. Yeah, the, the numbers have to be pretty large, and I think the total death count is north of a million between Ukraine and Russia.
Drew
Yeah, that's just Ukraine. These were civilian deaths.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, got it, got it, got it. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say the, the, the combatant death rate is way higher than that.
Drew
So even if anything, saving 600,000 lives and not having 2,500 more people die, it seems like that will just be a good off ramp. I know we're up in arms over the Iran war and we lost 13 people. On paper, maybe that number's a little higher or not, but I can only imagine 500 to 600,000 casualties. That changes the attitude of a country very fast.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes. Especially if you've gotten now to a static war. It's one thing if they're still pushing in, they're still gaining territory. It feels existential. It's another where you've lived for four years with them holding the territory. You've kind of gotten used to it. So at some point it becomes easy or it's certainly not easy, but it becomes easy. Or to broker a deal. Yeah, we'll see. This. I really was surprised to hear that announcement. Just shows that Iran has been sucking all the oxygen out of the room in terms of what people are paying attention to. I still say that China is the only thing anybody really needs to be thinking about if you're in the U.S. but, you know, anytime that you can spare human life.
Drew
But going to the China of it all, do we really have any say with the Taiwan invasion? Because I feel like Iran has taught us we're not as untouchable militarily as we thought we were. So do we really want to play that game with China? I think China has a free lane to Taiwan. I don't know if we get in the way.
Tom Bilyeu
It's one of those that right now, today, that would be a really hard decision to make about how involved you get, because much of our modern way of life is still contingent on getting chips out of Taiwan. And so if China were to take it today and decide, hey, we now have it and we're going to choke you out, that's a very, very difficult position. We would be giving up a lot of leverage against China at a time where we're clearly trying to do things to increase our leverage. So that one is. I don't think it would be as simple as the US Just going, all right, listen, spheres of influence, Taiwan, go ahead and take it. We got it. We're not coming over. I think there would be a lot of posturing. I think that it would escalate, escalate, escalate. I think we would send a ton of military hardware if they don't move while we're still overextended in Iran, of course. So that one becomes, I think that there would be a pretty big standoff, but I don't think America doesn't have the appetite to see, like, boots on the ground in Taiwan. No way. And especially because we've already started deploying as fast as we can chip manufacturing here in the US I would be very surprised if we did anything more than exchange rocket fire, but I don't
Drew
know even that because our economies are so intertwined. There's so many suppliers that get their stuff from China. I feel like if China was me, like, oh, you guys want to get, like, you want to push back on this? Okay, supply chain off? And I feel like that would be enough from.
Tom Bilyeu
From a drone perspective, they could certainly do that. Do they have a strong enough chokehold on the rare earth minerals that we need to build our other stockpiles? It would be tough. I don't know. I don't know.
Drew
I'm even talking about consumer goods and, like, how we were kind of choked out in 2020.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. But keep in mind that right now, China doesn't buy their own goods. If America doesn't buy them, then they collapse economically. So there is, like, if you imagine us both holding the other person by the nuts, you're in the right image. Like, this is a standoff. It's not like China has all the leverage and we have none. It's like, you squeeze mine, I'm going to squeeze yours. So why don't we both chill the fuck out? So that's why it's like, it's going to be interesting to see where this goes, because China's made it very clear that by 2027 that they're going to reunify. And I think part of the reason that they've broadcast that is to let the US Know. Get yourself in a position where you're not incentivized to come in militarily, because this is going to happen. You know, that we're militarily dominant in the region. You guys are going to have a much harder time projecting power here than we will. So just be ready. Like, build your chip fabs on ground or work out a much better relationship with us. We have obviously not chosen to build a much better relationship with China, though. We'll see what comes out of the meeting. But that one feels like it would go economic long before it goes kinetic. I. I'm sure China is well aware, based on what's just happened in Iran, that the US has lost a lot of confidence in its ability to defend, you know, a locale that is not local to them. So I'm sure they will use that to their advantage. But as of right now, today, we couldn't just be like, okay, yeah, we'll see.
Drew
China's making a move. And China and Trump are, Xi and Trump are meeting this week, so we'll see if anything comes out of that meeting and what that would, what those ramifications will be.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, and I don't. You may be wanting to move on, but I'll say one quick button here. China's been making moves for a very long time. China has upgraded their policy to officially be dismissive and I quote, of the West. And so that is all for sure. However, right now, China is in a weaker position than they have been in for a while. Given that we've taken Venezuelan oil off the table, we've disrupted the Iranian oil. So given that they're trying to hold back their reserves and they're being very strategic, given that they're in a precarious position from that perspective right now, they're not going to want to launch a war that is going to be just oil and energy intensive right now. And so Washington knows they've got a bit of time. Also, China right now is not in their strongest economic situation. When they had their basically their equivalent of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis, it's like they're still dealing with that. So they're like, xi's been purging his military. They're not in a super ready position. Now, part of why he's purging the military might be to get ready to have a pure loyalist military in 2027. But they're not. Famous last words. But I can't fathom them making a move right now. For those reasons. I think he has to shore up stability in the military from a personnel perspective. They've got to make sure that their economy is back on solid footing, which is going to require them to have a good partnership with the US who's buying a massive portion of their goods. They'll try to offload that to a better relationship with Europe, a better relationship with Canada. They'll try to keep pushing their relationships in South America. But like, as all that gets reconfigured, like this isn't just an easy, yeah, go get them kind of thing.
Drew
Copy that. All right, let's jump over to local politics now. I'm gonna start in California. Like I said, we're gonna hit Seattle Rent control, we're gonna hit the California diaper policy. But right now, Spencer PAC has just had an attack ad launched against him and certain people are laughing because they say, yeah, this actually sounds great.
Tom Bilyeu
All right, before you hit play, I want to set the stage for this is frame of reference at work. So the, the person laughing, at least in this tweet, is end wokeness, very right leaning outlet. And for them this is like hysterical. Like what kind of moron would think that this is a good idea? This just makes Pratt look better. It makes Pratt look better to undecideds maybe and to Republicans. But left leaning policies are left leaning policies for a reason. And the people on the right who in the last election won by like a super slim margin have somehow convinced themselves that there's been a just a total title shift. And even the people on the left realize, oh, this was all crazy and you know, we should be doing more right leaning policies. That is not what's happening. And I am just really trying to get people to understand Mamdani was not a fluke. There is a lot of energy behind going more in that direction. We'll play the Pokimane clip later. There's real energy among people that have a left leaning temperament. Even when they're making money, they have no sense of like, oh, these things that I'm spouting get me killed first. As a reminder, both in Cuba and in Iran, the left leaning people that got them elected then got killed because they're like, you were super useful, but now we can't have that, like you guys want equality and all that. Like, that's not what's on offer. So just being very aware that the left is going in their own direction. People that that lean left, they're going in their own direction. The energy is very socialist in nature and I don't think people are being honest about that. So when they put forward this ad, if your instinct is to laugh and be like, ha ha ha, they're committing suicide, you're not understanding what's actually going on in the psychology of people that lean left. So with that, now watch this understanding. You may be on the side that thinks this is funny, but this is a good ad for people that think in a left leaning fashion. Republican Spencer Pratt is the last thing Los Angeles needs for mayor. Pratt opposes using taxpayer money to build brand new houses for our unhoused neighbors, saying it's time for the homeless to get help or get out. Pause. Pratt thinks la. So the left is taking a page out of a playbook that is both pure resentment and compassion. And the two get intermingled. And especially when they make their arguments, they can argue From a place of compassion. I don't know that everyone will agree with me, but Katie Porter to me is the embodiment of somebody who says compassionate things, but is clearly just a bitter, angry person. Everything about the way that she talks, her tone of voice, the way she holds herself, literally everything about her screams like, this is a person who inside is just angry. And so when I look at that they want to build free houses for homeless people as a one, two punch of like landlords. Like, these are people, like, housing is a right. You're going to hear more people say that. They may even say that here. But I, I've certainly heard that out of many left leaning politicians that housing is a right, which is absurd. That's insanity. But they're like, hey, everybody should have it. We're going to use taxpayer dollars to build it. Despite the fact that the government would be the world's worst people to build these houses. Look at what they've done with the rail and a whole host of other things. Like, they'll get bogged down in bureaucratic nightmares. They'll fund NGOs with the money. I mean, just, it becomes pure insanity. But they want that. So when they hear Pratt doesn't want to build houses for the homeless, they don't think, oh my God, thankfully, somebody's being fiscally responsible. They think he's an asshole. Like, what kind of tyrannical monster would side with the quote, unquote, landlords that want to charge you money for housing? Like, that's crazy. That's what they're going to hear.
