Latest / The Elsa Kurt Show / Why The American Dream Feels Out Of Reach

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Why The American Dream Feels Out Of Reach · The Elsa Kurt Show

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_04: For most of our lives, the American dream wasn't particularly complicated.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_04: Work hard.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_04: Buy a house.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_04: Raise your family.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_04: Save some money.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_04: And hopefully leave your kids a little better off than you were.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_04: But talk to a lot of 25 and 30-year-olds today, and that doesn't necessarily sound like the American dream.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_04: It can sound like science fiction.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_04: Housing is increasingly out of reach.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_04: Two incomes don't always seem to go as far as one used to.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_04: Young adults are staying home longer, getting married later, having children later, and wondering whether they'll ever achieve the financial independence their parents took for granted.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_04: So what happened?
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_04: Capitalism?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_04: Corporations?
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_04: Government spending?
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_04: The Federal Reserve?
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_04: Bad policy?
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_04: Some combination of all of it?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_04: Our friend Mark Deluccio is back to discuss.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Mark, welcome back.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's so good to see you again.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's great to see you.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Although I see you almost every day on social media, but I don't see you like this.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: So I know.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: So so good to chat again, right?
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it in my real life, so to speak, I run into people sometimes and uh, you know, it's always like, hey, how you doing?
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And back and forth.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: And then then they go, Oh, I I I saw your video today.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, which one?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what you've seen, but I apologize for popping up on your news feed all the time, you know, because I want you, I want you there.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: So that's not a problem.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um I appreciate that.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there's somebody that rolls their eyes and shakes their head and like, not her again.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And that's okay too.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: I can't blame you folks.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: But um, Mark, I'm really excited to have you back on today.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you you always bring such value to these shows and you and you share with us some things that um I definitely don't know.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And my friends, if you don't know, Mark is what I would call a a US Constitution aficionado.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: You are, you are, I will call you an expert.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're a humble guy.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: You probably won't call yourself an expert.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: I call myself a nerd in that regard.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: A nerd.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: But um your your your breadth of knowledge is so huge on this and so important.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I love anytime I get the opportunity to have you on and um just share these things because it's just so grounded in the foundation of this country.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: And right now, especially, we're so ungrounded in emotions and feelings and lies, really, right?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, yeah, you're right.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard to kind of, you know, you you know I've talked about this offline.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's it's hard to decipher truth today.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, and truth comes in a lot of different forms, and so do lies.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: Lies come in forms of just not telling you something, you know, and just uh cherry picking with confirmation bias the certain things that you want to pull out to support your narrative, whatever it may be.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so the the the issue is how do we learn how to be good critical thinkers and and decipher, you know, things that are being fed up fed to us on a 24-7 basis.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, so true.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: So um I want to start with so okay, we're we're talking today about the the overarching theme of the conversation is the American dream.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And um, you know, has it actually become the American nightmare?
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um so when you say the American dream has become harder to achieve, what specifically are you talking about?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh let me let me just give you an example.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you know my background, you know where I grew up, uh because it's near you.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we both grew up, you know, lower middle class, at least I did, lower middle class.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: My father was a tool and dye union guy, tool and dye maker.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: Mom went to seventh grade, um, you know, industrial town I grew up in, and uh we had gangs, and you had to be a little street smart and that type of thing.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we worked hard.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: I learned a work ethic from my father.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he was a World War II veteran, uh, Battle of Iojima.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: He never missed a day of work in his life.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how he did that in 44 years.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he wasn't the healthiest guy in the world.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, when I I look at uh I was able to, you know, to go to school, first one in my family, my immediate family, and made something of myself.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: And you can only do that.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: You can't do that in a lot of countries.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And as most countries, you can't really rise that way unless you're born into it, right?
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I got married at 23.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: At 24, my wife and I, uh, she was a teacher.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know where she taught.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, I did.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, we bought our first house, uh Elsa, at 24.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: We had our first son at 25, and three years later we had Steven.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, he's our little guy that got killed over in uh Afghanistan.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: And we were unusual.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: We were very common back then.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm gonna be 70 in December.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I look now and you see kids that just can't move out of their homes.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: I was talking to a uh a neighbor and he says, Yeah, he just moved in.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: I've got two kids in their 20s, they're still living at home because they can't afford to move out.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they both went to college.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: They did all the right things, right?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: They worked, they went to college, they chucked all the right boxes.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: Not to say going to college is the the perfect you know solution to life here, but they did all the right things.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And they can't move, they can't, they can't afford, forget about buying a home.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: So people getting married later, uh uh child, uh uh children, uh birth birth rates are down, and you say, Well, why is this?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: Why, you know, we can criticize the kids all we want.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: They say, hey, you know, you're living home, you're a bum, and all that stuff.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: But come on, let's ask the question why you do think they want to stay home with their parents?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh a good friend of mine, his daughter just moved out of age 32, finally, in an apartment up in Boston.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: So uh you ask yourself why, and you start looking at the math and start looking at the numbers, and start looking at cost of living and and get into root cause solutions as to what's been happening to our country.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll just give you a a couple a couple statistics.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, first of all, the cost of living has gone through the roof.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so back uh I'm just going back a few years here, but back in in uh well, let's put it this way, since we've been off the gold standard, which by the way is a big part of this story, uh 1971, President Nixon, a Republican, by the way, took us off the gold standard.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And there are a lot of reasons for that, which I won't get into today.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: But that basically says that since then we allowed deficit spending, which basically means we spend more, the government federal government spends more than they take in in revenue and taxes.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I don't like to call it revenue in taxes.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: And uh our dollar has devalued 88% since then.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so basically, you know, whatever cost a dollar in 1971 cost$8.27 today.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_00: I love that you gave that example because I think I think we tend to glaze over that and not fully comprehend.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't, I'm not, I'm not gonna speak for anybody else.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't fully comprehend what that means.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: So when you gave that comparison, it was definitely like a okay, wow, that's yeah, that's quite a difference moment.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you know you're not as old as me, but you you've seen the costs go up like crazy over the years, right?
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: From anything from gasoline to a loaf of bread to you know, whatever.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: So, so let's talk about housing.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh housing, so wages has increased have increased in 1971 by eightfold.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: Housing doubled in that time frame.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_01: So your ability to buy a house today, just based on the price, uh, the probability is cut in half.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then you say to yourself, okay, well, what about the cost of money?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Interest rates now are sitting around, I don't know, 7% for mortgages.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: It just puts everybody out of the housing market.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not everybody, but it puts a lot of the people that should be enjoying at 25, 26, 27, buying their first home.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: So your your question was, what is the American dream?
