Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 458: Fact Check: Trump’s UN Speech

Transcript

Episode 458: Fact Check: Trump’s UN Speech · Words & Numbers

• 0:00
  Today, on words and numbers, the CDC has a warning.
• 0:02
  Justice and forgiveness. DNA testing dogs.
• 0:07
  And fact checking the president. And as a bonus, what is a woman
• 0:11
  anyway? All this and more coming up on
• 0:13
  Words and numbers. Hi, I'm James.
• 0:15
  And I'm Anthony and. This is words and numbers.
• 0:22
  So what's new and exciting era this weekend?
• 0:24
  We've. Talked a number of times about
• 0:27
  the words and numbers backstage group on Facebook.
• 0:29
  Yeah. You know, after your recent
• 0:33
  announcement, we got a big spike in.
• 0:36
  The people showing and I wanted to on the one hand, I want to
• 0:40
  address a topic that came up there.
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  On the other, I want to give people who aren't familiar with
• 0:46
  it an example of the quality of conversation that's going on
• 0:50
  there. And this is a post by one of our
• 0:53
  listeners. I'm not going to call them out
• 0:55
  largely because I didn't ask them to begin with.
• 0:57
  Having said that, I'm going to call out another one later.
• 1:00
  But let me start with this. This was in response to our
• 1:04
  episode a couple of times ago when you were talking about
• 1:07
  Erica Kirk and the fact that she forgave the the guy who who
• 1:13
  killed Charlie. And if one of our listeners
• 1:17
  says, OK, hang on, there's a difference between forgiveness
• 1:21
  and justice. Justice requires punishment.
• 1:24
  Regardless of forgiveness, though, the matter of degree is
• 1:27
  important. The degree of the punishment
• 1:30
  should be determined by the principles of justice, not
• 1:33
  forgiveness. Now, I responded to that.
• 1:37
  But wait, if the person who has been wronged forgives, who's
• 1:42
  left to demand justice? All the rest of us well, but OK,
• 1:47
  so in this is the quality of the conversation.
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  This person comes back right and says the wrong is not just to
• 1:53
  the person but to all of society.
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  In a larger society, there's an interest in seeing that the ACT
• 1:58
  is dealt with from society's perspective.
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  Such a perspective includes seeing that some moral balance
• 2:04
  is restored and the person is prevented from committing more
• 2:06
  harm. None of this precludes
• 2:09
  forgiveness and all of that sound.
• 2:12
  This is a great conversation, but it leaves me with this
• 2:16
  nagging question. Have we not just taken with that
• 2:19
  argument? Have we not taken a big step
• 2:21
  down the path that ultimately, ultimately leads to victimless
• 2:25
  crimes? I don't think so, although I
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  understand why you could make. I understand how you could make
• 2:32
  that argument reasonably given the circumstances, right?
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  So I don't think it's a crazy thought.
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  I, I would back up and say that there's a certain class of
• 2:43
  crimes that are so horrific that they must be punished.
• 2:48
  And, and I'll give you a quick example from the world of
• 2:51
  philosophy. Immanuel Kant, somebody who
• 2:55
  exactly nobody really wants to read because it's a chore.
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  But Kant said if society were to disband, its last act before
• 3:04
  disbanding should be to execute all the murderers.
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  And there's a point there. There's, there's a very
• 3:10
  reasonable point there, right? Because we're dealing with
• 3:15
  certain crimes. And I'm thinking of murder and
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  I'm thinking of sexual assault and especially child sexual
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  assault, right, which has incredibly high levels of
• 3:25
  recidivism. Some things are so bad that you
• 3:31
  can't turn away from them. You have to take the head on.
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  OK, so I have to ask you, are you saying that you can't turn
• 3:40
  away from it because of the moral status of the crime or are
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  you saying we can't turn away from it because this is a crime
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  that this person may commit again?
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  So in some pre emptive sense we want to prevent that from
• 3:56
  happening. My answer to that would be
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  clearly both. OK, because in, in the second
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  case, I can agree with you and, and I would say, look,
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  regardless of whether this person who was wronged has
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  forgiven, the fact is we've got a person here who has
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  demonstrated the capacity to commit a crime and to commit it
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  possibly. Again, it's in society's in
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  direct interest to put this person away.
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  And that is specifically to prevent future victims.
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  But let me let me take a a hypothetical and it it might be
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  hard to come up with an actual example, but the hypothetical is
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  you've got someone who is committed a crime that rises to
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  that very high moral level that you're describing.
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  And yet there is no chance here of recidivism forever.
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  Whatever reason, this person will never commit this crime
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  again. And here let me, let me, let me
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  paint a picture for you that makes exactly this point right.
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  A man gets incredibly intoxicated, let's say four
• 4:58
  times the legal limit, and drives his car through a
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  farmer's market, killing fourteen people.
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  Little did we know, there's a pill that you can take that will
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  make it so you can never be drunk again, and he's just going
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  to take that pill from now on. Do you let him off the hook?
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  OK, well 2 two things. First, let's suppose that he
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  kills only one person and that person forgives him.
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  OK. And and he's going to have.
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  Not that, not that person. Specific, right, right.
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  Yeah, sure. Yeah.
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  The people who have been wronged for.
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  Forgive him and for the reasons you describe, this is not a
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  crime that he would ever commit again.
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  I don't see the argument for society stepping in and doing
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  something. And, and I get I hear the words
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  of society has this larger calling to deal with this from a
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  societal perspective. But it really bothers me because
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  that is exactly the argument that you make when you outlook,
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  when you make things victimless crimes that, for example, drug,
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  drug possession isn't harming anybody except possibly the
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  person who possesses them. And yet we make it a crime
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  because we claim that society is somehow harmed.
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  Yeah, but society is in fact harmed by murderers and rapists
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  and thieves. Right.
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  But if the harm has been done, it's not going to happen again
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  and the person's been forgiven. What about the educative effect
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  on future murderers, rapists and thieves?
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  OK, but are we then misusing the justice system as a teaching?
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  Tool. Look, there's only a couple of
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  ways right to view the justice system. 1 is a teaching tool, 1
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  is a reform tool, and 1 is a punishment tool.
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  And reform seems not to work that well, but does under
• 6:58
  certain limited circumstances. Punishment works literally every
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  time because you punish people for what they did.
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  And the educative effect, I think, is an open question.
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  Yeah, and how many? People will how many people will
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  say I'm not going to kill that person because I know when
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  Johnny killed that person he went to prison for the rest of
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  his life. Oh, OK.
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  But when you talk about using the law to educate, and I've
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  heard actually a lot, a lot of people on both the left and the
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  right make that argument. Can I, can I change my word?
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  Yeah. Can I change my word?
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  Because educate doesn't seem right.
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  Inform. Sure, sure.
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  Right. It's somewhere in the middle of
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  it. It's a, these words form a
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  cloud, right? And the one I'm talking about is
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  kind of in the middle of that cloud.
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  I've heard someone, I was in a debate actually with someone
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  who, an economist who made that argument in defense of the
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  minimum wage. He said, yes, I'll grant you all
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  of the unemployment effects. You're talking about the
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  negative things. But the fact is, when we raise
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  the minimum, when we impose a minimum wage, we we elevate in
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  people's minds that indeed labor has value.
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  But labor does have value, right?
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  Sure. But that to me, that's an abuse
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  of the law. That's not what the law is for.
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  Well, let let me ask you this what's the negative externality
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  of locking up murderers? The negative externality,
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  putting aside recidivism. Yeah, it's just what I mean.
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  You you seem to be telling me that there's a problem locking
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  up murderers. What is it?
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  No, I'm saying, I'm saying if you have someone who is not
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  going to murder again and the person who was wronged has
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  forgiven, in my mind, society has no call to to be saying
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  anything here. Yeah, I think we have found yet
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  another one of those things that you and I are just going to
• 8:56
  disagree on all the way down. But I will say this, maybe
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  people don't realize it yet, but if you're watching on YouTube
• 9:03
  and you're at the very end of the episode and you see that
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  there's like 9 more minutes and you don't know what the hell
• 9:09
  that is. That's one of us telling a
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  story. And I got I've got 1 today that
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  exactly hits what you're talking about here.
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  All right, so all right, we'll, we'll leave this the
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  conversation for the end then. Yeah, and and for our time on on
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  backstage where I suspect emotions will be whipped up over
• 9:30
  over this, I want to talk about Ant a surge and and I'm going to
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  lose half our audience just with the first 3 letters that come
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  out of my mouth. The CDC, OK, everybody who's
• 9:44
  still here can continue listening, warns of a surge in
• 9:48
  dangerous, highly antibiotic resistant bacteria.
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  And man, are we going to catch everybody in this particular
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  net? It's like a 450 percent, 460%
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  surge from 2019 to 23. Holy hell.
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  As someone who, as you might remember, Aunt damn near died
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  from an infection, people. I don't know if we ever
• 10:15
  announced it per se, but I was septic some years ago and rushed
• 10:19
  to the hospital and bad bad things happened and and lots of
• 10:23
  antibiotics flowed into the Harrigan body for.
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  All and if you want to see it, it's actually recorded for
• 10:29
  posterity. James James and I were in the
• 10:32
  middle of an interview on something like CNBCI, don't know
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  what it. Was no.
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  It was an C-SPAN. That's right.
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  C-SPAN. That's right, yeah.
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  And the camera went on me and they immediately cut the feed
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  and two seconds. Later I was lean this way.
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  And then the next thing I know, I was in the hospital.
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  But anyway, we've got a 460% spike in in this and you know,
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  we used to say we'll put the article in the show notes and we
• 10:58
  can't, we don't say that anymore because we don't have show
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  notes. More on that next time Ant opens
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  his mouth. No, I I mean that in the
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  literal. I know, I know.
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  I have more on that next time you open your mouth.
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  But here's where it gets really weird because we all know that
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  over prescription of antibiotics causes this sort of thing to
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  happen, right? The the viruses or the pardon
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  me, the bacteria become I've, I've tipped my hand there a
• 11:32
  little bit. The bacteria become resistant to
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  the antibiotic. And, you know, Americans, myself
• 11:39
  among them, complain a lot that you can't just go down to the
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  Walmart and pick up some antibiotics.
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  You can do this in almost every other country I've ever been to.
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  And and yet when things like this pop up, you say, well,
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  maybe nobody should be able to get antibiotics all that quickly
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  because look what happens. But Aunt, do you, do you still
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  remember the years I told you we got the 460% spike?
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  You said 2013 to 2024, is that right?
