Oil Price Shock Chaos, Trump’s High-Stakes Gamble, and AI’s Dark Frontier | The Tom Bilyeu Show Live

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu: Podcast Summary
Episode: Oil Price Shock Chaos, Trump’s High-Stakes Gamble, and AI’s Dark Frontier
Date: March 9, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Co-Host: Drew

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Episode Overview

This episode of Impact Theory tackles a whirlwind of urgent headlines: the historic chaos in oil prices amid war in Iran, the Trump administration’s controversial messaging and high-risk geopolitical maneuvers, and the accelerating, unsettling frontier of artificial intelligence—from brain-on-chip experiments to massive job disruptions. Tom and Drew aim to cut through propaganda, memes, and headlines to lay bare the realities and unanswered questions defining this chaotic moment in economics, politics, and technology.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Oil Price Shock and Global Volatility

• Visual Chaos: Drew highlights dramatic scenes of oil refinery fires in Tehran—images “like a world-ending movie” ([02:56]).
• Historic Disruption Metrics: Tom quantifies the chaos: Oil prices have soared 35% in eight days. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has blocked roughly 20 million barrels a day, “four to five times the size of the disruption” in previous oil crises ([04:41]).
• Market Reactions:
  • The WTI crude price spiked to $119 a barrel, then crashed nearly $20 the same day, showcasing the market’s confusion and volatility ([04:41]).
  • G7 finance ministers announced emergency talks, seeking to release strategic reserves—a move that briefly steadied markets but is “absolutely not a long-term solution. They buy you days, not months.” ([06:47])
• Economic Ripples: The closure impacts not just fuel, but global supply chains:
  • 92% of sulfur (key for fertilizer and electronics) comes from oil/gas refining.
  • Closure threatens Taiwan’s gas supply—key for TSMC semiconductor production, “the components that run the majority of our modern way of life” ([19:57]).
  • “Half the humans alive today are only alive because of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer…a third of the feedstock moves through the Strait” ([19:57]).

2. Trump’s Iran Gamble and Geopolitical Strategy

• Administration Messaging: White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt’s comments leave “all options on the table in Iran, including a draft for US Soldiers” ([00:11], [45:36]).
• Short Term Pain, Long Term Gain?
  • Tom criticizes the robotic parroting of this talking point by GOP figures: “NPCs have glitched out their lines of dialogue” ([15:41]).
  • He cautions, “This could be short term pain for long term pain… Or maybe the world just got better for everybody” ([15:41]).
• Global Realignment & High Stakes:
  • Trump’s goal is to “isolate China” and fracture adversarial alliances (China–Russia–Iran–North Korea) by dominating oil supply ([25:02]).
  • The administration is running an “all-or-nothing strategy. If it works, it will be financially beneficial to the US...if not, huge problems on the world stage” ([25:02]).
  • Tom remains skeptical: “I think he is counting on something abrupt and aggressive in terms of a victory…Trump would leave Iran in chaos before he would put substantive boots on the ground” ([25:02]).
• Political Consequences:
  • Risks of escalating: “If he puts boots on the ground and you’re getting even dozens of Americans killed…peace out. Homeboy is toasted cheese. Like, there’s no way” ([25:02]).
  • Tom reflects on how history may judge this era, depending on outcomes ([47:24]).

3. Media War, Public Sentiment, and Propaganda

• Doubting the Narrative: Tom cautions about unprecedented levels of misinformation: “It really is getting incredibly difficult to parse out what is just naked propaganda…Your own government is lying to you. Foreign governments are certainly lying to you.” ([03:11])
• Challenging the US Role:
  • Drew observes a Gaza parallel: “We are losing the media war…Why are we even in this war? America’s the bully” ([23:51]).
  • Accusations of US culpability in a missile strike on an Iranian school further erode credibility ([23:52]).
• Iran: A Nation Divided?
  • The protests of the Iranian women's soccer team—a split between those seeking asylum in Australia and those returning home—mirror the broader divisions in Iranian society ([41:10]).
  • Tom notes, “It is right now impossible to ascertain…we don’t know [how divided Iran is],” underscoring the dangers of top-down regime change ([44:32]).

4. AI’s Dark Frontier

• Job Disruptions:
  • Layoffs at Amazon Video and falling job openings in finance/insurance point to AI’s accelerating impact ([59:11]).
  • “You are not going to get replaced by AI. You are going to get replaced by a human using AI.” ([59:53])
• Military and Safety Concerns:
  • Key OpenAI resignations raise alarms about “surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy,” with little debate ([52:44]).
  • Tom delivers a sobering reality: “Humans will develop any technology that promises an advantage. There has never been a technology…that promised a bigger advantage than AI.” ([53:42])
• Biological Computing Breakthroughs:
  • Scientists have mapped the fruit fly brain—simulating behavior from structure alone ([64:49]).
  • 200,000 human brain cells grown on a chip played Doom, signaling a new era of “wetware as a service”—with developers already able to code directly to living neurons ([64:49]).
  • “The technology is going to come into existence…and then we have to see what ends up happening to humans” ([57:47]).

5. Culture, Economics, and Unanswered Questions

• Changing Culture: Tom argues that imposing American governance by force never works: “We tried turning Afghanistan into America. That didn’t work. Vietnam. That didn’t work. Iraq. That didn’t work. Culture matters a lot” ([39:48]).
• Foundations of Conflict:
  • Tom insists, “All anybody ever cares about in the fullness of time is did you make my life better economically or not?” ([33:48])
  • The social, moral, and economic stakes of AI and geopolitical moves are debated, but Tom returns to “the reality of incentives…you’re not going to get even religious fighters to fight unless you were supporting them economically” ([33:48]).

6. Notable Cultural Moments

• Iranian Women’s Soccer Asylum Drama: Five teammates remain in Australia after a Silent Protest, risking retribution at home and symbolizing Iran’s turmoil ([41:10]).
• International Women’s Day: Drew jokes about the timing of Women's Day falling on “Spring Forward” (only 23 hours this year) ([44:46]).
• Voting Rights and Political Priorities: Trump’s refusal to sign other bills until passage of the Save America Act (“all chips in the middle”)—with Tom aghast at both parties’ political calculations ([49:49]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Oil Markets’ Confusion:
  • “Oil prices have gone up 35% in just eight days...The current Strait of Hormuz closure has cut roughly 20 million barrels per day.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([04:41])
• On Propaganda:
  • “I spent more time verifying things that I have seen than literally any other time that I’ve ever engaged with social media…Propaganda on all sides. Your own government is lying to you.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([03:11])
• On Political Messaging:
  • “It’s like the NPCs have glitched out their lines of dialogue. This kind of scripted stuff drives me absolutely bananas.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([15:41])
• On Trump’s High-Stakes Play:
  • “He is running an all-or-nothing strategy…It can cause huge problems on the world stage in the long run, but it will be economically beneficial to the US.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([25:02])
• On Iran’s Societal Split:
  • “It is right now impossible to ascertain that is exactly how divided Iran is. We don’t know.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([44:32])
• On Imposing Western Order:
  • “You’re not going to bomb them into looking like America…Culture matters a lot.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([39:48])
• On AI’s Inevitable Advance:
  • “Humans will develop any technology that promises an advantage. There has never been a technology…that promised a bigger advantage than AI.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([53:42])
  • “You are not going to get replaced by AI. You are going to get replaced by a human using AI.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([59:53])
• On AI Ethics and Resignations:
  • “AI has an important role in national security, but surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy...are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.”
    — Caitlin Kalinoski, cited by Drew ([52:44])
• On Biological Computing:
  • “A petri dish of human brain cells grown in a microchip has learned to play a video game. Welcome to the era of biological computing. Things are going to get wild.”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([64:49])
• On Historical Judgment:
  • “Imagine having 100 years of distance from this moment…Either you look back and it’s like ‘What a moron,’ or ‘He isolated China and it was a masterstroke.’”
    — Tom Bilyeu ([47:24])