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: The American dream to me is you know getting married, having a family, uh having some good stability in terms of work, uh, making a good living, uh, not working paycheck to paycheck and owning your own home.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: And and that dream is gone.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: And there are specific reasons as to why that's gone.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of it has to do with the people that we vote for, by the way, on both sides of the aisle.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: So okay, so let me ask you this.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: So those are those are are uh concrete facts, those those are actual truths, not you know, my truth.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: That is a truth.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is it also very so here's an argument that that I hear people say a lot of times, you know, I the the complaint from the younger generation is we can't afford to live, we can't afford to buy a home, we can't afford to do X, Y, and Z.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: All very true, all related to these things.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: But then I hear counter-arguments of, well, you don't have to have an iPhone, you don't have to stream, you know, 10 different streaming services, you don't have to have a BMW, you don't have to have, you know, Starbucks every day.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to eat out every day.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, and of course, and this is a back and forth that happens.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Like, well, you know, how how dare you basically say that I can't have nice things because, you know, so there's that argument that goes back and forth of like those older generations, mine and yours, like we didn't have those things didn't even exist, of course.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: There were no iPhones, obviously.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't have streaming services, we didn't have these luxuries that, you know, people in those days, you went out to dinner.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you went out to dinner at all, you went out like once a month or once every, you know what I mean?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very, very, very, very, very different lifestyles.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, how much of that?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is where I'm going with this, how much of that truly plays into this problem?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, like a lot of problems, they have multiple root causes, right?
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not trying to say that what you just said is the issue.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: It could be part of it.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_01: However, uh, having known people and have talked to people who are in this boat right now, you know, not being able to afford what we're calling the American dream, their default is, hey, look, I can't afford a house, and I'm never gonna afford a house.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: They do the math, they figure it out, there's no way they're gonna do it.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_01: So they have a rental somewhere.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: You know, owning a house, as as you know, because I think you own your own home, uh, is a big part of your discretionary income.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, you have to pay mortgages, taxes, insurance, uh, upkeep, all that stuff with homes.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: When you don't have that, the attitude of the people that I've talked to who are not able to afford that American dream, that home, let's say, says, hey, hell of it, hell with it.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not gonna be able to afford it.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna go out and buy a car better than I normally would have.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Or I'm gonna spend money on getting my nails done once a week or or or buying that iPhone because hey, look, I might as well enjoy something in life, some material possessions, because I know I'm not gonna be able to afford a home.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for it is a pipe dream.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's no way that's gonna work.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and so part of me, and the and again, the people that I've talked to, and I'm not saying what I the people I've talked to are representative and it's a big statistical study.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: But I do know they they say, look, I'm gonna spend my money on stuff that's gonna give me some material, you know, yeah, ownership on stuff, and I might buy that new iPhone 18 now, I don't know what it is, instead of having something that's an iPhone 8.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, because why not?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so there's truth to both, I think.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh like all issues, there's no silver bullet to any of this, and there's no one root cause reason as to why we are where we are.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: So are you of the mindset that we're we're spending just too much time arguing over like who's to blame and maybe not enough time looking at what Washington itself has done?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: I I know, I know you're very critical, rightly so, of the the government, no matter who's in charge, by the way, of you know, the government institution and how they're running, especially as as far as how they are honoring the Constitution.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um talk to me a little bit about kind of the the case against Washington.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Uh by the way, I want to go on record and say I'm so glad you're you're what shall I call her?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Kathleen Cammy.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, I'm so glad she didn't win.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, okay.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I am I am I am critical of President Trump, and I'm critical, I've been critical all my life of every president, no matter who they were, including Ronald Reagan, yeah, uh, on some of the things that he did.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because I my litmus test, as you know, is the Constitution.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: The Constitution is my litmus test, and when I see that being uh deviated from, I'm gonna call you out.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care who you are, okay?
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: Because I uh I I did a podcast episode, maybe we should talk about this some other day, but the founders were very uh critical in and afraid of allegiance to a political party.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: They said you're gonna be rooting for your team, if you will.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'll use my words, and your liberties are gonna be compromised when you do that, because you're more interested in winning than you are doing the right thing for our country.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the founding fathers were very critical of that, even though they started political parties, all right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_01: They they were very critical of the uh fraction uh the fractions that would be created.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: So let's talk about the fractions for a minute.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: If you go back, and you and I had a couple episodes on the Communist Manifesto, if you go back to the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx uh took the proletariats with the working class, and the bourgeoisie, who were the the us, the wealthy, the property owners.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you own a home.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're one of those rich people that are are actually uh depressing the working class.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: And the working class, so it started back then as far as class warfare.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at it today, class warfare is on steroids.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't care if it's class warfare by gender, by race, by income level, uh, by uh religion.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_01: Uh just go down the list, and everybody's fighting for some cause against another.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And everybody seems to be a victim these days, and that is all by design, because politicians get strength from from and power from from creating victims and oppressors.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: And I could I could put all of us in the oppressor category if you wanted to, depends on how you frame the question.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because the fact that I own an iPhone, I've been to Shangdu, China, and I've seen the kids that made this phone and the women uh in 100,000 people in the i uh the iPod plant, 100,000 people in one plant.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen the slave laborer making this phone, but I have one.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: I bought one, so maybe I'm the oppressor.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: So you can always make somebody out to be oppressor.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, and you you and I think I've talked about Obama, right?
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: Really put the race thing on steroids, and it's still happening today.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_01: No matter you just disagree with somebody, you're automatically a racist.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I've noticed we're so obsessed, this culture.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like it's more than ever so obsessed with tribalism.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you belong to group A, you must believe everything that group A says to believe.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if you question anything, well, now you're, you know, you're boycotted, you're you're banned, you're blocked, you're canceled, you know, all the buzzwords.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, why?
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why is that?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think you did kind of start to touch on that a little bit that that this is kind of a manufactured thing, but my goodness, how did we get to the point where it's this bad?
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is, I mean, you correct me if you think I'm wrong.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like we're the worst we've ever been with this.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting worse.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting worse.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: And again, this is Elsa, this is exactly what the founders feared.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: The founding fathers feared that this this tribalism that you just talked about is would would divide us, number one, but it would also uh take our eye off the ball in terms of holding our elected officials accountable.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and once that happens, we give them a hall pass to further uh issue transgressions against our freedoms.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: It happens, and that's and and all this is by design.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, do you really think that uh feminism, for example, um, hey, we're all for women's rights, whatever that means, but do you really think the the Democrats care about women when they're gonna you know look the other way when men are gonna play basketball in the WNBA?
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: They don't care.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: How was it that e uh electric cars were so uh unbelievably essential to saving the planet from global warming until Elon Musk aligned with President Trump?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: All of a sudden they're burning the liberals were burning Teslas.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Quite literally.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: How couldn't that literally?
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: So how could they do that about face if what you're saying was not is not true?
