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- [00:00]
Dave Smith
Foreign welcome to a special episode of Part of the Problem Special day and time. We moved this episode over because I wasn't able to get one out on Wednesday. And yeah, you know, every now and then things really work out where there's a, is a good time to, to have a new episode. Okay, so what can we say here? It was, we had a good run, guys. We had a good run. Of course, I want to, to talk today about the rather bizarre and extreme fallout between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. I, you know, you know, I've got a lot to say about this, and so I'm, I'm struggling a little bit on like what order to even go in or how to even approach breaking all of this down. So bear with me here. I'm just going to kind of, we're all going to figure this out together and we'll see what order we end up doing it in. So the first thing I would say is, and this is something we've talked about quite a bit on the show, is that the Trump coalition for Donald Trump 2.0, for, for Donald Trump 47 has been a very interesting coalition. It's made up largely of former Democrats, including Donald Trump himself, who's a former Democrat. But obviously, going into this election cycle, Donald Trump put together a coalition that was very different from the one he had in 2016, very different from the one he tried to put together in 2020, people like Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard. And you know, there was just a huge group of people who supported Donald Trump this time who did not support him in 2016 or 2020. And that also includes a group of like tech billionaires who were not his allies historically, but did support him in this presidential campaign. And you know, I've been saying this for, for about a year now, just about, I think it's, it was just about a year ago that Donald Trump got shot and maybe a little less like 10, 10 months ago that Donald Trump got shot and Elon Musk threw a support behind him. So through this whole time, what, you know, one of the things I've been saying, and I'm certainly the far from the only one to make this point, it's a fairly obvious observation was that this coalition had a window, you know, it, there were going to be cracks in it eventually and there still probably will be more cracks. Things are going to change as 2028 gets closer and some people might be competing for positions there. There might be a competition in which direction the kind of broader MAGA movement or the Maha movement is, is going to go. And you look, you've just got, you. You can see the writing on the wall. You've got people like, say, Bobby Kennedy, who really does not have that much fundamentally in common with Donald Trump. And in fact, the health stuff that Bobby Kennedy's all, you know, is his big deal seems to almost be something Donald Trump just kind of picked up. Like, why not? I, I don't really have a coherent health policy, so why not go with the make America healthy again thing and combine forces? But there's no, like, there's no obvious permanent reason for them to be in a coalition together, aside from the fact that he gave Bobby Kennedy the health department. J.D. vance himself was once a never Trumper. There's just a lot of, there's a lot of people who essentially are unified by, or were unified by their opposition to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden and the Democratic agenda. That's a, that in general, in politics, it works very well as a unifying force to be against a regime while that regime is in power. But, but once they're not in power anymore, it's just that that isn't quite strong enough glue to hold a coalition together. So this is kind of like a broader, you know, point with Elon Musk and Donald Trump. More specifically. I certainly thought it was maybe not inevitable, but quite likely that it would end in this way or something similar to this. I didn't, I didn't think it would get quite so fiery quite so fast. But of course, it's, it's important to remember with all of this stuff that there, there were tremendous efforts from the very beginning of Donald Trump's second term to undermine that relationship. And there was, it was a, an attempt by the corporate media and the establishment of, I think, both political parties to kind of drive a wedge between the two of them. All this talk, this ridiculous talk that people were saying, you know, is Elon Musk really the president? All of this stuff was always designed to drive a wedge between Trump and Elon Musk. By the way, you got to say, for all the people who were saying Elon Musk is the real president, this looks pretty bad for them. I'm not holding my breath that we'll get apologies from any of them anytime soon, but it does make that look like pretty ridiculous that you thought. But Elon Musk was the one who really was in charge of the White House, seeing as how he's now not only out at Doge, but is, is Now I, I would imagine an enemy of Donald Trump's. So look, there's a lot going on here that we don't know for sure what's happening. And of course this is fertile ground for speculation. Now, I'm not against that. I think it's reasonable for people to speculate about what might be going on, particularly when there's details like Elon Musk shows up with a black eye to the White House just recently, which is just strange. You know, that's maybe that's nothing he said that. I think he said it was one of his kids gave it to him. And I, you know, I got little kids and there's, you know, you rough house. Sometimes they come sprinting at you and you might catch a head to the head or something. It's possible also just seems a little bit strange. Okay, so there's some stuff like that. I, I will say that again. This is still also in the realm of speculating. There, there certainly is something that happens when you get men who are at this level where, you know, a level where Donald Trump and Elon Musk exist, that like ego comes into play. There's a certain alpha energy that men at that level tend to have. And it's not necessarily like alpha in the sense of like a personality type, because certainly I don't think Elon Musk is like, you know, it's not exactly what you'd think of as like an alpha male, but he's the richest man who's ever existed in the history of the world, and he had a huge role in getting Donald Trump reelected. And just in general with men, when you're playing at that level, I think it's almost impossible for there not to be like a certain level of ego that comes with that. That's not a knock on Elon Musk or a knock on Donald Trump. I think that's just more the way men work. And you, you are, are going to find that level of ego at that level of like apex domination in every tribe throughout human history. That's just, I think, part of, part of who we are as a species. And, you