Why Wealth Inequality Is Rising—And What You Can Do About It Before It’s Too Late | Arthur Laffer X Tom Bilyeu Impact Theory

In part two, Tom Bilyeu and Arthur Laffer tackle the most urgent economic debates facing America TODAY. They analyze wealth inequality, the emotional charge behind political decisions, and how populist sentiment can drive policy off a cliff. Arthur Laffer lays out concrete strategies for restoring growth, ranging from tax reform to trade negotiation and reshaping the Federal Reserve. Together, they challenge the audience: Is democracy really the solution, or the problem? Can private market forces—like cryptocurrency and blockchain—protect the average American from runaway inflation? The discussion drills into actionable advice for listeners, exploring the role of optimism, personal responsibility, and activism in shaping America’s future. From the pitfalls of government overreach in business to the future of currency and technology, this episode is packed with provocative insights and practical wisdom for anyone concerned about prosperity, freedom, and the next chapter of the American experiment. FOLLOW ARTHUR LAFFER: Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrArthurLaffer Laffer Center: https://www.laffercenter.com/ Business Wars: Follow Business Wars on the Wondery App or wherever you get your podcasts. Quince: Go to https://quince.com/IMPACTPOD for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Linkedin: Post your job free at https://linkedin.com/impacttheory HomeServe: Help protect your home systems – and your wallet – with HomeServe against covered repairs. Plans start at just $4.99 a month at https://homeserve.com Shopify: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at https://shopify.com/impact Sintra AI: 72% off with code IMPACT at https://sintra.ai/impact True Classic: Upgrade your wardrobe at https://trueclassic.com/impact CashApp: Download Cash App Today - https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/v6nymgjl #CashAppPod Connectteam: 14 day free trial at https://connecteam.cc/46GxoTF What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: If you want my help... STARTING a business:join me here at ZERO TO FOUNDER https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show: https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show SCALING a business:see if you qualify here. https://tombilyeu.com/call: https://tombilyeu.com/call Get my battle-tested strategies and insights delivered weekly to your inbox:sign up here. https://tombilyeu.com/: https://tombilyeu.com/ ********************************************************************** If you're serious about leveling up your life, I urge you to check out my new podcast,Tom Bilyeu’s Mindset Playbook https://open.spotify.com/show/47VE90Cittmo6TGGFqg2xf —a goldmine of my most impactful episodes on mindset, business, and health. Trust me, your future self will thank you. ********************************************************************** FOLLOW TOM: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices https://megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tom Bilyeu?

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• 0:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Their dashboard tracks what comes next based on what your business actually needs. So EIN number, registered agent, licenses and permits, bookkeeping, business banking. I tell every founder the same thing. Just make it official. Click the link in the show notes to check out Taylor Brands and get started on your business today. This is a paid advertisement. Welcome back to part two of my conversation with Arthur Laffer. Okay, so there's one thing in all of this that I still worry about, which is, whatever the government makes mandatory is the only thing the average person is going to use. So if the government is making the hyper, it's not technically hyperinflated,

• 1:29Tom Bilyeu?

  but the very inflated currency, the mandatory one to pay your taxes and all that. That's the one people are going to understand. I don't think the vast majority of people understand crypto, nor will they embrace it unless they're forced to. They need to because otherwise they're getting hammered by inflation. And so going, so period one.

• 1:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Here's the thing, they don't understand inflation. That is a hill I will die on. But to your point intuitively, they know something is going wrong. Okay, so that's one. The wealth inequality, even though that's the right thing to point at in terms of what drives people crazy from a, there's just a algorithm embedded in us from evolution that makes us hate, inequality. Perfect.

• 2:10Tom Bilyeu?

  However, you can distract people from that by giving them relative growth. So if they believe that, oh, I'm making more money today than I was yesterday and buying that car, that house, that whatever is a little bit easier today than it was yesterday. And I'm going to be able to amass some amount of wealth that I'll be able to pass on to my kids. So that I have reason to believe that their life is going to be better than mine. And therefore, all of my sacrifices are worth it. Yeah. The second you break that, you are in a real problem. And we have broken that. And right now, things are getting harder and harder for people to afford. And so that makes them go, wait a second, that guy's making a whole lot more than me. Which they never would have worried about or thought about if things that they wanted were getting effectively cheaper for them.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  You're right.

• 2:56Tom Bilyeu?

  So the question becomes, since we agree on that, and we know we're moving in the wrong direction. What precisely is Trump going to do from a policy perspective? Or more importantly, what are you advising him to do? To get it moving in the other direction so that real wages are going up? Not the nominal where it's like, yes, I'm making more dollars. That one, obviously, I'm not saying for you, I'm saying for the audience.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 3:22Tom Bilyeu?

  But so that the, the dollars I'm making sure are more, but in terms of what they buy, it is less. So real wages is where it's like, hey, the actual difference between how much I'm making, how much something costs has changed and I'm in a more powerful position. Okay, how do we get there?

• 3:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, I break it into five kingdoms of macroeconomics. If you look at a big macroeconomics textbook, you've got five sections in there. At least if you're talking about the US and developed countries. First section is taxation. Second section is government spending. Third section is monetary policy inflation, all that stuff. Fourth section is regulations. And fifth section is international trade. And I sometimes add one piece through strength, which is defense, security, sometimes. When I look at those five grand kingdoms, I look at, let's say, Joe Biden. He's a loser in every single one of them, just, just across them. Trump, in his first term, cut personal income taxes, cut corporate taxes, 100% expensing,

• 4:20Speaker 01

  cut the death tax dramatically in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. He did a great job on taxation. On government spending, he did the defense stuff that was pretty good. He reduced the rate of increase of spending there until it came to COVID. And then he blew it on the COVID. But even when he blew it on the COVID, he did get the vaccine in Operation Warp Speed by within 10 months, which is pretty impressive, by the way, they were expecting eight or nine years there. If you look at his monetary policy, he was 1.5% inflation during that period there. That was what he had there. If you look at regulations, he decontrolled energy, he decontrolled healthcare price transparency.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  I could go right to try, he did all of that stuff, which is pretty cool on regulation. And on trade, I'd love to talk about trade data, it'd take a longer, but he, all the deals he did in his first term were lowering tariff barriers, lowering quotas, lowering restrictions on trade, not increasing them. The Japan deal, the USMCA, the South Korea, the Brazil, and the Colombia ones were all freer trade, not less. This term, he got the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. He got no tax on overtime, so all those guys, all those firefighters in California and all the people in Palestine, Ohio, who spend 80 hours a week at 9/11, you know, do all the work and take all the risk, he doesn't, you don't tax the living crap out of them

