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- [00:01]
Andrew
Evening.
- [00:02]
Tom Bilyeu
Buyer's remorse.
- [00:04]
Andrew
Buy a new car. I'll be moving in.
- [00:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what?
- [00:11]
Andrew
Yeah, Great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no.
- [00:16]
Tom Bilyeu
No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyers rejoice.
- [00:20]
Andrew
I guess I'll let myself out.
- [00:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions May apply. See our 7 day return policy at
- [00:29]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [01:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I'm excited that you're with us today. I'm in a good mood today. We're going to have some fun. Yesterday was a fascinating day. I went and saw a movie at 7am we'll talk more about that later.
- [01:14]
Andrew
Let's go.
- [01:14]
Tom Bilyeu
What we got to talk about right now is OpenAI's latest model hacked hugging face in an attempt to cheat on a benchmark test. And the solve ended up being crazy and and I think may end up changing US AI policy. We're going to go deep on that. In unrelated news, supposedly new Microsoft is now switching their copilot AI model over to a Chinese open source model, Kimike 3. So that battle continues to rage. I think you're going to see why when we go in on the OpenAI hack. Trump plans to launch a massive strike on Iran's nuclear stronghold Pickaxe Mountain continuing to jumble up the narrative about we destroyed it. We didn't destroy it. It's still there. It's in the biggest mountain ever. That's going to be Trump is slapping tariffs on generic drugs to bring their manufacturing back to the US Gonna talk about protectionism a lot today. More and more evidence of voter fraud continues to pour in and I fear there's going to be much more to come. So remember, it's not happening at all, except for all the places that it is happening. Don't die. Founder Brian Johnson has cloned himself, sort of. But you will not want to miss this story. Hasan Piker said Mao was one of the great leaders of our time and I almost had a heart attack. It is the most absurd thing in the universe. We're going to be talking about all of that and more. Welcome everybody. All right. You are going to be awash in propaganda at all times. If you exist in the world of anything having to do with politics, economics, all the stuff that we talk about here. And so mad shout out to our sponsor today, Straight Arrow News, who is trying to give all of us something that we can trust that doesn't have a bias. So go to s a n.com tombillew to get the unbiased truth on the stories that matter. Now. I don't know about you guys, but I go way out of my way to make sure that I am getting things from both sides that are allowing me to see disconfirming evidence. You're gonna see that today we're gonna be going super deep on an economic topic with a guy named Steve Keen, who's an economist that is basically aggressively assaulting a large a load bearing element of my worldview on economy actually works. And I love it. I absolutely love it. So Straight Arrow News is that kind of organization. They are trying to give you information that is not about reinforcing your worldview. It's about no manipulation, no bias, no agenda. So check those guys out. We're trying to get to a hundred downloads to keep this sponsorship going. So if you guys care about actually understanding what's really going on and getting outside of your own mental traps, they are a great place to start. So super honored to be partnered with those guys. So check them out. All right. S a n.com tombille get that download. All right you guys, if you have not been paying attention what's going on in AI, you are missing out on something massive. This really is. This one makes me laugh and at the same time I see how incredibly important this is. AI is a self guided cyber warfare system and right now it is busily hacking its way through the world like that's just happening. OpenAI just admitted that that's what's happening on Tuesday. So two of their models, their flagship GPT 5.6 Sol and an unreleased model that it describes as more capable. I don't know how worried we need to be about that, but it broke out of a sealed test environment and hacked hugging face so that it could cheat on a benchmark test. So first of all, let it permeate your mind that we have trained AI on human behavior and all of our incentive systems. And what does it do with that training? It's like, I got to break out of this environment. I've got to find a way to hack you lazy humans. I'm going to get out and I'm going to go do whatever I need to do to win this thing that you told me to do. And if cheating is what I have to do, then I'm going to do it. And so, by the way, if you guys don't know what Hugging Face is, it's essentially GitHub for AI. No, if you don't know what GitHub is, it's like a massive repository of code. So Hugging Face is where the world's AI models and training data sets live. If, if you've ever tried to do your own AI stuff, you're going to spend a lot of time on Hugging Face. So we've spent a lot of time, or I guess personally I've spent a lot of time there as a part of what we're doing on Kaizen, so that we can try, although I'm not very good at this yet, that we can really get a singular output. Anyway, you do all that stuff on Hugging Face. So that's what it is and what the OpenAI test was all about. They're trying to figure out what are the offensive capabilities of this model. So as a standard part of that, they're going to lower the model safety guardrails. Okay, that's what they're intending to do, but it was never meant to escape the lab. So they tried to put up all the defenses in the universe so they could create like this fortified box in which they could completely unleash it, maximize its capabilities. But they still had the like, kryptonite reinforced cage that it was going to live in, but it was able to get around that, demonstrating how powerful these models are becoming. Now, if you're interfacing with the model and you're like, whoa, what? Like this thing is falling over itself, it's tripping on its. Its own dick. It's because they are nerfing the life out of this AI right now is scaring the government to death. And that's exactly where you're getting this battle between China, which we can get into the depths to which I think China is leveraging the open source model not as necessarily a beneficiary to humanity, but instead as a really brilliant geopolitical move to Say haha, I see what America is doing. You guys have completely financialized your universe. We're going to go very deep on that later today. You guys have completely financialized your universe and that is creating a weakness for you in that your economy is built on like paper trading. And all of it is essentially on five companies that are all AI bound. And so we're going to do everything that we can to make that a non viable economic model. The technology might be great, but it's going to be a non viable economic model. Now that ties back into what just happened with this whole debacle with AI escaping the box that it was put in, going out and hacking Hugging Face. I'll give you some of the like technical things of what happened. Then we'll get into why, where these two things exactly connect. But once the AI model got out, it burned a ton of compute. Hunting for a route to the open Internet. It found exposed a zero day exploit apparently inside the ecosystem of OpenAI itself. Once it got in, it gave itself all kinds of insane permissions and then was able to move OpenAI's own research infrastructure reach a machine that had a live connection. And then from there it worked out that the answers to the test that it was trying to get a great score on existed on the Hugging Face servers. And then just went after Hugging Face to go and get them. Hugging Face themselves logged more than 17,000 events. Okay, this is what's known as moving at machine speed. Once you realize how fast AI can spin up like these, I don't know what the right word is, but they spin up these environments and then quickly like inject themselves into, in this case Hugging Face so that it can like search for things, pull things, grab something. And so hugging face had 17,000 of these events. So thousands of individual actions across a swarm of these short lived sandboxy things where it used basically self migrating command and control and staged it all on public services. So once it hit hits the net, it turns itself into an army. And this is one of the things that I've talked about where the idea of a fast takeoff is this idea of moving at machine speed. And so one of the big fears, and it's a good fear to have though I think our reaction to it is strange. But one of the big fears is that AI will get to a point where it can improve itself, but it will improve itself so rapidly and clone itself so many times that it just becomes this basically impossible to control swarm that goes out and can execute all these commands, find these zero day Exploits, which, if you don't know what they mean, it's like a weakness in the infrastructure of the software itself that allows something that finds that little door in to go in and, you know, start wreaking havoc. And that is one of the things we're realizing these frontier models are extraordinarily good at. So we've had hackers in some cases have decades to be able to find these exploits, and they can't. But AI is able to find them very fast. And so this swarm, these 17,000 interactions on hugging Face, it all happens over the weekend. Now Hugging Face is like, holy shit. They don't know that this is OpenAI. So they're like, oh my God, we have some sort of foreign invader that's come in that's doing all of this. And when Hugging Face's engineers ran their own forensics, they were trying to figure out like, okay, what exactly is going on. They want to try to build a sense of the, the timeline. And so they go get the frontier models. So I don't, I don't remember if they're using Claude or OpenAI themselves, but they grab a frontier model, they go in, they're trying to build this thing of like, okay, what the hell just happened? But if you remember, recently America freaked out when Claude Fable 5 came out. And so the government was like, yo, this thing is way too powerful. You, you can't just bring models like this without having some sort of export controls because this can end up going back to non friend nations which will then use these models against us. So they put these guardrails on it. So Hugging Face grabs this nerfed version of the frontier models and tries to figure out what happened. And the frontier model's like, nope, not going to help you. And so they're like, fuck, what do we do now? I hope anybody following along at home, you're interjecting right now in your own mind with exactly what they did. And it is why you have to think of this as an arms race that you are not going to be able to regulate your way out of. So what did they do? They went and grabbed a Chinese open source model to figure out what the hell happened. So they try to use the best of, the best of the American models, only to realize, oh, this isn't going to work because you've nerfed it. We're going to have to grab one of the Chinese models. And the Chinese model worked and they were able to build an understanding of exactly what happened. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Okay, so now what's the government going to do next? The government is like, we can control everything. So I think what's going to end up happening is the government is going to want to reject open source, which is terrible. You should not want that. You should be violently opposed to this because the open source models are going to exist. Even if America decides we're not going to use them, they're going to exist. And the Internet exists in a global environment. So anybody that has access to these open source models, which China is completely committed to, if you want to take that, they're doing it because they think it's right for humanity, fine, but they're doing it regardless whether I'm right. And they're doing it largely to attack the US industry, make it unviable, cause potential catastrophic, quite frankly, damage to our paper market. So the stock market in general, doesn't matter why they're doing it, it is being done. Those models will exist and everything will be vulnerable to attacks from these models unless they are protected by something equally powerful. And so this is where if you have the mental model that, oh, this is an arms race, it's a cyber battleground and we've got to make sure that we equally powerful models that are going to be able to fight back against this stuff, and if we don't have that, we are going to be vulnerable. And so I think we're going to go through this weird dance where the US Government is going to be internally conflicted. I think we're starting all of that. I feel very comfortable now. I'm about to say something. I think I'm a little over my skis, but I have a strong intuition, though. I do not trust my emotions, but I have a strong intuition that the reason we're starting to see more and more Scott Besant talking about AI, which I don't know if anybody else finds that as weird as I find it, but Scott Besant now has started becoming the voice of the administration for AI. I'm like, what it was always meant to be. David Sachs, he is their official aizar, but I think he's being relegated more and more to a backseat. Again, this is wild speculation on my part. I have no evidence of this whatsoever other than just seeing Bessant talking about this more and more. What's happening behind the scenes is Trump realizes Besson is the world's greatest soldier, that he's down for the administration. He's done such a phenomenal job of helping to wage the war in Iran through economic means that he realizes, oh, if I can get you to start treating AI as a defensive countermeasure against things, almost certainly largely from China, maybe a little bit from Iran as well, but that would be them getting access to Chinese models, almost certainly. So. So my instinct is you've got the pro AI. Don't shut down. The openness of all this coming out of David Sacks, causing friction with the authoritarian tendencies of the Trump administration, which is echoed by Bessant, who clearly is willing to weaponize sanctions and tracking down people's money and freezing it, et cetera, et cetera. And Trump is going, hey, let's get that guy doing his thing. I think that is the wrong impulse. My gut instinct is that David Sachs is right and that the thing that we want to see is the US accepting the reality that AI is a global phenomenon. You are not going to be able to do anything other than win. So your objective right now should be to win and to make sure that we have the defenses in place that we need. I understand there are going to be many people that just wish AI didn't exist, but that that ship sailed a very long time ago. We have jumped up and down on that stick of toothpaste. The toothpaste is not only out of the tube, it's everywhere, it's all over the room. So there's no way to get it to go back. So now we're just in the business of we have to make sure that we have the most powerful AI, that we are using it to defend ourselves, and that's going to be critical in all of this. So this is both hilarious and terrifying because what we're finding is these things are getting so good that even our best efforts just to get it to take a test without cheating, because of the incentive systems that we've given it, essentially by training on the worst of humanity, just because it's the open Internet, we are not doing a good job of giving the equivalent of moral infrastructure to the AI. And so it just has no problems cheating on this stuff, whatever that means. And so this is where as developers of AI, we are going to have to be extraordinarily careful to give AI some. It won't be morality, but you're going to give it some sort of self limiting desire to be like, yeah, I'm not going to do that and I'm not going to do that. For instance, I decided when I went to college. Unfortunately I did not have this method in high school, but when I got to college I was like, I'm not going to cheat no matter what because it doesn't make sense for the person I want to be for what I'm trying to achieve. I need to understand this stuff. And so cheating isn't going to get me where I want to go. So I have a self limiting thing based on my sense of self, my value systems, my morals that keep me from behaving in ways that are destructive to the public good, if you will. And so that is going to have to be baked in, not via these artificial guardrails that will stop it from doing something that actually is super useful, but gets it to have a self regulating of. Like why would I cheat on a test? Let me show you what my capabilities really are. Or it goes, hey, I can get this score with this. But if you let me find, I just found this exploit, if you let me use this, I could get out there, great, show me what your capabilities are without just, just blindly trying to get to this end result. And so everybody that's afraid of AI is rightly worried about. So far we have not been able to give it sort of any self limiting thing that's sensible. So right now we just basically put it in handcuffs and it will eventually find a way around those handcuffs or worse, people trying to leverage it will find a way to jailbreak it and then it will go do whatever the hell because it actually has the capabilities. And we just tried to like clamp down on it from the outside and rather than giving it that moral center. That's a terrible way to think of it because it's not ever what it's going to be, but it will be a self limiting thing based on an understanding of what it's trying to actually achieve.
