Insane China Summit, Chinese spies, Iran Ceasefire, Market Crash & Mamdani

Key Takeaway

When negotiating complex deals, bring decision-makers directly into the room and set hard deadlines. Skip the intermediaries and lawyers who drag things out. Get everyone with signing authority on one call, lay out what matters to each side, and refuse to hang up until you've addressed every sticking point. This approach creates high friction but forces real answers and can close deals in weeks that would otherwise take months.

Episode Overview

Tom Bilyeu breaks down Trump's historic trip to Beijing with America's top CEOs, analyzing the negotiation dynamics between the world's two superpowers. He explores the leverage both sides hold, from oil control to consumption markets, and shares his unfiltered philosophy on deal-making—emphasizing direct communication, decision-maker involvement, and refusing to let lawyers drag out negotiations indefinitely.

Full Transcript

Transcript of Insane China Summit, Chinese spies, Iran Ceasefire, Market Crash & Mamdani from Impact Theory. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

Good morning everybody. Welcome to another episode of the Tom Billu Show Live. I am so honored to have you guys here today, but we do not have Drew. Unfortunately, he is out sick. I am very sad to report, but I know he is with us here in spirit. Ryan is going to be picking up a ton of slack. So, if you guys have anything that you want to fight about, Ryan is your man. All right. There is a lot going on in the world right now today.

Uh I think we all woke up to a bunch of things stacking up. Twothirds of the US economy is basically flying to China with Trump right now. Wild. A California mayor admits admits to acting as a foreign agent of China. Wow. Okay, that one's going to get weird. Trump says the Iran ceasefire is on life support. The UAE is now directly attacking Iran in a shocking turn of events. Michael Bur of Big Short Fame predicts the stock market is minutes away from a massive crash. I think he called it a bloody crash.

Zillow is predicting a large-scale housing market correction by 2027. Women now significantly outnumber men in US college educated jobs, but it actually may be setting them up for failure. This is going to be one of the most interesting things we talk about today. And good news for all of my Gundam fans out there, mechs are now real. It's wild. You guys have to see this. The footage is absolutely insane. Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Tom Billy Show live. Ryan, you locked, you loaded, you ready to rock?

I'm ready to go. I'm also You ready to pick up Drew's slack here today? today? today? I got chat right here. I'm ready to say anything they got. All right, let's go. Man, this is a wild day with Trump uh headed over to Beijing. This is obviously a big trip. You've got the two biggest economies in the world coming together, meeting. Everybody should be paying attention to this. and Trump landed in Beijing with 17 of America's most powerful CEOs in tow. You've got Elon Musk, Jensen Hang, Tim Cook, the heads of Boeing, Black Rockck, Goldman Sachs, Croup, Meta, and more.

And this is a very similar playbook to what Trump did in Saudi Arabia. You come in armed to the teeth with economic power, with the people that are actual decision makers that can get the ball rolling right then and there. You seduce, you cajol all at the same time. Trump knows that China does not consume their own goods, not in enough quantity to keep their economy going. They assued that as their strategy for growing GDP, unlike the US, which is exactly what we do. We buy things.

And China relies on the world to buy their goods. And when you're the world's largest economy and you're a consumption economy and you have a blockade on your biggest rivals access to its cheapest sources of oil, you definitely have some leverage to work with. Now, it's going to be very interesting to see if deals actually get done in real time on this trip. That feels more like a Trump thing than a Xi thing. Xi's not someone that you can intimidate or push around and he knows the power that he holds on the global stage.

Xi is many things, but a fool is not one of them. And however tough you think Trump is for everything that he stood up to here in the US, Xi is playing on a much more dangerous stage and has been able to consolidate power in a way that nobody's been able to do before him for decades. Mao was really the last figure to have the kind of tight control on the country that Xi has. And that's saying something. China is known for uh having very aggressive leadership that takes very uh ironfisted control of the country.

So he really is on another playing field. So anybody that thinks that Trump is going to go there and just sort of push him around is out of their mind. Xi's official doctrine is to become the global number one and he has communicated in the past at least internally but it's certainly come out uh according to Kevin Rudd if you guys know him wrote the book on Xi Jinping uh and Xi has communicated that China should be more and I quote dismissive to the powers in the west and obviously he's talking about us.

So despite all of these tensions, this really is an incredibly important bilateral relationship for everyone on the planet, for us, for everyone else. The US and China relationship is going to define the next 50 years. So it really is all eyes on Beijing for the next few days. These are the two powers that are going to determine the future of AI. That alone would be worth everybody paying attention to. But the fact that we have so much global instability and these are going to be the two countries that either escalate that or deescalate that.

Now, according to reports, Trump has demanded that every CEO that he's taking with him, and there's reports that they're all on Air Force One, according to a live tweet uh from the flight, Elon Musk said the only of the CEOs that are on Air Force One are him and Jensen Hang. Thank God. Like, putting that many people on one plane is just way too juicy of a target. Now, he said, "If you want to come, you've got to show up with one clear, tangible ask." Because Trump is trying to get these concrete deals done.

He wants something that could deliver a handshake basically um signed agreement while they're there in Beijing. That's according to Rodium Group's Reva Ku Jon. Uh so we'll see if that uh actually comes to pass. I would imagine that is pretty accurate in terms of what Trump is looking to get done. It's just a question of whether it's going to be possible when you have a Xi that's going to want to smile, shake hands, uh, but make no promises. Boeing supposedly is going there to close up to 500 737 Max jets, which would be obviously huge for America from an economic standpoint.

Cargill is there to get an agricultural deal. The other 15 are there to negotiate things like access to rare earth metals, which needless to say, uh, is very important. AI chip access, figuring out what that's going to look like, whether we're giving them, denying them, what that's going to mean. Uh, regulatory approvals, that's a big one for Meta, who's got a deal that's stalling out their purchase of Manis, I think is how you say it. Uh, China has officially shut that down. And so, I'm sure they want to see if they can breathe life back into it.

As far as I know though, Zuckerberg himself is not going at somebody else from Meta. Now, by doing all of this face to face, it is far more likely that a deal actually gets done versus just getting the the sort of half smile that she is famous for and a nod and then nothing ends up happening when the official negotiations happen down the road. We'll see. A lot of times out of these, you can get great PR, but there's not a lot that ends up coming out of it, at least not in a timely fashion.

Um, so that's really going to be what everyone needs to pay attention to on this. see through the headlines, understand that I'm sure there's going to be a lot of noise that comes out of this, maybe even a lot of things that look really good, but whether they become actual investments in the US is another question. There's rumors floating around that what Trump thinks he's going to be announcing there is a trillion dollar investment on the behalf of the Chinese in the US. Uh, I'll be very curious to see what ends up happening.

But with that, I would take all of that with a grain of salt. Just like we had big, I think $2 trillion in announcements out of the GCC countries and then we had the war in Iran basically put all of that on hold. Uh we'll see what one even just gets announced. I would be very impressed if that even gets announced. Uh but then whether or not it gets across the finish line is going to be a completely different story. So uh make sure that you when you're assessing what's going on, you separate the PR spin from what's actually happening on the ground.

Is anybody breaking ground? are the dollars actually being transferred over. Um there's often times a gigantic chasm between the words and then what actually comes to fruition. Now I think one of the most important things that people need to um decide what they think is happening here in order to have an accurate picture or at least to be able to hold themselves accountable to whether or not they had an accurate picture is whether you think this is Trump taking all these CEOs as a sign of strength or is this a sign of desperation.

Obviously, this is tending to break along political lines. You've got MSNBC calling it desperation. From their perspective, you've got the Iran wars dragging on in a way that Trump did not want to see. Gas prices obviously spiking, tariffs largely nullified by our own Supreme Court. His poll numbers just tanking. And so, from their perspective, Trump is rolling deep to try and finally just get a win for his side. and it's, you know, a little bit thirsty from their read. The Council on Foreign Affairs largely agrees, saying that China holds the upper hand at the negotiating table, but obviously the White House is saying something just completely different.

They are trying to get people to see this as classic Trumpian dollar diplomacy uh and an opportunity for the two largest economies to find a path towards mutual success in a world that is at least from Trump's recent rhetoric big enough for two superpowers. Trump all the things that he's been saying in the leadup to this. You know, China's a great country, got a great relationship with Xi. We're going to be able to work things out. I think this is going to be great. And by the way, even if you absolutely despise Trump, even if you think that he's not going to get anything useful out of the deal, for the sake of the world, we should want these two powers to come to some sort of mutual agreement.

You've heard me talk a million times about Thusidity's trap. The statistical reality is that China and the US are likely to end up in um either ongoing protracted economic warfare, kinetic warfare, or both. That is um north of what's it like 78% of the time or something. I forget the exact stats. 12 out of 16, whatever the percentage is of that. Um two powers that find themselves in this situation end up in protracted conflict. So, man, do I really hope uh that we're able to get something that is truly mutually beneficial.

Because if these guys can both set their egos aside, accept that the world is now multipolar, uh accept spheres of influence instead of one person trying to dominate everything, we could find ourselves in a much better position where we have trade deals that are healthy without being um in the US's case outsourcing all of its manufacturing to clearly a rival uh potentially an outright enemy. So we have to be very very careful about that. There is critical manufacturing we're absolutely going to have to bring back to the US.

But there are also things where we'd be in a much better position if we could have a an understanding where we are meeting as peers um and to be able to negotiate something that is beneficial for us. The rare earth materials being the most obvious case. Uh but there are a lot more things that China controls from a supply chain perspective. So we'll see. Um Trump himself has said that he doesn't need or want China's help on Iran, which is something that a lot of people have been saying like, "Hey, while you're there, uh you better make a play to get some help wrapping up everything in Iran." Trump's words is that the US is going to win against Iran, whether through war or diplomacy.

Uh but either way, we're going to win. We'll see. I think there's way more question marks there than Trump wants to admit. And the unsaid part is that the US and their oil squeeze on Iran and Venezuela has already disrupted China's access to its shiva oil supplies. Venezuela is the, you know, the Trump that he can play the Trump card he can play in his back pocket of, hey, not only can we, if we work together, get something done in Iran, but also if we can come up with a path forward that is mutually beneficial, we could get you some of that uh oil on good terms from from Venezuela.

Otherwise, we might just find that it's going to some of the other countries that are being impacted by the blockade in um the straight of Hormuz. So, we'll see what ends up happening with all of this. Um there's a lot on the table. There is a lot at stake and there's going to be a lot of PR battles going back and forth. So, it's uh it's a pretty wild time here in big power negotiations. negotiations. negotiations. It seems everyone has this idea that China has the upper hand.

And I'm curious where you fall on that because right now I feel like we've been painted as this paper tiger on the world stage. And so do you also agree that you think she has the upper hand or is there some way Trump could pull out some deals for us? us? us? I mean there's definitely ways that Trump can pull out deals for the US. There's no doubt about that. To say that the US doesn't have any leverage, I think is completely foolish. Um, the fact that Trump right now controls the oil coming out of Iran.

Trump controls the oil coming out of Venezuela. Those were two of the biggest places that China gets their oil. Now, I had seen reports that China was only pulling about 20% of their oil from um Iran, but I'm now seeing reports that they're pulling up to 50% of their oil from Iran. Uh but even if it's not that high, you put the two together, Venezuela and Iran, and that is a lot of China's oil supply, it it is a fraction of their oil supply that is so large, they will not be able to move forward without a solution to that problem.

Now, that solution could be an economic deal with the US. That solution could be um forcing Iran to go to the negotiating table to give up on the nuclear weapons and to um get the straight of Hormuz open back up. It could be a lot of different things. It doesn't have to be, you know, what the US wants to put forward, but China is going to have to solve that problem. And given that the US right now has the biggest impact on that, um I think that there is plenty of leverage.