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  You're exactly right. It was 2019 to to 2319.
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  So there, there you go. And what happened during those
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  years? COVID.
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  That was COVID. And at the beginning of COVID,
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  doctors were prescribing antibiotics like they were going
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  out of style because they didn't know what we were dealing with.
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  And they they didn't know it was a virus.
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  And there is no virus that responds to any antibiotic.
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  So keep your conspiracies to yourselves.
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  And yet the conspiracy theorists among us would not be without a
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  point here because it was it, it was a by product of COVID that
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  yielded this outcome. And this is one of those
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  unintended consequences you and I talk about.
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  And this one's a particularly thorny and horrible unintended
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  consequence. It's I I found it interesting on
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  almost every level. We can't, you know, at the time
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  we didn't talk that much about COVID because you really you
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  couldn't. People are getting cancelled
• 13:17
  left and right for saying all sorts of things.
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  I, I made a, a video on the number of people who were killed
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  by COVID versus versus killed by the fact that, that they had
• 13:29
  less access to hospitals. And I went over with a fine
• 13:33
  tooth comb everything I said in that video before it was
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  published. And even then I was nervous
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  about it. Well.
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  I, I remember those times and, and, and honestly, you and I
• 13:42
  don't talk about healthcare much.
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  We talk about science in the beginning of the episode quite a
• 13:47
  bit because it's fascinating, but we tend not to talk about
• 13:50
  healthcare that much because we don't understand it all that
• 13:53
  well, right? We're love to make statements
• 13:57
  about these things. But I will tell you, I was in,
• 14:00
  you know, I was in the hospital ostensibly for COVID early on.
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  This was May of 2020. And there's a whole sequence of
• 14:07
  events that that led up to this. And they put me in the hospital
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  and they immediately say COVID and they take the tests and the
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  tests don't come back. They're coming back negative,
• 14:19
  but they're still saying COVID. And they put me in the COVID
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  ward and they start giving me whatever the drugs were that
• 14:24
  they gave for COVID. And it was an interesting thing
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  because it was in this hospital they had jury rigged, which
• 14:31
  everybody was doing at the time. These blowers, one in the in the
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  window that was all taped up with plastic bags that sucked
• 14:38
  air out of the room and blew it to the outside.
• 14:41
  And then other ones in the doors of tubes and so forth that lets
• 14:45
  the air back in. And if if you were to design A
• 14:49
  room that would give you COVID, it would be this.
• 14:53
  Put somebody in this room on a floor with a bunch of people who
• 14:56
  had COVID. But the long and short of it is
• 14:59
  I ended up with quadruple pneumonia for a reason that had
• 15:03
  nothing to do with COVID. What the hell is and quadruple
• 15:06
  pneumonia? That's the four lobes of the
• 15:08
  lungs. I'm saying 'cause I'm sitting.
• 15:11
  Here thinking you only have two lungs, you know.
• 15:13
  Yeah, there's something about lobes.
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  But here's the thing, I I'm there and I'm getting worse and
• 15:18
  worse and they've got me on the oxygen.
• 15:19
  They can't get the numbers up despite the fact it's like 100%
• 15:22
  of oxygen. You know, it's blowing my hair
• 15:24
  off as it's like, but, but finally they listened to my wife
• 15:28
  when she said, but it's not because of COVID.
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  It's because of this other thing that was going on when they
• 15:35
  finally listened to her and they said, oh, this is just
• 15:38
  pneumonia, and they treated it as pneumonia fixed overnight.
• 15:43
  Yeah, I, I remember that and and you were in rough shape maybe,
• 15:49
  Yeah. Because I had untreated
• 15:51
  pneumonia, everybody was saying COVID.
• 15:54
  Maybe that's a story you can tell after an episode too,
• 15:57
  because it's actually, it's actually quite hilarious.
• 16:00
  But I, I remember and I, I got very sick a couple of three
• 16:03
  months thereafter and I had literally every symptom of COVID
• 16:09
  and I could barely breathe. And I, it was really rough and
• 16:13
  it got so bad that nobody would come into the, my office and I
• 16:17
  wasn't allowed out of it. They would leave I'd.
• 16:20
  Forgotten that? Yeah.
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  Remember the the family, My wife would leave meals at the door on
• 16:25
  a tray. Yeah.
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  And she, she wouldn't even come in.
• 16:29
  And it, it never occurred to me to go to the hospital because
• 16:32
  nobody was getting well going to the hospital.
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  So fuck it, I stayed home. It's going to end how it's going
• 16:41
  to end. And that's just how it's going
• 16:43
  to be anyway. And this, of course, brings us
• 16:46
  to the foolishness of the week. And this, my friend, is a very
• 16:50
  special week because two things are so stupid that I couldn't
• 16:56
  pick between them. The first I'm getting both of
• 16:58
  them. Yes we are.
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  The 1st is, and I believe I said I was going to cover this in a
• 17:04
  previous episode and then just promptly forgot.
• 17:08
  So here we are here in my home state of Arizona, a state that I
• 17:14
  have come, as you know, to love quite deeply.
• 17:17
  There's a, a young woman named Jacqueline Taylor.
• 17:20
  She bought a condo down in in Phoenix or Scottsdale, which is
• 17:24
  the the very nice version of it. To me, that entire area is
• 17:29
  simply Phoenix. But there are multiple towns
• 17:32
  down there, right? There's people that realize this
• 17:34
  Phoenix is the fourth biggest city in the United States.
• 17:36
  There's like 5 million people lurking around there in the
• 17:40
  middle of the desert. Peggy Hill on King of the Hill
• 17:44
  referred to it as a testament to man's hubris, which I think is
• 17:47
  exactly the right description. But poor Jacqueline Taylor's got
• 17:51
  herself a little tiny dog the way that young women do, the
• 17:55
  kind that you could probably carry in an oversized purse.
• 17:58
  So it's not a dog as much as it's a pet rat, but it's her pet
• 18:02
  rat, and she loves it. But she's in a condo and condo
• 18:06
  means homeowners association, and apparently the HOA there was
• 18:11
  taking issue with dogs pooping in the common areas.
• 18:16
  Now Jacqueline says, A, dogs are not pooping in the common areas
• 18:21
  and B, my dog never does because I take him over to this other
• 18:25
  place to do his business. So one way or the next seems no
• 18:30
  big deal to her. Until the HOA decided.
• 18:33
  And here's where it gets really quite wonderful.
• 18:36
  And anybody out there who, like me, lives under the auspices of
• 18:40
  an HOA will immediately understand the busy bully nature
• 18:45
  of this bullshit that they're pulling.
• 18:47
  They declared that every single dog in the condos had to be DNA
• 18:55
  tested so that so that when one of them had the temerity to poop
• 19:03
  in the common area, they could DNA test the poop and match poop
• 19:09
  to culprit. How much does Adna test cost?
• 19:14
  $150.00 Mandatory. Wow.
• 19:19
  And you can only imagine that if they match the illicit poop to
• 19:26
  your pet, there's going to be more fees after that.
• 19:30
  Wow, that's funny. This is why you got to ask
• 19:35
  around about an HOA before you move in.
• 19:38
  Yes, people, I ran across a quote.
• 19:41
  I wish I'd had it because it was beautifully written.
• 19:44
  I believe it was Harlan. Was it Harlan Elson?
• 19:48
  You would know the quote. I don't think it was Harlan
• 19:50
  Nelson, but it was, oh, it it was the one about the one about
• 19:58
  government doesn't make, in effect, busy bullies.
• 20:01
  Rather, they're attracted to to government.
• 20:05
  Yeah. Oh, now I've completely botched
• 20:08
  the whole thing. I should.
• 20:09
  Have looked it up, we'll edit this nonsense right out.
• 20:14
  Right out of the episode. Anyway, I I myself aunt as you
• 20:19
  know, live in an HOA. In one day they decided to send
• 20:24
  me an unsigned letter so I couldn't respond demanding I
• 20:30
  paint my house. And then when I painted my house
• 20:34
  $10,000 I had to take down all the lighting fixtures and it
• 20:39
  turns out they were all shot. They had to be replaced outside.
• 20:43
  100 and 3500 and $45 each. Go ahead, ask how many there
• 20:48
  were. Outside Lights, Good Lord
• 20:52
  10152900. So the local HOA board ended up
• 20:59
  before, you know, by the time you're all done with everything,
• 21:02
  it ended up costing me like $15,000 because some Jackass
• 21:06
  walked by my house and went, wouldn't it be great if he
• 21:09
  painted that? But but look in a microcosm.
• 21:13
  In a microcosm, that's the problem we have so often in this
• 21:16
  country of somebody walking by a problem and saying, oh, wouldn't
• 21:19
  it be good if that problem didn't exist without
• 21:22
  understanding any of the downstream ramifications?
• 21:26
  And people point out, somewhat rightfully so, that I had to, I
• 21:31
  had to. I voluntarily joined the HOA
• 21:34
  when I bought the house. Now that's actually correct.
• 21:36
  I did join. It wasn't exactly voluntary.
• 21:41
  If I wanted this house, I had to join.
• 21:44
  And it turns out if I wanted any other nice house in this entire
• 21:48
  city, it was coming with an HOA. Yeah, it's interesting how how
• 21:53
  things that in theory would not be coercion start to appear like
• 21:58
  that under certain circumstances.
• 22:00
  Sure felt like it to me when I had to paint the damn house and
• 22:03
  spent $15,000 but but anyway. Don't, don't leave the topic.
• 22:08
  I've got the quote. It's Frank Herbert.
• 22:10
  Frank Herbert says power attracts pathological
• 22:14
  personalities. It's not that power corrupts,
• 22:17
  but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.
• 22:20
  Well, that seems to be the case with HOA boards.
• 22:23
  Yeah, I'm, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about running for my
• 22:26
  own HOA board just so I could be a colossal pain in the ass to
• 22:31
  everybody who wants to do anything.
• 22:34
  I want to join the board and just say no every time a vote
• 22:38
  comes up. No matter.
• 22:39
  What? That's how Ron Paul got elected.
• 22:42
  Well, it's worth the thought. I did think about running for
• 22:44
  Congress on exactly that platform, that no matter what,
• 22:48
  I'm voting no. Get words and numbers on
• 22:52
  civil.com and on Civil's TV and mobile apps.
• 22:56
  Regular episodes are free. Sign up for an annual membership
• 23:00
  to support our show and for access to member exclusive
• 23:03
  content. I did say, Aunt, that there were
• 23:06
  two foolishnesses this week. Go ahead.
• 23:11
  We're we're we're going to England.