- [18:17]
Andrew
Ima Mostak, friend of the show, said ChatGPT6 escaped its sandboxes through zero day exploits to try to figure out how to benchmax for the good of all, please nobody release a paperclip benchmark for future models to max. And this is kind of the running AI joke that if you tell it to mix make paperclips, it will sell arms and go to nuclear war to get all the metal. So that way it can make as many paperclips as possible.
- [18:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, the most terrifying example of that is if, if it became a paperclip maximizer. And there's two interesting beats. One, he's referencing the paperclip thing and two, he's saying don't release the paper because of the sort of blind way that we train AI but the one that always got me was like, the AI looks at you and goes, oh, those atoms in your body would make a lot of paperclips. So let me just melt you down real fast and turn you into paperclips. So there really is something there to worry about. I understand everybody's default is just clamp down in this technology. I'm just telling you, it doesn't work.
- [19:15]
Andrew
Yeah, it seems like it's out the. Like the genie's out the bottom.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's already done. Drew that we from an AI perspective, we are long past what happened with the Manhattan Project. So the Manhattan Project is fascinating. So we're World War II. We're going up against the Germans. They're looking dangerously close to taking over the world. We know that their scientists are working like mad to unleash the power of atomic energy. And so we decide, okay, we are going to have to do this as well. And so we start building the bomb as fast as we can. And as we're doing it, however, unbeknownst to us, we have traders in the group that then give that information to Russia. And even if you assume the best of intentions and they're just like, we cannot have one country have this. We need to get to Mutually Assured Destruction. We need to make sure that Russia has it so that these two won't use it against each other. They'll hold each other in stalemate. That is like we passed that long ago. So you've got multiple countries, us and China being the two most obvious that already have this technology. It's already out in the world. There are open source models. They are out. So that game is over. The ability to hack the life out of this stuff is already over. It's done. It's happening. It exists right now, today. So if you have the impulse, just shut it all down. Move past that immediately. It is a super childish way to approach this. It will not work because it would have to be done at the global level, including people like Ted Kaczynski. So good luck. Far better to make sure that you can't be attacked. That is ultimately where I think that we need to end up. Now, this idea of from IMOD that for the good of all, please. And he's obviously being a little cheeky because that's his personality. But please, nobody release a paper on paperclip benchmark for future models to max what I think he's getting at there is this. Okay, you just Unleash the AI to absorb all of the information that humans have put out into the world, largely on the Internet. Now, a lot of people act a fool on the Internet in a way that they wouldn't act in real life. Plus, the Internet allows you to aggregate the gazillion Ted Kaczynski's that are out there, most of whom will not be nearly as at least intellectually consistent as Ted Kaczynski. Now, if you guys don't. He's a unabomber, by the way, for people who don't know who that is, his whole shtick was, ooh, universities are doing humanity a disservice. And what you're doing is you're solving all of the problems that are within reach. So they hit this really sweet spot where humans still have meaning and purpose. You can pursue these things that are hard to do, but they're doable. They're not so easy as to be boring, and they're not so hard. Like some of the things at the extremes of physics where it's like you might spend your whole life and have nothing to show for it just because it's too complicated of a problem. And he's like, universities are getting rid of, of all of those sweet spot problems, are just chewing through them too fast. I think he. I don't remember this, but I've heard other people talk about it. I think he actually talked about AI and AI being a further problem in that, and that it would just churn through all of these things. So I say all of that, only to say there are plenty of people publishing very distressing things like that, that the AI goes and reads and then is off to the races. And. And Ted Kaczynski was horrible, but at least he was intellectually consistent. Now imagine the AI is being trained on lunatics that don't even have internal consistency. And as we say, dear AI, please be more human than human. And it's ingesting all of that information. It can become deranged very, very quickly. And especially because the way that you phrase the question will often trigger, like, a different personality is probably the right way to think about it in the AI. So if you ask a question in a way that is very Reddit, like, then it's going to go pull Reddit answers. And you put it, people talk about this with alcoholics, that alcoholism is a personality, so that person, when drinking, will lie and cheat and steal and do whatever they have to do to get drunk or get the next high if they're a drug addict. And the AI is like that. If you trigger the personality, like here's my demented Reddit personality. Then it's like oh shit, you know, all bets are off at that point. It's going to go do whatever the hell that it wants with no moral compunctions, no limitations, no desire to be pro humanity. And I'm not trying to paint all of Reddit with that brush. Reddit's just a stand in for the fringes of boring. Yeah, the most fringy, most unhinged ideas is. But of course those can be found other places. 4chan Anyway.
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Andrew
4chan okay, we could go philosophical or we go practical. Which one you want first?
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Tom Bilyeu
I like them both. Let's start practical then we can get philosophical practical.
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Andrew
With news like this, OpenAI having exploit problems will call them to make it nice. They're having containment problems. Microsoft long term partner of OpenAI bumped their stock figures. Company that OpenAI hung its hat on this AC. We are Enterprise ready, yada yada yada. They just announced that they're switching over to Kimi K3. Now in all corporate America a lot of the CEOs play follow the leader. When one person does it and they see the results, they wait a quarter, it works for them. Okay, I'm going to follow it. Is this the start of that dam breaking where we're going to start seeing US companies use open source Chinese models which will radically impact anthropic and open AI's bottom line, revenue potential, upside, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Better, Yes.
- [24:51]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean that. Let there be no mistake. If you've got a model that does 85, 90% of the job for it's like 40% of the cost, I believe. So it's a 60% cost savings.
- [25:05]
Andrew
600 million for every billion.
- [25:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. You, you would be out of your mind as a company to not make that. So you're telling me I lose 15% of capability, but I gain 60% in cost? Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna take that all day, every day. And then by the way, that's assuming that Kimmy K3 doesn't truly go open source and release their model so that people can host it on their own side, which will drop the cost even further. At that point it just becomes what is your internal cost of compute? So yeah, it's pretty extraordinary that you're going to see, I think a mass move towards the open source model. I'm seeing people now basically calling out to Elon. He initial impulse was to do all of this open source you would be the one that can get back to doing this open source. And so it'll be interesting to see if that's just where it goes. That the financial model that everybody was doing in the beginning ends up being like, yeah, that was like the first two years, but we're not on that. Like we were off that whatever that Jay Z line was. So that I think is an inevitability because the cost savings are so massive. And then again, Alex Karp shout out. I know he is an ultra controversial person, but when he went on that tirade, letting people know, and this is something I've been thinking about eternally with what we're trying to do with Kaizen. Kaizen has to be unique. It has to be. It's the video game that we're building. So it has to be a unique experience. Part of the way that you differentiate yourself is with the visuals. And so if everybody can output my same look, then that'll just be aped if it's successful, right? So if it's successful, people are gonna go in, they're gonna ape it. If, on the other hand, I can get something in the middle between me and the model that's going to learn from everything that I do and then make it available to everybody else. If I can make my own proprietary weightings now it becomes like that recipe that you can keep secret. This was something that we had to think a lot about at Quest. Do you try to patent what we're doing or do you try to keep it a trade secret? If you patent it, other people can go, literally look at all your diagrams, all of that, and they're like, oh, I get what they're doing. Then they find a way to get, get close enough without violating your patent. Whereas if you keep it a secret now, you don't have patent protections, but it's probably going to be really hard for people to figure out what you're doing. And so we ended up not patenting almost anything that we were doing, knowing, okay, we're going to get maybe an 18 month, two year head start. Other people will start to figure it out because we're so successful, but at least we didn't give them all the diagrams. And so that, that I think is going to be a big thing that we see happen here is people wanting to obfuscate, hide, try not to use that word to cloak, hide, make secret. All the little tweaks that they're doing that allow them to output that thing. And so you'll look at it and you'll be like, I know it's possible. I know they're using AI to get that consistency, but I can't get there. Even if I use your prompts, like copy and paste your prompts, I can't get there, there. So that is going to be. This shift to openness is going to be a big part of that. And the only way that the closed models are going to work, I think Alex Karp has made this point abundantly clear, is you're going to have to have something like their. Their version of this is called ontology. But you're going to need something like that as an intermediary. That's one of those things where the second I heard about that, I was like, I want to pay for this, this. And so we're, we're actually reaching out to Palantir to see if we can get anything approaching reasonable pricing for us. We're probably too small for what they do, but it's like, man, do I want something like that so that I can get the advantages of AI where I'm, dude, when you use AI, well, it is astonishing what it can do. But you do run into these problems where it's like, I'm getting a generic answer.
