US-Iran Tensions, Japan’s Economic Threat, and the Truth About the Trump Account

Summary

Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu – Episode Summary

Episode: US-Iran Tensions, Japan’s Economic Threat, and the Truth About the Trump Account
Date: July 8, 2026
Host: Tom Bilyeu
Co-host: Drew

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Overview

This episode of Impact Theory dives into the chaotic intersection of geopolitics, global economics, and U.S. domestic affairs in mid-2026. Tom Bilyeu and Drew discuss the escalating US-Iran conflict, Japan’s mounting economic troubles, the consequences of U.S. financial policy, and the controversial Trump Account scheme. Layered throughout are sharp insights into political hypocrisy (notably in the Graham Platner scandal), economic dangers exemplified by the BOJ’s tightening, and provocative listener questions about the ideological drift of American government policy.

The tone is fast-paced, sharp, and unvarnished—a blend of macroeconomic breakdowns and cultural commentary with frequent asides, humorous analogies, and pointed critiques of political realpolitik.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. US-Iran Conflict: Ceasefire Breakdown and Market Fallout

(04:00–21:00)

• The U.S. launched its largest strikes on Iran since the recent ceasefire, after Iran attacked ships transiting the Strait of Hormuz.

• Markets responded with oil spiking 6% and gold dropping—contrary to expectations in times of instability ("Oil is up, gold is down...not the right up and down that I like to hear in my rap songs." – Tom, 04:13).

• The shift is attributed to investor fears of sustained inflation and central banks maintaining higher rates.

• Tom criticizes the superficiality and vagueness of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the U.S. and Iran:

  "There was no real available peace in the MoU...both sides were just going out to the media and saying basically the exact opposite of the things that were in the MOU"
  — Tom (04:35)

• Trump’s hardline rhetoric is highlighted, with direct quotes from his recent statement:

  "I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum...They're led by sick people, and they're vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it."
  — Trump, quoted by Tom and Drew (05:54–06:19)

• Tom notes that both sides used the ceasefire to "buy time"—a game of strategic delay and leverage.

• Discussion stretches into how war and peace gestures are largely tactical, used to influence markets or rebuild resources.

• Drew’s prediction:

  "This is a forever war. We're going to be in here at least two more years."
  — Drew (20:12)

• Tom likens the dynamic to "the boy who cried wolf":

  "...it is a tale of, you do ruin your credibility when you cry wolf and then the wolves hide. But it doesn't mean that there aren't actually wolves there."
  — Tom (21:08–22:14)

• Realpolitik analysis: Trump will avoid ground troops unless forced, but expects continual tit-for-tat with no resolution, driven by market anxieties and election timelines.

Timestamps

• [04:00] – Opening analysis of Iran strikes, market swings
• [05:54] – Trump’s direct language
• [17:44] – Oil market specifics, CENTCOM strikes, and re-imposition of sanctions
• [20:12] – Drew’s “forever war” comment
• [21:08] – Tom’s “boy who cried wolf” analogy

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2. Global Economic Volatility: Japan’s “Godzilla” Threat

(45:50–56:19)

• Japan is dramatically hiking rates to defend the yen amid post-COVID inflation.
• Naoki Tomura from the BOJ presses for rate hikes to 2% “without hesitation” (46:27), which Tom explains will cripple the global dollar liquidity “carry trade” system Japan has underpinned for decades.
• Japan is rapidly dumping U.S. Treasuries to prop up the yen, threatening U.S. debt financing and global risk appetite.
• Investor sentiment is shifting:

  "For the first time...the primary reserve asset being held by central banks as a way to backstop their currency, not U.S. Debt, it’s gold."
  — Tom (49:23–50:00)

• The yen’s fall (162.84 to the dollar, a 40-year low) and the specter of 200 yen/USD portend a possible “rogue wave of shocks.”
• Tom ties Japan’s crisis to several other macroeconomic risk vectors: ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict, the AI investment bubble, and European energy stress, warning of a potential global “contagion effect” (36:25).

Timestamps

• [45:50] – Japan’s debt unwinding explained
• [49:23] – Shift from US debt to gold reserves
• [53:08] – Yen at a 40-year low, possible “rogue waves”

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3. The “Trump Account” and Social Security Debate

(56:19–67:12)

• Drew pitches the idea of the U.S. government guaranteeing retirement security by putting Americans (especially children) into the stock market—a system dubbed “Trump accounts.”
• Tom explores the pros and cons:
  • Encourages mass asset ownership, which ties political outcomes to the success of US companies.
  • Warns that mass participation also risks asset bubbles and that the roll-over from Social Security to privatized investment will create a “transition generation” of losers (“the 30-something years of working history I have, none of that gets allocated”).
• Policy details: Only children born 2025–2028 receive the $1,000 “Trump account” seed.
• Heated debate over whether this constitutes “socialism”:

  "50% of Americans don't pay tax...So this is going from...they don't pay income tax...now they're getting an asset."
  — Tom (69:21)

• Tom sees the asset giveaway as a mechanistic solution to systemic problems, hedging that “paranoid” investing and humility are essential for survival (55:52).
• Ideal structure: diversified index allocations, not hand-picking companies (to avoid “zombie companies”).

Timestamps

• [56:19] – Drew: “This idea might work...” on the stock market and Trump accounts
• [62:19] – Tom: “This is the ultimate play for Social Security.”
• [69:51] – Is this socialism? Tom tackles the critique

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4. Political Hypocrisy: Graham Platner & Morality in Politics

(40:27–45:50)

• Drew brings up the Democratic Party’s rapid distancing from Graham Platner amidst sexual assault and Nazi imagery allegations.
• Tom contextualizes with Trump’s own (and prior presidents’) history:

  "Politics is the ugliest game in the universe. And Graham Platner is the latest example of how politicians do not steer by morals at all. They steer by power."
  — Tom (41:00)

• Both agree that outrage over moral lapses is performative in U.S. politics:

  "Morality doesn't enter into it. It never entered into it. It was always about power."
  — Tom (44:04)

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5. Media Manipulation, Digital Reality, and the Tyler Robinson / Charlie Kirk Case

(92:04–102:49)

• Coverage of the Tyler Robinson pre-trial for the Charlie Kirk assassination reveals algorithmic echo chambers:

  "The algorithms are like funneling people into either a...‘nothing to see here’ funnel, or ‘it seems like dodgy’ funnel..."
  — Tom (94:45)

• Preliminary hearings uncover oddities: evidence inconsistencies, missing shell casings, body cams that “mysteriously” die, and weird witness selection.
• Tom and Drew highlight the risk of media and social media driving early conspiracy narratives before facts come out.
• Emphasis: The actual trial—not the pre-trial/firehose of speculation—will clarify the truth.

Timestamps

• [92:04] – Drew: Courtroom oddities, evidence gaps
• [94:45] – Tom: Algorithmic bias and “alternate universes”

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6. Broader Commentary on Labor Mobility and Economic Survival

(83:43–88:57)

• In response to a listener upset about being told “just get another job,” Tom provides a pragmatic pep talk:

  "You either overcome the obstacles before you or you don’t. That doesn’t mean I don’t have empathy..."
  — Tom (84:43)

• He urges relentless self-improvement and skill-building as the real edge in turbulent times:

  "If you’re struggling to find a job, imagine pouring yourself over the next year or two into getting 100 times better at your job than you are today..."
  — Tom (87:10)

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Notable Quotes

• On US-Iran:

  "Bombs are going to be the ultimate negotiator."
  — Tom (06:40)

• On Politics:

  "You will eternally be confused by politicians if you map them against anything other than what do I need to do to gain and retain power?"
  — Tom (44:04)

• On Japan:

  "Japan continues to be a looming threat in the global economy. It is like a slow motion shot of Godzilla..."
  — Tom (46:05)

• On Asset Ownership & Inequality:

  "If you don’t own assets, you’re fucked. But if you do, everybody’s boat rises up."
  — Tom (58:08)

• On Investing Humility:

  "Only the paranoid survive. That is doubly true in investing."
  — Tom (55:52)

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Memorable Moments

• Tom’s “boy who cried wolf” tangent—used as a model for recurring economic/political alarms (21:08–22:14).
• The metaphor of Godzilla for Japan’s slow-moving but potentially massive economic upheaval (46:05).
• Drew’s dry summary of Trump accounts:

  "Hey, bro, hit it raw. You get a thousand dollars from Trump."
  — Drew (89:13)

• The casual roasting of political “performance” re: Mitch McConnell’s health:

  "If he was well, they would just show him."
  — Tom (89:50)

• Live on-air praise for Drew’s parenting and their evolving father-daughter handshake ritual—a rare personal touch (92:35).

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Episode Structure & Timestamps

| Segment | Start | Highlight | |------------------------------------------|------------|---------------------------------------------| | US-Iran Tension Breakdown | 04:00 | Market reactions, Trump’s rhetoric | | Conflict as Economic/Political Tool | 14:00 | Ceasefires as stalling tactics | | Iran strategic analysis | 20:12 | “Forever war” prediction | | “Boy Who Cried Wolf” Analogy | 21:08 | Misreading signals in geopolitics | | Graham Platner / Political Hypocrisy | 40:27 | Morality in politics debated | | Japan’s Economic Threat | 45:50 | BOJ rate hikes, liquidity, yen collapse | | Trump Account/Asset Ownership Debate | 56:19 | Retirement, inequality, and incentives | | Is it Socialism? | 69:51 | Ideology vs practical systems | | Labor Mobility Pep Talk | 83:43 | Market realities & self-improvement | | Mitch McConnell Rumors | 89:20 | Political optics, succession maneuvers | | Tyler Robinson/Charlie Kirk Case | 92:04 | Pre-trial confusion, media algorithms |

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Conclusion

Tom Bilyeu’s July 8, 2026 episode offers a panoramic view of the turbulent global and domestic landscape, dissecting US-Iran “forever war” stalemates, Japan’s looming fiscal reckoning, and America’s shifting social contract around retirement and assets. The tone remains relentlessly skeptical, encouraging listeners to arm themselves with knowledge, question their own filters, and prepare for uncertainty. The episode is a bracing reminder that the forces shaping headlines often run deeper—and are more interdependent—than mainstream narratives suggest.

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Transcript

[Tom Bilyeu]

Best thing that's ever happened to you financially. Go easy. Sold my car on Carvana. Amazing offer, really. I hit 200 on a scratcher. Did the scratcher come to your house

[Drew]

and hand you a check?

[Tom Bilyeu]

No. How many scratchers did you hit to get that? I hit a button on Carvana.com once. Okay, that's fair. It's like the lottery, except you always win. Not like the lottery at all, actually. Exactly. Inexplicably good offers worth bragging about.

[Drew]

Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I started Ornod in 2013 and we make bike apparel. The best part of Shopify for me is our ability to run the business as essentially non technical people. We're able to admin everything on the back end, front end and sell things online easily. If Shopify were a bike accessory, I think it would actually be the bicycle.

