How The Fed Quietly Created America's Communist Moment
A two hour Tom Bilyeu Show episode arguing that the rise of openly socialist Democrats is the downstream effect of a broken money system Bilyeu traces to the 1913 Federal Reserve and the 1971 end of the gold standard. He and co host Drew debate Zohran Mamdani and the DSA, why populism spikes when the economy hurts, who really subsidizes cheap Walmart wages, whether Trump should send the DOJ after big oil, and how the government plans to inflate away a national debt he puts above 39 trillion dollars. It closes on a long, candid argument about Muslim immigration, a Michigan flag ban, and whether America is a Christian country. The through line is Bilyeu's one rule: follow cause and effect.
Published Jun 24, 20262:02:32 video40 min readAdded Jul 5, 2026Open on YouTube →
At a glance
This is a two hour live episode of the Tom Bilyeu Show built around one central claim from host Tom Bilyeu: the rise of openly socialist candidates in the Democratic Party is not an accident of the moment but the downstream effect of a broken money system that Bilyeu traces to the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 and the end of the gold standard in 1971. Across the show he and co host Drew argue over Zohran Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America, why populism spikes when the economy hurts, who really subsidizes cheap Walmart groceries, whether Trump is right to sic the Justice Department on big oil, and how the government plans to inflate away a national debt that Bilyeu puts north of 39 trillion dollars. It closes on a long, unusually candid debate about Muslim immigration, a Michigan city council banning the pride flag, and whether America is a "Christian country." The engine underneath all of it is Bilyeu's single organizing principle, which he repeats like a mantra: follow cause and effect, and only cause and effect.
The cold open: a day of collisions
Bilyeu opens by racing through the day's headlines the way the show always does, laying out the collisions he wants to unpack. The Democratic Party, he says, "continues to be colonized by the DSA," with candidates who openly disdain the country and wipe their hands on American flags. The Strait of Hormuz is open again, but the United States, in his read, is negotiating from weakness. Trump is targeting big oil for price gouging and pointing the DOJ at it. He says Nayib Bukele claimed world leaders had long known USAID was corrupt. Gary Stevenson, of Gary's Economics, is reportedly set to advise a Labour government under Andy Burnham in the UK. The Bank of Japan is dumping foreign bonds, including US treasuries. A majority Muslim city council in Michigan voted to permanently ban the LGBTQ pride flag on public property. And on the hopeful end, he flags a "science fiction level" medical breakthrough and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind predicting a coming deluge of radical medical breakthroughs. The episode is sponsored by Plaud, an AI recorder, with code impact for ten percent off.
Then, before the first real segment, he plants the thesis the whole show hangs on. "If you want to know why the economy is broken," he says, "it all started in 1913." He tells it as folk history: the Titanic sank in 1912 and, in his telling, took down some of the wealthy men who stood against central banking, and a year later the country got a central bank in the Federal Reserve Act. Things accelerated in 1971 with the "final break from sound money," meaning Nixon closing the gold window. Since then, he argues, the machine has been "robbing from everybody and only rewarding people that own assets." The founders, he says, were so skeptical of a central bank that early charters carried a self destruct clause and expired after a set number of years, and the country simply gave up on that discipline in 1913. Deficit spend, force the Fed to print, reward asset holders, and you get the broken economy that produces the political extremism the rest of the show is about.
Figure 1. The mechanism Bilyeu blames for the whole political moment. Deficit spending forces the Federal Reserve to print, which he says inflates the assets owned by the wealthy while quietly draining the value of ordinary wages and savings. In his frame this widening gap, running since 1913 and accelerating after 1971, is the true cause of the anger that both parties are now channeling into extremes.
Mamdani's hat trick and the DSA takeover (2:40)
The first segment is the New York City primaries. Bilyeu says Zohran Mamdani "pulled off a hat trick," with three of three Mamdani backed candidates advancing, which he treats as proof the DSA is "colonizing the Democratic Party." He plays a clip of Van Jones conceding the night, saying the roof is collapsing on the Democratic establishment, that this is a battle between the establishment of Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and an insurgency led by the most exciting left wing candidates, and that "this is a new era for the Democratic Party." Bilyeu adds that New York is no longer just a power center for the establishment, it is the "power center for global economics" tilting hard to the insurgency.
He runs down the results as he understands them: Brad Lander knocking off a two term incumbent, a candidate taking out five term incumbent Adriano Espaillat, and Claire Valdez taking an open seat, for a clean sweep he tallies as three for three. One of the winners, he says, literally calls herself a communist and once bragged about wiping her fingers on an American flag for lack of a napkin, tweets she has since deleted. These, he stresses, were not long shots in red territory but "the safest Democratic seats in the country," which is exactly why he reads the result as a signal about who is winning inside the party.
His warning is that geography is not destiny. If New York keeps electing candidates moving in this direction, he predicts, the money leaves. He points to big banks already moving operations to Texas and lands on a line he returns to all show: "Money will go where it is respected. Period." The city can believe it is impervious, he says, but companies "follow the money," cool cities or not.
How a party radicalizes: 2009 to MAGA to DSA (10:20)
Drew reframes the story as a natural political swing. In 2009, he says, the Republican Party was a party of conservatives like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, with no Tea Party and no MAGA. After losing to Obama, the base swung right, became the Tea Party, and then the Tea Party became the MAGA movement under Trump, each iteration clicking one notch further right. Now, Drew argues, the Democrats have "beaten the bed" three elections running and their own anti establishment wing is telling Schumer, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton they are not listening, so the energy moves further left. To him the DSA wave is the mirror image of the MAGA wave, as predictable as an incumbent president losing the midterms.
Bilyeu says Drew has the cause and effect slightly backwards, and he lays out his model of populism. You break the economy, people cannot make ends meet, that produces anxiety, and the human brain converts anxiety into something that feels better, which is anger. That anger, he says, "is populism," which he defines as reasoning emotionally rather than reasoning through consequences. Because both sides feel economically insecure, both sides transmute that into rage and rush to the safety of a team, and the team then pulls them to the extreme, because whoever says the words that get the cheer keeps saying those words even when they are lunatic. He describes his own position, planted in the middle of the road, as the dangerous one, with no politically powerful friends coming to his aid. He notes that Eric Trump once agreed to come on the show, that Bilyeu hosted and interviewed him at an event with some questions off limits, and that the promised appearance never happened, his shorthand for how neither side claims him.
The stakes, in his framing, are existential. "The only way for us to survive as a country is to find our way back to the middle," he says, then concedes the ugly possibility that a party may have to go extreme, take over, and only then be pulled back. He argues the left is the more economically dangerous extreme because socialism and communism break the economy, and he calls the modern left "an ideology of resentment" that dies if you strip the resentment out. Drew pushes back: "I don't think the left dies. I think communism might die." Bilyeu accepts the correction and says he is really describing where the energy of the left is headed. He balances the ledger by naming the right's failure mode too: xenophobia. Each temperament, he argues, is something a society evolved to trust for a reason, the right to guard the borders and enforce order, the left to welcome, connect, and show empathy.
He builds this out through a clip of John C. Reilly marveling that we now have to tell people to be loving and kind, and insisting empathy is "a superpower," not a trap, against the Elon Musk line about the "empathy trap." Bilyeu says both are right: empathy is a superpower and it will be used against you. His worry is that people on the left with no mental model for malevolence get "parasitized," and he offers the grim example of a woman who set out to prove Muslim countries were as safe as anywhere, cycled through Afghanistan, and was raped and murdered, his illustration that it takes only a small number of predators to exploit undefended trust.
That leads to his sociopath argument. Societies need their sociopaths, he says, but on the front line and kept in check. He recounts a Joe Rogan clip in which a soldier, unbothered, said that if seven Taliban pursued him he would turn and kill them all, and claimed to have stopped counting kills at a hundred, contrasted with the terror of the Lone Survivor story. You need those "dead shark eyes" people on the wall to protect you from the malevolence of other men, he argues, and the whole game is aiming your weapons at the enemy rather than at your own people. The failure of a long, stable, peaceful society, in his view, is that almost nobody alive has actually made contact with malevolence, so they no longer believe it exists.
Storing calories on other bodies: the socialism argument
Prompted by the news that Gary Stevenson may advise a UK Labour government, Bilyeu unspools his favorite analogy for socialism. Imagine a morbidly obese person who keeps insisting the solution is more calories. That, he says, is the tax. "The UK does not have a revenue problem. They have a spending problem," and the same is true of the United States. The deep root, which Drew prompts him to explain, is that before refrigeration the only way to store surplus calories was on other people's bodies: I kill a wildebeest I cannot finish, I give you some, and I trust you to feed me when your hunt goes well and mine goes badly. That reciprocity, he argues, is the brilliant strategy that lets humans cooperate in large groups, and religion later hijacked the same wiring so strangers who share a symbol can instantly recognize each other as in group and cooperate across tribes and nations. He credits it for why the United States assimilated largely Catholic immigrants from Mexico and South America with relatively little friction, and why he expects far more friction around Muslim immigration.
The abuse comes when you no longer need to store calories on anyone, but the impulse to give keeps firing. That produces the freeloader problem, which he calls barnacles: enough of them build up on the turtle and the turtle drowns. Drew jokes, "I thought those were regulations," and Bilyeu allows both. To make the point about handouts he plays a viral clip arguing you should take Musk's roughly one trillion dollars to solve world hunger, which answers itself: Africa has received trillions in foreign aid since 1960, the United States already spends about 1.3 trillion dollars a year on education, America has spent more than 22 trillion dollars fighting poverty, and if you had to bet on who could solve a major problem you would pick "the guy landing rockets backwards" over the government. Money alone, Bilyeu argues, does not fix things. Rich kids implode, discipline is what actually helps, and he ties it to AI: the emerging literature suggests that if you offload all your thinking to the AI, you get dumber, the same trap as the humans in Wall-E riding around too soft to stand. The modern condition, he says, is evolutionarily strange, because we now die from an overabundance of calories rather than a lack, and the disciplined move, personal and national, is to stop chasing ever bigger budgets and only spend on things that yield a return.
Drew presses the analogy from the other side with the buffalo. A hunter comes back, thanks the group, hands out a leg here and half a leg there, keeps most of the buffalo, and tells everyone to become better hunters. Fine on day one, he says, but by day four or five the person who nearly got gored for a toenail's share starts to resent it, and that breeds internal revolt. Bilyeu says Drew is skipping a step, and reaches for the "sock party," the blanket party from A Few Good Men and Full Metal Jacket. He points to Japan after World War II, where he says soldiers killed their own officers over calories, because near the end officers survived longer than the men and the men "got theirs back." He credits Simon Sinek and "Leaders Eat Last," and the book "Endurance" about Shackleton losing his ship in Antarctica and not a single man dying, as the model of a leader who puts his people first. The lesson: a leader who hoards while his people suffer will eventually "get got," but if a lazy Timmy demands a bigger share after nearly getting everyone killed, the whole group should sock party Timmy. The thing modern society has lost, he argues, is the willingness to sock party the freeloader, so instead everyone is lined up to sock party Elon Musk, whom he insists is not the one stealing from them. The anger is real, he says, it is just aimed at the wrong man.
Who really subsidizes Walmart and Amazon (37:00)
Drew lands the counterpunch. He cites a report from around 2022 or 2023 that some 30 to 40 percent of Walmart employees were also on government benefits, with Amazon north of 15 to 20 percent, and argues that if the government has to subsidize your workforce, there is a break in the system. Bilyeu agrees there is a break but locates it in too many handouts. Not every job, he says, is meant to support a full time family, and an entry level Walmart position is a rung on a ladder, not a permanent destination. The only reason you can afford cheap Walmart groceries, he argues, is that some workers are paid a low enough wage to keep prices down. He points to Seattle forcing gig delivery workers toward a roughly 26 dollar minimum, after which he says three items from a Thai restaurant could hit 122 dollars delivered, people deleted the apps, and prices went up rather than down as the remaining users had to carry the cost. He invokes Javier Milei, who cut government jobs and answered the panic that people would starve with a line Bilyeu calls cold and correct: "They will find a way to not die." Decentralize the problem, he argues, and each person solves it in their own life. The government gets morbidly obese when it promises to make sure nobody starves, and the dependent becomes the kid in the wealthy parent's basement smashing windows when the internet gets cut off.
Drew makes Bilyeu say the other half out loud. There are corporations, he presses, with the margins to pay more, three generations of billionaires deep, whose great workers still need government assistance and have no upward mobility. Bilyeu agrees flatly: such corporations can and should pay better. But his remedy is exit, not mandate. "Go to a different company." Your leverage as an employee is your ability to walk, and he says he tells his own staff that if a better company exists they should take their talents there, because that fear of loss is exactly what keeps an employer honest. He describes the high churn Silicon Valley workforce, where he has trained people who left and even poached his people, as the system working as designed: ideas cross pollinate, customers leave companies that treat them badly, and companies that cannot compete should go out of business. What people should actually be furious about, he argues, is regulatory capture and de facto monopoly, which he flags as the coming fight in AI: the Biden administration signaling it did not want more AI companies, and the Trump administration signaling it would invest and "pick the winners," which he calls suicidal because the customer ends up losing. When the chat calls this "ivory tower" talk, he answers that he is only trying to earn his own respect and pull people back from destroying a country he loves, and tells the story of climbing from not being able to pay his bills to where he is now by wallowing in his own shame until he got out of bed, carried his own cross, and mapped how things actually work. His only team, he says again, is "team cause and effect."
Congress orders Trump out of Iran (49:40)
Drew flags the War Powers Resolution vote: both the Senate and the House voted that hostilities in Iran must end, a war they never approved. Bilyeu calls it legally pure symbolism and grandstanding. Privately, he says, the message would be useful, because Trump needs to hear that even his own team thinks the Iran adventure is "buffoonery," a judgment Bilyeu shares. But doing it publicly is terrible, because you should want Trump to be able to clean up the mess he made rather than punishing America to spite him, which he calls cutting off your nose to spite your face. It weakens Trump's hand, he argues, so he now negotiates "like somebody who's desperate," and Iran, seeing his own Congress cut him off, will only grow bolder. Putting congressional guardrails on a president's ability to wage wars of aggression Bilyeu loves as an idea. Actively rooting for Trump to fail while the country is inside the conflict he calls crazy town, and he ties it back to Mamdani: he genuinely wants Mamdani to make New York better, and if the policies work he will audit them and update his mental model.
He and Drew widen out to the broader realignment. The anti establishment wave, Drew says, is growing on both sides, pointing to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes drifting from the Republican coalition and the DSA break on the left, so that left and right feel more like directions than fixed lines. Bilyeu predicts that if ranked choice voting went national you would get four or five real parties almost immediately. His worry is that in an influencer driven culture the tribes just splinter into new tribes. His anchor against that is cause and effect, which he illustrates with game theory: people long thought tit for tat was the winning strategy, then more sophisticated simulations found forgiving tit for tat beat it, and then found deeper layered strategies still, which is his model for getting ever more nuanced reads on how the world actually works.
The segment runs into super chats. A viewer asks how to beat an irrational fear of needles, and Bilyeu speed runs a personal story: for fifteen years he iced an inflamed wrist, tried prolotherapy where a dextrose sugar solution is injected to deliberately inflame a joint and provoke healing, nearly fainted, and learned it was a vasovagal response, meaning he almost fainted from the needle itself. Enraged that he had nearly passed out "out of emotional weakness," he now pumps the vein and watches the injection go in, his lesson that you can harness anger, even anger at yourself, and that "sometimes the right answer is just don't be weak." Another viewer recommends Curt Doolittle's "political triangle" as a better map than the four quadrant political compass, and Bilyeu says he will look into it.
Trump does something Bilyeu likes, then doesn't: big oil and the DOJ (1:03:00)
Bilyeu reads Trump's tweet accusing the big oil companies of not dropping pump prices in line with the sharply lower price of crude, declaring customers "being gouged," and instructing the DOJ to investigate. Oil had fallen back into the high 60s, roughly where it sat before the Iran escalation, yet Drew says he still paid around 6 dollars for gas in California while paying about 4 dollars in Arizona. The number Trump is angry about: crude down about 27 percent on the month, but gas at the pump down only about 13 percent. Bilyeu's verdict is that the investigation is a dumb, politically motivated idea, and he is thankful there is no federal price gouging law, because "the government is the worst place in the world to try and set prices." He recalls attacking Kamala Harris for campaigning on grocery price controls and says it is just as dumb now. Price gouging is a state crime in some places, he notes, but the only real federal tool is the Defense Production Act, which covers hoarding of designated supplies, not the spread between oil and gas. And there is a real reason gas trails crude, he says: pump prices rise fast and fall slow, and a drop in oil takes weeks to work through refining and distribution before it reaches the station, so some of what Trump calls gouging is just how the system works.
Figure 2. The dispute in one picture. Trump points at the gap between crude falling roughly 27 percent and pump prices falling only about 13 percent and calls it gouging. Bilyeu answers that pump prices rise fast and fall slow for structural reasons, that a crude decline takes weeks to move through refining and distribution, and that if there is real collusion the remedy is antitrust, not a president deciding what the price should be.
To show why an outsider rarely understands an industry's real costs, Bilyeu tells the story of how his protein bar company Quest Nutrition got started. Everyone assumed rival bars packed in sugar out of pure greed. The real reason, he discovered, was that the government subsidizes corn, which makes high fructose corn syrup artificially cheap, and for seventy years the entire manufacturing supply chain had been engineered around the specific viscosity that high fructose corn syrup gives a product. Take the syrup out and the equipment simply stops working, so Quest had to design its own machinery. The punchline: a distortion like that hides inside an industry where neither the government nor even the incumbents fully understand it, the same reason Elon Musk had to rebuild rocket supply chains to cut costs. And, he adds, if the only problem really were greedy CEOs, the fix is obvious: go start a company, do not be greedy, and get rich doing it.