know, so I'm sure there's a lot of that going on. Now, I, I will say, to start, there's a lot of speculation about what Elon Musk's real motivations are. And I'll be the first to, to acknowledge that. I don't know. You know, I don't know. It's. It's hard enough in this world to know the true motivations of people who you know very well it's a challeng Know your own true motivations. Like, the human psychology is complicated. You know, it's like I could, I could sit here and say, you know, before I go on a big show or something like that, like, well, my motivation is just to tell the truth. And I believe that. And certainly that is true to some degree. But then, of course, if you're being honest is my motivation to make money and to get more recognition on myself and all of these things, it's like, oh, yeah, I guess all of that is kind of part of my motivations if I'm being completely honest. Because it's even a challenge to understand your own motivations. It's a challenge to understand your wife's motivations, your best friend's motivations. Now you're talking about people you don't personally know, and the whole world is speculating on their motivations. It's just a very, you know, it's something we don't know. Now, I've seen people put forth the idea that Elon Musk bought Twitter because he wanted to collect the data that Elon Musk was involved in Donald Trump's, in getting Donald Trump elected because he thought it would help further his business interests. You know, that he's closely associated with Peter Thiel and like the Palantir thing, which, by the way, I don't know nearly enough about. I do know that the company was essentially started by the CIA as like a data collection company. And my, my general rule of thumb is if anything was started by the CIA, it ought to be abolished. I'm not saying that's a 100% ironclad law, but it's a rule of thumb anyway. Perhaps some of that is true. Maybe not in general. I think when it comes to these types of things, you could always endlessly speculate about other people's motivations. I, I tend to try to judge people based off what they're doing, based off their actions and their stated motivations, unless they give you reason not to. It just seems to me to be a better way to move through the world than to constantly be wondering what people's secret motivations are, especially if you don't have good evidence to believe them. And so, and, and also, keeping in mind with what I just said, that you could have all of these motivations, like it's not, they're not necessarily in conflict. So I would say that Elon Musk is outrageously successful and outrageously rich. And I don't know if it quite Makes sense to me that his motivations were purely more power and control and money and things like that. I don't know. I have a tough time believing that there wasn't anything to what he was saying. But who knows? The bottom line is essentially this. Here's what happened. And by the way, I'm open to someone being corrected if I'm getting something about the timeline wrong here. That is not the part of this that I'm most married to. But essentially, as we, as we've been talking about for, for a while on the show, Doge failed. Now, I don't blame Elon Musk for that. I think Elon Musk gave it a good go. He gave it the old college try. I think there were lots of reasons why Doge was destined to fail. I talked about this since the idea of Doge was first floated out. And, you know, look, you're, you're going, you're, you know, when Elon Musk could just say things like, we're going to find $2 trillion to cut and the Pentagon isn't off limits and all this, and this sounds really nice. And look, man, you're the boss of companies and you, you're a genius, and you're like, hey, I've figured this out. We're going to use AI we're going to use these young genius guys to go do this. It's like, okay, but what, what you're actually talking about here is attacking the biggest honeypot in the history of the world. You're going after the most entrenched power in the history of the world. And by the way, at the top of this entrenched power is killers, like people who are quite comfortable killing large numbers of people to get more power, get more money. That's a dangerous game, and it's one that's kind of unlikely to be successful. And as we've seen over the last few months, while many of the latest public narratives that the regime uses have been weakened or destroyed or abandoned by many people, that does not mean that, that people, there's no more power. That doesn't mean that they have no other tools at their disposal. And let me tell you, going into Washington, D.C. talking about cutting trillions of dollars, you're going to make some enemies in that town and some pretty powerful enemies. So Doge failed, and it ultimately failed partially because of the swamp and partially because Donald Trump kind of turned his back on it. Donald Trump really wasn't that committed to cutting spending. And this is something we should have known from his first term. And in fact, you know, whatever it was, Doge comes out and, and finds, you know, some money that they've recommended we cut. And then Donald Trump turns around and asked for a trillion dollar defense budget. And just. Which would have been more than the cuts that Doge had proposed, which never even got put into place. Anyway. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Sheath Underwear, longtime sponsor of the Part of the Problem podcast and the best, most comfortable boxer briefs you will ever wear. Of course, Father's Day is coming up in a few weeks. This makes the perfect Father's Day gift. It is. I will tell you, I stand by this product. The most comfortable pair of boxer briefs you will ever put on your body. Go get some@sheathunderwear.com use the promo code DAD30 for Father's Day, and you're going to get 30% off your next order. This is the best deal they've ever done. Best pair of boxer briefs you're ever going to get at their best price. Sheath underwear.com promo code DAD30 for 30% off. All right, let's get back into the show. Okay, so as we know, the, the, there is this, the big, beautiful bill, this awful spending bill that Donald Trump is getting behind, and everyone who's Good in Washington, D.C. which is a small handful of people, have opposed it. You know, so Thomas Massie and Rand Paul and Ron Johnson and whoever else have been against this bill. And then, of course, Donald Trump being Donald Trump, he has to, like, aim all his fire at these guys, the best guys in Washington, the only ones who really stand for draining the swamp and having an America first foreign policy and all this stuff that Donald Trump runs on but doesn't govern on, he starts attacking those guys. Now, I noticed yesterday, we talked about this briefly in the members only episode yesterday, but this is before all the shit