MrBeast Backlash, Streamer Dies on Air, & Trump’s Alaska Flex on Putin | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: MrBeast Backlash, Streamer Dies on Air, & Trump’s Alaska Flex on Putin
Date: August 21, 2025

---

Overview

In this episode of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu and co-host Drew tackle a riveting mix of headline-grabbing topics—from Trump flexing military muscle with Putin in Alaska and complex peace efforts in Ukraine, to France's populist approach to immigration, viral race debates and culture wars, the tragic death of a French streamer on air, and the perplexing backlash against YouTube titan MrBeast. The episode wraps with a frank, sometimes provocative exploration of marriage dynamics. Throughout, Tom and Drew challenge mainstream narratives and highlight deeper societal trends, all through the show’s trademark lens of critical, clear-eyed inquiry.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

---

1. Trump, Putin, and the Ukrainian Peace Drama

[01:37–13:13]

• Putin Meets Trump in Alaska – The Bomber Flyover

  • Drew finds humor and symbolism in Trump having bombers fly over Putin’s landing, calling it a "flex."
  • Tom questions its real-world impact: "If people think that Putin is going to be intimidated by that... they're out of their minds."
  • Tom invokes “political theater,” likening the situation to someone bringing swords to a gunfight when both sides have nukes.

• NATO and Article 5 Guarantees

  • Tom explains the carrot being dangled to Zelensky is a kind of informal NATO-style protection, without actual NATO membership.
  • He emphasizes: "Putin...does not have a problem with NATO as letters... but if it is NATO in practice, just not in name, he is still going to be like, no."
  • Tom notes the weight of loss: "Rough numbers. We’ve lost over a million human souls. Brutal dead, though." [05:46]

• Putin’s Goals and the Ineffectiveness of Sanctions

  • Tom: "Russia is now sanction resistant... sanction piecemealing only makes them stronger."
  • Drew reflects on how Russia became "the super bacteria... they become resistant."

• Peace Prospects: Realpolitik and Buying Time

  • Tom urges removal of emotion and analysis of patterns: "Say the right thing, buy time, keep bombing." [11:45]
  • Both agree: the war is unlikely to end this year, calling a six-month resolution "zero percent."

Notable Quotes

• Tom: "If Trump is trying to end this war simply as a way to get into heaven, yeah, I'm here for it." [05:02]
• Drew: "Announce yours, not bombs. Mine’s going off, bro.” [03:06]
• Tom: "This is Hopium. People want it to be true. I want it to be true." [05:53]

---

2. France, Populism, and Immigration

[14:14–24:36]

• Marie Le Pen’s Hardline Speech

  • Le Pen vows to shut down radical mosques and expel “hate preachers.”
  • Tom sees this as "a sign of things to come" in Europe, reflecting on “the importance of values.”

• Assimilation, Populism, and Identity

  • Tom links France’s surge in right-wing sentiment to a failure of managed immigration and value-system mismatches.
  • He describes how unchecked immigration rates fuel populist backlashes, emphasizing: "You can only bring people into your country at the rate that they will assimilate to your value system." [17:54]

• Values as Fault Lines

  • Tom: “Values are the thing that people fight and die for.”
  • Europe’s experience is compared to historic nation-building (analogous to Israel), with an anthropologist’s detachment.

Notable Quotes

• Tom: "This is not a race problem... this is a values thing." [23:20]
• Tom: “If you thought you could import a ton of people that have different values and that the people holding the opposing views won't eventually clap back just as hard…you do this at your own peril.” [17:14]
• Drew: "You can't compare immigrant communities to native black Americans. The U.S. is a unique situation." [38:47]

---

3. Race, Culture & the Jubilee Black Debate

[24:36–46:56]

• Amanda Seales & The Black Twitter Reception

  • Drew gives context on Amanda Seales’ notoriety, explaining her "ragebait" debate persona.
  • Emphases the importance of not conflating black radicalism with mainstream Democratic politics.

• Stats, Narratives, and the Power (and Danger) of Framing

  • Tom discusses the perils of statistics being weaponized, "Stats can really be made to say just about anything that you want them to say." [28:07]
  • Critiques Amanda Seales’ approach: "When she’s losing an argument that's based on stats, she will just switch to pure emotion."
  • Advocates for "high utility ideology" and the need for culture focused on personal progress and resilience.

• Cycle of Poverty & The Power of Culture

  • Tom: “You become what you repeat.”
  • He explains that poverty, not race, is the deterministic factor in many outcome gaps—examples from non-black immigrant groups, especially Asians and Nigerians.

• Importance of Culture Over Skin Color

  • Tom rejects genetic essentialism: "If you tell me I'm looking at a Chinese person whose parents have an accent, I'm like, oh, that works hard. Guaranteed…culture has massive predictive validity, skin color has extremely low predictive validity." [44:09]

Notable Quotes

• Tom (on debate): “For this debate to work, they would have to pull into the conversation that I, Amanda Seales, do not care about facts and figures…This is about leading with love.” [30:44]
• Drew: (on cultural bias in policing): “… In some communities, cops are there to help, in others, they’re there to book you.” [32:45]
• Tom: "What we talk about is race. And I'm saying fuck all that noise because it literally doesn't matter if you keep reinforcing, reinforcing, reinforcing...Then it becomes a mind virus." [40:18]

---

4. French Streamer’s On-Air Death & The MrBeast “Evil” Discourse

[46:56–54:09]

• The Death of Jean Parmon during a Live Stream

  • Tom expresses horror at the spectacle: "This is a freak show...people will do anything for views."
  • Drew: "At some point, you need to pick up a trade, bro. This is crazy."
  • Tom draws a line between this and MrBeast’s content, emphasizing the difference between genuine harm and stress for entertainment.

• MrBeast’s Charity Livestream & Social Backlash

  • MrBeast’s livestream raised $12 million for charity but spawned viral tweets calling him "one of the most evil people alive."
  • Tom defends MrBeast: "YouTube is a mirror. MrBeast is showing you exactly what you want to watch."
  • Drew denounces the ‘crabs in a bucket’ mentality, linking populist resentment with a reflex to attack successful public figures.

Notable Quotes

• Tom: "If people are mad if they think that he's evil, what does that say about what they want to watch?” [52:35]
• Drew: "It seems like...populism in the government is leading toward resentment...the need for a bad guy." [54:30]

---

5. Marriage, Sex, and the Modern Relationship Minefield

[55:28–66:08]

• A Listener’s Dilemma: Sexless Marriage

  • The hosts analyze a scenario from Reddit: After years of "platonic co-parenting," the husband stops doing loving gestures as sex dries up; the wife complains in turn.

• Negotiation Framework for Marriage

  • Tom: "Marriage is a negotiation and sex is a point of leverage for women, typically. And kindnesses...is certainly a leverage point that men have."
  • He describes marriage as “a multi-decade game of influencing your partner” for mutual benefit, not mere transactional exchange.
  • Tom and Drew riff comedy on the push-and-pull negotiation (shopping for sex, period cycles, boundaries).

• Co-Dependent Partnership and Evolving Together

  • Advocates for embracing influence and intentional communication, calling for "independently codependent" relationships.
  • “We are moving through life as a unit... If something’s really upsetting you, then I’m going to enter into that world and try to help you back out." [61:59]

• Provocative Analogies (“The Mountain for Her Waves to Crash On”)

  • Tom, paraphrasing Justin Waller: “The rocks for the waves of her emotions to crash on.”
  • Balances evolutionary psychology with practical, lived advice.

