← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
SPECIAL EDITION: Tom Bilyeu Dives Deep into the Trump-Harris Debate
00:40:43
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- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
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Tom Bilyeu
Everybody, welcome. Thank you for joining us. Today we're going to be Talking about the one and probably only 2024 presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. I think it was very different than a lot of people expected. It certainly was for me. But there's something far bigger than the things that were discussed on the stage that we really need to be talking about. And we're going to be getting into it right, right now. Forgive the running start to this episode because we just started talking off the cuff as everything was getting set up. But I think that it was worthwhile conversation so we just kept going. Without further ado, here is our take on the 2024 presidential debate. That's life. Adjust. Fix it. But I need. What are the base assumptions that you're going to use when it doesn't work? How are you going to adjust? And so you've got Kamala Harris and you're gonna wanna write this down. Cause I definitely wanna talk about it.
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Interviewer/Co-host
We're recording. Keep going.
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Tom Bilyeu
Oh, word.
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Interviewer/Co-host
This is shoot it.
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Tom Bilyeu
But you've got Kamala Harris and she is. She's changed her position on a lot of things. Now personally I'm okay with that. Like I want people to learn and grow. Now I say that I'm okay with it in the reality that I know I'm being manipulated. I understand that politics is a game of manipulation, but I still am not so cynical that I don't want somebody to change their opinion. And I think it would be a fool's errand to be like this four years ago and now I'm going to duct tape them to that forever. That is just Stupid to me. So I want somebody that updates their thinking. Now, because I'm not stupid. I understand that she may just be saying the things I want to hear. So I need to see the policy and I need to understand the base assumptions. But what I'm getting is this top line idea of I haven't changed my values, I've changed my positions. Okay, that's a dope talking point. But now you've got to back that up with, what do you mean, what are your values? Tell me your values. And then what data do you look at to see if you're actually living in accordance with your values or not? And you know, this is my whole beef. This is my beef at the level of a company, this is my beef at the level of politics. Before, before you put a policy in place, you have to say, this is what I expect to happen from this policy. Specifics, real data points that you can be checked on. And then you actually check and you see, is this policy taking us where we thought it was going to or not? And the thing is, they don't. Because. And this is what makes me really sad, man. Politics is a game of manipulation. It's about setting a frame, okay? So there's a really important axiomatic idea that, that people need to really hold on to. It does not matter what you look at, it matters what you see. It's a fancy way of saying, is the glass half empty or half full? We're both looking at the same glass. So they set the frame. Glass half empty, glass half full. Then they have to control the frame. Hey, everybody. Because the glass is half empty, it means all of these things. And they're not going to, they, the parties are not going to allow anything that might change the frame. This is why I think the DNC is so ruthless in keeping people off the ballot, because they know that people are going to challenge their frame. And the Democrats are doing a very good job, A very good job. Like as, as somebody who has studied magic, I'm like this, this is masterful. Because you have to control where people look so that you can pull the sleight of hand. And from getting RFK off the ballot, to stopping people in the Green Party to keep them off the ballot, to working so closely with mainstream media to just keep that frame, keep that frame.
- [04:43]
Interviewer/Co-host
Social media, keeping Trump in court.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting. And every now and then I will be in an interview and I will have come in with a frame. Not even necessarily intentionally. I just, we all have a frame of reference and so I'll come in with my frame of reference and then the guest will say something so unexpected to me. They change the frame so hard and so far, because I'm not trying to control frame, I go with them. And then when I'm in their frame, I feel completely unmoored. And unmoored is the right answer. All of the sudden, I don't know. It's like we all live in a fortress of our frame of reference. Hey, I understand the world from here. When someone takes you out of that frame of reference and puts you somewhere completely new, you feel defenseless, like you don't know how to even talk about it. You don't know how to process the information. And that the need to stop that from happening on both sides is so intense that we are, we're not talking policy, we're not talking expected outcomes, because then you can be held to account. I feel Trump is so, He's so un ideological. I don't know, I don't know what the right way to categorize Trump is. He doesn't have a set concretized beliefs. I don't know. You never know what he's going to say. I don't think he knows what he's going to say. So you have this sense of being uncontrolled. In fact, this is a really interesting point about the debate because Trump does not come in with pre prepared talking points because he's going to say whatever's on his mind because he is largely emotional. The first time we as the voting public encountered him, it was, to quote Dave Chappelle, a star was born. Because he said, oh, I know the system is corrupt because I've been using it and they know it's corrupt, but they're still not going to stop it because their donors give them money. It, it was so shocking the way he changed the frame of reference.