Drew
Let's keep it going.
Tom Bilyeu
It needs thousands more police officers rather than more social workers and Republican speakers. Okay, pause. So same idea here.
Drew
Social workers, right?
Tom Bilyeu
Police officers are tyrants. Social workers are kind and loving. And we don't want to put more people in prison. Prison is, you know, just a brutal place that doesn't do any good for anybody. And so we've got to get these people back out on the street. We've got to show them compassion. Not realizing that, that the number of like, violent offenses come from a ridiculously small number of like just actual individual humans. That there are just some people that either through mental illness or whatever, have ended up in a place where for them violence is just an option. And so you're getting now more of these, like, there was a guy recently who refused to press charges on a guy and then like some matter of months later goes and kills somebody else. And now the guy's like, oh, fuck, like, maybe I should have pressed charges. And so it's one of those where if you are trying to respond to a violent outburst with the part of you that is devastated, as I am by the way, that somebody has ended up in this position either because they were. I mean, take drug and alcohol impacted at birth, right? I mean, just. You're setting somebody up for failure. If you're raised in a broken home, if you're abused, like, all of these things break the human psyche and they set you up to do horrific things down the road. And, like, that's rough, man. They did not do anything to deserve to be in that position. But nonetheless, like, when they roll up and the person is having a mental health crisis and they're putting other people in jeopardy, you have to physically restrain them. You can't show up and be like, listen, everything's gonna be okay. Like, that ship sailed a long time ago. And so that's where I'm like, I get it, I get it. It is. It really is a human tragedy. Dude, I've been way too close to this. When you see somebody who was broken in childhood for whatever reason, we were talking about IQ earlier. No one has earned their iq. Nobody. So maybe you got dealt a bad hand and because of that you were unable to defend yourself when you were young. And just every kid is vulnerable, and so you just get broken and now you're an adult. Anybody that doesn't meet that with, like, deep, deep empathy, which, again, a quote that sounds like it should be from the Bible, but probably isn't, there but for the grace of God go I. Right, dude. I think that way too often in my life. It's like, I really believe the importance of childhood is so extreme. Any of us could have been broken in childhood. And the ones of us that dodged it, just, like, we got lucky. And so I hear about somebody in emotional distress doing a very bad thing, and I'm like, that is so brutal. Because you can track it back oftentimes to head trauma, drug and alcohol abuse, genetic misfire, whatever. Like, there's so many things that they didn't do to earn that bad thing. But nonetheless, like, if you've got somebody that kills, like, you gotta lock them the up.
Drew
Yeah, the next one. This is public employees. Public employee unions should have less power.
Tom Bilyeu
Employee unions should have less power, not more. LA is on the right track and needs to stay the course. Vote no on Rep, Louisiana is on the right track. That. That is crazy. As somebody that's lived here now for like 32, 33 years, I assure you LA is on the wrong track as evidenced by increasing homeless populations, encampments everywhere, open drug addiction, like, like gnarly. The number of taxpayers that are fleeing bad. So we just have less money to deal with things. Now the thing in that, that I expect people to have a knee jerk reaction to is that the union should have more power. And I think they're going to find it weird. The thought of wait, why wouldn't we want workers to have more power? The reality is that unions have like almost no correlation with employee power in terms of being able to actually get your wages up. Globalism, like when you chart that, that that has decimated workers ability to increase pay over time. Unions had like something like a 2% correlation. It was very, very low. So getting people to understand what ends up playing out with unions is that they end up basically being able to hold people hostage, the politicians, because they can vote as a block. And so now they're saying we want to get these policies which as you can imagine will be good for them. There's also a lot of feedback loops where it's like, hey dear politician, if you help us get this money secured from an NGO or whatever then, or government grants or government contracts will then feed back into your campaign. So that gets very incestuous on both sides. So don't think anybody's clean here. But looking at that, what ends up happening is just like regulatory capture. The unions are not voting for the things that are going to be best for the consumer or for the business. They're voting things that are best for the union. And so when you look at education,
Drew
it's going to give the union more power.
Tom Bilyeu
Exactly. So we end up spending more per student than basically anywhere else on earth and we're middle of the pack in terms of results. So to me that is a catastrophe. And it shows you that throwing money at the problem, strengthening the union, neither of those things help. And so you want to put yourself in a position where people can be fired, that they're held accountable to results. But we just as a society, roughly 50% of people have completely abandoned that notion. And so we're constantly in this super precarious position where you've got a body that is able to get itself more and more power to help politicians get elected, they yield worse and worse results. And go back to that image. For me, I have a growing hypothesis that I fully understand is going to be very unpopular. But I have a growing hypothesis that unions, especially in education, that whole mentality of collectivism, we've got to get what's Quote, unquote fair. I need to see the image, though, and this is pure anecdote and I have no idea that this is going to end up being true. But if you had said, tom, I'm about to show you a picture of a union, do you expect to see more men or women? I would default say you're going to expect to see more women. And I really think that part of what makes women so powerful from an evolutionary perspective is this desire to caretake, to look after people, to make sure people are okay, to connect with humans, to think more about humans. That's super necessary. You need that. But it has to be in dynamic tension with personal responsibility, male, like ambition and aggression. Like, all of those things, they, they have to, like, hold each other accountable. And when they don't, things get out of balance. And so there's that woman, Helen something. Something Helen.
Drew
Helen Andrews, the division of society.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, if that's her name.
Drew
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
Talking a lot about this issue. And I think it's really potent. And she's like, things broke, quote, unquote, woke when women started making up the majority of that given role. And so this is one of those. I will beat to death the drum. Women are incredible. Lisa's one of the best business partners I've ever. I mean, literally, my wife is up there in the top echelon of. And I've worked with incredible people. Being a woman just, just has had no impact in terms of her ability to perform as an entrepreneur. It's incredible. So. And we have a host of females here at Impact Theory that are incredible at a host back at Quest. Incredible, incredible. However, without that dynamic tension, you end up in a problem. And so that's where I think we're going to see more and more of this. And women need to come to an understanding that, oh, this is how we go pathological, just as men have to understand how they go pathological. And right now we're not seeing it. They wrap it in this language of compassion. How could you ever push back? I can push back because it yields terrible results.