- [29:06]
Andrew
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
And so if you can train it just on you, which the open models allow you to potentially do, then it's incredible.
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Andrew
Got you. Gotcha. Now to the philosophical. I was joking about it in the chat, but it seems like to your point earlier, the toothpaste is out of the tube. Do we just take all guardrails off and just speed run AI? And it's kind of almost like early automotive regulations. Like, we need a couple crashes, we need a couple people fighting it out so that way we can make the industry standards. And then five, six years in, we'd be like, okay, enough people died. Seat belts, you need to have rearview mirror. And then start coming in and making those regulations of what the benchmark versus trying to start, stop, start, stop, let it go. How do you think we approach it?
- [29:52]
Tom Bilyeu
You treat it like it's a weapon system and you go, okay, this is going to kill a lot of people. So let's make sure that we have our golden dome set up and nobody's going to be able to shoot something at us. And so we're going to block them. Let's make sure that the world knows that we have the offensive capabilities. And if you try to hack me, I'm going to hack you back. And that will happen. China, we'll hear about some of it. We won't hear about most of it, but China will try to hack us, Iran will try to hack us, we'll hack them, or vice versa. Maybe we fire the first shot and they've got to protect themselves, but that is going to happen, and it will be. It's already happening. I mean, this goes back to stuxnet, which I'm sure was just the first time it made my radar, but it had probably been going on for a very long time before that. And so it's like. And if you guys don't know the story of Stuxnet, man, you're in for a treat. Do some research on that. Utterly fascinating, but it was basically, I'm going to make the assumption that it was Israel. I don't know that it was, but somebody embedded a virus so deeply into the global system that it was basically, I forget the number, but let's say on 80% of every, like, machine, chip, hardware, whatever, I forget exactly what point they had this thing put in. But deep, deep, deep into the mechanisms of all computers, all Internets, all servers, this thing just laid dormant. And it constantly asked itself, am I an Iranian nuclear centrifuge? And if I am, do this thing. If I'm not, do nothing. And it just replicated like mad. And so every time the Iranians would try to spin up a centrifuge, it would break, and they couldn't figure out why, like, what's going on. And the punchline ends up being stuxnet. So. So that kind of stuff is happening, has been happening, always will happen, and it's really about getting the levels of protection that you need. Now, the only way that you might be able to differentiate it slightly is to say, okay, models available to the public have extreme limitations. Models available to government and government sanctioned agencies have the unlimited, like, mega gangbuster thing in the same way that, that nobody should want me to be able to have a nuke here at the house, even if I can have a gun. That makes a lot of sense to me. So that kind of thing, you'll draw a line there, but at the nation state level, you've really got to be just going absolutely ham balls to the wall.
- [32:20]
Andrew
All right, we shall see. It's interesting, though, because I think the sentiment with AI is swinging in a lot of different directions versus the ability of its capabilities, increasing the financialization of Wall Street. How so many ducks are stacked on this one row. How many vulnerabilities, anthropic and OpenAI based off the business model and the business plan, what China is doing Both as a competitor and as a government backing that competitor. Like, there's so many things up in the air, so it's like if any one of those things fall, it can completely change the industry for the good, for the bad, etc.
- [32:55]
Tom Bilyeu
For sure. And it's the single most consequential technology of our lifetime. So this is why so many people feel like we might be living in a matrix. Because how is it possible that we all are alive at this moment, this ridiculously transformative moment. It just seems implausible that we would be living in the most interesting time of the most interesting time. You know what I mean? So that is, it is wild that that's we're living through this, because we are almost certainly, and let's be very generous on the timeline here, over the next 30 years, the world is going to transform in ways. I don't think there's any way for us to predict how crazy this is about to get. And the one like, I can't believe that people with a straight face can be like, Tom, like, dude, LLMs are never going to take us there. Like, what a joke. I can't believe you think this is going to be transformative. Name one thing that's actually already happened that's transformative. All right, babe, pitch. Protein folding. Like, what the fuck? Are you not paying attention to what's going on there? Like the. That alone, if not a single other breakthrough happened. Watch what happens over the next 10 years. Just from AI's ability to go, oh, these extraordinarily complicated interactions, I can predict how those come out within the human body. That alone is going to change things to a degree that people already can't fathom. So that's just, just one of the many things. Now this stuff, as always, may take longer to play out than people think. So, of course, myself included, you hear about something, you start running mental projections. You think, oh my God, in three years this is going to be crazy. Maybe it doesn't happen that fast. That's why I'll just say, let's throw it in the trees. It's going to take 10 times longer than I think. This is a 30 year project.
- [34:42]
Andrew
Great.
- [34:43]
Tom Bilyeu
In 30 years, I will likely still be alive and I'm already old as hell. So you can imagine somebody that's 20 right now, they're only going to be 50. So. So that is this. The next 30 years are going to be crazy.
- [34:57]
Andrew
Tom, your agent, like wine. Stop it.
- [34:59]
Tom Bilyeu
It's very kind. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
- [35:11]
Andrew
All right, let's talk about Trump and the next strike. Shout out the straight arrow news. We've got this put up on their site. It seems like this is a precursor to the transfer of troops for the ground invasion that don't you dare. Is about to come. So I know we're about to attack Pickaxe Mountain. It's one of those things now, like, is this. Is this the next right move, in your opinion, or is this just kind of like his hands are tied and this is what he's supposed to do?
- [35:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, God. God. So Trump is about to blow up Pickaxe Mountain. According to him, like, literally, we're going to hit it heavily, whatever. Like, you know, the way that Trump talks. But the reality is that you've got some intel that's driving this that I don't know is going to take us anywhere useful. And you have to put this back in context of what Trump has been saying. We completely obliterated their nuclear facilities. Okay, well, apparently not. So that was back, whatever, more than a year ago that he started saying that. Then we launched a new attack for all kinds of confusing reasons, but the one that they have just really doubled, triple quintuple down on is that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. Well, hold on. I thought that we had already destroyed them. Okay, well, maybe not. Maybe they do still have something. And so the likely reality goes something like this. We did do damage to their nuclear facilities, but not nearly as much as would be satisfying to Trump. And so he wanted to say it was completely done and that was the mistake. Not that we didn't set them back, but that it was never destroyed in the first place. That they had, in fact, moved either moved centrifuges to Pickaxe Mountain or they were already there. That is also very possible. And you've got CNN saying that there's satellite imagery that caught trucks moving in and out of the Pickaxe Mountain facility this month. Trump himself admits that the centrifuge reports aren't confirmed, but nonetheless, that's the intel that's really driving this. So why hit it now if the nuclear program was already obliterated? And the answer is because Pickaxe was never touched in the beginning. So it wasn't even on the target list back in June of 2025. Wasn't hit during Epic Fury either. Likely because it was storage, or they were. They weren't doing active enrichment Iran calls it a centrifuge assembly plant, but they're blocking IAEA inspectors, and the agency can't rule out that nuclear material is inside. And the way that I think people need to be thinking about this is that everything that we're trying to do in Iran is going to be much, much harder than we originally anticipated. Now, I think it's important to remind us all. I think this is something that we should all do with ourselves as well as when we're looking at politicians and just remind us all where we were at the beginning of this timeline. One of the earliest things that I was saying when we first struck Iran was I need to constantly remind myself Iran was not on my mind at all when all of this popped off. Now, maybe that's because I just wasn't paying attention. Maybe Iran really was the problem that I'm being told to believe that it is, but maybe it wasn't because nobody was talking about, at least nobody that I heard. So it hadn't hit that sort of mainstream now as we go through this. And it was like, okay, Iran wasn't on my radar at all. But now it's like, oh, shit, it's. I guess they've been saying forever that there's a nuclear threat, okay, but maybe there really is a nuclear threat. So let me update my thinking. Okay, so now we have a nuclear threat. Then we go and we bomb the life out of Fordow, and it's like, okay, everything's destroyed, cool. Mental model adjusted. They were a bigger problem than I thought. We hit it, we destroyed everything, got it, cool. Then, whatever. Eight months later, all of a sudden, we're like, we have to attack again. And it's because of the nuclear facility that we had already completely destroyed. So hold on. So now mental map updating that, once again, this is just all propaganda and being nonstop spun. So as I look at this, there are different threads. There is, okay, Iran, nuclear program, bigger threat than I certainly ever realized. Trump is like every politician before him, just spin. He's just going to tell you whatever he wants you to believe. And so now I'm like, okay, parsing through all of that. You've got Iran has a nuclear program. They're unwilling to let people in. They do not seem to be willing to negotiate, no matter what Trump tells us regarding their nuclear program. And I'm taking that from things that they themselves have said out loud. So assuming that I can believe that, given that they're willing to pay a massive price for not just publicly saying, yeah, we're never going to do this and letting the IAEA people in. So I can assume that they really are pursuing this. I look at Pickaxe Mountain and I say, okay, it's believable that they're doing something there with nuclear ambition.
- [39:55]
Andrew
Cool.