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Interviewer/Co-host
He said the quiet part out loud.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. That people were like, whoa. But now he feels constrained somehow. He's. It's like he knows, okay, if I go full blown wild card, you have no idea what I'm gonna say. He's gonna lose because he's already played that card. People already know that side of him. It doesn't win people over anymore. It now turns people off. But he's lost some of that wild man appeal by doing that. And so now it's. That was on display. She became presidential, he became a watered down version of himself. So the parts where he was, you know, they're eating cats and dogs and like, I didn't lose the election. And like, when he's hitting those points and he's getting really animated, he still feels restrained. So he is going just far enough to seem unhinged, but not so far that people are like, yeah, like, get him Trump. And so I have a feeling something is going to break down there.
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Interviewer/Co-host
I think she kind of used that against him in certain places where she almost kind of baited him into doing it. Like, that's why people are leaving at his rally had nothing to do with foreign policy, nothing to do with what they're saying, but she knew it would agitate him, get him involved, get him excited, and then he kind of bit for the trap. I had the best rallies ever at the most votes of Republican president and just kind of riffing and saying things. And to your point, it's not classic Trump. It's not the Trump that has gotten him into the office. It's the 2020 Trump who's kind of been taken out, who's like, you're doing too much. Sit down. The wild card that we are now getting turned off.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know who Anderson Silva is? The MMA fighter? Yeah, from Brazil. Yeah. He used to be able to mind control people. And he would go into the Octagon, he would like, dodge punches, slip punches, and people lost before they ever got in the ring with him because he really did seem invincible. It just seemed like people couldn't hit him. It looked like he was Neo in the matri. He could, like dodge punches, dodge kicks. It felt like he was just superhuman. And then he goes in one fight and he gets knocked out. He's doing his thing and bank done. And then after that, that mystique was gone. And I will be interested to see if Trump can deal with that, because going again, I can't state this enough. The heartbreaking reality of politics is, at its essence, politics is manipulation. And I'll. I'll say it again and again so people know what I mean by that. It's setting a frame, controlling a frame. It's not. Here is a policy, here is the expected outcome of that policy. Let's judge whether that policy worked or not. It's not that. And I don't know. And I think that politics is an evolutionary format. I think it has become what it's become, not because people are evil, but because the masses of people, that's how they respond. They need heuristics, which is a fancy word for shortcuts, which I should have just said that people need shortcuts. They want you to tell them in really simple ways, like what it means to ride with you. So what does it say about me if I'm on your side? Tell them that. Then tell them the words to use when they encounter somebody that's like, you're bad for following that person. And then they could say, no, I'm not. I'm for whatever. And you give them the talking points, which is why people talk about talking points. And it is excruciatingly disheartening to watch because I have a base assumption that we are in a positive feedback loop. And the positive feedback loop is going to break capitalism. And in breaking capitalism, you are going to get a really, really. Like, it could be as simple as. God, this is going to sound terrible. It could be as simple as America declining as a world power, going into a tremendous recession that drags on for decades.
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Interviewer/Co-host
Wow.
