← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
US v China Heats Up, Spirit Airlines Crashes, Trump Launches Project Freedom, and Why Men & Women No Longer Get Along | Tom Bilyeu Show
01:52:59
Tom Bilyeu and Producer Drew break down the escalating U.S.-China standoff over Iran, the economic ripple effects of war and AI, and the explosive controversy surrounding SNAP benefit fraud and political family drama.
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- [00:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Hey, sweetie. Your mother showed me this Carvana thing for selling the car. I'm gonna give it a try. Wish me luck. Me again. I put in the license plate. It gave me an offer. Unbelievable. Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair. It's done. The car is gone. I'm holding a check anyway. Carvana, give it a whirl. Love ya. So good you'll want to leave a voicemail about it. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pickup fees may apply. It's time to refund. Refresh your yard during Spring Backyard Days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill 3 burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill. And bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop Spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot now through May 6th. Exclusions apply. Seehomedeboy.com Pricematch for details. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I'm excited you guys are joining us today of all days. May the fourth be with you all. I absolutely am a total psychopath for Star Wars. We've got a little treat for you guys coming up in a little while, but first, let's get through everything that is going on in the world. Trump is attempting what he calls a humanitarian effort to get ships through the Strait of Hormuz. This is Project Free Freedom. So far, it is struggling to deliver results. We'll see what comes of that. Trump is also withdrawing troops from Germany after the chancellor said that Iran is humiliating the U.S. trump vows that he's going to do a lot more than the initial 5,000 troops that he's talking about. Now we'll see how far that goes. More wild words for all of Europe. In fact, China makes it clear that they will not recognize U.S. sanctions over the purchase of Iranian oil, and that is pitting the two largest economies against each other in a standoff that could get very messy. Elizabeth Warren sells 20,000 shares of Spirit Airlines just two weeks before it goes under. Man, she's good. She's so good. There are so many people, Drew, in Congress that are just unbelievable traders. What is their secret?
- [02:17]
Drew
The timing is just impeccable, you know.
- [02:20]
Tom Bilyeu
And in unrelated news, Representative Tim Burchette points out how corrupt DC Is when it comes to investing. We'll see if it ever stops. Warren Buffett said at his most recent shareholder meeting that people are treating the stock market like a casino in record numbers. Drew, have we heard anybody else say that? I feel like someone around here has said that over and over again.
- [02:43]
Drew
So brewing in there.
- [02:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Aye, aye, aye. All right. In an effort to curb fraud and abuse, all SNAP benefit recipients are going to need to reapply. We've got a story on that one. Marjorie Taylor Greene put Trump on Blue Blast for not releasing the Epstein files. That one's not going away. New data shows men have remained constant with their political views, but women have skewed far more liberal. And we've all been living through the consequences of that. So we're going to be talking about that and a whole lot more. Shout out to our Kalshi sponsor for today's episode who we turn to for understanding what the odds are of a given situation. It's really been interesting watching Kalshi rise as fast as they have for people trying to not only place their bets on culture, but also just get an understanding of where culture is. So super honored that those guys have shown us some love. So shout out to those guys. All right, Drew. It continues to be a fascinating moment in history.
- [03:43]
Drew
Yes, there's been a lot of changes in the Middle east region. The straight her moose drama has continued to be drama. Bringing it over to the Kalsi prediction markets. They are pretty much pricing in that the price of oil will stay above 11154 chance. That'll be 1105044 chance above 111. To me that just means that the market thinks that there's going to be more turmoil in the straight of Hormuz. This is going to be done. Yeah, no time.
- [04:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Safe bet. Yeah, yeah. I think that is very wise. On behalf of the public though, I'm surprised that the numbers aren't a little bit more wild because I don't see what people think the end of this is. So we're starting to hear rumors coming out of Iran that they are more likely, I should say. The US is reporting on the word coming out of Iran, which is that the they're going to for the first time be flexible on some of their nuclear ambitions. Now we'll see how true that ends up being. I think a more realistic read is probably that we don't exactly know who's in control. There's probably nobody speaking with one authoritative voice that can actually see this all the way through. We talked about in our initial coverage of the war that one of the brilliant moves that the Iranians did, was that they decentralized command. So you have a whole bunch of people that if the head gets lopped off, which it obviously was in the early days and the early minutes of the strikes, that they would still have people that understood the assignment before the Supreme Leader was killed. And so I think that we're still struggling with a lot of that. You hear Trump make reference to it all the time, that there's been regime change. These guys are much more reasonable. We'll see. I think that the reason that he'll say one thing and then a ship will still get attacked in the straight of Hormuz is that you have that decentralized command, that there are people that are making decisions based on the initial thinking, which, I mean, look, there's so much propaganda. It is so hard to know what's really true. But if it's true that you still have regime pro regime elements marching in Freedom Square, I think it's called Freedom Square in Tehran, basically saying, nope, we support this regime. We support the new Supreme Leader. If there is as much support for him as we're being asked to believe, then unless they see a path to their own victory, something that they can claim is a win, I think they're going to keep doubling down and doubling down and doubling down. So I don't think this is going away anytime soon. I think this is a classic case of it's easy to start a war and it's very hard to get out. So, yeah, here we are.
- [06:14]
Drew
The President over the weekend also announced Project Freedom. Let's go to Fox News. They covered it this weekend. Freedom launch this morning. The President calls it a humanitarian effort to safely guide some 800 cargo ships and tankers and their 20,000 crew members safely out of the Strait of Hormuz. The President says these stranded ships are running out of fuel, food and supplies and are merely neutral bystanders in this whole thing. In a very.
- [06:42]
Tom Bilyeu
All the people stuck in the ships.
- [06:43]
Drew
Yeah. Just kind of waiting for it all to play out. The true social post, the President Trump. President Trump went on to say, for the good of Iran, the Middle east, and the United States, we've told these countries that we will guide their ships safely out of these restricted waterways so that they can freely and ably get on with their business. The ship movement is merely meant to free up people, companies, and countries that have done absolutely nothing wrong. They. They are victims of circumstance. This is a human.
- [07:07]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really funny hearing China respond to all this stuff. Like when Trump put something out I'm going to paraphrase, but it was like, I don't think China has the appetite to open the straight. And then they clap back and we're like, the straight was open before you went in there, bro.
- [07:23]
Drew
What do you got to do with that? No, sanctions don't matter to us. We already got our deal going. Mind your business, Trump.
- [07:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So in. In a world where the information flows this rapidly and this kind of thing can get out to the world, we are gonna have a pretty fascinating time as we collide head on with China. This is not something we're going to be able to brush off. We have a bigger story about that in the future. But, you know, one of the things that I was beating the drum about before things really kicked off in Iran is this moment is about US And China. This moment is about US And China. And despite the fact that all the headlines are about Iran, this moment is still about the US And China. Now you've got Marco Rubio really drawing the lines of the new Cold War. And certainly there's a trifecta of China, Iran, and Russia. But in terms of who's the big player in those three, it's China by a country mile. And so, I mean, I hate that this is true, but it's like, people really have to pay attention to Thucydides Trap, what that looks like. And I think Trump may be the. The most likely to be ensnared in Thucydides Trap. Like, it just from a personality standpoint, everything that he's been doing since he came back into office is completely in alignment with that. Now, the problem with Thucydides Trap is you can't do nothing. And so you can't just take a backseat, let your country decline. You do have to do something, but, ooh, oh, I don't know that this is something that you have to do. So it will be. It will be interesting to see how the early moves in this play out with US And China from an economic standpoint, because if we lose any ability to sanction China, which we'll. We'll get to in a second, the mechanisms. The mechanisms of how China is combating this is very interesting. We'll talk about that in a second. But, yeah, this. This is not something that we can just brush off.
- [09:17]
Drew
But I think what's interesting about the Project Freedom spin is that making a humanitarian eff effort, he might be able to win the culture war at least. Shifted narrative that's happening in Iran right now.
- [09:27]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't think so. I think the reality is Trump is every day that the war goes on, he becomes more unpopular here at home. And here at home is ultimately all that matters. He's already alienated all of our allies. He's certainly not going to win them back with this. His only hope is that China has been doing some head feints that they're interested in Project Freedom, but they're not going to get involved. And at the same time, they're clapping back on us hard on the sanctions side. So we certainly can't expect any, anything coordinated there. And like, their official messaging is essentially nil. People are saying, like they're signaling openness, but that's going to be pretty vague. It's not going to be anything that will win people over unless they take action. And Trump can say, listen, arm around Xi, here I am, we're having our meeting and it's going swimmingly well. He's totally behind Operation Freedom. We're going to get those ships sailing. It's great. Then, yes, that would be a victory. I am certainly not expecting that. We'll see. But ultimately, I would expect China is going back channel to Iran. So they're going to be coordinating that. From that perspective, if, if China wants to see this all end and they put pressure on Iran to actually give us the, the end of the blockade so that they're saying, listen, you got to give something up. You've got to let Trump take a victory lap on the nuclear side of things, and there's some way for them to reduce the potency of the material that they have now. And so that I think is if, if I'm China, that's where I'm applying the pressure. I don't care if Iran gets nuclear. If I really want them nuclear armed, I'll give them nuclear weapons. So I'm going back channel. I'm like, hey, you need to chill out on that. Let him have that win. That gives him what he needs to get the fuck out of there. And then we can talk about what the go forward plan is, whether that's you guys being able to charge some fee, whether that's you charge a fe, but not to us. Like, that will be, I think, where this ends up playing out. So I could see China applying that pressure to Iran, which could bring all of this to a close. But right now, without knowing what exactly China is thinking, I, I don't know that there's enough give on the Iranian side on the negotiations for Trump to get what he needs to be able to signal to the US that I got this done. So we're still in a lot of question marks around the quagmire of actually getting free flowing oil through the straits so that the price of oil can come back down, at least in the short term. I think there's plenty of time between now and the midterms. The thing that remains a larger question mark for me is if this re escalates, what does that timeline look like for Congress to put an end to this from a legal perspective where Trump is unable to continue moving forward once the Iranians know that he can't use more military force, now they've got the leverage. Yeah, we're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about the worst investment most guys make on repeat cheap clothes. You buy them, they look fine, but six months later they're pilling, shrinking or just falling apart. So you replace them, you do it again and again, you're spending more over time and you never actually have anything worth keeping or wearing for that matter. That's the whole model behind Quint's. I've got one of their 100% Pima Cotton Tees and the quality is immediately obvious from the second you pick them up. They're soft, well constructed, the kind of thing that holds up over time. And that is the point. Refresh your everyday with luxury you'll actually use. Head to Quince.com impact podcast for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Quints Q U I n c e.com impact pod for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quints.com impact pod thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.
- [13:43]
Drew
I want to kind of drill down into the China of it all. Let's break down two tweets that we've seen come in over the weekend. One of them is that China says it does not recognize US's sanction on Iranian oil purchases and will not comply with them. And then the second one, and I think this one is a bit more interesting. Trump, like you said, he was tweeting and saying different things. He said at 1300 we will impose sanctions on China for buying Iranian oil. China at 13:10 we do not care about you. We do not recognize U. S sanctions on Iran oil purchases and we will not comply with them. We have trade agreements with Iran and strongly warn Trump not to interfere in our affairs. So it seems that they are pushing back actively, whether it's the mandates Whether it's our approach. So what is. What do you think how this, like, plays out between us and China in the Middle East?