[Drew]

It's the thing that you do the thing on.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We run the business on Shopify. So start your free trial on shopify.com Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show Live. I'm excited that you guys are joining us. All right, everybody. So the US has launched its biggest series of strikes on Iran since the ceasefire began. That's fun. The markets are freaking out. We'll talk all about that. More SA allegations are coming out against Graham Platner and the Dems are backing away now as fast as they can. That one's interesting. Welcome to platinum politics in 2026, China just delivered a master stroke in their plan to replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency. We're going to be doing a deep dive live here today on that. US debt is under pressure again from weakness in the Japanese bond market. Japan continues to be a very distressing looming threat out there. We'll be going into that. Tyler Robinson's trial for the assassination of Charlie Kirk is now sort of underway. It's really the pre trial, but it's already getting weird. We're going to be talking about some algorithm things that are happening there that have Drew and I living in alternate universes. And Mitch McConnell is potentially brain dead. But Republicans are playing Weekend at Bernie's to avoid a special election. That one is wild. And we've got some fun trolling on behalf of Thomas Massie out there. It'll be fun to look at that. All right, shout out to our sponsor today, which is Straight Arrow news. These guys are whole brand is that they don't manipulate the news. They're trying to make sure there's no bias. They don't have an agenda. They're all about helping people discover the facts and the context that they need. And man, in this media environment, that is going to be incredibly important for us all to stay grounded on that. I certainly appreciate Drew as somebody that's always trying to keep me honest. When we were talking about the differences in our algorithms over the Tyler Robinson thing, it was very startling to realize how fast decisions can be made for you about what is being presented to you. And Straight Arrow News is trying to do that for everybody. So shout out to those guys, check them out. Go to s a n.com tombillew to get the unbiased truth on the stories that matter and to support our sponsors, which mean a lot to us. All right, guys, Iran has really popped off again with the biggest strike since the ceasefire was announced and the markets are swinging hard. Oil is up, gold is down. It is not the right up and down that I like to hear in my rap songs, but nonetheless, that's what's going on. Investors now are really assuming that inflation is just going to continue to increase. So if you're wondering why you've got oil in a time of uncertainty, you expect gold to be the thing that's stable. I think everybody understands why oil is spiking, but why is gold going down? And that's because people are far more afraid of inflation going up, which means rates are going to be kept up, which means the rate, the risk free rate of return is now going up. And so being in something that doesn't return like gold is just not the play, at least as far as investors are going with what has just happened. So you can expect the markets to continue to be very weird. Things were quiet for a while, but the MoU now is just, it is such a vague mess when you really understand what both sides, I think, are doing. It is obvious that this was always going to be litigated through violence because both sides have said the things they needed to say. They've said those shibboleths to buy themselves time to regroup. Trump was trying to calm the markets, never be confused about that. And Iran needed some cash and they were both all too happy to give the other what they needed to buy that time. But there was no real available piece in the MoU. If you guys read the MoU, it was so ridiculously vague. And then both sides were just going out to the media, media and saying basically the exact opposite of the things that were in the MOU is wildest I've ever seen. And so it was obvious that the piece was not going to last long. You can play clips of me saying exactly that in previous weeks. Now, the specific spark that kicks things, that kick things off with Iran this time was that they attacked three ships that were transiting the strait. It's always when people are hugging the coast of Amman. And so that is what triggered them. They were saying that these were not routes that they had authorized. Now, them attacking the ships that were going through the strait obviously pissed off Trump. So he then hit them back with the biggest attack since the ceasefire was announced. He said, in fact, we should pull that clip up. But he said straight up that he thinks the talks are over. He left just a little bit of softness in his language for more negotiations to continue, but he did call Iran scum. So let's play that clip over.

[Drew]

Is the ceasefire done?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Is the MOU dead?

[Drew]

It's a very interesting question.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, it is to me.

[Drew]

I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum. You know what scum is?

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're scum.

[Drew]

They're sick people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I bet she's confused.

[Drew]

They're led by sick people, and they're vicious, violent people. And if they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it. As far as I'm concerned, it's over. I'll speak to our negotiators. They want to negotiate. They're good people. Steve Woodkoff, Jared Kushner, but they have

[Tom Bilyeu]

to come back to me.

[Drew]

As far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them. They're liars. We make a deal, and they will. If I make a deal with him, we have a deal and he goes out. He talks, we make a deal. Everyone's agreed, no nuclear weapon. We make a deal. They go outside, talk to the press. They say, we never even talked about it. There's something wrong with them. They're cuckoo.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, yeah, you can expect this to continue. This is going to be something where bombs are going to be the ultimate negotiator. Trump is talking like he's not in complete control of this. If he tells Wyckoff and Kushner that the negotiations are over, then they're over. So the fact that he's still sending them back in tells you that he always wants to have that card that he can play in his back pocket of like, hey, we're back to negotiating. You can watch interest rates. I mean, it's really, really pretty wild. I guess it shouldn't be Unexpected. But it is pretty wild that the negotiations are predicated on what the market will bear in terms of Trump's tolerance for stress in the stock market. So, yep, keep your eyes there. That's going to signal a lot more clearly than anything that he says or anything that Iran says as to whether or not we have to have a moment of peace or whether we can go back to the bombing, I don't see any way out of this. So you either litigate via war, knowing that that is the ultimate leverage point, or you're just going to be in this position. Now, you can mentally model Iran however you want. The most common mental model for Iran is that they're going to buy themselves as much time. They're going to tell you everything that you want to hear so that they can keep kicking the can down the road. I've talked about this in business. This is absolutely something that whenever you can, you want to buy yourself time for things to work out more naturally. And so when not that in business, it's advisable to lie, because if you're doing that, you're just going to absolutely blow your reputation apart. You're not going to be able to get anything done. But if you see an opportunity to buy yourself a day or a week when you're not able to get the things that you want, you never know when something might appear. And so this is Iran's strategy through and through. Everybody has talked about this, about their strategy of deploying delay tactics by promising you something that they never planned to deliver on. So, uh, this, to me, is yet another punctuation mark that we're going to see over and over and over until something finally makes this come to a head. And I don't know if that's getting on the other side of the midterms. There are plenty of analysts that think no matter what happens, whether Trump wins or loses on the other side of this, he's going to be unbridled. Uh, if he wins, obviously he's going to have wind at his back and he can go in and get back to bombing things and not have to worry about the election. If he loses the election, then he really has nothing to lose. Obviously, Congress is going to be pushing to impeach him basically immediately, but he'll still be able to do things through executive order. And so if you guys remember what happened when Obama ended up losing the midterms, he said, well, I still have a phone and I still have a pen, I think is exactly how he said it, meaning the executive orders and so expect Trump to do that exact thing and just go back to running the same kind of blitz of eos those that we saw at the beginning of his term. So I'm not expecting anything to play this out other than this constant back and forth of peace to either on our side calm the markets or on their side rebuild the war chest, followed by okay, now we can go back to being violent because we, we just do not agree on anything. If you listen to the things that Iran is actually saying, all the key elements of the MOU that'll make this a deal that they're never going to have nuclear weapons. What Israel is doing in terms of Lebanon, which continues to be this big question mark about how Lebanon feels about that. But anyway, so you've got that going on. You've got the straight being open them not being able to charge, you've got them obviously expecting the $300 billion in. They're not calling it reparations, but I'll call it reparations. So do not expect any of this to go smoothly. This is going to be something that will be played out with strike after strike after strike. Now the markets are getting that message very clearly. And on the back of this most recent strike, Brent jumped more than 6% to nearly $79 a barrel. Now that's a far cry from where we were when we were up over 100, but it is the biggest one day move since early June. Dow futures have dropped over 400 points. Energy stocks have rallied pre market because they're expecting the price to go up and chips those stocks just keep selling off. We're hitting pause for a moment but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere. Let's talk about why you're sweating. Summer is when bad fabric becomes too hot to ignore. 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If we go into the blockade and we see a week go by without any other movement, I would expect to see that number go up. And that's also going to hold the Fed hold their feet to the fire in terms of having to hold their interest rates high for longer. So anybody that was still fingers crossed holding out that the rates were going to be coming down soon, it's going to be tough to do that when you've got oil prices going up and up. So that is the standoff that we're really in. So we'll see. All right. As for the details of this most recent flashpoint, the ships that Iran hit, as I was saying earlier, were the ones that using unapproved routes. The CENTCOM targets that were hit were Iranian air defenses, radar and more than 60 IRGC fast boats. They've also claimed that they've hit and killed some more IRGC leadership. But that really does seem to be a never ending basket of people that they can draw on. So I would not expect there to be any sort of oh, we finally hit the one guy, that just isn't going to happen. So maybe more instability, maybe more infighting, but nonetheless don't expect us to be able to kill our way to a better regime over there. Now Scott Bessen has also brought the US treasury into the strikes. They've launched some attacks of their own, revoke the oil sanctions waiver that had been refilling Iran's coffers. And that's the thing that in all of this is maddening to me. It was self evident that the second you do that, Iran, who has made it abundantly clear in their rhetoric and how vague the things are in the MOU that they just want to get money going again, once they do that, then they're going to leverage that to build up their strength so that they can negotiate even harder. Oil sales are roughly half of Iran's revenue. So to give you an idea, you can cut off half, but then the second you open those spigots again, real money is flowing in. And the administration has given buyers until July 17th to wind down their transactions. But Lord only knows how much is going to happen in the nine days between now and then. So we'll see. Now, needless to say, Iran has hated all of this and they fired back this morning. They sent missiles and drones at US Bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. Kuwait says that it intercepted everything, that there was no damage, no casualties. But Iran has warned US Allies in the region, specifically the uae, that there are going to be no more restraints on their attacks, on their infrastructure. So expect that to get better or expect that to get worse before it gets better. It is wild. I'm actually surprised how energy prices have held on between what's going on in Russia and what's going on in the Strait. And they're talking about the Red Sea now. So this really could get wild. And it's going to be interesting to see if we, meaning the west more broadly, can actually start working around the Strait of Hormuz. So necessity is the mother of invention. So we'll see if we see places like the uae, Saudi Arabia, building more and more pipelines to get around. Saudi Arabia has done a phenomenal job of that already working around a lot of the Strait. I forget the exact percentage, but I think it was somewhere around 60 or 70% of their oil was now able to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. I don't know if there are reasons that they would prefer not to have to use that, but certainly people are working at a pace to try to get around all of this, But I would expect that to take years to build out something more robust than what's already in place. And the real question becomes, how do you protect that from more strikes from Iran, Given what we're seeing from drone warfare in the Ukraine, Russia war, man, you can do a lot of damage with long range drones. And I would suspect that Iran is going to have access to very similar kinds of technology as time rolls on. So drones aren't going anywhere. You've even got stuff in China, if you guys have been paying attention to this. They've had massive flooding there and they're using drones to airlift people out of the flood zone. So drones are getting more and more sophisticated extraordinarily rapidly. So, yeah, this, this one's going to get Weird. And it is going to affect the markets and it's going to force Trump's hand or anybody else's hand that's at the wheel. So regardless of who's in power, energy as it affects inflation is such a big deal. You just cannot look past it. We'll get into this more when we talk about Japan, but it's. It's going to be a rough ride.