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Tom Bilyeu
Or it could be a hot war. Now, it tends to break into hot war. But I don't want to oversell things, but if we. If we don't understand that the difference between a feedback loop and a loop is that the feedback loop, the product of the feedback loop, exacerbates the loop itself. It, like, speeds it up. So the more debt we rack up, which is, in my opinion, essentially all they should have talked about in the debate, the more debt we rack up, the more fragile the economy becomes. And eventually you have to pay the piper. And so none of us know, like, is this, Are we gonna have to deal with this in five years, 50 years? But you're gonna have to deal with it. And by implementing policies that are not designed to zero out the excess spending, you're just weakening the economy. And so when Harris goes to bat for things that sound really awesome to the average person, like, we're going to give you money to start a small business. We're going to pay off student loan,
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Interviewer/Co-host
the 50k small business, 25k for home loans, paying off student loan debt.
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Tom Bilyeu
But now what people have to ask is, are we living below our means? And now we're going to dip into our savings to pay for these? Are we living at our means and we're going to take on a little bit of debt to do this, or are we already astronomically in debt historically? Historically, and now we're just going to take on more debt? And economics is so confusing that people just don't have anything to hold on to. And so the confused mind says no. And so politicians know. I can't tell you the truth, so I'm just going to simplify it. I'm going to get into power and I'm going to kick the can down the road and I don't have kids. That's terrifying to me. Even if it happens after I die, bro, that's like. I don't think people understand how bad things can get. And if you don't have a sense of history and you only look at the last 70 years since World War II, I mean, look, we've had the Vietnam War, we've had war in Afghanistan, we've had war in Iraq, we've had war that we weren't involved in all over the world, but there hasn't been a big world war that really reminds people of how nasty and brutish that can become. And so they look at the last 70 years and they say, this is pretty dope. Like, what do we really have to worry about running our country this way is, is just not so bad. You can even look at Japan and be like, hey, stagflation is not that bad. Tokyo is my favorite city in the world, but there's a reason I don't live there. And the reason I don't live there is the opportunity is way lower. And when opportunity is lower, you get less innovation. Humans are a certain subset of humanity is drawn to innovation.
- [13:59]
Interviewer/Co-host
Can we dig into that? So is the impact that's happening at an inflation level? Because we always talk about the grocery stores, we always talk about small businesses, we always talk about kind of the surface level of inflation, but downstream of the economy, when you kind of get through high prices, you get through. People can't get jobs now. People can't create opportunities. You get to this like, stagnation point of itself. Like, I think that's more important. And that's something that's a bit. We need to kind of spend more time on. So are you saying that in Japan you don't have the ability to do it because of these economic pressures? What's the opportunity that is missing in Japan that's present in America for right now?
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Tom Bilyeu
So the most important thing to understand is politics, economic policy. It is all downstream of culture. And this is why I worry about what's happening in America to the culture of being anti capitalist, wanting equal outcomes instead of understanding that when someone can win disproportionately, they just go really hard. So Michael Jordan never becomes Michael Jordan if he doesn't have an opportunity to be the greatest of all time. Now, I think it's perfectly fair to say that Michael Jordan has a sickness, that I have a sickness. I'm Certainly not removing myself from this. That the reason I work as hard as I do, the reason that I've prioritized building businesses and not having children. If somebody says that, that's a sickness and we need to be concerned about putting ourselves on that path if it does not align with what we want to accomplish. And I'd be like, yeah, now the reason that I love that there is an opportunity for people like me to express themselves that way is it's made a better world. And innovation is the thing that's created all the abundance that we see and people. Man, if I could get people to go live a season of alone, that would change everything. Watch A Season of alone and you will get it. Innovation took us from being in fights with bears over salmon, having wolverines come and steal your store of food, or just straight up starving to death. Like, people don't understand how hard it would have been for the human animal to finally get enough cultural momentum where we could pass knowledge on through culture that we could get stable tribes that could survive a harsh winter. Or