David Friedberg Explains America's Economic Crisis in 60 Minutes

David Friedberg. We have five years till Social Security is bankrupt. If you had put all the extra money that was put into Social Security since 1982 into the S&P 500, the Social Security trust fund would have an extra $37 trillion in assets sitting in it today. The net worth of Americans is $183 trillion. The billionaires in America, their net worth is $8 trillion. The bottom 50% of America, their net worth is $4 trillion. Capital gains tax should be 40%, not 15%. That would be a fair tax policy. The key metric for America should be to convert 2% of Americans from labor to capital each year. If that would be the KPI from America for the next 250 years, we would crush it. I think it's about making Americans feel good again. 45 million Americans graduated college in the last 10 years with student loan debt, can't afford a home, can't afford healthcare, looking at the situation being like, 'What the f could you leave us with?' Oh, sorry. I'm just rambling off.

Thank you for having me.

Was this California bankruptcy?

Yes. Well, if the ballot initiatives and the tax policy and the battle that's going on in the state for spending and taxation is any indication, I, you know, think it's probably true. The current budget from the governor is something on the order of a 30 to 40 billion dollar shortfall that they bridge with kind of an accounting thing. There's another 30 to 40 billion dollars on the ballot to be spent as a California constitutional amendment this year. There is, you know, this massive kind of pension cliff. We have the highest tax rate. We just increased taxes, the highest tax increase in, I think, the history of California. So, yeah, it's not going the right direction. But you know, it's a reflection, I think, probably of broadly what's going on across the United States. I mean, we are in year 250 of this republic and there's probably a number of policies that were major missteps in the mid-20th century that bring us to this moment, which is not a very pretty moment.

I'll start with like one fundamental truth. I think a fundamental truth is that there's this natural feature of nature that plays out in the economy, in business, in markets, which is this idea of compounding. If someone or something or some organism has an advantage, it takes over. It ends up growing very quickly and it, you know, it can have an outside kind of influence or presence in its ecosystem. And the same is true in business. Compounding is an advantage that arises from once you've accumulated some capital, you invest that capital, you don't have to do work to make that capital grow and it just keeps growing and growing and growing. And that compounding advantage is to some degree a feature of capitalism, but fundamentally it led over time without the right policy from government sitting on top of it to an extraordinary kind of state that we're in today, which is the cost of everything has run away from the majority of Americans. They can't afford stuff.

And a small percentage of people have large assets, but a majority of Americans don't have assets. So when you fast forward some of the policy decisions that were made over the last 50, 60, 70 years to try and fill the holes that were being created, they were the wrong decisions. They were actually putting fuel on the fire. And it brought us to kind of this moment where the majority of Americans can't afford to pay housing. They can't afford their student loan. They can barely afford food. They definitely can't afford healthcare and they don't know if they'll ever be able to buy a home. And meanwhile, they're watching guys like Jeff Bezos and others go up into rockets and hold flowers out in space and say, 'Look how amazing the world is.' While the majority of Americans feel left behind and things are fundamentally unaffordable for the majority of Americans. And so I would argue that there was a series of policies that took place over the last couple of decades that we could talk about that bring us to this moment. But I just want to like, I should frame one important set of statistics.

People think that there's this small cabal of people that have everything in America. And while there is wealth inequality, the statistics are a little bit different than I think what everyone groks. And I just want to put these numbers out. The total asset value, the net worth of Americans is $183 trillion. You can look this up on the Federal Reserve website. They track this stuff very well. 183 trillion. The billionaires in America, the evil billionaires, their net worth is $8 trillion.

The bottom 50% of America, their net worth is $4 trillion. So it is true that the billionaires have twice as much as the bottom 50%. But 183, you know, minus that 12 is $170 trillion that the middle class of America has. And if you take the billionaires and take it down to like a $50 million net worth threshold, that's 23 trillion. So 23, call it 165, and then four. So the middle class is really where all of the net worth in America accumulated. And yes, there's an ultra-rich group that has a lot of assets, but this is really what won in America in the last half century, that middle class. But the problem is the bottom 50% left behind.

So that's, I think, what is really driving and motivating this socialism today. Things are too unaffordable. There's an inequality gap and there's this massive kind of motivation to do something about it. The problem is, I think, a lot of government spending is the fuel on the fire that got us to this moment. So we all think like, oh, you know, it was not fair what happened. This is, you know, they've stolen from us, etc., etc.

