Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Wall Street Meltdown, AI Shockwaves, and the Epstein Files: What No One’s Telling You | The Tom Bilyeu Show
09 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Motivation included.
Good morning, everybody. Welcome to another Tom Bilyeu show live. Yesterday was a lot of fun, despite the markets starting to climb their way back. Yesterday, they got absolutely clobbered, losing trillions of dollars across basically all markets, including gold, silver, stocks, and crypto.
Chapter 2: What caused the recent market selloff?
Is this the beginning of a bear market or was it just a transient drop? And we're already seeing it coming back. We're gonna be talking about all that and what it means to have a drop that rapid.
regardless of whether we come back today in Conspiracy Corner or strapping in as claims of Epstein's Fortnite account being active after his death or actively being scrubbed from the internet in real time. It is so wild. I cannot believe that this is really the timeline that we're on. I'm getting sucked into the vortex. I'm not going to lie. They're starting to get to me.
The Clintons have done an about face and are now ready to testify regarding their account knowledge of the Epstein situation. But in a very fascinating turn of events, they want the hearing to be public so that the whole truth can belong to the American people. Tom, what is going on with these markets? Yesterday was a lot of fun.
The markets got absolutely hammered as a massive series of sell-offs rocketed through practically every sector from precious metals to AI and crypto. It really was a bloodbath. The crash is being attributed to massive forced sell offs in what is being described by analysts as a classic risk off event driven by a confluence of a whole bunch of factors.
The big concerns are over excessive AI spending by big tech, weakening U.S. labor data, which many believe signals a potential economic slowdown. and fears of tighter monetary policy under a possible hawkish Fed shift, which that one we're going to want to talk a lot more about with what is Warsh meaning to the market.
It's very interesting to see Trump just banging the drum about we have to lower rates. But the guy that he nominated, the market is responding to as if he's going to come in and be more hawkish than what we've been seeing with too late Jerome Powell, if Trump can be believed. So it's pretty fascinating.
And the sudden move looks to many like it's a mechanical unwind of overcrowded trades at a time when liquidity is drying up, causing a cascading effect across many asset classes. And this is what happens.
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Chapter 3: How is AI impacting the software industry?
You've got a whole lot of people trading on debt. And when the um, the price of everything is going down. You get all these forced liquidations, which then causes the market to freak out. Now there are two distinct, but ultimately interrelated AI narratives that are driving some of the sell-off.
And it's important that we tease them apart so we can get a slightly better understanding of why the Marcus's market is acting so skittish right now. I liken it to a horse, by the way, that like has heard something and is getting jumpy. Um, And so it's going to dart off in weird directions every now and then. All right.
The first of the AI narratives that seem to be having a bigger impact of the two is that AI is beginning to encroach into the software application layer. If you're not paying close attention to this, I don't think a lot of people understand how good AI is getting at coding.
and Anthropix release of a new legal marketing and enterprise automation tool for its Claude Cowork product sent an absolute shockwave through the software sector. You guys need to try this stuff for yourself. So we are using it here at Impact Theory. I never know how much you guys know about what we're doing on the gaming side and all that.
So we're constantly looking at how we can interface with AI. And the team that we have is just like, at first they were like, this is all crap. It doesn't work. It's not very interesting. And then slowly over time, it was like, well, actually like, you know, it's completing some of the lines of code for me. And then it was like, whoa, like it's actually helping give me ideas.
And it's not like I can just turn it over, but it's doing a lot. And then they had it, not our team, but Claude, They built like a compiler of some kind, I forget, but it was like a like really low level compiler that does a lot of heavy lifting.
And it's coded from scratch, I believe, with one human offering like guidance and nudges when they were like because they use like 16 different bots to go in and code this thing and they would. occasionally run into the same problem. And so the guy would go in and nudge them. There's no doubt, much like Waymo isn't fully driving itself.
It's not doing this stuff on its own, but utterly fascinating to see how far it can go. So we're seeing that stuff firsthand. That's working its way into... The narrative and the response has been immediate and brutal.
If large language models can start doing the work that companies like Salesforce, ServiceNow, Adobe, and SAP charge billions in subscriptions for, then the moats that people thought they had around these businesses may be a lot smaller and more shallow than investors assumed. The S&P 500 Software and Services Index lost roughly $830 billion in market value in just six trading sessions.
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Chapter 4: What are the two narratives driving the AI market?
