Tom Bilyeu (8:26)
I mean, if you said, tom, this is a Lincoln Douglas debate, you need to be able to take either side of the issue. And now here's the case. I think they called them cases. Been a long time since I'd done Lincoln Douglas debate. And I have to defend a side that I don't believe in. But I'm going to give you the best argument. I would say something like, okay, listen, you've got all of Europe. Europe is in a very weakened state. You have Russia. Russia right now is being territorially acquisitive. You've got Putin, who has long believed that the fall of the USSR is a tragedy that needs to be rectified. And by invading Ukraine has basically broken like 80 years of. We no longer do the whole expand your borders thing. And so we've had this border integrity where people respond very swiftly internationally to say, hey, like, this is an incursion across sovereign borders. We absolutely do not tolerate that anymore. And there's massive pushback the world over. If the, if the invasion of Ukraine is allowed to stand from an international community perspective, we basically said, nah, like, all right, a little bit of territory acquisition is fine. And you run the risk of all hell breaking loose into Europe again, where Russia now starts going into other territories. And so what becomes the brakes on Russia? Or do they just start doing that? And now we're back in, you know, World War II era where. Where there's all these battles over who owns what territory, first, obviously, by the Germans, then the US And Russia sort of divvying up parts of Eastern Europe. So it, like, do we want to get back into that world? So let's say if I'm arguing this position, I'm going to pound the table. I'm going to say, absolutely not. I'm going to say, you cannot trust Putin, that you've got to understand that this is Somebody that will continue marching deeper and deeper into the former Soviet states, gobbling them all up. Is there really going to be anything that's going to stop him from pushing deeper into Europe? You've got a Russia, China alliance. Anything that we can do to weaken Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, obviously you got the BRICS nations, but I won't try to lump them all together. But from that, like Russia and China running all these military operations, putting out public statements that there's never been a deeper tie between Russia and China. And if you know Russia and China's history, it's pretty terrifying to think that from a military perspective they're more united now than they've ever been, given that they fought the war between what ends up becoming north and South Korea together, that there were a ton of Chinese troops fighting on the side of North Korea. And so you've got the. That allegiance is like, do we really want to see that getting stronger? The answer would be in this argument, absolutely not. Now, if I'm taking what I actually believe, America is going bankrupt, that will be devastating in a way to the average American, in a way that people are not, in my opinion, accurately mapping. It's one of those where I really have to decide if I'm going to keep talking about this. I have to find an emotional way to deal with this because it's forcing me to map the territory down to really minute detail. And the deeper I go, the more I zoom in onto the picture, the more I sort of map every pixel of this image, the more I realize, oh, the belief that I have in terms of how the economy works, it doesn't change, it just gets more terrifying. I feel that we are standing on the precipice over the next decade. This is not like a next five months problem, but over the next decade we will live through the process of what it means to go broke. And when you look at history, it is not pleasant. Now, it doesn't always play out exactly the same way. So it doesn't necessarily have to become a full blown civil war or anything like that. But keep in mind right now how panicky maybe the right word people are about the Affordable Care act, subsidies getting removed. Bro, it all goes away. Like when your country goes broke, it. You have to have a balanced budget, so that's $2 trillion a year instantly get vaporized. Then it's like, okay, well now that that's happened and we cannot borrow money internationally anymore, all we can do is print money. What ends up happening to the economy? What ends up happening to the dollar on an international stage. This is going to keep getting weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker. So you run. And then of course getting people to understand that printing money hurts the poor middle class the most. So all of that feeds into my belief that you have two options before you you become the world's gun store and you leverage conflicts to make money for the average American so that we're able to create military industrial complex jobs for a whole lot of people to make a whole lot of weapons. I get the moral implications, but I'm saying it is a an economically viable opt option for us to decide, hey, we don't, we're not going to get involved in these conflicts, but we're going to arm people to the teeth and we're going to re industrialize around weapons and artillery and all of that. Cool. Now they can fight as long as they want because you're making money. What we can't keep doing is sending money over either in the form of weapons that we're supposedly not going to use anymore. But if they're usable, obviously we could still use them doing that or just outright sending cash because that's a dollar that you're not spending here in America. Now I am the most worried about the cultural implications of America believing that you can just print money ad infinitum, that socialism is a good idea. That's the thing that terrifies me. So anything that gets people to focus on fiscal responsibility, I'm here for. So if extracting ourselves from conflicts that not near to our shores is the way that we get there, great. But I don't think this is the simplest thing in the world in terms of just be isolationist. We are still one of two incredibly important international powers. And so if we completely extract ourselves out of that, you become isolated, you're not making friends, you don't have the allies that you may need at some point in the future. And so as I say, make friends before you need them. So this becomes getting the voting public to choose usually forces you to give them binary options like America first is rapidly become America only because you just need something that's really concrete, really easy to see and understand. But it's probably far better that we run a more nuanced plan of helping where we can getting fiscally responsible such that we have money to do things internationally with when we need to. But that is going to be a brutally difficult sell. But getting into the nuance, and by the way, if, if these strands are not connecting for people, you need to Tell me where people are getting lost so I can really draw the connective tissue, because, like, I'm getting into a. The nuanced web that makes all of this stuff difficult to parse through. I know this is where people tend to get lost, but it is a very hard sell to tell Americans, hey, I know that we're going bankrupt. I know that we have to spend less money domestically, but we also can't go to zero spend on the international stage because these are allies that we want and need. These are ways that we get some of the power that we have as Americans because we have so much influence the world over. And if you give up that influence, which is already waning, but if you give up that influence entirely, then you're going to, economically, down the road, be in a much worse position. But that's hard to convince people of. When they look around and they're like, I can't make ends meet already. This does not feel good in any way, shape, or form. The youth feel totally disenfranchised, and they believe they're disenfranchised because capitalism. Bad. Not realizing they're disenfranchised because we gave up on capitalism a very long time ago and that the way to solve their problems is to move in the opposite direction. But good luck convincing them. In the middle of all of that, in the middle of people like me pounding our chest saying we need to balance the budget, and also saying, but by the way, you probably do want to use money to make sure that you have killer allies the world over.