Drew agrees on process but insists oil is the exception that proves Bilyeu's own rule. Oil is literally run by a cartel, he says, OPEC, where "the C is for cartel," so regulatory capture is oil's game. He remembers gas jumping from 1.99 to 2.99 dollars after 9/11 and never coming back down, and points to a class action lawsuit alleging that stations including Marathon Petroleum, 7-Eleven and Walmart used AI pricing software called Calibrate to inflate prices during the Iran war. Bilyeu partly resists, arguing that in an open market you can charge whatever you want, the way Louis Vuitton or Quest do, as long as there is enough competition, but he fully agrees the right target is the cartel itself. Break up the structural problem, he says, do not let Trump pretend he knows the correct price. He notes the UAE reportedly leaving OPEC and the delicate balance that oil has to stay profitable enough to keep shale drilling alive. His fantasy energy map: deregulate and innovate, keep a friendly Venezuela in line, get Alberta to break from Canada and join America under a pro energy regime, and get California to stop being, in his words, a morbidly obese tax sucker.
The ugly history of USAID (1:15:00)
Drew opens the USAID segment with a joke, that once USAID funding was cut, for the first time in twenty years a rap single was not number one on the Billboard charts. His actual thesis is a chain of causation: he claims USAID and CIA money funded the LA drug trade in the 1990s to bankroll a regime change in South America, which is the premise of the show Snowfall, and that without gangsters you get no gangster rap and without CIA backed money you get no gangsters. Bilyeu is skeptical of the tight version of the claim but very interested in the broader one. He reads a tweet arguing that most governments do not want USAID funds because they understand the money largely flows to opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements, with at best around 10 percent reaching real projects. He credits Mike Benz as being all over the story. If it turns out USAID was effectively funding left leaning governments across South America, and the recent rightward shift there is simply what happens when that artificial support stops, Bilyeu calls that "really damning" and exactly the kind of thing a country must fight. He describes his own year long update, from a default assumption that NGOs are good hearted to a suspicion that many are siphoning money and absorbing an "overproduction of elites," with figures he keeps seeing of 80 to 90 percent going to administrative costs. Drew, whose heart is in Haiti, says he has heard as little as 2 percent reaching actual Haitians. Both land on the same exhausted note as the Pentagon failing its audits with a trillion dollars unreconciled: the fraud is so overwhelming that the brain wants to shut off, which Bilyeu warns is exactly the impulse that lets it get worse.
Bank of Japan and the quiet plan to inflate away the debt (1:21:46)
The Bank of Japan segment is where the show returns to its monetary core. Japan, Drew notes, last dumped 382 billion yen of mostly US bonds and could sell up to a trillion yen this time because of a liquidity crisis, which he calls extremely bad for markets. Bilyeu corrects the scale, a trillion yen is closer to 38 billion dollars, not a trillion dollars, but stresses Japan holds well over a trillion dollars of US debt, so its selling still matters. He connects it to a deep dive he had just recorded on what he thinks Trump and Kevin Warsh are preparing to do: siphon wealth from everyone by weakening the dollar to manage a national debt he puts above 39 trillion dollars. Traditionally, he explains, foreign buyers soaked up much of that debt because they needed dollars, but they have been turning away from US treasuries because the United States sanctions too much, abuses its reserve currency privilege, and prints relentlessly. With Japan now selling to defend the yen, one of the biggest buyers is missing.
His prediction is that Warsh will publicly talk about shrinking the Fed's balance sheet as a cover story while quietly printing through a back channel, by letting banks create more debt, which he considers a marginally better method but still deliberately inflationary. He says they need it to be inflationary, and pairs it with financial repression through yield curve control: holding the interest you can earn on debt below the rate of inflation so the real debt burden shrinks over time, letting the government pay pre inflation loans with post inflation dollars while the tax base swells. To make it work with 9.7 trillion dollars of debt to roll over in the next twelve months, the Fed simply sets the rate below inflation. He frames this as a known playbook, the same one used to escape the debt to GDP levels of the post World War II era, and warns that "studying the economy is black pilling," but that while you may not be able to protect society you can protect yourself and your family. He nods to Simon Dixon and his framework, summarized simply as "elite people that understand economics steal from you all the time," and describes listening to Dixon as painful and addictive, like tonguing a sore in your mouth.
Figure 3. Financial repression as Bilyeu describes it. The central bank pins the interest rate below the rate of inflation, so anyone holding dollars or bonds loses ground every year. The shaded gap is the quiet transfer: savers and lenders bleed value while the real burden of the government's 39 trillion dollars of debt, and the 9.7 trillion it must roll over in a year, slowly shrinks. It is, in his phrase, how they get you out from under the debt without ever calling it a tax.
Muslim city council bans the pride flag (1:27:54)
The final and longest debate starts with a majority Muslim city council in Michigan, the implication being Dearborn, voting to permanently ban the pride flag on public property, framed by a viral tweet about "white liberal women who welcome refugees" now wondering what happened, the "consequence of suicidal empathy." Bilyeu treats Muslim immigration as one of the most important arguments the country will have over the next decade, and one that is hard precisely because America's tolerance for religious freedom has served it so well, so it feels strange to say freedom of religion applies to the faiths you like but not the ones you do not. He is emphatic that the vast majority of Muslims are lovely, largely secular people he has met and gotten along with in Muslim countries, and that anyone who concludes "all Muslims are bad" is a fool. The real question, he argues, is the reformation: Christianity went through its own bloody reformations that changed how believers police themselves, and the open dispute is whether Islam has been through the same. Without radically slowing Muslim immigration, he warns, a country can simply become a Muslim country by birth rate, which he does not want, even while praising Muslim devotion to family. On an orthodox reading of the Quran and Hadith, he says, the license to beat a wife or marry a nine year old is "there for you," and that small orthodox minority is not being effectively policed by the broader Muslim community, certainly not in the West. He plays a clip of a senior figure in a Muslim country warning, in English so there is no misinterpretation, that more extremists will come out of Europe and the West than out of Muslim countries, "because we're not fools" and shut that wing down at home. He raises taqiyya, the accusation that adherents may act weak when weak and assert themselves when strong, and lands on caution rather than either easy answer: do not become a xenophobic monster, but do not assume it will all be fine either. America, he argues, should pump the brakes and watch whether the people already here secularize and melt into the value system, given the birth rate difference.
He reaches for a deliberately provocative parallel. Israel, he says, ran a brilliant strategy in Palestine: bring in as many people as possible with good justifications, become politically powerful, then take over. If you hated that, he tells Israel's critics, keep your eyes open, because in his framing Muslims have run the same playbook for 1400 years, and so has Christianity, so that nearly every country has at some point been colonized by one or the other. The real question, he says, becomes "what's your brand of colonization."
Drew backs the argument up to constitutional principle, quoting that "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion." America, he insists, is not a Judeo-Christian nation founded on religion, and the Muslim council banning a flag on public land is doing the exact opposite of separating church and state by writing personal religious ideology into state practice. He is consistent about it: he is personally against abortion, he says, but if you want an abortion, "God bless you, you do your thing," and if he wants to wave a pride flag he should be able to. The council's action, in his view, should be struck down in federal court as a constitutional violation, and it is not "the Muslim of it all," it is anyone imposing their religion on others while in control. Bilyeu praises the move to principle and agrees any rule must apply equally to Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and Jains.
Then the two of them spend the rest of the segment on the harder disagreement: whether America is a "Christian country." Bilyeu's position is that the culture is Christian even though the laws are not based on scripture, and he insists on that distinction. He argues we run a "frame of reference algorithm" absorbed from the surrounding culture, that the Christ story communicates that the individual is divine and sacred, and that this is why the West is individualist rather than collectivist like China or Japan, places he says simply feel different day to day. He roots values partly in whether a society was agrarian, which favors private property and government, or a nomadic herding culture, which becomes honor based, and layers religion on top of that. He himself, he stresses, does not believe in God and has called himself a Taoist, yet acts in line with values he calls explicitly Christian. Drew pushes hard. If America was "plagued with murder, rape, and slavery" from the beginning, how is it Christian? Bilyeu answers with original sin: the point of Christianity is that you are a fallen creature, that Christ was sent to forgive precisely because humans "came up through the animal kingdom," and that the Bible, which he believes was not divinely inspired but written by people trying to teach a good life, had to grapple with the fact that humans will rape, murder, and covet by default. Drew's rebuttal is that this is selective, that "true undefiled religion is taking care of the widows and the orphans," and that the country invokes Christianity only when convenient. They converge on a shared vocabulary: America ignores scripture, and should, because it does not make laws from scripture, but Bilyeu argues religion still does its real work at the values layer.
His closing frame is that all religion is "a self help book written as a story," so a parent can end the endless "why" with "because the magical man in the sky says so," which is how values get instilled and passed to the next generation whether or not anyone believes literally. He traces Muhammad from philosopher to politician to warlord, comparing the warlord's intolerance of dissent to Genghis Khan's "if you're with me I let you live," and argues that any faith built on a final, unquestionable word must eventually go through reformation, because what made sense in the Middle East 1400 years ago does not fit 2026 Michigan. Reformation, in his telling, is simply the culture learning to emphasize some parts and quietly ignore others, the way Christians stopped stoning people and stopped defending slavery even though the scripture is still on the page. What is left, he says, is a small subset of Muslims still reading orthodox and not yet being policed by their own community, and that is the real problem to name.
Flashpoint
Tom Bilyeu's frame
Drew's pushback
The DSA wave
An effect of a broken money system driving people to emotional extremes
A normal political swing, the left's mirror of the MAGA takeover
Low wages at Walmart
Too many handouts, exit to a better employer is the fix
Corporations with the margins to pay more choose profit and let taxpayers subsidize them
Big oil and the pump
Gas trails crude for real structural reasons, price controls are dumb
Oil is a genuine cartel, this one really is regulatory capture
A "Christian country"
The culture is Christian at the values layer even though laws are not
Selective, the country ignores scripture whenever it is convenient
The flag ban
Both agree: writing religion into state law is wrong and should apply equally to every faith
Figure 4. The show is really a running argument between two frames. Bilyeu keeps pulling every issue back to his cause and effect thesis about money and incentives, while Drew keeps checking it against fairness, corporate power, and constitutional principle. On oil being a cartel and on the flag ban, they land in the same place.
Closing super chats and housekeeping
The episode winds down through viewer questions. Asked about the current state of Quest, Bilyeu says he has been gone from the company for a decade and cannot speak to its ingredient choices, noting that companies lose directional commitment when all the founders leave. A viewer recommends the economist behind the book "Aid Inferno" and the World Bank critic Michael Luchi as guests on NGOs and USAID, and he asks for the names. Another suggests adding "blind" alongside "dumb or evil," since frame of reference routinely captures intelligence, and Bilyeu agrees. A Zero to Founder member thanks him for help. Asked whether literature is dying, he predicts reading skews old and will diminish against shorts and apps, but is genuinely excited about direct publishing letting authors keep 90 percent of the economics instead of the publisher, warns of a coming flood of AI slop that makes marketing essential, and praises Steam and Valve for surfacing games like his own Kaizen by what players actually like. He thanks the viewer for the tip on Red Rising and says he already owns it. A detailed super chat corrects the bailout ledger, that AIG's roughly 182 billion dollar support returned a positive net of about 22.7 billion, that GM's 51 billion left the Treasury recovering about 39.7 billion, and that Ford took a Department of Energy loan rather than a TARP bailout and repaid it with interest in 2022, and Bilyeu stops to thank the viewer for paying money to educate the room. He closes with another Plaud read, the code impact for ten percent off, and an invitation to a free AI masterclass on launching a company.
Key takeaways
Bilyeu's unifying claim is that broken money, dated to the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and the 1971 end of gold convertibility, rewards asset owners and drains wage earners, and that this is the true cause of the populist anger now radicalizing both parties.
He models populism as a machine: break the economy, produce anxiety, convert anxiety to anger, and watch each team pull its members to the extreme. His only stated antidote is relentless cause and effect.
On socialism his central image is storing calories on other bodies: reciprocity built civilization, but past the point of scarcity it becomes the freeloader problem, the barnacles that sink the turtle.
He and Drew agree the fix for underpaid work is a competitive labor market and the freedom to walk, and that the real enemy is regulatory capture and monopoly, which he expects to become the defining fight in AI.
He calls the congressional vote to end the Iran conflict symbolic but damaging, because it weakens the president's hand while the country is still inside the mess.
On big oil he sides against a federal price gouging probe but concedes to Drew that OPEC is a genuine cartel worth breaking up, while insisting the pump lags crude for structural reasons.
He lays out an explicit playbook for the debt: back channel money printing plus financial repression and yield curve control to inflate away 39 trillion dollars, and urges viewers to protect their own families since they cannot protect the system.
On Muslim immigration he refuses both easy answers, praising secular Muslims while warning that an unpoliced orthodox minority and birth rate math require slowing immigration and watching assimilation, and he argues at length that America's culture is Christian at the values layer even though its laws are not.
Chapters
0:00:00 Intro and the day's collisions, plus the 1913 Fed thesis
0:02:40 Mamdani's hat trick and the DSA takeover
0:10:20 How parties radicalize, 2009 to MAGA to DSA
0:20:00 Storing calories on other bodies, the socialism argument
0:37:00 Walmart, Amazon, and who really subsidizes low wages
0:49:40 Congress orders Trump to leave Iran, plus super chats
1:03:00 Trump versus big oil, price gouging and the DOJ
1:15:00 The ugly history of USAID
1:21:46 Bank of Japan and inflating away the debt
1:27:54 Muslim city council bans the pride flag, and is America a Christian country
1:50:00 Closing super chats and housekeeping
Notable quotes
"If you want to know why the economy is broken, there it is. You deficit spend. You force the Fed to print." Tom Bilyeu, around 2:00
"Money will go where it is respected. Period." Tom Bilyeu, around 9:00, on why capital leaves cities that turn on it
"Populism is when people reason emotionally. They're just flying off into their emotional sides because they're seeking safety." Tom Bilyeu, around 12:00
"I don't think the left dies. I think communism might die." Drew, around 16:00
"Empathy is not a trap. Empathy is a superpower." John C. Reilly clip, around 18:00, which Bilyeu answers with "it's both, we need it and it will be used against you"
"The UK does not have a revenue problem. They have a spending problem. The US does not have a revenue problem. They have a spending problem." Tom Bilyeu, around 21:00
"They won't starve. They will find a way to not die. People always find a way to not die." Tom Bilyeu, around 43:00, paraphrasing Javier Milei
"The only team I'm on is team cause and effect." Tom Bilyeu, around 1:00:00
"The government is the worst place in the world to try and set prices." Tom Bilyeu, around 1:04:00
"It's regulatory capture, it's a cartel, and this is corruption." Drew, around 1:10:00, on oil
"Studying the economy is black pilling. But that is precisely what you're about to live through." Tom Bilyeu, around 1:25:00, on financial repression
"All religion is a self help book. But it's a self help book written as a story." Tom Bilyeu, around 1:45:00
This section steps outside the show's frame to separate what is settled fact from what is Bilyeu's opinion, model, or projection.
On history, the anchors are real but the color is loose. The Federal Reserve Act did pass in 1913 and the Nixon shock did end dollar convertibility to gold in 1971. The claim that the Titanic sinking removed opponents of central banking is a popular legend without solid historical support and should be treated as folklore, not record. The idea that the whole economy has done nothing since 1971 but reward asset owners is a genuine and much debated argument about asset inflation and wage stagnation, not a settled fact, and mainstream economists dispute how much of it the monetary system alone explains.
On the primaries, the framing is Bilyeu's. Whether the DSA is "colonizing" the Democratic Party is a contested interpretation, and specific down ballot results he recites at speed, including who beat which incumbent, should be checked against official Board of Elections tallies rather than taken as precise. His prediction that companies and capital will flee high tax cities is a real pattern in some cases but is a projection, not a law.
On oil, the structural point is well supported: pump prices are widely documented to rise faster than they fall, a phenomenon economists call rockets and feathers, and refining and distribution genuinely lag crude by weeks. That gasoline itself is set by a single OPEC cartel is an overstatement, since US retail prices are shaped by many factors, though OPEC's influence over crude is real. The Calibrate pricing lawsuit and the AIG, GM and Ford bailout figures were relayed from viewers and a lawsuit and are worth verifying against primary filings.
On the debt plan, the mechanism Bilyeu describes is a real historical tool, not a conspiracy. Financial repression and yield curve control were genuinely used to shrink post World War II debt to GDP, and economists openly discuss them today. But the specific prediction that Kevin Warsh and Trump will deliberately engineer inflation through a back channel is Bilyeu's forecast, not an announced policy, and his dollar figures for total and rollover debt are ballpark claims that move over time.
On USAID and NGOs, the strongest specific claims, that a fixed 80 to 90 percent of aid is lost to overhead, that USAID seeded gangster rap, or that it single handedly funded left governments across South America, are advocacy claims that Bilyeu himself repeatedly flags as needing more research and possibly overstated. Real audit and overhead problems exist, but the tidy causal stories do not have the evidentiary weight the segment gives them.