- [14:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, so in the Middle East, a great qualifier there at the end. That keeps my fractal much tighter. So to understand what's going on. So as Drew was just reading, China just told the United States that these sanctions don't apply to us. We're not the country they're looking for. I mean, this is like the ultimate Obi Wan droid move. On May 2, Beijing's Ministry of Commerce issued a formal injunction blocking US sanctions against five Chinese oil refineries accused of buying Iranian crude. Okay, this is where this gets really interesting. It's the first time China has ever activated its 2021 blocking rules, as they're known. It's a legal weapon that Beijing built five years ago, but they never used it. Now, obviously they're going to push this through, but the way that it works is really unexpected, fascinating, and shows that this is going to escalate as a, as a proper showdown. So in plain English, the blocking rules are a legal mechanism designed to neutralize foreign sanctions inside China's borders. Okay, so this is China putting pressure on Chinese companies so the Ministry of Commerce can issue an injunction declaring specific foreign sanctions are illegal under Chinese law. So, dear Chinese companies, I get it. The US Is going to sanction you. They're going to punish you. They're going to try in every way, shape or form that they can to cause you pain so that you will acquiesce so that you don't have those things placed against you, and you will change your pricing or your deal making whatever it is that the sanction mandates. But once this injunction is in place, the calculus of all that flips for every company operating in China because it basically says, you comply with this foreign sanction from the US and you've now broken Chinese law, and the penalties have teeth. Chinese firms harmed by another company's compliance with U.S. sanctions can sue for damages in Chinese courts. So if the US does something to a Chinese company that causes a Chinese company to do something that, say, increases their prices for a good that another company needs to buy. So energy being just absolutely obvious example here, that company who's like, hey, because you complied with US Sanctions, my costs have now go up, I can sue you. You can imagine that puts those companies that are caught between their, yes, they're Chinese companies or companies operating in China, but they're now stuck between who do I fear more, China or the US So Beijing can Hit a non compliant entity with regulatory fines, asset freezes, and an inclusion on what they call the malicious entity list, effectively blacklisting them from the Chinese market. So everyone's going to have to decide, am I going to back the US or the ccp? And that I would not want to be caught between those two powers. But this is what this moment is. This is. Watch what Trump is saying. Trump now talks almost exclusively about our sphere of influence. So does he ever say sphere of influence? Not usually. He just says our hemisphere, but what he's talking about is our sphere of influence. So when you hear either Rubio saying that or Trump saying that directly, what they're saying is, we're not the world's policemen anymore. They might as well be shouting, the old world order is dead. There is a new world order that we are putting in place right now. We are letting go of much of. Not all, definitely, but we are letting go of much of the world that is beyond what they're calling the Greater North America and China. You go do your thing, we're going to do ours. Do not mess with us in our sphere of influence. We will, I won't say not mess with you, because they certainly try to get their tentacles, but they're really backing off the posture. Like, for anybody that was around in the 90s and the 2000s, even early 2010s, like, we were the dominant player on the global stage. But getting China into the WTO just changed everything. Those guys have become an economic powerhouse. And because of that, it's just a different world. And I don't know if you guys are old enough to have seen how all of this changed. I get how there's just a blind spot to what's really happening, but if you've been around as long as I have, it's like all of a sudden you start realizing, whoa, this is a massive change of rhetoric. But this is. This is not going to be just some smooth walk in that direction. There is this insanely bizarre confluence of things that are all happening, coming together in this moment where it is going to be a very dramatic economic. Hopefully it stays in the realm of economic showdown between the US And. And so all eyes on this. Do not let Iran be a distraction between what is really playing out. Watch how every move reverberates back to the US Via the Chinese. And, dude, this one is fascinating because China is turning its guns inward. That was the thing that I thought was really fascinating and just saying, everybody make a choice. And so, man, this is such a flashback to the 80s where it really became about two economic models, two value sets where it's like, listen, if I'm China, this is my pitch. This is a very chaotic time. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. And because we, China have 5,000 years of history, we can look back and go every time like this. You need a strong government. Otherwise the catastrophe is so big that it is very worth giving up your personal liberties and your freedoms. Just get behind us. We're going to keep stability, we're going to make sure you guys are safe and sound, we're going to focus on economic growth. You're going to be good. And the US is historically leaned into its freedoms. But we're in a. And the pitch goes very similar. Hey, it's a chaotic time. The only way to get through this is the entrepreneurial spirit really taking advantage of the unique thing that makes America. America is where you know, this do or die by your bootstraps place where we have blazed a path forward for the last 250 years that has made us the dominant superpower in the world. Now's not the time to abandon those principles. And China's just always copied us. We are meant to be the leaders, like, come on, let's do this thing. But in the age of social media that's going to get weird. And so the Chinese have the ability to really clamp down, to keep people silent. James Burnham. James Burnham. And so it's like all those things that I worry about being in an outcome of the velocity and volume of information, the confusion, the populism, all of that. China has a mechanism of internal force where they can curb a lot of that. And so we're going to see these two things collide at, at an unprecedented time in the world. So man do ask follow up questions if any of that was unclear. So I'm saying this stuff out loud for the first time, but that, that like swirl of things is going to control the next three years.
- [21:33]
Drew
And but to your point though, would you say China has an advantage in that way? The fact that they do turn inward, they can do one state, one media message, one government type way to push them through the uncertainty where in America we're still infighting and fighting against ourselves and a war and all these other things.
- [21:49]
Tom Bilyeu
I have a very strong operating assumption that freedom is the only path to forward because what ends up happening, and I'll talk about this when we get to the male female dynamic later in the show. When you have a dictator, if they're right, everything's great. The second they're wrong, it's more catastrophic than all the infighting and all that. And so what's fascinating is China will tell you that they've only had one civil war, but what they won't talk about is how fractured they were for a very, very, very long time. But the most deadly thing that China has ever gone through is Mao. So that's what happens when one guy has total control of the country, and then he's wrong. And this. Please trust me when I say this is only one example. It's just the most stark.
- [22:43]
Drew
Yeah.
- [22:44]
Tom Bilyeu
He was like, listen, the way that we. Because he understood what he had to accomplish in international affairs. So he was like, everybody's going to plant this set of crops, and they're all going to do it at these exact times. And people tried to tell him that's not how geography and climates work. China's a gigantic country. What works in one place will not work in the other. And he just had those people killed. And so they ended up doing that. Obviously, people starve en masse. 45 million people. Absolutely insane. And so I look at all of that and I say, okay, America ran a different test. And that test was, okay, we're all fleeing these despotic monarchies or dictatorships. We're coming to the shores of America at ultra high risk, but we want that freedom. And then this thing kicks in. That is truly the only way forward is innovation. And the only way to innovate is to break the consensus that we have now. The way that humans think it calcifies into dogma. And so you're in your early 20s, and basically your worldview solidifies and you get too far out of your, like, early 30s, and you're. You're kind of useless. It's utterly fascinating to say that as somebody who's 50, but I'm telling you, like, this just plays out over and over and over, and so people can't get out of their own way. Genius is a young man's game. They calcify. And so we have a system that just eats those people alive. Now it's getting worse, because look at how old our Congress and Senate is. It's crazy. Yeah, so we have our problems, but it's like, do I want to see us lean more dictatorial, knowing that if the dictator gets it right, we'll go fast, but the second they get it wrong, it breaks so bad as to be terrifying? Or do we stick with the Messier thing, where freedom does go down a lot of weird paths and you Get a lot of infighting and all that stuff. But I still bet on that. The. Because the only way to get the dictator through, to get their vision pushed through is tyranny.
- [24:55]
Drew
Okay, I want to add in another plot line to this, and that's the reports that were actually withdrawing troops from Germany. So President Trump yesterday said that he's considering withdrawing more than 5,000 troops from Germany. I think we have a total of 30,000. So it's not like, you know, there's going to be six guns left, but a significant cut down.
- [25:16]
Tom Bilyeu
Why is the US Removing troops from Germany?
- [25:20]
Drew
We're going to cut way down and we're cutting a lot further than 5,000, thank you very much.
- [25:26]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, he's mad at Europe. That's the reality now as the spheres of influence change. I get it. The, the world order, everybody's being asked, you're going to go with China, you're going to go with the US and right now there is Carney. So Canada's Prime Minister Carney is saying, I think the future is Europe now. I don't know if he's being serious if he's just in Europe. And so he's popping off because he's also been blowing kissy faces at Beijing. So I'm not sure what his real strategy is. And to say that you think a new world order is going to be born out of Europe is so stupid. Like, of all the. If he said, look, China's the future, I'd be like, I get it, man. Like, that is a real question. China, if China didn't have demographic woes, I'd be like, yeah, China probably is the future.
- [26:13]
Drew
That was my next conversation because there is talk that their economy is collapsing right now. There was a mortgage crisis a couple, couple of months ago, a couple of years ago.
- [26:20]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know how it's been going on for years now.
- [26:22]
Drew
Yeah. So it's one of those things where it's like, are they also on a Jenga board economy and they're two pushes away from falling over and not being able to claim their number one spot in this new cities. Yes.
- [26:33]
Tom Bilyeu
But in the same way that the US is. So we are both on inside, insanely precarious footing economically. The U.S. i would say, is more of a dumbbell approach. So we've got more tragedy staring us in the face with the debt than China does. But we also have more opportunity because we are still the world's reserve currency. So there's a lot of abuse that we can push off onto the rest of the world that helps us. That's gross. I know I'm saying it very deadpan, but nonetheless, we are in that position and so we have a tool that they don't have. They have been printing like crazy. This. I'm, I'm out over my skis on the following statement. I would need to look this up, but I think that they have been printing at a rate that, in terms of their, I don't know, I don't know the, the comparison to the US like on what metric, but it was like their, their rate of printing is worse in the US it's not going to be, I don't think, dollar for dollar worse. There's almost no chance of that. But that was something where I was like, oh, they might be printing more than I thought because my take has always been China is printing. However, they haven't printed as abusively as we have. So I think they have more latitude than we do. So I need to do deep dive there to find out what the reality is of their economic situation. But every time I look at it, you sort of dead end at propaganda coming out of China. They lie about everything. They hide as much as they can. People have to start looking at like the amount of luminance coming out of the country. It's crazy to try to figure out, okay, like what's really going on here. Which is wild to think that A, we can do that and B, that they obfuscate their data so much that you have to look at the amount of light they emit.
- [28:14]
Drew
Yeah.
- [28:15]
Tom Bilyeu
So it's hard to answer that question. I would say we're both fragile, but we're both so far ahead of everybody else in the world that virtually nobody else matters.
- [28:26]
Drew
Got you. So this really is a two man game. There's no third quarter, fourth quarter, buzzer beaters with Russia coming out.
