John Tamny on debt, innovation, oil and Bitcoin

0:00We've learned anything from these past couple of years. My fellow Americans, is that personal medical freedom and liberty are in crisis. America, our love, polls brings together the top experts in healthcare-related fields to keep you a beat ahead. Listen to America out of a pulse radio on the I-Hart radio network. Ellen the America Out Loud apps for Apple Android and Alexa. Don't miss a moment joining us every Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern. I'm Dr. Randall Bach here to unpack myths, explorations, and give you actionable insights into the world of medicine and health. Watch your seats. Stay, stay ready. You've ever seen those videos where somebody goes shooting off the space and they feel the G-force of the world pulling back at them. It's a kind of a bracing experience to have John Tamion. He noticed in our green room

1:00that I just come out of the shower, I slick back here and all that stuff. Well, I consider John kind of a refreshing breeze and mist of illuminating thought. He is the valuable and valuable head of the park view institute and the author of the deficit delusion as well as a bunch of other refreshing topics. I keep bringing up that kind of refreshing aspect because John, for whatever reason, thinks differently from other people, was that some kind of injury as a child? You're dropped the wrong way. How did this happen? Wow. It's going to be really pretentious. But Elon Musk always said that he thought that he got his weirdness from his grandfather who was a chiropractor. I've got a grandfather who is a chiropractor and I'm also left-handed. You combine those two things. Chiropractors thought doctors were nuts. Doctors, of course, think chiropractors are nuts. I think economists are completely nuts. They think I am even more nut even I think they are. So I think it's natural. I was born in this way.

2:05Contrairingism is not a choice. It's just a state of mind. I think everyone's ridiculous, especially economists. Yeah. I hang out with a bunch of economists. Usually on the tennis court, squash court, that kind of thing. Occasionally dinner parties and whatnot. I have actually some unusual economists, friends, who I could find your views interesting and as I've used the term before, refreshing. But actually, refreshing could be just the word. I wonder if I refrigerate or people talk about refrigerators, but what was the redoing there? You're putting it in there. You're not refrigerating it. Anyway, your views are refreshing. A good number of them have worries about the deficit. That seems to be a topic on everyone's mind. The magical mystery number of 40 trillion. They're all kind of a luxury. The trillion is a thousand billion and a billion is hard to conceive of. I have not become a billionaire in anything. Probably. I don't even think in pennies, I'd be a billionaire.

3:10To have a trillion is more than that. What is the deficit delusion that we are operating under? What can I tell my economists, friends? Well, ask your economists, friends. Why are the markets not worried about the debt? Everyone's talking about higher treasury yields right now, but at the same level, they were in 2007 when the debt was 7 trillion. It's up nearly six times since then markets are just as happy now as they were in 2007. To me, the real crisis that no one talks about is that we can be 40 trillion in debt and markets don't care. Why don't they care? Because they know that the U.S. treasury has taxable access to the richest people on earth who are poised to become exponentially richer in the future. That to me is a tragedy of mythic historic proportions, because just think if they didn't have this much taxable access, think of all the NVIDIAs, Amazon's,

4:12Microsoft's, Google's that would be founded. Think of all the failures that aren't being founded because the rich are so excessively taxed now and in the future. That's the crisis that no one talks about. Markets keep telling us the debts, the easy part yet no one wants to listen to markets anymore. I'm an angel, not in real life and not in the next life, but as a metaphor, I belong to an angel group and we look at startups monthly. I've been doing this last maybe eight or nine years. The oftentimes their pathway is difficult. They have a failure to launch because of capital, frankly. I think a lot of the ideas are awesome. A lot of the people who are doing this are clearly axiomatically entrepreneurial and they are looking at the world in a different way and they bring energy and enthusiasm. Frankly, it's often hard to discern the bad ideas. I think every now and then there's something that kind of grates me. It seems like a self-serving thing.