really went down. Elon Musk start now after he's, you know, announced that he's leaving Doge, he's out of the White House, has a suspicious black eye, but whatever. That's neither here nor there, I guess. Or maybe it is, but we don't know. So Elon Musk now starts on Twitter, starts backing up Rand Paul and Thomas Massie and talking about how terrible this bill is. Now, here is really where, where things kind of escalate a bit. So I thought, as I'm watching this on Twitter the other day, I thought to myself, well, okay, Elon's going for it here. And this is already Enough to kind of ruin the relationship with Elon Musk and Donald Trump. And this is, you know, Donald Trump, when he is. When he sets his targets on somebody, and that's the bad person. Now, that's the enemy already. You being on the side of the enemy is. That's, I think, in Trump's world, a declaration of war. Now, I think that's unfair, obviously, especially in this situation where Elon Musk is right and Rand Paul is right and Thomas Massey is right, they're correct on the issue. And Elon Musk. And you have to imagine. This is why I kind of preface with the stuff I was saying about having an ego. I don't mean this in a negative way. Elon Musk is not a guy who, I don't think you're going to be able to tell. You got to bite your tongue on an issue you really believe in, that you have made your central issue of what you stand for. That's too. That is not a reasonable ask of Donald Trump. I'm not saying he actually asked that, but I'm saying it's not reasonable for that to allow you to get upset. Now, what I will say, and again, like I said before, I'm open to anyone correcting me on the timeline here, but this is as far, you know, because it's not like you go in one place and it has, like, the whole thing laid out. It's like Elon's firing tweets, Donald Trump's making comments, Elon's firing more tweets. You know, it's like, maybe I'm getting something wrong. But I did think. What I noticed was that, okay, the first major escalation came from Elon Musk. And the escalation that came from Elon Musk was that he went from not only backing Rand Paul and backing Thomas Massie and coming out in opposition to the big, beautiful bill. God. What? Okay, but not only that, but then he had a post where he encouraged people to call their representatives to tell them not to support the bill. Now, look again, I want to be clear on this. This was an escalation by Elon Musk. However, it's fair game. Like, it is a bad bill. He's against it for principled reasons. He's correct to be against it. And he has every right to encourage people to call their congressmen, to call their senators and encourage them to vote against it. There is. There's. There's nothing wrong in him doing that. However, this is politics. And you do have to recognize that once you do that. You are now, you are actively opposing the President's agenda. And you are, you're not some guy who's doing this. You're a guy with, I mean, how many Twitter followers does Elon Musk have? Is it like, it's like over 100 million or something? Right. Let me see here. Hold on one second. I'll look it up. Right now, Elon Musk has 220 million Twitter followers. So you are now broadcasting from the largest platform to oppose the President's legislative agenda. Now, just in politics, that's how you make enemies. Now, again, I'm not knocking Elon Musk for that. He's right to do it. But this is where. This is where this becomes a confrontation. And you, you have to kind of say to yourself, well, on one hand, Elon Musk decided to make himself, you know, in a political enemy of the President. On the other hand, and I would argue here, Elon Musk has done a lot for President Trump. You know, I think this is one of the things that, what comes down to this here is that both, you could kind of see. And again, this is. This is speculation to some degree, but you could see where in both of these guys minds, they could feel like they've done a lot for the other person. However, in reality, if we're being fair here, Elon did a lot more for Donald Trump than Donald Trump did for Elon Musk. I mean, yes, Donald Trump brought Elon Musk into the White House, and yes, he let him run Doge, but again, Doge never had any real power. Most of the things that he wanted to do, Donald Trump didn't do. And then by asking for a trillion dollar defense budget and by throwing his support behind this bill, he essentially undid all of whatever Doge may have done. And so still, it's, it's just, look, it's hard for me to look at what Donald Trump did by giving Elon Musk Doge and go, oh, my God, he did so much for Elon Musk. The truth is, Elon Musk, it took a. An enormous pay cut. He was getting paid nothing by Doge. And I, I'd imagine every minute that Elon Musk is working, he's making millions of dollars. So he's like, sacrificing quite a bit to do the Doge thing. He's also getting Tesla's keyed and all this other shit. Elon Musk put himself in a position to take a lot, a lot of abuse by supporting Donald Trump. Donald. Now, Donald Trump could Sit here and say, you know, I've been impeached, I've been had, the, the legal system weaponized against me. I've been tried, I've been convicted, I've had people, you know, try to kill me. All the things that Donald Trump's been through. Elon didn't do any of that to Donald Trump. Elon came on board after all of that had happened to Donald Trump. And it is hard. Now, I'm not going to quite make the statement that Elon Musk did more for Donald Trump than any human being has ever done for a presidential candidate. But, you know, like a few really brilliant historians could have a very, you know, like it, it might be the case. Now maybe you want to argue that like if you go, you know, the, the Rockefellers helped Woodrow Wilson even more. And in the old system where everything was completely controlled, having like the Morgans or the Rockefellers on board with you or something like that would have been more powerful, but you'd have to go to something like that. And there's certainly, I don't think there's anything in my lifetime that even comes close. I mean, Elon Musk, first of all, I don't think you can overstate how important for Donald Trump it was that Elon Musk bought Twitter. But you know, if you could try to put yourself back in this place. Just a few years ago, Donald Trump had been banned, permanently banned from Twitter. Donald Trump, not only was he banned, but so many of his, his most vocal supporters were banned. The, the entire kind of cultural constraints on speech had reached a peak of sorts. I mean, Donald Trump, after, particularly through the year 2020 with COVID but really when it came to like the Donald Trump's challenging of the 2020 election, January 6, all of these things, if you remember, the media was starting to do this thing where they wouldn't even cover Donald Trump. They used to, straight up, they'd be covering a speech and then cut away and say, we're not going to play the rest of this speech because he's making up ridiculous lies. Like they, they wouldn't even let the American people hear the former president or he was actually currently still the president when they first started doing this. They wouldn't let him hear the president make his case about why the, the last election was fraudulent. Think about how crazy that is. Twitter kicked off the sitting President of the United States of America. This is so wild. I mean, I know this was five years ago or whatever, but it's so wild that this actually happened. Imagine, imagine Living in a world where the sitting commander in chief cannot tweet because Twitter has decided that, like, what he says is too dangerous or something like that. But so this was the situation Donald Trump is in. An outgoing president who is more handcuffed than any president in modern American history. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Quince, a great clothing brand. Quince has always all the things you actually want to wear this spring, like organic cotton silk polos, European linen beach shorts and pants that work from everything to backyard hangs to nice dinners. The best part is that everything is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find from similar brands. You'll be looking great and saving tons. I will tell you, personally, I love Quint. It's an excellent clothing brand. I just got a beautiful hoodie from them that I love. I was just wearing it on the show the other day. Definitely go check them out. Elevate your closet with quince. Go to quince.com potp for free shipping on your orders and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-I-N C E.com potp for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com potp all right, let's get back on the show. So Elon Musk buys Twitter after Donald Trump gets shot. Elon Musk throws his support behind Donald Trump. Elon Musk gives Donald Trump 300 million doll or so. He's a huge, huge contributor to his campaign. Not only that, there's just no question that Elon changed. Like, him getting on board with Donald Trump was a huge change in this massive cultural shift. Because, you know, you had. You had Zuckerberg backing down and then getting on board. You had essentially, like, all these different platforms, YouTube and all of this stuff. They all kind of followed suit. Then you had Elon Musk opened up, like, a world of, like, tech billionaires who would now openly be behind Donald Trump in a way that they never would have before. You know, I'm just saying, when you look at it, Elon Musk did a ton to back Donald Trump. And if we're being completely fair here, this is after the assassination attempt against Donald Trump. This is after Elon Musk had seen that, you know, we're playing for keeps here. And he still went all in with Donald Trump. Now, I would suggest that that type of contribution to somebody's campaign. Now, listen, don't, don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that therefore Elon should get to be president or that therefore Elon gets his agenda through. No, the American people did not vote for Elon Musk. The American people voted for Don. Donald Trump. Now, probably I think it's reasonable to say Donald Trump wouldn't have won without Elon Musk's support, or certainly his support helped a lot. But I'm not suggesting that therefore Elon is entitled to anything other than he's entitled to say he doesn't like a bill and you should call your congressmen and senators to not support it. Like he has a right to do that. And I think after doing that much for somebody, it is not reasonable to feel like that crossed some line that they're not allowed to cross. That's all I'm saying. Okay, so that being said, okay, so, so then in the, in the escalations of all these things, so then at this point now, Elon Musk has backed Rand Paul, backed Thomas Massie, opposed the bill and encouraged people to call their congressmen to put pressure on them not to vote for the thing. Now this is where Donald Trump really escalates the situation. And I gotta say, I think this was a very poor decision by Donald Trump. I think that there is, again, in this world, there are allies that are powerful enough that you should not burn that bridge over something that, you know, you may not agree with but was their right to do is not unreasonable. It's. I, I'm sorry, I'm just never going to get to a place where you'd say that somebody who gave you, who bought a platform for you, I mean, he didn't buy the platform for you, but in effect, buying this platform opened it up for you to have a voice again and your biggest supporters to have a voice again, gave your campaign $300 million, has, has put his reputation behind you and risked his company, is his reputation, perhaps his life to support you. That guy, that guy should be shown the respect of like, okay, we agree to disagree on this one. Let's go to the tape because this is what Donald Trump said and I really think this is where things headed south. Do we have that? Thanks, Natalie.
- [30:20]
Donald Trump
So we've done a great job. Elon knew that. Elon endorsed me very strongly. He actually went up in campaign for him. Me, I think I would have won. Susie would say I would have won Pennsylvania easily anyway. Even if the governor ran, the real governor, not the governor from Minnesota, who's, I mean, he's a sick puppy, that guy. That poor guy feels sorry for him. But they Made a bad choice with him. But if you pick Shapiro or anybody else, I spoke to him recently about his, you know, his house being set on fire, which was terrible. But if they picked him, I would have won Pennsylvania. I won it by a lot. But I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here, better than you people. He knew everything about it. He had no problem with it. All of a sudden, he had a problem. And he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate, because that's billions and billions of dollars, and it really is unfair. We want to have cars of all types. Electric, we want to have electric, but we want to have gasoline combustion. We want to have different. We want to have hybrids. We want to have all. We want to be able to sell everything. And when that was cut and Congress wanted to cut it, he became a little bit different. And I can understand that. But he knew every aspect of this bill. He knew it better than almost anybody. And he never had a problem, problem until right after he left. And if you saw the statements he made about me, which I'm sure you can get very easily, it's very fresh on tape. He said the most beautiful things about me, and he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next. But I'm. I'm very disappointed in Elon. I've helped Elon a lot.