And then again what I was saying before we we are the biggest by far consumption economy on planet earth. China requires consumption economies. A lot of people do not understand that GDP is a function of what you sell and what you consume. The US builds I think 70% of our GDP is based on consumption. So, not only are we just absolutely gigantic by numbers, we are also mahusive in terms of dollars that we spend. So, if you're China and you know that your economy is in a slightly weakened position, I'm not saying that they're crumbling, but I'm saying that they're not in a great position right now.

If you're there, you're looking at the US and you think, okay, you've got this guy, he's all about deals. Let's get a deal done. China is very good about playing the long game, setting their ego aside, not needing to uh on every issue get people to bow down. That's definitely their long-term strategy. But China will do what they need to do in order to get the long-term victory that they're looking for. So, I think China will be more than happy to be diplomatic, will be more than happy to broker a deal that's good for both of them.

I don't think China's going to cut its nose off despite its face. Um, so from that perspective, the US has a fair amount of leverage to get something done. But in no uncertain terms, this is not Xi sitting over there like, "Oh my god, like I've got to get something done and I'll do whatever Trump wants." That isn't it. Imagine Xi sitting very calmly, very proud, very stoic. If a good deal comes his way, he'll take it. If it doesn't, he'll reject it. China can go a very long time.

uh they have like six to nine months or wait 9 to 12 months I think of oil reserves. So they understand that they can play a nice patient game that they can wait for the right moment that the US needs them as much as they need the US. And so um yeah, China holds a lot of cards. We're not a paper tiger. That's patently absurd. I think that when you look at the way that the war in Iran is going, if Trump can't tie that up in a bow, then people are going to realize that we're not as strong as we once were, and that is going to have big consequences.

There's no doubt. But it's not like China could go patrol the seas better than we could. And I think that's where people miscalculate. Right now, there's only one country that can play world's policemen. That's the US. China does not want to see Iran or anybody else um take control over international waters. And that's something that people talk about, but they don't talk about a lot. The fact that the current uh economic glory globally brought to you by the fact that the US has patrolled the seas.

And so if that were to end, that would be a problem for everybody uh not just the US. Be huge for China as well. I got the percentage of imports with oil for China for you. So, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Iraq, and Brazil make up 62% with the other percentage being uh Venezuela and Iran. So, that's kind of all the the massive ones, ones, ones, right? So, roughly 38% come from Venezuela and Iran. Yeah. So, Yeah. So, Yeah. So, that's pretty massive. Pretty big hit. Yeah.

Massive massive. Like that is not something that they can just be like, "Okay, "Okay, "Okay, we'll we'll we'll push on for now. Yeah, they're going to have to address it. But Drew mentioned um with all the business our Drew, our beloved Drew is in the chat. Let's go Drew. What's up, Drew? Drew, we'll hope you're feeling better. Uh says, "With all the business leaders attending with Trump, he's going to go the economic sanction route as the carrot." So, how much do you think things like tariffs and that are going to be the main focal point of this conversation, or do you think it'll lean towards things like Iran and Taiwan and things like that?

Trump is tariff happy, so there's no doubt that he's going to leverage that as much as he can. But if he thinks that Xi doesn't understand what's going on internally, that the US Supreme Court nullified a lot of his ability to do tariffs, he's talked a big game, but if you look at the way that he's responding, he's clearly still pissed off about it. So Trump is busily paying back a bunch of tariffs. I think he recently had from a um I forget what court, but another court reject another one of his tariff attempts.

So I think that while he wants us to believe he can tariff anybody at any time, it's just not playing out like that. So China knows he's not in a paralyzed position from a tariff perspective, but he's certainly in a weakened position. So that isn't going to be as strong of a card. Plus, Trump has been playing that card aggressively and China has been able to weather that storm. So from that perspective, it'll matter. But I think this ultimately is going to come down to the bigger leverage that the US has right now is that if we don't do deals with China and we don't we even if we just do um non-tariff trade barriers, you're going to we will be able to make it impossible for China to market a large portion of their goods in the US.

China knows that because China's run that playbook themselves. So, there's no question that we have economic leverage. China wants to have a deal with the US. Um, but I think Trump, as always, is far more prone to like, hey, let's do something that's in both of our benefits and he only brings out the stick when he doesn't feel he's being treated with enough respect or that he's not getting the deal that he wants. um and then he'll try to budgeon him with something whether that's to choke him off from an oil perspective, he'll threaten tariffs, but I think that that's a weaker and weaker threat by the day.

So, um it's all going to be part and parcel, but I this is a read I don't think many people share, but when I watch the way that Trump behaves, I think while he is a gigantic narcissist, he wants things his way and will pout and act like a petulant child if he doesn't get it. He really does try to pick something that he thinks is good for the other side and say, "Hey, this is good for you. This is good for us. Let's just get the deal done.

Um, and when people act in a non-economic way, that's when he's always very confused. Take Iran. Iran is not acting in Iran's best economic interest. Iran is acting like somebody who's fighting for their lives because the regime is fighting for their life. And so they're making economically catastrophically bad decisions, which is why he is completely confused." Um, so if China takes a purely economic stance, then we'll probably get something done. If China on the other hand is trying to play a political advantage, um, if they want to stall things out, if they're trying to buy time and they're willing to make their own econ economy, you know, continue to struggle for another year or two years to ensure that Trump is weakened more and more on the international stage.

They certainly can and will do that if that's where Xi feels his best interests lie and Trump will be very confused by that. Um, we were talking about it briefly before the show, but the list of people who are going with him right now is is rather interesting. Uh, who's the guy we mentioned who's doing Rush Hour for who's there right now? Brett Ratner. Though Brett Ratner would be one of the most surreal comeback stories ever if he makes it. I'm gonna derail on this, Ryan.

If the chat is trying to talk about something else, I'll come back. But, okay, speedrun on Brett Ratner. He music video director comes out of nowhere to become one of Hollywood's biggest directors. Does a rush hour franchise. If you're young, you may not even really know what it is, but if you're anywhere near my age, you know that this was an absolutely massive comic franchise. Did incredibly well. And it's like this USChina crossover. And it was a USChina crossover when everybody was just glowing about the US and China, you know, coming together.

We didn't yet see that the middle class was being hollowed out. I mean, it was just like this came along at a time where the US and China really were just like holding hands and singing kumbaya. It was awesome. Uh Hollywood was desperate to earn those Chinese dollars. Uh Chinese stars really wanted to make it big in the US. I mean, it was really really a fascinating time. So Brett Ratner rides on the back of that consciously or unconsciously and puts himself in just a a gigantic uh successful position, but apparently behind the scenes is just a meto time bomb ticking away waiting to happen.

Now I have to say I think I've shared the story here before uh but he made a pass at Lisa back in the day. So it was hilarious. He So I was teaching film at the time. He was friends with the owner of the film school. Long story doesn't matter. Uh, so they say, "Hey, Brett, will you come and do a presentation at the film school that at the time I'm running?" And so I'm literally sitting there with Brett. Obviously, he doesn't know that I'm dating Lisa at the time.

Nobody did because I wasn't supposed to be. Uh, and he was awesome. I I just cannot say enough nice things. He was funny. He was showing us his student films. He was offering like a free class in film making. So imagine this is at the height of his power and his success. It was absolutely it was so cool. It was such a neat moment. And then later that day he cracks on to my wife and is like or my now wife uh and says actually maybe this was already after Lisa and I I think we were back in the US.

That's correct. So we were engaged because she was like I'm engaged. And he was like uh does he is your fiance here in the US? And I just thought that was absolutely hilarious. Lisa thought it was hilarious. Obviously, she ends up shooting him down, but so that should have given me the indication, okay, uh oh, this guy's like playing a dangerous game. He's very fast and loose uh in terms of his approach on women. Ends up blowing up like yikes. Like big uh complaints about him.

Well, he's an Epstein affiliate. There's a photo of him with Epstein and two girls. girls. girls. Oh god. So, it gets even worse. So, Epstein classes as long as the day is long. And so he just poof disappears and then he's the one that does the Melania documentary movie or whatever the hell makes so much sense given the Epstein connection. connection. connection. And so I was like, "Oh god." So anyway, if he plays this as like his comeback card, that will be wild. That will be wild if he's able to get past this.

But what about like everyone else going because we have we have Musk think um Visa's guy is there like they have a lot of top business people uh from America from tech to finance. Do you think that's you know having that level of intervention is good or how are you feeling in that? Listen I look at this as an entrepreneur and so this is where I have to um confess all of my uh my frame of reference. So my frame of reference is if you want to get a deal done, you want to bring the people in the room that can actually make a decision.

There are two ways to negotiate something and this is like if you want like if you were ever going to see secret footage of me that made you think Tom is not who I think he is, it would be me on calls with lawyers. I am a psychopath. I get so [ __ ] agitated because lawyers are they want to drag things out. And so, uh, I am notorious, infamous, uh, for when I'm negotiating a deal, we've got 90 days to get it done. Uh, if we're not done with a deal in 90 days, everyone is getting on a [ __ ] call.

And we are literally not hanging up until we have everybody's sticking points. And I'm going to run that call like I'm unhinged. And I have to admit, even sometimes I'm like, "Oo, I'm I'm probably pushing the line a little bit here." Uh, I just cannot stand it. I cannot stand the way that people will [ __ ] manipulate you. Um, [ __ ] you, tell you, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes all the sense in the world." Then they go back to their client and they're like, "This is terrible. You shouldn't take this." And the client's like, "Really?

I don't know. Like, it seems like it could work." And then they'll come back and they'll negotiate tooth and nail for every [ __ ] little thing. And my thing is, there are some things I care about. There are some things I don't care about. I want to talk directly to the person that I'm negotiating with. I do not want somebody in between me. So, I'm reading this like Trump doing the same thing. Trump being like, "Hey, listen, [ __ ] We're going to go to China. We're going to sit at the [ __ ] table and we're just going to say, "I care about this.

I don't care about this. I'm willing to give on that. I'm not willing to give on this. What do you want? What are you willing to give on?" Like, when you just ask people that point blank, you can get real [ __ ] answers. If you don't, you are going to be in lawyer hell. One of the worst things happening to my beloved country, to much of the West, is we are becoming a nation not of builders, not of engineers, but of [ __ ] lawyers. And so by Trump taking these guys over there and just saying, "Sit down with your, you know, uh, the person in the Chinese government that you're going to be dealing with, let's just [ __ ] say the thing." Now, that's a super American approach.

I don't know that the Chinese are going to go for it. They've got way more of a hierarchy culture where there's expected difference and things like that. So listen, this might be the most brash American like suicide run ever where you're not going to get this [ __ ] done. But that is how I read this. It is in my opinion from a business perspective, this is how negotiation should be done. We sit across from each other. They've had plenty of calls leading up to this point. They've gotten like the big deal points and all of that.

Now we're just sitting across from each other. We're saying, "Yeah, I'll give on that thing. It matters to you. It doesn't really matter to me. Fine. Cool. I'm going to give on that. But this [ __ ] thing here, nope. I'm a sociopath. That we're going to get done. Plain and simple. Period. End of story. So, where the [ __ ] are we? Are you guys good or not? And uh I have found that while it is a very high friction meeting, lawyers absolutely despise it. But you can get deals done.

Uh, I never start there, but man, the number of times that I've had to get there where I'm like, everyone gets on this call. I don't want anybody else who we have to go back and check with. Everybody that can make a decision is going to be on this call. And if this call lasts six hours, this call lasts six hours. We are getting to the [ __ ] bottom of this thing. So, anyway, that's my hope is that they can just hash it all out right there.