One thing we got wrong is tax policy in the US. And I know this is super boring to talk about, but it is crazy that when you have capital, it can compound and then we put a lower tax rate, the capital gains tax rate of 15% or 20% on that capital when we're charging 40% for people to do labor. That's the tax rate for labor. It's crazy that the tax rate was flipped. Basically, labor should have always been taxed less than capital. And if we had taxed capital at a higher rate than labor, then you wouldn't have seen this massive kind of inequity. The second thing that we really messed up is Social Security. In 1982, Social Security, which is the safety net for that bottom 50%. That's really where their assets are supposed to sit. All their extra capital, which isn't really their extra capital, but it's yanked out of their paycheck, is put into the Social Security trust fund. It's an independent company supposed to hold all the money and it's supposed to invest it and make returns for the bottom 50%. In 1982 they changed the rules in Social Security and all of those assets were invested in one thing, a US Treasury bond making three and a half percent a year on average since 1982. As a result, there's $2.7 trillion sitting in the Social Security trust fund. It's a separate fund outside of the government. All the money and all it has is a Treasury note. All that money went to the government. They spent it all. It's gone. So, it's basically going to end up being a Ponzi scheme. If you had put all the extra money that was put into Social Security since 1982 into the S&P 500, the Social Security trust fund would have an extra $37 trillion in assets sitting in it today. Those would be stocks owned by America, by the bottom 50% of America. And it would have created extraordinary value and extraordinary net worth for the majority of Americans who today are left behind and can't afford stuff. And then, you know, pension plans. We had this other kind of problem which we can talk about, but fundamentally, you know, we had tax policy that was bad. We screwed up Social Security and then we ended up spending all this money to try and bridge the holes on education, healthcare and housing. And those are the three things that have become so unaffordable that no one can access them, that the majority of Americans can't access them anymore.

Education. In the last 30 years, administrative staff in educational institutions has grown by 6x while students have been flat. The reason is there's unlimited money for education from the government through student loans. No kid who's 18 years old is going to make a good decision about what school to go to when you can go to any school you want with any degree regardless of your personal GPA or income outcome when you come out of that school. As a result, it created all these misincentives where institutions could spend as much as they wanted on administrative staff, build a new building, put in a new rec center, charge more for tuition, charge more for tuition, charge more for tuition because there was no constraints. The federal student loan program would give a loan to any student going to any college for any degree regardless of the price. In a private market, you would have tested how much does that education cost? Is that a good school? Is that a good degree? And are you a good student? And it would have constrained how much was being loaned for education. Instead, it was unlimited and everything broke and everything got so expensive and now people can't pay their student loan debt.

And then healthcare, same thing. Federal government becomes the single payer. When the federal government's the single payer, everyone takes advantage of them and the price of everything goes through the roof. And then the other kind of great lie of the 20th century was to make everyone own a home and put all of their net worth in one asset. And when you do that, then the only way to keep Americans wealthy or to keep the middle class stable is to keep the price of homes going up because that's your only asset. So if you want your net worth to go up every year, they need to have policies that drive the price of homes up every year. And that ultimately leads to a point in time today where young people can't afford those super expensive homes. Back in the day, 30, 40 years ago, you got a good job, you could buy a home. Today, because we made everyone put all of their net worth in their home and therefore we had to keep home prices going up to keep everyone's net worth going up, people got screwed. So these are the fundamental issues that I think, you know, the mistakes that were made over the last couple of decades that lead to this great socialist wave that's underway right now. You know, it's been obvious for the last couple of years. Spending's climbing, inflation's climbing, and everything that the government touches gets more expensive. And it was obvious and inevitable that we were going to come to this breaking point where the majority of young people, 45 million Americans, graduated college in the last 10 years with student loan debt, can't afford a home, can't afford healthcare, looking at this situation, being like, 'What the f did you leave us with?'

Sorry, I'm just rambling off.

It's all good. The socialists are after me, but...

Are the socialists in the room? Yes. Anyway, I've been talking a lot, but I just think like... Oh, clear out.

Thank you.

It's a fake tree. But anyway, I think that's the moment that we're in right now. And so it's scary. I mean, we can talk about, you know, what else could be done and what's next, but it's pretty obvious that these idiotic policies brought us to this moment, one after the other after the other, and then pouring fuel on the fire. And then everyone looks for an enemy. They're all like, 'Oh, the rich people did this.' But, you know, the reality is it's these policies that are broken.

And, you know, the thing that's acute right now, let me just pause there and make sure this is okay. Following in the current state in California, I'm going to read you this quote. There's this effort to pass a wealth tax. I'm not a billionaire. It's not going to affect...

