Trump’s Wild Ultimatum: Iran Showdown, Oil Wars & Media Meltdowns | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Summary

Podcast Summary: Trump’s Wild Ultimatum: Iran Showdown, Oil Wars & Media Meltdowns | The Tom Bilyeu Show

Podcast: Impact Theory
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Episode Date: April 6, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode of The Tom Bilyeu Show (Impact Theory Live), Tom and frequent guest Drew Manning tackle a rollercoaster week in world affairs, focusing especially on President Trump’s combative Iran policy, global oil dynamics, media and political reactions, and America’s shifting values under pressure. The conversation seeks to look “behind the headlines and memes” with a blend of critical skepticism, lived perspective, and cultural commentary.

Major topics include Trump’s confrontational social media ultimata toward Iran over the Strait of Hormuz, economic risks in oil markets, military actions and fog-of-war reporting, escalating political and cultural polarization, the normalization of “mad king” rhetoric in American commentary, and reflections on collective values, media cycles, and civic accountability.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Trump’s Iran Ultimatum — Rhetoric Escalation & Real-World Consequences

• [00:24–09:07]
  • Trump’s tweet: Publicly threatens Iran with destruction (“Open the effing Strait of Hormuz, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell.” “Praise be to Allah.”)
  • Tom expresses concern over the normalization of extreme threats and presidential behavior:

    “There is an entertainment value. There’s a shock value, to be sure. But when you’re talking about human life, this stuff all gets very dark way, way, way too fast.” (Tom, 02:56)

  • Context on Trump’s pattern: multiple rolling ultimatums, deadlines extended, and apparent willingness to escalate.
  • Both hosts discuss the high-stakes brinksmanship and the perceived irrationality on both sides:

    “You’ve got Trump on a one way ticket to prison if he doesn’t maintain power... And then the Iranians literally life and death on their side.” (Tom, 08:48)

2. Oil Markets, Economic Fallout, Global Risks

• [09:41–18:31]
  • Trump’s strategy seen as one of clear force escalation; possible shutdown of the Strait of Hormuz would have massive economic impact.
  • Tom breaks down international oil pricing and why US self-sufficiency doesn’t insulate it from global oil shocks:

    “Oil prices are set internationally…that will be extraordinarily impactful to the global economy.” (Tom, 10:55)

  • The OPEC response—plans to increase production—but moving oil remains a risk amid military threats.
  • Tom emphasizes that, while world oil reserves are ample, any transition will be expensive and disruptive.

3. Asymmetric Warfare, War Crimes, and the Erosion of Norms

• [18:50–21:04]
  • Discussion on possible US attacks on Iranian civilian infrastructure as war crimes.
  • Tom’s realism about the “moral high ground”:

    “We gave up the moral high ground a very long time ago. And so the only question is, does this moment in history mandate that you give up the moral high ground? I don’t know—that will be a question for historians to look at.” (Tom, 21:04)

4. The Pilot Rescue Operation — Fog of War and Competing Narratives

• [25:23–34:03]
  • Detailed recap of the dramatic US rescue of downed pilots in Iran—a major military gamble.
  • Conflicting stories: US touts a daring victory; Iran claims to have shot down multiple planes; online conspiracy theories abound.
  • Tom appreciates the valor but urges skepticism toward all hurried accounts:

    “Please keep in mind...we are in the middle of information warfare right now. So what I’m gonna walk you through is the closest thing to the truth that I can cobble together at this early stage.” (Tom, 25:47)

5. Mad King Discourse — Polarization, Media Cycles, & Criticizing Leadership

• [38:50–42:58]
  • Candace Owens and Bret Weinstein call Trump a “mad king” and evoke removal/intervention.
  • Tom rejects that these are coordinated talking points, arguing both are speaking their minds in their own way:

    “I don't think there is a coordinated messaging campaign going out or anything. I think Trump is acting in a manner that makes it very easy to go, oh, yeah, this is a mad king.” (Tom, 40:04)

  • Discuss the necessity and risks of criticism in times of crisis:

    “Do you want a democracy where people are able to say, I think this behavior has now reached that level? Like, I think Candace…believes that is an indicator of truth, which is so crazy to me.” (Tom, 41:19)

6. Fraud Fractal and America’s Splintered Values

• [23:52–66:40]
  • Tom introduces the concept of a “fraud fractal”—both parties exploiting systems for power, the middle class losing in the process.
  • Deep dive into American fraud issues: $500B+ annually in federal fraud, waste, and abuse (per GAO); the real problem isn't lack of funds but corruption and inefficiency.
  • Tom makes repeated calls for plugging “leaky buckets” before increasing taxes or spending, emphasizing accountability.

7. Loss of Shared Values & Consequences for Democracy

• [46:33–56:05]
  • Extended conversation on America's eroding sense of a shared value system.
  • Tom distinguishes values from strategies/tactics (e.g., slogans like "America First" lack grounding).
  • Reminisces about eras (founding, 1990s) when the national ethos was clearer, suggesting economic and cultural upheavals (2000s dot-com bust, K-shaped recovery) have fractured consensus.

8. Culture Wars, Cancel Culture, and Public Redemption

• [72:28–85:00]
  • Commentary on social media pile-ons (e.g., Lex Fridman hate), cycles of “becoming the villain” as a function of visibility and optimism in a cynical climate.
  • Tom argues that greatness and the public’s desire for redemption ensure that some “canceled” figures (Kanye, Roseanne, Louis CK) will inevitably return:

    “If you can create…that thing that makes people feel the thing that they want to feel, then you’ve got…it’s not a free pass…but you’ve got a shot.” (Tom, 81:45)

  • Hypocrisy and selective outrage discussed as natural human behaviors, especially for institutions prioritizing profit (e.g., Pepsi, Disney).

9. Racism, Opportunity, and Group Dynamics in America

• [88:16–97:16]
  • Professor Jiang argues America is "probably the least racist country in the world" in terms of opportunities for immigrants. Tom and Drew dissect the nuance: systemic vs. street-level, ethnic vs. racial bias, global vs. domestic context.
  • Tom notes the hardwiring of in-group/out-group mentality but encourages focusing on opportunity and outcomes rather than obsessing over discrimination.
  • Practical mindset advice: “You become what you repeat.” (Tom, 97:36)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Trump’s Iran Gambit:

  “He [Trump] backs up the things that he claims, even when it seems absolutely politically suicidal. So if he does not see some sort of off ramp, you can expect him to push forward with that.”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [03:52]

• On Normalization of Crisis:

  “I would like PSA time to remind us all we are the frog being slowly boiled…here we are. So I think it’s important for all of us to remind ourselves how insane this moment really is…”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [09:41]

• On Media & ‘Mad King’ Rhetoric:

  “I think Trump is acting in a manner that makes it very easy to go, oh, yeah, this is a mad king…And the thing is, history is replete with people like this.”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [40:04]

• On National Values:

  “We don’t have, we certainly don’t have a shared sense of what are the values that America would live and die for. And if you don’t have a shared set of values, you cannot articulate them and stand for them.”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [47:56]

• On Fraud & Waste:

  “The amount of fraud that’s in the US system is so staggering. Besson talked recently…as much as 10% of the US federal government’s budget is lost to fraud, waste, and abuse every year.”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [59:03]

• On Social Media Cynicism:

  “Lex Friedman represents optimism in an age of cynicism, and people just cannot have it. A certain type of person cannot have it. And that is so sad.”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [73:20]

• On Racism and Opportunity:

  “You’ll never get to zero racism the world over unless you’re able to augment our genes or augment our actual physical bodies…It’s just wired into the human psyche.”
  — Tom Bilyeu, [93:12]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |----------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | 00:24–02:56 | Trump’s explicit Iran ultimatum, discussion of shock value and normalization | | 09:07–10:55 | Economic consequences of Strait of Hormuz crisis, oil pricing explained | | 16:20–18:31 | OPEC response and limits of increasing oil production amid conflict | | 20:38–21:04 | War crimes, “moral high ground” discussion | | 25:23–34:03 | U.S. pilot rescue in Iran – breakdown of conflicting reports, military/cultural context | | 38:50–42:58 | “Mad King” commentary from Owens & Weinstein; examining the normalization of radical rhetoric | | 46:33–56:05 | Discussion on fracturing values, populism, America’s lack of shared ethos | | 59:03–66:40 | Federal fraud and waste, GAO data, calls for systemic reform over tax increases | | 72:28–75:12 | Lex Fridman/media hate, optimism vs. cynicism in cancel culture | | 88:16–97:16 | Professor Jiang’s “least racist country” claim, nuanced takes on opportunity, group dynamics |

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Tone and Style

• Tom Bilyeu’s style is analytic, often self-reflective, and skeptical of meme-driven or emotionally charged narratives.
• Both hosts directly address anxieties, polarization, and “stupidity” in our public discourse, striving for realism but not defeatism.
• Frequent humor (“laminate is close enough”; “Are we entering into, like, we can’t criticize Trump?”), pop culture allusions, and references to classic movies and literature help make the analysis accessible.

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For New Listeners

This episode provides a sweeping look at how political drama, global economics, media narratives, and cultural anxieties intersect at a moment of maximal volatility. Tom and Drew blend technical knowledge (oil pricing, geopolitics, fraud) with philosophical arguments about values, leadership, and emotional reasoning in public life. If you want to understand not just headlines but the stories and psychology shaping them, this episode is an insightful guide—unafraid of hard questions or uncomfortable truths.

Final Note:

“Do not give in to cynicism. Try to find beauty in things. If you can make something people want, you can come back from a lot.”
— Tom Bilyeu, closing remarks

Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

I sold my car in Carvana last night. Well, that's cool.

[Drew Manning]

No, you don't understand.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It went perfectly.

[Drew Manning]

Real offer down to the penny.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're picking it up tomorrow.

[Drew Manning]

Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem? That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch. That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

[Drew Manning]

Wow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You need to relax. I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?

[Drew Manning]

I think it's laminate. Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up. Fees may apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I'm excited to have you guys here. I hope you had an absolutely wonderful Easter. It was a wild weekend if you were paying attention to world affairs. Trump told Iran, this is a quote, open the effing Strait of Hormuz, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell. Praise be to Allah. That actually happened. That's a real tweet. Oh, gosh. Trump designates Tuesday as Power plant day and bridge Day, then promptly pushes back the deadline. Some people are mad about that. I really hope it doesn't come to pass. We'll see. The US Managed to rescue both downed pilots in Iran. Many claim it was all faked, but I don't see any credible reporting on that yet. So we'll be walking you guys through the different narratives that are coming out over that one. Over 50 senior Iranian officials and military leaders are claimed to have been eliminated in a US Strike. We will see if that one ends up being true. The reporting on that one is pretty thin, but we'll cover that as a part of the ongoing fraud investigations in California. Over 200 fraudulent hospice centers have been shut down. I, for one, am very excited to see it. And Candace Owens openly calls for a foreign government to overthrow the U.S. also true. So it was a wild weekend. And, yeah, I hope that you guys are ready for the ongoing saga in Iran. It does not seem to be letting up anytime soon. We'll see if we can actually just bomb everything back into the stone Age and then peace out, which is what Trump claims he's going to do. I'm hoping that we're going to have some sort of negotiated settlement. My instinct is that this will get pushed back and back and back while we open room for negotiation, but we'll see.