On the closing debate, the "is America a Christian country" argument is philosophy, not fact. Bilyeu's frame of reference model, his reformation thesis about Islam, and his reading of orthodox scripture are interpretive and contested, and he is careful to separate lovely secular Muslims from a small orthodox minority. Drew's constitutional point about separation of church and state is the firmer ground here, and it is notable that the two hosts, from very different starting points, agree that no faith should be written into state law. Read the whole episode as one long, unusually honest argument between two people who keep testing each other's cause and effect, which is exactly how Bilyeu says it should be read.
Full transcript
Good morning everybody. Welcome to
another [applause] episode of the Tom
Billy Show live. We are here man. It is
a big day today. Oo, a lot has happened.
The Democrat party, they continue to be
colonized by the DSA, man. We're going
to talk about that. They've got
candidates who openly uh are hating on
America, wiping their hands on American
flags. We're going to talk about it all.
The straight of Hormuz is now open, but
the US is clearly, in my opinion,
negotiating from a position of weakness
as we are giving things away, trying to
get something in return. That drama is
unfolding in real time. Trump is
targeting big oil for price gouging.
He's sicking the DOJ on them because
they're not lowering, according to
Trump, their prices fast enough.
President Buchelli said that world
leaders have long known that USID
was a corrupt organization. Gary
Stevenson, aka Gary's economics, is set
to be an economic adviser to Andy
Bernham's labor government in the UK.
Good lord.
Can't wait to share my feelings on that.
Japan is dumping foreign bonds,
including US treasuries, due to their
liquidity crisis and currency wos.
That's getting weird. We'll see how that
has a knock-on effect here into the US.
A majority of a majority Muslim city
council in Michigan voted to permanently
ban the LGBTQ pride flag on public
property. So, if you want to know what a
collision of cultures looks like, there
it is. A new science fiction level
medical breakthrough is coming. We're
going to be talking about somebody uh
who reversed a genetic disease with uh
basically reprogramming themselves at
the cellular level. It is a wild story
and according to Demis Hassabis who runs
Google X we can expect an absolute
deluge of radical medical breakthroughs
coming in the next decade. I'm super
excited about that stuff. It is very
exciting and hopefully we'll have time
to talk about GTA 6. These boys are
going on a crusade to get me to do a a
very extended live when it goes live.
So, we'll see about that. All right,
shout out to Ploud. You guys are
amazing. They make an incredible
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record everything that's going on during
your day and figure out what you said
you were going to do, all of that, it's
really amazing. There's a QR code on
your screen right now. You can get 10%
off using code impact at plow.ai/impact.
It is very cool technology. I hope you
guys check it out. All right. Mom Donnie
pulled off a hat-tick, everybody. A
political hat-tick, but a hat-tick
nonetheless. New York City's
congressional primaries. Man, he did it
big. Three of three Mani back candidates
will progress to the election, proving,
as I have been saying for a while, the
DSA, man, they are colonizing the
Democratic party. If you want to know
where the energy is on the Dems side of
the ledger, it is all about radical uh
politics. These are people that are
either just straight communist or
communist adjacent. One of the
candidates that went through literally
refers to herself as a communist. Uh so
there you have it. Even Van Jones has
pointed out that this is a new era of
Democratic politics. I don't know if you
I did pull the clip uh if you have easy
access to that. Van Jones um not not
having a good time. Basically saying he
was saying this before the full election
results had come in. Uh but he was
saying, "Well, I'll let him say it."
>> Do you think Democrats not in New York
City should be learning from this?
>> Well, first of all, New York City
matters because the two most exciting,
uh, left-wing candidates are here, ALC
and Mammi. But also, uh, this is the
stronghold for the establishment, uh,
Schumer and Hakeem Jeffrey. This is a
this is a battle between the
establishment and this insurgency, and
the roof is collapsing on the Democratic
Party establishment tonight. uh if mom
Donnie gets a hat-tick uh three out of
three she did uh this is a new era for
the Democratic party and you can't write
off New York City because this is the
place where both uh it's a power center
for the establishment and the insurgency
and they're going headtohead tonight and
right now this is not no longer
>> power center for global economics.
That is what is so wild about this. All
right, so we get the gist from Van
Jones. Um, so this has been a drum beat
that I've been pounding for a while. The
energy in the Democratic party is very
much on the radical wing. And in
populist moments like the one that we're
living in now, because people are
emotionally driven, which we will talk
extensively about as we get to the Gary
economics uh, part of what's going on in
the UK, they're going to pull each other
farther and farther and farther to the
extremes of their party. You can expect
it on the right, you can expect it on
the left. Uh and so we're seeing it play
out here on the left. This the reason
that this should be upsetting to people
is that even if emotionally the things
that they're saying feel good, it will
break the economy. Not a maybe, not
possibly. This has been an experiment
that's run over and over and over and
over and over and over and over. If you
pour sugar into a gas tank, it will make
the car stop running. So the same is
true of when you start going to
socialist and communist uh policies.
They break the economy. So, remember the
president of Cuba literally admitted on
camera and just said, "Yeah, these
things don't work in practice." Uh,
we've had very similar admissions from
figures in history saying the same thing
that uh this was something I covered in
the what was it on Norway, I think. And
so, they were going more and more
socialist. And finally, the finance
minister of the party that put all of
this in place said, "These ideas are
great in theory, but they really just
don't work in practice." And yet somehow
someway, the Democratic Party here in
the US, the absolute epicenter of
understanding how free market capitalism
should work, uh, is we're going that
direction. We are going to dry hump that
stove. [ __ ] touching it. Like this is
not us putting a finger on and being
like, "Ow, that sucks." This is
literally us twerking on the burner. It
It is wild. I cannot believe people are
going down this direction. But they are.
Brad Lander, who is one of the DSA
friendly candidates. He knocked off
twoterm incumbent Dan Goldman. Daria
Lisa Ailla Shioali. Hey, let's go. uh
took out fiveterm incumbent Adrianiano
Es E es Espat. Oh god, it's gonna be
something close to that. Uh and by the
way, she is the one we're going to be
talking about. Uh she's the one I
believe that said she wiped her fingers
on the American flag because she didn't
have a napkin, calls herself a
communist. Uh a whole bunch of fun
things that we will run down a list of
allegedly. Anyway, she's deleted a lot
of these tweets. Uh Claire Valdez took
the open seat in the seventh. Uh 343
for Mom Donnie. Really a clean sweep.
You can't you cannot deny. Man, you can
say a lot of things about this guy. Just
has absolutely horrific policies. But
boy oh boy is he speaking to the heart
of I think primarily young voters who
have been disenfranchised by a um slow
and steady breakdown of the principles
that drive free market capitalism.
all started in 1913. Uh so yeah, it's
wild that the Titanic wiped out some of
the people that stood against uh central
banking and so just a year later we
finally get a central bank put in place
if you like tyranny. Uh and since then
uh it accelerated in 1971. I think
everybody's heard what happened in 1971
which was the final break from sound
money. Uh, and since then it has been a
non-stop shitow of robbing from
everybody and only rewarding people that
own assets. Uh, that's the real problem.
You don't have to look farther than
that. If you want to know why the
economy is broken, there it is. You
deficit spend. You force the Fed to
print. you allowed, not you guys, but
the people in 1913 allowed the central
bank to be created even though the
founders of America were hyper
[clears throat]
skeptical uh and said yes, you can do it
for a while, but it needs to have a
self-destruct button where it terminates
after a certain number of years. I think
the first one terminated uh after 20
years and we just gave up on that in
1913. So, uh if you want to know what's
actually going on, that's what's
actually going on. And so we'll keep
beating that drum in the hope and prayer
that people actually come to map the
cause and effect of economics rather
than electing lunatics that do not
understand the economy and will drive
you into a dark era of American history
by breaking the engine of prosperity. So
that's how it goes. Now if you want to
feel even better about this three for
three hattick, these weren't long shots
in red territory. These are the like
safest Democratic seats in the country.
So if you want to know who's winning the
battle in the Democratic party, it is
the DSA.
So yeah, all eyes on what's going on in
New York. They are the the economic
center not only of America, they're the
economic center of the world and they're
going the fastest to the left.
Absolutely wild. Now what people are
going to learn very quickly is that
geography uh is not destiny. And so
people will leave and you're going to
see just as we're going to talk about
when we get to the UK, you're going to
see people leaving. You're going to see
people leaving. I know people don't want
to believe that's true. I know people
want to believe that New York is
impervious to this. But you will either
kill these policies dead and stop
electing people that are going more and
more that economic direction or the
companies will continue to move. It is
wild to watch
Texas become a place that these big
banks are going. But hey, they're going
to follow the money. They're going to
follow the money, boys and girls.
Whether or not they have the cool cities
uh to go to like New York, they will
leave. Money will go where it is
respected. Period.
So, cheers boys and girls.
>> Cool. Uh okay, let's start at the very
beginning. Um
>> very good place to start.
Let's let's talk about 2009.
>> Okay,
>> 2009, the Republican party was a party
of conservatives. Mitt Romney, Paul
Ryan. There was no such thing as MAGA.
There was no such thing as Tea Party.
They got their behinds beat by Obama and
a bunch of people were like, "See,
conservatives let this black man win. We
need to take our party back. They don't
know how to do politics no more." There
was a radical swing to the right and it
shifted the conservative party in the
Republican wing to the right. It became
the Tea Party. It was a Tea Party for
like a day and a half. Obama went back
to back. So then Trump was his ascent.
He turned the Tea Party into the MAGA
movement. And with each kind of
iteration, it clicked one beat further
to the right.
>> Yeah. Um, and I feel like the Democrats
who have literally [ __ ] the bed the last
three elections because the Biden 2020
like he shouldn't have been there
either. Like the Democrats are not
stewarding what they have on this level,
right, at all. 0%. They shouldn't have
fumbled the bag. They shouldn't have
lost. Hillary shouldn't have went to
Milwaukee. I could go back to 2016 and
talk about all the failures that they're
having.
>> Sure. So, the fact that the
establishment um Chank uses this
anti-establishment versus left and
right, the stat the fact that the
anti-establishment movement on the left
is saying, "Hey, classic Democrats, um
the Chuck Schumers, the Bernie Sanders,
the Hillary Clintons, you're not doing
what you did. You're not taking care of
the things that you're taking care of.
You're not listening to our needs, so
we're going to move further left."
>> Yeah. So where the DSA is this new
iteration and I understand it's the
scary boogeyman that um a lot of people
on the right and Fox News needs to talk
about to get us scared because the Iran
war and Epstein files and everything
else that actually holds accountability
we can't talk about. But I want to just
ground this in the sense that there are
these political swings when the party
who's not winning is losing. And right
now I would say that culturally the
Republicans have been in power since co
although Biden was president he lost
power. the science was uh getting
contradicted and people started to
realize the people who are president the
pilot bureau there's autopen there's all
these things that were happening while
Biden was there that culturally shifted
everything to the right and I think for
the last now six years Trump can do
whatever he wants he's going on podcast
he's dancing on the news the entire
world had like hates our relationships
with um the US but it's okay now because
like everything has shifted in a
negative direction from the Democrats
perspective and now saying, "Okay, we're
sick and tired of it. Now we're going to
like shift." So just from a like
Democratic DSA takeover thing, I think
that that's a natural imp and like
indication similar to the incumbent
president always loses the bid terms.
>> So uh if I'm understanding you
correctly, you're saying that the click
to going farther left and going farther
right is to be expected in a moment like
this.
>> Yes.
>> I I think that's all true. I think we
could go to second level of like the
socialism, communism and all that other
stuff about but just like the DSA wave I
think is generally being brought up
right now because Mamani is winning in
New York City and all
>> well so I think you're getting cause and
effect a little bit wrong here. So the
cause and effect is um you break the
economy.
>> People really can't make ends meet that
makes them anxious. That anxiety must
for reasons of algorithms running in the
human brain. It must be transmuted into
something that feels better. Anger feels
better. And so whenever you break the
economy, you're going to get this
outrage. But the outrage is based on
insecurity. And so you're getting both
sides that are feeling insecure. They're
transmuting that into anger. That's
populism. that that that is
definitionally populism. Populism is
when people ration emotionally, reason
emotionally, excuse me. So, they're just
flying off into their emotional sides
because they're seeking safety because
they feel so uneasy. They need to be on
a team. That is real. From an
evolutionary perspective, it is wise to
be on a team. And the strategy that I'm
running is much more dangerous. And that
is I'm in the middle of the road. So,
uh, people on the Trump side, I talk so
much [ __ ] on him. Remember at one point
Eric Trump said he would come on our
show. He [ __ ] ghosted us as hard as
you can go somebody after getting me to
um go up on stage, host him at an event,
ask him questions. There were things I
wasn't allowed to ask about and I was
like, "Cool, I will do this, but you got
to come on the show." [ __ ] ghost
town. Okay, so obviously the right does
not recognize me. The left certainly
does not recognize me. I'm in the
middle. Most people are not going to do
that because it actively is a worse
position to be in. I don't have any
friends that are going to come to my aid
that are politically powerful. Okay, so
now I get why people are rushing to be
on a team and then their team is just
going to pull them farther and farther
to the extreme and they don't have any
way to go against it because it's like,
well, I'm on the team. And so it's
whoever is going to say the words that
gets the cheer from the crowd. They're
just going to say the words to get the
cheer from the crowd. Even if they are
lunatic statements, it doesn't matter
right or left. This is a human thing
that is deployed. depending on what your
personality is determines which team you
sound like a lunatic for.
But they are racing this way. The only
way for us to survive as a country is to
find our way back to the middle. Now the
right question to ask is okay do we have
to be extreme for a second, take over
the party and then pull us back to the
middle? Maybe. Maybe that's what life is
going to teach us. But god damn, that is
super dangerous, extremely ugly and
there's no guarantee that we will
survive. either spiraling off to the
right or spiraling off to the left. Both
of these may be terminal.
>> That's the bad news. So now when I look
at this, what I'm seeing is this is
populism is a response to something. So
I'm like, this is just economic anxiety,
but economic anxiety manifests in
shooting people in the face. So I mean
that literally. So that's where it's
like, whoa, how do we put some checks on
this? How do we rein people the [ __ ]
back in? And the only answer that I have
is to walk people through cause and
effect over and over and over and over
and over and over and over. Now, I am
far more animated for reasons I've
explained a thousand [ __ ] times about
going to the left. It is much more
murderous because it breaks the economy.
So that's where I'm like, hey, the very
thing that creates this moment is
economic um uncertainty. Which of these
two things is more dangerous from an
economic uncertainty perspective? The
left. Okay, that doesn't mean that the
right isn't dangerous. The right is
dangerous. It just means one of these is
um not like the other in terms of
magnitude. the magnitude of what the
left has done historically is is so much
larger. It's terrifying. But anyway,
we're not educated about all that [ __ ]
And so, as a globe, we just really don't
understand that the left sounds good
because it sounds so moral. It sounds so
loving. But it is actually a an ideology
of resentment. It it won't exist. If you
strip resentment out, the left dies. It
rides on it.
>> I don't think the left dies. I think
communism might die. I don't think the
left dies.
>> Perfect. I'll take that. So, uh I am
speaking to where the left is headed
now. But if we want to name it
socialism, communism, but let's keep in
mind ds a literally a socialism. Yes. So
the energy in the party, the way that
it's going now, it is very much a um
ideology of resentment. And so by the
way, if you want to be like, okay, what
is the right? The right is an ideology
that is xenophobic. like by their nature
that that is what we trust them to do
from an evolutionary standpoint. What we
trust the left to do from an
evolutionary standpoint. In fact, I
think I put it in the doc. I certainly
tweeted it. There's a clip of John C.
Riley and he's talking about like, whoa,
what the [ __ ] is happening to the right?
Like this is so crazy. How are we in a
time where we have to like tell people
to be loving and kind? And I was like,
he really means it. Like he really means
it. And he does not understand
malevolence. And so he's been protected
for so long from
the the reality of malevolence. He
doesn't even have a mental map for it.
And so that all gets caught up as you go
farther and farther left because the
left you're trusting them to be uh
welcoming
uh seeking of beauty, connection,
empathy, all of that. You want that. You
need that. That all gets caught up so
easy to co-opt
>> because they're especially when they've
been protected as long as they have.
They don't have a metal mental model for
how they would if you stand up for human
rights. Why is that a right? Let's let's
hear him say it
>> for human rights. Why is that a right or
a left thing?
>> Why aren't people on the right wing
concerned about human rights? They're
human, too. this whole thing that like
kind of has come into vogue of like
empathy trap,
>> you know, empathy [laughter] trap,
>> you know, like that's like Elon Musk
says like empathy is like don't be
fooled by the empathy trap,
>> you know, stick to your uh your agenda
and what's best for you. No, don't start
feeling bad for so and so. They're on
their own thing. Look out for number
one. Like, it's like, wait a minute.
Empathy is not a trap. Empathy is a
superpower.
>> That's right.
>> It's what makes human beings. Y is both
a trap and a superpower.
>> We need it. It's incredible and it will
be used against you.
>> Our ability to like look outside of
ourel. We're not an alligator trying to
just get the next, you know, we're human
beings.
>> Beautiful insight.
>> It's not us that, you know, like that's
a superpower like and it's the and it's
also the cornerstone of civilization.
the fact that we we stay at the red
light and don't just zoom out because we
want to get through the life faster
because what will happen? Well, we might
smash into someone. Well, you don't know
that person. Yeah, but I still don't
want to smash into them, you know, like
>> Okay, so he he does not know how to map
a healthy right-leaning personality. The
reason that you want law and order, the
reason that you don't go smash the other
guy isn't because you don't know him or
or I'm only not going to smash the
people that I know. like that's crazy.