- [28:33]
Tom Bilyeu
No, it'll be alliances. So it'll be if China, Russia and Iran come out of this stronger than ever. Like imagine Iran. Imagine Russia wraps up the war in Ukraine. They get the territory that they have. They let the world know, do not encroach on our borders. We will take forceful action. But they get out of that war. So now they've got the new technology because Ukraine and Russia really now are at the forefront of military. So those guys have knowledge that nobody else in the world has. So if they can both stop spending money, they're going to be in a much better position. So if Russia can extract itself there, then if Iran comes out of this and goes, we now charge A toll on the Strait of Hormuz. And everybody's like, I just, what are we going to do? Like, the US Is unable. Like, if Trump loses in the midterms and they are still doing their thing, they could be in a position where they can charge a toll on the straight of Hormuz. And if they then spin back up their nuclear ambitions, and it's like, we faced you down once. We're more than happy to do it again. Now it's like, if you see yourself in, I mean, God, how long would it take them? 3 to 5 years to get their program back up on its feet, yo. So that becomes very different calculus. This isn't going to happen overnight. But now you're in a position where China has its sphere of influence. The US Is sort of formally let go of pursuing that. We've got our sphere of influence, but we got our ass handed to us. Not militarily, but just outcome wise. In Iran, oil's going up. God, it's so this gets so complicated. I'm not going to fractal. I'm just gonna. I'm gonna put a thing here so people don't think I'm blind to it, which drives me crazy. Everybody thinks if I don't say everything out loud every time at the same time, if the world turns to the U.S. for oil, that will be great for the U.S. i'll just set that there economically. So as we retreat from the world stage, there are some big advantages to us. Okay. This all started based on Europe. Carney's a. If he thinks that this is going to rise up out of Europe. Europe has proven, one, they have demographic disasters just coming their way because of unchecked immigration. Two, they are, they're still, when combined, they are economically powerful. But they are really starting to fracture. Germany's AfD party wants out of Europe. Germany's AfD party is rising rapidly in the polls. Maybe they'll never take over, but nonetheless, there's that kind of pressure. And then also you're never going to lead economically if what you're known for is regulations. And, and right now Europe is one big regulatory body in the face of AI it is so stupid in all capital letters. And listen, I get the fears over AI Nobody shares those fears more than me. Like, I understand. I have the same anxiety. The thing I've wanted to do forever with my life, literally since I was 12, is under threat from AI right now. I just keep focused on AI can't do it without humans yet. So just keep executing with this Incredible tool. Any technology that promises an advantage will get developed. It promises an advantage. Europe is eschewing all of that. The only two real players are the US and China. So one of us is going to win the AI race. If you're not in the AI race, you don't matter. And so you've got the two biggest economies already. The two most important countries on planet Earth are the only two that are anywhere near actually being in control of the race to AGI. And so it's like it is a one, two punch that nobody else can counter. Yeah, taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after. Stay tuned. This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. November is Men's Health Awareness Month. So Talkspace wants guys to know that being prepared for life's biggest challenges and opportunities means prioritizing mental health too. Talkspace can help you go beyond fine tuned workouts, supplements and productivity hacks. Talkspace can help you fine tune your inner life so you can succeed in being the best version of yourself in any situation. And with Talkspace, you can get therapy from anywhere and on your time. You can even text your therapist between sessions. If you're depressed, stressed, struggling with a relationship, or just need a little extra one on one support, Talkspace is here for you. Plus, Talkspace takes most insurance and most insured members have a $0 copay. Men's Health Awareness Month is the perfect time to reach out to TalkSpace. Now get $80 off your first month with promo code space80 when you go to talkspace.com match with a licensed therapist today at talkspace.com and save $80 with code space80@talkspace.com that's talkspace.com promo code space80. Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.
- [33:25]
Drew
It's going to be interesting to see how all the pieces actually fall because I think to our point, there's international conflict, there's internal conflict, there's economic conflict, and those three pillars are the foundations of killing empires. Those three foundations of killing empires in the past before. So it's interesting to see which one of those actually caused the downfall when all three of them independently can cause a downfall. So it's interesting.
- [33:50]
Tom Bilyeu
The downfall is so predictable.
- [33:52]
Drew
Yeah, but downfall is a bit dramatic because even if we don't. Is it. I don't know if we go straight from here to Argentina. I think there's some, there's steps that have to happen in the middle before.
- [34:02]
Tom Bilyeu
It depends on your steps. So I can paint a picture of the different approaches. So the reason that I say it's not dramatic to say downfall is if you'll grant me a long enough timeline, these things are just guaranteed. I think the US is on a 10 year clock. If we don't, if AI doesn't help us grow our way out of our debt, we really are in trouble. I've got a deep dive on Kevin Warsh, who, man, I'm so conflicted. I really like the things that he says, but I look at the setup of what he's walking into and the things that he's not saying and I think it's very strategic what he's not saying. And I think unfortunately the world will not rescue him. And by that I mean AI will not grow fast enough. The world's not going to rescue him. What he's doing is going to be pro inflationary and he's going to accelerate the K shaped economy. Okay, so that's a fractal that's worth going down at some point. But for now to keep this streamlined, on a long enough timeline, the US is poised for collapse. They're poised for collapse for the same reason that every empire has fallen over the last 500 years. Once you realize that debt is magical, Drew debt is so powerful, but the temptation becomes to abuse debt. And so far no sequence of humans because you can get one leader that doesn't abuse it, but you'll never get 200 years of leaders that don't abuse it. And so something ends up happening that maybe even with the best of intentions, people start printing money. And because nothing bad happens right away, they keep printing money until the bad thing happens. And so as a plea to anybody that can hear me right now, the way that the game plays out is you start printing money, it accelerates, accelerates, accelerates. And then you either get revolution because of the K shaped economy, which that is what causes the revolution. So you get the revolution based on the K shaped economy or you end up defaulting and you're no longer able to access the debt that gave you the power. And so you become a backwater. Do you go all the way to Argentina? Argentina went all the way to Argentina. So they were the fourth most powerful economy. Camera if it's in the world. But I think it was. So they were massive. And when we were competing in the 1920s for immigrants, they were winning. So more people looked at the world and said, okay, we can go anywhere we want to go to Argentina because they have the most opportunity. And so they went from the sort of 1946 and on era America to being the backwater that has struggled for a hundred years. So it does happen. The UK has fallen. They ruled the entire world, dude, not that long ago. And they fell. Spain fell, Portugal fell.
- [36:52]
Drew
It's just like somebody, somebody in the chat has an interesting counterpoint. Andrew Weiss said, what time doesn't realize is there is nowhere else to invest other than the US that keeps us strong.
- [37:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, stop. So I think this is a really good point. I'm very glad he makes it up or that he brings it up. What he's not acknowledging is right now that only helps people that invest money. And what I'm saying is you have a dual problem. If you only grow the top of the K, you end up in revolution. And so this is why, remember, not every country falls because they default. We. The, the playbook that WARSH is almost certainly going to run is financial repression. Financial repression is also known as a soft default. So you just steal and steal and steal people's economic purchasing power until the point that they revolt or that you become England. Right. Because when England did it post World War II, they never defaulted, so they didn't have a revolution. But they still lost what, like 98% of the purchasing power. So that's in the last hundred years, man. Like this is not stuff where you have to go way back in time, Post World War II, those guys just decline, decline, decline, decline, decline, decline.
- [38:06]
Drew
Would you compare. I think Argentina's declining. The United Kingdom's decline is different.
- [38:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Not really.
- [38:12]
Drew
You put them in the same like category.
- [38:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it's, it's economic mismanagement. So now the cause for England was a more classic thing that happens to an empire. Argentina was never an empire. So England's was obviously wildly exacerbated by two back to back world wars overextending themselves in terms of, you know, having military bases all over the world, trying to be the world's policemen via the seas. Like the very thing that. Yeah, right. So all of that. Yes. But if you go up high enough, they become the same phenomenon, which is economic mismanagement. So going back to. Forgive me for forgetting his name, but the person in the chat who's like Tom doesn't seem to understand there's nowhere else for money to go. Again, he's only speaking to the top side of the K. And as every empire before us has proven, eventually there is somewhere else. And so if he's arguing the 10 year timeline, okay, maybe. But again, I will say when I'm Talking about the 10 year timeline, I'm talking about Revolt. I am not expecting us to hard default. We're going to soft default. But we are already on a knife's edge, dude. People are already like, flirting with open revolt. Now, what happens after 10 years, driving the debt to GDP up over 130%. Like, it is a nightmare scenario if it's where I'm like, yes. And it will be interesting if, as a community, we can start differentiating between. Tom has not said it this time. And the thing Tom does not understand. I cannot encapsulate the entire complexity of the economy. Every single time I talk about.
- [39:53]
Drew
You can't. Every single time, Tom, what do you mean you can't do that?
- [39:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Believe it or not. Now also, p. S, by the way, full confession. There are things about the economy that I don't understand. As the island of my knowledge grows, so grows the shore of my ignorance. So I'm very glad that people bring things forward because we will inevitably hit that part where I'm like, what the is that? And then I have to go research that as well. So I eagerly encourage people to bring forward things that they think that I really am missing. That just happens to not be one of them.
- [40:20]
Drew
All right, there's been some big news over the weekend. Spirit Airlines has officially ceased operations. Luckily for Elizabeth Warren, though, she sold 20, 000 shares of Spirit two weeks ago. Still took a loss, though, because those things were bleeding, but at least she didn't get caught holding the bag.
- [40:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [40:39]
Drew
This is interesting though, that Spirit cited rising fuel costs were one of the reasons that made them go under. This is a byproduct of this war. It spiked fuel prices. So I think all the. All the different airline companies are reporting at least 800 million to a billion in additional fuel costs. Just fuel costs, not ticketing, and all this other stuff that they have to shuffle around. Now, is this something. I know we're a free market and, you know, you need to see certain companies go down, certain companies lose, but is this like something that could have been avoided, you think? Or is it just would have kicked the can down the road, maybe.
- [41:16]
Tom Bilyeu
So ironically, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, I think it was at the time they shut down a merger between JetBlue, if I'm getting the players right, and Spirit Airlines and said that it was antitrust. Now, for me, when I hear somebody's trying to break up something for antitrust reasons, while I wildly distrust the government, that is the one area where I'm like, oh, maybe I don't need to go look at that antitrust yay. As sort of a default, probably a good thing. However, I have not done a deep dive, so I don't know if it was warranted for them to do it, because you certainly don't want to chill all of mergers and acquisitions, which has been a big problem over the last decade. So I would have to look deeply into that to know if this could have been avoided. So the question becomes, though, why was Spirit Airlines unable to get to the point where they needed to be purchased? So that would be the bigger question mark for me. I don't have the specifics on their economics, but I will just say that when a company goes out of business and if there are no governmental shenanigans that led to it, that's a perfectly acceptable outcome. People try things, some work, some don't. And that just is what it is. And we should want that. Like it's the burning of the underbrush in the forest. You don't want these, you know, that dry kindling to keep lying around so that you get something like 2000 or 2008 or Covid. And all of a sudden it's like the government is having to prop up every industry because you had so many economically fragile companies. You know, when you think about the stock price of Amazon fell dramatically, but they came out of it as one of the most powerful companies ever to exist in the history of the world. And the reason that they were able to weather that storm is they were actually profitable. So profitable. Tremendous. Like, once in a generation leadership. So that is what we should be looking for from our companies. And right now, it's like, slowly, slowly. This idea that the government should just. Just help everybody at all times has permeated the culture. And so whenever something bad happens, it's like, well, where was the government in all this? It's like that's where you have to have a principle of, do I want the government in the game of capital allocation? And for anybody that just needs the words to say, you do not want the government in capital allocation, they are moronic. They do not know how to allocate capital at all. And they have perverse incentives. So not only are they dumb, but they have the worst incentives in the world. Because now whatever tiny proportion of companies that they're taking a stake in or they've got some interest in propping up because it's too big to fail or whatever, you create massive distortions for them to help those companies rather than other companies. This is why, if any administration wants to do the right thing and make sure that if we're going to keep running the strategy of printing money, that we make sure that Americans own assets, it needs to be a broad basket of assets that are essentially blindly managed. So think index fund. There's just a criteria. Whatever companies meet the criteria in, whatever ones don't, they're out. And so it becomes harder, I won't say impossible, but it becomes harder to game the system. And that's the kind of position we want to be in. We want to see more Americans owning assets and we want to keep the government out of deciding what assets are valuable.