- [32:03]
Dave Smith
All right, so look, although Donald Trump might be saying this in a slightly diplomatic tone, I thought that was a major escalation. And what. What Donald Trump. First of all, you got to understand the guy who, like, really, when you think about it, Donald Trump's gonna sit here. First of all, he's imputing the guy's integrity. He's blatantly saying, and this was as. As Donald Trump says in the tape there, Elon Musk had not taken personal shots at Donald Trump yet. But Donald Trump, that is a personal shot. He's saying, like, straight up, like, this guy's a liar. This guy has zero integrity. He's saying he doesn't really have a problem with the bill because of the reasons. He's telling you he has a problem with the bill. He has a problem because it's not in his interest. It's not that he didn't get whatever provision about electrical vehicles that he wanted in the bill. Now, again, we don't know whether that's true or not. We don't know what someone's Pure intentions are. This is like what I was saying at the beginning of the show. You don't even know your own intentions half the time. So, like, I'm not saying there's no possibility that this is correct. However, for Donald Trump to make this accusation, this is. This is an attack, a very serious attack on someone's character. And again, you know, I've had this just with me this week. I've had a bunch of people because, you know, before this happened, the big thing on Twitter was my debate on Piers Morgan the other day. And really, not so much about me. It was more about Piers Morgan just being fed up with the. The. The Hasbro propaganda. But people, I got a bunch of people asking me, like, hey, Dave, is this new? Is. Is Piers Morgan being genuine here? Has he really turned against the war, or did he just see which way the wind was blowing and he went this way? And, like, people are asking me, like, I have no idea. I don't know what's in Piers Morgan's heart and soul. Why? Because I do a show, like, I don't know. I have no idea. But what. How am I to move forward in the world? Am I going to suspect that everybody has some ulterior motivation or. You have to, to a certain degree, kind of take people at their word? I don't know. Who knows what someone's true intentions are? Anyway, the point here is that Donald Trump is now, from his very large megaphone blasting that Elon Musk is someone you can't trust. He claims to care about these issues, these principles, but he doesn't. He only really cares about his own bottom line. That's what Donald Trump was saying there. And then on top of that, he's going to turn around and say he's done so much for Elon Musk. Now just imagine, imagine, just forget even, like the other stuff. Imagine just someone you gave $300 million to is telling you, you know, I've done so much for you. I don't know. I'm not seeing. I'm not seeing that. I'm not seeing how that makes sense. Donald Trump, what have you really done for Elon Musk? Elon Musk was. Before he supported Donald Trump. A year ago today, Elon Musk was the richest man in the world. He was doing pretty good already. What. What exactly has Donald Trump done for Elon Musk that's made his life so much better, it seems to me. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming Donald Trump for a bunch of liberals keying up Teslas or something like that. This is a choice that Elon Musk made, but it seems to be one that came with sacrifice. Now, Donald Trump, you could also certainly argue, could just be a rich, famous socialite having a nice time and instead decided to do this and is now dealing with a lot of, you know, a lot. But that wasn't Elon Musk. You know, it's like he didn't deal with that because he supported Elon Musk. He dealt with that because he ran for president. Elon Musk dealt with his things because he supported Donald Trump. And so I just don't think, I don't think this was. I don't think this was wise of Donald Trump to do. And again, like I said at the beginning, when you're playing on this level, you got to kind of be careful about how you talk about people, because then Elon Musk, Elon Musk took this escalation from Donald Trump and then took it to DEFCON 10. So Elon Musk first of all said that this was a lie. He, that, that Donald Trump had made the claim that he had seen the bill and he was on board with the bill. And it was only after the ev thing didn't come through, then he wasn't on board with it anymore. Elon Musk goes, that's a straight up lie. I never was aware of the bill. I never supported the bill. Then Elon Musk tweeted, and this was the one that caught my eye here. Hold on one second. I will pull it up right here. Okay, so then he, he posted, without me, Trump would have lost the election. Dems would control that. By the way, just to be clear, he, Elon Musk reply tweeted this to that video that we just watched. So he responded directly to what we just watched and said, without me, Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House, and the Republicans would have 5,149 majority in the Senate. Such ingratitude. Again, kind of hard to argue with what Elon Musk is saying here in. In my opinion. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is blackout coffee. I love this stuff. I've been drinking their cold brew for the last month. It's absolutely delicious. I am a bit of a coffee snob and I love this stuff. Roasted right here in the USA by people who believe in liberty, personal responsibility, and the Constitution. They do all the roast, hosting, packing and shipping. In house, there's no middleman. And no compromises. They have over 25,000 five star reviews. So, you know, I'm not the only one who's enjoying it. There's at least 25,000 other people out there. Go check it out for yourself@blackout coffee.com problem right now and use the promo code problem to get 20% off your first order. Again, that's blackout coffee.com problem. Promo code problem to get some delicious coffee at 20% off on your first order. All right, let's get back into the show. But then he really took it to, to DEFCON when he, he posted. Time to drop the really big bomb. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day. Donald Trump, Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out. All right, so obviously Elon Musk decided to burn the bridge. I mean, I think, I think that's pretty much it. I don't think there's any coming back from that now. I would say that I thought this was, I thought this tweet made no sense and reflected poorly on Elon Musk in general. First of all, well, look, I'll say it like this. We all, we already know what we know about Donald Trump and his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. We know what we know. We don't know beyond that, but it is, there's no question that at the very least they were friendly. There is a tape where Jeffrey Epstein refers to Donald Trump as his best friend, but we know that they partied together. Donald Trump is on record in one of the creepiest remarks that anyone's ever made about Jeffrey Epstein, where he's talking about how Jeffrey Epstein likes the ladies as much as anyone. And then he starts going off on a thing about how he likes him. Really young, pretty goddamn creepy. We know he's been on his plane. We know they were friends, they partied together, like all this stuff. So for Elon Musk to come out and say Donald Trump is in the files wouldn't actually be new information. This wouldn't be anything we wouldn't expect. We'd expect Donald Trump's name to be mentioned in the files. The, the relevant question would be like, did Donald Trump commit any crimes? You know, like, how involved was Donald Trump? And Elon Musk doesn't