I mean, there have been times in the past where you'll have many ice ages, you'll have full ice ages. And humans have managed to get on the other side of that how through ingenuity. And once you understand if you don't promote innovation culturally, the culture begins to stagnate. So you have to create that opportunity. And so there was a time in the 80s where Japan was just on fire. And if you look at movies, American movies made in the 80s, like Back to the Future 2, I think, very specifically, but it was always they, oh, I work for a Japanese corporation. Because it just seemed like the Japanese were going to take over everything. Even die hard, early 90s, right? Work for a Japanese corporation. It just seemed like the Japanese were going to take everything over. But then they have such a collectivist society, it just never ended up breaking free of that. They ended up having economic woes where their debt to GDP now is just way, way, way out of whack. They ended up in stagflation. I don't know all the specifics of how it broke down, but for anybody that wants to go, use that as a case study of how you go from looking like the rising global economic superpower to effectively relegating yourself to just steady now. They're not a bad country. It's amazing. But they're not the economic superpower that they were. And so right now in the US we're having a debate about whether we want to continue to promote that Kind of pursuit of excellence, being better than other people, which makes people today very, very, very uncomfortable. And once you begin to villainize excellence, then people stop pursuing that, because that's not how you get the admiration of your tribe. And if you get the admiration of your tribe by keeping your head down, doing as little work as possible and avoiding punishment at all costs, it's like you're not going to go very far with that or you're going to get a bunch of people that just run roughshod over you and you get that growing divide. And that's what we're seeing now is you get some people, they're just wired for it. They are going to build gigantic businesses. They are going to go with the government and engage with them and try to come up with policies that behoove them and allow them to just hoover everything up and get bigger and bigger and bigger. And as soon as you get that massive economic divide, you have a society that is unstable. And that's what we have now, because your average person does not celebrate the pursuit of excellence.
- [18:53]
Interviewer/Co-host
Wow, that's deep.
- [18:55]
Tom Bilyeu
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- [19:22]
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- [19:55]
Interviewer/Co-host
There was a lot of discourse on Twitter. A lot of people saying, Kamala won, Trump won, Kamal lost, Trump lost. There was a underlying notice that I noticed from a lot of people talking about how they wish the third party candidate was on their stage. They wish Kennedy was up there, they wish Jill Stein was up there. What advice? How would you allow, how would you tell people to approach this problem if their ideal candidate didn't make that stage and they were caught with these two choices that they don't really love? How should they evaluate their election process? How should they approach who? How would you break down that problem of who should I vote for?
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Tom Bilyeu
Whoa, those are two very different questions. So how you break down who you vote for is you really have to ascertain what their base assumptions are. So what makes for a great entrepreneur is somebody that can solve a novel problem. That is one of the things that I try to get young entrepreneurs to understand is your job is to solve not only a problem you've never seen before, but to be able to solve a problem nobody has ever seen before. The thing I teach entrepreneurs in Impact Theory University is what I call the physics of progress. The reason I call it the physics is there's nothing below it. This, it just is how you get better at something. But to do that, you have to know where you want to go. You have to know that in the political sense, the policy that you're going to pursue to get there before you implement it, you have to say, this is what we think will happen. And ideally, based on historical things that have happened, this is what we think will happen. And then you run the experiment. It should have a very finite time period. There should be early indications, like if you think that it's going to lower the debt by 50%, well, you don't wait 10 years to find out if it lowered by 50%. You back into that some reasonable, you know, growth rate. You don't just say, well, for the next four years, conveniently, we're really not going to see anything. But, you know, starting in year six, this is going to be amazing. Just long enough for, you know, the next person to get into office. But you lay that out and you see if you're actually making it. So base assumptions allow you to understand how somebody is going to approach a novel problem that that's just absolutely critical. We're not seeing that. That's not in the public discourse. And if I'm completely honest, I don't think it ever will be. Just it, it is the architecture of the human mind. The