- [44:31]
Drew
Yeah. Hopefully we can get some inspiration from Argentina, because Javier Milei has balanced the budget for the first time in 123 years as of January 2025. He did balance the budget with increases into 2026 as well. When I seen this I was like, no way. Like I gotta fact check this. But no, Grot kind of definitely broke it down. Yes. Malay achieved a primary budget surplus for the first time in 12323 years, the 24 to 25 season and maintains it in 2026. Budget plans 1 Budget plans 1.2% of GDP. Inflation lowered from over 200% to approximately 33% annually. Still like higher but smaller 3.4%. Monthly poverty officially dropped from 52.9% to 28.2%. Recession overcame growth of 3 to 4%. Expected peso more stable. So it seems like when you balance the budget, numbers go in the right direction.
- [45:25]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean this is the drum that I'm trying to beat like crazy. Now listen, everybody needs to understand Argentina is still in a very fragile position. They are not out of the woods yet. They are definitely trending in the right direction, but there's still a bunch of internal conflict because this kind of austerity does not come without consequence. However, if you want the entire country to get moving in the right direction, you've got to go through this period of pain so that you can get your balanced budget, so that you can get things growing again. So, so that there is money actually for the people and you're not in a constant, never ending position for 123 years of having run out of other people's money, as Margaret Thatcher so eloquently put it. So this is a necessary thing that they have to go through. But it is not without its turmoil. So this is why Argentina had to come to the US and say, listen, we want to be a very strong ally of yours, but we're going to need a little help. And so we did the currency swap. If I remember right, the US ended up making money on it. But nonetheless, we did take a gamble in loaning them money because it's possible that everything imploded. So, yeah, just I want to be upfront about the fact that while I'm clapping so hard for this, I get cramps at the same time. Let's not be delusional about there's no guarantee that it's going to work, yet it's trending in the right direction. I love to see it. It's a great example for us to pay attention to because our budget is like 6.6%. That's directionally correct. Of GDP. That's insanity. Which is why we're having to deficit spend in the trillions of dollars a year. So the fact that they were, what, 1.2, 1.3% of GDP is incredible. That's the kind of fiscal discipline that you need. But the part that people hate about the Milei story is going to see if I can encapsulate this without turning everybody against me. People, when they looked at the slashing that he wanted to do to programs to the government, people were screaming, people are going to die. And Malay's answer was, people always find a way not to die. And there are reports, I cannot confirm that this is true. This could be pure propaganda. But there are reports that people can't afford their own local beef. And so they are slaughtering donkeys and eating donkey meat.
- [47:39]
Drew
Meat.
- [47:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Which is going to sound terrible to an American audience. And let's assume for the sake of the argument that that's true. That's what Milei was talking about. Hey, if you can't afford the beef, then you're gonna get a donkey. And so people do find that way to not die. And it is. God, does it sound horrible? But nonetheless, it is ultimately what you have to do to be in alignment with the fact that economics operate on physics. And you can't just socialism your way to the other side of this. You actually, as China demonstrated for the world, you actually have to have a thriving entrepreneurial class that is productive, that is making things and kicking off revenue that you can tax. And if you don't have that, then people struggle to make ends meet for 123 years. I mean, it's really wild how long this stuff goes and the level of prolonged hardship that you have to suffer through.
- [48:41]
Drew
Yeah, that's real. Let's hope we avoid that. All right, I want to throw up Warren Buffett's message. This is your term to Do a victory lap time about how the casin the Wall street is just like a casino and a lot of people are gambling in the markets.
- [49:00]
Tom Bilyeu
You know, I've compared it the markets to a church with a casino attached and people can move between the church and casino. And I would say there are more people in the church and more people in the casino. But the casino has gotten very attractive to people. You know, if you're buying one day options or selling them, I mean that is, that's not investing. It's not speculating, it's gambling just totally. There's nobody that can explain why they're buying an option for one day. So we've never had people in a more gambling going to make money on it then now. But that doesn't mean that investing is terrible. It does mean. Sorry, I talked over maybe his most important statement. He said there's never been more people gambling than now. Yeah, we, we are in that moment and getting people to understand that the stock market is gambling at its very foundation. I get he probably would not agree with that statement because he's a value investor and he thinks, well no, these things are as close to a guarantee as you're going to get. Yes, I understand that. But if there was no risk reward there would be no reward. So it only has reward because there is risk. The risk is the gambling part. You believe that you understand better than anybody else why this thing will go up. And so you're making it's. It's a new game at the casino where you actually can beat the house. So fair enough, you can beat the house. It's one of the few games where that is true. But nonetheless you're still betting against other people and getting people to understand that the reason these things work over time is that there are winners and losers. And for you to make money, somebody somewhere lost money unless you, you held the entire time. And then you sell once to somebody who's going to hold for 20 years and then they sell once to somebody who's going to hold for 20 years. And so every. Yay, thank you. And they just keep going up and up and up. But the market doesn't work like that. So on balance, like yes, if you put your money in and you don't touch it, you're good. But the reality is the markets work the way they work because most people buy high and sell low. That's just the truth. Very sad. Most people cannot just hold. And that for my money means that the church sort of is a casino and that's Definitely my mental model.
- [51:31]
Drew
I mean, it definitely doesn't help its reputation when the highest asset class is Pokemon cards.
- [51:39]
Tom Bilyeu
So people need to look at this scale. This is wild. I looked this up because I was like, there's no way this is real. Somebody forged this. AI at least believes that this is directionally correct with some nuance and caveats of course. But yeah, this one is crazy.
- [51:53]
Drew
Yeah. So if you would have invested $1,000 five years ago, S&P 500, your money would be up 31%. Bitcoin, your money would be up 35%. Gold, you would be up 160%. Pokemon cards, you'll be up 1,900%. That's wild.
- [52:08]
Tom Bilyeu
That is crazy.
- [52:09]
Drew
That's wild.
- [52:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Now I'd be very interested to see if, if they're treating the Pokemon cards like an index where it's all cards across everything. They're like doubtful because the vast majority of cards are going to be just absolutely worthless. Even today, they'll be pennies. But yeah, it is very fascinating and I'm not entirely sure yet what this says about long term investing because I have a feeling that whenever you're seeing pop culture become this level of a phenomenon, that it is a bad sign that the markets, we're just so far out on the risk curve that people are investing in this and that this is going to contract in a very similar way to it. Not as bad as shitcoins basically, but it is in a similar vein. You have people that treat investing like gambling and oh, I can gamble on this thing that I really like. And so there is this natural affinity for this stuff. However, when people begin treating something that doesn't really have core fundamentals, it has nostalgia, it has like extreme emotional connection. Totally understand as somebody who collects one piece cards, I get it, but I don't collect them as an investment. I collect the cards. So that's one of those things where, man, I would not, I would feel very exposed if I were investing in this kind of thing in a major way. In the same way that I would feel exposed if I were fucking with shitcoin. So I would just warn people that, man, if you want a long term invest, there are far safer bets. And this is based on a little bit of knowledge. But think about a baseball card from, you know, whatever 100 years ago, it's just not going to have the popularity that it has now. And so cards for athletes tend to die off over time because the people that grew up with that player, they go through a phase where they get money. So in their 30s, 40s, 50s, like they're really hunting that stuff. As they start getting older, first of all, they're dying off and second, they're not going to be in high risk assets. So that's where those things tend to have a much more aggressive natural curve than something like an index fund in the stock market where the world only operates because of companies. And so you're going to have a lot more long term viability there. Don't bet on individual horses, but on the fact that that will be the way that the world operates versus that that particular card people are still going to be into. So I'd just be a little bit careful about that.
- [54:42]
Drew
I got to give Pokemon credit though. They do do a good job of getting the next generation just as excited. And that's whether you're Gen 1, the first 150 or Gen. I think they're at like 5 now where there's like a thousand Pokemon now. So it's like they are trying to, with every iteration every year, keep the younger audience. Where I see your points, sports cards. The people who really, really love Michael Jordan are now old rocking chair people. And everybody's like, oh, we love LeBron now. Then in 20 years LeBron is going to be the rocking chair people and there's going to be some new kid who does crazy things. So I do see that with time those popularity and culture investments can like decrease. But art, do you think art decrease over time or is it like as an asset class?
- [55:21]
Tom Bilyeu
It's very useful, but it's the same thing. You've got to be so good at identifying what piece of art is really going to stand the test of time. When is something high enough to get out of it. But yeah, art has as I don't know for how many hundreds of years been a very meaningful place to put your money. There are people that are going to argue that art is also a great way to scam the system, which is not an unfair statement. And so how much of art's value falls in that vein, I don't know. But people, humans really respond to art. There's a real appetite for it. This weekend I spent real money on cards because I have an affinity I do not accept expect to ever sell them. For me, it's when a piece of IP really impacts me. It's interesting we're talking about this on May 4th. When a piece of IP really impacts you, you want a way to engage with it in a more deep fashion. And so there's a certain type of person that is a collector. I'm not an investor. When it comes to pop culture, I'm a collector. But there are obviously huge amounts of investors that can invest because there are people like me that collect. And whether these things go up in value or down in value is irrelevant to me. I want it today. That's the price of it. Today I'm either in or I'm out. So, yeah, yeah.
- [56:35]
Drew
But MTG has been on a table really going anti Trump, saying that he is the reason they don't have the full Epstein files. Speaker Johnson has been there trying to protect them. This is a five minute video, so we won't jump into the whole thing, but just to kind of set us up. Do you. Do you see where she's coming from? Or do you put her kind of in the same category as like Tucker Candace? She just kind of.