[Drew Manning]

It was hilarious. Happy belated Easter, everybody. Hope you had A great weekend. Mayor Mamdani tweeted out. Happy Easter, New York. Today, millions of New Yorkers celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the victory of hope over despair and faith over fear. The Muslim socialists and the Christian president said, today will be a power plan day, bridge day, all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Open the effing straight. Somebody is having a drinking game that every time we say the F word, they have to drink. So feel free to drop it deliberately today or you'll be living in hell. Just watch. Praise be to Allah. President Donald J. Trump. Talk about threats. That's a spicy one. What was your initial reaction seeing that tweet?

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is more of what I come to expect from the President, much to my dismay. I really do miss the era of a president being presidential. I won't lie. I find this stuff morbidly hilarious. Emphasis on the morbidly so. There is an entertainment value. There's a shock value, to be sure. But when you're talking about human life, this stuff all gets very dark way, way, way too fast. So I couldn't believe it. I sort of guffawed out loud, largely from anxiety. But, yeah, it was one of those. I had to fact check it. I was like, there's no way that's what it actually said, right? Like, this is. Cause people write tweets in his voice all the time. But, yep, that one actually does seem to be real. He's like, at the beginning of this term, you could see he was trying to be restrained. He dropped the 1F bomb as he was about to get on, I think either the helicopter or headed to Air Force One. And it was like, oh, my God, it's a big deal. Like, can you believe the President said that? And then you see how far it's gotten. And clearly this is somebody who's building a mental map of the Iranians as being completely unwilling to negotiate, willing to let their country just be burned to the ground. We started to get this sense of what the Trump administration's mental map was of this whole process. When Witkoff said, you know, we can't believe that they haven't capitulated. So we're sending all this hardware, all of these troops, everything over into the region, and they're just not doing anything with it. You can. Eric, you can just go to the top. You're good, you're good. So that, like, once we could see that's where they're mapping all of this stuff out, is they're being unreasonable, that they're you should be able to build up force, hold a club to somebody's head, put a gun in their face and they react, act in a prescripted way. And the fact that they're not reacting that way, I think is very shocking to Trump. And so we're seeing that in this latest tweet. All right, so for people that don't have all the context, it went like this. Trump tweeted out. Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day all wrapped up in one in Iran. There will be nothing like it. Three exclamation points. Open the fucking straight with an actual apostrophe at the end. You gotta respect the attention to detail. There's you crazy bastards or you'll be living in hell. Just watch all caps. Praise be to Allah. The praise be to Allah part is what spun a lot of people out. Not the you crazy bastards, you'll be living in hell. All that. The praise be to Allah. It admittedly is an amusing choice, but nonetheless, Trump has now extended the power plant and bridge Day deadline three times. Something like two or three times. The current cutoff is Tuesday, April 8th at 8pm Eastern. We'll see if that holds. Iran has made it clear it has no intention of meeting that deadline. On Sunday, Trump told the Wall Street Journal, if they don't do something by Tuesday evening, they won't have any power plants and they won't have any bridges standing. Now, I for one, Trump backs up the things that he claims, even when it seems absolutely politically suicidal. So if he does not see some sort of off ramp, you can expect him to push forward with that. I'll be very surprised, however, if he doesn't extend this again pretty substantively if he's seeing cues that he has somebody that he can work with. Now, the Tuesday deadline is the latest in a series of ultimatums from your boy. Trump first demanded Iran fully reopen the Strait within 48 hours on March 21. Then he extended that window and now we'll see if the 8pm Eastern one holds. Iran's response basically coming directly from their foreign minister. He told Al Jazeera flatly, at present, there is no negotiation. And I can feel these guys like banging the table. It's like, how many times do I have to say this? We're not negotiating with them, which seems like a lie. P.S. by the way, I think they're standing on literal words. It seems pretty apparent that there is back channel negotiation going on with Pakistan. It's causing a lot of drama with the uae, which we'll talk More about later. But the speaker of Iran's parliament posted that no negotiations have been held, calling Trump's announcements a scheme to manipulate oil markets. The gap between what each side is claiming is getting pretty wide, but hopefully we're all getting used to that at this point. Trump told Axios that talks are going well and said there's a good chance of a deal, but warned if they don't make a deal, I am blowing up everything over there. That is a quote. The structural problem is this. Iran's counter demands are wild and they include an end to all US and Israeli strikes. Fair ask. Full sanctions relief. Gonna have a hard time with that one. Keeping its missile program intact. That's obviously a non starter. War reparations, that's laughable. And international recognition of Iranians sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Good luck with that. Washington has called their terms a non starter, as you would expect. Now, Iran's Joint Military command responded to Trump's Sunday threat by repeating its warning to target energy infrastructure across the Gulf. And an advisor to Iran's new Supreme Leader threatened closure of the Bab Al Mandab strait as well. So that's on the other side. So just trying to make sure that everybody's escalating from a just absolute mass chaos standpoint. Remember this is existential and it's existential for both sides. You've got Trump on a one way ticket to prison. If he doesn't maintain power in the midterms, he will get impeached almost certainly. And then if and when he goes out of office, all bets are off if the Democrats are in power. So he's looking at this from a. Well it's sort of Mount Rushmore or bust. And then the Iranians literally life and death on their side. So expect people to continue to be completely irrational from the other person's side. Because when somebody's backed into a corner like that and it really does seem existential from their perspective, they have a totally different set of calculus. So yeah, this one's gonna just continue

[Drew Manning]

to be strange in everything though because I feel like this is his fourth or fifth like deadline ultimatum. Does this specific narrative worry you that

[Tom Bilyeu]

he backs off all the time?

[Drew Manning]

No, no, just this specific threat. Because I have a poll.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Jesus.

[Drew Manning]

I have a poll in the chat right now. Does Tuesday's deadline you know cause trustee. Yeah, because I feel like civilian infrastructure is a bit of a different category. But I don't know if we are just categorizing this as like, oh well this is just like he threatened the oil. This is just like he threatened the island. This is just like he threatened the Strait before. Or does this feel different with you because of the bridge? Because of the.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, here's the really bad news. It doesn't feel different. This feels like the normal escalatory path that I would expect Trump to be on with a regime that feels that it's in an existential fight for its life. However, I would like PSA time to remind us all that we are the frog being slowly boiled. And if I went back in time to say October, and I said, this is the headline in, you know, April, what, 6th? You guys would be like, no way. Like, there's no way. That's so crazy. And yet here we are. So I think it's important for all of us to remind ourselves how insane this moment really is, that we really are at war right now, that we are threatening to take out their energy, their civilian bridges, which will cause retaliatory strikes across the GCC nations, which will. If you think oil prices are rough right now, wait till you see when we wipe out Iran. Iran then wipes out a bunch of places across the Gulf because oil prices are set internationally. So you're going to hear Trump bang one drum over and over and over. The US doesn't need the oil from the rest of the world.

[Drew Manning]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Great. Largely true. However, oil prices are set internationally, meaning there's a certain amount of oil that is produced every day that can be shipped around the world. And if you have oil in your country meant to go to the people in your town and somebody around the world, namely China, goes, well, you just blew up everything. In Iran, where we were getting between Venezuela and Iran, something like 20% of China's oil comes from there. Now all of a sudden, they're going to start bidding for that oil that was meant to stay domestic. But now those producers are like, cool, guys, I'll let it stay domestic, but you're going to have to match the price that I can get on the international market. So the prices are still going to go up. Whether we're ever going to deal with shortages is a different story. You're still going to see the price climb. So that will be extraordinarily impactful to the global economy. So the reason that I hope, myself and everybody else included, stays alert to just how high risk this moment is from a global economic standpoint, not just loss of human life standpoint, is that this is the kind of thing that escalates out of control. You're never able to get the escalatory dominance that you were hoping to get. And so the Strait of Hormuz then just effectively get shut down and the world will respond. And Saudi, for instance, is already beginning to pump oil over land, so it will do things like that. We'll reorganize around North America, both the US And Canada that are getting richer because the world is now turning to us for more oil. So it's all going to be these crazy trade offs, but that will take time. It will not be a smooth transition, let's say that. So yeah, we're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. The people who win, they're not smarter, they just absorb more ideas faster. There are thousands of books right now on business psychology, leadership books that have already changed how the best operators think, think. And everyone you haven't read is a gap between you and the people who have. This is a bandwidth problem, not a discipline problem. And that's exactly what Blinkist was built to solve. It takes the world's best nonfiction books and distills them into 15 minute summaries you can read or listen to. It's got over 9,000 titles. We're talking atomic habits, thinking fast and slow. The hard thing about hard things? Books you know you should have read by now, done in the time it takes to drink your coffee. And because it's built for mobile, your commute becomes a classroom. Blinkist also sends you personalized recommendations so you actually build a daily learning practice instead of just planning to do one. Start your free trial at blinkist.com/ that's B L I N K I S T.com impact start learning aggressively today. It will change your life. Most people don't realize that three out of four US Homes have toxic chemicals in their tap water. Standard fridge filters aren't cutting it, and bottled water is also loaded with microplastics. Aqua Tru is a countertop water purifier with a patented four stage reverse osmosis system. It's been tested and certified to remove 84 different contaminants. This goes way beyond ordinary filters. No plumbing's required, no installation. Just pure water that actually supports your health instead of sabotaging it. Business Insider and Popular Science have both featured it. Good Housekeeping named it the best countertop water filter. And 98% of customers say their water is cleaner, safer and healthier. Head to aquatru.com and use promo code impact for 20% off. Aqua Tru even comes with a 30 day best tasting water guarantee. So head to AQ U-A T R U.com and use promo code impact to get yours today. Let's talk about gold. Gold is the right asset these days, but most people are using it wrong. They buy it, hold it, and then wait for the price to go up. But that price is still denominated in dollars. So you haven't actually escaped the system. You're still playing its rules. That's the shift monetary metals helps make possible. They've built a way for your gold to earn yield paid not in dollars, but in more physical gold, up to 4% per year, more ounces compounding in hard money every single month. You're growing the quantity of the hardest asset on earth and storage and insurance are included. So there's no hidden fees that are going to eat away at your yield. Most people are passively absorbing inflation. This is exactly how you actively compound your weight. Out of that, click the link in the show notes or visit monetary-metals.comimpact to learn more. Again, that's monetary-metals.comimpact this is a paid advertisement. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Drew Manning]