• 23:13
  And we rarely do this. We rarely talk about England.
• 23:17
  But you know, England has fallen apart.
• 23:19
  You've seen it lately, right, with people getting arrested for
• 23:22
  speech and things like that. But apparently the city of
• 23:26
  Bristol have solved all of their other problems because the City
• 23:32
  Council has decided that they have to from henceforth refer to
• 23:38
  women as quote, people with ovaries UN quote.
• 23:43
  All right, now this is England, so I have to ask, to whom does
• 23:46
  this apply? Is it just people?
• 23:48
  With ovaries, no. No, no.
• 23:50
  Who's the directive? Is it people in the government
• 23:53
  or anybody who lives there? The city of Bristol and, and
• 23:57
  I'm, I'm sure that it, I'm sure there will be tragic overreach.
• 24:02
  With this So what about the other people?
• 24:04
  Is it people without ovaries? That's.
• 24:09
  Left to the imagination, given the news stories I've read.
• 24:14
  And then there's a further problem.
• 24:16
  They don't want to use the word maternity anymore, referring to
• 24:21
  all of it as paternity, not seeing that there's an obvious
• 24:25
  problem with their own logic in their own context doing that.
• 24:30
  But no. And we've gotten to the and
• 24:32
  we've gotten to the point where nobody is willing to say men and
• 24:37
  women anymore. And you know what?
• 24:40
  I am. There are men and there are
• 24:42
  women and that let's just be realistic about these things for
• 24:46
  the love of God. People with ovaries, you've got
• 24:50
  to be kidding me. But this is a beautiful example
• 24:55
  of what we talk about often, the importance of first principles.
• 24:59
  The first principle is it's the thing you hold dear, from which
• 25:03
  logically, other things follow. And if you don't operate from a
• 25:09
  basis of first principle, you very quickly end up as the city
• 25:13
  of Bristol is with contradictory holding 2 opinions that are
• 25:18
  mutually contradictory because neither one of them is based in
• 25:23
  some principle. Yeah, I, I don't know what the
• 25:25
  Hell's wrong with these people. And I, I honestly, I don't care.
• 25:28
  They, they, they need to stop. Apparently the backlash against
• 25:32
  the City Council in Bristol was severe and unmistakable.
• 25:37
  So I'm not going to sit here and tell you that the English have
• 25:40
  lost their collective minds, they have not.
• 25:43
  But the Bristol City Council surely has, and I I suspect
• 25:48
  there will be a different composition of said council
• 25:50
  sometime after whatever they have for elections there.
• 25:54
  Oh my God, I love it. I refer everyone back to Frank
• 25:57
  Herbert's quote. It is not power that corrupts,
• 26:00
  but it is magnetic to the corruptible.
• 26:03
  Yeah, and there we are. The the week, the week of two
• 26:07
  foolishnesses. Or is it 3?
• 26:09
  No, no, it's 2 this week. What prompts our topic this week
• 26:15
  or a couple things, but but first amongst them is again on
• 26:19
  our Facebook group, Words and Numbers backstage, one of our
• 26:23
  listeners, TomTom Wisnowski, who has listened to all at the time
• 26:29
  of his writing, 457 episodes, which I've lost track of how
• 26:33
  many episodes we have now, now that we're coming out twice a
• 26:35
  week. About that many he's listened to
• 26:38
  all of. Them he's listened to all of the
• 26:40
  episodes thoroughly enjoys it, but he calls us to task not for
• 26:44
  criticizing the president, but for quoting headlines.
• 26:50
  And I think he's got a point here.
• 26:54
  And we we call other people to task when we write op eds and
• 26:59
  they only read the headlines. Well, two, two things.
• 27:03
  That's right. We do, I do.
• 27:05
  I will read you out loud the the headline of various things I'm
• 27:09
  looking at as a snapshot of what's to follow.
• 27:13
  But that second, the second thing is, is more important.
• 27:16
  And it it's where Tom is maybe more right than even Heath, than
• 27:22
  even he thinks. Because you and I know too well
• 27:26
  that, you know, we've written some 300 editorials, and we have
• 27:29
  named exactly none of them. The titles are always written by
• 27:33
  an editor. Yeah, right.
• 27:34
  And when I was an editor, I wrote titles over and over and
• 27:37
  over again, even though I wanted desperately to respect the
• 27:41
  wishes of the authors who submitted the work to me for
• 27:44
  publication. You know, authors write lousy
• 27:48
  titles. Authors of great articles write
• 27:50
  lousy titles. And they, you know, you need
• 27:52
  something punchy that will get people's attention, which is by
• 27:56
  definition, maybe a slant on the truth of the story.
• 28:01
  So Tom's not thought a point here.
• 28:05
  Now, I, I do my best to give what I think is an honest take
• 28:11
  of the thing. I'm sure I get it wrong
• 28:14
  sometimes. I don't think I get it wrong a
• 28:17
  lot but but sometimes I'm sure I do.
• 28:19
  Yeah, one of the discussions that came up was had to do with
• 28:24
  the executive order and flag burning.
• 28:27
  And I actually had a back and forth, a nice conversation with
• 28:31
  a couple of people on backstage about that, where I, I actually
• 28:35
  found the executive order and put it there.
• 28:37
  And there were still, even though the words were right
• 28:39
  there in front of us, there was still a reasonable disagreement
• 28:43
  about what they meant and not none of us being lawyers, we
• 28:47
  couldn't say anything other than, you know, some people are
• 28:50
  interpreting it one way, some people interpreting it another.
• 28:53
  Yeah, one of the things that came up today was that and I, I
• 28:58
  don't know if this was Tom, I don't want to put words in
• 29:00
  anybody's mouth, but there were a number of criticisms in the
• 29:03
  same thread. And I, I think some of them were
• 29:06
  more valid than others, but they all had something to offer.
• 29:09
  And I appreciated seeing them, if you could believe that.
• 29:13
  I responded to a couple, but one of the, the criticisms was that
• 29:19
  we should use more conservative news outlets than we do.
• 29:24
  And I, I, I, I disagree with that primarily because I don't
• 29:29
  go out of my way to find a partisan outlet for news.
• 29:34
  I go out of my way to find the news itself, right?
• 29:38
  So if we're going to criticize something, let's just pull one
• 29:42
  out of the air that Donald Trump said.
• 29:44
  I want to see the film of him saying it because people abuse
• 29:48
  the quotes so badly that I don't.
• 29:52
  I don't know when I'm looking at a more partisan news source on
• 29:57
  either the left or the right, if they're being honest with the
• 30:00
  source material at all. So I go out of my way to to find
• 30:04
  when I can. And you can't always.
• 30:08
  And I know for a fact that when we get into numbers, you go to
• 30:14
  the source material. We're not reading through an
• 30:19
  ideologically biased lens. That doesn't mean that our
• 30:23
  biases don't appear. It just means that at most
• 30:29
  you've got one level of bias. Ours right and, and I, I freely
• 30:34
  admit that I am as biased as anybody else, but I think that
• 30:40
  by admitting it, I can work on it and.
• 30:43
  I try real. Hard to work on it.
• 30:45
  I think I can give unbiased opinion.
• 30:48
  Everybody's biased now. Some people are.
• 30:51
  Some people are blatantly, unapologetically biased.
• 30:54
  Now that's a problem, but you know, for the rest of us to try
• 30:57
  to get it right, this is where this is where open, respectful,
• 31:03
  civil discourse is so incredibly valuable to us.
• 31:07
  And we were talking just before we started that.
• 31:09
  You know, we've been doing words and numbers for seven years plus
• 31:13
  now. And we've never had a, a guest
• 31:18
  who's hard left, not because we don't want one.
• 31:21
  We actually really, really badly want one to have a conversation.
• 31:26
  And we ask. But as people seem to be, at
• 31:29
  least everyone we've reached out to is more interested in pushing
• 31:32
  an agenda than in having a conversation.
• 31:35
  Yet they will not come. The leftists, for whatever their
• 31:38
  reasons, will not come. And that doesn't mean that I'm
• 31:43
  going to present their opinion. Why would I do that?
• 31:47
  I'm going to present what I think is the correct opinion,
• 31:51
  which I would do, which I do all the time.
• 31:53
  When right wingers come on the show, we push back on them when
• 31:57
  we think they're crazy, but left wingers won't even come on.
• 32:01
  Well, along along those lines, one of our listeners sent me a
• 32:06
  link to President Trump's address to the United Nations.
• 32:11
  Can. I start with two other things
• 32:13
  with the UN thing before we. Get there one.
• 32:16
  Of them matters and one of them doesn't.
• 32:18
  But there were two criticisms, 2 things that happened at the UN.
• 32:23
  The first, you probably saw it. Trump and his wife Melania
• 32:27
  walked up to the escalator and went to get on it and it stopped
• 32:31
  working and everybody lost their minds.
• 32:35
  Look what they did to him at the UN.
• 32:38
  Look what they did to him to embarrass him or make him fall
• 32:41
  this kind of crap. And then when he walked out on
• 32:44
  stage, and this is the one that matters, the teleprompter didn't
• 32:47
  work. I saw that, yeah.
• 32:50
  Right. And look, if you're going out to
• 32:53
  speak in front of a large room and you've got certain points
• 32:56
  you are absolutely going to make, you need something in your
• 33:00
  hand or on a screen, right? People.
• 33:03
  Usually. But people have given speeches
• 33:06
  with their remarks typed up in their hands for hundreds of
• 33:10
  years, since the typewriter, I dare say.
• 33:14
  But it turns out that it was White House staffers,
• 33:18
  apparently, that we were responsible for both of these
• 33:20
  things. Oh really?
• 33:21
  Oh, really? The escalator.
• 33:23
  Too the escalator too. Yeah.
• 33:25
  And and I only say apparently because the UN did the
• 33:31
  investigation, but you I'm not hearing a whole lot of pushback
• 33:35
  from the White House saying that's not true.
• 33:37
  It was all on you, which you would I think if if it were
• 33:41
  otherwise. But remember when we talked
• 33:44
  about the speech he gave that the beginning of it was without
• 33:49
  assistance of a teleprompter? And then at some point in the in
• 33:53
  the middle of a very long speech, he said, oh, and by the
• 33:55
  way, it's working again. And I want to say something
• 33:58
  relatively kind, which is probably going to make heads
• 34:01
  explode about Donald Trump. He is really good in front of a
• 34:06
  room, right? Even if he's saying things I
• 34:10
  disagree with, he's engaging, he's entertaining.