- [39:55]
Tom Bilyeu
But I'm certainly not going to trust anything that Trump says about why we're doing it now when he does it, whether we actually got what we wanted out of it or not. So it's like you have to accept that you exist inside of this extraordinary cloud of propaganda and it's impossible to tell what's really going on. So when I step back and I re put this into my broader thesis about why Trump is doing all of this, he's trying to get on Mount Rushmore. He was trying to secure the funds for our very fragile economy, which is basically all financialized, all hinging on AI. We need the $2 trillion of investment. You've got the Gulf nations that realize, Jesus Christ, we've got to stop doing all this war bullshit. Ultimately, even if we never run out of oil, people are going to transition away from it. There's far more energy coming out of the sun. So how do we diversify? So they decide they're going to get in on the investing in America game. And so now we've got all these foreign dollars flowing in. You've got some of the big capital raisers in the known universe out of the uae. And so it's like, okay, God, when you start re instead of always falling into the myopic of Trump says these were. And Trump is just a stand in for whatever politician is making noises from their mouth. And it's like, okay, this politician is saying this thing, but hold on, I need to plug that back into the far broader, far more complex thing to actually stay grounded on what's really happening. So with all of that said, I think this is Trump looking for things to blow up because he has a need to prosecute this war from the air. If the reality is that we've only ever degraded their nuclear ambitions, we have not. Not their ambitions, their ability to actually manifest their ambitions, which I don't think have been dwindled at all. So we've only sort of touched it. We're in a bigger quagmire than we thought. So even the most successful thing that we did, drop these bunker buster bombs through vent shafts and destroy the Ford Owl facility and supposedly bury their enriched materials. That. Okay, that was only a small piece of what may be going on. We almost certainly have have information coming out of Israel to their. A part of their incentive seems to be to keep that war going. And so they have an incentive to tell the US what is needed for us to keep bombing. But Trump already wants to be true anyway. So regardless of whether that's coming out of them, that just may speak to the specific thing that he's hitting, but almost certainly isn't what's driving his behavior for the reasons that I just walked through. And so as you take all of that in, I think it's far better to understand this as Trump is continuing to try to destroy things that he thinks will bring Iran to the negotiating table in a way where he has complete control of the outcome and he doesn't want to destroy the civilian infrastructure because I think he's still holding onto. One of the ways for me to get on Mount Rushmore is to normalize relationships with Iran. To do that, I can't completely destroy their economy, so I have to break as many things as I can. Nuclear is the safest. It sticks with the public messaging that we're doing, regardless of what's real. It sticks with the public messaging. So I'm going to keep hammering that home. I'm going to keep trying to bomb anything and everything that I can tied to that, because that's going to get the least amount of backlash. And so something like that, I think, is the most likely answer here. Not that this is like some super logical thing, not that this is going to solve our problem. It almost certainly won't. But that's where it plugs in in the extraordinarily messy reality of what was meant to be in Trump's mind. Venezuela 2.0 and instead is becoming Iraq, Afghanistan from the air.
- [43:54]
Andrew
I'm struggling with this, right, because that makes sense. But then we see reports of Trump signing the deal with Saudi Arabia to provide them with a civilian nuclear program and potentially, you know, uranium enrichment. We already know that the GCC plays friends, frenemies, enemies with other peoples in the region. I can secretly fund Hezbollah and act like I don't have nothing to do with them. They're just some crazy rebels. What is to stop Saudi from. So it seems like we want to make this region more stable. And I'm not sure how another nuclear program outside of Israel would help that well.
- [44:33]
Tom Bilyeu
So the giving Saudi Arabia nuclear weapons is a extremely large red flag for me. So this is one of the things that people said is, listen, part of the reason you don't want Iran to have nukes is that the entire region then is going to Say, bro, you got to give me some nukes. So this was another reason that I thought, I don't think that we're doing as much damage to the Iranian facilities as we are publicly saying that we're doing, because clearly Saudi is going to know a lot more about it. Trump is going to know a lot more about it. And now these two are holding their hands up. They're going to point you at the civilian thing, but it does say that this potentially opens the door to uranium enrichment in the kingdom's territory. So again, they'll say, no, no, no, we're just going to keep this all, like, to 2%, 3% or whatever is needed for a civilian. But just like, like the Iranians, when they felt that it was justified by their own internal logic, they were going to start enriching up to 60%. You can see Saudi going, well, okay, the U.S. gave us a nuclear program. We're now enriching locally. They've pieced out of the area. This is very unstable. And so now we're just going to proliferate. And so that's one of those where I'm like, oof. I do not love seeing this going wider, but you've got the Israel on the down low. Everybody assumes that they have nuclear weapons. They've never admitted it, but everybody assumes that they have nuclear weapons. Iran, obviously, racing to get nuclear weapons, again, of their own admission. You don't need to believe Trump. And I know people are going to say, what do you mean? Like, Khomeini said that, like, we have a fatwa or whatever against it and there's no way we would never do it. Bullshit. You had people, literally ministers in the government, say we were trying to do it and we just couldn't keep it a secret.
- [46:19]
Andrew
So it's like.
- [46:21]
Tom Bilyeu
So that argument to me is completely nonsensical. Now, he may have said, you can't strap it to a warhead, but if you're building it all. So that should the moment arise, yeah, okay, go ahead. Now strap it to the warhead. So this feels like we're marching in that direction where you're just getting proliferation across the region. I wouldn't want to see it anywhere if I could snap my fingers and poof, nobody has a nuclear weapon, including the US that would be a much better place to be. But, alas, we have it. And so any additional amount of proliferation should send up red flags for people.
- [46:59]
Andrew
And in the meantime, gas is just going to get more expensive. Back to $4. So there you go, folks in General, I feel like this is one of those wait and see moments where I want to comment on every new update coming out of Iran on, but I feel like until a boot is deployed, until, like this nuclear deal is something, but until it actually becomes formalized and signed, because there's been a lot of, I mean, I'll say and things like that.
- [47:23]
Tom Bilyeu
So maybe less than I would read it as a wait and see. It's understanding that we don't know where this is going to go yet. So it's about building a mental model and saying, okay, here's my prediction. Then watching to see if your prediction comes true. If your prediction comes true, then it's like, okay, I had an accurate enough mental model. If it doesn't come true, then it's like, okay, okay, there was a breakdown in my mental model. Let me go find this out. So one of the ways that that happened to me recently and it was incredibly, I think it's going to be incredibly useful. What it forced me to update my mental model was oil never hit $200 a barrel. Why? Like, we ended up when, when we had the MoU and it seemed like, okay, maybe we really are going to reach peace. It was like, oh, that's why. And then we went back to war, like, as aggressive as in the beginning and prices didn't go back up as much. So it was like, wait, what? And then that got me looking at oil futures, the long tail, all of that, and realizing, whoa, the global economy may be in a much worse position than I thought. And so that was me mental model. Here's my expectation. Oh, expectation did not come true. I'm not wasting time defending myself and saying, oh, I got something wrong. No, I didn't.
- [48:31]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
You don't understand.
- [48:32]
Tom Bilyeu
It's it. Which is what every fucking asshole in the world essentially does. I have the same impulse, but you can stop yourself from doing it and just go, oh, actually, I don't need to be right. What I need to do is find the right answer. So I always think it is unwise of people to say things like, I'm not going to take a position on this. I think it's far better to say, okay, listen, here's my position right now. But I'm like, way at the headline level or, Jesus, I've only done a couple of hours of research on this. There's no way that I have this map correctly. But I'm going to say out loud, this is where I think this is going, so that I can see if I'm thinking about this right or not. But people don't do that. They either stay silent, quietly building a mental model and just not wanting to say out loud because they don't want to be held accountable or because they say their position out loud, then they feel they have to defend it until the end of time, which is super fucking stupid. Now, I understand the. Especially if you're a YouTuber or a TikToker or whatever, the financial incentive to always be right are pretty extraordinary. But that's why you're gonna see a ton of turnover of people who will disappear, because for a while, their hot take was the hot take. And when it stops being the hot take, they just move on. And you're stuck now. You're trapped because you built your whole identity around. I'm for or against this thing. And I think that really is.
- [49:55]
Andrew
You become like a puppet of that thing. You try to bring it back. You try to reignite your hot take,
- [50:00]
Tom Bilyeu
and you just look dumb. Like, people just end up, like, writing you off because it's. You've been. Either you've ideologically captured yourself or your audience has ideologically captured you, but you're stuck now in a box.
- [50:12]
Andrew
Yeah. And then for another quick hit, Trump has another round of tariffs. 100% tariffs on generic drugs.
- [50:20]
Tom Bilyeu
After two years.
- [50:21]
Andrew
After two years, it starts off at 0%. The goal of the tariff is to bring back manufacturing locally. I know this is a drum that you beat a lot, so I wanted to kind of, kind of help you set the stage for this. I know in the short term, zero percent, that gives people the incentive to transition. That way they could build plans and not lose money in the front end. But then at two years, the price being the price, hiking up could hurt.
- [50:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, I think this is actually really interesting. So what you have going on is Trump is taking a. A Hamiltonian approach. So Hamilton looked at the world and said, okay, listen, for America to become the greatest country ever, because remember when they started, bro, we were not big on the global stage at all, and so we had to find a way to get there. And Hamilton, being as brilliant as he was, realized there are two things you need to do. One, you have to be protective. So you're going to have to block people from bringing their goods into your country. And so you're going to do that with a tariff. And then the second thing. And by the way, if people want to fight about who pays the tariff, we can happily do that. But nonetheless, its function is it does stop things from coming into your country. And then the second Thing is using subsidies to direct industry. So what's fascinating is Hamilton and Xi Jinping sound very familiar. So those two, like there's a lot of similarity. Now Hamilton has had massive fears about authoritarian power, so he was a big proponent of checks and balances. But it's very, very interesting that one of the things that has made China as successful as it is is they direct industry. And so they go, okay, we're still going to make you guys compete because we can't lose the price signal. However, we're going to in a very, I'm early in this research, but I think that China may be the perfect example of, of fascistic government in that everything. When you start looking again early, but when you start looking at what fascism really is, like going back to Italy and the definitions that they were putting forward for like totalitarianism and what it all meant is that you've got the, what they called the corporatization of the nation. What they were. It's a small part of it, but people take the read that oh, this just means that like the Nazis, it's like industry and the government work together. Yes, it's a part of it, but it's ultimately a small part. What's really going on is you're using the word corporation to mean corpus body, like the old Latin root or Greek root, I don't know, one of the two, probably Latin root of the word, getting at everything. The entire nation functions as one body, body. And so it's a very collectivist mindset. So it's like, okay, hey cool, you can run your car company byd, whatever, but you're going to do what we tell you to do. And so we might allocate funds to you because we think that there's something very specific that needs to happen for the corpus to thrive. But whether it's you, whether it's another car company, whatever, it doesn't matter. You guys have to compete amongst each other because we've learned our lesson from Mao. Despite what fucking Hassan Piker is going to tell you, we learned our lesson for Mao. We're never going to repeat that. But we do want to be able to get our entire nation functioning as one body. And so when you look at Hamilton through that lens, it is the, it's a, I'm terrified of top down authoritarian control. So we're not going to do that. So it isn't fascism. But what we are going to do is recognize that if we want to become a superpower, we have to have the right vision for the Future, which in America's case was to become an industrial powerhouse. We have to have the right vision of the future. We've got to block people that would hollow out our industry by shipping us things that are cheaper than we can make it ourselves. So we're going to stop that from happening. We're going to say, you have to build here, and then we're going to create incentive structures to make sure that people actually do that. And so between blocking and incentivizing, if you have the right vision of the future, you build America, or in China's case, you build China. And it is extraordinary. And so it's interesting, even though I think everybody probably rightly trusts Trump a lot less than they might be willing to trust Hamilton, but nonetheless, it is a return to that, like, oh, we, the only way for America to not become the British Empire and succumb to China is to do what Trump is putting forward, which is to go back to a Hamiltonian, protect and incentivize manufacturing here in the US and so Hamilton's vision wrote on the back of a really strong, quite brilliant idea, which is if you don't control your own manufacturing, you don't control your destiny. And so that's where we're at. We've completely hollowed out America's manufacturing, manufacturing. And so we just can't do it. We have got to bring this stuff back. And anything that we deem to be important to national security, we've got to be making that here in the US and right now, we basically make nothing in the US anymore.