Notable Quotes

• Tom: “The weight of my heart is not through my stomach, it's through my dick. And if you understand that, we are going to get along really fucking well.” [58: 39]
• Tom: “The sort of modern day framing of there's always another fish in the sea and I don't need no man... this is just full retard. People are out of their goddamn minds." [62:45]
• Tom: “Part of a man's job is to put boundaries on the emotional outbursts of a woman. That just is.” [57:52]

---

Memorable Moments & Quotes (w/ Timestamps)

• Tom on political theater:
  “If people think that Putin is going to be intimidated by that... they're out of their minds.” — [02:23]

• Drew on modern populism:
  “It seems like...populism in the government is leading toward resentment, and that resentment is going from the Z juice, to the black fatigue, to now, MrBeast smiling too much...the need for a bad guy.” — [54:30]

• Tom on the marriage exchange:
  "When someone does something you don't like, you tell them, you pull it up short, you draw boundaries." — [56:31]

• Tom on race and culture:
  "Culture has massive predictive validity, where...skin color has extremely low predictive validity." — [44:09]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

• [01:37] — Ukraine, Russia, and Trump’s B2 Bomber Flex
• [06:24] — Russia’s Historic Attitude Toward Losses and Sanction Resistance
• [14:14] — France’s Populist Right and Immigration Clash
• [24:36] — Jubilee: Black Radical vs. Black Conservative Debate Context
• [32:16] — Policing, Statistics, & Minority Communities
• [44:09] — Culture vs. Race as Predictors of Social Mobility
• [46:56] — French Streamer Dies During Abuse-Laden Marathon Stream
• [50:53] — MrBeast’s 12 Million Dollar Charity Livestream & Backlash
• [55:28] — Sexless Marriage & Negotiation in Modern Relationships
• [62:45] — Tom’s Unfiltered Thoughts on Contemporary Dating Narratives

---

Summary Flow & Utility

This episode stands out for its candid, sometimes contrarian analysis—eschewing culture-war slogans for deeper structural commentary and personal conviction. The hosts deconstruct headlines, challenge herd mentalities, and ultimately call for agency, value-driven living, and hard-nosed realism—whether in geopolitics, identity, or marriage. Tom’s blend of intellectual rigor with lived wisdom and Drew’s wide-angle, street-level nuance deliver a fast-moving, meme-aware, yet profoundly practical listen.

If you want an unvarnished take on what really matters behind today’s memes and news cycles, this is an essential episode.

---

Miss This Episode? Key Takeaways

• Diplomatic spectacle doesn’t move dictators—hard incentives and hard power do.
• Populist backlash in France and elsewhere is deeply rooted in unresolved cultural and economic tensions, not just bigotry.
• Race debates in the U.S. are clouded by conflated stats and historical context—culture and poverty are greater determinants than skin color.
• Modern fame comes with toxic incentives—YouTubers like MrBeast reflect the audience’s desires more than they drive them.
• Resentment, rather than aspiration, is driving both social media and political trends.
• Marriage, like social progress, is a negotiation of values, boundaries, and mutual shaping—and modern narratives are often completely, even dangerously, off-base.

---

Final Word (Tom, [66:08]):
“Everybody, thank you guys. Always. It is so wonderful to see everybody join us today. Today was a lot of fun...and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.”

Transcript

[Commercial Announcer]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom]

If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done. Trump meets Putin in Alaska, flies a B2 bomber over his head. Trump and Zelensky meet with European leaders in the White House, and Zelensky wore a suit. Marine Le Pen is coming in hot on radical Islamists. Black conservatives collide with a black radical on Jubilee. French streamer dies in his sleep after physical abuse during a marathon stream. MrBeast raises $12 million for charity and gets called. Evil man's wife stops having sex with him, so he stops doing anything nice for her. You guys are not gonna wanna miss today. Buckle up. Let's get to it.

[Drew]

Let's jump right into it because I really wanna talk about Ukraine, Russia. So there's been a lot of things happening. Trump brought Zelensky and the European leaders in most recently. But last week, Putin came in from Alaska. I thought that was funny. We talked about that yesterday.

[Tom]

You said you thought he threatened him.

[Drew]

Okay, Putin. Trump is flexing on Putin.

[Tom]

Yes.

[Drew]

As soon as you walk out the plane, I fly over you with a whole bunch of bombers on land. That was yours that I got for a discount because you were broke. So I feel like he was slapping him in the face. But you had a different takeover.

[Tom]

Here's the thing. I didn't see it as a threat, that's for sure. However, I do think if you listen to what Scott Besant said about this, Scott Besson was like, oh, he was trying to flex on him. He was trying to remind him, like, hey, we've got all these toys. So it's your read, isn't crazy. I think the overall way that people are looking at this, if people think that Putin is going to be intimidated by that. They're out of their minds. It's like, if you, you're walking into my house and I have an arsenal with bazookas, AK47s, Glocks, like, literally, gun on gun on gun, and then you walk in and show me that you've got a really nice sword collection. Now, I know you also have a whole bunch of guns, but you're trying to flex on me with the swords. Like, what, dude, these. We have Mutually Assured Global Destruction aimed at each other with dead hand triggers.

[Drew]

Like, they announced yours, not bombs. Mine's going off, bro.

[Tom]

This is like, look, if you're going to do that flex on Paraguay, okay? But doing it on Russia. This is all political theater from top to bottom. If Trump had said, listen, there's this. We're going to lift all the sanctions off of Russia. They're having a really hard time right now. Like, we're, we're. This is an economic game. We want to get these guys back into a good position. I can see how we're going to end this thing. It's going to be fantastic. I'd be like, interesting. If Putin is signaling that economically, like, look, I'm really tired of this. This is becoming a problem. I see an off ramp. I would buy that maybe we were making progress. But when you start talking, the thing that's getting Zelensky excited and bringing him to the table is that we're going to have some kind of Article 5, like, guarantee. Now, for people that don't know what Article 5 is, admittedly it's very broad, but it says, well, we will. If somebody attacks one of the members that has this protection, we will respond as we deem fit. We could come in and, like, fudgeing, drop troops on the ground. And now this is really on. We could drop nuclear weapons, whatever. We. Or we could send a strongly worded letter to the manager, like, all of the above. It is the toothiest part of the reason to be a NATO. That's why you want to be a NATO. It's like, my brothers are going to come and whoop your ass if you do anything untoward. And that's why I want to be a part of NATO. And so they're saying, okay, look, we're never going to let him into NATO, but we're still going to roll up as the brothers and, like, kick the shit out of anybody that messes them. That is the thing that he has a problem with. He Putin. He does not have a problem with NATO as letters so it's like if it is NATO in practice, but just not in name, he is still going to be like, no. And so given that Putin's like cabinet, I don't remember who the exact people are, but there are people that are out there saying, yeah, we're never going to agree to this. Putin is completely silent. Only Trump and Zelinsky are like, yay, we're getting closer, dude. He keeps saying that. So I think that Trump really wants it to be true. I am very glad that Trump legitimately seems to be pursuing peace. I don't know if it'll come up later, but I love that Trump believes that this is his way to get into heaven. This is why religion is so useful. People will stop bad behavior and do good things because they believe that there is an all seeing eye in the sky that will punish you for all of eternity if you do the wrong thing. So I've got no beef if Trump is trying to end this war simply as a way to get into heaven, yeah, I'm here for it. The bad news is I don't think Putin is interested in ending the war as a way to get into heaven. So he. I don't understand. Realpolitik, people, Realpolitik. Putin is going to keep pushing until he reaches sufficient force that will push back. He's not going to go, oh, yeah, I'm going to back out of my territorial ambitions, my desire to create this buffer zone of NATO, because you guys are going to give him NATO protections without the name NATO on it. I'm not sure how people are mapping this. This is Hopium. People want it to be true. I want it to be true. Rough numbers. We've lost over a million human souls. Brutal dead, though.

[Drew]

Brutal. Shouldn't that impact the leader of the country?

[Tom]

Like a lot of young half the impact is Putin. So when you look at Russia's history, and this is where people need to understand culture matters a lot. Russia will cram as many people as they need to into the maws of death and destruction to make sure that they protect Mother Russia, period. And they've done it over and over and over. It is a thing for them. And that's where we're at. Like, yeah, they're losing people. They are prepared to lose a lot more. So says history. And if you don't make this good for them in some way, I don't see why they would ever agree to this. So what would Putin want to do to get his way? He wants to forestall as long as humanly Possible deeper intervention on behalf of the US and Europe. So what are you going to have to do? You're going to have to show up to the meetings, you're going to have to be friendly, you're going to have to, like, hint towards positive things. You're going to have to lay the flowers on the soldiers that died when America and Russia were allies. Somebody just explained to me, what does he get out of this? And if people think that, like, oh, my God, they're just so broken. Look at how much oil India is now buying from Russia. Like gobs and gobs of gobs. It went from like 1% to like 42%. And India's arbitraging it. They're just reselling it on the market. And they've made some untold number of billions of dollars just doing that arbitrage. So Russia's like, yeah, much like Nick Fuentes. We have found a way to make money despite all of your sanctions.

[Drew]

Once the Russia's a Nick Fuentes of the world.

[Tom]

They are the super bacteria that if you don't kill all the way, they will only get stronger. They become resistant. Russia is now sanction resistant. And so maybe if you had done all these sanctions right out of the gate, you could have stopped them. But piecemealing it, and I've heard Trump making noises to that effect. It's like, or maybe it was beset, but one of them was like, yeah, it takes a while for sanctions. Oh, in fact, it was Marco Rubio. What am I saying? That it takes a while for sanctions to, like, really have bite. And so, like, I don't know that we're gonna get anywhere with that.