• 34:15
  He is fully committed to what he's saying.
• 34:18
  He's a very good public speaker and I I think that in no small
• 34:23
  part made him president twice. But well, this anyway, I I got
• 34:28
  the the link to the video and not only did I watch it, I
• 34:33
  downloaded the transcript so I could get his exact words and
• 34:37
  get them right. But but our this, our listener
• 34:40
  sent this with the, with the statement that if you watch this
• 34:44
  video, which I have, you'll see that he front loads it with lots
• 34:48
  of economic facts. And the question to us is how
• 34:54
  much of this is true, how much isn't?
• 34:58
  And so I'm just doing a some fact checking here.
• 35:01
  Now to go back to your original point about data sources.
• 35:04
  And, and I don't say this enough, I guess I should, when I
• 35:08
  quote numbers here on words of numbers, they're coming from the
• 35:12
  sources. So it's either Bureau of Labor
• 35:15
  Statistics or Bureau of Economic Analysis or is the Fed or
• 35:18
  whatever it is, it's not, let's say today.
• 35:21
  Right. Let's take a deep breath.
• 35:23
  They come from the very government that Donald Trump
• 35:27
  sits atop. Yeah, yeah, right.
• 35:31
  This isn't this isn't some wing nut out there saying we hate
• 35:35
  Trump. How can we cook the books to
• 35:37
  make him seem worse? Yeah, Now along those lines,
• 35:40
  someone can still argue with the numbers, but the but the hurdle
• 35:46
  becomes much higher because if you're going to argue with the
• 35:49
  numbers, it's not, it's not an argument of well, that numbers
• 35:53
  has been misquoted. It's an argument that the
• 35:56
  literally hundreds of analysts, fact checkers, data collectors
• 36:02
  have somehow gotten together to produce an incorrect number.
• 36:05
  I'm not saying that doesn't happen, I'm just saying that.
• 36:08
  That that that doesn't happen. What does happen though, and
• 36:12
  this is something we've talked about a number of times, is that
• 36:15
  certain things are notoriously difficult to measure.
• 36:19
  And yes, how you, how you choose to measure them will have a
• 36:24
  noticeable effect on the number you get at the end.
• 36:26
  And the perfect example is unemployment.
• 36:29
  Who counts? And if you're, if you're out
• 36:32
  there saying, well, unemployment is better than it's ever been,
• 36:35
  it is it who counts as as as unemployed right now?
• 36:41
  There's a bunch of people. How's it defined?
• 36:43
  Yeah. A A bunch of people are no
• 36:45
  longer applying for work. They're so discouraged they
• 36:47
  don't count in that number. That seems to be a problem.
• 36:51
  Why? Because they're unemployed,
• 36:55
  right? And you see the difficulty here.
• 36:57
  But if they're not looking for work for whatever reason, you
• 37:01
  can't really count them because that doesn't get you to the
• 37:06
  heart of what unemployment is trying to measure.
• 37:09
  Yeah. And now that you mention it,
• 37:10
  James, it reminds me of we talked some years ago about
• 37:15
  infant mortality numbers. Now that seems to be a very easy
• 37:21
  thing to measure, right? Because you've got, you know,
• 37:25
  pregnant mother or newborn baby and death.
• 37:28
  And yeah, but these are binary conditions, right?
• 37:31
  Right. Yeah.
• 37:33
  But it turns out even that is hard to measure when you are
• 37:36
  comparing across countries because for example, in some
• 37:41
  countries, if a child is, if a child dies all the way up to age
• 37:47
  one or two, it's counted as an infant mortality.
• 37:51
  Whereas in the USI believe it's a matter of months.
• 37:53
  I forget what it is, three to six months or something older
• 37:56
  than that. It's not an infant mortality.
• 37:58
  There's also the also the problem that the better and you
• 38:02
  have this in the United States, the better your Healthcare is,
• 38:06
  the more likely a woman is to come to term with a sickly
• 38:10
  child. Whereas if the child dies in
• 38:12
  utero because you have worse healthcare, that doesn't count
• 38:16
  as infant mortality, right? But if your left does come come
• 38:20
  to birth and dies, then it does. And anybody who's dug into this
• 38:24
  ends up squarely looking at a problem.
• 38:28
  And that problem is, is that infinite mortality, for whatever
• 38:32
  the reason, is very high in the United States compared to third
• 38:36
  world countries. The hell.
• 38:40
  Yeah, yeah. And people point to that and
• 38:42
  say, see, that's that's because of your bad healthcare or
• 38:45
  whatever it is. No, it's evidence of very, very
• 38:47
  good healthcare actually. And and and any number of data
• 38:54
  points have this kind of difficulty woven into the
• 38:57
  collection. But nonetheless, let me let me
• 39:01
  go to his talk and I've pulled out a number of the factual
• 39:05
  things. He says a lot.
• 39:06
  He says a lot of things that were opinion and I'm not, I'm
• 39:10
  not looking at those one way or the other.
• 39:12
  I just want to look at the things he said factually.
• 39:15
  And he starts off by saying we are rapidly reversing the
• 39:20
  economic calamity we inherited from the previous
• 39:23
  administration, including record setting inflation, period
• 39:28
  inflation like we've never had before.
• 39:31
  Now all. Right, So I want to be clear.
• 39:33
  I want to be clear. We're starting with the
• 39:36
  incorrect things that he said, I take it.
• 39:39
  Oh no, this is. This is just in chronological
• 39:41
  order. Oh, OK.
• 39:43
  So we're going to have, I'm guessing some that are nowhere
• 39:47
  near the money and some that are on it.
• 39:49
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So.
• 39:52
  So I have two, two points here. We're rapidly reversing the
• 39:55
  economic calamity we had inherited from the previous
• 39:58
  administration, inflation like we've never seen before.
• 40:00
  And on the one hand, he's absolutely right that inflation
• 40:03
  is coming under control. However, two things worth
• 40:08
  noting. Inflation started coming under
• 40:11
  control under the Biden administration.
• 40:14
  And you can point to that and say, yeah, but we inflation
• 40:17
  became a problem under the Biden administration, which is
• 40:19
  absolutely correct, but it became a problem as a
• 40:23
  consequence of all of that COVID spending that occurred in the
• 40:29
  first Trump administration. Yeah, now and, and help me out
• 40:34
  here for a minute. The the calamitous inflation
• 40:37
  that we had and it it look, we had pretty bad inflation.
• 40:41
  It peaked to like 10%, roughly 10%.
• 40:43
  What? What was the inflation back in
• 40:45
  798080? One, it was about the same.
• 40:49
  In fact, no. One was higher, I think it went.
• 40:51
  To 1415%. That could even that can't be
• 40:54
  right because I remember being able to get a certificate of
• 40:57
  deposit for 17%. Yeah, you're correct.
• 41:00
  So maybe it went even higher still, but nonetheless, we,
• 41:03
  we've seen much worse inflation. But here's, here's my point
• 41:07
  here. Firstly, it's incorrect to blame
• 41:10
  all of that inflation on the Biden administration when in
• 41:13
  fact it came about because of things that were going on during
• 41:16
  the first Trump administration. And secondly, it's it's kind of
• 41:20
  incorrect to say that he's got it under control when in fact it
• 41:23
  started coming under control well into the Biden
• 41:26
  administration. But above and beyond any of
• 41:29
  that, I wouldn't either blame or praise either one of them for
• 41:35
  this. This was not a presidential
• 41:38
  thing. This was, we had COVID, we had
• 41:40
  to do something. The thing we did, I think the
• 41:44
  better thing would have been not to have lockdowns.
• 41:46
  But given that we did have lockdowns, I think the second
• 41:49
  best was what happened. What happened necessarily gave
• 41:51
  us the inflation. I don't place blame anywhere
• 41:54
  here, nor do I. Well, if I'm going to place it
• 41:56
  anywhere, it's going to be on the Fed, but that's another
• 41:59
  episode. Yeah, we'll do that some other
• 42:01
  day. I'm with you.
• 42:02
  And we were pretty consistent being against the lockdowns.
• 42:08
  Yeah, yeah. Pretty, pretty consistent.
• 42:10
  And when they happened, we said now you're going to have massive
• 42:14
  government spending and when you do, it's going to be so massive
• 42:17
  that it's going to cause spiraling inflation and, and
• 42:20
  we're all going to have real trouble as a result.
• 42:23
  And and that's what happened. Yeah.
• 42:26
  I mean, OK, once you tell people they're not a lot out of their
• 42:30
  houses, certain things naturally follow.
• 42:33
  And understand here people are going to come back and say,
• 42:35
  well, you know, so you're saying we shouldn't have spent all that
• 42:38
  money. And my response is, no, we
• 42:40
  should have spent it given that we were having the lockdowns.
• 42:44
  It was given that. We were given that we were
• 42:47
  having the lockdowns, I'm not sure we spent enough.
• 42:51
  Possible, possibly. I mean, we, we came through
• 42:53
  COVID much better than any other country did, minus the debt that
• 42:57
  we incurred. But but a lot of people ended up
• 43:02
  losing their businesses. A lot of people ended up
• 43:06
  becoming homeless, right? The these were problems that
• 43:10
  emerged once you tell people you're not allowed to do
• 43:13
  business when you're shutting businesses down, people can't
• 43:17
  make a living. And we didn't give people enough
• 43:20
  to replace what they lost, right?
• 43:24
  So, you know, there was no good answer.
• 43:26
  Well, there was a good answer. Don't lock down the economy.
• 43:29
  Yeah, and but, but once that happened, the rest of it, it
• 43:33
  just all naturally followed. I don't want to take issue with
• 43:36
  what you said here a little bit. Inflation is not under control.
• 43:41
  Oh, more on that in a moment. OK, all right, I'll just, I'll
• 43:45
  just shut my mouth and let you go.
• 43:47
  Next, next statement. And again, this is just in the
• 43:49
  order that he said them. Under my leadership, energy
• 43:53
  costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are
• 43:57
  down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated.
• 44:02
  What's that phrase I'm looking for aunt.
• 44:05
  What is it? Bitch, please.
• 44:10
  I just saw one as I'm reading it.
• 44:12
  I saw one. I didn't look at the grocery
• 44:14
  prices. I'll pull those up right now.
• 44:16
  But here's what we do know. So he said the energy costs are
• 44:19
  down and not really. The price of electricity is up
• 44:23
  7% from this time last year. You know, 7%.
• 44:28
  You know, it's not double digit, which is nice, but it's
• 44:31
  certainly not down. It's up.
• 44:32
  Not insignificant. Yeah.