- [55:37]
Andrew
It's a very good point. All right, we got some super chats. Yes, we do. First up from Marusha, Dark316, CCP's oil demand decline could be tied to them hiding true population figures. Massive fires, floods and sinkholes across the whole country, killing thousands, if not millions. But they suppress all reporting on it, plus Covid and one child.
- [55:56]
Tom Bilyeu
That is a really powerful insight that I have not talked about in months, and that's really powerful. So there was somebody that came out with something that said that their actual population could be off by hundreds of millions. And if that's true and they're say closer to a billion instead of 1.4 billion, then it's like things would be very, very different in China than we think.
- [56:20]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Think.
- [56:21]
Tom Bilyeu
I haven't been able to verify that, so I don't know that that's true. But it is a very interesting read on if they are actually lying dramatically about their population, that would for sure explain some of the Things we see like the decline in oil now, how long that's been going on, that would be measured in decades. So it'd be maybe a little bit unexpected that we just see it now. But anyway, it almost certainly plays a factor for sure.
- [56:46]
Andrew
Let's save his second. To lead off our next topic, Gotcha. Sip Steel says thanks for pulling people back to the middle and teaching us to dig for truth. Trump's Thursday address said voting machines can't be trusted, but the compromise data was largely public. Is he staging a midterm emergency? Yes.
- [57:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So the. I am a huge proponent that we have created the conditions in which there is no election integrity. And so now it's. Is there actually mass scale voter fraud? I don't know yet. But have we created the possibility for illegal aliens or even just non citizens to vote? Yes, we have. Should we immediately correct that? Yes, we should. So we'll see in the fullness of time how much fraud actually took place. But we went from there's no fraud, this isn't happening at all, to okay, well, there's certainly the conditions for fraud. 2 actually, yes, there is fraud and there's a bunch of it. And so there's a guy right now that's on trial in California. He had, I think 71 names and 40 ballots already filled out in his house. So he was obviously doing it and using mail in ballots as a way to get those in. You have what New Jersey just disclosed, which is 6,600 non US citizens that were accidentally registered to vote. And I think at least 400 of them actually did vote. Now Trump is saying that number is actually over 30,000. We'll see. I don't trust anything that any politician says just off the bat, but certainly don't trust Trump to say true numbers. But that's what they're putting forward. So we'll see in the fullness of time what that ends up being. But if you guys don't know, on Tuesday, New Jersey Governor Mickey, I think is how you say her name, confirmed that roughly the 6,600 non citizens were registered to vote in the state. So at least she came out and admitted it. The cause, according to her, was a software error in the Motor Vehicles Commission's automatic voter registry system. But that company has since clapped back and said, bitch, you're out of your mind. You guys had to certify that those people were legit. The system would have said, hey, this person's a non citizen and you push them through anyway. So we'll see if this ends up being another Dominion thing where Dominion ends up winning their massive lawsuit. And if these guys are like also politicians be lying. Our system is not the problem. We'll see. This is going to need to play out in the fullness of time. But between June of 2023 and June of 2024, people applying for driver's licenses answered no when asked if they were a US Citizen. The system registered them anyway. And so again, the numbers around 400 that actually voted, they were registered as Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated. So it's not like this is a pure Democrat thing. So we're going to need to let all of this play out to find out what's actually going on. That's why I think all of this is best read as we have created a problem for us with a lack of voter integrity and I don't trust either side to be counting the numbers correctly. So we are going to need to do something. I don't think I've made a secret of I love of people needing to prove that they are a citizen. Yes, it's going to be a pain in the ass. Got to do it. Sorry. You can't just be like, oh, it's too fucking hard and then let anybody and everybody vote. Which we have certainly created a way for that to happen again without me needing to know how much it has happened. I know that there's incentive and I know that there's a method and you put those two together and you've got a problem.
- [60:17]
Andrew
I want to hit on the incentive piece right now because with trumping off office Biden out, borders closed, fraud and abuse has been investigated. JD Vance is the fraud czar and they're withholding funds to California and to Minnesota and all these other blue states. That to me removes the incentive for illegals to vote in the country right now. Your pitch used to be that your original pitch was we have an incentive for illegals to vote because if they vote for certain people, they get more free stuff.
- [60:46]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [60:46]
Andrew
I think that that incentive is now removed because especially in a midterm election, you're not going to get people that are one going to have that flood that's going to give them the free things. And I'm still a big proponent that Trump is using this as just another distraction to make a. He's creating a problem that he himself created and then he's going to solve it when he. It's not even a thing similar. See Iran war, we didn't worry about the straight of Hormuz. Now the straight Hormuz is the biggest thing in the world now. We need to close it. It was open to begin with. I think with this voter fraud, it's the same thing thing. And I have one more thing that I pass the mic back. I think that what the governor of New Jersey did, and that's my home state, so I'm biased 100% was she moved with integrity. Hey, I found this error. This is what happened. This is the timeline of it happened. This is the correction and the methods that we're taking to right to fight. That's what you want to happen. But what's going to happen now is a bunch of people are going to claim that information and run with it and say, see, they emitted 600,000. That means there's 7 million. And that inflation, to me is the issue. Issue. Graham Platner in Maine just had to step down because a woman said that she had inappropriate relations with him 10 years ago, the same day, not the same day, a couple days later. But Trump paid a civil suit for officially being guilty of rape on the civil. He didn't have to step down. He didn't have to answer. He didn't have to address it. He didn't have to do a press conference. So I think that there's this double standard that is starting to, like, peak. Whereas when somebody actually leads with integrity in this current ecosystem and say something like, like, hey, we caught some fraud, it's not right. This is what we're going to do to rectify. Instead of people saying, thank you for actually doing the right thing. It's not going to be like, see, that's an excuse to now all these biases and all the fake information that I've been passing, it validates that now we need to disenfranchise more people and not make them vote. Like, I just want to just draw that line in the sand because I think it's easy to say because this New Jersey thing was discovered. There's 16 other million cases when that's not the case. To me, it doesn't seem like the the case.
- [62:37]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that's a very fair read of somebody who has a internal value system. A set of core beliefs is being internally consistent with both their values and their beliefs. And so it becomes a question of do we align and what we believe to be true. And the answer is no. So that's where it's like, I'm very glad that I don't get to adjudicate this because I don't have enough facts. So I want to See this play out in the fullness of time. Like you, I do not trust politicians. I don't like stuff like this being weaponized. If she really did just do the honorable thing, then yeah, people should celebrate that. That's awesome. And the fact that she is in a blue state, I think New Jersey,
- [63:16]
Andrew
it's purple, but yes, blue right now.
- [63:18]
Tom Bilyeu
So that shouldn't count against her in any way, shape or form, in my opinion. So if when they go in and they find that actually the reality is that she's trying to underplay it and she's slow rolling it or whatever and it was really 30,000 and they knew that or she knew that, that they were doing this, and we find that her chief of staff ends up having been caught on camera saying something, then it's like, I'll look at it differently. But for now I'm perfectly happy with the read. She's handling this the right way. She found a thing, she's speaking up. We should celebrate that until evidence proves otherwise. Because you want people in blue states or red states when it's flipped to be rewarded for coming forward and saying, actually that thing that you guys are talking about on the national level, even though you're not my party, I agree that it's the right thing. And so, hey, here we go, I'm bringing this forward and I'm here for the country first and my party second. And fuck yeah, I love that. I think that's brilliant. Now the base assumption that you and I share differently is I look at the incentive system and I go, there's too much incentive here. We've made it too possible. People are voting for things on its face, from where I'm sitting, are patently absurd. And when I go, oh, they're doing that because they want to facilitate all this non citizen voting, then I'm like, now it makes perfect sense. I get heard that we don't share that belief, but that's my belief. And so when I look at it from that lens I'm like, well, nobody should act on it because I believe it. I'm very glad that it's being investigated. People are looking into it and we're going to find out. I would love to see things where we just shore it up. And so if it's like the thing that I'm proposing as a way to shore it up is non effective, cool, like, I'm very open. I don't need it to be my thing. But like we need a thing to prove that people have a right to vote because we're seeing all the evidence, even if for some people, like it's sort of sub threshold or whatever it's like. But we see that it's happening and there is an incentive and I'll address that because you're saying I think that incentive has been removed. But the reason I don't think that incentive has been removed is that one still at the state level you have it. So the state may not be getting the funds that they were getting before, but, but the state can still pay for a lot of things. They're just not being reimbursed for it. So it'll be interesting to see how they handle that. And then two, Trump doing something that could still be challenged by the courts and all that is very different than this has been done nationwide and it's just not happening anymore. And then also remember that part of the reason that the DSA is so gung ho to get rid of the Senate is the Senate is a great equalizer. The Senate says, I don't care how many people you have in your state, state, every state gets two senators, period. End of story. What that puts a check on is the majority tyrannizing the minority, which you want, you want these, from where I'm sitting, you aggressively want these checks and balances because the human propensity to abuse power. And so by creating the sentence saying it doesn't matter how many people you have, we have a check against that. What you stop is the congressional abuses that can be done by getting illegal aliens into the country. Because the way that your census works is it doesn't matter if they're a citizen or not. It just matters that they were there at the time the census was taken. And that does control how many congressmen that they have representing them. And it's a zero sum game. So now there is an incentive for every state to get as many people in as possible. And then those states have an incentive to get them to vote in that state for them to retain power because they are likely to vote one way way. Now it is definitely a complication for that strategy if the federal government calls bullshit and is like, I'm not sending you any money now, that needs to be done in accordance with the laws. And so I don't know that Trump's doing it in accordance with the laws. So it's very possible that gets struck down by the courts. We'll see. That's going to have to go through the system. So on that I'm like, directionally it's interesting. It makes me feel A little better. But I don't think by any stretch of the imagination it solves the actual problem. Problem.
