What if Tom were the President, Tom's Political Compass, Essential Reads for Combating the New World Order | Weekly Recap
Tom Bilyeu participates in a simulated presidential policy game, takes a political compass test, and recommends five books he argues are essential for understanding the current political and economic moment. The episode covers his hypothetical policy priorities—budget balancing, housing deregulation, congressional accountability—as well as his views on communism, regulatory capture, and the dangers of ideological tribalism.
Summary
The episode opens with a sponsored segment for Plaud, an AI-powered conversation capture device. Tom then participates in an interactive simulation where he acts as president for a day, proposing policies and receiving simulated public and congressional responses. His core presidential platform centers on balancing the federal budget through spending cuts, extending the retirement age to 69 over 15 years, withholding federal funding from states with unbalanced budgets, deregulating housing to increase supply, eliminating rent control, and creating manufacturing incentives. Most policies faced congressional gridlock, with only watered-down versions passing the House before being filibustered in the Senate.
A simulated mass shooting crisis prompts Tom to argue that gun violence is rooted in economic despair and mental health rather than gun availability, and that removing guns without addressing root causes would not stop violence. He explicitly refuses to touch gun control policy. A Chinese state-sponsored hacking incident leads to his most popular policy response—imposing sanctions on China—which earns his highest simulated favorability ratings. Policies focused on congressional accountability, such as making members ineligible for reelection if the budget deficit exceeds 3% of GDP, banning insider trading, and imposing term limits, also receive near-universal approval across political demographics.
Tom reflects on the simulation by noting that the American public responds most strongly to policies that hold politicians accountable, and that economic prosperity tends to unify people across political lines. He delivers a brief mock State of the Union address, acknowledging he would likely be a one-term president for prioritizing cause-and-effect over popularity.
The second major segment covers five books Tom recommends for navigating the current political climate: Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang, Red Famine by Anne Applebaum, and The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom by James Burnham. Tom argues these books collectively shift one's worldview from naive optimism to a clear-eyed understanding of how power works, how communism leads to mass atrocity, and how elites always seek to control the frame of reference of the general population. He emphasizes that Nazism has been effectively communicated as evil, but communism has not received the same cultural reckoning despite comparable or greater atrocities.
The episode concludes with Tom taking the Political Compass test live. He lands slightly right of center on economic policy and strongly libertarian on the social axis—far from authoritarian. He expresses that some questions lacked sufficient nuance, particularly around climate policy and schooling. He closes by arguing that political tribalism is dangerous, that most people mistake their preferences for objective truth, and that societies function best when competing sides occupy the moderate center.
About this episode
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Key Insights
- Tom argues that the American public's strongest bipartisan agreement emerges around policies that hold politicians accountable—such as budget-tied reelection eligibility, insider trading bans, and term limits—rather than around specific ideological positions.
- Tom claims that regulatory capture means corporations, not workers, are the primary beneficiaries of increased government regulation, and that conflating regulation with worker protection is a fundamental misreading of how lobbying works.
- Tom argues that communism has not received the same cultural condemnation as Nazism despite comparable 20th-century atrocities, and that this gap leaves Western societies vulnerable to repeating those mistakes as they re-debate economic systems.
- Tom contends that mass shootings are more likely symptoms of economic despair and mental health crises than of gun availability, and that removing guns without addressing root causes—as Europe's rise in knife violence suggests—does not eliminate the underlying impulse toward violence.
- Tom argues that housing markets like Houston, which have heavily deregulated zoning and building, demonstrate that deregulation keeps rents and home prices stable, benefiting those who haven't yet entered the market at the expense of existing homeowners' asset appreciation.
- Tom claims that Solzhenitsyn's central insight—that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart—is illustrated by the gulag system's use of prisoner-informants, and that most people would likely become guards rather than resisters under sufficiently oppressive conditions.
- Tom argues that James Burnham's work on Machiavelli is essential for the current era because increasing transparency through social media will expose the elite power structures and secret networks that have always governed societies, and without a framework to interpret this, people will be radicalized by conspiracy theories.
- Tom's political compass result places him slightly right of center economically and strongly libertarian socially, which he says reflects a belief in personal responsibility and classical liberal values rather than alignment with authoritarian conservatism.
Topics
Transcript
Right now, I want to talk about a bet you're losing every day. Someone says something important in a meeting, a client drops an offhand comment that matters, a teammate floats a half-formed idea, but you know it's gold, and then you bet yourself the same thing every time. I'll remember that. But nine times out of 10, you lose that bet. Everybody does. Your brain wasn't built to retain 40 hours a week of dense conversation. And the cost isn't just a forgotten detail. It's the follow-up you never make, the promise that you don't keep, the connections that slip through your fingers. And Ploud is built to make sure you win that bet every time. It's an AI-powered…
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