[Drew]

So that probably explains this clip that Charlie Kirk retweeted that talked about that Putin said that if Trump were president in 2022, there would have never been a war.

[Commercial Announcer]

I'd like to remind you that in

[Tom]

2022, during the last contact with the previous administration, I tried to convince my previous American colleague the situation should not be brought to the point of no return when it would come to hostilities. And I said it quite directly back then that it's a big mistake today when President Trump saying that if he was the president back then, there will be no war. And I'm quite sure that it would indeed be. So I can confirm that.

[Drew]

So are you just saying he's doing this? Is Trump Trump Trump's ego? He's just trying to buy time, man.

[Tom]

That is a really good question, because there's no way that he's unaware that that is like, the thing that he could say to Trump that would be. I mean, this is like tickling his G spot. Like, this is wild. This is exactly what he was here

[Drew]

scribbling this in a notebook later, like Putin said.

[Tom]

Yeah, yeah. So I. That feels like a give. That feels like him mapping Trump relatively well. Of like, okay, I know what this guy wants to hear. You caught Trump on a hot mic. I don't think it was a big deal because this is exactly the kind of thing that he would say on knowing that he's being recorded to the world. But he was like, he wants to do it for me. Like, he wants to end the war for me. Like that admittedly. Yeah, right. That admittedly is a pretty wild thing to say. Like, he wants to stop killing people for me. No, like, if he's not encountering. If he thinks that you are, you represent the sufficient force that's going to stop him. Okay. Like, I guess you could say that's for you. But it's really just about, I'm not going to get what I want by pushing into this. This is going to make things worse for me, so I'm going to back off. He's not going to do it for him. That's absurd. So it just becomes a question of what's the, like, leverage that I'm going to get. And so if he's buttering Trump up, great, smart tactic. Exactly what I would advise anybody to do. I mean, this is 48 laws of power stuff. So my guess is that's all this. That the official words coming out of the Kremlin are like, well, this is going to take time and we're going to have to, like, slowly figure this out. And. But, you know, we do want to see if over time, slowly, slowly, like, we can find a path to be. It's like, oh, my God. So a lot of word salad stuff, a lot of buy time stuff, which is again, in keeping with if you remove all the emotion and you don't listen to what people do, but instead you just look for the pattern. The pattern in all of this is say the right thing, buy time, keep bombing.

[Drew]

Say the right thing by time, keep bombing. Yeah, that's.

[Tom]

That's their pattern. So there's a couple people in chat that are saying that you're misrepresenting the planes and it was a salute, which has been done throughout history. Any thoughts on that? Hold on. Do a search for Bessant, who literally, a member of the Cabinet, saying this was a flex. He was trying, like Besant's words were almost all the way to Drew's position of this was a threat. Now he was saying it like a little bit tongue in cheek. But if you type in I've got a imagine besant flyover, something like that, that you'll get this. So anyway, I love you guys, but don't be ridiculous.

[Drew]

Here it is.

[Tom]

I want to set the record straight

[Drew]

on what went on in Alaska.

[Tom]

Alaska was a show of force by President Trump. He invited President Putin to land that

[Drew]

the Russians used to own.

[Tom]

He displayed a huge amount of military hardware and then did a flyover. It was kind of like inviting your uncontrollable neighbor to your house and showing him your gun case. So then the bad news is your neighbor has an equally large gun case. But yeah, look, this was a flex for sure. This was a show of force. I don't think it goes all the way to threat. I don't think Trump is that dumb. But it is. Certainly he's trying to flex on you, man. That's just all there is to it.

[Drew]

Okay? Over and under. The war ends before the end of the year. Like next six months.

[Tom]

Not going to happen. No way.

[Drew]

Zero percent.

[Tom]

Nope. Zero.

[Drew]

Got it. Well, we'll see. We shall see.

[Tom]

We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Booking a verbo vacation rental means you get verbo care and 247 life support, verified reviews from real guests and top rated homes with the Love by Guest filter.

[Commercial Announcer]

I just booked my VRBO because there was a sweet wine fridge.

[Tom]

We all have our reasons. If you know you've erbo terms, apply

[Drew]

cvrbo.com trust for details.

[Commercial Announcer]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-GRAINGER Click grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.

[Tom]

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

[Drew]

All right, let's jump over to France.

[Tom]

Let's talk about this.

[Drew]

Marie Le Pen was talking about this spicy. I got the perfect moment.

[Tom]

Okay, this is Marie Le Pen. For people that don't know, she is the leader currently of the far right party in France. I'm telling you, this is a sign of things to come I do not know what people were thinking when they threw the borders open, man. All right, we're going to talk about values, but we're going to read for you, just in case you're not in front of your phone, because she's going to be speaking in French. We will translate, but this. Get ready.

[Drew]

Boom. Radical mosques will be shut down, hate preachers expelled. The associations fused with Southism and the Muslim Brotherhood will be dissolved.

[Tom]

With me, she wants to be elected president.

[Drew]

Be sure that the rights of women today challenged by the Islamist obscuritism, will be granted to all the women of France. With me, the security will not go against liberty in any case, not against the liberty of honest people.

[Tom]

At the beginning of this speech, she also talks about stripping French citizenship from Islamists. Now she uses the word Islamist, so I'll choose to believe that she means extremists. So stripping their French citizenship, expelling them from the country and punishing even people of French nationality if they have. She doesn't say aid and abet the enemy, but, like, that's the vibe. I forget the exact word she used. Forgive me, because I'm. She did not say that. That exact phrase. So she is supposedly, if the polls can be believed, she has 42% over people. I believe it's voter intention over Macron's party. But the election doesn't happen until 2027. She is. She has been convicted already of. She's appealing a crime.

[Drew]

Oh, that was that. I remember that.

[Tom]

Yeah. Of embezzlement. And so she's appealing it. But if she loses that, then she will be unable to run for office, which she herself has said would be political death. And obviously she's saying that this is a political attack, that it isn't. She wasn't. The courts admit she wasn't personally enriched by the supposed embezzlement, so. Which is usually, I think, in the us, like, you have to show that the person was personally enriched for it to be a crime. I think. I think someone would have to fact check me on that one. I don't feel confident in that. But anyway, the court system admitted that she wasn't personally enriched by it. She denies that there was any wrongdoing whatsoever. She's fighting it, and so we'll see. But the thing to focus on here is this is also what you're seeing play out in the uk. And I am literally shocked that people did not realize. People will fight and die for their values. Values are the thing that people fight and die for. And if you thought you could import a ton of people that have different values and that the people holding the opposing views won't eventually clap back just as hard. Like, you put yourself in a position where you have two sides that will kill and die for their values. Israel, Palestine, it's the same situation. So you're now playing it out in Europe and people are going to fight back. So we'll see. We'll see how far it goes, man. But you do this at your own peril. And this is why I'm saying you, you can only bring people into your country at the rate that they will assimilate to the value system.

[Drew]

But again, is this a just a populism thing? We need a bad guy. The Muslims are on the rise. They're the bad guy. Let's get mad at them.

[Tom]

And doing this at a populist moment is how you magnify the effect a hundredfold. But it isn't just that people will fight for their values. It becomes a quantity thing.

[Drew]

What do you mean by the first thing you said? Doing this at a pipeless moment makes it a hundred folds.

[Tom]

So you're going to pour accelerant on the fire by introducing people with different values at a time where resentment is already through the roof and people, whatever, 20 million people, think that Mr. Beast is evil. In a moment that unhinged emotionally. If you then import a bunch of people that are anathema to your values, they're gonna go after them. So in a way that they would be far less fast to go after them. Because in a time where everything is going good economically, people are having a good time, people just aren't going to react as hard and fast. It's like, life is good. So it's like you're going out of your way to find a problem. And that would be the pushback that everybody would give you is like, bro, why are you obsessed about Islamists? Like, they're like 2% of the country, bro. Like this chill. And then you go, yeah, but if you follow this out, they're going to be 10% and then they're going to be 15%. And this is exactly how things go awry. They get political power, they start making demands, and this is all bad. P.S. this is exactly how the Jews got Israel. So if you got beef with the Jews, then I don't understand how people don't recognize the. That this will be the same inflammatory problem in importing them into Europe. Like, and this one I look at as an anthropologist, and I'm just like, this plays out in A very knowable fashion, boys and girls.