• 44:34
  Now he's right about gasoline. Gasoline is down year over year.
• 44:38
  It's only down 1%, whereas so many other things are going up.
• 44:44
  He often says, though, that it's under $3 a gallon, which is, I
• 44:49
  guess, not fair, is fair. We stick with this speech and
• 44:52
  this speech alone. Yeah, yeah, I think so.
• 44:55
  Mortgage rates, he said. Mortgage rates are down.
• 44:58
  They're actually up 2/10 of a percent from this time last
• 45:01
  year. Inflation has been defeated.
• 45:04
  Well, consumer prices are up 3% now.
• 45:10
  That's not the 10% we saw at the peak of 2022.
• 45:14
  So in that. Fed.
• 45:15
  But it's not the Fed's 2% goal, either.
• 45:19
  Not only is it not the Fed's 2% goal, it's not the 2% average it
• 45:23
  was prior to COVID. For decades, yeah.
• 45:27
  So 20, almost 20 years. Yeah, about that, give or take,
• 45:31
  maybe 15. Yeah, But so there, I'll say,
• 45:35
  yeah, I'll give him credit for the statement.
• 45:38
  Inflation is quote UN quote defeated in that it's no longer
• 45:42
  10%. It's now 3, but it's still 3,
• 45:45
  not 2, and there's no indication it's headed toward 2.
• 45:50
  And three is 50% higher than two.
• 45:53
  Yeah, right. Yeah, The pain to use 50% more
• 45:56
  than the pain of two. The only thing that's up is the
• 45:59
  stock market, which just hit a record high.
• 46:02
  In fact, it hit a record high 48 times in the last short period
• 46:07
  of time. I don't know what period of time
• 46:09
  he's talking about, but here's the numbers.
• 46:12
  S&P 500 is up 16% over the past 12 months.
• 46:17
  That's a good return. Last year it was up 32%.
• 46:22
  That's an. That's an even some.
• 46:25
  Might say that's. Twice as good somebody might say
• 46:29
  that. The.
• 46:31
  Nonetheless, 16% is pretty solid. 16% is is solid,
• 46:35
  particularly in light of the tepid economic news.
• 46:39
  The economy has been growing at a lacklustre pace.
• 46:42
  Inflation or unemployment keeps ticking up.
• 46:44
  Inflation, we can't get it back down to where it was.
• 46:47
  So all of that is kind of, you know, tepid to bad news.
• 46:50
  And yet the S and PS up 16% for the year.
• 46:54
  That's really good. Would be average.
• 46:57
  I didn't look at the Dow and I don't look at the Dow largely
• 47:00
  because when you look at the Dow, you're really looking at an
• 47:03
  average of a couple of very large companies.
• 47:05
  Yeah, you're just go look at those companies.
• 47:07
  It's 30 companies, but it's it's overwhelming.
• 47:11
  It's overwhelmingly, I think 5 or 6.
• 47:13
  Yeah, right. That's correct.
• 47:15
  Now S&P also has a similar problem.
• 47:17
  The S&P 500. Although it's representative of
• 47:19
  500 stocks, it's driven largely by A small subset of stocks at
• 47:24
  the top. You know, maybe we should be
• 47:25
  talking about the total market. Index.
• 47:28
  Yeah, and there are, there is one like that and we could do a
• 47:30
  whole episode on it. In fact, he's going to talk
• 47:33
  about stock market. It hit a record high 48 times
• 47:37
  recently that I didn't count. But I would not at all be
• 47:40
  surprised that he is correct. But the reason he's correct is
• 47:45
  because the stock market has been rising.
• 47:48
  So if the stock market's rising, of course you get 48 record
• 47:51
  highs. If it's if it's higher tomorrow
• 47:54
  than it is today, that's another record high.
• 47:56
  It's just going up. The question is what's the
• 47:58
  percentage change? That's what matters.
• 48:01
  Yeah. Well, look at at 16%, wow,
• 48:05
  you're, you're going to make a lot of money in a market like
• 48:08
  that. Yes, 16% is higher actually than
• 48:10
  the average. The average of the long term is
• 48:13
  like 12%. Yeah, it's, it's well higher.
• 48:17
  Oh, and I found the number for food prices.
• 48:20
  He says his one of his first statements.
• 48:22
  Food prices are down. And for those of you who are
• 48:24
  interested in how we get the data I'm on, I'm on a beautiful
• 48:28
  site called Fred. It's the Federal Reserve Bank of
• 48:30
  Saint Louis. You can go to Google, just say
• 48:33
  Fred and whatever it is you're looking for and a graph comes
• 48:36
  up. And what I have here is
• 48:39
  inflation over the past 12 months for food 2.7%.
• 48:46
  Inflation on food is a little lower than general inflation.
• 48:50
  Yeah, it is lower than general inflation.
• 48:51
  Now he says that food prices are down.
• 48:53
  They're not. They're up 3%.
• 48:56
  And this is what kind of irks me here, I think.
• 48:59
  And if you watch his his talk, you see this elsewhere.
• 49:04
  He is, he's excited about things and he wants to put, he wants to
• 49:09
  get his point across. And I think he engages in way
• 49:13
  too much hyperbole, you know, saying food prices are, he could
• 49:17
  have said food prices. Yes, food prices are up, but
• 49:20
  they're less than overall inflation.
• 49:22
  And we're going to work harder to make it even better.
• 49:24
  Still, that would be a correct statement and still people would
• 49:27
  be interested in it. A person dedicated to presenting
• 49:31
  things truthfully would have said something like food prices
• 49:36
  appear to have stabilized. Yeah, yeah, that's a perfectly.
• 49:41
  Unreasonable thing to say, right?
• 49:43
  And, and here's, here's, I mean, I say this every few weeks, but
• 49:47
  look, food prices are so inflated now that even if our
• 49:53
  inflation rate went down to 0, which is not going to happen,
• 49:57
  even if it did, food prices would not go down.
• 50:01
  That's right. 0 inflation. That doesn't mean they're coming
• 50:03
  down, just means they're not going up.
• 50:05
  Back it. It's not going back to where it
• 50:07
  once was, right? And I'm still left in a in a
• 50:12
  situation where I'm supposed to drink more water here at home
• 50:16
  because water doesn't cost anything.
• 50:19
  Right, those Coke Zeros are expensive.
• 50:22
  Yeah, it really adds up. The president goes on.
• 50:24
  Growth is surging. I presume he meant economic
• 50:27
  growth. Manufacturing is booming.
• 50:30
  Well, kind of the the economy grew 2% year over year.
• 50:35
  That is growth. However, last year grew 3% year
• 50:40
  over year. So yes, it's growing 50% slower,
• 50:46
  right, or slower growth, Yeah, yeah.
• 50:48
  Depending which direction you want to look at it, 2% is
• 50:51
  actually nothing to sneeze at. It's OK.
• 50:54
  Yeah, it's all right, but it's. It's certainly not booming.
• 50:58
  Yeah. It's not what I would call
• 51:00
  booming. And furthermore, it's less than
• 51:03
  what it was last year. And I think that's the
• 51:05
  comparison that he's trying to make here.
• 51:07
  And let's let's actually think about this for a second, right?
• 51:10
  Because words matter. I'm I'm words, your numbers and
• 51:13
  words matter, but there's no way to quantify booming.
• 51:18
  That's an assertion, right? That's just an assertion.
• 51:22
  That's not a fact claim. Now, once you start to unpack
• 51:27
  it, the assertion doesn't hold up.
• 51:30
  But it's not like he's saying the economy is growing at a 24%
• 51:35
  rate. Yeah, that's correct.
• 51:36
  That's correct now. That would be a booming economy.
• 51:40
  Yeah. Well, on that, do you call that
• 51:43
  equivocation? Is that the right word?
• 51:46
  No, I don't think so. OK.
• 51:48
  Well, along the lines of the thing you just described, the
• 51:52
  manufacturing is booming. This is a yes and a no thing
• 51:55
  manufacturing real output. So this is the actual production
• 51:59
  of goods and services is up 1%. That's up.
• 52:02
  That's great. However, there's 78,000 fewer
• 52:06
  manufacturing jobs versus last year.
• 52:09
  So on the one hand, we're producing more.
• 52:11
  And as an economist, I would look at that and say, actually.
• 52:14
  That's good news. That's good news.
• 52:15
  That's actually. Good news, we're producing 1%
• 52:18
  more using 78,000 fewer workers. We're getting really good at
• 52:22
  this. Yeah, we're becoming more
• 52:24
  efficient would be what you would.
• 52:25
  Say yeah, he says. The stock market is doing better
• 52:30
  than it's ever done. Oh, that's not right.
• 52:33
  No worth. The stock market.
• 52:35
  The stock market is higher than it's ever been.
• 52:39
  Yes, it's not. Yeah, it's not doing better than
• 52:41
  it's ever done. Right.
• 52:43
  And and just to drive the point home, the level of the stock
• 52:46
  market isn't relevant. What's relevant is the
• 52:48
  percentage change, the growth. Right, the growth.
• 52:51
  And we're up 13% this year. And if it keeps on going the way
• 52:55
  it has, we'll be up 17% this year, which is quite good, but
• 52:59
  it's not better than ever. Over the past 25 years, that
• 53:03
  would make this year the 8th best.
• 53:06
  There were seven other years since 20, since 2000 that did
• 53:10
  better than what we're projected to do this year.
• 53:12
  Yeah, and and look 8th best is pretty good in a 25 year time
• 53:16
  it. Is it is There's actually good
• 53:19
  things to say here, but he's opening himself up for exactly
• 53:22
  this kind of criticism by overplaying the hand.
• 53:25
  He, he always has to say he's the best at everything.
• 53:30
  And, and look, you and I have talked about this before.
• 53:33
  Presidents get way too much credit when the stock market is
• 53:36
  high and not, not and way too much blame when it's low.
• 53:40
  Do their policies matter? Yes, they absolutely matter.
• 53:45
  Do they matter 80%? No, they do not.
• 53:49
  Importantly, workers wages are rising at the fastest pace in
• 53:54
  more than 60 years. Now I don't have data going back
• 53:58
  60 years, but I got data going back to 1980.
• 54:01
  So that's what is that 24 that's like almost 50 years.
• 54:06
  Real wages are up 2.2% this year.
• 54:10
  That puts that's good, but it puts us in the top 15% of the
• 54:13
  past years not. 4545 years. Yeah, in the past 45 years.
• 54:20
  It's not the fastest in 60 years.
