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Kevin Rose
The Big Beautiful Bill Gets Approved in the Senate Elon promises to primary fiscal conservatives who voted for the big beautiful bill. RFK claims the CDC buried a study linking hepatitis B vaccine to an 1100% increase in autism. Trump calls Candace Owens to ask for a favor and wait till you hear what it was. Meta builds an all star superintelligence team pushing AI forward. UPenn strips trans swimmer of all medals and vows to conform to the Trump mandate. And Bob Villain gets himself in trouble at the Glastonbury Music Festival for some wild chanting.
Drew
After a 27 hour vote O Rama, the Senate narrowly passed the Big beautiful bill with J.D. vance doing the tie breaking vote.
Kevin Rose
There it is.
Drew
We have some of the details of the bill. For example, state and local tax deductions have been increased to 40,000 for the first five years. No tax on tips or overtime. No tax on car loan interest. But there's been a lot of spending criticism that elon Musk hates. For example the $5 trillion hike to the debt limit. 150 billion in new defense spending. 25 billion in Golden Dome missile defense 45 billion in ICE and illegal immigration detention. 4 billion to hire new border agents. What say you about the Big Beautiful bill and the impending rise to the deficit?
Kevin Rose
Yeah, so I mean, listen, this is there's really two points that we need to look at this through. One, if Trump really believed that he was going to grow his way out of this and it wasn't going to be a problem, you would not need to increase the deficit by $5 trillion. Like if you felt like you had to buy yourself a little bit of time because it's coming up real quick. I get it, you're hedging bets because you don't know. And honestly, that's wise. You have to you hope that we'll be able to grow our way out of this and trust me, that really needs to be part of the plan. But man, this is just more spending. This is. It does not matter if you are on the left and the right. The reality of the physics of money mandate that given the system that we have, this is going to happen literally forever. And so I'm with Elon in this one. This, this is crazy. And people got into office by saying whatever they needed to say. Such, such is the way of man as political animal. Read the book the Machiavellians by James Burnham. It's really distressing once you realize that people will say whatever they need to to get elected and get reelected. In fact, pull up the trial, you already have it up. So here is Donald J. Trump saying, for all cost cutting Republicans, of which I am one, remember, in all caps, you still have to get reelected. Don't go too crazy. We'll make it all up times 10 with growth more than ever before. No one will ever have seen anything like it. True, man, I wanna believe it, but here's the reality. People say whatever they need to to get in the office and then they do whatever they need to to stay in office and get reelected. And we are in a fiscal death spiral because people cannot help themselves but promise things for free. And so yeah, if I'm Elon and I was sleeping in the hallways doing everything that I could to get rid of waste, fraud and abuse and people were lighting my businesses on fire and. And then the guy that asked me to do it ends up raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. I'm going to feel some kind of way about it for sure now. I mean, look, you, you play a political game, you win political prizes. And I think he thought that with the money that he was splashing around that he was going to get things his way. Fuck around and find out, Drew.
Drew
He found out. And Elon had a clapback. If this insane spending bill passes, which it did pass the Senate, the America Party will be formed the next day. Our country needs an alternative to the Democrat Republican Unit Party so that the people actually have a voice. He also tweeted this picture of Pinocchio saying, anyone who campaigned on the promise of reducing spending, but continues to vote on the biggest debt ceiling increase in history will see their face on this poster in the Primary next year. It, this is me and s political animal. I get it. But I know a lot of one issue voters, you were one of them.
Kevin Rose
I'm a two issue voter. Just for the record. Always, always remind people of that.
Drew
Your one priority, your number one priority was reducing the deficit. And this bill does not do that. Is this a betrayal in your, in your mind?
Kevin Rose
It's not a betrayal because I don't trust politicians, to tell you the truth. I trust them like vehemently to say whatever they need to say in order to get into office. So I was faced with two horrible choices. You make the best of the choices, the one who I found least offensive of my options. And then, I mean, we'll see. Like, I still am optimistic that he is less problematic for the economy. But the reality is if we can't break the money printing debt spell, then you will be in revolution in certainly the next 10 years, maybe sooner. But you just look at the math. In the last 500 years, only 2% of countries have avoided ending up in revolution or civil war if their debt to GDP ratio exceeded 130%. We're at 122%. So it is, it's absurd. We are driving towards bankruptcy. People seem to think that it can't happen here. It can and will happen here at this rate. It is a mathematical certainty. So unless something changes. This reminds me of the horror of dying by taking too much Tylenol. So if you overdose on Tylenol, there's no way to save you. Your liver is going to die within 72 hours and then you're dead. And so it's like once you do it, people then regret it because they realize it doesn't kill them in real time. So they have 72 hours to sit with the poor life choices that they have made and they are going to die. And so we are going to go bankrupt. And this is like Elon screaming about AI. Nobody listened to him. And so AI just went marching forward. He's screaming about the debt for the right reason. No one's going to listen to him. They're just going to keep marching forward. And the more deep dives that I write, the more times I'm confronted with, oh, no one ever pulls out of this. And no one that I've seen has yet asked me, well, who's in the 2%? And the answer breaks my heart so much because we will never be able to do what they've done. And I and that's Japan. And Japan, if you remember in the World cup was the group of people that cleaned the stadium before they left after their matches. You're. You're not going to get Americans to behave like that. So right now, barring growth, we will tear ourselves apart from the inside in some sort of probably civil war. Feels more like where we're headed within the next 10 years because of the math.