- [56:55]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, I'll. I'll give my naked read on mtg and I will say that, that I have not gone super deep on this. I could be getting completely bamboozled. When she first made my radar was at the State of the Union. I can't. I think it was Trump's first, maybe it was Biden's last, I don't remember. But it was the one where she was like screaming and yelling and smacking things together and just acting a complete fool. And so I was like, this woman is unhinged and completely wrote her off as somebody not worth paying attention to. And then when this all happened with the Epstein files and she actually left Congress, now she might be on a run for something else. And so maybe this is a grand political strategy and I'll eat my words. But when she left, I was like, wait a second, is this somebody who's actually standing on principles and was willing to act a fool because she so believed that she was right and she understands social media. And so she was just like, I know how to get attention. I'm right. I really believe what I'm saying. And so I will make a spectacle of myself simply to get people's attention so that they hear my real message now that she is toned down and she's not like yelling and screaming and banging things in a place that I consider just completely inappropriate to do that. And she's just laying out her message. She's like, listen, I was in the room. This is exactly what was being said. I completely extended myself to Trump partly because I really thought he was a guy that was going to fight for these women and that he has not done that and he has Said to my face and to other people that, you know, there are good people that are going to be hurt by this. And she's like, what the fuck? Like, there are good people that were already hurt by this and you're now silencing their voice. And so my mental map of her as updated to somebody that behaves in a manner that I don't find interesting most of the time previous to this, however, is really somebody that's standing on principle. Now we'll get to the emotional reactivity of it all when we talk about the growing divide between men and women politically and what from a neurological standpoint, I think is driving that. So she's got a behavioral affectation that I don't respond to, but I'm now mapping her as somebody who is deeply sincere about a set of principles that she really believes in. And woe be the man that violates those.
- [59:14]
Drew
I want to tag this on with this kind of, of anti war coalition that's happening right now. Somebody in the chat just said something like, what? Tucker and Candace aren't in the same category. How can you compare them to Interesting. But there is this category of we might have difference in ideologies politically, but we're both aligned that we want to be an America first anti war coalition of people just until midterms, just until the next election.
- [59:40]
Tom Bilyeu
Values matter. Values matter, dude, race and political party, same, same values. You suddenly see like, oh, it's not about being on the left or the right because that's a tribe at this point. It's about what do you actually believe. And so now all of a sudden there's this common ground being found between people on the like, hard left and people on the hard right who are like, on this issue, we share a value set. And so now all of a sudden it feels good. Like you see this thing that I really care about the same way that I do. And they are discovering an about being a human, which is values are the only thing you care about. Everything else is an affectation layer. It's a presentation layer. It's not like it's not the real thing. You don't give a fuck about that. Like, that's all just like, do you like blondes or brunettes? The reality is it doesn't really matter. You could end up marrying somebody that is completely different than you ever thought because it's. How does this person make me feel? So that's fascinating.
- [60:38]
Drew
Yeah. Do you think that it takes that much? Because I think right now I have been feeling frustrated politically because I See all the things.
- [60:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it real?
- [60:48]
Drew
Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have. I've been seeing all the things that are wrong, but I don't understand necessarily how to combat that, what, where to start, how to move. And even in this exchange, I'll jump right to it. Mehdi Hassan kind of retweeted Tucker Carlson's New York Times interview and says, hey, Chenk and all the other fellow anti war leftists, I get the desire to ally with anti war rightists in this movement. Anti left, anti war leftist, anti war rightist. That's the coalition. But this is one of the many, many reasons I still have issues with Carlson. He lies so easily and casually and casually and demonstrateably. It's a trust issue with him. And then Cenk replied, I genuinely don't understand why you think it, think in this binary way that in order to be allies with someone on an issue, you have to vouch for that person in their entirety or every policy position they have.
- [61:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Have.
- [61:34]
Drew
No, you just had to have to be their ally on that issue. Do you agree with that? That you can make allies as long as you guys have one principle that you can stand on? Or does it matter the totality of their character before you get into a partnership with somebody?
- [61:48]
Tom Bilyeu
I think the, the politically expedient thing, and this is where I go into Tom Billy mode, which is, oh man, does it drive people crazy. But the way that I look at it is, I'm just gonna tell you what is. It is politically expedient to partner with somebody that can help you get a thing that you really care about done, knowing that you disdain them in a thousand other ways. And so politicians will do this all the time. They'll become bedfellows for a minute and then they completely jettison each other. Talk shit on each other again. Once that, thank you. You did what I needed you to do and now I don't care about you anymore. This is precisely why I hate politics. So then there is the, the flip side of that coin, which is it's a very caustic strategy. And so it makes you look like a slick politician who doesn't actually care about people. And so for anybody that reads the situation of well, but hold on, this is a, this person is a whole character. I cannot look past these other things and anybody that can, like you're faking, you're manipulating me. And so you'll get that reputation over time. So that's what, what is now, I don't think that people are going to be able to politically get things done that they want to get done. If they're not able to partner with somebody that they don't agree with across a whole bunch of things, but do agree with on one, I think you have to take again, for political expedience. You have to take the partnerships where you can get them knowing that you're going to ditch them. The classic example of this is one of the biggest monsters of the 20th century, one of the biggest monsters in all of human history was Joseph Stalin. And the us, the uk, the Allies, partnered with Joseph Stalin to get rid of Hitler. And it's not that they didn't know what Stalin was up to. They knew perfectly well. The reason that they partnered was that it was expedient. We both hate Hitler and Hitler is an acute threat right now. You're a long term threat, but he's an acute threat. So cool, you help us out, we'll get this and then we can fight our war, which we then ended up fighting all the way up until like 99. So it's. Or 92, sorry, 91. Anyway. So that's the thing that I think we need to look at. So if I were advising the country, I would say, yes, partner with somebody if they can help you get this thing done. Like if we needed to partner with China to get what we want out of Iran, do it. But knowing we're still in Thucydides, trapped with China, nothing is going to change that. So that's how I would play it.
- [64:23]
Drew
This reminded me of like a quick fractal. It doesn't have to be big, but like, are you one of those people that can separate the art from the artist? Like that whole argument?
- [64:31]
Tom Bilyeu
I can, but it, it does tarnish it. Even Star wars has been damaged for me by the most recent stuff. Star wars is about training, using the force to improve yourself. George Lucas started taking it down a bad path with midi chlorines. That was just a, a crazy mistake on his part. And then modern Disney just absolutely ruined it by saying, well, as long as you're a woman, you're already powerful. That's just stupid. Showing a woman earn her stripes is dope. So that's why, like take a movie like Kill Bill, female protagonist, nobody had beef. In fact, she's dope as the day is long, but you watch her train and become a badass. She's not just badass by dint of being female. So period, to keep it from being.
- [65:20]
Drew
No, I got you, I got you. It's, it's interesting though. We'll see how this Coalition kind of happens because I think that while everybody's friends, when everybody has a need, but as soon as one person gets a need and then the opportunity arises, I'll be interesting to see who jumps ships and backtracks and who says, okay, cool, done onto this and now they're attacking again. So we'll kind of see. But it seems like this war has united different factions of people in ways that I didn't see coming coming initially. And we'll see when we get to the midterms. All right, we have to talk about SNAP and the people that were scamming this system. These are some hall of fame scammers. But apparently, according to Fox News, it will be. 186,000 people have been found dead on SNAP. Hundreds of thousands of double dippers. So there is a thought now that you will be forced to reapply to the program and have to kind of clean up the rules. I know this is in the midst of J.D. vance going through Minnesota and California. I think they found over 400 businesses and fraudulent hospices and all these other things. So there is a purge kind of happening. What was your opinion on the SNAP news?
- [66:32]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, in addition to the dead people and the double dippers, 14,000 people that are on food stamps were caught driving Bentleys, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Fraud mud. And that, by the way, was what was found in just one state. So the USDA is calling out that there is massive systemic fraud in the SNAP program. Because of that, the Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, is forcing every single SNAP recipient in the country to reapply all 42 million of them. This is coming after the 43 day government shutdown. The USDA dug into the recipient data from 29 states and what they found just set off a ton of alarm bells. 186,000 dead Americans collecting benefits. Half a million people enrolled in two states at the same time, double dipping on taxpayer dollars. 226,000 fraudulent claims have been approved. EBT cards sitting on balances of over $10,000. Cards issued to people who just don't exist. And again, that's just from the 29 mostly Republican led states that actually complied with sending in the data. 21 Democratic led states refuse to hand over their data and are suing the USDA to keep it locked up. This kind of thing drives me nuts. I don't know how as a society we stand for that. That is crazy. Turn over your data. We can FOIA request people in the government for a reason. There's supposed to be transparency. Unless it is a national security issue. This data should be public. We should be able to figure out exactly what is going on. Now, Rollins says the administration has already moved 4.3 million people off of SNAP since Trump took office. There's been 118 arrests, and she's saying that there's going to be more. So the mandate becomes very simple. If you want to keep collecting, you've got to prove that you actually qualify. You have to re verify your income, you have to re verify your house, you have to re verify that you're alive. Yikes. That we have to do. That is crazy. For decades, SNAP enrollment exploded with almost no scrutiny whatsoever, which has been a huge mistake. Improper payments hit nearly 11% of the program last year, roughly $10 billion in waste, error, and outright theft. So Rollins is saying that that game is over. We're not doing that anymore.
- [68:55]
Drew
Anymore.
- [68:55]
Tom Bilyeu
We'll see. But I, you have to means test this stuff. This one is crazy to me.
- [68:59]
Drew
At this point now, I feel like you have to go just across the board. Every government program just needs to get audited because we're seeing it in Medicare, snap, housing, health insurance. So it's like they haven't done it yet.
- [69:13]
Tom Bilyeu
Education this day and age. Drew, there is no excuse for every dollar that the federal government spends not to be tracked down to exactly who originated it, why they originated it, and where it went it, period, full stop, end of story. They were talking about this in the beginning of Trump's second term with Doge, that one of the things Musk said that they put in place was they just made it mandatory. The field for why is this money going out, which was not mandatory in the first place, which is pure insanity. We allow our government to get away with absolute outright theft, fraud, all while racking up $2 trillion a year in deficit spending that is driving the K shaped economy. The very thing that people are furiously angry about, that they keep saying is because of greedy business people or wealthy people that won't pay their fair share. Instead of going, why the are we spending $2 trillion more than we need to be spending? We need to balance the budget. And when we're allowing for this level of fraud and we're making people poor every day, it is so maddening. You want to talk about getting disheartened because you see the problems and you don't know what to do about them? I see this problem. I know exactly what to do. And we're not doing it. And that is the wild thing. And by the way, not only are we not doing it people are lying about it as fast as they can. They're lying about the cause of the problem. The politicians that are banging on are either, as always, there are two options. Dumb as, or they're lying. Either one of those is terrible. So anybody that's not saying that we need to have a balanced budget, and that includes basically everybody other than Thomas Massie. Rand. Pa, you got a problem.
- [70:52]
Drew
And then. So this story is kind of funny, too. I'm sorry I'm throwing a lot at you today because I just feel like a lot happened this week.
- [70:59]
Tom Bilyeu
This one doesn't make you sad? This one makes me so sad.
- [71:02]
Drew
It does, but I'm proud of her. So it's like. Because this took balls, but it just depends what her relationship is like with her. Set it up so that people wonder
- [71:14]
Tom Bilyeu
what we're talking about.
- [71:14]
Drew
Breaking news. The daughter of US Republican Senator Jay Block said Israel pays money to my father and he spreads propaganda. I am deeply ashamed of this situation. I believe my father has sold his soul to the devil. I hope his career ends.
- [71:26]
Tom Bilyeu
So my dad, a Republican state senator
- [71:28]
Drew
in New Mexico, just got back from
- [71:31]
Tom Bilyeu
his trip to Israel, which was not
- [71:34]
Drew
like a personal vacation, by the way.