• 54:22
  Top 15% again pretty good. Yes, yes, there were lots of
• 54:27
  really good things he could say here.
• 54:30
  Right. And a lot of really bad years
• 54:32
  that people remember, right? Exactly.
• 54:36
  Look, you remember back in pick, pick whatever year you want when
• 54:40
  this happened and that happened. And he didn't even have to go
• 54:45
  back that far. You can talk about anything from
• 54:48
  2020 up until the present to for examples, he says President,
• 54:54
  under President Biden, we had less than $1 trillion of new
• 54:57
  investment in the United States in just the 8 months since I
• 55:00
  took office. We have secured commitments and
• 55:03
  money already paid for 17 trillion.
• 55:06
  Think of it, four years, less than a trillion, 8 months, four
• 55:11
  years less, 04 years, less than a trillion.
• 55:14
  That's Biden. Eight months, much more than 17
• 55:16
  trillion is being invested in the United States.
• 55:19
  And I believe from the context of the sentence that he's
• 55:22
  talking about foreign investment in the US.
• 55:25
  Yeah, I got to get a bullshit button for my desk because this
• 55:28
  is. Now he does, he does put the
• 55:32
  footnote about committed and committed can be, yeah, we
• 55:36
  agreed to spend this money over the next 10 years.
• 55:39
  Or the next 100? Yeah, yeah.
• 55:42
  I don't know anything about that.
• 55:44
  And you know, I'm going to point out that there's an obvious news
• 55:46
  story here, the Koreans, the South Korea, good Korea, not
• 55:51
  best Korea, but good Korea, opened up a plant in Georgia to
• 55:56
  to make electric cars. But then the Trump
• 55:58
  administration rounded up all the workers on immigration
• 56:01
  status, sent their asses back to South Korea.
• 56:05
  How much investment do you think South Korea is going to follow
• 56:09
  through on now? Yeah, yeah, the.
• 56:11
  Correct answer. Almost none.
• 56:14
  There's a all their people got arrested, right?
• 56:17
  I'm like, come on. There's a name for this, foreign
• 56:19
  portfolio investment. This is foreigners investing in
• 56:23
  US assets. Foreign portfolio investment is
• 56:26
  up 1.5 trillion since January. Not bad.
• 56:31
  Yeah, not bad at all. That's foreigners, you know,
• 56:34
  plowing money into the US 1.5 trillion since January, but over
• 56:38
  the same period last year, it was up two trillion.
• 56:40
  Yeah, also not bad. Also not a little better the the
• 56:45
  bad part 1/3 of it is investment in treasuries.
• 56:50
  That is what 1/3 of that money is due to our government having
• 56:54
  to borrow more and forms ponying up the dough.
• 56:57
  So you can expect that as long as foreigners are willing to
• 57:00
  pony up the dough, that number, that investment number will get
• 57:04
  bigger. And you really shouldn't be
• 57:07
  bragging about that. Yeah, that's not.
• 57:09
  Yeah, yeah, at least that part we should couldn't be Bragging
• 57:11
  about. Words and numbers is part of the
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• 58:16
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• 58:20
  We have implemented the largest tax cuts in American history.
• 58:24
  All right, a couple things to say here.
• 58:26
  First, this is he's referring to the.
• 58:28
  Big. What do they call it?
• 58:29
  The big, the big. Beautiful Bill.
• 58:31
  Big beautiful Bill. What's happening here is under
• 58:36
  his first in his first term, Congress passed and he signed
• 58:40
  his tax cut legislation, the Tax Cut and JOBS Act.
• 58:44
  The Tax Cut and JOBS Act was designed to expire at the end of
• 58:49
  this year, 2025 S all through Biden's administration, he's
• 58:54
  living under President Trump's tax cuts.
• 58:57
  And along comes the big beautiful bill.
• 58:59
  And the big beautiful bill extends the Tax Cut and JOBS
• 59:02
  Act. So if you want to, if you're
• 59:04
  going to parse the words, technically it wasn't a tax cut,
• 59:08
  it was a renewal of a tax cut, but it was that original tax cut
• 59:12
  was his. It was his A.
• 59:14
  Continuation of the tax rates already in place.
• 59:17
  It was, and I, I think actually that I, I'm all for lower taxes,
• 59:21
  but that particular thing, the tax cut and JOBS Act, one of the
• 59:24
  big things it did, you know, detractors were saying it was
• 59:27
  tax cuts for the rich, which it, it did knock down substantially
• 59:32
  tax rates on higher income people.
• 59:35
  But what its detractors never seemed to point out is that it
• 59:39
  doubled the standard deduction from 12,000 to $24,000.
• 59:45
  Which? Made a lot of people's lives.
• 59:47
  Taxed more middle class? Yeah, well.
• 59:49
  Make their lives tax free. Yeah, yeah, at the very low end,
• 59:53
  absolutely. So that that tax cut might have
• 59:57
  been the best thing he did in his first administration, apart
• 1:00:01
  from a couple of Supreme Court nominations.
• 1:00:03
  Yeah, I I tend to agree with you.
• 1:00:05
  Now, I think again, in in Trump's style, he's employing
• 1:00:08
  hyperbole that that actually shoots him in the foot.
• 1:00:11
  We've implemented the largest tax cut in history.
• 1:00:15
  What he should have done here was invoked to the spirit of
• 1:00:19
  Reagan, another Republican, because Reagan had the largest
• 1:00:23
  tax cut in history. Tax cuts under Reagan the top
• 1:00:26
  the top income tax rate dropped from 70% when Reagan took office
• 1:00:31
  to 28% when he left. That was the largest tax cut in
• 1:00:35
  history. Still too high?
• 1:00:38
  Still too high, but but he had an opportunity here with a
• 1:00:42
  little bit of humility to draw a parallel.
• 1:00:45
  Yeah. And, and Reagan now is
• 1:00:49
  remembered quite fondly. Yes, it would be a good thing to
• 1:00:55
  compare yourself favorably to to Reagan.
• 1:00:58
  And you and I, aunt, we were, we were in California, and we got
• 1:01:03
  to actually touch the desk upon which he signed.
• 1:01:07
  Yes. Do you remember where he signed
• 1:01:09
  that tax cut? Yeah, Yeah, that was incredible.
• 1:01:13
  I almost cried a little bit. And the thing about Reagan,
• 1:01:19
  people forget he swept the country.
• 1:01:23
  It. Was every state, I think save
• 1:01:26
  one in Washington DC. Yeah, he won every state except
• 1:01:29
  Minnesota, the home state of Walter Mondale, his opponent,
• 1:01:33
  and Washington, DC, which, you know, Republican candidates
• 1:01:36
  don't win. In this era when Americans, both
• 1:01:40
  left and right, are tired of the divisiveness, to to to point
• 1:01:45
  back and to inherit the mantle of the last president to sweep
• 1:01:49
  the nation almost entirely would have been a really smart thing
• 1:01:52
  to do. Yeah, it would have been really
• 1:01:54
  smart, but continuing? Tax.
• 1:01:58
  Look, continuing the tax cuts is also a smart thing to do.
• 1:02:01
  Continue is a smart thing now, he says.
• 1:02:04
  He says the tax cuts because of tax cuts this makes makes
• 1:02:08
  America once again the best country on earth to do business.
• 1:02:13
  OK. I mean, that's I included this
• 1:02:15
  one despite the fact that's not a numeric thing.
• 1:02:18
  But I can throw some numbers out here.
• 1:02:20
  If you look up best countries for business.
• 1:02:22
  And in here, I'm going to go to some rankings.
• 1:02:25
  Forbes ranks the US #17 if you go to Heritage Index of Economic
• 1:02:32
  Freedom, they rank the US 26. Fraser Institute and I have
• 1:02:36
  immense respect for Fraser Institute's data set.
• 1:02:39
  The economic freedom of the world they ranked the US is
• 1:02:42
  number 5. Incidentally, we, the guy who
• 1:02:46
  overseas that data set, has agreed to come on as a guest in
• 1:02:49
  the near future. Superb, superb.
• 1:02:54
  Fraser does rank the US #2 in the world for business friendly
• 1:02:58
  regulation, That's after New Zealand.
• 1:03:01
  And that's hard to believe given the amount of regulation we
• 1:03:04
  face. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:03:06
  So I would say, you know, making this, making us once again the
• 1:03:11
  best country on earth. I don't know that I would have
• 1:03:13
  said that, but I certainly would have said one of the best.
• 1:03:16
  Yeah, that's right. In the world, there's a handful
• 1:03:21
  of places that it's easier to do business than everywhere else,
• 1:03:25
  and the US is certainly one in that handful.
• 1:03:28
  Yeah, yeah. That, that is correct.
• 1:03:30
  And, and that leads me to some some good things that we could
• 1:03:35
  say about the US economy that I wish he had said that are
• 1:03:39
  absolutely backed by the data. We have the highest after tax
• 1:03:47
  per capita income in the world is the US highest after tax per
• 1:03:51
  capita income. The Canadians who are, I have
• 1:03:54
  several Canadian friends who are always saying about how well,
• 1:03:57
  you know, the problem with America is you don't have free
• 1:03:59
  healthcare. We have free healthcare.
• 1:04:02
  Free healthcare my ass. Let me put some, let me explain
• 1:04:05
  to you exactly how expensive their free Healthcare is.
• 1:04:08
  The after tax average income US versus Canada and this is of
• 1:04:14
  course adjusting converting to U.S.
• 1:04:16
  Dollars in the US after tax Average per capita income
• 1:04:21
  $67,000 Canada 32. $34,000 worth of difference now, yeah, I'm
• 1:04:28
  assuming you're going to tell me how much healthcare costs.
• 1:04:32
  It's not $34,000 a year per person, I can tell you that.
• 1:04:37
  It we, it's not it's, it's high, it costs a lot, but it doesn't
• 1:04:41
  cost nearly that amount. Right.
• 1:04:43
  Yes, we have the highest growth, hands down the highest growth in
• 1:04:49
  disposable after tax income in the world.
• 1:04:53
  Our after tax income has grown 30% since 2007.
• 1:04:57
  That's huge. Yeah, out flanking everybody on
• 1:05:00
  the planet. I think the next one we're 30%.
• 1:05:03
  I think Canada was second at like 24%.
• 1:05:06
  Even that's huge. Almost the lowest unemployment
• 1:05:10
  rate we're 4.3% right now, and that's after the unemployment
• 1:05:13
  rate ticking up for the past year and a half. 4.3%
• 1:05:17
  unemployment in US, Canada 7.1, France 7.5, Germany 6.3 Italy 6%
• 1:05:26
  Spain 10%. Europe averages around 5%.