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, and there's there's a thousand examples like that, right?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we're all right up to uh just this past uh week or two with uh the uh singer Ed Sheeran, you know, essentially being canceled for choosing to be neutral, to be apolitical and keep his politics to himself and just be a musician.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: And now he's you know, j uh just being absolutely uh bullied and and terrorized for that.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: So many.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: I guess diversity only counts when you agree.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that's you know, and I don't think, um, I I don't think conservatives are are you know scot-free on this.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I don't think, quite honestly, I don't think we're nearly as bad or as vicious as uh the the left is with that.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, lately I feel like we're maybe not as far off as we once were.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And and that to me is actually more disturbing.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: You know, from the left, I expect these things.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is exactly, this has been their their MO, you know, their their their communist manifesto, you know, this is their their socialist agenda.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: And uh for me, when I when I see hints of that, maybe even stronger than hints of that, coming from factions of the right, you know, that same tribalism, you know, either if you don't think Trump is, you know, brilliant 100% of the time, then you're a traitor and you're not America first, and you're, you know, you're all of these things.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And and then of course the flip side of that uh is the opposing view.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I that is actually more alarming to me than the left being the way that they are.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: How about that?
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, because yeah, I I agree, because we already know where they are and what their agenda is, right?
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: Their agenda by but is Marxism, okay?
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's communism, it's tearing down capitalism and our way of life.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, we know that.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: So now we just deal with that.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_01: But now we start looking at our side, if you will, if there is such a side.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I even hate to say there is a side, but there is a side.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_01: And when we have transgressions on our side, we sort of kind of rationalize it.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I see it on on Fox News, I I see it on all these other these pundits that are out there today.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been very critical of President Trump on two major things.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: One was terrorists, uh, and and the other was uh uh declaring war unilaterally without going to Congress.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: All right in Article 1, Section 8.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: The first art the first section of Article 1, Section 8, the first clause says that Congress sets terrorists, not the president.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and so Congress, you know, ceded a lot of their power to the executive branch.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: See, the the the the founders never thought that the the executive branch, the president, for those of you in Rio Linda, uh I had to say that, sorry.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um should have the power he has today.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_01: All right, and and he has a lot more power.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's why it's so important as to who becomes president, because of the power that's been ceded to the executive branch through legislation, none of all which is constitutional.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: So uh I was critical on the on that.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: I was critical on going to war uh without going to Congress and all the different reasons why uh we shouldn't this time go through Congress.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the last since World War II, we haven't done that.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_01: We haven't gone to Congress and declared war.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_01: Officially, uh Roosevelt was the last, of all people, FDR was the last one that did it.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: The biggest socialist out there, right?
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: How about that?
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, I and I took a lot of heat from all my Republican friends about that because uh uh, you know, it's like, well, aren't you aren't you aren't you supporting President Trump?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: I'm supporting our constitution because I trust nobody in government.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't care who it is.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: As much as I love President Trump, you know, I met him, he invited us to the White House after Obama snubbed us after nine years.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I and I'm so glad he won, by the way.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: But I fight for my country, not for any party or and I know look, I'm a line, I'm a Republican.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well I fight for my my my country first, my country second, my country third.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I you know when when you start looking the other way because you're fighting for your party, or when you're fighting for a one politician, uh we're gonna continue to lose our freedoms.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why my podcast is called Constitution Solution, right?
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: One podcast under God.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we followed the Constitution, most of our not all of them, there's no silver bullet, but most of them would go.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Way.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Just because we have a document that's written and says what we should do, the question is, are we doing it and are citizens holding our uh elected officials accountable to that document?
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, and the answer is no.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: It's the answer is that's where we are.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: And you've made the the very important and great point in our past conversations, too, that you know, you have to keep in mind what's good for the goose is good for the gander, right?
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're cheering, in this case, President Trump for uh, you know, executive orders, maybe way, maybe where they shouldn't be used, um, then you better be prepared to accept them when the other team, you know, the guy or girl from gal from the other team is using those same authorities to do something that you don't want them to do.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's that slippery slope, right?
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think you've been great about pointing that out.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: Like, listen, if you're if you're saying, okay, that Trump can do this, even though it's, you know, kind of not quite in line with the constitution, then you get ready to say it for the next guy and and hope you're ready for it because once you set the precedent, you know, good luck undoing it.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: You ruin the day.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: You ruin the day that you look the other way this time.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I think the other thing too is, you know, I really do think President Trump cares about uh uh Americans.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: I really do think so.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's not a constitutionalist, okay.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_01: So we know that, right?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I think overall, boy, thank God he won.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, because uh uh, you know, it's it's uh who knows where we'd be right now, okay, with with a Kakaline Kami there.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, and they probably would shut you down, number one.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: They would I would be, yeah, I would definitely be done.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: I I would not have a platform anymore.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I feel fairly confident about that, actually.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: I feel very confident.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: I got kicked off of LinkedIn when I ran for Congress for two years.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: So they didn't like what I said, which came out turned out to be true when I said they had to let me back on.
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, getting back to this American dream, though, you know, uh it's complicated.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: And why is it complicated?
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because there's a lot of things that go on in the financial world that people just aren't schooled to understand.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not easy to understand.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I'll just give you a very simple why why did why did our value of our dollar since 1971 go down by 88%?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_01: Which means, you know, it's a dollar then is worth 12 cents today.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's very simple if you think about it this way.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: It goes back to the definition of inflation.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people think inflation is an increase in prices.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: And every time you you see the consumer price index or somebody talk about the price of eggs, oh, it's because of inflation.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: The price of gas, it's because of inflation.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Now, don't get me wrong, there's there are other things that affect the price of goods and services.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: But the fundamental thing that really drives it is the increase in the money supply.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: And what do you mean by that?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: People don't think there is a money supply like there is a supply of houses or a supplier of automobiles or or tomatoes or pick something, right?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: But there is.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: There is a supply of money, of money out there today, and there's a right now it's about$23 trillion.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: And what happens is, now you would love to be in this business, and I would too.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, the Federal Reserve, which is not, it was founded in 1913.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and there's a we can talk forever about the the DV the deviants that did that, okay, and what their plan was.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_01: But it was founded in 1913, and it's not a constant, it's not a governmental agency, it's an independent bank.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Congress can modify the Federal Reserve or they can abolish it if they need to, but they won't uh for a lot of reasons.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the Federal Reserve is a bank.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: And you have to be in all the banks in the United States are members, they're stockholders within the Federal Reserve.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: So when the federal government spends more money than it takes in, and right now, this year, we're looking at$1.9 trillion of deficits, that's what we call deficit spending.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um that money has to be borrowed.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: So how do we borrow it?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: We borrow it from the Federal Reserve.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, the member banks are are obligated to buy our treasuries, which is our debt, okay?
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the Federal Reserve prints, when you hear the word printing money, they're not printing anything.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: What they're doing is going to a computer and saying, I'm going to add another trillion dollars to the money supply.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Just like that.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: So what happens when take any commodity?
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: I don't again, I don't care if it's cars, houses, whatever, when there is more of any one commodity, the price of it goes down.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: In other words, the value of it.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: So if if you only had, you know, and I said this to my, and I think I told you this last time, uh, my grandson, when he was 10 years old, I said, Hey Adam, I said, you know, if if if there was only one Mickey Mantle baseball card in the world versus a million, which would be worth more?
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: He says, Poppy, he said, if if if if there was only one Mickey Mantle baseball card, it would be worth a gazillion dollars.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: He gets it, right?