• 5:45Speaker 01

  anymore, you're not going to tax them for putting in 90 hours a week at the highest rates. Interest on loans should be tax deductible, as long as interest income is taxable, interest loans should be. Tips. Why in the hell should you spend a billion dollars trying to collect a million dollars from tips? There's just some things that are just not worth it. He did that as well. What he did, he put in workfare in there, he put in the medical price transparency and the big beautiful bill. He put in a bunch of other things there that I won't go through the details on, but are all pretty damn good. What I see him doing on trade is trying to negotiate to get better free trade deals. That's my belief, he's a free trader all the way, he just loves to negotiate them to

• 6:29Speaker 01

  reduce their tariffs. We have much lower tariffs than any of the other major countries, and he wants them to bring theirs down. And that's exactly, and the deregulation, I mean, he's doing that really well. So I think in the five grand kingdoms, Trump is an outlier. Doing really well on taxes, government spending. I think he's doing well on monetary policy, on regulatory policy, and on trade policy. And I think his use of trade to negotiate peace, like in Ukraine, like in China with Taiwan, like in the four countries in Africa that he's done it, with Pakistan and Afghanistan, what he did in Gaza, you know, he really knows how to leverage those types of tools to bring the peace down. He is very Reagan-esque

• 7:12Speaker 01

  in every respect, except his personal demeanor. He is a CEO. Reagan was soft-spoken, was lovely, high. Reagan was as radical a revolutionary as Trump is. I mean, my godfather was Justin Dart, who was head of Reagan's kitchen cabinet. Believe me, he was Donald Trump. He was a CEO. Donald Trump is doing all the right things there are to be done, and I couldn't be more happy than I am about how he's doing it. So that's my story. I'm sticking to it. Let me give you an example where I was wrong and some of my advice to him. He scared the hell out of me on trade. He scared me to death. And, you know, I've just seen-

• 7:57Tom Bilyeu?

  Because of the tariffs?

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to other, you know, just whenever I see a president getting involved in that stuff, I'm like, here's the depression. You know, 1929, when they passed the smooth-holly tariff in the fourth quarter, the stock market fell by 35% when it was signed into law by Hoover on June 30th, 19, June 30th, 1930, the market fell to 13% of its previous high. Unemployment rate, it's really bad. I was there in the White House when Nixon put in wage and price controls, when he did the 10% import surcharge, when he excluded foreign made capital with a job development credit. I was there, I watched the country go to hell in the hands of these president guys. Don't know straight up from second, they're really

• 8:40Speaker 01

  bad. And, you know, there ain't no lesson to be learned from the second kick of a mule. And so when I hear a president talking about using trade, I'm scared. He called me, now this is a true story, he called me, I think in 2019 at home. It was in the evening, early. I had not had my first bourbon yet, but I was preparing at Maker's Mark a little bit, oh, I love it. And he said, Arthur, I want to talk to you about trade. I'd love to, sir. He said, you know, I'm a free trader, you know, basically, I've known him for a long time, not well. I've known him, but not well, I'd never sat down, chatted with him, I don't know. And, you know, he ran an international company, and I believed him always to be a free trader.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  I don't know of any CEO of a big company that's not a free trader. Fred Smith, all the rest of them are all free traders. And I then said, in addition, anyone who imports two foreign wives has to be a free trader. He didn't giggle, by the way, Derek. And what he said to me was the following, he said, you know, if you look at the major countries in the world, the US is the freest trade big country. Now, maybe you get the Isle of Man, you maybe get Jersey, Jersey and Sark, or Monaco, or maybe Hong Kong is freer trade than we are, but we are a really free trade. It all came about from World War II. At the end of World War II, we granted all of these combatants, both hostiles and friendlies, the right to use protectionist trade legislation to develop their infant industries.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  We allowed them to do that, but they never gave it back. And as they grew and finally became big, they have all these tariffs against America, we have very little against them. That's, that's what's called reciprocity. He said, there's also another thing that is there too as well, which is called, which is called leverage. When you look at these countries, these countries, big countries with large markets have a lot of leverage over little ones because they don't bear the gains, they don't bear the loss of the gains from trade nearly as much as the other. The point here is that everyone's hurt in a trade war. Everyone is.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  No one wins in a trade war, but they don't all lose equal amounts. And little countries, especially little relative to the US, lose more than we do, so it gives us a leverage factor on them. The last thing is, today it's flexible. You know, back in the days of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, you had to pass legislation. It took you two, three years to get the coalition. Finally, you passed it there. It takes equally as long to undo it. It's just a very cumbersome, inflexible thing. Today, with executive orders, he can raise a tariff on you today, cut a tariff on me tomorrow, you can get a tantrum and put a tariff on Ford in Canada, that guy who runs Ontario, and then drop it the next week because he gets cool tariffs. Yeah, it's flexible. So reciprocity, leverage,

• 11:31Speaker 01

  and flexibility are new features of the trade system. What he tried to describe to me was these three features gives him the ability to negotiate other countries to lower their tariff barriers here. He said, "I'm going to scare the bejabers out of these people, get them to come to the table to negotiate freer trade deals with them." That's what he said to me, literally, "I'm a free trader." And I've watched what he's done, and I've seen what he's done. He has done exactly that. He uses international trade as a negotiating tool to achieve all sorts of global good objectives in the system. So that's where I am on Trump on trade.

• 12:13Tom Bilyeu?

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• 12:54Tom Bilyeu?

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• 13:35Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:20Tom Bilyeu?

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• 14:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for sticking around. Let's get right back into the action. What's the metric that you look at to decide whether it's net effective or net problematic?

• 14:52Speaker 01

  What the final results I expect to be.

• 14:56Tom Bilyeu?