Drew
Yeah. So there's two things on the table right now. Trump's proposal is that growth is going to save us. We'll be able to grow our way out. I don't know if that's AI. I don't know if that's robots. Fingers crossed. And then Elon with, we need a third political party that can maybe circumvent the Democrat, Republican.
Kevin Rose
I think that's probably going to make it worse.
Drew
Oh, man. So either way, you're like 50% on growth and less than 50% that we're going to be able to third party our way out of this as well.
Kevin Rose
Okay. I haven't looked at third parties enough, but my gut instinct is, if you have the third party, what you end up with are all these weird coalitions and you end up with governments that really aren't popular because it's only when they group up together that they're able to get a majority. But now you're really fractured. And so instead of. And this, again, I'm shooting from the hip here, but instead of two parties that have to find their way more to the middle to. Obviously, we're not doing that right now, but historically, you would have to find your way to the middle to build a coalition because there were only two teams. And so one of you had to get a really substantive amount of the vote. Now, it's pretty rare that you get more than 50% of the vote, but anyway, you have to get a very substantive amount of the vote. You water that down when you have two parties, because then they can build a very uneasy coalition, get the majority and then fall apart and turn into bickering and you just end up getting even less done.
Drew
Is there any hope for us to do take a book out of Japan? I mean, we might not.
Kevin Rose
No, Japan is definitely not the answer. You do not want to end up like Japan. That is stagnation. Stagflation, as they call it. You don't want to be there. I think Japan is about to decline even more rapidly. That. That is not the answer. What is the answer? And Ray Dalio has been screaming this from the rooftops, is you have. You must get out from under your debt. You must, you must. Hey, you must get out from under the debt. There is a way to do it. It's called a beautiful deleveraging. He maps out how to do it. I've mapped out in detail one of my deep dives. We've got another one coming on Monday where it happens to get another shout out. But will people do it? No, almost certainly not, because what ends up happening is inequality makes people mad. People don't understand what causes the inequality. They think that it's billionaires mopping up the money and that's what's leaving them poor, which it has literally nothing to do with that. And what ends up happening is once people are voting emotionally, they vote for the person that will turn on the money. Printers promise them something for free, and they don't realize that when you have inequality and that's making you vote for somebody who's promising you free stuff, that is the very thing that will accelerate your demise.
Candace Owens
So.
Kevin Rose
So if you're already middle class pushing towards lower class, that will speed up the rate at which you exit the middle class and into the lower class because of the physics of how money printing works. But people don't understand that, so they keep voting for it. They vote for the very thing that's holding them back. And so what ends up happening again 98% of the time in the last 500 years is we go to war with each other because we're just so angry. And so the left hates the right, the right hates the left. Everybody gets on a team because you have to, because people start throwing punches. I mean, we literally have political assassinations happening. And I don't just mean Trump. I mean, two people in Minnesota, two Democrats, I believe, were gunned down immediately after an unpopular vote. I don't know that that's what it was, Drew, but, whoo. Pretty coincidental if it's not so. You're living in an era of political assassinations. People are very angry, and they have a right to be angry because the inequality is intolerable. But the very thing that they're voting for that they think somehow is going to take them out of it is the thing that accelerates the inequality. It is maddening. It's one of those where I'm like, I always want to know the truth. So I'm not really sad that I'm looking at this, but the more I look at this, the more I'm just like, yikes, this is a black, black pill.
Drew
All right, I got to get the alpha for my. My investor bros out there. We know that they're going to spend more if you did 5 trillion. Hypothetically speaking, let's say we increase the debt 2 1/2 trillion, 3 trillion, whatever. Like that. Is there a way we can benefit from that? Because I know that the world is falling among us, but if I could just make my portfolio go up a couple percent, that might be able to just.
