Why Global Interventions Fail: From Japan’s Economy to the Middle East’s Oil Wars

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Why Global Interventions Fail: From Japan’s Economy to the Middle East’s Oil Wars
Date: August 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this high-stakes, rapid-fire episode, Tom Bilyeu and his co-hosts dive deep into the failures and consequences of large-scale government interventions—spanning U.S. military action in the Middle East, currency intervention in Japan, economic alliances, and the unintended fallout of policy decisions. The episode systematically deconstructs current global headlines, exploring why grand interventions often falter, the mental models and histories behind these patterns, and how narratives in media and culture are shifting in real time.

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Key Discussion Topics & Insights

1. Middle East Oil Wars & U.S.–Iran Tensions

Timestamps: 00:30–18:00

• Trump’s Aborted Strike on Iran:

  • Trump calls off what he claims would have been the “biggest attack since World War II,” citing Middle Eastern allies' lobbying and the threat of wider regional escalation.
  • Quote:

    “The enemy always gets a say in the war. ... Iran's answer to the US burning Iranian oil was for them to go burn the oil of the other GCC nations.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (03:01)

• Retaliation and Regional Stakes:

  • Direct strikes would result in attacks on oil infrastructure throughout the Gulf, not just in Iran.
  • Kuwait's vulnerability is highlighted, with its military reporting Iranian drone attacks and fears that escalation could wipe out the entire country.
  • Tom recasts the image of Gulf states as highly modern, major global economic players—far different from outdated Western stereotypes.

• Mental Models & Propaganda:

  • The show stresses the fatigue and confusion generated by information overload, propaganda, and the difficulty of forming accurate mental models about the region.
  • Iran’s leverage over shipping lanes, with Oman caught in the middle, illustrates the complexity.

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2. Global Interventions, Stalemates, and “Antibiotics Problem”

Timestamps: 16:52–26:43

• Military Realities & Resource Shortages:

  • U.S. is running low on Patriot missiles; repeated ceasefires allow Iran to rebuild and adapt—leading to the “antibiotics problem” where only the most resistant elements survive and get stronger.
  • Quote:

    “That’s exactly why you don’t stop a treatment of antibiotics. ... now you have the most resistant replicating.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (19:22)

• Political Impasse:

  • Tom analyzes Trump’s possible motivations and political calculus: pausing military action to use temporary economic relief (oil price deflation) to benefit midterm elections, masking crisis-led deflation as policy success.

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3. The Trap of Financialization and Dependency

Timestamps: 27:02–32:00

• Globalization’s Double-Edged Sword:
  • Decades of chasing cheap everything has resulted in fragility: “We went into a shooting match with like half a clip.”
  • Both right and left political extremes ultimately want heavy state intervention for different reasons—leading to a “horseshoe theory” where the center becomes marginalized.
  • Quote:

    “The only voices in the middle screaming for temperance sound like Luddites.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (29:15)

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4. Exporting Democracy: The Unique Case of Japan

Timestamps: 38:38–42:56

• Why U.S. Interventions Succeeded in Japan, Failed Elsewhere:
  • Tom urges listeners to “research Japan”—highlighting how U.S. rebuilding efforts succeeded due to cultural alignment and U.S. willingness to not permanently occupy, contrasted with failed attempts elsewhere.
  • Quote:

    “Do not let historians or fucking pundits tell you, don’t look at Japan. You must understand why it worked there and why it doesn’t work other places.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (39:43)

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5. Japan’s Economy: Carry Trade, Intervention, and Decline

Timestamps: 60:42–81:05

• Japan–U.S. Currency Coordination:

  • U.S. and Japan intervene jointly to prop up the yen, exposing how decades of financial policy have locked both economies in an unsustainable embrace.
  • Detailed explanation of the “carry trade” and why quick fixes (interventions) only delay a reckoning.
  • Scott Bessant’s public signaling and its market impact are discussed.

• Long-term Remedies vs. Short-term Fixes:

  • Tom advocates for painful but necessary reforms to “kill off all their zombie companies by slowly raising interest rates,” letting real economic growth take the place of artificial props.

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6. Corruption, Trump’s “Truth API,” & Political Self-interest

Timestamps: 43:08–54:28

• Trump Monetizing Market-Moving Information:
  • Selling early API access to his social posts raises serious ethical and likely legal concerns about politicians profiting from insider knowledge.
  • Quote:

    “You cannot let the President profit off of basically creating a little side feed for people like, hey, look, this is what I’m about to do. ... That would be insane.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (47:46)

  • Deep sadness over how political office, once a hard and sacrificial calling, has become a path to obscene personal wealth.

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7. COVID Lockdowns: Hindsight, Decentralization, and Policy Failure

Timestamps: 84:34–91:33

• Centralized Responses vs. Local Agency:
  • Tom now views government-mandated lockdowns as fundamentally destructive to economic and social health, advocating instead for decentralized, individual decision-making.
  • Quote:

    “If I’m a gym, and the government forces me to close, I go out of business not because of a decision that I made ... we can never abide that again.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (85:10)

  • Death toll numbers are questioned—emphasizing how data can be manipulated for propaganda.

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8. AI, Human Augmentation, and Cultural Crossroads

Timestamps: 91:51–99:34

• Neuralink, Augmentation, and Societal Adaptation:
  • Elon Musk’s viral Neuralink clip catalyzes a debate over brain-computer interfaces, the inevitability of augmentation, and cultural resistance.
  • Quote:

    “It is only going to accelerate as AI gets better. ... We are already doing human brain-computer interfaces. It will all start with people that are blind, but...”
    —Tom Bilyeu (91:57)

  • Tom insists everyone will need to account for rapid change in AI, economics, and even what it means to be human.

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9. Film, Cultural Storytelling, and the Apology for Greatness

Timestamps: 99:39–113:39

• Box Office Success as a Cultural Signal:
  • The new Spider-Man film’s record-breaking performance opens a discussion about global storytelling, the rise of Japan and East Asia as cultural exporters, and the declining self-confidence of Western narratives.
  • Quote (on greatness in storytelling):

    “Only in the west do you have to apologize for greatness. That is wild...”
    —Tom Bilyeu (105:19)

• U.S. Cultural Origin & National Identity:
  • Tom details America’s unique self-reliant, excellence-driven national identity—contrasting it to modern tendencies to apologize for success or exceptionalism.
  • Quote:

    “If it is to be, it is up to me. ... I’m going to act like I’m the CEO. I’m going to act like if I don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it.”
    —Tom Bilyeu (108:41)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Iranian military strategy:

  “Have no doubt, if the United States escalates, the nature of the war will change. … There won’t be a Kuwait after Iran after a few days.”
  —Middle East Military Analyst (13:38)

• On the “horseshoe theory” of political extremes:

  “When they get too far away from each other and they‘re both tending towards the pathologies of … each side, they suddenly want the same things for different reasons.”
  —Tom Bilyeu (29:15)

• On political corruption and trust:

  “When being a politician at this time may cost me my life, but I so believe in what we’re trying to do here that I’m willing to die for this cause. We just don’t have that energy anymore. It’s always me, me, me…”
  —Tom Bilyeu (51:24)

• On U.S.–Japan economic ties and interventions:

  “We built something that was the financial equivalent of being below sea level. And then COVID was that you didn’t maintain your levees and now you’re fucked.”
  —Tom Bilyeu (76:20)

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Structural Outline with Key Timestamps

• Middle East Escalation & Oil Wars: 00:30–18:00
• Delays, Military Resource Limits, and Repeat Stalemates: 16:52–26:43
• Financialization & Political Pathology: 27:02–32:00
• Japan—The Exception that Proved the Rule: 38:38–42:56
• Currency Crises: Yen, U.S. Interventions, and Carry Trades: 60:42–81:05
• Trump’s “Truth API” & Political Corruption: 43:08–54:28
• COVID Lockdown Hindsight—Decentralization & Data Doubt: 84:34–91:33
• AI, Brain Augmentation, and the Next Human Leap: 91:51–99:34
• Cultural Power: Film, Storytelling, and National Narratives: 99:39–113:39

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Conclusion

Tom Bilyeu’s episode delivers a sweeping, sharply critical analysis of today’s geopolitical and economic chaos—artfully blending historical analogy, realpolitik, and cultural reflection. He challenges listeners to upgrade their models for understanding state interventions, embrace complexity, resist propaganda, and rediscover self-reliance amidst societal upheaval.

Closing Note:

“We've got to stop telling ourselves that we have capitalism and get back to actual capitalism so we can tell that kid, go contribute.”
—Tom Bilyeu (116:04)

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Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Co-host or Guest 1]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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[Co-host or Guest 1]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about. Sell your car today on Carvana.

[Commercial Narrator]

Pick up.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Fees may apply. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. We are coming to you. In the midst of absolute world chaos, Trump has tacoed out again on his threats to hit Iran harder than anyone has ever been hit since World War II. So he says. We're gonna take a look at that, why it's going on, what's happening. You're gonna want to hear the behind the scenes rumors of why oil prices crashed when Trump announced the massive strike on Iran, Why wasn't going to happen. And in completely related news, Trump Truth API has launched selling trading firms early access to his tweets. Going to talk about if this is legal and if it's not legal, should it be, or, sorry, if it. If it is legal, should it be illegal? I have some pretty strong feelings on the issue. The US has coordinated with Japan to try to prop up the Yen. Man. There's just intervention everywhere you look in the world. We're going to discuss what this means and where. Where we're likely to go from here. Elon Musk has sort of re gone viral for an insane breakthrough from Neuralink that is proving, in my opinion, that we're all going to be cyborgs in the near future. We're going to talk about what that looks like, whether you should be scared or embracing it. And something happened this week at the film box office that is absolutely mind blowing. And I think that we may be moving into a new era. And as a film buff, I couldn't be more excited. Our all right, things that I'm not excited about. Trump has served a plate just absolutely chalked to the brim with tacos over the weekend as he called off what was supposedly going to be the biggest attack since World War II. We've got a clip of him saying that. Let's take a listen.

[Iranian Analyst or Expert]