[Drew]

I must take my claim right now. This is a forever war. We're going to be in here at least two more years. Oh, minimum. Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Jesus. Not getting out here before his presidency, I can't imagine. I can't imagine you're going to see this back and forth. So they're not going to call it a war. There almost certainly will not be ground troops. I know Professor Jung is just convinced that Trump is going to have to put troops on the ground. I don't put it past him. He has now a long standing history of making terrible decisions, so it is certainly possible that he ends up doing that. I'm not expecting it, but I am expecting this back and forth tit for tat kind of thing where he's constantly saying, hey, they're saying all the right things. I know they're saying bad things publicly, but no, this is going to be all good and so. And that will calm the markets, but it will only do it for a while. And the God. Do I want to do a tangent on the real story of the boy who cried wolf. I'll stop for now, but there's no.

[Drew]

I know, I need that. Come on. All right, Foreplay me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And let me here is that the really fascinating thing about so many of these stories is that the way that they've been sort of smoothed over largely by Disney gives you an unrealistic version of what the actual thing, the moral of the story that we're trying to be told with the original. So in the original, the Boy who Cried Wolf story is the kid goes up to the edge of the forest and he sees wolves. He's not making it up. He actually sees wolves. He goes back and he says, hey, guys, there's wolves. They all go check. Nope, no wolves. Hey, kid, you're lying. Don't fucking do it again. Kid goes back to edge of the forest, the fucking wolves are back. And so he goes back, he's like, guys, I'm telling you, wolves, they go check. No wolves. This kid, we can't fucking trust him. The wolves are trying to use the boy as a way to convince everybody that the radar system, the early warning. People who are like, no, no, no, for real. This is a real problem when it doesn't happen. This is like with the economy when it doesn't happen again. And people say, like, Peter, like people like Peter Schiff have called nine of the last two recessions. It's. You start to go, yeah, yeah, these, these guys are full of shit. There's nothing real. And so finally the kid's like, I don't know what to do. And so he ends up going into the woods and the wolves eat him. And so the kid really does get eaten. Nobody believed him. And then now anybody that tries to go in after the wolves, they get eaten too. And so it is a tale of, you do ruin your credibility when you cry wolf and then the wolves hide. But it doesn't mean that there aren't actually wolves there. So that's where I would say, yeah, like there is going to be a lot of that, whether it's from pundits, whether it's from me saying like, hey, this is going to be risky, or Japan, I can already feel this one. So there's three points of spread still between even Japan, like at their worst, and where the US is. So the Japan yen carry trade, it is unwinding, it's going to keep unwinding because you can't hold that forever. And so. But I'm sure people have been saying that for a very long time, but then Covid hits and now all of a sudden that inflation actually does reach Japan. And now all of a sudden they're having to react. And so people are going to say, this is all bullshit. All these people saying that the Japan carry trade is going to unwind. They're just crying wolf. But remember, the moral of the story is the wolf is really there. And when you go to look for it, it recedes, you walk away, it comes back, you look and you just keep getting that until finally the wolves attack and you've got a real problem. So expect a lot of that with Iran. Expect this to drag on for a very long time. But remember, ultimately the kid does get eaten and the wolves really are a problem. And so I would expect that to play out both from Iran actually is a problem. Iran really does have negative intentions towards. I think everybody will get on board that they have very negative intentions towards Israel. But remember, the US is the big Satan, not the little Satan. Israel's the little Satan. So what happens as they get ballistic missiles that can reach Europe? What happens if they get ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S. so it's like, yeah, has Trump done a ton of damage? Have all the people that have said, hey, they're about to get a nuclear weapon, hey, they really want to do bad things? Yes, because then they don't do bad things. But does that mean that it isn't a danger? And I would put forth no, it doesn't mean that they're not a danger, but it does mean that the way that we're dealing with it right now is not working. So now what? To your point, we've gotten sucked into something that's probably going to last for years with this back and forth, tit for tat. We're in a war, we're not a war. But that doesn't mean that the danger is not real. And that's how you suck people into this stuff. You drag it out just long enough that people finally have to let their guard down to not look like complete dumbasses. Because that's the thing, man. Imagine trying to run on Iran as an imminent threat in 2028. Good luck. Good luck.

[Drew]

Like, we're still there. So everybody there was. Jordan, I think in the chat was like, Trump needs to apologize and just back out. And I was like, we're already past that point. Because Iran, at the very minimum is going to reject that apology. So that way they could do a victory lap around the world and point and say, haha, we beat the U.S. look at us. Like, there's no incentive for us to stop this war unless we just bomb everybody to oblivion and we just kill 90 million people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, we have an incentive to stop the war. That's the bad news. So just like we have an incentive to print because in the immediate term it isn't bad, it's bad in the long term. So we've been the, the Boy who Cried Wolf has played out phenomenally well with the inflation. So people have been eaten and people are just constantly getting eaten by inflation. But yet we keep saying, no, no, no, far better to just keep running these deficits better than to face the austerity. Same with the war. Trump would be, would in the short term be much better off backing off because they're not going to get a nuclear weapon before he's out of office, almost certainly. So now you're in a position where somebody finally has to say, okay, this may not play out on my watch, but I really believe that this is true and I'm gonna push this all the way to the end. Is that gonna be Trump? Maybe. We'll see. He's very, very responsive to the markets, if for no other reason than the markets have made him fantastically wealthy by trading on what I'll call insider information. Whether it makes meets the legal definition of that or not, I don't care. It's the spirit, I think, is exactly the same. He knows that his money is contingent on the policies that he passes. And so given that, you can expect him to have a massive incentive to do things that are good for his money. Again, I think that the way Trump thinks through this stuff is I'm going to do what's good for me if it happens to be good for America too, great. But I am certainly going to do what's good for me. So he has that personal incentive to calm the markets. So this one is weird. It's like a glitch where there's the sort of Mount Rushmore of it all. Listen, I've laid out my full thesis. I'm not going to do it again here. If people are confused about why I think Trump did what he did, I can certainly answer that. It's not as simplistic as it's what's good in the short term for the markets. But I do think that he's got a long term vision for needing to get the investments into the U.S. anyway, I've talked about so many times, so you've got all of that at play. There is a reason to end the war. I don't think he'll take it.

[Drew]

Yep, we're going to be here for a while, so get comfortable. Is there pressure from the allies that could possibly force Trump's hand? If Iran is really honest that they're going to take off their quote unquote restraint if they start attacking the uae, Dubai, all like all these other places and they feel that pressure, would that be the domino that can make Trump say, okay, okay, we really need to stop this war. Would it ramp up? What do you think his response would be if they really go unhinged?

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, so I think it's a thought exercise that probably won't play out quite like that. But let's run the thought exercise. So if the allies turn against Trump. Yes, it could be untenable for him. If it is literally the uae, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, like, if they're all like, fucking stop, get out of here. We, we are booting you out of our bases. Like, we don't want you here anymore. You are not welcome. And they start siding with Iran. Yeah, that could push them out. If Turkey comes online with Iran, which Trump has said nakedly, the only reason that Turkey didn't enter the war on behalf of Iran is because I told them not to. Now I've got to wonder what he had to promise, because it wasn't just like, hey, bro, please. It would have been that Erdogan sees something that he can get from the US that he wants. I don't know what that is. Sanction relief, but there's going to be. Yeah, I mean, that's a great default assumption. So if Erdogan comes in, all of the countries in the region are like, you got to get out of here. We don't want you here anymore. Then, yes, I think he would then be like, all right, I tried. These guys want to blow themselves up, then fine. I'd be very interested to see what the relationship. It will matter a lot what the relationship is between the US and Israel at that point, as to whether the US completely ejects out of the region or if they just keep funding Israel so that they can fight the fight and go back to basically using Israel as a proxy to try to do something in the region. But certainly, if we really do have energy independence in the us, we're able to stabilize our market. We're getting. Because we're getting massive cash inflows into the US market right now from all around the world. Like, I don't know that we're at historic levels, but I think we are. I'm only hedging because I don't have the graph in front of me, but if I'm not mistaken, we have literally historic levels of foreign investment, like, over the last 60 days. So it is right now, for all of the weirdness in the US market, for all of the missteps that the US is doing, people are looking around the world and they're not seeing anywhere else to put their capital, and capital will always seek a return. And so if there is nowhere better, even if it's just like, this is like the best of all my bad options, the money is still pouring in. Now, I think that's predicated on AI. If the AI story crumbles, expect that to stop. Also, if the AI story crumbles, you could have a global recession, especially if it's riding on the back of Japan and war in the Middle East. So, yeah, this gets nested very quickly. I am going to tease these things out more. We're going to be talking about Japan in a minute, but these are the dots that start connecting. You've got energy, stress that will affect Europe for sure, maybe even all the way to China. I don't remember how much oil China is getting from Russia. But if you've got Ukraine hitting the energy infrastructure in Russia, you've got Europe continuing to shoot itself in the foot. You've got continued instability in the Middle East. If Iran really does start destroying civilian oil infrastructure all across the region, you could put a real squeeze on the energy markets. Combine that with what's going on in Japan, combine that with a broken AI story, this gets global real fast.

[Drew]

Do you think the AI story is broken? Because I'm on team, it's looking broken.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Here's the problem. To me, the historical trend is so obvious that I am so paranoid about my read. So anybody that if you ever put in the comments, where does Tom actually invest his money? The reason that I don't post that is because I am so paranoid that I'm going to be blindsided by something. The last thing I want is people being like, well Tom really understands this stuff and so this is what he's doing, so I should do the same. Jesus Christ. I live in a constant state of paranoia that either there's a black swan event or I'm not mapping something correctly. And so I am so confident in my read of AI that I'm afraid of myself, if you see what I mean. I fear my confidence. That's when I'm like, oh, there could be something here. So the historical loop that AI is a part of says very clearly that what will happen is whenever you have a truly extraordinary new technology, it will get flooded with investment, it will get way out over its skis and the early investors will get wiped out. And then what they call the inheritance generation will come along behind those people take advantage of all the infrastructure that was built but that bankrupted God knows how many people along the way. And then they'll build over the next 10 to 20 years they'll build the real surviving companies. And so I'm watching this play out and I'm like, I do not trust myself to get the timing right. I do not want to be over invested in AI. I don't want to be overinvested even in the US though right now I probably am. And so all of that is like to me so self evident a pattern. And by the way, we're now getting the early data that yeah, this is really playing out like that in terms of look at the revenue going into the AI industry is so much slower than what the debt would tell you it needs to be at this moment. So again, historical parallel. This is exactly what happens with all of These new major, real technologies that come on board, they always go through this. And so the revenue is not coming in as fast as you'd like. Also, corporations are now starting to back out. Also, corporations are getting paranoid. The whole Alex Karp rant about, wait, are these companies just basically absorbing my business model through the things that I give to them? Exactly. And so now it's like, they're gonna want to lean on these Chinese models that are coming out that are open source. There's potential drama there, but just follow the logic. So they're like, wait, I can actually reduce my cost dramatically. So hold on, you're telling me that we have an industry that needs big revenues right now way faster than they're getting them, and people are already spending less than expected and they're trying to optimize to spend dramatically less. It's like, as a consumer, this is great. Just kill the first generation of investors. Don't care. Give me the 20 year build to the greatest technology the world has ever seen that's going to totally transform the world. But the gap between even my own analysis at the beginning of this was like, yo, this is going to happen so fast, it's going to eat everything. This is going way faster than I ever could have imagined. And then you start going, actually, I still believe this is all playing out, but I'm not as confident about the timeline assessment. And then you start looking at the historical example and you're like, yeah, it's probably better to bet against it happening in the right period. By bet against, I mean in words. I am not shorting the market. Fuck that. I do not trust my read on this nearly enough for that. But that the intellectual humility as a bet against AI I think is very wise. Rather than saying, oh, this is going to be everything. We're hitting pause for a moment, but there's plenty more ahead, so don't go anywhere.