Kevin Rose
So here's the really bad news. You are 100% correct. The only people that survive are the people that buy assets. This is why there are more billionaires made. This is why it drives me absolutely crazy when people are like, should billionaires even ex. Hey, guess what? It would be so much harder to become a billionaire if you did one thing. Stop printing money. If you stop printing money, you stop inflation. If you stop inflation, it becomes very hard for asset prices to go up enough that people become that kind of absurdly wealthy. But again, people don't understand the physics of money. They don't realize that you have to be in assets right now. If, if you go into assets right now and listen, I never want people to mistake the specifics of what I say. I will give you an answer because I hate it when people dodge questions. I'll tell you the answer, but it's not investment advice. People need to think through this stuff for themselves. They need to make sure. You don't want to bet your life savings that I have accurately mapped cause and effect. Let me take that risk with my own life savings. But if you know you need to be not only in assets, but ideally in low risk assets that are inflation resistant. So the lowest risk inflation resistant asset over extended periods of time is gold for sure. If you have a higher risk appetite, Bitcoin. So I've got a little bit of gold. I've got a lot of bitcoin. And then I'm just general in the stock market. So I still believe in the US Stock market. We are the home of innovation. Some of the stats on the US that really just make you want to weep because we are so far ahead of everybody else and we are just ripping ourselves to shreds. We have more billion dollar companies, 600 unicorn companies.
Drew
Wow.
Kevin Rose
Than all other countries combined. You can literally add. And the thing that people need to understand is a billion dollar company is a stand in. Not exclusively, but a lot a stand in for innovation. They solved the problem in the market that people said, ooh, you created a machine that outputs something that's more valuable than the inputs. It is extraordinarily hard to do. And no one on planet Earth does that. Like America. And so seeing us erode our own system from the inside is insanely distressing because we really do have the right culture to to grow our way out of this. But over time, we've just been putting so many barnacles on the turtle, and the turtle is starting to sink. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Get that MX gold cart ready. I'm way too tired to cook tonight.
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Kevin Rose
Yes.
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Kevin Rose
Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
Drew
Well, we have to investigate it. We have to do the science, we have to do the work. And that's what RFK wants to do as well.
Kevin Rose
Okay. Is with hepatitis B.
Drew
He has seen a link that caused a spike in autism rates that he says the CDC has buried. Evidence that corroborates that. This is from his Tucker Carlson interview
Thomas Verstraeten
you would do if you wanted to find the answer, which is to compare outcomes in a fully vaccinated group to health outcomes in an unvaccinated group. And CDC did that study in 1999. They brought in a team of scientists under a Belgian researcher named Thomas Verstrad and they looked at the data. They looked at children who had received the hepatitis vaccine within their first 30 days of life and compare those children to children who had received the vaccine later or not at all. And they found an 11,135% elevated risk of autism among the vaccinated children.
Kevin Rose
Drew, if I could snap my fingers and get the world obsessed with one thing, it would be to get them obsessed with don't worry about being right. Just find the right answer. And I get there's money on the line and all of that. But when you obsessively focus on what's really true, you can maybe in this moment you hurt one of your revenue streams. But if you're really just like what's true, how do we do something better? You open up revenue streams ahead of you. I remember at Quest we made a decision that cost us Drew. It cost a lot of money. I mean in valuation it would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. And it was just like you found a company on a set of principles and you say the very reason that we are successful is because of these principles that we are looking at what is metabolically real. If you're a drug company and you're not founded on a principle of like what's real, what actually helps, you're going to flame out. And it's this really weird thing that's lodged very deeply in the human psyche of optimized for. Right. And this is part of the reason that founder led companies will do so much better than companies where they have a team that just comes and takes over and is in the revenue extraction phase. Instead of like the build and create and overcome all the obstacles, it just becomes a very different thing because you're not married to those principles anymore. But if like moments like this, what I find interesting about RFK and we'll see, man, maybe he's a lunatic. He did not come across that way to me when I researched him. He did not come across that way to me when I was sitting across from him. I know that people feel some kind of way about him, but he, he really feels like somebody. He's right when he says that if you want to know what is true, you would compare the vaccinated group to an unvaccinated group and just see what the data says. Even if he's a lunatic, that statement is true. And so if we as a nation could become obsessed with. We just want to map cause and effect. We want to understand. We do this, we get this outcome. People just, they can't, they have such a hard time reconciling it. Careers are caught up in it. The whole idea that science doesn't advance one insight at a time, it advances one funeral at a time because people build their career and I said this thing, it's just super dangerous as in terms of it leading to good outcomes for you and your life. So as a psa, I will remind people that you can choose what you build your self esteem around. If you build your self esteem around. Everything I've said historically has been right. And I will Fight to the death over that. You're going to top out. You've put a glass ceiling on yourself. Because the odds of that is true are effectively zero. Newton, arguably the smartest person who ever lived, was just wrong about physics. And so had he lived long enough to see Einstein say, hey, by the way, you were wrong. If he had doubled down, defended that, like, what a tragedy to have that kind of mind stuck on ego. But it happens all the time.
Drew
Is this just strictly ego? Because there's something about us curing the symptoms versus the actual disease. There's larger conversations about the pharmaceutical companies influencing media and advertising and things like that.
Kevin Rose
It's ego tied up in legacy, tied up in I want to be right. Which I think humans have a really, like, just deeply ingrained desire to be right. Being right has a huge dopamine loop to it. And money, money is powerful. And money isn't what people think it is, but it's probably more powerful than they think it is.
Drew
What do you mean by that? You can just drop that.