exactly say that, but he does say he's in the files, and that's the reason why the files haven't come out, which is, again, possibly true. We don't know. The problem is that to come out and say that now because you know, he threw, he took some shots at you. Which, by the way, again, I blame Donald Trump for that. Donald Trump was out of line and he's the one who burnt that bridge in, in my opinion. But it just doesn't reflect great on Elon Musk to be like, yes, I knew about this the whole time and was like, you know, as many people, I'm far from the only one who pointed this out on Twitter. But like, it. Are you saying, like, if you had gotten spending cuts, then that would have been okay? Like, so you knew Donald Trump was implicated in the Epstein thing, but you were not going to say anything about that because. But it was then when he did that and had a reckless fiscal policy that was too far. There's just no way that this reflects good on Elon Musk. But regardless of any of that, here we are. I don't, you know, I've seen some people online saying that maybe Donald Trump and Elon Musk can work this out or something like that. To me, these type of comments, they've. I just don't think there's any coming back from that. I just don't think so. And that, you know, is. It is what it is. Okay? This is, this is about as nasty and as not. Not just. It's not just being nasty. It's not just insulting each other. It is. Both of them now have in the most vicious, profound way attacked the essence of the other's character. You know, like, you've, you've told your people that this guy is a fucking piece of shit liar. Both of them. You know, Donald Trump has told his people now that Elon Musk is fucking lying to you. He doesn't give a shit about. He doesn't give a shit about government spending. He doesn't care about any of the things he claims to. He was just trying to get rich from government contracts for electric vehicles. He's a fraud. That's Donald Trump's allegation. And Elon Musk's allegation is that Donald Trump is keeping secret a, you know, the details of a giant pedophile ring with like the most heinous crimes committed, but at the highest levels of American society for his own self interest, because he thinks it would look bad and maybe even criminally implicate Donald Trump. I mean, I don't know. He doesn't say it, but there's no way you could read that and not like, take that as an implication. I don't know how you get from there back to a healthy working relationship. I would venture to say this, this is done, maybe I could be wrong. Who knows, Crazier things I guess have happened. But I think it's pretty reasonable to say I don't think they're going to be fixing this relationship. So this is kind of the, the drama and the personal aspect to all of this. I guess what I'm left with here is, is saying, to reiterate again, I'm not claiming that you can know what any of their motivations are here. I think it's a reasonable assumption that ego is playing some role for both of these men. And you know, and, and there's also, it's also reasonable to assume that they both have their own self interest in all of this. But I will say that when it comes to the actual issue, like if we're, if we're taking people at their word and we're going to be charitable and give people the benefit of the doubt, there are two major issues that Elon Musk has essentially attached his brand to, has said, look, this is what I stand for, this is what I'm, this is what I oppose, this is what I'm fighting for. And these two issues were free speech, that this was the whole, his stated reason for buying Twitter. So really, Elon Musk has attached himself to free speech and out of control government spending. And on these two issues, Elon Musk has picked two of, if not the two most important issues of our time. And he is 100% on the right side of both of them. Now, if you want to sit here and argue with me that there is some conspiracy in the background, that he is trying to collect data, he's partnering up with Palantir, he's trying to usher in this new oligarchy. I mean, look, I'm not, I don't know, maybe you're right. Again, I can't, you know, it's enough of a challenge to read your own heart and soul that it is, it is a near impossibility to, for me to do that with someone like Elon Musk, who I've never met. So I, you know that I'm not denying that that is possibly the case. I'm simply saying if you listen to what Elon Musk is saying, he's telling you that these are the, his key two issues. They are may maybe the number one and number two most important issues of our time. They are certainly up there, certainly both in the top five. And he is absolutely correct on the issue, absolutely correct. I mean, what was released in the Twitter files should if, if we weren't living in such crazy times, they would. It would be the number one scandal of our generation. It's. It's not probably because there's been so many others, you know, but that's not. That doesn't take away from the importance of the issue. It just happens to be that the government shut the world down over a virus that they made and then lied about. But whatever, then it happens to be that they've started, you know, seven mass murder campaigns based on lies in the last 25 years, and they framed the current president of the United States for treason. So, like, okay, there were other things that happened that might take the cake, but oh my God, what a scandal it was that the government was suppressing free speech through social media companies, pressuring the social media companies to ban certain people, pressuring them to kill certain stories explicitly for political reasons. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and cleaned up at least a lot of that. Now I'm not saying he's cleaned up all of it, and I'm not saying that we have pure, unbridled free speech on social media, but it is much, much better than it was. Dissidents of the regime have a real fighting shot now to voice their opinion. And if there is one person who deserves the most credit for that, it is Elon Musk. That I know for sure. So that's him on the free speech front. And then he decided to take on this issue of government spending and go all in on it. And he, you know, again, this is like the richest guy in the world. He's doing this for free. Now, okay, you could argue there's some other self interest in it down the road maybe, but at least on the surface of it, there seems to be a lot of other things this guy could do to make a lot of money and get a lot of power, and he's doing this instead. And so whatever you want to speculate about his motivations, he is correct on an enormously important issue. An enormously important issue. Listen, again, if it wasn't for, say, all the scandals that I just mentioned and the ones that we cover on the show regularly, this is, you know, it's like the greatest scandal in the history of America, but it's so slow moving and it's right in front of our eyes that no one even treats it like the scandal that it is. But the fucking. Our federal government has bankrupted the United States of America. They, they inherited the USA and presided over a bankruptcy. It is so goddamn appalling and it is not as some people try to make it. It's not like just a made up thing or just some like accounting numbers. I know there's like, that's like a. What's been popular on like Left Tik Tok or something like that for, for many years now. And before TikTok it was other things, but it would always just be like, oh, it's just a number. We could just erase it and write a new number. Money's fake. Who cares, who cares about the national debt? But that is, that is