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same thing with everything else.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same thing with cars, it's the same thing with everything else.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: So again, there are other things that's that affect price, but this the supply and demand is uh is what we're talking about.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the more money I have in the money supply, the less valuable it is because it's chasing the same amount of goods and services, especially if the economy doesn't grow.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why your dollar, when you you still have$10 in your wallet, but it's not going to buy you$10 worth of goods next year.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's going to buy you$9 worth of goods if you had 10% inflation.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, if you if you inflated the money supply.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that aspect right there, and so what's the root cause of the Federal Reserve expanding the money supply?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's because we're spending way too much money as a federal government over our tax base.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: So the bottom line is our budget today, which is about$7 trillion, 70% of it is obligated by law.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot change it.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And what's remaining is interest payments and the the uh the agencies and the military, the the defense budget.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so any politician that says, hey, we're gonna, I'm gonna go and cut spending, what are you gonna cut?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: You're obligated by law.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: So if we don't change the framework of our government with transfer payments like the Social Security system, I hate to say that's it's supposed to be our money, but it's not.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um Healthcare.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Healthcare, we we spend almost$2 trillion of our budget on healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, all kinds of other stuff, SNAP programs, these are all transfer payments that the founders today, if Jefferson was here today, he'd roll over in his grave.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, he would they're all on constitutional spends.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: But we've done that now because the gold standard allowed uh put a cap on how much money we can we can have the money supply.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Once that was gone, forget it, it just took off.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why it went up that much, 88%.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I know there's a little kind of complex and there's a lot of pieces to this, but yeah, yeah, it it it is.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_00: And and I'll be honest, I have a very hard time grasping all of it.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh tell so anyone for anyone who is like me and doesn't quite understand what you mean when you talk about the gold standard.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Give us like the kitchen table version of what you mean when you say the gold standard.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is the gold standard?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the whole history of money is a very interesting topic, but uh but I'll get into that.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: You were able at one point in time to go to the bank, bring$10 into the bank, and say, I want that in gold, and they'd have to give you actual real gold.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: So our money was backed by gold.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: So, and gold is a very special commodity, and why did they pick gold versus anything else?
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot of reasons for that.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: I won't get into that now, it's a little in depth.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: But gold is one of those things, it's a limited supply.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_01: It uh, but it you were backed by something that you had confidence in that this money that I have today has a backing of gold.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: Once we took that away, and the gold standard, by the way, also was the amount, the amount of money that we had in our treasury, in gold, our money supply conceivably could not be extended beyond that amount.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: So back in the Nixon days, I think the the gold standard, I think our gold was 5 trillion.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: And right now our our our money supply is 23 trillion.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: So we couldn't do deficit spending and borrow money past that gold standard.
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_01: Now that that's gone, it opened up the kimonas for Congress to spend on anything they wanted to.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's that so the gold standard was kind of a control that held us in check.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Now, just to let you know, if if if you were sitting at your computer and saying, I need another, you know,$10,000 and you printed it, wouldn't you like that job?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what the Federal Reserve is doing.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and the sad part about it is we as taxpayers not only got to pay back the principal, we got to pay back the interest.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Out of nothing.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: They they made money out of nothing.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: They had zero cost of sales, zero.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and so the gold standard actually was kind of like the the the control.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_01: So our money now is not backed by gold at all, and neither is any other currency in the world today.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: And that's known as fiat currency.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: And fiat currency is uh, I guess it's I think it's a Greek word or Latin word, it means by decree.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: It is worth something because the government says it's worth something.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's the only reason.
• 31:18
  unknown: Wow.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: By degree.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: By decree.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so when you hear the word fiat currency, that's what that means.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: So so you know, I know I'm getting a little into the into the minutiae here, but but just understanding the fact that if if we spend more than we take in as a government, your dollars that you have in your savings account are gonna continue to go down.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the people that get that new money first are the big investors that buy hard assets.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when they buy up all the hard assets like stocks and like uh homes, houses, the prices go up because they inflate.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and then they're paying back these loans with cheaper dollars over the course of time.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: So so I hate to say it, but and it just sounds very liberal, but there is a transfer of wealth from the middle class to the elite.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: I hate to say it.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: I hate to say that.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: I know that sounds so uh like a talking point, but it's true.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's absolutely true.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and and they're not doing anything wrong.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: The fault needs to be with our representatives or spending money like drunken sailors.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's where it has to stop.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: And Rick Sky, I'm a friend with Rick Sky, I know Rick, uh out of out of Florida.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: So he was on the news this morning, and I kind of went nuts.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna call him later, but he said, Um, we're gonna I'm gonna talk about what we're gonna do about the cost of living.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: He voted for the big beautiful bill that had$1.8 trillion deficit.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and he continues, these people continue to vote for these deficits, deficit, you know, inflationary bills.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's like this, you're gonna do anything for the cost of living, nothing, until you stop voting the way you're voting on these budgets.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that's on both sides of the aisle.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's not sure we know the Democrats are gonna spend money like crazy, okay, on all kinds of crazy things like Planned Parenthood and stuff like that.
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_01: But but it's on both sides.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Both sides are destroying our economy.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look back in history, every single nation, uh Empire, if you will, the Roman Empire, Greek, all these different, you know, all fell for the exact same reason.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: Exact same reason.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_01: So anyway, I'm blabbing on here.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's just I know that's the thing.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_00: No, that's no, that's okay.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's really interesting.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like filled with filled with questions, and I'm and I'm trying to like narrow them down to the most beneficial ones, I guess.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um one being, so here's probably it's it's not necessarily that it's a hard question to answer.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a hard thing to to actually put into action.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: What are some of like the immediate actionable steps that should be happening right now?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_00: Whether, you know, I guess the accountability, I guess, would uh uh technically fall on us the citizens to hold our lawmakers accountable.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, we say things like that.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_00: I know I say things like that all the time.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: Get involved, you know, be involved.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_00: Most of them, I'm, you know, again, I I don't mind throwing myself under the bus.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Most of this stuff goes directly over my head because I actually feel like it's deliberately confusing and and convoluted and so many different layers.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're just this average person like me going, well, what the heck am I supposed to do?
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what do you want me to do with all of this?
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me what to do, Mark.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing would be to get educated.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, because you can't really talk to any representative if you don't have some fundamental uh and it could be just as easy as why are we spending more than we're taking in?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there's no silver bullet here.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people say, I remember I ran for Congress, my opponent said, we we're for a budget, a balanced budget.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you're for what if they don't cut spending and just increase your taxes?
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's not that's not the answer.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's no silver bullet, you see.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_01: So just become educated and ask why are we spending the money the way we're spending it?
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in order for a lot of this spending to go, you know, to be reduced, we have to change the framework of things like Social Security and Medicare and all these other things, these mandatory payments.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and no politician is gonna get elected when they say, Hey, I'm gonna go in and reform Social Security.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's a killer, right?
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I'm gonna take away your benefits, right?
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh that's that's that will be the the thought about that.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: But if you so first first is to become educated, but there are other things we could do that forces this because you cannot solve a problem with the same people that created it.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the government.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_01: But if we can get back to a a gold standard, all right, and a lot of comments out there, oh, you can't do that anymore, you know, and they're all Keynesian economists are socialists, right?