Drew
And I want to kind of ground us for a second because you started this at the beginning saying that this is a slant. So we're depending on what the. What part of the partisan side they're leaning towards. So right now we're talking about the La Mayor race, but I'm saying right now this is going to be in Ohio, this is going to be in Florida, this is going to be in Texas. So. So while we're breaking down this specific entity, I Think the same guidelines that you're pushing should be applied to wherever our viewers are listening from and whatever political ads they're gonna see in their YouTube TV shows. That's gonna be coming increasingly frequent over the next couple months. So this is the groundwork that you're setting out. But this is also kind of a cause and effect breakdown, if you will give me that generosity of how to approach these ads when they're saying these claims and when they're saying certain things.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, that's all true. The reason that I wanted to talk about this specifically is that I think in California they think that people on the right think that, oh my God, Spencer Pratt's got this on lock. Like his ads are incredible and I am admittedly optimistic and I certainly as of right now, he's the only candidate that I would ever consider putting any energy behind. However, I think it is a mistake to think that there is a huge swath of independence that are swayable. I think we're were a one party state for a reason. We have been a one party state for a very long time and there's actually a name for this, but I forget it was based on a Boston politician who basically ran, ran the city more or less into the ground to get people to leave that didn't want to be a part of his policies. And I think that California does the same thing by being so anti business, by doing things that are, are so left leaning. People on the right like myself go, okay, am I really going to try to get people over the hump in terms of looking at cause and effect or do I just go, I got to get the fuck out of here? And so more and more people leave, making the state more and more one party. And that is the thing I really want to call attention to. It's like no one, no one should want a one party state, a one party country. Like that's how you really get yourself in trouble. And I see people increasingly calling for that. So yeah, that would be.
Drew
I feel like you put something up on the sheet too. People be like, vote with their feet, like yes.
Tom Bilyeu
And it creates good and bad things. So you can go somewhere where the policies that you want to see enacted then get enacted and you get to run that experiment. But it's bad in that you end up getting instead of these like really mixed places where it's all about persuading the persuadable, doing something that works for the vast majority of the people, regardless of whether they're left leaning or right leaning, that that to Me is way better. Because remember, I'm coming at this from an evolutionary perspective where what I'm saying is evolution had to get us to be able to cooperate in these really large groups, like massive tens of millions of people, hundreds of millions when you go the country level, to be able to cooperate together. And the solution that it came up with is basically the left right divide, as we call it, male female divide, which breaks similarly ish along the left right divide and religion so that we can have this meta value system that can be communicated very rapidly. So I'm saying we need those two things. You will function at your best. So I look at Florida and I'm like, well, you guys are just gonna. If you keep going and you get more and more right, then you're gonna start having a pathological problem on that side. As California gets more and more left, you're gonna start being pathological on that side. And so it's like moments of populism are problematic. Like populism is in and of itself a pathological state of being.
Drew
All right, let's keep it going with the different policy initiatives. We have Prayer Jayapal, she's a congressman running in Washington. This is her tweet. Seattle as one of the worst housing crises in the country. I see it every time I'm home in my district. People working full time jobs who can't afford rent, teachers, nurses and transit workers who can't live in the city. They serve families on housing assistance waiting lists that have been frozen for years. This is a policy failure, not an inevitability. We built this crisis by choosing developers over people. We can choose differently. Housing is a human right. We fight for it like no one. He talked about the housing is a human right thing. And then in response to that, Caleb Hammer, let's go to the wide real quick. G. He retweeted it and then actually I literally just closed that tab out. You're killing me right now on the live, guys. You're killing me. Caleb Hammer retweeted and showed some of the Texas's policies that literally show that we have overcome this just by increasing the supply of housing. So it's one of those things where we kind of hear of a problem. I think every political ad starts to say, here is this ominous problem. Here is this bad guy politician who's caused it, or this billionaire who calls it or this bad person X. And then here I am. That's going to make everything better. That's the typical setup for the beginning of a political ad. So when it Comes to housing. I know you did a whole deep dive of it, but what are people missing? That. That rent control isn't the thing. What, what's the part that. What's causing this disconnect?
Tom Bilyeu
Well, on rent control itself. The reason that that policy is never going to work is because you are trying to take something that the free market is incredibly good at, which is incentivizing people to build new things, to set the price based on what people can actually afford, and to dynamically adjust when anything gets out of balance based purely on human selfishness. Right. So the landlord's trying to make as much money as possible, the builder's trying to make as much money as possible, but they're up against the realities of the people that are willing to pay. When there's a shortage of housing, you are putting the landlord in the position of power and you're de. Powering. You're making it harder for the people that are trying to buy or rent. You're making it much harder for them. Where. If you create a situation where builders can take all the risk of building something because they may overbuild and they may put. Put themselves in a situation where they lose all their money, but if they don't build, then they don't have a job. So these guys are trying to walk that line. When you leverage that, when you have the ability to tap into the selfishness of humans trying to do something awesome with their lives, trying to be ambitious and build something cool, and they will realize very quickly, if I build something better than my competitors, I'm more likely to get people into my house. So the most selfish thing they can do aligns with the selfish desires of the person trying to rent or buy. And now you're in a great position because selfish desires are aligned. When the government tries to be a nanny state, do it from the top down, they end up breaking it because. And this is the part, no matter how many times I say this, people just. It doesn't click. And I don't know what else to say. The reason this all breaks down is because you, dear viewer, you, your mom, your dad, your friends, none of you will work for free. And because you won't work for free, a house, a building, an apartment complex, those are all businesses. And you're expecting somebody to do the upkeep, but the person that you want to do the upkeep, they have to pay somebody to come in and fix the thing, but that person won't work for free. And the person making the PVC pipe, that the plumber is going to go buy at the store. They won't work for free, and the person at the store won't work for free. And so what we say is, there's no universe in which a government employee really think about government employees for a second. There's no universe in which the government employee is going to be able to price everything to take into consideration how rapidly all of those prices are moving. Because who knows? Something happens like right now in Iran with oil, oil affects the price of plastic. PVC is made from plastic. So now a plumber's job is being impacted by the cost of the PVC for them to do the job. All of that stuff. There's no way for a politician to know. So when they say that apartment can only cost this much, then the landlord goes, whoa, I don't want to own this building. Then the builder goes, I don't want to build any buildings. A, there's so much red tape, and B, even if I get this built, who's going to buy it because I'm trying to sell it to people that want to be landlords who know that they can make money, but the landlords can't make money because the politicians are convinced that they know how to set prices. It is absurd in the extreme, but people, because they're not looking at cause and effect, don't understand why things can't be free. And the reason things can't be free is no one will work, work for free. So we are all the collective problem. The second we're willing to work for free and just, yeah, of course I'll go do that thing. And by the way, not only work for free, but work on what the government official tells us to work on for free. So now you might be doing a job where you don't enjoy that thing. Tough shit. You've got to go do it for free because we've got to offer the free housing, and that's what the free housing is going to require. And it's like screaming into the void to get people to understand this is mappable. You can know why we have to set this over to the free market. We can know why a policy will have a negative impact, why it makes the amount of available housing go down the more you try to control rents. Like, this is all knowable, it's easy to explain, and yet people just keep banging their heads against this absolutely asinine policy of trying to make this stuff free.