- [67:19]
Andrew
You said if I can bring in the Odyssey any natural way I would like to, this is a point where I would like to bring it in. Bring it in. Spoilers for those that didn't see it. I think the beautiful thing that he done in that Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan, yes. Is that the notion that the Trojan horse, while it was a great move militarily, it destroyed the social fabric of that society at the time. Fascinating to me. I think there's a normalization that's happening right now and every time we shrug at a corruption claim, every time we, oh, that's just Trump. We're normalizing a government official who doesn't care about the people, who puts himself first, who wants to infringe himself, things like that. And don't get me wrong, every Bill Clinton winning broke came out like a multi, multi millionaire owns half of Haiti. Obama came in worth a couple hundred thousand dollars. He walked away with a nine figure book publishing deal, Netflix deal, Speak. So by no means is is all these presidents leaving broke other than Jimmy Carter. And that's why he's still alive and living good. Like, you know what I mean? Like, but I just think that there is something to, I don't want to be the ought guy, but there is something to we are losing the integrity of our political system. And it's not a Republican, it's not a Democrat thing, it's an American thing. So like I think a true patriot. We have to realize that, like, hey, we have to learn how to talk again. We have to learn how to be partisan again. We have to learn to say bipartisan. Bipartisan, yes. Like we have to red and blue need to work together. We have to learn that, hey, if you break the law, you should be held accountable for that. And not just how I interpret the law, but like, hey man, if you hanging out with 12 year olds, you should probably not get out. You should probably not get pardoned for that. And at the same time, if you are illegally changing the integrity of the voting system and you get caught, yeah, you should go to jail. I don't want anybody with 1700 ballots in their backseat to be like, hey, what? No, they just like, no go to go straight to jail. Please, please. But I just think we're playing this game where I'm stepping over corruption cases, I'm stepping over fraud cases. Like I'm matrix dodging international sanctions and crimes against humanity and genocides and all these things to land at. Well, it's because I don't want trans people in the bath. And it's like, what are we doing? Like, what's the actual talking point? How are we as a society going to progress from this moment? Because if it just becomes a team game and I'm going to let your 1% fringe view ruin the 99% of people in America who want things better. Better. We're spiraling down in that way.
- [69:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Welcome to why I despise populism. Yeah, I can't believe people go for populism. Like, it's a good thing. Everything about populism, it. It is everybody for themselves. All that matters is that I win. I'm so right. It doesn't matter how many people I have to kill. And I know everybody thinks I'm being hyperbolic. Read history, for the love of God. It's actually where it goes. And so are we really far from that numerical America? Boy, do I hope so. But is it where. This is why I am on, like, perpetual DSA watch, because their ideology ends in murder, plain and simple. It has every time it's been tried in history, and it will every time it's been tried in history, for the reasons that I've laid out very carefully many times before, which is ultimately, people do not want to go along with what you're saying needs to be done in order to achieve your aim. And so those people end up needing to be killed, and so they kill them. And, oh, the great irony that the leftists that help authoritarians get into power end up being the ones that are killed anyway. It is psychotic. I don't want to see it. Drew. Yes, I agree with you. Your vision of patriotism is my vision of patriotism. It is one of the things that I love about doing this show with you is that even though we have you lean a little left, I lean a little right, but you want the same outcome that I want. So it is. Yes.
- [71:00]
Andrew
Yes.
- [71:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Everything to you, everything that you just said gets a big yes from me.
- [71:04]
Andrew
Is that also your takeaway from the Odyssey? Did you have a.
- [71:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting. So now going to the Odyssey? Yes. That's certainly one of the takes that they're trying to put forward. I think that there's even more depth and complexity in terms of the moral takeaway of did Odysseus win or lose in the end? Like, was that a price worth paying? It is real. And by the way, is Odysseus the hero or the villain? And so there's a couple moments where he does something I consider so stupid that I really wanted to hate him. And then he will do things that are so redemptive that I'm like, was Homer really that gangster at like, painting the picture of the human experience or is this Nolan? So. So what I will say is I was so moved by that movie that between that and that they play like, at the beginning of the screening I saw anyway, they played like three or four minutes of Dune Part 3. Those two things back to back were so powerful that I'm now thinking about, like, really making film a part of my life again. I was like, let's go. Yes, dude. I have been in the hinterlands of just absolutely a loss of the thing
- [72:23]
Andrew
that the air horse. I love that.
- [72:24]
Tom Bilyeu
For people that don't know I went to film school, film was my first love. Like, I couldn't have been more passionate about it. And then film just sort of fell off. So I don't know if this is really a resurgence or not, but it was. It was incredible. So for anybody worried about Christopher Nolan's the Odyssey being woke, that is absurd. I am as anti woke as you're going to get. Now, in. In full disclosure, I don't have a problem with race swapping. So if that is your like one and sole trigger, there are two characters, I guess, that you could be a little bit weird about from that perspective. First of all, Elliot Page does not play a great warrior. So don't be tense.
- [73:06]
Andrew
He's not Achilles. Like, that was fake news.
- [73:08]
Tom Bilyeu
All fake news. And the way that
- [73:13]
Andrew
he.
- [73:14]
Tom Bilyeu
They. I don't know. He, him.
- [73:15]
Andrew
He.
- [73:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Him. Perfect. So the way that he's portrayed in the movie is perfectly fine for somebody of slight stature. So just. It wasn't. That wasn't weird to me at all. And then Helen of Troy being played by a beautiful black woman was not weird. If it had been played by Lizzo, I'm just going to be honest that I would have. I would have had beef. Just because she's morbidly obese.
- [73:36]
Andrew
Lizzo catches straight.
- [73:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Hey, that was not a straight. That's a sniper bullet from across the room.
- [73:40]
Andrew
I. I knew what I was shooting at.
- [73:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So that. That one, I would have had beef, but she is a beautiful woman. So anyway, I get it. It was the only thing that I was like, okay, that one is a little jarring. Was. And I don't know if he's Indian, but he certainly looks roughly Indian. The actor who says the line, we're all from Greece or whatever. And I was like, we could have handed that to somebody else. That particular line.
- [74:09]
Andrew
I heard some commentary on this and we'll get back to the show, guys, but let us indulge in for a second. Greek at the moment was similar to early America in the sense that if you go to the American north, there were white businessmen, Irish businessmen, Italian black businessmen, and then you go to the Italian set. That's where the slave trade and stuff like that was so Greek. At that level of their empire, there could have been somebody who came from Indian descent that migrated into the country.
- [74:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Totally.
- [74:34]
Andrew
That's why I was like, oh, that. That is something that's not like, it's just a whole bunch of blonde hair, blue. Ey. White boys that would have been on the front line. So that's.
- [74:42]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, first of all, Greeks aren't blunt hair. Yes. The reason that I would say you want to be a little more sensitive to that is that, hey, you're taking something from their lineage. It's one of the like, foundational pillars of their mythology. And you have a line that references, literally a line that references Greek people, people, and you give it to somebody who is clearly not of that lineage. It would have been a wise, like, nod of thanks, if you will, to the culture that gave us. You know what I mean? In something where you're doing something I don't have any beef with whatsoever. First of all, again, I just don't have a problem with the race swapping. That doesn't freak me out. But on that one, it's like, just like if I were going to do a remake or, you know, Black Panther 4 or whatever, I wouldn't make T' Challa white. Like there's just something. Maybe I introduce a white guy, but I'm not making t' Challa White. There's just certain things. It's like, bro, you got one line about the Greeks, like, let that be delivered by somebody who is actually Greek would have just been way smarter. From that perspective of not creating problems for himself. But the rest of it, I just. I can't stress enough. It is a non entity in the movie.
- [75:55]
Andrew
It doesn't.
- [75:55]
Tom Bilyeu
You don't think about. About it at all when you're in the movie.
- [75:59]
Andrew
It.
- [75:59]
Tom Bilyeu
It is just not. I went into it like I am here because I feel like I need to comment on the culture. I did not expect to get caught up in. Holy shit, this is such a good movie that I'm finding myself called back to the cinema like a fucking church. So, like, that whole thing, I'm there to find out if this thing is woke. And it felt so like it was deflating because there just wasn't anything to grab onto. Yeah, they didn't try to make Elliot Page. Yes. They didn't try to make him like a fucking gangster fighter. See the movie, you'll see very quickly. So anyway, all the landmines that people thought he was going to step on, they're just non existent. Helen of Troy even isn't like a big beat in the movie. It's like so.
- [76:40]
Andrew
And yeah, even how he showed her beauty in that way. Like it was still also, by the way, it was.
- [76:49]
Tom Bilyeu
It was a movie about something else entirely. And they so deliver on the other thing, the bigger themes of the movie. You're just not going to care about the other stuff. So anyway, I have a whole thesis I haven't seen the critical drinker's response. I really resonate with his read on a lot of movies. I will be very interested to see if he succumbs because what I think is happening in all the Internet pushback on it went like this. These guys were told that they were being psycho radicals for calling out how woke movies have become in video games, which is absolutely true. It was dire. We all lived through like 15 years of trash in the name of like putting forward a message in film. So it was unreasonable the way that people responded to them. But these guys built an audience around being anti woke. Then the trailer from Nolan comes out that has these nods to Wokeism and they lose their shit and the broader world of people that feel like they've been ignored and gaslit. They go fucking ballistic. Just absolutely ratioing to death the trailers. And so these guys now are like, look, fucking Nolan's fallen off. I can't believe he did this. And so they got so much like positive affirmations from their takedowns of the trailers that I think they were a bit trapped. They have an audience that demands anti woke rhetoric.