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [02:56] — Iran oil fires, refinery chaos, and fierce gas price hikes
• [04:41] — Scale of disruption: historical precedents and Strait of Hormuz closure
• [06:47] — Emergency G7 meeting and market volatility explained
• [15:14–19:57] — Political messaging, “Short term pain, long term gain,” macroeconomic dominoes
• [23:51] — The U.S. “media war” and public opinion consequences
• [25:02] — Trump’s strategy: China, oil, dollar dominance, and all-in risk assessment
• [33:48] — Economics as the center of global conflict and domestic incentives
• [39:48] — The cultural realities behind foreign interventions
• [41:10] — Iranian women’s soccer protest and asylum
• [44:46] — International Women’s Day and societal divisions in Iran
• [45:36] — Possibility/messaging around a military draft
• [47:24] — How history might remember Trump era moves
• [49:49] — Save America Act, voting security, and party politics
• [52:44] — AI, military contracts, OpenAI resignations, and unregulated progress
• [59:53] — AI’s real-time impact on jobs and “the new kind of replacement”
• [64:49] — Biological computing breakthroughs: fruit fly brain simulation, human neurons playing Doom

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Summary Flow & Takeaways

This episode is a tour-de-force of real-time history, cutting through fog, spin, and techno-shock to spotlight the seismic changes shaping the 2026 world. Tom and Drew are at turns skeptical, blunt, and awestruck: at markets so volatile no one knows the future; at politicians scrambling for narrative control; at the speeds with which AI is decimating and reinventing whole sectors; at culture wars and media backlash reshaping global alliances.

In the end, Tom’s refrain is clear: Prepare for disruption, verify your information, don’t mistake propaganda for clarity, and—above all—focus on the fundamentals, whether in investing, politics, or technology. Mastering the tools of the new era, especially AI, will determine who adapts—and who is left behind.

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For listeners seeking clarity in the chaos, this episode is a bracing, wide-ranging reality check.

Transcript

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[Drew]

Maybe it's because the oil Refinery is on fire. Literally. If you could throw that up, Eric, this is crazy. From Tehran, there's that image and then there's the image coming down the highway. This looks like a world ending movie. So no surprise that gas prices might be a little bit higher up there this weekend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I spent more time verifying things that I have seen than literally any other time that I've ever engaged with social media. It really is getting incredibly difficult to parse out what is just naked propaganda, by the way, I'll remind everybody. Propaganda on all sides. Your own government is lying to you. Foreign governments are certainly lying to you. Everybody thinks that they see the truth. I really try to be honest about the fact I cannot see the future. So I will do my best to lay out what I think, where I think things are right now. But it certainly will all change. And then because of AI, it's like so much of this stuff, it looks real, but it's like I have a feeling if I fact check this one that it's not going to be real. And then if we layer on top of that, you've got AI being systematically trained to have a bias. It's like, it really, it's tough out in these streets, Drew. I'm not gonna lie. These AI laden streets are not for the faint of heart and it is getting spare.

[Drew]

Speaking of streets, if you went to the gas pump, it is crazy. I was in Phoenix this weekend and literally gas prices are a dollar higher, like, than it was six weeks ago. Like eight days.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Eight days.

[Drew]

Crazy. Crazy. I was just there and I was like, oh, I could find something for 292.75415. I'm just like, am I in LA? How did this happen? Like, instantly? So kind of break it down to us. We're seeing a lot of these images, things on fire and stuff like that. But what is actually happening on our level and what's causing this blowback?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, the thing to look at is that oil prices have become insanely volatile. It's the wild swings both up and down that give you a clue to what's really going on. Oil prices have gone up 35% in just eight days. And Daniel Jurgen, the guy who wrote literally the definitive history of oil, said this weekend that the world is looking at the biggest disruption in oil production in, in history. Okay, again, this is not like a random pundit. This is the guy that actually wrote the book on oil disruptions throughout history. And he's just saying this is completely unprecedented. That reality caused the wti, which is the basically the benchmark that you evaluate the cost of crude through, it caused that to spike to $119 a barrel, but it then crashed nearly $20 in the exact same trading session. The market just cannot make up its mind right now as to what is actually happening. This is everybody trying to look into the future. This is why I say that the markets are a casino, people are gambling, and they're trying to reach into the future, figure out exactly what's going to happen. And they're coming up completely confused, which is pretty befitting of the situation in Iran, to be honest. We're going to talk more about that later. I don't know that we can bank on the propaganda that we're receiving from our own government. Painting a clear picture or an accurate picture, I should say, about what the sentiment is on the Street. I think it's far more divided, which means that this could go on for far longer. We'll see. To give you guys a sense of the scope of the disruption, the Iranian revolution back in the 70s cut 5.5 million barrels of oil a day. The 1973 oil embargo, which was like the oh, my God moment of oil, cut 4.5 million barrels per day. The Iraq Kuwait war cut 4.3 million barrels per day. The current Strait of Hormuz closure has cut roughly 20 million barrels per day.

[Drew]