>> The reason you don't smash into that
person is now you don't have law and
order. There's no way for you to have a
high trust society. It's deeply
inefficient. It's inefficient from
keeping your family safe. It's
inefficient from an economic
perspective. And so when you think
about, okay, building a mental map of
the world that has high utility, it has
high predictive validity. I know how
things are going to work. That's why you
want law and order because you cannot
have people acting a fool because
everything degenerates. It takes very
small numbers of people to create
absolute chaos in a society. Society is
a response to people going no matter how
strong I am, I am weak when compared to
a wellorganized force that opposes me.
So I need to have a wellorganized force
that can push back on that. That isn't
going to come from people that have a
natural left-leaning personality. Their
job is to be like, well, hold on a
second. These immigrants are in like a
hard spot. like we want to really be
able to help them. Again, you want that
impulse, but you have to have a balanced
society that understands, but that can
be weaponized against us. And so, when I
watched this, I was like legitimately
touched because I I love that he's
thinking about that. I love that he's
like loving other people and wanting
them to do well. It shouldn't be a left
or a right thing, but he just doesn't
understand the way that the human mind
is programmed. he doesn't understand
game theoretic mechanics and I think
that there are a lot of people on the
left this is how they get parestitized
is that they actually don't understand
that their empathy is being weaponized
against them and there are too many sad
stories it's not like an epidemic of
this but there are too many sad stories
where you'll get like the woman who's
like I want to prove to people that um
Muslim countries are just as wonderful
as any other country and then she bike
rides through [ __ ] Afghanistan and
gets raped and murdered and it's Like
again, these are just a handful of
stories, but that's pretty [ __ ]
rough. That's somebody who they have not
built a mental model that it only takes
a very small number of malevolent people
to go, "Oh, I see this dumb [ __ ] I'm
just going to take from her." Because
that's literally a thing in society. We
have sociopaths for an evolutionary
reason, but if they're not kept in
check, they become a weapon that fires
off randomly.
>> Could we talk about that? Because I feel
like oftentimes we are selective about
our prosecution of sociopaths and I
think that in certain societies we are
only okay if our people are sociopaths
but you can't come from another place
and be a sociopath.
>> But that's that's exactly what you want.
>> So is but is the problem sociopath or is
the problem other sociopaths?
>> The problem is other sociopaths.
>> Got it.
>> So you literally want your sociopaths on
the front line of your battle. And
there's a guy that I've shown this clip
before it. will have a hard time finding
it. But there was a guy that was on Joe
Rogan and he was like um you want to
know that there because there was I
think it was um the guy from Lone
Survivor and he was talking about you
know he's like struggling trying to stay
alive and oh my god all my friends got
killed and I'm just trying to haul ass
to get to this next village and there
was like seven Taliban behind me and
this guy like the alligator that he's
talking about just completely calmly was
like you want to know about seven dead
Taliban have seven Taliban pursue me I
will turn and kill them all. And I was
like, "Fuck, this guy really means it."
Like, he was like, "I I think this was
the same guy. Please forgive me if I'm
conflating people, but he goes, um, I
stopped counting my kills at 100." And I
was like, damn. So, here you have a guy,
dude, he has no like there's no anxiety
for him. There's no like I feel badly.
There is just kill the enemy. And when
you are in the middle of a war, you need
people that are just dead shark eyes.
They just kill the enemy. And so that
becomes a this is the kernel
justification of the world. And you have
to understand, you need those people.
You need them on the wall to protect you
from the malevolence of other men.
>> But you got to keep them in check. You
can't just let them run riot in your
society. So you need them. The other
side is thinking the same thing. I need
them. And the problem becomes your own
people will turn on you if you don't
have ways to keep that [ __ ] in check.
But you a thousand% have to worry about
the other side being like, I'm going to
send you my most malevolent, my most
sociopathic because I know how much
damage they will do. And if you don't
have laws in place that protect you,
borders to keep them out and then laws
internally to make sure that your
weapons are aimed at the right thing.
Then it would be like saying, uh, are we
the problem or is it the other guy's
weapons that are a problem? The other
guy's weapons are a problem. I just
don't want weapons aimed at me. They are
clearly weapons, but I need weapons and
I'm going to make sure that the other
guy can't hit me with theirs. That's
just the reality. And so we we are
struggling with this because for so long
nobody alive has made contact with
malevolence. We just don't know what it
actually looks like which is crazy. I
mean God bless that we've made such a
stable society but it's causing
delusion.
>> Keeping down that mom Donnie train and
Tom's love of socialism. Let's talk
about Gary economics. Gary Stevenson
who's said to be the economic adviser to
the new labor government. Um this is at
a time when the government is turning
over. So I would think that he has some
slay say stay some say and sl s s s s s
s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s
s s s s s s s s s s s s s s sway in his
um recommendations to the new uh um
prime minister and things like that. Um
you use a good analogy that I kind of
want to queue off of this.
>> You always say that like
society started with like I'm gonna
store calories on your body. Yes.
>> That can you break it down? I don't want
to mess up.
>> Yeah. So I think where you're going is
when you think about socialism, I want
you to imagine a morbidly obese person
who keeps saying what we really need to
do is get me more calories. So that's
the tax. The UK does not have a revenue
problem. They have a spending problem.
The US does not have a revenue problem.
They have a spending problem. Now, where
all of this starts, what Drew is
referring to is literally before you
have refrigeration, the only way to
store calories is to go, "Okay, I just
killed this will the beast. I'm not
going to be able to eat it all before it
goes bad. So, what I'm going to do is
I'm going to give some to you, and
you're going to store my calories on
your body. And that way, if I have a
hard time with a hunt, but you have a
good time with a hunt, then I can trust
that you're going to give me some of
that when I'm the one who's down bad and
you're doing well. It's an absolutely
brilliant strategy. It also is the thing
that allows us to come together as very
large groups. We have a very strong
impulse to cooperate, to reciprocate, to
be kind to each other, to fall in love,
to see people as friends, to band
together. It's brilliant. religion ends
up filling or not filling but hijacking
in a very positive way the that um
neurological
like wiring to say okay cool I'm going
to come in as like this mega bond and
now if I wear the right symbol you
recognize me as somebody who's um inroup
and not outgroup and so now without ever
having met we can like cheers our
crosses and be like yo we're on the same
team and those people will come
together. It's an immediate transfer of
values. It's a recognition that or not
transfer, it's a connection over your
values. You realize that you have a
shared frame of reference. You pray to
the same God. And so, it's allowed us to
not only transcend our local tribe, but
it's allowed us to transcend nation
states where people can cooperate beyond
borders because they share the same
religion. This is a big part of why I
think the US did not have a hard time
assimilating
uh people from Mexico and South America
because they were largely Catholic. And
so it was like we just shared so many
values but we're having a much higher
point of friction around Muslim
immigration because we do not have the
said same shared values. And so you're
seeing a much bigger collision there. So
that's where it's when you understand
that we have the neurological framework
to to cooperate and that that framework
is wildly advantageous. Um, however,
this becomes something that gets abused
over time when you no longer need to
store calories on anybody's body. You've
got plenty. But you can no longer
recognize, oh, I could eat more, aka tax
more, but that's not actually good for
me at this point. Um, I could give more
to people, but that's not actually good
for them at this point. Because what
ends up happening is you get the
freeloader problem. This is very well
known in sociological literature. If you
don't address the freeloader problem,
this is what I call barnacles. the
barnacles end up building up on the
turtle and they sink it and a turtle can
actually [ __ ] drown because it gets
so many barnacles on it. Um, I
>> thought those were regulations.
>> Those are regulations. Those are people
clamoring for more free things. So when
you look at this is a really interesting
thing about the moment that we're in
right now.
>> So if you look at um people saying okay
we we've got to tax more. So, for
instance, um I think it may even be in
this. There was a video breakdown of
like, hey, why don't we take Elon's
money,
>> Elon Musk?
>> Yeah. So, it was like a banger video
about like if you did a search for
banger, it'll pop up. Um but the video,
which
>> we're going to play for you right now,
and then I'll explain it.
>> We should take Elon Musk $1 trillion and
use it to solve world hunger.
>> Except Africa [clears throat] has been
given $2.6 $6 trillion in foreign aid
since 1960.
>> How about fix the education system?
>> Except the US already spends $1.3
trillion a year on it.
>> Let's end poverty worse.
>> Except America's already spent over $22
trillion fighting poverty.
>> We should just tax it more.
>> Except if you had a bet on who could
solve a major world problem, would you
pick the government or Elon?
>> Yeah, probably the guy landing rockets
backwards.
>> Exactly.
>> We should take Elon. Okay. So, uh I love
that video. Um that is
so true. Unfortunately, there are many
problems that cannot be solved simply by
throwing money at it. This is why rich
kids implode. This is why you're
teaching your daughter discipline. Um
this is why teaching a kid hard work and
what I call the only belief that matters
that if you put time and energy into
getting better, you will actually get
better. But you actually have to put the
time and energy into getting better. And
so if you just give people free stuff,
they don't improve. That's the bad news.
It's also one of the things we're
starting to see in the AI literature. Uh
the more you study this, the more you
will realize that you end up in a very
unfortunate position where if you just
hand over your thinking to the AI and
let it do everything for you, you
actively get dumber. And so you're now
in a worse position because of that
tool. And so we're going to have to deal
with that when it comes to AI. If we
don't want to end up in idiocracy, then
you've got to force yourself to be
disciplined. This is also something if
you guys watch the uh Pixar film Wall-E,
same idea when they flash forward into
the future because everything is being
done for people. They just become
morbidly obese riding around in these
little carts uh because nobody has to do
anything for themselves. And in the
modern world, we're in a position where
we have to be disciplined. People don't
die anymore from in the west from lack
of calories. what they die from is an
overabundance of calories and the wrong
kind of calories. And so it's wild.
We're in an evolutionarily strange
position where we have to go, I could
eat this thing and I have every impulse
to eat it, but I need to not eat it. The
best thing for me to do is not eat these
excess calories. And I'm telling you,
the best thing for us to do as a nation
is to not keep trying to raise our
budgets. We've got to get disciplined
for the sake of being disciplined of
saying we're only going to spend money
on things that yield a return. And if
you did that, that is how you begin
pulling people out of poverty. You say
you have to bear your own cross, carry
your own weight, focus on getting
better, engage in the economy,
contribute in some way. Uh and then if
temporarily you find yourself knocked
off your feet, cool. We're going to be
there. We're going to pick you back up.
It's wise. But if you just give, give,
give, give, give, it deranges. And uh
again, the reason that socialism and
communism end up breaking the economy is
the only way to get people to keep
giving until the end of time when people
are freeloading is you have to point a
gun in their face. It doesn't work.
at where we at right now. I think if we
were to compare it to your analogy of
storing calories on other people's body,
>> there is,
let's just like start from the social
contract, right? There are people who
come back with a buffalo and they say,
"Thank you guys for helping me with this
buffalo. I appreciate it. You take a
leg. You take half a leg. I'm going to
give you three toenails." Um, and if you
guys want more of a buffalo, you need to
learn how to be a better hunters. And
then they walk around with the rest of
the buffalo dragging it into the corner
by themselves.
>> Literally,
>> the first day that's cool. The second
day that's cool. By day four or five, I
start to realize, wait, the buffalo
almost hit me and I got a toenail. I
feel like I should have a little bit of
a bigger piece of the buffalo. Yeah.
>> And that would lead to internal revolt.
>> Well, I think you're skipping a step.
So, it it does start there. And I think
that that that is something that's
always being negotiated. And um for
anybody that's watched uh A Few Good Men
and Full Metal Jacket, they both explore
something very similar, this idea of a
sock party.
>> And so if you've got a guy that is
legitimately being an [ __ ] uh and
man, people really need to study Japan
after World War II. So Japan after World
War II,
>> um they were so wars over.
>> Imagine that. And then there were
Japanese soldiers that went and killed
their superior officers. the war is
over, dude. And they just went and
straight murdered the guys that were
leading them in battle. Now, why did
they do that? Literally over calories.
So, they were like, "Hold on. In all of
these camps towards the end of the war
when there's like basically no calories
and we're losing, um officers were
surviving much longer than the men."
>> And so, the men got theirs back. They
were not blind to the fact that there
was something very unfair happening. And
so this is why shout out to Simon Sak
who I am just very loathed to give too
much love to but uh he does the whole
idea of leaders eat last brilliant he is
100% correct and a leader like dude the
book endurance about the guys that end
up getting lost in uh I think it was
Antarctica uh when they're trying to
cross the um the [ __ ] whatever the ice
sheet is known as
>> and they get stuck for like two
And so he ends up not a single man dies.
It's one of the most incredible stories
of leadership ever. Uh and this is a guy
who understands like I've got to put my
people first. I've got to make sure that
everybody feels um treated fairly. So
definitively if you're the [ __ ] who
really is like, yo, Timmy almost got hit
by the wilderbeast and really did a
great [ __ ] job and we give him
toenails. Dude, they you will eventually
get got for sure. Now, if Timmy got
toenails because he almost got hit
because he was [ __ ] around playing in
the grass or flirting or whatever, then
[ __ ] Timmy. Timmy gets toenails and
nobody's coming for you but Timmy. But
the whole group will [ __ ] sock party
Timmy. And they'll hold him down in the
middle of the night and be like, "Fuck
you. Don't you dare complain about your
toenails. You're lucky you [ __ ] got
toenails. You almost got all of us
killed because you're [ __ ] around."
That's the part that we don't have
anymore. We don't sock party the
[ __ ] And so everybody is like ready
to sock party Elon Musk and we can
certainly have we should have the debate
about that and I just did a deep dive
about it which you should all watch
because Elon is not the guy [ __ ]
stealing from you but you are being
stolen from. So I get the anger. We're
just displacing it. We're putting it on
the wrong guy.
So, okay. I feel like Elon is the puppet
and Jeff Bezos and the Walton family
love that because they don't have to
they get to dodge all the accountability
from their malpractices as hiring the
most more employees than Elon does. And
the reason I say that is there was a
report, this was right before the last
election cycle, so I'm assuming 2022,
2023, that it was like 30 to 40% or
something like that of Walmart employees
are also on government benefits.
Amazon's was also like north of like
1520. And to me as an employer, if the
government is has to subsidize your
employees, there's a break in the system
right there.
>> Yes. But the question is, is the break
in the system that we're giving way too
many handouts? Probably. So, one, not
every job is meant to support a
full-time uh like family. Like you can't
be like, "Oh, this is my job forever and
I'm going to support my family." You've
got to be climbing up the ladder.
>> Very true. Um, so that I want to remind
people the only reason that you can
afford your groceries at Walmart is
because of that. Now you could say hold
on
>> because of what?
>> Is because that they have people that
are getting paid a low enough wage that
they can offer the um goods at the store
for cheap.
>> And if you for I mean we just saw this
in fact I another thing that we have in
the document. So, I believe it was in
Seattle, they were like, "Oh man, all
these like um food apps that are using
the gig economy. They're abusing their
contractors. [ __ ] these kids. Force them
to pay, I think it was $26 minimum
wage." And so, all of a sudden, three
items from a Thai restaurant becomes
$122 if you want it delivered. And so,
it's like, yeah, welcome to the way that
this [ __ ] works. You do not understand
the business models of these companies.
You don't know if they're just like
taking all of the money off the top
because the numbers that are like paid
as bonuses are often so small that if
you tried to put them back into making
things cheaper, it it's just nothing. It
doesn't matter at all that when
distributed across a gigantic
organization, it's completely
meaningless. You wouldn't feel it at
all. But you look at the bonuses and
you're like, "Oh my god, that's so
grotesque." But it's like you're arguing
about the wrong thing. if the service
isn't good, stop using the service,
which is exactly what's happening to
these apps in those places. People are
just deleting the apps. And so prices
are not going to go down, they're going
to go [ __ ] up because now it's like,
oh god, like in this area, we can't get
anybody to work for us because there's
not enough money to be made because
people aren't using the app anymore
because things got too expensive. And so
now the only way to stay in business is
to charge even more on the few people
that are still using it. So it's like
Jesus Christ. I don't know how many
times people have to go through this
before they realize let them [ __ ]
decide what they're going to charge and
then as humans if we're like this is a
stupid amount of money for this thing
don't buy it. So that's where that gets
very frustrating me watching people
shoot themselves in the face. So um
unfortunately that's just not the way
that the economy works. People need to
be honest about how the economy works.
And so if the way that Walmart is able
to keep the cost of the groceries so low
is that they have part-time employees or
that they're like, "Hey, this is an
entry-level position. It is not enough
to support a family. We know that." Uh,
and so take this job when you're like
fresh out of high school or while you're
in high school or whatever. And then
transition out of this as you get older
rather than going, "This is going to be
my full-time job forever and I'm just
going to take the rest on government
subsidies." And this is Malay's thing.
Malay's thing. And it sounds it it is
cold. Not only does it sound cold, it is
cold, but it works. And unfortunately,
you have to do it. And when he came in,
he said, "I'm going to eliminate a
massive amount of government jobs." And
everybody was like, "Holy [ __ ] you
can't do that. People are going to
starve to death." And his response was
both cold and correct. And it was, "They
won't starve. They will find a way to
not die." He was like, "People always
find a way to not die." He's [ __ ]
right. And so that's just you put people
in a position where they have to carry
their own burden and they have to you're
decentralizing the solving of the
problem. And so each person has to solve
the problem in their own life and figure
out okay how do I not die?
>> That is as it should be. The government
gets morbidly obese when we say dear
government you take care of everybody.
