The 50-Year Economic Collapse That Created Socialism Is Happening Again Right Now | Impact Theory w/ Tom Bilyeu & Daniel Priestley

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu & Daniel Priestley: “The 50-Year Economic Collapse That Created Socialism Is Happening Again Right Now” Released: May 21, 2026

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Overview

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu sits down with bestselling author and entrepreneur Daniel Priestley to explore the cyclical nature of economic upheaval, specifically drawing parallels between today’s rising calls for socialism in the West and the "Engels Pause" — a 50-year period of widening inequality during the Industrial Revolution. The conversation unpacks why socialist ideas become attractive in times of economic distress, the real roots behind perceived economic injustice, how global capitalism and digitalization allow the elite to evade traditional controls, and what lessons historic and modern economic models (like the Nordic countries) hold for societies today. Discussions are candid, nuanced, and seek to cut through ideological soundbites.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Engels Pause and Modern Parallels

• Definition: The Engels Pause was a 50-year period (roughly 1770–1820) where economic productivity soared but workers’ wages stagnated or declined. This led to the birth of socialism and communism. (02:14)
• Historical Causes: Technology (like mechanized looms) enabled a minority to amass tremendous wealth while skilled workers lost value, leading to mass discontent and new ideologies. (02:57)
• Modern Echoes: Today’s AI, automation, and digital leverage are causing a similar bifurcation, where a small group is rapidly accumulating wealth, leaving many feeling left behind. (04:05, 07:19)
  • Priestley: "It's like, how is it that some people are able to amass a billion dollars...That's like someone saying it's impossible to run a marathon in under an hour. Well, if you're on a bicycle, you can." (07:19)

Pathways Out of Severe Inequality

• Historical Outcomes: The end of the Engels Pause came through three revolutions—ownership (asset access), skills (mass education), and political power (franchise & fair elections). Some were violent (France); others, like Britain, were democratic (Chartist movement). (04:05–06:50)
• Violence vs. Reform: Not all social/economic revolutions are bloody; mass, peaceful protest and institutional reform can redistribute power and assets.

K-Shaped Economy & Fairness Reflex

• K-Shaped Recovery: Economic growth benefiting a select few while the majority stagnates or declines—mirrored in today’s wage vs. cost-of-living crisis. (07:08)
• Fairness Reflex: Priestley and Bilyeu discuss the deep-rooted, almost primal human emphasis on fairness. Social media exacerbates discontent by exposing people to lifestyles far removed from their own, intensifying perceived injustice. (09:37–12:24)
  • Priestley: "...watching monkeys get rewarded with cucumber versus another one get rewarded with grapes...that exact thing that you're seeing in those monkeys, that's Instagram." (12:24)

The Real Root of Social Discontent

• Not Just Inequality: Both argue that declining prospects—when people cannot keep up with the cost of living despite working hard—is what sparks mass unrest, not inequality per se. (09:13, 14:18)
  • Priestley: "Inequality is an output, Right? Inequality is the scoreboard, and it can't be a cause." (14:18)
• Progress as Happiness: Bilyeu posits that non-progress ("falling behind") is the critical driver for outrage—“Progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness.” (13:19)

Why Socialism Always Sounds Intuitively Right, But…

• Obvious Appeal: The redistribution of wealth from rich to poor is emotionally and intuitively compelling. (01:00, 21:29)
  • Priestley: "How could you be so daft as to not go in for that?...That is the most obvious thing in the world." (21:29)
• But It's Not the Whole Solution: Priestley explains why fixing the “scoreboard” (unequal outcomes) without redesigning the "game” (system that created them) fails—productive individuals can avoid redistribution through global mobility and financial engineering. (22:10)
  • Priestley: "When you start taking 40% of what people produce off them, they become extremely motivated to figure out how to...stop losing what they get." (24:06)
  • Chasing wealth only makes the most creative people focus their energy on avoiding taxes or offshoring production, reducing their positive impact on society.

The Limitations of Government Power

• Globalization vs. Geography: Borders tie governments, but digital businesses (and wealthy individuals) can move elsewhere (25:00–28:14).
  • Amazon, Google, Facebook taxes are cited: “If you buy a Facebook ad, you’re buying a UK ad, but Facebook’s in Ireland.”
• Danger of Government Monopolies: The consolidation of power (even to ‘fight’ business) can be much more dangerous in government, given armed forces and enforcement power. (28:14)
  • Priestley: "If you don't like the idea of Jeff Bezos having a strategic monopoly...the good news is Amazon doesn't have prison camps. Amazon doesn't have an airforce. Yet." (28:58)

The Value of (Small) Competition

• Break Monopolies, Not Markets: The healthiest capitalism comes from robust competition, especially favoring small businesses over giants. (31:57–33:43)
  • Less regulation for small businesses can keep markets dynamic and disincentivize the consolidation of power.

The Nordic Model: Lessons & Myths

(Segments: 37:54–44:27, detailed analysis from Sweden/Denmark/Norway)

• Mythbusting "Nordic Socialism": Sweden, once world’s 4th wealthiest country, fell to 25th after trying full socialism, with runaway debt, inflation, and dysfunction.
  • Priestley: "So socialism absolutely crushed their economy...They needed a bailout, right? So socialism absolutely crushed their economy." (38:15)
• The Real Nordic System: Since the 1990s, Nordic taxation is not primarily rich-to-poor; instead, it’s a “time-shifter”—redistribution from your high-earning years to your young and old ages. (57:11)
  • Wealth taxes were abolished; corporate taxes are lower than the US. Broad-based high income taxes fund universalist services.
  • Nordic countries have “astronomical” wealth inequality—higher billionaires per capita—dispelling the myth that they are socialist utopias of perfect equality. (57:43)
• Homogeneity & Values: The viability of generous welfare systems depends on shared cultural values and trust. Large, homogenous societies are more cohesive; multiculturalism challenges that consensus, sometimes leading to social friction (44:02–54:02).