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna say that.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then reinstate Congress's role over the power of the purse.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Because we have a lot of other things that leak money out, like these wars and like the um the the uh the emergency spending uh bills, which I didn't get into, that the president can spend money, okay?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um and once we have a gold standard, you can't have deficit spending.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Now, now now your your representatives are gonna be faced with rate voting to raise your taxes or cut spending.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so that's not gonna work for them.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: So that that's what has to happen.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: And bottom line, too, is and I had this conversation directly with uh Tom Cotton out of Arkansas, Senator Cotton, to why I said, just because the the the 16th Amendment says that you can now tax our income, uh income tax, which by the way they always could, all right.
• 36:38
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you don't have to tax our income.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: And he agreed with me.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: I said, so why wouldn't we not go back to tariffs in excise taxes like we did before 1913?
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I don't think there's enough money there to do that.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: I said, because you're spending too much.
• 36:55
  unknown: Okay.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: I said that to him and he agreed.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Yeah, well, I think you're right.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you make a good point.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: He said, but you you got to remember, there's a lot, it's it's easy to talk about, hey, this is what you should do, but we've got a couple what I call complexes in Washington today.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: We all have heard the military industrial complex, right?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of money in war.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: We heard about uh that there's also what I call the healthcare industrial complex.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of money in people being sick.
• 37:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of uh we have the financial industrial complex, which is what I'm talking about today with the Federal Reserve and all the other things.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_01: And we also have the technology, technological, if you will, industrial complex, and they're all tied together.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh all these, all these have special interests.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, J.D.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_01: Vance, I hate to say, it was brought in by Peter Thiel to be the representative for the technology industrial complex.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and so you got all these interests that are looking to uh continue to deficit spend, and and the government is their customer.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_01: Every one of these, you know, healthcare, for example, the federal government is 36%.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, 31% of the total healthcare spend in this country.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: And this and when you get to the states, it's another it's almost 50% in total.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_01: The government spends 50% of our$5 trillion healthcare market.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: The government is the customers of these complexes of these big companies, right?
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and so it's harder to do because everybody's kind of got interest in these in these complexes, if you will.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_01: So but but if you don't, if if if people first don't get educated on the basics, okay.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And and and when when I saw MAGA Republicans fighting for the big beautiful bill, uh I'm like, why would you fight?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: You said you were a fiscal conservative.
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_01: $6.9 trillion on a$5.2 trillion tax base.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you do that?
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_01: Why would you support that?
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: If the Democrats had that same bill, which by the way was bigger than anything Biden ever did, then they reject it.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: It goes back to your tribalism.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: And and um and I said to Tom Cotton, I said, How could you be gonna kind of a high-end fundraiser for him in New York City, about 20 of us there.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I was probably the poorest guy in the room.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I said to I said to Tom Cotton, I said, you know, you just got through telling that, hey, inflation is down and all this, and you're but you just passed the big beautiful bill, which is inflationary.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how can you stand there and take credit?
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: Because no matter what the government does, inflation's gonna increase.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: And it's you can see it now, it's happening now.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_00: How did he justify?
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_00: What was his justification?
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Did he give one that you can share?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, these guys are great on they're great word salad guys, right?
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he said, well, you know, one quarter of that bill was Biden's bill because of the way the budget works with October and everything.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_01: I go, I go, really, Senator, that's really the answer.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: You know.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then the next bill that came out was higher than that.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, um, so it's not uh you can blame Biden all you want.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he has plenty of things to be blamed for, but it's it's it's just on both sides, okay.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: So he he had no answer to answer your question.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_01: He had no answer.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I I I I challenged him directly.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you think on this very specific topic we're talking about, where do you think right now Trump is getting it right and Trump is getting it wrong?
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_00: Like Terry, when he talks about the like tariffs, for example, you mentioned tariffs a little bit earlier, comparatively, like obviously he's getting tons of pushback or has gotten tons of pushback on that.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: So where where do you think he's getting it right and where do you think he's getting it right?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think oh, let's just talk about tariffs for a minute.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, constitutionally he's wrong.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and the Supreme Court already ruled in that regard.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, like I said, they I thought they would.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, it's a very conservative Supreme Court, and and they they rule that way, okay.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, not everybody's conservative on there, as we know.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, but where he's getting it right, though, is that he's recognizing that the United States has been subsidizing NATO and other countries all these years, and that the that those those tariffs that those countries have imposed on us since World War II, all right, were there because the United States felt benevolent that, hey, these countries got to rebuild now.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_01: They've been decimated by the war economically.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: They printed themselves out of, you know, a lot of these countries, like Germany, for example, and and a lot of other countries, they just their the the mark back then was worth nothing because they printed so much money.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: They do the same thing.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so, oh, you know, and they got decimated by the war and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna go help them rebuild Japan and all this.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: So they looked the other way on these terrorists.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you put those terrorists in, we'll take care of you.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And that's been good.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody challenged that until Trump.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, President Trump.
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't call him Trump, he's President Trump.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh, and and so he got that right.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: You the the the the gravy train is over.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_01: You got it, guys gonna start sp spending money on your own defense.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Germany has no military, basically, so to speak.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: A country like Germany, okay.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh you guys got to start spending money on what matters, and we're not gonna bail you out from a NATO perspective because you you because you're relying on our military.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: We got bases over there and everything else.
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're relying on us to bail your ass out when you get attacked.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_01: And you're not spending any money on that, but you're spending money on these social programs and green energy and all this other crap.
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so that that stops right here.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_01: That's what he's getting right.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: But by the Swiss Congress had the guts to be able to stand up and do it themselves.
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: You know, our Congress is very weird.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: I and I knew I knew that when we took the Republicans, took the House and the Senate, and we have the executive branch, and you can argue we got Supreme Court too, right?
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: But when they took off all those branches, right?
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: I looked at it and said, don't get excited because we can't even pass the Save Act, right?
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: Think about that.
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: We're for election reform.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: We can't pass the Save Act with, you know, and Dune can kill the filibuster and get this passed, okay?
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I said, it's no different than the proverbial dog chasing the car down the street.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_01: And once he catches the chrome bumper, he doesn't know what to do with it.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what that's what the Republicans are in terms of power.
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_01: They don't know what to do with power when they get it.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_01: And it's and it's really, really, really sad.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's frustrating.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, nothing, nothing, nothing surprises me.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing surprises me, you know, and and uh, and to your point earlier, you know, the Republicans are more right than not on so many things, but they are complicit as and you know the the the system is set up where any one individual can't really make that kind of a difference.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Thomas Massey tried to do it, and look what happened to him.
• 43:44
  SPEAKER_01: He got ousted by his own party, right?
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and uh but and Massey had a 99% constitutional voting record.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_01: 99%.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: 99%.