You figure out how everybody doesn't
starve. And then people go oh [ __ ]
you're just going to do this for me?
This is like the kid who's living in the
parents' basement and the parent is
wealthy, so they're just like, "Ah, [ __ ]
it. I don't want to get into a fight."
And so they just keep funding all their
[ __ ] And then if you guys have ever
seen those crashs where like the mom has
finally like had enough and she's like,
"You've got to go get a job." And so she
shuts off the internet so he can't play
Call of Duty anymore and he's literally
smashing windows in his own mom's house.
That [ __ ] is crazy. But that's exactly
what happens when you just give and give
and give and give and give. The kid does
not have a mental model for I have to
take care of myself. So he's just like
this is an injustice acts like a crazy
[ __ ] fool and that we are we are
turning a huge portion of the nation I
mean look as a percentage it's going to
be small 5% 10% but we're making a huge
proportion in terms of the damage that
they can do number of people feel like
like literally not have a mental model
for I need to carry my own burden it is
this is owed to me this is what the
government should be doing these rich
people should be getting taxed more so
that I can keep doing this thing. It's
[ __ ] crazy.
>> Um, okay. So, I feel like um heard
received. I feel like often times um
during the show we look at the outskirts
of society and how they can like impact
a larger uh ethos of everybody else. So,
it's.1% of trans people, but it impacted
80% of our conversations leading up in
the last election cycle. Um we have the
you just use that example of like people
leeching on the system. There are people
who I can work, I should work, but I'm
going to keep having babies, keep
chilling at the house, and just
expecting the government to like
handhold me. Completely understand,
heard, received, all those things. I
just need you to say this sentence so
that way we can kind of cure descent in
the chat. There are people in there are
corporations who take advantage of that
labor arbitrage. They can pay more. They
have the uh margins to pay more. They
could pay more, but they're instead
choosing I'd rather keep the money than
give it to the people that helps me
accumulate that money.
>> Correct. So I think just like the 1% of
population can control 80% of the
conversation when it comes to the trans.
I do think there are a lot of
corporations that can pay better, should
pay better, have three generations of
billionaires because what their dad did
80 years ago and yet there are people
who work 40 hours a week. They are great
at their job but there's no upward
mobility and they still need government
um assistance just to get themselves.
>> Go to a different company.
>> Yeah.
>> So if it's just that easy
>> here here's the thing. I will say this
to my own employees. If there is a
better company for you to go work for,
obviously that's the negotiating power
that you have against me. And you should
be willing to take your talents and go
somewhere else and say, "Yeah, I'm not
being treated the way that I ought to be
being treated here." That that is
completely just. That is exactly how the
system should work. And I should
constantly be in a position where I'm
like, man, I really want to get the best
people that I can get. And it's going to
come down to how well do I pay? It's
going to come down to like, does the
company have energy? Is it moving in a
right direction where people are
excited? Um, how do I treat people? And
so on a whole host of dimensions, you
guys should always be evaluating the
company and saying, is this where I want
to spend my time? Uh, and where I want
to invest my future. And so my job is to
make sure that the answer to that
question is yes for as long as possible.
It unfortunately is never going to be
yes forever, but hopefully it's yes for
a really long time. And that is how
everybody should be approaching whatever
company they buy from, whatever company
they work for. Like are you treating me
in the way that I want and are my skills
such that you can create fear of loss in
me. And so if a company wants to be
greedy and they're not taking good care
of their employees, then [ __ ] them. Like
people are going to leave. Uh and that
that is as it should be. And so when you
look at a high dynamic workforce like
what we see in Silicon Valley, it's the
employees are constantly moving. So like
I can't tell you how many other
companies I have staffed. So somebody
will come work for me. I will teach them
the things. I will teach them mindset. I
will teach them how to run uh an
entertainment company, how to do
content, and then they go work somewhere
else. And then even those [ __ ]
and you know who you are will even try
to pull people out of the company that
they cross paths with. And so yeah, it's
like that's the battle. But anyway, you
create a dynamic space where people are
moving from company to company that I
can go steal somebody from somebody
else's company, which 100% unless the
owner of that company is a friend of
mine. Fair [ __ ] game. And that is as
it should be. So all these ideas are
cross-pollinating. People do a vote of
no confidence and leave a company all
the time. People fire people. They leave
all the time. If a company really is
treating their customers poorly, those
customers should go somewhere else. And
if a company can't stay in business,
they should go out of business. That is
exactly as it should be. And nobody
should be confused about that or be
fighting against it. And so yes, we we
should leave companies to decide what's
the right way to allocate this capital.
Is it to pay your employees more? Is it
to not pay some roles more, other roles
more? Is it to [ __ ] bonus the CEO to
death? Is it to uh make sure the execs
are making all their money? Whatever
actually works. Now, what people should
be up in arms about is is there
regulatory capture? Is there something
happening that allows a company to act
as a de facto monopoly? This is going to
be a huge question in the AI industry
because oh my god, AI is already going
to have a moat of it's just insanely
expensive. And then when you've got uh
the Biden administration straight saying
we don't want more AI companies and now
the Trump administration being like
we're going to financially invest and so
we're going to pick the winners. This is
[ __ ] suicidal. It is so stupid. The
customer is going to end up losing. So
what we should want is competition, a
regulatory environment that is very
light touch but protects fishly against
letting companies build an unfair
advantage.
>> Um, can I get the charger first? Um, and
second, you're getting cooked in the
chat. They're giving you ivory tower
vibes when you said just get another
>> [ __ ] them. [ __ ] [laughter] them. If you
guys don't understand, literally if you
guys don't understand how the economy
works, great. Hey, you you can go watch
you can go watch any show you want and
that's as it should be. And here's the
thing. I I am worried about two things.
I'm gonna earn my own respect. Period.
Full stop. End of story. I don't give a
[ __ ] about anything else. And then
number two, for now, I am going to do my
best to pull people back from the brink
of destroying America, a country that I
love and think can serve people
extraordinarily well. Now, if you have a
good answer that is better from a cause
and effect perspective, I will adopt it
immediately. I don't care if you hate
me. I don't care if you're trying to say
it to hurt my feelings. If it is more
useful, I will adopt it whole cloth
aggressively and deploy it immediately.
The only thing I know about my thinking,
it it is flawed in some way and I don't
yet know the way in which it is flawed.
So, if you have like actual, hey, here's
the thing that you're getting wrong,
dude, I'll take it. But from uh the
ivory tower perspective, that's
completely meaningless. So, I am talking
to what [ __ ] works. Now, my advice to
you would be like, "How did this guy go
from not being able to pay all of his
bills at one time to being in the quote
unquote ivory tower?" That was me just
finally wallowing in my own shame enough
that I started actually getting out of
bed, so carrying my own cross, realizing
nobody was coming to save me, then
trying to figure out from a cause and
effect perspective how things actually
work, not being afraid to look stupid,
yada yada, all that stuff. Cool. So, I
do that ends up paying dividends. So, I
am trying to get people to deploy that
for themselves in their own life. But,
um, for better or worse, because I think
it actually is worse for the company's
revenue, uh, I'm never going to tell
people what they want to hear. I'm I'm
merely going to try to tell people what
actually works.
>> Yeah. Um, Ryan, you got anything? I
think we got it. We're about to loop.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's probably just
>> All right. Um, I feel like this is a
quick one. uh the resolution act in
Congress. So now the Senate and the
House have voted that all hostilities in
Iran must end. They never approved the
war to begin with. So I feel like this
is like a more of a grandstanding vote
than
>> it is literally like it it is legally a
grandstanding vote. It is pure uh
symbolism. I think it's it is if they
could do it privately, I think that this
is actually really useful. Trump needs
to understand even people on his own
team think that this is buffoonery.
I would agree very aggressively with
anybody that thinks that the way that
things have gone in Iran is buffoonery.
It is. Uh I think it is terrible to have
done this publicly. Uh because you
should be wanting Trump to be able to
clean up the mess. He made the mess, but
there's no point in punishing uh America
to punish him. That is literally the
definition of cutting off your nose to
spite your face. So yeah, that that I
think is dumb. this puts him in a worse
position to negotiate a deal. And right
now he is negotiating like somebody
who's desperate.
>> Um
because now Iran is seeing that okay
even your own Congress cut you off at
the way so you can't do anything.
>> Yeah. I mean they they hopefully they
know better. They know that this is
symbolic but they know that that
shortens the timeline that Trump can
really go and bully.
>> And so you're going to see Iran get more
and more bold. Um, and that that is not
the place that America should want to be
in. So, we should not want for our
enemies to win. We should want us to win
and then we need to have a
reconciliation of like how the [ __ ] do
we end up here?
>> Um, so that I think is right and just
and smart and um putting stronger curbs
on a president's ability to be um
aggressive, meaning that this was not
defensive. That is certainly my read of
this. And so, yeah, not letting them go
wage um wars of aggression and putting
congressional like guard rails around
that. Love that idea. Uh but now that
we're in it, to want to see him fail,
that is crazy town. Like I will just say
I want mom Donnie to make New York a
better place. That'd be amazing. You
believe mom Donnie is making New York a
better place. And so
>> it's first quarter. It was two
possessions, but he scored both times.
But the reason I say that is one, I want
people to track. If he really does end
up making New York a better place, then
I'll be like, "Fuck, yeah, word. I I
have an outcome that I'm trying to get
to. If he can get us there, then I'm
going to audit those policies, update my
mental model, and be like, hey, this
[ __ ] really works in practice."
>> So, you and I are stretching out into
the future, and we see a different
outcome. But I think that it is um
perfectly wise to say this is where I'm
at today, but if I end up being wrong,
why would I double down on that? So, I
get it in a populous moment that's good
for clicks. It's good for views because
it people can trust that they can come
to me and I'm going to make them feel
the way they want to feel. And I will
routinely unintentionally betray people
who are coming to me to just make me
feel like I'm smart, I'm good, I'm
right. And I'm going to often be like,
"No, that doesn't make any sense. I'm
going to vote against the quote unquote
team and then people are going to be
very confused and that will be the thing
that will ultimately hold me back. Um I
just don't know if there's a big enough
audience for people are like yeah I'm
going to often feel like [ __ ] like my
quote unquote team we made the wrong
play here and we've got to adjust and
that won't feel good for people in a
moment where I just want to be on a
team. I just want to tell me I just want
someone to tell me that I'm the winner.
I'm the good guy. And what I'm saying is
no, no, no. We are either getting
towards the championship or we're not.
And if we're not getting towards the
championship, by definition, we were
doing the wrong thing. And so we have to
adjust. That would be very disconcerting
for a lot of people.
>> I think the anti-establishment wave is
like increasing though because whether
you're on looking at Tucker Carlson
leaving the Republican party, you're
looking at Nick Fuentes leaving, you're
looking at the DSA break on the left,
the I feel like the left and right now
is more of a directional thing versus an
actual like line. I think there's a lot
of people on the right that don't even
agree with each other. I think there's a
lot of people on the left that doesn't
agree with each other. So
>> although people are still on teams, if
rank choice voting becomes national
federal policy, I think immediately we
have four or five policy uh four or five
parties.
>> It's wild. And I think that uh you could
take a read on that that's positive and
say, well, they weren't afraid to say,
I've got to update my mental model. I'm
not on this team. But I do worry,
especially because this is an
influencerdriven culture, which I don't
say in a derogatory fashion, but it's
going to have consequences that we will
have to figure out how we navigate. And
if they just go build another team,
>> then it becomes a problem. And so what
I'm trying to say is the only team I'm
on is team cause and effect. Mhm.
>> And that has proven to me in life is so
powerful because you can really set a
course and actually get there. Um that
that's the only thing where I'll be
like, "No, I'm not going to abandon
cause and effect." The cause and effect
may be happening at a layer that I was
blind to. And so now I've got to go
deeper. There's like really interesting
stuff on this with game theory where
it's like, "Okay, here's game theory. We
think it plays out like this." And then
you find, nope, there's actually a
deeper strategy. So like for people that
understand the whole tit fortat strategy
for a long time it was like tiff fortat
is the strategy that people deploy and
then they started running more
sophisticated like war games and they
realized oh actually tit fortat isn't
the best strategy there's forgiving tit
fortat then they found out forgiving
tiff fortat isn't the best strategy
there's like another I forget what it's
called there's another layer below that
where it's like not randomized
forgiveness but it's like you get in a
loop where um you will run a punitive
strategy followed by forgiveness
followed by punitive. Again, it's really
um it starts getting complicated, but
that is that's where I'm at. It's like
I'm just trying to to get successfully
more nuanced layered reads on how the
world actually works. Period. Copy.
Copy. Uh all right, we got a bunch of
super chats.
>> Yes, we do. First up comes from Tyler
Gibb who says, "Oh, $100 super chat from
Tyler." Hey, excuse me, Tyler. Tyler's
coming up.
>> Thanks for covering GTA 6 for [laughter]
>> Hi, Tom. This is the first out of the
last three live streams I've been able
to actually manage to get on time.
Although, probably was a good thing I
missed the one 11 days ago because that
was the first time that I can say that I
disagreed with everything you said. So,
that's great, man. So, what I love is
maybe that would be the one that would
be most important for you to make. Um
because if you can stay engaged and
you're you're using me and the way that
I think as a way to sharpen your own
thinking, but sometimes the way that
that sharpening comes is because you're
like, "Wait, that does not feel right to
me at all." Then you translate that into
very specific cause and effect and
you're like, "Here's where he's getting
the cause and effect wrong." I think
that's always extremely powerful. Um,
and
hopefully I don't you don't perceive me
as more or less useful uh because we
will sometimes or maybe even frequently
disagree. It's whether or not I'm
sincerely trying to map cause and
effect. If I'm sincerely trying to map
cause and effect and I'm doing my best
to get out of my own way and not to
become dogmatic, then we'll both be
useful to each other. If you are equally
sincere and you're able to articulate
why I'm wrong, then I can engage with
the why instead of just, oh, this guy's
a [ __ ] idiot and then you just peace
out, that's always where it's like, what
am I supposed to do with that? So, um,
that's not useful. But if if we actually
here's my fantasy. It's probably a
fantasy, but my fantasy is that this
community just keeps growing and growing
and growing. We've been on a really
growing stretch for the last several
weeks, which thank you guys. Uh, but if
we can really grow as a community to the
point where this really becomes a
movement of people who are obsessive
about cause and effect, um, man, would
that be cool. And it is inevitable that
there are going to be times in a live
where I I legitimately get something
wrong to the point where down the road
I'm like, "Yeah, I got that wrong.
Here's how I've updated my mental
model." Maybe times where I get the
whole thing wrong. Great. As long as I'm
willing to go, okay, here's where the
cause and effect broke down and this is
how I've updated my thinking. Um
hopefully this community and one day
movement uh remains useful for us all.
>> Next up comes from Blake Bullion with
another $100 super chat.
>> Hey, back to back. Let's go.
>> Our audience rich.
>> You guys are legit. Thank you.
>> Tom, I appreciate you saying [ __ ] them
and speaking the truth. I come here for
the truth and I'm sure many others do. I
want to see our country do better, too.
I wish everyone could contribute in
their own way. I appreciate and value uh
how you do. I'm assuming what you do.
Truth isn't always pretty.
>> Thank you, man. That means a lot. Uh a
lot a lot. I appreciate that. And yes, I
would expect anybody to say the same
thing about me if I'm not articulating
the actual like here's what you do about
it. Um so said with love, of course.
>> Next up with another $100 super chat, uh
K. McIntyre 111 says, "Chaning mindset,
Tom. I have an irrational fear of
needles and medical procedures. It's
embarrassing and holding me back from
better health. Can you give me uh I'm
going to say $100 because I sent the
super chat twice. Can you give me $100
worth of advice on how to overcome
irrational fear?
>> I can I can actually change your life
with this exact thing. I'm going to
speedrun this story. Um so you guys have
probably heard me talk about for years
for 15 years I was icing my wrist every
night because I had so much inflammation
and I didn't know what was causing it.
And so I tried this thing called
prolotherapy. It's where they inject a
dextro solution. So sugar into your
joint intentionally to inflame it, which
is interesting. So sugar equals
inflammation. Intentionally to inflam
inflame it so that the body will go, "Oh
[ __ ] I need to go address this." Now
it's an absolute lunatic hypothesis. I
now know, but at the time I didn't. And
so I would go in and they would give me
I forget how many injections like maybe
six to nine injections around different
parts of my wrist. And the guy would
literally say poke every time he went to
give me an injection. Like you, I used
to have an irrational fear of needles.
Like really a problem. Same as you. I
didn't want to go to the doctor. Needles
freaked me out to like the extreme.
So give me these injections. And I've
done it many times. But I start going
back and I get this guy that says poke
every time. So now looking away isn't
enough because he keeps saying poke,
poke, poke. And so he's doing all this
and I get up, he finishes and I'm
leaving and I get uber lightaded and I'm
like, "Oh [ __ ] they injected the
dextrose solution directly into my vein
and I must be having like um a diabetic
response to this." And so I'm I put my
head down and I'm like, "Guys, I feel
really lightheaded." And uh about to
pass out and they're like, "You need to
sit down. You need to wait. Don't
drive." And so I sit there for like a
half an hour and I think, "Oh my god,
like I'm going to end up in like a
diabetic coma. This is [ __ ]
terrifying." And finally it passes after
about 30 minutes. I go back the next
time to get it. And I had talked to
people and they were like, "Yeah, maybe
they really did inject like the pure
sugar solution directly into your vein
and that was the problem." And so go
back the next time and I get this guy
again and I'm like, "Hey, the last time
I got really lightheaded." And he goes,
"Oh, you just had a veagal response." I
was like, "What do you mean? What's a
veagal response?" And he was like, "Oh,
you you just got like overwhelmed by um
the needles and by being injected
because even if we had injected the
dextrose solution directly into your
vein, you wouldn't have had that kind of
response." I'm like, "Hold on a second.