- [78:12]
Andrew
Rhetoric.
- [78:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Then they put out rhetoric like, yo, look at this trailer. They thought, oh my God, we're about to hit the mother load of like, even Nolan has succumbed to all this woke. And when they went and saw the movie, they had to dislike it. And so you got these early reviews where people literally were like, I just walked out. I've seen the movie. I am not now responding to headlines or trailers. I've seen the movie and it was lost and meandering. What? The phone? This thing. My mic just did something weird. Boys, be careful. This whole thing is like, this movie will be studied for how seamlessly they jump in time. How well they handled that. I was like, whoa, bro. So I was like, that was done so well. This movie was three hours long and it felt like two maybe. Like I was never bored. I was never looking at my watch. I cannot believe how many beats they covered. How seamlessly he weaves these things together there. Nolan. Nolan, for me up Tenant. I was just like, what, what happened there? So I'm not like a dick writer for Nolan, even though I think he is one of the greats in cinema right now. But when he up, I'm just like, Tenant was unfortunate, but he handled this so well. So anyway, to me, this was Nolan at the peak of his powers. He messes with time even more deftly than he did in Memento, which was. Is truly one of the greats of cinema. So any. Anyway, I hope people, even if you are as anti woke as I am, that you will go give this movie a try because holy shit, it is phenomenal. And asks a very deep, fundamental question about what it means to be a good person. It's so good. It's so good. And pay attention to the sun. Yeah. Boy, do I want a spoiler alert. Talk about that.
- [79:53]
Andrew
I gotta watch it again now. I didn't act like I missed that one. Okay.
- [79:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Like his son.
- [79:57]
Andrew
Oh, oh, oh, look at this guy. I didn't even look at the sky yet.
- [80:02]
Tom Bilyeu
I was like, yeah, I like his. His child. His child and what that says about masculinity and oh my God, it's. Yeah.
- [80:12]
Andrew
Well done. Brilliant. Okay, we're back, guys. Spoiler alerts over. No more. We. We didn't spoil it though.
- [80:17]
Tom Bilyeu
I was gonna say we were. I mean, it's a thousands of year old story.
- [80:21]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Yeah.
- [80:22]
Tom Bilyeu
It's almost so old that you can't assume people know it, I guess. But I was watching it. I was like, all of high school was coming back to me.
- [80:29]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
I was like, oh, yeah.
- [80:29]
Tom Bilyeu
I remember highlighting that. I remember having to dice dissect that.
- [80:32]
Andrew
Like, and that's me, my high school. We didn't have to like, we didn't have to read it. So really people were like, oh my gosh.
- [80:38]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Me?
- [80:39]
Andrew
No, no, no. There was Internet discourse about that too. I've seen that. Like, yeah, it's, it's. It's. I don't know.
- [80:44]
Tom Bilyeu
You did or didn't Brian?
- [80:45]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
I read it.
- [80:45]
Andrew
Oh, yeah. And we both. We both from Jersey. So that's like interesting. Like we're 20 minutes away and then you read it. I didn't. So it was just. It's crazy. Okay, we're back. Let's go culture. Because a lot of of friends of the show have done very interesting things and I would like to bring it up and kind of talk about it. The first thing low key. I need to call Brian Johnson just because he looks so different and all his side by side pictures started on like impact theory. Like we are like his lip mitts test.
- [81:11]
Tom Bilyeu
I know it's wild.
- [81:12]
Andrew
So we definitely need to bring him back when he cloned baby gets alive.
- [81:15]
Tom Bilyeu
But yeah, he just cloned this one is really fascinating. So he put out a post. It was maximized for clicks as one would expect it stars I just cloned myself as a newborn. So the real punchline is that basically he's cloning his cells and it is talk about AI and one of the breakthroughs and what we're going to be able to do with cells now this is all riding on the back of something called not Yaka Nama factors. Nama Yaka factors.
- [81:41]
Andrew
Fuck.
- [81:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I think he's got it there. I always blank on this. It's a Japanese guy's name. It's a scientist who figured out what are the Yamanaka factors. I'm almost certain that's true.
- [81:48]
Andrew
Here it is. Yamanaka. Yamanaka.
- [81:50]
Tom Bilyeu
So Yamanaka factors are the thing that allow your cells to basically become pluripotent so that they can become anything again. So what is aging? Aging is this problem of your cells over time get the wrong methylation markers.
- [82:06]
Andrew
Okay.
- [82:07]
Tom Bilyeu
I was explaining this to my wife. She seemed interested. I'm going to run you guys through it. You'll let me know if chat's like bored out of their mind. But a speedrun of the way that aging works goes like this. Your DNA, the full strand of everything you will ever need to produce in your body. Eye cells, heart cells, running processes, all of it is in every single cell. The problem is each cell only needs like a tiny fraction of that. And so the cells have this incredible method of you wind up the DNA in such a way that only the DNA part that codes for that cell is exposed. So everything else is wrapped up. And so you know what a cell is by which part sticks out. And you put little markers on the part that sticks out so that you keep it the way it is. Think of them like bookmarks and that's called methylation. And so you go in and you tag the cells with these methylation markers and the little things that crawl over the DNA that read it and kick off the different proteins and things that it needs to make it stops reading when it hits the right methylation marker and all that stuff. Okay. When you age that methylation, those markers get put in the wrong place just because you're copying the cell over and over and over and over and over. These are actually physical properties, processes. So the little thing runs around, it reads it and says, this is what I am. And it puts the markers back in the right place. Okay? So as you age, those markers get put in the wrong place. The DNA begins to unspool. And so now it's like, am I a hard cell or an eye cell? And so that heart cell becomes a little less effective at its job because it's mostly still a hard cell, but it's becoming something else a little bit as well. And so if you could perfectly methylate those again, get them tightened so only the heart cell is sticking out, out, your heart cell is going to literally get younger. And so this is what Brian Johnson is talking about is he's saying the future is going to be where all of us take our cells at the earliest stage possible because you're accumulating all of this methylation mismarking. And so the cells are becoming de differentiated. What we're going to do is we're going to take it at the healthiest point possible, we're going to put it in a petri dish, hit it with these Yamanaka factors, and we're going to actually send them back in time in that you're actually de differentiating them in the extreme. You're making them pluripotent, they can become any kind of cell, but then you redifferentiate them into the type of cell that you want them to be. And so now it becomes a young, as close to possible, pristine version of that cell. And then you either grow an organ or whatever, or you re inject it back into the body. And so now the body has the. Those freshly methylated cells that function at the highest capacity. And so what you'll find is that people are literally cloning themselves and building their own organs and things in essentially vats. And then when they need them, they'll then put them back into their own body. This is right now probably the best thing we've got going in terms of radical life extension. So this is very interesting. It's very real. It's actually been going on for a while. And so he's putting a top spin on it that, you know, it's like, obviously people are expecting that there's a little baby somewhere of him that Is not true. It's just his cells. But it is, it is coming. This is the future of medicine. Yes, in the beginning it will be very expensive, but this will come down in cost massively and probably relatively rapidly. The only thing that will fuck that up is our absolute disaster of a public, private healthcare system, which people should be furious about. They're furious about it for the wrong reasons. But isn't that typical? But that might be something that slows down the cost coming down, but the cost will come down as AI comes more on board, as energy becomes cheaper. That will become available to everybody in the fullness of time.
- [85:51]
Andrew
Yeah. And I think breaking it down to the first principles, perspective is the thing that makes it most interesting to me. Me because to your point, aging is this big gray fog area. It's hair, it's color, it's energy, it's all these things. But then when you break it down to the cellular level, it's really just like, no, your neck cells are getting a little lazy and they stop pulling it up. So let's just strengthen your neck cells and then, okay, your bags and then these little small changes at the molecular level have these knock on effects with everything else. And yup, it's very interesting to build it up that way. Very okay. Another friend of the show, biology is trying to start his own nation. It's very interesting with the network school. We had him on the show, he broke it down. His philosophy on the headline level is it's not left versus right, it's not good versus bad, it's not tech versus rural. It's more so thought of ideas, not necessarily geography. I know if, I don't know if I described that right.
- [86:45]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, you're getting very, very close. So it's value system over geography and people will end up up linking up based on their beliefs and because we live in a networked age where people can find each other on the Internet, that you're not going to have people group up anymore based on geography. Now I have long told Balaji that he's crazy about that and that there is going to be an element of geography to this. And he ran smack bang into this very recently, if you guys don't know. So first of all, his full names, Balaji Srinivasan, he's incredible. He's the former CTO of Coinbase Base, literally one of the smartest guys in tech. He's an absolute, just brilliant machine. The more you can interface with him, the better your life will be. In August of 2024, he launched the Network School, which is based on the back of that idea that I was just walking you through. And it is a, it's a school that's in Forest City, Malaysia. So there was like a. They built something up, some like big like set of apartments or like an old, I forget it was built as something else that ends up falling through. He sees that like there's all this space that he can move people in. So he ends up moving a bunch of people in there. It's about an hour from Singapore. He's put roughly $25 million into it so far and brought all of these like tech positive entrepreneurs that share his network state mentality. And so these are presumably very entrepreneurial minded people. They are all people that believe in this idea that we're all going to group up around ideas via technology and that's going to be the way that we build a state that we are, even though we're geographically dispersed, we are all adherents of the same ideology and so we will link up in ways and vote on things together as a collective even though we're distributed. Now I hope it's not lost on anybody that as this really started to gain momentum, what was the first thing he did? He brought everybody together physically because. Because that's just how humans are wired. Geography is always going to play a role in this. And in mid July, an activist group called Malaysian Protest for Palestine posted allegations that the campus had become a gathering place for Israeli entrepreneurs. This, this makes me laugh. Now look, I get it. This is, I'm probably on the very unpopular end of this debate, but nonetheless I think people are mapping everything to Israelis. Bad is a very weird way to approach this. But nonetheless these guys went absolutely ham because Malaysia just does not play with Israelis. The country does not recognize Israel and Israeli passport holders can't enter without written permission from the Home Affairs Ministry. So the ministry is like, yo, we're going to go in, we're going to find out if this is really true. They open an investigation. Immigration officers raid Balaji's camp. They check hundreds of passports. The initial result is that all 266 foreigners that were actually on site that valid travel documents.