5:14Recently, I saw a medical company that was promoting a product, a revolutionary new product with a nice little gizmo for a problem I never heard of medically ever in my entire practice spanning four decades or more. They would be able to find a code for it to see PT code. There's a little bit of backdoor cronyism kind of thing going on. It would probably benefit the doctors doing the treatment more than the people receiving it. I literally never heard anybody ever complained to it. They're from a 40 million people who have this problem in the US. Anyway, aside from the rare one like that, most of the things that come across our desk are really nice products. One was a at home streptest, which didn't even make our grade to be heard. It's a nice little product and if everything works, I'm not saying everything does. You would save people a lot of time as the tech of Clerm schlepping back and forth to the doctor's office wasting time in the waiting room, parking all the stuff to have the test at home and you'd save the visit. It would be a way of kind of zoom calling your medical business, which I think has been a boon.

6:19One of the actual positives out of the coronavirus era, we can come back to that because you have a book on that as well. As I've invested in companies, oftentimes they hit snacks. None of them have really come up as the flowering boon and benefit to the investors or the company itself. But most of the time, they hit on the the the shoals of lack of capital. I think getting back to coronavirus, I think coronavirus event was horrible in killing off the startup companies as well as existing companies and so forth. Because the market, the money got diverged. We weren't creating things. We weren't getting the benefit. You don't like really like term printing money, but something happened where everyone kind of like subsisted and we grew our deficit and so forth. There's not a question there per se, but maybe you can kind of address that aspect of you know, constantly. You just hit on it. People who have read the deficit delusion properly have

7:22said, this isn't about debt. It's a tribute to entrepreneurs. And I say, yeah, it is. And you just hit on why you say you guys pass on a lot of companies. Well, of course you do. That's not a knock on you. Silicon Valley is littered with VCs that passed on Facebook and at Google and Apple and go down the list. I never forget that Steve Jobs, when he first, he first offered roughly 50% of Apple to an elected basically a radio shack store owner in New York City. And that no one was interested. They started to rogge not because everyone's lined up to fund them, but because no one's interested. And so think, okay, you know this, the rich provide all the capital. Sorry, they provide 99.9999% of all startup capital. They just do. The rich created Silicon Valley. That was the Rockefeller's Vanderbilt's Fips well that went out there and created it. And so my point is the rich have money to lose. Just think if we didn't so excessively overtax

8:27them such that the government can run up 40 trillion in debt, think of all the wild and crazy ideas that would be funded. And now they're not being funded and they're not because, as you say, there's a limit on capital. There's only so much the rich can lose. They could lose a lot more. If right left supply side libertarian didn't all agree that the problem with the debt is not enough revenue, which is so shockingly abjectly absurd, they say the debt is because there's not enough tax revenue, which so defies basic logic. But because they agree that all these great businesses will never see the light of day or all these failures will never see the light of day. Let's be clear, it's failures and just as important. Yeah, there's a lot of that. You know, and I don't want to necessarily we've already had a talk on this topic, but getting, since we're on the concept of startups, you are the world's expert on the opposite opinion of Liz Holmes. She recently made the

9:28news again because there's a quote unquote secret documentary. I don't know how you can do a documentary by secret right before her. Whatever the word is for shuttling off to prison. And two guys were with her and the New York Post kind of I read the article there. I haven't seen the video itself, but they talk about the fact she doesn't blink. I watched a little piece of a she's blinking. Like I'm not saying weird things. She has wide open eyes. Her eyes are not wide shut as the Kubrickian movie would conversely say. Just briefly, since we are a health show, and it's kind of on an entrepreneurial tilt here, what's the Liz Holmes defense? And where do things stand with her? I know you engaged with her husband, Billy Evans's name. Yeah. It's interesting. My take on the clip that they showed was that was classic Elizabeth Holmes.

10:31And I say that in a good way. What if it had just been a clip from the documentary that showed her walking around her house or feeding the baby? No one would have cared. She's so smart. She recognizes that if it's this odd clip showing her staring intently and saying, I'm real, the interest in the documentary is going to skyrocket. And what I hope from that is that there are some revelations within it that remind people, again, wait, why is she in prison? Now I have said to Billy off air. I've said that, look, I don't think I don't want you guys ever to be apologizing for what Elizabeth did. Never do that. That chain that switches the discussion to the terms of her detractors. What Elizabeth did was heroic. We need more serious fundraising to discover the future. If she weren't pretty, if she weren't a Stanford dropout, if she didn't, I think a lot of people

