Is Socialism the Answer? Tom Bilyeu and Drew Debate Economic Policy and Free Buses | Tom Bilyeu Show Live

Summary

Impact Theory Live – “Is Socialism the Answer?” Tom Bilyeu & Drew Debate Economic Policy and Free Buses

Podcast: Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu
Episode Air Date: October 31, 2025

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Main Theme & Purpose

In this episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live, Tom is joined by co-host Drew to dissect and debate contemporary economic policies, with a particular focus on socialism, deficit spending, and the proposed policy of free buses in New York City. Using the candid and sometimes provocative energy of a live show, the conversation unpacks the headline-grabbing rhetoric around socialism, wealth inequality, infrastructure spending, and populist politicians like Zohran Mamdani, questioning whether leftist policies offer solutions or risk deepening America’s systemic problems.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Current Events as a Backdrop

• The episode begins with a nod to global turmoil (Israel-Gaza, Venezuela, etc.), highlighting how populist leaders rise in times of crisis:
  • “You don't have Benjamin Netanyahu as a person who creates the problem. You have a problem. And Benjamin Netanyahu rises to the top in that moment.” (Tom, 01:57)

2. Populism and Economic Discontent

• Tom critiques the reflexive support for anti-billionaire politics:
  • “[People believe] the one thing guaranteed to make your problems worse… Because he was like, we can have a better world. The bad news is you have to fix the economy if you want said better world.” (Tom, 03:16)
• Drew counters, suggesting the need to examine the systemic failures causing populists like Mamdani to rise:
  • “Let's see the symptoms that brought Mamdani into power and gave him this rise versus saying he's going to be the boogeyman in the corner.” (Drew, 03:38)

3. Deficit Spending and Economic Physics

• Tom offers a crash course on the dangers of deficit spending and money printing, likening it to “government sanctioned counterfeiting”:
  • “…it is mathematically, it is government sanctioned counterfeiting. So we all agree counterfeiting is bad, but for some reason, when we let the government do it, we go, that's cool.” (Tom, 04:01)
• He draws a sharp line between types of deficit spending:
  • “The only people that are worse than Trump in terms of immoral deficit spending are the Democrats. And the only people worse than the Democrats are the Democratic socialist wing of the Democrats.” (Tom, 07:26)
• Tom’s underlying message: More populist/socialist policies - especially those with little regard for economic reality - intensify wealth inequality and hurt the poor more than the rich.

4. Debating Mamdani's Free Bus Proposal

• Drew presents a practical argument: reallocating billionaire tax breaks to fund services like free buses should be feasible without “going full socialism”:
  • “If I were to take that $175 billion tax break and made it $165 billion tax break… and I feel like now I have free buses and I feel like nobody flew. And we didn’t go full socialism and nothing blew up.” (Drew, 10:00)
• Tom maintains this is economic sleight-of-hand, arguing free buses—and broader entitlements—will inevitably degrade in quality, create unwanted consequences (e.g. “homeless people will just post up in there… a bus that's just full of people that are mentally unstable”), and increase deficit spending. (Tom, 12:01)
• On New York rent freezes: Tom notes 40% of NYC already has rent control, but conditions haven’t improved; expanding such policies will only escalate failures. (Tom, 15:02)

5. Infrastructure Spending: Reallocate or Allocate Less?

• The chat summarizes the debate as “Drew equals reallocate, Tom equals allocate less” (24:50), but Tom clarifies:
  • “What I'm saying is you must balance the budget. You're gonna have to get out from under some of this debt… In the ways [Mamdani is] doing it, it just is not going to yield the things you want to yield.” (Tom, 25:09; 25:35)
• Both agree infrastructure can be a worthy investment when it supports commerce, but Tom insists only “thoughtful” investments matter, and not all spending qualifies.

6. The Deeper Crisis: Wealth Inequality, AI, and Skills Gap

• Tom and Drew discuss a Ray Dalio quote on America’s bifurcated economy:
  • “There are two economies now in America. They have completely fractured away from each other, and basically rich people are driving all of the spending.” (Tom, 40:45, quoting Dalio)
• 60% of Americans, says Dalio, have below a 6th-grade reading level, signaling a “travesty” in American education and preparing the ground for populist revolt:
  • “America no longer believes that we are worthy of winning… And so the fact that we let 60% of our population go without being shamed into oblivion for having a sixth grade reading level… The only way to get people to do this kind of hard stuff is to make them want to earn the respect of the people they respect.” (Tom, 44:03)

7. Worst-Case Scenarios and Lessons from History

• Drew floats an alarming hypothetical: what if massive layoffs—by AI or government cuts—create 30% unemployment? Wouldn't that force America to “cut off the hand to save the body”?
• Tom’s response: True crisis would require “a nuclear option” of debt forgiveness, massive deregulation, creative destruction—but also tough love:
  • “You just have to let some people fail… If they are stealing or whatever, they go to jail.” (Tom, 53:00)
  • “But you have to let that creative destruction take place. You’ve got to let people fall from their mighty perches. You have to. Otherwise people just can’t rise back up.” (Tom, 53:44)

8. China: The New Economic Superpower

• The episode closes with wide-ranging thoughts on geopolitics and China’s strategy:
  • “China, by the Numbers is the new America, but much, much bigger. That’s bad. That's very bad. They are your biggest rival and they control your entire modern way of life.” (Tom, 57:22)
  • Tom describes China’s quiet, disciplined build-up of manufacturing might and contrasts Chinese collectivism with American individualism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Populist Leaders:

  “Trump is not some tremendous leader that has moved us into a populist era. He is a populist leader that could only come to power in a moment like this.”
  (Tom, 01:57)

• On Deficit Spending and Socialism:

  “…deficit spending is the villain. Now, the problem with socialism is that it believes to the core of its existence that you can deficit spend.”
  (Tom, 05:00)

• On the Limitations of Social Programs:

  “If you can point to the government run institution that is deeply efficient and highly innovative, then I’ll be like, okay, cool, let’s copy that. …It doesn’t work like that because they’re not forced to compete.”
  (Tom, 33:23)

• On Educational Failure:

  “It’s a travesty that our taxpayer dollars go to teachers unions that are letting this happen. And anybody that's like, ‘oh, it's not their fault.’ It's entirely their fault. 100%. Now, ultimately, who do I blame? The parents, of course.”
  (Tom, 55:10)

• On the Consequences of Wealth Inequality:

  “You can't have it simply because of envy and resentment. …We as animals cannot look out at somebody else that has way more than us where the economy is working for them and be okay.”
  (Tom, 41:15)

• On China’s Rise:

  “They become not only the manufacturing hub for the world, they become the advanced manufacturing hub of the world. …They have geniuses… but a whole lot more of whatever. And they're just build, build, building. Now they're not as good as us at innovating. They don't have freedom. And freedom is just better for certain things, namely innovation.”
  (Tom, 62:00 – 64:01)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• Populist Leaders and Underlying Problems: 01:29–03:38
• Root of Economic Woes & Federal Reserve: 04:35–07:24
• Democratic Socialism vs. Trump: 07:24–09:14
• Free Buses & ‘Reallocating’ Tax Breaks: 09:41–12:01
• Impact of Free Services on Quality & Society: 12:01–15:45
• Should Government Invest in Infrastructure? 24:27–25:34
• "Bring Back the Middle Class" & AI’s Threat: 38:05–40:13
• Wealth Inequality and Education Crisis: 40:35–47:45
• If 30% Unemployment Hits—‘Creative Destruction’: 49:32–54:08
• The Case of China as New America: 57:22–61:27
• China's Long Game & US System Weaknesses: 62:00–67:06

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Tone & Language

The dialogue is passionate, often blunt, and occasionally provocative, with Tom deploying analogies (“step off a ten-story building”) and zingers, while Drew plays the role of challenger and pragmatist. There’s an overt effort to move the conversation beyond partisan talking points, focusing instead on foundational economic principles and honest appraisal of both left and right policies.