[Drew]

So in one fashion, I've heard you talked in the past about like we talk about corporate greed, tax rate greed, and you're like, you can't get mad that capitalism is the game and people know the game better than other people. Is this similar in the fact that like the Muslims wouldn't have their free immigration, they wouldn't have a stronghold in certain communities of the U.S. if those communities weren't dying barren outside? Everybody talks about Dearborn, Michigan. Everybody's like, there's a whole Muslim population. We should have stopped that. Dearborn, Michigan used to be where the Ford factory was. So the Ford factory was still there. If we didn't ship it out, there still would have been blue collar jobs there. Americans still would have been still. There still would have been a diner, they still would have had 1950s there. They still would have been playing country music. But they decimated the town. Everybody left. The Muslims came in for cheap. So we can't get mad that the. You know what I mean? Like, is there a. I just really

[Tom]

do love the way you encapsulate some things. That's brilliant. I love everything about that. You are saying very, very true words. The catch is that there's a way to do immigration well and there's a way to do immigration poorly. And Europe did immigration so poorly that we at least have the lead to go, okay, hold on a second.

[Drew]

Based off of that experiment.

[Tom]

Yeah, like you, you can't do it devoid of checking for value system and you can't do it devoid of speed. So if you're English and you have, and I use that word very intentionally because my wife, who is a British citizen, is not English. And I remember the first time I called her English, she was legitimately, like bothered by it. She's like, I'm not English. And I was like, what the fuck? Like you're from England. She's like, yes, but I'm Greek. And I was like, what? What kind of weird ass distinction are we making? So it would be like if I said to you, you're American, you're like, whoa, bitch, I'm Haitian. It's like, I live here though. I pay taxes and that's how I felt about my wife. And so, but I was like, oh, I get it. Like, England is a thing. Being English is an identity. And Unlike America, that's 250 years old, England is thousands of years old. London itself is like over a thousand years old. It's crazy. So these are civilizations that have been around for a very long time. So there really is like a distilled difference between being English and being French. So if you're a white English person, that's very different than being a white French person. They feel some kind of way when, like, if you say to a, like, if you have a French person in England and you said you're English, some percentage of them are going to take be like, no, I'm not, I'm British, I'm not English. So I was like, okay, but here's why, like the Greek communities did not create as much because I'm sure if you imported too many of them, you'd have a similar problem. But the reason that the Greeks were able to assimilate in a way that Islamists for sure going to struggle and possibly Muslims is that they're not the same religion. And so if you get secular people from the Middle East, I don't think it's going to matter at all. Like if they come to England, they're like, hey, word man, I'm here for finance, bro. Like, this is dope. I'm British, I love it the most. England is my home, couldn't be any happier. I'm secular, no beef. But when you've got people coming in, ah, we've got, we've got the Cypriot Greek girl just off camera. And so that's where this gets problematic. The Greek are Christian. So it's like you get Christian on top of Christian, nobody's got beef. They've got different churches, but churches and everybody sort of gets it. Even the clergy, like follow similar rankings and all that. So it's like, yeah, not a lot of friction there, but you start getting into now a totally different religion, you're going to have problems. So again, I think it's wise of people because I think it lowers a lot in predictive validity if you just look at Muslims. Because if Muslims come in and they're like, no, we're cool, we don't want Sharia law either. We also don't want any form of religion to be baked into the government secular. We're here for it. I don't. There's not going to be a big clash. Especially if the second generation kids are like, I'm Muslim, but like, I grew up in England, I see myself as British. You're not going to have a problem with that. Again, this is not a race problem. If though, you get somebody who's like, yeah, we want Sharia law, we're going to be chill about it for now. But let me tell You. When we start hitting 7, 8%, we're gonna start saying something about it, and then we hit 15%, you're really gonna know about it. It's like, okay, you're gonna get a clash, and that's literally what's happening. So be careful. This is a values thing. And when people try to rapidly change the values in a country, you will see fighting. It may not be like actual punching in the face, but you're gonna see protests for sure. And then it can always escalate, especially if economic times get too difficult.

[Drew]

All right, let's jump into this. Black radical versus black conservatives. Okay, before we start this conversation, I need to just have some.

[Tom]

We're doing 45 minutes on this.

[Drew]

I need to have some mild markers, please. It's like a debate. Like, let's do definitions. Let's just start at the very, very beginning. Amanda Seals is a black radical. She's not a liberal, so she is not a representative of the Democrat. She's not a Democratic ideology. Yes. Recently, the Democrats adopted black people, so that way they can have them vote for them. Recently, since 1960.

[Tom]

I was going to say, yeah, if you're trying to say since 1920, I'm. Or 2020, I'm going to have a problem here.

[Drew]

But so just. So this. A lot of people are, like, dunking in comments like, yeah, this was wrong with the left. It's like, yeah, well, she's not representing the left, so I just want to be respectful of the left in the audience. Secondly, we have to understand who Amanda Seals as is as a person. A lot of people don't even know who she is. It's their first time interacting with her. She. She was, like, famously kicked out of Insecure, the Issa Rae show that was on HBO for a bunch of years because she was too, like, oh, yeah, it wasn't easy. It was a good show. It was one of the number one or number two black shows out at the time. She was kicked out of it for being too problematic, too high maintenance. Like, she is notorious for always arguing with people. She lost a radio show in Chicago because she used to argue with the callers all the time. So it's like having her in this position, it literally was like rage bait. And like a lot of the black community, black Twitter that knows her from that era now seeing her as, like, a debater, as a commentator. It's all funny because you used to be the clapback queen, and now you're sitting as a debater and doing all

[Tom]

these things, and the black Twitter community thinks that's ridiculous because she can't be taken seriously as a debater.

[Drew]

It's one of those things, like, she's the most argumentative person. Like, on the. On the.

[Tom]

Is that what you want in a debate? That's why it was like, Destiny is

[Drew]

like, so it's like, oh, this is funny. Because all she's going to do is yell at people and do this thing. So when people were like, well, all she's doing is raising her voice and y' all is like, yeah, that's what Amanda Seals does. So it's kind of like her caricature. Almost like Sarah Silverman is going to tell a dirty joke. Like, that's her. That's her stick. That's her funny in.

[Tom]

Got it. Okay, cool. Now, is that a popular thing? Like are would. If we took a poll on black Twitter, would she be like, wildly popular, wildly unpopular?

[Drew]

She's a character. So it's like, we know who she is. There's people who love her. People hear her. That's why you Sarah Silverman, because that's a very specific female comedian with a regular style. Like, there's a thousand comedians, but not everybody's Sarah Silverman. There's a thousand black women who do comedy, but they don't do it like Amanda Seals does it. All right, so this was. I think you said this was one of your favorites. The James Nuclear dude, Colin Wright retweeted. This ideology is on its way out and it's still widely believed and entrenched in many institutions. But it's intellectual vociousness is being exposed every day for autisea. They have no coherent argument, just snark and sanctimony. We had enough.

[Tom]

You can give everyone here like a $50,000 check, especially people that are in the streets who are committing violent crimes, consistently, a $50,000 check. It's not going to fix anything. It's not going to increase the median household income in the next 10 years by 10% or 20%. For example, we have the Chinese Exclusion act of 1882. We prevented Chinese people from getting citizenship and even entering the country. We discriminated against them and basically put them under apartheid, even here in the United States, yet they have the highest median household income. How is that possible? How come they don't complain and feel entitled consistently to beg for reparations and beg for this when they are killing each other 90% of the time, which is the rate that black people kill each other according to the FBI.

[Drew]

Oh, young Matt.

[Tom]

Yet white people are the Oppressors.