There is some good news on the horizon with that though. OPEC met yesterday and they are agreeing to increase their output. So at least from a supply and demand perspective, they're at least helping add to the supply which if they can

[Tom Bilyeu]

ship it around, you know, foster cost. Yes, but a lot of this isn't that oil production is a problem right now. It's that moving the oil is the hard part. So that's awesome that OPEC is doing that for sure. But if a large portion of OPEC is getting bombed, then now you have a problem. So. And if they can't move it because the Houthis have talked about getting involved in the Red Sea, which would be create another choke point. So it's probably more precarious than anybody wants you to think. Now we'll see how it plays out. No need to get out over our skis. But that is certainly the reality of asymmetric warfare is such that Trump is going to continually feel like how much do I have to break these guys before they finally give in? And because that's his mental model that I can put enough pressure on you and you will eventually cave. I think this is going to go really far and he's going to destroy a lot of stuff only to realize like, damn, like we really might have to put boots on the ground if we want to get where we want to get And I worry that he would be willing to do that. So when he talks about taking the off ramp. And by the way, at least before we went live, it looked like the markets are pricing in a ceasefire. So that's some good news in terms of what they call the Sharps placing their bets. So I'd love to see that. But at the same time, there is a path where I can see this becomes runaway. Trump destroys their civilian infrastructure, they then respond even harder and they just completely shut down the strait. They start attacking the oil infrastructure and possibly desalinization infrastructure across the Gulf. And now you're in a much worse global position again. We'll rebalance. I'm well aware that the world has no shortage of oil. There are plenty of places other than the Middle east where we can get oil. But the transition will be extraordinarily expensive.

[Drew Manning]

Yeah. Going back to the strait, there was reports from Fox News that they're thinking about doing some type of toll booth vessel fee. And then America responding to that will say, well, we'll do a $2 million escort fee for every vessel. So it's one of those things. Do you think that this is viable, having an actual escort versus a toll booth? It seems on paper it sounds good, but when missiles are flying, I don't know if any company wants to take that chance.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think the reality is that if. First of all, the person that put that forward was just like a guy. That's not like actual Trump policy. But I think that if you're charging people that kind of money, first of all, you look like an asshole because you started this and now you're profiting off of it. If we were actually able to get people through the straight, we should do it for free and show people, hey, look, we can actually keep this straight open. I think the problem is we can't actually keep this straight open. We keep saying we can, but then a couple well placed drones and everybody gets real skittish. It's like that idea that, hey, there's, you know, whatever, only 30 soldiers with guns, they can't kill us all. It's like, yes, but they can kill the front two or three rows. So how do you get that momentum? Like, how do you get the first people to run in to be the, you know, the machine gun fire? So if anybody's seen the movie Saving Private Ryan, there's a phenomenal scene where D Day attack World War II. They're storming the beaches in Normandy and you realize there's nowhere for you to go. As soon as they open the doors, you're getting shot. So you either move forward, jump over the side, something, but you're either going to die there in the boat, you're going to drown if you can't get to the shore, or you're going to push forward, taking the risk of getting shot. And so eventually you just get put in that position. So what would need to happen for people to be willing to take that chance? It would have to be dire. And so without, hopefully we never find ourselves in this, in that situation. And yeah, the Trump admin charging $2 million to solve a problem that they started is not going to go over well.

[Drew Manning]

Do you, do you worry about any of the international implications of us attacking a bridge, attacking plants every day? Because that is an international war crime line. But I feel like nowadays it's like, what's a couple war crimes amongst friends, literally. So I don't think we'll necessarily have anybody policing us in that. But is there some type of moral high ground we need to take? Or at this point it's just we have to win, get out of here.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We gave up the moral high ground a very long time ago. And so the only question is, does this moment in history mandate that you give up the moral high ground? I don't know that that will be a question for historians to look at. It is living through it is not fun because all of the sense of like, okay, we're America, we're doing the just thing like that has gone out the window. Now the question becomes, are we doing the effective thing? Maybe we'll see. That will come out in the wash. Right now it looks like everything is up in the air and it is entirely possible that it all comes crashing back down to earth and that what we end up with is a situation where the global economy is in a recession because we have put ourselves in a position where we cannot effectively get the oil out of the Middle east. And we need to begin transitioning into a future world order, by the way, a world order where America is probably fine because of our geographic positioning, because of our access to resources, all of that, but it will be. How long does that take? Is that a year? Is it two years? Is it three years? That's a long time to be in the grips of a global recession. And the question is, does America stay stable? I won't say intact, but I will say stable through all of that because there is so much hatred between the two sides. I won't fractal into fraud, but there's a fractal to be had on fraud right here, where you just see the two sides racing away from each other. Yeah. So until we see how this actually plays out, until we see if the US can get a stable Iran, if we can get an open Strait of Hormuz, if we can get things flowing again, and then it looks like this sort of very icky, morally repugnant move that we made. If we can go, okay, well, in the end we got what we wanted, which is a defanged Iran, a stable alliance in the Middle east, the Abraham Accords, bringing everybody together, finally, everybody in the Middle east looking at this as the economic problem that it is. Instead of end of days theology, which is what it feels like more now. So if Trump can actually pull that off and on the other side of this in the very near term, like if this is a 30 day ish thing where we start seeing everything move in that direction, then I think people will go, okay, the results that we got justify what we did, you'll still have a ton of fighting over war crimes and get Trump out, lock him up, all of that, but it will deflate a lot. If the result is good, if the result is bad, he's toast.

[Drew Manning]

What's the first paragraph of the fraud fractal right there? I don't understand the tie in.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you've got the left and the right are both plundering America. They're doing it in different ways. So the right is going, all right, we have very little left on our power play. Let's go remake the world to make sure in this new phase that is multipolar, that we're in an incredibly dominant position in the Western hemisphere and that the Middle Eastern switch to not just being about oil, but being investing feeds the Western hemisphere. Then you've got the people on the left that are like, okay, for us to maintain power, we've got to get more people that are likely to vote blue. So basically open borders, bring in as many people that are reliant on our government largesse. So Medicare, Medicaid, all that kind of stuff, welfare, get them in. And then, yes, there's going to be a ton of fraud that comes up with that, but you're able to draw more people into your state and the overall impact is we stay in power. So I don't need people to like one or the other. I just want want everybody to map. Ah, cool. Like, no matter which way I go, I've got somebody that's trying to plunder the middle and working class via inflation to do their Insane thing. And full disclosure, in terms of my biases, I'm far more interested in the US being in a strong position moving forward. But nonetheless, what's happening right now is gross copy.

[Drew Manning]

I also want to do an update on the rescue of the pilots because we have reports that they were rescued. It's very. A lot of spin out there. So let's just talk about what we, what we. What we know. Yeah, but I have seen everything from it was a successful rescue to it was a planned op to it was supposed to be a ground invasion and then it foiled and now they. So help us see through the fog of what's actually happened with it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's cover all the narratives. So no man left behind really was the phrase of the day as the US pulled off from where I'm sitting, an incredible rescue operation to extract the downed F15E crew. There were two of them. one point they were both stuck in Iran. And the rescue ended up taking about 48 hours, dozens of aircraft and a CIA deception campaign. Iran says it was a catastrophic failure disguised as a victory. And the Internet has a whole different ball of wax that we'll get into now. Please keep in mind, as Drew said, we are in the middle of information warfare right now. So what I'm gonna walk you through is the closest thing to the truth that I can cobble together at this early stage. And I'll give you the dominant counter narratives that are coming out on the Internet. But the official story is that the F15E went down over southwestern Iran on Friday. Both crew members ejected into hostile territory. The pilot was actually pulled out the same day after a seven hour operation in broad daylight, by the way. They ended up getting him safe and sound. The White House stayed silent about all of this stuff while it was unfolding to avoid tipping off Iran and compromising the search for the second airman who was the weapons systems operator. And that person is a full bird colonel. And they spent roughly the 48 hours evading capture in the mountains. He crawled up as high as he could into a mountain crevice and just waited. It was like 7,000ft or something. Now I doubt very much that this was like an Alex Honnold type, you know, bare knuckle climb. I'm sure it was a little bit easier than that. But nonetheless he scrambled up into a ravine that he could hide in. Iran was offering a $60,000 reward for his location and IRGC forces were actively hunting him down. The CIA had to run a deception campaign inside of Iran, spreading word that both crew members had actually already been recovered. And that was an effort to throw off the search teams. But they didn't do a very good job since it was all over Twitter that one of them, the weapons systems operator, was still behind enemy lines and had potentially already been taken into custody by the Iranians. If I remember right, that's what we said at the very end of the broadcast on Friday. We were seeing reports that he had been captured. Thankfully, he had not. Now, one of the really bizarre twists of all of this is while Trump was radio silent, heads down, just trying to deal with this. It looked like the online denizens here in the US Were actually trying to convince the public that Trump was dead or dying at Walter Reed Medical Center. I mean, there were tons of reports of people saying that they saw, like, all this insane activity and that the American people were being lied to and they were keeping it from Trump. And you can put literally tweet after tweet after tweet of people using almost identical language, which is becoming a thing on the left and the right, so don't get confused there. But as it turns out, Trump had ordered and extraction just knee deep in overseeing the operation. Dozens of heavily armed aircraft went in. The rescue required the US to set up an entire improvised airfield deep inside of Iran near Isfahan. And analysts note. This is going to be important in a minute. Analysts know that Isfahan is exactly where Iran's buried stockpile of highly enriched uranium is buried. So keep that in mind. We're going to get to that, that whole angle in a second. Now, this was not like a simple helicopter swoops in, snatches up the airmen, and takes off. U.S. special forces carved an improvised airstrip out of hostile mountainous terrain deep inside of Iran, flew in hundreds of troops and dozens of aircraft, and used little bird helicopters to push commandos up into the mountains where the Colonel was hiding. US Air Force jets also conducted strikes against IRGC forces that were actively trying to reach him and get him into custody. And any convoy that got close was just shot to death. You see plenty of footage of that. The whole thing got super messy. Two MC130J aircraft got stuck in the sand and couldn't take off. At least that's the official story. The US Flew in three replacement aircraft, extracted everyone, and then blew up the stranded aircraft. So it was like two of the C130s, plus, I think, four helicopters. I've seen reports there were two helicopters seen, some that were four. So not entirely sure of the final numbers. Those were according to the official story, all on the ground already stuck in the sand, and they blew them up so that they could keep them out of Iranian hands, because this is obviously highly sophisticated machinery that they don't want them to understand what we've got going on. Now, there were rumors flying that at least One of the C130s was shot out of the air, and given that they don't have ejection seats, that there had to be U.S. casualties. Now, it seems like in reality, the aircraft that was actually hit was an A10 warthog that was providing cover fire during the rescue. Despite the fact that it was hit, it managed to make it all the way to Kuwaiti airspace, where the pilot then safely ejected. The aircraft did crash, so you could say that it was shot down for sure, but it wasn't shot down over Iranian territory. It managed to limp all the way to Kuwaiti airspace, where the pilot got out safe and sound. Okay, all of that is the official story. Iran is telling a very different story, and it says that it shot down the C130s that the US is claiming that they destroyed in place. Iran also claimed there was at least one dead US Soldier in the wreckage. And there's an image that they're putting around that looks like a skull is burned these days. I don't trust anything that I see. Some people online have even claimed that the Iranians are reporting that the U.S. killed their own service member to keep them from being captured. This is a concept that the Israelis use, known as the Hannibal Doctrine, where it's like, well, if they're about to get captured, better to kill them than to let them be tortured. So those are some of the narratives running around. There's also another narrative making the rounds on social media that this wasn't a daring rescue at all. This was a fail attempt to secure the uranium in Isfahan. Now, given the fact that this all took place in Isfahan, where Iran's uranium stash is said to be buried underground, it's not exactly hard to see why conspiracy soaked chronically online. People would be understandably, by the way, distrusting of everything that they hear. They gravitated towards this version of events. I certainly don't blame them. It is very tempting. And who knows, in the fullness of time, I've seen conspiracy theorists go up big on plenty of stories. So we'll see. Given that experts right now are admitting that if in the future we wanted to go get the uranium, any future operation would require the same infrastructure that was laid down for this rescue, namely a Local or makeshift airstrip near Iran's Batter Air Base, which sits roughly 10 km from the Isfahan nuclear Complex. Iran's military is certainly pushing this failed attempt to get the uranium narrative. They claim the entire operation was completely foiled, that the US used an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan as a base, and that the two C130 transport planes and two Black Hawk helicopters were destroyed by the Iranians in the process of them trying to get out with the uranium. So far, the US is sticking to the official narrative Again, we'll see in the fullness of time what the real details are. But right now, this seems like a big win for the US military, certainly for the families of the airmen that will return safe and sound. So, man, as somebody who's a fan of the, like, Delta Force movies and everything, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly stallone from the 80s, I was loving this moment. We go in, overwhelm them, get our boys out. I'm here for it. I just hope that it's actually what happens happen.