[Drew]

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[Tom Bilyeu]

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Drew]

We shall see. This is one of Those things that I'm really interested at how it plays out because to your point, so many things are interconnected because we have a debts, a debt time bomb that's happening. We have our international crutches that we traditionally relied on Japan for financial. Israel, who now wants to just fight everybody taking us in two different directions. Russia is getting its reserves bombed, so that might re reshuffle the entire I get my oil from, like, deck. Like, there's so many things being stacked up right now that one thing breaking one way can just cause, like a domino effect. So, yeah, I'm curious to see how it all plays out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I mean, there's real potential for a contagion effect here. So, yeah, I mean, it's. It's all eyes on this stuff, but everything is so destabilized right now. It's really unnerving. And the really interesting thing, I want everybody to remember what Covid felt like. And I remember somebody saying at the time, this is impacting the kids more than you think. And I remember thinking, I don't know about that, man. Like, if you can't see the effects right now, what are, what are the odds that it has, like some long and lingering effect? But now seeing how what's happening in Japan is actually Covid related, I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. So this is years later, it's finally working its way. The wolves are finally eating the first people at the edge of the forest. And you're like, holy shit, the kid was right. There really were wolves hiding there. But it's taken years for it to play out. And so there are these long tail, knock on effects that I don't think people are being realistic about. And so when I look at all of this instability, I was pretty nonchalant about what was going on in Russia. I'm now thinking that's a big mistake. And so it's like that's going to, I think, be a bigger deal than we want to think up to and including, does Putin get backed into a corner and lash out. It is very interesting watching the rhetoric coming out of Zelensky. Zelinsky is always pulling his punches, which I give him a ton of credit for. He's trying not to be provocative to Russia, despite the fact that they're bombing the shit out of them every night. He keeps saying, hey, let's get to the negotiating table. We're killing this many Russians. We do not want to be doing this. This is not a source of pride. We would very much like to stop. And you could say that he's bullshitting and that that's not really true. My bet is that is true and he would very much like to have a negotiation, redraw borders in some sort of sensible place and be done with the aggression. I think he's going to be pretty aggro about getting into NATO for reasons that I think will be self evident. I'm sure Russia is going to be completely opposed to that. But nonetheless, man, when you look at that and you see that it's this completely destabilized thing, they're killing 30000 people just on the Russian side. Forget what's happening on the Ukrainian side. Russians are losing 30000 troops a month. So, yeah, anyway, it's crazy. You still got everything going on with Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Hamas, like all of that has to chose. I don't know what you mean by that. I mean, I think I do, but

[Drew]

Israel just built some for palace. Oh, I'm sorry. It's a resettlement colony because we love the Palestinians.

[Tom Bilyeu]

We're going to get into this. We should probably make that a separate segment, but flag planted. So that'll be fun. Drew and I will be able to collide on that. So, yes, a lot of destabilization. The Iran war, as you very aptly said, is not going anywhere anytime soon. The US is on, by my estimation. Take that for what it's worth. But we started a 10 year ticking clock nine years ago. I mean, honestly, the clock has been ticking for a lot longer than that. You can just look at the M2 money supply to see the problem, but that clock is ticking. We're now at nine years by my estimate. If nothing changes, you are going to have a crisis within that window. That crisis will be gigantic. And when the crisis happens, I know some people think that they're going to be fine. They're not going to be fine. That is an everybody gets poor kind of situation. It's happened before, so you don't have to reach too far back into history to understand how devastating this shit can be. And I know the people like Marxists think, yeah, that's what we need. We need a revolution. We need to overturn the table, bro. It's not fun to live through, least of all for the people with the least resources. So yeah, no bueno.

[Drew]

All right, we need to talk about Graham Platner and how Democrats are moving to distance itself after allegations came out. I find this story very, very interesting. And I think that the faux outrage that I'm seeing from both Sides is very telling because now, all of a sudden, we care about sexual assault allegations.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't love topics like this because it really does sound so partisan, no matter how you approach it. So I'm going to do my best to lay out what's going on in a way that will help people draw their own conclusions as to what's going on. Don't just drop. Don't just adopt my mental model. So it goes something like this. Politics is the ugliest game in the universe. And Graham Platner is the latest example of how politicians do not steer by morals at all. They steer by power. Once you understand that all politicians want is to gain and retain power, then the way that they behave is going to make perfect sense to you. This is not a thing unique to the Democrats. They just happen to be the ones that are in the middle of it right now. So Trump had very credible allegations made against him. Whether you believe they ended up being true or not, they needed to be taken seriously. He had very credible allegations of rape. He had credible allegations of sexual assault, obviously impropriety. So you've got that guy, becomes president, then you've got Graham Platner, who's being abandoned. And so the question becomes, given that they knew he had a Nazi tattoo, he had credible allegations of certainly sexual impropriety, perhaps being too rough. I'm not sure what we would if we're going to say sexual assault anyway, very credible allegations that this guy was not what would meet my definition of a quote, unquote, good person. The Democrats were still willing to get behind him in the same way that the Republicans were willing to get behind Trump. And so what I believe Drew is getting at is, like, for the love of God, if you're going to be morally outraged about Graham Platner, then you better be morally outraged about Trump. I think that's a very reasonable read. And I will just say that we long ago passed morality tests for our candidates for office. And I remember I lived through when it was like, dude, the turmoil that Clinton went through with having potentially smoked a joint, man, it was insane, because it was just like, yo, if this guy could do an illegal drug, then, like, he just can't be trusted. He's not a moral person. Bad, bad, bad. And he had to convince everybody that, okay, yes, they passed me the joint, but I didn't inhale. And I remember thinking, wow, like, people really care about this stuff. That's wild. And so now to be where we're at, where you've got a guy on the mic saying, grab him in the. I just still can't believe that was recorded and he got elected. But nonetheless it happened. So that, to me, is a fascinating example of where we're at as a society that just. It. It. I won't say it doesn't matter because it's certainly a cudgel that each side will use against the other. And by the way, the second the Democrats can use something like this against a Republican, they will do it as if they did not go to bat. I think it was Senator Warren that said, this is my kind of man, referring to Graham Platner. So morality doesn't enter into it. It never entered into it. It was always about power. Morality was only used as a cudgel when it was an effective way to gain power. Please. You will eternally be confused by politicians if you map them against anything other than what do I need to do to gain and retain power? So that, to me, is what's going on with Graham Platner. Now. Is there any love lost for me that a guy with a Nazi tattoo is going down? No, there is not. But I think it's important to understand that the reason that he's going down now is not because, oh, there was finally a credible claim made against him. It was that in the mind of the public, there were enough claims made against him that people turned against him and he was losing in the polls. And that strikes me as far more realistic that any political group will put up with anything as long as they're polling well. And what you're seeing now is just they no longer believe he can win. And since they don't believe he can win now, they're going to abandon him. It's grotesque. And boy, do I hope that we go back in the other direction where it's like we actually really do give a shit about the morality of our candidates. This is a populism problem. I did a whole deep dive about what populism is, how it bites you in the ass, how it will just make everything worse. We are smack bang in the middle of a populist moment. Watch that video. It is just, I think, going to give people insights into why this kind of thing is so, like, yeah, no big deal. All these things leading up to this moment and then all of a sudden they turn on him because he's not winning in the polls. So, yeah, it's gross. It's real. It is happening on both sides. It is the nature of politics. And that's why politics really is the ugliest game. In the world.

[Drew]

So facto to that, let's talk about Japan now, because let's, we're not, we're not, we're not moral, we care about money. So let's talk about our money. And right now, Japan is dumping aggressively foreign bonds. Break it down for us, Tom.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Japan continues to be a looming threat in the global economy. It is like a slow motion shot of Godzilla just breaking the surface of the water as it charges towards the shore. And as the water's like doming and you're like, what's coming? It's hard to tell how big the thing is, but you know, it isn't small. The bank of Japan has a board member that just told the markets to brace for impact. Naoki Tomura has encouraged the bank of Japan to keep hiking rates towards 2%. That would be double where we're at today. And if inflation continues to intensify, which given what's going on in Iran, it's going to, the pace of the hikes should accelerate. And this is a quote from her without hesitation. So she is saying, stomp on the gas of these rate hikes, which if you do not understand how the global economy is structured right now, you may not get what a big deal that is. Japan, like 30 years ago made a sort of Faustian bargain, a deal with the devil where it was like, all right, we're going to basically do anything and everything that we can to stimulate our economy by holding rates artificially low. We're going to let there be, I mean, at one point, what was there like a 4 or 5% gap between the price you could borrow money from the bank of Japan and the price that the Fed was setting in the US that is insane. That creates this ultimate arbitrage to the point we've got Jay Z rapping about the yen that he handles. Okay, what he's talking about is the carry trade. I can go get money for cheap in Japan and then I can put it to work anywhere where I can get a better return than the effectively 1 or 2% that I might have to pay there, man. Right now if you're investing wisely, you're going to be, you can be pushing like 13% on certain asset classes more if you're really willing to go out on the risk profile. So let's call seven just like dead simple. So now you've got a five point spread between the two that you're paying on your yen and the seven that you're getting in the US markets like God damn. So people are doing that like crazy. That just created a flood of liquidity into global markets. Now the US has been the primary beneficiary and that has kept us going through really a period of stagnation where the growth stocks that we've would normally count on weren't really growing that much. You had obviously the Magnificent Seven, but that was kind of it. And the Magnificent Seven was largely being driven by the cheap money that people were getting from the bank of Japan. Okay, so that's like the setup. So for Japan to go basically, fuck that, now we're going to jack our rates up. Now you start seeing that window narrow where there's not so much of a spread. Now even at two points, there's still a spread to where we're at, but it's getting more narrow. More and more people are going to get paranoid and it's going to start to suck that easy money out of the liquidity of the global markets. And that would be brutal for anybody that's still riding the yen carry trade and anyone that's expecting AI to just continue to get funded to high heaven. And between those things, that's a lot of people. And it is certainly going to impact Japan's ability to hold U.S. treasuries. I believe Japan is still the single largest holder of U.S. treasuries.

[Drew]

Okay?