architecture of the human mind is I have a family, I need to take care of them. My life is hard enough, I don't have a lot of free time. I just please you. I trust you distill this down for me. Give me the talking points again, going back to tell me what it means to align with you and give me the words that I say to somebody who thinks I'm stupid for doing so. That's what people need. And then ultimately they're going to vote based on emotion. So it becomes a, I mean, we can talk about that at some point, but people will ultimately make this decision emotionally. The complex calculus of that is largely about set the frame, control the frame. Because in setting the frame and controlling the frame, what they're trying to do is influence you emotionally. And so each side is pulling for your emotion. They are not talking to you logically, they are not saying how their policies are going to help you. They are, they are. And I think Harris does a better job of this, but it unnerves me far more is to say, I'm doing these policies and it's going to have this impact on your life. Emotion, emotion, emotion. Not like, hey, looking back at the economic history, when things like this have been put into place, we've seen an uptick in whatever, whatever. And that's why we're doing this policy. We're not seeing that. And historically I think and anybody fact check me, but almost certainly if you want to boom the economy, you're going to reduce tax, you're going to reduce regulation. And the reason that we see saw between those is as you reduce regulations, then people start getting, the end consumer ends up getting at risk of being taken advantage of and we clamp back down. And so it's like this constant back and forth of the company's incentive is to go too far and the political apparatus is to gain power. And so you just have this never ending seesaw of the government's. The government's evolutionary mandate is to get bigger, to seek control, to grow budgets, to spend more money. And a business's incentive is to get so big that you're effectively a monopoly and to keep people out. And so this is why I'm not libertarian. I think that corporations, given the architecture of the human mind, they'll derange. And so you need a government that keeps them in check. But governments also derange and you need the people to keep them in check. And so this is why I'm such a, I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I come very, very close because if people are not allowed to say what they see, then you really can get tyranny pretty fast. So going back to the first part of your question, how do, how do people break this duopoly of we're only going to have two choices? I really hope that being able to see the manipulation in real time is having a very real impact on people and that they're like, oh, I see, I'm caught up in a game of manipulation. I see the frame that's being set for me. I see the frame that they're trying to control me with, but no one's looking at the outcomes of whether this stuff is actually working or not. And so I demand, by speaking to my Congress people, by going on podcasts, by tweeting out, I demand that we make it as easy as possible for more people to get on the ballot. And I'm perfectly fine that they're going to need to be some constraints to that so that it doesn't, you know, just become a cloud show. I mean, maybe I haven't thought through this. Well, my instinct is that in all things, my instinct is almost always, you need some regulation, but you have to be very, very careful of having too much. And so the fact that RFK was kept off of strategic battleground states, the ballots in those battleground states, bro, if that doesn't, like, really upset you, you're not paying attention. Even if you hate rfk, like, you should want the idea to be seen and for people to go, that's a terrible idea. I reject it. The fact that they're doing the same thing with the Green Party, terrible. The fact that the mainstream media doesn't cover this, terrible. So it's. I don't know that the following thing will work, but as you and I talk a lot about, like, what is the. What does it mean to subscribe to impact theory? Right. What does it mean to say, I think the way that Tom thinks through this problem is a meaningful way is I steer from base assumptions. And if we could get people to just be obsessed with, okay, you want to put that policy forward, but what's the base assumption that drives that? So, for instance, if Kamala Harris says things like, the only just world is a world in which everybody has the same thing. I'm out. Now, the reason I'm out is because her base. If that were her base assumption, it would be in direct conflict to my base assumption, which is that if people are not allowed to pursue disproportionate returns, they won't. And therefore, you never get anything that delivers disproportionate returns because they know that it's crabs in a bucket, they're going to be held back. And human ingenuity, human passion, desires, intelligence, they are evenly distributed across populations, as far as I can tell. But they are not evenly distributed individual to individual. And it's been heartbreaking for me. So I'll agree with people that Musk is a loose cannon.
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Interviewer/Co-host
Cool.