[Drew]

I'm not sure where your education came

[Tom]

from, but they lied to you. Stats don't lie, though. Statistics lie all the time. So let's pause it for a sec. So, in fairness to her stat, statistics really can be made to say just about anything that you want them to say. You can look at them from a different angle. You can frame them in a way that does not mean that you want to abandon statistics, because there can be real revelations in the data. But you do need to be skeptical of the data. You do need to try to look at things from multiple different angles. When I'm writing my deep dives, a lot of times I'll get a stat, and I'll be like, okay, that's way too convenient for my narrative. I need to go look at this from different angles. How do we end up here? What is this really? How was the study framed? And I have no doubt in the fullness of time, there are going to be stats that I've used where it's like, okay, there was some flaw in the underlying study or whatever. So I concede her point. But what I saw a lot of from her is when she's losing an argument that's based on stats, she will just switch to a pure, like, emotion. Or she'll tell, like, I can't remember if this kid, I think it is this kid, where she's like, think of me as your mom. Don't talk to me like that. It's like, that's not an argument, Especially not when you're talking to people in a way where I'm just, like, aghast. So one. One thing that I really like about the way that Destiny debates and listen, I know Destiny has his flaws, and he will for sure go unhinged, but when people are attacking him, he just almost doesn't even acknowledge it. He just, like, keeps going, here are the stats. Here are the figures. And she says something at the very, very, very end of the debate. Literally, after everybody goes, they bring in a few more people. This is done. The debate's over. You've got, like, three minutes left on the Jubilee video. Most people are gone by now. And they brought a couple more people out solo just to, like, ask them a couple questions. And she's one of them. And she's basically like, we don't need to be having this debate or conversation. I forget which word she used at the level of data. We need to be having this at the level of love. And I thought, oh, this is somebody who's like, I just I have a narrative that I believe. I have a set of values that I hold. And we're going to argue from that position. And then from there, if you map her as that somebody that legitimately doesn't care what is sort of true, grounded in factual reality, and instead is like, this is going to be narrative driven to get to an outcome that I believe in. Then it's like, oh, all of a sudden there's a point where she's like, I'll just keep raising my voice until you stop. There is telling people they're not going to talk to her like that, telling her to stop, stop, stop, when they deliver a fact that she doesn't like saying that they're incorrect when the fact checker is like, no, they're not. So it's. Once you start mapping someone like that, you realize that whole idea that I've talked about many times in a marriage where you'll be arguing about the T versus, like, what's the actual thing? Like, for this debate to work, they would have to pull into the conversation that I, Amanda Seales, do not care about facts and figures. None of that is relevant to me. This is about leading with love. And here's how I believe that we need to manifest, to use a very loaded word, manifest that love. This is based on my beliefs, my values, and that's it. And then at least you can go, okay, well, I'm going to go after your beliefs and your values, or I'm going to go after the very fundamental nature of the premise and say, this can only be had at the level of facts. Now, I get that that's boring as hell. Like, that's terrible tv. So I understand why we're not going to do it, but that's the only way that you're going to get something productive out of this. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[Drew]

Yeah, I want to jump in onto the stats and figures thing for a second because I think what she's alluding to here, where stats and figures can be manipulated, is, okay, so I dated my first white woman in college. I was like 22, 23 at the

[Tom]

time or after first OJ now Kobe. That's it. No more white women. I remember that chant. That was hilarious.

[Drew]

So I, like, went to her. I went to her house. She lived in, like, a super community. Her dad was loaded, so, like, his house was here. Her uncle's house was down the street. Her aunt's house Was around the corner. Like, they were very ingrained in the community. I remember one time we were out one night drinking, got to her house at like 2 in the morning, whatever. We're sitting on the couch laughing and giggling. We see like a car pull up and a cop, like, come behind it. A cop knocks on the door. We kind of tense up because we was drinking. Like, oh, snap, something happened. Her pops walks up and the cop was like, yeah, sorry, caught Mr. So and so at the pub again. You know, make sure he's good, here's his keys, whatever, like that. And in that moment, I like, smiled because I was like, this is hilarious. But that's a thing that I often point to when we look at these crime stats and we look at certain things like that in certain communities. When a police shows up, he's like, how do I help this community? How do I take care of them? How do I do these things in other communities? When I go there, I'm not talking, I'm not asking questions. I'm throwing you in a paddy wagon and I'm booking you. If I was in that same exact position in that same exact neighborhood, I don't know if he would have been like, hey, do you know anybody here? How can I get you home? How can I make sure you're good? Right. That same logic can be applied to early statistics as done in elementary education, where black kindergartners and white kindergartners do the same thing. Black kindergartners get suspended. White kindergarteners get talked to and put in, put back into play. Same thing can be. So there's all. There's different tent poles that we can look through, through different levels of society. So it's not even like murder stats. Yeah, you got me there. Black people kill a lot of black people. I'm not even going to argue that. But when you just say black people are inherently. It's in their DNA. There's all these crime stats. Once you start teasing that out and actually start pulling apart, the second you

[Tom]

say DNA, we have beef. So here, here would be my thing, just like as. Because I know this is the big beef with my audience, and I have a lot of empathy for people in the audience that roll up to the live who haven't seen me in years, and they're like, oh, my God, like, he's going to be doing mindset stuff. And then I am not doing mindset stuff. As the mindset guy, I will say that you become what you repeat. And so we have a perpetual motion machine and the perpetual motion machine is that we are in a world where through a whole series of obviously horrific things, starting in slavery, echoing through today, you've got a position where we have trapped people in poverty and just disproportionately by way of population. You're going to see a lot of blacks especially, but minorities just in general, and end up in that cycle of poverty. Cycle's the right way to think of it. You can think of it as like people being weighed down. Like it, it is economically right now so hard to escape that it's not impossible. But Jesus, it is like we've gone out of our way to really trap people there. So now we've got people stuck in this cycle of poverty. That cycle of poverty kicks off real statistics that people really should care about and they should ask like, oh, like that's not good. So if you have a cop that's coming into that situation and life has taught them that they, they're not mapping it to poverty, they are mapping it to skin color mistake. But nonetheless, I get how they end up there. And so they walk into a room full of people that really are visually tied to like, way elevated crime statistics. Now if they're also geographically in that space now the cop is like, okay, double whammy. They look like the people who did a thing and they're in the neighborhood of people who really do the thing. And so it is wiser from a safety perspective for me to come in like, way alert, so all of those things make sense. Where it breaks down is how the hell did we get out of this? That's where I'm saying you become what you repeat. And right now, what we are repeating ad nauseam is like, this is all racism. The system is against you. It's all bad all the time. And this is why, and I think this is a fascinating part of the argument, when people point back and go, hold on a second. When we had first exited slavery, we very rapidly did better as a community than we're doing now. So what I, I look at that and I go, you can rule out as a thought experiment. I do this with entrepreneurs all the time. Run the thought experiment to see if you can rule out some options. You can rule out that racism is the thing that holds you back when you realize that things were better in the black community like a hundred years ago. So something happened in the intervening 100 years. Now, maybe I can't get you to buy into in the 60s, the, all the different welfare programs and stuff that gutted the gutted poor Families in general, which, because there was a disproportionate number of blacks, is going to be disproportionately impactful. And so that creates this snowball effect. Even if I can't get you to buy that, you can just rule out that this is a problem of racism. Now you may come back to, well, then what we have to do is be insular again. We have to be cloistered communities. We have to reject integration with white society. Okay, that strikes me as a terrible idea, but at least that I would understand why you would come to that conclusion. And I don't have a thought experiment in America to rule that out.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom]

Now we at least have a place that we can start. And this is what I think he's getting at with Mr. Nuclear here, which is really his Twitter name is trying to get at is he's like, the Chinese were put far briefer, but the Chinese were put through something equally horrible in America. Maybe not equally horrible, but bad apartheid. Literally, the system was against them. And now later down the road, massive success. Same with Nigerian immigrants. Massive success. So, like, yeah, as you start getting into trying to get to the cause and effect, my hope is that people look at those things and go, okay, cool. The narrative that we're using a just doesn't map to reality. And then, baby, if Tom is right and you become what you repeat, we are making everyone obsessed with race by talking about it all the time. And I always forget her name. Satya something just did a whole breakdown of this on cnn. The increase in the word, I think it was slavery. And something else from like 2000 to 2020 goes up by like 5000%. Now, we haven't had a 5000% increase in slavery from 2000 to 2020. So there's something else going on. And if I'm right, that you become what you repeat. The mere fact that we now obsess over race is making race a bigger problem.

[Drew]

You said something interesting about Chinese immigrants, how they were overcome and came through. I think one fallacy that we also have to let go of is that you can't compare immigrant communities to native black Americans. The United States is the unique situation out of any other country in the world that the people that they enslaved, they then set free, and those freed people stayed in the same spot. Usually it's like you set free, then they migrate over here and they go stay over here, or they set free and they leave Japan and they go back to Korea or something like that. But it's not necessarily like, okay, you're free, go across the street. So I think comparing those types of people with people who are the best and brightest because I was nimble enough, I was ambitious enough, I was able bodied enough to trans cross the entire Atlantic Ocean to chase my dream, pursue a better life, that's this different level of ambition, intellect and things like that. So you're comparing the type slice of another population with the majority of the existing population. You're saying, well, see, these exceptional 1% people do it. So how come you guys are doing it when the people that reporting to, they also have their exceptional 1% who are doing it.

[Tom]

Okay, this is amazing. I think you laid that out very eloquently. If at any point you think that I'm misrepresenting your view, please grab me. Because this is one where, man, if, if you and I can get on the same page about this, especially because you're the CEO of the black community, like this could really be transformational.

[Drew]

We can make a deal. There we go.

[Tom]

That would be incredible. Okay, so here's what I see in that. What I see in that again is, is literal evidence this isn't a racism problem.

[Drew]

The skin color problem you said.

[Tom]

Correct. This is so interesting. I know you have a whole take on that and so does Amanda Seals for that matter. So maybe we'll talk about that in a second. But for now I'm just saying it is not a. I can cue off of what you look like visually problematic. And because I look at you and I see somebody who is different than me, I'm going to try to hold you back. I'm going to try to create systems that hold you back. All that. Okay, so point conceded that there is going to be a difference between people that were forcibly brought here and somebody who immigrates here, meaning somebody who immigrates here. There's already a massive selection bias for risk taking, possibly for intellect, like it may be a proxy for iq, all of that. And so what I hear you putting forward, and I think this is very valid, is you've got a whole group of people who knows it's going to be the whole gamut of intellectual capabilities. Whereas immigrant communities, they come over and that's going to be more selected for, for people that just have more success tied, more success correlated individual traits. Okay, cool. What I'm saying is, yes, therein lies the problem. But what we talk about is race. And I'm saying fuck all that noise because it literally doesn't matter if you keep reinforcing, reinforcing Reinforcing, reinforcing. Then it becomes a mind virus, and then people are going to derail even more because people are legitimately, as far as I can tell, actually becoming more racist. It really didn't feel like this in the 80s and 90s, man. It really did not feel like this. As a white person, it did not feel like this. I didn't look around and see people, like, secretly being racist like you might have. And honestly, yeah, okay, Even I, like, you would hear, like, the occasional, like, you look sight. No, I never heard anything like that. But you'd hear, like, comments from your. Whatever, your great uncle. Not even my uncles, but, like my grandfather's brothers and sisters might say, like a weird thing here or there, but it was so, like, just considered gross. So nobody in my universe was, like, leaning into that. And I'm talking at school everywhere. It just, like, it didn't feel like it feels now. Okay? So from that perspective, I feel like we're moving in the wrong direction fast. People are legitimately becoming more racist. I think as an obsession with race, trying to classify everybody. Then people team up, then they fight for their team. And so you're pushing people where it's like, think of yourself as white first. Well, then you're going to get white nationalists and all that bullshit. And because you're pushing them to think of that as their team, very stupid, in my opinion. Okay, so, but using. Going back to what you were saying, we have now delineated that this is not a skin color problem. This is a. I mean, intellect problem. If we're really going to boil it down, no matter what your race is, if you don't have the intellectual horsepower to get out from under a system that's trying to hold you back, you're in trouble. But I think when you start looking at broader communities like Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, like, you start seeing a cultural trend because they've been here for generations and generations and generations. So this isn't just like Nigerian immigrants who are all going to be very recent. This is like, not only do I not have a Chinese accent, my parents don't have a Chinese accent. Their parents didn't have a Chinese accent. So now I think it maps far closer to culture than to intellectual. And the culture in Asian communities right now, today is you are going to work until your face falls off. Like, from the time you're a little kid, you're going to be going to tutors, you are expected to excel academically. All of that. I don't know. These Stats. But I would be surprised if there isn't more two parent households. And so once people start going, okay, wait, hold on a sec. Like a core pillar of my entire belief system is that humans became the ultimate apex predator, the most dominant creature the world is ever, ever seen. The ability to leave the planet for one reason and one reason only. We pass things on through culture. We don't try to hardwire everything the way that a horse does a horse 20 minutes after it's born, it can do all the things that a horse is ever going to be able to do. A human is not like that. We've got 25 years of brain development. We can be dropped into any circumstance and it's going to wildly impact our lives. And so once you, if I can get people to agree that that is true, then it's like, okay, then what you're transmitting to young kids, which matters a factor of 100 more. To indoctrinate people with high utility ideology when they are young is the entire game. And if you don't have two parent households, if you're having to put your kids in a bathtub, if you, if because of stray bullets, if your school is absolutely God awful, areas of the brain actually don't develop. They just don't develop. They don't hear the right number of words. My whole Geoffrey Canada speech, which anybody wants to hear, I can certainly go down. But it's like the matter, the number of words that you hear matters tremendously to your brain development. So now we've got, okay, here's real problem. Real problem is poverty is destroying brain development. Culturally. You don't have intact families, so you're not getting male and female influence. You need both. Again, brain development, seeing things from different sides. Men teaching you to be tougher, to be more emotionally resilient, mothers making you feel love, like you can do anything. Like these are very necessary ingredients to the development of the human mind which is designed to react to its environment. So now you take all of that. You in my estimation have proven this is not a skin color problem. And now it becomes, okay, this is an intellect culture problem. Now I am certainly not making the argument, which you will hear out on the Internet that black people in general just don't have the intellectual horsepower. I think that's total horseshit. Just my own lived experience, as cheesy as that is, tells me that it just doesn't matter. Walking up to somebody based on their skin color, I am not going to be able to tell whether they are smart, whether they are funny. Whether they are good at name this, that or the other. But if you tell me that I'm looking at a Chinese person whose parents have an accent, I'm like, oh, that works hard. Guaranteed. There is so much pressure on them culturally because I can just guess what that culture is going to be like. And so to me, culture has massive predictive validity where in terms of how well that person is going to do and skin color has extremely low predictive validity.

[Drew]

French streamer. Jean Parmon of Okie Okie dokie Soviet. Let me know if I pronounce that right. Has passed away in his sleep at the age 46 during a 10 day. A day 10 of a marathon stream. Now for context, this was. Dude was getting beat up and all those things during his stream. But allegedly he died of natural causes in his sleep. After the 10 day there was a community note added. More context needed. Raphael Graven was found dead in bed after enduring 10 days while being sleep deprived, tortured and fed ingested different toxic products by other people that participated in the 10 day stream marathon.

[Tom]

This is super weird. Now I don't know enough about this guy. So it's entirely possible he's the problem, that he's driving this, he's telling people to do this, that whatever, whatever. It's also possible that this guy is mentally ill or whatever and people are taking advantage of him. I don't know, but people. Here's one people choking him and there are a bunch of people choking him. And so at one point people are like putting paint all over him. I mean this is just weird. So this is the. I don't know if this is what people think they see when they watch Mr. Beast content. Because I react to this the way that chat reacted to Mr. Beast the last time that I brought him up. They talk about Mr. Beast like this is what Mr. Beast does. This to me is a freak show. This is like read the book. Technically Richard Bachman, but Stephen King nom de plume called the Running Man. The way that I felt reading the Running man is how I feel watching this where it's like people will do anything for views, man. Like this is wild. And trust me, the irony is not lost on me that I'm on here trying to get as many views as I can. But like they were. They're just punching him like this is so weird.

[Drew]

Yeah, all of this thing is just physical abuse like in your, in your 48, bro. I'm sorry, I'm. I'm not to be ages, but like I don't know at Some point, you need to pick up a trade, bro. Like, something like, this is crazy.

[Tom]

This is. I don't get it, man. I mean, I do get it. That's the problem. You get attention, you get money, but at what cost? Like, people. So people always say that all of the world's problems are due to man's inability to sit in a room by himself. And I think that there is a lot of truth to that. I think a lot of the modern era is that people have a hard time being invisible. And trust me, I get it. Like, not being invisible has high utility. But I've rebooted my channel so many times that I'll go from like, I'm getting recognized everywhere I go to, then I'm completely invisible again, to then I'm getting recognized again to I'm completely invisible. And one of the things that I really liked was I went through a huge reboot of the channel during COVID and. And so I was just, like, not on anybody's radar. I wasn't seeing anybody out on the streets. The view counts were just, like, abysmal. And I was like, oh, this is what it's like to have total anonymity again. It just doesn't bother me. So I'm very grateful for that, because when I see stuff like this, I'm like, damn. Like, when you really need the attention like that. Look, I get it. I'm speaking from a place of, I have a loving wife, and if I didn't, I might be in a totally different psychological space. But yo, yeah, that. I don't like to see it. So I'll be interested to see what happens with the autopsy when it comes out. If it was from something, one of the toxic things that he supposedly ate, if it was completely unrelated, or if it was just, like, stacking stress. Cause they were also doing sleep deprivation. So it's like you keep choking him if, like, let's say that he ends up dying of a stroke. Okay, you just choked him a whole bunch of times, which is. You want to talk about blood pressure? Holy hell, that's going to spike massively if you're eating something toxic and that's creating massive inflammation. And so you go from. You're choking a massive blood pressure while he's got massive inflammation, and then you get, like, a stroke again. I don't know. I have no idea that's what happened. But if something like that happened, I could see it. Body just has limits, man.

[Drew]

Yeah. And then going to your point of Mr. Beast, raw egg nutritionist at Baby Gravy 9 did a tweet that has 62 million views.

[Tom]

Wow.

[Drew]

Wild. Mr. Beast is genuinely one of the most evil people alive today. I mean, that. And this is retweeting Mr. Beast. Who said he did. He just did his first live stream and raised over $12 million for charity.

[Tom]

Yeah.

[Drew]

Most money ever raised in livestream. So this is part of Mr. Beast's clean water initiative. He raised it to effectively give it, like, donate it to people, but yet they're calling him the most evil. And people in the chat were, like, agreeing. So I don't. I don't get it. Like, there are tons of real evil people we need to give our pay. Like, this is also like, my, like, Trump beef. When, like, a lot of people call Trump Hitler, I'm like, trump is doing real things that are actually hurting people. So let's do that. We don't need to jump into hyperbole and all these, like, analogies. Like, let's just get mad at the policy he passed or this executive order that's deporting people, but don't just give him this fictitious bad guy villain title and try.

[Tom]

There are plenty of real life villains.

[Drew]

Exactly.

[Tom]

I should be mad at.

[Drew]

And I think this is the same thing happening with Mr. Beast, where it's like, you might not like the style or what he's doing, but they call him evil. Like, I feel like he's like, so. Yeah. Like, it's just weird.

[Tom]

Yeah. I don't get it. So one, I've had the good fortune of meeting Jimmy.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom]

Behind the scenes. Lovely guy behind the scenes. And then also just seeing what he's done on YouTube is unbelievable. Like, when you see someone like Mr. Beast or you see, like, Alex Hormozi and what he just did. For people that don't know, Alex Hormozi just did a book Launch that made $77 million that is INSAN. The fastest selling book of all time. So you see, like, these younger guys come up and they just. They're like, the new school. Like, Mr. Beast is to use an anime reference. It's like he learned from all the. The power systems that came before him. And he creates, like, the perfect Jujutsu Kaisen power system. Like, he gets all this, like, love right away because people recognize, oh, he's distilled, you know, like the 50 years of anime that came before him, manga and anime. And so it's. He's looked at all the people that came before him on YouTube and, like, really learned the YouTube game better than anybody. And now plays it in the extreme, and people are losing sight of the fact that YouTube is a mirror. Like, Mr. Beast is showing you exactly what you want to watch. And so if people are mad if they think that he's evil, what does that say about what they want to watch? First of all, I. I sort of get, like, if you don't like the psychological experimentation of him putting people under stress, because he certainly does put people under stress, but he's not actually endangering anybody's life. Like, if I think about myself in my poorest of poor days in those situations, I guarantee you I would never cry. I wouldn't be shedding a tear. I wouldn't be freaking out. I would come in and be like, okay, cool. Like, I've got a chance at, like, big upside. But my downside is exactly where I was before. So, um, I don't. I don't watch that stuff and think, oh, my God, like, this is some evil, like, genius. What's that guy? Buzzsaw? Who's the guy from the Saw series?

[Drew]

Oh, Jigsaw.

[Tom]

Jigsaw?

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom]

I don't look at him and go, this is some Jigsaw guy that's getting people to cut arms and legs off. Like, the streamer we're just looking at is having people choke him, eat crazy stuff. So I don't know. This. This one's very weird to me.

[Drew]

April said, when can we stop acting like crabs in the bucket? And it kind of makes me seem of like I'm starting to see parallels in all these different moments where populism in the government is leading toward resentment, and that resentment is going from the Z juice to the black fatigue to now Mr. Beast smiling too much. I don't like him neither. And it seems like there's this a.

[Tom]

There's this resentment.

[Drew]

Yeah. The need for a bad guy. And in every category, across all sectors, it's like, well, this person is a problem. I hate this person. I hate Fortnite now.

[Tom]

We hate people that win.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom]

If it's big, it's popular, we hate it. We don't want to see it. Yeah. It is absolutely heartbreaking, and I would love to see us get back to the point where you have the social mobility. People really can play and win the game. Housing is affordable like that. We get back to that sense of the American dream is real, and we can do these things, and we can accomplish great stuff, and we're moving in a cool direction. Somebody said, isn't bankrupting your own country evil? Yes, but it's like good luck finding one person that you're going to be able to pin that on everybody that's doing it. Maybe with the exception of central bankers, but they all think they're doing something good. And even central bankers can pretty easily hide behind the good things that modern monetary theory does do. And it does do good things. It just plays out in a cycle where you get to the end cycle and it really is evil.

[Drew]

So yeah, all right, you tease this in the intro. Let's jump into it. My wife stopped having sex with me, so I stopped doing things for her. Yeah, me, 37 year old male, wife, 32 female, have been married for seven years. We have two kids. For the first few years, sex was great. Not just the physical part, but the connection. Then about three years ago it slowed down a lot. Now we're basically roommates who co parent. I've tried initiating, I've tried talking about it, I've tried planning date nights, even helping more around the house. Every time I bring it up, she says she's too tired or not in the mood or that I make her feel pressured by even bringing it up. So about a year ago I just stopped, stopped doing the little things I used to do for her. Making coffee in the morning, leaving notes, fixing things right away, giving her massages, planning surprises. I still put my weight with chores and the kids, but the quote unquote extras felt pointless when I'm basically being treated like a platonic roommate. Now she's upset that I've changed and that I'm not as loving anymore. I told her straight up that love feels different when it's one sided.

[Tom]

Marriage is a negotiation and sex is a point of leverage for women, typically. And kindnesses and all the little sweet things that I think women are far more drawn to is certainly a leverage point that men have. You are going to train your spouse, you are going to reinforce behavior you want more of and you are going to quote unquote, punish behavior that you want less of. That is plain and simple. And you can hide behind niceties and pretend that's not what's going on all you want. And marriage is going to be one long confusing endeavor for you. The reality is this is how we interface with the world. When someone does something you don't like, you tell them, you pull it up short, you draw boundaries, you say, I'm not going to put up with that anymore, I don't want that. Now understand how to interact with people to actually get what you want. That a smile, a touch, a hug, kindness, doing Something sweet for somebody. If you frame it as this is all tit for tat. Everything is transactional in a relationship. You are also going to be confused, and your life is going to be a nightmare, and you're not going to understand, like, what's going on. If, on the other hand, you go, hey, a big part of this game is manipulating my own emotions and manipulating their emotions, and everybody hates that word. And I'm perfectly open. Influence, nudge, push, gently. Influence. Like, whatever people want to call it, fine. But the reality is that you are going to play a multi decade, if it goes well, a multi decade game of influencing your partner to do more of what you want and less of what you don't want. And you should welcome that they are going to do the same to you. And we broke something, Drew, when we stopped admitting that part of a woman's job is to make her man better, and part of a man's job is to put some boundaries on the emotional outbursts of a woman. That just is. I am a better person because of my wife. I push for more. I strive for more because she had huge demands of me.

[Drew]

And.

[Tom]

And it has been awesome. And thank God that when I did something cool, that woman would touch my genitals, Drew. And when she want, I literally told her one day, the weight of my heart is not through my stomach, it's through my dick. And if you understand that, we are going to get along really fucking well. And so she was like, oh, word. So I remember.

[Drew]

Say less, fam.

[Tom]

No, we're going to say more. We're really about to go deep, and my wife is going to have to forgive me for airing all of this stuff. And look, I get it. Someone's saying, Tom kind of icky right now. Scriba durba. I'm just letting you know how this all plays out. And I've been married for 23 glorious years. It's been amazing.

[Drew]

I got to see her later. Tom, come on.

[Tom]

I know, I know. My wife was like, she really enjoyed shopping, and I didn't. And I was like, if you touch me up in the changing room, we're gonna have no problems. I'll go shopping with you as much as you want. So she started touching me up in the changing room, and I was like, let's go shopping.

[Drew]

So you wake her up on a Saturday morning. Who's ready to go shopping?