[Tom Bilyeu]

They own a lot. Like a lot a lot. And if they continue to sell, which they are doing now to try to support the yen, because it is falling like a rock compared to the dollar. So the dollar is getting stronger, ironically, as inflation goes up, which by the way, remember Trump doesn't want that. Trump wants a weaker dollar. This is where it gets complicated and where boys, I will trust that you will ask questions if Chat gets confused, confused about how these things go. Because this shit is complicated. When you start really getting into the weeds, a lot of it's very counterintuitive, but the dollar is getting stronger, which is bad for the yen. Great if you hold dollars, but it's bad if you have to refinance your debt, which is what the US has to do. It's bad if you want to stimulate the US economy, but nonetheless, that's where we're at. And so that's going to put the bank of Japan in a situation where they've got to get rid of their US debt. Now the US debt, I don't know if it's at all time lows, but it's at like regional psychotic lows in terms of how much of our debt is being held by foreign central banks. Okay, for a long time, foreign central banks used US Debt like gold. Now they're using gold as gold. And so that is for the first time, I think it happened in 2025. For the first time in a long time, you've got the primary reserve asset being held by central banks as a way to backstop their currency, not US Debt, it's gold. So that shift is happening. We're in talk when we get into China. Oh, baby, we're really going to talk about this. So we're going to be doing, by the way, we're going long today, boys and girls. Anybody that wants to stay with us, we're going to go real deep on China here at the end today, in into our third hour. So stay with us for that. But that is where all of this stuff starts to really get dicey for people trying to navigate their way through all of this. Because if the US can't count on these foreign investors to soak up the appetite for their debt, then guess what has to step in to buy it? The Fed. Now guess how the Fed is going to buy debt that nobody else wants. They're going to print money. Now guess what printing money does causes inflation. We're already at 4%. Okay, we've got the on again, off again war, which is click back into the on position. And now if Japan can't keep holding their debt and they're in a selling mode and other federal or other central banks have decided they're not into the game of buying US Debt anymore and many of them are also selling, now you're in a position where you're going to have to turn back on money printing in a very serious way and that's going to drive inflation further layer. On top of that, the In Carry trademark is being fueled or sorry, is fueling global liquidity and has been for decades. And couple that with the shakiness in the AI markets and now you've really got like a looming set of shocks that may converge all at once into a rogue wave of shocks that can be very destabilizing for the global markets. Now, going back to this idea of the boy who cried wolf, I cannot tell you what the timing is going to be on this. Is it going to hold out for another year, five years? Does it go 10 years? I mean, at some point, just mathematically it is going to break. But the fact that it's moving as rapidly as it's moving now, and you've got members of the bank of Japan just straight saying, listen, you've got to deal with the inflation. Like, we had almost 30 years of effectively zero inflation. And so now because of COVID it's really started now it's being exacerbated by what's going on in the, in Iran, the war in Iran. And so this is all putting the yen in this, like, horrible situation. And so the yen hit 162.84 yen to the dollar. That's the weakest since 1986. Japan has recently, like, really recently spent a record 11.7 trillion yen, that's $72 billion defending their currency in April and May. But it hasn't successfully stopped the bleeding. So when you've got the bank of Japan being like, yeah, this isn't working, we're going to have to be prepared to just go and crank these rates up. You've now got investors talking about something that would have been just absolutely unthinkable two years ago. And that's 200 yen to the dollar. You've got Minex's Jesper Cole and Blue Edge Advisors both saying that 200 yen to the dollar is very possible if the bank of Japan keep struggling to get this under control. Now, according to Reuters, Japan's Ministry of Finance has gone silent and doesn't plan to continue telegraphing what their moves are going to be. Now, for anybody paying attention, guess who else has said, ah, we're going to stop telegraphing, at least to the degree that we have been. Kevin Warsh, the new US Fed chair. So you've got two very systemically important banks saying, we don't like the way that you guys are responding to everything that we say. Japan's really got their eyes on people trying to short the yen. So now those two banks are like, we're going to use something that's basically like an ambush strategy. And an ambush strategy is where they intervene, but they don't tell you it's coming, they don't warn you. And they're trying to catch those yen short sellers, in Japan's case, off guard so that they can stop them from exacerbating the risk. So this is this. We're going into a very unusual time when our own Fed is trying to remove the dot plot. Warsh refused to give his own dot. There's still whatever, 17, 18 other dots that we're getting. But he's trying to say fewer words, which he literally did in the last update. He's trying to give fewer indications on where things are going. And Japan obviously has a reason to do the same. So now you can have investors basically Guessing, which is going to make them less predictable doesn't mean that the markets are going to be more or less stable, but it does mean it'll be harder to read what investors are going to do. And so that makes it harder for the average person to know how to position themselves, which just puts us in a very weird position. Now, like I was saying before, Japan's rate gap against the Fed right now I think is still about 3 points. So we still have some cushion before the yen carry trade unwinds purely mechanistically. Right now, people are doing it by choice, but there will come a day where it's just, it will have to unwind because people will be losing money by holding yen. So this is going to become ultimately a question of whether or not Japan can get the situation under control before that cushion runs out. And man, I don't know that there's any way to see that super clearly. So once again, approach the markets with humility, with a very large degree of paranoia. But as I say, in business, only the paranoid survive. That is doubly true in investing.

[Drew]

Okay, I got a pitch.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Let's go.

[Drew]

I went down a Twitter rabbit hole. This idea might work. This is how we fix the stock market. This is how we avoid the Roman collapse that everybody wants to happen. This is how we like free us from our debt. This is from Eric Bakunas. I published a note today that I've been thinking about for months, about how the US Stock market has arguably become too big and too imp to fail. We know what those words mean. It's basically America's retirement fund now. And plus even the savior of Social Security, which is expected to run out in less than 10 years. Everybody wants us to shift Social Security to the stock market, making 401ks instead. Currently, 55% of people own stocks, by far the most in the world. And Trump accounts bringing in 28 million additional Americans into stock market ownership. The vast majority of people, including the top 1% who own half the stock market. Middle class, lower income. We now have a financial interest in the health of the stock market. And they're all voters. I say all this to say the Fed, instead of buying debt, what if it starts buying ETFs? The stock market's already propped up. We already all on fire. We might as well have the treasury get in on this.

[Tom Bilyeu]

They're already doing that. So this was a big part of 2008 was just going, this company's going to live, that company's going to die. They went in and swooped up a bunch of their debt. So yeah, it's, I'm talking guaranteed ETF. Well, they buy ETFs. I don't know. I won't make a prognostication about that. But I know that they will pick winners and losers. I know that they will manipulate the market. That is a guarantee. Now the reality is you only have two choices. Choice number one, you get rid of the central bank. I love it, I'm here for it. And if we have a sensible path to doing that, I would legitimately be thrilled.

[Drew]

Choice number two, can we talk through those choices? Oh, I'll let you list. I want to talk through what that actually means though. Like we talk about it, but let's go to the ramifications of it.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But yeah, choice number two would be that you have to get every American in the stock market in a very meaningful way. Those are your only two options because you have to get them into assets. Let me say it in a, in a more truthful way. Now, will the government ever back something that isn't just us? Probably not. So they're going to get you in the US Stock market, but you have to do that. Anything else is truly sinister. And the wealth transfer from the middle and working class to the wealthy happens because you have a central bank. But the vast majority of people, because that stat that he gave is so misleading. The vast majority of people don't have any meaningful amount of wealth in the stock market. And so you've got to get them a meaningful amount of wealth so that it's like, oh, this is real. And without that, you're just going to continue to bleed them dry and you're going to continue the K shaped economy and everybody's going to be like losing their minds. Now show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome. If every American is bought in literally by using tax dollars and donations to get kids from birth, which is the Trump account, I'm sure many people hate that it's his name on it. But I don't give a. Like you've got people like the Dell family donating billions of dollars just to American kids. And so now all this, and doing it, by the way, in a way that sort of teaches them financial literacy but certainly ties them to America, they now own a piece of the American economy in a very real way. That one to me is, is an unmitigated good because now they care as long as you don't have them investing in specific companies and you treat it like the s and P500 where it's a qualification, it is a set of sensible things that they must do. Have been a company for so long, be profitable things like what The S&P 500 does. And then you just say, you don't need to care which companies are in this, just that companies in America are thriving such that your net worth is going up. Now at least as the central bank steals from everybody, it's also giving back to the poor. To every kid in America that has a Trump account. They all so like when we say, oh, the poor get poor and the rich get richer. Now it would be, if you don't own assets, you're fucked. But if you do, everybody's boat rises up. Now it puts them in a position where if, when they turn 18, they start taking that money and doing dumb with it, now you've got a problem. And so that's one thing that people are worried about is just the smart money is going to fucking rob these kids blind. So it's like an 18 year delayed theft from the people that know how to play the game against people that don't know how to play the game game. And that one, I take a principled stand. I just become absolutely irate when people are like, this is a nanny state and people should turn to the government for everything. You give them the chance, you make it tied to. There are certain things that they can take it out for and certain things that they can't. And the things that I've seen them put forward are like, you can start a business, I think, pay for medical bills, like there were a few things where it's like, you could take the money out as of 18 to pay for those things, but the goal should be to get them to hold and this is their retirement account. Because there's never been a time where there's been a 20 year period where you weren't positive. So if you give it to kids when they're young and then they hold it to when they're 65, like, holy shit, this should be worth an insane amount of money. And again, show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome. If all Americans are in a position where it's like, yo, I need American companies to do well, you would have looked at the World Trade Organization, been like, fuck you, no way. There's no universe. I'm not letting you outsource all of our jobs and weaken our companies, like, no, no, no, like we're not playing that game. So you're going to do things that are good for American companies. So that is a great place to be where you're making people very invested in what's going on in America.

[Drew]

But this is the ultimate play for Social Security. We're just going to stop throwing it into the Social Security fund, giving it to the government, and instead putting it in the stock market.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And I mean, you know, that's way better use for it.

[Drew]

Way. I mean, the boomers are cashing in on the check and they don't think so because they're guaranteed till their death. It's the young people who are going to get screwed because then now we're.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Wait, wait, wait. So you think young people are screwed by the by, I think young people

[Drew]

are screwed because I've been paying Social Security into all this time for something that I'm not going to benefit from. So if my total contributions to Social Security are now going to be rolled into a 401k, oh, I love it the most. But that's not going to happen. It's going to be like, sorry, guys, starting now, all Social Security disbursements are going into this 401k. So the 30 something years of working history I have, none of that gets allocated. None of that gets compounded. None of that gets a 7% interest play. So the people that are in the middle of the flip switch, they're going to get screwed.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But, well, so I would say it a slightly different way. What I would say is the Trump accounts don't protect those people who need a solution. But the solution is you're going to run out of money in Social Security. So now when you look at Social Security, it's like, okay, how do we want to solve this problem? I can't take anybody seriously that doesn't start with, we're going to balance the budget. Then as a part of balancing the budget, do things like extend the retirement age. Love that. If we need to reduce benefits somewhat so that we make sure that it isn't going to run out of money. I love that if we want to focus on growth, to make sure that we have more raw tax dollars so that we can make sure that people are, are going to be taken care of. I love that. But if you don't start by balancing the budget, you just keep doing the same thing. You are stealing from everybody, you are making them poorer and you are only giving back to people who own assets. And so that group of people will just continue to get hammered. So for them, it's like if you actually want to solve the problem, you want to be voting for things that do the things that I just said so that stop the bleeding in terms of unbalanced budgets, that reduce the bleed out of the system, given that we're now a column and not a pyramid. And so that's going to be very important. But you it that doesn't make the Trump accounts a bad thing. That is such a net positive. And you want to start that now so that it starts paying off in, you know, 18 years from now. And then the real payout being when the kids that are born today go to retire. And it's like the first thing where we're planning so far out into the future. I love it. Like, that could really, really be a win without taking away from the fact that, yes, you're pointing to another thing that we have to solve, but you're going to solve that almost certainly by different means.