  As of when? Like, how long are you gonna give this?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  But there is no moment. With Trump, it's like a Calistoga or Conestoga wagon coming down a mountain with rocks that's sort of with no driver. You know, it's gonna be bumpy, bumpy. If you think the harmony is gonna be achieved next week... Think again, it's just gonna be a new issue, a new bang thing. He keeps disrupting, he negotiates. He is a change agent all the time and you don't need a change agent forever. But when the dust settles and the smoke clears, I think we're gonna have a much freer trade world, a much more peaceful world. I think he's gonna solve the Ukraine-Russian situation. I think he's gonna solve the China-Taiwan situation. I think he's gone long distance on solving the Gaza-Israel type of situation, Hamas.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I think he's gonna do all these other ones. And I'm watching what he's doing and how he's doing it. And every day and every way, I'm getting a little bit more optimistic on how he uses these tools. He is a CEO, he is not a pollster in charge. He's not a other thing. He takes these tools and negotiates and brings them to achieve really good results is where I come out on trade with Trump. That's, now, I think in three, five years, and I'm sorry, I'm eighty-five years old, because you're probably twenty-seven or something like that, I don't know how old you're.

• 16:16Tom Bilyeu?

  Twenty-six, yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Okay, twenty-six. All right, you're gonna live a wrong time and you can flip me off ten years from now and I may not be around, but I'm gonna be around. But I mean, the dream is that we're honing in on the horizon effect, which is a freer trade, more peaceful world. The way Reagan left us after NAFTA, I think Trump is gonna leave us with much lower tax rates. He's gonna get that tax rate below twenty-eight percent. He's gonna get the corporate rate, I would guess fifteen, fifteen on all these. He's just pumping all the time, moving us in that direction. Bing bang on the rocks and everything in that wagon, but I am really excited. But it's the horizon effect I look at. And the same one I did with Reagan. Remember, we didn't get the twenty-eight percent tax rate until nineteen eighty-six.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I mean, he had been in office five-plus years before we got that. No, we passed that bill ninety-seven to three, which is amazing. We got every lib Democrat to vote for our bill to cut the rate down to twenty-eight percent, to raise the lowest rate to fifteen. I mean, how did Reagan do that? He did it by just working his tush off all the high there. Hello, hello. But

• 17:25Tom Bilyeu?

  Did he though, or was it that he actually was able to deliver tangible prosperity? Cause my concern with Trump is that what we're seeing is somebody who talks a Reagan game, but really is erratic and that sort of it's I'm all over the map. I'm using this as a weapon and I buy into the way that you describe it. But in terms of how it's playing out in reality, it the tariffs have turned into an incredible cudgel. They've generated billions of dollars, maybe even hundreds of billions of dollars so far.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Well, you'll enjoy a piece I'm writing in the Wall Street Journal this week that'll come out this week. You'll enjoy it because it's what you do with that money.

• 18:02Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah. So I'll be very eager to hear if you've got anything you want to tease us with now, but

• 18:06Speaker 01

  I'll tease you with it right now.

• 18:08Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  I'll hit the right. They say, what should you rather do? Give money to people who don't work or cut tax rates on people who do work?

• 18:17Tom Bilyeu?

  Uh, I would rather cut tax rates on people who do work. And that is not true. There's no way you believe that. Arthur, you know better than that. There are people that are angry right now. There is a cross, a cross world study. Hold on. You've got to hear this.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  I'm not going to do a poll, but you go ahead and give me the poll number.

• 18:35Tom Bilyeu?

  That's right. If this, you know enough people.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  When you say Arthur, Malay always yells at me when I talk to me. Professor, Professor. I said, look at, remember I'm on your side. I'm I'm just pushing you a little bit, but I'm not.

• 18:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Which I same here, but there are people. If, if you map socialists as people that want to help the poor, you will be eternally confused. If you map them as people that want to hurt the rich, they will suddenly make all the sense in the world.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. You're right.

• 19:04Tom Bilyeu?

  But that means they don't want to vote for things that are going to help the wealthy. They don't want to vote for tax cuts for people that are making money. They want to get more money so that they can give it to the people who are struggling.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Something when you were started, you said politicians, all they care about is can they maintain any power?

• 19:22Tom Bilyeu?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Now, let's take a look at what happened when Reagan cut tax rates. He didn't give it out in handouts. Reagan didn't do that. He cut tax rates. He cut the highest rate from 70% to 28%. That's not chopped liver, guy.

• 19:35Tom Bilyeu?

  No, it was huge.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  He cut the corporate rate from 46 to 34. He got rid of, I mean, the capital gains tax was way, way down.

• 19:40Tom Bilyeu?

  But didn't you say it was 12% GDP growth?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's 12% in 18 months. We grew at 8%.

• 19:47Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, Trump is not giving us that.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  No, but he is. It's just starting. Reagan was able to do that because he caused a recession, depression in the first two years. And almost all of that was just bounce back in first part of 83. Trump did not make the mistake of phasing in tax cuts. He didn't make that mistake. So therefore, you're not going to get the huge bounce. But those growth rates right now are 3+%, 4%, and I'm telling you, they're going to come in 4%, 5%. You're going to get real serious growth. And when that stuff starts hitting, then you're going to start seeing people, woo, dancing in the streets, you know, tussles and tousles all over Baton Rouge and all this stuff. It's going to be, oh, it's going to be a party time in the US for a while. It'll be the 20s.

• 20:30Tom Bilyeu?

  All right, so you really think that we're going to see that kind of tangible growth for the average?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  Not 12% in 18 months.

• 20:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, no, you were clear, 4%, 5%.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  4%, 5%, 6%, the bounce back's not going to occur, but the rest of the Reagan period was huge, too. We won the election in 84 with 49 states. I told you, I was on the executive committee of the Reagan-Bush Finance Committee, which is fairly cool. I was the only poor person on it. All the rest were billionaires. And I worked with Reagan really closely. I knew Reagan very well. He'd come over to the house for dinner. I've known him forever and ever. My godfather was his best friend. I've always gotten my positions in life through privilege, not through earning them. And I love it for getting privileges much more for fun than actually having to do the work. And you look at what happened with Reagan, and you saw what happened. Reagan could have won President of the World. Mondale was a

• 21:24Speaker 01

  great guy, but don't run against God. You're going to get hammered. We even were able to get that silly guy, George Herbert Walker Bush, elected in 88 because of the Reagan coattails. What a loser he was. I mean, Trump is right on that trail there, not as dramatic, but the down wasn't nearly as dramatic either. When he came in, it wasn't a 12% unemployment rate. Reagan had it go up to well over 10%, I think. So, I am very much in the camp that when these or the smoke clears and the dust settles there, you're going to see a very bullish economy. You're going to see a stable currency and it may not be the dollar as we know it. It may be some tether dollar or something like that. He's going to do the inflation.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  The people he's going to appoint to the Fed are going to be really good, good price rule people like Paul Volcker. I mean, you know, all these things are coming together in a very cool way. And, and, you know, I'm amazed at the guy, given what he's gone through, but, you know, he, he doesn't ask his staff, what should I do? He tells his staff what he's going to do and what they have to do to stay, keep their jobs. And that's the way he should be. He's not a pollster in general. He's just not, he doesn't look at those polls. You know, if he did, scare the hell out of himself, but he doesn't. And he's just doing the right thing.