Capitalism as the Best Moral Game

• Voluntary Exchange: Capitalism allows peaceful, mutually beneficial cooperation regardless of race or origin—what matters are shared values and the willingness to work and trade. (55:22)
  • Priestley: "The beauty of capitalism, it's the most moral system because nobody cares about any of those stuff...voluntary trade is this amazing leveler…" (55:22)
• Socialism Promotes Distrust: When distribution is pooled, people worry about whether others contribute equally—“Socialism makes people very suspicious of what everyone else is doing." (55:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Daniel Priestley on Social Media & Resentment

  "Today it's like, hey, wait a second, what do you mean that 27-year-old has a Lamborghini? What do you mean that dude over there has a river running through his house?" (11:06)

• Tom Bilyeu on Human Motivation

  "If people are making progress, they're not going to rage out… It's the not getting ahead, it's the falling behind." (13:19)

• Priestley’s Marquee Metaphor

  "Imagine that we're all running a marathon and then a small group of people get the whisper in their ear, if you want, you can get on a bicycle…if you have access to a bicycle, you finish the marathon way faster than everybody else because you've got leverage now." (07:19)

• On the Limits of Redistribution

  "When you start taking 40% of what people produce off them, they become extremely motivated to...duck and weave outside of the system." (24:06)

• On the Dangers of Centralized Government Power

  "Government is also a strategic monopoly, but it has one big difference. Violence...If you don't like the idea of Jeff Bezos having a strategic monopoly, well, the good news is Amazon doesn't have prison camps. Amazon doesn't have an air force." (28:14–28:58)

• On the Nordic Model’s Real Structure

  "It's redistribution from your peak earning years to your needy years. So they time shift, they don't wealth shift." (38:15, 57:11)

• On the Myth of Nordic Equality

  "Just so you know, the wealth inequality in, in the Nordic countries is astronomical. They have plenty of [billionaires]." (57:43)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:00 Priestley: Emotional appeal of socialism
• 02:14 Priestley: Engels Pause defined, historic disruptors
• 04:05 End of Engels Pause: Revolutions in ownership, skills, political power
• 07:19 Priestley’s “Marathon with a Bicycle” metaphor for unequal opportunity
• 09:37 “Fairness Reflex” and Instagram’s impact on perception of inequality
• 14:18 Priestley: "Inequality is the scoreboard, not the cause"
• 21:29 Priestley: "Sounds obvious...take money from the rich"
• 24:06 Priestley: The 40% Tax “Duck-and-Weave” Threshold
• 28:14 Limits of governments vs. global companies & risk of government monopolies
• 31:57 Competitive edge: Favoring small businesses for true capitalism
• 38:15 Priestley: Sweden’s failed socialism, subsequent reforms
• 44:02 Priestley: Homogeneity and values in social trust, limits of scaling “redistribution”
• 54:02 Capitalism, values, and voluntary cooperation

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Final Takeaways

• Recurrent economic crises produce calls for radical system change (e.g., socialism), but history shows real solutions stem from structural reforms—broadening ownership, reskilling workers, democratizing power.
• While inequality is emotionally charged, the true societal danger is when ordinary people are regressing relative to living costs, sparking fairness reflexes and mass unrest.
• The success of “socialist” models like the Nordics hinges not on confiscatory wealth redistribution, but on building high-trust societies with broad-based contribution and aligned values.
• Breaking up monopolies (corporate or governmental) and incentivizing healthy competition—especially for small businesses—are better long-term paths than resentment-fueled redistribution.
• Capitalism, at its best, is a moral system anchored by voluntary exchange and competition, which naturally fosters peace and innovation.

This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the deeper dynamics behind headlines about inequality and economic frustration. It challenges received wisdom, blends history with current events, and offers actionable frameworks for both policymakers and individuals.

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

The thing with socialism, it sounds obvious. It's like, hey, you've got one group of people who are billionaires and rising class and they can afford 10 houses and private jets. And it sounds so obvious that you would just take the money off those guys and give it to people who can't afford to eat. How could you be so daft as to not go in for that? Anyone who looks at the problem, on the surface, it's like, what, are we all thick? Take money off the guy who's got a private jet and give it to the person who's struggling to feed their children. That is the most obvious thing in the world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Daniel Priestley, welcome back.

[Daniel Priestley]

I'm so glad to be back. Thank you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's good to have you. I'm on your turf this time, so it'll be. It should be a very interesting conversation.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah. I love the fact you're in London.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is a spectacular city that I think has a lot to teach us about economics. So it'll be interesting to have this here. We're living in such a palpable example of some of the things that I think are in need of answers. So there's something going on right now where the social contract is broken in some kind of way. You've got AI looming in the background, and suddenly socialism is the most exciting political idea on offer. What is it exactly that has led us to that being so exciting?

[Daniel Priestley]

So if I was to say what's actually going on in the world right now we're going through a big long term disruption. So there's little disruptions that might happen every five to 10 years and then there are big disrupt disruptions that might happen every 70, 100, 200 years. And I often talk about the Industrial revolution because it was the last time we had a really big wholesale change to the economy. Let me start at a strange point. If we were to talk about the fundamentals of economics because we're talking about economic systems. We had this period of time called the Engels Pause. Nothing worked. We had inequality. The birthplace of socialism and communism was created during the Engels pause. Engels is actually Karl Marx's best buddy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what is angles pause for people that don't know it?

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah. So the Engels Pause was a period of about 50 years where economic productivity went up, but workers wages went down. That the economy was growing because of the industrial methodology, the industrial revolution. But it wasn't fairly shared. Right. So you had situations where someone who previously was a highly skilled tailor and could earn an amazing amount of a few years later couldn't earn minimum wage because the spinning looms could create beautiful tapestry, beautiful, you know, clothing very cheaply and an unskilled person could do the job of a tailor with if they had a spinning loom. So we had this essentially this pause, this 50 year pause where the economy got worse and worse for the majority of people. But for a tiny elite who understood technology and who understand how to do these new things called factories, they understood with steam and coal and mechanization, they became wildly successful. They became, they got, they got called something called industrialists.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So these sounds distressingly familiar.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. It's predictable. It's, it's happened before. So at the end of the Engels Pause, three major revolutions happened. Essentially there was a revolution in ownership. People could own new assets. There was a revolution in skills that we invented the schooling system as we know it today. And we reskilled en masse. So there was a mass movement towards democratization of ownership. There was a mass movement towards democratization of education and there was a mass movement of democratization of political power. So we had these three big revolutions that, that kind of ended the Engels pause and started to move things. We then had the growth in wages, we had the growth in economic prosperity.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then we, for people taking notes now that want to know how to end this sort of angles paws like moment, are the revolutions necessarily violent? Like how did actually come about?

[Daniel Priestley]

So there was both. So in France There was a violent revolution where the guillotines came out and. And they chopped off everyone's heads. It was really interesting. It wasn't even a workers revolution. It was. It was an overproduction of elites. People who had been to universities, people who had been to colleges, people who had law degrees. They were the ones who actually read led the French Revolution. A lot of people think it was the workers who rose up. It wasn't. It was the disgruntled elites who didn't get the cushy job that they had been promised.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But did they end up doing something awesome for the working people?