not true. Look, as, as we've said before on the show many times and this is something that Elon Musk is, he is well aware of this argument because he constantly, I think he was just the other day sharing another Milton Friedman video where he was breaking this down. But the fact is that government spending has enormous consequences on a society. And government spending and this is the stuff that Milton Friedman was breaking down that Elon Musk has regularly shared. So when you. Government spending is the real tax, right? That's the tax is that government spends money. Now when government spends money, there are three different options that they have, but only three of how they're going to pay for that spending. Okay, the first obvious one is that they tax you. The second one is that they borrow the money and the third is that they print the money. This is how government pays for what they spend. Now let's just go through these one at a time real quick, okay? When government taxes you, they, they by force, the threat of violence, take your money and then they spend it, okay? Now what this, what this does is it essentially removes the money from where it would have been allocated and puts it into people who are connected to government. Now this might be weapons companies, this might be some solar energy companies, might be some health insurance. Whatever it might be, they take the money out of the productive economy and give it to their cronies. Now, me personally, okay? And this is just one small example in a country of hundreds of millions of people. But I pay about half of what I make every year in taxes. I would make double if I wasn't forced to pay taxes. There is simply, look, there's just no question about it that if you were to, if you were to abolish my taxes, which would instantly double my income. What I would pay Rob more money, I would pay Natalie more money and I would certainly hire at least one or two other people. There's just no question about that. What would happen if you were to just double my productivity? I would be able to Pay more to the people who work for me, and I would be able to hire more people who work for me. So there is an enormous burden that taxation puts on the regular productive economy. Because this is not just. Again, I'm just one example, and I don't even really. I run a very small business. If you were to now, you know, do this for every single business owner in America, if they were to get huge tax relief, would be able to pay their people more and hire more people. It is a tremendous cost to the economy, the productive economy, that we have to pay such high taxes. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is crowd health, a great company that I've been telling you about for many years. We all know the health insurance system is broken. Nobody that I know really likes their health insurance provider. And we talk at length on this show about why that is. It's all because of government intervention. But now there is a true alternative to health insurance, and that is crowd health. Crowd health is a decentralized health care payment system that frees you from the tyranny of health insurance. You can go to whatever doctor you'd like because there are no networks. It's significantly less expensive than health insurance. Singles are just $185 a month. A family of four is $605 a month. And you can use the promo code POTP to get 99amonth per person for the next three months. Go check them out. Crowd health is not health insurance. It's a totally different way of paying for health care. Terms and conditions may apply. Check them out@joincrowd health.com that's joincrowdhealth.com and make sure to use that promo code POTP to get $99 a month per person for the next three months. All right, let's get back into the show. That's taxing. Number two is borrowing. Is borrowing the money. And this is where a bill like this that adds to the debt. This is where the borrowing has gotten so crazy that we're now just into goofy numbers. Tens of trillions of dollars that we owe. And this is a commitment that future taxpayers will have to pay back. So this is a commitment that we will continue to starve the real productive economy in the future to pay off for the nonsense consumption that our government borrowed to spend. And then, of course, if you think the debt's bad, we'll understand. Or if you think. If you think you're. You're paying too much in taxes or if the national debt sure does look like a scary number, just keep in mind that that's not nearly enough. Government spending is so out of control that they simply cannot tax us enough or borrow enough in order to, to keep spending at these levels. Because there is. The thing about taxation is it is a bit of a balance. You can only tax so much before people just stop working as much or just close down businesses they otherwise would have, would have started. I mean, if you want to just reducto absurdum this, right, like if you were to say that you were going to tax me 100%, right? So if you were to tax me, every single dollar I make, I owe to the government, I keep none of it for myself. 100 tax rates on all income levels. Well then obviously anyone here can see there is now zero incentive to work, right? There's no reason to work because you don't get any of it. Why the hell would I work if I didn't get any of the money? You know, Okay, I kind of like what I do, but like for most people, there's no zero. Okay, well that's, that's the reductive absurdum. But still at 99%, 98%, 97%, it's still pretty, almost no incentive to work. So you can't just tax to infinity. Eventually people will just stop producing because there's no incentive to, so they can only tax so much. There are limits on borrowing because eventually people don't want to lend you money. Whether it's individuals or foreign countries, they have to choose to lend you the money. And you can only find so many people who will lend you money. So there's limits on that money printing. On the other hand, you're not even limited at this point by the trees you can cut down because, you know, most of the money printing at this point is not even actually printed. It's just zeros on a computer. The Federal Reserve just sends them over to JP Morgan Chase. It's nothing. It's as, as many zeros as you can type. That's, that's what you're limited to. And so that is the preferred or one of the preferred methods of how governments maintain this level of spending. And this is what has wrecked our society, not just wrecked our economy, wrecked our society. This is the reason why prices are out of control. It's the reason why young people can't afford to own a home and to send kids to college and to, you know, whatever, all of the things that you'd need to do. If you think about it, there is absolutely no reason why we should have this affordability crisis. This is something that I think is lost on a lot of people because if you don't spend time thinking about this, it's very easy to just take it for granted. And especially since we've lived in an inflationary economy for, you know, 112 years or whatever it's been since 1913 when the federal Reserve was created. And it becomes this thing where almost everybody, just like regular people who aren't even paying attention to politics at all, you just as, as I once did too, you just take it for granted. It's almost like a given that prices rise over time. That's what they do, right? Prices go up. I mean, you know, your grandma will have some story about how a bottle of Coke used to cost a nickel and you're like, yeah, that same bottle of Coke cost $2.50 now. But like that's what prices do. They go up. They go