Get our NetSuite's free business guide, Demystifying AI at netsuite.com slash theory. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash theory. Again, that's netsuite.com slash theory. All right, let's dive right back in. Many analysts like those from Truflation and House of AI also are highlighting rising bankruptcies, slowing growth indicators, and a widening two to 10 year yield gap.
It's the highest in four years on bonds as potential recession signals, adding to the list of things that may have driven this bizarre synchronized selling. It's typical that when recession risks rise, investors are going to reduce their risk exposure across the board.
It's a pretty natural response when you're worried that your money's gonna be trapped for very extended periods of time, that there may be a better place to get yield.
And then we talked about this briefly in the intro, but add one more log to the fire and you've got Warsh's nomination for Fed chair, which somehow people are responding to like he's going to come in and be super hawkish and keep rates tight. They're calling it the Warsh shock. I think ultimately people just aren't sure how to read that he historically has been hawkish.
But you combine that with Trump's ambiguous comments on rate cuts, but with his own statements about needing to lower rates. And he's been so pushy about that. People, again, just skittish feels like the right word.
Now, supposedly the speculation about Kevin Warsh being hawkish and pro quantitative tightening is also draining liquidity from tech, crypto and metals because people are not convinced that those are going to keep going up.
liquidity man you got to keep your eye on liquidity where's the money coming from where is it flowing out of what's it flowing into follow the liquidity and you can normally follow the gains the consensus view of what just happened seems to be that all of this is a broad free fall from system-wide de-risking rather than any of the isolated events that it's reminiscent of past unwinds but without that single black swan to make the cause super obvious to anybody paying attention but
And if you want to take a conspiracy angle on this, there are some people who believe that they, and of course they are not specific about that, but presumably government, big banks, are crashing virtually every aspect of the economy trying to drive people into the U.S. bond market. Why? Because we have to keep the appetite for U.S. debt sky high. Now, is that really what's going on?
Probably not, but... I will say that the Epstein files did break a part of my brain. And so I'm so much easier to look at something and see coordination behind the scenes. Deep dive on my thoughts on that coming out on Tuesday. Keep your eyes peeled. But yeah, that's where we are, man.
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Chapter 5: How are recession fears affecting the economy?
Tell my Drew, should I sell my crypto? Should I sell my crypto? I'm like, put your phone down. It doesn't exist. Stop thinking about it. So like, how do you react when you see like big swings like this in the market?
I am a macro thesis investor who does not trust his ability to see the future, who understands that you're going to get wild swings. And the reason the best advice in the universe is to buy low and sell high is because that's the advice nobody can take, myself included. So I put a thesis together and I think about what the thesis is. I don't make quick moves. I'm not trying to time the market.
So while I have in the last six months, I have moved a reasonable amount of things around. It's never been based on something went up or something went down. It's based on adjustments to my thesis. So when I look at the price of gold, everything that I just said makes sense to me. But in terms of short term.
What makes sense to me in terms of the long term is I think that you're going to see a return to what I'll call the physical world. So you're going to see that silver can't be in a deglobalizing world. Silver cannot be controlled at the paper level. It's going to be in terms of price setting, in terms of who has the power to manipulate, may not be the right word, but I'll use it to manipulate it.
It's And so given silver's role in manufacturing, I'm paying a lot more attention to that than I am a momentary dip. Copper is interesting to me. I haven't bought any yet, but that's like, as I think about thesis movements, I think about, ooh, okay, if copper is needed for energy, energy is needed for AI, then it's like, oh, I could see moving something over to that.
Not as a reaction to metals going up or down, a reaction to, I believe at a macro level, the world is going back to something more physical because we can't trust each other anymore. So there isn't going to be this globalized, like we're all just at the casino trading on paper. We're now at the casino and I don't trust that your mark or your voucher is good.
And so, no, no, no, I'm going to need you to put the chips on the table and I want to walk out with the chips, meaning I want to walk out with the silver. I want to walk out with the gold. And so that's driving my thinking. So Bitcoin goes up or down. Has it changed my thesis on Bitcoin? If it has, then cool. I need to start migrating money out.
If it hasn't, which it hasn't, then I don't touch it. So I haven't sold any of that. Um, so I try to be in a position where I don't need to be smart. I need to be directionally correct and I need to be wildly diversified. And so the momentary stuff is interesting to watch in terms of human psychology.
It's interesting to watch in terms of early indicators that maybe there's something not that I'm not understanding, but what business has taught me is trends are incredibly important. You can make a lot of money with trends. But you have to understand what a trend is. A trend is merely, call it 80%. It's 80% cultural energy. That's it. So it means it's psychological.
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