• 22:45Tom Bilyeu?

  Talk to me about the Fed. I want to know, what's the right thing there?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  The right thing you do is use a price rule. Which I went back and what we did prior to 1913, we defined a dollar. And what you had is the supply of money adjusted to the price level. You know, that's what you did back before that, and it did perfectly. What you need is a price rule, the way Volcker did it, was he looked at spot commodity prices. And if they were rising too rapidly, he would sell bonds in the open market, take money out of the system, reduce the Fed's balance sheet. And then if it was going down too fast, he would do just the opposite and expand the Fed's balance sheet. And sooner or later, if you stabilize spot commodity prices, the price level stabilizes right along the way. Exactly what we did from 1776 to 1913 was a price rule.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  It happened to be gold and silver from 1776 to 1913, which worked really well. Uh, this time you can just use the CPI or something else. That's just what Volcker did and, you know, when Volcker did it, the inflation rates, I mean, I told you it was 21 and a half percent prime, double-digit mortgages were 15%. He brought it down to way down. I mean, if you just look at it, the inflation just collapsed. And that's what I think the Fed people are being looked at in terms of doing that. And structurally reforming the entire Federal Reserve system. There's no need to have 400 PhDs of Larry Summers at the Fed being employed there.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  We don't need 400 PhD economists at the Fed. Believe me when I tell you that. These people should try to get, there's been huge uh uh uh creep in the uh in the functions of the Fed, and it's been ruining the system. We need to really structurally change it, and I think that's what he's gonna do.

• 24:31Tom Bilyeu?

  Given that we are-

• 24:33Speaker 01

  You, you should be very excited by this.

• 24:36Tom Bilyeu?

  That's what they're gonna do?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I think they're gonna do that, yes. I mean, I'm, look, I'm great at forecasting the past. I'm a lot less good at forecasting the future, but I have no choice here. I have to, and I think that's what's gonna happen. The next Fed chairman is gonna really rock and roll and shake the foundations of the Fed.

• 24:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, that's-

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Very happy.

• 24:58Tom Bilyeu?

  That is, the way that you describe it in terms of effectively um steering by price is interesting. Uh, I'm gonna set that aside for now because I don't, my intuition is that's not where we end up. So, when I look at the, we have fiscal dominance, so the government spending and debt obligation is so massive, we can't raise rates. Um, and we are going to have to print money because we don't have, Trump is not interested in balancing the budget. So, you've got, we know we're gonna be running hot. Right now, we're 2 trillion roughly a year. Uh, so that's gonna have to be printed to make up for that.

• 25:41Tom Bilyeu?

  And, given that, and he's screaming for Jerome Powell to lower rates, which is, from where I'm sitting, absolute insanity. That is going to uh flood the market with even cheaper money. You're going to get bubbles. I think we're already in a massive AI bubble, uh, and I think that that's only going to get worse if we lower rates. Um, so, that, given that that's what Trump is signaling, what is it that makes you think instead of doing that, we're going to get a Volcker-style?

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Now, now I'm gonna use inside information with you, if you'll forgive me. I've known Trump for long. And uh, I, you know, he's been very successful in many, many ways, comes up there, not to that-

• 26:32Speaker 01

  You've got to take Trump seriously, but not literally. And I think you're taking him literally when you sit there and say, right, you know, what Trump does is he is on all sorts of sides of all issues. But he uses the chaos and the mayhem to be able to get things through and to get them done. When I look at what Trump's plan, when I look at what he's going to do, is he wants lower inflation. He wants inflation to be effectively zero. Does he want the real return on capital to be zero? No. I mean, when you look at, let's say, the end of Clinton, when the 10-year was yielding four-plus percent, and it's yielding four-plus percent right now, all right?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  The composition of our four-plus percent right now is probably two-and-a-half percent inflation, and then the real yield, the tip's yield, is probably one-and-a-half, something like that. When you had Clinton, it was just the reverse. What you want to do is you want to have a very high real return on capital, which is the tip's yield, and one you have a very lower expected rate of inflation. Those two rates always move in the opposite direction. And I think what we need to have is a Fed that stabilizes the value of the dollar. So that a price level now, a dollar bill is worth today what it will be worth next year, five years from now, 100 years from now. We need a monetary system like the gold standard was in from 1776 to 1913. That's what we need.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And I think that's the direction we're going to go. When I look at the lessons of Paul.

• 28:04Tom Bilyeu?

  How are they going to do that, though? Are they going to re-peg to gold?

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Well, no, I think they're going to use a spot commodity price index, or they may use some of the some of the cryptos. I mean, they're talking about all sorts of things, not just conversations. I'm not saying is it Trump or not. I don't know. But there are all sorts of things of a crypto dollar, where you have a tether for a dollar, where you know, you guarantee it's stable, you know, a stable coin. You can design a currency today with crypto to guarantee it's stable in value. You can do it. And you can do it with complete confidence of its secrecy, because if you read Singh's book on code. You can make codes that cannot be broken. And the blockchain is a way of guaranteeing that you don't have the double payment problem.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  I mean, all of these things are there and available now that have never been around before. I mean, the dollar bill was an amazing creation back in 1913, whatever it was. And we're now at one of those right away. And I just see market forces bringing that in. And any government that doesn't take advantage of that's stupid. And if this government doesn't do it, which I think it will do it. You've got places like Bucol's El Salvador. You've got places like Malay's Argentina. You've got all these other places in the world that are all doing it. And, you know, we can't fight this thing of change of getting a stable currency. You just can't. And it's like the dollarization of the world.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Back in the day when the dollar meant something, we had dollarization, but we don't now. Now, they can cure the dollar. They can, or they can allow us alternatives to come in and provide an alternative currency that's stable and valuable. I love that these cryptos are coming in and challenging the dollar. I just love it.

• 29:57Tom Bilyeu?