from being a nickel to being $2.50. But that's not organic. That is not. There's no law of nature that says that prices just go up, that things just get more expensive. That's not like written into stone anywhere. And in fact, the natural order of a productive economy is for prices to fall. Now people don't know this, but in 1913, if you were talking to your grandma, she would have been telling you how expensive something was to buy back in her day and how much cheaper it is to buy today. Because we didn't live in an inflationary economy. We lived in a productive economy. And when you live in a productive economy, prices tend to fall. It's the natural path because you get better at producing things and therefore you can produce them more efficiently. And therefore you don't have to charge as much for them. Like obviously, if you, you know, if you just think about this on a basic level, right? Like if you have technological improvements, if, if I, if, if the job were say like to make a man made lake and I had to do it with men, with shovels, I'm gonna have to charge you a lot more than if I were to do it with an excavator. If I have the machinery and the technology. One man can now do the work of like a hundred men. It's just much cheaper to produce things you can char. But we don't live in that world because we live in this world of insane government spending and they can't tax us enough and they can't borrow enough, so they have to print up the money and when they print up the money, who ends up getting the money first? Because that's what the whole game is about. When you, when you print new money, right? Theoretically. Theoretically, if you were to print money and evenly distribute it along the lines of how PE people already have money. So, like, if you were to double the money supply but just give it out, you know, double everybody's individual net worth, then you're not going to have a huge transfer of wealth. It should be more or less around the same. But that's not how it works. Who gets the money first? When you print all this new money, who gets it first? Well, it's government's cronies and Wall street, but I repeat myself. And this is where someone like Bernie Sanders can come in with whatever his numbers exactly are, whether they're exactly accurate or not. But where he says of the new wealth that's created, 99% of it went to the top 1% of millionaires and billionaires. Well, he's not completely wrong about that. He doesn't now, he doesn't understand who the real culprit is here. He always just thinks it's greed and corporations and that, but that's not actually true. It's a government banking apparatus that is specifically designed to print money and give the new money to their friends first. Because, of course, when new money is printed, the prices don't immediately rise. It takes time for the money to get into the economy. That drives upward pressure on prices. And so if you get the new money immediately, you buy stuff at the price that it used to be, and then you sell it at the new, artificially increased price. And so essentially, the bottom line here is that when it comes down to it, Elon Musk has staked his reputation on two issues that he is absolutely correct on and are enormously important issues. And I gotta say, of all the reasons to walk away from the Donald Trump administration, of all the reasons to, like, say, no, this is too much for me. I won't cross this line. This is a pretty damn good one. It's a pretty damn good one. This isn't just like some abstraction. This level of government spending is destroying our society. It is making our economy more and more corrupt. And you just, you can't overstate how, how severe the costs of that are. You know, like, it's beyond just economic costs. It's like when, when corrupt people become the most successful, it poisons a culture because it's puts all of the incentives toward being corrupt. Like, that's what you should go do. You know, this is something that, like, almost everybody knows you know, about, like, black neighborhoods in the inner city is that this was always one of the things that was so corrupting is that you're like, you see everybody broke, and then the drug dealer is the one who's got, like, a fancy new jacket and a nice car. And you're like, well, what message does that send to all the little kids? It's like, hey, man, you want. You want to escape this? That's what you got to go do. And you see this all over the place. You know, you. You think about, like, how many, you know, like, only fans or whatever. It's like, why are these young girls going and doing only fans? It's like, well, you know, part of the reason there. There's a lot going on, but part of the reason there is like, this is your ticket out of this struggle. I don't know. It's like, I don't want to go 200 grand in debt for a useless degree and then go work for Door Dash. So instead, I'll do this. Now, I'm not justifying that, and I'm not saying that person doesn't have responsibility or, or agency, but like, yeah, this is the effect of. Of corrupting the entire economy and then the effect of creating a generation of young men who can't support a wife and kids. Like, all right, you want to play that game? It's. It. There's some serious costs associated with that. So it's just like this issue of out of control government spending, of bankrupting the country is so goddamn important. And for Donald Trump to be in a situation where you've got, like, the Republicans win. With Elon Musk's very substantial help, the Republicans are now in control of the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court. Doge was incredibly popular with the American people. And then for you to turn around and this is your first big spending bill. Yeah, it's a. It's you. You spit on all the work that Elon Musk was trying to do. And what's the expectation that he's supposed to take that and then continue to support you while you brag about what you've done for him, when you've done nothing for him. He's done everything for you. Tell me where I'm wrong on this, guys. Tell me where Elon's wrong, at least on the issues that he's publicly stating. You know, I'm curious to hear some of your feedback on this. Obviously, this thing, this just went down yesterday, and these Are, are kind of my initial thoughts on it. But I gotta say here, I think if I'm, if I'm treating everybody charitably in the situation, I understand why Elon Musk did what he did. And I think Donald Trump was out of line to fucking throw him under the bus for it. And at this point, I don't think there's any repairing the relationship. But Elon Musk, where he goes from here is going to be very interesting. I mean, he was tweeting about starting a third party the other day. He's, you know, this is a guy who's got near infinite resources and might be interested in primarying some Republicans in the midterms. There's a lot of possibilities for where this could go. And I will tell you, I still think, even though obviously there were a lot of possibilities with the partnership of Trump and Elon, I still think Elon Musk can be like a real force for good in, in our, in our society. We will see, and of course, we will continue to follow whatever the, the latest developments in this are. We have not really seen Donald Trump respond as of now. That might be different by the time you're, you're watching or listening to this, but I'm sure there'll be a lot more going on and a lot more to talk about. So anyway, thank you guys for, for listening. Thank you particularly to everybody who signs up over at part of partoftoftheproblem.com I very much appreciate that, and I will catch you guys next time. Peace.