We’ve Lost the Plot – Why Partisan Political Media Is Failing Everyone & How To Fix It | David Pakman PT 2

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Episode Overview

Podcast: Impact Theory
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Episode: We’ve Lost the Plot – Why Partisan Political Media Is Failing Everyone & How To Fix It | David Pakman PT 2
Date: March 27, 2025
Guest: David Pakman — political commentator, YouTuber, and host of The David Pakman Show

In this episode, Tom Bilyeu continues his in-depth conversation with David Pakman, diving into the complexities of American political discourse, partisan media, and strategies for breaking through polarization. The discussion focuses on the failures of both left- and right-wing media landscapes, the need for critical thinking and dialogue, examining political messaging, and tough policy debates ranging from the Trump administration to international conflicts.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Framing of Political Arguments

• (01:36) Tom contends David made a "moral case for the left" in his book, but David clarifies his intent:

"I think really I’m making an empirical and economic case...the problem with making the moral case is morality can differ a lot more than I think economic metrics can."
— David Pakman (01:36)

• The challenge: People's frames of reference are deeply rooted in their biology, beliefs, and lived experiences—making genuine persuasion extremely difficult.

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2. Media Urgency vs. Calm Discourse (and the Role of the Echo Machine)

• (02:49–06:12) Tom asks about the tension between urgency in media/political shows versus nuanced conversations. David acknowledges that media incentives sometimes force urgency and entertainment, while real conversations require calm.

"On certain platforms, you have to play certain games in order to get attention...the content of it is what I believe. But, you know, we, we are playing the game that you have to play if you want to build an audience."
— David Pakman (08:13)

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3. Judicial Crisis and the Rule of Law

• (06:12–10:08) Discussion of the Trump administration’s response to federal judicial orders—Pakman describes the refusal to comply as a genuine constitutional crisis.
• Tom and David agree that ignoring judicial rulings poses an existential threat to checks and balances.

"If you have a federal judge who’s like, hey, you can’t do this, and he does it anyway, that is a huge red flag for me… I love me some checks and balances."
— Tom Bilyeu (09:24)

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4. Declining Faith in Parties & the Newsom Factor

• (12:43–16:17) Both parties face historic lows in approval. Tom points to Gavin Newsom’s podcast as an example of what Democrats could do better (“bringing the people that hate him”). David counters that while Tom admires Newsom’s risky outreach, the tactic appears to be backfiring among both left and center audiences.

"This is backfiring. Because you take the Charlie Kirk interview… he’s not convincing the right...And the middle and the left seem disgusted with the podcast."
— David Pakman (15:02)

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5. Democratic Strategy and Policy Messaging

• (22:43–25:25) Tom asks: What should the left actually run on? Pakman asserts that "the policies don't matter" as much as coherent, unified messaging does. Democrats often pick the wrong battles and candidates, failing to authentically represent voter desires.

"You need a candidate who is genuinely what people want rather than someone who needs to be molded... There needs to be a unified explanation for why what has been going on isn’t good."
— David Pakman (23:17)

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6. Trump, Tariffs, and Foreign Policy

• (25:25–32:07) Tom and David discuss Trump’s economic strategies, notably the use of tariffs as a tool in the US-China relationship and supply chain security.

"The conversation as we talk about it often degrades and it's become, are you for tariffs or are you against tariffs?...If you're trying to cut a cheesecake, the hammer is all of a sudden not a great tool."
— David Pakman (29:37)

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7. Team Purity and MAGA Culture

• (32:15–34:51) Tom notes how "team purity" drives people to accept whatever their side’s leaders say, regardless of logic or reason. He expresses optimism about Trump assembling a team of top business magnates, while David warns there is no evidence business elites make good government leaders.

"I just have not seen evidence of that. If it was demonstrated to me, business people in general are the best in these cabinet roles… the record isn’t so great of business people in government necessarily."
— David Pakman (34:51)

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8. Checks on Presidential Power

• (39:54–41:46) Deep concern about the expansion of executive power, with David highlighting Trump’s desire for unchecked authority; Tom grapples with the tension between wanting checks and voting for a candidate who undermines them:

"You want checks and balances… and then you said, and I decided to vote for Trump. And when I hear that…Trump says, I will use the DOJ to investigate this laundry list of people…He wanted immunity to cover things he did in July of 2021, when he was not even the President."
— David Pakman (43:55)

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9. The Deep State Debate

• (49:44–61:36) Tom expresses his discomfort with "the blob" or “deep state” he sees running the government behind the scenes, while David insists that what’s called the “deep state” typically just means checks, accountability, or long-term government inertia—not a secret cabal. They agree bureaucracy can frustrate change but disagree on its meaning and danger.

"My lived experience is … you get a large group of people, even if they are well intended, they make it very hard. Even if you're the CEO and you can fire everybody, even just finding where the problem is becomes difficult."
— Tom Bilyeu (58:35)

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10. Defining MAGA and Political Identity

• (69:10–70:49) Pakman argues that "MAGA Republicanism" is defined by loyalty to Trump, not consistent policy positions, contrasting figures like Adam Kinzinger who hold to more traditional principles.

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11. The Trump Phenomenon and Authoritarian Fascination

• (70:58–74:37) David explains Trump’s rise as a function of charisma and tapping into fears, not clear policies. He critiques Trump’s affinity for strongmen abroad and doubts over the "anti-war" branding, given new conflicts under Trump’s tenure.

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12. Handling Global Crises: Ukraine, Israel, Gaza

• (74:59–79:59) On Ukraine, David supports a U.S./NATO role for ceasefires but slams Trump’s “bluster” and apparent deference to Putin. On Israel/Gaza, David outlines his longtime advocacy for a two-state solution and rejects the idea of ethnic cleansing.

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13. Getting Beyond Partisanship: David Pakman’s Path Forward

• (82:21–84:20) David’s closing vision calls for critical thinking education, genuine civic engagement (especially local), and real-world conversations outside the toxic online environment.

"We gotta get back to teaching critical thinking and media literacy probably by fifth grade to everybody...Sometimes picking one or two things is much more effective than spreading yourself super thin. And...in person communication bears significantly more fruit than kind of yelling at each other on social media."
— David Pakman (82:21)

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• Tom on the power of emotion and leadership style:
  "People don’t remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel." (18:36)

• Pakman on political parties:
  "The whole political party thing to me is just — these are institutions. They’re almost like corporations that justify their own existence." (12:43)

• Tom on bureaucracy:
  "You will never have a government, a swim team, you’ll never have anything that isn't run by a small group, which is literally what oligarch means, just rule by the few." (52:03)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Topic / Discussion | |-------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------| | 01:36 | David clarifies 'empirical and economic' case for the left | | 06:12 | Constitutional crisis: ignoring judicial rulings | | 12:43 | Party approval ratings and Democratic Party crisis | | 15:02 | Newsom’s podcast and the pitfalls of Democratic messaging | | 22:43 | What should the Left run on? The importance of messaging | | 25:25 | Tom & David on Trump’s tariffs and supply chain geopolitics | | 34:51 | Skepticism about business leaders in government | | 39:54 | Fears about presidential overreach and checks on power | | 49:44 | Deep State debate and government bureaucracy | | 69:10 | What defines “MAGA Republican”? | | 70:58 | How did Trump rise to power? The role of charisma & fears | | 74:59 | US role in Ukraine and Middle East conflicts | | 82:21 | Critical thinking, civic engagement, real-world conversations |

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Closing Thoughts

David’s prescription for fixing political media and our polarized culture:

• Teach critical thinking and media literacy early.
• Encourage local civic engagement over empty online activism.
• Foster in-person, real-world conversations, which are more productive and less toxic than social media debate.

Tom’s ethos: Even across sharp disagreement, respectful debate and focused, empirical reasoning can uncover deeper truths and allow listeners to calibrate their own beliefs.

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For more, find David Pakman on YouTube and Twitter, and his new book at davidpakman.com or wherever books are sold.

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Transcript

[David Pakman]

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[David Pakman]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm Tom Bilyeu and this is Impact Theory. This is part two of my eye opening conversation with David Pakman. And if you're just tuning in, welcome. Because here in part two we are, we are going to the next level. David and I try to see if we can come eye to eye on what exactly is deranging politics right now between the left and the right. Spoiler alert. We do not get on the same page, but I think that this discussion is going to help a lot of people come to their own conclusions about what is really going on in a world where we cannot agree on some of the basic facts. Let's jump right back in. In the book you make a, there's a chapter called why choose the left? And I would say you, you're making a moral case for choosing the left. What do you see if, if you agree with that assessment, what do you see as a moral case for the left?