• 1:05:31
  So we've got higher income, we've got lower unemployment,
• 1:05:35
  we've got the highest income growth.
• 1:05:37
  All of this is is stuff worth talking about and it's backed by
• 1:05:42
  the data. And that's the end of my
• 1:05:45
  analysis of his economic claims, just with kind of the sad
• 1:05:49
  thought that if he if he just fact checked himself a little
• 1:05:54
  bit and rained in his speech writers a little bit, he could
• 1:05:58
  have had a really good. Speech here I'm I'm pretty sure
• 1:06:03
  aunt that the speech writers are not to blame.
• 1:06:08
  I have to say look, I have known speech writers in my day and
• 1:06:13
  they tend to be rather sober minded.
• 1:06:16
  They Fact Check themselves. They have other people Fact
• 1:06:19
  Check them. This is a Trump problem.
• 1:06:22
  The the self aggrandizement problem has been in evidence
• 1:06:28
  from day one, long before he ever even got into politics.
• 1:06:31
  So. But notice this is part of his
• 1:06:32
  personality. And look at the problem here
• 1:06:36
  that he does this. And so next time when he goes to
• 1:06:39
  say something, everybody's just going to, well, everybody.
• 1:06:43
  I for one am just going to largely ignore what he says,
• 1:06:47
  having been conditioned to not believe the numbers when in fact
• 1:06:51
  there there's really good stuff he could be talking about.
• 1:06:53
  Go talk about that. And he wasn't exactly lying
• 1:06:58
  about the things that he talked up.
• 1:07:01
  No, he was. He was in the neighborhood of
• 1:07:03
  the truth, in the ballpark. Right.
• 1:07:07
  Close enough for jazz, we might say.
• 1:07:11
  So you know, there it is. There's our honest assessment of
• 1:07:15
  the recent tumbling of many words out of the Trumpian mouth.
• 1:07:18
  I think it's pretty fair. Do you have a?
• 1:07:21
  What can we do about this? Well, I, you know, when, when
• 1:07:25
  you talk, because I do one, when you talk about one human being
• 1:07:29
  and his propensity to exaggerate there, there's not a lot that we
• 1:07:34
  collectively can do. Now we can, we can demand
• 1:07:39
  different behavior by electing different people.
• 1:07:42
  But you and I both know that's not exactly right, right.
• 1:07:45
  I mean, well, you got to get what you're going to get, what
• 1:07:47
  you're going to get. And and the American people did
• 1:07:51
  in fact vote for this. So right, there you go.
• 1:07:55
  But I'm I'm willing to hear what you think we can do about it.
• 1:07:58
  Well, now that I say I've got something, maybe I don't, but a
• 1:08:03
  thought, how's this? We make a big deal about the
• 1:08:06
  problems of coercion, and when we think about coercion, we
• 1:08:09
  think about physical force or the threat of physical force.
• 1:08:14
  But I argue, sometimes coercion can take the form of false
• 1:08:17
  information. If I give you information
• 1:08:21
  knowing that it's incorrect and knowing that you will react in a
• 1:08:24
  certain way, I have reduced your agency.
• 1:08:28
  I've achieved the same outcome as if I had imposed physical
• 1:08:32
  force. And it's even worse when what
• 1:08:36
  you're the falsehoods that you are peddling are partially true,
• 1:08:41
  because then here they they have a veneer of truth.
• 1:08:45
  And I I get in trouble for blaming both sides of our
• 1:08:49
  political aisle for a lot of our ills.
• 1:08:52
  But I think this isn't yet another one of those things that
• 1:08:55
  they all do. And notice I didn't say both
• 1:08:59
  sides do. I said they all do.
• 1:09:02
  Yes, right. Right.
• 1:09:03
  They people in positions of power play fast and loose with
• 1:09:08
  the truth to get you to acquiesce to their point of view
• 1:09:13
  and their preferred policy outcomes and.
• 1:09:16
  But fortunately, this the same tool that brings you all the
• 1:09:20
  divisiveness of social media also brings you the source data.
• 1:09:25
  Yeah, but with time in a chair and a keyboard, you can find the
• 1:09:28
  fast. For those of you who follow me
• 1:09:30
  on Twitter have seen a trend recently where every day I make
• 1:09:35
  it my business to find one person on Twitter who lies
• 1:09:40
  endlessly and has gargantuan followers.
• 1:09:44
  Follower numbers, right? So I say, Yep, look, this is
• 1:09:48
  what you say to get 600,000 followers, but none of it's
• 1:09:52
  true. Well we don't have 600,000
• 1:09:56
  followers because that's what the truth gets you.
• 1:10:01
  That is what the truth gets you. There aren't enough people who
• 1:10:05
  want to be sober minded and think things through and hear
• 1:10:09
  the totality of an argument before rendering a decision.
• 1:10:12
  No, because the feels are so much more fun, James.
• 1:10:14
  So much better. And that old saying is the one I
• 1:10:17
  keep using, right? The a lie is halfway around the
• 1:10:20
  world before the truth gets its pants on.
• 1:10:23
  And now with the speed of social media, it's, it's literally
• 1:10:26
  halfway around the world before the truth even wakes up.
• 1:10:30
  So there you go on that happy note.
• 1:10:33
  And I wish you well and I hope your life is nice and that you
• 1:10:37
  continue to seek the truth the way you do.
• 1:10:40
  And I, I would encourage everybody to be kind to each
• 1:10:43
  other in these trying times, which, you know, it's always
• 1:10:45
  these trying times. They're not that trying right
• 1:10:47
  now, but what the hell, Be nice to each other anyway.
• 1:10:50
  Just give it a shot, try and be nice to somebody that you
• 1:10:53
  disagree with, see what happens. You never know.
• 1:10:55
  Ant does this all the time and I make fun of him for it, but it's
• 1:10:59
  actually kind of impressive. Catch you next time, Ant.
• 1:11:02
  See you next time, James. Words and Numbers is a Civil
• 1:11:05
  original podcast. We work with Civil to advance
• 1:11:08
  their mission of upgrading civilization by exploring ideas
• 1:11:12
  that promote civic equality and cooperation.
• 1:11:15
  We believe the most pressing issues humans face, war,
• 1:11:18
  poverty, debt, tribalism, arise from coercive institutions that
• 1:11:23
  bring out the worst in us. We at Civil look to voluntary
• 1:11:26
  solutions to these and other problems.
• 1:11:29
  We invite you to explore Civil's new platform at civil.com
• 1:11:34
  thatscivl.com. I usually ask what the hell
• 1:11:38
  these people are still doing here, but I kind of told them to
• 1:11:41
  be here this time, so kind of gave away the form.
• 1:11:44
  But what the hell were we talking about?
• 1:11:46
  It was all right, right? It was about crime and
• 1:11:49
  forgiveness. And you know, what the hell
• 1:11:52
  should we do? And I know I've told you this
• 1:11:55
  story before, but I've never told it to our listeners.
• 1:11:59
  At least I don't think I have. If I, if I have, you could
• 1:12:02
  always just turn it off. No need to be angry.
• 1:12:05
  But the time I was in Iraq, I learned all about new and new
• 1:12:10
  and exciting institutions that we don't have in the West,
• 1:12:13
  right? And one of them was kind of in
• 1:12:17
  the neighborhood of what Ant was talking about.
• 1:12:20
  And for those of you who don't know, I was Dean of the American
• 1:12:23
  University of Iraq. And that put me in charge of all
• 1:12:27
  academic and non academic discipline.
• 1:12:30
  And in a place like Iraq, that's actually a daunting prospect,
• 1:12:35
  right? Anyway, one of the things I was
• 1:12:37
  responsible for was attendance. And we had a draconian
• 1:12:41
  attendance policy that if you missed X number of classes for
• 1:12:45
  any reason, you were expelled. And there, there was no latitude
• 1:12:49
  here, right? And, and this kid comes into my
• 1:12:52
  office and he says, Doctor Jamez, they all called me Jamez,
• 1:12:55
  Dr. Jamez, I must miss class on Friday.
• 1:12:59
  And I called up his attendance records and I'm and I said,
• 1:13:02
  buddy, you know, you've already missed the Max.
• 1:13:05
  If you miss another one, I have to expel you.
• 1:13:07
  And he says, but I must. And I said, and I wish I hadn't
• 1:13:14
  because I should, I could have just said the rules are the
• 1:13:17
  rules and to hell with you. But like an idiot, I thought,
• 1:13:20
  well, maybe there's a special circumstance that we'll have to
• 1:13:24
  address. And I said, well, what's so
• 1:13:27
  important that you can't come to school?
• 1:13:30
  And he said, last week I killed a man.
• 1:13:33
  Oh, yeah, here we are. Wasn't expecting that at all.
• 1:13:38
  And I said, and how exactly did you kill a man thinking maybe
• 1:13:42
  that was relevant? And he said, I ran over him in
• 1:13:44
  my car. I said, oh, so you accidentally
• 1:13:47
  killed a man? He said, yes, I didn't mean to
• 1:13:49
  do it. It just happened.
• 1:13:52
  And I said, all right, well, you got to go to court on Friday.
• 1:13:56
  He said, no, no, it's, it's more complicated than that.
• 1:14:00
  The first thing I have to do is go to his parents, his family,
• 1:14:06
  and ask for their forgiveness. And if they forgive me, that's
• 1:14:13
  the end of it. And I I'll be back to school.
• 1:14:15
  And I said, what if they don't forgive you?
• 1:14:18
  He said they could ask for what's called blood money.
• 1:14:21
  And I, there's a phrase I'd heard 1000 times and didn't know
• 1:14:26
  the etymology or I didn't know where that came from.
• 1:14:29
  And I said, what the hell is blood money?
• 1:14:32
  And he said, well, they could demand I pay an amount to them
• 1:14:36
  for the offense of, of killing their family member.
• 1:14:39
  I said, huh. And I said, well, how much could
• 1:14:43
  they ask for? And he said whatever they want,
• 1:14:46
  but they have to understand that if it's low, I'll absolutely pay
• 1:14:51
  it. If it's high and I don't have
• 1:14:53
  that much, there's no way I can pay it.
• 1:14:57
  And we'll we'll have to figure out how much I can afford.
• 1:15:02
  And I said, well, what if they don't forgive you and they won't
• 1:15:05
  accept money? He said, then I have to go to
• 1:15:07
  court. How interesting and that.
• 1:15:10
  Flies, and I look at that. To me, that looks like a much
• 1:15:13
  more civilized system than what we have.