- [71:36]
Tom Bilyeu
It was him and a bunch of
- [71:38]
Drew
his other Republican cronies who got invited
- [71:41]
Tom Bilyeu
to Israel for what I can only assume was.
- [71:44]
Drew
Was just like a propaganda trip. See, it looks like my dad and a bunch of other just like, loser
- [71:50]
Tom Bilyeu
politicians from New Mexico went to loser politicians. Man, this is heartbreaking. I'm surprised you and I are as far apart in this. I mean, so I think we get it.
- [72:00]
Drew
Yeah.
- [72:02]
Tom Bilyeu
So value system. My value system is there has to be some integrity to the units that you build in your life, and your. The units you build at work are always going to be a little bit sus. The family unit, though, needs to be strong. Now, her father could be a parent that is so bad that this is justified. And maybe as I look closer, I'll be like, okay, I get it. Given the things that he's done to her, there's no safety there. There's no unity in the house. It is what it is. But when I see just the trend where people feel a deeper allegiance to their followers than they feel to their family, that. That is really distressing to me. And if she wants to harangue her dad and go after him privately, if she wants to say publicly, listen, I'm not going to comment on my dad, but needless to say, we don't see everything the same. Got it? Understood. But to put your family on blast is really gross. I would be very curious to know if Dante, as in Dante's Inferno, ever commented on this. I would be a little surprised if he didn't. If this doesn't fall into, like his betrayal bucket. I just really hate to see this. I wouldn't want to see parents putting their kids on blast. 50 Cent, I'm looking at you. I think think the way that 50 has handled his son, it's like, that's your son, man. If you up when he was a kid, that's on you. And so as far as I can tell, the whole like Brad Pitt thing, like his kids completely distancing themselves from him, I'm gonna guess he really something up, but at least he doesn't exacerbate it by throwing his kids under the bus. And he's just like, I'm here as their dad if they ever need me. Like that kind of thing. Like, yeah, I just, I don't dig it, it, I don't dig it, man. And it's becoming like a bigger thing.
- [74:05]
Drew
Yeah, I, I get not airing out dirty laundry. I get some things have to stay in the family. Like, I, I, I understand that. I think here I don't know their relationship. So I'm projecting 100 me and Lynn's relationship onto this situation. And I'm like, if Lynn had to get on TikTok and say, I'm disappointed in my father for A, B, C, D and E, I know in my life there had been so many other steps that failed that the fact that she's doing that now, it's big enough deal that I need to kind of
- [74:40]
Tom Bilyeu
take a step back, get that and listen, maybe as a parent you're gonna help me see something. But here's what I would say to that. She looks very young. I'm gonna guess she's somewhere between mid teens to early 20s. I just really can't tell. But let's say she's 15, 16. I don't know if it says anywh, but the odds that in 10 years or 15 years that she feels the same about things in life as she does at this point is effectively zero. That's true. The world is going to open itself up to her. She's going to realize that things are far more complicated. Kids tend to go on a pretty knowable journey with their parents. Some parents are truly bad, and maybe he is. But it goes from, my parents are morons. They know nothing. And then in your early 20s, you start realizing, oh, that thing they warned me about is actually coming to fruition. My parents are a lot smarter than I thought, and I remember going on that journey now, in the end, I've taken a leadership role in my family. I did that quite young. And so even more than most, I would say I was probably onto a lot of things early that my parents never quite understood. And because of that, my life has been as successful as it is. And so I can point to a lot of things I said as a kid and be like, well, those actually ended up being true. And still I point at my youth and go, thank God there was no video evidence. And thank God I was not able to, you know, say something stupid about my parents in a public forum, because I'm sure that the temptation would have been there, because I really felt that I was right, vindicated on some things, an absolute moron on others. And so that kind of thing is just, like, I don't like to see it, man. And. And from a parenting perspective, I'm not sure how much you can stop it other than you do your best to say, listen, we. There is a. This is exactly what I would try to do if I had kids, which I do not. But if I did, I would say, listen, the thing that does the most psychological damage is a frenemy. Somebody who you should be able to be close to, somebody that's in your life, somebody that you're doing something with. With, but they're actually your enemy. And I never want you guys to see me as your enemy, and I never want to see you as my enemy. And so I don't want to have to pretend to be something that I'm not with you. It is inevitable that you will push back against me at some point, that that is how this all works. And part of that is you're going to think that I'm really stupid for a period of time. What I'm saying is, in the Billew household, we do not light each other up on social media. We keep that here. If there's something you've got to say, you can say anything to me, you can tell me how wrong you think I am, all of that, but we don't put each other on blast in a public forum. And you can go argue for your ideas. They can be diametrically opposed to mine. Just don't be pointing at me. Don't say anything behind the scenes. You know what I mean? Like, if she were out there and just lighting up all the causes and saying, israel is a mess while dad is campaigning for Israel. Cool, cool. Love it. Not saying she needs to be silent. She needs to say what she believes. I'm all for it, but putting each other on blast, you become frenemies. And it really is psychologically destructive. One of the things that I look at, I hate to say it, but Lisa and I have commented about this. When we see stuff like this, we are like, yeah, glad I don't have kids.
- [78:00]
Drew
Dodge that bullet. Yeah.
- [78:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Like, I don't want to have to think about. Because I have to think about that with employees. Right?
- [78:06]
Drew
Yeah.
- [78:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Where it's like, oh, somebody gets disgruntled, obviously, they then can run out and tell whatever narrative they want to tell. When you've had thousands of employees, like, that becomes pretty real, pretty fast. And so that's already an uncomfortable feeling where you have to be vulnerable and real if you want to actually lead people. But to have it with your own kids, yikes. That is the thing happening right now that I do not envy parents.
- [78:33]
Drew
Okay. And then because I want to just make some clarifying points and see if we kind of end up in the same place. Place I'm assuming, like the. Who was it the Beckham. The Beckham kids. Yes, that Completely out of line. That's a money thing. I deserve entitlement, like all that stuff. Yes. I put that in a separate category. So even some of the examples you pull specifically if there is something that he did maliciously, not just he went to Israel, came back, you went to Israel, you kissed the ring. Now you're a massad agent. Let's assume all those things are. If she legitimately has a grievance, hey, dad, you did this thing. He passed a law that's going to pollute all the water in New Mexico. I'm making this up. Allegedly, all that stuff. But hypothetically speaking, he has influence over a law that would actually hurt the environment at a grave cost. Certain people at a grave cost, kick 2,000 people off their medical insurance, something like that. Something measurable. She can see it like that. She brings it up to her dad. Her dad says, you don't understand this. In 10 years it'll make sense to you.
- [79:31]
Tom Bilyeu
You.
- [79:31]
Drew
In her frustration, she then goes on social media. At that point, I'm not like, betrayal, you're the word. It's like that would make me pause and have that self reflection. And then to that point we'll have that conversation. And that's where it's like, I wouldn't just start with anger at her. I would try to kind of mend that bridge.
- [79:48]
Tom Bilyeu
I think that's very smart. I think that's exactly how the father should play this. The way that I would look at this is, okay, let's say that I am a very political person. I'm raising a daughter who's going to be very political. First of all, she's female, so she's likely to skew liberal. Second, she's young, so she's likely to skew liberal. So as a dad, I'm like, okay, I'm a conservative guy. My daughter's likely to be doubly sort of not conservative. And also maybe third, kids push back. They're whatever their parents aren't. And so three strikes against me, she's likely to be liberal. So cool. Now, what I would say, let's have some ground rules as you find your footing as a political commentator or just a voice to your generation. Whatever. Let's do this. Let's imagine that we have two competing press conferences held at the same time. I am, from your opinion, toxic waste dumping over here, and you're gonna fight for the environment. And now you're saying all the things stats, figures, beliefs, ideology, all of that. And a reporter is inevitably going to ask you, well, your dad is over here, Isn't he the one that's driving all of this. This. If your messaging is something along the lines of I love my dad, we do not see eye to eye on this issue. I am eternally grateful for what my parents have given me. They've raised me. Obviously, this assumes that this is not a completely dysfunctional, sinister person. And at the same time, we all need to fight for what we believe in. And so my dad needs to put the vision for America that he believes in forward. And I'm going to do the same thing. And so you're never going to find me speaking ill of my father, but you'll find me saying that I don't like certain policies that he has. I would look at that and go, yeah, this is how people should handle this. The father should be doing something very similar. My daughter's an incredible young woman. I cannot wait to see what she becomes. I think over time, life is going to teach her different lessons. But everybody needs to fight for what they believe in. We trust the youth to come in and shake things up, which is exactly what my daughter's doing. I'm not going to abandon my principles. I always look at the arguments that my daughter puts forward. I'm very grateful to have somebody in my life that challenges me. I have nothing but love and respect for her, for the political process. Now, look, I get we're not in that moment. But I do hold myself accountable to modeling those behaviors because I think that they are so high utility. This is exactly what my wife and I do in our marriage. There are times where the things that I believe my wife thinks are crazy and the things that she believes I think are crazy. But nonetheless, I'm not going to get up and talk on my wife. My wife is the most extraordinary person that I know. So it's like.
- [82:24]
Drew
So I think that's what I'm hearing. Like, the subcontext is not necessarily that you have a differing opinion. It's not necessarily that you're quote, unquote, calling out my stance. It's. You're talking about me. Like, you're. You're talking bad about your dad. You're talking about.
- [82:36]
Tom Bilyeu
She's like, he sold his soul. These guys are stupid. Like, that's where I'm like, like, God damn. I don't have beef with her publicly disagreeing with her father in the same way. I don't have a problem with my wife publicly disagreeing with me. It was a absolute mistake for her YouTube channel to interview me, but it was an awesome time as husband and wife to be able to discuss the most contentious issues in our marriage. So those kinds of things. Yeah, if you can do it with respect. But that is not this.
- [83:08]
Drew
And then last thing, April is like, we're assuming that he cares about his daughter. What if he's just like a pos. My easy go to like, if he's a piece of. That's what you get. If you would have been a better dad, you would have had a better daughter. So I. To me, all of this is void if he's not in her life. If he's abusive, he did anything that's. And not just triggering. He makes me feel a type way. But, like, pathologically, wasn't there abuse his mom didn't like, you know, if there's anything measurable actionable that we've seen that he did that was wrong as a father, then by all means, means, you are now sowing those seeds that you planted so you can't get mad at anybody. But you're.
- [83:42]
Tom Bilyeu
If they. If they are a true enemy and it's not a frenemy. And there. There are certainly scenarios you could paint where I'd be like, yep, like, you reap what you sow. I totally get it. I still don't love it. As I would much rather see them handle this quietly in whatever way they need to handle that. But, yeah, on that one I'd be like, all right, listen, I get it. It.
- [84:04]
Drew
If.
- [84:04]
Tom Bilyeu
If he was neglectful in, like, a true pathological. Not just like, my dad wasn't at my games kind of way, but still, it's not my favorite thing to see.