Kevin Rose
Money is the great facilitator. Everything you've ever wanted to do in your life, you either can or can't do because you either can or can't afford it. And so getting wealthy, you realize there are two things that are just astonishing. One, you don't stress about money. It is amazing. And number two, anything you want to do, obviously that you can afford. But, man, when you start getting wealthy, you can afford some really crazy stuff and you just start going, whoa, I can build whatever I want to build. Like, this is amazing. This facilitates every dream I've ever had. I want to make a video game.
Drew
Okay?
Kevin Rose
I can afford to make a video game. I don't have to even sit there and click clack for seven years. I can hire people that come and do the click clacking for me. You can get the greatest artists in the world to come and design things for you. Absolutely incredible. So you have to want something, though. You have to know what you're going to be pointed at. But when you have people at a company like this and their ego is tied up in, I got to protect my career. I want to just feel right. I've really extended myself. And this is another part of the ego trap is to cut through the noise, to get the attention, to get the promotion. You've got to be loud. You've got to intoxicate people with certainty. You've got to put your reputation on the line. You've got to bet against a consensus and be right. You've got to get people going. Oh man, that guy really knows what he's talking about. The problem is when you build your reputation like that, the bold claims, like moving in that gap like a race car driver and being like, no, this is true, you're in a very fragile position because the second somebody can come and pick apart your reputation, then people won't follow you anymore. And so it really, it's super effective to be that bold person if you're right often enough and you can hide your mistakes. But ultimately it's a very fragile position because other people are watching how you move and they will take you out. So my method has always been to say, listen, I'm going to lead based on one thing, what I call the physics of progress. I'm going to be wrong a lot and I'm just going to constantly look for what's cause and effect now because cause and effect stacks and you're able to do crazy stuff over time because you realize how things connect. You can do a lot, but you have to, you have to find a way to build your ego because you need an ego, but you have to build it around identifying the right answer instead of being right. You have to be able to sit while people are laughing at you and they might be laughing at you for extended periods of time because you're wrong a lot as you iterate, iterate, iterate. But if you can sit in that discomfort and keep stacking the cause and effect, then on a long enough timeline, you can beat almost anyone at almost anything.
Drew
Nice. That was a mic drop right there. Candace Owens, she is infamous for her claims and for her interesting journalistic.
Kevin Rose
I talk about making bold statements and
Drew
then somebody from the White House asks her to do something for her in claims of all her in lieu of all her claims. Let's hear it straight from Candace Stones to say what her mystery phone call was about.
Candace Owens
And I get another message that's like, hey, keep your phone on. And anyways, this phone call is coming from Florida. Pick up the phone and lo and behold, you know, so here's what happened. I, I, I'm negotiating this thing. I'm negotiating Ukraine and Russia and you wouldn't believe how many, how many parts are part. It is President Donald J. Trump. He is calling me. And in true President Trump fashion, he jumps right into the narrative. We're not hey, how you do. He just like jumps right into the narrative of exactly how this went down. I am L I, it is hard to catch my breath to comprehend that four days ago I'm ending a series about Brigitte Macron. And for. And now I'm speaking to the President. And the topic of conversation, no matter which way you want to slice it, it's about Macron's wife's penis. I mean, there's no other way to say it, right? Anyways, I have Macron. I like Macron. We're speaking at the White House, and I'm walking him to his car, and, you know, he says to me, Mr. President, can I speak to you for a second? I say, of course. You can speak to me about anything. What's going on? Macron wants to have a little sidebar. And then Macron says to him, Mr. President, do you know Candace Owens? And I say, yes, yes, of course I know Candace Owens. What's going on? And then continues his narrative. He tells me that Emmanuel Macron is requesting to his face that I stop speaking about his wife. And one of the things Trump said is, like, you. You know, he tells me, you know, she's old and this is really, really impacting her.
Kevin Rose
What timeline are we on, Drew? What timeline are we on? Like, I want to dismiss this and be just like, this is crazy. I don't think she's lying. Which means that the President of the United States, at the behest of the leader of France, a. Trump, please tell
Drew
her to stop talking about Z penis. I need to.
Kevin Rose
Of my wife.
Drew
What are we doing? What's happening right now? This doesn't even seem real.
Kevin Rose
This really doesn't seem real. Like, this one is crazy for a second because you guys won't see it in the final edit. But we had originally pulled up a different clip where she was just saying that someone from the White House called. And I, for a second was like, wait, I did see a clip where she said it was Trump. I was like, is this the Mandela effect? Like, is my brain inserting? No, no, she really did. Yeah. I don't. I don't know what to make of this. This feels super strange. We are living in a very weird moment in terms of the fact that people can transition. There is a fascinating algorithm buried in the human brain that makes us just uncomfortably obsessed with other people's sex lives. And it really is interesting. That is the bad news. It's super engaging. And if. If there was a breaking conference news conference where he was going to say that his wife was really all that, Candace, I would watch. So there. There is for sure something that's just embedded, but that Trump would reach out. That is crazy. That's also just another thing on this, the power of independent media, the fact that she's got a big enough audience with what she's talking about that it's on his radar. So, whoo, that's crazy. And then just to make it extra spicy, the fact that she would pressure her husband, the president of France, to tell the president of the United States to sweat a podcaster about talking about this is hilariously human.