I'll maintain that motion. But I have a fundamental issue with the idea that the government should take private property from citizens regardless of their wealth or regardless of what it's being used for. And the reason is that the United States was started on this really important principle of private property rights. Because everyone that came to the United States came from a place where you didn't have private property rights because tyrannical governments could take whatever the f they wanted from you whenever they wanted to take it. Whatever background that country had, whether it was a socialist state or a monarchy, there were all these governments that didn't give you the rights to have anything because at any point they could take it from you because they had the rights to take what they wanted from you. So the US was set up to give people rights. One of those rights was the right to ownership, the right to private property.

John Adams had this great quote. I want to make sure I get it right. He said, 'Property must be secured or liberty cannot exist.' And he wrote a couple of years after this an important piece that said, 'The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.' So it's very poignant on the 250th anniversary of the United States to like read back on this founding principle of the United States and look around and realize we f'd up our public policy. We f'd up our tax policy. Half of America is left behind. They can't afford anything. Half of them are looking at all the wealthy people being like, 'What the hell?' And the course is seize the private property and start to distribute it. Because if you think about it, once you take that step, once you have a right to take someone's private property after they've paid their taxes, right? They've earned their income, they've paid their taxes, they buy a home, they buy a car, they buy a watch, they buy whatever, a wooden table, and they're like, 'This is now mine.' And the government can come in and say, 'You know what? We need it because we got to pay bills. We're going to take that from you.' That's when anarchy and tyranny kind of ensue. And so that's why I worry so much about this wealth tax in California and the conversation happening about instituting a wealth tax, which is really an asset seizure throughout the United States. It sounds good in principle to take money from the rich and give to the poor. It sounds fair. It sounds right. It sounds just, but it is a violation, I think, of one of the reasons the United States was started. And there are other policy paths that can be taken to fix the wealth inequity, to fix the injustice, to make sure that the wealthy do pay their fair share, and to address some of the policy issues that got us to this moment and hopefully not get too far down the path where we can't actually reverse them. So, I think it's really important that both sides, politics, politicians, and all that, take a look at this moment and say, number one, we recognize the state that we're in. We recognize how f'd up half of Americans are. We recognize how much we f'd this country up through these idiotic policies. Stand up and say they were idiotic and what we got wrong and then be really clear about the changes that need to take place because otherwise you are going to have tyranny/anarchy, which are both basically the same, happening over the next couple of years in the United States.

He's on my board.

Yeah. So there, you know, Ro Khanna and other aspiring politicians have said we want to put a wealth tax in on people over X million, 50 million. Some people have said 10 million. Some people have said 1 million. And you see how quickly it kind of has cascaded down because again, once you open the door that says the government can take any of your property, suddenly all property is the government's property, which leads to mob rule, which means 50% of people can take whatever they want from the other 49%. 51% can say, 'I want 49% of people to give me half their assets,' and then you have a very slippery slope to nowhere. That's not good tax policy. It'll cause people to flee and run around and get away and it'll cause more discontent, but it doesn't solve the policy problems. It doesn't solve the problems that the majority of Americans don't own assets. They don't own equities. They don't own a piece of the productivity that drove America. Think about how f'd up this is. These 50% of Americans that were told when you retire you will have Social Security and it will take care of you. They never got to own a piece of the American businesses that drove the economic engine and success of the United States. All that they owned was a three and a half percent Treasury bond from the government. That's what they owned their whole life. Three and a half percent yield per year signed by the federal government will give you three and a half percent at the end of your life. And by the way, it's capped in how much you're going to make. If they had bought the S&P since 1982, they would have 37 trillion dollars. They all were left behind. That policy needs to be fixed. We can fix that policy. We can fix the policy where everyone's getting these what are called defined benefit programs, these pension plans in public governments. I'll give you another statistic. In 1974, there was a law called ERISA that passed. After that law passed, it basically changed the rules around pensions. Prior to that, 40% of Americans had a pension plan at their company that they worked at, IBM or wherever your local business was, AT&T, and you had a pension plan. When you retired, you got a piece of your pension plan paid out to you. The problem with pension plans is if a pension plan makes 3% a year, 4% a year, or 5% a year, compounding for 40 years, the difference between 5% and 3% means that this pension program is way overfunded or way underfunded and the pension plans simply don't work. All these companies would go bankrupt. So, they all switched over to 401ks beginning in the 80s. So 1980, 40% of Americans had a pension plan. Today, less than 8%. 1980, 90% of government workers had a pension plan. Today, 90% of government workers have a pension plan. So government employees were kind of left with these pension plans while the middle class that worked in private companies got these things called 401ks. You know what they had in those 401ks? They had equities. And they owned assets that were productive. They owned a piece of American business. And that grew and grew and grew and that's how they became $170 trillion of net worth today, the middle class, because they owned a piece of the American business. You know, we really did kind of f this up and we got ourselves to a point where, you know, we put the wrong policy in place. And I think it's not too late to fix that, right? Like every American instead of having a Social Security account, they should have the equivalent of a 401k where they own stocks and when they retire they get all those stocks or they can start taking a piece of it out when they turn 50 and take some money out every year and start living on that if they want to. You know, this whole idea that you only get a fixed income when you turn 62 or whatever it is is crazy. You should put money in, own a piece of business that makes America drive, that we all participate in, grow with it, and take some out when you want.