- [27:40]
Tom Bilyeu
But he's also the most effective entrepreneur in living Memory, maybe ever. And when people attack the second part, that, hey, if you think he's unhinged and you hate his views, I get it. Like that that's a, that's a value system, that's a belief system. And I totally understand how people can believe different things and value different things, so no problem. But when you look at objective reality of what somebody's accomplished, it's insane, man. The number of billion dollar companies that he's built, people don't understand how hard that is. Like, it's insanely difficult. And he's done it as an engineer, he hasn't done it as a finance guy. So he, he is manifesting things in the real world that other people have not been able to manifest. So that's where I start running into trouble. I want people to lay out what their base assumptions are. I want them to understand how their base assumptions conflict with somebody else. So if I hear somebody saying, oh, this is my base assumption, that we want everybody to end up in the same place, I'm like, history tells us that that's an absolutely abhorrent idea because you, the only way to do that is by force because of the fact that you have Elon Musk's and, and you have not Elon Musk's. Right? And so there's just. People have to deal with the world the way that it is, not the way they wish it were. I also wish it were that it was just all equally distributed intelligence, because I wish I were a lot smarter. But the reality is it's not. We all have to deal with the hand that we're dealt and currently we don't. So people are going to have to, to get the right people on the ballot. You have to evaluate things from base assumptions. I just, I don't think the average person is going has the bandwidth or the desire to think through that.
- [29:25]
Interviewer/Co-host
You are famously a one issue voter. You talk about inflation to every guest that walks through this door. I feel like you have told the neighbors about inflation after watching this debate. Do you feel better about inflation? Do you feel like one candidate or the other has a plan that makes you less anxious about it?
- [29:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Literally neither of them talk about it. I don't know that they think about it. We've had both a Biden Harris presidency and a Trump presidency and they're each as bad as the other. I mean, it's, it's really crazy. It's, it's really crazy that people are not paying attention. That people think that you can just go deeper and deeper and deeper into debt forever. And that there's never going to be a piper to pay. And so this is where, man, as a student of history, you step back. This is what I talk about with the feedback loop. The feedback loop is the human mind. And the way that we are is if we can borrow from the future, we will do it. And that's even people with kids, man. So at some point, always, forever, throughout human history, you end up with the debt jubilee. It is the most heinously named thing in the world, because what you really end up with is bloodshed. That allows people to overturn the tables and say, you're never getting your money back. That's what actually happens. And so you sometimes just bomb them into submission and say, we win, you get nothing. Or you literally start decapitating people in the streets. Hey, France. Looking at you, and you're never getting your money back. So that's the only way to get to a Jubilee is to blow things up. So I don't think people are being realistic. And I shouldn't say the only, because there's something like 15% of the time, it doesn't end in bloodshed. 85% of the time, it does. And so there are real consequences to our behavior.
- [31:12]
Interviewer/Co-host
Do you think we're closer to Venezuela where hyperinflation, our economy tanks, we become a. We lose our ranking as that number one economic superpower? Or is it more bloodshed, war, you think is the way out at the end?
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Tom Bilyeu
I mean, given what's going on in the world right now, it feels like bloodshed is the most likely outcome. So now, one thing I will say is utterly fascinating, and I don't know what to read into this yet, but China hasn't moved on Taiwan, and Biden is still president. Let that one sink in. Biden is still president. They removed him from running because they knew he has cognitively declined. Nobody's arguing that point. So you have a sitting president that has some form of dementia, and that's insane. So I kept thinking, maybe Taiwan's going to make a move. Like, if you're going to do it, now seems like the time. So either China understands that whoever represents Biden or whoever Biden represents is probably a better way to say it, that they're actually afraid of them and they think that they would retaliate or whatever, or they have their own dysfunction to the point where they're like, oh, man, we're missing our opportunity. Now would have been the time, but we're not ready. I don't know. But that is fascinating. So anyway, given what's going on in Israel, Gaza, given what's going on in Russia, Ukraine, I think that violence is in the air. To be sure, if the Middle east keeps growing and that sparks into something bigger, that could be very problematic. But the one that we should probably be the most afraid of is Russia, Ukraine. I mean, unless that just becomes a. A stalemate and they say we've diminished the Ukraine so much that they're now what John Mearsheimer calls a rump state. And we don't really have to worry about them. They're effectively just a puppet for us. And we can say, look, took this back and now NATO knows to not play on our borders. But if NATO keeps messing around and pushing the issue, or if we escalate what we send to them, bro, like, it's as if people don't understand that there could be real consequences.
- [33:20]
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- [33:51]
Tom Bilyeu
And when I was growing up in the 80s, people knew enough to be like, they have a lot of nukes, we have a lot of nukes. That does not end any way good. And we were always trying to deescalate, turn down the tensions. And now it feels like people just been so cavalier that it's just ratcheting. Up, up, up.
- [34:11]
Interviewer/Co-host
Cool. Any final thoughts about the debate? Anything you want the people to kind of leave with? And then I got some rap questions.
- [34:18]
Tom Bilyeu
So very much, boys and girls, the policies you choose have very important consequences to the economy. I think people should think a lot about the economy. I think that you should think about now and the future. Think about your kids, think about your friends, kids. Again, I don't have kids, but I think a lot about the kids. And we all want to live in a world that's dope, where the economy feels good, where we can create things that we think make people's lives better. And if your only thought is, I want to win this election, you're going to be in trouble. If, on the other hand, you step back and go, hey, I really want to map out, how are people thinking through these problems? And it's Interesting to me that Trump is going on long form podcasts, but I actually haven't watched any of them, so I doubt that they're asking him policy questions. I would love to see Harris do the same so that we can understand again how will this person react when something unexpected happens. What are the what are. So just to give people an idea, your frame of reference is built of three things, your biology. Okay, so we're 50% of us is hardwired and then the remaining 50% is a combination of beliefs and values. Now people mistake beliefs for objective truth. Beliefs are rarely objective truth. Objective truth, from where I'm sitting, is physical reality, meaning physics. We don't even understand all the laws of physics. So the odds that we understand what is truly true, we know we don't have a complete picture. So we're dealing with only approximations. And that's why people like even Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris can get bogged down in a two hour episode just trying to define truth. So anybody that thinks, oh, truth is self evident, it's really not. That's why I say it doesn't matter what you look at, it matters what you see. So we really have to be thoughtful about mapping out the candidates beliefs and values. So if beliefs is what you believe is true about the world, values are what you believe ought to be true in the world. So ought meaning a stand in for morality. So I believe that people ought to have the opportunity to pursue excellence. Some people believe people ought to, ought to have the same outcomes. Okay, that's a value judgment. It's not an is judgment, it's a what we think the world ought to be. If you can map your candidate there, then it's like, okay, cool. If those are really their beliefs, then when they encounter an unknown problem, they're going to anchor around those beliefs. Now if what you find when you look at a candidate, and this is my fear with Donald Trump, that he's not cognizantly aware of what his beliefs and values are. So if you said, hey, give me the beliefs and values that make up your policies or that make up your worldview, that you wouldn't necessarily get them. Because he feels very confident in his gut reactions, which is why he doesn't prepare and he just comes in and he's like, this is how I see the world. And I've been around, I understand, I know how to broker a deal and all that stuff. And there's a lot of bravado and look, it's super effective. Like he's done what he's done. But it doesn't help you when you encounter an unknown problem. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, I have fears because she was acting and thinking one way and now she's changing on a lot of them. She's got a great line about, I've changed my positions, but not my values. But what are your values? Say them out loud. Because if you say them out loud, then we can all go, oh, if those ideas are driving these policies. And I know we have a problem. And so that is. That's what I would want people to pay attention to. And then also it's interesting that I think the war machine is real. The military industrial complex is very real. Money in politics is very real. So where does the money. Who does the money want to see win? Right. Who does the war machine want to see win? So people that are anti Elon Musk are going to be super sketched out by him and other billionaires that are contributing. But then I think some people are going to be sketched out that you've got Dick Cheney that came out for Kamala Harris. Putin came out for Kamala Harris. It's like, and I'm not even. I haven't thought all the way through that. I will just say that's on my list of things, like, really think about what that means because it hits me funny from the jump. So something that feels like, like my honest answer is I don't have enough receipts to back it up, which is why I'm coy. But given what the Democrats did to rfk, who I was hard leaning towards, I was accused of being an rfk, Stan. I was certainly hard leaning in that direction given that they went so hard to keep him off the ballot. That feels hyper undemocratic. I'm okay if, if the way that I view the world loses, if it loses in a fair fight. Because I really believe that even people that you are just utterly convinced or stupid and should not have a vote should have a vote, because that's the only way you avoid the tyranny of the elites. And I feel like Covid revealed, we've been being manipulated by the quote, unquote elites for a very long time. And that to me is. Is pretty sinister.