Are you talking like I almost fainted
because of the needle?" And he was like,
"Yes." And I was like, "Wait, you're
telling me I almost fainted because I'm
a pussy?" And he was like, "Well, I
don't know if I'd say it like that." And
I was like, "What the fuck?" And so here
is the answer to your question. I filled
my soul with rage at the fact that I
almost fainted out of emotional
weakness. To this day, I'm enraged by
that. So now when I go and get
injections, I will stick my arm out. I
will pump the vein and I will watch them
[ __ ] inject me, take my blood, and
I'm like, "Don't you dare feel some kind
of way about this." And so now I'm a
psychopath who leans into it. How many
more needles do you need? How many more
injections do I need to have? Now, if I
can make it painless by having them
pre-numb it, all that stuff, I will do
it. But I refuse to let myself be afraid
of that. That one mental shift of like
that was just me being weak and there's
no universe in which I allow myself to
be weak. absolutely changed it. You can
harness anger, even if it's anger aimed
at yourself. It [ __ ] works, man. I
know how uncomfortable that's going to
make people, but sometimes the right
answer is just don't be a [ __ ]
>> And last up for now, the super chat from
Patrick Wrightson with $50.
>> Hey, shout out to Patrick.
>> Super chat.
>> Yes, on the political asymmetry.
Important to understand Kurt Dittle's
concept of the political triangle.
There's more political really uh really
philosophical variance right of the
middle. Highly recommend looking into
it.
>> Didn't we look at the political triangle
at one point?
>> We looked at political compass. That's
the four quadrant.
>> I think I have seen the political
triangle but I don't remember it well
enough so I'd have to look into it
again. Uh but thank you for that. Much
appreciated.
>> And by the way, thank you for the yet
another banger super chat.
>> Yeah, big super chats today. Thank you.
>> All right. Um, shout out to the chat.
Um,
>> big shout out.
>> Trump did something I like. Dun dun. I
need a dun dun dun sound.
>> this is a terrible idea.
>> Trump tweet, "The big oil companies are
not dropping their price as the pump
commenserate with the sharply lower
prices they are paying for oil. Those
prices are dropping like a rock. In
other words, customers are being gouged.
I've instructed the DOJ to immediately
start looking into this. Gasoline prices
better start going down a lot faster
than what I'm seeing." President DJT.
And as we look at oil prices today, they
did fall below straight or Hermoose war
levels. Um, it's back in the 69s. It was
a 70. Um, and that's where it was a
couple months ago before we got into
this war. But I just got gas and I still
paid $6. So I guess we're still at war.
>> Well, you're also in California, so
>> I was just in Arizona. I paid $4. It's
still just as bad.
>> That's a lot better. Six versus four.
>> It used to be 270.
>> Yeah. Hey, [laughter] and let's get
back. But Trump is pissed because the
price of oil is down 27% on the month,
but gas at the pump is down only 13%.
Because of that that gap, Trump is
freaking out and said that he's going to
have the DOJ investigate big oil for
price gouging. The problem is there's no
federal price gouging law, thankfully,
because it's a dumb idea. The government
is the worst place in the world to try
and set prices. If you guys remember
when Kla Harris campaigned on trying to
control prices in grocery stores because
she said they were gouging people, I
said this is a dumb [ __ ] idea. It was
a dumb idea when she did it. It is a
dumb idea now when Trump is doing it. If
we're worried that big oil is colluding
on prices to keep them high and acting
like a cartel, then go after them for
that. We have laws on the books for
that. If we think they are somehow
deploying monopolistic practices, go
after them for that. But if the
president is just big mad because he's
created an absolute mess in Iran and
politically he needs the prices to come
down faster, he can shut the [ __ ] up.
Now, stupidly price gouging is a state
crime in some places. So, states can go
be dumb if that's what they choose to
do. But the only federal tool is the
Defense Production Act, and that covers
hoarding of designated supplies, not
necessarily the spread between oil and
gas. So an investigation here would be
pointless and obviously just politically
motivated. When you try to control
prices at the top level and force it
down on people, you do not know the
economic realities. So again, unless
these guys are doing something
monopolistic, which should be broken up
for the mere fact that it's
monopolistic. Let people go be stupid.
Like look at what California is doing.
The taxes that they're putting on gas is
an absolute outrage. The fact that they
refuse to actually generate and process
their own oil here. I think we do
generate some, but we end up shipping it
to [ __ ] Texas. It is crazy. So,
people vote with their feet and they
leave and they say, "I'm not going to
put up with this anymore." That is
exactly how this is meant to play out.
Let an upstart company get on and start
making the cost of gas cheaper by
solving whatever the problem is. If it's
price gouging, then let them build a
business off. We don't do that. So, you
want to put the market in the position
to solve this stuff because there is no
way that Trump, the government is going
to get this right. So let people vote by
going to the place that responds the
quickest because if a gas company wants
to get ahead and there actually is a
reason to drop prices really fast, then
they can pull ahead of the competition
by being the one that reacts the fastest
and gets their prices down quickly. So
again, if they're colluding, go after
them for that. But if they're not, then
there might be a reason that they don't
understand. So the reality is there is a
reason that gas trails crude. Pump
prices rise fast, but they fall slow.
Economists have decades of data on this.
A drop in oil takes weeks to work
through refining, distribution, and then
make its way to the station. Okay? So,
some of what Trump is calling gouging is
just how the system works. So, yeah,
this to me is ridiculous.
>> I don't know.
>> Listen, they're going to keep prices as
high as they can. This is why you need
competition. So, okay, listen. How did I
get rich?
I got rich by going into an industry
where I was like, "These guys are
putting terrible ingredients in their
products." And if somebody would just
put better ingredients in their
products, then I I'll be wealthy as the
day is long. So, we go and we make the
formulation. And everybody, I'm sure,
was banging drums and saying, "These
guys are so dumb. They don't care about
their people." Not us, but the industry
before we got there. Uh, all these
protein bar companies, they all put
sugar in it. [ __ ] these kids. are just
doing it to lower prices. That isn't
true. That isn't true. And so when we
got in and tried to launch our
competitive product, what we realized
is, oh [ __ ] there is a very complicated
reason why everybody put sugar in their
bar. And so the punchline is something
the government never would have known
about. The industry actively doing it
didn't understand it. The realization
that I had was, oh my god, what's
actually going on is because the
government subsidizes corn. Mhm.
>> Now, all of a sudden, sugar is made with
corn via something called high fructose
corn syrup. High fructose corn syrup by
accident has a certain viscosity. And
so, all of the equipment that has been
engineered to help people make things
that use this very cheap sugar because
the government is artificially lowering
the price. Do we see where the problem
arises? Because of that, all of the
equipment for like 70 years has been
made assuming that the product will have
the viscosity of something that has high
fructose corn syrup in it. The second
you take out that high fructose corn
syrup, the equipment doesn't work. So
now we come in with these big ideas.
We're going to make a bar that's
different than everybody else. We're
like, oh [ __ ] we have to design our own
equipment. So imagine that there's a
problem like that that hides within this
system. The government isn't going to
know about it. That doesn't mean that
people don't keep prices as high as they
can. But it does mean that often times
the problem that you solve is so unique
to that industry that if you're not in
the industry, you don't actually
understand it. And there can be all
kinds of ancillary things that you have
to do in the supply chain. You have to
solve that problem. This is exactly
again how Elon got rich. So, how do you
drive down the cost of a rocket? You
have to completely change the supply
chains. So, it's these problems are
often way harder. I know people want it
to be very simple. It's just greedy
[ __ ] running these companies. Dude,
it is so much [ __ ] harder. By the
way, if it is just greedy [ __ ]
guess what? You're about to get rich. Go
start a company. Go build the gas
station that just isn't greedy. And you
will, ironically, if it really is true,
and the only problem is greed of the
CEOs, go launch a company and just don't
be greedy. And you'll get rich by not
being greedy. That that's that's the
competition that you want at work. And
I'm not even saying that like flippantly
like it's never going to work. It really
might work. And if that really is the
problem, there's a huge opportunity. And
now you just have to make sure that
those oil companies aren't actually
going to do something illegal to stop
you. And if they do, that's the place
where you should go absolutely apeshit.
Because when we let regulatory capture
happen and the corporations do the evil
thing, let's go get them for the actual
evil thing that they do rather than
stopping short at the dumb thing.
>> This is the actual evil thing that they
do. Oil is literally controlled by a
cartel. The oil producing countries cart
OPEC. The C is for cartel. So it's like
it's literally regulatory capture is
oil's game. I can understand software
companies. I can understand food
companies. I can understand in grocery
stores. I completely get that. But we
can't act like gas prices are like, "Oh,
well, my processes, we announced the war
on Friday. By Friday afternoon, prices
were a dollar higher." It didn't. It
didn't. Come on. I was born that night.
Not last night. Like, that was 100%
driven by I can do it, so I will do it.
Same thing happened over 911. As soon as
we had 911, we went into um Eastern
countries. Gas prices literally went
from $1.99 to $2.99. That was the first
time I actually seen in my life like,
"Wait, we're paying a dollar more for
gas and everybody's cool with that? The
war is over. We're done. We're back.
We're still paying a dollar more for
gas. It never got back down. It stayed
this level. It was elevated ever since
then." I'm old enough to remember 99
cent gas back in my day on my rocking
chair. So, the fact that it keeps
ticking up for every conflict. We can't
just act like, "Yeah, gas companies, you
guys got it so hard. Sorry. It's it's
regulatory capture, it's a cartel, and
this is corruption."
>> So, go after that.
On top of that, there is also a class
action lawsuit right now against a bunch
of gas stations like Marathon Petroleum,
7-Eleven, and Walmart about them using
an AI software called Calibrate to
artificially inflate the prices during
the Iran war. So, like there's all these
other elements of corruption on top of
that even.
>> Why is that corruption?
>> Artificially in inflating the price.
>> What do you mean artificially inflating
the price? In an open market, you should
be able to charge whatever you want and
if people are willing to pay it, then
you've cornered the market. there is uh
Louis Vuitton artificially inflating the
price is uh was Quest artificially
inflating the price. We charge more for
our product than the next person. So
it's like you should be able to charge
whatever you want and then there should
be enough competition in the market.
That's why I'm saying the thing Drew has
put his finger on is the right thing.
You literally have a cartel that runs
this. Go break up the cartel. [ __ ] that
noise. Now there are complexities even
around that because and we're it'll be
interesting to see if now that uh the
UAE left I think OPEC if I'm not
mistaken.
>> Mhm.
>> So let's see what happens. Do those guys
just go [ __ ] it, we're going to flood
the market. Uh but there is a balance
where you've got to keep oil at a
certain level of profitability in order
to keep doing the drilling and all that
[ __ ] Uh this is why shale in the US
they'll do it sometimes but not others
because there are times where it's
profitable and times where it's not. So,
look, there are complexities there, but
if anybody's going to say, "These guys
are a cartel. [ __ ] them." I'd be like,
"Yeah." As a default reaction without
doing any deep research, I'm right there
with you. But that's the part where you
want to go berserk. The Trump trying to
say, "I know what the price should be."
That's not the place.
Just go break up the structural problem.
>> And we're the number one expert on oil
now. And we didn't stole oil from all of
Venezuela. We stole all day oil and
y'all still charging me a dollar more.
Is it Venezuela that made us the number
one or what was the trigger to make us
number one? I was just I didn't context
to that
>> innovation innovation deregulating do
more of that. Uh if you want to see
America really become like you can just
forget the entire Middle East exists.
Get um Alberta to break away from Canada
and join America under it would have to
be under a pro-energy policy uh regime.
But oh my god, if we had that, we have a
friendly Venezuela because we have guns
pointed at their heads. Uh we have a
voluntarily friendly Alberta, Canada,
and pro- energy policies. Holy Jesus,
that would be incredible. And then
because we all live in California, if we
could get California to stop being a
morbidly obese tax sucker, uh then we'd
be in a much better position. Oh my god,
it'd be amazing. But alas, probably not
going to be there anytime soon.
>> Uh, all right, let's jump over to US A
because it is getting exposed right now.
My favorite thing about US A is once US
A funding was cut off, that was the
first time in in the last 20 years that
a rap single wasn't number one on the
Billboard Awards. Causation is
>> interesting. Do you think there's really
something there?
>> Yeah, because um, USA funded the drug
trade in LA in the '90s. That's the
whole show Snowfall is about because we
needed to do a change a regime change in
some South American country. I'm
blanking on the name of it. So, how they
funded it was they bought a bunch of
coke from the um militia in um South
America, gave it to inner city
neighborhoods to like sell and all that
so that way they can keep funding.
>> And that made rap work.
>> Um that was the origin of gangster rap
is the drug like change. You don't get
gangster rap if you don't get gangsters.
And then you don't get gangsters if you
don't get CIA fundedbacked money.
>> Same same thing happening to Haiti right
now. Support 50 grand of
>> So that hypothesis makes a prediction
which is that if rap music disappears,
gangs have disappeared.
>> No. If gangs never appeared, rap music
never appears. It's a
>> Do you like or dislike rap? I can't rap
music. So, but I can't map what you're
saying right now. Were you being
sarcastic
>> about
>> about uh So I thought you were saying
USA bad and I love that now rap music is
isn't in the top 40.
>> I love USA bad. USA is bad. Yes.
>> Um it it's a funny causation of USA that
it also influenced the rap music
industry.
>> But how are they influencing it now if
it isn't via a reduction in gang
population?
>> The same way that they got exposed for
they did um
>> so they just funding it out right now.
They funded a international uh
resistance movement uh musician. We
talked about this on the show. What uh
with Mike Benz, they funded it was like
Pakistan or some some type of like
insert
>> the guy that was the UK kid.
>> No, no, no, no, no. That's um
>> Bob Villain.
>> Yeah. Yeah. No, we're not talking about
that. But US aid funded a country in the
Middle East their their revolt and part
of the revolt was like a music festival
and it was like a I'm going to say
Iranian. But you are saying that US A
was funding US rap the rap industry.
>> Okay, I'll put it this way. They were
seed investors into it.
>> I'll put it that way.
>> But only back in the 80s or whatever.
>> I don't know if they're still doing it,
but once the USA fund got exposed.
>> Very interesting. I mean, the US aid
stuff to me is very very interesting in
terms of it. I don't think we know
enough yet to actually link what's
happening all across South America uh to
US aid, but there are certainly plenty
of people that want us to link them
>> like Kelly. Uh yeah, so B Kelly put out
a tweet. This is phenomenal.
>> Most governments don't want US aid funds
flowing into their countries because
they understand where much of that money
actually ends up. While marketed as
support for development, democracy, and
human rights, the majority of these
funds are funded to opposition groups,
NOS's with political agendas, and
destabilization, destabilizing
movements. Very, very true. At best,
maybe 10% of the money reaches real
projects that help people in need. These
are such cases, but the rest is used to
fuel disscent, finance protest, and
undermine administrations that refuse it
align with the globalist agenda. Cutting
this so-called eight isn't just
beneficial for the United States, it's
also a big win for the rest of the
world.
>> If it ends up being true that US aid was
basically funding left-leaning
governments,
dude, that's wild. You want to talk
about um the secret elite cabal that's
running the world, here it is. If the
sudden shift to the right across South
America is simply because there's no
longer funds going there, meaning
without artificial support uh that we
would be the countries in South America
would be more likely to lean right, that
is really damning, really damning. So,
this is definitely something that we
need and Mike Benz is all over it. So, I
hope more and more data comes out about
this because man, that's the kind of
thing that is is a real um you've got to
protect against that. You've got to
fight back against that. That is
definitely not something that you can
allow. And it's been wild in my own
mapping of how the world works to go
from literally in the last year from a
default assumption that NOS's are good,
beautiful, wonderful people trying to
like have a positive impact on the world
to being like, "Holy [ __ ] NOS's are
basically siphoning money off to um
basically handle the overproduction of
elites problem where they're perfectly
happy to take fraudulent dollars. um
they've got to go get paid by somebody
and so they're perfectly happy to take
uh you can't even say skim off the top
taking the vast majority people are
clocking it and this this needs more
research so I want to be very clear that
maybe this isn't as true as people are
putting forward but the thing that I
keep seeing around is like 80 to 90%
of the money is going to the
administrative costs uh rather than
actually making its way down and I know
um Drew Haiti is very close to your
heart. And they were talking literally
about 10% making it or 2% making its way
to actual Haitians. And I was like, god
damn, like that is correly
trying to help. And if it's really being
siphoned off by um elite globalist
people that otherwise cannot contribute
to the economy, [ __ ] all that. That's
that is a level of infuriating. Like the
thing that you guys feel about uh gas
prices, I feel about that. Like that
[ __ ] is sinister.
>> US aid is your gas prices,
>> dude. [laughter] That is so sinister.
Like yeah, that you you are um
when money and politics was regional, I
really hated it. Seeing that money and
politics is just this huge global um
distortion is is grotesque at at a level
that's so horrifying.
Yeah, I really I really hate everything
that I learn about this. I hate
>> um
>> and by the way, one big fear that I have
is that fraud is going to be so
overwhelming. I find myself pulling link
after link after link on fraud and then
being like it would take me so long to
like tease out what's real, what's not
real
>> that I'm like
>> part of my brain just wants to shut off
and be like
>> just like how we react to the Pentagon
failing audits. It's just like yeah it's
just
>> $1 trillion and that you haven't
reconciled any it's just too much to
start and
>> yes
>> just so so hard. But if we give into
that impulse, it's going to [laughter]
get worse. But boy, do I have it.
>> Crazy.
>> That's hilarious. Uh, okay, we got to
jump over to the Bank of Japan because
they will dump foreign bonds today.
>> Last time they dumped 382 billion. What
is it? Yen, what did they do over there?
>> Uh, yeah, that's yen.
>> Uh, mostly US bonds. This time it can be
up to 1 trillion because of Japan's
liquid liquidity crisis. This is
extremely bad for markets.
>> And so again, that's yen. So you're
talking somewhere in the neighborhood of
like $38 billion. Not exactly that, but
it's close. So it's not the the trillion
yen isn't a trillion dollars, but it's a
lot. And they hold over a trillion or
they did before they started selling it
off over a trillion dollars in US debt.
Um so that's a lot, man. These guys own
a lot of US debt. And so if they start
dumping, yeah, you're going to be in in
a pretty rough spot. uh the deep dive
that I just recorded yesterday. This is
it's not on Japan specifically, but it's
on what I think Trump and Kev uh Kevin
Walsh are going to be doing to siphon
wealth away from everybody to weaken the
dollar to deal with our 39 trillion and
growing uh US debt here. And when you
have traditionally you would have
foreign buyers soak up a huge amount of
that debt because they needed access to
US dollars. And so a great way to get it
at effectively no risk was to go buy US
debt. But they have been turning their
back on US debt now for a while. We
sanction people too much. We abuse our
privilege as the reserve currency. We
just print print print. And so people
are now like don't love this. And now on
top of that when you've got Japan being
like yo we've got to defend our own yen.
So now we're going to have to um get
liquid. And one of the ways we're going
to get liquid is by selling all of our
foreign debt. Not all of it, but selling
major chunks of foreign debt, including
US debt. So now one of your biggest
buyers is nowhere to be found. So what
are you going to do? You've got Kevin
Walsh who's like, "Hey, I I want to
shrink the Fed's balance sheet." Which
sounds great, but is almost certainly a
cover story for what do you mean? We're
not printing. uh and they're going to
use a back channel way of printing which
is basically to let the banks create
more debt. It's a better way to do it to
be sure because there's at least some
positive outcome there but it's still
going to be wildly inflationary. They
need it to be inflationary like they are
doing it specifically to be inflationary
and so um if they do that coupled with
financial repression uh which they will
certainly do then they'll actually be
able to get us out from under the debt.
So, it's this crazy thing of they're
going to widen the K, they're going to
make a revolution literally far more
[clears throat] likely, but it will get
us out from under the debt. Now, this is
where, boys and girls, you have heard
many times the phrase if uh those who
don't know history are condemned to
repeat it. We've been through this
before. We've been at these shocking
levels of debt to GDP before when? Right
after World War II. far more justifiable
reason to be in that kind of debt. But
nonetheless, we were in that kind of
debt before. And there's a very knowable
playbook that you use to get out from
under it. And it is you're going to
steal from your entire populace via
economic repression, something called
yield curve control. You're going to
make sure that the amount of interest
that people can earn by owning debt is
lower than the rate of inflation. And
that's known as financial repression via
yield curve control. The way that you um
or the effect of doing that is that over
time the debt just becomes easier to pay
back because everything gets more
expensive. So people are making more
money at their jobs and therefore the
tax base grows larger uh and you're
getting like postinflation dollars to
pay pre-inflation
loans. But to make that work, you have
to make sure that the debt that the
government is raising, because we have
to we have to roll over $9.7 trillion in
the next 12 months. That [ __ ] is crazy.
So, you've got to be super paranoid
about the rates. But hey, guess what?
You set the rates. So, the Fed will set
the rate literally below the level of
inflation to make sure that they can
keep paying the interest on the loans
that they take on. and then just saying,
"Sorry everybody that owns dollars. Your
dollar is going to get weaker over
time." God, studying the economy is
black pilling. But that is precisely
what you're about to live through. Now,
the great news is you may not be able to
protect society, but you can protect
yourself and your family. Uh, so make
sure you do. Make sure you do. But now
you know how it's going to happen. Very
obvious, very noble. So react
accordingly.
>> Have you like internalized Simon Dixon's
Mick Fick tick of it all?
>> Enough to talk about it.
>> Yeah. But in your day-to-day like as you
evaluate the economy, do you look like
borrow that lens or is it more simple?
>> I mean, so here you can sum up uh Mick
Ficktick in a very simple
straightforward way. Um elite people
that understand economics steal from you
all the time.
That's it. That that that is Simon Dixon
in a sense. Now, the way that he will
invite you into the mechanism is it's
kind of thrilling in like an espionage
kind of way cuz he can actually start
pointing to some of the people and the
way that they do it. And so, he is an
intoxicating person to engage with
because you you really feel like
somebody's lifting up the curtain and
being like, "Here are all the [ __ ]
rats." Um, and so that is extremely
um, if you've ever had a sore in your
mouth and you find yourself like
touching your tongue on it all the time
to like feel that pain and just remind
yourself that what the [ __ ] is that? Um,
that's what it feels like listening to
Simon Dixon is like, "God, this hurts
and I hate it, but I love it at the same
time." Uh, so yeah.
>> So good.
>> Yes, literally. So that is Simon Dixon.
Simon Dixon brought to you by It Hurts
So Good. Um, yeah,
>> we definitely pulled the Muslim flag
thing, but I can't find it on the sheet.
Am I tripping? Um, I searched it
>> flag thing.
>> Yeah, the how the Muslim city uh ban the
>> Oh, the LGBTQ thing. Uh, search for
culture clash. I think my headline was
this is what it looks like when cultures
clash. Um,
>> got it.
>> Booyah.
>> So, man, I'm curious to know how you're
going to transition out of the tick big
tick to this.
>> [laughter]
>> Uh,
>> Drew, what do you have for us?
>> It's like the spotlight hits the
comedian. Like, uh, uh,
>> say something funny.
>> Uh, uh, guys, uh, yeah, I got nothing.
We're just going to jump into it. So,
Majority Muslim City Council of Michigan
voted to permanently ban the LGBTQIA++.
Um, there was the indigenous woman.
There was something else we forgot about
there.
>> Oh, you hit it with I. That's the I.
Indigenous.
>> No, remember the I A the Canadian
>> two spirit.
>> Oh, I a T sub. I think it's like SSLA
LGBTQ. It's some crazy [ __ ] like that.
>> Plus plus of pride flag on public
property. White liberal women who
welcome refugees from exotment countries
are now wondering what happened.
Consequence of suicidal empathy coming
to a leftist town near you. Um
the
like the um stray at liberal white women
is funny. But there is something to we
are tolerant of a culture that seems not
to be tolerant to us in this way. I
think that's the framing of the setup.
>> Yeah. So if if you want to understand so
Muslim immigration is going to be one of
the most important arguments that we
have to have as a society uh over the
next call it 10 years. And the reason
that this is so complicated and it's
going to be so difficult is one America
has tolerance for religious freedom that
has served us very well. So it feels
very strange to say, well, hold on a
second. Um, it's freedom of religion for
my religions, the ones that I like. Uh,
but it is not freedom of religion for
the ones that I don't like. That's going
to be problematic. Then there is also um
that the vast majority of Muslims you
you life will be extraordinarily
confusing to you if you don't understand
that the vast majority of Muslims are
incredibly lovely, beautiful, wonderful
people that you would get along with and
that they're largely secular and so you
interface with them and you're like
these people are incredible. Why the
[ __ ] would I be worried about Muslims?
Um and then the world will also be very
that the reformations that um the
Christian church, Catholic church,
Protestant church, all of that, the the
Christian denominations, the
reformations that they've gone through,
which were bloody by the way,
extraordinarily bloody. they had a they
yielded a different outcome than the
some people will say that Islam just
hasn't been through a reformation and
other people will say well they've sort
of been through part of it and it just
hasn't gone the same way and so that's
where all of this stuff gets muddy if
you take the stance all Muslims are bad
you're an [ __ ] and so that's where
it's this this is going to get tough
because for America I believe America
has principles and we have a value set
we have an identity and if we don't um
radically slow Muslim immigration, we
will wind up a Muslim country. Um I for
one am not here for that. Even though I
think the vast majority of secular
Muslims uh are wonderful. I've been to
Muslim countries. They were wonderful.
The people were incredible, lovely. Um
so nobody has to convince me that
there's a huge preponderance of just
incredibly lovely secular Muslims. Um,
you do however have to acknowledge that
I would have been pretty hesitant uh to
let Christians into my country uh back
during the Crusades in the same way that
the vast majority of Christians were not
represented by the people that were
going out during the Crusades. But they
had not yet gone through the
reformations that made people go, "We
don't [ __ ] do that. That's just not
the Christian way. [ __ ] all y'all." So,
uh, that had to happen to make it such
that Christians were policing themselves
and being like, "That's not how we do
uh and so you are seeing a small
percentage of Muslims becoming extreme
but those small percentage of Muslims
that are becoming extreme are not being
effectively policed by Muslims and so
until that happens countries have to
decide because they are the birth rates
are admirable it is very impressive
Muslims are all about family they're
going to raise a lot of kids and
unfortunately the ones that break um to
a strict an orthodox is probably the
right word to use. The Muslims that
break on an orthodox interpretation of
the scripture, the violence is there for
you. So if you want to smack your wife,
it's there for you. If you want to marry
a nine-year-old, it's there for you.
It's literally an orthodox
interpretation of those things that
violate, I will say, Western values that
Americans should be able to stand on and
say, "Yep, this is what we believe." an
orthodox interpretation which may be a
very minor percentage of people but it's
there and right now it's not being
effectively policed certainly in the
west it it's probably being better
policed in many Muslim countries we can
play that clip on an endless loop where
um the guy who I forget what he is u but
he is very high up in a Muslim country
and he says I'm going to say this in
English so there can be no
misinterpretation there are going to be
more extremist Muslims
that are born or coming out of Europe or
the West. Came said Europe or the West,
but coming out of Europe or the West,
then there will be Muslim countries
because we're not fools. We are Muslims
ourselves and we know what the extremist
wing of this looks like. And so we shut
that [ __ ] down. So that's where like
you're going to get people that are on
the Muslim side either because they are
sincerely
um they are secularized.
They love the West and they don't want
to see anything bad happen to the West,
but they themselves don't see the danger
of that wing. They don't see the need
for the reformation. Um or they're doing
uh you'll hear tea thrown around a lot
that they have a rule that says that you
can lie and that you should act weak
when you are weak but then when you're
strong just run this [ __ ] Um so you're
going to hear all of that stuff and so
it's going to be incredibly complicated
and everybody of course is going to
reach for overly simplistic solutions
but I think that America really does
have to pump the brakes and say we need
to see what assimilation looks like. we
already have uh a ton of people here.
Let's just look and see do they
secularize. If they secularize, then
cool, we've got no beef. If they don't
secularize, then we do have beef. And
so, and by the way, if they don't
integrate, we need a melting pot. And
so, if Muslims melt into the American
value system, amazing. Um if they don't,
then we have a problem. And so, right
now, given the birth rate discrepancy,
man, we would just be on like a cultural
suicide pact. um if we don't hit the
pause button and see what assimilation
looks like. So that would be my advice
to everybody. Don't take the easy out.
Don't become uh a xenophobic psychopath
who's like uh merely being Muslim makes
you bad or being from a Muslim country
makes you bad. Um those would all be
completely you become the monster moves.
Uh that would be unwise. But also
assuming this is all going to be fine
and we'll recognize our country on the
other side of this would also be
foolish. So yeah, we've got to be way
more thoughtful. Anyway, this all
triggers from you get one of the things
that people are worried about is that
and this is why I say hey for all the
people that hate Israel, let me give you
a little bait here. So, uh, Israel ran.
It's a brilliant strategy, and they
said, "We need a place to live, and so
we're going to go to this area, um, that
we now call Palestine, and we're going
to be low-key about it in the beginning.
We're just going to bring as many people
as we can and we've got really good
justifications for why we're bringing
people because they're being persecuted
everywhere else and uh we have a some
people have a historical tie and we'll
just pretend that there's no such thing
as European Jews and we'll just bring
them into this area. We'll become
politically powerful and then we'll just
take over. And that's exactly what they
did. And if you hated that they did it,
then have your eyes wide open to um
Muslims have been running that same
playbook for 1400 years. So it's like
you don't have to look anywhere other
than what's happened in the past. And so
Muslims are extraordinarily good at
doing this. Um moving into an area and
saying we're going to take this over.
Christianity has been extraordinarily
good at this. Uh going into an area and
taking it over. And so now it's just
like well if we know that all basically
all lands at this point not all huge
numbers of uh countries throughout the
world have either been colonized by
Christians or colonized by Muslims. And
so
>> what what's your brand of colonization?
So you're you're going to be forced to
pick and that's why this is going to get
real dramatic. Um
I think that a great man once said
Congress shall make no laws respecting
an establishment of religion and I think
the separation of church and state we
somehow conflate that into
America has western values or these
certain type where we're or
Judeo-Christian nation and all these
things we aren't a Judeo-Christian
nation we aren't a nation established on
religion however this Muslim city
council banning this flag on public
lands is doing the exact opposite of
separating church and state. They
shouldn't put their personal religious
ideology into state practice into state
law. I have I hold that up with the
abortion laws because you say it's
killing a baby. I personally am against
abortion, but if you want to kill your
baby, God bless you. You do your thing.
Um and if I want to wave a pride flag, I
should be able to wave a pride. It's one
of those things where it's like I can
say both and I can hold both ideas in my
head, but just because I believe
something doesn't mean the person next
to me is forced to do something. So,
while I can look at this instance with
Muslim doing it and I'm saying this is
wrong, this was the wrong action. This
should be struck down in a federal court
because this is a constitutional
violation, I can also say that I don't
think it has it's not the Muslim of it
all. It's the my religion doesn't like
this, so I'm now banning other people to
do this as long as I'm in control. I
love that you're backing up to the level
of principle. I think that's very smart.
And so whatever rule I'm going to put in
place needs to apply to Christians in
the same way that applies to Muslims, to
Buddhists, to Janists, whatever.
>> Um that's very very wise.
>> Um the part that I think people are
missing in this whole debate is that um
every society, every society has a set
of values. They have a frame of
reference. Now, if if I can get people
on val on on point with the following
statement, this is going to be a lot
easier to contend with. The thing that
people will kill for is to protect their
family. They'll definitely kill for
that. And then they'll kill for their
value system. And you don't have to look
any farther than Protestants and
Catholics killing each other for a very
extended period of time. That's just
values. And so, I think this
interpretation of the book is right and
your interpretation is wrong. And for
people that don't know, Catholics and
Protestants believe in the same Bible
and they just interpret it differently.
>> And so from that difference in
interpretation, they have solidified a
set of values and um that then mixes
with the like call it evolutionarily
um the the evolution of their culture.
So, and that will be largely contingent
on were they an agrarian society or were
they herder hunter gatherer like what
was their society based on? People that
are all about agriculture feel one way.
Uh they're going to be really um into
private property. They're going to be
into governments because you're static.
You can't move. Um hurting cultures
become very honorbased. It's nomadic.
Um, so it it's very different vibes that
then collide with the religion that does
a huge amount of transferring the values
or communicating the values. So now if
we know the people will kill and die
quite frankly for their values, then
it's like when you say that we're not a
Christian country, you can rightly say
that we are not a our laws are not based
on explicit scripture. That is true and
that should always remain true. But
you'll be very confused about what
America is if you don't understand that
our frame of reference is even
unintentionally Christian. Like I'm not
a Christian. I don't believe in God. And
yet I've been raised in a value system
that is explicitly Christian in nature.
And I know I've said this a million
times, but the thing that Christ as a
piece of mythology communicates rapidly
to anybody that grows up in that
environment is that the individual is
divine. The individual is sacred. And so
we're an individualist culture versus a
collectivist culture like China. And so
those values are just very different.
And we would be very surprised by the
way that being in China on a day-to-day
basis would feel. same in Japan. Having
spent not a lot of time in Japan, but
having spent time in Japan, you realize,
whoa, like this is just very different.
People communicate differently, they act
differently, behave differently, it's
just different. And so when you try to
um pretend that there are no origins to
that, that it isn't like we're running
this frame of reference algorithm that
we see things very differently, you're
going to be very confused. And what
creates that frame of reference is
knowable. And one of the most important
things that created that is agriculture.
So we're um certainly white Anglo-Saxon
Protestants, uh wasps, like that all
comes from European ancestry,
agriculture largely. And so it's that's
carrying a lot of it. And then they
drank very deeply of this Middle Eastern
religion known as Christianity. So
they've taken that and run with it. And
so when they came to America, they
brought that frame of reference. And
then America has specifics because it
was so hard and harsh and so many people
died and yada yada yada. But anyway, so
we have a set of values. They can be
said, they can be articulated. They can
be indoctrinated into the next
generation of children. So it is a
distinctly Christian frame of reference
even though scripture does not guide our
laws. Now that's where I think people
break down because scripture does not
guide our laws and we have been very
wise to partition that off. They will
then say, "We're not a Christian
country." You'll be very confused. Our
culture is Christian.
>> When you say you'll be very confused,
what where is the what's the confusion?