• 43:53
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Freedom Index.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, he did.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: And MTG had ninety seven.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_01: And And and these people are ostracized by their own party.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, I'm not saying, you know, and I've met MTG.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: I never met Masy, but I've met MTG.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I don't think maybe she made the right moves in some cases in terms of what she did, but but you look at her voting record, she was like right there.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a constitutionalist and a conservative, you can't argue with the way she voted.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think she um, you know, again, I you know, I guess you could you point to that tribalism uh again, you know, as soon as she took a hard turn against Trump, um, that was that was it.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_00: The uh, you know, the force field went up against her.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: And um I don't I don't think she'll I don't know if she'll ever recover uh from that.
• 44:39
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I I I happened to see a post from her not that long ago, and I just popped open and I never comment on anything anymore.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I happened to pop because I was curious what people were saying, and uh I popped open the comments section and she, you know, it was a lot more negative than positive, so you know, which doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot, but you know, it is.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: She's out there sometimes, you know.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the thing though, uh Elsa Congress, you know, being the Senate and the House is not an extension of the executive branch.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, now Trump's a very powerful leader and he feels that it should be, all right.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: But Congress does, you know, he could ruin you, and Massey was a really good example.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right?
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_01: There's a guy 12 terms congressman, got ousted big time.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't even close.
• 45:25
  SPEAKER_01: Biggest money spent on that race.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and so the president has too much power.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't care if it's Trump or anybody else.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not trying to make this a Trump thing.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 45:35
  SPEAKER_01: But Congress is not an extension of the executive branch.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: There should be an independent party.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: We have checks and balances, all right.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: And they should be an independent.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's how our government's supposed to work.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's not supposed to be everybody's, you know, gonna just drive their agenda through and and basically stomp on our freedoms, as that, is that, you know.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_01: So so that's how I think it's one of the misunderstandings that people have of our government is how is it really supposed to work?
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is supposed to be debate.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: There are supposed to be debates about war.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: People said, well, you know, you know, we'll lose a surprise attack.
• 46:12
  SPEAKER_01: We had we had half our fleet over there three months in advance.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like we weren't gonna attack Iran.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_01: What kind of secret was that?
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_00: So worst kept secret, right?
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Worst kept secret.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and and the debate was supposed to happen.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the founders did not want our laws to be passed so easily.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: They want it to be difficult, and they wanted debate in the House and in the Senate, and that's why you know both houses have to pass uh a law.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_01: They wanted it to be difficult to pass a law.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and make sure that we really were not working on today's emotion.
• 46:44
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look through history, a lot of the big changes that were unconstitutional, if you will, happen in times of uh uh of emotion, like like 9-11, we got the Patriots.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, which is highly unconstitutional.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that was passed by a Republican, by the way, George Bush.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and you go back into World War II and you go back to World War I, a lot of things happened along the line there that were based on, hey, let's take advantage of the American public's uh uh hysteria, if you will, or emotion, and get these things passed.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: So many amendments were passed in the early part of uh the 20th century because of the emotion coming off of World War I.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm sure the uh the lawmakers get giddy in that regard when these things happen because they know you know whichever side benefits the most, side that benefits the most is.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's funny.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: I I kind of make the analogy like like in baseball, right?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_01: When a really great player retires, like Derek Jeter or whoever, you know, uh you have to wait five years before you vote him in.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: He can be voted into the Hall of Fame because they want that emotion to simmer down, simmer down.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying that that's what we should do in politics, but but you're right, they do see the vulnerability of Americans uh, you know, in and say, hey, let's let's pass this and let's get this all in the terms of our safety and our benefit, right?
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and as Franklin said, if uh if you're gonna compromise, you know, in uh I'll paraphite phrase, but if you're gonna uh compromise your freedom for safety, you deserve neither.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's exactly what's going on today, you know.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a it's interesting.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think about, well, it's but let me start here.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_00: I I think about from my perspective, at just about a minute away from 55, as a 55-year-old who has, you know, seen the evolution of all of these things, uh, the world as we know it now.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel this exhaustion from it.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: I feel this, you know, lack of understanding and confusion about it, frustration, all of these things.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_00: And and I think about that as somebody who, you know, has kind of like this lifetime of experiences and and uh education, maybe not the best uh or the most rounded, certainly, but definitely more so than what our current, I we'll go with a 25-year-old, you know, we'll use that age.
• 49:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I compare it and I think I can I can see why a 25-year-old, again, just the token age that I'm using, um, looks at socialism, this this pretty little box with the bow on top that they call democratic socialism.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_00: I understand why it's appealing to them.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we, you know, like it's easy to understand why it's so appealing to them.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, you're looking at a 25-year-old, they have student debt, they are living in, you know, mommy and daddy's basement.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and I don't mean that the sarcastic way that, you know, we often say things like that.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it quite literally that they are living in their parents' home because they can't afford to, you know, move out and get a rent on their own.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, they can't certainly can't afford a house.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, they're watching people who already own all these assets, the the rich just get richer, right?
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's what they're they're seeing.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_00: And they have somebody like mom Donnie who comes along and says, you know, you know what the problem is, capitalism did this to you.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's why things are the way that they are.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um so, you know, is it any wonder that the youth is rejecting capitalism?
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_00: And and of course it's it's misguided.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_00: So um I mean, what what what do we do, Mark?
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like how do we win them back here?
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that goes back, uh Elsa to what you said earlier in terms of class warfare.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's the corporations, it's the Elon Musks that are taking your money.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and in in in in an indirect sense, they're not wrong.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're not wrong.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: And when you say the rich get richer, that is exactly what's happening.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the middle class is getting poorer.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: And and so, you know, when I look at wages go up, you know, eight times and and housing went up 16 times over since 1971.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then interest rates, forget about everything just painful, it's it's it's not it's not even a proposition.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_01: So when you use capitalism, if you're a Marxist, like we have a lot of those in government, you mentioned Mandavi, uh, AOC and Bernie Sanders and all these other Elizabeth Warrants, they're all Marxists, right?
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_01: Kamala Harris is a Marxist.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I don't even want to use the word socialism anymore, because that was a dumbed-down word to soften the communist/slash Marxist label.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, I'm at the point now where there's no difference, right?
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and we know Lenin, Lenin said uh uh socialism is the uh is the is is the path to to communism, right?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think there's a difference anymore.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and it to me, why it's not a difference is because of the mindset that you have, right?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_01: The mindset a politician has that believes in socialism, which is 100% opposite of our founding uh documents, right, and our our our our fundamental framework of our country, yeah, 100% against it, right?
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: And we are now, we have so many different socialistic policies that are driving us down, including what I talked about with the budget, transfer payments.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: The founders never, they were all for charity as a personal responsibility.
• 52:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: They were not, they did, and there's documents I could pull out quotes, and I've done this, where they say nowhere in our founding, uh in our federal government should a dollar be spent for the benefit of any one individual.
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 52:28
  SPEAKER_01: And these guys are big on charity.