Yeah, it's a lot like... it's a lot easier to claim an enemy, get elected than it is to fix a difficult policy problem. And I think that's the fundamental kind of concern I have right now. Again, like I don't think that the people that are complaining and that are trying to go down the socialist path are wrong in how they're feeling. I think they're absolutely right. And I think the politicians take advantage of it. I think that they feed into it in a way that doesn't actually look at realistic solutions. It's about inciting emotional responses to get themselves votes. I mean, this is as old as politics. Tell someone that there's a problem. Tell them who's responsible for it. Tell them you're going to fix it and you get elected. You know, you've now got them emotional. You got them riled up because they see an enemy and you're the politician that's going to solve their problem.

And that's a moment. I mean, look, Ro Khanna is the perfect example of this. This is some dude who has a $300 million net worth. His children have memberships at three country clubs. Literally, his kids have memberships at three country clubs. His kids own like a piece of country clubs. The dude lives in a $10 million house in Washington DC. And he used to be the moderate Silicon Valley guy who would go around to all the tech CEOs and founders and VCs and be like, 'Hey, give me your money. I'm a moderate. We're going to make the Democratic party work for you.' And then he saw the tides change and he's like, 'Oh, this is yum yum. I'm going to run for president in 2028.' That guy, just to be clear on this, he is so unlikable. I think he'll likely end up being Secretary of Housing and Urban Development if AOC is elected president. Okay? Okay. So, he'll be on the campaign trail. He'll maybe convince 2 to 3% of people to vote for him and then he'll end up in this role where, you know, that's his progress in life. But it's so crazy because he saw the moment and he seized it and he said, 'Okay, we can go for socialism. That's what we should do.' And rather than be brutally honest by looking around at all the places where socialist policies have failed, and rather than diagnosing the actual policy decisions that got us here, I do not disagree with him or Gavin or anyone else that tax policy in America is f'd up. When billionaires borrow against their unrealized capital gains, they should pay capital gains tax. Capital gains tax should be 40%, not 15% or 18% or 20%. They should pay the same as labor. In fact, labor should pay less. Income tax should be much lower. Capital gain should be much higher. That would be a fair tax policy. I don't know a lot of people who are wealthy who will look me in the eye and truly disagree with that. It's a lot of f when we all say, 'Hey, it incentivizes investment.' Great. It incentivizes investment. What are you going to do with your excess capital if the tax rate is 40% versus 20%? You're not going to invest it now? Of course, you're going to f invest it. You're going to invest your money. We can charge more for capital gains and solve this problem. But instead of those practical solutions like I just laid out, they're all like, 'Let's go fire up the f socialist train because it's worked so well in f Cuba and Venezuela and the Soviet Union and all these other places. Look, look how well it... Oh, wait. Don't look over there. We're going to do it right this time. We're going to get good socialism this time.' It's a lot easier to do that than it is to actually go through the boring, annoying f policy points that I just went through and say, 'Here's how we're going to solve each one of these.' And what both parties are missing is a policy agenda that says, 'Here's the f we got to do to keep America from going down the socialist death spiral.' And they all should be f doing it, both sides. Forgive my language.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think it would be really helpful to explain socialism and what actually happens when this takes off. It's like kind of like a virus. I don't know what was that that we watched, Project Hail Mary. What was that like, a bacteria thing?

Exactly. It's like astrophage.

Astrophage.

Socialism is like astrophage. It is. It is. If you study it, there's an inflection point. Part of socialism is like multi-level marketing. There's an aspect of like, you know, you just got to sign up one person per day. You go around and, you know, it's incredibly well organized. And the Democrats are pulling their hair out, by the way. Mainline Democrats. They're like, 'What the f?'