>> You'll be confused why a person like me
who doesn't believe in God still acts in
ways that are so in line with Christian
values. Why? I'm like, "Yeah, I'm not
worried about somebody coming from a
Catholic country. I think they'll
probably I won't give it a blanket pass,
but they'll probably assimilate well."
So, like when I think about people
coming from Mexico, my concern is, hey,
if they come here and they're not on any
um social assistance whatsoever, they
can't vote until they become a citizen,
I'm less worried about that. They are
likely to assimilate, especially if we
don't start acting like Spanish is
actually the official language of
America. Like, make English the official
language, which I don't think we ever
have. We should, but that kind of thing.
That one gets a different read in terms
of what I'm concerned about. I'm
certainly not concerned that they have
different skin color. So that to me is
just like, okay, cool. You're going to
have the same level of analysis. The
individual is the right place to uh read
this. It's not a collectivist, strong
family, blah blah blah. So that we
haven't struggled with the assimilation
in the way that I think we will struggle
with assimila assimilation now with
people coming from Muslim countries.
It's a very different cultural read.
yeah. I I I guess I struggle with saying
like we are inherently a Christian
country when
we were plagued with like, you know,
murder, rape, all the things that
happened at the beginning.
>> That's humans though, man. You're never
going to be able to get away from that.
Every society is going to have their
murderers and their rapist.
>> Exactly. But every society is not
Christian. So you can't say So you're
saying we're a Christian country when
we're doing things that are opposite of
Christianity.
>> Obviously, always. This is why Christ
was sent to forgive you for your sins.
That you are by nature a fallen
creature. What do you mean? Like
literally the whole idea of Christianity
is meant to address the reality that you
cannot escape original sin. What
original sin is trying to contend with
is nature. Humans humans came up through
the animal [ __ ] kingdom. And when
you're writing that book, which I
believe was not divinely inspired, it
was just people trying to figure out how
to tell you how to live well. They had
to grapple with the fact that you will
rape, murder, kill, covet, all of that.
And so we better teach people to not do
it because by default, we will do it.
>> I I just think that we selectively
decide when we want to use a lot of
these arguments. So I think right now
we're selectively decided to be a
Christian nation when true undefiled
religion is taking care of the widows
and the orphans.
>> So that I can orient. When you say that,
do you mean we're ignoring scripture?
>> Yes. Okay. I I say you were saying the
same thing.
>> I say we're ignoring scripture. I can
say we're ignoring it's it's one of
those things where it's like
>> we are and should ignore scripture. I
>> I I think a lot of these things are put
together to establish a talking point.
And I think that I can go through.
>> You think I'm doing that?
>> I I think beat by beat and it's not I'm
not saying you're doing that maliciously
or nothing like that.
>> No, no, but it'd be at least we can then
pull on that thread and go that makes a
hypothesis which can be tested. And so
if you believe that I'm conflating
scripture, like unintentionally, but I'm
conflating scripture with what I'm
trying to communicate, which is frame of
reference,
>> um, then I can
>> show you how that isn't what I'm doing.
Yeah.
>> So when scripture is I do this because
the scripture tells me to, I never do
anything because scripture tells me to.
Never. Not once, ever. But I do things
at all times based on my value system.
What I'm trying to say is
>> but your value system can fall under
other religions. And you wouldn't say
well how you believe right now is 80% of
what Buddhists believe. Yes.
>> So you can say that I think
>> how you just said I'm confused because
I'm acting in a way that aligns with
Christian values. Technically you also
act in a way that aligns with Buddhist
values.
>> Yes. So what I'm some there'll be some
overlap, but if you try to map me as a
Buddhist, you'd get much closer with me
because for a while I literally called
myself a Dowist. There's massive overlap
between Dowoism and Buddhism.
>> But
>> okay,
>> stripping that out for a second.
>> If you want to um so you have the
scripture which says do this because God
told you to.
>> Yes,
>> that that would be one way to articulate
what scripture is. It is a written word
of God or divinely inspired.
>> To say act this way because so it is
written.
>> This will guide you in your in your
walk.
>> Yes. But because God said to write it in
this book
>> because God said that's why you need to
listen to it in order to walk through.
That's when when
>> I'm trying to I think all of your
frustration comes from you think that's
the only way that one can be a Christian
country is because God had written in a
book to do this thing and you know that
America does not make their laws based
on scripture. You know that America's
constantly going against Christian
scripture and I'm saying I totally agree
with you but I've got another thing
coming. But can we agree that's what you
mean about scripture and why you see a
discrepancy?
>> I wouldn't call it frustration. I'll
call it confusion because you So that's
why you're confused. Okay, cool. I get
that because in a scripture standpoint,
America is not a Christian country. Our
laws are not based on scripture. We
don't say this law exists because God
told us not to do this thing.
>> Totally agree. Now,
>> and then bringing back to this, I think
the Muslim city council did that be
based on scripture. That's where that's
coming. Welcome to the debate.
>> Yeah, that's going to be the problem.
>> That's I think that that's a problem.
>> Orthodox read of uh both the Quran and
the Hadith are going to be that it
expressly says that you can beat your
wife if she's disobeying you.
>> And it in the orthodox read of the Bible
and the Old Testament. So I don't think
laws should be made based on historical
religious.
>> Totally agree. So now what we're saying
is okay, we're both going to say that's
that's a thing
>> and your confusion arises because people
like Tom who don't mean to be wrong but
is wrong in your perspective because we
clearly are not a country that bases its
laws on Christian scripture. So what the
[ __ ] are you saying, Tom? What I'm
saying is there's a second part of a
culture becoming Christian without you
even thinking about laws. And the way
that you become Christian even when you
actively disbelieve even when the
country does not have laws based on
scripture and that is the thing that
religion is actually doing is
transmitting values.
>> All to me
>> all religion is is a self-help book. But
it's a self-help book written as a story
so that you can say when your kid just
keeps hounding you. Why do we do it that
way? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? You can
just say because the magical man in the
sky says so.
>> And so you have a final terminal point
where you just do it because that's what
God wants. But I don't understand. Well,
God works in mysterious ways. Why are
all these people dying, Mom? Why is evil
a thing? Because God works in mysterious
ways. So making it a self-help book
written by the ultimate authority who
can never be questioned is how you get
people to instill these values.
>> What I'm saying is you're going to be
indoctrinated by your parents. Full
[snorts] stop. End of story. You're then
going to be further indoctrinated by
your friends who are indoctrinated by
their parents but also are rebelling a
little bit. You're also going to be
indoctrinated by all the bumps and
scrapes you get along the way. The adult
who yelled at you for something and made
you feel kind of guilty. All of that
[ __ ] Okay? It's all of that. The soup
that you grow up in that is you being
told, "Hey, in this town, this city,
this family, this school, this country,
this is how we do things."
And that has been shaped dramatically
by the self-help book known as religion.
Now, it isn't living a scripture, but
it's still alive. And so, I have been
nudged and influenced in ways that I
wouldn't have been nudged and influenced
had I grown up in China,
>> had I grown up in Japan, had I grown up
in Saudi Arabia, had I grown up in Iran.
Those are all they have their different
books that communicate values that they
have spread. And I I honestly think
everybody's trying to get at just like
here's how you live a good life.
>> But the problem is the way that you live
a good life 1400 years ago
and you're a guy that starts out as a
basically a philosopher, a religious
person, scholar maybe even as Muhammad
did. Mhm.
>> But then you become a politician and so
you start going, "Ooh, this magical book
written by the man in the sky that tells
me how to live a good life." Technically
wasn't a book at that point, but that's
going to be our actual um laws for me as
a politician. And then when you become a
warlord, it it all starts to mix
together. And so the things you learn as
a warlord, you got to be strong. Like
Genghaskhan was just like, "If you're
with me, I let you live. If you're not,
I kill you." And so I think when you're
at war, you learn very quickly, you
cannot tolerate disscent. And so I don't
think anybody should be too surprised
that the guy who ends up being a very
successful warlord ends up going, "This
is the final word. This is the one that
you can't question." Why? Because when
you're leading people into battle and
it's literally life and death, you can't
have [ __ ] people question it. So now
you're going to like really like tighten
that [ __ ] up. And so it's like that may
have been the ultimate self-help book in
that region of the world at that point
in time, but everybody with a magical
self-help book written by the man in the
sky as the world changes has to go
through a reformation. And the thing
that made sense 1400 years ago in the
Middle East is not necessarily the thing
that's going to help you in 2026 in
Dearbornne, Michigan. And so now it's
like, whoa, this doesn't feel right when
you're taking an orthodox read. So, you
want the Reformation to happen. You want
the secular Muslims to go, "Let me show
you how to make this accessible today."
And then you just ignore [ __ ] and you're
just like, "Yeah, we pretend that part
doesn't exist." In the same way the
Christians are like, "Yeah, we don't
really do the slave thing anymore." And
you emphasize other things or we don't
stone people to death for lying with a
man, which is not how we get down. In
fact, it's crazy that Christians who
have scripture that tell you that if a
man lays with another man as he lays
with a woman should be put to death. Uh
they're the ones most likely to be like,
"Actually, no. We're tolerant
because Christ works through us. We are
tolerant and accepting of gay people."
That's a wild transformation. It
requires you to ignore a lot of [ __ ] So
it it transmits away from the scripture
layer into the values layer where we
emphasize some things, deemphasize other
things. And now you get me uh who grew
up in this post-reformation
Christian country who's like super
welcoming and open to gay people.
But if I had been born 1500 years ago in
like a really hardcore like and I don't
forgive me Coptic Christians if you
don't believe this but like I can
imagine growing up in a Coptic Christian
like Egypt, you know, almost 2,000 years
ago and being like, "No, you got to
stone that [ __ ] to death. The
book says to do it." And that's
Christian. So you got to you got to
update for the times. And I'm just
saying there's a small subset of Muslims
who are [snorts] not doing that because
they have a book that's like this was
the final word. There's nothing else
coming so [ __ ] take this [ __ ]
literally and beat your wife marry
nine-year-olds. And like when you take
an orthodox read, it's all there for
you. And so you get this like small
minority of people that have not yet
secularized that I don't think are yet
being policed well by their own
community.
We have some super chats.
>> Yes, we do. Seven
>> question things says, "Are you allowed
to talk about the current state of
Quest? I struggle to find good
sugar-free protein bars, and Quest bars
are made of all polyunsaturated fats.
PS, I posted that example vid you asked
for on the Discord.
>> Let's go. Um, I can talk about anything,
but I'm not involved with the company
and haven't been for a decade. So, God
bless them for continuing to um be
popular enough that that shines on me."
Uh but yeah, I've not been there for a
decade, so I'm not in the nitty-gritty
of why they're making the choices that
they're making. Unfortunately, it tends
to be companies lose uh a certain
directional commitment when the founders
leave and none of the founders are still
there. So,
Canadian roots says two people to talk
to economist Dr. EJ Brerly, former World
Blank uh World Bank employee and author
of Aid Inferno. She dishes on World
Bank, NOS's, and US A. Uh, and
>> can you please slack that name to me?
>> Yes. And Michael Luchi was the other one
they have.
>> Send them both. I'll take I'll take a
look. Thank you so much, by the way, for
those suggestions.
>> Ryan, I'll send it to our group.
>> That is always extremely appreciated.
And when people uh give super chat
dollars to support us while also trying
to help us, uh, it's amazing. Appreciate
it very much.
>> Jumping back. Next up comes from Connor
Brown. People are either dumb or evil.
Please add blind as an option. Feeds the
populist mindset to say, "Well, this
person isn't dumb. They must be evil."
That's just not true. Frame of reference
routinely captures intelligence.
>> Um, yeah, I don't have a beef with that.
I'll probably forget because to me dumb
includes blind, but I get why you're
trying to tease those out. Um, I don't
have any beef with that whatsoever.
>> James Island Panther says, "Just wanted
to say thank you for your great content,
insight, and great deep dives. your
breakdown of how things work have been a
huge help to me. I am a ZTF member in
the past two years have invested over
30K got uh gotten strong. Thank you,
>> man. I love that so much. Thank you for
being a part of ZTF. We need more great
founders. Uh and so I appreciate that is
incredible. Um and thank you for the
support. It's amazing.
>> Barbaric Bass says, "Hey, Tom and Drew.
Just wanted to say I love the insight
and nuance. I get my uh I get my I get
most of my news from you. As someone who
is writing a sci-fi novel, how do you
see the future of literature, dying or
nah? Also, you should read Red Rising.
>> Uh, thank you for the tip on Red Rising.
I already own it. I just haven't read it
yet. Um, so what do I think is the
future? I've actually started looking
into this recently because um in quote
unquote retirement, I see my path as
just writing novels uh because I don't
need anything else. Uh, man, I could do
it in just complete isolation. Um, but I
do think it looks something like this.
Reading books is currently mostly for
old people. And because I'm focused on
the youth, it's less of a thing there.
Uh, it's not that it doesn't exist.
Thankfully, it still does, but it's
certainly less of a thing. Um, there is
now a big push into direct publishing,
which I think is really exciting. So,
instead of the publisher capturing 90%
of the economics, you'll capture
literally 90% of the economics. So,
you'd have to sell a lot less books in
order to actually make a living, which
is very, very exciting. Uh, I think
there'll be a ton of AI slop. So,
unfortunately, you are going to have to
be good at marketing in order to cut
through. And you should be putting a lot
of pressure on anyone that controls the
visibility through the algorithm uh to
make sure that they're surfacing books
that are based on what people like. And
so, shout out to Steam, uh, Valve.
They're doing this on the gaming side
and I'm I'm very happy to see them
putting real effort into um making it
algorithmically easier for me to take
something like Kaizen and actually find
the people that like survival crafting
games. Um that's huge. And so I think
there's going to need to be a lot of
author pressure on the algorithms like
at Amazon being the most obvious, but
there are other places um that are
growing in popularity where you're going
to need to put a lot of pressure on them
to do the right thing algorithmically.
Um, and I do think its future is right
now in a weakened state. It's less
exciting for somebody like me who
focuses on scale. I will say that. Uh,
because of algorithms, apps, shorts just
get a lot more people's time and
attention than they used to. It's a sad
reality. Maybe people will bounce back
from it because they see that not
reading is bad for the brain. U, but I
don't put a lot of faith in that. So, I
think it will diminish over time. I
think that's the real answer. Esoteric
dichotomy says checked AIG support loan
was one uh 182 billion and returned a
positive net of 22.7 billion overall. GM
got 51 billion. Treasury recovered 39.7
billion billion um which is they said
minus I'm assuming they're meaning down
from 11.3 billion. Ford didn't take TARP
it had a 5.98 DOE loan not a bailout and
they and fully repaid it in 2022 with
interest. So, GMO, what's the money?
>> So, that is dope. Thank you for doing
that. That's amazing. Somebody, let's
literally just take a second to
celebrate this person. What was their
name?
>> I just believe it esoteric
>> esoteric dichotomy who's been here
forever. Thank you so much. Uh, you just
paid money to educate us. That's
incredible. That that is a level of
support that uh I don't take lightly.
So, thank you. That's amazing. And the
last super chat of the day comes from
Blake Bullion who says that whole rant
of this is what you got to do. Tough
[ __ ] It's 100% true. There's always a
way out. The second you tell yourself
there isn't, then there truly will be no
way out. You'll be trapped if you let
yourself be.
>> Too true. Too true. Preach.
>> All right. Shout out to Plaude. No,
Ploud.
>> Plow.
>> I got to stop getting their name wrong.
>> Plow. No, for real. So, these guys, I've
spent time with their technology. Uh
Ploud, thank you for sponsoring today's
live. Uh it is very appreciated. Your
technology is very cool. Um this for
somebody with a memory like mine, Ploud
is incredible. I've used it um when I'm
talking to my developers. So I'll be
like, "Fuck, what did we talk about? How
was I supposed to do that thing?" Uh and
so it's very good at that. It just
literally records your day whenever you
turn it on. Uh it records everything
that's happening and you can just say
like, "Uh, remind me to do this." And
then later you can go back because it's
an app and so you can go back into the
app. What were the things that I needed
to do? And it'll pull up. Here's where
you said remind me. Um, so very cool
technology. I think you're going to see
more and more stuff coming out of these
guys that will help you uh in a world
that will otherwise get away from you.
So yeah, I would at a minimum take a
look, see if it's something that might
help you. Uh, they're doing some really
cool stuff. So shout out to Ploud. Those
guys are dope. Uh, do we have is there a
QR code on the screen? Because I believe
there's also
>> code on the screen. Um, what's the code?
Impact. Use code impact.
>> Yes, use code impact for 10% off.
>> Let's go. Let's go.
>> Plow. Get that plow.
>> All right.
>> But it's spelled like clawed with a P,
but it's plow.
>> P L A U D and I believe.AI.AI/impact.
>> 10% off.
>> Let's go.
>> Do it right now, guys. Right now. Do it
>> All right. Do we get all the super
chats?
>> Yep. That's all the
>> All right. You guys are amazing. Thank
you so much. Uh, you supported us big
big today. Uh, really really appreciate
it. And we will see you guys very soon.
But before you go, we have an AI master
class coming up Thursday, July 9th at 1
PM Pacific. This bad boy is as free as
the day is long. If you've ever wanted
to launch a company, I'm going to show
you how to do it using AI. This is
transformative. There's never been a
better time to start a company than
right now, today. And I will show you
guys how to do exactly that for maximum
impact. Thursday, July 9th at 1 p.m.
Pacific. Hope you guys will sign up. The
link is in the description. All right,
everybody. See you on Friday. Take care.
Peace.