Drew
And that's where it comes down to, because from his perspective, the president of France, I can kind of see that conversation happening in, like, the car. And he's like, he doesn't want to do it. He does it. He probably disagrees 100%, but, you know, wife, happy, wife, happy life. Hey, between me and you, can you just. You know what I mean? So.
Kevin Rose
Oh, it's more. I'm sure she's in tears, she's traumatized. He feels like an asshole. He's like, fuck, I'm the president and I can't even get, like, one podcaster to, like, knock this shit off. Like, what if I just held up the Ukraine negotiate, just. Just a little drew so that I could get my wife what she wants and put a smile on her face. This is how power messes with people, for sure. Like it.
Drew
Zelensky's in a cave, bullets are flying by his head, and McCrone's like, Hold on one second, we got to get. We have Candace on the line. We're so close to getting this done.
Kevin Rose
Oh, my God, this is crazy. Again, Alleged. Alleged. This is all like, second and third hand and all that, but goodness gracious, it's a little too fitting with what I know about humans. It's a little too fitting with what I know about humans. This is crazy Town taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned.
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Kevin Rose
Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it, man.
Drew
Well, on one side, we have political willing and dealing. On the other side, we just have regular willing and dealing. Because Meta got their super team, Zuckerberg was out here like a sports gm, just signing people from Other teams. He has a dream team that he's calling the Super Intelligence team at Meta. Now, Alexander Wang, the former CEO of Scale AI, which was I'm assuming absorbed into Meta because it said that Meta invested in it, but we haven't gotten all the details of that deal yet. But we have a list of engineers, most of them coming from OpenAI, Deepseek, Anthropic, Gemini, Meta pretty much just pluck talent from all these other industries. Does it put pressure on Meta to really deliver something? Because if you're passing out $100 million signing bonuses, you can't come out with another LLM. It seems like you have to do something leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
Kevin Rose
No doubt. Yeah, people will be sweating them to get results from this, but I think everybody that's in the investing community, if they're engaged in entrepreneurship at all, understand that this is really a move that he had to make. If you're Zuckerberg, you do not want to lose the AI race as that could be so important to so many things that you're doing. He's making it open source to try to get people invest in his ecosystem and if he loses that because his AI just is not up to snuff, that's not going to be a good look. Especially given that right now the things that he's doing over on the Meta side that they named the whole company after.
Drew
Yeah, Metaverse didn't necessarily.
Kevin Rose
Yet, man. Listen, I still believe that that is a thousand percent the future. Like when even just the thing that we're building here. I can see where this is all going. Dude, I'm telling you. Were you in the conversation where we were talking about the old folks and like. Yeah, you were. And imagine that instead of being a vegetable 98 in your old folks homes, like you can't. You're in pains, you can't get up and go anywhere. Instead, you're effectively jacked into the Matrix. Ready? Player one style. So you can take the headset off whenever you want and it'll be super lightweight. It's not going to be like what you see today. And you can be exploring Mars, traveling the solar system, traveling the us going anywhere in the world you want, going to artificial lands that people have made. And already right now, in 2025, you can do incredible things inside of a game in terms of exploration, dopamine, loops, feeling like you're engaged in a story. It's unbelievable. Today it is only going to get better for sure. So on a long enough timeline, I think he's going to have victory. But man, when you're running a public company, you don't get to think in those kind of epochs publicly it might be able to do it like privately when you're talking to the team and what you're aiming at. But boy, if you're not putting some wins up on the board, you're going to be in real trouble. So I think that this could be, I'm not going to go so far as to say existential, but companies come and go, man, and it is back in the 1960s, if you made it onto the S&P 500, you were likely to stay there for I think 63 years. It's now 16 and dropping. So just because you're a big company does not mean you're going to stay that way. So AI is the race right now?
Drew
Yeah. It reminds me like the Dodgers, they signed Ohtani to a billion dollar deal and everybody's like, oh man, how's he doing that? But he sold $600 million in jerseys the first year ticket sales increase, sold out. They won the super, the World Series.
Kevin Rose
Oh, Zuckerberg got clowned on for buying Instagram for whatever. A billion, $2 billion. Who's laughing now? Good lord. The number of billions that they make on that annually is crazy.
Drew
So but with this team that he assembled, assuming everybody got $100 million plus compensation packages, this is a $2 billion team. Roughly. What do you think the scales of return do they like, is the ecosystem that big that they see this becoming $100 billion trillion dollars in returns?
Kevin Rose
Over for sure.
Drew
Wow.