[Drew]

Because I think that there's two things that are true. Something that happened historically is if something happens is a quote from the Alchemist. If something happens, it's never going to happen again or it's going to happen repeatedly. We're going to keep deficit spending. It happened before, it's going to happen again. It's going to happen in the future. I haven't found a politician yet that has talked about austerity. Yeah. So now that we know that this is going to happen, how do we solve it? Central Bank. I don't think the Central bank is leaving anymore. America likes being the boss and telling other people what to do. So we do that by throwing money in their faces. So we're not going to give up that power either. So Central Bank's not going away. We're not balancing the budget. Next thing, Trumpet cap. I love it the most. Three of my family members signed up. I got a new guy, I got a new nephew, and Lynn has two more siblings. They're both all Trump accounts. They're going to be rich when they're 18.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Did you get one for. You got one for Lynn?

[Drew]

No, Lynn's. She doesn't count.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yes, she does. I think if they're under 18, they count under 18. Look it up.

[Drew]

Under 18, they can start one. I have to invest in it, but I already have like a 529.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But they don't. They won't put anything.

[Drew]

The thousand dollars only for the babies.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Got it. So she gets the tax breaks.

[Drew]

She gets the tax breaks and the accounts creation benefit, but she doesn't get the actual. The disbursement. I'm not beefing on that, though. I get a free 401k. I don't got to pay for it. I'll take it again. I'm not mad at this. I just know that the next thing is going to be like, okay, how do we fix Social Security? Well, the Trump accounts are going so well. Why don't we try with. And I think that's going to be an interesting conversation that we're going to

[Tom Bilyeu]

have to figure out in terms of how we fix Social Security because they're

[Drew]

going to, I think Trump accounts are going to be the plan of like Trump accounts have worked in two, three years. They're going to look back and they're going to say, okay, X amount of people signed up, they had this money. When they started the stock market went, they now have Y amount of money, they grew up 30, 13%. This is great for everybody. This is better than Social Security. Let's get everybody on there. And then.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which is all true.

[Drew]

The disbursement is going to be the problem. That's going to be the next issue that we're going to see. Just like the straight home.

[Tom Bilyeu]

When you say when they take the money out, is that what you mean by disbursement?

[Drew]

When the. How they're going to convert people from Social Security's current system to the Trump account for adult system.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't buy that argument. So I don't think that they're going to try to do that for the, for the kids, sure, maybe. But that doesn't help with the, the core group. It is a better answer in my term. It is a better answer for the young people today.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

The people that are already outside of that system, what are we going to do about them? So going back to where you started, we're not going to get rid of the central bank. That's almost certainly true. We're not going to balance a budget. That is almost certainly false. We are going to balance the budget. The budget will be balanced. Balanced, I guarantee it. And it will be balanced because there will be no money, no appetite for our debt. And that's my nine year clock. And at that point they won't be able to raise the money. And so their only two choices are going to be to hyper inflate or balance the budget. And at that point they'll be forced. And that's the thing I can't seem to get people to understand. There's a mechanism you're going to run up against. This is not me like saying, oh, there's a moral, moral reason why we're gonna have a crisis in nine years. No you're, you're going to hit a mechanistic thing where if people don't buy your debt, the only thing you can do is print. And if you need $2 trillion a year like we do now, you can't print that much money without hyper inflating your currency. So because the reality is when we have a 2 trillion dollar deficit, we're not just printing all of that. If we did, we'd already have the hyper inflation. It's that we're able to sell a huge, huge, the vast majority of that people buy up for us and then there's small amount. It's like $40 billion a month right now. Not saying that's trivial. I'm just saying compared to $2 trillion, it's trivial. So you've got that reality looming on the horizon and you also have the just debt repayment, which man, do we even make it nine years? But let's just assume that we do that there's just plenty of interventions and we slow it down enough and we really do get to nine years. But yeah, that is, that will force a balancing of the budget, but it will force it in a way that will be so traumatic that I don't imagine we get away without bloodshed.

[Drew]

Internally, there are some criticism of the Trump accounts because some people are saying, hey guys, this is free money to the taxpayer. And I thought we didn't want to give away free money because I thought that was socialist.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is free money to the taxpayer. I don't understand that statement.

[Drew]

Trump accounts, I'm giving $1,000.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Taxpayers are funding the free money.

[Drew]

We're paying it ourselves.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Well, I think that, I think people are confused. 50% of Americans don't pay tax. They pay 3%, but it's nothing. So this is now going from they

[Drew]

don't pay income tax because I feel like we still, we minimize sales taxes.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Very fair point.

[Drew]

So the most like, yes, okay, let me restart this. I thought giving free money away to the citizens were bad and that was socialist. Communists were going to start eating babies and now we're giving $1,000 to every kid and we're high fiving and saying we solve the future.

[Tom Bilyeu]

This is amazing. Okay, if this is sincere pushback, there

[Drew]

is people calling it socialism. I'm being like, okay, sure.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So if we want to say that every dollar in tax is wealth redistribution, which is a very reasonable thing to say, I don't know anybody maybe other than Michael Malice that believes the answer is zero tax. And so if you want to say, okay, like a Black belt. There are 9 degrees of socialism and Mamdani is a 9th Dan black belt and I am a 3rd ranked black belt. Okay, sure. Because yes, I'm not looking for zero percent government. I'm looking for a mechanistic solution to our problems. One of our problems is that because we have a central bank and because our politicians are unhinged, because we vote for it, but because of all of that, we steal from everybody and we only give back to the mechanism, only gives back to people that own assets. And so therefore must get people owning assets. I don't have a problem with that. Where I have a problem is where people don't recognize that the prosperity engine is capitalism. And every free markets, more aptly every degree you move away from that is a distortion that causes problems. And so there's for instance, when you eat, you're running cycles in your body. And the reason that you can freeze somebody and for like 90 minutes or whatever, and you can unthaw them and they actually survive. And it's like how the is that possible? It's possible because you stop the body's metabolism. When you stop the metabolism, the cells can't degrade. So when you eat, you are, even if you're eating a healthy diet, you're forcing metabolism to happen. The system is degrading over time and you're aging. So is the solution don't eat? No, because you're just going to die from something else. You're going to die a hell of a lot faster. So I'm just saying you can't organize in groups this big without a government. Once you have a government, somebody has to fund the government. And so you're in a situation just like you are with food, where you have to be disciplined. You want to take some in taxes, you want to curb the free market in some ways because very powerful people that are very good at playing that game will become parasitic. And so you want to put checks against that, but those checks can go wrong. And so the reason that I think it was Franklin said you have a republic if you can keep it, is he understood what they were asking us to do was to walk this tight balancing act and where you tax a little bit but not too much, you regulate a little bit, but not too much. And so if people want to try to be right and get a gotcha and say ahaha. I knew what these motherfuckers like, they were socialists all along or these dumbasses don't realize that they're socialists like whatever thing, whatever emotional satisfaction they get from saying that, it's like, yeah, that's kindergarten schoolyard retardation. And if they want to retard Max, that's totally up to them. But I would advise against it. And I would say, look at the cause and effect. What are you saying? Anarchy. And we just. People hoard as much money as they want, and if you can get them to voluntarily interact with you, do it. Or. Or do we want to say probably good that we have defense. So now we're already taking money for collective defense. Probably do want a fire department. Yeah, that's good. Oh, but by the way, as a reminder, the only reason we have tax revenue in the fucking first place is because of free market capitalism. Creating things that people want, and that allows us to make money literally out of thin air. Whether they're seashells, glass beads, dollars, gold, doesn't matter what you use, but what you're actually doing is creating things of value in proportion to the amount of glass beads that you have. And so as long as that is working, your economy functions and it can grow literally with no limit. And the second you up that ratio, you have a problem. And I'm just saying it's very hard to stop people from up that ratio. But my solution is not zero taxes.

[Drew]

So we just need like third degree socialism and not ninth degree.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, I mean, look, if, look, that's. Guys, the problem with that is then people will go, Tom is an admitted socialist. It's like, okay, sure, like if. If we want to play games, we will get retarded prizes. And that is people have the right to do whatever they want. But that really is retard maxing. And I don't understand why people want to play that game. It's like really, really for real. So this, the number one complaint about me will go something like this, this guy's an idiot. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

[Drew]

Cool.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Which part? So I will routinely reply in the comments. And by the way, Ryan, you, I certainly check. But if you guys ever see a reply that's thoughtful, send it to me. I want to know. I want to be at the interface of cause and effect so that I can make my own life better. And it just so happens that I like being a part of a big group. And so I'm all for a nice, stable society. So I'm trying to figure out where I'm wrong. I know I'm wrong somewhere. It's just very hard to identify. So if somebody really sees it. But anyway, the, the attacks on me are almost always like that. They're not enunciating. Okay, he has this fact wrong with the exception shout out to some of our the people that do super chats. They've been phenomenal. But the more specific they can be about what they think I'm getting wrong the better. And people are almost never specific.

[Drew]

I got two things for you. One person has come out and said, okay, ask him if he thinks that owning a piece of intel is owning a piece of the means of production.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So yeah, that would be a fool's errand. The, the last thing you want to do. For the same reason that Drew does not want to see the Fed deciding what companies live and die, you don't want the government to invest in specific companies. You want them to invest in a criteria. So if a company meets this criteria, then we buy it. We buy it in these proportions. That way we don't care if a company falls off, if a new one replaces it doesn't matter to us. But the interventions that we're going to pull as a government are going to be to create the economic environment where companies can thrive and meet those criteria. That's great. And if that criteria is about innovation, US dominance, things like growth, life expectancy, extension, I mean there's, we can put together a group of things that we like really care about. We really want to see companies that meet that. You want to keep that list as light as fucking possible because it will get abused. Just look at the anti fat stuff that people did that killed generations of people far too early. But anyway, so when you are doing that now you've got a chance. But when you're investing in intel specifically, you create zombie companies. And a zombie company is a company that isn't actually able to survive in the real marketplace. But you kill off competition, you either kill off competition for people, you kill off competition for capital, or both. And so that's where you run into trouble. That's exactly what Japan did. That's why they're now just absolutely riddled with zombie companies. That's what is going to increasingly happen under Trump, who seems hell bent to invest in specific companies, which is fucking stupid. He needs to stop immediately. Yeah, that one's dumb. No matter who does it, no matter what company they invest in, don't do it for SpaceX AI, that would be really dumb. Don't do it for Amazon. These are great companies, but don't do it for them, that'd be really dumb. Don't do it for intel where they are doing it. So I get There are going to be industries that we want to make sure are able to thrive in America. Manufacturing being the most obvious. But you still don't want to invest in specific companies. That doesn't mean you don't make grants available and people don't take advantage of those grants. Someone, that's why you made the grant available. Someone is going to take advantage of that. But that grant needs to be available to anybody. And then whoever wins, wins. But yeah, you want to avoid picking winners because you will do it a terrible job of it.