- [84:15]
Drew
Quick fact. I have a family member who didn't grow up with a father, and he's now in his 20s. He has a relationship with his sisters on his father's side. Like, he has other interactions in the family, but, like, his actual dad has a wife, like, three or four kids, lives in a different state, and they're like, happy housewife. And then all his, like, bastard children are now, like, a coalition together and all this other stuff. Long story short, we were talking on the phone. I was like, yeah, have you talked to him? Because he was talking about him and his sisters are getting together about to do something. I was like, yeah, well, have you talked to him? And he was like, nah, like, whatever, he hates me. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, he doesn't talk to me. He hates me. And I was like. I was about to. Like, he doesn't hate you, or he does it. And I was like, well, he's not here to give his. His argument in court. So that's like the default judgment. It's like, if you get a ticket and don't show up, the court's gonna be like, all right, well, I guess you were speeding. Next on the docket, right? So I'm like, as much as I hate that that's his takeaway that he thinks he hates him. It's like, well, you weren't there to then disprove that notion. So you can't get mad at what takeaway that person comes down to. So that's kind of what I'm saying with this. Like, if her dad did do something, that, as a dad, you let, like, you let her down. You were absent, you weren't there. You can't get mad at how they respond to that trauma and how they work on themselves in order to live through it. It might be. It might be bad. It might not be the way you want it to be, but you can't judge somebody else's healing when you cause that, like, wound. Does that make sense?
- [85:38]
Tom Bilyeu
It does.
- [85:38]
Drew
But no, give me. Give it back to me. Let me see how you.
- [85:41]
Tom Bilyeu
I think right now we're in a very weird place as a society, as an American society, very specifically, I think that I don't know these people. So your presentation could be precisely correct, but I do Worry that we're becoming like a society that does not expect any resilience from themselves, that does not give any leeway. Listen, my dad was very busy when I was a kid. I will put that very gently. But when I speak to my dad, my actual overwhelming sense is one of gratitude. So my dad worked his ass off. And obviously I see in myself that same drive, that same ambition. So I get why my dad poured himself into work. There were consequences. My mom and dad also had a bad marriage. And so to some extent, I think my dad did hide in his. And my dad listens to the show, so he's probably going to hear this. I think that my dad did hide in his hobbies, and I. Unfortunately, he did invite me in. I absolutely hated every one of his hobbies, barring movies, which may explain a lot. And so because of that, my dad and I didn't spend a lot of time together when I was growing up. But my dad did provide, put food on the table, certainly made me feel loved, like he wasn't there in the way that my mom was. So a lot of my memories from my childhood are of my mom, like, just corralling my insane energy. And so I have huge gratitude towards my mom for that. So I could see somebody with a different wiring, with a different mindset, putting my dad on blast. And to me, especially now as I'm older, that seems very unfair. And I don't think people all see this the same. But my dad stayed until literally three weeks after I, as the youngest, left for college. Then my dad bounced. But for me, I had what I saw as a normal childhood. So I'm so grateful to my dad for doing that. So anyway, even in an imperfect situation where I think. Think some people could read that and be like, hey, I'm putting dad on blast because he works so much. I'm just like that. Still, I would take that up with dad, figure out what's going on there. I'd give a lot more leeway. So that's me saying we're having a cultural moment where it's like, male ambition is read in a really stupid way, in my opinion, where people are expecting men to take on a very feminine role of caretaking, looking after. I don't think men are wired for that. So the classic men are more into things than people. My dad was just more into cars and work, and so he spent more time with cars and work. Right. And so I think that this moment in time is brought to you by an aberration that does not line up with our actual evolved psychology. And so we're asking men to be something that on average they really aren't. And, and seeing this sort of, I'm not even sure what to label the way that people speak, but when you sound like a psychotherapist and you're talking in those terms, which I know I can do 100%, but I'm always like a little careful, we still are people that have foibles. And so we need to be able to fall back on, have some resilience, give people some grace, like accept nobody's going to be perfect. I think it was Aristotle that said the only impossible job is raising a child. And I think that that is accurate. And for kids to just reinforce their own trauma from the way that they were raised is not a wise idea. There's plenty of data coming out that shows if you ruminate on your traumas, they become worse, not better. And so I think people would be a lot better off. Even if you have to say, my parents were so toxic, I'm never going to talk to them again. But like, it is what it is. Whether you want to take the. I'm sad that that's how their psychology ended up and that they couldn't get out from under that long enough to take care of a kid. But I've got, you know, some empathy for that. Some people just get wired in a gnarly way, right? Like it's, listen, I don't know if other people just don't make mistakes in their life. I make enough mistakes in my life that I'm like, God damn. I think I'm high level at navigating myself. And if I really am high level and I make mistakes, like everybody that isn't hasn't been, you know, given by the coder of the Matrix, these skills of navigating their own emotions, they're going to be in a much worse position. So giving grace.
- [90:11]
Drew
We got some spiciness in the chat after the men aren't caretakers thing.
- [90:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Here we go.
- [90:15]
Drew
Do you think that it's just a different expectation? Because I also had alpha dad. Same thing. Like my dad has taught me so much about my car. He taught me so much about like work ethic. I've never heard my dad complain. And he used to work 12 hour days every day. My entire child, like child childhood, like literally like five to five every day. I don't think I've seen my dad take a sick day before. But he, we weren't going out in the back throwing the ball and playing Catch. But it's like, I can't. I don't judge him for that because I think in the 40s, like when he was like his had his kabupets, it wasn't about how good of a caretaker you are. It's like, my job is to make sure you guys have everything you need and you get further than I am. My dad's highest education equivalent is eighth grade. The fact that I graduated high school is like, like, like you, you won. You did more than me. Like, you know what I mean? So it's like I don't judge them for that. And I think now, in 2026, with now we're having more access to information, more naturally, more emotionally intelligent. Now men have realizing, oh, okay, not every guy just wants to turn a wrench. Some guys are like, okay, I understand the deficits. I can now become a better caretaker. Stuff like that. Or do you still think it's just innate in us? Caretaking is not something that men do in math.
- [91:27]
Tom Bilyeu
I think the right way to say it is we have a nature that requires nurture. So our brains are developed in such a way that we are. We have a nature, so we are a certain way. Men are different than women. And then you layer on top of that the social reinforcements and you get something very specific. But they've done so many countless studies on this. And when kids are way too young to have already been acculturated, boys show a preference for different type of toys and girls. And it just. The blank slate hypothesis has no data backing it up whatsoever, it is a fool's errand. Anybody that says that is a moron, and you can ignore them categorically. So now anybody that tells you that all men are the same and all women are the same, they are also a fool, and you can ignore them. But once you realize roughly we're 50% hardwired, so we have that nature. And there's obviously variation within that. But. But when you layer on top of that cultural reinforcement, it won't take if it's not in alignment with the wiring that's already there. But there is a high degree of flexibility. Now, ironically, the flexibility exists on different dimensions across men and women, which I find utterly fascinating. And we could really fractal for a very long time about the. The flexibility that adult women show in their sexuality, which men don't. Men get locked in. It's like at 14, it's like whatever a guy finds interesting at 14, that's it, game over. And women show a little bit more flexibility Utterly fascinating. So, anyway, there's a bunch of conversations that we could be had there, but it is a very complicated interplay of, okay, male, female, where are you at? Then on you're a guy, but now on the spectrum of masculine to feminine, where do you fall? Like, I am very much on a masculine scale, but I fall more towards a feminine temperament for a guy. So I have. I'm in touch with my emotions, but at the same time demand that I never dance to the tune of my emotions. So it is. Everybody has to figure out sort of where they are on that spectrum. But to act like we don't have a nature, that there is no difference between men and women is silly. And I'm happy. Like, if the chat wants to keep fighting, I'm happy to do it.
- [93:40]
Drew
I think this is the perfect segue to how men and women see their political views and how it has changed through time. So, interesting chart. Young women have become more liberal. Young men, not so much.
- [93:55]
Tom Bilyeu
So you're going to want to look at your phone or your screen if you can right now, because when you look at the graph and you see that men rock in this really tight band and then women have just been on this escalatory path over the last 10 years. It's pretty wild.
- [94:11]
Drew
Yeah. The gender ID ideology gap has more than doubled from 12 points in 1999 to 23 points in 2023.
- [94:19]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, young American women are now five times more ideologically separated from young American men than they were roughly 25 years ago. Now, you guys have heard me talk about this before. Dynamic tension between the sexes is good. It's great, we must want it. But we have reached something that is truly unbalanced in a way that is not healthy. Women are racing away from men ideologically. And the data that we're talking about here shows that men have stayed almost perfectly consistent. We've got a total net swing of one point, whereas women are racing to the left. That's according to new Gallup data from the Poll Social series that tracks political identity from 1999 through 2023. In 99, the net ideology gap between 18 to 29 year old women and men was 12 points. Okay, that's manageable. Today, it's 23 points. It's almost double. But men are just holding steady. In 99, 24% of young men called themselves liberal. By 2023, that number was a nearly static 25%. So only 1 percentage point move in 24 years. The trend, though, breaks open in 2027, the year Trump took office, obviously in 2026. And you've got the Me too moment going viral. The gap crossed 10 points and has not stopped widening since the fall of Roe v. Wade, by the way, in 2022 accelerated it. In a 2021 survey, 71% of Democrat Democratic college students said they wouldn't date someone who voted the other way. Brookings reports that nearly half of men 18 to 29 now say they face discrimination that's the highest of any male age group. Now, I would hope that you guys would expect all of this in a populist moment, but right now young Americans are just sorting by tribe. They date, marry and befriend by ideology. And at a time where we're all so divided, this is a recipe for disaster as it shoves everyone down an echo chamber pipeline and limits everyone's pool of options down to just those who think the same as they do. And that to me is extraordinarily dangerous as we look at some of the demographic challenges that we have as America. And also just, just your well being, your well being is going to be so much better if you're sharing this life with somebody. Not the least of which because left to their own devices, you've got men are going to do just men things and women are going to do just women things. Whereas when we put them together, there's this dynamic tension of men trying to gain sexual access to women. It's not just this like evolutionarily, or at least the experience layer isn't, but it's I think, an important way to talk about it. Men, in trying to gain sexual access to women, are forced to rise the bar. And so it is very interesting what happens when women have raised the bar for themselves so much that it's no longer a question of can I partner with a man and get him to raise his bar up, up, up, up, up. Instead I'm just going to do it myself. And now because women have a tendency towards hypergamy to date over a peer or up somebody who's achieved more than they have, if they're super high on that scale now, there's nobody for them to peer with or go up, it becomes a very, very, very small pool of people. And so it's creating wild distortions in the psyche of people in the West. It's pretty crazy. There are consequences to choices that we make as a society. Whether people want.
- [97:44]
Drew
Isn't this correlated to education? Because like, women are more educated and higher education tend to be more you like if you want them to stop
- [97:51]
Tom Bilyeu
having kids get them educated correlation. But it, it really is true. But I think the, one of the biggest things that can't be overlooked is the pill. Because now women can have sex without getting pregnant. And so you don't have to be as thoughtful. You'd be like, no, this guy will be fun for a minute. And then you put yourself in that situation where you're no longer a sexual gatekeeper. And without. If men either can get easy access to women sexually or no access at all, then they just eject out of the system. And I think from an evolutionary perspective, because people don't like to talk about it, women being the sexual gatekeepers and going, oh, if you want to have sex with me, you got to jump over this bar. Men start working on their vertical jump pretty fast. And so that dynamic has worked for hundreds of thousands, millions of years of evolution. So it's, it's a dynamic that we have broken and we are paying a cost. Now we may go, that cost is well worth paying. Great. But we're paying a cost.