Kevin Rose
I mean, you want to talk annually, it's billions and billions and billions. So investing 2 billion, it's nothing. Especially given the amount of capital that Meta kicks off. Yeah. This is not some, this is not an egregious investment the way it would be for a smaller company. This is serious and he's certainly got his ey wide open. But if you think a couple bill like no for them and that's, that's not like some huge earth shattering thing for them, it just seems so insane because we're all looking at like a hundred million dollar signing bonus. That's crazy. But it just lets you know that dear young people out there, learn about the future of technology. Learn about the future of technology. There is nothing that says that that will be a bad investment. So yet again be the truth of the following statement. If you can make someone else money, you will always have money yourself. So you've just got to find a way to make yourself valuable. In a valuable value chain to use value way too many times in a single idea there. But yeah, get to it. Study the things that matter.
Drew
One thing that stands out for that a lot of this team is foreign born citizens. People who've come kind of matriculated, but they did a lot of their studies overseas. Is there.
Kevin Rose
Wait, are they foreign or. They did their studying overseas.
Drew
They did their studying overseas, but they're nationalized citizens from these other countries, from India, China, and I want to say Taiwan is the third one. I can fact check that. Bro, bro, bro, bro.
Kevin Rose
Like, in fact, I'm going to say this directly to you as a PSA as to somebody that's about to have a 14 year old daughter.
Drew
Oh, man.
Kevin Rose
Drew, please, for the love of God, discipline, study. She's got to be hardcore. Do not let her get sucked into all of this like grind. Culture is toxic, dude. You were in a world where you've got China, one point whatever billion, India one point whatever billion. Like the world is full of people whose parents are standing over them saying, if you want to make it in this world, if you want to eat, you are going to have to be able to kill something. And America has just been way too comfortable for way too long and we have truly lost sight of how intense some people out there are. The world is full of a bunch of Kobe Bryants and they are going to play in your game, whatever your game is. There's going to be a lot of Changs and patels coming for your neck, man. And if you're not ready for that, you're going to be in real trouble. And here, shout out to all my Changs and Patels like, I am here for it. I want more people getting their kids hyped up. More people getting their kids focused on. It is fun to compete. It is fun to play, to win. It is fun to see how far you can push your own talents. And listen as a person who is not the greatest at anything, it's still rad to strive for it. To see like, how good can I get at something, even if it is only relative to myself, to see that I can push my skills. 10x50x100x is awesome. But if we tell everybody that working is for chumps, it's just somebody else trying to take advantage of you. Yeah, yeah. Getting $100 million signing bonus. I'm really going to cry for them that Zuckerberg is going to expect them to work on a Sunday. Boo hoo. Like, get to work. Do something that matters. Do something awesome. And we are losing that energy as a country. Man, it is sad.
Drew
Yeah. Well, in a recent reversal, UPENN has backtracked on its open equality for sports. They are now defaulting to Title 9 resolution. So what does that mean? UPENN will restore female athletes at all individual UPenn Division 1 swimming records, titles or similar recognitions which were misappropriated by male athletes. Their now adopting the biology based definitions for the words male and female pursuant to Title 9 and to Trump's executive orders. Both they're defending women from gender, ideology, extremism and keeping men out of women's sports. They're also going to be sending personalized letters of apology to each impacted female swimmer. Leah Thomas was one of the famous swimmers that went to UPENN that won a bunch of rewards. She competed against Riley Gaines, but they both tied for fifth. So it wasn't like she beat out Riley Gaines or anything like this. But this seems like the first domino to drop in a federal college saying, okay, we'll bow the knee to Trump's EOs. Do you think this is going to become a multiplication factor where other universities are going to get on board?
Kevin Rose
Yes, but this is going to break along party lines. And so just like we see cities, New York, Louisiana, saying, no, we're going to fight all the ICE stuff, you're going to see very similar things. So people that are getting donations from people that are conservative, they are going to say, we're going to adhere to this. People that are getting donations from people that are liberal are going to do the exact opposite and people are going to follow the money. And so again, for better or worse, money is real and money is super powerful. And money can very much get a dean of a university to bend a knee for sure. Because these guys are constantly raising money from the alumni. And if your alumni is like, listen, bro, I'm not giving you any more money unless you get on board with this. They will get on board.
Drew
Do you think that there's something to the freedom? I know we talk about religious freedoms, we want to separate religion and state. You know, politics should stay out of the classroom. Certain things like that. Is this something that should be kind of separated from schools, mandates? Because I understand Title IX and holding up that standard, but this seems like almost like a political statement that they want to say, well, both with the apologies, restoring the record. Is there a line somewhere there? Should every company kind of follow the UPenn guidelines of Title IX? Yup. Apologies, restoring the records and kind of just biology. That's It. That's my, that's my out.
