The Gen Z Debate, Mamdani Sued For Grocery Stores, The Jury Problem the Clancy Retrial Exposed | Weekly Recap

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Queen Carvania stood haloed by the morning sun. An army hung on her every word.

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

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Drew (0:31)

All right. And there have been reports. This is based from Puberty. Puberty.

Tom Bilyeu (0:35)

I was going to say this is from Puberty. Let's go.

Drew (0:38)

Mamdani is being sued by the National Supermarket Association for trying to open five state funding grocery stores with reasonable prices. Supermarkets claim they can't compete with Mamdani's prices and these stores shouldn't be allowed.

Tom Bilyeu (0:51)

The way that the economy is structured, if you start messing with the price structure, you collapse the supply chain, which makes things harder to get and more expensive. It does not make things better. Look at the natural experiment of East and West Berlin. It was clear as day on the side where the government is trying to control the price structure, it becomes impossible for people to innovate, for prices to go down, everything stagnates. They had a limited number of things on the shelf.

The quality of the product stayed stagnant for decades. Whereas on the side where the free market was allowed to reign, the way that you get your mustard on the shelf or your eggs on the shelf or your chicken on the shelf is you innovate at some place in the chain. You either innovate from a quality perspective, you innovate from a distribution perspective, but you do something that allows you to get more people to buy your product. You make it cheaper, you make it better, but if you're doing it simply by taking taxpayer dollars, subsidizing it to make it cheaper, you've now removed the innovation impulse and you've made it harder for other companies that have been trying to just innovate to compete, you've made it impossible for them to stay in business because you've artificially stolen their own tax dollars to weaponize against them. This is so patently absurd. This one, guys, for real, please, I beg of you.

Drew (2:09)

I thought you caught yourself.

Tom Bilyeu (2:10)

No, no, no. I really, really want people to hear me. All things in life can be boiled down to what are the mechanisms. This one you can understand at a mechanism level. And the way that people respond to this, like with this arrogant, flippant attitude of like, oh, these guys just don't want to see your groceries get cheaper. Bullshit. Groceries have gotten cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to the point of being a modern fucking miracle that you can get fruit off season for pennies. It's absolutely insane that we've managed to pull all this off. And we've managed to pull it off because of the free market. We have not managed to pull this off because you're getting government subsidies. Government subsidies derange things in ways that people do not understand.

Let me give you one example that I know intimately. How did I get wealthy?

You could actually boil this down to a key insight. And the key insight was that the government had been subsidizing corn for so long that corn was so cheap that everybody was making sugar using high fructose corn syrup. Why?

Corn is such a random fucking place to get sugar from. You do it because the government was making it artificially cheap. So it's like, okay, well, we'll just run this through this weird ass process. And it comes out with a certain viscosity. Now, for 70 years or whatever, that the government had been subsidizing corn, we had people then using to get sugar in their product, high fructose corn syrup, which that viscosity gave the products a certain tolerance in the machinery. And so for 70 years, machinery was built assuming that you were gonna use high fructose corn syrup, which is terrible for you, terrible, terrible. If you wanna understand why America is in the kind of health crisis that it's in, it is partly due to the obsessive use of high fructose corn syrup. And so when Quest came along, we were like, well, we want our bars to actually be good for you, so we can't have high fructose corn syrup. We came face to face with why nobody had made that bar before us, because all of the equipment assumed that high fructose corn syrup. When you remove that, the bars just wouldn't produce. So we had to then go engineer our own equipment. And that becomes one of the ways that we just end up running away like a freight train. When you let the government subsidize things, there are all of these deranging, bizarre consequences that end up being a knock on effect down the line.