Help.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. This is much, much bigger than the disruptions that we've faced historically. So this isn't like, you know, 20% bigger. You're talking four to five times the size of the disruption. Now, what is causing the trigger of the pullback in the markets? The report that the G7 finance ministers are going to be holding an emergency talk this morning to coordinate a release of Strategic Petroleum Reserves through the International Energy Agency. So people are like, okay, they're going to release reserves. And based on that, the market immediately sold the headline. Prices dropped nearly $20 off the intraday high. Now, this is a sign that the market is so starved for good news that an announce of a potential meeting move the price by 15%. So that's markets doing what markets do. I would not take that as a sign of what the reality is on the ground. Now. Add the top five historical oil shocks together and you get roughly 20 million barrels per day. We've got that much in just eight days. That's where you're actually at. Now, does that mean that this can't unwind quickly? No, it doesn't. There's supposedly an emergency meeting that Trump is going to be having I think today at just before 5pm Eastern time, people are predicting that what he's gonna be announcing is a ceasefire. We'll see. That is rumor. That is conjecture. So completely unknown right now. But the messaging around all of this is creating these huge ripples in the markets. The thing to take away from that is that markets are skittish, markets are super reactive. Anything that happens in like short term periods is traders playing a totally different game than the way that. I highly encourage all of you guys to think about this, which is long term, very non reactive, have a strategy, let it play out. One thing that I remind myself when we hear about all these historic pullbacks from somebody like Warren Buffett and they're sitting on all this cash, remember, they're sitting on the cash so they can redeploy it when things become cheap. So if you don't have an extraordinarily detailed map of what cheap looks like per company, don't try to take what Buffett is doing as a signal of what you should be doing. They are playing a totally different game that has everything to do with reading a gazillion quarterly reports and having mapped out, okay, this company at this price is a deal, this company at that price is a deal. And if you don't have that kind of thing, you should be thinking about index funds and set and forget thinking in years, movements and not the kind of day trading stuff that you're going to read about or hear about all this stuff. All right. The global reserve response sounds reassuring to many, but I really wouldn't read it that way, not at this scale. OPEC spare capacity sits at roughly 4 to 5 million barrels per day. Strategic reserves though are a bridge. They are absolutely not a long term solution. They buy you days, not months. And there's only going to be so much that's put away in storage. So be thoughtful about how you read that situation. Iraq has already cut production BY A reported 60% because it physically has run out of storage space because they can't export anything. With the Strait of Hormuz closed, Kuwait has also cut, Saudi Arabia has cut. And these cuts are going to echo for a while, especially since we have no idea when the Strait will open up again. Asian markets are already pricing in this reality. South Korea, which is just getting battered by all of this. The kospi. Kospi, they triggered a circuit breaker this morning, which means they stopped trading because people were freaking out. Japan's Nikkei fell over 6%. US futures are also deep in the red. So the G7 meeting steady the next 48 hours, but it is not going to change the underlying math, which is that if you don't open the straight again, you've got problems. And right now the straight is still closed and thus the problem is growing bigger by the day, with only question marks, as far as I can tell on the horizon. We just don't know when this is going to end. So all eyes on Trump's announcement later today, which could be totally unrelated, or could be him saying that we've reached some kind of pause in the fighting. I very much doubt that he's going to say that we're ending the aggression. Just pausing. That's a guess. We'll see. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned. A great wardrobe is not complicated. A few pieces that fit well, hold up over time and work in almost any situation. That's it. That's what you need. The problem is finding them without paying luxury prices. That's exactly what Quince is built around. 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[Drew]

The messaging seems to be out on the Republican side. This is some of the talking points we heard on the newscast over this weekend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is a short term disruption for the long term gain. Short term pain for the long term gain. Short term pain be for long term gain. We're going to have some short term

[Drew]

pain with long term gain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Short term pain, long term gain, short term pain, Long term gain. Short term pain Drew long term gain.

[Drew]

So is that going to be enough?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Because right now, first of all, let's just focus. This is like a DLC that downloaded in the background. It's like you, you roll up, you plug into the game and all of a sudden it's like the NPCs have like glitched out their lines of dialogue. It's like guys, guys. Like this kind of scripted stuff drives me absolutely bananas. So yeah, is this short term pain for long term gain? We don't know. This could be short term pain. For long term pain. It could be short term pain for the world. Just got better for everybody. Like if you listen to and this is somebody that I respect tremendously. If you listen to Victor Davis Hansen, it's like, hey, taking out this regime, best thing you could do ever. You guys don't understand the axis of evil that's running between China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Like this is beginning to break that up. Trump is running a masterstroke. Cuba's going to be next. Like we're literally doing the thing that America's been trying to do since the 40s, which is effectively isolate all the communist countries, push them out of our hemisphere. Man, good days are coming. And I'm just like, bro, there's a lot of assumptions in that, Mr. Victor Davis Hansen. And nobody knows better than you that things can break badly in a war. So I think we're counting a lot of chickens before they hatch here. So this one, honestly, if you were to say, okay, put, put a flag right here, if this ends up going well, it's going to be that meme like, oh, they had us in the beginning because right, this looks like you've just destabilized things way too much. So man, if we're, if he were like, listen, we are not sending troops into Iran, like that's completely a no go situation for me. We are going to be able to deal with the close of the straight of Hormuz in the following way. And yes, like there is going to be this temporary issue that we're going to have to deal with in terms of, you know, you're going to have two to four weeks of, you know, the instability as we line up the insurance and we line up the military escorts. But like, you don't have to worry about a bunch of ships getting blown up. We're going to get this all back. And then if I saw that Iran was like, call it 8020 in one direction of like, yes, we want a new regime. This is terrible. We're not willing to suffer this anymore. I'd be like, okay, but that is not what I see. What I see are our historic allies being like, eh, I don't really want to get involved in this. And then when their bases get bombed they're like, all right, all right, you can have like a couple bits and bobs. Maybe the francing is real and they're sending the only non US nuke nuclear powered carrier into the region. That's something. And I want to see what the rest of the Middle east does. The GCC countries, if they're like pro America down with Iran, then maybe there is enough will in the region to see this thing through. But this went from like, hey guys, don't worry. You saw what I did with fordow, like quick lightning strike, you know what I'm about. I don't do boots on the ground, no new wars, et cetera, et cetera. And their messaging is now slowly trying to warm us up to. What do you mean? I never said that wasn't me. Like we, all we do is war. What are you talking about? And so I'm like, hey, hold on. This is this incremental change in messaging, which by the way is brilliant. It works on humans every time, which is extraordinarily distressing. But if you just slowly like, no, hey, like you accepted that little bit, now take a little bit more. Now take a little bit more. It's. They're running that playbook. And because the playbook is as obvious as the DLC download of the new MPC dialog around short term pain for long term gain, it's like, oh, I see where this is headed. So.

[Drew]

But that's the interesting thing is you put me on land, man. And ever since watching that show, I feel like I know all about oil economies now. But Once oil hits $100 a barrel, it doesn't just aff at gas prices, it like hits all these other points in the economy. So short term paying, long term gain is like, okay, yeah, it's cool, you might to pay a little bit more for gas. But if this goes up a week, two weeks now, everybody has changed prices, the grocery store changes, there's all these ripple effects into the economy. So what's that look like in regards to not just oil prices, but the larger macro puts it up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm so glad you brought this up because this is the thing that people just are not paying attention to. There is a massive knock on effect to the war in Iran that could be far bigger than just oil prices. Yes, 20 million barrels of crude per day has stopped moving through the Strait of Hormuz. And that is a very big deal. But oil is best thought of as the first domino. The subsequent dominoes that may be falling are more immediately problematic. 92% of the world's sulfur, for instance, which nobody thinks about because it's not sexy or interesting, but that comes from refining oil and gas. Without sulfur, you can't make sulfuric acid. Without sulfuric acid, you can't extract copper or cobalt. Without copper or cobalt, you can't build transformers, EV batteries, or data centers which are becoming more and more important by the day. And that cascade of problem starts accelerating the Very moment that refining stops and refining in several places has already begun to slowly. That's not even to talk about the chips. So Qatar, which halted gas production after Iranian drone strikes hit its facilities, ships roughly 30% of Taiwan's liquefied natural gas through Hormuz. Analysts estimate Taiwan has already like down to 11 days of reserves left. Yikes. TSMC, the company that manufactures 90% of the world's advanced semiconductors, draws nearly. This is psychotic. 9% of Taiwan's total electricity. Taiwan is a country. One company takes almost 10% of the entire country's total electricity. So if they're not getting gas, means they don't have power, given how much power they need. No power obviously means no chips. No chips means the components that run the majority of our modern way of life become hard to get. Remember Covid, Remember how quickly, like, even used cars were, like the hottest commodity ever? That's the kind of thing that we're going to be dealing with. If this drags on, then there's the single most important issue that we have to be talking about, which is food. Half. Half of the humans alive today are only alive because of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. That's a real stat. Roughly a third of the world's nitrogen fertilizer feedstock moves through the strait. Okay, that's the. What's known as a Hyber Bosch process. It turns energy that runs through the Strait of Hormuz into food, so via sulfur. So you've got sulfur, semiconductors, food, three civilizational supply chains running through one 21 nautical mile passage that is being shut down because ships can't get insurance due to the IRGC threatening to bomb them if they try to pass. Now, we're not in a doomsday scenario, at least not yet. But Trump has floated navy escorts. France has dispatched his nuclear carrier. The strait is effectively closed due to insurance, not to a physical military blockade. That's good. Some ships are seeming to be able to get through by turning off their transponders and basically sneaking through at night. But every day that this holds, the cascade gets worse and is going to be hard, not harder to reverse, but it's going to take longer to reverse. And so that means that we'll be stuck with whatever the negative consequences are for longer. And when you start talking about food supply disruptions now, you get into really dark territory.