[Daniel Priestley]

Not really, no. They. Well, basically they chopped off a lot of people's heads. They gave rise to the Napoleonic Wars. So that was very violent. And then in, in Britain we had much more of a democratic revolution. So we had the Great Reform Act. We had. We had a massive movement called the Chartists. And the Chartists were basically millions of people. I think at a time where we had less than 20 million people in the country. We had between 1 and 3 million signatures on petitions. And basically they wanted a new charter, a political charter. And they had six demands of what they wanted. And basically they wanted to have free and fair elections. They wanted to have. You didn't have to own property in order to vote. You didn't have to tell your boss who you were voting for. You could have secret ballots that an MP could get paid so that a normal person could rise up and become an MP without having to be independently wealthy. So they had this list of six things that they called their charter for political power. They took to the streets. Huge. Hundreds of thousands of people on the streets saying that we wanted to change the way the political system runs. And here in the uk, through peaceful protest, we politically changed the way power is distributed through acts of government.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so if I'm at home and I'm really trying to track what you're saying. Angles, pause. I'll take it for granted that everybody understands why that's bad. You've got a small percentage of people doing financially just incredibly well. The vast majority of people. Are they flat or are they actually trending down?

[Daniel Priestley]

They're trending down mostly, yeah. K shaped economy would be exactly what you'd call it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so a K shaped economy I think needs further like that to me feels like a slightly different thing that maybe isn't as.

[Daniel Priestley]

It's a bifurcation, it's. It's essentially it. Like just think about it like that. Here's a really great way to Think about it. Imagine that we're all running a marathon and then a small group of people get the whisper in their ear, if you want, you can get on a bicycle, you can hop on a bicycle if you like. Right? And they go, oh, okay. And if you know how to ride a bicycle, and if you have access to a bicycle, you finish the marathon way faster than everybody else because you've got leverage now. And suddenly you get this, this separation of a group of people who can collect all the rewards on every single marathon because they know how to ride a bike. And the vast majority of the population are going, what the hell is going on? This seems rigged. It seems unfair. How is it possible that these people are doing these incredible marathon times that seem inhuman? And it's the same thing with technology here. It's like, how is it that some people are able to amass a billion dollars? How is it some people are able to, you know, AOC saying a billionaire shouldn't exist, it's impossible to earn a billion dollars. Right. That's like someone saying it's impossible to run a marathon in under an hour. It's like, we can, if you're on a bicycle or a car, you know, you can do 26 miles an hour pretty easily if you've got the right technology.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What I want to zoom in on is going back to the K shaped economy. I think people go, K shaped economy. I now have the words, I don't have to understand how we got here. So how we get here is deficit spending, money printing.

[Daniel Priestley]

So you and I disagree, right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's a two parter. Hang with me. So we've got that side which we can debate. But the thing that I think I want to put forward, and you can tell me if you think that this is patently wrong, is that we wouldn't find ourselves in the moment that we are in where there is so much resentment building up. If the rate at which prices were going up.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Was not far exceeding the rate at which people are making more money in the middle class.

[Daniel Priestley]

Totally.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so that to me is the thing that people just rush past and because they can look at all the other things like, oh, there are people making an incredible amount of money. Oh, we have a K shaped economy. And that's bad. And I go, yeah, like a K shaped economy is bad for the reasons that I laid out, but it isn't dangerous. What's dangerous is when you have people that can't make ends meet.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah, well, K shaped economy is dangerous because it plays into all these Human things around fairness. We actually have an inbuilt thing called a fairness reflex, which when I see you eating a big steak and I'm getting a tiny little piece of bread, there is an existential anger that kicks in that we call a fairness reflex. And all primates have this fairness reflex. We don't like it. We will sacrifice ourselves and our own happiness to make sure that we punish someone who we think is doing something unfair. So like monkeys, when, when they see something unfair happening, they will do things that is detrimental to their own circumstances in order to try to redress fairness. It is a, it is a major cause of violence. Like violence happens around perceived injustices.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so you don't think it's necessary for inflation to outstrip wage growth in order to end up in a violent situation?

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, we have a very dangerous cocktail where Instagram gives us the insight into how a lot of people live very, very well prior to social media. How many, how many people? Like consider this, if we would go back prior to social media, the typical person, how many insides of a house have they actually seen? Right. How many people have actually seen inside somebody else's house? You would have seen your family's houses, you would have seen your friends house of which would have been very similar to your house. You would have essentially maybe seen some houses in magazines occasionally, maybe, maybe Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, maybe Pimp My Crib kind of shows. But very, very rarely did we get an insight into how other people were living prior to social media. And today it's like, hey, wait a second, what do you mean that 27 year old has a Lamborghini? What do you mean that dude over there has a river running through his house? What do you mean? You know, that person who seems like, you know, they didn't work harder than I do, you know, has now spending time on a private jet going between locations. So we're now seeing into other people's lives. That sparks the jealousy, it sparks all of that. Everything's getting more expensive. Our skills are being devalued. Right. So the stage is set for, for people to be really pissed off.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Agreed. And I'm very aware of the studies and literature around the fairness principle. Watching monkeys get rewarded with cucumber versus another one get rewarded with grapes. Look it up. It is absolutely. In fact, we'll put it on the screen right now. I think humans will recognize it right away. Okay. So I don't know that we have to spend a lot of time on this, but.

[Daniel Priestley]

And to round that point, that exact thing that you're seeing in those monkeys, that's Instagram.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So here's the thing too, that we will disagree on. So I really believe that progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. If people are making progress, they're not going to rage out. Even if you have Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, even if you have MTV Cribs, which is primarily fake anyway, but it's still in the 80s and 90s. It wasn't creating the problem that Instagram creates today. I think people think this is a ubiquity problem. I do not think that is the case at all. I think that what's happening is the person isn't getting ahead, and it is the not getting ahead. In fact, it's the falling behind. It's the not having progress in their own life. Well, so here's why I think it's the K becomes important if the middle line is.

[Daniel Priestley]

It's relative to the middle.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but it's real expenses is what I'm getting at. So if the bottom of the K is going below the cost of things, then now you're going to trigger a real danger zone. And so going back to what you're saying about the French Revolution and why it broke so bad, you have overproduction of elites who not only have a status to maintain, like people are looking at them some type of way, but now they can't afford that lifestyle, and so now they are falling down. And if I'm right that progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness and they are regressing and not progressing, they are for sure going to be set off the reason, I think that. But it's at least worth saying to the audience, there are two different ways to view this. Even if we're not going to reach a conclusion in a timely fashion, that would be good tv. I put that out there because I think ultimately, to solve the problem, you have to know what's actually causing the

[Daniel Priestley]

problem and if it's a diagnosis.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But if you think it's inequality, you're going to derange because you will not understand.

[Daniel Priestley]

Inequality is an output, Right? Inequality is the scoreboard, and it can't be a cause. A lot of people say the cause is inequality. If you're looking at two sporting teams, two basketball teams, and you go, oh, 120 versus 35, you say, oh, the problem is inequality. No, no, no. The problem is that the teams are playing differently and they have different skill levels. The inequality is just a scoreboard and people are not understanding that. It is just an output and you can't blame the output. You have to understand what causes the output.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah, the pain's not there. If your savings account is going up, if you're upgrading your car, if you're upgrading your phone, if you're getting a pay rise and it translates into actual real benefits. Yeah, like you're not going to get violent revolution off that. It's when the two things diverge. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The two things diverge from the relevant cost of things. It's a very important caveat for me to keep banging home. Okay, so if we can agree that that is the foundational issue and that the reason that inequality becomes the boogeyman that people will chase and find themselves coming up empty, there's always going to be inequality. You want inequality because if you want to incentivize people to play the game, like, they've got to feel like, oh, I can really get ahead, I can win, I can do better.

[Daniel Priestley]

It's more than that. Inequality means that the market is correctly recognizing differences of value. So if you have a market that was very equal, then the market has lost its ability to distinguish between anything. So, for example, if. If the marketplace has total equality, it means there is no difference between my singing and Adele singing and Ed Sheeran singing. Right. The market can't distinguish between the value of Ed Sheeran singing a song and me singing a song. That's equality. Right. So what we see when we see inequality is a market that can distinguish between the quality of output and we want a level of inequality because that means the market is able to distinguish.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, totally agree. So that's why I really want to make sure that that's articul. Okay, so we. We've got the Engels pause. We come out of it through some violence, some not so violent.

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, the three big revolutions was the political power being redistributed, the ownership starting to redistribute, and the mass retraining of skills that were. That were relevant for an industrialized economy. So those were the big three.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay. And so the thing that's broken now, to put it simply, is people are falling below the cost of things. They're regressing, they're not progressing. Okay, so given that, what is it about socialism, like, if we were really going to give it its due, what is it that makes this idea of people go to different extremes, but the idea of redistributing wealth, what is it that makes that idea so attractive?

[Daniel Priestley]

It sounds awesome and it sounds obvious. Like the thing with socialism, it sounds obvious. It's like, hey, you've got one group of people who are billionaires and rising class and they can afford, you know, 10 houses and private jets. And it sounds so obvious that you would just take the money off those guys and give it to people who can't afford to eat. Like that just seems like the obvious thing. How could you be so daft as to not go in for that? You know? So anyone who looks at the problem on the surface, it's like, what, are we all thick? Like, take money off the guy who's got a private jet and give it to the person who's struggling to feed their children. That. That is the most obvious thing in the world.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so then why isn't it the answer?

[Daniel Priestley]

It's not the answer because we have to distinguish the difference between designing a game that works versus trying to fix the outcome that that game produced. Right? So, for example, if we don't like the score between two basketball teams, we can say, oh, well, the obvious answer is just take, you know, 50 points off of the winner and give them to the loser. And now the winner has to win by more than 50 points in order to beat the, you know, beat. Not actually addressing anything that produced the inequality in the first place. You're just simply saying, oh, we just don't like the score. So because we don't like the score, we're going to redress the score. We're Going to use, you know, a, you know, marker and a pen and just kind of change the score. And, and then you, you also get the people who actually win saying well I'm not going to play in this league, right? I'm not going to, I'm going to take my game elsewhere. Now in like to, to. I don't want to stretch the analogy too far but in the real economy if you do this too much, the highly productive people, they stop creating jobs. They come up, they spend a lot of their creativity on how do I set up international structures, how do I set this up in my kids names and my, you know, different company structures and how do I game the system. They become extremely creative as to keep hold on to the productivity that they generate. There's a, there's a law and I think it's around 38, 37, call it 40%. When you start taking 40% of what people produce off them, they become extremely motivated to figure out how to change the game so that they stop losing what they get. That has two impacts. It means that the impact is that they duck and weave outside of the system which they historically do. It also means that they put all of that creative energy that was creating jobs and affluence in a wealthy society. They go and they put that into creating structures and ducking and weaving and that sort of stuff.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So they, why isn't the answer then to clamp down on that?

[Daniel Priestley]

The issue is, is that when you're dealing with extremely wealthy people, they have, they have the ability to pay for advice. They have the ability to be leaner, more nimble, more dynamic and they have the ability to, especially in a digital environment, be anywhere in the world that they, that they think they can be advantageous with. So you know, the problem with all governments is they're geographically limited. The first word in every government is the geography, right? So the Australian government is the island of Australia. And it can only impact Australia, right? Can only do that, but it can't, it has very limited ability to impact Google because Google is a global company here in the uk Amazon doesn't pay tax. Starbucks doesn't pay tax. You know, Meta doesn't pay tax in the uk. We have met. If you buy a Facebook ad, you're buying a Facebook ad to run to a UK audience to sell a UK product that will be shipped from a UK warehouse. But Facebook's in Ireland, right? And you're going to buy something on Amazon. Oh, that. Actually technically we're in Luxembourg right now, right? When you're Buying that thing in Amazon, even though it's from the UK address to a UK address, we're going to be in Luxembourg at the moment, right? So these government, these billionaires, these billionaire corporations, they have figured the game out, right? And as long as governments are limited by geography, then they will always be one step ahead. You have to acknowledge there is a limitation to how much you can take off people. And there are also, there are other ways to fight billionaires. There are other ways to like the best way, the, the most dangerous way, right. I'm going to get shot for even saying it is anti monopolistic breaking up of companies. So you know, what they discovered about 100 years ago is that if you have a strategic monopoly or if you have a scale monopoly and they just break it up and they have to compete with each other, it's good for consumers, it's good for shareholders, it's good for everyone other than the person who owns the monopoly. So Amazon, you could argue, has a strategic monopoly. And you could say, look, you can't have AWS and Amazon because those two things are too well hedged against each other. It gives you a big strategic monopoly. You're going to have to spin out AWS and it has to stand on its own feet and compete on its own feet. You have to spin out Amazon. In fact, you're going to have to also break up Amazon prime and there's, you can't have Amazon Basics and Amazon the distribution center because you've got too much of a strategic monopoly here. Those things have to compete on their own merits, not based upon your strategic monopoly. Now, now what I've just said out loud is the most scary thing to the big companies. They do not want Google, Google Maps, YouTube to all have to compete on their own. They want a well hedged monopoly, which is called a strategic monopoly. They love the idea that these things offset each other. And actually there's nothing you can do to any of their businesses that won't be immediately offset by the other business. You know, that's what they're building for. They're trying to create strategic monopolies that are bigger than governments.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, So I think you're doing a really good job of speaking to some of the frustrations that people have with what they would call the billionaire class, with the way that companies are structured. Why shouldn't somebody at home be like, see, see, like exactly. This is what I'm talking about. Like these guys are dodging at every turn. If we could just have a one world government Then we could like finally stop them from being able to run and flee and hide so that we could actually get the fair share. Like, do you think that they are doing something? The. You're very clear on the anti monopolistic practices. I think you very clearly come down on the side of they shouldn't be doing it. And if you really want to go

[Daniel Priestley]

after them, effectively, that's part of capitalism. Capitalism is breakup monopolies.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Totally agree. So on that one, clear.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now go back to the first things that you listed. The way that they'll be in Luxembourg when they need to be, they'll be in Ireland. Like, is that something where like, this is grotesque. They shouldn't be doing this.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah. So the answer is not to create another strategic monopoly called government. Right. So government is also a strategic monopoly, but it has one big difference. Violence. It has a police force, it has an army, it has a navy, it has an air force. It can shoot you, it can lock you up, it can put you in a prison camp if it wants to, and it does all the time throughout all of history. So if you sit there and say, I really don't like Jeff Bezos having a strategic monopoly. I wish AOC had a massive strategic monopoly. I wish some Mamdani guy could actually take over the entire one world government. That would be a lot better. It's like, if you don't like the idea of Jeff Bezos having a strategic monopoly, well, the good news is Amazon doesn't have prison camps. Amazon doesn't have an air force.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yet.

[Daniel Priestley]

Right? Yet. Right. But, you know, these are businesses and yeah, okay, they're making a ton of money and they're very robust, very resilient. But as soon as you consolidate an equal and opposite power in government, that's where human life becomes completely expendable. And this is what a lot of young people don't understand right now. We've run this experiment of giving a lot of power to government and giving them a strategic monopoly. They absolutely abuse it within days. Like, they are the most freaking horrific people on the planet end up in politics. Right. These are not productive people. They're not people who think like normal people. They're psychopaths. These are people who want power, want to consolidate power, want to control you. They, they want to run your life. And if you give them power and violence and money and all of that stuff that you want to take off the billionaires, they are not your friends. Right. These are people who will, historically, they will put you in a prison camp. They will send you to the gulags, Right? So that the history of fighting monopolies by creating government monopolies doesn't work. What does work is the distribution of wealth and power. Right? So you need to go, let's break up the monopolies and make these companies compete on themselves. Let's create systems and processes that prevent you hitting a certain level of scale before you have to include others into that scale. Right, but it's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What does it mean to include others in that scale?

[Daniel Priestley]

So, for example, this here in the uk, the labor laws and the minimum wage laws and all of those sorts of things are exactly the same whether you run a tiny little hair salon or whether you run Tesco with 300,000 employees. And if you really kind of want to disrupt Tesco, give less regulation to small business and say, hey, look, if you're a small business with 10 people, you don't have massive bargaining power over your workforce. You know, start your labor laws wherever you want to start your labor laws, whatever people agree with, like, obviously some basics. But minimum wage, if you want to employ someone who's, you know, who's struggling to get a job, and you want to employ them on a wage that you can, Right. And that gets them on the, on the ladder, but the scale of it is only 10 people. So therefore there's going to be lots and lots of little companies competing for those types of people, and they're going to find, you know, we're going to let the markets function. But if you're Tesco with 300,000 people and a HR department and all those sorts of things. Yeah, you do have to have minimum wage and you do have to have more stringent controls because you have a disparity of power over your workers. So the idea is that you want to favor small businesses. You want to basically create entrepreneur. And if, if someone is a small business, if they're an entrepreneur, you want to have lower regulations, like anything under 50 people, let the market, like give them an advantage because that's what the big companies fear the most. They fear having to compete with these dynamic little startups.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, I want to zoom in on that a little bit so I understand why you're biased towards small companies. So is it that you think that they innovate better? Is it that you think that they are more attentive to the customer? Why, why should small companies be advantaged?

[Daniel Priestley]

It's competition. It's. It's competition that is keeping capitalism. Capitalism works because of competition, right? So as soon as, and, and look, it's interesting. We're exactly 250 years right now since the text Capitalism was written. So it was, it was written exactly 250 years ago. A guy called Adam Smith, I think 1776, wrote the wealth of Nations. Prior to that, he wrote a book on morality. He wrote a book about the moral instincts of humans. He was a deep, deep thinker. He was a very human thinker. He was not some guy who was like pro money and down with the poor and up with the rich. Like, that's not, that's not where he was at. He was, he was all about morality and he wanted to know what is the most moral way of running a society, not just what is the most affluent way. And he wrote wealth of nations with that as his lens. But he talks very clearly about the fact that it is the compet, it's the competitive part of capitalism that keeps all of it in check. And as soon as power consolidates, then it's essentially the end of capitalism. You have to break that down as much as possible. So when two bakers are in a city and he talks about this as an example, if you've got two bakeries, they're both trying to make the best bread at the lowest price. And if there's only one bakery, any bread at any price is what you end up with. So competition drives prices down, drives quality up. So I'm just pro competition because that's the lifeblood of capitalism.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about what's hiding in your cabinet. Count the bottles. The multivitamin you stopped taking back in March, the greens powder you forgot about in April. The mushroom capsules buried all the way the back. That's not a wellness routine, it's a graveyard. The problem was never the ingredients. It's the format. That's what makes Nandica by peak different. I've tried it. It is awesome. This is the rare product that doesn't feel like a chore. Nandica is a ceremonial cacao nootropic and it actually tastes like something you want to drink every morning. But what's inside is fantastic. Full spectrum reishi, including spore powder for cellular resilience. Just one cup can deliver calm energy, an elevated mood, sharper focus and cellular support. Stop stacking a bunch of supplements, you're never going to finish. Get 20% [e-mail] impact that's P I Q U E life.com impact every business has it A ton of it hours buried in reconciling spreadsheets, chasing down reports re entering the same data across systems that don't talk to one another. Nobody puts it on the P and L, but it is costing you in time, in speed and decisions that just come too late. The solution is NetSuite by Oracle. It's the number one AI cloud ERP trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It brings your financials, inventory, commerce, HR and CRM into one source of truth. Truth. No more stitching Together data from five different places. Now, with NetSuite AI connector, use the AI of your choice to tap into your actual business data. Ask every question you've ever had. If your revenues are in the seven figures or higher, get NetSuite's free business guide demystifying AI at netsuite.com theory the guide is free to you at netsuite.com Again, that's netsuite.com theory. Let's talk about how exposed you really are. Let's say you cut someone off in traffic. They're furious. They snap a photo of your license plate. Within minutes they can pull up your home address on a people search site. Your phone number, the names of your kids. Your personal information is sitting on hundreds of data broker sites. Your address, phone number, email, even your Social Security number number. Incogni shuts that down. They track your data down across hundreds of sites and remove it. You authorize them once they handle the rest and they keep removing it as it comes back. Plus, with custom removals, you can send them any link where your data shows up and their team is going to get it taken down. Incogni is the first and only data removal service independently verified by Deloitte. So you know it actually works. Go to incogni.comimpact and use code impact for 60% off an annual plan. Try it risk free for 30 days. That's incogni.com impact and be sure to use Code Impact. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. Historically speaking, governments have been a bad place to let power consolidate. When you let power consolidate there, they don't necessarily work for. And I'm going to put my own editorial spin here, correct me if any of this goes awry, but they're not necessarily always looking out for the little guy. They're looking out for the organism of the government. And so given that, they will become tyrannical and the individual certainly becomes meaningless in the face of the bureaucracy. And those bureaucracies will grow and grow and they will feed Themselves. And this is where the overlap to what I want to get into now comes. I just did a deep dive on Sweden and that was one of the things that they began to realize is that, oh, this bureaucracy can get so big that it starts becoming.

[Daniel Priestley]

They almost bankrupted themselves.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Correct. So it starts to work in the opposite direction. But if I were to take the Nordic example and say, well, hold on, we don't have to go all the way to tyranny. There are places that are doing it well now. Sweden is a incredible place. They have more billionaires per capita.

[Daniel Priestley]

They have huge wealth inequality. So yeah, they have massive wealth inequality, right. The reason, the reason Sweden has such wealth inequality is because of where they got to with socialism. And it's important, it's important to separate Norway because Norway is resource rich due to the oil in the North Sea. They have a massive sovereign wealth fund. In many ways they're very similar to Saudi Arabia or something like that in the, in the economic way that they operate. But Sweden is, is not. And Sweden is a great example of socialism gone, gone wr. So Sweden was the fourth wealthiest country in the world, the highest GDP per capita. They were doing incredibly well. But they had some wealth inequality, right? Some people were doing better than others. So they became a socialist country. They went all in on socialism and then they got to the point where they had runaway inflation, tyrannical governments starting to come in and control everything. They had dropped down to the 25th wealthiest country in the world. So they had lost 20 places, 21 places in there on the league table. Nothing was working. You couldn't get anything done. Their debt went crazy. I think at one point, 500% of GDP or something like something insane, they needed a bailout, right? So socialism absolutely crushed their economy. They went from really wealthy place to a desperately like failing economy under socialism. But they had all these socialist people and socialist structures who had gotten used to all the socialist just like everything's done for you thing. So they came up with a new brand of socialism. And the new brand of socialism is not redistribution from the wealthy to the poor. It's redistribution from your peak earning years to your needy years. So they time shift, they don't wealth shift. So what I mean by that is if you were to take a typical lifespan and you say you, you are dependent upon others as a child and then by age 40 you're earning great money and you are a wealth earner, wealth provider, and that goes right through to say 55 and then you start to taper off and then you're dependent as an elderly person. What Sweden's aim to do through government is to chop off your peak earning years and redistribute it to your beginning and end of life. Right? That's the goal. We help you at the beginning because we tax you so heavily in the middle and then we help you again when you're older. Right? And what they got away from is punish the rich for being rich and reward the poor for being poor. They got away from that and they said time shifting, not wealth shifting. And as a result of that mindset shift, they were able to come up with a socialist style or democratic socialist or basically a high tax, high services environment. But they also, we haven't run the experiment of what would have happened if they just had have stuck with capitalism and been the first four. They, you know, they were the fourth richest country in the world by capita and then they had to come back from the 25th. So this social socialist experiment, they, they themselves admitted that it failed and it only got better when they went free market and all the like. Americans are pissed off because they don't have health care really as a major sticking point. And they look around the world and see other places that have health care and it makes a lot of sense and there's better systems. They, you know, all of that sort of stuff. They. And yes, Sweden's got a healthcare system, but so does Australia, so does New Zealand, so does the UK. So do most places. After World War II, most Western countries came up with some sort of a healthcare system. US was the most lenient on the side of sort it out yourselves guys. And UK was very much, we'll sort it out cradle to grave for you. But you know, there's ultimately about 15% of GDP goes into healthcare systems around the world. So.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the interesting thing for me is so many people, including a Mamdani or an aoc, they'll point to Sweden and they'll say, see, this is an example of socialism done. Well, I think without realizing that they tapped out in the 90s and completely gave up on that. And it's interesting, there are quotes from Sweden, from Swedish government officials. One the finance minister saying, for the love of God, will you guys stop saying that? We're social specialist. Same idea from somebody in Denmark. Same thing. I think it was the sitting or former prime minister said because Bernie Sanders had just started his bid for Presidents back in 2019 and he said, I'm really glad that Bernie got a chance to visit the Soviet Union in 1988 before their entire System collapsed basically because of bad socialist policies. And so there's this sense that the Nordic countries are doing something that maybe they are, maybe they're not.

[Daniel Priestley]

Not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When I look at Sweden, the thing I found interesting is that when you start comparing the numbers, you realize very quickly America is also not what people says it is. So I would put forward that America is socialist. Ish. So the Swedes spend 24% of their GDP on social services, we spend 22%. So it is, it is a huge expense. Here in the US we do it terribly and the way that we're going about it obviously is absolutely nonsensical, which is another conversation. But I don't know how deeply you've gone into the Nordic countries, but when you think about beyond Sweden, maybe setting Norway aside, is there something there to like, hey, let's do a broad based tax. So if in the U.S. 50% of people pay 3% of the tax tax, 50% pay 97%. But in Sweden it's very, it's across everybody. Like is there a win there where we just say, cool, we're just going to tax the life out of everybody?