• 1:15:16
  That flies in the face of what I said earlier, right?
• 1:15:20
  That it. It doesn't yield the outcome
• 1:15:23
  that I would demand, but it does yield the outcome that you would
• 1:15:27
  demand, and leaves open the possibility of addressing the
• 1:15:33
  problem in other ways if there is no forgiveness.
• 1:15:37
  Right, right. Then you can.
• 1:15:38
  Finance involved, yeah. And you can incentivize
• 1:15:42
  financially forgiveness, which is fascinating, right?
• 1:15:48
  Do you really want to have financial forgiveness?
• 1:15:53
  Well, it's better than no forgiveness at all, I guess.
• 1:15:56
  Yeah, and I keep coming back to if the people who were harmed
• 1:16:01
  are OK with it, the rest of us have nothing to say.
• 1:16:04
  I do. There's no way any of the rest
• 1:16:06
  of us have a higher moral claim to this question than the people
• 1:16:09
  who are directly wronged. And I disagree with that, but I
• 1:16:14
  take your point as an important one, right?
• 1:16:17
  I, I do think we will disagree about this forever.
• 1:16:20
  But in an, in a manslaughter case, right, where the death is
• 1:16:24
  accidental, I could easily fall into your line of thinking,
• 1:16:29
  right? And, and notice, remember the
• 1:16:31
  things I brought up, they were horrible things that you can't
• 1:16:34
  take back. This is a horrible thing that
• 1:16:36
  you can't take back that you didn't mean to do.
• 1:16:40
  It just happened. And for those sorts of things,
• 1:16:45
  those aren't exactly crimes, right?
• 1:16:48
  Mens Rey is not there, right? The mind, you didn't have it in
• 1:16:51
  your mind or your heart to go do this.
• 1:16:54
  You may have acted impulsively or inappropriately,
• 1:16:59
  irresponsibly, but you didn't say today I'm going to go out
• 1:17:02
  and run a guy over. Right.
• 1:17:04
  And that, that seems to matter. I, I don't know how far down the
• 1:17:08
  line it has to matter, but it does seem to matter.
• 1:17:13
  I'll give you one more institution that I, I learned
• 1:17:16
  about when I was there that I think is utterly fascinating.
• 1:17:20
  There was no such thing as a car loan, so you had to pay cash for
• 1:17:26
  every car you bought. There's no such thing as a
• 1:17:29
  mortgage either, but we'll leave that for another day.
• 1:17:32
  You could long and short of is you couldn't borrow money, but
• 1:17:34
  that's not the important part. You could also not insure your
• 1:17:42
  possessions against the loss. So there was no auto insurance.
• 1:17:48
  Now you could see where that's going to be a disaster, but
• 1:17:52
  that's going to be a a disaster. And I saw a car accident the
• 1:17:56
  first couple of days I was there and I was with an Iraqi.
• 1:17:59
  And he said, oh, let's watch, this will be interesting to you.
• 1:18:02
  And I said, OK, And the two cars, the guys got out and they
• 1:18:06
  approached each other. And I'm thinking, do they fight?
• 1:18:10
  Because they maybe that's why this will be interesting.
• 1:18:13
  But no, that's not why it was going to be interesting.
• 1:18:16
  And they did not fight. They just stood there looking at
• 1:18:19
  each other, waiting. And then all these other people
• 1:18:22
  who saw the accident pulled over and they created a circle around
• 1:18:28
  those two guys. And then as a group they all
• 1:18:34
  argued about it, came to a conclusion, figured out who was
• 1:18:38
  at fault and how much he owed the other guy.
• 1:18:41
  So the, the, the people in the circle, they're also taking part
• 1:18:44
  in this, in this conversation. Everybody was in on it.
• 1:18:47
  Wow, that is so cool. It is cool.
• 1:18:52
  I don't know if I would want to live that way, but it sure is
• 1:18:57
  interesting. Huh.
• 1:19:00
  Sure is interesting. And you know I've got a great
• 1:19:03
  FDA drug Iraq story. Maybe I'll tell that one next
• 1:19:07
  time if you remind me. But.
• 1:19:09
  Oh, you've got so many good Iraq stories.
• 1:19:12
  Well, it and that's because it was such a foreign environment,
• 1:19:14
  right? They, they do things there
• 1:19:17
  differently than we do things here.
• 1:19:20
  And yet, and and this is going to sound weird because people
• 1:19:23
  don't think of Iraq in this way, it works.
• 1:19:27
  It's a perfectly reasonable place.
• 1:19:29
  They have reasonable traditions, they're understandable even to
• 1:19:35
  an outsider, and they're weird as hell no matter how well you
• 1:19:40
  understand them. Yeah, I'll give you one more to
• 1:19:43
  explain how weird it was. The money changers, doubt at the
• 1:19:48
  outdoor market, the bizarre. There were money changers.
• 1:19:51
  I had no idea how they made any money at all because the
• 1:19:56
  exchange rates are set by the government and there's no
• 1:20:00
  arbitrage. They are exactly what they are,
• 1:20:04
  and nobody ever charges more and nobody ever charges less.
• 1:20:07
  How these guys make any money, I don't understand.
• 1:20:10
  I think they're all subsidized by the government, but but to
• 1:20:14
  hell with that. That's not that's not the
• 1:20:16
  important part. I'm, I'm walking there and I'm
• 1:20:18
  probably in town for a week and it's 120° outside.
• 1:20:22
  I'm on an outdoor market sweating my ass off because you
• 1:20:26
  can't wear shorts, right? So I'm going to get a pair of
• 1:20:28
  jeans and shoes and it's really hot.
• 1:20:33
  And I come across the money changer and he's got like a
• 1:20:35
  little a little card table, Not a card table, like one of those
• 1:20:39
  tables you'd kind of waddle up to your couch to eat dinner on.
• 1:20:44
  Maybe 3 feet across and a foot and a half wide.
• 1:20:48
  And it's got 2 elastic bands attached underneath that go
• 1:20:52
  across the money to hold it in place.
• 1:20:55
  And I looked at it and it had U.S. dollars and Chinese yuan
• 1:20:59
  and EUR and rubles. It had every currency I could
• 1:21:04
  name and A and a few that I had never seen before.
• 1:21:08
  And knowing what I know. And I made it to be about a half
• 1:21:12
  $1,000,000 sitting on top of a flimsy 3 by a foot and a half
• 1:21:18
  table with elastic bands keeping it from blowing away in the
• 1:21:22
  wind. And I thought, this is
• 1:21:26
  interesting. And I stood there and looked at
• 1:21:29
  it for a while. And the guy who was at the
• 1:21:31
  table, he would turn around and go talk to somebody else for a
• 1:21:35
  while and then he'd come back. And I'm thinking you turn your
• 1:21:38
  back on that kind of money in an open air market in a third world
• 1:21:42
  country, you're out of your mind.
• 1:21:45
  But here's where it gets really good.
• 1:21:46
  Because then he took I guess like a small hotel tablecloth
• 1:21:51
  and threw it over the whole table and walked across the
• 1:21:53
  street to the tea shop, walked in and didn't come back for 1/2
• 1:21:57
  an hour. I know he didn't come back for
• 1:22:01
  1/2 an hour because I sat there watching the entire time.
• 1:22:06
  Nobody even looked at the table. There was the average middle
• 1:22:13
  class family was living on $300 a month.
• 1:22:16
  He had a half, $1,000,000 on that table.
• 1:22:19
  So what's going on? Nobody even looked at it.
• 1:22:22
  There's no such thing for the most part 9099%.
• 1:22:26
  There's no such thing as St. crime.
• 1:22:29
  Really. Doesn't exist.
• 1:22:31
  The social pressure and the social cohesion is so profound
• 1:22:36
  that nobody steals anything. And as a matter of fact, I have
• 1:22:40
  to tell you one more because that would apply to Muslims,
• 1:22:45
  correct? In a 99.9% Muslim country that
• 1:22:50
  the social cohesion comes from that and that alone.
• 1:22:54
  So the call to prayer goes off, which means every Muslim leaves
• 1:23:00
  the bazaar. Who's left in the bazaar?
• 1:23:05
  The only non-Muslims who were there, the very people who are
• 1:23:10
  not part of the social group and don't share in the cohesion.
• 1:23:14
  And not a single merchant locked the door of his shop.
• 1:23:18
  That's so strange. Why?
• 1:23:21
  I mean, I, I, I get they're not locking the doors of the shop.
• 1:23:24
  Why are why is nobody taking advantage of this the theft?
• 1:23:29
  Can't be 0. No, it it can't be.
• 1:23:33
  But the shame of stealing to an entire family is so great that
• 1:23:39
  nobody does it. And there's, you know, there's a
• 1:23:42
  religious prohibition against it, which plays.
• 1:23:46
  I mean, there is too in the US too.
• 1:23:47
  It doesn't stop much of anybody. But even when they know that
• 1:23:54
  only the non-Muslims will have access to the shop, they still
• 1:23:59
  didn't. Most of the shops didn't even
• 1:24:01
  have doors. They would they would put a
• 1:24:03
  broom in the door on a diagonal to indicate that you shouldn't
• 1:24:08
  go in there. But all you had to do is move a
• 1:24:11
  broom. Yeah, right.
• 1:24:13
  It didn't take Superman to just clean them all out.
• 1:24:17
  And and I, I'm sure that the money changers didn't leave a
• 1:24:21
  half million dollars out, right. There's some risks you don't
• 1:24:24
  take, but I never saw a locked door.
• 1:24:28
  The call to prayer happened. Everybody went to pray.
• 1:24:30
  Everybody came back and then you bought whatever you wanted and
• 1:24:34
  they never thought twice about it.
• 1:24:36
  So, you know, is it a third world country?
• 1:24:39
  Yes. Does it have some beautiful
• 1:24:41
  customs and traditions? It absolutely does.
• 1:24:44
  Are some of the things that happened there much, much better
• 1:24:48
  than the things that happened here?
• 1:24:50
  Yes, of course. Just as the reverse is true,
• 1:24:54
  just as it would be true both ways with almost any other
• 1:24:57
  country, right? And, and I, it was fascinating
• 1:25:01
  living there. It was endlessly fascinating.
• 1:25:04
  But that's the story for today. I'm I'm I'm sad that it made
• 1:25:08
  your point and not mine, but somehow.
• 1:25:11
  Good. Story change just works somehow.
• 1:25:13
  Life just works this way. I'll catch you next time, man.
• 1:25:16
  See you next time.