[Drew Manning]

Yeah, somebody said in the chat they're going to turn this into the movie. Like, this is like the next black type thing. So we'll see. How do you think Iran is going to respond?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think they're in chaos right now, man. Like, if so there are reports coming out right now, we'll see if they're true, that 50 more, roughly, senior Iranian leaders made the catastrophic error of getting together in a group and then getting bombed. Reporting is thin on that, so we'll see. But you can only kill so many people and make it hard to get together and share a space so many times before it just becomes hard to have everything be coordinated, the good and the bad of decentralized command. The good is very hard to kill. The bad is very hard to coordinate. And so now you're going to be pulling in all kinds of different directions, which makes negotiating difficult because they're going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll do that. And then some other guy over here pops off and does something that foils the negotiations and. And they might even be able to rightly claim, hold on, that fucking guy is like, a lunatic. I mean, remember back In World War II, there was a Japanese guy in the jungles of the Philippines who lived there for like, 20 years and just refused to believe anybody that said that the war was over. So it's like, you'll get guys that are like, no, I don't buy it. This is information warfare. You never know what you can trust. Dude, information is tough Even as a CEO of a relatively small company, I'm just like, it's hard to know, like, people will manage up so they'll tell you what they think you want to hear. And so you're like, God damn it, do I actually have the information that I need? Now imagine that people are bombing you all the time and you're spread out and the supreme leader said before he got killed, P.S. if I get killed, like, you guys need to go do your thing. You know what you're supposed to do. Just go wreak havoc in these ways. Go blow these things up. This is what you have access to. Go crazy. So, like, this is undoubtedly a recipe for chaos. People pulling in different directions, doing what they think is best. Some people like trying to smooth things out only to have another asshole pop off and do something crazy. So this one feels like it's going to spiral out of control even more. I mean, it's already out of control, but spiral out even more before we're finally able to get something that resembles order. Taking a short break, but there's more Impact theory after. Stay tuned. Let's talk about what is going on in your closet this time of year. Most people realize half of what they own isn't even worth keeping. Things that look fine in the store, but they don't hold up. Pieces you keep but never reach for. I know that one all too well. Spring is when you see it all clearly. You don't need more, you need better. That's where Quince comes in. I picked up one of their cashmere sweaters and the quality genuinely shocked me. It's incredible. It's incredibly soft, well made. You can feel the difference immediately. That's 100 Mongolian cashmere for you. And that is the same material luxury brands charge a fortune for. Refresh your wardrobe with with quince. Go to quints.com impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada as well. Go to Quinc. Pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com impact podcast taxact pod taxact knows filing taxes can be confusing. So we have live experts on hand who can help answer any questions you may have. Questions like, Can I claim my SUV is my home office? If I answer work emails in my car? If I adopted 12 dogs this year, can I list them as dependents? And am I doing this right or am I doing this very, very wrong? Our experts have the answers to those questions and many others. Tax Act. Let's get them over with.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[Drew Manning]

I want to go, I want to jump to the Candace Owens, Bret Weinstein, because this seems like a download of a talking point because I've never seen two people say mad king about Donald Trump in the same time in the same weekend. Candace Owens, first tweet. This is a satanic administration. We all realize that. Satanic Zionists occupy the White House and cry against a move to have the mad king Trump removed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hold on, you can't gloss past that. The White House and Congress need to move to have the mad king Trump removed. Okay, yep, keep going.

[Drew Manning]

All of our lives may depend upon other countries realizing that Trump is deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah. We are in uncharted territory. Leaders worldwide need to act accordingly. Okay, yeah. Now let's jump over to Brett Trump, who I advocated for in 2024. Thank you for taking accountability on that. Has gone full mad king. In considering my responsibility, I ask you to remember the case I made rested on the fact that Biden Harrison were figureheads shielding a cabal that couldn't be held to account, whereas Trump could and we must. So now these are two separate commentators, I'll call them, who are now calling Trump a mad king. And there needs to be some type of larger intervention. Is this a coordinated effort? Did this strike you as weird?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not in the slightest. Okay, so first of all, man, nobody at the end of the road is like, hey, they're above reproach and they could never be flawed. So I'm sure Brett could. There's something that could turn his head and make him deny his principles. But when you look at Brett's history of taking personal losses, extreme losses, to stand up for what he believes is right. Now, he may not always believe the thing that other people believe is right. He's done that. So I have no reason to believe that Brett is saying something that he believes to be untrue. So I think he believes this to be true. Candace Owens, shockingly, I actually think is also saying what she believes to be true. She has just got a way more bombastic, outlandish mental map of the world. That may be the most generous way to say that. So I don't think she's lying. I think she might be caught up in the feedback loop of when I say this thing, my audience really likes it. And so maybe I start saying a bit more of that thing because I'm really feeling something. To me, I anchor always and forever around Candace. When she feels something she believes that's an indicator of truth, which is so crazy to me. So that's completely anathema to my experience in the world. But no, I don't think there is a coordinated messaging campaign going out or anything. I think Trump is acting in a manner that makes it very easy to go, oh, yeah, this is a mad king. This is somebody who is just going to completely rogue. They think it's the right thing to do, and so they're doing it. And the thing is, history is replete with people like this. This is where, man, do I want people to really look into Polk a little bit more because we've had this quote unquote mad king thing before where our own military was saying, what he's doing to the Mexicans is they didn't have the concept of war crimes, but, like, that would have been. I think the cry is, this is immoral. It's disgusting. He's gone in and violated their sovereignty because he could. He knew that we were militarily stronger, and so he's just taking this land. And they were like, we'll never be able to wash the blood off of our hands from this crime that is so great. And now none of us think about it, we're just like, yeah, America, from sea to shining sea, baby. It is what it is. So I would understand if people at the time had called polka mad king. And by the way, when he finished his one term, which he said, I'm only going to run for one term, he the sort of romantic way to tell the story is he worked himself to death on behalf of the American people. So he saw all of it through and, like, three months after the end of his term, he died. It's so crazy.

[Drew Manning]

I'm over it. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, yeah, I get it. And look, I think that this is a good thing. I think you want a democracy where people are able to say, I think this behavior has now reached that level. Like, I think Candace. I read Candace's tweet when she says she's being careful in her wording, but I think that he has become a mad king and New paragraph, admittedly, but the international. The countries internationally need to act accordingly. So in the same tweet where you're saying this guy has to get out of office and then the international community needs to recognize he's unwell and act accordingly. It's like, so that's somebody who wants America to lose under the current leadership. And I feel the same way about people who want for the downfall of our current leadership as I did when people wanted Biden to have a downfall. It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, this is still America, man. So don't love that. But she has every right to say it. And so I've got.

[Drew Manning]

Are we entering into, like, we can't criticize Trump. If we criticize Trump, we criticize America.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I certainly hope not.

[Drew Manning]

People.

[Tom Bilyeu]

A, you should be able to criticize America. Criticize America.

[Drew Manning]

But you said, like, I read Candace's tweet, like, she wants Trump out of there. Yes, but you think that that means America loses. She.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, I think aggressively. She is calling for the international community to either, most generous, read, alienate America. Would you go that far?

[Drew Manning]

Until Trump is, like, situated, until we figure out what our White House situation

[Tom Bilyeu]

is, he's deeply unwell, and they should act accordingly. The most generous read of that would be, yes, keep doing what you're doing. Alienate Americ. Keep your distance. And that is not cheering for American supremacy. Dominance, which I'm sure she would say, yeah, I don't want America to be in that position. Okay, I just violently disagree.