- [39:36]
Interviewer/Co-host
Well, well said. Well said. A couple rapid fire questions, one answer. Let's get right to it. Who won the debate?
- [39:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Kamala Harris. What was the biggest surprise that Kamala Harris got so much better? Like some of her early clips, I was like, yo, she was poised.
- [39:55]
Interviewer/Co-host
Nice. Can politics be fixed? Going back to the Lincoln Douglas debates traditional, like we're sitting down at a table talking through policy. Are we going back there?
- [40:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, are. Those are two very different questions. Are we going back there? I, I am optimistic, given independent media, I hope can create a groundswell that over the next 10, 15 years, I mean, it's going to take time. Can really begin to swing people because we have been there historically. I think it would be bizarre for me to say every negative thing that happens can happen again now, but the positive things can't. That would be absurd. So, yeah, I mean, given how much reverence early Americans had for the government they had fought for and created, I would love to see us get back to that. Hyper optimistic. America stands for this. Here's the thing. Ah, this is supposed to be speed round. I'll stop. We could do a whole episode on how I want to see Americans galvanize around a set of ideas.
- [40:53]
Interviewer/Co-host
But speed round coming soon. We'll save that for another one. What was the policy that you wish they would have talked more about?
- [41:01]
Tom Bilyeu
The debt, the economy. Like, that's it. It should have been three hours. About their base assumptions about the economy and the policies and how they're going to address it.
- [41:10]
Interviewer/Co-host
And as a pet owner, how do you feel about pets allegedly being eaten?
- [41:14]
Tom Bilyeu
I'm so on the outside of that. Like, okay, so, dear Trump, if I were coaching you, I would say you got to stop with like the crazy throwaway remarks. They, I mean, he must think that they are red meat to a certain part of his base. But it really just as a sound bite, it just sounds weird. Like if you don't have context, you're like, what? Like, I, I didn't know anything about what was going on. I hadn't heard the claim. So for me, I was like, did I just hear him right?
- [41:45]
Interviewer/Co-host
What is he talking about being punctured?
- [41:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. I was like, is this, is this a deep fake? So those things don't help with credibility even when they're true. So this is like the Alex Jones problem. Okay, let's say you got this really crazy thing and it's super true. You got to come at it like Eric Weinstein. Eric can ground you. He can talk about the things that sound crazy at a headline level, but he can really walk you through, show you the receipts, be calm about it, explain why people would be led to that. And look, he, he is an extraordinary human, so not everybody's going to be like him, but Trump's got to knock those off. Like, just leave him alone. If you can't do the Eric thing.
- [42:26]
Interviewer/Co-host
And last one. Who do you think wins in November
- [42:31]
Tom Bilyeu
for the first time? I don't feel like I have a good read. Until this debate. I thought Trump was going to win for Swayze. For Swayze. And then this happened. She came across very presidential. Trump came across like Trump, but in a less cool version, if that's a right way to use that word. So, yeah, now I'm just like, I need to know if the things she's saying now represent her actual change in core beliefs. Like, if she's actually updated her base assumptions and she can articulate them, cool. If she can't and this is just political manipulation, then I sound the alarms and run for the hills.