Kevin Rose
Calling something a cultural war is really the right language. We are in a battle for the values of this country. And for so long it was just the water. There wasn't like as much division as there is now. And so all of a sudden people realize, oh, wait a second, we actually have to choose our value values. I think that seeing massive immigration, especially from Muslim countries, is really going to bring that to the fore because like when you had a ton of Mexicans flooding in, they're all Catholic, so it's like there was no collision of values. So I think pretty easy to assimilate on that front. But when you've got somebody that is coming from a totally different religion, you're going to be colliding from a values perspective. And so whether it's trans rights and we're colliding over the values there, or it's religion and we're colliding over the values there. When you have a discrepancy of values, you have to find a way to navigate that. You've got to decide what you do and don't allow. It's one thing to remove God from the classroom when basically everybody sort of has a Christian vibe, but once that isn't true anymore, now you're really going to see people fight for it. Because it wasn't that big of a difference, I don't think, from religion in classrooms, religion out of classrooms. So. But now it's really, people want to see their values reflected and there's way more divergence. So it'll be interesting to see what happens. So in terms of the actual policies, like, what do I think? I think that keeping a separation between biological men and women just makes all the sense in the world. And if people wanted like a trans league, if it really gains enough steam that there are that many athletes, by all means, like have a separate division, but. But the reason that you create that division is that reality will slap you in the face in terms of there being a biological difference. And listen, I have my whole tirade because I find this so fascinating that women are the sexual gatekeepers. And so men having much stronger upper body strength, men having better spatial relations, things like that are all the result of men asking women on evolutionary time scales, what do you want? And here it is. So yeah, they have. I mean, this is a weird way to say it, but it's pretty accurate. Women have selectively bred with men that can out compete them in not all sports, but basically all sports. And so why then are we, it's just for competition. It's just for fun. And so just like in a video game, you have of skill based matchmaking, you want to do the same. When you're doing a sport, it wouldn't be fun. Like imagine that you are an ungodly talented female athlete. But like Serena Williams. Serena Williams out of her own mouth was like, I'd be ranked 115th or something in the men's division. Yikes. That wouldn't be fun. You can be the greatest of all time to ever hold a racket in the women's division and get the proper accolades for that or go be somebody that nobody will ever remember in the other division. That seems pretty lame. All because of something that you don't control. Like, that's just your biology. So yeah, it seems pretty simple to me. If you were born a biological male, you're going to play in the biological male side. If you're born a biological female, you play with biological females. No beef. Literally no beef whatsoever. If somebody is trans. Cool. I don't, I don't even understand what people get mad about, but. But them blending sports now you just create that problem. I was just explaining with Serena Williams.
Drew
Copy that. And another clash of cultures. This is very interesting. So Bob Villain was caught on stage leading a chant for Free Palestine and death to the idf.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Bob Villain
Free, free, free, free, free, free. All right, but have you heard this one though? Death, Death to the IDF. De to the IDF. De to the IMF. De to the IDF. De to the IDF.
Kevin Rose
Hell yeah.
Bob Villain
From the river to the sea Palestine must be. Will be Inshah. It will be free.
Drew
And since this concert, he lost his tour dates, lost his visa to the US his label dropped him and apparently Instagram blocked him. Him. I feel like I get it. You can't talk about Israel. Deaf to the idea. That's bad. But him losing his American visa and Instagram say no, you. I just feel like we. Is that the appropriate reaction to this?
Kevin Rose
Well, it's interesting. So I think you and I see this slightly differently. So I love that he lost his U.S. visa. Okay, I don't like the Instagram. Hit pause. Like, like bro should be. Okay, listen, this is probably inciting violence. So on that. Okay, I get. People are going to say the IDF is an amorphous blob. It's not a person. And there's an argument to be made there and a judge should adjudicate that. My thing is that we are about to be in a values war. And I think every country needs to Say, ah, here are the values that we welcome into our country and here are the values that we reject. So listen, I think that people should have a pretty broad like grace for something. I don't want people scrolling my timeline and being like, nope, can't come here. And I don't want to have to check with every country while they go scan my. And I'm sure I've said stuff that would piss off some country somewhere, but in fairness, I respect the right for countries to put up the walls that they think are right and every. I mean, this is like the great irony when you talk to Muslim countries is they're like, like, please, you are not going to come here and play. Not with our religion. We're very different. And so I respect that. They like draw a hard and fast line. And when I was in Saudi Arabia, when I was in Kuwait, I wasn't like, I'm going to be as American as I want. I was like, what's respectful here? I'm going to be respectful. And if they're not, the places that I went were not at all weird about western dress, but had they been, I wouldn't have had a beef. I would have worn like, okay, cool, if this is respectful, then I'm in your country, so I don't have beef with that. So anyway, I think that for citizens, free speech all day long. But when I'm thinking about up to not inciting violence, obviously, but when I'm thinking about who I let in my country, when somebody does something that I think if a judge said, yeah, that really is inciting violence, I wouldn't at all be surprised. Is that going to be somebody that I'm like, hey, come on in. No, probably not. If they let him in, I'm certainly not going to be marching in the streets. Like to me there's enough gray area with an amorphous blob there. But like, dude, listen, we are in a period of political violence. People are actually being killed for their political views. LA was on fire because of the immigration protests and stuff. Like, this is not a chill moment. So from my standpoint, that's more about a country stating its values.