[Tom]

Of course. Who wouldn't, Drew? So I'm just saying I don't get why people are so weird about this. Like, what is it that you want communicate to your spouse, Let them know the things you like. Let them know the things you don't like. And don't be transactional. Try to figure out, like, how do we get connected over this? How do we bond over this? How do we understand life is hard? We're doing it together. That I want you to shape me, I want to shape you, but I want to love and be loved, and I want grace. And when I mess up, I don't want you to just immediately tit for tat. It's like, you've got to have grace is what I call shock absorbers. You've got to let the person do things where it's like, okay, look, that's kind of wacky. But I'm not going to, like, jump in and draw a hard line every time that you like. I remember Lisa and I, we would say, look, if you're about to come on your period and you are being overly emotional, I'm going to let you cross like 10 lines. And then line 11, I will eventually say, and this was a magic phrase, I think that your response is disproportionate to the stimulus. And that was a way of just saying, listen, I've been absorbing all of these things that feel like overreactions, but I might be wrong, and maybe that's not it. Maybe there really is something real here. But there is an eventual line where you cross where I'm like, okay, hold on, this is so disproportionate now to the stimulus. I'm going to call it out. And then if you disagree, like, walk me through. But we know this is a literal cycle that happens, and it's very predictable. And so let's just talk about it. And so Lisa and I being able to talk about the things we like, the things we don't like creating space when it's like, hey, if you want to go do that thing that I really don't like, fair enough. Like, I'm going to go over here, I'm going to do my thing. And then you would welcome the person back into your space immediately when they stopped doing the thing that you didn't want. And all of these little negotiations have made our communication extremely high level, have made our marriage the most rewarding thing in my life. Far more rewarding than money or success is my marriage. My marriage is the thing that I will defend literally to the death. But we understood that this is all going to be these little negotiations, that we were going to influence each other, that we were. I'm not Going to hang out with you if you're doing something that I absolutely hate. And so it's like, yeah, these are all fine. And so over time, you begin to shape each other into like this cooperative unit. But people have at some point decided that we didn't want to be units. Lisa and I have talked about a lot about we are independently codependent. Like, we have intentionally, like, fostered that we're sharing a life. That if you're, if something's really upsetting you, then I'm going to enter into that world and I'm going to come into that emotional frame. I'm going to try to help you back out for sure. But it's like, I'm not going to be like, well, that's a you problem. Like, we're a unit. We're moving through life as a unit. That is the literal experiment that we're running. What does it look like if two people share their lives and we just say, look, there are going to be richer men than me, there are going to be hotter women than you, and I'm committed to you, so it doesn't matter. And while I'm going to enjoy your beauty while I have it, that certainly isn't going to be the only thing. So I just. The sort of modern day framing of there's always another fish in the sea and like, I don't need no man and all that stuff. This is just full retard. People are out of their goddamn minds. It is so out of step with evolution, it's crazy. On average, men are goal oriented. So if a woman is stepping in to help you be better at achieving your goals, you're going to feel good about it. If she does it deftly, if she makes you feel like you're on insecure footing because you didn't get that goal, that would suck. If she's like, I'm here to catch you. I'm here to help you get better. Like, I want to push you, I want to cheer for you, but I'm also going to soothe you when you're down and not be like, fuck you, I'm off to the next guy. Like, if she looks at it as like, part of my job is to help you, like, make the most of your potential. That feels so good. My wife bet on me when everybody else thought I was a loser. Nobody thought that I was ever going to amount to anything. Nobody. I've run through that whole thing a million times. But my wife was like, yo, I see something here at a time. Remember, she says, yes to my marriage proposal. When I'm lying in bed four to five hours a day, every day, okay? That's when she says yes. Not because I'm already the thing, because she sees what I can become and that she wants to be a part of it. And we used to clown on women for wanting to fix guys and all that stuff. You should be like, cool. I want to leverage that to my advantage. I want somebody who wants to like, help me achieve my potential. It's incredible. Okay, now women. So if we're the goal oriented species, then what women need is somebody to help with setting boundaries, protection, pointing in a direction, leadership, all of that. And part of that is going to be, everyone is going to hate this. I really wish that I had a better analogy. Please forgive me. I'm scrambling in my brain to try to find something better. I don't have anything better.

[Drew]

Shoot. Let's do it.

[Tom]

Okay. When you put a dog on a leash, it is more aggressive than when it's off leash. When a woman knows you're going to, if I get out of whack, you're going to like, pull me back in. They feel more confident, more secure, they're more ambitious, more aggressive. People with the strongest home life take the biggest risks. And so being able to provide that safety and security allows them to express themselves in a bigger way in the world. Because they know, ah, if I'm getting out of hand, like, he's going to point out, hey, maybe don't do that. Maybe that's ott whatever. And helps rein them in. Because women have a, let's call it, larger range of emotion that the emotions can happen faster and be more consuming to have somebody there. That is the port in the storm. That is the orienting mechanism that can help you see, like, is this in proportion to what's happening?

[Drew]

The mountain for her waves to crash

[Tom]

the rocks for the waves of her emotions to crash on. Shout out to. I can't believe I'm forgetting his name right now.

[Drew]

Breedlove.

[Tom]

No, it's not where I heard it the first time. He's in Andrew Tate's orbit. Oh, God.

[Drew]

He's been on the show.

[Tom]

Lovely guy.

[Drew]

Waller.

[Tom]

Yes, Justin Waller. Thank you. I actually really, really like him. Lovely, lovely.

[Drew]

Shout out to Justin Waller.

[Tom]

Yeah, and it's a great line. So if you can be that, then it will feel like this incredible exchange because your wife, in my case, has a echolocation device where it's like, I really feel this thing. But is this proportionate? This is the ping is it proportionate to what's happening. Yes or no? Will this help me get where I want to go? Yes or no? Like Lisa turning to me and saying, you're far better at pursuing your goals than I am. Here's the thing that I want to do that feels emotionally correct. Should I pursue it, yes or no? And I'll say literally 80% of the time, no, it's not going to be effective at moving you towards your goal. So if that's the question that you're asking, that won't work. Here's something that you might want to try. And so it's been this incredible exchange of talents between the two of us. So there you have it. I know people are really not going to enjoy that analogy, but I don't have a better one. Everybody. Thank you guys. Always. It is so wonderful to see everybody join us today. Today was a lot of fun. I appreciate you guys being here and for being so active in the chat. And if you haven't already, everybody, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Trump has taken over D.C. sort of. TRUMP and Putin are set to meet in Alaska to discuss Russia, Ukraine, war. Andrew Cuomo fires shots at socialist New York mayoral candidate Mamdani Elon and Sam Altman prove you can be wealthy and still. We'll get back to the show in just a second, but first I want to talk about how to make eating well a no brainer. There's a massive difference between good protein and garbage protein. A lot of people have never experienced the good stuff. Instead they're gambling with grocery store meat that's been sitting around for weeks. That's exactly why I I'm a Butcherbox customer and have been for a very long time. I've got multiple freezers full of my favorites like filet mignon, organic free range chicken breast, wild caught salmon, and of course a whole lot of applewood smoked bacon. These are the cuts that my wife Lisa and I reach for every day to fuel ourselves. And now Butcherbox is letting me send my favorites direct to your doorstep. In the Bilu box you get these selections plus a few more and free bacon for life. Right now you can get the bill you box plus free bacon for life and $20 off your first box. Just head to butcherbox.com impact and use code impact. And now let's get back to the show. We'll be back to the show in a second, but right now I want to talk to you about how investment apps can actually destroy your wealth. If they're using gamification techniques to get you to make poor decisions, you are in a bad place. Turning push notifications for hot picks, giving you streaks for daily trading. These apps are designed like slot machines, keeping you addicted to trading instead of actually building wealth. That's why I'm excited about Aliocapital. Alio is built for independent thinkers who want to invest with discipline, not hot emotion, which is the only way to invest their altitude. AI focuses on what actually matters. Inflation shifts, interest rate changes, global risk. It adapts your portfolio based on real economic forces, not market hype. Stop gambling with your future. Start investing with intention. Download the Alio app in the App Store or Google play or text Tom to 511511 Investing involves risks, including potential loss of principal. Past performance does not guarantee results. See Terms and Conditions. Tax fees may apply. This is a paid advertisement. And now let's get back to the show.

[Commercial Announcer]

When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system, they matter even more. Grainger gets it and knows there's no time for managing multiple suppliers and no room for shipping delays. That's why Grainger offers millions of products in fast, dependable delivery so you can keep your facility stocked, safe and running smoothly. Call 1-800-granger. Click granger.com or just stop by Granger for the ones who get it done.