[Drew Manning]

Got it. I took that a little bit differently as, like, Trump is toxic right now. Let us figure this thing out. It's kind of like, I need some time. It's not me, it's you. But interesting. Ann Coulter was another one that made a really good point. And I was arguing with somebody in the chat, I forgot who it was last week when they were talking about California fraud and the fraud thing, and they were like, see, this is all fake. Like, we're. And I Was like, hey, guys, there's actual things that we need to be mad about. There's actual things that we need to fight and have legal teams around. There's actual lies we need to call out. But when you see a fact that you don't like and you want to double down on that, you open up opportunities for actual fraud and actual crime to go unchecked because you're. You're. You're spending all your wheels valid, like try to invalidate something that's actually true. And then Coulter kind of articulated that way better by saying, I really wish legal experts had it scream bloody murder at every little thing Trump did so they could speak with authority now that he's actually committing war crimes. So saying that he's the worst president ever, he did all these things just because he said something you don't like. Now that he's actually bombing a territory that you don't like and you're saying it, it doesn't matter because he to used. You already called him a Nazi for wearing a hat. Now you can't call him a Nazi again because he's doing something. You know what I mean? So there is a level of all this I'm putting together as how do we as a country make sure that we're keeping our leadership accountable while also, to your point, waving the banner of America? Because I think one thing that America is standing on is we are a United States. We do have a separation of power, states and federal, because we want to make sure that we can keep leaders, either the states accountable, we want to make sure we can keep the Fed accountable. But we also know that we need both of these things to work to have a prosperous America.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Man, Drew, you have made something completely insane sound very rational and cogent. You are rational and cogent. But this moment is not. We are in a populist moment. Populism is about emotions. There's a reason that someone like Candace, who literally believes emotion equals true,

[Drew Manning]

she

[Tom Bilyeu]

would rise up in a time like this. Because when you realize the pie is shrinking, we're fighting over the shrinking pie, then people go into a desperation mode of just get me and my team my stuff. So everybody's on a team. They dehumanize the other side. They want the other side to lose, and they will be vicious and cruel to that other side to make sure that they get what they want. And so in populous moments where everybody's on a team and they are thinking emotionally, they're reasoning by emotion, and when you reason by emotion, meaning I'm Making my decisions based on what feels a certain way. Now you're like, you're in the most chaotic, divisive territory that you could ever hope to be. And I don't think America is going to be able to bring itself back together unless we're able to state what our value system is, say these are the values that we stand for. And we're not going to tolerate things that deviate from that. So I'm reading a book about the end of Teddy Roosevelt's life. It's very fascinating. So he was a two term president, sort of. He had almost two full terms and was exceedingly popular. Gets out of office after his second term and doesn't run for a while. I forget how many years, like eight years or something crazy. But he's still psychotically popular. And so he goes to run again, but as an independent because the Republicans have basically turned their back on him. They had a new candidate, they wanted to see him. He had already done one term, he wanted to do two. So he comes in, spoils the election. All this stuff ends up being like this big drama. He does not get reelected for a third term. By the way, this is before the constitutional amendment. And the thing in the book that's actually fascinating is people were like, Teddy was a man of great character. Again, some people are going to disagree with his character, but he could articulate what it was, what he would and wouldn't do. And we've lost that. So we don't have, we certainly don't have a shared sense of what are the values that America would live and die for. And if you don't have a shared set of values, you cannot articulate them and stand for them. Because your question was like, basically, how do we hold America accountable? How do you hold politicians accountable? You have to say, these are the things that we Americans agree are the right way to do things. You have violated that, that get the out. And when you don't have those shared things, then everybody just says, no, no, my team's right. And they'll lie to you and feel completely justified. They will manipulate you and feel completely justified. And nobody is going, no, hold on. Like it means what it means to have these values. And so if I say I'm going to be honest with the American people, then I'm going to be honest. If that means that I get booted out of office, it means I get booted out of office, whatever. But I maintain my character and it means something to be an American. And so it's very interesting because the Place that we're seeing the value system, like where it's clearest and it is playing out the most strongly is Japan. And Japan is like, we know what it means to be Japanese and we're going to stay Japanese. You're seeing it in the anime culture where they're actually passing laws to stop up trying to appeal to a Western audience. Very fascinating. Because anime is changing. It's like tenor. It's pretty weird. Like it's from a Western standpoint, you understand why parents are like. But the Japanese like, hey, the reason this has become popular is because we have a certain value set and this represents that value set. And they're moving fast on immigration in a way that I think makes a lot of the world uncomfortable. I will say, first of all, I absolutely love Japan. But I'll be the first to admit that when you're there, you can tell that you're being treated differently as a non Japanese person. So it's like, huh? But they know who they are, they know what they stand for and that's that. And so America has to find that again.

[Drew Manning]

Wasn't that the Constitution though?

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, the Constitution doesn't lay out much of our value system. You'd be a lot closer with the Declaration of Independence from a values perspective. Now you can infer values from the Constitution, especially the amendments, freedom of speech, things like that. But when you read the Constitution, it is shockingly vague and simplistic. So you're not going to get a lot there. You'll learn a lot more about America's value system from Christianity than you will from the Constitution. And we've thrown that shit out the window though.

[Drew Manning]

So what is that? What does that look like then? Because we have to write down a value system, a shared narrative and go for it. Maybe that is why there is a rise of America first maga. All these institutions, I'll call them, I don't know a better word for it right now that they can clearly articulate America first means I'm going to do whatever that puts America first Maga. Even that, like socialism is like, at least everybody has their tenors that they can can articulate their values.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No one's articulating their values. People are articulating their strategies, their tactics. But they, first of all, they don't agree on what make America great again means. Like what era are we talking about? And are we talking about economically we want to make America great again? Are we talking about job creation? Are we talking about like blue collar versus white collar? Like, what are we actually Saying, because I will say that, that the economy was a lot better in the 80s and 90s. And anybody that thinks that that's untrue is absolutely historically blind. And you look only at the K shaped economy. So that is very easy from an economic standpoint. But there are other issues that in the 80s and 90s were not as good. So now you've got to map all that out. Okay, so people don't understand that they have a value system. First of all, most people don't understand that their values are choices. They confuse them with objective truth. That always creates a tremendous amount of confusion for people. I can tell you what I think the American values were when I was growing up. I can tell you what I wish they were today. But in terms of do we actually have shared American values? No, we do not and have not for a very long time.

[Drew Manning]

When do you think that was the last time we had shared American values? I'm just trying to go to something

[Tom Bilyeu]

where we all had like in the 90s it was a lot clearer. And that was sort of when things started petering out, out.

[Drew Manning]

And was that on the back of the Cold War, you think we had to articulate them or where did.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, the Cold War forced us to confront in a very like constantly talking about it kind of way, the difference between capitalism and communism. So that helped because there's a large values debate hiding within that. But it, it really was sort of an unbroken American ethos that started with the founding of the country, but. And it really got solidified. There was like just. I don't think we've ever again had an outpouring in terms of being taken seriously by the like literate influencers of the day. An outpouring of what does it mean to be American? Like we did when the Federalist Papers were being written during the founding of the nation, the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the writing of the Constitution, like all of that stuff really forced the elites, when that actually meant something, to concretize. What does it mean to be America American? What is it? What's the structure on which we're going to build America? And it was so infused with a Christian ethos, even though there was separation of church and state in a way that wasn't cynical. It was like just pervasive at that time where it was largely assumed you were some variant of religion. Now a lot of those guys had a different version. Like I think it was Jefferson that wrote his own version of the Bible. So pretty interesting. But nonetheless it was very much infused and if people want to understand, like the most simplified version of what it means to be built on a Christian ethos, that the individual is the right level of analysis, that we're not a collectivist society. And that's born of this idea that you can send your son, have him crucified for everybody, to erase everybody's sins. Like, that whole idea of, like, each of you will be judged individually, you must act individually. And I send an individual down as, like spiritual cleansing. So that, like, permeates everything that oversaw the west for so long. And that started to really break down massively in the early 2000s. And you know my take, because of a K shaped economy.

[Drew Manning]

So that was the first thing that 2028 started to K shape, which then started to splinter.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Value 2028.

[Drew Manning]

I mean, 2008.

[Tom Bilyeu]

2000. Really? People give the dot com a pass for a reason. I don't understand.

[Drew Manning]

Got it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So all of our bad habits started with a dot com bubble burst.

[Drew Manning]

Got it. Okay, let's jump over to Elizabeth Warren because she wants to tax on more people. Surprise, surprise.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What a shock. What a shock.

[Drew Manning]

I say, Drew, Jeff Bezos has $222 billion. If he paid my wealth tax this year, he could fund insulin in America for everyone who needs it, plus free school lunch for every kid in Texas and have plenty of money left over. And Bezos will still have 205, $15 billion to spare. To spare.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay? So money has physics, boys and girls. And the thing that Elizabeth Warren is forgetting is that money operates in a certain way. So one thing that I love about you guys in this community is that you are hyper aware of the fact that unrealized gains is fake money. It's not real. And so Jeff Bezos has $222 billion of fake money, and that if he ever tries to make any of that real money, he does get tax taxed. Now, if there are tax loopholes that you are absolutely traumatized by, welcome to the club. I'm here for it. And so if you want to make some noise around a flat tax, I'm all for it. And that way, there's nowhere anybody can hide. Cool. Love it. Now, my dearest Elizabeth Warren, as somebody who doesn't want to be on a team, I'm perfectly happy to help advise, and I would love to see you shine. That would be absolutely incredible. What you would have to do to shine is to start with fraud. Okay? Fraud has become a vampire, and it is bleeding America dry. And once we understand that fraud is a vampire, that's Bleeding America dry, then we know that we need to start right there. We need to be in a position where we're going to solve those problems first because America does not have a revenue problem. We are by far the richest country on planet Earth. What we have is a spending problem. And if you always spend 15 or 20% more than you make, no matter how much I give you, you're going to be in the exact same position. And that's the part that people just are not reckoning with. No matter how much money you raise in tax, if you continue to deficit spend, then you will have the same problem always and forever moving into the future. You will have a K shaped economy, you will continue to hollow out the middle class. People will be unable to make ends meet and you'll have a bunch of people who figure out the asset game and they'll get richer and richer and richer, sort of, by the way, they're not even really getting that much richer. They're just treading water and keeping pace with inflation. But anyway, it looks like they're getting richer on paper. So those people continue to run away from the people that are falling farther and farther behind every day because you refuse to balance the budget. When you throw money at an inefficient system, it does not fix the system. The system just has more money going into the inefficiencies. The level of fraud that we're facing right now as a nation and we have, we're going to talk about this a little bit later, but the amount of fraud that's in the US system is so staggering. Bessant talked recently. He said as much as 10% of the US federal government's budget is lost to fraud, waste and abuse every year.

[Drew Manning]

You might as well jump into that. You can't just throw that out there.

[Tom Bilyeu]

10%. So until we address that problem, we're never going to make any progress. So that's really the stark new reality that Bessant is trying to just absolutely beat into people's heads. But clearly Elizabeth Warren is not getting the message. But Besant cited estimates from the Government Accountability Office itself, by the way, and it found that between $233 billion and 521 billion billion is being lost. And here's the important part. Every single year, 500 plus billion dollars every single year. Now Besson is careful to point out he's not the one that came up with that number. Okay, this is a direct quote from him. That's not my number, he said, that's the Government Accountability office. That's about 10% of the federal budget. And this is so shocking. It's 1 to 2% of our GDP. That is insane. 2% of America's GDP is just flushed down the toilet every year. Now, what I'm hoping I can get everybody on board with is that if 10% of your money just disappears every year and you could dramatically improve your life just by putting an end to that, you don't have to raise more money, by the way. And again, every time they talk about raising money, they're talking about fictional funds that don't actually exist. It would be devastating to the economy if they tried to. To make that money real. And if they did, it would already be taxed. Okay? So you don't have to raise more money. You don't even have to cut funding. All you have to do is stop money from being stolen from you. Just start there. Don't. Don't have any other discussion. Just stop the fraud before you ask for any more money for anything. And this is one of those. I fear we're not going to be able to get people on board with this. And that's where I begin to really struggle to find the path forward to be useful. Because if we cannot get people on board with that, we're really in trouble, because the country will go broke. Now, as an entrepreneur, you learn that lesson really fast. Going broke is the death knell for your company. And so you never throw money away on a broken system. It doesn't work, and it will actually make the problem worse. So if you look at your company and you say, hmm, we're hemorrhaging money. So I know that we've got some sort of inefficiency here. What I need is to go raise capital. Now you accelerate your burn now, you start making foolish decisions. Instead, before you seek additional capital, you want to make sure that you're running efficiently, that you've optimized your organization, that you have the right people in the right seats making the right decisions. Decisions. Now, Bessant is leaning on a classic law enforcement playbook to try to get everybody on board with this issue. And he said that treasury is now offering cash payments to whistleblowers who can detail, excuse me, fraud operations, who was involved, how the cash was moved, when decisions were made, that kind of stuff. And he's betting that fraudsters will actually turn on each other. And he's framed the Minnesota investigations as the model that they're going to use with explicit plans to push this idea out to all of the other 49 states. Now, please remember, y' all fraudsters are like Pokemon. You've got to catch them all. And if I can, collectively, if we can get together on that, man, we can make things so much better. It's over $500 billion a year. That is such a staggering amount. So if I put myself in the, like, I want to bring everybody to the middle position. And instead of being absolutely irate at Elizabeth Warren, who I think is probably cynical, but if I instead say I eschew all cynicism and I really want to see everybody win, I will just beseech everyone in Congress to plug the leaky parts of our bucket before you ask people to just keep pouring in mythical money showing that you don't understand the economy. Just plug the fraud, get serious there. Doesn't have to get to zero. It probably won't get to zero, but, boy, it could get so, so, so much better. We are behaving as a nation, going back to this idea of values. We are behaving as a nation like we're trying to strip mine this country because we can feel that it's about to be sold for parts. And so if it's going to be sold for parts, we at least want to be the ones that benefit from that. We've got to completely flip that script. Remember, America's actually been in civil war before, so all of us were alive after the country figured out a way to reconcile. We absolutely can come back from all of this. It's just a question of how much pain and suffering are we going to force ourselves to go through to actually start making decisions that are good. And by the way, if people have a challenge, please remember to challenge my belief system. All you have to do is go, human flourishing is a dumb goal to pursue. Or saying a spiritually and economically thriving middle class is a non sequitur when it comes to talking about human flourishing. Cool. Now we can have that argument. Either you can say there's another place that you think that we should want to end up, or, no, that's where we should want to end up. But, Tom, your definition of that is stupid. And then we can go further and say, tom, the economic policies that you keep beating the drum for, those don't make any sense as a way to actually get where you want to go, right? I'm laying it all out if people want to challenge it. And because the only one that I'll, like, really fight back on is that human flourishing is stupid.

[Drew Manning]

Stupid.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If people say that that's not a wise thing to Strive for. Okay, that one I'm going to fight for is like a matter of grounding principle. My entire worldview sits on top of that. So never say never. But that would be pretty shocking if you could get me to say that that is not worth pursuing. So I lay out my value system. I lay out the cause and effect that I believe leads us there. And if somebody sees something that's better than what I'm proposing, I am very, very open to it.

[Drew Manning]

It.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But if we don't have anything better, man, would I be honored if people would join in the fight for that. It is not my fight. It is just what I think is the absolute right fight for us all to be engaged in. And this is coming from somebody who's won the game of capitalism. Like, I get it, man. That is, I get why people get into these elite buckets and then they just want to fight for the shit that they've already gotten. And I'm perfectly willing to put myself at risk of losing everything that I have if that's what it takes to make sure that everybody can fight to win. Now, I won't give up everything that I have. That would be moronic. But I will fight to ensure that the system that got me here is available to everybody. That is for sure. So let's see.

[Drew Manning]

It seems like there's a lack of accountability that wants to happen because these are actionable things. But there are certain institutions that I guess are just above approach. So we're talking about fraud. Easy answer is like, okay, if there's fraud in a certain system, we should go over there and we should audit it. And then you hear reports the Pentagon hasn't passed the audit in nine years. So it's one of those things where it's like, even when there are who checks the people that are supposed to be that are supposed to do the

[Tom Bilyeu]

checks, that's us, the voting public. We are the watchmen. So here is the. I'll give the magic words that the politicians should be saying to each other. Let's say that you uncover fraud in Minneapolis and you see a political victory with Tim Walls to just absolutely drag him through the streets and make it clear that Democrats suck nuts. And those guys can just piss off Instead, dear Republicans, what you should be saying is we've uncovered a ton of fraud. Fraud in Minneapolis, but we're in this together. And so we want to help Minnesotans get to the bottom of what's going on. Now, getting to the bottom may involve incarceration of corrupt politicians, but that's not the drum that we beat. And we let that become the sad reality that ends up being at the end of the investigation. And then it is what it is. And if we find ourselves having to incarcerate somebody who's just committed blatant and egregious fraud, then it is not a celebratory act. It is. Hey, that's the kind of thing that we have to put behind us. Americans need to be in this together. It doesn't matter what side of the aisle that you're on. Let's just define where are we trying to get? How do we get there? But it's turned into a like windmill dunk contest where people are leaping over a stack of little people to dunk a ball in some crazy ass fashion. And like, it is absurd theatrics and circus behavior that is never going to get us where we want to be. So yeah, we have to find a way to a virtuous path forward. Virtue, man. We got to bring some of these old school values back. Like, you just have to be willing to be like, yeah, this sucks for me and this is going to be bad for me, but I'm going to stand up for this value. Dude, can people just watch more anime? Like, it's wild watching Japanese culture express itself because they have some really weird values from my perspective, obviously, where like honor is still a thing and it's like, no, I would rather die than give up my honor. That's wild. But. And I'm not saying that's the value that Americans need to get, but we need to remind ourselves that there are things that, that we've got to be willing to say. Yeah, even if this hurts me personally, this is the right thing. And so I'm going to stand up for it.

[Drew Manning]

It's interesting though, because we talk about how do we get out of this moment, but this moment was perpetuated by the shrinking pie. So is that the only way out? Is we just need to figure out a way to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Not the only way. It's just history tells you that if you solve the shrinking pie problem, you don't run into those frictions. So it's a bit like you can think that you have no political friction with somebody by not talking about politics. When the pie's growing, people just don't talk about money. There's plenty to go around. It's when the pie starts shrinking that suddenly people go into like a panic mode. And it's like, I've got to get for me and mine. And it gets wild, man. Because like, if you think about, okay, let's say, read about Native Americans. So there's like a cultural thing where. Where if you offer food to somebody, then. And I'm sure it's different for different tribes. And the tribe that I'm thinking of, fuck, I'm gonna forget the name of it right now. That's the second shot today, I think, for people playing the drinking game. I'll try to keep you out of getting poisoned. I forget the tribe that did this, but they, if they offered you, they got, you know, they capture the wildebeest or whatever, they bring it back. Not a wildebeest, I'm well aware. The buffalo. They bring it back. And if they offer you, like, hey, if you're old and sick, you can come and get some. That means you eat last as the person that caught it. Now, you don't have to make the offer, but if you make the offer, you stand by it. Now what happens if you make the offer? You didn't realize how many people are going to show up at your doorstep. Now you realize, oh, my mom's, like, really in dire straits. I need to save some for her. Which is more important? Is it that mine, me and mine first, or are you going to stand by the. In our community, if we say the sick and the old can come get some, they can come get some, even if that means I go hungry. And so there's really interesting story that gets told in the book that I'm reading right now about that where the. The actual hunter that did it was young, and so he popped off a little bit too much. Too many people came and they only ended up having like two days worth of food. And he was like, hey, I want some more. And his mom was like, sorry, you told everybody they could come get. They come got and like, now you're in trouble. But she was like, but now they're really, like, singing your praises because you were so honorable. And so it's like, okay, what are you going to stand by? You going to stand by being hungry? No, most people won't. That's why they say that you're only, what, nine meals away from revolution? Three days of starvation. People start acting real different. So that's just the reality. We're in a place where people have not defined their values. They don't reinforce values in their kids, like, up to. And saying, like, this is how we are, even if that means that you suffer personally. So, yeah. Expect people to fall back on selfishness.

[Drew Manning]

No. That's interesting. That kind of leads us into our next conversation. We've been talking about this right before we got rolling, so I'll give you guys a timeline of this. So Joanie Az Cola tweeted a picture of Lex Freeman, said one idiot we are happy not to hear from anymore. And then Caleb Hammer retweeted him and say, what did he do? I feel like the Internet just decides to hate someone after they are popular long enough for no reason. And I went through the rabbit hole of like, did Lex retire? Did he end the podcast or something? But no, he dropped the episode like, three days ago. So it's like, I don't know what the rub is, but that Lex was just the copy the topic of conversation, and everybody just wanted to kind of dunk on him. So is. Is there some type of historical context for there? The only reference I have is the Chris Nolan line, you either die a villain or live yourself long enough. You either die here or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. Like, that's the only place I can kind of see rationalizing this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think Lex Friedman represents optimism in an age of cynicism, and people just cannot have it. A certain type of person cannot have it.

[Drew Manning]

It.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that is so sad. So first of all, Lex, I don't know, you never met. You keep doing what you're doing, man. If you need any encouragement, here it is. So, yeah, what he's doing is awesome. And he came out of nowhere and built this incredible podcast. He's very good at what he does. I get that he's not everybody's cup of tea, but as somebody that's done over a thousand interviews, I will tell you right now, this kid is good. Very, very good at what he does. Whether you like his book list or not, which is like the first thing that people lit him on fire for, I was like, the fuck. Like, will you please just let whoever like the things they like? You don't have to like it. He didn't say, here's the book list that you better read or you're a bad person. He said, here's the book list I'm gonna read. And people went crazy for him. So, yeah, I don't get it. I think that we're living in an age of cynicism right now, and I think that giving in to your darker impulses is a terrible way to live your life. Life. Find beauty in things. Find people that find beauty in things. Try to encourage that. Seeing somebody who's passionate about something is awesome. And this guy will go super deep by the way he did an interview recently with I am Jeff from Overwatch. Jeff Kaplan, I believe is his name, who's doing a video game called Legend of California. By the way. You guys should check that out. I've applied for the initial. It's in alpha testing right now. Anyway, if you're into that kind of game, be sure to check it out. Thank you, Lex, for that five hour interview with him, which I absolutely loved. So anyway, don't be cynical, boys and girls. Don't give into that. That is a really subpar way to live your life. So don't give in to all that Internet drama.

[Drew Manning]

Do you have, like a secret beef with somebody on the Internet? Be honest. Is there, like, secret beef?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you.

[Drew Manning]

Anybody get Internet mad at people?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Oh, I get Internet mad at mom, Donnie. I have to really check myself with, like, how I even think through those problems because I'm like, okay, you're at your most emotional, which means that you're at your least rational. You have motivated reasoning. So I spend like half my time trying to find, like, what's the positive thing that he's doing here? Like, what's the belief that he's holding? He's building this world. Like, is he being cynical or does he actually have a worldview that would lead him to believe this really is the right thing to do? Like, you've really got to spend time with that. Is there anybody else? Like, he's the only one, because he's an avatar for me for socialism and communism. He's the person that I get big mad at because, like, when you really get on the ground level of making people's lives better, he is the absolute worst thing for them. And it's one of those where. How do I make this make sense? Let's say that you know what's going on with Epstein, and Epstein launches a camp for kids, and we're going to help kids learn skills. And you're just like, stop. Everybody stop. This guy is molesting every one of these kids, okay? It's like a factory. They're destroying their lives. Please, for the love of God. And somehow, some way, you just can't get people to listen. And you're like, hold on, this guy went to prison. Like, imagine for a second he went to prison. What did he go to prison for? Guys, he went to prison because he literally had, like, an industrial child abuse complex that abused 45 million children. And you'd be like, get out of here. 45. No, no, no. For real. Receipt after receipt after receipt. And people still send their fucking Kids, and they're raising money for it, and they're electing them. And you're like, what is happening? That's how I feel about socialism and communism. It took China alone. Just China and just their famine starved. It's known as an engineered famine, meaning they made choices that made it happen. Just China's engineered famine, which was not the only one, killed 45 million people. So I'm like, holy bejesus, boys and girls. Can we please. These policies are not new. They've been tried. They don't work well. They work at being absolutely murderous. They're really efficient at murder, murder, murder. So we freak out about the gas chambers, but we don't freak out about the starvation. And that's the part where I'm like, how do you get people to pay attention to that? Every book you could imagine is written about it. Your AI knows all about it. You can just ask right now. I talk endlessly about it, but people just like, like, go. They wave hammer and sickle flags. Dude. What? That's crazy. That's crazy. That's like going to a, like, preschool and waving Epstein flags, where I'm just like, I'm sorry, what's happening? Like, this is. This is so crazy. It is that ridiculous. And the way that you feel right now, like, this is ad absurdum is how I feel when I see people waving hammer and sickle flag legs. I'm just like, either you're evil or you are so historically ignorant that you don't actually know what that means. Oh. So anyway, that was a question about who am I big mad at on the Internet. And as you see, I cannot stop myself. So he is an avatar.

[Drew Manning]

For all that I have seen that. Another person who was catching heat this weekend was the artist formerly known as Kanye because he did two sold out shows, 80,000 people, at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, Wednesday and Friday.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Look at that, bro.

[Drew Manning]

Crazy stages.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's the thing. He said some things that are tough to get past.

[Drew Manning]

He made songs that are tough to get past.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He made songs that are tough to catch. You, though, you got to give that. Now this. This is. He is an artistic genius. He can both be morally repugnant and. And an incredible artist, but that, like, if you want. Okay. When I got into podcasting, somebody said to me, tom, what are you doing? It's all played out. This is like, what, 2015? It's all played out. The people that have made it have already made it. And I'll remind anybody listening to this, I've made tens of Millions of dollars over the life of my podcast. And they were like, like, I don't know why you're bothering. This is crazy. And I was like, there's always room for the best. Now I've never achieved that, but that's the right attitude. Kanye is showing there's always room for the best. Like if you can create. Look at this. If you're not looking at your screen, this is the craziest set I've ever seen in my life. For like it. He's standing on basically half of the. What's that thing in Vegas?

[Drew Manning]

The sphere.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's standing on basically half the sphere and just performing on top of the world's largest, like LED screen screens. This is. It makes these incredible images and he's got a catalog that's just like people gonna get hyped. So, yeah, like, if you can still make a statement that makes people feel something you can come back from a lot. But if you're a half ass artist, good luck. You're. But he's not like, he's really got the goods. It'll be interesting to see, man. It'll be interesting to see. He went hard, hard, hard in the anti Semite paint. Like it was pretty wild. So we'll see.

[Drew Manning]

It's interesting to have this conversation because I feel like every time Kanye does something the whole, like cancel conversation, like, rears its ugly head.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but if his music's good enough.

[Drew Manning]

Yeah, and. But I, I could even extend that conversation where like Louis CK is doing a. Netflix is a joke comedies festival. So there's certain people that, that were, quote, unquote, untouchable five, six, ten years ago, whatever, like that, that we see. They go through their arc and they're starting to pop their head out. Roseanne got canceled. She's been on. She's like back on Twitter. She's a social political commentator now. So there's all these people that we kind of exile. Then they. The great ones make their way back. Some not so great ones just kind of like fizzle off. And is it just all going back to. When you're that great at something, you find the audience again.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's something that I tell entrepreneurs all the time. You get 10,000 channels, senses to make a first impression. If you can come back with something that people really want, the, the goal of all of this, whether you're an entertainer, whether you're an entrepreneur, is you want to make something that people want so badly that they'll pay some sort of price. So there's some sort of like, cultural hit to say, no, no, I. With Kanye, like, he's great now. It's gonna be like, oh, yeah. Like, there are going to be corners of the Internet that are like, yo, like, that guy supports Kanye. That is crazy. So they're going to pay a price, but if they like it enough, they're still going to get behind it. And the same is true of an entrepreneur making a product, a comedian doing their thing, whatever. If you can make something that people like, damn. Like, this is. I mean, it goes back to consequentialism. If you can create that thing that makes people feel the thing that they want to feel, then you've got. It's not a free pass. Because certainly there are things that you make the bar so high to come back from that you just may not be able to do it. And I'd be very interested. I don't know if Kanye would have been able to make the comeback if he didn't first have the beat of. I'm essentially. I'm being a little bit glib here, but I'm back on my meds, and I'm sorry about all the shit I said about Jews. If he didn't have that beat, if he didn't do the mea culpa, then he probably doesn't get. Get the opportunity that he's getting now, or it would be viewed through a different lens. But he does the mea culpa, puts his head down for a few months, and then, like, comes back with a real banger. Then it's like, yeah, you've got a shot. Humans are on mass. We are knowable. Like, we respond to things in a certain way. Like, if you go too high, we want to see you torn down. That's knowable. If you get torn down, we want to see you come back. That's knowable. If you apologize because. But only in a certain way, then we'll give, like, a certain opening. If you apologize but in a weak way, then we, like, bury you forever. It's, like, really fucking interesting. So, yeah, this is fascinating to watch.

[Drew Manning]

There's Somebody put something on there, and I want to put something else on the table because there is this floating brand morality, I'll call it, where, for example, Kanye can issue a Wall Street Journal apology, say, I'm on my meds. I was talking crazy. He gets allowed to do Sofi again, hypothetically speaking. Right. He also announced that he was highlight. He was headlining the Wireless festival in London in July. Pepsi recently just pulled out because of him. Because he was a Headliner last year at the wireless festival. It was a rapper called Central C. Literal Murderer. Like, literally, like time for murder, right? Pepsi, no problem. We're cool with the murder thing. Things somebody put it in the chat. There's so many people that are still closing up with the Epstein class. There's so many people on the private sector that will still fund certain things in Mar a Lago. Certain people in the administration, like, so there is this kind of floating, like what you are associated with who and you do what now? Okay, I could turn a blind eye to that. This I can't turn a blind eye on. How do people navigate that? What seems like hypocrisy, but I'll call it like a smoke.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Seems like this is humans, baby.

[Drew Manning]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hypocrisy is what we do. So humans are selfish. They will do whatever they want that makes them feel the way that they want to feel or advantages them in some way. Trump will rightly cozy up to a dictator if he can get from that dictator what he needs. He desanctioned Russia's oil even though Russia is actively trying to kill Ukrainians and take over the country. He'll desanction oil because that's what he needs to get done to make sure that things are good for America, that he's got a chance of getting reelected, that he helps other countries around the globe. Yep, it's all the right thing in terms of, again, consequentialism. I'm trying to get to that thriving middle class as I have described it, and standing on your quote unquote morals as you continue to ice Russia out, that that doesn't make any sense. And so that's where it's like, you've got to figure out what your actual value system is. Don't be pulled by fake value system. People are selfish. That's the invisible goal that they have. That pulls them in directions that from the outside seems like hypocrisy. The real thing is when they were telling you like, oh, no, no, I don't do this, that or the other, like Pepsi. That's because they think it's what makes them money. So Pepsi is going to do whatever they believe is most profitable, period, End of story. And they will. Where it gets confusing is take Disney. They'll hire WOKE employees when they think that that's the most lucrative thing that they can do. And as soon as that starts being bad for business, then they're going to fire WOKE employees and they're going to start doing the thing that makes the most money. Now there can be a five or six year window where it's like they don't really know. Like, they've been working on this thing. It's probably better to still release it. Or there's so many WOKE executives that they can really fight in the company for a long time to try to control power. Power. But I assure you that company is trying to do the things that it thinks will make it the most profitable. Period. End of story. It just is what it is. Same thing with countries. They'll be as moral as long as they can until something bad is happening to their country and then it's going to flip to, oh, actually, psych. Just kidding. Like, we're now take Germany after World War I. We're gonna liquefy Jews if that's what we have to do. Like, we are going to get back on the world stage. We're going to build our military, we're going to become economically strong. And quite literally, I will kill everyone that stands in my way. Like, everyone. So that's humans. If people make the mistake of going, well, bro, that was just Hitler or that was just Germany, no, you're dumb. You don't understand people. History is just replete. That's what humans do when backed into a corner. Period. Full stop. End of story. So, yeah, humans are selfish.

[Drew Manning]

All right. There was something else in culture that I wanted to get to. Professor Jiang with another banger. He's been doing a lot of, how

[Tom Bilyeu]

is this guy just a high school teacher?

[Drew Manning]

Spiciness. Hey. I mean. And people were trying to dunk on him like, he went to Yale, he taught in, like, college, but I think he just went back home.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I really want to go to China and hang out with this guy. For real? For real. All capital letters. It is only because I talk so much shit on China and am wealthy that I'm worried about going, we just can't film anything.

[Drew Manning]

It has to be all iPhone photography.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't know if I buy it, but I really do want to go. First of all, I find him incredibly interesting. But anyway, so Professor Jiang sitting down

[Drew Manning]

with Sneako and he had this statement to make. Let's talk about it.

[Professor Jiang]

Consistent issue. But what I'll also say is that I've been to a lot of countries in the world and I would say that America is probably the least racist country in the world. Because regardless of America's racist past, Americans have deep respect for hard work and for talent. America's the only country in the world where you can come as a nobody and work really hard, open a restaurant and be a millionaire. And. And I know because my relatives have done so. And you couldn't do that in China. You couldn't do that in Europe. You can do that anywhere else. So, yeah, I understand that there is a racist past in America, that there's a path of slavery, there's a path of genocide against the indigenous people. I understand that. But at the same time, we can't forget that America is still probably the most open and generous society in the world.

[Drew Manning]

What he's saying is America's the. Is the least racist country in the world because you can come here, they reward hard work. You won't be isolated from pursuing your higher opportunities, I guess we can call it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I think this is where one. You have to separate systemic racism that's actually baked into a system designed to stop people. And then on the street, you don't look like me, and so I'm gonna give you some shit. Needless to say, the community is gonna want to hear your take on whether as the CEO of the black community, Drew. Which we have not talked nearly enough about that.

[Drew Manning]

Not even. I got impeached.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You got impeached. So as the man who brought it up, tell us about it.

[Drew Manning]

Drew, I feel like you just taught. You tossed me a hot potato. I was like, here, here. You got it. You got it, Drew.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Take it. I like to think I gave you the nuclear football. You can hand it back. But. But we do. We do need to hear your take on this.

[Drew Manning]

To that point. Yes. There are different lines. I think that when it comes to the core of race in America, I want them to. I want everybody just to realize America has done something very unique when it comes to race. America has a very different set, like view of race versus the rest of the world. At America, it's just at the skin color level. So there can be. Doesn't matter your heritage and all these things. If you are a certain skin tone, you get treated a certain way historically, in other parts of the world, it could be a group of white people arguing and they are racist against each other. But I'm racist because you are Irish and I'm English and you are. So it's different types of things. So there are that nuance and amanutia completely separated from America. I think what the professor is saying in this clip is less about racism as the hot pocket, the hot trigger word that it is for us, that when we hear race, we think of skin color and things like that. And I'm saying it's more of like an opportunity thing where you can go to America and you are allowed to navigate the country as you see fit. We were just talking about China. You can't just go to China and start a podcast. What are you doing? Who are you talking to? You don't have that level.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Don't be weaker.

[Drew Manning]

You know what I mean? So there's certain things that you can't show up in other America, in other countries, and just be as you can in America. And to that standpoint, I do agree that yes, America does have that most freedom, but there's a bunch of other things that America, I think needs to come to focus. Cutting the terms with, with. I think we have a very, we do a very good job of romanticizing the past and only talking about the positive outcome versus some of the mal intent that caused that positive outcome. For example, segregation didn't end because white people were like, you know what? We should be nicer to black people. It ended because Alabama was almost bankrupt because of the Montgomery bus company. Abraham Lincoln didn't save the slaves because he was like, I feel bad for all the black people. Let me go help them. He wanted to. To cripple the southern economy. So there are certain things that was ending. Slavery was in a sense a sanction during a civil war. So there are certain economic motivators that lead to a conversation that can help people morally. But I don't want people to be blinded to think that we were just like, I want to help people. Let me go help people. There's always got to be some greed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's also, though some people really, really did just think this is inhuman. And this goes back to the roots of this nation under Christianity, where it's like, that was a ticking time bomb in the psyche of the country of like, wait, how are we justifying. You look at the Bible, the New Testament. I get the Old Testament. It's a little slave endorsing. But you look at the New Testament and it's going to push you in the outcome that we ended up seeing. Now, the part that feels like humans aren't being honest about what our wiring is like is we have school of fish mentality. So we are wired to look at the world and say, this is me and mine, and that is the other, and the other poses a threat. And so if you want to make somebody prepared to kill somebody else, you have to make them the other. So yeah, they might be white like you, but they're German and you're American. Kill, kill, kill. And so you can very easily get somebody to other somebody based on a whole bunch of criteria. Religion, Irish killing Irish Catholic versus Protestant. It, it would be absolutely no comfort whatsoever to somebody. Then that was like, well at least the Irish aren't prejudice against your skin color as they bomb you or your family. You'd be like, why would I care about that? Yeah, they're still killing me. They're still killing my family. Like so I care deeply about them. That. So as long as humans have the wiring for school of Fish, we are going to at times group up, especially given that we're a melting pot. So we've got cultures from all over the world coming together that look all kinds of different. And then we go, ah, yes, this is. I'm on a team in this environment. Who's on my team, who's not on my team and can I tell immediately? And so it's like you can tell real fast best if somebody is a different ethnicity than you. And so that one's just always going to be the odds. You'll never get to zero racism the world over unless you're able to augment our genes or augment our actual physical bodies through technology to erase the impacts of that group up in group out group phenomenon. It's just wired into the human psyche.

[Drew Manning]

We. Yeah, and but you're saying that across all there's always going to be misogyny. There's going to be, yeah, like it's

[Tom Bilyeu]

the way that I think about racism in Japan is the way that I wish Americans thought about racism here, which is, yeah, this is a fundamental part of the human psyche. So I get right now I'm on the outside of this group. And so rather than spending all my time being obsessed with the fact that if I, I were living in Japan that I'm going to be treated differently. I'm either going to say, okay, do I want to be here or do I want to go somewhere else? Do I want to. Is racism to the point where I need to find a way around this or is this something that it's like, okay, yep, I'm going to encounter this every now and then. That's a limitation of the human mind. I'm just not going to spend my time thinking about it because the more time as we're finding out with more studies coming out about therapy, the more you ruminate on something, the more you hardwire it in your brain. The more it's hardwired in your brain, the more you see it reticular activating system. Like you can just become obsessed with that and if you look for it in an obsessive way, you're going to find it in an obsessive way. And so the more we lean into it culturally, it actually becomes a bigger problem. And so the more people can dissipate it. Be like, yes, that's the thing. But I'm not going to think about it. I'm not going to focus on it. I'm either going to work around it, go somewhere else, whatever. Like, there are. Especially now, hopefully I can get people to agree that, yes, there was a time where the black community was. It's a very good strategy working only within the black community. Banks for blacks, stock market for blacks. And then those were firebombed and fucking attacked. That's not going to happen now. And so if that's a strategy that people want to run, yeah, do it like, what's his name? What is his name? Magic Johnson, dude, homeboy got rich going into the essentially black community. Now, it would be probably way more Hispanic, but when he started, it would have been largely black areas. And saying, these guys are underserved. But there's like, if I can bring them cool experiences, movie theaters, stores, things like that, then I can make a ton of money and do something rad for them. And that's like, it is a wonderful strategy that made him. I think he's a billionaire. I mean, made him insanely wealthy. So that would be my advice to people, is the more you think about it, the bigger a problem it actually becomes. And the more you just go, cool, this is the lay of the land. How do I deal with it? Then you can be. You can find a path through that is extraordinarily positive in its outcome.

[Drew Manning]

Have you been following Marc Andreessen's like, tweets lately about the self obsession and

[Tom Bilyeu]

like, not on that topic in particular,

[Drew Manning]

when he was talking about. About. He doesn't ruminate about things, he kind of moves on. Like the. So are you. Would you be in that camp, that internal self reflection, you can overdo that. And you should have a. You become what you Repeat.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So phase one of my entire YouTube career was trying to get people to understand you become what you repeat. So if you're repeating a bunch of negative stuff, you're going to become. That will be literally from a caloric standpoint, it will become the easiest thing to think and feel. So what do you want to be the easiest thing to think and feel? If it's resentment, bitterness, anger, all of that, then loop on that. That otherwise, as I remind myself constantly, I cannot stop myself from having the first thought, but I can stop myself from repeating that thought. And so I will literally just do a pattern interrupt in my brain, like with overwhelm. I don't do overwhelm. So if I feel myself starting to get overwhelmed, I say, I don't do overwhelm. Stop. Nope. And then the actual act of just saying I don't do that causes that to dissipate. It's pretty fascinating. So, yes, all the mindset stuff that I've ever talked about, it's all real. I just don't talk about it anymore because, God, I've said it so many times, it really just got boring. And I figured that the people that are going to do something with it are already doing something. And those videos still exist if you want to go watch them. But, yeah, be careful what you repeat.

[Drew Manning]

Cool. And Thursday's the day.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thursday is the day, boys and girls. This Thursday. Finally, April 9, 1pm Pacific. I'm doing a live AI masterclass. Come learn how to build a business with AI. This has helped a ton of people start companies using AI. I believe this. This had nothing to do with us, to be clear. But I believe that there's a guy that's on pace to do over a billion dollars in revenue this year in 2026. He is a company of one using AI to build an incredible company company. So it is certainly a very real thing and we've helped a lot of people leverage AI to start companies. This is free this Thursday, so I'll walk you through how to create AI employees to launch your company. We also have a little something something for everybody that shows up live, so make sure that you don't miss it again. That's our AI masterclass this Thursday, April 9th at 1pm Pacific Time. And I hope very much to see you guys there. It will be awesome. Awesome, I assure you. All right, with that, everybody, have a wonderful Monday. Do not give into cynicism. Do not give in to cynicism. Send some love to our boy whose name I'm completely blanking on. I cannot believe that. Come on, Lex Friedman. There we go. Send him some love, everybody. Send him some love. Don't be cynical. That was terrible. All right, love you guys. See you Wednesday. Bye. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do? You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop 8 ounces of water and you're done. Done. You're getting 75 plus ingredients, vitamins and minerals, pre and probiotics, nutrient dense superfoods, everything that used to require six seven different supplements and perfect planning now happens in one drink that takes about 30 seconds to make. Right now, AG1 is giving you $87 worth of free gifts with your first subscription. You get a welcome kit, travel packs, vitamin D3 plus, K2 and flavor sample. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.comimpact to claim this offer. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and Sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With USAA you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.