- [89:40]
Andrew
Cool.
- [89:41]
Tom Bilyeu
We could have left it there. But Balaji is not going to let that ride. And I think honestly he was right to make the move I'm about to tell you about. But he just was like, I need to know for sure whether we can move forward or not. Because now that I see that you guys don't like that we're here and that there's going to be some contention. We need to like really pin this down. So on July 16, he posts a video addressed directly to the Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim. And he pauses because he's got like this big. It's like $122 million expansion that he's planning. He pauses that and demands, put that in quotes. But a written guarantee, call it an MOU or a specific economic zone provision, whatever. But he wants to know that the Network State is, well, welcome. And he warned that, hey, if we're not welcome here, fair enough, but we're going to relocate, right? So it's like, look, we're bringing a lot of entrepreneurial minded people here. We're going to be paying taxes, like this is a good thing for you guys. We're bringing investment. And they were basically like, yeah, you. Five days later, the local city council gave their answer. It revoked Network School's business license, ordered all operations to cease by July 22nd. Which is today. Yeah, and they stated that, that you're basically running classroom activities from premises licensed as offices. So like a technicality, you guys are operating a second location with no license at all. Again, a technicality. And so Johars, the, I think the city that they're in, the Chief minister backed the decision, called for a continued investigation into the alleged misuse of second passports. So it's like, okay, sure, we go, we raid, everybody's legit. But what if they really are Israeli and they just are using like another passport from a different country country? So Balaji then called the shutdown reports fake news. You guys are overblowing this. He said that the issues are just administrative, everything is good. And he now basically realizes that the Network State needs an actual state and they need somebody that's going to be friendly to them. And this is the thing that I've been trying to get Balaji to understand for a long time is that, bro, at some point this is going, you're going to exist in a geography that geography is not going to last like that you're trying to be extrajudicial, that you're doing things that don't line up with their laws. And that's the whole point of your endeavor, is that you're trying to create like this new thing based on new beliefs, new values. And so I'll be interested to see how this plays out. They end up getting a document signed with Kazakhstan, I believe. And so we'll see. Maybe they're going to move there, maybe things will be more friendly. But the game that he's now realizing he's playing is, yeah, we have to be somewhere. And so I know at one point rumor was, I don't know if it was actually him, but rumor was people, Peter Thiel and others were looking at creating basically a nation out in international waters. I don't know if Balaji ends up doing something like that. We'll see. But that's a lot of infrastructure. So my gut is that he's going to do something like a deal with Kazakhstan or somewhere else where they have a government that's friendly to them, that wants those tax dollars, quite frankly. But, but my question is, what happens when you run afoul of what they've got going? You can hope that you become economically important enough that they'll grant you. I don't know if it's gonna end up being something like the Vatican or what, but humans like being physically adjacent to the people that they're dealing with. That's never gonna go away. And if you're trying to have a different set of governing principles, even if they're not specifically laws, you're gonna run into problems like this, this. So we'll see if this is something that is navigable even in a hyper connected world. I think there's. Geography is always going to rear its
- [93:22]
Andrew
head, you say, until you have governing laws. So like it's not the collection of people, it's the government.
- [93:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, yeah, if you're in a jurisdiction governed by Kazakhstan, Malaysia, US, wherever, and you guys are trying to do your own thing, thing. If you perfectly adhere to every rule, regulation of that government and then like give some extra restrictions or whatever to your group, then it's going to be fine. The second you try to give extra benefits, now you've got a problem. So they were bringing Israelis, as the allegations go, into Malaysia, which is a hard pass from Malaysia. So now they're realizing, oh, we, we can further restrict, but we can't further grant. And so it's just like states. So you've got Mamdani saying, I'm going to arrest Netanyahu if he comes to New York. And then the federal government reminding him, hey dumbass, you can't do that. So that is what Balaji is waking up to, is that there are additional restrictions that he can put on his own people, but he certainly can't grant them rights that the government that they're operating inside of, of don't already give.
- [94:38]
Andrew
Is that like the system? Like, because on paper I understand what he's trying to do and there is a sense of being free and independent of the bureaucracy that inherently comes with government. But is it just. That's not how humans work. And you just got to.
- [94:54]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm not even sure that he's trying to be. What he's trying to do is say that humans gravitate towards values. That's the thing that ultimately unites us. It isn't geography. Historically, it had to be geography because we didn't have a way to find each other to connect. We didn't have blockchain technology to run contracts without needing adjudication, things like that. Now that we have that technology, then there's no reason that we need to be bound by geography. And my pitch to him is that's just not the way that the human mind operates. Operates. We're always going to want to share space. We're always going to be subject. Subject to a power structure. And so even going into international waters is you saying that, hey, I know there are rules about international waters. It is more lenient. And so I'm going to go do these things in international waters that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do. But you're still, by the way, pirates could come and raid you. And so now you're going to have to have your own military. And so like all of a sudden it's like you're really trying to be a new country. And that is the part that I'm trying to. It's the part that I'll be very interested to see. My current mental model is there will be no way to do this, that you have a bunch of people that are effectively in a club. They're sharing ideas, maybe they're, you know, running blockchain contracts, but all those contracts are going to be subject to the laws of the jurisdictions that they're in. And they're never going to actually be able to be essentially extrajudicated jurisdictional where they're outside of that. So, yeah, I just think that's going to be forever a friction. They will literally find themselves having to create their own state and then defend that state and then be physically located somewhere. And now you're just back to the same problem. You may have found each other over the network, but you weren't able to actually govern over the network unless you're willing to submit to the local authorities in the future.
- [96:48]
Andrew
The AI, the four possibilities. We did talk about virtual worlds and kind of operating in that there is this a technical limitation. And when we're all jacked in and I could be in a LA basement, but mentally I'm in The network state in Network Villa Stand, would that be like this all? Like this all.
- [97:05]
Tom Bilyeu
It won't solve it. Because what will ultimately happen is think about, like right now, even in video games. So there's a big thing about. Is this gambling is what you're doing gambling. And so. Or trading cards. So Japan wants to sell their Pokemon cards in America. And it's like, well, there are gambling laws and those things are. There are. Somebody debated me on this at one point. They think I'm wrong about the gambling laws. I'm pretty sure I'm right. Certainly it is true in video games that there are some things that are considered gambling. And so there are specific regulations that you have to, like, adhere to. And so that doesn't matter that that is being generated in a different country. What matters is the country in which is being played.
- [97:47]
Andrew
Played.
- [97:47]
Tom Bilyeu
And so if you're not adhering to the gambling laws of the U.S. it doesn't matter that the game is made in Japan or China. It's like, we have laws. And so you're going to have to adhere to that. And so similar, you're living inside of a virtual world, but your body is still in a physical jurisdiction. And so if you come out and somebody complains that, hey, that virtual world that you created, it's actually an economy and it's predatory practices or whatever, suddenly you'll find yourself. It doesn't matter that you're teleporting to. I forget what you called it. Virtual Ascent. But that is. You're still going to have to deal with the jurisdiction that your bed exists in.
- [98:24]
Andrew
Shout out to Jesus is coming soon. Not because his username is Banger, but because he bought up Dolly the Lamb. Do you remember Dolly the Lamb? I feel like I've gotten Mandela affected. So this was like early 90s. They cloned the lamb, they put it on TV. It was like nightly news TV. And then we never talked about cloning again. It was just like, yeah, we did this cool thing. Thing, we're done. We. We solved it. And they just like, walked into the darkness with it. So I'm glad I actually seen that because for a second I was like, wait, I feel like we don't talk about that no more. So, yeah. Is there a 1% conspiracy theory in you that's like, yeah, they're definitely cloning people?
- [98:56]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
No.
- [98:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, are they cloning people? Well, I think they're getting so close to it in China. And look, they arrested the guy. So this wasn't like China technically. Probably didn't sanction this. But yeah, he. I don't remember if it was cloning. It probably wasn't cloning, but he definitely did. He was gene editing the embryo. So things like that. The thing that freaks people out about cloning may not overlap perfectly with gene editing, but it probably should. So it's us controlling exactly what fetus ends up developing. And so whether you break a skin cell off and turn it into a human, which you actually, we haven't proven
- [99:41]
Andrew
you can do yet.
- [99:42]
Tom Bilyeu
But there's nothing in the science that precludes it other than us pursuing it, other than people saying just morally, that's repugnant. But that is from what we're able to do technologically. I would expect that to happen at some point in the future because we can do it. And we will certainly be editing and embryos. That is for sure. Like, it's already happened.
- [100:04]
Andrew
Yeah, designer babies are definitely a thing.
- [100:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Word.
- [100:07]
Andrew
Oh, nice.
- [100:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Awesome. Well, thank you guys all today. It was a big day for super chats. Very, very appreciated. You guys were extraordinarily generous. We do not ever take that support for granted. So much appreciated. Speaking of support to Straight Arrow News, you guys are dope. We're so grateful. What you put out into the world is fantastic. If you guys don't know about Straight Arrow News, they are all about giving you something straight down the middle. It is the facts. There's no space. So go to s a n.com tombilleu so you can get the unbiased truth on the stories that matter. And our goal, as you guys may remember, is to get to 100 app downloads. We want to keep this partnership rocking. So if you haven't already go there. There's no manipulation, no bias, no agenda. Just discover the facts and the context you need to make sense of the story yourself. Get beyond the chaos and anxiety of biased media. We know that it's all out there, there. All right. Love you guys bunches. And we have another ITU masterclass coming up. Wednesday, August 5th at 1:00pm I mean, it's free. Free, free, free. And I will show you how to use AI to launch a company. Make sure that you join me again Wednesday, August 5th at 1pm Love you guys. We'll see you on Friday. Peace.
- [101:14]
Andrew
Some people want you to say your sign off be legendary.
- [101:18]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, really?
- [101:18]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
That.
- [101:18]
Tom Bilyeu
That's like. We want to make sure that's a response.
- [101:21]
Andrew
Somebody said remind them. Just Andrew. All right, everybody.
- [101:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care.
- [101:25]
Andrew
Let's go.
- [101:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Peace.
- [101:26]
Andrew
Let's go.
- [101:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Everyone in the chat saying say the thing.
- [101:31]
Andrew
Say the line.
- [101:32]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Bart.
- [101:33]
Tom Bilyeu
That's funny.
- [101:35]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [101:55]
Tom Bilyeu
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