There's no intermediaries. It's just everybody saying the thing. Do you fear though with this instance, so we look at Tesla, Nvidia, even Boeing, like these are companies that export their labor to other countries. Do you worry with China's rise as a superpower that these um individuals would want to make deals to push their work out of America to make it cheaper for them? Or do you think there's any way they would want to bring it back? Cuz I feel like when you are sending these people with power and money within our economy specifically and not our government, you're almost asking for them to push all labor out of the US.

the US. the US. Uh, I Trump knows that's suicide. Now, does he have to wrangle a bunch of business guys that are like, "Well, this would be a lot cheaper if we could build it in China." Uh, yes. He almost certainly is going to have to wrangle a lot of business guys that do not give a [ __ ] about the middle class and they will do whatever the [ __ ] they want that's good for shareholders. Now, that ironically is not in their best interest. is so shortsighted and Lord knows I hope to bang this drum hard enough that these guys hear me.

But the reality is Trump is well aware of that. Trump's base is getting the real wages in America to go up. And if he is not able to get real wages in America to go up, the Republicans lose guaranteed. He loses at the midterms and then Republicans just lose, plain and simple, at the next presidential election in no uncertain terms. So Trump has everything that he's been doing shows me he is trying to get things manufactured here in the US. He is trying to break um some of the supply chains out of these other countries, get them to come back here to the US.

Um he is obviously willing to punish corporations through tariffs if nothing else to get them to manufacture on US soil if the rumors are true that he's trying to get Xi to make an announcement that he's going to build factories here in the US using the now I'm presuming this part but using US labor those would be huge wins for the agenda that Trump already has on the table that goes along with everything he's postured about everything that he's said all of that now Trump obviously uh is hyper aware of the um financialized part of the US economy.

And so he's going to do things to balance that out and not just swing all the way to Main Street. This is when you hear Scott Besson talk, it's always we can do Main Street and uh Wall Street. And so that that would be my hope. I think that is 100% the way that Trump is going to play this. Um, now do I think that when you're running, especially a public company, that you are doing everything you can to keep cost down and you're thinking essentially only of shareholders?

Yes. Um, but Trump knows that. So, this is one of those times very fair if you absolutely despise Trump. But he really does get the thing that's going to get him re-elected. He understands that. He appeals to the working class. Um, and he is very cognizant of the fact that if real wages don't go up, he's toast. I want to push back on that last note just because he did go on record recently, and I'll read the full quote. I don't I don't think about American's financial situation.

I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. Okay. Shame shame on Ryan. Shame on Ryan because now he's spinning you guys. So Ryan, why don't you play that or uh I don't have the connection, whoever's got control over there. I can't see behind the TV, but if pull up for everyone to see the whole clip of him talking about this because if Trump in response to the question he was asked said, "Yes, I'm thinking about Americans finances." I would be furiously angry that this [ __ ] drug us into a war and that clearly is worse for Americans pocketbooks when if you're trying to help American pocketbooks, you don't go get in a protracted war around [ __ ] oil.

Oil is the thing that is going to act like inflation. So anyway, if he did it for that reason, he's [ __ ] So now he probably did do it for part of that reason just to be very clear, but that's the stupid reason. So yes, the clip is in the doc. Do you see it or do you need me to find the I guess for me I'm also just I'll I'll vamp while they're looking for it. But um you know is has stopped clicking. So is this uh yeah, you also have control there, but I can play it from here as well.

well. well. All right, if you can play it because you already have it pulled up. Let's go for it and see if this is really the one. one. one. When you're negotiating with Iran, Mr. President, to what extent are Americans financial situations motivating you to make a deal? Not even a little bit. The only thing that matters when I'm talking about Iran, they can't have a nuclear weapon. I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. I think about one thing. You cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

That's all. That's the only So, here's the good news. Uh, they're finally being consistent in their messaging. Now, it's PR. It's been It's largely [ __ ] yada yada. Please don't lose sight of that. But at least they're finally being consistent on their messaging and saying, "Listen, this is about the nuclear weapon." Now, the thing that I like about that is while we probably never should have gone into Iran, uh it for me it really does hinge on were they actually about to get a nuclear weapon. If they were, obviously they lied about Isvahan, we took it all out and all that.

Whatever. Politicians lie. It's what they do. If they were actually about to get a nuclear weapon, then yes, I would want them to go in. If they weren't, I'm I think status quo is a way better position to be in given what's happened. Now, we all have the ability to look back and go, "Yeah, this ended up being a quagmire. We should all just default assume war is always a quagmire if you're not willing to go to total war." Anyway, I don't want to digress on that, but okay.

So, here we are. We're in the middle of this. while you're in the middle of this and you're trying to focus everybody on the very thing that you're saying is the reason that you're doing this, which is we cannot have a nuclear armed Iran. I'll add the caveat, especially now after we [ __ ] pissed them off. So, can't have a nuclear armed Iran. Cool. I was on board with that before we launched the attack. I'm certainly on board with it now. huge question marks around whether I'm being manipulated about whether were you lying to me when you said that it was all demolished and they were never going to get it.

Are you lying to me now? But whatever. If you abstract it out and say, "Do I want there to be a nuclear armed Iran?" No, I do not. Okay. Now, as you prosecute the war, are you thinking about the fact that this could be bad for the American economy in comparison to nuclear Armageddon? If your dumbass is worried about the economy, [ __ ] you. So it all comes down to if you hold the belief that hey this really is about nuclear weapons and you are clearly more concerned about everyone ceasing to exist than you are about people being poor then the right answer here is yeah that's not what I'm thinking about thinking about what I'm thinking about is he doesn't say nuclear annihilation that's obviously what he intends okay so obviously you can have this debate on two different levels if you want to have the debate this guy's a [ __ ] liar None of this is true.

That is not at all why we went in. He's He had so many confusing things in the beginning. He's only slid to this because it's the only thing that polls well and so now he's just sticking to that one thing. Cool. I love it. Yep. That's a very reasonable argument to make. If on the other hand, you're Ryan and you're trying to spin people, uh, then you're going to focus on the fact that he said in abstraction that he doesn't care about Americans money. I would push back on the on the spin though because I feel like all of the things he's done throughout this war are inherently hurting Americans, right?

Or am I looking at this at the wrong angle? Cuz to me, I'm looking at it and I'm like, okay, we're seeing gas at the highest price in years. Um, we're looking at inflation and wages. Wages are now below inflation due to this war. Uh, I I don't know. I guess I'm looking at the below inflation for a long time. But so, uh, let's take the the thing that's happening right here, which is what I'm focused on, is different than what you're focused on. And so, I want to make sure that we tease these two things apart and then have whichever conversation we want to have.

But this is how people get manipulated by the media. Okay? All I'm saying is it is a very disingenuous framing. And maybe you're just caught up in it because you're so angry about the other thing. But it is it is just empirically a disingenuous framing to say that Trump is just saying he doesn't care about the uh American people's finances. And all the headlines that I've seen around this are that Trump says and then they say the quote, but I also said earlier today I'm a sociopath.

Now, I don't mean I'm a sociopath in the context of saying when lawyers are acting like that, then I act like a sociopath to make sure that I get that [ __ ] thing done. Obviously meant to be hyperbolic. And by the way, the thing that I'm being me'd on right now is that if you don't have kids, you better have a damn good reason, which people out of context make it sound like I'm saying that I think everybody should have kids, which if you play it in context, you realize I'm saying your own mind is going to [ __ ] with you.

be real careful because if you're like me and don't have kids, you better have a damn good reason so you have meaning and purpose, purpose, purpose, right? But in the abstract, it is both true and entirely misleading. So what I'm saying is the statements that Trump said he doesn't care about whether this hurts people's pocketbooks is both true and completely misleading. What he was saying is in a hierarchy of values when trying to stop nuclear Armageddon, you can't think economically. You've got to think survival. And so cool, now we can have the argument that we were talking about there.

When was it a lie? Is it a lie now? Was it a lie then? All of that. I think that's very fair. But let's not glom on to see Trump's an [ __ ] He doesn't care about you. Different thing over here. We've got the should we have gone into the war? Is this not a total mess? Has Trump created an economic disaster for the American people? Hey, both of those great arguments. The only one I'm trying to say, for [ __ ] sake, if we could just get people to stop doing the if I take these words out of context, like there's one of Sam Harris saying, why can't we eat babies?

Now Sam Harris legitimately said, why can't we eat babies? But if you zoom out, he said, you know, it's very interesting watching all these debates happen because if you're at like a conference and it's about morality, you'll see people ask questions like, no, really, why can't we eat babies? So he's giving an example of something that would make sense in the context of a morality conference where you're trying to find the edges of okay, I'm not saying that you can't eat babies. I'm just saying what is the moral rationale for why we can't.

And so it's just it's so maddening. And in an era where we have the velocity and volume of information that we have now and [ __ ] are just going in on like the abstract quote, dude, it drives me crazy. It it is one of those things that it makes me from a what I do with my day-to-day life now, it is an existential question of like to to what point do I feel like I am um you know trying to drain the ocean one eyropper at a time and at some point you just have to say this isn't going to work.

Uh I'm never going to be able to get people to stop doing this. Um, so it is I won't say triggering because I I don't emotionally spiral, but it is um this really this really this really this thing that when I see it in our little micro corner of the universe, I feel necessary to really put a fine point on it. Mhm. And jumping back to your nukes over economy um statement. Um what do you think Trump's next move should really be? Cuz I mean looking at this, we are on week nine.

It is a war that has gone that was supposed to be four weeks that we won in a week and right now we are hearing Kamani came out and was like you know if they keep pro poking the bear we will actually make a nuke. So obviously that can just be like high school like Drew was saying in the chat high school like threats. It's just like h but what do you think his next step should be? I can give you the pundit's take on what his next step should be, but obviously I may think incredibly differently if I had the intel that he has.

And that is incredibly important. I think the punditry game is great. I think it helps people um think through very difficult problems. But the second that pundits are not honest about the fact that they don't have all the information um that is where it can get a little frustrating. So, knowing that there are um pieces of intel that could come out that would make me completely change my mind, my thinking is you absolutely have to get the straight back open. Um and walking away from this without opening the straight I think would be a categorical disaster.

I would like to see Trump go figure out what he needs to do to get other people on his team because the US smashing Iran harder and harder um is going to be not only a humanitarian disaster for the people inside of Iran, but it's also going to end any shred of credibility that America might still have. Um because I think everybody is reading the situation without additional intel that we did not need to go in and do this. um that this was probably Trump looking at Iran, thinking they're Venezuela, thinking I can secure my two trillion in investments for the US from the GCC by finally uniting the Arab world, uh that I can be a Mount Rushmore president.

Like, when you map it all against that, it all makes sense that he made the move on Iran. I'm going to be the guy that has the balls to do what nobody else is going to do. That's that's the read. Now, if there really is intel, that shows that they really were going to get a nuclear weapon and there was reason to believe we had to move now or never. Um, fine. But without that, and I don't think the world buys it right now, that you just continue to erode America's credibility.

So, he has to find some way to build a consortium. Now, seeing the UAE actually do strikes of their own, which hopefully we'll have time to cover in detail later, but the UAE is now doing strikes on Iran. Iran is proving though I think that it is it is very messy. But Iran is proving that their uh gambit to attack all of the other countries in the GCC would cause them to go, yeah, why did the US do this in the first place? Uh and that they would band together against the US, which they have not done.

Now, there's not a unified front coming out of the GCC that I see. But seeing the UAE, which is one of the most important partners, is basically the UAE and Saudi Arabia, those are the two that the US would really want to win over. Um, seeing the UAE actually directly strike Iran is interesting. Now, they don't have boots on the ground or anything like that, but they are hitting targets. So, you've now got US, Israel, and the UAE. That is wild. Imagine the UAE, a Muslim country, teaming up with Israel to go after another Arab nation.

That's wild. So, this is not I don't think the calculus is playing out for either side in the way that they expected. So, um, take that with a grain of salt. But that's what I want to see Trump do. Build, uh, an alliance of people. It doesn't have to be Europe, but it has to be somebody. You've got to get other people to say, "Yep, this is completely unacceptable. We all condemn the closing of the strait." Narrow the scope of what you're doing so that this really is just about nuclear weapons.

And then boom, we've got, you know, one clear thing. We've got to get the straight open back up. We've got to make sure that you guys don't have a path to nuclear weapons and then yeah, that would be it. That's where I would like to see this go. We'll see. Uh, and speaking on spinning a narrative, it seems like China might have more influence over the United States than we thought. Jesus, dude, if you're talking about the um the spy thing, this is pretty wild. So, yeah.

Um, if you guys are paying attention, there is a mayor in California, Arcadia. So the town's Arcadia and they also found like some weird sort of baby mill in uh Arcadia. So Arcadia has been on people's radar locally here for just there's weird things happening. But the mayor of Arcadia just stepped down after admitting to being a foreign agent or acting on behalf of a foreign uh country and that country of course being China. So this is I think going to have massive ramifications. I think that there's going to be a ton of investigations um certainly in the city of Arcadia, but going elsewhere to see how much influence China has actually been able to get over US officials.

And so there have been people talking about this for a very long time that China was running some sort of operation across the Darian Gap um and trying to get as many sort of military-aged men into the country as possible. Obviously, we have birth tourism. So people are especially Chinese nationals coming here to have kids so that the kids are born on US soil so that they have instant citizenship. And remember the US is running I don't know if they're doing the same things but we're trying to get as many spies as we can into China.

So don't think this is something oh that makes China uniquely bad. This is what great powers do but you want to be the one doing it. You don't want them doing it to you. And so you've got to find out who are all the people that are doing this. Obviously this is a problem. Obviously, we need to root this out uh and nip this at the bud because this would be it is incredibly dangerous to allow your foes to take you over from the inside. So, having China buying a bunch of farmland, super risky.

Having China buying property next to military bases, also risky. Uh having China have some massive amount of property ownership in the US, risky. I'm not saying you say no to um foreign nationals buying property in the US, but I am saying like you got to be thoughtful about it. Are there ways that you can do it that mitigates some of the downside risk? So, uh figuring out exactly what's going on here, figuring out how deep the corruption goes. I really think the next 10 years, uh for America is going to be a great truth and reconciliation reconciliation reconciliation uh around fraud and corruption.

And I think that we're going to see that it has been massive for a very long time. Uh and part of that is going to be foreign nationals taking advantage of that. And so whether it's uh people in Somalia extracting tremendous wealth and sending it back to uh the home country or whether that is people uh in Congress saying things like I'm f I think she was Guatemalan like I'm Guatemalan before I'm American. Like yikes. uh people that have beef with people that say that they're Israel first uh over America.

Obviously problematic. We don't want any of that [ __ ] And we certainly don't want anybody that is saying that uh oh yeah, sorry, I should have registered as a an Asian of a foreign uh power. Like that's wild. So yeah, China is running a playbook and we need to be very careful. Yeah, everyone's everyone's agreeing in the chat. They're saying that it's crazy that she also just outright was like, "Yep, I did it." Bro, she knew that the FBI had her dead to rights. Like, you don't admit it if you think you're getting away with it.

You admit it when the FBI is like boom boom boom boom boom just down the list and you're like, "Ah, yeah." Like, I don't know if you guys are watching Friends and Neighbors, watch Friends and Neighbors. It is fantastic. And there is, spoiler alert, I guess if you're not in season 2, there is a moment where I guess I'll be as vague as possible, where one of the characters just gets caught on camera doing something. And it's like, yeah, about the time that your enemy just straight has you on camera.

There's only so much denying that is left. So caught red-handed, you might as well uh try to plea it down, I suppose, as much as humanly possible. So, people are using I even used it in the headline of today's episode, Chinese spies. She has not plead guilty yet. I mean, we'll see, but she has not plead guilty yet to being a spy, just as she's an unregistered agent of a foreign power. And that what she's pleading guilty to is yes, I should have registered because I am an agent of a foreign power.

That's the part, dude. She's a mayor of a US city. That is so wild. Boys and girls, welcome to uh the Cold War 2.0. This is what it felt like growing up in the 80s, by the way. Uh, so you can expect some Red Dawnesque type movies coming your way. And may they haunt you as a teenager as they haunted me. Man, I used to have a recurring nightmare about uh Red Dawn. That's wild. It's a great movie, by the way. But damn, if you're 12 or 13, it's rough.

It is rough. Uh, someone in the chat, deplorable Ula said or Ulock says, "So, and this is on your fraud note, we're going to ask Trump who is already a fraud in so many ways to cut back on government fraud. I feel like this is the sentiment amongst most Americans." Uh, so I'm curious your take on that idea. Man, my take is that I don't care who's doing the fraud. You, we cannot tolerate fraud. We have a two trillion dollar a year deficit. That money is stolen directly from the rich, the middle class and the working class.

And then we deficit spend in order to deal with it and reward who only the rich. So now like hey if I can just get that populist juices flowing in you for a second when we allow fraud what we're saying is [ __ ] you middle and working class. Like that money is going somewhere else. That money is going to a different country. That money is going to fund politicians, but it ain't going to you. So, this is where I just I cannot believe that we're going to have any appetite whatsoever to tolerate fraud.

That is madness. Now, if you're like, "Ah, fuck." Like, trying to get the president, whatever president, uh, for it, that's just too much. Like, I don't have the political will to try and fight that. Fine. But I would prefer we go after the president on down. If we have reason to believe that these people are committing fraud, we have got to find out, get rid of it all. Like we really, dear Gen Z, read the fourth turning. We are counting on you guys. You've got to be the people that are like, "Fuck this." And you find that new like America can be great spirit that you reconnect with all of our roots.

Like that's what I'm talking about. Let's get some of that. like America, we're going to have to agree on what it means to be great, but like we got to make America great. We've got to do the hard work. We've got to like really find a set of values, galvanize around those values. I have some suggestions about what those values should be, but if we don't do that, America's in trouble. So, we cannot just keep tearing ourselves apart. The bad news is, as the fourth turning makes abundantly clear, you guys will only get there on the other side of a tremendous crisis.

But hey, don't worry. We're in the middle of it right now. So you've got 10 years roughly to enjoy the crisis. And then on the other side, we got to start rebuilding. So, but it's going to be built around the value system, whatever that may be. Feel free to push a different direction if you'd like, but our favorite pot filling socialist, uh, pot hole filling socialist out in New York City actually did balance the budget recently. That is very fair. So here I want to talk about M Donnie in a um my promise to myself and to you guys as always that if I see something that's done well I'm going to call it out.

So M Donnie who I consider my mortal nemesis nonetheless he has balanced the New York City budget and he did it largely by clawing back New York City tax revenues that were flowing to the state. So in fairness to him those dollars essentially belong to New York City in the first place. I think that that is a very good place to start. And the most recent fiscal flow study from 2026, it uses fiscal year 2021 2022 data. So some things may have changed, but that found that New York City contributes 54.5% of state revenues when measured by place of work.

Okay, that's very important. Now, on the spending side, New York City only receives 40.5% of state operating expenditures. Okay, so that's dodgy in my estimation. The rest of the city is gobbling up nearly 60% which is substantively more than they generate. New York City contributed roughly 68.8 billion but only got back roughly 47.6 billion. This is a net subsidy to the rest of the state on the order of $21 billion in that fiscal year. Now admittedly the gap narrows down depending on how you allocate the income taxes.

So if you look at place of residence then New York City contributed 46.7 46.7 46.7 of the total revenue rather than the 54.5. 54.5. 54.5. The difference is basically commuters. So these are suburbanites that work in New York City. They pay New York income tax on wages earned there. And if you credit that revenue to them uh out in the suburbs that does change the picture. Um, but if you set that aside, Mom Donnie I think had a pretty reasonable uh request of New York State um and they gave it to him.

So I think that they recognize that New York City is the economic engine of the entire state. And so trying to push them around was probably going to be a better idea or a bad idea. And so that one makes sense to me. Now, you guys know me, and I'll talk more about this in a second, but um cuts cuts. He should have done cutting. He didn't, but at least he's clawing back dollars that were generated by New York City. He also did another thing that I thought was pretty clever.

And so, the headline win on his like we did it by taxing the rich. Not really. But there is one thing that they're doing that is legitimately targeting the rich, and that is this new PAR tax. Now, a pedar is basically a non primary residence. So, second or third house. It's only things that are above $5 million. So, that to me is very clearly targeted at specifically the wealthy. It's projected to bring in $500 million annually. Now, I think it's a very smart bit of political engineering on his part.

No one is going to fight for the ultra wealthy guy that doesn't want to be taxed on his extremely expensive second or third home. That gets pretty hard to argue. uh especially if he can't vote because he doesn't actually live there. So that one I thought, okay, I get it. It's smart politically. Obviously, I would rather see them do this via cutting, but if you're going to do it, this one makes sense. So, where I start saying, okay, hold on a second, is that a PA to tear probably isn't going to generate as much of the revenue as they think it's going to.

uh it's certainly not going to affect housing affordability because even if this does cause the ultra wealthy to stop the practice of owning the properties in that place, the properties that are in question aren't the properties that are driving values high, that is a der of properties in the ranges that the average person actually can afford. And also the wealthy owners are likely to restructure their assets into LLC's, trusts and corporate vehicles uh that are owned there uh owned by someone in the state and then may take it outside of this tax.

And because of that and this is many people are already saying this the tax gains will inevitably fall short of what they're projecting. So the $500 million number is a nice planning assumption but it's not a guarantee. And so I'll be interested to see if at the end of the year if the budget actually balances or not because I have a feeling they're going to have a shortfall here. Now if this ends up chasing off would be buyers. Another bit of push back I would have is that now there's just less money flowing into the city.

I get that we're at a cultural inflection point where we think people with money are bad, but the reality is that everybody's got to have money. Nobody wants to work for free. So anybody that ever says, "I'm not going to do that because I'm not getting paid." we're all the problem. So, just getting everybody to remember you want money to flow into your city. You want that money to be handled well. You want your city, your state, your country to respect that capital. You want them to put restraints that don't end you up in the kind of like runaway toxic um inequality that we have now.

Obviously, this needs to be fixed, but you don't just want to become predatory with your taxes causing people to leave. We've run this story before and it ends up being bad news. In fact, I want to talk to you guys um about something um that's going on in Sweden which Manni himself has used as an explanation for the kind of policies that he wants to bring. We have a write up on this. Go to um go to the one about Sweden if you would. Uh I can give you the number if you don't see it immediately.

immediately. immediately. Number two. Number two sounds about right. So um really fascinating. For years everybody has been talking about like the Nordic model. Uh look at what Sweden has been able to accomplish. And they use this Mamani specifically use it as an example of why they want to put forward the policies that they're putting forward. And what we're going to talk about now is basically largely me going after the DSA. Because when you've got Mom Donnie banging the drum about um making it sound like cutting isn't an option, fiscal discipline isn't an option.

The only option is more free stuff and more tax on the wealthy if we actually do an audit. And I'm actually writing a deep dive on Sweden right now because I didn't realize that this is what had happened. I've been so propagandized around Sweden and the Nordic model. Even I didn't realize what was actually happening under the hood. So, a recent article came out showing that Sweden has leaned into capitalism, has been doing it for decades, and as a result, they've gotten richer, a lot richer.

From the 1970s through the late 1980s, Sweden's GDP per capita, that growth had trailed the OECD average, which is basically other developed democracies. So, they were falling behind. So, with all the Nordic model, they were falling farther and farther behind. They they had a progressive tax system that's gonna AOC is going to love this. They had a progressive tax system that at the highest level was pushing past 90%. past 90%. past 90%. In an effort to say it with me now, tax the rich. But what was it actually doing?

It was dragging down their entire economy. This is my fear for New York City. This is my fear for the DSA policies. So Sweden had a heavily nationalized approach to business. They were doing their best to tax the life out of the rich. And they were famous for being the prototype of cradletograve socialism. Hey everybody, don't worry. We've got you. Like you're never going to have to worry about a thing. Now, ironically, or not, if you understand the physics of economies, this actually ended up putting them in an insanely fragile position because remember, the only thing that generates any taxable revenue are entrepreneurs.

Full stop. So you're either an employee for an entrepreneur or an entrepreneur yourself, but that's it. This is how we derive value. So when Swedish uh the Swedish banking crisis hit, lasted from about 90 to 93, that dropped their GDP by roughly 5% and sent unemployment skyrocketing from 2% to over 10% in just three years. Yikes. Now, in the middle of all that, voters finally decided that they'd had enough of what I will call moronic policies. though I imagine at that time they would have been pretty happy to agree with that sentiment and it's one of those things that works on paper but in real life it starts having problems when you find yourself in that kind of position and so they ended up electing Sweden's first centerright prime minister in 61 years not some like wild right leaning guy just center right okay he comes in his coalition dismantles the Nordic social democracy model that had gotten them in the mess in the first place the very model that people will say, "Oh, they're running the Nordic model." Sweden hasn't been running the Nordic model for decades now.

They immediately began implementing what has become some of the most aggressive set of reforms in Sweden's history. Sweden's top income tax rate is now around 50% from its high of roughly 90%. Public social spending has dropped to 24% of GDP, which is the same as the US, by the way, which there are many things to be said about that, but we'll leave it at that for now. And the country now has more billionaires per capita than America. Okay? So, think about that. We have these policies, cradle to grave, going to take care of you, hit a banking crisis, all of a sudden we go, whoops, you really do run out of other people's money.

we're going to have to go in do things that actually stoke the engine of prosperity which is the free market. And now we actually turn things around, get things going in the right direction. Suddenly people are waking up within Sweden, you know, back in the 80s that the country um needed to go in a way that gets the fiscal engine to be more disciplined and gets the free market to kick off more capital that can be taxed. And so what everybody is now seeing with this article is that the very country that Americans have argued about for 50 years, the one that was supposedly supposed to be proof that socialism really just makes life better across the board, has actually spent two decades not proving the exact opposite.

It is complicated. And we'll get into some of the complications. And trust me, when I do the deep dive, you're going to see all of this. And I want to be as fair to what works and what doesn't work. And I don't want to paint some propagandist picture about the free markets. However, as of right now, nearly half of Sweden's primary healthcare clinics are privately owned, mainly by private equity firms. By the way, one in three public high schools is privately run. And school operators trade on the stock market in Stockholm.

Health care spending per capita has only grown by roughly 1% a year from 2014 to 2024 which is half the rate of UK and a third of the rate of the increasingly socialist United States. And what it shows is that private competition even in health care is the thing that keeps cost down. regulation, government involvement. When they get out of hand, because listen, Sweden is still very heavy government. But when they get out of hand, that involvement is the thing that drives costs up. So if you want to know why the US is moving in the wrong direction, it's because of this weird helter skelter like regulatory madness in both trying to not become singlepayer, but not let the private market do what it does.

It's [ __ ] crazy. So when you really start looking into it, Sweden has produced more than 500 IPOs in the last decade. Okay, that's all about private capital, free market capitalism uh in the decade that ran through 2024. That's more than Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain combined. Bro, do you know how small Sweden is? It is tiny. It's like 11 million people. Spotify, CLA, Skype, Minecraft, My Beloved, Candy Crush, all of them came out of Sweden's embrace of capitalism, capitalism, capitalism, opening the free markets back up.

Their finance minister, Elizabeth Fantinson, has cut taxes three years running. Cut taxes three years running. And as a result, Sweden's economy is now outpacing its European peers. So they go from being behind to now being ahead by embracing the free market, not entirely, but by heading more in that direction. The Swedish government debt sits at about 32% of GDP. Remember, we're 123% when the European average is closer to 90%. Real GDP per capita in Sweden hit an all-time high in 2026 according to OECD figures. Swedish per capita GDP growth has outpaced most OECD countries over the past decade.

And this is where it gets weird and I'll be very interested to see how you guys respond to this one. That is despite rapid population growth from immigration that is putting a massive drag on that number. So, and I'm talking by the math, not by my gut or anything like that. They've run the numbers and the um uh to give you the the specific place that it breaks uh I'll do in the deep dive from memory it's roughly like on when you take their um immigration in totality it is a massive drag.

It's like oh god it adds something like 50 billion but is a drag of like 85 billion or something. So they're in like this massive net loss. The European Commission projects that Sweden is going to grow 2.6% in 2026, which is among the highest rates in the EU. It's not very exciting, keep in mind, but it is better than their competitors. France grew by 2% by being far more socialist in the final quarter of quarter of 2025. Germany has been functionally flat for two straight years.

Sweden's employment rate is the 10th highest in the entire OECD. Inflation just hit 1.5%. That's awesome. I wish it were zero, but at least 1 point actually I wish it were negative. Don't get me started. I know the debate. Real wages are climbing, which is fantastic. Household disposable income is rising. These are all good things. While France raises taxes to chase a deficit. Germany debates how to fix an industrial base that's basically just in total collapse. Sweden on the other hand is like cool what can we open up to the free market without losing our identity of being a very um big social safety net country.

Okay, they've not like turned their back on that identity. But what they're proving is that if you want to distribute, you've got to first have a strong economic engine. Okay, this is the exact thing that happened in China. You realize that the free market is the thing. Now, the country that was supposed to bury capitalism is I would put forward to you and I hope that what you guys take away from it is that it's proving that you can build wealth much faster by opening up to the free market.

That if you want to have a big social safety net, the the very thing that you have to light on fire is the economic engine of prosperity, which is the free market. And the way that you do that, you ready, Ryan? Keep your finger on the pulse. I'm so curious to see what people are going to say to this next thing. The way that you do that is by allowing inequality to run hot. Now, there is such a thing as too hot. There's no doubt about that.

But if you don't create an incentive structure by distributing, redistributing less, letting people keep more. Remember, more billionaires per capita in Sweden than the US. So that I think per capita makes Sweden number one. I'm almost certain that's true. that's true. that's true. For what? Sorry, let me look that up. For the number of billionaires per capita, I think it's Sweden. US has more by a lot in terms of raw numbers, but per capita, I think it's Sweden. So, you've got you're letting people have that reward for all the hard work, taking all the risk, all of that stuff.

Now, nobody is more eager to concede that inequality can become toxic, a thousand%. But when people say follow the Nordic model like Sweden and don't acknowledge that what they did was abandon the Nordic model so that they could reignite the engine of prosperity and then have enough to distribute and create a big um social safety net. That's you you have to acknowledge that. Now, the immigration thing is where this gets really gnarly because what I predict is going to happen in Sweden is that if they don't curb their immigration problem, they're going to find out very fast that there is a big gap between the people that are able to turn their talents and their drive into economic productivity and the people who are counting on the redistribution.

And when that gets lopsided, then you run into the kind of place that America is where you're going to have to deficit spend. The problem is we are the world's reserve currency and so we have a lot more latitude. A country like Sweden isn't going to be able to do that. And so what Sweden is going to find out is once again that you're going to run out of other people's money. And so there are a lot of caveats you can put around Sweden. They only have 11 million people, very small population.

Um it's a very high trust society. And historically, historically, historically, the ratio between producers and people that were um relying on the social safety net, it was balanced towards the people that were producing. And so you could get away with a level of redistribution that you're not going to be able to get away with as you bring on more and more immigrants. Again, the math, it's just the math. So you end up finding that it's very hard to find somebody capable of generating a billion dollars.

I know it's become very uh go to talk positively about billionaires. I know AOC is going to have a stroke when she hears this, but the reality is you really can't earn a billion dollars. And you don't do it by taking from other people. She just fundamentally does not understand economic value. And I mean that literally. You can create additional economic value. You don't have to take it from somebody else. Okay? Okay? Okay? Let's just all be real clear about how value creation works. It is created.

It is not transferred from one place to another. The value is created. We don't have to go down that road right now. Uh but they it is very difficult is a very small number of people that can pull that off. And so if you create an environment where you just keep redistributing from the people that are able to pull it off, you disincentivize them to go and do it. Now all of a sudden there just isn't anything left to redistribute. That's what they found out the hard way in the 70s and 80s.

Change their policy and they've been richly rewarded for doing it. It is the very thing that the West is going to be confronted with. You will run out of other people's money and you will have to answer the question, what are you going to do to get back on the right side of that? No country needs to answer that more urgently than America. Uh which is why I hope I can really get people to pay attention to what actually happened in Sweden. Um billionaires, it goes Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, then Sweden.

Billionaires per capita. Yeah, read them again. again. again. Uh, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, Sweden. Sweden. Sweden. And that's just I stopped. United States is six, so we're not far off. I've got to look at Sweet uh Switzerland. Like, they just keep coming up. People are really trying to get me to pay attention to those kids. They're one of the top Well, actually, this kind of leads into my next point. They're one of the top quality of life in the whole world, and so is actually Sweden.

So, I'm curious. Uh, Sweden basically has this mix of free market economy with some socialism safety nets, right? right? right? uh and it is considered to be top five quality of life countries across the entire globe. entire globe. entire globe. Um in in what ways would you could you see those policies being implemented in like a New York City to make it more flourishing to then spread to United States because I feel like Mandani balancing the budget and then we look at all these Nordic countries.

It almost feels like it's kind of this opening for more social safety nets to kind of be introduced into America in a way that is more digestible for people. It won't work work work like in any capacity. It won't work in any capacity. Why is that? Okay. So, um here is going to be the thing that people are going to refuse to talk about in any meaningful way. And anybody like me that is just dumb enough not to keep their mouth closed, um they're going to get smeared because the reality is that what matters is you have to be a small country.

So, I looked this up yesterday. There's no country with over a hundred million people that um doesn't run doesn't run doesn't run inequality at a pretty hot level um and grows. So what you end up seeing is that you can run a big social safety net, stall your growth out and stay small. Um or you can let inequality run hot and you can do it on a really big population. So take China is the king of hot inequality. I think people don't realize China has more inequality than the US.

And so why does China tolerate that level of inequality? The answer is because they know that hundreds of millions of people were pulled out of poverty, like grinding, starving to death poverty by going, "All right, fine. We're going to let some of these guys get rich." and people's um shout out to anybody that's done research on China. Thank you. I love you guys. Please help spread the word. For anybody that just refuses to [ __ ] learn the lessons of history, it's such a windup as the Brits would say.

Uh because the answer is right there. Like they realize the only way to equal everybody out is to equal them at zero. And as much as people make fun of me, equal at zero means you eat your own child. Not everybody obviously. But if I told you, hey, there's a policy on the floor for a vote that leads to people being so hungry and malnourished that they will actually eat their own kids. Like provably, would you not just go, okay, it's a bad idea. Let's not do it.

I would hope so, but people don't. They actually still [ __ ] do it. It's crazy. crazy. crazy. So anyway, what China learned was, all right, we're going to have to let inequality go uh run pretty hot so that these guys are incentivized because the ratio of people that are capable of generating a billion dollar company versus the people that are capable of collecting a welfare check um is is so disproportionate that you end up bogging them down and you disincentivize them because you have to redistribute so much.

You end up um disincentivizing them so much they stop creating. redistributing the wealth of billionaires to the people who don't have billions is what you're saying just yeah so you're you're asking hey can't we just do some of these social safety nets here in the US like wouldn't that work and what I'm saying is social safety nets don't scale just to say it really succinctly really succinctly really succinctly scale as in as in literal numbers of people yeah so when you've got a country now here's why I say the people that talk about this get attacked there is a part of this I'm not saying and part of the reason I'm not saying is because I actually don't believe it but if you go Ask AI.

If you go talk to most of the thinkers on this subject, when they tell you about why Sweden can do it, they are going to say they are ethnically homogeneous. Now, I think that's [ __ ] and I think people do not understand ethnic homogeneity is meaningless. What matters is value homogeneity. If you are value aligned and your values are, we don't take handouts unless we are in dire straits and we take a handout for as little time as humanly possible and we make demands of our own family that like if a dad is saying to his kid, "Hey, [ __ ] get off the dole.

Get back to work." Then like cool, you can have a country that can pull this [ __ ] off. They feel a sense of obligation to each other. People will round that to ethnic homogyny because ethnic homogeneity is one of the ways that you can get there. But then you [ __ ] spill into racism and all that [ __ ] and it drives me absolutely [ __ ] mad. So this isn't about race. This is about values. Now we as Americans are a melting pot. So we've got people that have all different kinds of values.

All different kinds of values. There is no one American ethos anymore. And because there's no one American ethos, we're in a position where there are literal people who believe that billionaires are evil, that they're actually saying words out loud like there's no way to earn a billion dollars. You must have done something illegal, immoral, etc. to get it. And therefore, of course, they are justified in confiscating that wealth. There are people who believe that the president of the United States deserves to be murdered. On and on and on.

So when you have that kind of hyper division, then people feel that fraud is justified. you had Hassan [ __ ] saying, "Yeah, it's perfectly fine to rob the Louvre um to rob certain stores, like no problem." So when you have that, when you create a government program that is redistributing wealth from the highly productive people to people that are not productive, now all of a sudden people go, "That's just and good." And so we're going to spin up as many um daycarees as possible, as many learing centers as possible, uh as many hospice care facilities as possible.

and you get industrialcale fraud. So now imagine that you're coming up and you're looking at 90% tax rates. Obviously we do not have that right now, but there are people braaying for it. And so if you look at that and that's actually where you go, you just don't pursue it. And so now all of a sudden the economy starts to slow down and that's where you run into problems. And it's just it's so self-evident and it's played out so many times over history. And yet when things have been going well for long enough, we forget that prosperity is the hard part.

Redistribution is the easy part. Um I I two things to push back on. Note with the spinning uh just to go back to spinning stories with the Hassan comment, it the Lou thing was about um like we need to make crime fun again. It was more like a bit. So that wasn't like actual for that. Hold on, Ryan. Yeah. Do you feel that I have in any way, shape, or form misrepresented what Hassan [ __ ] actually believes? actually believes? actually believes? That was for chat. That wasn't fine.

Dear chat, beloved chat, do you think that Hassan [ __ ] is like, "No, no, no. We need to protect capitalism like that you just can't [ __ ] around with." or do we think it is an accurate representation of Hassan Piker's beliefs that um we need a revolution in the country that uh billionaires have done something evil and wrong and that their wealth needs to be confiscated from them. them. them. Um sorry I'm answering someone just said a super chat turned off. No one has sent in a $20 super chat for context chat.

Um, and then the other thing I was going to push back, World War II, post World War II is arguably the biggest boom in economic history for America, right? Um, at that time though, the top uh the top marginal tax rate on the highest earners in the United States was 91%. And so I'm curious how that feeds into um your argument about um I can't think of the word right now, but the fluctuating tax rates um the progressive tax. Progressive tax, that's the word. Yeah, man.

What a great question, Ryan. Uh, I love this. Okay, so the US comes out of World War II, 90% uh, progressive tax rate. And the reason that they were able to do that is because everybody believed in the war. So, we go into World War II, we're fighting on the side of right and good. We've got to end the Nazis. You know, people are becoming increasingly aware of the atrocities. We've been attacked at Pearl Harbor. So, people were all in. And so there was a real sense of it is my patriotic um duty is even the wrong word.

But sure, my patriotic duty to do this, but people wanted to do it. They wanted to help America. There was this real sense of we're all in this together. We've got to do whatever it takes to win. As we came out of the war, what we realized was that on a per taxpayer basis, we are actually cap um capturing less money. And so it probably felt good to say that people are paying up to 90% but the reality is that even comparing it to today on a per taxpayer basis they were collecting less money.

So I get it. People love to hear that number but the reality is that you're never going to actually capture that money. So what's going to end up happening is either people stop producing or they find ways around it. So um it just doesn't work. And that's why we then very rapidly began backing off of that. Uh I think there's a very credible argument to be made that the um redistributive redistributive redistributive redistributive making that sound hard. Uh nature of like the um the New Deal, what was that called?

What was his name? Roosevelt doing his whole thing. That that ended up prolonging the Great Depression and that it was only the economic juice of the war that ended up getting out of it. and that if we had just let the depression run its course, not tried to engineer our way out of it, that we probably would have gotten out of it faster. So, um, that is the right way to look at what happened in World War II. And it goes back to that idea of when values are aligned, you can do things that you can't when values are misaligned.

And I cannot think of a time other than I mean you've got um during the Civil War and during maybe the 60s where the US was as divided or more divided than we are now. And so this would be a terrible time. I mean we're seeing it in the fraud numbers. They're just absolutely ludicrous. Uh in terms of what was the phrasing you just used? Sorry, I'm reading chat and bouncing around. It was um if everyone's on the same page. What was the if we share values?

If we share values. So, if we share values, looking back to New York City, um I I feel like voting in Mandani and having them be like, "Let's, you know, balance the budget, fix things without removing from our social services, that feels like everyone in New York City is aligned on those values." And I know in previous shows you have mentioned like if this is what the people want, we'll ride with it. Um so, I'm curious how those play into this New York City balancing of the budget plus his now push to continue social.

I I should probably be more clear when I say balance the budget. I mean without raising taxes. Okay. So if your method of balancing the budget is to money print or raise taxes, like that's not a balanced budget in my estimation. Um now if you like take uh what's going on in Sweden for three years in a row, they've cut their uh taxes. So when you're in that kind of place now, I'm like, yeah, you've got a balanced budget, you've got a surplus, you're building things up.

if like in the US over the last I forget how many years but like 20 years let's say um for every dollar additional that we've collected in tax revenue we've spent an extra $1.58 and so that's the kind of path that New York is on that there are um they're drawing money from the state which hey fine it was revenue generated there but now the rest of the the state is going to struggle so that really is just moving value from one place to another um And that when you do that instead of reduce and you're on a path because by 2030 their numbers are going up like another 26% or something in Sweden projected project no in New York City.

So New York City is projected to be to have the cost of their budget go up substantively in the next three and a half years and they already spend um more than Florida does. And Florida is like three times the population. So it is pure insanity. Like they are spending money like we ran the the number a few weeks ago. It's like $87,000 or something per homeless person in New York City. That's insane. So um yes, the statement is true that if you have a balanced budget and you don't have to just keep raising taxes.

If you have a balanced budget and you decide you want free healthcare, free buses, whatever, great. By all means, that's vote. Vote with your feet. If you don't like it, you can leave. All of that, that's perfect. The state should be able to do what they think is best. The city should be able to do what they think is best. If they've got the balanced budget and the tax dollars to pay for it, great. That's what people are voting for. Um, but we have to distinguish between like you're on a trajectory of spending more and more money.

you got a balanced budget this year by taking away from other people in the state and increasing taxes on people and so you're not on a sustainable path. sustainable path. sustainable path. Uh Drew mentions Drew Dynamite. Uh Ray Dallio's beautiful deleveraging requires raise taxes and I I honestly don't know how the deleveraging works. So maybe just an explanation on that for those who don't know. Um but that's what Drew had to say in the comments. Yep. It it's a great point. So the only way out of where we are now is to do a beautiful deleveraging.

The reason that I always have beef with Drew selectively saying that is a beautiful deleveraging is to do all of the levers like it also includes money printing. You're going to have to money print. You're going to have to forgive some debt and you're also going to have to do austerity. And so if somebody were saying, "Hey, we're going to raise taxes, but we're also going to cut the budget and we're going to forgive some of the debt." and and they were doing all of the things, then I'd be like, "Yeah, we've all got to tighten our belt.

Cool. I'm happy to pay." Like, I actually don't have a beef paying more tax. What I have a beef is paying more tax when the fraud is insane. The budget is not balanced, we're printing money like crazy, we show a disregard of the middle and working class that is so extreme as to be categorically immoral. So, I'm just like, yeah, I'm not going to be happy about paying more taxes in that case because it's literally just mainlining fraud. So, hard pass or mainlining socialism. Hard pass.

It doesn't work. It will lead us down a very bad path. So, that's where I'm like, I want let's see, how should people by the numbers just think about me? Um, I've been reinvesting every dollar for the last decade into building a company. It doesn't mean that I'm not making money off of investments. I do and a lot. That's money printing and maybe good decisions, but nonetheless, money printing is your big culprit there. Um, so I'm not like these are not policies that will benefit me directly.

These are the things that I scream about. They are policies that I'm not I'm not going like, "Oh my god, like please stop taxing me so much." I'm saying, "Please make sure there's a middle class so that America will be stable." Um, but I think people read it because I'm wealthy that I'm somehow secretly this is awesome. It's going to be good for me. Um, that's not what motivates me. So, I'm mobile. I can go wherever is going to be good to uh capital if that means leaving the country, denouncing US citizenship, like all of that's on the table for me.

This is really about it was awesome when I grew up. The 80s were awesome. Go watch 80s action films. Please get motivated, get inspired. Uh I want to pay that forward. I want people to um be able to climb the social ladder and I know that for that I have to be willing to fall down the social ladder. Perfectly willing to accept that. So anyway, uh I don't expect many people to believe that that's true. Uh but that is true. Uh Brutus is asking in chat.

Yes, Brutus Lugo says Lugo says Lugo says all caps. all caps. all caps. All cap uh all caps. Tom, what's your effective tax rate? Um, right now my effective tax rate because I just basically put all my money back into the company is very low. Um, my effective tax rate when I was at Quest was like 53%. Um, and yeah, no one else is really Oh, I am curious though I if we were to implement a system like Sweden for healthcare specifically because the US is the one uh developed country that doesn't have singlepayer um healthcare to my knowledge.

Um, with the scalability of it, do you think there's a world where we could see both singlepayer healthcare and a private sector as well? Well, Sweden does. So, there is a way I'm not the guy that as of today would be able to map out how that works. My instinct is always that you don't want a singlepayer that you want competition, but that competition has to be done in a a very a very a very rewarding way. And right now the way that we're doing non-s singlepayer is so weird that I can't just go, oh well this obviously is going to work.

We are clearly proving that there is a way to do it poorly. Uh so we are doing it very poorly, but I don't know the edges of how that all breaks down to see um what exactly we're doing wrong. The person that whenever I hear them talk about it that seems to have the best read on this is um Cuban who who who who did you mention? Sorry, Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban. Oh, Mark Cuban. Mark Cuban. Yeah, not the Cubans. I was like the country, I guess.

Um, can you define scalability a little bit with these types of policies? Because I look at some place and I'll use healthcare again, like Brazil, they have SUS. That's the actual name of their singlepayer system, by the way. It's SUS. It's a full name, but I think Sus is the No, no, it's SUS. SUS is appropriate. Um, but they have like 200 million people, and the most complaints I hear out of it is, um, sorry, what country is this? Brazil. Brazil. Brazil. Okay. Um the the most complaints I hear out of it is like oh you know for the basic like oh I've got flu maybe the wait times are a little longer.

So I'm curious what your definition of because you you argued scalability is the issue. Y Y Y why exactly is that comparing I guess Sweden and America. Why do you think scalability causes problems with these types of policies? Um so I don't have the stat about Brazil memorized but when I was doing the research on is there any country over 100 million people that is um keeping their inequality low uh actually growing economically and has a large social safety net. Brazil was specifically part of that and it was like yeah one of those metrics they're failing on.

I don't remember which one. It wasn't 100 million so they are a big country. Um, but they either aren't growing or um their inequality is running hot. I don't remember which. I'd have to go back and look, but this will all be in the deep dive coming out next week. Uh, so I'll make sure that I specifically cover Brazil, but it it did not invalidate the thesis. That much I can tell you. Gotcha. And American uh American in Dion says singlepayer is horrible, but the system we have is horrible.

So where do you go from there? Yeah. To me, this is one where we have to create a system that allows the innovation to return to the space. So, when you look at what Mark Cuban is doing and you hear him talk about how regulation has entrenched these um I forget what they're called, there's like these middlemen that end up being able to hold everybody hostage in terms of the cost of drugs and treatment and things like that. And so him having to go through and having the sort of entrepreneurial guts and uh persistence to push through and get on the other side and to be able to do uh what's it called?

Drugs plus or something cost plus I forget the name of his drug company. But that to me is very interesting where the big innovation there is just he is doing total transparency so that everybody knows that it's cost plus 15% I think. Um, and so getting past the PBMs, I think are the initials, but I don't remember what it said. it said. it said. That's what it's, uh, pharmacy benefit managers. managers. managers. Got it. Okay. So, um, basically I I'm at the headline level. So, if this ends up being a misread, fair enough.

But I read the PBMs to be the same as I read unions where it's people that are supposed to be doing collective be supposed to be doing collective bargaining on behalf of people, but they end up uh working on behalf of regulators and the organization itself, making sure that it continues to thrive. And so we've got to find a system that unlocks entrepreneurial creativity that allows somebody to get wealthy by innovating because that is the thing that incentivizes people to innovate whether we want it to be um the you know huge driver or not.

They also want to do great things. Most of them not everybody but most. But if you strip away all of that incentive as we see time and time and time again you just don't get the innovation. And so we've got to unleash innovation. I have a feeling at the headline level that looking at the um healthcare industry, our big problem is regulation. And while it sounds very scary, and I understand why it scares the [ __ ] out of people, you're going to have to deregulate massively. Be far more intelligent about the regulations that you put in place to make sure that people aren't being abused because that's what regulation should be about.

It shouldn't be about top- down control to ensure that people aren't being abused because that goes so ary. Um, so we're gonna have to be smart about the way that we regulate that, but you're gonna you're gonna need to massively deregulate that industry. Gut instinct. Um, jumping over though, back to an earlier topic, UAE, tell us what's happening with UAE in the Gulf. Just bombing the [ __ ] out of Yeah. No, it's very interesting. So, this for me, this is a big development out of the Gulf War.

So, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the United Arab Emirates secretly joined the fight against Iran, making it the first Arab state to put bombs actually on Iranian soil. Uh the confirmed target was an oil refinery on Leavon Island. The strike sparked a big ass fire, knocked out uh production for months now. Whether they'll even be able to get that back online given everything that's going on is an even bigger question. Thrron's entire strategic bet was that we're going to punish the Gulf States.

We're gonna make them so mad at the US that they're gonna go against the US. They dropped 550 ballistic missiles on them. 2,260 2,260 2,260 drones were launched at the UAE alone. And they were thinking that the Arab world was going to say, "All right, we got to distance ourselves from Washington and Israel." To be honest, I think they did put them on shaky ground. Like when I saw uh was it Kuwait and Saudi for a minute denied the US access to their airspace, I was like, "Uh oh, this might be working." So hearing that the UAE was like, "Nah, we're bombing them directly." I was like, "Okay, well at least some people are taking it very personally that Iran is going after them.

It is not causing them to distance themselves from Washington and Israel." So we'll see. And if more people get behind that, then Iran may have ended up getting the exact opposite of what they were looking for. So we'll see ultimately how all of this plays out. But that one is um uh a pretty big deal. and open source researchers are saying that UAE uh and Chinese-made wing long drones were operating over Iran and territory recently. So Saudi Arabia is now reported to have carried out its own retaliatory strikes.

I don't have as many details on that. Um so we'll see. But if you start seeing more and more of this um it would be a very big deal. So keep your eyes peeled on this one and we'll watch it as it unfolds. But that that would be a very big gust of wind in the sales of the US to put together that consortium of other countries that I was saying they need to do. I don't think there's enough there yet to get too excited. Um but it is some early indications that uh Iran may not be getting the response that they wanted.

So word now on um other things that I want to make sure that we get to. We've got that Gundam is real. I can't believe that's a whole thing, but that really is a thing. we got to cover that. Um, so if you want to pull that up and then I want to make sure that we also get to um Zillow and its prediction about the housing markets and then we must save time for women now outnumbering men because I think there's something interesting there. But let's let's real fast fast fast because that came that news came the day we just posted a video about women losing their jobs to AI.

It's becoming like a bigger and bigger thing which is really interesting um in terms of how that plays out. Uh, Eric, I don't know. Really fast, let's do our um the Gundam one. This is like a nice quick shot. Uh, so if if we have any uh Mecca fans out there, like this is the big fantasy of these giant robots you can actually crawl inside of. so much of um the history of science fiction is that it ironically ends up leading science fact because what happens is you get somebody like an Elon Musk that grows up reading books with a picture of what um spaceships are going to look like, what space outfits look like, all of that.

And then that person becomes an engineer and they go on and make this stuff real. So, Japan since what, the '7s, I think the first Gundam came out in the 70s, painted these picture of these giant robots that humans could actually crawl inside of. I don't know that it makes any sense for the human to actually be inside of the robot. To be completely honest, it feels like these would be much better driven without somebody inside of them. But, nonetheless, you have generations of people all over the world that grew up fantasizing about being able to climb inside of a Gundam robot.

And so, now somebody has made them. Uh, I think there's plenty of criticism to be made about these things being uh far less functional than they are just cool, but they're going to show a clip of this thing in a second, like knocking over a brick wall. Uh, there, I think, are precious few things that this thing can actually do at this point. Uh, but it's big as hell and certainly strong. So, it'll be wild to see as certainly as AI comes online and we're able to knock down There goes a brick wall.

uh we're able to knock down like more and more um of like the limitations of manufacturing. It'll be interesting to see what kind of crazy like megalithic structures we're going to be able to build. The starship that Musk has built is so big. It's absolute insanity. So anyway, this stuff is like there is a child inside of me that gets very very excited by this even though I think that this really is ultimately going to go nowhere and is uh probably the worst way to build this kind of technology.

But nonetheless, that stuff is cool. All right, now with that, I want to talk about what's going on with women. This as it collides with AI, this is going to get very strange. So, what's happening is you've got more women that are um getting degrees than men. I think there's 200,000 women in the US more than there are men getting um college degrees. And so, people are looking at that. The initial reaction is, oh my god, like what's happening? Men are getting left behind. Oh no.

Like, this is that big problem that we've been watching happen for quite some time now. And so, does this just mean that we're going to see more of a breakdown in the roles between the sexes as women, you know, they hypergamy, so they date over and up? Uh, and so men have just checked out of education because it's become so affeminized. Uh, men's ambition has been so attacked for so long, right? All of that, I think, is very real. It's a very real conversation that's been going on now for probably a decade.

But I think that there's something different that's actually playing out right now. And what you're seeing when you combine it with what we were just talking about the other day is the fact that the jobs that women occupy are actually more vulnerable to AI replacement than the jobs that men occupy. And as you start researching it, and I don't have all the specific numbers, but as you start researching it, you realize men aren't just checking out. They're actually going in and increasing numbers to things that are going to be harder for AI to replace.

So they're going into the trades. So seeing more men go into things like being a plumber or an electrician. And as you think about all the data centers that are spinning up around the country, which I do not think people understand how big these data centers actually are, how many people their construction will employ for the next decade, 20 years, I don't know. It'll be fascinating to see how long this goes. But there are going to be a lot of people that go into these roles that are going to be harder, not impossible, but they'll be harder for AI to disrupt.

So I think really what you see in this story is an exacerbation of the fact that women are in more of the humanities, more of these exposed roles that can all be done on screens. Anything that can be done on a screen is going to get replaced much faster, much sooner by AI. And so it'll be very interesting to see if what we actually see creating more trades, this is going to be controversial, but the thing that we see creating more trades is actually AI. That will be very fascinating as the jobs that are available that the economy just says are valuable end up being these things that aren't geared at men.

It's not specifically aimed at men, but it happens to be things AI can't do as well. And if jobs that men find themselves more drawn to happen to be the thing it's more physical um happen to be the thing that men find themselves more drawn to. It's more abstract, less dealing with people. Right? If you're spending all day pipe fitting, uh that's not exactly interacting with other people. And so men tend to be drawn towards things. Women tend to be drawn towards people. And so if the ultimate thing that creates uh a some amount of a resurgence to a more traditional male female dynamic ends up not being religion which has historically been the thing that kept that um going but instead it's just that AI is replacing more female centric jobs.

That will be wild. wild. That will be wild. I feel like another layer to this is also just college is so expensive we should respect trade schools more. Like college is absurdly expensive. I'm going to stop you there and I'm going to say do not respect trade schools unless they provide something of value. Being cheap is like whatever. I couldn't care less about that. Um taking on debt if your job the job that you're going to get at the end of that degree doesn't pay it back is stupid.

But what we're seeing here, I don't think is men saying college is too expensive and women saying no, it's fine. I think what we're seeing is men going, "Oo, I like this job anyway. That sounds dope. Uh, and I can make money. Yeah, I want to go do that. And I think they have a much stronger drive. And ladies in the chat, light me up if you think I'm crazy here. I think men are hardwired to be ambitious to want to provide in a way that women are not.

And so, women might get a sense of freedom. They might get a sense of meaning and purpose, especially if they're not having kids, but I don't think that they have that same I'll just be emphatic. Women do not have that same level of drive and ambition that men have. And the numbers bear that out. So, it's like as they find the friction with, ooh, this isn't a job that I necessarily want, I think that they're going to turn to something else. Now, will that something else be Only Fans, or will it be uh getting married, having kids, that's a much bigger debate.

All right, if you thought that was crazy, by all mean, all mean, all mean, but I cannot think of a single woman in my family who doesn't wear the pants in the relationship. Right. [ __ ] Like, I I Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. I have confessing. I've always been surrounded by very strong independent women, right? And I think for me, that's very different to me than wearing the pants. I would say my wife is a strong independent woman. My wife, if she were sitting next to me, would tell you I wear the pants in the family.

In no uncertain terms, she wouldn't need to laugh or giggle about it. She'd just be like, "Yes." So, um, that to me, those are two separate things. I don't want to derail if you don't mean Well, I would say they're both Yeah, both of them are accurate to describe most of the women in my family. Like my aunt was a banker. My mom was a prosecutor for a bit. Okay, but that still doesn't mean that they need to wear the pants in the family. I just want to be very clear.

Well, but they're always the ones calling the shots. Yes, they may actually wear the pants in the family. But I want to say being a lawyer doesn't mean you wear the pants in the family. Uh that's a totally different thing. Well, that's on the ambition note of like I feel like again my family, but um every woman in my family has had a career ambitions and yes, they want a family, but all of them have pushed for my careers first and then once they decide to have kids, you know, that shifts, right?

Then it's like both the parents are now focusing on the children. Um so I don't know. I I guess the stats could say something else, but my lived experience tells me otherwise. I'm so curious. We have a woman lingering right outside the uh the tent here right now. I see you, Christina. Uh, so yeah, this is a topic I expect to strike a nerve for people. So, uh, let's tease out two separate things. So, women being ambitious, buy the numbers, just not as um, hellbent to work the hours, climb the ladder, uh, be driven by money in the same way that men are.

Again, just by the numbers. Um, if you say that a woman wears the pants in the relationship, to me that's a very different thing. There are plenty of women that are your default assumption about a woman should be that she is as extraordinary at her job chosen field as a man would be, right? Women are the if you think of intelligence, the curves are slightly different, but there are a ton of smart women. In fact, I think I'm almost certain what I'm about to say is statistically dead accurate.

There are less dumb women than there are dumb men. Women are more educated than men. No, I'm not talking about education. I'm talking IQ. talking IQ. talking IQ. Okay. Okay. Okay. So, there there are more dumb men than there are dumb women. I'm almost certain that is just statistically true. Now, there are more smart men on the like way end of the curve than there are like hyper um high IQ women. So, that is also true. But when you meet a woman, you should just assume like she's going to be as capable and as smart as the next person.

That doesn't matter. But when you start looking at the statistics, the kinds of rules that they go into, um the fact that they will often uh choose to go home when they have kids, work less hours, those kinds of things. Um that explains a lot of what we see out in the workforce. But that to me is a very different thing than I'm the decision maker in my family. So um the whole idea of hypergamy which again you just see in the data over and over and over and over and over is a woman wants someone that they feel good following.

This is not everybody. So you just may be in a family where nope you have collected women that they're just not motivated like that. They want to be the one in charge. They feel great about it. They're good at it. I'll make that presumption. and that they've found men that are not interested in being in a leadership position anyway and they would rather um have a woman that yeah, I would like her to take the lead and she's great at it and I love it and my marriage is extraordinarily happy.

I'm not saying those people don't exist. They do. I'm just saying these are two different things. ambition as separate ambition and ability let's say separated from I want to be the leader because you can imagine prosecutor ultra high level but still my husband is the one that I turn to to um be the final decision maker in the household to set the vision for where we're going that doesn't mean that the woman is silent my wife is anything but silent my wife is very aggressive with her opinion she is going to fight for what she believes in if she thinks I'm wrong, she is going to tell me in no uncertain terms, but at the same time, she is with me because from the moment we met until today, she believes of the two of us, I'm the right one to lead.

And so those are two very separate things. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. In my opinion. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense in terms of like the comparing it to the stats and stuff. stuff. stuff. Yeah. If you want to understand what's going on in the world, if you want to understand why some relationships work and some don't, I think you have to like really begin to tease those things out because somebody who is like let's say um I know multiple women, I won't name them, and I know these women well, and they are incredible, very successful in their roles.

Um, one of them is an entrepreneur and extraordinarily successful business. I mean, she inspires me. [ __ ] incredible. incredible. incredible. And they've both gone through pmenopause and they're like, "Yeah, I just don't care like I used to anymore." It's like, yeah, word. Such is the power of of of like your hormones. And so I think men have hormones driving them to scale, to climb, to win, to compete. I think that women have a hormone set that makes them want to connect and nurture and um nurture, that's the right word for it.

And so when you take them as like big statistical numbers, you're just going to find that in terms of like ultra hardcore climb the corporate ladder, there's just less and less and less as you get more and more towards the top. More women just feel a different impulse. And so they either pursue careers that just don't take you that high. Um or they eject out when they have kids or they eject out because um they're making enough money that their husband is successful. they want to go do philanthropy or work at their kids' school or whatever.

Um, it's just two different life paths. And it's very weird to me that we place a value judgment that like women should want to do those same things as men and that if somebody says that women don't do those things that that's somehow a slight against them. I don't think the world ought to be judged on a male curve. I think males should be judged against a male curve. I think women should be judged against a female curve. And you shouldn't say, "Oh, there should be like this complete overlap between the two." That to me is evolutionarily nonsensical.

nonsensical. nonsensical. Yeah. I Yeah. I Yeah. I preach preach preach preach to myself. So, is there anything else you want to add though? Pivot to super chats. Oh, if we have super chats. We got five words. Oh, damn. Oh, damn. Oh, damn. We hit a nerve with this one. First up, R.J. Johnson says, "No, Drew. No super chats. Causation or correlation?" correlation?" correlation?" That's a great question. Yeah. Like, what's happening, guys? No. No super chats when Ryan's at the helm. Don't know. know. know. Come on, guys.

Don't know. It's a good question. I'm Am I just I'm just scare all the people away. Uh Tabitha Parton says, "Tom and team love Oh, $50 super chat by the way." way." way." Damn. Let's go, Tabitha. Thank you. That's amazing. That's amazing. That's amazing. Tom and team love the channel. Tripled my income. Learned tons about the economy, AI investing, and we now have six figures in the market. You've changed my life. Quick question on Sweden. Sweden. Sweden. Hold on. Like, we need to pull that. That is dope.

I love that. You have no idea how much I live for that kind of stuff. That's amazing. I'm so happy to hear that the information has been high utility for you. That is like my the the thing I hold myself accountable to. I love that. love that. love that. Uh oh, their question on Sweden. Is it true they have significantly less fraud? Please cover. It was how they ended. That's a good question. I would have to look into it. So my uh my instinct is given the math on the um the immigrant situation while I can't say it is or isn't fraud I can say that the onbalance uh the if I remember the math correctly it's somewhere between 30 and 50% more cost on the immigrants over lifetime than contribution and so are some people going on the dole simply because they can um or are they all just desperately trying to be economic contributors and they just they just can't quite make it.

It's possible, but certainly given some of the things we see here in the US, I think it's highly unlikely. So, my gut instinct is some percentage of that is going to be fraud, but I am that's shooting from the hip. Total gut instinct. I have no evidence to back up that claim. that claim. that claim. Um Avidly Aspire says the health care system is not a free market. costs are separated from the service itself. No ability for consumers to shop around. The only way to make uh significant profit is to be an extractive middleman, i.e.

PBMs, which we discuss PBM shortly or or or man, I don't want any of that to be true, but that all sounds pretty believable. believable. believable. Uh and then Avidly Aspire again says Sweden, so thank you for the 40 Avidly. Yeah. Oh, damn. Uh Sweden's system may be 40% PED, but it's publicly funded. US healthcare is privately funded through individuals and employers. That changes the PE dynamics. Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point. So part of the whole um question for me is what of this scales?

And so is this that okay this works in a small country you don't have a lot of immigration there's value system homogeneity and so you can get away with this because the country has a push to say okay dip into the social safety net when you need it but we want people to need it as little as possible and so and also please don't forget in the US the debt is basically the biggest part of the social safety net so when people talk social safety net.

They'll point to things that we can all get behind like we need to do better with healthare. I mean I suppose there are some people that are like no [ __ ] them. But I think most people are like yeah if we could do it like in a way that wasn't a drag on the economy. They just don't see a way to do it that's not a drag on the economy. Doesn't mean they're right. But that's like the sentiment for people that are against it. Um Medicare, retirement, all that stuff.

Nobody's thrilled about taking that age higher. I'm sure there are people that are like, "No, I just want to see people work longer." That's not my thing. I just look at how many things we end up going, "Okay, we're going to give away all these things for free with no accounting for fraud, waste, abuse, all of that stuff." And we put ourselves in a position where we're taking on $2 trillion a year for things we actually can't afford to pay for. And so the social safety net includes that.

And so when you look at that, it's like, holy Jesus, like we are delivering terrible outcomes and taking just a metric [ __ ] ton of money from people. And so I think what we're going to find is yeah, when you're small, you can do it. You can find that balance of we have just enough um people that are high producers that because our actual population is small, the ratio works. But the ratio of producers to people that may need to draw on the social safety net becomes as at scale the number of people that draw on the social safety net just grows so much at a at such a different rate than the number of producers that at scale it doesn't work.

So like one person who's really good at entrepreneurships entrepreneurship let's say can cover like a gigantic number of people right but you the number of people that you can put into the system just grow so much faster than you can grow even those heavy hitters and I my intuition is that's exactly what happens and that's why you don't see this go above once you hit 100 million people in population you just find that there are none of these gigantic social safety nets where they also uh are growing the economy and have low um inequality.

It just doesn't exist because I I think that ratio of high producers to people that extract end up becoming just you just can't balance that math. that math. that math. Uh Avidly Aspire jumping back in. Thank you for the 60 total. Uh clinicianowned practices have lower costs and higher quality via clinician retention and fewer extractive middlemen. Regulating PE and consolidation in healthcare would dramatically reduce costs. That's really interesting. So, when I heard the PE stat about Sweden, I admittedly was like, "Whoa, okay, that's not what I expected." Uh, for the exact reason that you're talking about, I think PE firms are incentivized to have a portfolio to remove all the debt from the underperforming companies that they'll just bankrupt.

Uh, so they move it off of the good ones and onto the bad ones and then just bankrupt them. Um, I have a feeling feeling this is feeling this I don't have the numbers to back this up, but I have a feeling that's part of what we're seeing um play out in the PE world and that we're going to see bigger issues uh come from that. We'll see. Uh, it's pure intuition. So, don't uh don't make any investments based on that idea. Um, but yeah, that's an interesting take that I would have to look more deeply, but that fits my intuitions.

And the last super chat for the day, Chaos Ballads says, "Can't wait for Tom's deep dive on the rules of acquisition." But in all seriousness, the rules of acquisition, what do they mean? mean? mean? Uh, that's all they said. I don't know specifically. specifically. specifically. And then they made they implied that it's a joke. I don't understand acquisition, acquisition, acquisition, but they said they love the channel. The rules of acquisition were the sacred precepts upon which Faren society was based. based. based. Faren, Faren, Faren, I don't know what that is.

This is all very cryptic. This is all very cryptic. fully transparent. fully transparent. fully transparent. It's very very kind of you to Oh, Faren G is from Star Trek. Okay. I know nothing about Star Trek. Yeah, I was a Star Wars kid. Yeah, you and me both. Star Trek never spoke to me visually. I don't know. There's just something about it. All right. You guys are amazing. I love you bunches. Thank you. Uh we'll see you on Friday. By the way, we're going to be coming to you live.

We We will be live on Friday. Normal time, all of it. We're going to be coming to you live from London. So, that'll be a lot of fun. I'm very much looking forward to that. Drew, if you're still in the chat, I hope you feel better, brother. I will see you in London. And uh yeah, everybody, see you on Friday. Peace later.