Drew
But I mean, I can understand if he was going to tour in Israel, but he was coming to tour in America.
Kevin Rose
Yeah.
Drew
And isn't that a slippery slope with like the whole free speech thing?
Kevin Rose
Very much so. You a hundred percent have to be careful with this kind of thing. That's what I'm saying. This one is like, he's saying death to the idf, but at the same time, Drew, the number of times that I have wrapped the song f the Police, that it's like, did it really incite me to want to, like, get in a fight? No, it did not. So this is. Again, this is not one that I'm gonna get hysterical about. And then here's my really secret take. He's a musician. Like, he's supposed to, like, rile people up, and he's supposed to say the things. It's a bit like the comedians that they're supposed to walk that line. Like, musicians are always in fray. At least as long as I've been alive. They've always been popping off of the mouth politically. You've got. Oh, God. Who was it that ripped the Pope? Sinead o' Connor ripped the photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, and it caused an uproar. And the thing is, like, you both want them to do edgy stuff, and you need there to be a backlash. Like, the only reason this works is because there's a backlash. So it's like, I don't know, man. The reality is I'm on my America needs to decide what it stands for kick. So I am a bit like, hey, fuck this kid.
Bob Villain
Too bad.
Drew
Sorry, this is two years ago. Cool. But not right now. We don't need this right now.
Kevin Rose
This is not the moment. And at the same time, as artists, we want them to push the envelope. We want them to take risks. But it's like, again, we're talking about him because he went too far. And so that's the. That's sort of what you pay them for, is to go too far to get the backlash to see if they can recover. Some can, some can't. Dixie Chicks could not. Whoops. But again, I don't think Instagram should be shutting this guy down. I don't think he should be debanked. Like, all of those things, to me, are outrageous. So, yeah, it's a. It is very much a slippery slope. But values. Values. Drew, we're gonna have to decide what we stand for.
Drew
Also, how much I've heard you drop the F bomb. It's funny that you said, f the police. That's all I got.
Kevin Rose
Drew, do you know why I said f the police?
Drew
Why is that?
Kevin Rose
Because, like, seven words later. So I'm on my full censorship to make sure that we stay in the straight and narrow.
Drew
Drew.
Kevin Rose
We stay. Woo, buddy.
Drew
No problem, Drew. I love the police. I love the idf. I love Israel.
Kevin Rose
There it is.
Drew
I love everything.
Kevin Rose
Drew doesn't want us to lose electricity suddenly or find ourselves, themselves in trouble. Fair, Drew? Very wise.
Drew
That's all I got.
Kevin Rose
All right, guys, if you haven't already, be sure to give us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
Podcast: Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Date: July 3, 2025
Host: Tom Bilyeu (Kevin Rose and Drew as co-hosts/contributors)
Theme: An incisive exploration of the controversial new U.S. spending bill, Elon Musk's reaction, America’s fiscal trajectory, cultural divide, and breaking stories in tech, politics, and society.
This episode dives into the newly approved "Big Beautiful Bill" in the U.S. Senate, a massive spending deal that triggered backlash from supposed fiscal conservatives—and a fiery response from Elon Musk. Tom Bilyeu and his co-hosts dissect the implications of the bill, Musk's threat to create a third party, and wider issues like political integrity, America’s “fiscal death spiral,” toxic partisanship, and headline cultural controversies. The hosts also react to stories—from Meta’s AI super team, RFK’s vaccine claims, Title IX reversals, to viral moments in music and sports—putting them in context with wit and directness.
(01:00–09:13)
(07:53–09:13)
(09:13–14:18)
(16:03–20:10)
(23:26–28:12)
(29:14–36:29)
(36:29–42:37)
(42:37–48:16)
| Segment | Content | |-------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:00 – 07:53 | The "Big Beautiful Bill", Musk's furor, and U.S. Fiscal future | | 09:13 – 14:18 | Wealth, assets, and inequality | | 16:03 – 20:22 | RFK/CDC vaccine-autism controversy, truth vs. ego in science | | 23:26 – 28:12 | Candace Owens, Macron, Trump—viral diplomacy | | 29:14 – 36:29 | Meta's AI team, education, and global competition | | 36:29 – 42:37 | UPenn, trans athletes, culture wars, and university politics | | 42:37 – 48:16 | Bob Villain’s chant, censorship, and free speech debates |
This episode is a tour de force through the most provocative headlines of the week, blending fiscal analysis, political skepticism, cultural critique, and realist philosophy. The hosts don’t shy away from hard truths or controversial takes—providing both context and caution for those trying to navigate an era of upheaval. Whether parsing spending bills, AI’s future, or cancel culture, the underlying message is clear: only honest confrontation with reality, combined with grit and innovation, can avert a deeper national crisis.