- [98:54]
Drew
There's a couple things on the table right now. Whether it's women had act didn't get access to their own bank accounts to like the 80s. There's the women are out educating men, I think like 60, 40 at this point or something like that. There's the pillow.
- [99:08]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah.
- [99:09]
Drew
Is it the summation of all these things? Is there one thing? I don't want to say that if we take away quote unquote, that it might balance the scales a little bit.
- [99:17]
Tom Bilyeu
It's just all the trade off. So if I were in, back in the dating pool, if I were a guy, I would say, okay, listen, whether or not you decide to pursue a woman, that's totally on you. I'll make my argument for why I think your life would be better if you do. But even if you're not going to, you can have control of your own life. And I'm going to try to teach them all the same lessons over here about self improvement, about how skills have utility, that you can grow more powerful and try to bring out all the competitive instincts, even if it's not aimed at impressing a woman. Cool. Your life will be better even if you end up being single. If you're on that path, there's an algorithm that runs in your brain that wants to see you make progress. Tony Robbins has said, and I think he's right, that progress is a foundational pillar to human happiness. That if you're not making progress, no matter what, even if you're already wealthy There will be a sense of unease, like you want to be getting better at something. I think about that in my own life, game development. Like what? Like we're this tiny ass developer, but I'm getting better at it and the game is making progress and I'm getting better at doing that thing. And so I have this incredible outlet for that algorithm in my brain saying, you need to be improving. So I think people need to account for that. Women, on the other hand, I would be saying something very similar, like, you need to have the life that you want. You just need to be very careful to make sure that you're playing the game you want and not allowing a masculine frame of reference to be pulled over your eyes. So figure out what are the things that light you up. Don't feel like that. You need to make career your number one focus. It can be, and there's a really beautiful outcome that can come from that. But you need to be very thoughtful. And this goes back into how I memed over what I'm about to say again, but it really is true. So I'll keep repeating it, which is that. And of course this will get clipped out of context. The context is there are algorithms in your brain that will push you in given directions. Women are getting pushed in the direction of having a child. And so there's going to be a tremendous evolutionary pressure on you to do that. That. And if you don't, there will be some weird longing in your life. Now you can address that weird longing by having a meaningful contribution to the group in some way. It could be philanthropy, it could be tutoring. It could be like, Lisa gets a big part of that out of specifically helping young women. Like, so she's got this algorithm that's clearly pushing her to want to help people. And there's just something about the siren call of the hard things that she went through as a teenager, wanting specifically to help girls in that period and to make her light up. Like, you need to only talk about that, focus on that. Now, that is her dealing with not having a child. She's just not weird about talking about it. She's like, I get it. If I'm not gonna have a kid, I better have something that addresses that thing. And my wife is like super career oriented, wants a career. It's very clear that she doesn't want kids, but nonetheless understands, oh, this really is a thing. Like, I really do. And maybe she has less of a push than the average woman because my wife, though very decidedly female, has a slightly more masculine temperament. So that has both of us leading towards the middle, which is part of why we get along so well. But in all of that, she understands, oh, I can't just go chill on a beach, sip my ties, you know, and say, I'm so glad I can day drink because I don't have kids. She understands that's not the game. You have to have meaning and purpose. You've got to be focused on that because of those algorithms running in your mind. So again, if you're not going to have kids, you better make sure that you have something in your life that you care enough about that it will deal with the unease, the anxiety, the sense of emptiness that you will feel if you don't have that. So evolution gets its way, man, whether we want it to or not. And it creates these internal intrinsic desires within us. And we can, as a society, we can nudge people. Like, we can give women so many other options that a huge number of them decide not to have kids. But also, there was a study done not too long ago that showed the most unhappy people in America are female partners in a law firm. And now I'm speculating as to why, but my gut instinct is it's a hyper masculine environment because it's all about being argumentative. Which women are more consensus driven. So you're putting them into a hyper masculine field that's run by guys. And it's so demanding from a time perspective that the odds that you're able to have kids are low. And if you do have kids, you'd be able to spend as much time as you want with them is also low. And so at some point, everybody pursuing success will ask themselves the question, to what end? Why am I doing this? And early in my career, it was always just, I want to build an entertainment company. I didn't think about why I wanted an entertainment company. Now I've gotten to the point in my life where it's only because of the why that I keep pursuing it. And so I'm just saying everybody's gonna have to contend with the why. Having kids. Instant answer. See this kid forward, Your brain's like, ah. It will give you all kinds of other problems, all kinds. The fear of raising the kid, the amount of time that they suck away from you. You really are passing on your life force to them. I'm not saying that doesn't come without its own anxieties, but that sense of like, I know what my mission is. By doing it well, I'm contributing very meaningful to the group. I'm doing something that's beyond myself. I'm getting out of my own head. I'm living for somebody else. All things that the algorithms want us to do it, meaning the internal evolutionary algorithms.
- [104:54]
Drew
And then we have one more in the chat. This is from Mark, I believe his name is. Yes. Big business is more of the issue. The family unit was broken around the Industrial Revolution when the men left their sons to work in factories instead of teaching them the. Their trade. I understand direction what he's saying. I'm going to put another cherry on top of that. What say you about some of the societal narratives that have caused this fraction in men versus women? Whether it's feminism to go and have your own things causing two different households to pay the same bills, whether it's the pressure on society and family that as soon as your kid turns 18, you got to kick him out the house. Like all these other societal pushes that meant that made more independent children, which has now led to independent men and women who don't necessarily coalesce as much as they used to.
- [105:38]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, so I think the. The thing that Mark said in the chat, I would challenge and I would ask him, at what period in society did he think that we were doing it? Well, because there are some crazy things. Like, if you want to ruin your day, go do research on why were Romans and Athenians so notorious for men having sex with young men. Like, say what? Like, how does that become a thing? And I don't advise doing it. Drew. It is. It is a deeply distressing answer. It is a very careful thing, the relationships between the sexes to be done in a way that a modern audience would feel morally justified in doing. And at the same time, some of the moral cleanup that we've done has come at a cost of societal cohesion. And so you would have a very hard time saying that the moral side of this doesn't matter. And therefore, let's just go back to, you know, some mythical period where everything was great. I don't think there ever was. I think it's just. It's always trade offs. And right now I think we're making way better trade offs. But some of the trade offs scare me in terms of why this moment will be temporary. Like, I'll make a prediction, barring AI, AI changes everything. So I'm merely trying to speak to trajectory, not what I actually think will play out, but purely from a trajectory standpoint. The way that we're going now, you get mouse utopia and you get like this super weird thing where everybody becomes so me focused that the Colonies come completely collapse and so they'll get replaced by whatever group does not do that. And right now you need only look at successful population growth. And that comes down to hyper religious groups that basically sequester female opportunity to make sure that they have kids. Now, I'll leave them unnamed. I think everybody knows where we're headed here, so, Yeah, I don't know that people want that outcome either, so. But it's all trade offs, man.
- [107:53]
Drew
I feel like I still don't have an answer about why the.
- [107:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Well, it would take you a while. If you want me to speed run it. God, do I want to speed run this. Okay, the speed run is that in an era where there is no birth control, modern audiences will have a hard time with this. But when the average life expectancy is 30 years old, you are having a midlife crisis at 15. At 15 you've probably been married for a year, two or three to a much older man. P.S. i'm sad to report. And having babies to a modern audience that's like, oh my God. So what happens in a society where you're like, we've got to separate men and women because they just will knock each other up like crazy. And the only way to pass wealth down is to know who is your kid and who's not your kid. And to keep these relationships tight. Remember, marriage started largely as an economic way to pass wealth down. And when you start spreading wealth out too much, it becomes a problem. So you say all these bastard kids, like, no, no, no, just there's one official kid. That kid gets all the money. And so some cultures, these two in particular, chose to separate men and women when they were young. And they would only have them marry, say in their. For women, late teens, early 20s, for men in their 30s. But now imagine you're a 16 year old and you want to have sex. And so their solution was the prison solution, the guys. And so. But bro, like, okay, we're hardwired. Tom just said that you can only like do so much. So what's the. So much you go after guys that look feminine. And who are the guys that look feminine? Young people. It's so gross, dude. I hate everything about this. But nonetheless, unfortunately, your research will lead you to that conclusion. And so this is pederasty. And I'm just like, God damn. Like, when you start reading about the. This is Sparta, the Spartans, okay? We think of it as the hardest core ever. One of the problems they had was the men would be sleeping with each other so much, they'd Be like, bro, you're 18, you've got to take a wife now. You cannot keep your like war buddies. And so it was like that, that becomes a problem.
- [110:17]
Drew
It's, it's crazy that like the toughest army was just out here each other ever.
- [110:21]
Tom Bilyeu
They were the most hardcore gangster of
- [110:25]
Drew
all time chasing each other booty.
- [110:27]
Tom Bilyeu
And they were still like, bro, this guy just won't stop the other guys. Like, this is wild. We've got to get them to take women seriously.
- [110:33]
Drew
300. It was propaganda. They had none of the sex scenes at 300.
- [110:37]
Tom Bilyeu
Propaganda, dude. It's wild.
- [110:39]
Drew
It's wild.
- [110:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So there, there is all of this stuff is the human when viewed as animal is so distressing. So we put a lot of layers on society and we say, well, this is how we really are. And it's like, not really. So it's, it's all trade offs. I, I don't want to make the trade offs that the Spartans made. I will tell you that right now. So I'm perfectly happy. I think it is wise to give women every opportunity in the known universe. But we do need to educate them in terms of like, hey, here are the tendencies. And in different phases of your life, you're going to feel very differently. So as you get older, especially if you don't have a strong partnership with your spouse, you're going to be like, where are my kids? Kids? And that impulse will be strong. So anyway, just be careful.
- [111:31]
Drew
Also, you said earlier about how like senior, after you graduated, like your parents ended up getting divorced. I remember senior year, like that summer going into college, divorce hit like six of my like, friends. Like, it was like, yep, last one out the house. All right, cool. Like, so many people are like, all right, we're done now. Wrap it up. And then just like dissolve their marriage. It's crazy.
- [111:49]
Tom Bilyeu
I mean, shout out to all the people that stay together for the kids. Like, I really do respect.
- [111:53]
Drew
And we got a masterclass coming up, right?
- [111:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Yes, we do. And it's this week, Zero to Founder is where I teach you guys how to build a company largely using AI. And the masterclass that we're doing on the 7th at 1:00pm, which is this Thursday, is where for free, no fee whatsoever. For free. I'm going to teach you guys how to build your first five essentially AI employees to launch your company as a solo entrepreneur. It is very doable. We have people doing it all the time. And so join me this Thursday, May 7th at 1pm Pacific. For free. I'm going to walk you guys through how to do it. It'll be awesome. All right, you guys, thank you so much as always for joining us. We will see you on Wednesday. May the fourth be with you later, everybody. Peace. 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. 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 samples. Click the link in the show notes or visit drinkag1.comimpact to claim this offer. Hablas espanol spries du Dzoich? If you used Babbel, you would Babbel's Conversation Based Techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking thinking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at Babbel.com Spotify spelled B A B-B-E-L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply.