Warren's Wealth Tax Will DESTROY the Middle Class, America Is Spending on War While The Working Class Struggles, Trump Said "2-3 More Weeks" In Iran! | Weekly Recap

Summary

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Impact Theory with Tom Bilyeu

Episode: Warren's Wealth Tax Will DESTROY the Middle Class, America Is Spending on War While The Working Class Struggles, Trump Said "2-3 More Weeks" In Iran! | Weekly Recap
Date: April 5, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this weekly recap, Tom Bilyeu and his guest host tackle the hottest headlines and most contentious economic and geopolitical debates shaping America. They dissect Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, scrutinize the real costs of deficit spending and war, and explore the cultural values at stake in ongoing U.S. foreign policy, especially regarding Iran. The hosts emphasize first-principles thinking and robust discussion, challenging mantras from both the right and left, providing listeners with a toolkit to navigate—and thrive in—disruptive, uncertain times.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Elizabeth Warren’s Wealth Tax Proposal

[01:00 - 06:25]

• Proposal Summary:
  A 2% annual tax on net worth over $50 million, with a 1% surtax for billionaires, targeting both financial and non-financial assets at market value. Includes a 40% exit tax for wealthy Americans who renounce citizenship.

• Critique:

  • The guest calls the proposal “confiscatory” and suggests it amounts to government theft, warning it would “crater” asset prices and force liquidation, especially since it applies to unrealized gains.
  • Major risk: Wealth—and the innovative people who hold it—will flee the country, eroding the tax base and damaging long-term economic competitiveness, similar to historical declines in Argentina and Cuba.
  • Quote [01:32]:
    Guest Expert: “You’re not being taxed on money that you’re making. This is a tax on the things that you own. It is confiscatory. It is the government stealing from you.”
  • Argues that proposals like this display “a stunning lack of how unrealized gains work” and confuse the intended outcomes, suggesting proponents are either “economically illiterate or want to destroy prosperity.”

• Broader Consequences:

  • Small businesses will be disproportionately hurt since they’ll struggle to pay taxes on illiquid assets, leading to increased corporate consolidation.
  • Uses the term "mark to market taxation," explaining the complexity and potential harm of taxing fluctuating asset values annually.

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2. Deficit Spending, Money Printing & Middle-Class Squeeze

[06:25 - 09:09]

• Closing Loopholes and Loan Taxation:

  • The hosts debate alternative solutions, such as closing tax loopholes and taxing the practice of billionaires (e.g., Elon Musk) borrowing against their shares.
  • Quote [08:21]:
    Guest Expert: "Just treat it like he’s taking capital out. You’re not going to tax it at the full rate, or tax it at the full rate but let him deduct the interest."
  • Emphasizes that money printing and deficit spending are the primary mechanisms by which value is stolen from the middle and working classes.

• False Narratives:

  • Disputes the idea that wealth inequality is driven solely by tax avoidance, blaming instead relentless government deficit spending and inflationary policy.
  • Quote [06:43]:
    Guest Expert: “The way that your money gets stolen from you and it is being stolen from you is through a very simple mechanism. That mechanism is money printing… If you’re not deficit spending, you don’t have to money print.”

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3. “How Would You Balance the Budget?” – Systemic Failures & Possible Reforms

[09:09 - 12:28]

• Areas for Reform:

  • Entrenched inefficiencies in education (“spend more per student than almost anywhere else on earth, yet rank in the middle”).
  • Need to raise retirement age owing to demographic shifts.
  • Widespread public sector fraud, high regulatory burdens stifling revenue growth.
  • Suggestion for limited debt forgiveness or "soft defaulting."

• First Principle:

  • Balanced budget is central: any reform (including those aimed at redistribution or investment) will fail if deficit spending continues.
  • Quote [09:09]:
    Guest Expert: "If you actually want to generate more tax revenue, then you just need more revenue at the same tax rate. If you focus on that, good things come of it."

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4. War Spending, Values, and American Foreign Policy (Iran/Trump discussion)

[12:28 - 19:59]

• Rubio on Iran:

  • Senator Rubio criticized for hypocrisy—spending on war rather than improving domestic welfare.
  • The panel discusses the West’s historical willingness to “fight for values” and how that’s shifted, with Americans losing faith in their own value set.

• Philosophical Underpinnings:

  • Values must be defended, not just militarily but culturally: “If you don’t indoctrinate the next generation with those values, then they simply won’t have those values.”
  • U.S. post-WWII dominance was tied to belief in Enlightenment values and the willingness to act on them.

• Iran & Proxy Wars:

  • Argues Iran is theocratic and driven by an apocalyptic ideology, seeking nuclear weapons as leverage.

  • The conversation underscores that current tensions are as much about value systems as material interests.

  • Quote [13:28]:
    Guest Expert: “This is the part that confuses me…Americans have somehow gotten into their heads…and Europeans…that it’s perfectly fine for somebody else to get strong and ultimately tell them what to do because they’ve lost faith in their own values.”

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5. Generational Struggle, Upward Mobility, and Systemic Barriers

[19:59 - 24:47]

• Generational Disparities:
  • Today’s young adults face drastically higher costs for housing, education, cars—without proportional wage growth—compared to previous generations.
  • The root cause, the guest contends, is government-enabled inflation, not mere “avocado toast spending.”
• Critical Analogy:
  • Quote [21:06]:
    Guest Expert: “[It’s] like a woman who’s being beaten by her husband…she’s like, ‘I’m so anxious’…Her husband is beating her, so couldn’t that be the problem?…No, in fact, it’s the opposite. Seeing how strong my husband is makes me feel safe.”
    • Used to explain how deficit spending and inflation are the real issue harming Americans, not simply the allocation of spending.

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6. Asset Ownership and Housing as an Asset Class

[24:47 - 26:53]

• Problems with Housing:

  • More Americans should own homes, but if home prices always keep up with inflation, they remain inaccessible to those on the bottom rung.
  • If homes become more affordable, they lose their utility as an inflation hedge/assets; if they are valuable assets, by definition, the poorest cannot afford them.

• Economic Complexity:

  • Guest emphasizes the importance of understanding cause and effect and warns against simplistic narratives about asset ownership as the cure-all.

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7. The Cost of War vs. Domestic Investment

[28:17 - 30:43]

• War Spending’s True Impact:
  • Billions spent on war are both inflationary and economically wasteful; merely redirecting these funds to domestic programs would not fix the underlying problem if the budget isn’t balanced.
• Hypothetical “Good Debt”:
  • Investment is only justified if it grows the economy at a faster rate than inflation/deficit—something U.S. policy has historically failed to do.

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8. Conspiracy Theories as Entertainment and Social Phenomena

[32:01 - end]

• Candace Owens and Ballistics “Controversy”:

  • Analysis of recent Daily Mail headline about Charlie Kirk’s assassination; the hosts separate fact from meme-driven conspiracy, noting the real evidence is inconclusive due to ballistic fragmentation—not proof of a second shooter.
  • Guest points out how speculation and “conspiracy brainrot” serve as a new form of reality TV, helped along by partisan incentives and public frustration.
  • Quote [38:13]:
    Guest Expert: “Watching Candace feels like that…I feel like I’m watching John Nash at the board…those patterns are there, but I don’t think they mean what you think they mean.”

• Meta-Observation:

  • The Internet’s hunger for narrative and meaning drives conspiratorial thinking regardless of underlying facts.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Wealth Taxes:
  • “This is a tax on the things that you own. It is confiscatory. It is the government stealing from you.” [01:32]
• On Deficit Spending:
  • “The way that your money gets stolen from you...is through a very simple mechanism. That mechanism is money printing.” [06:43]
• On Economic Decline:
  • “You will spend 100 years as a backwater nation…When it happens, it happens and it happens for a very long time.” [05:47]
• On Democracy & Values:
  • “Young people get the world that they’re willing to fight for. And if they’re not…they will get killed by the person that is willing to fight and die for their value set.” [14:27]
• On Conspiracy as Entertainment:
  • “It is a new form of entertainment…you’re doing journalistic looking things to dig into the conspiracy...But they're just not meaningful patterns.” [38:13]

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Important Timestamps

• 01:00 — Discussion of Warren’s proposed wealth tax
• 06:25 — Calls for budget balance, critique of money printing
• 08:15 — Elon Musk and taxing billionaire loans
• 09:09 — How to balance the federal budget (education, entitlements, regulation)
• 12:28 — Iran, American military spending, and values
• 19:59 — Generational issues, cost of living, analogy on systemic causes
• 24:47 — Asset ownership is not a magic bullet for upward mobility
• 28:17 — War spending v. domestic investment
• 32:01 — Candace Owens, ballistics, and conspiracy culture

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Tone & Language

The episode is lively, blunt, sometimes biting, and always focused on first-principles analysis. The guest host does not pull punches—critiquing proposals from both major parties and punctuating arguments with analogies, colorful metaphors, and real-world examples. The conversation values nuance over partisanship, and encourages listeners to question received wisdom and "meme narratives."

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This summary captures all major themes and arguments, preserving the tone and passion of the original discussion and highlighting critical dialogue for listeners who may have missed the show.

Transcript

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[Guest Expert]

If you guys are paying attention to what's going on in the government, Elizabeth Warren is putting a new tax proposal on the docket. And so just yesterday she announced a new proposal that is completely insane. It's a wealth tax, not an income tax. So this, you're not being taxed on money that you're making. This is a tax on the things that you, you own. It is confiscatory. It is the government stealing from you. This new proposal is another one in an endless parade of economically illiterate politicians that are robbing American workers blind. You guys, you guys are being robbed blind with deficit spending fraud. And then they erode their own tax base because wealth will flee the second you start doing this stuff. The people that can move will move. This is the ultra millionaire tax, as it's lovingly being called. It would impose an annual 2% tax on the net worth of households and trusts over $50 million and an additional 1% surtax on billionaires. So net worth over a billion. Remember, this is all about net worth. The bill has 45 co sponsors in the House. It's led by Reps. Pramila Jaipal and Brendan Boyle. The tax base would consist of a household's financial and non financial assets, stocks, land, things like that, all at market prices as the IRS determines it, which will of course absolutely crater when people go to sell them. Now they will have to sell them to pay the tax because these are unrealized gains. I'm trying to protect myself, obviously, but I'm also trying to protect the middle class. What's my North Star, a thriving middle Class, I'm all about human flourishing. You don't have to believe me. Just watch the things that I actually do now in the bill to deter avoidance, right? Because that's the big narrative, that the wealthy don't pay their fair share. Keeping in mind that only 50% of Americans actually pay tax. It's like the top 1% pay something like 90% of the taxes. It's absurd. So that whole argument is just completely ridiculous. And let's also remember, underlying all of this, you don't have a balanced budget. And so instead of saying, hey, let's get our together like we would expect of any American, let's balance our budget first and then seek additional tax revenue. Now, to avoid deterrent or to deter avoidance, the bill has proposed a 40% exit tax on anyone worth more than $50 million who renounces their American citizenship. Now, to me, this is like the new Boston Tea Party. This is the line in the sand. Like this will. I'll just completely change my life around this because it's so ridiculous and is nail in the coffin of the middle class. It will not come back. You will spend 100 years as a backwater nation. And so, yeah, just brace yourselves for that. If you don't believe me, go look at the history of people that went from second, third biggest economy in the world to just falling off an absolute cliff. Argentina being one of the most profound examples. Just absolutely tragic. If you look at it regionally, same thing. You have Cuba thriving and then completely backwards now for what, 50, 60, 70 years, something like that. When it happens, it happens and it happens for a very long time. Now, anybody that can propose this kind of thing, they are showing you a stunning lack of how unrealized gains works. This is like telling someone that if they want to own a car, they have to give over the carburetor in order to have the car. You have to break the car apart to pay the fee for owning the car. It doesn't make any sense. One of two people is going to bat for this. Somebody who is stunningly economically illiterate. Do not let those people run your country. Number two, someone who would like to destroy your country because they believe that prosperity itself is the problem. Both of those people literally get them all the out. This is so crazy. If we elect people that actually want to destroy the economy, we are going to go down very rapidly. There's a notion here called mark to market taxation. When you're looking at the unrealized gains, you say, hey, what's the market value? If they were to sell this. So this requires the annual valuation of assets that lack a clear sale price. Normally we just say, well, you sold it, that's when we're going to tax you. So now we know we don't have to guess that's what it's sold for. Okay, Doing this this way, not having an actual sale price is exceedingly complex, potentially quite economically damaging. By the way, it may necessitate the liquidation of some or all of the assets to pay the taxes on the valuation. I bet the people proposing this bill hate big corporations. But guess what? Wealth taxes will 100% lead to less market competition, make the corporations that they hate much bigger. It's going to massively increase corporate consolidation because a small business will not have the cash to pay their tax bill. I get that these ideas sound good on paper, but the reality is they end up hurting the average person. When you have a government that refuses to balance its budget and thinks that it can just tax its way to prosperity, the builders stop building, they leave, and the tax base begins to dwindle. I don't need you to look any farther than going back three years in New York City. This is not, oh, I wonder if this will happen. It's happening right now.

[Interviewer]

Chat has kind of been mixed all over the place with this topic so far. I'm noticing on both sides of people who like it and people who don't like it. Well, if this doesn't pass, should we then do things such as closing loopholes that hurt the middle class or prevent the rich from being able to get loans against their assets as a way around their taxes?

[Guest Expert]

So wild guys balance the budget. The way that your money gets stolen from you and it is being stolen from you is through a very simple mechanism. That mechanism is money printing. You money print because you're deficit spending. If you're not deficit spending, you don't have to money print. Once people understand your money's not being stolen from you because the wealthy aren't paying their fair share and they're avoiding taxes. If your mentality is, it's never enough and I don't need to be held accountable to my results, just give me more money and the act of giving me more money is the only thing that matters, which is how we govern right now. Remember, the reason the wealthy are getting wealthier at a runaway pace is because of deficit spending and money printing. It is not because they have done something wrong. They that they are taking money out of somebody else's pocket. It is because money has to go somewhere to hide from money printing. So if you have money and you're just saving it in your bank right this very minute, you're being stolen from. Because we're money printing right now. The numbers, at least, this is pre war, at least $40 billion a month just created out of thin air right now. That's standing policy. That's where your money's going. You have to balance your budget at some point, right? At some point. You simply must balance your budget because you will run out of money.

[Interviewer]

A lot of the chat has been bringing up everyone's favorite Texas transplant and saying, Elon Musk, he gets to take out hundreds of billions dollars in loans against these stocks. How in any way does that not harm the middle class?

[Guest Expert]

Yeah, tax it.

[Interviewer]

How much would you say tax it though? Like, what if you were to label how that system would work?

[Guest Expert]

Just treat it like he's taking capital out. You're not going to tax it at the full rate because. Or tax it at the full rate, but let him deduct the interest. And by the way, that's people actually understanding how the economy works because that creates like if he borrows $200 billion, whatever, against his assets, that $200 billion just poof, came out of nowhere. It didn't exist and now it exists. So it's an inflationary event. Now if it's one to one with productivity, you don't really feel it. The odds that all of this stuff would be one to one with productivity is effectively zero because so much money is driving up of that stuff because they're trying to hide from inflation. But yeah, I have no beef with that. Let's go.

[Interviewer]

We're talking a lot about balancing the budget from your perspective. If you were in a position to balance the budget, what would that actually look like? And how is the middle class? Like, what should we be asking for?

[Guest Expert]

This would be something that I'm going to give you an answer because I hate it when people dodge questions. But to have a real answer, you need somebody that actually has access to the budget, where we're spending money, all of that. And so I don't know all of the line items, but the things that I would look at will go something like this. Your education system is so flawed that you're almost hopeless. So I would be starting there. Anywhere where there's a strong driving union inside of a governmental agency. I'm going to be looking at that because I need to see outcomes that justify the expense. We spend more per student than almost anywhere else on earth. I think we do spend more. I don't even think it's like I think we spend more than anywhere else on earth and we're routinely in the middle of the pack. You're almost certainly going to have to raise the retirement age. So we have a demographic problem right now. We are a column and the way that meaning we have as many old people as mid as young and it's slowly inverting and so it's doing this and over time we're going to get to the point if our birth rates continue where we've got way more old people that are outside of the workforce. And so you've got to keep people in the workforce longer. We have an obscene amount of fraud. I'm going to guess it's hundreds of billions if not edging up to a trillion dollars and that's annually and we will have to get that down as much as you can. I don't think anybody's ever going to get it to zero. But you're going to need to get it much, much, much lower. Then we're going to have to continue to deregulate so that we can actually generate more revenue, more taxes without having to increase the percentage, which is where you run into trouble. If you actually want to generate more tax revenue then you just need more revenue at the same tax rate. If you focus on that, good things come of it. If you focus the other way around, all kinds of bad things come of it. But there are going to be consequences to deregulating. Now I don't think that we're anywhere near any of those consequences being bad right now. I think that we've got an absolute absurd amount of regulations. But just know that everything is going to be a set of trade offs. We're probably also going to need to free up some economic bandwidth by doing things like some debt forgiveness based on some things, some soft defaulting. We'll have to work through that well as that isn't going to be easy. But that's where I would start. We're hitting pause for a moment but there's plenty more ahead so don't go anywhere.

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[Guest Expert]

Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action.

[Interviewer]

Marco Rubio is catching some heat for what he said about negotiations with Iran.

[Guest Expert]

Imagine in Iran that instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran, you'd have a much different country.

[Interviewer]

People are kind of highlighting the hypocrisy of that.

[Guest Expert]

Yeah. This is where we are going to have to decide as a globe what values actually matter. For a long time, we believed that Western values were worth killing a lot of people for. And now we are backing off of that. And ultimately we're going to have to decide what we're willing to fight for because it's not always going to be, oh, there's an existential threat and it's very clear. And so we go in and do our thing. There is a reality to be faced that if your enemy does not share your values and you let them get militarily strong, that ultimately they can tell you what to do. And so this is the part that confuses me. Americans have somehow gotten into their heads and Europeans that it's perfectly fine for somebody else to get strong and ultimately tell them what to do because they've lost faith in their own values and they're somehow still thinking that, well, they're just going to leave us be. No, they're not, mother. Like, they are going to take you over, even if only just culturally. And I don't think people understand that a culture is a thing that you have to defend. If you don't indoctrinate the next generation with those values, then they simply won't have those values. And whatever country that believes in their values enough to say, I'm going to build a military to protect my values, they will ultimately end up having the influence on the world. This is exactly why the US Was able to have the kind of influence that we had. We were the strongest economically, we were the strongest from a manufacturing standpoint. We had the clearest vision of our own identity in terms of value set. And so we're like, yeah, we're not going to let the Nazis or the Japanese take over the world. We just, we don't stand for fascism. And so we're willing to put our lives on the line to make sure that that doesn't spread. Same with Communism. Now, we don't have that belief, and there are going to be consequences to that. Right now, I think people in the west are actually perfectly fine with that. They either don't know how to think through the problem well or they are perfectly happy for somebody else to go well, I do believe in what I stand for, and I am willing to kill a lot of people in the name of that. And so they're just going to back. That to me is wild. But I'm a product of the 80s. I understand that. I am well aware of how generations work and young people get the world that they're willing to fight for. And if they're not willing to articulate, this is my value set and I'm willing to die for it, then they will get killed by the person that is willing to fight and die for their value set. Just is what it is.

[Interviewer]

I agree from a philosophical standpoint, but I think practically what's happening right now in Iran is Trump did bite off more than he can chew. It's okay. It's maga. Don't, don't trip. You know, Trump did a lot of great things for you guys, but he did. He was a bit more hubris than he needed to be in this one situation. He now is trying to solve a problem he himself created because the strait was completely open with no tools. There was no, there was no problem. Iran hasn't attacked anybody, hasn't done any specific attacks against another country since the 1970s and in the 1970s.

[Guest Expert]

So you totally discount proxies.

[Interviewer]

I do discount proxies because that would say, then we attacked Russia, we attacked China, and I would say that we never directly attacked people either.

[Guest Expert]

We can.

[Interviewer]

If you go in proxy, you can't proxy on one side. It's proxy both ways.

[Guest Expert]

Yes. And I would say that it is proxy both ways and that this is exactly what I'm talking about. The war with Iran is a war of values. And so people don't want it to be about that. People do not want to talk about

[Interviewer]

the what's the value that happened, that needed it to happen right now.

[Guest Expert]

Well, I think that is probably the wrong argument. I think the real reason this happened right now is economic and has to do with Trump wanting to be on Mount Rushmore. I think that's real. What's the background thing that they're trying to. That is both true and they're going to use as a cover story. It's not the real reason that they did it right now, but it is the background cover story that's been real for a long time, which is they're a theocratic regime that really does believe God wants them to destroy the US and Israel. Destroy, wipe off the map. They are clearly trying to get nuclear weapons. Now, if there was no beef and there was no conflict and everything was perfectly fine, why does Iran want nuclear weapons? The only reason to get a nuclear weapon is to be able to defend yourself against other nuclear states, to be able to posture and be aggressive as you see fit. Nobody else in the GCC other than Israel has nuclear weapons. If Iran left them alone, I don't see any reason to believe that Israel was going to do a preemptive strike on Iran with nuclear weapons. You've got a state that is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world. I don't. There's no credible voice that says, what are you talking about? Iran just misunderstood. They're not doing that. Everybody's like, yes, this is true. They are trying to get nuclear weapons. And we've been saying for a very long time, everybody will, everybody in the west will agree that's like a hard and fast line. We only disagree on whether they were about to do it right now. But nobody's like, yeah, of course Iran should be able to have nuclear weapons. That comes down to, well, are we prepared to fight about it? Like, do we want, like if we could snap our fingers and say only one country in the world can have nuclear weapons, who do we want it to be? What country are we going to give the nukes to? I think right now people are saying it's, it shouldn't be America. But just to be clear, for the last 80ish years, I think people would have said, yes, it should be America. And it's been a tragedy that other countries have gotten nuclear weapons. Now that's very much American perspective. And I understand that each country, many people in their country will want it to have been theirs. But the global community as a whole got to enjoy untold prosperity for almost 80 years. And that's the part I don't want anybody glossing over. Now America had to go do horrifically, morally unjustifiable things. But the result has been globalization. While it worked, it was extraordinary for reasons that are articulatable. It was inevitable that it was going to stop working. We're now in the it stopped working part of the game. But. But that was extraordinary. And everybody agreed. The reason that this was awesome is because of Western Enlightenment values. You can really kind of boil it down like this. It is very difficult to know what is true, but identifying what is true is hugely advantageous. Therefore, you must let people be free to explore being wrong, that the individual should be sovereign. It should not have the boot of the government on its neck. Scientific inquiry should be free. And from that comes innovation. From that comes prosperity. We should do the things that we can do to free up entrepreneurs, to create and to innovate, and that will propel society forward. That used to be the set of values that we said we're willing to fight and die for that. Now we're saying not so much. And you've got people waving at the no Kings rallies, waving sickle and hammer flags. That is a level of absurdity where we're saying the new value set is the weak must inherit the Earth. And if we have to kill tens of millions of people to ensure that weak inherit the earth, then we'll kill tons of millions of people. And so that is so crazy to me and so outlandish to me that I spend an inordinate amount of my time trying to figure out where I need to take my wife to be safe in a world where that ideology takes hold. Because it sure as hell isn't California. And it may not be America, but right now feels like only sufficient pain will cause young people of future generations to be like, yeah, that didn't work. And then they'll rebound. But it takes roughly a hundred years.

[Interviewer]

Okay, you laid a lot of things on the table right there. So you started at the end about the young people and how they need to have sufficient pain in order to feel it. But I think if we go upstream from that. Use the great analogy of if you're at the bottom of a waterfall and you keep seeing a bunch of dead bodies, I eventually have to go up the waterfall, see where those dead bodies came from. And I think that from a systemic standpoint, the opportunities that were afforded to our parents, to the people in the previous generations, are no longer afforded to us. We're told, stop avocado toasting, and everything will be prosperous. Where the house. Houses are four times as expensive. Rent, cars, everything is four to five times expensive. But wages are 1.5 times higher than they were. So they're not keeping up or getting lost. We could blame the Fed, that's cool. But the Fed was there in the 80s, too. It was okay in the 80s. It was okay in the 90s. It was okay in the early 2000s. Now in the 2020s, they're really feeling the pain of that. Now we go back to Iran and Iran. No, you had a tirade with seven things. You can't stop on the one thing because we were talking about Iran and Israel.

[Guest Expert]

I'll set something here as a reminder.

[Interviewer]

Okay. The.

[Guest Expert]

You're missing something so important in the thing that you just laid down. And it's the very fact that people don't understand why what you just said is catastrophically wrong that creates all the problem.

[Interviewer]

Okay, what's the cat.

[Guest Expert]

I'm happy to move on.

[Interviewer]

No, no. What's the catastrophic wrong? Because that's. That's a big adjust. That's big.

[Guest Expert]

This is. I don't have a perfect analogy, so I'll give you an imperfect one. The way that people are responding to the very broken economy, as you are very appropriately laying out is like a woman who's being beaten by her husband, and she's like seeing a therapist, and she's like, I don't know what it is. I am so anxious. And the therapist is like, okay, well, your husband is beating you, so couldn't that be the problem? And the person is like, no. In fact, it's the opposite. Seeing how strong my husband is makes me feel safe. And so, yes, like, I don't. There's a lot of pain involved with being beaten, but I need to know that my husband is strong and going to protect me.

[Interviewer]

And that's the notion that the communists and socialists want more spending that will put us in more deficit spending and that would increase the budget.

[Guest Expert]

They want to be beaten harder to make sure that their husband is as strong as they think he is. And I'm just like, nope, the problem is you' beaten.

[Interviewer]

And I would push back on that. That says the 20 to 50 billion that we just spent on the wharf, we spent that on a workforce training program. The engineers and mechanics that the Ford CEO's complaining. He doesn't have. He could have gotten. Yeah, and that could have been true.

[Guest Expert]

So true. This. This is.

[Interviewer]

It's not true. Why is that not true?

[Guest Expert]

Because if you're deficit spending, it doesn't matter what you spend on. It's just bad. And so you can deficit spend. Like, let's say I go, but I've made the bridges incredible. You have, like, all this daycare. Yes, I.

[Interviewer]

Using Chinese example, you take your food

[Guest Expert]

stamps and you're starving because there's actually no food on the shelves. But look at the bridge. Man, that bridge is beautiful. You can get to the other side and starve to death over there much easier than you could before. And I'm just. No, no, no. This is what actually happens.

[Interviewer]

But those aren't direct. Those aren't direct correlations, though.

[Guest Expert]

Yes, they are. Because they're not only correlations, they're causation.

[Interviewer]

What I'm saying is there's money that's allocated that's already spent, that the impact of their inflation. That is already created, it's already generated. It's already there. It's already in the shelf.

[Guest Expert]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Now, if I could take that money and if I kill a bunch of brown people, that helps absolutely nobody in America. But if I take that money and I invest in a bunch of people, it could be white, it could be brown. I don't care what color it is. It's American.

[Guest Expert]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

Those people can at least be on the top side of the K and they could be looking down on the bottom side of the K. They won't

[Guest Expert]

be on the top side of the

[Interviewer]

K because upward mobility will still be invested in. There'll still be an opportunity for them to get to the next point.

[Guest Expert]

Drew. What? So that I can calibrate, what do you think they would have to invest in to get them on the upside of the K with this inflated fake money?

[Interviewer]

Money with this inflated fake money. First, deregulation in the housing sector doesn't cost money. It does cost money because I would also give incentives to builders so that way they would build more, so be tax breaks on the other side.

[Guest Expert]

So that's different. The deregulation didn't cost money. The tax incentives cost money.

[Interviewer]

Taxes will cost. But we just. We just slash all the taxes for rich and billionaires and corporate taxes. We can slash the taxes for builders depending on how many homes that are filled, not just homes that are built. So you have to have a certain occupancy rate so that incentivize builders to build and then have people actually move in. And then there'll be incentive for a tax break, another tax break. If you sign up for a trade school, you get tax incentives on that. So. So again, I can. This is just something that I'm spinning off the cuff that Google Gemini popped out. Now imagine if I had a whole conference table of economists and AI artists and all the data center people. They need construction jobs, right? To build data centers, so that way we can AI growth our way. Why aren't we investing in construction Jobs we have. We need AI engineers that can connect all the chips together. Why aren't we investing in the chips? We have TMSC that we wanted to fly in and give them jobs.

[Guest Expert]

You have a bunch of brilliant ideas that would work if we had a balanced budget. The correct answer to the question that I was asking. The only way to get. The only way to get people on the bottom of the K to the top side of the K is to get them to own assets. Otherwise you have to change your entire economic structure. So must balance the budget.

[Interviewer]

Let's go there. To own assets. In order for them to own assets, they should. Must have a job that provides them a living wage with a little bit of margin on top of that. So that way they can actually purchase those assets.

[Guest Expert]

Yep.

[Interviewer]

Okay. Now we need to make. We can make assets more affordable by turning a bunch of levers. We can make. We can. We can either decrease the mortgage interest rate, which you have called for because that will refinance the debt and give us more favorable terms.

[Guest Expert]

Yes. It gets cheaper. It's not a good asset.

[Interviewer]

If a house gets cheaper. It's not a good asset.

[Guest Expert]

Correct. If a house goes down in value over time. Which is precisely what you're saying, which is a good thing and I hope that we do. It makes the house stop being the asset class that you can hide from inflation.

[Interviewer]

But okay. Because now the goal post is moving. Because that would be them owning an asset. Because eventually will go back up. Because inflation.

[Commercial Announcer]

Please.

[Guest Expert]

The goal posts aren't moving. There is cause and effect in the economy. This is what people like keep losing sight of. So why do I want to. Why do I want housing prices to come down? I want housing prices to come down because it becomes a forced savings account. But that forced savings account instead of being an asset, it only works as an asset when you're in an extreme inflation environment and you've got to hide your money somewhere. I've always said houses are great because your wife is going to pressure you to own it anyway. Cool. Now the idea of driving the cost of houses down is different because the value of the house now is not keeping up with inflation.

[Interviewer]

Yay.

[Guest Expert]

Praise Jesus. It's getting cheaper and now people can own it. But it stops being a good asset and it starts being a good for savings account. So at least it's a real thing. You live in it. It forces you to put your money into that. Cool. You have a real asset in terms of I can live in it. Protects me from the weather, et cetera, et Cetera. Also, people invest in their neighborhoods, blah, blah, blah. Okay, but from from an asset perspective, assets only work if they keep up with inflation. So if you have an inflationary environment and you're owning assets that aren't keeping up with inflation, you're. So you have this conundrum with housing that it either keeps up with inflation and people can't afford it because you're in an inflationary environment, or you try to decouple a house from that. And you say houses need to be affordable because people actually need to live in them. Cool. That's like a separate thing. But when people start conflating those and they want the prices of houses to come down and yet remain a good asset, which by definition means it keeps up with inflation, it's nonsensical. And so all of the cause and effect of the economy is where people get lost.

[Interviewer]

I understand what you're saying. And none of that, I think, stops the position I was trying to make initially. Because in order to own assets, you need two things. You need income, you need wages, and you need things to put your asset, that money and that income and those wages into. Now that income could be self generated. You could be an entrepreneur, it could be coming in from whatever different direction. So that's a different conversation. We either want people to get on the property ladder and then eventually become on the investment ladder. And investment could be Robin Hood. Whatever you need to do, that's the pipeline that we would like most Americans to do do. This is the lowest percentage of 30 year olds that own houses. I don't think anybody in the room thinks that that's a great thing. We can mutually agree that it's more important for more Americans to own homes. Can we agree on that?

[Guest Expert]

We can. It doesn't solve the problem that you were bringing it up on. That's why I'm saying it doesn't solve

[Interviewer]

the problem of people owning assets if more people own homes.

[Guest Expert]

If a house keeps up with inflation, it will be forever out of reach of the people on the bottom of the K. You have to solve that problem.

[Interviewer]

Okay. And what I'm saying is if we are talking inflation at the 2% that the Fed is reserving or inflation of what happened in the last five years. Those are two different rates.

[Guest Expert]

Yes. When people look at inflation and say it's 2 or 3%, they're out of their minds. So that's 2 or 3.

[Interviewer]

I'm looking at the Fed, what. What the Fed announces as the federal standard for 2%.

[Guest Expert]

Understandable. But when you start comparing it like what were the cost of things 25 years ago. You start seeing the real. It's mahusive.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Guest Expert]

When you authorize the government to steal 2 or 3% of your money, it eats away your money very, very, very quickly because of compounding interest.

[Interviewer]

Last question on this. The 20 to 50 billion dollars that we just spent on war, did that generate an outcome that you think will add to human flourishing?

[Guest Expert]

No, it's terrible, terrible, terrible. It's going to speed up inflation.

[Interviewer]

We can say that that was a waste of money.

[Guest Expert]

We can say it was a catastrophe.

[Interviewer]

Is there another way? If we were the business of America, that we could have reinvested 20, 50 billion locally in the country of America? That could have helped, helped Americans either balance their budgets, change financial positions, increase their wages. Is there something that we could have invested in that would have gave them an opportunity for upward mobility?

[Guest Expert]

Not if it's inflationary.

[Interviewer]

The 2050 billion that's already spent, that's already inflationary. But we couldn't reallocate that.

[Guest Expert]

That's correct.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so what I'm hearing is when we spend it on war, it's a terrible thing. That's inflationary. But if we take that same money that we already spent on war and spent it in America, it's. It's just as bad.

[Guest Expert]

So. Yes.

[Interviewer]

So even though that it's going to help a couple people, it's still just

[Guest Expert]

so you, you could make an argument for. If you invest in things that are going to cause the economy to grow faster than inflation, then it's worth doing. And that is a true statement. However, I don't see that is such a big gamble that you're never going to get me on board. It does not violate the physics of money. So, yes, if you find a way that actually grows the economy, yes, it would be worth it. Debt is worth it to do that. The US has proven time and time again that they don't do that and that they will just deficit spend, deficit spend, deficit spend. And however much growth you get, then they just spend more than that growth. You are saying very true words. They are hypotheticals, which is why, because we're going fast. I am constantly like, yeah, like, not really. Because if you deal in the hypothetical, if you could somehow invest the money in a way that got people on the bottom of the K into assets to keep up with inflation, that would work. If you could somehow, some way invest in a manner that caused the economy to grow faster than your deficit is growing, that would work. I'm Just saying we're not actually doing that. And so when I look at the spending on the war, I go, this is crazy. We're just deficit spending. All of this. This is wild. If you had gone in and you had gotten control of the oil and now oil prices dropped, then it's like that would become deflationary in a positive way.

[Interviewer]

So it's like, yeah, we're spending $2 at the gas tank instead of $4. Correct.

[Guest Expert]

But we're not. And so it's like this ended up so far. Listen, maybe some miracles coming down the pike but as of right now it just looks like we unleashed chaos, created problems that this is not going to work out well, that at best we sort of end up back where we were and it was a non event economically in the but damaged our relationships with our allies and becomes a very big problem long term from that perspective. So I'm looking at this going okay, how do you actually solve the problem? And if the words that come out of somebody's mouth are not balance the budget, then I know whatever they're literally whatever they're about to propose in real life isn't going to work. Taking a short break, but there's more impact theory after Stay tuned.

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[Guest Expert]

Thanks for staying tuned. Now let's get back to it.

[Interviewer]

Candace Owens is doing a victory dance right now, but the ballistics on the bullet did not match. This could be a nothing burger. Then the sheriff resigns. It could be something.

[Guest Expert]

It could be a something burger.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's what I mean.

[Guest Expert]

Is this just smoked double patty with cheese. This is a royale with cheese. Royale with cheese. Rumors are flying that Candace Owens was right about everything. Charlie Kirk was not killed by Tyler Robinson. According to a new ballistics report. Anyway, the new ballistics report from the ATF says that the bullet that killed Charlie Kirk was not, not conclusively from Tyler Robinson's gun. Now the way that it's being framed by the Daily Mail is the exaggerated version that it wasn't him. Like this is proof that's not what's real when you look more closely. What the report actually said is just that it's not conclusive. When the bullet hit Kirk's body, if all of this is being reported straight, it struck a bone. It broke up on impact. The forensic pathologist recovered fragments, not an intact bullet. Law enforcement sources told Fox News it is impossible to do ballistics analysis on a bullet fragment. Additionally, and I haven't seen many people reporting on this because it's not cool and not conspiratorial, but the spent shell casing found on the scene did match the rifle. So you're in a situation where it's not that the bullet was like, this didn't come from that gun. Dun, dun, dun. But the shell casing on the scene did. The gun trigger has Tyler Robinson's DNA on it. A retired FBI supervisory special agent said that basically, this is a pretty significant piece of evidence for the prosecution and pretty damning for the defense. The defense even have the full ATF case file, yet it's only a summary. As the retired FBI agent put it, nobody outside the ATF lab knows why they couldn't make the match yet. Now, I'll admit this will be a far more engrossing story if Israel or somebody else is the one that killed Charlie. But right now, the narrative is up against a confession to Tyler's dad, a text message confession to his lover, and a massive video archive of Tyler actually on the day of the assassination, as well as the bent bullet casing, as well as his finger, DNA from his finger on the trigger being present. All of this is probably just the defense trying to buy themselves more time to find a way out from under all of that. And on March 27, Robinson's defense team filed a motion to delay his May preliminary hearing. And it was. The thing about the bullet was just buried on page 22 of the filing. So the whole thing the Daily Mail took and ran with as proof of conspiracy, probably more just a headline grabber than anything in reality. The Daily Mail basically turned that into just a headline that was something like, bullet used to kill Charlie Kirk did not match the rifle. And it's like, sort of inconclusive. That is true, but the implication is more for conspiracy theorists than it is something that's real. Within hours, the Internet, of course, was going crazy, exonerating Robinson and saying that there had to be a second shooter. The reality is that fragmentable bullets are routinely inconclusive in ballistics analysis. So unable to identify. Being confused with came from a different gun is what's causing the drama here. It means that the physical evidence was just too degraded. I think people want to slow down here. This is not the bombshell that people are making it out to be. The defense filing for a preliminary request for more time is not exoneration. So they're sitting on like 61,000 pages, 31 hours of audio, over 700 hours of video. So they're just asking for more time to go through all of that. But it's like, this is one of those. I almost don't want to deny people. They're fun, you know what I mean? Like, this is one we don't know. So it is possible that it wasn't him. And there's all these weird things. I think the punchline is going to be, tyler Robinson killed him, but full stop. I want. Yeah, but I want to have a good time as we go. I do get why people think that there's something more going on here.

[Interviewer]

I'm going to put on my conspiracy edutainment hat on for a second because I loved how you said conspiracy as a form of entertainment. Now, I followed a tiktoker. I'm not going to give him a platform because his ideas are wild, but he's just like, yo, I feel like they clone people. And I feel. And he says it so passionately, and it's just like, oh, I get it now.

[Guest Expert]

Like he says, did you hear Matt Gaetz?

[Interviewer]

Oh, with the hybrid alien.

[Guest Expert]

Yes, Matt Gaetz. I watched the video myself. Matt Gaetz said a person in military uniform, a real part of the military, in an unclassified briefing said that aliens are being co bred, like the DNA with human humans.

[Interviewer]

The most important information will be the

[Guest Expert]

biologics that are not human that have been discovered. And like, even some of the briefings that aren't classified just. Just need to be out in the public. I mean, I had someone come and brief me who was in a military

[Interviewer]

uniform, worked for the United States army that was briefing me on the locations

[Guest Expert]

of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic. Benny's like, yo, I've said some, but Gates, like, can we. Come on, bro. Like, even my audience has their limits.

[Interviewer]

So there is this. This seething need for, like, the world is out to get me. I'm trying my hardest. I'm not able to get on this property ladder. I'm mad, I'm frustrated. There's aliens over here breeding with people. We have all these wars. So it's like, I don't know if this Conspiracy breeds on that frustration. Or if it's just an entertainment escape, it's the evolution of reality tv because the Kardashians don't do it for us anymore. I don't know where that next thing is, but it's just. If Tyler Robinson gets off, do you know what that would do to TP usa? The Internet would go crazy.

[Guest Expert]

The Internet would go absolutely insane. There would be backlash in an extreme fashion. That would be wild. I do think this is partly conspiracy as the new reality tv. It is a new form of entertainment where you've got like, I don't know what to call the form of journalism, but it's like you're doing journalistic looking things to dig into the conspiracy to do the. John Nash, for people that don't know he's a guy from A Beautiful Mind, is schizophrenic. It's not exclusive to schizophrenics. They're just early to the party. But they'll see, like, patterns in things where there actually aren't meaningful patterns. Like there are patterns, they're just not meaningful patterns.

[Interviewer]

Correlations, not causation.

[Guest Expert]

Type exactly. Watching Candace feels like that. I feel like I'm watching John Nash at the board and I'm like, those patterns are there, but I don't think they mean what you think they mean. And so there is an entertainment level to it. She's obviously doing incredibly well. And honestly, shout out to Candace for just reading this moment. Right, right. Again, this is not a moral statement of whether she should be doing it or not, but it's like she understands how to marshal people's attention, whether she believes what she's doing or not. For now, I'll just assume she does. And she's seeing these patterns that don't add up to anything, but she's drawing all these conclusions and it's wild. And there's some part of her that believes that because you feel it, which is like anathema to me. It is the exact opposite of how I approach the world. But she believes that if you feel it, that's proof that it's true, which is the wildest ever. And I advise you guys never, ever, ever to interface with the world like that. But it really makes good tv.

[Interviewer]

Okay, I got one more conspiracy brain route.

[Guest Expert]

Let's go.

[Interviewer]

I don't know if you've been seeing the Dan Bongiano, Tommy Massey back and forth on Twitter.

[Guest Expert]

No, say more.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so Dan Mangiano called out Thomas Massie, called him a fraud, and said, this guy's the worst politician. I called him three times. He didn't pick up because he doesn't want to understand the truth. Thomas Massie replied gave like an eight thing well actually you called, you fabricated this lies you were trying to intimidate staffers. FBI whistleblower was really a way to out FBI people who are holding the FBI accountable. There was a bunch of back and forth. He came out with receipts but what was interesting is Thomas Massey showed a screenshot of his calls. He's like wait, you didn't call me at 1 in the morning. You didn't call me at 2 in the morning. Why are your screenshots messed up? So Thomas Massie showed his screenshots there 8am 7:30pm you know, reasonable hours. Knoxy Love I got to give credit where credit is due. Retweeted Dan Maggiano actually posted screenshots of his phone calls in a wannabe gotcha to Massey. Turns out Dan's timestamps match the time zone in Israel self owned himself. So if you do the five five hours from the east coast is actually interesting as and this is about about the FC Transparency Act. So it's like you were literally calling him in Israel as you were trying to figure this out. Causation correlation. It could be his phone was updating. He could have been on it on a jet traveling.

[Guest Expert]

But that's amazing.

[Interviewer]

Brainrot conspiracy theorists are going crazy with that. So that goes there. When you manage procurement for multiple facilities, every order matters. But when it's for a hospital system,

[Guest Expert]

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