[David Pakman]

I don't agree with that. I think really I'm making an empirical and economic case really. And it's a lot of the stuff we've already talked about, much of which we disagree with. I mean I think the, the, the proof here is the tension you describe as important. I agree is important and I advocate not for the rubber band coming off and flying all the way to the left. I advocate for something that is modestly to the left, to use that shorthand of where we are right now. And I, in the book, I point to examples around the world, some of which we've talked about. It's really primarily, you know, the problem with making the moral case, which I think, you know, you could make, I guess. But the problem with the moral case is morality can differ a lot more than I think Economic metrics can differ. And so my effort in the book, and maybe I failed to do it if it came off as only a moral case, is that when we look at the five or six examples I cite, that there's a really good empirical and economic case for what I'm advocating for. It doesn't crush innovation. It doesn't stifle liberty or freedom. And I try to defend that in the book. I may fail to do it, but that. That's. That's. That's the goal for me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The reason that people have such a hard time convincing people is you're going up against somebody's frame of reference. That frame of reference is going to be built around their biology, their beliefs, and their values. And it also has to describe the world as they see it. And so if you're giving them a piece that they look at and they're like, that doesn't match what I believe to be true about the rest of the world. I can't shoehorn in this piece to a totally different worldview. And so, um, this is something I found with every human I've ever encountered, myself included. Piercing somebody's frame of reference is exceedingly difficult. And it's really interesting because reading your book, I. And it's written word, and so Lord knows I was obviously putting top spin on it. But reading your book, I felt like you were making a very aggressive pitch to the left, the way that the book felt to me. And you've been very careful and articulate here, and so I will take that. The way you're presenting yourself now is accurate. And my read of the book was off. But what I took away from the book was the echo machine is a thing of the right. And the right is, especially in this modern Donald Trump era, like, is really becoming unhinged. And there is a reason that you should be choosing the left. And you do break down the empirical arguments that. That. That is for sure giving countries all that stuff in terms of this is the world that I want to live in. We talked about that at the top of the show. And. But, man, I literally am convinced if I did a search for your book, that it actually says something along the lines of. And it's more moral. And so I was like, wow, like, he's making a moral case that the. The left is the right way. The right is. Is wrong. They're, you know, racing off into madness. And if I watch your show, admittedly entertainment values a thing. And if you watch me on my show, you and I are both meeting energy for energy. So neither of us is doing the escalatory. Like, if one of us started, like, really going ham, I'm sure the other would, too. So I love that. But if you're watching your show, like, there's a sense of urgency, like, there is a bad thing. That bad thing is happening right now, and there is a thing that we need to do about it. And as you're laying that out, you will point to the book. I talk about this in my book. I illustrate this point. I think you are acting, what I'll say socially. Right. In that you're meeting me where I'm at. And this is very cordial. It was cordial before we started. It's cordial now. And I love that. Which tenor, though, represents where you think we are as a country? Do you think that, hey, we really are. This is a. I think in today's episode or yesterday's episode, you're like, the constitutional crisis is happening right now. It is real. Or the book, which, as I read it sort of in that vein of like, yo, this is. This is bad. This is happening right now. We've got to do something about it. Left, you got to learn from the right. The right is manipulating people, and we've got to get better at being on message and all that so we don't get steamrolled. The show also has that urgency.

[David Pakman]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But here as we're talking, it feels more like, hey, we're okay. Like, this is going to be fine.

[David Pakman]

Well, listen, here's the thing. This is really good. It's really good that you're framing it up this way. All of these things are true. And the sorts of conversations we need to be having, I think depend on the environment. So if I start ranting to you about how the Trump administration just ignored a specific and concrete court order and that it's not clear that the judiciary is really going to be able to enforce what I believe historically it has been able to enforce, which are specific decrees. This relates to the deportation to El Salvador of a bunch of people that a court said, you got to. You got to come back. This was done extrajudicially. The Alien Enemies act doesn't apply. You haven't declared war. We're getting, like, into a very specific and punctual aspect on that issue. I think it is literally a constitutional crisis in the sense that as design kind, the judiciary is still supposed to be able to set some guidelines and say, this is a court order. Do not do this. And if whoever the party is does the thing, the Judiciary should have some way, either by using criminal or civil contempt or other mechanisms to enforce what it decreed. The Trump administration, as we are taping this, is ignoring that. I do not know that the judiciary is going to have the teeth to actually enforce what it has decreed. The Trump administration may be able to get away with saying we don't care what a court has determined objectively. Whatever you think about the deportation, if you care about the Constitution, I think you have to be concerned about that. Now, I have no idea what your opinion is about that, but I do think that that is an urgent thing where if even courts can be ignored, we are going against the rule of law in this country. I'm for the rule of law and law and order, so I'm scared by that. And I don't say I'm cowering scared, but I'm scared in terms of, like, what it means. At the same time, I think a lot of the. Once Trump is gone and I do believe he will leave. You know, I know people are talking now about he's going to never leave third term. I think he's going to leave or he's going to die. Right. I mean, he's a very unhealthy, close to 80 year old guy. The broader conversation about values and ideas and how an economy should be organized, that is also an important conversation to be having with you. And the only way to have that conversation is in a sort of sane and calm way, not by kicking and screaming. And so I think that they're both accurate, if I'm honest. And of course, we all know that on certain platforms, you have to play certain games in order to get attention. And I would love it if I could call my videos a sober discussion of the constitutionality of judicial orders. I would have no audience and I would get zero views. And so the content of it is what I believe. But, you know, we, we are playing the game that you have to play if you want to build an audience.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, I get it. Looking at. To answer your specific sort of question, I'm with you. If Trump starts ignoring executive orders now, I've got beef. My thing is judicial orders.

[David Pakman]

Judicial orders, not executive. Executive are the ones he signs.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you. Judicial is what I meant. If you have a local judge that federal, but you know, obviously not at, not on the Supreme Court. If you have a federal judge who's like, hey, you can't do this, and he does it anyway, that, that is a huge red flag for me. I certainly do not consider Myself Republican. So that's nice and easy. I just try to, um, always steer by what is going to lead me where I want to go. And I love me some checks and balances. Very big believer in the Constitution. So that one sends up red flags. Now, if there's, If Trump believes that these are activist judges and they are problematic and we need to do something about it, then it's like, well, okay, what does the Constitution say you do

[David Pakman]

when you have it says you appeal.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Exactly. So it's like you follow that process. And so seeing him flirt so heavily with that stuff, that is deeply distressing for me. And I would like to think anybody who's not playing on a team, unless you're going, yeah, you know what? I think that the executive really should have the supreme authority and they can overrule the other two branches of government. And this is how I like it. Then it's like, cool. Pass a constitutional amendment and if you can't do that, sit the fuck down because that's crazy. So, yeah, anyway, that stuff is deeply troubling in terms of they are red flags. Now, he has made mouth noises about we're not going to ignore the courts on this one. We believe that we're in the right and that we're going to be able to prove that in a court. Playing pretty fast and loose, for my money. So, anyway, I agree with you that this could escalate into something. I think I'm, you know, maybe five or ten paces behind you in terms of where I think we're at, in the danger zone. But there's no question that we're flirting with things that, that I find really distressing. Going through your book, you definitely feel like somebody who's coaching the left on how to do this. Well, we've talked about your economic policies. We don't necessarily see eye to eye on how all this stuff plays out, but I think you're very cogent. You've explained your take and so people can now do without what they will. Stay locked in because you are not going to want to miss what we talk about next. From taco night in Tulum to sushi in Tokyo, every bite is rewarding and pulse worthy with MX Gold's 4X Membership Rewards points at restaurants worldwide. Wherever you dine, points are piling up. So bring your friends along for your next course, because it's not all about the posts, it's about the company and the memories. How can Gold from Amex sweeten your next food moment? Learn more at american express express.com explore-gold terms and points cap apply. All right, we're back. Let's get into it. When you look at the declining popularity in the most recent polls showing that the Democratic Party went From like, low 30s now to high 20 and like 29%, how do you read that in terms of what are we going through as a nation, whether we should be or not? I think you've even talked about this. Like, I'm not going to argue with how people feel. I'm just going to address that. That's what they feel like, how do you conceptualize what is the country feeling? Why is the left unhappy with itself?

[David Pakman]

So the background is the country is as unhappy in general with our elected officials as it's been in a long time. So, like Trump, if you. Right now, March, you know, mid March, late March of the first year of a presidential term, Trump has the lowest presidential approval of any president at this point in time, other than himself in his first term. So Trump's approval for March, mid March of year one is historically low. Democratic approval is low, the Democratic approval being low. And I just, as a, by the way, I'm not a Democrat. I. The whole political party thing to me is just, these are institutions. They're almost like corporations that justify their own existence. And so to the extent that the better candidate is a Democrat, I'll vote for the Democrat. But I've never been a Democrat. I'm not part of the party or any of that stuff. Just as like a side note, when you've lost everything, it makes sense that people would look at your party and go, I don't approve of what's going on. Right. I mean, Harris lost, Democrats lost the House, Democrats lost the Senate, and Trump has just been sworn in, and people on the left are upset about what he's doing. It makes sense that approval would be absolutely rock bottom. Am I worried? I mean, I'm generally worried that the party isn't going to figure out what the hell to do anytime soon. That's my concern. And that would be reflected in the approval. But it does make sense to me that this is basically rock bottom for the Democratic Party. And so it's logical to me that approval is extraordinarily low. And at the end of the day, the Democratic Party is not really doing anything right now. There's not that much they can do other than either obstruct or, you know, recently Democrats helped to keep government open. But, yeah, I think it is a concern for, for the party, and it doesn't bode particularly well. Unless something turns around, it's interesting.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I feel like the thing they can and should be doing is what Governor Newsom is doing. I. I am shocked as a. I've been in California now for over 30 years, mortified to my core about what has happened under Newsom's leadership. And when you started the podcast, I was like, oh, damn, this guy is slick. He is charming. Like, I get why people like him. And that made me think, okay, if I were coaching the left, I'd be like, guys, listen, that's the playbook. Like, he's not bring friends on. He's bringing the people that hate him. He's.