• 52:30
  SPEAKER_01: That should be a moral obligation.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the government is not a charity, basically is what they all said.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: Madison, all of them.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: However, when the General Welfare Clause got reinterpreted by the courts, it opened up the Pandora's box to allow anything that they thought was a benefit to anything or anybody, whether it's a corporation, a group, um, an individual, it's okay to write law on and pass a budget on, right?
• 52:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why we got what we got today.
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: All these things, Medicare, Medicaid, uh, Social Security.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_01: None of that, according to the original founding of our country, is constitutional.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and you got to remember the courts, everybody looks at the courts as being uh the golden standard of arbitration as the constitutionality, and they've made unbelievable uh errors, including Roe V.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_01: Wade and other things.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: So the courts are not any better than our legislators, really, when you get right down to it, you know, and and uh so you know, and just because we have laws like the Second Amendment, uh, doesn't mean that we're gonna govern that way.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you asked a good question a couple of times ago on your show.
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_01: You say, hey, how come uh all these different states have all these different laws?
• 53:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it should be a lot of representatives at the state level to write those laws.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_01: To me, there's only one law, and it's called the Second Amendment, okay?
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I go to Maryland, I you know, I can't own a gun in Connecticut.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be a I'd be a felon right now.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 53:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we froze.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_02: Did you freeze?
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_02: I thought you're frozen on the side.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_00: That like we lost this whole recording.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_00: It says it's still recording and it's still live.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think we are fine.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: Mine says live one oh three.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, it's still good.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_00: I was about to lose my shit mark.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I don't, I everything kind of like flickered here.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't know if somebody ran into a poll or something.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know, I don't know what just happened, but I think I think we're okay.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: My neighborhood's going to fiber underground fiber optics soon, so I'll be happy about that because Yeah.
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, I know we need that.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_00: My daughter has that in Florida and they like never lose power.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_00: Never lose power.
• 57:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we'll we'll kind of I'll I'll figure out where to where to fix that.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_01: Let me just just real quick, just to finish it.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the whole thing about uh young kids, you know, you know, yes gravitating towards socialism, and uh, I really cannot blame them because first of all, capitalism has been put out there as this evil thing.
• 57:33
  SPEAKER_01: Capitalism is not evil.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: The people that act immorally within capitalism are, and many of those people are are our representatives who are decrying capitalism, okay?
• 57:43
  SPEAKER_01: Because they're not walking the talk in terms of our founding documents.
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: But you know, it's class warfare uh warfare, I should say.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: And they have what else are they gonna do?
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: They see their friends, they can't, they can't buy a house, no matter how hard they work, no how many degrees they get, no matter what kind of job they have, both families have to work to put bread on the table.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I I've I have a relative of two.
• 58:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh hey, are they gonna have a second child?
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, they can't because they can't afford it.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that kind of thing.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is hardbreaking.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, reducing the amount of people on this planet uh is part of the globalist movement.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh if you listen to Klaus Schwab and all those yo-yos over in the World Economic Forum.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and and also, you know, breaking down our God and and and destroying the fabric of the family.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's holding our country together.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_01: You with all this stuff that's going on with transgenderism and all this other crap, breaking down the fabric of our family is is uh is is not an accident.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: It is not an accident.
• 58:48
  SPEAKER_00: No, absolutely by design.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: I agree with you completely on that.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's um it's terrible to watch.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it makes me angry and it makes me sad because um I I just I want so much for all of the next generation.
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I look at my my daughter and and uh my grandbabies and their family, and and they're you know, they're just so blessed.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: They're so blessed to be able to live uh a traditional life.
• 59:13
  SPEAKER_00: You know, they've been able to make that work, and it's certainly not easy.
• 59:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but that they've just been so fortunate and so blessed to be able to do that.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: And it just it warms my heart to be able to to witness that, to watch that and participate in it, of course, as a grandparent.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you know, in the general landscape, when you look around, that that isn't the case for so many.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_00: And um they they just have no idea.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_00: Some of them do, some of them have an idea because they watched it, you know, they saw it with their own parents and their grandparents, and and they do value that and they see the beauty in it and want it, you know, and they look around and they're like, I just, I can't even do it, you know, it can't even be a thing.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got that part of the group, so to speak, that wants it desperately and doesn't feel that it's achievable.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have the other part that we were just talking about that have been conditioned and trained to believe that it's that that's evil, that that's wrong and bad to want and aspire to that life.
• 1:00:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's my goodness, I just don't envy uh that that younger generation.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and I think the the youngest generation, I I forget what they call them, gen, gen Y?
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't even think.
• 1:00:23
  SPEAKER_01: I was never good at that.
• 1:00:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I mean, I just know my own basic.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_00: I know boomer because it always makes me laugh to say boomer.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a boomer.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, my husband's a boomer, and I remind him that all the time.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: He just makes it into the boomer category and it cracks me up.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but yeah, you know, you look at all of that and you're like, oh my goodness, it just I hate for it to be this way.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, which actually kind of brings us all the way back around to the beginning and I and here where we start.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and here's what I want to ask you.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope you give me the answer that I want, but you give the answer that is truest.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, is the American dream dead or is it still recoverable?
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, I don't think it's dead.
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it's it's in this dark.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_01: You ever have a dream that wasn't a nightmare, but it wasn't a good dream, and you kind of woke up not feeling right and all that, you know?
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's where we are right now.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, I I I look back, I look back at our history, and we've been through a lot of crazy stuff in this country.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_01: Come on, from the Civil War, slavery to all the wars that we've endured and and and the depression, which by the way was instilled by our government.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_01: Again, I can someday talk to you about all those different economic uh calamities that we had.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they didn't just happen, all right.
• 1:01:33
  SPEAKER_01: And uh so I look at I look at where we've been as a country, and it takes us sometimes a little bit of time to figure things out.
• 1:01:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, uh I think we're getting there now, we're getting to the point where we're we're starting, and maybe because it's things like your podcast, okay, and and in uh social media in general.
• 1:01:53
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's because of that that we're becoming more informed to a degree, but sooner or later we're gonna hit a tipping point where we just can't afford to do anything.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: And uh short of a revolution, I think I think it's salvageable, and I think we we can uh we can we can recover uh because we've been through worse.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: We we've really been through worse as a country, okay.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a faith in American people.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: I still have faith in American people.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: That's we're gonna guess the right answer.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, and I look at uh and I go back to spirituality and and think about God, and I don't think God ever intended our life to be easy.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think he meant it to be hard, but he didn't mean it to be impossible.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and that's where I think we're going right now, okay?
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so uh yeah, we're gonna put some challenges in front of you and make you a better person and and your resilience and your you know and and your courage and your uh taking the negatives and the grief that we all are handed and using as energy to do good, right?
• 1:02:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you've been an excellent example of that, shining light of that, in terms of how you carry yourself with your with your all the things that you do.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_01: And and so so I I really I I have faith.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think it's uh it's a nightmare, uh, but it's it's not terminal yet.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's one we can wake up from.
• 1:03:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we have to look at history too and look back at the brilliance of our founders and how they recognized all the other empires of the world and what happened to them.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you know, Jefferson was against paper money.