Drew
Yeah, I finally got those graphics up which prove exactly your point. So if you see on the left before rent control, this with the amount of permits, building permits by a quarter. Once rent control was instituted, the amount of housing supply dropped down less.
Tom Bilyeu
People dramatically, dramatically drops.
Drew
We go to Austin in 2022, at the height of the pandemic, they kind of opened up their housing market. Anybody could build wherever, whenever, and as you can see since then, it kind of dropped down kind of.
Tom Bilyeu
If you're not looking, at least it is a cliff. Now, I don't know if some of that is projected or if that's all real, but that is a cliff, man. So basically, if you leave it to the free, they will see, oh, there's constrained supply. Because people flooded into Austin during COVID that constrained supply prices skyrocketed. Selfish builders, remember, you want them to be selfish, then aligned their selfish desires with the selfish desires of the people trying to rent and buy and said, we're going to make a bunch more because I as the builder think I'm going to get wealthy. And then that's going to be great for you because that's going to drive the cost down. And lo and behold, it actually does drive the cost down because all of those builders making their individual decisions, not doing it up at the level of the government where they're never going to have the level of visibility that they need. They just get to be entrepreneurial and they get to try something and say, I think I can do this better, I can build something. I'm reading the market right and we get to harness that energy and it brings cost down. It is. Look, I get it. If you're not entrepreneurial minded and you're stuck at a job and you watch somebody who is become a landlord and they build all this incredible housing and it's selling like hotcakes and you're looking at that and you're getting angry because they're pulling away from you. I get why you get frustrated. But if you then go to the government and you say these assholes like, you've got to curb that. It's gross what they're charging. Guess who ends up stepping in to help write those laws. It's going to be somebody that's advantaged by those laws. It may or may not be the landlords themselves, but it's going to be somebody. It's going to be. We were just talking about them. It's going to be a. What are they called? No, when they come together, a union or something, it's going to be a politician. They're going to be getting something from someone somewhere that is advantaged by this. And it may just be the homeowners. The homeowners are like, hey, we're going to vote. They come together as a block and they're like, we want to make sure that you can't build more houses. This is what's called NIMBYism. Not in my backyard. Hard. So now I've got my house, I don't care if the next generation behind me can't get theirs. I want the value of my house to go up, up, up, up, up. And so you end up putting yourself in a position that is completely against your own best incentives. So, yeah, it becomes wild when you divorce yourself from cause and effect.
Drew
We have Martin in the chat that said, why would a builder ever build low income housing when they could change, when they could charge much more for the higher end? I think the point here is everybody wants to build the higher end housing, but when there's so much more housing, the competition drives the rent prices down just naturally.
Tom Bilyeu
Well, no, they're wrong about that. So this is somebody that has not spent any time being an entrepreneur. So in high end housing, you're taking a much bigger risk on every house. So part of the reason that you do low end housing is it's much easier to get in and get out. So you can do something that is your extending far less capital to build that house. And so if you're like, I want to do a volume play, let's say that you really believe one also, you might have something where they grew up in a position where they didn't have wealth and so they want to create something beautiful for people. And then you have the lack of capital outlay. So if you're like, I know how to go into these houses, I can turn them fast. I can make something that looks, looks beautiful for the neighborhood. And it just makes me feel good about the people that I'm contributing to. That's how you end up there. But there are going to be more people that are building middle class and building lower income. So, yes, for the most part, people will follow the money, but there is a risk and reward ladder that you go up. So that's again, this is why you want it to be handled by the free market. Everybody pursuing their own best interests ends up coming out in the wash, being more broadly spread out than when the government says, no, no, no, you're going to focus on this thing.
Drew
All right, and our next policy I want to go through. Gavin Newsom tweeted it, so I'm gonna start with his tweet first, rather than start with the allegations, but here are the facts. It's a $6.2 million contract. It covers 40 million diapers in year one.
Tom Bilyeu
So this is the free diaper thing.
Drew
Free diaper program. And it's about 15.5 cents per diaper, not 50 cents is claimed. And the Baby2Baby, which is the NGO that is going to head off of it, it's a nonprofit organization that through. That was chosen through a rigorous competitive procurement process. It's a national nonprofit based in California with strong experience in delivering diapers for families in need. And in the last 15 years, they have distributed over 300 million diapers to families in need across the country. So I'm going to take Gavin for his word and just let all the spin go.
Tom Bilyeu
Yep.
Drew
Looking at this program, the promise is 400 free diapers for all newborns in California. $6.2 million contract. This is something that I heard you say in the past. You know, if you want. If government wants to do anything, they can do anything they want. They just have to balance the budget and get to it.
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. I'll say that ever so slightly differently, which is if people want the government to do something like this, then the people should vote for it. And as long as the government is balanced or budget, I despise there being a sense of that we work for the government. Okay. The government is a servant, quite literally to the people, just as a psa. Yeah, but yes.
Drew
And then. So then this was kind of the. The lay of the land, how we're laying it out. There's something to Steve Hilton, who's running for governor of California, and his whole pitch is, why don't we just do it direct to the consumer themselves? So again, he's using the old figures at that, $0.50 per diaper, but this is his pitch.
Tom Bilyeu
So Gavin Newsom is taking $20 million of your money to send 100,000 babies, 400 diapers. That works out at 50 cents per diaper. We just came into Target to check out what you could buy it for in the store. Here you go. Just check this one out here. 162, $26. That works out at 16 cents per diaper. Gavin Newsom's diapers are three times more expensive. This isn't even Costco. Why is it three times more expensive for Gavin to send diapers to 100,000
Drew
babies than just leaving the money in
Tom Bilyeu
the bank accounts of the parents in the first place? Because he's going to some total bullshit nonprofit which the cronies of his are
Drew
going to make money.
Tom Bilyeu
And that is what is wrong with California. Instead of just cutting taxes so you can afford diapers and sending it out in this ridiculous bureaucratic scheme.
Drew
So there's kind of a running kind of speculation that although on paper this seems like a good idea, this is what's wrong with government. It's a way to funnel money to different avenues, revenue, stuff like that. I wanted to lay both of those out there in front of you. So again, the people who are at home when they get their political ads, they can kind of at least try to see through the minutia of what's being like told to them. So kind of lay out the pros and cons of those two scenarios. Wouldn't it just been easier to cut taxes and give single working mother or new newborn parents more money in their pocket so they can buy as much diapers as they want? Or is it the government stepping in and if it's as long as it's affordable in a balanced budget, that's the way they should do it. It give us kind of the pros and cons of both arguments.
Tom Bilyeu
So right now the reality is that people break into one of two camps. You either think people are too stupid to make their own decisions and therefore you want the government to do it for them, or you think the people are responsible, can think through their own problems and therefore you want to put the power in their hands. So whether it's diapers or school vouchers, anybody that says nope, you don't get to decide for yourself because we don't trust parents to think through this problem. Well, that is a nanny state person and they are an enemy of the state as far as I'm concerned. So we have to get on board with the reality that the government is a servant to the people and that if we decide as the people that we want to help expectant mothers, then great. Or mothers with small kids, I love it. I think that making sure that parents have tax incentives, making sure that parents are able to make their own decisions, I fully support all of that. That so putting the money in their hands in terms of a tax break win, putting the money in their hands in terms of a coupon that they can spend, it's a win that also allows the private market to go and compete for that by making a better product or a cheaper product that people can then make the decision as to whether or not that's how they want to spend. Like if they just want to get an unending amount of diapers because they Go through them faster than the government thinks they should, whatever. Put them in control. And that, to me is where all of this breaks. You either think people are too stupid to make their own decisions and the government needs to make it for them, or you're like, hold on, I want to be able to think for myself. People need to be able to think for themselves. And therefore, if we're going to balance the budget and then distribute things like this, fantastic. Let people make the decision for themselves. But that is the breaking line. It doesn't need to be. Whether we do it or not do it. It is a much more interesting question to say, how do we do it? First, from where I'm sitting, it can only be downstream of an already balanced budget. No new taxes for you. We're already being taxed to an absurd rate in California. And then let the people decide, put it in their hands.
Drew
Yes, push if you think that one.
Tom Bilyeu
If I didn't, because I didn't give you the pros and cons of both sides. So if you want me, by all means, push, criticize. I'm here for it. This is an argument that needs to be had.
Drew
We wanted to help the declining birth rates. Isn't this kind of something on the like, we're trying side? Like, this seems something to me that I was surprised how much pushback it was. Give it if the number really is 6 million, if it's 50 million, just like the rail thing and it blows up, I'll take everything back and I'll eat my crow. But on paper, $6 million.16 a diaper, it seems like the right incentive for people to have a baby, you know. Oh, thank you, California. Give me 400 diapers. Thank you. Think like, I think that there's at least something there that is at least directionally correct.
Tom Bilyeu
I, I really hope that I'll distill my argument down. I really hope that you're going to be like, I'm totally on your page. So anything that is pro family, I love. So if we're doing something to help people with kids as, as like a high level 30, 000 foot, I don't know what you want to do, but I just. Am I generally interested? I'm generally interested.
Drew
Okay.
Tom Bilyeu
Now as we drill down, I'm saying, oh, cool, we want to do a program for diapers. You don't need any extra tax money? No, we don't need any extra tax money. Okay. Rad. I'm liking this already. How do you want to do it? The government is going to distribute Funds to an ngo. And the NGO is going to do it. Fuck you. Hard pass. Absolutely not. The government is going to do it via tax break. Love it. Great. Government is going to send out digital coupons, ideally so that we don't lose some of the funds to just the paper of it all. Great. Love it. Yeah, Wonderful, man. If you don't need new tax dollars and you're putting the power in the hands of the parents to make the decision of like, what brand they're going to get and what they want to do and where they're going to shop and all. Yeah, I think it's great.
Drew
It's the NGO Managed Administrative.
Tom Bilyeu
They will bleed the money dry. It will end up. Look, NGOs have the world's worst reputation. I didn't realize this until whatever eight months, ten months ago. So I get if people still think of NGOs as like this beautiful. Oh my God, these non profits are really helping. It isn't how it works. This is a part of the overproduction of elites that need somewhere to go and they end up just milking these NGOs for all they're worth, using them as political statements and not necessarily, not necessarily not working for the people. Your default assumption about an NGO should not be, oh, they're doing something beautiful for humanity. Your default assumption about an ngo, it won't always be right, but your default assumption about an NGO is this is a political apparatus that is trying to basically fund the apparatus itself to make sure that the problem continues to exist so that they still have a job versus like, hey, let's have this be the lightest burden from an administrative position as humanly possible. Little to no bureaucracy, either tax break or coupon, whatever, distributed directly to the parents and then let them make the decision. I fucking love that, that. But when you're putting it into an ngo, you are saying, I want this money to bleed out. That's wild. Let me be very clear. I am. I'm not interested in getting the diapers so that there can be come in a diaper industrial complex that like feeds NGOs. This is not about creating jobs. This is about helping parents. And if you're here to help parents and you're here to try to make sure that more people have kids, which is beautiful and wonderful and I love it and I want to see more of that. And I did not do my part to have children and so I want to do my part to help make it easier for other people to have kids. So I love this. However, it has to Be direct, Get it direct to the people. Like otherwise you're, you're going to lose some percentage of the money to bureaucracy. And that is a non starter for me.
Drew
So your thing is like if they would have done a tax break on your. So every year on your tax return you can fund, you can take off up to $1,000 on in diaper fees.
Tom Bilyeu
You want to get crazy?
Drew
Yeah.
Tom Bilyeu
You have kids, don't pay tax for the first 18 years. Period.
Drew
No NGOs.
Tom Bilyeu
No NGOs. And a lot of babies.
Drew
A lot.
Tom Bilyeu
I'm going to run out and have a kid. Baby. We got to get you on that, that IVF stat, so. Yeah. Yeah.
Drew
Okay. Okay. Somebody's in, in the chat. Like they should have did diaper stamps. And then you could just get like food stamps. Diaper stamps.
Tom Bilyeu
It's better than sending it to an ngo.
Drew
Where's my rim shot? Pdut pals. I tried. Guys, there it is. G. Got me. All right, moving on. We have to talk. So all of these policies are bubbling up to this same kind of ecosystem. I wanted to save this conversation till the end. After we talk the policy level, because you said it a couple of times, it's hovering between empathy and envy, I would say, or jealousy and compassion, resentment and compassion. People in the chat were even talking like, Tom is thinking that we're just jealous but we can't afford rent. Or Tom is thinking that we're just mad when I can't afford to pay my grocery bill. Stuff like that. So.
Tom Bilyeu
Well, why we should have talked about it. I love it when people heckle. We can certainly go into it. So I'll say something fast on that because I know you're going somewhere else else. But the fast statement on that is I understand why you're mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore. What I really want people to understand though, if you're making the decision emotionally, ask what the emotional, the emotion is. If the emotion is anger. That's exactly what I'm saying. People are coming from a place of anger. They want to see somebody else punished. And if you're coming from that perspective, the odds that you pick a winning strategy are virtually zero. Now, if you're not one of the people that's doing this from a place of resentment, that's amazing. I'm not, not saying there's never a time where everybody thinks the same way. However, if your argument is that people with left leaning policies that in that mix, not that it's each and every one of them but if you're saying that the left, when pathological does not go resentful, then you are completely blind to history. So it is a bet that I'm willing to make absolutely blindly that people banging pots and pans for left leaning policies. You're going to find a lot of resentment in there, I guarantee it. And you don't have to go very far to see the language. A CEO was shot and killed and people were celebrating that. So it's. There's so much evidence on my side. So again, I'm not saying you individually, you are the person that is leading with resentment. But I'm saying in the. The right word is milieu, but that's way too fancy. So in that group of people and the ideas that they put forward, it is clearly going to have a massive amount of resentment, period.
Drew
There it is. So now we're going to this Pokimane clip for transparency. This is about a year old but it just got resurfaced with this new wave of socialist policies and things like that. So we'll. I'm just acknowledging that this is. Does say 2025. Do you think someday we'll have a revolution like that in America? Right.
Tom Bilyeu
It's getting there.
Drew
Right? We already have one. Another one. What's going on? The wealth disparity is getting bad. The wage game. I hate that. No, wealth disparity. Wage gap is like between men and women. Men and women. We love each other and we hate the rich. Anyways.
Tom Bilyeu
Posit, aren't you too rich?
Drew
No. Aren't you rich rich like the ultra rich, the ultra giga rich. The unnecessary.
Tom Bilyeu
Clarify.
Drew
They're gonna clip that and it's gonna make.
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, they're going to clip it because people are estimating her net worth at like north of 6. Some people have it all the way to 20 million. So you've got a multi, multi millionaire basically saying the rich are bad. But I'm not rich. This is exactly how I feel seeing this. When I see Bernie go from millionaires and billionaires are a problem and now he only talks about billionaires. Why? Because he's a multi millionaire billionaire. So it's like this is all very silly, but it's queuing off of something very real. And I worry that what ends up happening is we spend all of our time on the part that is silly and we ignore the part that's extraordinarily real, which is that right now you have a K shaped economy by design. It's very knowable what's causing the K shaped economy we keep doing the thing that's causing the K shaped economy and we wonder why people are getting so frustrated, why it's so hard for them to make ends meet. And we really could be doing things to reverse that. We're not. They're going to accelerate. And because the conversation is populist and emotional, you'll first of all get dumbass statements like this where somebody who's wealthy is saying that we hate the wealthy. I was just stupid. And we will fail to help the people that actually need to be helpful.
Drew
Helped. Yeah. It seems that this is both. Some people are looking at it cyclically and saying, you know, every couple years this happens. I know you bring up the French Revolution example a lot.
Tom Bilyeu
True. It is. If they mean every couple of years, they're. I'm not sure what they're queuing off. It just isn't true. You. You can look at our economy. It is a massive K. So. And it wasn't a massive K. It began in like 2000 basically as we started money printing, although people don't often refer to that, but that really is for me, when the virus escaped the lab and we started doing ma. I don't know if they were calling it QE back then, but same idea, just massive money printing, buying assets. And then obviously 2008, it just goes ballistic.
Drew
I was gonna say a 2000. 2008 to 2020. And then that kind of gets us to the present now.
Tom Bilyeu
And then just $2 trillion a year in deficits every year and growing.
Drew
And with it now looking like. I know you talked about this early with Thomas Massey, with it now looking like Trump is increasing the deficit. It was 1.7 it 2. If that. If all of his official policies that he wants to roll out, the increased military budget, increase ICE spending, stuff like that goes. Excuse me, goes through. It seems like the deficit is only going to be growing versus shrinking. So.
Tom Bilyeu
Correct.
Drew
Where. How do we get up? Because it seems like a wave is hitting us on this side and a shark is chasing us on that side. And it's like I don't even know where to go anymore in this ocean.
Tom Bilyeu
Okay. So to keep it tied to the Pokimane thing. So first of all, we really got to break out of the emotional. This is all a class conversation. And if you're in one class you're good. If you're in the other class, you're bad. That. That just isn't true. So there is a noble reason why the people who got rich got rich en masse. Of course there are going to be exceptions. But that noble reason is right now you're living through economic times where if you buy assets, your asset prices are going to go up steadily over time. And so that if you're not buying assets, you're going to get steadily poorer over time because the government, via banking regulations and a refusal to balance the budget, is running a strategy of rob from everybody and give to asset owners. And so if you do that long enough, asset owners just become the wealthy. And so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Plus people end up getting so good at at doing that transfer that it accelerates. And so we think that regulatory things are good. And the reality is they just keep feeding the K shaped economy because they make it harder to displace the people that are already there. The government just gets bigger and bigger. It consumes more taxes partly because of all those regulations. And that then means that you're going to have to deficit spend more, which then fuels the K shaped economy. So you have this like no escape from the K shaped economy because the people that are most being abused by the K shape, the very thing that they reach for is the thing that makes the problem worse. Okay, so this is quite literally somebody adrift at sea. They're dying of thirst and the only solution they have is to scoop out cupfuls of seawater and drink it. But because the sea water contains salt, they're going to die that much faster. That is the current position of people in the working and middle class. The very things that they're calling for are going to speed up the decline, not slow it, and certainly not reverse it.
Drew
Man. This is from Swan Marcus. His this is the retweet in conjunction with the Pokimane clip. I think what pisses me off most about the clip of Pokiman saying rich people like her, okay, but the altruists are bad, is that there is absolutely no universe where Pokimane deserves her money more than Jeff Bezos deserves his. This is incredibly obvious. The reason I brought this up is this goes back to AOC saying like billionaires haven't earned their money. And there was just a bunch of retweets for like, well, how did Taylor Swift get her money and how did LeBron get his money and all these other things like that. So there is this sort of this person is a good rich person, this person is a bad rich person. And that line seems to be arbitrary a lot of the time.
Tom Bilyeu
For me, this guy's statement is just as dumbass as it coming from the other side. What does he mean that she deserves her money more than Jeff be Bezos. People have said that she provides enough value to me when she's live streaming that I want to support her. Brands have said, hey, we want to be associated with her because it helps us move more units. So I guess this guy values Jeff Bezos's infrastructure and the company that he built more. And fair enough, everybody's going to feel differently. But the people buying the product said, this is exactly how much we want to support her. And she made that money. Now she's Jeff Bezos makes more while he sneezes than pokimane is worth. Full stop. So the market has already said, we agree that Jeff Bezos has certainly brought more value. But saying that she doesn't deserve the money that she has is just dumb. She did not steal her money. As far as I know, there's no fraud. This is everybody just going, yeah, this is exactly how much we value it. It. This guy might be traumatized that people value that kind of entertainment as much as they do, but it's like, mate,
Drew
the market decided I want to jump to AI next. But there's one more question I want to get out here. So Pedro Priest said, how is a balanced budget going to bring home prices down and stop investors from buying most of a new home project to rent them?
Tom Bilyeu
Well, he's conflating two different things. So you have to balance the budget to stop the inflation problem. So inflation is going to keep making houses more and more expensive in that way, in that the value of your dollar is going down. So I hope that answers that question. But when I'm talking about housing, I'm typically talking about you want them to be able to make more housing so that there's more supply in the market. The cost is going to be a function of supply, demand and inflation. And so if we can solve at least the supply and demand problem as we have seen in the areas like Austin, like I think it is not Dallas. What's the other one?
Drew
Houston.
Tom Bilyeu
Houston. They've done a phenomenal job of leveraging supply to drive the cost down. So that's typically what I'm talking about there. But they do both matter. But yeah, when I'm talking about balancing the budget, that's just a blanket that's going to impact the cost of literally everything.
Drew
Then there was one more. The problem is Tom's solution to this problem no longer works. The average person in America will fall further behind no matter how hard the they work.
Tom Bilyeu
What does he think? My solution? The balancing the budget always works always and forever. It is the only solution. So I don't understand what he thinks won't work.
Drew
I think, yes, he's saying he doesn't think that politicians would balance the budget.
Tom Bilyeu
Well, that's a very different question. And so politicians will do whatever we vote for. And if we continue to act like people in a populist moment and we say, I'm on a team, I just need my team to win, therefore I'm going to vote for whoever slaps the other guy around and whoever gets me more free stuff, then yes, we're doomed in that we will just keep going down that path. Unless something miraculous happens, like we get a Margaret Thatcher who comes in and is like, oh no, we are doing austerity and. Or AI grows our way out of this. Those are your two options right now.
Drew
Gotcha. You all right? This is from polymarket. A new analysis reveals that female dominated corporate roles are more vulnerable to AI automation than male roles. I don't necessarily understand what they mean by this, but I'll let you give us the breakdown of it.
Tom Bilyeu
Let's go into it. This is becoming rapidly one of the most fascinating areas to think about. Women are bearing the first wave of AI job losses and I for one think a regulatory war war is going to be the result. 86% of Americans, most AI vulnerable workers are women. Three new reports just confirmed the pattern. The January 2026 study from the Brookings Institute and the center for the governance of AI identified 6.1 million US workers who face the highest AI exposure and the lowest ability to find new work. 80, 96% are women. Clerical jobs, admin jobs, office support roles overwhelmingly held by women. Now to be clear, it's not that these are the only roles held by women which many people are going to spin this as. AI is just going after women. So you can completely ignore anybody who uses this data to say, ah, listen, women don't do useful work. They're just going to get replaced so easily by the economy. That's bullshit. That is not what this data shows. Women obviously do incredibly valuable work in the economy, but the roles that are most exposed to AI happen to be the roles that as a category are dominated by women. So women tend to be abnormally attracted to the things that AI is going to be able to do very quickly. On March 5, the International Labor Organization confirmed, by the way, that this pattern is is global. Female dominated occupations are nearly twice as likely to be exposed to generative AI as male dominated ones. So it's 29 versus 16%. At the highest automation risk, the gap widens to 16% versus 3% across 88% of the countries that the ILO studied. Job categories dominated by women face more exposure than categories dominated by men.
Drew
Men.
Tom Bilyeu
Then on April 28, the National Partnership for Women and Families made this all even harder to ignore. Women make up 47% of the US workforce. They make up 83% of workers in the 15 most AI vulnerable jobs. Given that policies in the west right now are largely driven by the female approach to compassion, however misguided, and a sense of fairness over effectiveness, here's what I think is going to happen next. When a technology produces this kind of statistically obvious outcome that is disparate between the sexes, US regulators are going to lean on a 60 year old playbook doing things like Title 7 EEOC enforcement state AGs that obviously are looking to push this agenda. Class action firms are going to jump in on this. So you're going to get disparate impact lawsuits where by the way, you don't even have to prove intent. They just require proving that the pattern exists. And the pattern is already very well documented. So I think that we can expect a regulatory battle to begin to unfold. I don't think anybody's going to be confused that I think letting this play out in regulatory is a terrible idea. This is going to be regulatory capture in the extreme. We will try to do something that is top down to hold on to making sure that women continue to make up roughly 50% of the workforce as AI comes in. But that just doesn't make any sense. You want to make sure that the most qualified person is the one that's getting employed. And if for whatever reason AI overlaps with the things that women have a tendency towards, you can't change that. That doesn't make any sense and start saying, okay, we're just going to make sure that women can keep having those roles. You've got to say, hey, women that want to be in the workforce, here are the things that aren't being disrupted by AI. Go after them if you care about being in the workforce.
Drew
It seems like we're dunking on women a lot today. Is it?
Tom Bilyeu
Here's the thing. I tried to be very clear in that, that this is not about women like being able to add to the workforce. All we're saying is the jobs that AI overlaps with tend to be the jobs that women are drawn towards. I am very sorry for all of us that AI is disrupting so much of the world. Disruption is, is thrilling. Because there will be a world on the other side of this that will be better. But it's always very difficult to live through the disruption. We've seen it time and time again. So what I'm saying is you don't go and handicap AI because you will lose to the countries, namely China, that don't handicap AI. And what we should be doing is saying, women, look, these are the things that the world is going to value on the other side of this. So don't be a lamplighter, don't be a knocker upper. Like go and be somebody who's doing the thing that the modern economy is going to want. Make that obvious to people. Give them that opportunity to adjust what they're going to pursue. Because you will weaken the country, you'll make things more expensive. It just ends up being a nightmare on a whole host of dimensions if you try to say, no matter what, we're going to make sure that women can have whatever job they want and they're going to be protected. It that doesn't make sense. They should have equal opportunity to qualify for the jobs that the world says AI is not ready for this 100%. But you don't just go, oh yeah, they want those jobs, so we're going to make sure that they can have those jobs. It would be just as absurd if you flip the script and say, oh, this is like, everyone was like, oh my God, this is going to take over trucking. Trucking is largely male, therefore we've got to defend the men and make sure that they have these jobs. No, like if it takes over trucking, it takes over trucking. The world is saying this is a better technology. We don't want to live in the past, we want to live in the future. And so yeah, it's going to disrupt a generation of men who. That's what they have optimized their lives for. It just is what it is, man. Like, trying to stop the tide of technology to me is absurd. Like it's never worked in the past, it is not going to work in the future. And if this one happens to be impacting women, I can see that people are going to make that argument that you're making that this is somehow like targeted at women. That just isn't true. And if we end up having the debate at that level, as if this is something that is specifically being used to hurt women somehow, or the one that I worry about, which is that people are going to be like, haha, I told you women aren't adding value to the workforce, which is patently absurd. And so both of those are false. And the thing that we need to be looking at is this is where the job market is going. And let's make sure that women can compete meaningfully for those jobs, that there's no hurdles for them just because they are a woman. They either can do the job or they can't. But if they can't do the job or don't want to do the job, there's no holding jobs for them just because they want them. That's absurd. That's that top down bullshit that creates all the madness that we're seeing.
Drew
It's interesting though, because I know that, that in this grand future we're going to have ubi, right? Pipe dream, pipe dream, pipe dream. But in the near term though, that
Tom Bilyeu
won't solve problems just for.
Drew
Yeah, and I don't believe it either. In the near term though, it seems that we're breaking left and right already. Maybe there's better term. There's a majority of Americans who feel like they can't get on the property ladder, who feel like the economy is leaving them behind, who feel like in order to benefit they have to go more to the left in their policies, more socialism, more communism. And that's going be to make the world fairer and better for me. We thought that we were going to have to kind of quell that uprising before we had to worry about the AI revolution. It seems like these two things are now happening at the same time where AI isn't disrupting enough jobs, that everybody's massive homeless and we haven't done this big review. I haven't touched the second one if you want that one. But on the flip side though, it seems that we're still like people are already at the stage one of this AI revolution and we're already breaking communist and socialism. What happens when we get to stage seven of that revolution? You know what I mean?
Tom Bilyeu
So I think that we would have been fine if we weren't dealing with the K shaped economy. But yeah, having these two things happening at the same time is wildly exacerbating the problem. So that's going to shorten our timelines to figure out a solution here. Which is bad because we're getting how much of this is PR around? Like, hey, we made all these cuts because of AI, but in reality some percentage of that is just we over hired or the economy's turned or whatever. But some of it is certainly AI productivity. I don't think there's any doubt about that. So it'll be interesting to see if we feel the economic uplift from. And, and when I say that, I do not mean that stocks are becoming more valuable. That is not going to help solve the problem drop. It's got to be felt in wages, more jobs, higher paying jobs. Like that is the only way that this, that we're going to get out of this. Because. And it sounds like you and I both agree that ubi, even if there's a lot of it isn't going to help. And what ends up happening is we're up against a psychological problem. We're not actually up against people starving to death. People act like we're up against people starving to death. We are not. And so what we are up against is people see other people have more than them. And that is a psychological problem that humans are not good at getting past. And UBI won't stop that.
Drew
Well said. And then last story. This is very interesting, right? Because we're seeing all these robots and the dexterity increase and people moving around and stuff like that. So now you kind of said it. I forgot the Jetsons house.
Tom Bilyeu
Rosie.
Drew
Rosie. So this will be, you know, Rosie in 2026.
Tom Bilyeu
This is so crazy, man. I was like, drew, you and I are really about to get that bot for the show.
Drew
I'm right here. I'm waiting for it.
Tom Bilyeu
This is gonna be wild. Now I need to get to the point where I'm convinced that's not going to attack us. I've seen far too many unitry clips where the bot is having a stroke, flailing arms everywhere. So, yeah, I still think that we, we may have more to go, but I love that it threw the Frisbee at them like a dog. It's like fetch.
Drew
Yeah. And I also don't understand why it has clothes on. Am I being weird about that? Like, does it need the apron?
Tom Bilyeu
It probably doesn't need the apron, but it lets you know, don't worry, you don't have to be afraid of this. This is a house helper. They're for you. Yay. So, yeah, they're trying to send out all the signals that they can. It's subservient. It's not going to take over.
Drew
And then on the other side of that, we have our first robot fight club, which was just. It was a pain to watch. Like, this isn't what I want.
Tom Bilyeu
This told me, I'm like, oh, we still got some time, boys. We're good. We got a few months still before the bots are really going to Be able to take us out. But there were some kicks that it threw that I was like, oh, snap. Like, that's a good kick. Like, it maintains balance.
Drew
Yeah. If it does connect, if it can pay attention and can attack in the
Tom Bilyeu
right straight line, man, I'm telling you, you've got. What do you have here? Two years until these bots are just beating the life out of each other.
Drew
Yeah, yeah. BattleBots. That's cool.
Tom Bilyeu
That's wild, man. I don't know this is really going to be a thing because battlebots already exist, right? They're just not in the humanoid form. And so seeing them now come in actual humanoid form and seeing everybody form the, like, little circle around them as they fight, there just really is something to us. We want to see this kind of thing now. I don't think this just like Magnus Carlson can be demolished in chess by his phone. We still want to see him compete against other humans. I don't think human fighting goes anywhere, but robot leagues really will become a thing. It's pretty interesting. And then obviously, warfare becomes far more terrifying when these guys are, like, roaming
Drew
the battlefield on the front line.
Tom Bilyeu
Yikes.
Drew
Wild. All right, that's all we got. Shout out to Kalshee. If you guys want to make your own trades, use code IMPACT to get $10 off.
Tom Bilyeu
And if you just want to learn about where the world is, it is an extraordinary place to understand sentiment. All right, guys, thank you so much for being here, as always, and we will see you on Wednesday. Take care. 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. And that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop 8 ounces of water and you're done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six, seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts. With your first subscription, you get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus K2, and flavor samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.comimpact to claim this offer.
Episode Title: Can You Survive the Next Industrial Revolution? AI, Iran, & the Chaos of 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Date: May 11, 2026
Co-Host: Drew
Episode Focus:
Tom Bilyeu unpacks the disruptive forces shaping 2026—from the impact of AI on jobs, to volatile global geopolitics in Iran and Ukraine, and crucial policy debates affecting American life, including the 2026 midterms. The conversation challenges conventional thinking on personal responsibility, economic inequality, and technological change, empowering listeners to thrive in a rapidly changing world.
“If you had said, not only do you not know how to break into the industry, but the industry might not exist, or it won’t exist in the way that you think of it now... That’s a level of unnerving where you just go, have I just wasted the last, you know, however many 15, 16 years of my life?”
“Do not be the person that is whining and crying about how the world is changing. Just win. The rules of the game are what the rules of the game are... Just acquire skills like a fiend and outperform all the old people who have gotten so calcified in their thinking.”
“Pray not for a lighter load, but pray for stronger shoulders. Or is that just something that came later? It’s so dope, I wish it were in the Bible because this—FOR SURE—is the thing that, if you want your life to go well, pray not for a lighter load. Instead, pray for stronger shoulders.” —Tom Bilyeu [09:41]
“It is very easy for Iran to keep running an asymmetric warfare game. So just fucking things up in the Strait of Hormuz enough...”
“If what we have been told is real... that material is buried like, deep. You don’t run in with a couple shovels, dig it out in 25 minutes, jump back on your planes and take off... That one just seems silly to me.” —Tom Bilyeu [25:41]
“Gerrymandering is a terrible idea... It does not matter if it briefly advantages you. It will be used against you on a long enough timeline.”
“Right now, you have a K-shaped economy by design... Asset owners just become the wealthy. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.” —Tom Bilyeu [94:23]
“People, because they’re not looking at cause and effect, don’t understand why things can’t be free. And the reason things can’t be free is no one will work for free... So we are all the collective problem.”
“Your default assumption about an NGO... is this is a political apparatus that is trying to fund the apparatus itself to make sure that the problem continues to exist so that they still have a job...” [86:01]
“It’s not that these are the only roles held by women which many people are going to spin this as. AI is just going after women. So you can completely ignore anybody who uses this data to say, ah, listen, women don’t do useful work. They’re just going to get replaced so easily... That is not what this data shows.”
“Trying to stop the tide of technology to me is absurd. Like, it’s never worked in the past, it is not going to work in the future. And if this one happens to be impacting women, I can see that people are going to make that argument that you’re making that this is somehow like targeted at women. That just isn’t true.” —Tom Bilyeu [105:18]
Robot Housekeepers & BattleBots: Rapid advances bring science fiction into reality, but physical robot combat and service bots are still in early, sometimes comical, stages.
“I was like, Drew, you and I are really about to get that bot for the show. This is gonna be wild.” —Tom Bilyeu [110:02]
Warfare: Automation raises new ethical and strategic questions for battlegrounds of the future.
“Your life is going to be a reflection of your choices. … Just win. The rules of the game are what the rules of the game are.” —Tom Bilyeu
“The government is a servant, quite literally to the people, just as a psa.”
“We’ve really got to find a way to think about what the outcomes of the policies are instead of just like, is this my team? Yes. Cool, I want it. Is it my team? No. Then I don’t want it.”
| Section | Timestamp Range | |----------------------------------------------|----------------| | AI Disruption & Grad Commencement Response | 00:11 – 11:25 | | Iran–U.S. Crisis & Global Ramifications | 14:52 – 27:57 | | Midterm Redistricting & Gerrymandering | 32:22 – 37:03 | | Ukraine Conflict & Russian Announcement | 39:45 – 46:04 | | Housing, Rent Control, and Policy Mechanisms | 66:02 – 77:21 | | California Diaper Program Policy | 79:08 – 88:41 | | Populism, Resentment, and Wealth Debates | 92:59 – 99:41 | | Gender & AI Job Automation | 100:34 – 107:18| | Robot Helpers and BattleBots | 109:43 – 112:09|
This episode delivers a sweeping and bracing survey of the major disruptions shaping the late 2020s, centered around the AI-driven economic revolution, global power realignment, populist politics, and policy fights at every level. Tom Bilyeu’s core message: the only way through chaos is by embracing personal agency, relentless skill acquisition, and unsentimental reality-checking on both policy and technology. Listeners are challenged to out-adapt, out-learn, and out-compete—because history, technology, and human psychology all conspire against the status quo.
For further exploration and timestamps, see above.