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• 31:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Thanks for staying tuned. Now, let's get back to it. And when you say "take advantage," are you talking about building a Bitcoin reserve?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Well, I don't even think you need a reserve, no. I just think Bitcoin can do it itself. Now Bitcoin does not...Bitcoin is a fixed quantity, or at least supposedly a fixed quantity of something. When you have a fixed quantity, the prices vary. So Bitcoin serves beautifully as a store of value. That's true. But when you see something like Tether and some of these other ones, they have a fixed value and the quantities vary. You have a price primal and a quantity duel. With Bitcoin, you have the quantity is fixed and the prices move. With a stablecoin, you have the quantities move and the price is fixed. And what we need is a stablecoin for transactions purposes. And in that regard, we don't need to have reserves.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  You know, we don't need to do that. The Bank of England ran the gold standard for two centuries without having effectively any reserves except for a transactions volume of that. It just, you don't need it. You just let the quantity of the entity vary. And we can do that really well by making sure it's stable in terms of goods and services. The way you do that is you can take it like Tether in terms of dollars and then it have a pay interest on that or allow the currency to appreciate by the amount of inflation. And it ain't rocket surgery. It can really be done quite simply. You and I could sit here, I'll do the programming, you do the computer stuff.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  We can make that program and just guarantee that we have a currency that is stable in terms of goods and services in prices. Forever and ever, amen. Why not now? I mean, and they're doing it. It's not, back 15 years ago, there was none of this. Now it's all over the place. There are 55 stable coins being, and you want to have the competition amongst these alternative cryptos. I mean, you really do because it's great. One does something, then another one, and they compete, get the, the consumer gains all the gains from competing crypto stable coins and crypto value coins. So you see where I'm coming from. And you understand what I'm talking about.

• 33:53Tom Bilyeu?

  I do.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  And I read, you know, the math on this stuff. I mean, you can make it completely secure and you can make it take care of the double payment problem. Bingo blockchain is incredible. I mean, and they can do now blockchain trades 43,000 a second. And they're going up to 200,000 a second. I mean, it's a, you remember when you have to go to the store and put your card in that machine and you wait? Don't pull it out yet. Beep, okay, you pull it out. That's just clearing it to make sure you take care of the double payment. You write a check, your bank doesn't let you use it until they clear that check with the other guy's account. That'd take five days. All of that's gone. All of those transactions are gone.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  This is a period of incredible efficiency gains in the marketplace and transactions. And I watched this happening before my very eyes and I'm just blown away. I'm 85, but I can't believe this. I mean, the world is really, I'm just ecstatic by what the world is creating. Ah, well.

• 34:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I know I'm going against your pessimism, but I do like your logic. Your logic is much better than your feelings, by the way. Your logic is super high. You, you just want to be pessimistic. Did you beat your little sister or something when you were a kid? Or I'm just joking with you.

• 35:11Tom Bilyeu?

  The, the funny thing is, uh, I am a extremely optimistic person by nature, but I have to ground, I don't trust my emotions, so I always ground it in logic. And the problem is that when I think up from first principles, um, I take the exact opposite of you, which is that the math does not justify your optimism. I've tried to anchor us in terms of what the difference is in the base assumption. So you think everybody will just migrate to crypto. I do not.

• 35:44Tom Bilyeu?

  Because they didn't migrate to assets. Crypto right now is best understood as an asset. Now, the reason that I say that.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  No, no, that's only Bitcoin.

• 35:51Tom Bilyeu?

  I know you're gonna bear with me. The reason that I say that is because their life is not set up to make that an obvious thing that they understand from the time that they're born. And so now they have to learn about it and they have to migrate themselves over to that system. And I'm saying that they're busy trying to make ends meet, trying to fall in love, you know, trying to keep their head above water. And the reality is that they...

• 36:18Speaker 01

  That's not the first principles. That is the second principles. You believe that people are emotionally incapable of doing the right thing.

• 36:24Tom Bilyeu?

  That literally is first principles. The human mind works in a certain way.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  I think that's the opposite.

• 36:30Tom Bilyeu?

  You're falling prey to man as economic animal and you are not.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  I am the Darwin of economics. I believe...

• 36:35Tom Bilyeu?

  Perfect. Then you will agree wholeheartedly that humans are an emotional creature first and foremost. We do not think through things logically. We are emotion based. So, listen, there has been a study where...

• 36:46Speaker 01

  We don't jump off cliffs.

• 36:48Tom Bilyeu?

  Well, first of all, yes, we do when people get depressed enough. But if you selectively damage the area of the brain that is responsible for generating emotion, a human being will cease to be able to make a decision. So, they can tell you why you should have fish instead of beef. And then they won't be able to, when you sit them down, say, "Do you want fish or beef?" They won't be able to decide. We use emotions as the thing that propels us in a direction. So, given that, anyway, we could lose a lot of time there. But I'm 10 toes down on that's first principles.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Before we started, I said I had a story for you on first principles. And let me tell you my story on emotional people.

• 37:26Tom Bilyeu?

  Let's hear it.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  I looked and I asked myself, "Where's the most socialist state in the nation?" And I came to the conclusion it has to be Massachusetts. And I asked my, "What's the most socialist city in that state?" Cambridge. "What's the most socialist institution there?" Harvard. "What's the most socialist moment there, department there?" Sociology. "And what's the most socialist moment?" And it's in the front lawn of the sociology department at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Bernie Sanders is giving a speech, Elizabeth Warren is "hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo", in the front row. Everyone's going along this stuff. So, what I did, I went to my house. I got some pillowcases. And I packed them full of $20 bills.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  Tied a little dot. I went over here to Nashville BNA, the airport, flew to Logan. I got off there, I got an Uber, took me right over to Cambridge. I went right to Harvard University. I went right to the sociology department. I went to that lawn where Bernie Sanders was giving his speech. And I got one of those fold out chairs, all these people were tearing off their clothes, screaming and hollering, redistribution, red flags, all this run, Bernie's hair was flopping back and forth. And so I stood up on this little chair, there was a slight wind blowing. And I opened up the pillowcases full of twenty dollar bills. I threw them all, and they floated over the crown. And there, with twenty seconds, every one of those twenty dollar bills was picked up. Every single one. They are as capitalist incentive based as anyone.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  All of their emotions went to the wind when one of them has a girlfriend. And the other one wants to share that girlfriend with the first one? Uh-uh. They're like all the rest of us. They live on those incentives. They just like the emotional crap of this, but when push comes to shove, we can manipulate them with perfectly good economics all day long and twice on Sunday. I love that story, by the way. It's hypocritical.

• 39:23Tom Bilyeu?

  Obviously. It is fun. So, again, any theory has to describe the world that I actually see. And the world that I actually see is a UK that's fallen on its face, is Argentina that has struggled for over a hundred years because they actually embrace socialist policies, is a world where you had the USSR, but it fell only to be replaced with Putin. You've got China, that Mao, which, God, I want to ask you about Mao, since your time there in the seventies. Mao killed tens of millions of people. These things actually happen. They actually take control of people.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  You're right. Are we Mao? Are we China?

• 39:59Tom Bilyeu?

  The thing, well, we're getting there.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think so. That's where we do disagree. I think that's the real disagreement.

• 40:06Tom Bilyeu?

  Really fast. Let me just put a bow on that, and then we'll debate that. So the bow on that is that America is historically, from just a number of years that humans have existed, it's a total anomaly. From the fact- That every empire before it has collapsed, it's literally right on cue. We're now marching towards 130% debt to GDP. So you, you look at all of this stuff and we fit the historical patterns. No one before us has ever escaped and kept doing the right thing. Everybody does debt and money printing until they collapse. Literally everybody, more places have lived under tyranny than have lived under a thriving democracy. So it's like you put it all together and that tells me that humans are a certain way.

• 40:49Tom Bilyeu?

  And from where I'm sitting, we have an opportunity to get out of this death spiral, but we will not get out of this death spiral by going, ah, this thing, it's all going to work itself out. So I'm like, no, this isn't going to work itself out on accident. We are going to have to really get into this. Now, the reason that I say that-

• 41:05Speaker 01

  That's what I do. I'm an activist. I'm a policy shock. I'm not someone who sits back and waves my hands and says, oh, don't worry, it'll take care of itself. I'm in there every day fighting Prop 13, all the tax cuts. All those were my babies. I worked on them to get them to go there. I am an active change agent. So I'm not someone who just sits back and goes woo hoo.

• 41:24Tom Bilyeu?

  Now that is for sure inarguable. Now, I will say-

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I go in there and I think we're going to get it changed in the right direction. That's my thing. I'm working on it day and night. Property tax limitations in almost every state in the nation. Getting that tax rate down to 15% per federal tax. And I think I'm going to get that, you know, 15% corporate tax. I think I'm going to get that. I'd love to get, I mean, I think we're going to get a lot of these. Trump gave me credit for price, healthcare price transparency. That's one I really were. I was chairman of the board of the Centennial over here. I saw how crappy the system was. So I'm an activist and I'm a revolutionary. I'm just not a commie. I really believe in using incentives. I think the commies are cute little stupid people and they don't know, they don't know what they're doing.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  And they act in one way, like the picking up the $20 bills and protecting their girlfriends and shoot this. But their behavior, their, their speeches are just silly. And I listened to AOC, I listened to this one, you know, there and Bernie Sanders, I dare him to debate me. I dare him. I dare Sayez or Piketty. I've asked all, come on, let's do it. Manu we mano, let's go through it. They won't, and for obvious reasons, they won't. They'll lose their shirts. I've had about five debates on income inequality and each one of one and the other side concedes. Duh. I mean,

• 42:48Tom Bilyeu?

  That's awesome.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  It's just common sense. It's just common sense. And then I try to go in there to policies and you see how I explained it with regard to a check versus lowering tax rates. You see now, like, and the numbers really do bear me out. And, you know, I've been pretty successful presidents, pretty successful with Argentina, with Chile, with all those, the rules, my students down in Chile there. You know, those are the things I try to do, and I think we're winning on this one. And I think we're going to win big. I know you're going to be really rich. You're going to be really happy. Do you have kids?

• 43:20Tom Bilyeu?

  I do not.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Oh, see, I've got six kids, so you can tell what an optimist I am.

• 43:25Tom Bilyeu?

  And what, 14 grandkids, two great grandkids, something like that?

• 43:29Speaker 01

  Or great grandkids, yes.

• 43:30Tom Bilyeu?

  It's amazing, man.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  You've been kicking it in my diary, haven't you?

• 43:33Tom Bilyeu?

  Of course, of course.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  But isn't it just, I mean, I've just never been happier.

• 43:37Tom Bilyeu?

  That's amazing, and I will say that comes across, and Lord knows, I hope that I am as energetic and sharp as you at 85. Uh, it is thrilling to see somebody with your experience.

• 43:50Speaker 01

  Dick Cheney, one of my dearest friends, but a classmate of mine at Yale, Dave Gergen just by, they both co-croaked recently. I mean, get all these people, Lieberman, all, all of my classmates at Yale and all in there. I, if I want to talk with them now, I have to use a Ouija board. You know, it's, I mean, but I'm going to live a lot longer and I'm going to really enjoy the project. And we're going to have a thing there where you're going to say, you know, Dr. Laffer, you were right on those issues.

• 44:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Oh, Lord knows, I hope. So, uh, speaking of issues that I want to see, uh, who is mapping this correctly? So I think that we are starting to make choices much like China. We're taking positions in companies. I think that is a very big mistake. Um, what's your read on the Intel situation and some of the other companies?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And we did, we took it on us, us, what was the one that Obama did, that one that sun, that sunlight shine one, what was it? Solyndra. He did it in Solyndra, the big government buyout of that. Intel's just a lousy thing that they did it in Columbus, Ohio. They did all the buyouts and everything. They gave them so much money, the government did Ohio as well as. Federal, all of them did until, and they're a loser. They, they fell behind and they became dependent on that. I don't like the government taking positions in companies. It's very hard for them not to, given the size. I would love to shrink government back down to where it was in 1910. That's me. Uh, you know, 1910, the federal government was about 3% of GDP.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  You know, and at that time, we became the preeminent economic force on planet earth with 3% of GDP. It's a little higher than that today. I, I thought I'd mentioned that to you, just, I know you aren't aware, but the government's got a lot bigger. But I think we can shrink this quite substantially. Now, on the state stuff, I moved to Tennessee from California because it's the lowest tax state in the nation. Since I've been here, we got rid of the death tax and gift tax. We got rid of the unearned income tax. I'm trying to get a property tax limitation like Prop 13. You know what I did there in California with 13? I'm going now, working with Ohio. I'm working with Missouri. I'm working in all these states, non-stop. I'm getting good policies in. I think we're going to get government to be much smaller to 15, 20 years from now than it is today. That's me.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Now, I'm wrong a lot. I never tried to be wrong. I really, I am wrong a lot. You could just ask my first wife if you want to find out how bad I can be. Uh, but I really think I'm not wrong. And I really think we're at a big change in the US on bringing in free market economics back in. Your problems that you describe are true. But you know, the stock market, when I told you in 1973, was by law, you had to pay 34 cents per share traded. It's now zero. Airline de-control was amazing. Truck de-control was amazing. Energy de-control has been amazing. You should see the stuff that have happened there. You know, it used to be in America that you couldn't sell a product

• 46:46Speaker 01

  that was manufactured, except that these manufacturers suggested retail price. Discount houses were illegal. We then got rid of Hubert Humphrey, and we've now got discount houses all the hell all over the place. We are moving in the right direction and we're solving social issues. The bald eagle is back. My hometown, Cleveland, Ohio, Youngstown in Cleveland, two crappiest places. If God had come back to earth in the 1950s, and Jesus come back to earth, and had made the mistake of landing in Cleveland. To prove that he in fact were the Christ, he wouldn't have to walk on the water. Hell, anyone could walk on the water. He'd have to sink in the water back then. You know, today the water is clean. Kioga River is clean. Lake Erie has got the fish. I mean, it is amazing the progress we're making.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  L.A., three states smuggling. You couldn't go to school. People were there. All gone. The air in the Los Angeles basin is massively improved. I mean, I could take you through all these things. We are, still have lots of problems, as you point out very correctly. You're right. But the blackfoot and ferret is hopping around. You know, all these, we are making enormous progress. If you look at the air quality in this planet, it is improving enormously without those stupid goofballs in the, what is the something, a cord there, the quality air cord or whatever those people are. You know, we're doing it. We're getting there and the markets are adjusting and really providing this stuff.

• 48:12Speaker 01

  And I'm very excited about the future, as you can tell, but I think we're solving lots of problems. And we are have still a lot to go. You, I mean, debt is way too high. I will concede that to you here. I don't think it's rogoff high.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Twenty, eighteen percent of total net wealth is too high, but it's not, I'm going to kill my country. And especially when you see what's happening with the currencies and all that stuff. Well, you've heard me lecture there. And I'm just trying to fuse you with some of that lithium so that you two can see the stars, spangled banners and happiness and dancing girls and lights and shining and.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  You don't have to die to have heaven. You could have it here on earth.

• 48:58Tom Bilyeu?

  Awesome statement. Uh, let me ask, in terms of what you see going on in the stock market today, um, what do you make of that? To me, this looks like a liquidity, I'll say, problem where assets are going sky high because debt is so cheap. Uh, we've printed so much money. We, people are trying to escape inflation. Uh, and so when I look at, you know, a company like XAI, uh, raising money at like a hundred and fifty X, uh, my heart skips a beat, uh, because we're so detached from fundamentals. Uh, what do you see?

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Thank you. This is the best question of all. What we have seen happening over the last 20 years or so is you've seen private equity replacing stock market equity and for good reason, it's the regulations, it's all the taxes, all the treatment, everything like that. So the stock market is a smaller share of total wealth than it has been historically, if you look at it. And yet, all of a sudden, the stock market starts really going way up. I think I see what the stock market sees. I think I see a very, very boisterous, wonderful future. And the stock market is reflecting its expectations of higher profits and greater

• 50:16Speaker 01

  prosperity in the future. And, you know, stock market doesn't tell you what has been, it tells you what it expects to be. And I think the stock market is expecting the type of world I'm describing to you. And so therefore, I look at the stock market as reflecting what my view of the world is, rather than telling me a bigger problem is here.

• 50:38Tom Bilyeu?

  So when you look at the stock market, you don't think business fundamentals, that's not really relevant. This is more of a sentiment. Well, so we've got whatever, seven to 10 stocks that produce the entire performance, and those are detached from business fundamentals, certainly from anything historic. Not troubling. That's just a...

• 51:02Speaker 01

  You're using historical numbers rather than future numbers. And that's what I think. If you knew that there was going to be a huge boom in the economy next year, and that profits were going to increase tenfold, would you sell all your stocks now, or would you buy more?

• 51:18Tom Bilyeu?

  I'd buy more.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Thank you. I think that's what's happening. Now, I'm exaggerating, obviously, the numbers.

• 51:24Tom Bilyeu?

  But that's sidestepping the business fundamentals question, because I agree in that scenario.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  That's a business fundamental.

• 51:29Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  If you say that transactions costs are going to be gone, I mean, when you go buy things and look at all this, like, the huge, huge change in productivity that's going to come about by replacing all of these transactions and banks and clearances and all that stuff, it's huge by having transparency in healthcare prices.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  All of these things are going to be huge generators of productivity increase, I think. That's me. And I think the market's reflecting that.

• 51:56Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I'll say, once again, you and I agree on like the simple statements and then we take away very different conclusions.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  So. That's all right.

• 52:04Tom Bilyeu?

  Agree, I think that AI is going to be transformative in ways that we can't even imagine.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Thank you. That's what I do too.

• 52:12Tom Bilyeu?

  For sure.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  It's reflected in the stock market.

• 52:14Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, in a way that.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  What is Nvidia but that? I was a big investor in Nvidia in the beginning and then I got scared and I sold it four years ago. How stupid is that? But at least I held it for a lot of up. And by the way, I'm also, just for your viewers, I am not a guy you want to follow as market advice. If you follow my market advice, you're going to lose a lot of them.

• 52:40Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, I mean, so, well, I think that probably points out something fundamental which people need to understand, which is that markets are, first of all, they're gambling and second, it is people gambling based on emotion. Once you understand it's gambling based on emotion by people far more sophisticated than you, it becomes very difficult to make money if you're trying to trade. If you're just going to buy and hold, bet on sectors of the long run.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  I buy them. That's all I do and I still lose.

• 53:09Tom Bilyeu?

  Yeah, it all comes down to when you sell, but.

• 53:11Speaker 01

  Well, no, well, I, there's no money, no, it doesn't come down to that. I start losing the day my check clears. Yeah, I just keep, I could sell it any day and I still lose. But there is no money back guarantee with my statements about the stock market, just for the record. But I am very optimistic, as you can tell, and I am fully invested in the market, fully, fully, fully, fully, and I love it.