It was going to be a massive attack. It was going to be attack that would have been by far the biggest attack since World War II. But they've. They said Please don't do it. And other their neighbors said that too. And so we're just going to see whether or not we can make a deal toward the denuclearization. Yeah, well, they start tomorrow.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, so he's claiming that the negotiations are going to start tomorrow. I think Iran feels a little bit differently, but we'll get to that. Now, while there are no guarantees in war, it is almost certainly true that if the US Hit Iranian energy infrastructure, which would undoubtedly be included in this massive attack, Iran would have hit the energy infrastructure of the US allies. Now, how do we know that? Because Iran's answer to the US Burning Iranian oil was for them to go burn the oil of the other GCC nations. And honestly, they've just said as much. They've said that's precisely what they would do. And while Trump wants everyone to believe that he can just go around and bully everybody, the reality is the enemy always gets a say in the war. And so people around him were trying to make it abundantly clear what would happen. The AP reports in fact that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman mbs, told Trump exactly that that's what was going to happen, that strikes on Iran's oil sector would bring retaliation against Saudi and Gulf oil and gas facilities. Also, Tehran again just beats that drum over and over. If you guys do this, then we're going to do it back to you. So you don't need to do a lot of guesswork here to figure out what's going to happen. Riyadh also told Washington that there is a stark reality that everybody is going to have to face. While Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar can probably absorb whatever Iran throws at them, Kuwait cannot it exposed to Iranian backed militias in Iraq. Now, one of the things that is absolutely fascinating about all of this is from an American perspective, not a lot of us have the appropriate mental model of what's going on in the area. And so being able to see all the interconnectedness of this, being able to see how connected Iran and Russia are geographically, how close they are to each other, how those two things are starting to connect, how all the destabilization in Iraq now becomes a battle for who's going to control that. Is the U.S. going to be able to have more influence there? Is Iran going to be able to have more influence there? And so that's going to be another part of this battleground. And so none of this is going to remain limited to what's happening just between the US And Iran. And this is the hard reality of war. And for all of our claims that we're just absolutely decimating Iran's ability to strike back, that just doesn't appear to be true. And every time that we end up backing off, we create an opportunity for Iran to go in and rebuild. So Kuwait's military right now is saying that Iranian drones have already hit several vital facilities in the north, and if they escalate, this is really going to be a problem. I've actually been to Kuwait. It's pretty wild to have. I've been now to Saudi. I've been to Kuwait. I've been to uae. I've been around the region. And if you guys are thinking that these are just like desert outposts and, you know, it's a bunch of tribes, Bedouin tribes, running around the desert, that is not what it's like. You're there, you're in shopping malls that look better than stuff that we have in the US These are insanely rich countries that have been doing what they can to enter the modern era by transferring all the wealth that they've built up through oil and try to modernize. Remember, much of the west has had a gun to their head for decades now, saying, we're going to move away from oil whether it is in our economic best interest or not. Germany, I'm looking at you. We've been moving away. And so they got the memo, and they've been modernizing as fast as they can. So these are highly developed countries where you would recognize daily life like it really looks and feels like what it looks and feels here. So now imagine that people are blowing up the oil and gas infrastructure in your country, and so you'll get a sense of what this will look like and why they're rallying Trump so hard to be judicious in his use of force. But that puts Trump in this impossible situation where he's got to somehow get them to back down, because the US as the global hegemon, is at risk right now, and the whole world is watching. And by the way, I hope it surprises absolutely no one that as of this very morning, Iran is just flat saying, this is our foreign minister making it very clear there are no talks now. He said there are no Iranian negotiators that are being spent. There's no delegations that are being scheduled. And of course, they are addressing a audience in their own country. So it's not necessarily representative of what's actually true. But as Trump was saying, that we're getting so close to a deal, and we just need to Give peace a chance. Iran struck a ship trying to transit the Strait. So this is one where, boy, oh boy, I'm actually glad that we have the velocity and volume of information that we have in this era. I think it's going to stop a lot of people from getting sucked into just never ending propaganda. But there's so much information to assimilate and try and figure out what's going on. There are so many things moving. Even if you just narrow your focus to a small set of things, it's still so much information to try to build an accurate mental model that isn't so riddled with shortcuts that you're totally blind to what's actually going on. But if you really just think through first principles what this war is like from the Iranian perspective, then you're going to have a better sense of what is likely to happen here. So again, a modernized country that does not want to see their infrastructure being obliterated. They have military installations that have been designed to withstand this kind of attack. They have known for a very long time that the US And Israel are allies and that they are looking for some way to go in and bomb these guys back into the stone age. So they're ready for that. They understand that the pressure points are the global energy supply, so they can disrupt the strait. They know that they can also just hit the energy supply as it sits nakedly exposed in these countries. We've talked so much about their. Everybody wants to run a pipeline to get around the Strait of Hormuz, but that's all going to go over ground. It is going to be static, it is going to be easy to hit. And if Iran has the will and the ability to hit it, which of course they certainly have the will because this is an existential threat to the irgc and they have the ability, no matter what Trump keeps saying, they display over and over and over that if nothing else, they can mimic the mosquito fleets that they see operating so effectively in Ukraine. They can do exactly the same kind of thing, getting supplies from China, getting supplies from Russia, that they can just keep doing this kind of stuff. So now we're in this position where you've got Iran trying to help Russia in the hopes that they have an ally there. They're obviously trying to build up their relationships with China so that China can, if nothing else, sort of secretly be handing them things backdoor so that they can keep fighting. And every time we pause, you've got, you're giving Iran the ability to build back up their munitions. Now Iran says that their only discussions right now, which are very much not with us, are with Amman and they're about the shipping lanes and Iran wants to control them. Iran is not acting like somebody who's just on their back foot. They are acting like somebody who understands the point of leverage that they have. And they're going to press it. They're going to press it as hard as they can. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about timing. It's August, the slow part of the summer right now you have time. In a month you won't fall hits. Your calendar is going to fill up fast and everything that you meant to handle over the summer gets buried like the drawer of faded, stretched out teas. The stuff you keep meaning to replace but don't. The time to handle it is now, while it's still easy. That's where Quince comes in. Fewer pieces, better prices, everyday staples. Premium materials built to outlast all the cheap stuff. 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Go to surfshark.com tomb or use code tomb for four extra months. That's S U R F S H-A-R-K.com tomb go to surfshark.com tomb right now and use code tomb for four extra months. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action now. I actually found a really good breakdown of the situation of them trying to work with Oman to clamp down on the strait. And basically Oman has the opportunity to be a part of it, or they can get isolated by Iran, who will just keep bombing ships that try to hug the coast of Oman. So I think this is worth listening to. So here is an Iranian analyst giving us a breakdown of the situation between Iran and Oman and a little bit about Kuwait as well.

[Middle East Military Analyst]

Have no doubt, if the United States escalates, the nature of the war will change. Iran will no longer be targeting U.S. assets or maybe a couple of Kuwaiti assets in the north. They'll be going for the electrical power plants. They'll be going for the refineries and the oil installations, and they'll destroy it all, and they'll destroy the ports and within. And then of course, there'll be the Iraqi resistance. That'll be an end to Kuwait. So right now, the this is, you know, the Iranians are striking targets to prevent Americans from being able to wage war against Iran or to weaken the United States in its war against Iran. But if the United States chooses to target critical infrastructure, then everything changes. There won't be a Kuwait after Iran after a few days, or, yeah, I guess after a few days at most. Well, Oman has earned the anger of Iran because they helped bring about this. New phase in the war. They allowed the Americans to create this corridor, which was in violation of the article of Article 5. And of course, they were under duress. American Trump threatened to destroy Oman and he said it in public. But in any case, they allowed the Americans to use their territory against Iran and install Radar installations and jamming installations and they allowed the Americans to use their port, the US military. So, you know, if Iran retaliates, Oman, I, I don't know, but Oman could be on the list just as the other countries. But, but Oman, it, the Iranians have told Oman that, look, we're not going to accept two corridors and we're not going to accept two different authorities over the strait. There will be one authority and they will work together and any corridor that exists, whether it's one or two or whatever, the Iranians will have to have a presence and they will have to have control. And so either Oman works with Iran together and they do this together in a way in which is acceptable to Iran, where certain ships will not be allowed in like Israeli linked ships or US Naval ships and the fee will be taken from all ships and they'll do this together. Or Oman is incapable of participating under duress and Iran will do it alone.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So what our man may lack in eloquence he makes up in the analysis. I think that is exactly correct. Iran has said as much that, that, hey Aman, wake up. Like we this, the strait is going to be controlled. You can be in on it or you can be left out. But Iran has been very clear about what their strategy is for the Strait of Hormuz. They're going to control it, they are going to charge a toll. There are going to be people that they don't allow, such as Israeli flagships. Obviously at this point they've got massive beef with the US and so they're going to be trying to keep those ships from transiting the strait. So understanding that battle right there, that Iran has very clear messaging, they've not backed off from that. Every time we pause, it gives them a chance to rebuild. This is not something that's going to go away very easily. And there's also a second reason for all of the delays. The Wall Street Journal has reported last week that a planned two week strike campaign was shelved while officials counted interceptors. Now, this is rumor. Trump obviously denies this, but the CSIS estimates more than 1,500 Patriots have been expended since February and that we have somewhere less than a thousand left. Now, obviously, again, the Pentagon is denying this. However, given our ability to produce them, how long it takes to produce them and how many we've used, it seems like a shortage is almost certainly true. During the six week cease fire in April, US Intelligence told CNN that Iran restated, or sorry, restarted their drone production and dugout buried missile launchers There is an estimate, not verified, but there's an estimate of surviving launchers out there in terms of how many Iran has. We were calling it sort of roughly half. Not Trump, obviously, he would ask you to believe they've all been destroyed, but the estimates were ranging somewhere in the neighborhood of a half. Now they're ranging somewhere around two thirds after they've gone in, dug them out, repaired what they can. The Financial Times reported in July that Iranian engineers have restored underground missile bases as well and improved accuracy against American air defenses. Now, we'll see what ends up actually being true there. But you, you've got to believe that every time we do one of these pauses, that Iran is going to use this to get back in an offensive position. And I was talking about this before. This is exactly like the reason that you don't stop a treatment of antibiotics. Once you start, you start killing off whatever bugs are in the system, the ones that are most resilient against the antibiotics last. And if you stop the antibiotics early and you don't kill them all, then those are the ones that begin replicating. And so now you have the most resistant replicating. If you do it again and stop short again, then again you've solidified down to the most, most resilient. Those start replicating. And over time, you get true resistance. And that's exactly what's happening in Iran. Every negotiator ever has talked about the fact that Iran is always just going to tell you what you need to hear to come back to the negotiating table, to buy themselves time, to stymie things, to call out to the world and say, look, we're trying to be reasonable, but you guys aren't giving us a chance. Come on, let's give piece of chance. We want to sit down. We're, you know, we're willing to be here at the table. And then they just stall and stall and stall for time, and nothing ever gets across the finish line. And we have to look at the math. Five months in, we've done hundreds of US Strikes against Iran, and Iran is still managing to hit targets in Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, ships actually trying to transit the Strait. So every time we pause, we reset the clock in Tehran's favor. It's just the hard reality of the situation. And so when I look at this, it's like I'm not even sure what Trump thinks is going to be his plan forward. Now you've got reports coming out that the Pentagon has actually reached out to the military directly and said, hey, does anybody have any ideas. Now, the great irony is that's actually a good strategy. You might have somebody who's smart inside of the military that's not yet been heard, and they actually do have an idea. And that idea would be brilliant. And the last thing I want is leaders that are unwilling to listen to the people that are around them. But the bad news is these are terrible optics. And it really does highlight the fact that the Pentagon is out of ideas. Because the reality is, and I know I've said this many, many times, you should probably just avoid war whenever humanly possible. And if you can't avoid war, however, you've got to go all the way. Now, we in the west certainly do not have a stomach for total war, which is great from a human life perspective, but it is, is absolutely terrible for victory. You're not going to be able to have victory. All you're going to get is quagmire. All you're going to get is the eternal war that never ends. And you get the antibiotics problem that we've been talking about. And that's where we are. And so it just feels like this insane Groundhog Day where Trump will go on and say, we're about to hit them harder than ever. The other countries in the region point out the obvious fact that this is going to be so devastating, there will be so much loss, that at some point, even if you win, even if eventually you break the back of Tehran, have you actually won anything? If we've set the energy industry back 10 years, 20 years, and so now you're in a position where you have a global recession, possibly only saved by the fact that we're already in a recession and so we don't need as much oil coming out of the Middle East. Boy, is that cold comfort. And so the question becomes, what do you do if backing off creates a problem and pushing forward creates a problem, you really are now stuck. And that is, unfortunately, the place we find ourselves. So the one card that Trump has in his back pocket, it'll be interesting to see if he plays it, is to basically pause everything, the midterms. Let the natural deflation of the fact that we're already in a global recession show that oil prices are just going to come down, everything's going to start getting cheaper. And we sort of mask crisis led deflation for the good deflation. Remember, there is good deflation, but there's also crisis led deflation, which is what we would be getting if we just hit a pause button. Now, if Trump goes through the midterms like that and can actually retain control of the House and the Senate off the back of people being confused about why we're getting the deflation that we're getting and people are just like, hey, prices are coming down. And if he can stave off there being massive job loss in the interim, so you get that leading edge of the crisis led deflation looking like it's something good, you hold off through the midterms, you claim that this was a victory, that this was all about good policy. Now he retains the Senate and the House and he can go back to basically something much closer to total warfare on the other side of this, where he no longer has anything threatening him because he's going to be out of office in two years anyway. That is, I think right now the most likely outcome. He's already shown a willingness to hit the pause button, even when it's completely nonsensical. So I think that him hitting the pause button when it actually at least serves him in the short term, odds are very likely that that is the path. Or at least I'm going to plant the flag now and say with my current understanding of everything that's going on, that feels like the most likely outcome. Obviously, I will update my thinking as new information comes out, but that feels like what I know of Trump's mentality and the way that he is easily persuaded by both. I think he has a legitimate desire to not blow people up, but more importantly, I think he has a desire to maintain the financial interests in the Middle east to make sure that they're investing in our stock market, which of course, if you're Saudi Arabia, that's going to be. And the uae, quite frankly, that's going to be your point of leverage, which ironically, those two are actually pulling in different directions. Don't be confused about that. The UAE is mad for one reason, Saudi Arabia is mad for another. The UAE is. UAE actually wants Tehran to absolutely be hammered into oblivion. It's not fractal into that right now, but you've got all of these promised investments. We've talked about the $2 trillion. This is a big reason I think Trump went into this war in the first place. And now everybody is basically saying, hey bro, we're not going to be able to give you that money unless things come out the way that we want. So Trump is caught in this very difficult position all at a time where this asshole is going to charge money for an API to get access. I know, Drew, but you can't, you can't complete this picture. Without bringing this up. So this is where understanding, okay, humans think in shortcuts. We have to. It's the only way to make sense of an overly complicated world. But if you don't put all the things on the table, even if in shortcut format, you can't leave some of the shortcuts out. And a big part of this is Trump understands, and I'll actually give him credit for this, Trump understands that the US economy is in real trouble if he's not able to make sure that AI actually becomes the thing that it's supposed to become. He put Warsh in place because Warsh believes that AI is going to cause deflation, but innovation led deflation, the good kind of deflation, and that he's counting on these massive investments from the Middle east to make sure that we have the dollars that we need to actually build out the AI infrastructure. Because the revenue is coming in more slowly than expected. And now it's coming in even more slowly because of it's potentially going to come in more slowly because of the promise of things like Kimmy K3, which is open source, which will drive revenue into a much more dire situation for the big boys that we've been funding with public debt, which is OpenAI and anthropic. So all of this stuff gets very complex given how much the US go forward strategy of growing out from under our debt is predicated on the AI bubble continuing to inflate. Wild, wild times, man.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

I have to shout out Darius in the chat because he kind of said it better. It's surprising that we went to war on the offensive with Iran and it seems like we weren't even prepared for it. Like we went into a shooting match with like half a clip flip, like why wouldn't we stock our munitions? Why wouldn't we get things in order and then start talking like junk to Iran?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, here's the bad news. There's actually an answer to that. And the answer is that we have for the last 30 or 40 years, maybe more. You could probably stretch that clock back to the 60s and 70s, but for at least the last 30 to 40 years, we have been using globalization as a way to get everything for cheap financializing our economy so that you get, and this is a big part of the K shaped economy is we've created a method for people who understand assets to win tremendously, giving us the ability to give everybody a bunch of free stuff to become dependent on the government. And so you have this right left alliance, which I don't even know how Much. They understand it. But you have a right left alliance where the left wants to get everything for free. And you can do that by financializing your economy, making sure that everything gets cheaper, including labor, more people lose their jobs, exit out of the workforce. And then you say, but not a problem, because we've got all these government subsidies for you, and that makes you more likely to vote for the left. The right loves to financialize because the right, their side of the oligarchy equation is that these are people that understand getting into the stock market, the making a ton of money off of that financialization. And so both sides are like, yeah, keep financializing this so that we have all the money in the world. We'll just tax the wealthy more and more and more, not understanding the difference between money and wealth. And so they fall into that trap. And then their voter base gets bigger and bigger because they're actually able to give things away for free because we just money print based on the financialization. And it's crazy. And so now, for very separate reasons, they both have an incentive to do the same thing that every empire ever does, because both sides, remember, every stable society is counting on there being two sides that hold each other in dynamic tension. But when they get too far away from each other and they're both tending towards the pathologies of their each side, they suddenly want. This is the horseshoe theory. They suddenly want the same things for different reasons, but they want the same thing. And so the madness then just accelerates. And the only voices in the middle screaming for temperance essentially sound like Luddites. They sound outdated. They sound completely antithetical to. To the energy in both parties. So somebody that's center right sounds stupid to the MAGA people, and somebody that, that center left sounds stupid to the dsa. And so it's like this is where you end up, where they're both racing in these pathological directions towards this sort of unity. It's so infuriating because to actually get people to understand it, you have to put all the pieces on the table. And every one of those pieces is like PhD unto itself. And most people will eject out at some point. They're just like, I don't want to think about this anymore. There are things in my life I just want to do. So what do they do? They shorthand to influencers, and so they outsource their thinking to somebody else who's like, I have all the answers you need, only listen to me. And then that person takes shortcuts, okay, known as heuristics. Rules of thumb. They take those shortcuts, they shortcut them even farther into sound bites. And now the people that are the most profoundly followed are the people that can trigger the deepest emotion with the most memorable hooks that people can just repeat to their friends. And the reason that if you give, like, okay, okay, tell me what this person thinks about like, Israel, Palestine, this is where this all comes in. If you tell me that I know the rest of their belief system because I know what heuristic traps they've fallen into. They're not thinking through all of these things. In fact, it's not even that they're succumbing to heuristic traps. It's that they need a bundle of things. And so it's like, I don't want to think through all these problems.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Bless you.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But I need to understand how do I think? Because I'm going to get attacked. If I say something publicly, someone's going to come at me and say, well, what about this thing?

[Co-host or Guest 1]

Thing?

[Tom Bilyeu]

And then I'm like, I haven't researched that one. So I just, ah, give me the package. And so people take the package. And these things are so complicated to think through that they, they do just take the package. And so they've got like, oh, I know what the, the sound bites are for that. I may not have researched that one, but I know what my sound bite is. I can get you off my back with that thing. And so it becomes these, like, maddening packages that you're up against. This is what people refer to as talking points. And now you're in a world where people harden their positions based on emotional reasoning and outsourcing to influencers who give them a bundle of bumper sticker slogans that they can repeat. But all of this stuff is highly consequential. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead.

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[Tom Bilyeu]

And coverage selections don't go anywhere. Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. I'll, I'll stop if you Tell me to. But I'll go one more fractal. So this weekend I was saying to Lisa, things are going so well on Kaizen. I was so amped up this weekend, I was like, holy shit. This is the most productive weekend I've had on the game in God knows how long. It was incredible. And I'm like, every now and then I really am just like, okay, this is probably the focus of the content I should be doing, so I can just market the game and all that. And I'm like, but we're living through one of the most, certainly the most consequential time in my life, possibly the most consequential time since World War II. So it's like, God damn, dude. Can you really afford, even if I just want the game to have a market to sell into, can you afford to eject out of this? Or do you have to try to disentangle these things, even if only for myself to know how to navigate through this stuff? And that's where I keep coming back to is I don't know that anybody, even if they're just trying to preserve their own safety economically and literal safety, I don't know if we can afford to eject out of this and coast on what was, you know, this 80 years of prosperity and peace that we could just come to rely on. Period. Now, related, new paragraph. If you guys have not watched season two of the House of the Dragon, holy hell, it.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

It.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Listen, I'm beginning to think that one of the brightest historical minds is George R.R. martin. I think that's his name. The guy that wrote the books on that. Yeah, because it, dude, it. It follows so closely the conundrum of the wars that we're in. Now. If you take the dragons as like these really strong militaries, but some dragons are bigger than others. And like, okay, but some dragons are big and lumbering. Other dragons are smaller, but they're more nimble and they can move faster. And so like, what. What do you bet on the way that the different houses, meaning different countries, end up aligning with the people that have the strong dragons? And how do they make that decision? And dude, it's. It really is very insightful for this moment and shows in a very dramatized fashion the way that people can get sucked into these traps and then the like, behind the scenes propaganda of how. Because people think in shortcuts. What do you say? What do you repeat? Do you actually need a strong leader or do you need just a visible leader who will say what the council wants them to say, oh, my God. It's really insightful politically. But they look at the dragons and so you're over here able to see a commentary on human nature that is playing out in this hyper consequential way. Now, in, in a very similar way to MASH was able to comment, which was about the Korean War, but it was used to comment on the Vietnam War. It is literally like the House of the Dragon is being used to comment. Obviously it came out before, so they couldn't have known. But it's just so true to human nature that we're seeing it play out now. It's really, really fascinating, but to the point where one of the speeches in season two is about how we had this time of peace. And this time of peace has created a style of leadership where people want to obviously hold on to this time of peace. But the energy that's captured people isn't that anymore. It's people that want to do battle. It's people that like, this war is going to happen. There's this really great scene where these two, basically the, the sovereign leaders of two nations get together in secret and they both are like, we've got to eject out of this. And they can't. And you see how they've gotten trapped by the things that they've said and the moves that they've already made. And oh, God, it's so interesting because it is what we're living through right

[Co-host or Guest 2]

now and that I'm thinking about dragons now you got me kind of looking in the side. I know oil prices crash, the economy is going to be shocked. There's all these other things that are happening. We're definitely going to get to the Trump API thing. But the Oman and Kuwait piece I think might be a surprise to me because I don't know if that's good strategy from Iran's standpoint that like, yeah, you could beat us, but we're just going to kill. Like, take everybody else down with me.

[Iranian Analyst or Expert]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

And it's one of those things. Now as a sovereign nation, you're now looking at the U.S. please don't have them destroy us. When I don't even think Trump was thinking about Kuwait when he first kind of went in there. So to your point of getting caught

[Tom Bilyeu]

into these traps, Trump definitely wasn't. Yeah, yeah. This comes down to when you look at your military and just listen to what Trump says about it. We have the biggest, baddest military of all time. Now think about when Trump grew up. We are all products of our time. Trump grew up in the post World War II era. Trump. Trump saw what happened in terms of we were this manufacturing powerhouse. We came out of World War II largely unscathed, and we built something that the world has never seen before. I mean, it's really extraordinary. We made the best use of that Post World War II power play that anybody has ever made of. I know I beseech you guys all the time to research Japan, but research Japan. And so you look at what we did in Europe, Europe, we had our Europe first mentality. We helped rebuild that. We saw a just naked conflict between different styles of governance. So you had Russia, obviously, representing sort of one hardcore bent to this. You had a far more socialist Europe taking another approach to this. And then you had the American approach. And the American approach just came out ahead. But what people didn't realize was that the US Was so dominant and created so much wealth and prosperity that you run into this position where people go, okay, now this works so well. I'm going to spread it everywhere that I can. But that's just a naked rejection of culture. And cultures are not going to just embrace that. And so we went on this, like, tear of trying to export democracy. And most people don't want democracy. And so if their culture doesn't align with it, they're not going to embrace it. And this is why you have to understand why it worked in Japan. Do not let historians or fucking pundits tell you, don't look at Japan. You can't extrapolate. You must understand Japan. You must understand why it worked there, why it doesn't work other places, what the difference is. And when you understand that, then you realize, oh, the US Going, hey, China, come on into the wto.

[Co-host or Guest 1]

Yeah, cool.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

All good.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Completely misreading China's supplication that it was like, oh, they're going to be. Call it an honest broker on the world stage. They're going to run the same playbook that the US Ran. They're going to help everybody out, amass a ton of gold, make sure that they get as strong as humanly possible, build a massive manufacturing base, become. Become capable of becoming a war machine. Because keep in mind right now, if you just look at their military, you're going to be tempted to take the Peter Zion of it all and be like, what do you mean their military can't challenge the U.S. that's ridiculous. They will turn their entire manufacturing over to the military machinery, just like the US did if they're given sufficient reason to do so. And so if they Make a move on Taiwan and the US makes the mistake of attacking them, then they're going to flip the script and they're going to say we're a top down economy. I'm going to shift all of this manufacturing capability to one, crushing everybody. Because we now have the ultimate choke point. Fuck the straight of Hormuz, all that shit. Who cares? If you fuck with my oil then you're just not going to get rare earth magnets and shit. Your whole modern economy ceases to exist. What the fuck are we even talking about here? So it's like, yeah, that is asinine. We will find ourselves in the position that the Japanese admiral who said, I fear that we have just awoken a sleeping dragon and filled it with a terrible resolve. That is precisely what we will do if we go on the offensive with China. It is very similar to what we've just done with Iran. Now they're not big enough to reach beyond where they're at, but they can really do damage in the region and they will. This is where you have to understand humans. Humans, whether they want to kill or not, they will kill absolutely indiscriminately. If you back them into a corner or challenge their value system. They will kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. This is where, man, boy do I wish that I could avoid talking about Islam, but it's not going to be possible because one is just such a good example of this arc of like, just like China ran the. What do you mean? Like we just want to help. Like hey, we've got cheap labor, send manufacturing. And then as they got stronger, they started being dismissive of the West. Same with Islam. It's literal doctrine to be chill when you're weak, weak, and then when you're strong to assert your position. And the US has done the same. This is what humans do. And so there was a really weird period where the US in sort of the golden age of Post World War II, instead of being punitive, we said we want to help these places rebuild. And that was really glorious. We didn't want to be an occupier. Even in Japan, dude, we could have occupied them literally forever, ever. And we didn't. We occupied them for like three years now. We kept military bases, but we didn't occupy them forever. We said, we want to stand you up, we want you to run your own government. And then we bounced and we put a ton of money into turning them into a self sustaining economy that could be a tremendous ally. Instead of being like, you're the whatever number of state they would have been at that time. But nowadays we'd refer to it as the 51st state. So we get them up on their feet and then back off and we do the same thing in Germany and Europe ends up flourishing, finally getting out from under the Soviet Union flourishing. And so it's really this bizarre, never before seen in history, probably never not going to be seen again in our lifetime where we go in, we build them into an ally, we trust that they're going to be democratic and then we bounce. And that isn't the play from China's perspective and it isn't going to be the play from an Islamic perspective if that propagates. And you need only look at the historical moves to see the truth of that. And by the way, I'm not sure the US would run the playbook the same. We're certainly not running like that now. Now it's become this extractive Venezuelan situation where as long as you do what we say, we're happy. But if you do something else, there's going to be a problem.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And that works by the way, when the, when the countries are excited to do it like Europe, like Japan, but when they're not excited to do it and now you're having to force and coerce, it just becomes a totally different thing.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah, now we just talk about this API thing. So this is from Mario nfa. Trump's media company just started selling early access to his own posts for up to $100,000 a month. $100,000 a month? Yo 60,000 on the three year lock in trading firms get Trump's Trump's true social posts milliseconds before everyone else. Plus eight other top accounts his post already moved markets, tariff pauses, Fed comments, war updates all posted there first two former incident SEC officials say this may violate securities law outright. One trading firm CEO put it bluntly, if this were any other public company's chief executive, it'll be jail time. Trump owns roughly 41% of the company selling access to his own words.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay, this one is very complicated. Let's run through the facts and then we'll get to whether this is really jail time or not. So Trump Media launched a product called Truth Apart from on Saturday it sells trading firms early access to posts sort of from the 10 highest profile accounts on Truth Social, including obviously the President's. As Drew was just saying, it's up to a hundred thousand dollars a month. It's 60,000 I think if you sign a three year contract it comes with an Archive going back to 2022. I don't know why anybody would care about that. That feels like marketing message meant to obfuscate with what's really going on. The company says customers signed up before the launch, but obviously they're not going to say who. That, by the way, is not weird. On neither account. I wouldn't expect them to just publish a list of people buying this. Trump is the largest shareholder of Trump Media through a trust controlled by Don Jr. Now, all of that is going to matter a lot because whether this is routine or criminal comes down to basically one detail. If the API delivers posts that have already been published just basically faster because there's a delay on, say, X due to the algorithm, it's ordinary data licensing. So Bloomberg already does this, Dow Jones does it. Trump Media spokeswoman says that's exactly what they're doing. This is just the fastest way to ingest what is publicly available data. Okay, so let's be very clear if that's what they're doing. And this is. He puts it out on truth first and then it just very quickly goes out via this thing. It actually isn't the problem. There's no legal problem whatsoever. The issue for me is just the absolutely grotesque nature of the President benefiting from the fact that he moves markets and now is double dipping, basically because, and I say double dipping because he's already making an ungodly fortune off of what I'm going to call insider trading. That's Tom Bilyeu's personal opinion. I don't know that it actually meets that legal requirement. But to me, for the same reason that I absolutely despise Congress having the ability to trade individual stocks, I despise that the President is able to benefit from the individual trading of stocks. Like absolutely despise it. It is so grotesque, we should make it illegal immediately. This is horrific. And now because his media company is failing, I think they did like $3.7 million on this. So pathetic. Oh, my God. To give you an idea, Trump's media company is substantively smaller than Tom Bilyeu's media company, okay? That shit is crazy. So that fact alone tells you why they would be in a desperate situation trying to do this. Now, keep in mind, if it really is, is publicly posted and then sent out it, there are many people that already do this. Traders pay a fortune for that kind of thing. So whatever, that is what it is. But if the fee delivers posts before they've been published, now everything changes. The 2012 Stock act says that executive branch Employees owe a duty of trust and confidence to the government and to citizens regarding material, non public information. From their position, the statute names the President specifically. So, yeah, at that point, I think this would be illegal. I think that you would be looking at violations. And at that point, you would and should be talking about somebody going to jail. Dude, you cannot let the President profit off of basically creating a little side feed for people like, hey, look, this is what I'm about to do. Sign up here, get it first. Worst, that would be insane. Doing it and saying, algorithms are slow. This is fast. Whatever. Obviously, I think that there are moral implications that we should be absolutely up in arms about in terms of him being able to profit from that directly. Made my position on that clear. But at that point, it wouldn't be illegal. So we're going to need to see exactly how this plays out. They're obviously saying, listen, this is publicly available information. We're just giving you a faster way to ingest it. Fine, fine. That standard operating procedure. But I think Trump should immediately divest everything that would allow him to personally profit off of that. That is just crazy. This is so crazy. We should not allow politicians to do that. That really is like, you want to talk about oligarchy, Everybody should be absolutely, metaphorically up in arms. That one, that one. And that is a left, right thing. You have people on both sides, sides of the aisle profiting off of the fact that they know that their policies are going to influence markets. That shit is crazy. And we should be stopping it immediately.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah, nice. This is. This is fraud. This is corruption. This is bad. I don't think there's any confusion. I just want to really draw the line that the President of the United States is worried more about his financial standing than he is about the people in this country. Country. And if he was a businessman, cool. If he was a CEO, cool. I get capitalism. I want that. I don't need the health insurance CEO to care about me. Get it? But the President, I feel like you should. So I don't understand how we're not more mad about this. I think we need to draw this with a red Sharpie. I think that this is the. He's bad. Like, I think there's nothing. There should be no mixed language around this. There should be nobody trying to look at it. Tilt eyes to the side and justify it. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. The end period, full sentence.

[Middle East Military Analyst]

Yes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And Drew, I love you. Brought something up.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

That is,

[Tom Bilyeu]

I worry that some people will ignore it because it feels like an emotional appeal, but I think it's the right place for an emotional appeal, which is that I should be able to trust my politicians to have the country's best interests at heart. Honestly, man, look, there are complications of this. So I'm going to say this from an emotional place far more than like, actual prescribing policy. But when there is hardship due to being a politician, I trust that politician far more than when it is one of the most lucrative things that you could do. Right now, being a politician is one of the most lucrative things that you can do. So I do not expect it to attract people who are like. Like, I'm willing to suffer to do something great for my nation. And there is a deep sadness in my soul for as I have gotten older to realize that when I believed that that's what drew politicians in, it was propaganda. And so that may have been true at the founding of the nation, because those guys, I mean, this is, if you've ever heard. To put your John Hancock on something. John Hancock was one of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, which, if we had lost the war, was guaranteed. Guaranteed to get you hung. And so if you look at the actual Declaration of Independence, there are people that sign so small it's hard to read their name. And John Hancock, look at the Declaration of Independence. He wrote his name so comically large because he was doing it to say, I don't give a fuck. Like, if you come at me, come at me. Like, I'm not going to be shy or bashful about this. And that's how that phrase becomes famous, because that guy had nuts like Gigantor nuts. And that's my kind of guy. Like somebody who goes in and says, being a politician at this time may cost me my life, but I so believe in what we're trying to do here that I'm willing to die for this cause. And we just don't have that energy anymore. It's always me, me, me. What am I going to be able to get out of this? And that. That's really devastating. As somebody who just. I just. I want somebody to believe in. You know what I mean? I want somebody that's like, yo, oh, I'm in this because I want to do the right thing. So no one is ever going to be pure. This, this is not Tom Bilyeu looking for a purity test. This is. This is. If you guys know George Washington's story, it's really pretty crazy. This is a guy who legitimately was just like, over and over and over. Will you guys please Let me retire. He did not want to be president. It was what's his face, Hamilton, that basically like guilt tripped him into being president. This is after he serves in the Revolutionary Army. Like, again, this is a rich guy who gives up all rich guy shit to go freeze, get shot at multiple times. I think there were four times where a bullet like passed through his clothes but didn't hit him. This was a dude at the front, man. After that finally wins that fucking war and is like, okay, I can go back to my farm in Virginia, right? Nope. Psych. Just kidding. You've got to come do eight years in Washington in which he hated and finally retires. And like three years later or whatever, he's dead.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

But

[Tom Bilyeu]

you can put a lot of trust in somebody who's willing to fight, to risk their own life, who isn't doing something. This was not a time where politicians got rich for a very long time. Being president often drained your personal finances. And so you would go, you would leave far poorer than when you came in. And now it's the exact opposite. So you've got these. Just a very different ego of person. You always have to be egotistical to say I'm the right person to lead. But God damn, it's a whole nother thing when it's like the whole world should listen to me because I'm the President of America, so I'm the most important person on earth. And on top of that, I'm gonna come out so rich. It's crazy, man. It's crazy.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah, it's sad time time, sad time that we're in right now. We'll see what happens. I hope this gets struck down by the sec, but Trump dismantled the sec, so it's a bunch of people he appointed to oversee it. So I feel like somebody's going to sign up for this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But here's the thing. This. If it is the first way where it is actually publicly available information that really is true, the SEC isn't going to, isn't going to be able to make it illegal. This is a question of will Congress go? We've got to stop making politics so lucrative. And so we're going to remove ourselves from the ability to trade on individual stocks. And we're going to make sure that that goes up to the presidency as well. That should be the play. The position I want to see these guys all in is for me to get wealthy, the average American must be successful, succeeding. Great. That's awesome. I love the idea of a president getting rich. If they crush it for the average American and right now you get rich if you crush it for the elite. That is a dumb setup. That is the K shaped economy. That's revolution. That's just idiotic. But yeah, letting people be able to reap the rewards of making things great for their country. I love it.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah, we'll see. So I want to give us an update about the Spanish territories in Morocco. This is from Rep. Thomas Massie. He tweeted don't fall for the fake Fox GOP outrage. Two weeks ago the House passed a bill that greenlighted the transfer of Spanish territory to Morocco. Every Republican except for me voted for it. But now they are acting shocked at this invasion he highlighted in the sec. In the securities appropriation bill, the committee notes that the Spanish administered cities of Cubata and Malaya are located in Moroccan territory and remain the subject of Morocco's long, long standing claim. This is on the back of the quote unquote invasion that happened last week. And there are some reports that although the Pedro Sanchez, the president of Spain said that everybody left, there are some reports that there's still 10 to 15,000 migrants still in the city and they have set up encampments and shelters.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, this one. You're being propagandized. Be careful what you believe. I assure you you do not have enough information. Thomas Massie certainly does not have enough information. As you drill into this like just go read the Thomas Massie has posted twice on the subject. If you start reading the comments, people are pretty quick to point out things like the city of Ceuta. I don't know how to pronounce it, but anyway, you guys know the two cities. Yes, they are on African soil. However, they were Spanish before Morocco even existed as a country. So calling it Moroccan territory is a blatant, blatant lie. I don't know who the wrote that down. I don't know if they're malicious or ignorant. But nonetheless, it has never been Moroccan territory. So there is a big difference between it is on the soil of Africa and it is Moroccan territory. That would be like saying that Alaska is Canadian territory. It is not Canadian territory despite the fact that it has borders that border Canada. That is true. They are on the same landmass us but they are not the same territory. So the fact that there happens to be water between it would be like us saying that Hawaii belongs to somebody else because there's water between us and mainland America. These are nonsensical arguments. So it is a Spanish territory. It is a, it was a Spanish territory long before Morocco even existed as a nation. So that's propaganda. Now, that doesn't mean that the US isn't fucking with them. And I think that they're the Reid probably. But trust me, I am very cautious of my own belief. I have not spent enough time researching this to be like, oh, I know exactly what's going on. But one of the pieces that's certainly on the table if you're trying to build a mental model of all this, is that the US is very upset with Spain for them not helping and a whole bunch of trade policy stuff. So the US wants to see Spain get punished. And so they really do seem to be with Israel trying to get Moroccans to go and at least from a propaganda war, push the narrative that this is part of our territory. Why do you guys even have control here? Which to me is be very careful, people on the right because. Because now they're leaning into leftist language of like you're. This is, this is colonization. And it's like, if you start beating that drum because it is politically useful for you from a get back at Spain, try to get them back in line, try to get them to do the things you want to do, those arguments are going to be used against you when you try to defend Israel or basically any other territorial dispute, which there are plenty the world over. Just everybody's quiet about everything except Israel, Palestine. So this is stupid. This is literally selectively taking your opponent's argumentation when it's expedient for you and then acting like you never said any of this stuff when it's not expedient for you. It knocks people off their moral high ground. It puts them in a really stupid position and shows that this is all just about telling the plebs what they need to to get them to do the things they want to do. Do have some principles, man. Like, listen, I get it. When you have a set of principles, there are times where your principles will lead you up to something where you're like, huh, this is rough. I don't like where my principles have led me. Now your option is to become a total sham of a human being and abandon your principles selectively or realize, oh, I have to update my mental model. This is why. Meaning I have to change my principles. Once you do. This is why I know it doesn't work, but this is why I wish everybody had to run a company for years and that your only way to pay your own rent is by your company being successful. Because God damn, does that bring a lot of clarity. And when you try to implement a one off thing inside your company. And then everybody comes and goes, wait, why does that person get preferential treatment? You will find yourself coming back to okay, everything just has to be a policy. I put it in place and it affects everybody the same way way. And once you do that, you start having to do things by principle. And it will take you up against things like what do I actually believe here? And you have to model it out. And when you run up against something that you don't like, it may force you to update your actual principles. But you should be able to update them in a way that you could write down and say this is the principle that is determining this policy. And yes, it can be deeply uncomfortable. And yes, there are going to be times where you don't get the thing you emotionally want because you realize to get what you want emotionally, you're going to have to come up with a stupid policy that's based on a principle that you sometimes agree with and sometimes don't. That can be very hard for people. But nonetheless, you've got to do it. And that's where I've always said a country will be as territorially acquisitive, as murderous as they can be until they hit sufficient external force or their internal moral compass, meaning their value system says we don't do that, that thing. And so that may sometimes put them in a very difficult situation. But hey, we don't do that here and you've got to live and die by that thing. And so seeing our politicians just so nakedly manipulative is really disgusting. I hate this.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

The Japanese stock market was all red this morning, but Scott Besant is about the Scott Bessant. Now I felt the type of way about this, but he shut me up over the Argentina price swap. So I need you to bring break this down to me because I feel like if anybody can manipulate currency, it's got Besant.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So yeah, you're, you're definitely right about that. If you guys don't know Scott Bess since priors, his resume is dope.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

He's crazy.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Homeboy made a lot of money taking down the British pound, basically. So yeah, your mental model of Scott Besson should be this guy is a financial gangster. Okay, so what are the particulars? The United States bought yen on Friday for the first time since 1998. And it's not because things are going well, boys and girls, if you were thinking that, unfortunately, it's because the US is trying to stop a total collapse of the Japanese economy, which is absolutely necessary because our two economies are so intertwined due to the carry trade. Now, I've talked about the carry trade before, so hopefully you guys know what it is. But to speedrun it, Japan got themselves in financial trouble in 1989. They were the biggest economy in the world. In the mid-80s. It all ends. By 89, their real estate bubble burst. And basically all of them just said, yo, I don't want to have debt anymore because debt is so destructive. And so no matter what Tokyo tried to do to stimulate the economy for almost 30 years, none of it worked. And so what ended up happening is they kept their rates ridiculously low. And so people the world over were borrowing money and spreading that money as liquidity around everywhere around the world that they thought that they could get a bigger return, the US being the primary beneficiary. So that locked our two economies together. And for a very long time it was extraordinarily beneficial to the us they were buying a ton of our debt. And the US because of our deficits, we need appetite for our debt. And Tokyo was providing a lot of that. But now you've got Tokyo selling dollars. They sold this money much as 58.97 billion in USD in a single day to buy their own currency because all of their stimulatory stuff didn't work. But then Covid hits. Covid causes that 30% rise for everybody. Doubly bad for Japan because they don't make anything themselves. So they're importing everything. And so now they're just getting absolutely hammered. And so they have inflation for the first time basically in a very long time. And so to combat it, they've got to start raising their rates. As they raise their rates, all the people that took out loans to bet in other economies, especially the US are like, oh, I need to start unwinding this trade now. As they start unwinding this trade, you would think that the yen was going to get a lot stronger. But the problem is that every time they try to basically unwind this thing, the US and Japan both panic and they're like, hold on a second, we need to slow this down. We don't want this to happen. Even though it would be great for the yen, we don't want this to happen. We need to keep that liquidity flowing, or at least it's got to be a bubble that doesn't pop, but it slowly deflates. So what do we do? We're going to not raise rates nearly as much as we should. So the carry trade remains in place now because Even though they've raised rates, there's still a massive spread between Japan and the US for sure. Just to keep it simple, that people are like, oh, I guess we're not going to unwind the carry trade that much. And so people go back in and now the yen gets weaker again. And so they're left in a position of oh, what do we do? They start buying the yen because they don't want to unwind the carry trade. So they can't just raise rates to pump the brakes that way and get all that yen demand increased as people try to get out of their positions and pay that back off. Okay, now the problem is, even if the carry trade begins to unwind and you get these temporary spikes as people buy to pay off their debt, if they're just paying off their debt, those dollars are ceasing to exist or those yen are ceasing to exist, that's not going to solve the problem. What they need is for the pension funds, the insurance funds, government contracts, all of that they need they investors, they just need the money coming back into Japanese assets. That way, it's Japanese assets that are being purchased in yen, staying in the country. Now if you do that now, you could get their economy to grow. The problem is that every time they try to do one of these interventions, they signal to the smartest investors in the world that the Japanese economy is in trouble. So now you get into this idea of risk adjusted return. As risk goes up, the demand for return goes up. Now people will take insane risk. Look at AI. If they think that the reward is going to be massive. So now people go, hey, AI is super risky, but I'm potentially facing such a disproportionate return that it's worth doing. The problem is Japan doesn't have anything like that. That so the risk is going up, but the return isn't or the expected return isn't. So now their economy looks worse and worse. Guess what that does to the yen? It makes the yen drop even more. Because people are like, I don't want to invest in Japan, I want to go invest somewhere else. So I'm going to take this cheap money that I can get and I'm going to go elsewhere. And that includes the pensions, that includes the insurance companies, that includes the Japanese investors. And so money is just fleeing Japan. Until they solve that problem, they're not going to be able to solve this. And so the dollar, as we've now gotten ourselves into this quagmire, people are looking at that going, I'm not sure that I like the US trying to bail these guys out. It's not going to work. So the dollar dropped 3% which was its biggest one day fall since late 2022. Friday, Japan went, went again during New York hours, this time to shore up the yen. And keep in mind, what are they selling to buy that yen, right? Everybody's afraid or the US is afraid that they're going to sell US debt, which is one of the easiest things to sell in order to buy that, to buy their own yen. So now Washington is joining them in trying to prop up the yen. So the New York Fed sold euros for yen on behalf of the treasury, which by the way, that's going to cause European trauma. So this is back to are we trying to punish the Europeans? We're certainly saying we don't care about them very much. So that's going to further heighten tensions which just to momentarily fractal. Remember how interconnected all of this is in this moment. We're now mad at Europe, we're secretly trying to fuck up Spain. Like we want Europe to pay their share and all that shit. And so now do we try to protect their debt and their treasuries? No, we do not. We sell that, that to protect Japan because it helps protect the purchasing of our own US debt. And so you do that. And again the sharp investors look at that and go, ooh, this is a sign of weakness. This is not a sign of strength. Now there was a photograph taken from Camp David where Besant is sitting there and on a notepad he writes literally for the photographers to see. Buy Japanese Yen 5 to 10 billion. Now I don't hear anybody commenting about this, so I could be out of my mind. I think he did that on purpose. I think he did it to signal the problem is it caused a massive drop in the US stock market. So that photo ends up getting posted. The US stock market maybe coincidentally, but I certainly don't think so, drops by like one point something trillion dollars. It's like one point something percent. So not massive in terms of percent, but a trillion dollars dollars is a lot of value to evaporate instantly, like it happened in like 40 minutes or something. Ridiculous. So investors are like, hey, what are you guys doing? Why are you trying to prop up the yen? This isn't going to last long. Now the yen did get propped up and so the yen closed at 157.40 yen to the dollar, which is the strongest since early May. But just days earlier it had hit a 40 year low. And I think you guys should expect this to continue to slide once the sort of sugar rush of propping it up wears off again until Japan can address risk adjusted return, which means that people who are going to put their money at risk in the Japanese economy, whether that's Japanese companies, insurance brokers, etc. Or foreign investors, they've got to look at the Japanese economy and go, hey, this is moving in the right direction. Now, these guys are likely to grow because all they see right now is the US And Japan doing everything they can to artificially prop up the end. Okay, so people paying attention like this might work temporarily, but this is not the same as building a thriving economy. And unfortunately for the world economy economy, unfortunately, the only thing Japan is going to be able to do to save itself long term is to get their economy actually growing. And to do that, they're going to have to get rid of the zombie companies which have survived on all the cheap debt up until now, and actually start building companies that are innovating and doing things that other companies in the world can't do. And therefore people ought to be investing in Japan. But there's no shortcut to this stuff. It always looks like there is. But I think right now what the US Is doing is essentially working with Japan to manage their decline. Now, I'd rather have it managed than just blow up overnight. So I'm not mad per se that they're doing this, but I am reminding myself that everything the best in the saying is just absolutely propaganda. So when he posted on Sunday that the treasury won't hesitate to intervene again, and he called for the Fed's FEMA repo to facilitate more Japanese intervention. Now, the reason you do that is you're like, okay, Japan, listen, I want you to intervene, I want you to buy your yen, but I don't want you to sell Treasuries to do it. So they're making that FEMA repo bigger so that Japan can borrow dollars against its Treasuries instead of just selling them. Now, if people are smart and they take this opportunity to go, I should get out of this carry trade now before there's a problem. At a minimum, I should stop doing it on debt so that I can get myself out of this slowly and at a pace that isn't destructive. But they won't. And the odds are that people are just going to continue to do the carry trade as long as there is arbitrage to be gained from the low rate that they can borrow Japanese yen and the high rate that they can get paid back in the U.S. economy. And so eventually people are going to get burned. And I don't even think people understand how many places the carry trade is hiding in their portfolio. I'm sure I don't even understand all the places that it's hiding in my own portfolio. And I think about this stuff an obsessive amount. So, yeah, slow the train down is better than something abrupt. But if people just keep going, oh, well, the train is still moving. It might be slower, but it's still moving. And then they just keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it. We're going to end in catastrophe.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah. Did you see Trump's thing about Japan's been good to us with the exception of Pearl Harbor.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's so funny with this. Why is the US Intervening to support the Japan in at this time?

[Iranian Analyst or Expert]

To support who?

[Tom Bilyeu]

To support the Japanese currency?

[Iranian Analyst or Expert]

Because we have a good relationship with Japan and I don't. We're very strong, very, very strong financially. And they are, you know, they have a weakening yen and they wanted a little bit of help and we're always there for Japan. Japan's been very good to us, with the exception, of course, of Pearl Harbor.

[Tom Bilyeu]

He's always got like some mental look.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

I get it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

As somebody who talks into a camera for a living, living, you do have these webs of connections. But the way that he will bring them up over and over and over is amusing.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Again with the Argentina thing, It was a $20 million credit line. They ended up only borrowing 2.5 billion. They paid it back with interest. US made millions. It was clean slate, like books made. With this situation, you seem a bit more apprehensive. Is it because the nature of Japan or are you trying to get us to, to get off of the narcotic of the Japanese yen carry?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so it's probably good to be a little bit skeptical of what we did in Argentina. My read of Argentina goes like this. China has made massive inroads into South America. We cannot have that. We are almost certainly going to be a regional hegemon, not a global hegemon. China's going to have their thing. So we've got to. In Asia, we need to shore up everything in our hemisphere and that means we've got to have relationships with, with these countries. The US Is looking at the recent flip to the right of so many of these formerly hard left countries. And so the, the stalwart in the region is Argentina. I was talking about this in the video game realm on Friday where it's like you need something in your origin story, in your national identity to point back to and say, we've got to go back to being the real Argentine. And the real Argentina was a competitor for opportunity with the US back in, I think, the 20s. So in the 20s of memory serves was when more immigrants the world over wanted to go to Argentina than they wanted to go to the US because there were just more opportunities in Argentina.

[Commercial Narrator]

Think about that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So now we have this post World War II mental model of everybody in the world is trying to get to the U.S. but that wasn't the case as early as the 1920s. And so just a little over 100 years ago, Argentina was, was this insane economic powerhouse. And by going to the left, they broke the engine of prosperity. And this is the kind of thing that I talk about all the time. If you don't understand the actual mechanisms of the engine of prosperity, you break it. It goes away. And it goes away for a very long time. So I'm the U.S. i'm looking at people going now more towards the right because they're tired of being impoverished. And they see Argentina elect Milei, who's like the most libertarian guy ever, and they're like, cool, cool. We're going to use him as a success story to get more people who are going to the right to adopt his principles, to become very US Aligned, because Malay is very US Aligned. So we get all of South America, not through coercion, not by fucking them up with the IMF or anything like that, but just like good, sound economic principles, getting them back into capitalism that will allow us to eject China because these guys aren't starving and in need of a handout, which is exactly what China leveraged. They come in and say, look, you guys have been unable to get anything going. We're going to do the Belt Road initiative. We're essentially going to lend you money for infrastructure, and then you're going to pay us back the debt. They become debt slaves, and China reaps the benefits. They can basically trade in, oh, you can't pay, no big deal. Just give us more access to your political infrastructure, et cetera, et cetera. You become a vassal state of China. Okay, US Obviously doesn't want that, but we either then have to become the sugar daddy or we need people that can stand up on their own. So I look at the intervention as a way of going, okay, we believe your policies are directionally correct, but it is very hard to pull out of a socialist tailspin. And so as you fight the good Fight, we're going to loan you some money, which they made money off in the short term, but long term it's still a question mark. I'm still not 100% sure that Milei, even though I do agree that his policies are directionally correct. You don't have an entire country like yay, Malay, let's go, let's just get behind this austerity, all that. It's the right thing. So you're a divided Nation who's had 100 plus years of socialist indoctrination. Not everybody wants to sing for their supper. Not everybody wants to fight hard and take personal responsibility and do all the right leaning things. So that's going to be a challenge. The US is going to go in, help them and you could take a similar read on and say they're propping them up, it's not working naturally of its own accord. And so it, it is a question mark. We'll see if it ends up working in the final analysis or not because I want to see them get back on their feet. I'm for it, but I'm, I'm. What do they call this? Intellectually honest about the fact that this is them intervening in their currency. So take that photo's worth. Okay, now you go to the Japan three thing. Japan thing, man, is just so systemic. But because I really want to see the entire globe get back to something that looks more like sound money. I don't love that we're continuing to create this arbitrage for a economy that is broken, that learned the wrong lesson from the bursting of their real estate bubble. What we need to do is get Japan back on the innovation train, get them innovating, get them growing again. And if we can do that now, we've got something incredible. But if we're just like, no, listen, I need you to remain a supplicant. I need you to keep your interest rates really low so that we can keep getting global liquidity. You're going to need to keep a cap on people who now want raises and shit. We can't have that. And it's just, it's being dishonest about what we actually did to break this. And as a reminder, and no, I was not one of those people that saw Covid. Covid. Clearly I'm one of those people that looking back on it now though is updating my mental model and going, you can't let the government grab a hold of power like that. You can't do it. And so now looking at what the outcome of all that was very clear to me that when you say this thing is so dangerous, authoritarian tendencies come into play. People break the global economy as if it's no big deal. Print money to high heaven at first, as if it's no big deal. And now all of these economic consequences, they are specifically because of, not exclusively. We were making bad choices before, but we could have gotten away with it if it wasn't for you pesky kids who closed the economy. Now, because you close the economy, all of these problems come home to roost. And so this is like, if you build your levies high enough, you can have whatever, the fifth Ward in New Orleans, because even though it's under sea level, it's not a big deal. Your levies are great, but you can't both be under sea level and not take care of your levees. And so you stop taking care of the levees, they break. And now you look like gas clowns. And so, same thing. We built something that was the equivalent, the financial equivalent of being below sea level. And then Covid was that you didn't maintain your levies and now you're fucked. So we have to be honest that as a globe, we let authoritarians make an economically suicidal decision and now we're paying for it. We need to be honest about that. We need to get Japan back up on their feet. The you can't just tell Japan now economically suffer, become essentially a third world country that can't get out from under all of this debt and forever remain in a position where every sensible investor in your country will send money elsewhere. You can't be in that position. And so if the US is going, okay, listen, secretly Takaichi, we gotta, we gotta deflate this bubble. We gotta get the carry trade unwound. We gotta help you get Japan back in a position where people want to invest in Japan. You have to coerce them. You don't have to prop anything up. People are just like, yeah, you guys are a good place for capital, so we're gonna help you, but we gotta move in that direction. That'd be awesome. And I'd support that. That's way better than just like it. Let's see what happens. It will be devastating globally. I don't think that's what they're doing. I think this is. Well, as long as it's good for America and it will only be good for the top of the K and it will only be good in the short term. That's sort of true. By protecting the top of the K, you protect jobs. But it's not sustainable. You've got to let Japan become a real economy.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

So is this one of those situations? There's a couple things in there. One, I want to drill into the COVID thing because I think we're getting like, a renewed sense of, like, revisionist history with it and I want to, like, dive into that. But first, with the. With the Japanese thing, to kind of wrap it up, is this one of those moments we should have let them fail and let them figure it out? Go to the all like, I'm trying to think what level of intervention is necessary to make them a real economy while also not just, I guess, subsidizing their transition.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Basically, you need to take the next 10 years and kill off all their zombie companies by slowly raising interest rates and making sure that good companies come to the fore in Japan so that people want to invest in those companies so that money can actually get a return in Japan in yen. Once you have companies making return in Japan in yen, then when you are basically trying to keep the yen stable or make it stronger, that now you're in a position where the reason it's strong is because the money isn't fleeing the country. And right now the Japanese economy is weak and they're trying to disguise the risk by propping up the yen. But the yen is merely a signal that the Japanese economy is weak. And so if you have a headache because you have a brain tumor and you give somebody Advil and the headache goes away, but you are masking the fact that the longer you leave the brain tumor untreated, the more likely you are to die. So you're going to have to do chemo and it is going to be disruptive. But it's 10 years of disruption versus forever, essentially being a vassal state of the US and your debt, it's like this weird hybrid. So that I don't want them to just say, oh, fail, because they are too globally important. But you do have to make them a strong economy. And to make them a strong economy, it's like a slow failure. It is. You want. Here's the fantasy. For every company that dies, they're replaced by a new vital company. The question is, how do you stop it from being a contagion? I certainly don't have the answer. It won't be easy, but it will be things like intervene to buy yourself time. But you've got to like, you've got to signal that people have got to get out of this trade in an orderly fashion. But it's one of those. The Second you say we're in distress, the dollars leave. So I don't know. I don't know how you actually pull it off. I just know what you have to accomplish. And you have to accomplish a growing economy, which means that the companies that are sucking up the intelligence and the labor cannot be zombie companies that aren't doing anything innovative and that have basically promised people jobs for life. It doesn't work. I know it feels good, and I know people on the left love it the most. But the reality is, if somebody doesn't have to kill themselves to earn their slot, if somebody isn't constantly under threat by the next young kid coming up, I mean, here's the hard reality. Hey, 50 year olds, I'm one of you. The young people should be coming, coming for you, and you should have to outperform to keep your slot. And it should be harder every day. And so you better be ready. You better be ready for the fact that one day you just can't hold them off anymore. And when you can't hold them off, you better have saved up enough that you can take care of yourself. I mean, it's just. That's the reality. And that's how life worked. Literally forever. Because the world was so doggy dog. And now we've gotten in this position where we've created a, a false sense of security. And Japan very specifically was in a hyper weakened state because of all this, but there was just never an attack. And so it's like you can have a compromised immune system inside of a bubble, but the second you try to go out into the real world, you get hit. And that's when you realize, oh shit. It would have been a much better strategy to have a strong immune system.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah. Okay, I want to touch on Covid really quick. Quick. Because with the Fauci trial, him pleading the Fifth, we didn't get the answers that we wanted. And with that, a lot of people have now kind of created narratives around Covid. So you said, like we did a bunch of things, that COVID ruined us. Is your thing specifically the economic money printing, the lockdowns? How do you rectify the balance of we had to save people versus we had to save, like money, you know, like what, what was. How are you now looking at that in hindsight?

[Tom Bilyeu]

The thing that protects lives more than anything is strong economies globally, stability globally. If you have a disease that is killing people, you're going to have to let people make their own decision. And that way you are diversifying the response. Some people will shut down so like, I don't regret the way that Impact Theory handled it. So what we did, because we're an information company, right? So we're a media company. So we're not shipping widgets. So we don't have a factory now. I would have had to make very different decisions. If I request, if I request and I need people showing up, I would say, you got to show up, you got to work, we got to ship a product. And at Impact Theory I could say, hey, everybody, work from home. I don't know what this is going to be. Let maximize safety, go home. And in doing that, I made a decision. We see if that ends up working or not. And if it doesn't, we go out of business. It is what it is. If I'm a gym, let's say, and the government forces me to close now, I go to a business, business not because of a decision that I made. I go out of business because the decision they made that, that we can never abide again. No way. So let's say that you've got a virus and it's killing 30% of the people that it touches. That's catastrophic. Now, now you're in full panic mode. Everybody needs to be like super paranoid. And I would expect people to make rational decisions and say I'm gonna close just because it's too dangerous for me to go out. But I still don't think it should be an authoritarian top down decision because they are unlikely to do anything other than propagandize. Do what's in their short term best interest in terms of staying in power. I watched it happen, so I know that's what people do. They will disguise whose fault it is. They won't want to talk about it. It's all crazy. It's all a power grab. You centralize control at the very moment where people should be making more decentralized decisions. And this is where you go, okay, we're going to let freedom reign here. So that's how I would look back on this and say, I was like, yeah man, we don't know how bad this is going to get. I understand that people are going to die. And so I was just like, yo, like this makes sense to me. Shut down as much as you can. I had no sense of how catastrophic this would be. I didn't understand inflation yet. I thought inflation was a law of nature. I didn't understand money printing. I didn't even realize that we were printing money. So it was like throwing, but thinking how recent that was and how little I Understood the economy. That is one of the things, things that makes me hopeless. Mike. I'm a relatively smart guy. I knew how to make money hand over fist, but I didn't understand investing and I certainly didn't understand like economics. And so it's like, God damn, you can have smart people that legitimately just don't understand the mechanisms and so they don't understand what they're breaking. So this is why, given that I don't trust politicians to understand the mechanisms, I don't trust them to make a centralized decision. And that's my big thing. You've got to decentralize that.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Got it. So it was, was the forcing of businesses to be closed. In a perfect world, the government would have said we recommend everybody stay home. But if you want to make that decision, make that decision.

[Middle East Military Analyst]

Yes.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

And then at the point, I don't know what the final totals is. Ryan, can you look this up? What the final COVID deaths were in the US that number will you want

[Tom Bilyeu]

the world or just no matter what you see?

[Co-host or Guest 2]

It'll be fake.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It will be fake.

[Middle East Military Analyst]

Yeah.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Is there any number that you agree with?

[Iranian Analyst or Expert]

With?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't. I haven't seen anybody do a truth and reconciliation on the way that we are tallying COVID deaths. I've only seen people point out that if you died in a motorcycle accident and you had Covid, that was called a COVID death. So until somebody actually shows, hey, we know how to go through the records and readjust them, I'm never going to believe that total. But by all means, say what it is. I'm just saying people need to understand how much propaganda is, is already tied up in those numbers. So whatever they are backwards looking numbers are probably not going to be super fruitful. What we're going to need is some sort of like research based. What was the fatality rate of. You got Covid. You were an isolated population. Your death was only marked if it was known Covid related complications. It's going to have to be something like that. Maybe that already exists. I certainly have never seen it.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah, I have the death number. It's 1,231,440 in the US in the US specifically. And the overall fatality rates switched a lot during the pandemic. But to put it short, they averaged between 1 to 3%. And that was early pandemic because obviously once the vaccine happened that drastically dropped.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well also you get the virus itself evolves and it tends to evolve into a weaker state over time. So it was going to get weaker no matter what.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah, it just took a few years for it to get weaker. Okay, so I guess when you first started you said that the thing that saves people the longest is a well thought out of economy. So let's cut those numbers in half just to say that those are fake numbers. So let's say 600,000 people died.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I would say just take the hardest number. So take the full 1.2. Assume 3% death rate. Now even at those numbers, are we saying we should or shouldn't close that? I think I try to always make the question as hard as it can be. That's why when I talk about this, I talk about something where there's a 30% death rate. Now it's like, oh, there's no hiding at 3%. That's asinine. That's crazy. I can't believe we did it. Especially when you think about the people that that were being impacted. It was the old and the obese. It's like, so only people that are already unhealthy and immunocompromised or dying. It's like, okay, that's a fucking tragedy. Every life lost and given. My mom is in like old and obese. It's like I was hyper paranoid. But if I put myself in a difficult situation or someone in my family's in a difficult situation, you don't shut down the global economy. So that is where like if kids are dying now, I expect people to be way more paranoid. But even then it's still going to be a grab for power. That's where you just go, let people make their decisions. If people are like, I got to keep my kids home because I can't have them out in the world. Yeah, cool, great. Got it. But don't make that a blanket policy where it's no longer that person gets to stay at home, it's everybody must stay at home. That's crazy. That's very different.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Okay. That I thought we were gonna go in a much different direction. Okay, that makes sense. I feel like I got the one statement I needed of just what was the blanket policy that should have been implemented. That was a change. Okay. We had the Elon Musk thing. That guy. Community noted, though it's actually old clip. We can still talk about it, but

[Tom Bilyeu]

it got community noted. What was the community note?

[Co-host or Guest 2]

His clip is over a year old.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, but what the fuck does that matter?

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Oh, got it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So yes, that's why I said in my read that it's re going viral. So the reason I find this so interesting is, whenever you repost this, the odds that it goes viral are very high because it's forcing people to come to the question of are we going to augment ourselves or not? This is going to be one of the defining arguments of our time. And so you're already seeing how people are reacting to AI. You're going to see them react to augmentation in a very similarly ferocious fashion. This is going to become a religious debate. But to understand what's actually playing out, Neuralink's blindsight implant is going to be something that allows people essentially to skip the way that the eye works now completely. So a camera is basically mounted on glasses that capture a scene. A processor then converts it. The signal goes to a chip that's embedded in the visual cortex of the human brain, which fires electrical pulses at neurons. Each pulse produces, like, this dot of light in the visual field. You put enough dots together and the brain assembles a picture. Okay, the thing that I want people to understand, this stuff is already being worked on right now. We are already doing human. Human brain computer interfaces. It is only going to accelerate as AI gets better. We're going to be able to better map the brain. We're going to be able to fast track the implementation of this stuff. It will all start with people that are blind. But what Elon says in the clip is that we're going to be able to take people not with like, oh, they had sight for a while, but then they went blind. No, no, no. We'll be able to take people who have been blind since birth Earth, and we're going to be able to restore their sight. And what I'm trying to get people to contend with is you live in this era where there is a. A large handful of things you're going to have to become aware of. You're going to have to be aware of economics, because the economic world order is changing. So we've got Bretton Woods 2.0 being talked about. Most people don't even know what Bretton Woods 1.0 is. They don't understand how it was changed in 1971. They don't know what Bretton Woods 2.0 would look like. They don't know about the petrodollar. Like, all of that stuff is blind. You guys can't afford to be blind to it. Not because of the way that we have financialized our economy. If you're listening to me right now, you have to understand it, okay? Because you're going to have to make decisions based on that. AI is going to be one of the defining characteristics of our time. Muslim immigration is going to be one of the defining characteristics of our time. And augmentation is going to be one of the defining characterizations of our time. Radically extended life is going to be one of the defining debates of our time. So these five things, and I'm sure there's a couple more that I'm forgetting right now, they are going to be something that everybody is going to have to think about, what it means for their life, what they want it to be in terms of policy and to put that stuff forward. And also, can we just talk about needing to be excited? I forget what it was. I saw some this morning that I was like, oh, shit, I need to get back into mindset content. I've got to remind people of what. How liberating and thrilling it is to be a hardcore motherfucker. Oh, God, it was. I think I even pulled it that there is, like an article that was written talking about adult children, have their parents help them negotiate salary raises, that they will sit just off camera to help them in, like, interviews and zoom calls. And I was like, what the fuck? If my parents had tried to do that when I was a kid, I would have meaning a young adult. Like in my 20s, I would have had an absolute fucking stroke. I was doing everything I could to get away from my parents. I remember being dropped off at college when I was 18 and being like, I love you guys, but can you just leave now? I wanted to get on with my adult life. I wanted to be standing on my own two feet. And look, college was a transition period for me. My parents were very helpful. I never want to take that away, away from them. It was glorious and it was a great way to transition into adulthood. But by the time I was 22, everything was on my own. I, in fact, was sending money back to my mom, who was going through a divorce. And so it was. It was hard. There's no doubt about that. But it makes you become mentally resilient. And we, we are creating real problems. If you're looking at your screen, you're showing this.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So the report was from the Wall Street Journal. The title, anyway, is Helicopter Parents Are Co Piloting Their Adult Children's Careers. Now that needs to be read as an indictment. One of the reasons I didn't have kids, this is just pure confession, was I wasn't sure that I could put them through the hardship that I knew that they would need to be put through. I have the impulse to do that to take care of them, to make the problems go away. And in my early days in mindset, which was never on camera, remember, I spent like a decade doing mindset shit with my employees and just trying to help them.

[Co-host or Guest 1]

Them.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And you do realize very, very quickly that, oh, the temptation is just to give them the answer because you'll try and try and try to get them to see something and you realize, fuck, the only thing that's going to help them is for them to suffer and to get to a point where life hurts enough that they realize they have to make a change. And I was like, damn, I have this really strong impulse to just help people and just do it for them and to carry weight. And then finally I realized I can't want it for them. Them and my ability to help people is so finite that finally you just realize you've got to let them do their own thing. And I was like, can I really do that with my own kids? So I get it. I understand why parents do this. But the reality is you break your kids, you make them weak, you stop them from developing. That's the right way to think about it. So you start putting all this stuff together and it's like, we should want to be ultra hardcore. And when you. You nest this inside of where are we going as a society? Are we going to try to compete with AI? Because at some point, AI is going to be better than us at everything unless we begin to augment ourselves. Now, I know this is going to be a religious debate, and I know some people are going to take this and say, there's no way, over my dead body all that. I'm not here to sway anybody. You make the decision that you're going to make, but we are all going to have to make that decision. I, for one, while I will not be an early adopter of this technology, which I know will have safety concerns in the beginning and unintended consequences. But yes, will I augment myself if it is safe? Absolutely. So anyway, this is something that I think people need to think through. Whether that video is a year old or not. That's such a weird response to that video. It's going to be a question. Question we are all going to have to look at nakedly. What does it mean to be a human? How far am I willing to push myself? Am I going to compete with AI or just move into the woods?

[Middle East Military Analyst]

It.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It is going to be an important question.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

You want to hit play on it then? So let's play.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Pause it for a second. Keep in Mind Elon Musk is always wrong with his time frame. So if he says six to 12 months, he really means three, four years, something like that, or he may not mean it. I think he gets himself excited, but it always takes longer. But keep in mind, everything he said he's going to do, he has done. So that's going to be the question. Do people want their skill sets pushed or not? Yeah, I think a lot of people are going to reject this, but I think in the long run, anything, any technology that promises an advantage will be developed and it will be deployed. So yeah, this is a fascinating moment, man.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Interesting. Okay, we got a couple good ones, ones that I would love to cover.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's go.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

First off, shout out to Spider Man. It's doing numbers. This is a fun one. So I'll start here. Spider man surpasses the Odyssey at the Globe box office in just four days. This is one of the craziest opening numbers like out. I think this is the most profitable AMC has been ever this weekend. Ryan, you just sent me that 106 years of the company's history. This is the most money AMC has ever made in a weekend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Revenue or profit?

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Revenue. Yeah. Okay.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Then it's like, okay, are we talking nominal? Are we talking adjusted? But anyway, it is extraordinarily exciting that we're on like this tear where movies are now actually making me want to reinvest in a way that I haven't emotionally in a very long time. Because film just felt dead.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Yeah. 927 million in its debut week in weekend. That's global, right? That's global, yeah. 67 territories that opening weekend. Opening weekend.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That is incredible. So it's probably not going to be the highest grossing film of all time, but it's going to be in the top 10. I mean this is like really something that is really, really exciting for me. What's interesting about this is for a long time we've been in a position where an actor could not open a film with the exception of Tom Cruise. And we're now seeing with back to back blockbusters. Having Tom Holland at or near the top of the ticket is pretty interesting. So is this kid about to actually plant himself as a new actor that can actually open a film? That would be incredible. Now I think Nolan carries the weight more on the Odyssey than Holland does for sure. But the fact that he's able to get somebody like Holland to pick him to put him in the slot is very, very interesting. I'm super excited to see this. I haven't seen the movie yet, so I can't comment there. But it is very exciting to me that we're seeing this uptick in what's going on in the, the world of film. Film is how we communicate our, our value system to each other. This is why for so long it was so critically important. Important that America was the number one exporter of culture. It's not America in my estimation anymore. It's now Japan. I don't know if Japan has this on lock from a dollar's perspective, but, ooh, between their influence on video games and just the actual style of storytelling and anime, Pokemon like, damn, they are exporting culture in a massive way. Even like if you look at Chinese anime, it's all clearly aping either Korea or Japan. And Korea is aping Japan. So you've got China aping somebody either aping the source material directly or a once removed ape of the original source material. And even I as a creator was like, this was like seven or eight years ago. I went on an absolute tear. I was like, you can't make mythology right now without understanding Japanese style storytelling. Because kids are just, just inundated with anime and video game style storytelling, which is all an echo of Japan. To me, that is a sign that the west has lost faith in itself. And we're all turning towards a culture that still believes in itself and still is just telling the fucking stories that it came to tell. And so it would be very, very exciting to see Americans refind their footing as storytellers or the West. Cause I don't think our man's here is American. But anyway, you get the idea. It's very exciting.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

I'm glad you said that because that leads to what are we trying to tell with our story? And this is from an interview that Nolan did with the Chinese publication.

[Co-host or Guest 1]

Okay, wait, wait, wait.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Before you play. So there's a really interesting debate sort of happening online about, okay, what is Nolan asked when he goes on the press tour in the West? And what does he ask when he goes in China and when he goes in the West? It's like, oh, tell us about imax. And you know, what was it like working with this actor? And then you go over to China and you're going to hear the question that they ask. It is deeply philosophical. It is deeply important to national identity and storytelling. And I thought this was really interesting. We live in an age that demands apology from greatness. Yeah, great storytellers, when they portray greatness, Homer celebrates it.

[Commercial Narrator]

We circle around it, we dance around

[Tom Bilyeu]

it, we turn Greatness into privileges and

[Commercial Narrator]

we demand apologies for it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's a fact of Hollywood. And I'm just wondering if, as one of the greatest storytellers of our age, how do you approach greatness? Is it still a story of apology that demands repentance and reflection and self criticism?

[Co-host or Guest 1]

Well, I think that when you're talking about storytelling, you're always in conversation with the expectations of the audience. So it really is an energy that's brought from the audience as well as an energy that's put forward from the story itself. When we create a heroic figure in a story, as storytellers, we have to be mindful of the energy that the audience brings to that story and the interaction between our intention and the way the audience receives that. And the fact that that mechanism is identifiable to people doesn't invalidate it. And part of that mechanism is saying, are we going to treat greatness as an absolute or coming from a democratic, coming from a more idealized philosophical state that we live in in today's world where we want to view people as equal, do we have to apologize for that greatness? And the answer is yes, we do, or the audience rejects the greatness.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Only in the west, baby, only in the west do you have to apologize for greatness. That is wild. Trust me when I say China is not going to be apologizing for greatness. No way. They are. They're just on a generational tear right now in terms of having high expectations for their citizens, expecting people to unlock their best to push themselves far into the future. It is a deep tragedy to think that in America we have to apologize for greatness. That was the thing that made America America, was the fact that we were the ones that were going to pick ourselves up, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, get good at something, get so good we couldn't be stopped, go out into the world knowing that it was going to try to knock us back and still rise up. And that we were the civilization that celebrated that. That we wanted to see people achieve something heroic. We wanted to have heroes like even the Boy Scout of all Boy Scouts, Superman, that we could look up to and say, yeah, that's somebody that is, is always doing the moral thing, that is better than all the rest of us, that is elevated physically, that's elevated morally. And it gave us somebody to aspire to. And now we're so cynical about that stuff. It is a real, real tragedy that we no longer look upon greatness as something to aspire to.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

There's something to that apology thing. Though, because it's. I don't want to say we have to. You get attacked for that greatness. Just like I don't want to make it seem like when George Washington was around, everybody was just celebrating his greatness. There were people that were jealous of him, there were people that wanted his spot, there were people that thought he was going to be tyrannical. So in history we could look upon that and then we label it as greatness. But then the time, there's always been this battle of people feeling attacked because somebody else is great. I don't think that's something that's uniquely to this time.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's definitely not unique to this time at all. Nothing is ever unique to any time. Everything is always, always about the human psychology born of evolution rearing its head in the different contexts that it's in. But the thing that made America so interesting was America was founded at a time where all around the world you had dictatorial leaders, whether it was just an authoritarian or whether it was an outright king. And people that said, I can't do this anymore, I'm going to flee to the new world where I'm likely to die, but if I survive, I can do what I think is the right thing. And so all the weak literally died on our shores. They died off in the early winters. They were killed in battles with the natives. Like all of that stuff really created this super hardened puritanical work ethic where it was like, you're playing the ultimate game of Minecraft and you will starve to death, you will freeze to death. So you better build that fort, you better find a way to survive out here. And you mix that with this, this puritanical Christian work ethic of the spark of divinity lies in the individual, but the individual is expected to carry their own weight, to shoulder the burden of their own cross. And it's like, nobody's coming to save you. You've got to do this on your own. And because the conditions were so harsh and there was no. You took care of people if you could, if they were like in your immediate tribe, like in the early, early, early days. But it's like if you didn't carry your weight, they would fucking literally ostracize you, which meant certain death, death. So you can just say, if you didn't carry your weight, they killed you. And you can imagine you do that for three or four hundred years. All of a sudden you have a national identity. By the time we actually found ourselves as a country, you have a national identity that is unlike anything in the world. And while we recognize democracy today as something that's all over the place, we were the only ones. And I heard somebody phrase this in a really interesting way. Unfortunately, I forget their name name. But they said, I want you to imagine that America is the answer to the question, who is the king of America? And the way that they answer it is the people, each of us. And you would never have a king that didn't know how to provide. You would never have a king that wouldn't stand up for his country or himself. And so now what we're saying is, oh, you want to live in America? You've got to be prepared to act like I'm the one. God damn it. You've got to act like I'm the one. And I used to say that when I was just a copywriter at the company that originally hired me, I ended up becoming a partner, blah, blah, blah, that leads to quest, yada, yada. I would say to myself every day, if it is to be, it is up to me. And I would just repeat that little nursery rhyme all the time, if it is to be, it is up to me. I'm just a copywriter. But I'm going to act like I'm the CEO. I'm going to act like if I don't do it, nobody's going to do it. And that's why I became partner, because everybody else was just like, well, this is my job and I just do my job. And I was like, fuck that. Like, this company, company needs to be successful for my dreams to come true. If I have to drag this entire company across the finish line, the CEO included as the copywriter, I will fucking drag this guy across. You can't do it like an. You have to do it in a way that people love and want you around and all of that. But I did that. And so they ended up making me a partner because they would rather give me a piece of the company than fear losing me. That's what it means to be like, yo, I'm the king of America. I've got to. I've got to have the answers to that stuff in my own life. I'm not waiting for something, somebody to save me. I'm not looking for a handout. I'm looking to contribute. I'm looking to have an answer to the biggest problems. And this era, more than any era in American history, is making that demand of all of us because we have lost sight of what America is, what it means, what it stands for, why it was this Unique experiment. And we've got to find our way back to that, man, or we are going to find ourselves overrun by a culture that believes in itself. So whether that's China, and China just says, hey, we learned a lot lesson. We know what it means to be great. We know what it means. Every time I see that photo of that gigantic magnet that they have built to generate insane amounts of energy, basically it has created something that creates energy hotter than the center of the sun here on Earth. And I think these guys, that's inspiring, man. They. They are a worthy adversary. Say what you will about the geopolitical collision. I definitely want to win, but I'm inspired. Like, that's. That's a culture that believes in itself, that's going to do its thing and Godspeed. That's how everybody should act. Everybody, like, think of the world like the World Cup. I don't care if you're. What was it, coat divery or whatever that, like, ended up. No, something else. But anyway, Cape Verde. Thank you. So those guys, they. They came to win, and they weren't making apologies. Same with Norway. They were not making apologies. We are not here just to play. We're here to win. And that's the kind of thing I want to see from every country. I want to see people play to win. China's playing to win. America's not playing to win. America's playing to apologize, to say that, oh, if some people get farther ahead, there's some corruption that's going on. No, for whatever reason, God has decided that everybody's going to be different. We're all going to have different talents and intelligence. It just is what it is. And so now make the most of what you have. Reach for the farthest star that you can possibly reach for. Make huge demands of yourself. Make massive sacrifices to get better and achieve that. But we've got to celebrate that in other people. We've got to be able to celebrate people that do better than us. I look at Elon Musk, yes, I understand that you can hate his politics, but he has outperformed me as an entrepreneur. And I don't seethe with anger. I'm not, like, jealous. I'm like, fuck that. I want to be inspired. I want to look at him and go, oh, there's levels to this. So however much I've managed to achieve in my life, God damn. Like, that guy is way off on the horizon. And it's motivating. It's exciting. It's not demoralizing. It's like, if you Guys know the story of the four minute Mile. There was a guy named Roger Bannister. Everybody said the four minute mile can't be broken. It's just there's a limit to the rate at which the human lungs and circulatory system can process oxygen. We're never going to be able to do it. And he said that I'm going to break the four minute mile. And he ends up breaking the four minute mile. Now that was a boundary that had stood for quite literally all of human history. And then he breaks it. Within like three weeks more people had broken it because they just needed to see that it could be done. We need people to believe in. We need people that we look at and say, this person is exalted. It's all mythology. That person for sure has thoughts in their heart, actions that they've taken that you would hate. But saying, okay, this person accomplished something in an area that I value and I celebrate that. We've got to re embrace that.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

It's interesting though, because I feel like on one hand we marvel at the technological advances that China is making, but at the other hand we don't strive to reinvest into America at the level that China does.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Therein lies the problem.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

But I mean we, America runs a very get rich and you'll be fine. If you don't get rich, you won't be fine. Work harder, get rich. Take care of yourself. We are all the kids.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That would be awesome if the economy wasn't rigged against you. But the problem is that the economy is rigged in a knowable way. I've explained it before, I'm happy to do it now. But if you accept, okay, the economy is rigged in a knowable way. And so what used to be a rad stand statement, hey, go pick yourself up by your bootstraps, do all that. It's going to be awesome. Go kid, go. It worked because the government was not so involved in trying to manipulate the economy. Now that the government is involved in manipulating the economy, you're in a position where their desire to give you things for free to make your life easier is actually trapping you. And then the people who understand how the economy is rigged, they use it to their advantage and then they continue to rig it further by money in politics and getting politicians in that are going to vote for things, things to make sure that the top of the K is just going to keep being this wonderland. And so it's all a problem. I talked about this at the beginning. You've got the left and the right in full pathology mode. Re meeting together as they wrap around wanting the same thing, which is the government to be hyper involved in everything so that they can both win. The left wants to keep winning votes and getting immigrants in and giving things away for free. The right wants to protect the top of the cat. And so it's like, yep, now they both want to do the same thing for different reasons, but it now accelerates the pathology. But we've got to stop telling ourselves that we have capitalism and we've got to start getting back to actual capitalism so that we can tell that kid, go contribute. Being rich is actually the wrong focus. The great irony of getting rich is that the surest path to getting rich is to add value to others lives. It is not to focus on wealth. So it's a hard lesson that everybody has to learn if you're on, at least from an entrepreneur's perspective, if you're going to do it through the financialization, then it really is. But that, yes, a very different game. So I agree with you that a massive obstacle is being put in people's way. It's just that the obstacle is not what people people think.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

All right, cool. Yeah, now we're done.

[Middle East Military Analyst]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay everybody. The next Impact Theory University masterclass. It's free and it's coming Wednesday. This Wednesday, August 5th at 1pm Pacific. I will show you how to build a company using AI. Dude, the more I use AI, the more I'm like, guys, come on, you need to get in these waters. They are very, very warm. And the window of opportunity where the vast majority of people are still not using it, which is crazy to me. You want to take advantage of this opportunity. If you are at all entrepreneurial minded or just want to control your own destiny, you need to understand what AI can actually do, what its limits are, because it falls on its face in very specific places that you can know and work around. Anyway, I'm going to show you how to do it all. Wednesday, August 5th at 1pm Pacific. It's free and it won't be replayed, so be there or be square. All right, everybody, love you bunches. See you on Wednesday.

[Co-host or Guest 1]

Take care.

[Co-host or Guest 2]

Peace.

[Commercial Narrator]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

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