Republicans are pulling... they're just like, 'What? This is nuts.' There's a recruiting model around it. And that recruiting model involves like bringing in, organizing really well door-to-door. And the other thing they're really good at in socialism, in driving the adoption, is to create spectacle. Zoran Mamic jumping in the pool.

These viral moments in front of a desk, knocking on the glass in front of Ken Griffin's condo. Those viral moments that we've all seen, that we all watch are key to the strategy. It's the spectacle. It draws people in. And then it's about recruiting. Slow conversion rate. And then everyone's responsible for being part of that. We're all now in the cult of socialism. And we all have to share the views of that cult. And it grows. Again, I don't want to disparage the individuals that are advocating for it because they're coming from a place of hurt. This is the hardest thing for anyone to hear that hates socialism. It's not coming from a place where they're evildoers, but it's bad policy because ultimately it leads to a drop in productivity. It leads to poverty. It doesn't optimize for the most important thing that I think the United States should optimize for, which is economic mobility, giving everyone the opportunity to move from labor to capital. Socialism locks everyone in labor for the rest of their lives. Everyone will always be labor. But let me tell you something about America. I came here, graduated college with $19,000 in debt. Had no money besides that. Worked, paid my debt off, succeeded in America. I had no f silver spoon introduction. I had no nepotism.

Didn't have three country clubs. It worked out. And I can say that about a million of my friends. It worked out. There's this opportunity set in America that's unlike anything else in the world ever. And I think the key metric for America should be to convert 2% of Americans from labor to capital each year. If that would be the KPI from America for the next 250 years, we would f crush it. Because what that means is that in 50 years, every American would be able to choose whether or not they want to work because they could just live off of the capital that they've accumulated, that they've appreciated, and they can now take that capital and live off of the income from that capital and live whatever life they want to live. That should be the goal for America. And that metric of economic mobility, no politician talks about. They use those words, economic mobility, and they throw it away and they never talk about it again. But what's the metric behind it? What does it mean? Economic mobility means that at some point in your life, you've saved up enough and invested enough that you can now live off of your investment and you don't have to go work for X dollars an hour or X bucks a week or month or year to live your life. When that transition happens, it is a beautiful moment. I've experienced it. I went from needing to be labor in order to pay my bills and pay my rent, pay my healthcare bills, buy my food, to a moment where I didn't have to work. I still choose to work because I love the things I do. But every American should be afforded that opportunity to make that transition. That's what economic mobility is. That's what this system today allows. And it is a f'd up tax policy and the government spends too much and ruins everything. That needs to be fixed. But the system itself, the underlying system of capitalism works and we just need to make it more accessible to more people. But as soon as you take that system away, no one has that opportunity and economic mobility is lost. And then all these Americans who are advocating for socialism will be stuck as labor for the rest of their lives. What socialism does is it puts a foot on everyone and it says we're all down here and we're all stuck. Except of course for the rarified few who get to be in the politburo that get to make all the decisions. And every socialist country in history has had the upper echelon that lead the socialist party that get to fly private jets, live in $10 million homes, have three country clubs, and be part of this elitist politburo while everyone else is down here. But no one can transition up. And if we lose that in America, we lose America. And actually, the world loses America.

So, we're at day one of Trump accounts or Invest America accounts or whatever they end up being called. Obviously, it turns a lot of people off by calling them Trump accounts.

But the idea is right. It's a 401k for everyone. Social Security needs to flip into being a 401k for everyone tomorrow. We have five years till Social Security is bankrupt. That's not my assessment. That's the CBO score. Like that's what the CBO said is going to happen. Congressional Budget Office. When you look at how much is going to get paid out and what the pay-in rate is, Social Security runs out of money in 5 years. We should be flipping. It's got 2.7 trillion in it today. That account, it's a f treasury. Like, you know, but they should sell that treasury. They should take that cash and they should go buy the S&P 500. And everyone that has Social Security should get an account and they should get their money and it should buy the S&P and it can also buy private stock and it can also buy whatever. If the federal government is now going to go and set up a private equity account, a sovereign wealth account to buy assets in private companies, I personally don't love that. I don't love that America is like suddenly going to become public-private. You know, that's not my free market kind of like belief. But if they do that, then all of those shares can go distributed to those accounts and we could flip Social Security tomorrow into that system and expand it in that way. And we should do the same for all government employees and get them off of these pension plans. These pension plans are poison. The fundamental problem with these pension plans is that they will ultimately end up bankrupting the states or they will become Ponzi schemes where people get screwed because they're expecting retirement benefits and they don't get them and they're going to get bailed out somehow anyway. They should all be flipped to retirement accounts. They should all be flipped to 401ks. Everyone in America should get the same thing. 401k, you own a piece of these equities in America and we all participate together in the growth of...