[David Pakman]

You know the problem, though. You know the problem. His approval has collapsed since the podcast started because. And this is me being the messenger here, the perspective from so many in the middle and on the left is he's playing too nice with what are perceived as extremists and that this is a calculated move to appeal to moderate Republicans in the middle to fix his image as being too far left to set up a presidential run for 2028, and that it's been a miscalculation. This is. This is not my analysis. I actually have only watched a couple of clips of what he's done so far. But the analysis I'm getting from many is this is backfiring. Because you take the Charlie Kirk interview after Charlie Kirk got him to concede to a bunch of stuff. Charlie Kirk was interviewed by Alex Michaelson, and Charlie Kirk was like, I think that this. There's no one in the world that wants to be president more than Gavin Newsom. I think that's the reason he's doing this. He's not convincing the right that he actually is someone that they should consider. And the middle and the left also seem disgusted with the podcast, so I think it's backfired. From what I'm hearing, I totally respect and understand that you like it based on your sensibilities, but at scale, it doesn't seem to be going super well.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Man, that's interesting. Okay. I love finding out that I was wrong. I like planting flags so that I can watch my thinking to see if it has predictive validity. So I'm going to plant a flag now, having heard that this is currently backfiring, I'm going to say this is going to be the win for him that he's expecting it to be, because I could not have been more emotionally prone to dislike him. And when. When I saw him during the fires, I really had, like, a negative emotional valence towards Him. I wanted to crawl through the TV and headbutt him and was just like, fuck this guy. He let a bunch of houses burn. Forget about the wealthy houses, dude. There were plenty of poor people that lost their fucking houses. And his response really, really was enraging to me and everything. I found myself nitpicking the way he was doing that shimmy. And when you get down to like, I don't like the way you fucking move. Like, you clearly are in an emotional space. And when somebody was like, yo. He launched a new podcast and he interviewed Charlie Kirk. I was like, what? So I was like, okay, we gotta check this out. That's interesting. And seeing it, I was like, damn, I want to hate this guy. And at the same time, I'm like, that move is so gangster. And the way that he. Because he got my. My sort of begrudging respect because he brought on Charlie Kirk. Charlie's not dumb. Charlie is very partisan. Charlie is going to go after you if he can. And he did a pretty good job of disarming Charlie in that Charlie even had to do his own. Not mea culpa, but he was like, listen, you're about to watch this interview. You're going to wonder why I'm not attacking him. And the reason is that you're in somebody else's house. You don't want to act like an unhinged fool. So he's like, so I tried to get my one liners in, but, like, I think he would admit that Newsom is very good at this game. And you also talk about the left eating their own through purity tests. If I'm coaching the left, I'm saying, guys, there's something here. You've got a guy that's willing to go into the lion's den in a way that your other candidates during the 2024 election cycle were not. And you were saying that there's this thing, like, it's relaxed, it's cool.

[David Pakman]

You.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's the guy that can give you that. When he, like, fucking Matrix style dodged the French laundry question. And look, people are gonna meme it. But like, he didn't give you a thing to be remad about. He was just like, oh, no, man, I can't get you reservations. No, I know. All good. Biggest mistake in my life. Grow up, man. Move on. It was just like that slow bullet time. Like, I was like, damn. So I think he's good. And people don't remember what you say, but they remember how you made them feel. And I have a feeling that this guy, he's going to have to push through his own party being grossed out, his own party railing against him. But when it comes down to the wire and it's like, who are they going to have to beat right now, this probably won't play out like this. It's always path of most pain. But J.D. vance, let's just say Trump really does go. J.D. vance is the 2028 candidate. And now all of a sudden, unless they've got an Obama hiding in the wings, they're going to look to somebody like that who can do the thing, who can do the podcast, who can go out there, who can be slick and represent their side. And I think, again, if I'm coaching dear left, let go of the policies that are not winning you any friends. If you can let go of those policies, find your way back. And again, this is my bias. I want to see people move towards the middle, but if they can let go of some of the stuff that's, you know, more 70, 30, 80, 20, 90, 10, get to that stuff that's more in the middle. He's. He's laying the groundwork, man. And again, I want him out of office in California. So I'm not a guy that's like, oh, I want to see him become the president and do to the US what he did to California. But at the same time, if somebody's good, I'm not going to lie about it.

[David Pakman]

I've always seen him as extremely skilled in it, in political situations of all kinds. And he's very polarizing among Democrats. I mean, there are a lot of California Democrats that say he has ruined the state or they don't like how he's handled crime. At the same time, I think that he brings a lot of important skills to the table. I'm terrible at prediction, so I have no prediction like you to make. But what I will say is this. One of the huge mistakes that Democrats seem to make over and over again is having some vague idea of what the candidate should be like, picking someone who isn't like that, and then bringing in consultants and doing focus groups to try to change that person. And the example is Kamala Harris, the Kamala Harris I met in March of 24 when I went to the White House behind the scenes, okay, Extremely dynamic, warm, personable, spoke extemporaneously about AI, economics, education, China, Russia, Egypt, right? All this stuff. And I said, this is somebody who really could be president. The first two weeks of her campaign, dynamic speeches, different speeches every day, they picked up on this. These Guys are really weird thing, which, like it or not, was actually working very well because it turned Trump into a joke, which he hates being, and it was triggering him. It lasted two weeks, maybe 12 days. And then all of a sudden she was giving the exact same speech multiple times a day. That these guys are weird stuff ended. The hyper controlled interviews, like the Alex Cooper thing began and it was almost like the consultants and the focus group said, this is, this is what she's doing. This is what we need the candidate to do. Force her into this box. And so, like, what seems very clear is that the Democratic candidate needs to be chosen because they're the right thing without changing, without being brought through the consultants. And the modifying way that you talk and relate to people, I don't know who that is. Maybe it's Newsom, maybe it's not, but it, you can't keep trying to change the candidate into what you believe voters want. You have to pick them because they either are what voters want or don't pick them. If they're not and leave it at that, that that's definitely something that needs to change.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, so if we take your book is coaching to the left, what is it that you want to see them run as the policies, even now they're not in power, they're gonna have a hard time getting stuff through. However, they can start messaging, building that package up for people to really glom onto. Do you want to see them run a Trump is dumb strategy? Do you want to see them stand 10 toes down on universal healthcare? Like, what do you think is that, you know, 70, 30 in their favor thing that they could be running on?

[David Pakman]

Like you said, the policies don't matter. I agree with you. I mean, I'm sort of, sort of being tongue in cheek, but to a great degree. I mean, listen, we know that there are issues that are not issues with which you win a national campaign if you're a Democrat. Right. Gun safety regulations nationally are not going to win you a presidential campaign. We just, we just know it. Okay, so the first thing would be identify what really shouldn't be the important aspects of the campaign. Second part of it I already mentioned, is you need a candidate who is genuinely what people want rather than someone who needs to be molded. So let's assume that that's done. I think the key thing, and I was speaking today with Congressman Jamie Raskin about it, and he seemed to agree with me, is it's what I said earlier, which is there needs to be a unified explanation for why what has been going on isn't good. Right now, I'm leaning towards. We don't argue about tax rates or deductions or Q bid. Right. The qualified business income deduction. Personally, I care about it a lot, but it's not necessarily salient to everybody. It. I think right now it has to be. Look at all the promises. Look at how they actually governed. They have nothing for you. It's about the Cabinet with the most billionaires on it that we've ever seen, and putting an unelected bureaucrat. Their language. Right. Which now we turn against them. They put an unelected bureaucrat, Elon Musk, in charge of just about everything. Trump sits slumped over in the Oval Office while Ellen, wearing a hat, rants and raves as his kid picks boogers and puts him on the Resolute desk. The imagery is humiliating. Putin has him on hold for an hour. It's embarrassing. And they've got nothing for you. Now, obviously, I'm not a political consultant that's not fully fleshed out and it needs to be built upon and much smarter people than me should do it. But to me, that is way more salient than $5,000 tax deductions. If you start a new small business. Right. Which is sort of like, man, that's not getting you any traction.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If I were advising them, this would be a sit and wait game. Never interrupt your enemy while they're making a mistake. I don't yet know if Trump is making a mistake, and my audience already knows this, but for anybody joining us, I voted for Trump. I believe that he was looking at things economically in the right lens. Now it feels more and more like I'm asked to believe that he's playing tesseract chess and I'm not. Not just 4D, but. Like who, buddy? Like, this thing is folding in on itself. So I don't like tariffs, though.

[David Pakman]

Tom, you. The tariff approach, you think economically it doesn't make sense.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I think hokey pokey tariffs, where you put your right tariff in, you take your right tariff out. That game is creating economic chaos. Now, that economic chaos in the market is actually doing a good thing. And that good thing is it's deflating asset values, which means that people that previously couldn't afford some of these assets can now get them. Do I think he did that on purpose? No, I do not. So this is a I believe and this is where now I have to start stacking my belief set, otherwise what I say isn't going to make sense. So my belief set is the following. You're In a cold, cold war with China, you have certainly the potential for a hot war with China, though I think it's certainly avoidable. You will certainly have heard of the idea Thucydides trap. I'm sure your audience has. For anybody that hasn't, Thucydides trap was something that a Greek philosopher honed on, like 2,000 years ago. They said, when you have a declining power, in this case the US And a rising power, in this case China, the declining power will not be able to accept that they are lower on the totem pole. And, I mean, you can just look at the way that Trump reacted to Zelensky not showing proper respect, and you know exactly what it looks like. And then the rising power won't accept to be acknowledged as a peer, and maybe not just a peer, but somebody that's beginning to pull away from you. And so historically, they just end up colliding. They can't. They can't avoid it. And they end up, historically, anyway, in a hot war, we at least have economic warfare that we can go through before we get there. And. And hopefully we do, and we can sort of exhaust ourselves at that stage, but nonetheless. So you're doing that now. Trump starts banging on about tariffs, and I'm like, yes, this is good, because we need to return some, not all, but we need to return some manufacturing back to the United States, because you cannot have a war with somebody who controls your manufacturing. And that is the position that we're in. I'm not saying war is good. I'm just saying we are in a position now where you can't pretend that that's not on the table of options. Taiwan holds the key to your modern way of life. And if you believe, like I believe in AI and innovation in general, and that AI will be the progenerator of more innovation than anything else in human history at a speed the likes of which we have never seen before. So AI matters. And now something like 85 or more percent of the AI chips come out of Taiwan. China has said in no uncertain terms we will be reunifying with Taiwan. That doesn't mean that they instantly cut you off from that, but it does mean that they can. And so now that puts you in a subservient position, which I do not see Trump for sure. No way he's going to allow that. So now you're in this position where I'm like, okay, he's doing the hokey pokey tariffs. I don't think he's doing it on purpose. He's causing massive disruptions in the the asset market, the stock market. And what we need is a set of actions that will return some manufacturing to the US that will ensure that countries are making big investments here for sure. We need the Taiwanese companies that are running the chips to make investments here. Apple talking about investing here. So it's like he's got the business leaders saying the right things now. I don't know if they're actually just sort of saying what he needs to hear and then waiting to see if he implodes. That's certainly possible. And I'm sure they could drag their feet enough to at least get to midterms and then see is he still popular? And if he's still popular, cool. We're actually going to spend the money. And if he's not, then we're really going to back off. All of that's possible. So I just know what he's doing will bring some manufacturing back, but he's playing a game of chicken. And will he implode the economy before he does it? I don't know.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, it's interesting you mentioned the Taiwan example, because I've been thinking about that a lot when I talk to my audience about tariffs. First of all, I think that with Trump, what is said is almost irrelevant. And I think back to his big announcement on, like, the second week of his first term, where he went to at this point, Hoop, was it Indiana, was it Ohio to say, hey, you know what? The carrier air conditioner plant is staying here. We just did a great deal. We're already winning. And what it was was they gave carrier a bunch of money to stay there for a year, and then carrier still got up and went to Mexico and it was sort of like what is said and what the truth is with Trump, I think are two different things. The tariffs, though, I think are really interesting because the conversation as we talk about it often degrades and it's become, are you for tariffs or are you against tariffs? And as I've said to my audience, it's a tool. If you have a bunch of nails that you need to nail in, a hammer is a fantastic tool. If you're trying to cut a cheesecake, the hammer is all of a sudden not a great tool. Right. So it's, what are you trying to do? For me, when I think about how would I consider tariffs as a useful tool, I would say for national security and because of the future of AI and tech, I would love to bring chip manufacturing back to the United States. The way I would conceive of doing that would be a tariff on Taiwanese chips with an on ramp, as well as subsidies for companies that come and do it in the United States. Understanding that the time horizon has to be longer than one presidential term, because that's really, you know, we have four year presidential terms and two year congressional terms when a lot of times the projects are decade projects. It took 40, 50 years to get to the manufacturing status quo. We have now through a series of cumulative decisions about offshoring. So that would be a specific use of a tariff that I would completely support 2550 to 10% on Canada because of fentanyl or actually because of the border or actually because of being taken advantage of economically or actually because he doesn't like Trudeau. That seems nuts to me. The Taiwan example, which you and I both sort of seem to have come across as there might be something here useful. And so I think, you know, this is not really the conversation that most people are having. It's like tariffs good, tariffs bad. But I agree with you that the chaos it's causing is absolutely nuts.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Hang tight. Up next, David and I continue our conversation around modern politics.

[David Pakman]

We'll be right back.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, we're back. Let's get into it. Yeah. This, to me, is the team purity test. If you long to be on a team and you want the heuristic, the shorthand, and you want the sense of belonging, then tell me what my talking point is. I'll find a way to get behind it. The thing that I am most interested in with the Trump presidency, and I think you and I are going to disagree about this, which, hey, base assumptions is fine, but. But I remain incredibly excited by the people that Trump has surrounded himself with. When I look at Scott Bessant as Secretary of the treasury, knowing that he grew up under Druckenmiller, one of the most successful capital allocators of all time, that he's been, you know, his entire adult life been saying, I'm going to understand the global economy and I'm going to make bets, and obviously has done a phenomenal job of betting and winning. So certainly somebody that I would say understands the way that the global market works and what forces impact it. That's exciting. My most controversial fantasy football pick is Elon, who. Oh, boy. He is not a super popular guy right now, and my team keeps telling me to stop talking about him. But the reality is I'm going to say what I believe and time will age it like wine or cheese. We'll find out. But wine or milk, I think, would be a better analogy. So on that, I just think it's incredible. He's got the greatest builders, the greatest capital allocators. And while I think that this is an incredibly complicated thing, and I seriously doubt that he's the greatest dealmaker of all time, there is an element of the way that he's moving the chaos that he's creating, if it doesn't destroy us, the economy, which it certainly could, could eviscerate our allies and make them just want to see us burn, because fuck you, that's very possible. But if it doesn't, it could move the Overton window enough that he can actually get some of these things done and change the economic balance of power around the world, such that to your earlier point, we don't have to have 50 military bases in Germany because Europe is now taking care of their own defenses. And I would love to see a world in which there's more, we're less the world's policemen and more of a. I don't know, Big Brother is probably the closest thing that I can get to right now because I don't want to lose our dominance. But the way that we've been treating it like an empire is just too expensive. It'll burn us out.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, we completely disagree. I mean, listen, a lot of this is going to just be. I've told my audience with this economic stuff, I'm simply going to be looking at data and I will share the data with you and you can fact check the data. We're two months in, so right now it's been chaos. Is it conceivable that Besant is going to take the skills you described and make America great again and the growth and all of this stuff? Sure. I'm just going to look at the numbers and where I am skeptical is I think implicit in your analysis is that people from the business world are sort of naturally the good or best or right people to be making a lot of these government decisions. And I just have not seen evidence of that. If it was demonstrated to me, business people in general are the best in these cabinet roles. And as president. Right. The whole argument with Romney was we need a business person. And if you go back in history, it's like it doesn't, you know, the record isn't so great of business people in government necessarily. I just struggle to think that the cabinet with the most billionaires ever, combined with Trump's, I believe, complete kind of lack of understanding of how even tariffs work. Like, I think Trump still thinks China cuts a check for the tariffs. That's how disconnected I think he is. I just don't see a reason to expect things to go super well. But I hope that they do. I mean, I said on the day of Trump's inauguration, I hope he succeeds, not politically. I hope he succeeds in improving the lives of Americans in a way that we can empirically measure. And so, you know, there's eight or 10 metrics that I look at. I hope that you're right. I'm very skeptical about it, but I'm going to be completely upfront with my audience about where I ultimately come down.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I hope that I'm right. I have my level of skepticism watching what I see happening. But when I look at the alternative and think about what does it look like if we were still in the place that we were at with the Democrat Party in control, that one. From an authoritarian standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from an innovation standpoint, very specifically, AI, that's where I am more afraid of the direction that the status quo was headed. But I'm certainly not blind to the fact that there is a breaking point. And if you bring too much chaos down upon yourself, yeah, you can really break alliances. But look, we have such a strong economy, people are going to want access to it. So we've got tools that people aren't going to walk away from easily. But yeah, I think these, the, the thing that's happening with the tariffs strikes me as what I call the shoot me in the ear bro hypothesis. Like, if people think that all of the chaos that he is creating is a well orchestrated plan, it would be like his assassination attempt, him being the one to orchestrate it and say, look, look, just, just shoot me in the ear. Like, it's got to look real. Like you got to get it really close. As if that couldn't go so horrifically wrong that it would be the dumbest idea of all time. And I remember when that happened, people were like, I bet he set it up himself. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Do you know how close that bullet came to killing him? It's nuts. So, yeah, that would be absurd. So this, that's how this feels to me. We may end up in a good place, but the odds that the way he's doing it is intentional and that he's got it mapped out is effectively zero.

[David Pakman]

Now, Tom, on the $5 million, the $5 million Trump gold cards for citizenship, we, but we agree that's Nuts, Right?

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, I love that.

[David Pakman]

Okay, so here's my question for you. Here's my question for you on it. And we don't have to go deep into it. Aside from your opinion as to whether it's good or bad.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[David Pakman]

You agree there is no way in hell that 10 million people sign up for that the way Trump is. Sure. Right. Like have you run the numbers on it? Yeah, that's like the most successful programs like this get a couple thousand people a year and they are far cheaper. Program like, you agree the numbers are nuts. There's no way even a. I don't think there's a. I don't even think 1 0,000 people get one of these gold cards. Forget about 10 million. I think it's, I think it won't even be 10,000.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Where the low end number is. Don't know, haven't thought about that. But the high end numbers are so absurd. But as I was telling my wife, hey, I'll take every $5 million donation that we can get from somebody that wants to come here if they're vetted. So if we are vetting people and saying, yo, this is somebody that we'd want over here, somebody who's successful, somebody who's a builder and they want to come over to America and continue building, I love that the most. So given that we have the mahusive debt that we have, anything that's going to help us pay that down, I'm all for. So. No, that one, that one didn't hit me weird. There are plenty of things that he does that, that hit me with a 10 year, but not that one.

[David Pakman]

Okay, fair.

[Tom Bilyeu]

What's the thing that freaks you out the most? The one where you're like, oh my

[David Pakman]

God, I don't know that. I mean, I think it's more the approach of he knows more than everybody and also he's the ultimate authority on everything. I mean, similar to what you said, the court stuff, and ignoring the judiciary from a constitutional standpoint that is, that is scary to me. I think that that big picture issue is the one that terrifies me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, that's fair. The thing that has always given me great comfort in the American experiment is that we say, hey, look, you can't trust people in power. You've got to have people that check each other. There's a certain amount of gridlock that you can expect that. To me, when the early, like when I started saying, I think I'm going to be voting for Trump, like that was the big one. But like, oh my God, he's going to come in, he's going to take over. And I was like, no, I think our, our democracy is strong enough that it will hold up, but if he starts talking about wanting to be king or whatever, and then motherfucker started talking about a third term and I was like, God damn it.

[David Pakman]

See, it surprises me that that would drive you towards Trump because again, this goes to left, right as shorthands and the kind of realignment that we've seen, seen the right slash. Republicans used to be like, very clearly about reducing the amount of presidential power, executive branch autonomy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's what I'm saying. That's what I wanted.

[David Pakman]

Right. But Trump campaigned on the opposite.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He did. What do you mean he campaigned on it?

[David Pakman]

Well, Trump, Trump, Trump openly said the Justice Department under him is going to be used to investigate and go after his political enemies. He's going to look at taking away broadcast licenses from media outlets that are adversarial to him. Ultimately, he is the top authority. Presidential immunity applies to everything, including non official acts conducted while he is president. I mean, Trump wanted and implicit in his campaign was the greatest expansion of presidential power in at least 150 years.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So looking at the way that Trump was campaigning, it was certainly mixed messages. But he would say, we've got to end this political persecution. We don't want to keep doing this. He would admittedly acknowledge there are people that we're going to have to investigate. You can't have people doing this, that or the other. And when you look at it on its face, you cannot let crimes go unpunished. Like if people are committing crimes, you've got.

[David Pakman]

No, but hold on a second.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You're fine, let me finish because I think I'm going to. No, no, I think I'm going to get where you're going to be way more comfortable. I'll finish the thought and then if you think I'm crazy, by all means, sounds good. So my take has been very consistent that Trump has absolutely got to like take the, the pen one, even if it was such that a, these have to be wet signatures. Letter of the law, gotta be. And now we're going to go after, we're going to rebuke these pardons and they're null and void. If even if that were the law, which is my understanding that it's not, and you don't need a wet signature and it doesn't fucking matter at all. But even if it were, I was like, Trump would be asinine to pursue that because now you're just perpetuating a cycle of violence. And so if he does go after his political opponents, weaponize the DOJ against them, do all that stuff, that, that would be, forget bad for Trump, that's just bad for the presidency. That is us again going back to this, racing away from each other. You get into civil war territory at that point where now we're just trying to imprison our elected officials. So I had one guy in my, and I, I would assume you see it differently, but in my view, what they did to Trump was that, that you had not. It's not like there wasn't smoke. They went after the smoke, but turned it into a fire. And so I was like, okay, I have people actively doing it. And then this guy that, God, like, he flirts with it sometimes, but also sometimes says, like, you gotta stop doing that and you can't do it. And so now, I don't know, he, he may absolutely listen to the devil and let it whisper in his ear and he becomes a sociopath. There's no doubt that's possible.

[David Pakman]

Well, here, here's what I would propose to you with peace and love and respect, which is something that I've seen happen to a lot of you can

[Tom Bilyeu]

go as aggressive as you want.

[David Pakman]

A lot of people that I know that I call into my show or voted for Trump, they tell me what's important to them and then they say they voted Trump and Trump promised the opposite. And so, like, I just, I'll give you my understanding of what you just said. You're in favor of reducing the power of the presidency. You want checks and balances, you want oversight, you said. And then you said, and I decided to vote for Trump. And when I hear that this is me with my biases, right? Trump says, I will use the DOJ to investigate this laundry list of people. Cash Patel, who he hired to be FBI director, had his own list of people that, that he was going to do that with. He says he is the ultimate authority at the end of the day. And it doesn't matter what state attorneys general say about elections, it doesn't matter what courts say about initiatives. He is ultimately the authority. He made an argument for presidential immunity that goes above and beyond anything we've ever seen, which includes non official acts conducted while he is president and even after he is no longer president. He wanted immunity to cover things he did in July of 2021, when he was not even the President of the United States as president now. So it's not just what he said. But it's what he did. The firing of independent agency commissioners, ftc, fcc, arguably not a power that the president has. You know, it's being legislated right now. I could go on with the list, but. So what I hear from you is, oh, man. Tom has a principle that he says is important, and he voted for the guy who violates that principle more than anyone else who has held this office. Is Tom confused, or does Tom not really care about that principle?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. So reach into my soul. What do you think is going on?

[David Pakman]

I think you're probably confused. I think you do care about the principle. I don't know. I'm not sure. I'm not sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

No, no, no. Yeah, I think so. That kind of thing, I think is very good. It's what I always do is say, if this person were a character. So for people that don't know me, my background's actually writing for film, and if this person were a character I was writing for a film, what would have to be true about them for them to be in accordance with what they feel, believe, think, whatever, and still act in this way? And you could always do, oh, they're a liar. And so this was like public positioning, and they just. That's what they want people to think. The reality is, to understand why I voted for Trump, you have to understand my perception of what happened in the Biden administration, which we're not going to agree, but I look at the Biden administration and I see a blob, a deep state, which I think is the right word because it has ominous overtones. That ran a puppet president that was not a. Essentially not a real person, certainly wasn't making decisions. They were hiding him from the American people. Speaker Johnson was saying it took almost a year for him to get a meeting with the President. That's fucking crazy. He's second in line for the presidency. So it's. I look at that and I say, oh, my God. Like, I don't even know who actually is the president. Also, they're going hard in the paint against free speech. That's crazy. Which, for me, understanding that free speech is like my kill switch. Free speech for me is the one where I use the Second Amendment. So that's the level that I'm at with free speech. Not a free speech absolutist. I love the Supreme Court and the decisions that they've made. I think it's amazing. Then you've got the way that they're stifling innovation. So for all the things that we went through in the beginning, economically, I think they're way worse. And then also some of the stance that they were taking specifically around AI, telling the Silicon Valley guys, Marc Andreessen being the one speaking most obviously around this idea of, hey, dear Marc Andreessen, don't even invest in AI companies because we're going to control. It's going to be two or three companies we're going to control. They would never use the word regulatory capture, but that's exactly what they were going to do. And we're gonna really control this thing. And so that. And to your point, I could keep going and list more, but all of my alarm bells were going off and screaming. On the other hand, I've got this guy who's a little wild. Definitely, like he will joke with things like, I don't know, maybe I can run for a third term and stuff like that. That definitely I was like, oh God, I really hope he's joking. But also some of it being. And if he does break bad, do I think that democracy is going to catch us? So I think low probability really like breaks and then high probability that even if he does like that, high probability he won't break. And then even if he does that, it's going to be guard railed in. And then the person I actually wanted to vote for was rfk, which may lose me credibility with you, but given the people that he was able to surround himself with, I was like, okay, I'm not a big Trump fan, but I like the people that he's got around him Now. I'm a big believer, which I know we disagree on, but I'm a big believer that being one of the greatest living capital allocators puts you into a class that is so incredible and so few people fall into that category. The fact that he was able to get so many of them to do things that are quite frankly detrimental to certainly their short term financial interests, potentially even medium term, probably not long term, that I was just like, I don't think these guys are doing it because they're secretly trying to get control of the government. I think the optimist in me, because I felt the same thing. They're doing it because they know that there's a way to structure the government that allows for a thriving lower and middle class. And I want to see that play out. So this was not me rushing towards Trump. It was more rushing towards his cabinet and then rushing away from what I thought was multiple steps down the authoritarian path.

[David Pakman]

But at the time you voted for him, he hadn't said any of the names of the people that would be in his cabinet. So how did you rush towards his cabinet in November?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Of course he had. Literally. His RFK's VP was on my show when they broke the news that they were going to back out of the race because Trump had made them an offer. So he was already starting to talk about this stuff.

[David Pakman]

Okay, that's true. That. That one. He did allude that RFK will have a position. I don't think we knew what it would be. I mean, listen, I do disagree with just about everything you said. I mean, I agree most of the words you used were English and I understood them. So I feel like that's. That's like our kind of shared basis of standing here. But no, I just have one thing I do want to ask about. I know you said you don't totally know who was really in control. When you talk about the deep state and Biden being a puppet, who do you suspect are some of the puppet masters? Because when I asked, like, Vivek Ramaswamy this, he kind of had like, no idea. The only name he came up with was Susan Rice, which I kind of laughed about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Honestly, I don't know the government apparatus prior to me launching the Tom Bilyeu show almost at all. So I wouldn't know anybody by name. I've only been doing it for like three months, so I don't know any of them by name. I just know that it wasn't Biden. And if it wasn't Biden, whoever the punchline is is wildly unacceptable to me.

[David Pakman]

Well, let me put it a different way then. Yeah, if you're confident that a deep state exists, you must have some sense of the sorts of folks that are in it. Who are they?

[Tom Bilyeu]

So by type.

[David Pakman]

Well, what I mean is this. You. You very confidently said deep state, and Biden was a puppet of the deep state. When I asked you who, you said you haven't been doing this long enough to have any idea, but it sounds like you've been doing this long enough to know that there was a deep or there is a deep state. So you're confident that there is a deep state, but you're kind of saying, well, I'm not really that experienced here, if you know.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And so the me saying I'm not experienced does not mean I don't owe you an explanation. It means the explanation I'm going to give you just won't contain names. Okay, so the way that I think the deep state plays out is really simple, which is why I Understand why people say the managerial class.

[David Pakman]

That's a veg phrase. So it's sounding like the Vivek. I mean. Well, and I'm not sarcastic.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Bear with me. No, no, I don't mind. I don't mind if at the end of this you're like, oh, this is the same beef that I have with Vivek. And now you get a chance to push me harder. So at a minimum, I get a chance to explain myself. But James Burnham wrote two books more than that. But the two that really jump forward, the Managerial Revolution, which is about what we would now call the deep state, and then the Machiavellians, which is about this idea that no matter what, you will never have a government, a swim team, you'll never have anything that isn't run by a small group, which is literally what oligarch means, just rule by the few. And he makes a very compelling case that the architecture of the human mind is such that every group always and forever will be run by a small group, that he makes another case for that. In the quest to understand man as political animal, you have to understand that they will lie, spin position, all to acquire and maintain power. So I think that any company, any political organization, any ngo, they all fall prey to the physics of the human mind. And so all of them are going to try to entrench and then try to grow and try to maintain power. So to me, very simply, and I do want people to hear wolves howling in the background, but it's not for a specific set of people. It's going to happen on both sides. But you're looking at the likelihood that somebody gets themselves into a position at the FBI, the CIA, the whatever, and that all of them have a frame of reference, there is a set of beliefs that they believe are correct. And in the government, the way that it works is you get the elected officials are constantly coming and going, especially the president. And so they know they can just put their head down for a few years. This person will lose power. Could be as early as midterms, certainly by the time they get outvoted, and probably no one will ever notice that I'm the one that's slowing something down. And so it's a whole host of people that are. They have an agenda of things. And I'll just choose to believe that they are all acting with the world's best interests at heart. Now, I may disagree with them, but that they really are coming from a good place. But in coming from a good place, they stymie the person that we all elected to get this thing across the finish line. Given how much people hate change, given that we make progress not one insight at a time, but one funeral at a time. If you create an apparatus like we have done with the United States government, where there are bureaucrats that are going to be there their entire careers, they have a frame of reference and they don't want to change that, that becomes a portion. People are now calling it the fourth branch of government. That certainly is not a way I would have thought of on my own. But they become this thing that makes it very hard to steer. Now, as somebody who has grown companies and I've had 3,000 concurrent employees, I know how you can get stymied in the weirdest places. And you cannot figure out why is this not getting done. Like we've talked about it, we've got SOPs been articulated, everybody signed a document, everyone says they know what to do, but it's not happening. And so figuring out why it's not happening becomes incredibly frustrating. So bringing all of that to bear, when I look at it's oftentimes even if I gave you a set of five names, they wouldn't be the real five names because it's going to be, ah, it's just way deeper into the problem. It's so structural, both for the organization and the human mind. Oh, it is tough to get around.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, I just, you know, call me old fashioned, I kind of apply a sort of simple version of Occam's razor here. And I find just about everything you said kind of unnecessary because the explanation to me seems much more simple and kind of publicly knowable, which is the deep state to a degree is accountability in the sense of when we have a system and a check or a balance or there's a consequence or accountability to something that has been done usually in the first term. When we started hearing so much about the deep state, it was by someone in the Trump administration, it's that the checker balanced work. Then there was accountability. And often I heard an analogy or an allusion to the deep state made when there was accountability. For me, that's not really a secretive thing. It's a checker balance worked.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The second thing either talking about two different things.

[David Pakman]

Well, you're talking about who's really in control.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, but are you saying that you want the checks and balances to happen at the level of unelected bureaucrat, to use that now beaten to death term?

[David Pakman]

You know, I said we're kind of derailing now. I think the problem with unelected bureaucrat as a term, is that it can mean something extraordinarily benign. Like when I hear the term unelected bureaucratic, it might mean Elon Musk gets the keys to everything and gives them to 21 year olds. Okay, so, like, I think that's bad. Okay. Or it might mean there are employees of the federal government who have personal political beliefs but function simply as bureaucrats, no matter who's president, fulfilling some role that we determined is a valuable role. And I think that unelected bureaucrat could mean either of those things. And the pejorative that's been attached to it isn't necessarily accurate. The only other thing I want to say, and we don't have to make this all about the deep state. I mean, I think, I think who's really in control is relatively public. It's, you know, disproportionately rich people in corporations and boards of directors. I think that, that, that's kind of the answer. But a lot of the people that we've heard over the last number of years be pointed to as examples of the deep state are people that Trump appointed. Right? Like Christopher Wray was part of the deep state. Bill Barr, John Bolton, Esper. And so to some degree it just kind of becomes a catch all for I screwed up, someone did something I don't like, there's a consequence for something I did. It's never been like super interesting. And the fact that we never really figure out who's in it, it becomes kind of like with a lot of conspiracy theories, an absence of evidence becomes part of the conspiracy. Where you go to the conspiracy theorist and you go, you know, there's a total lack of evidence for what you're saying. And they go, that's right, because they've covered up the evidence. And either way, you hear a justification for what someone wants to believe. I just struggle to think that we need to even look to the deep state as described by some, because who's really in power seems pretty obvious.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's interesting. I have a totally different take on that. I know this is coming from having run a large company. So good luck overcoming my lived experience. Mr. Pac man, to use a phrase the left loves my lived experience is the following, that you get a large group of people, even if they are well intended, they make it very hard. Even if you're the CEO and you can fire everybody, even just finding where the problem is becomes difficult. And so given that reality, when a government gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and remember the thing that you're really battling with in my mind is a map of the way that humans work. When you're talking about political power can even be within a company. Getting your job, maintaining your job, making sure the organization grows, gets budget, all of these things begin competing for resources, always wanting, they want the dollar instead of the next person. They want to do the things that protect their job. They start managing up. Um, and so you get into this thing where somebody can just slow roll something. And so even if you're watching them you're like yeah, it's kind of hard to say like is this the thing that's creating the problem? Are they doing that on purpose? So on and so forth. So knowing how hard it is. There's a concept in business called VMG Velocity made good. And if somebody doesn't know how to adjust the sails so that they can capture the direction of the wind, tack the ship back and forth so they can go in a direction that might not be the exact direction that the wind is blowing, that, that is very hard to do. And if you have a government staff of people that don't know how to do that, it, it will just bog everything down. And so not looking at that, not wanting to figure out okay, we've got these ideas, we're trying to get them through. We only have. You were talking earlier. Four years is very limited. Four years is even more limited if you've got people that are trying to trip you up at every turn and so finding ways to address that. And this all stemmed from. If it wasn't Biden, who is it really? Again, I don't need it to be ill intentioned people. It's just I want the person I elected to have the appropriate amount of control. I don't want them to be able to override the other two branches. There should 100% be checks and balances but I don't want them going up against an unnamed unknowable foal that is just like a hundred thousand people slowing things down, tripping things up, whatever, whatever in a million directions. I know firsthand how much that can make progress next to impossible.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, I mean I don't want to belabor it. We certainly don't agree on this. I think at some point I do want to know. I think it's reasonable to say give me some of the names of the people that are really in control. Because I don't think it's valid to say it's 10000 bureaucrats that are in control. Because we know that once you get more than 150 people, it's very hard to act in a unified way by saying the 100,000 are all in control. Someone must be the figurehead someone or a few.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Try one more analogy. And if this doesn't work, then we'll just leave it and say we, we don't see eye to eye. Have you ever seen a complex algorithm for something like Facebook?

[David Pakman]

Have I seen the algorithm like as a, as a physical instantiation as lines of code. I mean I've seen lines of code. How meaningful they are to me as a non coder is minimal, but sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But the idea being you can have thousands, tens of thousands of lines of code and they're written by a bunch of different people. It's no one person. And so often people will get very confused that the algorithm is outputting an output that you don't expect. And so this happened a lot to us. We were pretty early in YouTube, not as early as some, but early enough to where we, we would have a YouTube rep tell us, go do this thing. Like, hey guys, we're really getting behind lives. Go do live. You do a live and it would tank your channel and you'd be like, hold on guys, what the hell just happened? They'd be like, oh wow, that's crazy. We didn't expect that. So we're like, hold on, you don't understand your own algorithm? And they're like, there's like a thousand variables in that thing. We don't understand what they all are, how they interact. No one person here knows all the way that this stuff works. That's like the government where you just, there's, they are so complex from the, the deep state perspective. And to ease up, the, all the managers, all the mid level employees within the government, each of them are a node on that algorithm. And when you start getting these outputs from the government that you are very confused by, it comes down to the fact that this is a whole bunch of humans, each with their own slight different variation of what we should and shouldn't do, how things should be done, levels of competence, levels of clarity on what they're supposed to do. And that bogs the machine down. And I, I am saying given the likelihood of that getting bogged down approaches 100%, we should, as a government, we should want people going in and cleaning that out and coming up with a system that essentially tidies up and simplifies that as much as we can.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, I, for me the analogy doesn't, doesn't really hit, but I do Think on this issue, we just disagree.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fair enough. Perfectly happy to move on. Okay. So what do you see as next steps? People read your book, they take away the. It's interesting how my takeaway from what your book is. I'm going to give you my takeaway and you can tidy up my. The. Where it breaks down.

[David Pakman]

Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I'm going to try to quote you as much as possible so that this feels very grounded. The right isn't just better at messaging. The right has created an echo machine for itself. They are isolating themselves from diverse viewpoints. The takeover of the modern Republican Party started with the Civil Rights act in the 1960s. That the modern Republican Party is largely defined as the group that wants to forestall racial progress. That we need to learn their tactics of messaging and we need to act more in concert with each other. We need to convince people that being on the left is going to be the thing that's the best for them, the best for the country. That we want this to be social democracy. As you very carefully defined. That will look something like Europe. I know that's very much shorthand, but something like. And I don't mean that in a derogatory like Serbies in Europe, like the highest performing countries in Europe. Fair, because I'm certainly not trying to drag you down with Serbia or whatever. And if we can do that, then we'll be able to outperform the right and get the country going in a direction that will be better for the vast majority of Americans.

[David Pakman]

That's more or less accurate. The only issue I take with it is I don't say anything about the modern Republican Party being having as a driving force forestalling racial progress. The only relevance of that is I talk about resentment over the direction of the civil rights movement starting in 58 as an influencing factor that started coalescing what ultimately became the modern Republican Party. But I don't say anything in the book about right now. That's one of the goals of the Republican Republican Party.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So. But that mattered enough that you spent time on it. How do you want us as readers to understand that initial thing, how it echoes today?

[David Pakman]

It created a division politically that started to shape the way the parties aligned themselves in the late 50s and early 60s. But that's 60 years ago. That's so I don't say in the book that today part of the Republican Party platform is forestalling racial progress. I think there's a lot we can say about race. It's not my primary topic, but I tell that only as there were people in 58 to 64 who didn't want the civil rights movement. They wanted segregation to remain legal, etc. They wanted schools to remain segregated. Those people became a group and that went through a number of iterations that got us to the modern Republican Party. But I am not making the case in the book about any 2025 Republican platform being forestalling racial progress. So I just don't say that. So. So I don't want to include that in the analysis.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it. Got it.

[David Pakman]

Very fair.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I certainly do not want to misrepresent you. I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to take away from the schism started with that. Is it essentially you just picked a starting point to start clocking the modern Republican Party and that just happened to be it. But there's no sort of remnant of

[David Pakman]

that now, or I don't listen, I'm feeling like you're trying to pull me into some kind of Republicans are inherently racist sort of thing. Not necessarily, necessarily deliberately, but maybe because you have the sense that it might be something I believe. I didn't pick 1958 to start the story for any other reason. Then you had this huge schism of the Civil War. You then had Reconstruction, you had the Progressive era, you had World War II, the New Deal era. There were political shifts and realignments then, but it didn't seem to me in interpreting where the party is today, that they were as relevant to go back to. It seemed as though the civil rights era started the dividing lines that reflect sort of the alignment of the parties today. It wasn't like a calculated thing to include or exclude anything. I could have started a little further back. I could have skipped and started at Reagan and the story would have been similar. But it was. There was nothing. There was no subterfuge in selecting that. It just is the case that one of the big political dividing lines in 58 was there was a movement that said we shouldn't segregate schools and have black only drinking fountains and this sort of thing. And there was a movement that said we should have that. That division morphed into for and against the Vietnam War, for and against Reagan. Not perfectly, but it sort of lays across that in a way that's relevant to where we are today.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, let me ask a question. In a different way, how would you characterize the Republican Party now? Like, what is the. The platform? Because it's my understanding that you look at what's going on in MAGA Republican circles as like, ooh, this is not good for the country. So what is that thing, either belief system or action set that you would say characterizes somebody as mega Republican?

[David Pakman]

Honestly, what characterizes someone as a MAGA Republican is they support Trump and they like the idea of what MAGA is doing and they believe that MAGA is making America great again and the people. One of the problems is the specific policy beliefs have changed so many times since Trump, as he likes to say, came down the golden escalator. So, so this is, I deal with this in the book, in the chapter about how to run against a party that doesn't really have policy that's fixed, and we don't have to rehash the entire content of that chapter. But I think the point here is right now, the primary prism that I that defines MAGA Republicanism is a loyalty to Trump. If you look at someone like an Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, but not a MAGA Republican, he does have principles that he seems to believe about how government should be organized, how economies should be organized, how we should revere or not the Constitution that seems relatively fixed or consistent. He's not a MAGA Republican, as I see it. And of course people are free to disagree. Loyalty to whatever Trump's flavor of the day is seems to be kind of the defining characteristic right now of being a MAGA Republican.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Does Trump represent something that is so in the social zeitgeist right now that it makes sense that he rose to power?

[David Pakman]

It makes sense that he rose to power in the sense that he was a charismatic individual, entertaining individual, made a very good interview and did coalesce people with some shared fears about the direction of the country and said, I have the answers. And this now goes back to 2015, 2016. He did a very good job of both. He brought his celebrity and his comfort doing interviews and being on camera and combined it with some growing feelings that resonated with people. The feeling that if you're American born, maybe you're being supplanted by someone from a different country, that China's taking advantage of us, that the media has turned into left wing indoctrination and he convinced people that he has the solutions to those problems. So you don't hear me with a specific set of policies there because, you know, his, his proposal on trade was, he's an expert and he knows how to fix it. It wasn't exactly super clear what the policy was. So I would be more specific on the policy if there was more specific policy. But I do think that that's a big explanation as to how he ultimately rose to power. He did a very good job in a moment of coalescing people with certain fears, legitimate fears to a degree. Right. I mean, they weren't all illegitimate fears and saying, I'm the solution to this problem.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, what do you think about his international movements? How do you make sense of what's going on in Russia, Ukraine, what's going on in Israel, Gaza? How do you see that playing out?