[Drew]

So we have oil on one side, we have food disruptions, possible down marketing, manufacturing chips, tsm like that. And for some reason, I think we're becoming the Israel of the Israel Palestine media war a couple months ago.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What do you mean by that?

[Drew]

We are losing the media war when it comes to this. Where the New York Times is reporting that a video has been. New video evidence suggests that a US missile was likely to hit the Iranian school that killed 175 people. Majority of them are children. It was Iran, did it? No, that was Israel's missile. Now they kind of actually pulled up a video and it seems like it was an American tomahawk. And then that same image that we just showed with the the oil refinery on fire, somebody retreated it. Imagine these horrors in general believing the US is there to help the Iranian people. So the same kind of chipping away at America's credibility is kind of what we seen happen a couple months ago with Gaza, Israel after October 7, where the media is now saying, why are we fighting this war? Why is America being the bully? America needs to rely because only America, it's only America. So you have the external pressure that why are we even in this war? It's not justified. You're being a warmonger. And we have the pockets pressure where gas prices are high, food pressures are high. It seems like I don't know how the administration is going to spin their way out of this because even with the growth things, at least we can point the AI like they're going to save us. But it seems like we're getting hit on all sides when it comes to this war.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If he doesn't win, it's game over for Trump. That's the reality of what's going on in Iran. He is running an all or nothing strategy. I've been talking about this for a while with his other strategies. Everything he does, if it works, then it will be financially beneficial to the us it will alienate our allies, it can cause huge problems on the world stage in the long run, but it will be economically beneficial to the US that is the current strategy in Iran. If we can take over Iran. Remember all of this stuff, even though I will often not bring this up, it is always in the back of my mind. This game is largely about China. And so understanding that you are caught in Thucydides trap. You've got a rising China, a declining US and you've got a populist moment that brought to power a person like Trump who is like there is one way to gain an advantage for the US for at least another generation. Of course he's not thinking like that. He's thinking it's going to perpetually extend America's dominance forever and Ever. But the reality is that the strategy that he sees is this big all or nothing. We go in, we use the remaining power that we have to bully enough countries to get on board with us, such that we can diminish the connectivity of China so that it is unable to continue its rise, because its rise counts on a lot of the US Economy, first of all. And by not having access to the US Economy the way that they have historically, that forces them to basically dump cheap goods into their own economy, into surrounding economies, which will then cause them to backlash against China in the same way that we are now, because it hollows out your own ability to manufacture. And everybody understands that in a time like this, having your supply chains offloaded to somebody else that could potentially be an adversary is bad news. So the US Is trying to isolate China, is trying to disrupt this interconnected web. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea being the four major players. The attack on the US dollar, trying to disrupt that as well. Obviously, this in from where I'm sitting, the physics of the situation is such that this comes back to central banking. So I will certainly forgive anybody that thinks that it's shadow bankers that are, you know, doing all of this, whether they're actively involved in any of these discussions or they're simply systemically important to the incentive structure that makes this the actual play. This really is where we're at. So Trump is going, cool, I'm going to take out Venezuela. That's cheap oil for China. That's a, you know, a knock against them. Then I'm going to take out Iran, which is another source, a larger source, in fact, of cheap oil for China. And so if he can do that, not only does he start to remove China more from South America, which is going to be very important, as they were trying to leverage that to build the gold corridor, to have one of its main assaults on the US dollar in terms of its supremacy. But also just keeping people out of your backyard is a very smart play. As the world fractures and you've got multiple powers now instead of just the one US Power, then on top of that, you absolutely have the Israel of it all. So you have an ally in the region that wants to make sure that their investments in terms of dollars into the US Political system pay off in terms of getting us to help. And then I still, man, listen, history may prove me wrong, but I still believe that the Freudian slip or the. The honest answer that Rubio gave about us making a move, and we did, because we knew that Iran was going to be struck by Israel. And so we wanted to get in there first. It's so wild. I still believe that that was accurate. Hey, that's one guy's feelings. We will see. Rubio, who I think is extraordinarily good at his job, just really wants us to believe that that isn't how things played out. And it was taken out of context. I've seen the context. Still feels pretty real to me. So anyway, I think that that's all a real part of the equation. So you put all of that together, and if Trump pulls it off and we are able to isolate China, we deal with the costs of oil going up now, only to come back down, as the US Is hoping, obviously to get a friendly regime in place in Iran. If they do that, we're able to take advantage of putting that oil under US Sanctions and getting better deals for us, then all of this works out well in the end. If he pulls that off, if he puts boots on the ground and you're getting even dozens of Americans killed, yo, if this is dragging on at the midterms, peace out. Homeboy is toasted cheese like, there's no way. Listen, I've been wrong before. So if somehow he's got boots on the ground and dozens of Americans are dying, or God forbid, hundreds of Americans are dying, or God, thousands of Americans are dying, and he gets reelected, that I will admit, I don't see that one coming. I'll update my mental model as reality forces me to do so. But why would that surprise me? I just think the backlash is going to be swift if that is what actually ends up playing out. I think he is counting on something abrupt and aggressive in terms of a victory for the US So I will again plant a flag for me to just check my own thinking against, because trust me, I do not over esteem my ability to be right about this stuff in the fullness of time. But the way that I'm thinking about it now is that Trump would leave Iran in chaos before he would put substantive boots on the ground. He might do like, special operations stuff, like, they're talking about taking over a distribution hub that's like an island that I could see them actually doing and being able to fortify. But like boots on the ground in mainland Iran, I would be shocked. So we'll see how it plays out. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

[Drew]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Drew]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Drew]

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[Drew]

It's interesting that you brought up the China veto. I seen the report that allegedly China is recording the US war and kind of keeping track. So to this point in Thucydides Trap, we're kind of showing our hand on what happens when we do an all out offensive, what happens when somebody punches us back, what happens when we mobilize? Which one of our allies are actually dependable? Which one of these allies are we actually running operations from? So it's kind of like scouting the other team before the Super Bowl. Like you're kind of seeing what they would do. Like, okay, I see a couple weaknesses there. Okay, let's see how the reload time is and stuff like that. So you're starting to kind of see those. The strategy from a world perspective. I got a lot of pushback in the chat from me saying that we're kind of acting like Israel where we're being a bully, we didn't really bomb the school and things like that. Trump, logic aside, what do you think is actually happening in this war and how do you think it actually turns out? I know you're Not a crystal ball reader. I know you're not a military strategist and nothing like that, but lay it out to us. Do you think that this is something that we can come back from and it's just gonna be a blip in the map of history?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, we can definitely come back from it. All anybody ever cares about in the fullness of time is did you make my life better economically or not? And I know that even my community just does not like that blanket statement. But I, I am just, I'm aghast at all of you. I'm gonna be completely honest. I do not know how you look at the world and continue to walk away thinking that this is anything other than economics. Even with like all of the religious element to this, which is very real and gives people motives and all of that. You're not going to be able to get even religious fighters to fight unless you were supporting them economically. This is why everybody has choked out Iran historically by denying them money. You're not going to see people in Hezbollah or Hamas if they feel that they've been abandoned economically, keep going. Like, I just, I, I can't. I don't know what people are gluing together when they look at the world and think, oh, economics doesn't matter. Economics isn't the foundation of this. This is religious. If that were true, then people would just keep fighting with or without money. But they tend not to do that because they have to buy weapons. And the world just grinds to a halt when you find someone in your supply chain who's like, yeah, God's great and all, but P.S. by the way, where the fuck is my money? And then it just all stops. So anyway, I'm looking at this from an economic standpoint and when you look at this from an economic standpoint, I. The incentive for the US to get in there to do its thing in terms of trying to block out China, get control of oil. It's all there. Now how this is going to play out is there is a key piece of information that I need that I don't have. And I think that Iran is far more divided than people want to believe. We want to believe, and we're certainly being propagandized to believe that like 98% of Iranians want to go back to a 1970 ate Iran before the revolution. And I don't think that that's going to end up being true. So I don't think that you get, I don't think that you get 47 years of this kind of theocratic rule without raising people that that's all they know. You've got at least two generations of people that did not experience in any way, shape or form the pre Islamic revolution Iran to be able to say that was better. So this is all they know. So while I will certainly say it seems self evident that Iran is divided in that you've got people on the streets that are, that were willing to die, they were protesting in massive numbers. But the question is now that we see they have the opportunity to like break out again and to really stand for something and really like take the streets back, you're seeing pockets of it, but you're not seeing like a big concentrated effort. You're seeing. And again, I don't know how big this is. I don't know if it's two percent, I don't know if it's 20%, I don't know if it's 50%, I have no idea. But you're seeing people on the other side that are coming out and waving their flags when they announce the new Ayatollah. So I don't know. And I need an answer to that question before I know how all of this is going to play out. Because if we try to top down change Iran, I think we are in for a world of hurt. If we loosen the military infrastructure such that there is a bottom up uprising, then you've got a shot. And I just don't know which way that's going to break.

[Drew]

Yeah, I'm showing the footage right now. People out on the streets, 3:30 in the morning, honking horns and celebrating. It seems like they didn't take it as hard as we thought they would take it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's the thing, think about America. If I show you Minnesota, you're going to look at that and be like, yo, these guys are against their government. But if I show you Florida, you're going to be like, yo, these guys support their government. That's a very good point. And so I have a feeling Iran is the same. Remember Iran is enormous. It is enormous. It is modern, it isn't like. So I used to have an Iranian employee lived here in the US but he like accent the whole nine. Did you ever meet Farhad? So he was always like, Tom, you don't understand. Like Iran is beautiful, it's lush, it's green. He's like, you guys have this propaganda that Iran is just like a big desert. And he's like, that's not what Iran is. Now listen, Iran has desert, but it isn't just like, one big pile of sand. And he's like, I think that's what Americans think Iran is. He's like, it's not that. And so when you see it and you see that, oh, yeah, like any country, there are people that are for the current regime, which is exactly how they stay in place. And then there are people that are against it. I have. I'm just not on the ground. I have no sense of, like, what are the proportions even in the US And I am on the ground. It's hard to tell, like, where is the actual. The silent majority and all that that's supposedly in the middle. It's like, if you want to blow up on YouTube, pick a side.

[Drew]

Side.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that tells me something. Tells me that, like, we're pulling farther apart. If you want to get elected to political office, pick a side. So it's like, I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that there's certainly mobilization in the middle. So people do seem far more animated in the extremes. And so it's tough to get a sense of, okay, which side is bigger. And without knowing that, it will be very difficult. The only thing I will tell you is Iran is not America. You're not going to bomb them into looking like America. And so what is that going to become as they rebuild their own structures and start moving forward? I don't know. We tried turning Afghanistan into America. That didn't work. We tried turning Vietnam into America. That didn't work. We tried turning Iraq into America. That didn't work.

[Drew]

Work.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So it's like, we have to understand culture matters a lot. We're gonna get into some of the, like, issues that America's having, importing people that have different value systems, namely Islam. That's just going to become a bigger and bigger thing. It matters. Culture matters. You don't even have to say one is better than the other to say that everybody inside their own culture thinks theirs is better. And that dynamic of, I think mine is better, you think yours is better. Empirical truth is either impossible to ascertain or nobody cares. And so now it's just two worlds colliding. And if Iran has two worlds colliding, I need to know which one is bigger to predict what the outcome is going to be.

[Drew]

Yeah. And what's actually happening? I'm pulling up the Australian Iranian women's football team drama. That's happening. You would think that this isn't happening. While some people are saying, Iranian people are fine, they didn't need liberation, the women will love it. There's and Then. So then you're hearing these stories that directly contradict. So to your point of starting the show, there's so much media spin that if you look at one section of one city block, it's like, oh, they love it. They want Ayatollah Part 2. They hate America.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dev.

[Drew]

To America. And then you look over here, where literally there's women internationally protesting, carrying the backs of their civil rights, trying to make, like, legitimate change. So it's hard to kind of parse those two. But I'm gonna be honest, I'm at the headline level with the Australian thing. If you could catch us up really quick on what's going on out there. There.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The Australian soccer team is utterly fascinating. It is, in one moment explaining exactly what's going on in. In Iran itself, because they're divided. Even the team is not coming up with a unified response. But if you guys don't know the background of this story. After an Iranian soccer player flashed the international symbol for help as they. So they were coming out of a soccer tournament, they, at one point had stood in silence. It was really an incredible move during their own national anthem. They stood in silence at some point, I think, a couple games ago. And then there was a ton of pressure for them to, hey, the next time the cameras are on you, you better be, like, singing along to the national anthem, because if you don't, we're going to hurt your family back here. So it was like, okay, what's really going on? And then they lost and were removed from the tournament while in Australia. And one of the players, at least one of the players, flashed that international symbol for help. 200 Iranian supporters in Australia swarmed the team's bus to stop them from getting shipped off to the regime that had promised to treat them like wartime traitors. This was on their national tv, obviously, was a big deal. And so it was known that they were going to get some sort of harsh penalty when they returned. And it's. It is a very big question in terms of how this is all going to play out. So you've got five of the members of the Iranian national women's team that is now seeking asylum in Australia, but the rest of the team is preparing to go back home, and the coach has said that they're eager to return home. So the. The question is, how did you get all of them to remain silent? Did they all want to do that? Did they feel a tremendous amount of pressure from, like, a team captain or something? And so they wanted to, you know, do their part to show Solidarity with the team, or is it as straightforward as they had their moment? It looked like things were going one way and they felt this tremendous wave of optimism. And then the threats start rolling in, and all of a sudden you realize, oh, maybe the regime is not as weak as we thought or as we had hoped. And so now they're just worried about what's going to happen to their family. And so it's like they know if they don't go back that something bad is going to happen to their family. I don't know any of the specifics, and I don't think anybody does about the five people that have chosen to stay behind. But if the five people that have chosen to stay behind, for instance, are people that have little to no family back there, or they have family that are ultra militant about wanting a regime change and are willing to suffer whatever consequences come their way, that tells a very different story. And so I don't know if this is a team where some people really do identify with Iran and they want to get back and other people are feeling pressured or other people really are like, I don't care what comes of this. There's no way that I'm going back to Iran. I want to see the regime change. So this is one of those. It's all happening in real time. But the fact that five of the players are seeking asylum lets you know that they were serious, that they probably really did flash that symbol. It's been verified by a bunch of different outlets. So while I was looking at the bus footage, I couldn't see clearly what they were seeing, but it has been verified, and to be honest, I don't even know. Do you know what the universal symbol for help is? God, I hope people haven't been flashing me for years, and I'm just like, hey, what's up? He was just waving at me because I. Yeah, he just waved.

[Drew]

So weird. What's wrong?

[Tom Bilyeu]

What that is. So we'll see how this one plays out. But it is a good reminder that it is right now impossible to ascertain that is exactly how divided and Iran is. We don't know.

[Drew]

Nice. Speaking of Women's Day, yesterday was International Women's Day. Happy International Women's Day to everybody. It's kind of funny, though, that it was on Spring Forward and It was only 23 hours.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's hilarious.

[Drew]

So that's it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's hilarious. Did you enjoy February 28days, Black History Month, Jerreau?

[Drew]

Yes. Black History Month is every day. I don't know why they gave us 28 days. Oh, is that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's the title.

[Drew]

You're Morgan Freeman? Yeah. I'm no. Black History Month.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's go. Because you want to see it deeply integrated into just normal history.

[Drew]

I feel like eventually we got to realize that these people that were been here 400 years next to the Irish dudes that's been here 400 years next to the Italian dudes, that they're.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fuck, yes.

[Drew]

We're all Americans. And at one point in time, we got to kind of. Let's go understand our contributions to each other. Okay, Back to. Back to politics. Karen Levitt casually threw out on the table that she might be okay with doing drafts. Trump is leaving all his options open.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Mothers out there are worried that we're going to have a draft, that they're going to see their sons get, their daughters get involved. What do you want to say about the president's plans for troops on the ground? As we know, it's been largely an air campaign up until now. It has been and it will continue to be. And President Trump wisely does not remove options off of the table. I know a lot of politicians like to do that quickly, but the President, as commander in chief, wants to continue to assess the success of this military operation. It's not part of the current plan right now, but the president, again, wisely keeps his options on the table.

[Drew]

Wisely keeping his options on the table. Yeah, dude.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So this one, to me, just feels like political suicide. So. Yep. I mean, look, some people will just keep doubling down, doubling down, doubling down until get that victory because they're at the table. And it's like, well, I'm. I'm down a half mil now. What's a million, Drew? And they just keep trying to dig themselves out of that hole. Now, I'm not saying that Trump is in a hole right now with Iran. I think it's too early to tell. But I think that the signs coming out for my money, like this is showing that it's got legs. So in terms of remaining a conflict where you do not get the settled down aspect that you want, quickly, again, Trump could be today announcing. No, no, like, we've worked something out. We'll see. But I think that would be him leaving Iran in its current state because you've just replaced the Ayatollah with his son. Yeah, so it's like his son who you just killed, like, half of his family members, including his wife, his mom, one of his kids, kids. So it's like, this guy is not going to be like, hey, everybody, let's hold hands. You know what, I just want to,

[Drew]

I'm ready to make, I want to

[Tom Bilyeu]

forgive, like, what happened. Everybody, if we could just say, you know, amen and love, love your neighbor. I don't think that's what's going to come out of this. So I would be very shocked that there would be stability that would come out of that announcement if he makes it. We'll see. So, yeah, telling the American people that you are not going to remove a draft, like, like there's a one to one with poll numbers going down on that. So we'll see. We'll see. This is it. It is very interesting to look at Trump as a transformational figure. Imagine having a hundred years of distance from this moment and what this will look like, because at that point it's just all outcomes. And so if this goes horribly awry, it's just like, what a moron. He was completely unhinged. This is what happens in a populist moment. You elect dictators and they fucking go nuts and they run about the world and it all fucks falls apart, or if it all works, you look back and go, America finally elected a president that wasn't afraid to take action. Who did the hard thing to isolate China. One of the few times, you know, they were coming up in an era where 12 of the last 16 times that a rising superpower collided with an established superpower, they ended up in war. And yet Trump somehow was able to isolate China by systematically going after these different proxies, breaking their access to oil, forcing them to move all to solar. And you know what I mean? Like, you can see how it, like, would break down where you look back at it and go, whoa, like actually a very impressive move. But if you looked at it, you would say, but what was it like on the ground at that time? Because everything is so uncertain. And that's where we're all trapped, which is we don't have the historical perspective to know which way this is going to go. But it still remains up in the air that, yeah, he could end up pulling this off. And pulling this off to me means he stays in power long enough to make this economically advantageous to the U.S. not that it will ever be morally justifiable. So, and I think that that's one of the things that people take away from me. And every now and then I am so interested in just fighting with the people in chat that I see every now and then. But unfortunately, that has not proven to be good tv. So we, I will Resist. But yeah, I'm so curious to know what people's best take is, like, where this goes.

[Drew]

I'm gonna have to put your feet to the fire here, too, because Trump is doubling down. This is his true social post. Great job by hardworking Scott Pressler on Fox and Friends talking about using the filibuster or chalking filibuster. In order to pass the Save America act, an 88% issue with all voters, it must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else must go to the front of the line. I as president will not sign other bills until this is passed. I want to just pause right there for a second because to your point, he's in the middle of the war, he has all these things working against him and now he's not going to pass anything else until the Save Act. It seems like he's definitely pushing his chips all into the middle with this one.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, it's interesting, Yes. I would say his chips are way more all in in Iran. Iran, from a political standpoint, is far scarier in terms of the Republican Party's future. This, I think, is one of the things that gets at the heart of your politicians are not working for you. In poll after poll after poll, American people want there to be ID for voting, just full stop. They support it. It's 88. I, I've never heard that poll. Maybe it's changed. I've seen 84. And that takes into account Democrats and all that. Like, I think it polls for Democrats in the upper 70s. So it's like boys and girls, you've got to understand that the American people, writ large, regardless of party affiliation, want you to protect voter integrity, Period. End of story. Simple as it should be. The easiest thing in the world. Now, whether Trump has the ability to just like veto things that come across his desk or refuse to sign it, I don't know about the refuse to sign, but certainly presidents can veto legislation. So he does have with unless there's a super majority. He does have a pretty big tool in his arsenal. And if this is the one that he's going to burn the political capital on, I get it. I just, I am aghast that the Democrats are not getting behind something that their own voters want. I get them being obstinate about something that their voting block doesn't want. But when their voting block wants a it, this is insane. And then it's like it goes back to. I did a deep dive on what I think is really going on with elections and I think that it is aggressively Importing immigrants. And just a large population of the immigrants that were brought in or certainly over the last four years were illegal immigrants to boost the census, to give their party more control so that they can get a one party state. And nobody should want a one party state. I don't care what side you're on on. You should not want your own party to be the only party. I don't know how else to say that. You. It will go into tyranny very rapidly. You will become paristatized by your own extreme wing. This is exactly what happens when there's only one party. So like boys and girls, please, for the love of God, figure that one out.

[Drew]

AI has been taking over the world in a bunch of different places. But I think what is happening lately with the Claude debacle of Department of War and now we just seen that somebody resigned at OpenAI. The line between AI robotics and war is starting to collide a lot more than we are more comfortable emitting. So this is from Caitlin Kalinoski. I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn't an easy call. AI has an important role in national security, but surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without American authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle and not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team and I'm proud of what we built together. So a bunch of CEOs last week said it. Get out your feelings. This is the military. We're not going to let some guys from Silicon Valley dictate it. But when are we going to have this conversation? Because I feel like it keeps getting pushed and more people are leaving. Contracts are being voided.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're not going to have this conversation.

[Drew]

No. No input at all. This is what it is.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Drew, Drew, Drew. Here is the terrifying reality. Because I don't want people to think that explaining something means that you're happy about it or that you like it. But the reality is, in Los Alamos, we had to make a decision. If we do this nuclear test, it may light the atmosphere on fire and devour every living thing and just completely terminate life. We don't know. There is a non zero chance that that will happen. Happen. And they did it anyway. So I don't have a clearer example. Humans will develop any technology that promises an advantage. There has never been a technology in all of human history that promised a bigger advantage than AI and truly, if we don't, China will. And I know that Feels like that that offers no solace. I'm not trying to soothe people. I'm merely trying to tell you how the human animal works, works. And so this is why people go, is it possible that we've never heard from an alien civilization? Because there was a great filter and evolutionary creatures which, which literally remember we evolved to go, oh, you have cells. I would like, I'm going to come kill you and take those cells and use them for myself. That's what humans do. We eat other animals so that we may have their cellular structure. Okay? So like, like people need to come to grips with how bloody in tooth and claw evolution really is. And so we have evolved to say, like here, let's make everybody real uncomfortable. What is one of the pieces of property that people have gone to war for over time? That's right, Women. So they will go kill all the men and take the women so that they can reproduce. Like, bro, when you realize that humans will do that, that it's like there are parasites in this world that will go in. Like, there's this fungus, I think, or a worm that goes and like embeds itself in a wasp. Makes the wasp like go to water and then the larva from that worm eat the wasp while it's still living so that it can like reproduce in the water and all stuff like, dude, nature does not give a fuck it. It will just do its thing. So humans at least have some moral check in their programming. But we are going to develop AI no matter how many safety people we, the population, no matter how many safety people bounce out. If America goes, listen, we just can't do this. We can't be a part of it. And like, we come together and we all just say, nope, maybe Tom's right, maybe someone's going to do it, but it's not going to be us. Cool. Maybe we can count on China to say the same thing. You really think you can stop the Ted Kaczynskis of the world? Like, bro, it. Let's say you're a Ted Kaczynski psychopath and North Korea reaches out to you and goes, you're going to need way more funding than you're going to be able to get, so why don't you come on over and build it for us?

[Drew]

It will happen so facto to that. It just. It's one of those things where we see the negative ramifications of AI but we just can't help ourselves. It's just like, yeah, let's a little bit more. It's going to Be fine. It's going to be fine. A little bit more jobs, a little bit more.

[Tom Bilyeu]

More like, yeah, it is too powerful. And so, yeah, I mean, God, how much do we want to derail on this? When you look at evolution, lineages die off all the time. And right now humans are preparing themselves to be a midwife for a synthetic species. That is almost certainly true. And now will humans remain and they don't die off and we do colonize the stars? Maybe it's kind of a cool way to think about it that we get off Earth and it's not just us and there's us and synthetic.

[Drew]

The midwife thing. Like, I feel like when AI gets to that level of control, I'm kind of with Bustamante. I feel like they'll be like, this society is weird. We're just gonna go and beep and boop and do stuff over here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, possible. Maybe they leave us alone and then maybe things get better. Maybe it's like, okay, we. We got the face hugger of, you know, AI and it fucking pumps the little aliens into our gullet and then it bursts out of the chest of a few people and we're like, yo, that was terrifying. But it is what it is. And now the rest of us, like the little alien creature runs off and starts colonizing places far beyond and leaves us alone. And we rebuild and we take the line out of Dune and we just go, no one shall make an AI in the likeness of a human mind. And we're just like, nope, no more of that. That game is over. Cool, Whatever. But it. The technology is going to come into existence and then we have to see what ends up happening to humans. And I think that it's really going to be. I think that it's going to be ultimately spectacular. I think it is going to be terrifying and bumpy. And I certainly understand anybody that's like, I'd just rather it didn't exist. But the reality is that the things that it lets you. Intelligence is the single most profound, like, thing in the universe. It's incredible. No one wants to see a bunch of lifeless rocks. What we cherish is consciousness. And so if AI can achieve that kind of state. Be incredible.

[Drew]

Well back into the reality of what's actually happening on the ground of AI now. Finance jobs seem to be the next sector that AI is, is eating. This is a retweet from Peter St. Ange, friend of the show. He was on here. Finance and insurance jobs openings fell 117%. 117,000 in December to 134,000, the lowest level since February 20, 2012. So you can see this graph. It seems pretty, pretty low. And that's right over the back of the, like, recession. The Great Recession. Yeah. So one sector after another and then we have this economic pressure on the stock market. It seems like this the house of cars are starting to teeter when it comes to AI and layoffs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's a way that I think everybody should think about AI and the jobs market right now. We have no reason to believe that this isn't going to be just a reconfiguration. Every time we've gone through one of these technological changes on a long enough timeline, the technology ends up creating more jobs than it destroys. So you had the Industrial revolution, you had the electrification, you had the great Internetification. All of those revolutions caused massive disruptions to the job markets. Remember the Internet one, the one that ironically feels the most invisible to us because we're just in the middle of it. The deaths of despair on the back of that from people that just could not get trained up to exist in this world. They were too far down the old path. The number of those deaths is so high that it has lowered the average life expectancy of the nation as a whole. Okay, so it is an absolute catastrophe, but you end up getting through it. And kids that grow up in the Internet era, they end up building incredible things. And we are, look, there are downsides as well, don't get me wrong. But we are marching forwards, making incredible progress, doing incredible things. And now we're seeing this new disruption. Now I think that this time is going to be different. But I have a rule in my life that says anytime you say the magical phrase this time is going to be different, just assume you're wrong. So I simultaneously believe it's true and recognize the foolishness that history has shown over and over and over of people that say this time is going to be different. So right now I am saying, okay, I'm living in this moment. I can see what the real impacts of this moment are. And right now the reality is you're not going to get replaced by AI. You are going to get replaced by a human using AI. So I'm using AI as much as I can. And it has been a boon to every aspect of my life. Now, like everything, there are people that have a drug addled quality or relationship with it, and so they're getting addicted to it and they're using it in negative ways. I am not. I'm saying, okay, here are the goals that I'm trying to achieve. I don't want this to turn me to a pair of hands. I want to understand why it's doing what it's doing. I want it to help me map cause and effect. I want it to help me think out from first principles so that I understand it myself. So I don't need an output from that to be able to do something that I can actually understand the thing. Okay, so how you force yourself to interact with it is going to be a large part of this. Now, on a long enough timeline, does this usher in an age of abundance, an age of high income, as Elon Musk has said? Probably, unless it asymptotes from an intelligence perspective, or we just cannot get our shit together enough to get energy going in appropriate amounts. I think that this just keeps going. But this is gonna play out over a longer time period than any of us want. Certainly longer than I want, or even some days longer than I predict. But that's just the way that things tend to go. They tend to take longer than you think, not be quite as cool as you think. And so in my more sober moments, I go, okay, I've probably got a transition that ranges somewhere between three and in seven years where I still recognize the world, it still seems reasonable, and that gives us all time to adjust to whatever's going to come on the other side. Now, AI is the first technology that just continues to surprise me day after day after day with its rate of doubling. So take that with a grain of salt. But that is the way I think right now to think about it. Use AI, deploy it in your life. Don't get so doomer that you're only looking at the dark side of what could happen. I think spending some time there is warranty, but spending all of your time there is not wise. And so even if I'm right in my most aggressive prognostications, and three years from now, capitalism just doesn't exist right now, today it does. Right now, today. It matters. Right now, today having a job is important. And right now, today, the way to keep your job is to be the one that uses AI the most effectively. So look at all of this stuff. Not as like, oh God, my head is on the chopping block. Look at it as the people who are being willfully ignoring AI, not finding a way to use it in their jobs, they're going to be the ones replaced by people using AI. So you have the life raft that you need, which is to master AI.

[Drew]

Man, we really need to get this ipsof XO button. You cooking the day, bro.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There it is.

[Drew]

AI has been making tremendous breakthroughs, though. I thought this was, like, satire. I was like, oh, this is a Babylon Bee article. This is not real. But just then there's a petri dish of human brain cells grown on a micro trip has learned to play Doom. I wish, like, that was. That's a full sentence. That is it. And this is, like footage of the gameplay that happened. Like, below here you can actually see that they're taking real neuron gameplay and they just laid it on a microchip, bro.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is so crazy. Believe it or not, boys and girls, that statement is true. A petri dish of human brain cells grown in a microchip has learned to play a video game. Welcome to the era of biological computing. Things are going to get wild. Developers can now literally write code to living neurons via the cloud. Okay, there's two stories that have dropped recently that most people are treating as novelty. But they're not realizing that when these two things are combined, it. It tells you the direction of travel that we're going. When you put them together, they point to a transformation that I'm not sure it is singularity. Like, in that it will be very difficult for us to predict. On the other side of this, the first story is that scientists at Princeton and Cambridge have spent years mapping every single neuron in an adult fruit fly. Okay, so they've mapped a fly's brain. It's nearly 140,000 neurons, 50 million connections. They've loaded the entire wiring diagram into a computer simulation. Then they simply fed this simulated brain sensory inputs. So there's no separate behavioral training. Okay. It is just architecture. So there's no reinforcement learning applied to the outcomes. It's just the structure. And the simulation correctly enacted the real flies brain's motor responses, including the circuits that control walking, with no one telling it what walking was supposed to look like. The lead researcher's quote says it all. One fly had to be sacrificed for this experiment. But that fly will now live forever in a simulation. Now, I hope part of you just got excited and I hope part of you just became terrified with that story too. You've got an Australian company called Cortical labs. They took 200,000 living human brain cells. Cells, 200,000 living human brain cells. They were grown from adult skin, placed on a silicon chip, and then they built what they call the world's first code deployable biological computer. Okay. An independent developer with zero neuroscience background used their Python API to pipe Doom's video feed into electrical signals, sent those signals directly into the neurons. And in under a week, the cells were navigating levels, targeting enemies, firing weapons, all in real time. Now, to give you a sense of the insane rate of progress here, they had done something similar in the past with the game Pong. If you're young, you may not remember what that is. A very simplistic game, and it took them 18 months. Doom, a far more complicated game, took only one week. Things are speeding up dramatically now. For anyone worried about the energy consumption of AI, I've got some good news. The energy economy economics of slapping brain matter onto computer chips is insane. A full rack of these bad boys draws just 850 to 1000 watts. Combined. The human brain runs in just 20 watts. But a single GPU cluster training a large language model can burn through megawatts. Biological compute is wildly more efficient. And just as a reminder, it's already here. This is not some insane thing way down the road. It's already here. And the investor list reflects exactly who's taking this seriously. You've got Horizons Ventures, Blackbird, and reportedly In Q Tel, which is the CIA's venture army. Now, I want to be clear. The In Q Tel thing is unconfirmed. So that may require a tinfoil hat. We'll see where that goes over time. Cortical Labs is now selling access through a cloud platform that they're calling wetware. As a service, developers deploy code to living neurons remotely. You don't need a lab. And it's priced like a software subscription. This is so insane. Now, when you put it all together, on one side, you've got proof. You can load a complete biological brain map into a computer and have it predict behavior from structure alone. And on the other side, you have proof that living human neurons on a chip will learn in real time. Drawing on 4 billion years of biological optimization that so far, no silicon chip has been able to replicate synthetic brains. Man. They are coming to a server rack near you. AWS is about to get a second wind. Boys and girls. Things are gonna get nuts. People are going to get so weird with what they. How they respond to this. And honestly, understandably so. There are so many moral implications of what's going on with this. We're talking about growing brains and strapping them into data centers. Man. Buddy. This one is. This one's gonna be one for the ages.

[Drew]

That fruit fly one is crazy to me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

That it's just walking around. And does it know that it's in a simulation and is it just a copy of it. And what's the. We were talking about this in Slack, Me press and Ed got into like a rabbit hole of like what actually is consciousness and how do we map consciousness? And Ed was like, well I think it already is consciousness. And I'm like, I think the question now is going to be what is the definition of consciousness? Just like what is the definition of truth? It became, oh, it's easy, easy. But then you take away religious standards, oh, it's easy. Then you take away society standards and then it becomes like this like mushy, like sliding scale. And I think consciousness is going to be the same thing. So the fact that they could do that with fruit flies, my conspiracy theories. Every time government or scientists do something to an animal, they immediately do it to humans in the military, like that's the pipeline. So we cloned a goat. Never heard about goat cloning again. They've been cloning people. I know, I just can't prove it yet. Same thing with this fruit fly. They got the fruit flies like brain map maps. What's to stop them from like stealing like a terrorist somewhere, mapping his consciousness in a box and saying, you're gonna live here forever unless you give us the secrets. And then they kind of like torture him in that way. Like it's perpetual torture. Even though his real body's not tortured, he's somewhere else. But we mapped your body into the make believe land to interrogate you there. I might actually write that. That's a good pilot. That's a good actual I conspiracy myself. That part out there down. But you know what I'm saying that there is this we're going back to moral thing again where it's AI is now becoming more and more powerful and there's starting to be so many applications. It's like, wait a second, this thing is just going in different directions like at the same time. We're taking over fruit flies, we're firing finance bros. College grads can't find a job. But now growing brain cells can play doom by themselves. It just seems like everything is happening at the same time. And it's like my head's on a switch level. It's, it's just interesting how we're progressing at such a rapid pace.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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