America. And then everyone's incentivized to see businesses succeed. And then the more you put in, the more you can kind of set yourself up to transition from labor to capital sooner. You should have the opportunity to do that. So, hey, look, I mean, if you want to spend less and save more, go for it. Throw more in the account and you can retire sooner. And I think that's what everyone should get. So I think the Trump account set a good standard for kids. I think it's a great way to think about this. We have to make this change through legislation.

As you know, Democrats, Republicans can't seem to do anything today. This next wave in between now and 2028, it's going to be chaos in America. It's going to be AOC and the socialist wing versus Gavin and the centrist wing versus the kind of Republican mainline versus the Republican ultraright angry nationalists. It's going to be a nasty four-way battle over the next two years. So, how in that environment are we going to really set America up for success? How are any of these guys going to stand up and lead and say, 'Here's what's got to come next for America to survive.' It's going to be really hard. It's going to take some pain. And I think probably till after '28, or we need some of these guys to decide they want to be leaders and they want to buck the party and they want to buck the fight and they want to say, you know what, we got to do something different. We got to give everyone a piece.

Look, I mean, I'm here today to talk about this because I think it's important to have the open conversation. I don't know if anyone listens to this.

Your show's got great viewership in Silicon Valley, but I don't know if it's going to affect the... I don't know if people are going to stay tuned in this far.

Why did you go there?

Okay.

Yep.

That's awesome.

So, I reached Paducah. No, no. I believe that you've reached Paducah. I don't know if the viewer made it all the way to minute 83 or whatever we're on right now of this episode with me talking about public policy, but I'll keep going. But that's why I think we got to have these conversations. I'm just hopeful that more of the politicians... it's, you know, you've got to face the hard facts.

We fucked up. Talk about what we fucked up. This is what we got wrong. Both sides need to talk about it. You cannot ignore the bottom 50% of America, describe what we got wrong, and say what we're going to do to fix it. But if you take it all and you just reduce it down and treat everyone like an idiot and pretend that everyone's dumb and you can convince them that there's a small number of elites that have totally taken over everything and you're left with nothing because of them, vote for me in socialism. You are lying to them. You're perpetuating more of these lies.

And you're creating a sinister environment that's going to lead to America continuing to be split apart and ripped apart in a really nasty way and rob everyone of the opportunity that America has afforded us for 250 years. For everyone to have the opportunity to progress, to have economic mobility, to have liberties, to have property rights, to have all these amazing vested rights in this country. And to sit around and tell people reductively because I think you're dumb, this is the bad guy, let's go socialist and let's go get all their stuff.

I don't think that's the right answer and I want more people to kind of stand up and say the right thing. So I think that's the only way. Look, I mean, you ask about a scope. The thing about the socialist movement is it's designed to be viral. It's designed to be eccentric. It's designed to be sensational. It's designed to be emotionally titillating. It's designed to have an enemy that incites emotion inside of you to drive you to do things extraordinary, to go out and be a recruit. It's like a cult. You got to go recruit more people to be in it. This other side is cerebral. It's rational. It's harder to recruit. That's why I said I don't know if people made it this long. It's a discourse. It's a conversation about here's what we fucked up. But maybe it's about being emotional about all those things. And maybe it's about getting all the people that you would otherwise think would be rallying around socialism to say, you know what, that's right. This other thing is right. These are the policy changes we got to make. We did all get it wrong. But it starts with everyone saying we got it wrong. If you've got people running around saying, hey, policy has been good in the United States for the last 50 years, you're a fucking liar. You got to be able to stand up and say we got it wrong. And I think that's the first step. But no politician wants to say we got it wrong because they'll get unelected.

Then you go from we got it wrong to here's the right answer and here's how we're going to get it done. And you got to have a group of people start to coalesce around that idea.

That is correct. Yeah.

It's all good. We're going to call that tree the Republic of the United States of America.

How many leaves are there? I bet you there's 50 leaves on that tree.

Yeah. One leaf at a time.

It's sad. You ever watch the movie The Never-Ending Story?

It's like slowly, you know, the... Oh my god. You got to watch it. You watch that movie?

Oh my god.