[Drew]

I have one more for you. I guess this is a scale conversation. They're saying you spent an hour and a half on Mom Dani's speech, and then you should do like an hour and a half on handing out free money is bad and socialist, like you did with Mom Dani speech.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I don't understand why.

[Drew]

Cuz Mamdani speech, you were talking about all the bad things that can possibly happen. If this ideology exists, why do they

[Tom Bilyeu]

need the like, same amount of time?

[Drew]

I don't understand. Because it's basically like you have that same energy on one side, you need that same energy on the other side.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So on which side? So wait, they want me to do an hour and a half on Trump shouldn't invest in intel? Is that what they're saying?

[Drew]

And the free money, the free, the Trump accounts is free money and it's socialist and we need to stop paying people.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And they want to hear me talk about that, even though I'm for it, they want to hear me talk about it for an hour and a half.

[Drew]

It's one of those things where you said socialism and all these bad things. Once you start giving people money, you're going to remove the incentive. I, I think they're having a trouble differentiating the line between this is an ideology that I think leads to something bad. And then when actual policies, intel owning the means of production, Trump handing out free money, the things that actually are socialist in practice. Whereas to your own admission, Mamdani's free things haven't even made it to the budget yet. It doesn't get that same level of scrutiny. Okay, so I'm, I'm trying to read their mind. I'm.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Welcome to the the channel. It's wonderful to have a new visitor here. I've talked about this before. I gave an extended tirade as to why you're always going to get me more animated talking about somebody who's a socialist versus somebody like Trump who is trying to get the industry going. Roaring, ripping and roaring, who is making A mistake by investing in a given company, probably doing it because it holds some advantage to him somewhere. I don't see it with intel, but I'll just assume that it's there. That's bad. We should talk about it. I have talked about it. I'll put time and energy into that for sure, because it is bad regardless of who is doing it. But if you want to understand why I fear the Left more, their death toll is ideologically driven is the only way that that can terminate, has been run everywhere through all of time, and that's where it ends. They are saying aggressively, they are socialists. They want to do that. They have a litany of things that they are doing that is horrific. Then you've got over here, you've got Trump trying to create a system upon which he can be a parasite, but he's trying to create the system that works in terms of being an engine of prosperity. Now, there are things that I think that he's going to do that will make it work less efficiently. But my mental model of Trump is he wants industry to thrive. Now, if you think that Trump doesn't want industry to thrive, and he is also trying to make sure that the government controls everything, that we want to get rid of the free markets, and we want to make sure that, to use the language of socialists, we want to make sure that the workers are able to come in and take over these companies. The people that are making money are doing something intrinsically evil that billionaires shouldn't even exist. If that's your mental model of Trump, then I don't recognize that. So I'm gonna call out the things that he's doing that are going to fuck things up. I'm gonna say that nice and aggressively, but they are not the litany of ideologically driven catastrophes that I see on the left. Now, I understand that that's not gonna be everybody's cup of tea, and there are gonna be people that build a mental model. This is part of why I think that doing the show with Drew and Ryan, quite frankly, works, if you guys will grant me that as well as it does. They don't have the same mental model of the world as I do. And so they are constantly reminding me that there's another way to see this. So if you resonate with somebody that's like, yo, I just want to tell you about how bad Trump is. By the way, Destiny, I think, is phenomenal at this. So Destiny is very smart. I think he's very sincere. I disagree with him on the vast majority of his views. But I'm very glad that the world has him and that you can go because he is way more afraid of the right than he is of the left, and I'm way more afraid of the left than I am of the right. So, yeah, you're never. I'm not going to fake the level of fear that I have, but I think it's very reasonable of you at home to go, I got to balance this out with somebody that's as afraid of the right. That seems very reasonable to me. And my advice to you is then build your own mental model. What meaning? Be able to say it to yourself. What are the base assumptions? Like what I just walked you through with why I'm not as afraid of Trump, even though I think he does really dumb. And I would like him to immediately stop doing it. And if you give me a viable candidate that is better than him, I will vote for them in a fucking second versus my thinking on the left. And I will keep articulating it. I think you probably have a base assumption that people that speak into a microphone are swaying the world, which is very reasonable. And you're worried that we should be more afraid of the right than the left. And therefore each person needs to spend more time on that or they need to spend equal time on. Anyway, I'm going to stop there, but I don't share that base assumption. But if you can become a far more elevated human than I by combining people that view these issues very differently, Godspeed.

[Drew]

Last but not least, this is a personal thing, but I think this is something that you talk to very well. So I'm bringing it up. They said last week when we were talking about wage theft and all this other stuff, you told them to just quit their job, that their con, their county was.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I would rather say it like this. Find another job.

[Drew]

It doesn't just quit, but get another job.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah. Taking talents elsewhere.

[Drew]

They listed a bunch of reasons why they couldn't get another job. They due to restrictions in their county and their state and local politics, whatever it may be. So a lot of times it's like the market that the job market that was thriving when you were an active job seeker is a different market than we see now. We have people who have been searching for jobs for a year plus is like the norm default as been moved up. LinkedIn indeed. All these things that have tried to make that process easier, a lot of them are ghost. Jobs are not actually being filled. So the job market itself is a little bit different. And it's no longer just go to that office and give them your resume and show them how hard of a worker you are.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Brian.

[Drew]

But I know it's a.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So I've seen 2008. I was trying to start a company in 2009. So this was, like, brutal. And nonetheless, we talked about it. It was like, okay, well, we can make excuses and no one will fault us for it, or we can say, and now what? I'm gonna have to work harder. It's gonna be harder to get capital, all that stuff. But you either overcome the obstacles before you or you don't. That doesn't mean I don't have empathy for things being harder for some people than others. That is for sure true. The thing that I have the most empathy for is somebody that just doesn't have the intellect to pull it off. That is brutal. Clearly, if I had the intellect that I wanted, I'd be much farther along in life than I am. But I've been dealt the hand of cards that I've been dealt. And so my job is to figure out how, with the talents that I have, how far can I push myself? How much can I develop myself? So you're 50% hardwired, 50%, what you do with that hard wiring. And so all of us are trapped in some way by our biology. All of us are products of our time. I get all of that.

[Drew]

That.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But the reality is, if you Just because we're still in the middle of the World Cup, I'll use that as an analogy. You're on the pitch, on the World cup, and you're either going to win or lose, and no one's coming to save you. This is it. And there are excuses that you can take. I get it. And if you take them, people be like, yeah, there's just. There was no way for the US to win, for instance. Okay. Or you can look at that and go, all right, well, we didn't make it this year because we have not had a soccer culture as long as some of the Europeans, even though the best we've ever done in the World cup was 1930. And. But for whatever reason, that culture fell off. And so kids didn't grow up revering it, so they grow up training. So we don't have the right coaches, we don't have the right financial incentives to make the team what it could be, and all of that stuff. And the MLS is weak compared to the rest of the world, and so we don't have the training ground for the talent and all that. All of those Things are real, but they're also completely irrelevant. And so you either figure out a way to overcome those things, or you're forever trapped again. There's a real moment where everybody realizes their life is not going to be what they thought it was going to be, myself included. And how you react in that moment is going to determine the quality of your life.

[Drew]

Life.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If you let that be the most devastating thing that ever happened, or you just go, cool, well, I'm going to have as much fun as I can playing this game. And I will say, when I audit people's lives, they often leave a lot of optimization on the table. So I can obviously give this speech from a very dickhead place. I am actively not feeling that vibe right now. So I will just say, look, we all have the same amount of hours in the day, we all have different abilities, but Everybody can get 100 times better. And so if you're struggling to find a job, imagine pouring yourself over the next year or two into getting 100 times better at your job than you are today. The odds that you will be able to get a job go up dramatically. And when I think about how much time I put in just to understanding the economy, me, it's hours a day, seven days a week. So now it's like, I've gotten better. And if you apply that to whatever, whether you're a marketer, a salesperson, customer support, whatever, I think you'll be shocked. Basically, nobody does that. Almost nobody is trying to get better at their job. And if you just put time and energy into becoming the goat of accounting, whatever your thing is, you will be shocked at the opportunities that open up for you. As somebody that interviews all the time. I have conducted well over 1500 interviews at this point. That's a lot. It might not sound like a lot, but that's a lot. And when you really start putting the patterns together, you realize the vast majority of people come in, they can't interview for shit. They're not actually very good at their job. And that when you find somebody with even the slightest spark, it. It's like, oh, my God. So be that person. Be the one with the spark.

[Drew]

All right, we need to. I have the Trump account thing from earlier. I was going to add a qualifier because you hit all the points, but the 1000 goes in for. I don't know if y' all mentioned it specifically, but for people between born between 2025 and 2028. Yeah, yeah. Just newborns.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Thank you.

[Drew]

So, hey, bro, hit it raw. You get a thousand dollars From Trump.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Damn true, though. And we do need more kids, so let's go.

[Drew]

I just spoke to my good friend Mitch McConnell. So he's good guys. I spent 20 minutes talking to him.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Nice.

[Drew]

He says he's all good. He tells me to bring his Ricardo. He's gonna cook you some barbecue when you get back to Kentucky.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Can't wait.

[Drew]

He loves your roadside chats and he just cherishes them. Are we really doing this? Because this is kind of like the Platner thing. Like, remember when everybody was on news on cnn? What? I just talked about it. He's so sharp, yo. He memorized my aunt's birthday and he asked about my cousin's twice removed. He's the smartest person. Like, we're doing the same thing.

[Tom Bilyeu]

If he was. Well, they would just show him.

[Drew]

Or just talk to.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah, like for 20 minutes. Yeah, like put. Have him live stream for 20 minutes and then I'll believe it. Like, this shit is so wild. Politicians are a fucking mess. Yeah. I continue to love Thomas Massie when he did that thing. So tell me why you like gay porn? I was like, wait, hold.

[Drew]

What? What?

[Tom Bilyeu]

What?

[Drew]

What?

[Tom Bilyeu]

I just thought that was fucking brilliant. So Massey was trolling today with the same thing. So many people are claiming to talk to Mitch McConnell. I don't know these brain dead. Obviously, I don't have any insider information whatsoever. But the fact that they're keeping him hidden and have been for like, three weeks now.

[Drew]

Yeah.

[Tom Bilyeu]

There's something super weird that if so his wife, like, 72 hours or something after he had this heart attack or whatever it was that required cpr, he had to be resuscitate. Resuscitated. She ended up going to China to meet with, like, a VP in China. I was like, what? So that shit is crazy. If my wife did that, I would be mortified. So, yeah, I have a feeling this is just straight down the middle. They've got to keep them alive until, like, August 18th or something. I forget the exact date. But if they keep them alive until then, then there's no special election and they can just pick the candidate that they want to see in the primary and that'll be that.

[Drew]

And it's Kentucky. Thomas Massey's, like, is eligible to get that run for that seat. Yeah, they're trying to keep Massey out.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Dude, so wild. God, that'd be awesome if he got back in. Like, that would tempt me to believe in God. I was like, oh, really? Oh, really?