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Summary

This episode offers a no-holds-barred debate about economic policy, challenging the rise of socialist-leaning populism and defending the hard realities of economic physics. Tom Bilyeu repeatedly stresses that well-intentioned but economically illiterate policies—like free buses—lead to decline, not uplift, for those they aim to help. The exchange with Drew creates necessary tension, fleshing out real-world anxieties about wealth inequality, government waste, skill decline, and the threat of a rising China. Their back-and-forth ultimately underlines the need for both economic literacy and bold policy, warning against the dangers of “solutions” not grounded in reality.

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For listeners who want to think deeper about the consequences of the next political wave or the lure of populist promises, this episode is an essential guide to seeing through headlines and rhetoric to the bedrock of how economies (and societies) actually work.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

The.

[A]

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[B]

You know, it was just we were celebrating, taking victory laps. We were like, hey, how come he didn't get the Peace Prize? Where's the peace Prize? And then Israel's like, hold my beer, we're not done yet. It's a developing story. So I wanted to just make sure we acknowledge the elephant in the room that is Benjamin Netanyahu. But of course, now do you really.

[A]

Think this is just a Benjamin Netanyahu problem? Like, get rid of Benjamin Netanyahu and problem goes away?

[B]

I feel like that's what we've done in Middle Eastern and other regime changes. We're trying to do that in Venezuela.

[A]

It never works and they shouldn't do it in Venezuela either because here's what happens. You, you have a problem. These people are bottom up leaders. They're not top down. You, you don't have Benjamin Netanyahu as a person who creates the problem. You have a problem. And Benjamin Netanyahu rises to the top in that moment. In the same way that Trump is not some tremendous leader that has moved us into a popular populist era. He is a populist leader that could only come to power in a moment like this. And so once you understand a moment like this is the thing to focus on, like, what are all the underlying things that drive this? This is why it drives me nuts when people aren't talking about the economic problems. I. I feel so sad. This is as close as I'll be able to give people moral outrage. I feel so sad. Like, today there's a comedian guy. I forget his name. Very funny. I retweeted it so it'd be easy enough to find, but he was like, I'm against any politician who billionaires are for. And so I'm supporting mom Donnie, and I'm just like, oh, my God. The. The one thing guaranteed to make your problems worse. Because he was like, we can have a better world.

[B]

Yes, here it is.

[A]

Yes, you can have a better world. The bad news is you have to fix the economy if you want said better world. And guess who's going to make the economy worse? Just going to the mathematics of how economies work. Zoran Mandami. So I get it. I love that you feel a connection to the working man. That's amazing.

[B]

But the reality is, okay, I was trying to save this and bury this a little bit, but I feel like we keep saying that Mamdani is going to make the economy worse when we are losing a million jobs. The stock market is being propped up by seven and a half companies, so it's not like the economy is humming and Donald Trump is just rolling it in. So it's like, to your. To your very same point, let's see the symptoms that brought Mamdani into power and gave him this rise versus saying he's going to be the boogeyman in the corner.

[A]

Okay, so if I could show you that the policies that make this happen are like, let's say on a scale of 1 to 10, they're like a 7, and Mamdani is a 10 of the same exact policy. Can we agree that we at least understand why I'm saying this is going to be worse?

[B]

If you can tell me that Trump's impact will be a 7 and Mamdani's impact would be a 10, then I would say it would be worse. That's the. That was the question.

[A]

Yes. Yes, it was slightly different than that, but that's close enough.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Okay, perfect. So all of this comes down to. In 1913, you passed the Federal Reserve act, which gave the government the ability to print money, which meant printing money simply means I can take money from everyone in the country at will. For any reason, without passing any sort of legislation, okay? Once people understand it as that it, it is mathematically, it is government sanctioned counterfeiting. So we all agree counterfeiting is bad, but for some reason, when we let the government do it, we go, that's cool. And the great news is we've run the experiment. Because the honest answer is, I get why modern monetary theorists get very excited. Because you can create money really easily, and that creates high velocity of money, which gets people to buy a lot of things, which gets people this sort of sense of, I feel rich, but it only works for a while, and then it does the exact opposite and it starts creating massive wealth inequality. And I can drill into any one of these beats, but if you'll just grant me. So it starts creating this massive wealth inequality. And then all of a sudden people go, wait a second, I'm not rich. I'm actually shockingly poor. Okay? So this is all tied to 1913 Federal Reserve deficit spending. So deficit spending is the villain. Now, the problem with socialism is that it believes to the core of its existence that you can deficit spend. And it will hurt only the rich, because they're just going to go take more in taxes from the wealthy. But what they don't understand is you will actually the more you try to take from the rich because they pay just an obscene, disproportionate amount of the tax. It's like the top 10% pay something like 90% of all taxes. I mean, it's like insane. So what ends up happening, Laugh or curve, we're going to get them on the show. Is that the more you try to tax them, you end up getting less revenue. So they always think, well, I'm just going to tax them into oblivion and I'll get more tax revenue. You won't. You end up getting less. So you try to give all this stuff for free and you say, I'm just going to tax it doesn't end up working. And so all of those things that you're giving away for free also tend to go down in quality because you can enslave people, so you have to pay them. So now you go, well, fuck, I've promised all these things, I have to deficit spend. So you deficit spend. But that takes from the poor as well as it takes from the rich. And it hurts the poor a lot more than it hurts the rich, like, a lot more. And so now the poor get more and more frustrated and they. They demand more and more things for free. Rent freezes, all of that. So you do it. Which then makes you have to deficit spend more, which makes the poor poorer.

[B]

So Trump escalating.

[A]

Yeah. So Trump is terrible. He passed a big, beautiful bill. Literal crime against humanity. The only people that are worse than Trump in terms of immoral deficit spending are the Democrats. And the only people worse than the Democrats are the Democratic socialist wing of the Democrats. So he's on the DSA side. He's all the way to just complete madness. Dialed to 10, maybe dialed to 11 in terms of how bad he's going to be for the poor. So this is not a defense of Trump overspending. I'm just saying if you've got one guy that's like, I'm only going to overspend by 2 trillion and you've got another guy that's, I'm going to overspend by 3 trillion and then you've got another guy that's like, I'm not even think. I don't even know what the effects are going to be. I just know I'm going to freeze rents. And he has no concept economically of how all this works. Like, if I sat down with him, he, he would hit a point where he's befuddled. And so he would just start like coming at me with like random non sequitur bullshit or empty politician platitudes. There's no unit. He's either sinister or he doesn't understand economics. Those are your two choices. There's no third option. He, he's either ignorant or sinister.

[B]

Kabi. Okay, what you're saying is his deficit spending is worse than Trump's deficit spending. So that's why he's. Trump is a 7 and he's a 10. Yes, I summed it up.

[A]

Yep. Just to keep it real simple, do.

[B]

You think we run a free market capitalist system currently, right now? Okay, so do you think that Mamdani is going to enact a full 100% socialism structure overnight in New York City?

[A]

Overnight? No.

[B]

Probably. He doesn't even have government powers to raise half of the taxes that he's talking about because he'll need the government approval.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So even if he had 100% leeway, everybody said yes to everything, he couldn't make New York City 100% socialist.

[A]

Yeah, correct.

[B]

Cool. Okay, so we now we're both agreeing that if it was, if we can pick something starting at zero, 100% capitalism is way better than 100% socialism. Yes. No argument. 100% agree. Handshake agreement. Now, when we're talking about these blurred, messed up Systems. Let's dive into it a little bit more. For example, Currently, right now, USAID needed $35 million in order to enable food banks, food programs across the U.S. some international.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

We said that was too much. 35 billion. We gave 40 billion to Argentina. Yep. So I'm gonna put that one to the side. That's right here.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay. Second thing. Billionaires just got $175 billion tax cut through the big, beautiful bill. 175 billion tax cut? Yep. I'm. Put that in the middle.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Mom, Danny said to run the buses for free. It'll cost $4 million. I'm not including the free grocery stores and all that other stuff that's in like the 40 billions. Let's just call 4 billion. The 4 billion. If I were to take that $175 million, $175 billion tax break and made it $165 billion tax break, I feel like billionaires would still be okay with that. You got 160 billion. You didn't get 175.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

And I feel like now I have free buses and I feel like nobody flew. And we didn't go full socialism and nothing blew up. Not a single baby's eaten. Okay. The math is going to math. We literally did this physically in Impact 3, where you talked to one of the teammates and said, hey, you spend too much of your time doing this. I'm not going to allocate more time or I'm not going to take away more time. I'm just going to take these things that aren't profitable, and I'll put it into something that is profitable. And my argument, and I think the thing that is making Mamdani rise to power is right now we've been playing this trickle down game that I'm going to now say yes to everything billionaires want because they create jobs and they make the economy flow, and they do all these things. But somewhere in that system, whether it's the regulations, whether it's the capitalist, or whether it's the greedy monocle guy from Monopoly, somewhere there's a break. There's a break in the system, and that, that trickle down is not trickling down.

[A]

Okay, so you're making a rhetorical flourish that I don't think you realize you're making, but you're breaking down, trap me into an argument that I'm not making.

[B]

Break it down for me. Let me know my flow.

[A]

The breakdown is very simple. You can't say, hey, Tom, we have a bad economic system. I want to replace it with a worse economic system. And I'm going to borrow from this bad economic system and reallocate it over here and pretend like this isn't an. An economic system that just will escalate as fast as humanly possible. So if he were, whatever amount he's able to do from a socialist standpoint is just going to make it worse from where we are today. So there's one. I'm saying this isn't sustainable. The position that you try to make sound like is mine as in the current. It's Democratic in New York, it's not Republican. But the current Democratic lunacy is not my position. The current Republican lunacy is not my position.

[B]

Agreed. I didn't allocate.

[A]

My position is very simple. You have degrees of lunacy. And if you're the guy all the way in the end, Mom, Donnie makes people feel seen and so they're voting for that. The problem is in feeling seen. It's going to make your life far worse and all the things you're worried about are going to escalate. So now we have to one we'd have to go into like what are the tax breaks for? Do they generate jobs? If they don't generate jobs, then okay is if this is just going into the billionaires pockets like that's bad. If we could take money that was like just going to private citizens in their pocket wasn't creating jobs, wasn't an incentive to get something like a factory or whatever built in their state. It was literally just hey, go get your money then yeah, you would be better off doing something that gave to poor people. Buses wouldn't be the answer but like hey, that at least there would be some logic on. I'll just make my prediction right now in terms of what's going to happen to the buses. They are going to get worse. They're going to. If they're truly free. Homeless people will just post up in there because now they've got a slightly weather protected place that they can go and fall asleep. So now you've got a bus that's just full of people that are mentally unstable in many cases. Certainly disconcerting for the average citizen. For many people they have no barrier to entry whatsoever. So now one of Mamdani's pushes is that by making the buses free, more people are going to take the bus, less people are going to drive. We're even going to get. It's not his main argument, but we're even going to get fewer people driving cars. You're Going to get the exact opposite. More people are going to drive cars because they don't feel safe on the buses.

[B]

And so isn't a law and order problem and not a.

[A]

Well, now we have another knock on effect to all the things that he's trying to claw back in terms of what he said about defunding the police.

[B]

He said he was going to defund.

[A]

The police though, dude, there's so much footage of this guy talking about how the police are a problem, they're anti queer, on and on and on. Now we can say, hey, maybe he's had like this complete reversal of fortune.

[B]

Because he knows that's not a winning position. Just like politicians always politic. I can pull up a bunch of taco moments where Trump had a position and back kind of backed it up. So, you know, we, we, I think we both agree that politicians say things and then they take they.

[A]

What you're trying to do though, is map out what are they actually going to do. So if you map out the positions of the dsa, they are all catastrophic at a whole host of cultural levels. He is in that same vein. Oh, and by the way, all of his economic policies are completely suicidal. They've been tried a gazillion times before. I did an entire deep dive about the housing crisis in New York and how the fact that when you freeze rents it makes everything fall to shit. And so I'm just saying, hey, we've.

[B]

Already tried these and they're already 40.

[A]

In that same fucking city.

[B]

They're already 40% rent frozen, though. So I, I think what the, the.

[A]

Issue you and I had this argument before and I'm getting scared now that either I didn't convince you then and you just went quiet, or you're reverting to the mean when you tell me, Tom, there's already 40% rent freezes in New York and everything is fine. I cannot reconcile that with everything is so shit that we need Mom, Donnie to come in and save us by freezing the rents. The very thing I'm saying is, if you've already frozen 40% of the rents in New York and it hasn't fucking worked, why are you going to try to freeze the rents more like. This is so outlandish I feel like.

[B]

We'Re having, because we're going in the same kind of circle of like Mamdani is going to usher in Mao style, Stalin style, Marxist style socialism.

[A]

Mamdani is pitching those ideas. Hold tight. We're going to take a quick break. Let's talk about the Hidden Cost of DIY when you're running a business, most founders think they're saving money by piecing together their own financial system. But that DIY approach isn't saving you money, it's costing you money. Every hour you spend switching between systems is an hour not spent growing your business. Found consolidates everything into one business banking platform. Expense tracking, invoice management, tax preparation, virtual cards for different spending goals all in one place. Open a Found account today for free at F O u N D. Found is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided by lead bank member fdic. Don't put this one off. Join thousands of small business owners who have streamlined their finances with Found. This is a paid advertisement. Most entrepreneurs pick a platform that works great at launch but breaks when they grow. You start small, gain traction, then you hit a wall. Now you're migrating platforms mid growth, losing momentum, losing sales, and rebuilding everything from scratch. Smart founders, though, start with the end in mind, from the beginning. And that's where Shopify comes in. Whether you're making your first hundred dollars or your first million, whether you're testing your first product or processing thousands of orders daily, the platform of Shopify is going to grow with you. Stop betting on platforms you know you're going to outgrow. Build for scale from day one. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today on Shopify.com impact. Go to Shopify.com impact again. Shopify.com impact if you're tracking your health in a serious way, you know the problem. One app for sleep, another for nutrition, a third for fitness, a fourth for Recovery. You are juggling five different platforms just to get an incomplete picture. That ends now with Bevel. This is the all in one health tracking solution that I have been waiting for. And that is why it is on my phone right now. Sleep, nutrition habits, recovery, stress, fitness. Everything consolidated in one place. What's really exciting about Bevel is that the AI is proactive. It does not just sit there waiting for you to ask questions. It analyzes your metrics real time. It holds you accountable to your goals. It remembers your lifestyle and tailors every suggestion specifically to you. And your data stays private. Everything is stored on the device, not on servers. And if this sounds awesome, head to Bevel Health Impact and use Code Impact to try it free for an entire month. That's B E V E L and use Code Impact. We're back. Let's dive right in. And what so do you think that I just don't understand what no, because.

[B]

What I'm saying is that he doesn't have the power to enact socialism at that level in New York City. Great. So. So it's okay, I guess if he.

[A]

Is pitching these ideas that we know are not only terrible economically, they end up being murderous. Okay. For reasons I can walk through.

[B]

But. But again, hold on. But it's murderous from the top down. He doesn't have that power to make it.

[A]

And like, I understand, I'm going somewhere with this. Okay, so you've got a guy spouting policies that we can prove are murderous. They're. They're terrible economically. He's going to go into New York. Do we have reason to believe that he will not try to enact up to the limits of his power everything that he can within?

[B]

Cool. Yeah.

[A]

So we have a guy that's moving us in a horrible economic direction who will make maybe 2%, but he will make to some amount New Yorkers lives worse.

[B]

Ipso facto, period.

[A]

I've got another point, but I want to first get agreement on that.

[B]

That's where I'm kind of pushing back from. Because I think you're saying his policy equals bad. Free buses equal bad. And what I'm saying is we have a allocation problem. I learned this from you and I think this is why I'm pushing back. The government collects a lot of money, but somehow we spend it on bullshit.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

And I think if we stop spending it on bullshit and we can spend on something that actually impacts the middle and lower working class positively. Right. It can possibly help. Okay. Now, I understand that increasing taxes and making it into a black hole is bad. I understand that if we increase the tax revenue, we're going to run out of rich people's money to take. I understand that if we did this on a national level, this is not sustainable and it would break. I understand all of these policies. I think that's where the federal and the state problems. That's how they balance the power out. I don't think that Mamdani's policy should be on a national level. Absolutely not. I don't think free buses should be on a national level. Absolutely not. But to say that infrastructure isn't a. To me, infrastructure is a worthwhile investment. Agreed. Versus unnecessary tax cuts.

[A]

See, again, you're prescribing to me a philosophy that is not mine. So every word that you just said, we agree on. It's only when you then say, mom, Donnie is the guy that's going to do that, that I'm like, that's not what he's pitching. So if you were saying, hey Tom, I want to vote for this guy, whoever this guy is, because he's talking about we've got to reallocate these tax dollars to building up the infrastructure of New York. And then I would say, to do what? And if you said we're building up the infrastructure to facilitate commerce, I'd be like, fuck yeah. Good investment. Very good investment. I just did a deep dive on this coming out on Monday. So you want people to, you want the government to tax the people to put things in place that facilitate business. Okay. As a speedrun, the only reason you ever have a single tax dollar ever is because of business. Just to make everything clear for everybody.

[B]

Absolutely.

[A]

So you want to build the infrastructure as a way of saying, wahaha, I'm a politician twirling my mustache. I'm going to make this place so amazing, so business friendly that you're going to build all these businesses, hire all these people and it's going to generate all this tax revenue for me. Great. That's fucking fantastic. You will make everyone's lives better. But that is not what Mamdani is doing. He is very anti capitalism.

[B]

However, that, that is the pitch that has been pitched out since the 70s and we have seen that making pearl business fewer regulations has not generated this.

[A]

Remember, you're just restating things you and I already agree on. If you focus on you're going to bat for mom Donnie. I'm just saying mom Donnie is bad. And you're saying no, no, no, the system is so broken, there's a better way to do this. And I'm like, okay, so you have.

[B]

A person with that person saying this.

[A]

Yes, because he's about to get elected and his policies are going to be so bad for New Yorkers because it is a fundamental misunderstanding of the foundational physics of economics. And because he doesn't understand the foundational physics of economics or he does understand them and he does not give a shit. And I will remind everybody of the cross cultural study that showed what people actually vote for is punishing the rich. They do not vote to help the poor. They vote for policies that if the policy would help the poor but also help the rich, they will not vote for it. If the policy hurts the poor but also hurts the rich, they'll vote for that.

[B]

Okay, I can give you an example. Remember when you were voting for like we were talking about who we voted for last election, we brought up Trump. You said, I didn't vote for Trump because I thought he was going to be this leader. I didn't vote for Chuck because I thought he was gonna be this enigmatic guy. I voted for Trump. Cause he's gonna deregulate crypto and he was gonna be more pro AI. And I was like, okay, out of those two policies, out of the 10 that he pitched, eight of them are bullshit. The two that actually honed in on are the ones that I'm interested in. If I said that I have the same kind of faith in Mamdani in the sense that there are two policies out of the 10 that he pitched that could work and could be better, is that worth the trade off from business as usual? Because I think we both agree that business as usual isn't working.

[A]

If on balance he were going to do things that were better for New Yorkers, of course I would vote for him. But I. If you're talking about buses being free as one of the policies that's going to be better for New Yorkers, then we just fundamentally disagree about what's about to happen.

[B]

Copy. Okay. Do you think that it's important for a government to invest in infrastructure? Full stop. Or everything should be.

[A]

You need to be very thoughtful about what the infrastructure is. But yes, security, national defense, infrastructure that supports commerce. Like these are hugely important things that America has neglected. And America has spent money like a drug addict. Like we have no logic or sense and we're just all over the map.

[B]

Shout out to Riley J6ers. I think they summarized this last 15 minutes in one line. They said, Drew equals reallocate Tom equals allocate less.

[A]

No, that's not accurate.

[B]

Okay. You don't think that you should. You think the government should get less tax dollars to accolate to spend.

[A]

What I'm saying is you must balance the budget. You're gonna have to get out from under some of this debt, which I have not talked about in this sequence. But in terms of what I'm saying in this sequence is Mamdani will move you closer to a system that is going to literally gut New York in the way that it was gutted back in the 70s and 80s where people burned buildings for the insurance money. They probably won't do that this time because the insurance companies are too savvy.

[B]

But.

[A]

But it'll be that same sort of just desperate setup where it's making everything worse. Now, in the greater context of what I'm saying, you have to put yourself in a position where you can get out from under a bunch of this debt. You are going to have to Do a beautiful deleveraging which requires you to tax the wealthy more, it requires you to redistribute wealth. But in the ways that he's doing it, it just is not going to yield the things you want to yield. You're going to have to money print. Even though I think that it is just an astonishing ev. And you have to be, you have to balance the budget. I'm forgetting the name of the fucking word. Austerity. You have to have austerity measures. And no one, not Republicans or Democrats, is prepared to do what needs to be done. And what I'm railing against is I can feel all of this populist energy catching people up. They get somebody that speaks to them in emotion and now we're totally detached from what actually works. It, it is, it's crazy making. Is the crazy making. It is crazy making. So what do you do? Like this, this is how it feels to me. I am, there are people that are far more knowledgeable than me. But I am like a junior physicist and I understand physics well enough that I like get the sort of big blocky movements of it. And if you step off of a 10 story building, you fall to your death every time. And I can explain it to you from just gravity pulling an object seemingly towards the center of mass. I can explain it from the sudden stop that your brain tissue goes through and that causes it to basically fragment. And then it can no longer send electrical and chemical sign signals. And so you become lifeless. Like whatever. I understand it well enough. Like I can sort of give you all of those, the different ways that people are going to die and what it's going to look like and you know, rough trajectories. And now I'm hearing somebody that's like, but you should be able to step off that building. And the reason that you haven't been able to step off the 10 story building is because all these rich are holding you back. Like, this is wild. Look at them. They get, they take a helicopter off that building all the time and you think just because you're poor you can't step off that building. You, this is crazy. What are we going to do? Everybody, we're going to step off the building. We're going to make building what free? Who gets to jump off the building? Everyone. And I'm just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I get why you guys are mad 100%. You're right to be mad. You have been taken advantage of. This is fucking terrible. And by the way, I want, while I'm saying all of this. You have to remember, I've got the fucking G5G, 6G 7G. Not whatever fucking G. I want over idling to take me to whatever country. I want a nice island where no mosquitoes at whatever, okay? But I'm here and I'm trying to get people to understand. This guy's going to fuck you up. Now, if Mom Donnie ruins New York, it will not impact my life. But I love people, Drew, and I want to see them win. And so I'm just like, hold on. If you do that, you are going to fall to your death. And so while I understand how mad, how righteously mad people are, the solutions that they are finding most enticing will accelerate their demise. So I'm just like. The only idea I can tell you to rule out is if you have three candidates, which one wants to spend the most money? Get rid of that guy. Get rid. Because economics are your problem. Look at your three candidates and ask, who's the most economically illiterate? Get rid of that guy. And right now, that's Mamdani.

[B]

So one issue voter is because he's spending so much money, it's not going to work.

[A]

As long as you're saying that the one issue is save America from violent revolution, yes.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

If you're saying the one issue is spare the poor. Yes. Then I'm a one issue voter.

[B]

We're about to lower the Fed rate right now. Mamdani has nothing to do with that. That is going to then hurt the dollar. We are also set to go $107 trillion over the budget. We still haven't talked about SNAP. We still haven't talked about the shutdown, but let's just earmark it. Two trillion that we're probably going to go over budget in our deficit. So to me, it's funny because you're saying everything you're saying. I'm not debating, but for some reason you think that I think that government should do everything or I'm team government. I think I love the government.

[A]

I am arguing one exact thing that you've said, that free buses are good. That's it.

[B]

Okay?

[A]

I'm not ascribing literally anything else to you.

[B]

Free buses are good and free buses are bad. Because let me speedrun this. Mechanics are going to be like, the government is paying for this now. So I'm going to overcharge them for repairs. Drivers are not incentivized to drive faster or slower because the government's footing the bill. So I could just do as I want homeless people who can't be on buses now when they check the fare 50% of the time are now going to be on buses all the time and they're just going to be chilling there and nobody's going to do anything about it. And then the people that actually are saving the 250 are just going to start driving more, even though they have a $30 congestion tax in Manhattan to drive. So it seems like when we have very specific problems that I think it's not impossible for the US to come up with a sustainable bus system. Like I don't think that's impossible, especially with the rise of robo taxis in this AI future that's right around the corner.

[A]

When you can money print, nothing's impossible except prosperity. Hold tight. We're going to take a quick break.

[B]

Foreign this episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move. Being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.

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[A]

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[A]

We'Re back. Let's dive right in. The one thing that you left out of that is that the way that a self sustaining economic engine works is when costs go up, you charge more for it.

[B]

Mm.

[A]

And so when you're in a situation where costs are going up for all the reasons that you listed and more, they can't raise Prices. So they now have a fixed price that they can charge the customer, which is zero dollars and zero cents. So they're raising the prices on taxpayers we've already talked about. You can't just keep taxing, taxing, taxing, taxing. So they'll have an option, they'll try to tax some, they'll try to cut costs and that's when the quality goes down. So if you can point to the government run institution that is deeply efficient and highly innovative, then I'll be like, okay, cool, let's copy that. It doesn't work like that because they're not forced to compete. And when they're not forced to compete, the way that you compete as an entrepreneur is you go, oh shit, I've got to find really smart people and I've got to get them to focus on my problem. And so I'm going to spend money, I'm going to create a cool environment. Like I'm going to do all this stuff to try to get the smartest people in the world to come and work for me. The government doesn't have that ability because they fix funds. They're not innovative. They're huge bureaucracies. You said that you were, I can't remember if you said red pilled or black pilled on. It's the bureaucracy that grows. It's not like in a university. You just put a bunch of new teachers, you put a whole layer of middle management. So you're going to have this terrifying amount of middle management running this free bus system. And so it will be a clusterfuck and there will be no financial incentive to make it better. And so it won't get better, it will get worse.

[B]

Do you believe that the government should invest in infrastructure at all?

[A]

Yes, aggressively, but towards things that facilitate commerce.

[B]

Like an airport.

[A]

Airport's a good example. Roads are a tremendous example. Bridges are a tremendous example. Train stations might. I'd have to look at like where that falls. If it's like human transport, probably not. That's probably best left to the private sector. Maybe they lay some of the track, but I don't know. I'd have to look more closely at that one in particular.

[B]

All right. Do you think he's going to bring Cherie a lot to New York City?

[A]

Him? No. Like you're 20 years out from that kind of thing.

[B]

What do you think the worst case scenario of Mamdani is? Worst case scenario of four years with.

[A]

Him, he damages the police force dramatically. He does things to reduce their sense of confidence, going into conflict so they start backing off, you start losing more good officers. You get increased lawlessness. You make more things legal. Like he wants to legalize prostitution whether he has the ability or not. I haven't looked closely at that. So I don't know. But just going off of things he's talked about publicly that he wants to do. So as you decriminalize things, then gangs move in to the vice type stuff. And you're going to see increased lawlessness, especially because he doesn't believe in harsh policing. You're going to get like social workers and stuff. Having some of the policing dollars reallocated to that those put on the street. That isn't going to work. It's a very feminine approach to a very masculine problem.

[B]

I think that's just the masculine problem is the law. Like order.

[A]

Violence.

[B]

Yes, violence. Yeah.

[A]

You will have people. I mean, listen, I know I like to talk about tcg, but you can find videos of like masked men just walking into, sometimes not even masks, walking into a TCG shop, smashing everything and just grabbing it and going, mm. And back in my quest days, there was a guy who was like, oh yeah, we used to. There was a Jack in the box. We used to practice. Or Burger King, I forget. We used to practice robbing it. That was like the practice place. And so everything was like bank teller, like plexiglass inside of a fast food restaurant. So it's like these things can and do happen when you don't have law enforcement in those areas. So I think that'll be the big one. The next one will be, he'll make buses worse. Whatever economic policies he. The ability to pass, he will universally make them worse. And because he is so charismatic, he's really going to win more people over to the dark side. That is socialism. And yeah, even when everything goes worse. Yeah, because they drew for the same reason. You're a very smart man. You and I battle all the time. And yet you're still like, free buses is probably a good idea. So.

[B]

Okay, the reason I say free buses are a good idea is because government is already stealing my money. And instead of giving it to people I don't like, give it to something that'll make me feel better. Okay, this is 100% self serving.

[A]

I'm going to say something really horrible.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

If somebody is raping my sister, I don't go, can you please rape her in a better way. I go, if you don't fucking stop raping my sister.

[B]

But nobody's proposing no taxes. Nobody is.

[A]

Drew, I'm not proposing no taxes. You have to balance the budget. Now I just want to remind everybody my sister in this horrific analogy is poor people. So what I'm saying is everything has to be geared towards bring back the middle class. And what I'm saying is Mamdani is going to make that worse, not better. We need to bring back the middle class. Bring back the middle class. Dude. AI is the problem you've got to be looking at. And we are going after the most dumb stuff ever. Focus on what matters. Be economically literate. Be able to walk me through your cause and effect. Like these are the things that we need to be doing and we're just not doing them. And it is wild and smart. Well intentioned. People are getting caught up in the emotion they get. As far as I know I'm being screwed over. And then as long as the person says I'm fighting for you they can. Then after that I'm fighting for the working class. They can say the dumbest most self destructive stuff ever and people will still be for it. Like I'm still raging against the Gary economics machine. Because he will literally walk you like making content.

[B]

He will walk.

[A]

Has he really?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's probably good. He'll walk you through the problem and then he'll throw his hands up as soon as you ask him to put forward a solution. It's wild. And people let him get away with that. That's crazy town. So I mean listen, I'm going to live and die by. I have mapped out at the end of every one of my deep dives and now go do this. I'm not trying to hide behind vagaries. I'm literally giving people every video ends. This is my best guess at what the right path forward is. No way am I going to be a hundred percent. Right. I'll just tell you that up front. But I'm at least trying to put forward actual solutions that people can execute against.

[B]

Hypothetically speaking. I know we talked about this number earlier that estimates 40% of people are employed by federal and like government. I'll say federal and state. I'll put combine those numbers together. Let's say we slash that to 20%. That is roughly 60 million people on top of the other million AI job losses. That is kind of on the that.

[A]

This is where it gets scary.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is you now run the risk of putting yourself into a deep dark depression from just all the job loss.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Because whether that's recycling tax dollars or not, that's money that people have to put into the economy. Dude. So we have to pull up the clip or the tweet from Ray Dalio. This is. This is one of those showstoppers. He's saying the same thing he's been saying for a while, but every now and then he'll just say something in a slightly new way, and it's like, ooh, yeah, that's rough. And he said that there are two economies now in America. They have completely fractured away from each other, and basically rich people are driving all of the spending. And you can look at our economy and go, oh, like, hey, 1.8. Okay, that's not great, but it's not horrible. And then you start looking under the hood and you realize that that 1.8 is largely fake because of people working for the government. And then on top of that, it's driven by, like, a tiny number of companies. The spending is driven by a tiny number of people. It's like 10% of Americans are driving, I don't know, 80% or more of the spending. Yikes. Dude, you can't have that. You can't. You can't have it simply because of envy and resentment. Yeah, like, there's not a complex mathematical formula about why you can't have it. You can't have it because we as animals cannot look out at somebody else that has way more than us where the economy is working for them and be okay. We won't be okay. We'll start fighting. We start hurting other people. Like, that's the response. And when you get a mass number of people mobilizing to hurt other humans, you have instability, lack of safety.

[B]

It.

[A]

It is a nightmare of epic proportions.

[B]

All right, let's jump into the tweet. This is Mario Naufa quoting Ray Dalio. Billionaire investor Ray Dalio says, you can't look at the US Economy as whole anymore because the gap between winners and losers is too extreme. About 3 million people. 1% of the population in AI and tech are thriving, while the bottom 60% are struggling. 60% of 350. Hard. Uh, 71. Oh, 5. About. Roughly about 100 million people. Um, if you're looking at, let's say the AI world and really, what amounts to about 3 million people, 5 to 1% of the population leading, and then the 5 or 10% around them. You have one world that. You have one world that the whole world is dependent on. Then you have the bottom 60% of the population. Consider this. 60% of the American population has below 6th grade reading level. That's. And with that, they're becoming unproductive and because of those things, you have a dependency, an extreme dependency. The numbers back them up. 22 states are in a recession while only 16 are growing. California, New York carry the entire economy on their backs. Wealth inequality has exploded since 2020. The top 1% nearly doubled their wealth. Point 1% nearly doubled their wealth from 12 trillion to 22 trillion. The bottom 50% gained up just 2 trillion combined. The economy now runs on spending from the rich. If they stop, everyone else is toasted it.

[A]

Bro, bro, bro.

[B]

When you read this, what was your initial reaction?

[A]

Stop printing money.

[B]

Got it.

[A]

Balance the budget. Jesus Christ.

[B]

I feel like 60% of Americans voice.

[A]

Was screaming in my head.

[B]

I feel like we just kind of skimmed over the 60% of Americans below.

[A]

Have.

[B]

Have below a.

[A]

That is so terrifying. So in the age of AI, what is happening?

[B]

That's tough. And with that, they're becoming unproductive.

[A]

Here, here's here. Okay, Drew, I'm. I'm now just talking to you. I'm going to pretend like there is nobody listening. This is why I'm into children's entertainment. We. Somewhere along the way, we lost a sense of. Your job is to become a badass motherfucker. Your job is get hard. Get hard, young man. Work your ass off, put a log on your back and. And fucking stand in like a seating position until your quads are on fire. And then do it again over and over and over. Your job is to get smart, is to get educated, is to read. To be a Renaissance man, to take in as much knowledge as you can from every direction. And for everyone to pressure their children to do that, to pressure your friends to do that, to let your friend know he is cool for being good at sculpting and architecture and archery. Like, dude, when did we lose all of that? I'm so. I'm watching One Piece right now, bro. I am blown away. The Japanese just have figured something out. They get it. Like, they get the hard work. Set a goal, go after it. Literally One Piece. The kid says, like a hundred times, I'm going to become the king of the pirates. And if I die on the way, that's fine with me. Dude, imagine. Imagine something in America made where the kid is like, I'm gonna go do this insane thing. I'm gonna risk my life, and I don't mind dying in the pursuit of it. And, like, that's not even the thing you talk about when you watch One Piece. But it's like, that's exactly what makes it dope. America does not have that Spirit. America has lost its belief in itself. America no longer believes that we are worthy of winning, that we're even worthy of competing at that level. And so the fact that we let 60% of our population go without being shamed into oblivion for having a sixth grade reading level and, dude, I don't care. It. The only way to get people to, like, do this kind of hard stuff is to make them want to earn the respect of the people they respect by doing the things that those people do. So, yeah, I get it. You grew up with a single mom who's working 18 jobs because she's being money printed to death. And I still expect your friends to clown on you and shame you for not being able to read well, for not getting more powerful by the day, for not setting your sights on just victory over everyone, that you are going to play an honorable game, but you are going to play that honorable game to win. I want every kid in America sitting around in groups like my friends and I did, or on the monkey bars like my friends and I did, saying, I'm going to be rich. I'm going to be the best at this. I'm going to conquer this thing. Whatever. Your mission in life is fucking do it. And at the society level, we've got to encourage that, man. And if you're fucking off and you are wasting your potential, dude, people need to clown on you hard. Like, you need to get it top, bottom, left, right. And yes, it will hurt emotionally. And yes, you will carry those scars with you. And yes, it will make you work harder because you don't want people looking at you like that. Dude, we've got to get back to that because we are going to face a. A massive population of Chinese people that are doing this, that believe in themselves, that are prepared to win, that are going hard in the paint to be the greatest of all time at whatever. And you will meet them in economic battle, if nothing else. And if you are not prepared to fight to win, you will lose.

[B]

Man, man. Man.

[A]

Dude, I'm telling you, like, we've really let go of something. And we are going to pay a huge. We are already paying a huge price.

[B]

All right. Hits blunt. I got an idea. 60% of people are unproductive. There's going to have to be a reckoning coming soon. I'm not going to say that. 30% of them, maybe 50% of them, I don't know how much the percentage is going to be. I feel like the homeless population is about to explode. I feel like there's going to be a lot of people that are going to quote unquote, need help now. We talked about balancing the budget, we talked about how we're already broke and we can't help any more people. What happens when those 60% get exposed? The tide comes in and we see there's a lot more naked people than we thought. We see that there's a lot more broke people than we thought. There's a lot. The people been paying themselves, the government has been propped up. Trump gets rid of all these non essential workers and we see the unemployment rates go to 20, 30% at that point. Is that a we have to cut off the hand to save the whole body because if we get bacteria infection, it could kill us. But if we just sever that, we can just sear it and we'll be good to move on. This is a tough conversation. I know this is worst case scenario. I'm not saying let's go around and kill 30 million people.

[A]

I hope not.

[B]

But I feel like there's a population of the people that we don't know what to do with. And all I'm saying is maybe I understand why Mal popped him. I don't know, maybe, maybe I understand why they have.

[A]

God damn true.

[B]

Maybe that's where we're at right now. I don't know. What do you think? What are we gonna do with the 30 million people?

[A]

Sounds completely unhinged.

[B]

We can't house them, we don't got it. We can't feed them, we don't got it. There's not enough churches, we don't got it.

[A]

So we're living in a fictitious thought experiment where we're saying that we're at like 30% unemployment and what do we do? Okay, so always build up from the physics. If you're at 30% unemployment, you're in Great Depression territory. So now you've got to be focused on all. You treat this like a national emergency and it becomes what do you have to do to rebuild the economy? You have to immediately unburden people from debt. And so you're, you're hitting a nuclear option and you're, you're going to do a ton of debt forgiveness, you're going to do like the beautiful deleveraging. But if it gets ugly, it gets ugly. Like you've just really got to get people out from under the debt. You've got to create an economic environment that is so deregulated, so pro business, so anti incumbent being able to block everybody else. You've got you, you've put People in hunger mode, which is great, but you've now got to clear the Runway for all of those guys to innovate their way out of poverty. Because there's going to be a huge number of people that look around and go, I'm not willing to let my kids go hungry. And so some will turn to violence, obviously, some will turn to crime, obviously. But a lot of them are going to create incredible companies. There's a stat, it's not quite true, but it's often repeated. It gets the spirit of something right, even though it is not literally true. But it will often be repeated that more millionaires were created during the Great Depression than any other time in human history. What they're trying to get at is in those moments of desperation, there is a subset of people that go, oh, I'm going to win because my back is so against the wall. And you've got to facilitate that. You've got to get the debt off their back, you've got to give them access to sound money. And maybe bitcoin is enough already, but you have to make sure that there's no regulatory hurdles for that so somebody can amass money in a non inflatable currency. You've got a. This is where you start thinking about infrastructure, digital, physical, everything. That's where the government needs to be allocating their money. And you have to let people fail. And this is the part that people are gonna have a really hard time. So this is where you gotta audit fdr. He was very popular at the time, but the reality is he almost certainly prolonged the Great Depression because he was doing all these socialist policies and they don't work. And so his own cabinet, like finance cabinet, economic cabinet, said like we tried everything and it just didn't work. So we look back on that fondly because it felt so humane. But the reality is, to your point about the cutting off of the hand, where I thought you were going was you just have to let some people fail and you don't kill them a million million percent. You do enforce the law. So if they even out of desperation, if they are stealing or whatever, they go to jail. So unfortunately it's not one where you can be like, oh my God, I feel so bad for you. No, like if you did a crime, you were going to serve the time. But you need to understand why they're doing that so that you can change, you can terraform the economic landscape to be ready for people to build back up. And that was one of the lines in my deep dive is the cycle of history. Pre1913 was boom, bust, and then rebuild. And it was brutal. When people lost everything. It was brutal, man. Nobody wanted to see that. But you had a shot to rebuild. Like, listen, I've arrogantly said many times that you can drop me into any company in whatever the lowest ranking person is. Six months later, the odds that I'm an executive border on 100%. And then on a long enough timeline, the odds of me becoming CEO are ridiculously high. So it's like, I'm just not worried about having to rebuild. I don't want to go through it. This is not me. Like, oh, I don't care. I'm not trying to be flippant. What I'm trying to point at is skillset matters a lot. And so if somebody actually has the skills and they get knocked all the way down, that would be brutal. But then you set about rebuilding and you find out if you actually know how to do something or not. This is why I want people to understand skills have utility. They let you do a thing other people can't do. If you actually have skills that are better than other people, you just go out, compete them, understand what the outcome, the desired outcome of the game is, get very good at delivering that desired outcome, and then go do that thing. And as long as the system isn't rigged against you in a way that is just impossible to overcome, then, hey, you've, you've got a shot. But you have to let that creative destruction take place. You've gotta let people fall from their mighty purchase. You have to. Otherwise people just can't rise back up.

[B]

Do you think we have a skill issue now in the US like that?

[A]

Obviously, if you have people that 60% of the country has a sixth grade reading level. Okay, this is wild. I did not do any research, but when I started writing the Deep Dives, I dumbed down from my audience and doubled my dollars. They criticized me for it, but they all yell, holler. So I consciously was like, I'm gonna write these at a sixth grade level. So it was like an intuition about where we're at. But that's wild. That's literally true. Let's look at the bright side of what the military did, because I fear they're on the side of how do you cannon fodder. A bunch of people. But the military also realized we need to educate them to make them better soldiers. They did the GI Bill. So coming out of the war, a lot of those guys also got educated in a way that they never would have been educated otherwise. And so you were asking about infrastructure earlier. Honestly, I'm way more focused on education. We are. It's a travesty that our taxpayer dollars go to teachers unions that are letting this happen. And anybody that's like, oh, it's not their fault. It's entirely their fault. 100%. Now, ultimately, who do I blame? The parents, of course. But it's like you can't deliver those kind of trash ass results and expect me to keep funding it. That's. That. That is literally criminal. We, we are abusing our own citizens at a rate that is grotesque.

[B]

Can we just shout out Nunya for a second? Thank you, bro. Or sis. I appreciate you.

[A]

What they say.

[B]

They just are doing a lot of super chats to. Yeah, we got two more from, from them. And it's, it's LeBlanc as well. Like LeBlanc is. Oh, Twitch. LeBlanc.

[A]

We got LeBlanc back. Wait, Nunez. LeBlanc.

[B]

LeBlanc. Y' all be trying to switch up on the streaming platforms. Get us confused.

[A]

Tricky, Tricky Blonde's legit. Second one from Nunya or LeBlanc.

[B]

People think the next war and draft.

[A]

Is going to be just blue collar people.

[B]

It's not. It's going to be poor and uneducated. Yeah, that's why, honestly, I thought you were going to say that we'll. We'll start another war.

[A]

Because that's like, Christ, I certainly hope not. I mean, listen, the war is what pulled us out of the Great Depression. Oftentimes people will credit fdr. That just isn't true. The bad news is we were a very different country at that point. We're not that country now. So I don't think a war is going to happen like that.

[B]

No.

[A]

No. So it'll be very interesting to see you guys watch this most recent deep dive. So I'd give a lot of facts about what we were capable of at the beginning of World War II in terms of our. Well, really, even before World War I, with our manufacturing capabilities, it was insane. Now we're like some ridiculously small amount of global manufacturing. I mean, it's crazy. So that the fact that we don't make things here other than software and services is very distressing. So right now the country, and I'm going to let you guess, I don't normally do this, but I think you're going to nail this one. What country do you think has the kind of manufacturing stats today that America had right before World War II?

[B]

China.

[A]

Correct. Easy. So China, by the Numbers is the new America, but much, much bigger. That's bad. That's very bad. They are your biggest rival and they control your entire modern way of life. The vast majority of the supply chains for weapons. It's not good.

[B]

Was it that the transition from Britain to the US superpower transitions wasn't that bad because they spoke English. And if like China becomes the world superpower, like we're now gonna like have to learn, like, I mean that was.

[A]

A big part of it because we could become allies with England very, very quickly. And so there was, we had already had, you know, call it a hundred years of getting over the. You used to be a colony, you smug, impudent, you know, little bastards. Yeah, exactly.

[B]

We were shared families, like siblings type thing.

[A]

Yeah, definitely. Yes, that's part of it. But the other part is the British and American cultures are so similar. Chinese culture is authoritative, authoritarian, top down, collectivist, and America is bottom up, individualistic. And so like when you talk to Chinese people, they love China. Like, don't be confused. Of course there are going to be people that don't. But for the most part, like the Chinese people I've interfaced with, they love their country, they have pride, as they should. I'm not at all surprised, but boy, are we different. So that's the. This is me trying to get everybody to focus on values is your beef. It isn't the fact that they look different than me, it is the fact that they have a different value set.

[B]

Because they're going so hard again, like they're going so far in front of us. Does it even make sense with them to leverage a war or leverage any type of conflict? Because it's like you already, like on paper, they're winning like bigger, stronger manufacturing, real gdp, depending on how you look at it. If you turn your head and take out the government's like they're beating us. In the essential categories that companies use to rank each other. What benefit do they have of like starting a conflict? I feel like they could just keep, they could just keep doing their own thing and.

[A]

Yes. Which they would want to do until they're so big that it's just self evident. And so that's certainly the play that they want to do. They want to get into a position where they could march onto the beach beaches of Taiwan. Taiwan wouldn't resist. America wouldn't say about it because we're, we know we're not gonna with China. They don't want to get into a hot war. But I don't think China's afraid of a hot war. So it's one of those where peace through strength. Keep growing your power as much as you can. America and China will fight the war cold for as long as they can. It'll be economic, it'll be allian, it'll be all the things that we saw v Russia, but heightened. It'll be a battle for AI supremacy, it'll be a battle for energy supremacy, all of that stuff, long before it becomes kinetic. But those battles will also be rough, like the. The Cold War was fascinating in some ways. It galvanizes you, it focuses your attention. It get. It gives people somebody to challenge. So when you look at somebody like Palmer Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, you realize, oh, yeah, this is a guy going hard in the paint because he looks out there and he sees real enemies. Enemies that are amassing troops at the gates. And he's like, huh, our military? Like, he was the one that introduced me to the fact that China makes 200 ships or maybe 2,000. It was some. The number was so startling, but let's just say it's 200. 200 ships for every one we make. Like, imagine being outproduced at that level. Like, that is. Dude, People don't know what that means. That is not good. That is very bad.

[B]

So, okay, and then I know I'm in this rabbit hole, but I want to, like, expand this. Do you think that we really could ramp up? Like, I think what's happening right now.

[A]

Is ramp up manufacturing.

[B]

Yeah. I feel like everybody thinks they knows better, and that's why we're not. We're fractaling in so many different things. It's like they're saying this, the other side saying this. I know better. You know better. You're broke, you're done poor.

[A]

We are like, we're doing this weird dance between are we going to go into open revolution or civil war or get our together on the international stage first?

[B]

Yeah. So I feel like if China really was like, all right, they're America's sweet now. Boom. Dropped a bomb on San Bernardino county, took out hat that would. That's there.

[A]

That wouldn't be a smart play for them because you'll turn the entire world against you. But what would be a smart play for them is imagine you're Deng Xiaoping. Mao finally dies, you take over and you go, okay, listen, guys, gather around. We're going to spend the next 40 years. We're going to get really strong, and we're going to do that by being the hub of manufacturing for the world. And we're going to invite Americans to come over and teach us about capitalism. And you do, and they teach you everything. And you start getting really strong and you realize, oh my God, we've got this incredible card that we can play, which is we'll enslave our own people. So we'll put up nets around Foxconn so that Apple will is incentivized to come here to get cheap labor, and we won't even let them kill themselves. This, this is all real. And so they become not only the manufacturing hub for the world, they become the advanced manufacturing hub of the world. And there's a great line in the Social Network where the character playing Mark Zuckerberg says, china's so big, they have more geniuses than America has anything. And I remember thinking, oh God, like, that's hard to digest. And so now you've got incredibly smart, hard, driven, moral, wonderful, like all the things that you think anybody has a monopoly on. Nobody has a monopoly on that. They've got all that too, but a whole lot more of whatever. And they're just build, build, building. Now they're not as good at us as at innovating. They don't have freedom. And freedom is just better for certain things, namely innovation. So there's no doubt that we have some advantages. They have some advantages. And so they're playing their advantages. So Dang Xiaoping is like, we're going to grow really strong, but we're going to be quiet about it. We're not going to say shit. And so for a long time they just keep more powerful, more powerful GDP skyrocketing, going from like $260. These are not literal numbers, but they're very close. $260 GDP per person to like 12,500. So it in generation. Imagine, imagine like while your wages stagnated in that same time period. There's 30x. That's the real number. That much I know is true.

[B]

Okay, yours can't read past the six.

[A]

Correct. So all of that and China's turning out people that know how to read. Okay, I'm not saying that they're creating some mythical super soldier. They're all human too, but like they're really doing the thing.

[B]

They know how to read. Yeah, at the very minute.

[A]

So they, they're like pushing their students to get hyper skilled. They're parsing them out based on ability. Everything's meritocracy, yada yada. Okay. Then you get this guy named Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping goes, hold on I saw what happened in Russia. We're not playing that game. So all you guys that are getting uppity, we're not here for that. So he boots like a hundred thousand or something people out of top roles in the Communist party that he doesn't think are loyal. Kills a few, disappears a couple billionaires, namely Jack Ma, the most famous, literally like a day or three days before his IPO. 70 billion IPO. Just insane, insane, insane. He says, I don't like the way that our banks give loans. Disappeared, kidnapped him, literally. Re educate him and let everybody know in the entrepreneurial class you serve at the pleasure of Xi Jinping, Xi Jinping goes, oh, by the way, it's time to let America know. And so he now, as an act of policy, says, we are going to be dismissive of America. We are no longer going to, like, play the little bro role and abide our time and get strong. We are now dismissive of them on the world stage. And so they start showing their hand. They start openly going against the dollar. They're building this gold corridor all across South America. They're letting people know, basically. They're not saying exactly this, but like, we're gonna re peg our yuan to gold. You're going to be able to get gold. We're not going to control it. Like, you guys are going to be able to access it. So we won't do what Nixon did to you guys in 1971. Like, you're actually going to be able to get your gold. So start doing transactions in yuan, because we're going to protect you. And they're doing all these Belt road alliances, all that stuff. Right, okay, so you want to know why America's funding Argentina? Because they can't have Argentina break China, like, break their way. So it's like, we've got to go and now get some of these guys shored up. Probably something similar happening in Venezuela. So you're getting like all of this geopolitical movement maneuvering, but China is now, like, coming forward and just saying, we are reunifying with Taiwan, whether America wants to or not, I don't give a shit. And so I forget what timeline he's put on it, but it's like they really do plan to make those moves. They really are being dismissive of America. They are not hiding anymore, that they are strong. They see themselves as number one, not just in their region, number one, that they have a mandate from heaven to basically be the central kingdom, the, like, center of everything. So brace yourself. Gonna be a wild call. It 25 years.

[B]

I interrupted a super chat for that. Sorry.

[A]

I was about to say, we went a long way on the super chat. Pretty solid.

[B]

That's on me. And had more come in while we were away. Speaking of more coming in, the next one from Nunya. So many from Nunya today.

[A]

Difference between Chinese and American. Chinese is linear. Us is imaginative.

[B]

Their genius doesn't matter if they can.

[A]

Think outside the box. Also, Chinese geniuses are going to be old and dead soon.

[B]

They don't have replacements.

[A]

Yeah, they've got demographic problems. There's no doubt about that. Yeah.

[B]

And the last one from Nunya.

[A]

Tom and Drew should dress up as rubber chickens on the Halloween stream. Why rubber chickens?

[B]

I don't know, but the mental image is hilarious.

[A]

We're not. We are going to dress up, but we are not dressing up as rubber chickens. It was so funny. I was going hard in the paint on. I don't dress up for Halloween. This is some bullshit. And then Drew as a producer was like, well, hold on for the episode though. It'd be good. And I was like, God, for the numbers top. So. So we're gonna dress up. We're gonna dress up. Make sure you show up on Friday.

[B]

Yes, dress up. We're dressing up. Everybody drop your costumes in the discord General chat. Um, we can't see you, so make sure I want to see you guys dressing up and stuff like that. Happy Halloween. Um, and for those who don't celebrate, give them candy, pass out a Bible. Whatever you do, don't be a buzzkill.

[A]

Nice. I like that. That was a good psa. All right, we have more.

[B]

Nope, that's it.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Oh, God.

[A]

There was something I was going to say. What was it? I want to commit because I like to be held accountable to the things. So my goal, this. This I'm not committed to, but the. The next thing I am. But my goal for 2025, I'm going to have watched by December 31, 250 episodes of One Piece, the anime. By the end, by December 31st of 2026, I will be caught up.

[B]

Okay, what episode are you at now?

[A]

I'm at like 68.

[B]

68. Okay, and then how many episodes are there total?

[A]

Like 1,126 or something.

[B]

Oh, okay. That's a scale.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. No, bro, we gotta go harder.

[B]

Go on quest on your animate consumption.

[A]

Here's the thing. Lisa was literally laughing at me because she was like, when you set your mind to something, she's like. Even when it's something like this. She's like, you are a freak.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

So, yeah, no, I'm already. I've clocked 68 episodes in like two weeks.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

So I'm on a pace is going.

[B]

Crazy in the chat right now. It was your fault, Straw hat. We couldn't do without you. You've been holding the one piece down.

[A]

For a while, man.

[B]

You the realest one for real.

[A]

But like, if you're at all into impactful children's entertainment, yo, one piece is goaded. It is goaded. It is really like the morals in that thing are dope, but it is illicit literature. It is stuff where the kid is going to look over their shoulder a little bit because like, oh man, Mom's not going to love this. She's probably not going to stop me from watching it. It was a little bit how I felt about Alanis Morissette when that song came on and my mom heard for the first time, would she go down on you in a theater? And I was like, oh God, my mom's going to freak out. It was like, you're not going to get grounded for it, but mom is going to turn like a sideways glance to it anyway. It's incredible. I'm loving it. And as somebody who is on a deep mission to make some of the greatest children's entertainment, most healthy habits are hard. Meal prep takes hours. Gym routines get derailed all the time. Complicated supplement regimens fall apart, often within weeks. But AG1 Next Gen is different. AG1 Next Gen delivers what your body actually needs. 75 plus vitamins and minerals, 5 clinically studied probiotic strains, plus prebiotics and superfoods. It replaces your multivitamin probiotics and more in one simple daily drink. AG1 next gen comes in three new flavors. Tropical citrus and berry. All plant based flavoring with zero added sugar, zero artificial sweeteners, zero erythritol. Every flavor maintains NSF certification for sport, so you know you're getting the strictest quality standards. Subscribe today to try the next gen of AG1 and if you use my link, you'll also get a free bottle of AG D3K2, an AG1 Welcome Kit and five of the upgraded travel packs with your first order. Click the link in the show notes or just head to drink ag1.comimpact to get started again. That's drinkag1.com impact.