[Daniel Priestley]

It's a little bit tricky because you've also got very small populations, very homogenous populations. These are populations that all cluster around a few cities. They've been to the same school systems, they got the relatively same education. They look the same. Right. They look like it's very difficult because humans are primates. It's very difficult. When you want to go a continent size example. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Why does it break apart? What's the actual mechanism?

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, for example, when you have a small population that are homogeneous, they roughly speaking accept the idea that we're all in this together because we all live very close to each other. I can see all of us kind of working the same, doing the same culturally. We've got the same values, you know, so there isn't a huge upset with the idea as soon as like for example, a lot of the Nordic countries at the moment are having massive issues because there are no go zones where people look very different and have cultural, very different cultural values. And suddenly a lot of the Nordic people are saying, hey, we're not happy with this idea that we're all in this together because these guys don't seem like they're all in it together. They seem like they're running a very different culture to our culture. So we don't like it anymore. Right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's it?

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, we don't like sharing the pie. Like for example, if, if you've got like, let's break it down to the size of a tribe. If roughly speaking, we all know that we're part of the same tribe because we're tribal animal and we all, roughly speaking, work the same. But for the fact that there are some of us that are older, but we know that they did their time and there are some of us that are younger, but we know that they are the future and they will do their time, then we're all very much minded towards this idea of we're all in this together. But as soon as we say, oh, by the way, this group of people who look very different and have very different cultural values, they don't want to work as hard as you want to work and they don't want to work the same way as you want to work and they don't have the same schooling or education as you and now you have to provide for them. Them, our little monkey brains don't, don't tend to go in for that. So in places where you have a homogeneous society that is very small, right. Living in a few cities and everyone kind of looks the same, you get a much more acceptance towards socialism. Like if you were to sort of say, if you were to pick a particular couple of cities where it's all very much like the same in the US you probably would get away with it. But as soon as you try and scale it across an entire continent, you know, it's just harder. It's just harder with scale.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, we're running the experiment in New York City. What's your prediction there?

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, the first issue with all socialism is that you have to extract wealth from the productive people, right? That is how it works. You've got to say who currently owns the wealth. There's two types of people who've got the wealth. There are people who through unproductive gains through inheritance or winnings, luck, marriage, divorce, they've got gains that you might say are passive gains or ill gotten gains, right? So you can sort of say, okay, well can we get some of that money? But also you have to cast a wide net at the level of government. So you're going to catch a lot of people who are productive business owners and job creators and all of this sort of stuff. There was a period of time where the physical location was very largely linked to the wealth. So physical buildings, physical factories, physical supply chains, ports. Right. New York was built because it was a port, you know, that ships could go into originally. So there was all of these kind of physical things that made New York, a place that you kind of just had to be if you wanted to be part of this New York ecosystem system. And what we're discovering really quickly in this digital age is that the physical geographical locations don't really matter that much. You know, we don't really care. Like a hedge fund doesn't really care if it's based in Dallas or Miami or, you know, New York somewhere else. Right. We can move those things around. So we're discovering that there's a decoupling from geography. So the first problem that you have with all socialism is that if you introduce punitive taxation and punish people for being rich, and you point out this is this guy's house, and he's, you know, made way too much money, and we want to take. Take a chunk of his house off him. And by the way, he employs 16,000 of us who are the highest earning of us, who pay a ton of taxes. We don't like them either. Then those guys get together and go, why are we here?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this is where we flash on the screen. This is a true story. As Mamdani calls out Ken Griffith.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah. So those. Of course. Of course, they sit there and go, we've got an ego. I don't want to be in a city that doesn't want to have me here. Fine. If you guys want to be better off without me. Better be better off without me. You know, it's kind of. It's kind of like the husband and wife where the wife's earning all this money and the husband's like, oh, I don't like this. I'm going to go get a divorce. And the wife goes, okay, enjoy. Right? Go. Go on life without me. It's like. And they go their separate ways.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The reason I brought this up, though, is you were saying this could work at a city level level. So what is it about New York where it doesn't match your instinct on the city level?

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, I'm only saying that people might have a more all in it together attitude at a city level. At a local level, communism works. At a family level, my family is communist. Right. So there's five of us together, and we redistribute the wealth as our communist dictators see fit. Right. So we're totally communist at a family level, we're socialist at a. A community level, perhaps at a church group level. And then we become very capitalist when it comes to bigger groups that we don't know everyone in the group and we're not sure what the others are doing and how hard they're working and whether they're putting into the pot as well. So it's just harder to scale is all I'm saying.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let me say it in a really colloquial way. You tell me if this lands. So I really get annoyed when people talk about this being a race thing. So people will say homogenous. And I'm like, why do people think it's homogeneous? I don't think it has anything to do with looks. I think it has everything to do with values. If people share values, meaning, hey, we're all growing up together.

[Daniel Priestley]

I would agree with that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I see this person isn't pulling their weight. I'm gonna go, hey, fuck wit, you're not pulling your weight. I see you every day. This is small enough that I know you. And so we share cultural values. Like Japan has really intense cultural values. And so there. If you've never been to Tokyo, it is the most surreal thing in the United States universe. They have no trash cans on the street. You will end up carrying your trash for real.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I remember thinking, this is the weirdest thing in the universe. If this were America, everywhere on the ground. Because Americans don't share that same value. And so in Sweden, yeah, it is a value thing.

[Daniel Priestley]

It's a values thing that, that essentially that. That it's culturally. We're aligned. Values. We're aligned. We want to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Certain values like it will only work in a culture where the value is don't take if you don't need.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And. And work as hard as you can. Right. And it's that like if you take post war Britain, everybody knew we're in the rebuilding phase of the country and it was considered to be absolutely abhorrent that you would go on benefits if you didn't need to be on benefits. There were people who had their legs and arms blown off who said, I will find a way to go out to work. Right. And that's an all in it together. Whereas today we have. I think we now have a welfare bill here that is bigger than income tax combined. We have hundreds of thousands of homes that have just decided that they're better off in benefits and they don't want to work. And we now have this issue that it's culturally totally fine to just be on benefits because you've calculated that you'd be better off on benefits.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's why to me, homogeneity isn't the thing. Certainly race is not the thing.

[Daniel Priestley]

Values homogeneity. But I also.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But a certain type of values homogeneity. Because if you have. Have values homogeneity about get whatever you can, you're toast.

[Daniel Priestley]

But I also will say that don't underestimate. Humans are primates. So like if, if cult, like if just people who look different are going to also, you know, they have this. The issue is, is that when people dress differently and look differently and have come from a different place and don't speak the same language, literally the same language, they don't speak, speak. You know, this is where this. And by the way, I'm not talking about theoretically, I'm talking about it is breaking down in Denmark, it is breaking down in Sweden because of these

[Tom Bilyeu]

immigration like is that there was millions of

[Daniel Priestley]

people who were brought in, right. So there was a period of time when millions of people came into those countries and have set up groups that don't integrate well. And this is one of the things that is putting pressure on that, on that system.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But you guys in the UK have a bunch of Albanians.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is it going to be a problem for them even though they're white?

[Daniel Priestley]

The, the. Well, it, it, it's. It has been an issue historically. Romanians and Albanians and all those sorts of things. Prior to Brexit, that was actually a conversation because it was these, this group of people are failing to integrate and they don't seem to have the same values as us around, you know, so, you know, they don't have the all in it together values. They're here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I agree, but I thought what you were trying to tell me was that, hey, we're monkeys and we do notice

[Daniel Priestley]

the skin difference, dressing difference, language difference. So it's all the markers of values and alignment and all those sorts of things.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you're not going to let me escape the racing. We have to put it in.

[Daniel Priestley]

I just think it's all part of. I think it's all part of it that when you see groups of people that integrate really well, they have more in common than difference. Right. So they just have a common language, they have a common dress, they have a common courtesy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so interesting. It's. I heard. Trust me, I get what you're saying and it may be because I'm an American and so I grew up with. You're just around other nationalities all the time.

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, I'm here in London for 20 years. Everyone's from somewhere else.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now that wasn't true even say 25 years ago. But when you. I'll lay out the thesis and if you think it's bunk, you're going to have to help me reconcile because I feel like you're pushing me to accept that. No, no, no. There is going to be a race component. We have to accept that. But what I want to test with the American hypothesis that this really is values. Everything else is confusion.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so in America, you're going to grow up around a whole bunch of different races. Unless you're like just somewhere where somehow that didn't happen and you can still identify each other around shared American values. Like Americans are. You can spot them a mile away internationally.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Like there is a way that we behave, there's a way that we talk, there's a way that we act. Sure, there's no monolith, but it's like you really can tell an American. And that I would say is very easy for it to transcend color. And I feel like people are so rabid about being anti racist that they make this about race. And I feel like I'm screaming into a void saying this is fucking values.

[Daniel Priestley]

It's values.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It doesn't have anything to do with race.

[Daniel Priestley]

I agree with you. And also, here's the other thing. It doesn't really matter under capitalism, because under capitalism you voluntarily trade with whoever you want to voluntarily trade with with. Right. What, what I'm describing is that when you go full socialist and it's a, we're all in this together and we're going to pool our resources and split our resources, that's where these things start to become more of issues. Because we look at each other suspiciously and saying, are you working as hard as I'm working? Right. That's all I'm saying that socialism makes people very suspicious of what everyone else is doing. Right. So like, just think about, about the group project at university. If it's like we're going to put seven or eight of you together and you're going to get the same grade as each other. All of a sudden, that guy who's off getting drunk and not sitting there studying and working on the group project, we're now pissed off because, hey, wait a second, how come I'm carrying your grades? Right? And you try and scale that. The beauty of capitalism, it's the most moral system because nobody cares about any of those stuff. The more capitalism, the more peace you get between nations and people and individuals. Because the deal is really simple. Simple. You have to be a value to me so that I can trade with you. And I've got to be a value to you. So you want to trade with me and we can look Different. We can sound different. You can do things your way, I can do things my way. Whatever you want to do is fine, because it's all based on voluntarily, voluntary trade. So voluntary trade is this amazing leveler where everyone can be however you want to be. But ultimately, if you want to be successful, you're going to have to be a value to someone else. Do that however you want to do that or not.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so give me the final analysis on the Nordic countries. Because the, the. Our time together is meant to drive towards. We are going to present a solution.

[Daniel Priestley]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so I want to know if we can just go Norway or we can just go Sweden, Denmark, whatever.

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, here's what you've got to accept. If you want to go the Nordic model, you've got to accept that this is not redistribution from the wealthy to the poor. This is redistribution throughout time in your life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay? So that's universal. That's not just Sweden. That's how they Nordic model.

[Daniel Priestley]

That's how they think about it as the Nordic model, which is we're going to do really high taxes so that when you're old and when you're young, you get looked after by the state.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But it's not a Ponzi scheme. It's. You are going to pay a ton in, but we're going to give you a ton at the end.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah, right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Or is it you're going to pay a ton now, but you're going to get the same as everybody when you're old.

[Daniel Priestley]

But just so you know, I actually

[Tom Bilyeu]

don't know the answer.

[Daniel Priestley]

Just so you know, the wealth inequality in, in the Nordic countries is astronomical. They have plenty of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The Gini coefficient rating is.

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, it's like 0.4 or something like that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Jesus, that's like China.

[Daniel Priestley]

It's, It's.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You sure about that?

[Daniel Priestley]

Well, let's, let's look into, fact check

[Tom Bilyeu]

it and put it on the screen.

[Daniel Priestley]

But I will say billionaires, per capita, millionaires, per capita wealth inequality, right? The, the percentage owned by the 1%, the percentage owned by the top 10%. Right? The wealth is astro. The wealth inequality astronomical. They're not. Not. When they tried to tax wealth, the wealthy left and it damaged the country. So they stopped doing it. When they tried to go full circle.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Their corporate tax is lower than America's.

[Daniel Priestley]

They basically have two systems. If you want to be a. Let's imagine this. Let's imagine that there's a quadrant, right? And you've got people who love to take risks, right? And they were happy to Play the risk game and you've got people who love to work hard. Now entrepreneurs are hardworking risk takers. And if you're a hard working risk taker, the Nordic countries are great for you, right? They low company taxes, right. All sorts of support and help and educated people, all this sort of stuff. Hard working risk taker. You're in this category, you're in this box. We're going to look after you. You're a wealth creator, right? Hard working, but don't like taking risks. Okay. You're a worker. We're going to tax you high when you're earning high and redistribute it to when you're not earning high. Right? So that's what they do for that box. You're a risk taker, but you're not a hard worker. Okay. You're an investor, right. Investment class. You're a financier, right? So we're going to tax you a different way because of that. Low risk taking, low hard working. Oh, you're a pain in the ass, Right. You're, you're a socialist, right? So, okay, we're going to try and keep you as quiet as possible and keep you stopping from getting in everybody's way.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There went the comments section lighting up there on that one. Okay, so it's kind of true, by the way.

[Daniel Priestley]

Yeah, look at all the socialists. They're not. They don't like hard work or risk now they want to go to university and they want to get a degree in butterfly farts. And it's a good degree, Daniel.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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