• 1:03:21
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at the Constitution, Congress can coin money, they can't print money.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's in Article 1, Section 8.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_01: Congress can coin money, not print money.
• 1:03:30
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a reason for that.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so, uh, because with paper, you can do all kinds of crazy things.
• 1:03:35
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, the government now counterfeits money and counterfeiting if you did it, you go to jail.
• 1:03:42
  SPEAKER_01: Counterfeit money.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I I have faith.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's it's dead.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_01: I I really don't.
• 1:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because I love that.
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:50
  SPEAKER_00: I love that we we get to finish off on a high note like that, because there's so much of the conversation that's just so hard because it it's so massive.
• 1:04:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like the problem is so big because it's not one problem, it's layer after layer after layer of problem, right?
• 1:04:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it feels so overwhelming to think about how to chip away at all of it, because you can't just wave the magic wand and say, do this, and it's fixed.
• 1:04:19
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so you know, with knowing that, um, it it's nice to close out on a faith note and uh a hopeful note that, you know, and I agree with you, Mark.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we you look back, you look back at history, and you know, if nothing else, we we are a nation of imbalances.
• 1:04:38
  SPEAKER_00: We love to overcorrect, right?
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we go too far one direction and then we go, oh, wait, we got to fix that.
• 1:04:46
  SPEAKER_00: And then we go too far the other direction.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we just go back and forth, back and forth.
• 1:04:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I would love, I would love to believe that at some point we're gonna finally find that middle.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to find the middle of my screen.
• 1:04:56
  SPEAKER_00: Find that middle and and just be okay.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't know, I don't expect to see that in my lifetime, but you know, hope is a nice thing and I like it, and I'm gonna go with it.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: We're always gonna have to fight for our freedoms, no matter, you know, and and and that's always gonna be the case, you know.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I I kind of laugh because you use the word chip away.
• 1:05:16
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I'm gonna go back to the Roman Empire.
• 1:05:19
  SPEAKER_01: What they would they take a coin and you ever go off shaving a nickel or shaving, you know, they shave off some metal, make that that whatever value of that coin still have the same printed value.
• 1:05:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they take the extra gold and mint more money and expand their money supply.
• 1:05:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's what the Roman Empire did.
• 1:05:34
  SPEAKER_01: So when you set chip away, you can even do it with coins.
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it is funny, but but you know, you won't be able to do it with the way we mint money now, you know, because it's the way it's shaped and all that.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_01: Uh but but but but but you know, that's that's exactly what we do.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I I have I I have hope.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: I have faith.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of good people still that you don't hear about because you hear about all the crazies today in the news and on social media.
• 1:05:57
  SPEAKER_01: They're the ones that make news.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: Remember the news is a Money making deal, right?
• 1:06:01
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not gonna put on the news a father and a wife who raises two great kids and they have jobs and they obey the law and they pay their bills and they mow their lawn every week.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they're not that's not news.
• 1:06:14
  SPEAKER_01: That's not fun.
• 1:06:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:06:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not interesting, right?
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_01: I I know they're out there.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_01: I know they're out there.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: They are so out there.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's so many more of that.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_00: They, you know, there's so much more of that middle, that balanced middle that you know we were just talking about.
• 1:06:28
  SPEAKER_00: And exactly like you said, you know, that is the last thing they want us to hear about because that would give us collective hope and faith in humanity and faith in each other and you know, restore or repair some of that divide that we we live in and maybe cure some of that tribalism that we exist in.
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, that's the last thing that they can have happen.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, that that should be our sign to be the the thing we work hardest to do, um to just get out of the tribalism and and pointing fingers at each other and and uh pointing the finger where it actually belongs, right?
• 1:07:03
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and I said to somebody the other day, well, you know, guys like Elon Musk are really, you know, taking all of our money.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_01: And in a sense, they're not wrong about not Elon, but you know, the the wealthy.
• 1:07:15
  SPEAKER_01: But I would say look at your paycheck and tell me where's the deduction for Elon Musk or any other billionaire, millionaire, trillionaire, whatever.
• 1:07:22
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's the government taking your money.
• 1:07:25
  SPEAKER_01: And we're letting them and the founders were against an income tax because of the personal property rights that are embedded in the Constitution.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, they're against that as a tax.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it was Churchill who said tariffs are the worst tax ever, except for all the other taxes.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, you know, yeah and and and so you know, that that that those kind of reforms have to happen here, you know.
• 1:07:56
  SPEAKER_01: And and hopefully they'll I don't know if it's gonna be another party or it's gonna be a like the Freedom Caucus that I talked to Mark Meadows directly about, the freedom caucus is a disappointment to me because they all supported this uh unconstitutional bill.
• 1:08:10
  SPEAKER_01: If those, you know, when I was talking to him back in 2022, there were like 40 people, uh 40 Republicans in that Freedom Caucus.
• 1:08:17
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's more now.
• 1:08:19
  SPEAKER_01: But even 40.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_01: 40 is enough to stop stuff and get things done.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:08:24
  SPEAKER_01: If if you're all aligned, but everybody has their own constituencies and their own promises that they have to pay.
• 1:08:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, so it's it's it's a really a corrupt game.
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and I got a first hand look at it.
• 1:08:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's very corrupt and yeah, and very easy to get sideways, you know, from an ethics perspective.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I can think of one bright side here.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_00: We're not gonna run out of conversations to have about all of this, right?
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_00: There's no I don't I don't think this will be solved uh in a month.
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I I think we're gonna have plenty more conversations to to have about this and different aspects.
• 1:09:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I I know there's so many different lanes that we could go down in this conversation.
• 1:09:05
  SPEAKER_00: So um I think we're gonna have to split it up into multiple conversations if you're game for it.
• 1:09:10
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think the next one we should do is a lot easier, and you and I can get this done in an hour.
• 1:09:15
  SPEAKER_01: Just solve World Hunger.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: We'll just solve World Hunger.
• 1:09:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's easier to do.
• 1:09:18
  SPEAKER_00: We can solve that.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: No problem.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_00: Easy.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: I could do that in my sleep.
• 1:09:22
  SPEAKER_00: Come on.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:09:23
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: Come on.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's like you haven't done it already, you know.
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:09:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, geez.
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: You and Cammy, you and Cammy, you know.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we can do it.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_00: No problem.
• 1:09:30
  SPEAKER_00: No problem.
• 1:09:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my goodness.
• 1:09:32
  SPEAKER_00: Mark Deluzio, my friend, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us.
• 1:09:37
  SPEAKER_00: I appreciate it greatly.
• 1:09:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I can't wait until the next time.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_00: So thank you.
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm sorry I got into a lot of rat holes today, but uh hopefully it made some sense to somebody.
• 1:09:45
  SPEAKER_01: So, yeah.
• 1:09:46
  SPEAKER_01: So Yeah.
• 1:09:47
  SPEAKER_01: All right, my friend.
• 1:09:48
  SPEAKER_00: All right, everybody, thank you all for watching, and we will see you all in the next episode.
• 1:09:52
  SPEAKER_00: Take care.
• 1:09:52
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