[David Pakman]

A couple of things. Number one, the trend is Trump's pretty enamored with authoritarian leaders. He doesn't like Justin, you know, the governor, Justin Trudeau. He doesn't seem super impressed with Emmanuel Macron or, you know, kind of our traditional Western liberal allies. He is much more interested in talking about the love letters that he traded with Kim Jong Un. He seems very deferential to. And he calls them love letters. That's not a pejorative. I mean, I'm just quoting what Trump says he's deferential to, to Putin and saying, you know, Russia's given up so much, they've lost people. It's like, well, they did start the war, right? I mean, to some degree. So I think that that is a concerning direction because myself, as a libertarian, small l, anti authoritarian, I don't like authoritarian leaders. You know, where you write something Putin doesn't like and you end up accidentally stabbing yourself in the back 10 times. That sort of stuff I don't like. So I'm concerned about that. The second part of it is we were told, and Trump told us, and a bunch of people believed that the real anti war candidate is Trump. And just so far we saw Trump, okay? The latest actions from Netanyahu in Gaza, which led to 400 dead. And I say this as someone who is criticized for being a liberal Zionist, right? I mean, I don't like Netanyahu, but I'm called a liberal Zionist. So we saw that Trump authorizing an offensive against Houthis in Yemen. Trump not ending the Russia, Ukraine conflict. You know, his first promise was it would be over within a day of winning. Then it was within a day of inauguration. I think the Latest is within 100 days, but we're getting to that. Right? That'll be April 20th. It's not. It's not looking so good. So another takeaway, big picture is the anti war guy is definitely presiding over a bunch of continued and new conflicts, which is counter to what he ran on.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now, if you're looking at that and you were either advising him or if Kamala had won, how would you want them to handle, let's take them each one at a time. How would you want them to handle Russia, Ukraine? Like, do you feel like we should be invested in stopping it, or should we be invested in making sure that Putin understands you cannot invade a sovereign nation?

[David Pakman]

I am not someone who is always pushing for the US to be the policeman of the world and the arbiter in every conflict. I do believe that as members of Naito, given that this was an offensive war by Russia where Ukraine is defending itself, I think that it's reasonable that the US Play a role in getting to a cease fire. So I don't fault Trump for saying, I'm going to try to get a cease fire. I mean, great. I fault him for the bluster of always saying he's going to do it better than everybody and faster than everybody and all of this stuff. I do fault him for playing coy and just, he seems so enamored with Putin and taken with Putin that his perspective, you know, he, he didn't even want to say Putin is the aggressor here. And so many people that work for him refused to say that. They go, listen, we just need a solution. So I fault him for that. But I think it's reasonable that the US Would have a role to play, given our membership in Naito, the implications in Europe for security. And I think it's reasonable that the US Play a role with NATO countries

[Tom Bilyeu]

going to Israel, Palestine and the Houthis. I'll definitely throw in. Where, where are you at? Again, if we were not dealing with Trump, we were dealing with somebody else. How would you want to see this play out? Did somebody need to check Netanyahu and tell him, jesus Christ, man, you got to stop. Like, this is just plain and simple ethnic cleansing. How do we deal with Iran, the Houthis, making international trade in international water so problematic? What's the, what's the right way to handle that?

[David Pakman]

Houthis and Iran, I will sort of defer because it's just simply not my area of expertise. My interest in it is within 50 days of being sworn in, Donald Trump has a new military offensive, which he told us he wouldn't do. So I think that we could. I would want to do a deeper dive on the Houthis with the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I am on record for more than 10 years now in laying out super specific proposals of what I think is really the only way forward there. Some people like it, some people don't. It is a two state solution. It does involve concessions from both sides. It does involve both sides agreeing that this agreement that I have dreamed up is the resolution to the conflict and that you can't just kind of do what Netanyahu just did, which is say, I don't feel like we're making enough progress. We're going back to the bombing. So you need to have some, some agreement that says this is the end of the conflict to this point and everything after this point is going to be considered a new conflict, which we will evaluate and deal with as a sort of new proposal. I go into detail even about who should control east and West Jerusalem. I go into detail about settlements and what should happen with the ones that can be dismantled and the ones that are not likely to be dismantled. This is such a big thing that it's not even about what should Trump do or what would I like Harris to do. It's a huge geopolitical cluster f that is worthy of its own discussion. Quite frankly, I don't believe that Harris would have solved it had she won. And I don't think Trump's going to solve it either. Remember, Trump told us in his first term that Jared would solve the Israeli Palestinian conflict during that first term. And that was, of course, crazy. That was laughable. I don't think either candidate would have solved it. But I've laid out in a lot of detail the framework I think would work.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you think about some of the proposals coming out from Donald Trump, about we're just going to clear them out and, you know, these poor, long suffering Gazans, we just got to get them out of there. They can't be a part of the rebuild. Which always strikes me as like, say what I have to imagine. I know that you don't respond positively, but I'll give you a chance to give me your own words. How does that hit you?

[David Pakman]

The two state solution that I envision acknowledges that both groups have historical claims to the land. And it also acknowledges that the last 60, 70 years are not even close to an acceptable status quo. And so I think the, you know, there's a lot of people that criticize me saying, David, you should be more about a one state solution where it's only Israel, or you should be about a one state solution where there is no more Israel. I think inevitably it's going to have to be a two state solution that includes that land for Israelis and part of that land as well for Palestinians. So I am first and foremost focused on what could realistically lead to peace and kicking all of the Palestinians out and turning it into resorts or whatever that Israel will control. If history has taught us anything, it's that will not put an end to the conflict and therefore I'm against it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Meaning that people will come in and bomb it and they'll do whatever they can to disrupt that.

[David Pakman]

No doubt.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, yeah. This is the only thing I will say that's interesting with the way that Trump brings chaos. And I heard Sam Harris talk about this and he's like, look, the, the stalemate, for lack of a better word, that's been going on for whatever, 70, 80 years. Nothing has moved the Overton Window and we're stuck. And Sam was certainly not going to bat for Trump. I think everybody knows he is not a Trump fan.

[David Pakman]

Yep.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But he was saying that the one thing that if you were going to say anything good had come out of this, it was the fact that he had moved the Overton Window and he'd offered these solutions that were so crazy that at least it was changing the tenor of the conversation that people might start thinking of different solutions. My thing with this has always been that what do you do, like, if he boots everybody out? And certainly your point is well taken, that will it really ever lead to peace? But seems pretty self evident to me that if Trump actually did what he said and completely cleared everybody out of the land so that they could rebuild, that is definitionally ethnic cleansing. But what if it worked? And what do you do with something that yields an outcome that you like, meaning peace, but you absolutely despise the way that we got there? And so that I don't know what to do with, because the, the status quo is, is certainly very ugly, but it does seem like they are just going to keep going. The bombings will continue until morale improves. And so. Whoo. Yeah. It doesn't seem like anyone's going to hit the brakes here. Like, do you see a termination point? Do you see, like, international pressure mounting? It felt like for a minute they sort of did everything they were going to be able to do and it just didn't work.

[David Pakman]

Yeah, that's, that's my view. And, you know, I've been following this since I was old enough to even understand that Israel existed. I, I wish I could be more optimistic, but right now there's very little to be optimistic about.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, brittle. I mean, your book ends with this wonderful sense of this is what we do going forward. What shall we do going forward? You and I have had a very reasonable conversation. We disagree on some fundamental things, but you still remain one of the intelligent people that I think is Sincere that I like to aim at my worldview to see if you can help tune me up. So regardless of whether I or anybody listening would follow this step by step, paint that vision of how we move forward smartly.

[David Pakman]

Well, I think fundamentally to de partizanize it, okay, this I think would apply to everybody. Number one, I think we got to get back to teaching critical thinking and media literacy probably by fifth grade to everybody. I think it can only improve our ability to have adult conversations by the time kids become adults if we give them these skills starting very early. Number two, I think it's important for people to understand how to engage with the political system. And so, yes, voting the, signing petitions online doesn't do very much. Let's figure out how to work in our local communities. Let's figure out what sorts of change we want to affect. And very, you know, you can't fix everything. I can't get involved in the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the Ukraine war and health care and education and abortion rights. And so being informed is great. But then figure out what you really want to work on. And sometimes picking one or two things is much more effective than spreading yourself super thin. And then number three, this is like so cliche, but I do think that to the extent that we can have real world conversations rather than social media, you know, the things that people say to me on social media, disgusting, disgusting stuff. I think 90, 98% of them, 2% of them maybe are that crazy. 98% of them, if we meet in the real world, go totally differently. I was recently in Vegas. I had an Uber driver who knew my show and was a Trump guy. And I was certain that if we had been talking on Twitter, the epithets would have been flying. But we had a completely reasonable conversation. He said, I don't agree with communism. I said, great, neither do I. And he said, what are you talking about? You're a communist. And I said, no, let's talk about it. And so I do think that between the pandemic and everything else, a lot of stuff is happening online. And I think it's clear that in person communication bears significantly more fruit than kind of yelling at each other on social media.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Now makes sense. David Pakman where can people follow you and get your new book?

[David Pakman]

Search my name on Google. I we're on everything. Twitter, Blue Sky, YouTube, etc. The books on Amazon, the books on Barnes and Noble, and then there's a limited number of signed copies@david pakman.com Booksmith I think there's about 150 left.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I love it, man. The echo machine, brother. Thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate it. It was wonderful. Everybody at home, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. Sun Tzu famously said the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. But in today's high stakes tensions between America, China and Russia, what if the ultimate battlefield isn't military, it's economic? Today's guest, Edward.