[Drew]

Amid just that time. Image is that time. Yeah, but that's Crazy. You need a CPR and your wife hopped on a 17 hour flight.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's wild.

[Drew]

I'm like, I can understand if she went from, like, D.C. to Kentucky to come home. Yeah, like something, but. Oh, you're going to the hospital. I'll be back in 17 hours. In three different time zones. Come on, man.

[Tom Bilyeu]

That's crazy.

[Drew]

Fixes in. I'm not going full mtg, though. She's calling her a Chinese spy. I don't know anything about his wife. I'm not going to, you know, Allegedly.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

I like electronics. I don't want nothing to blow up on me.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Right.

[Drew]

But I would say there's. When there's smoke, there's fire. So there's definitely.

[Tom Bilyeu]

It's weird. No matter what, it's weird.

[Drew]

There's some politic and happening over there. Speaking of it's weird, let's talk about these Tyler Robinson preliminary hearings.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Yeah.

[Drew]

Okay, so there's somebody in the chat who's been trolling me for like, the last, like, two. I haven't even been here. It was my daughter's birthday, guys, like, I'm sorry I can't be here every day. I'm the only one on the set with kids. Y' all don't understand my plight. So I'm not. Everybody thought I got fired on Monday. Everybody was trolling me in the chat. I'm like, this is cool. I just. I have a 15 year old. She requires a lot of attention.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Rightly so. And by the way, I could not support that more if I tried. And I have said this to you off camera, I am so grateful for you raising your child well. It's incredible. Drew's dope, so I appreciate that, man. She's here.

[Drew]

Our handshake has added another layer. I don't know if I told you guys this. Ever since she turned into a teenager, we had, like a secret handshake. Growing up, for every teenage year, we add, like, another, like, layer to it. So it was her birthday, we added a new layer. I'm excited for it. When she's 19, our handshake's gonna be like two hours. I'm so excited for it, but okay. I have to play some of these videos that we've seen online now. Preliminary hearings. They're talking through the evidence. They're trying to see what's admitted, what's not admitted. We still don't have a full breadth of knowledge. There's still a lot of things that need to be admitted, but there are just some very interesting things that the defense is Pointing out that they want to make sure is laid out on the record. This is something I think we both talked about. This is the defense talking about the decision to pave the crime scene.

[Tom Bilyeu]

I want to go back, if I can, to the scene, the scene itself, the preservation of the actual scene.

[Drew]

Where the.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Where Mr. Kirk passed. Did you all have. Have K9 dogs at any point that sniffed that area?

[Drew]

I don't know specifically that area, but

[Tom Bilyeu]

I do know that K9s were present

[Drew]

or a canine was present on the day.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But you don't know what task the K9 was given?

[Drew]

My understanding was that it may have been used in an effort to track an individual that had jumped off the roof, but I don't know for certain.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And obviously that didn't produce any results or we would have heard about that, right?

[Drew]

Yeah, not that I was made aware of.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Okay,

[Drew]

Were.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Do you know when the tent and the stuff was actually removed from the scene? I don't. I would imagine it had been at least a couple of days, if not

[Drew]

longer than that before anything was removed from the scene.

[Tom Bilyeu]

You didn't have to give permission to remove the tent.

[Drew]

Me personally? Right. No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So you're not sure when it was removed?

[Drew]

Nope.

[Tom Bilyeu]

And were you involved in the decision to pave over the dirt that was

[Drew]

under the tent at uvu? Huh. No.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Did you know that happened? Only because it was in the news.

[Drew]

All right.

[Tom Bilyeu]

But you don't know when or who ordered that?

[Drew]

Nope.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So who's that guy?

[Drew]

Lead investigator. The agent leading the investigation.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So, okay, this is all going to come out in trial. Is he with the FBI or is he with the Utah police?

[Drew]

I don't know. Let's check.

[Tom Bilyeu]

So that'll be an interesting thing because if the. They're calling him the lead investigator, if he was the lead investigator for the Utah police. But there is an FBI guy that has the answers to all this stuff. Awesome. But that. That's going to be something people need to account for. The fact that they paved over that is so insane to me. But just to go back and start at the beginning. So Tyler Robinson is doing the pretrial hearing part of what he's doing now. But the thing to me that's interesting, far more than the details that are coming out, is the conspiracy theories that are being kicked off. And we're just getting started now. Again, this. This isn't the trial. But despite that, the algorithms are like funneling people into either a. Look, there's nothing to see here. Funnel. Or it seems like dodgy funnel. And I Didn't even realize that until Drew and I. Drew was telling me what he was seeing, I was telling him what I was seeing. And I'm in the, like, there's nothing to see here camp, apparently. And Drew's like, in the, no, this is all, like, this is all fake camp. So it was pretty wild. So just as a public service announcement, remember to wildly distrust your algorithm, to constantly seek disconfirming evidence, very, very important. But this week in the. It's a five day preliminary hearing. And when they get to the actual trial, you're going to see a lot more experts. You're going to see people putting forward all the, like, data, walking people through it step by step by step. So don't think that what you're seeing in the preliminary shows, like, a lack of intensity or anything for what the prosecution is going to look like or for that matter, what the defense is going to look like. All of this is just a warm up so that the judge can assess whether there's reasonable grounds to try Tyler Robinson for the murder of Charlie Kirk. Now, people are estimating that basically the likelihood of this not going forward is essentially zero. So this is more or less perfunctory. We are going to see this trial move forward. The state's case, which represents the there's nothing to see here camp, this is exactly what it looks like. Goes something like this. Surveillance video allegedly shows Robinson arriving on campus about four hours before the shooting, returning multiple times, climbing over a railing onto a rooftop overlooking Kirk's event. You've got DNA consistent with Robinson's that was found on the rifle, the fired casing, and the towel that it was wrapped in. Prosecutors say that he confessed in a note to his roommate, who was also his romantic partner. I think everybody knows that. And he confessed again on discord. The roommate, Lance Twigs, gave a sworn recorded statement in April in exchange for limited immunity. And in that he says Robinson confessed to the killing, confessed that he hid the rifle. And he confessed that he destroyed his clothing and that he told Lawrence specifically to be silent with the police. And then there are texts back and forth that back it up. And when asked. Twig. Sorry. When Twigs was asked to Tyler Robinson, he said, you weren't the one that did it. Right. And then Robinson allegedly replied, I am. I'm sorry. And then charging documents say he further implied. Implied, though, and this is the prosecution's own words, that he further implied guilt to his own parents before surrendering. And when his parents asked him why he killed Kirk, and this is why they say it was implied because he doesn't challenge the context of the question. He doesn't say, I didn't kill him. What do you mean? He just gives an answer. And he said that Kirk was spreading too much hate. So his parents directly ask him, why did you kill him? And he gives an answer which is, he was spreading too much hate. So he didn't say to them, I killed him. But obviously it really is pretty strongly implied. The prosecution is saying that this is a slam dunk case, but the defense disagrees. They note that the initial ballistics testing on the bullet fragment that was actually pulled from Kirk's body came back inconclusive and could not be matched to the rifle. Now, this is a big part of what fueled the second shooter hypothesis. And some people are even saying that this was a staged death that's sweeping the land. On cross examination on Monday, the first officer on the scene admitted nothing found that day specifically identified Tyler Robinson as a shooter or identified any shooter, any specific person that would be the shooter. The lead investigator, David Hull, further confirmed that an unfired round was found on the report roof of a different building. He couldn't say which building, when it was found, or where that bullet is now, only that investigators believe an officer ejected it while clearing his own rifle. So these kinds of things are the type of things that are getting people going that I think are going to be cleared up when we're actually in the trial. And you have individual experts that are meant to cover very specific parts of the case. So it's like you bring in the guy that knows where that shell is now, or you bring in the guy that knows when things were cemented over, who made the decision, that kind of stuff. So I don't think we know one way or the other yet what this is all going to look like. But it is interesting that no shell casings were found on the rooftop where Tyler supposedly had his sniper's pad. But they say it was found in the gun and that bolt action rifles don't automatically eject them. But you, you can get what people are starting to put together. There is a casing found on or a bullet found on another rooftop. There isn't one in the rooftop that he was on. You sort of get what people are queuing off of. At least two other firearms apparently turned up at the scene. So going to need answers as to what that means. Then you've got that this is. This always drives me crazy. The first officer's body cam died while he was on the rooftop. Isn't that convenient. And Hull, the first, sorry, the lead investigator admitted he never interviewed two witnesses whose own rooftop video allegedly showed someone whose bill doesn't match Tyler Robinson. So why the hell would he not investigate them? Are we going to find out that somebody else did and it just wasn't him? Or are we going to find out that, oh, they didn't think that it was credible for some reason, who knows? But that's weird. Even the FBI's, and I should say it's weird given what we know now. Now in the fullness of the trial, it may not be weird at all, but it certainly, I understand why people have a hard time with that one right now. Even the FBI's DNA analyst conceded her report names Robinson only as a possible contributor, not a confirmed source. But you see these kinds of questions all the time where it's like, yes, I can't tell you that it's exactly him, but it will come down to percentages. Was this like a 98% match, which makes it highly unlikely that it's anybody else. Was this a 42% match, in which case maybe it's far more questionable. And that's the kind of stuff that when you actually get into like the fullness of the trial, you'll have people testifying specifically about percentages and what they mean and all of that, what we can take away from it. So again, this is just preliminary, so I wouldn't expect any of this stuff to. I. People that are taking this and running with it I think are going way too far. So just keep that in mind. Now, the defense also accused prosecutors of running a media tour to try to basically taint the jury pool. And the judge refused to make Robinson's roommate testify in the pre trial hearing. So that's only recorded statements because apparently hearsay is actually allowed at this stage in the trial, which I didn't realize. But hey, there you go. Robinson still hasn't entered a plea, so we don't know if he's going to say he was guilty, not guilty, don't know. I imagine they hold off on that till they get some more of the cards put on the table during the pre trial. So it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this. So again, he hasn't said one way or the other. Prosecutors are pursuing the death penalty. So obviously this is very high stakes and like I said at the beginning, the odds of this go through are basically 100%. So stay tuned, we'll cover this as we go. But there's, I don't think Anything obvious on either side was presented at trial.

[Drew]

So we'll see. We shall see, indeed. Weird way to start an investigation. I would say that.

[Tom Bilyeu]

All right, guys, that's it. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. That would be wonderful. And then for all the people that are here with us live, one more shout out to Straight Arrow News. Thank you guys so much for sponsoring today's episode. They're giving you the news, straight man. It's not biased. There's no manipulation. They're giving you coverage from across the political spectrum.

[Drew]

Download the app, y'. All.

[Tom Bilyeu]

Download it. I'm so grateful that we're seeing a resurgence of trustworthy journalism. Wouldn't that be nice? Go to s a n.com tombillew to get the unbiased truth from Straight Arrow News on all the stories that matter. All right, thank you guys all for joining us as always, and we will see you on Friday. Love you. Punches.

[Drew]

Bye.

[Tom Bilyeu]

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