• 53:31Tom Bilyeu?

  All right.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  I've got all my trust funds for my grandkids and my great grandkids and I'm just wallowing in fun.

• 53:39Tom Bilyeu?

  Okay, so you and I both agree that we've got a shot at the future being incredible, but it's not going to happen by accident.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  No, it's not.

• 53:46Tom Bilyeu?

  What should individuals do, whether that's how they invest, how they vote?

• 53:49Speaker 01

  Give money to good politicians and get those politicians that want to shrink government, the lower tax rates, to free entered markets, decontrol the place, give them and get involved politically. People deserve the governments they get. And if you don't take care of that government, who does? Me? You know, come on. I'm working my tush off day and night to change government in the way you and I see the world. You've got to do the same thing. And so do all your viewers. Get out there and get in there and get and do the right markets. Get the good politicians in there. Get these guys out of bed. It's not Republican. It's not Democrat. It's not liberal. It's not conservative. It's not left wing, right wing. It's just good economics. You know, I'm a Kennedy Democrat. I'm a Reagan Republican. I'm a Clinton Democrat. I'm a

• 54:33Speaker 01

  Trump Republican. You know, I was a Gary Hart economist when he ran for president in eighty-eight. I was Jerry Brown's economist when he ran in nineteen ninety-two. He wanted to get rid of all taxes and put in two flat rate taxes, the thirteen percent on flat tax, if you remember that. I did that with him. I think Jerry Brown was cool. I wished he'd won. It's not party. Get your guys to get in there and become political activists because it's your future. It's your kids' future. It's everyone's future. Get them out there. If they aren't involved in politics, they don't deserve to have good results. How's that?

• 55:08Tom Bilyeu?

  That was amazing. Arthur, I cannot thank you enough for coming on. I can't thank you enough for all the books that you've written. Where can people follow you?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Right through you. You know, they can find me on the internet. I have a thing there. But I don't, I don't even do emails. I don't know how to do emails. I had a flip phone until Bucol's security people broke my flip phone. I had to get this new one and I'm butt dialing everyone all the time. I don't know what the hell to do with this stupid thing. And so there is a thing called the Laffer Center if they want to get involved with it. Ten sixty-five, I think it's called. And I have a firm here in Nashville, Laffer Associates, which is, but it's just small. It's just me and ten other peoples. But we do all the work we do here and we just put it on the line. And, you know, I have made a vow that I'd never go to work for government because once you pay a paycheck, you're an employee.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  And once you're an employee, you have an oath of loyalty. You know, I worked in the Nixon White House, as I mentioned to you in nineteen seventy to seventy-two. And I found out what I don't do well. I don't work for government well. But, but when I'm not there, when I go in with Trump or with Reagan or with any of the others, I never took a job with any of them. And I did get offered great nice jobs. But I didn't take them because I want to be independent and tell him what I think is right. I hold his confidences. You know, if he talks to me and stuff, I try not to listen to what he's gonna do. But I then keep my mouth shut about it and I, but I never operate against them in any way, shape or form. But when I see my colleagues and you know, my colleague at Yale, classmate of mine is married to Janet Yellen.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  I know all of them there. I know Austin Goolsbee, he has my position at the University of Chicago. I had tenured professor there as well. And I see them and these people, I mean, especially, you know, Romer, I mean, you know, Romer and Jared Burnsy and all these guys. They will rebut

• 57:02Speaker 01

  arguments they know to be true in order to curry favors with their political benefactors. And I'm not willing to do that yet. Okay, when I go in there, I talk with him, he hears what I say, he can't fire me, he can't hire me, he can't double my pay, he can't have my pay. He can yell at me. But all of that, so you know, it's like with you. You know, we can have a good, firm discussion, but you know I'm trying to be straight with you. You know that, and I'm trying to give you the best, and you make the decisions that you make and President, God knows he has ten times more information than I do. He makes, but all I want to do is make sure

• 57:44Speaker 01

  that he understands what I'm talking about, let's say in trade or deregulation or taxes, all that stuff. And make sure he understands and uses that in his calculations. I'm not gonna talk trash about him or good, I'm just gonna step aside. And that's what I view my role at in this work. Now, in state stuff, I go in and do tax plans and do all that stuff and campaigns and stuff like that. And I was very involved in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, as you know. And the eighty-six Tax Act was my paper, the complete flat tax that they use. Kemp, Casten, as well as Bradley Gettler with that. I really get involved in all that stuff, right down to the gritty. But I never take a job with a politician. And I never, ever, ever, once they pay you, you're an employee.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  And then you gotta say nice things about your boss even when he does it wrong. I was with Nixon as George Schultz's right-hand person when I was 29 years old, 30.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  I remember telling my mom, I said, Mom, you won't believe it. I just wrote a speech for Nixon. Mom, I wrote a speech for the President of the United States. I mean, he loved the love, he only changed two words, Mom. Only two words he changed. He said, wherever it is, he put his not, and wherever I put his not, he put his. But Mom, it's my speech. And I learned, you know, that that's not where I belong is in government. I belong outside giving really what I consider measured, correct, base advice. And then I go home, play with my Great Danes and my family and my kids and all that. But you, you follow me? It really, you get, you get, you get, you get co-opted when you buy into being a government official.

• 59:27Speaker 01

  You do. And you're completely right. They want power and power and power. My job is to just blow up all this, all the positions of power till we, we get to the world that you and I really want. Is a 3% of GDP government, state and local, one and a half percent, four and a half percent total. We have a low rates, broad-based property tax that never exceeds 1% of market value. You have an income tax or flat tax rate. That's it. And get the hell out of the way and let the markets solve the problems. Yeah, you're going to get problems. Free markets have problems all over the place. They do. But government's even worse than free markets when you talk about problems.

• 1:00:10Tom Bilyeu?

  Ain't that the truth? Arthur, thank you so much for joining me today. And I really appreciate it. Everybody at home, if you have not already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care, peace. Let's talk about a pattern that is guaranteed to be killing your progress. You know what you need to do. You need consistent nutrition. We all do. You need vitamins, probiotics, greens. We all know that we should be doing more of it. When your morning gets chaotic, you skip it. When you travel, you skip it. When your routine breaks, everything tends to break and that inconsistency compounds against you every single day. AG1 is designed to solve the execution problem. One scoop, eight ounces of water, and you're done.

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