11:33got bored with her story. And so she's because she's now in prison for it. But we need more people like her. We don't need less. Well, the old question comes down to whether she misrepresented. And that's a separate, and again, we covered this on a previous video. I'll recommend I'll link up to that one as well. But there's a fair amount of misrepresented misrepresentation in any startup. I have a startup friend that I was mentioning probably to you. He's a good friend of mine. And he's brilliant. I mean, one of the more brilliant people I know, I know, fair number of brilliant people. His device kind of micro-size is the metabolic room that we saw in medical school and still exists today. It's kind of a large room that kind of has, you have to have everything kind of closed so you can check out the oxygen function if you're on a bicycle and so forth. Actually, the amount of checking our engine, basically, how much oxygen we're using, how much carbon dioxide we're putting out, and his device is tiny. It's like two

12:37ounces or something like that in weight. And it's easily over the face. This probably would have looked not out of place during the N95 COVID mask error. It's probably smaller than those things. Almost the same weight. And his does think everything that the metabolic rooms do, or now they have the size of telephone booth or something like that. And eventually it ran a ground because of lack of capital and so forth. But the thing is, along the way, you present the image of what's going to be there and then you fill in the details later. You don't necessarily have everything milled and perfected in your interface and your software and hardware. You're doing it, you have the idea and you have the genesis. Now, the question with Theronos is whether her idea of having this, you know, every test in the drop of blood was ever achievable. I mean, at some point down the road it will be, but to achieve a reasonable mozzarella pizza strand from A to B to

13:37concatenate from her idea to the reality and did she misrepresented. And that's where, you know, calls into concept of fraud and whom she defrauded probably was more important. It's like George Schultz's grand kid and by I think we may have George Schultz himself, whatever. So there's kind of like proxies for the people who got insulted and taken in. But frankly, I've been taken in and I kind of think I'm maybe above average or close to average in intelligence. It's like, I got taken in by stuff and it's like, you know, our batting average, frankly, to be a good hitter in baseball means you hit the ball like a third of the time, you know, less than a third of the time and then you're all on the all-star team. If you hit the ball like a fifth of the time, you're out of the league. So this is a sweet spot. Not only in your baseball bat, on your hitting average and those are great hitters, but they're up against great pitchers. So there's always this competition that the pitchers don't want you to hit and the hitters, you know, whatever. So where do you stand on the

14:40actual, you know, the kind of that focal point of where they graded her as having to fraud it? Well, that's the thing. It's Silicon Valley's business model to fail. They're investing in the impossible. If they're not investing in the impossible, they're not in business because it's not the singles doubles and home runs that stay in you in Silicon Valley. It's the multiple grand slams that fund all the losers. And so Elizabeth Holmes, only heir, was that she raised too much money in pursuit of revision. But these weren't widows and orphans. These were smart people. These were the most sophisticated investors in the world who wanted more of her shares, but she wouldn't sell any of their own shares, which is odd since everyone says she was out to defraud people. If you're if the scam is working, you kind of you kind of liquefy some of what you own. She sold none of it. But again, I just think the bigger thing is you make the obvious point that maybe a drop of blood

15:43couldn't achieve what she intended to true, but remember the Washington Post said in the early 1900s that it's a fact that man will never fly. This is about the impossible. She was pursuing the impossible. That's why the valuation went up so high. Again, these weren't idiots. These were real people. And so the fact that she had grandiose visions, the fact that she's seductive to this day, which some people say about this documentary, well, I hope so. You kind of have to be if you're trying to do what no one's ever done before. Yeah, now there's a fair amount of that. You know, I recently got wooed and bought into I think the single best pitch I'd ever seen. And a bunch of us, again, nobody's brand new and fresh in this. And we've got experienced scene companies on a regular basis. And there was a company I'm not going to mention, but we invested back in January. It flopped. It floundered. I don't want to insult that fish. It had it caught it.

16:50We got scrawd. There you go. You know, like two months later, but it was a great idea. I don't know. You know, it was, you know, it's something to do with, you know, getting customers online and getting their eyeballs, you know, coming back to your product after they kind of grazed over your web page and being able to suss out who that was by kind of a light fingerprint, you know, based on your web page and try to get those people that, you know, you wouldn't otherwise. And you know, I don't know. I mean, I was seduced, I guess. I don't think it was mouth-fees. And I just think he ran into problems. He couldn't foresee, you know, which is like probably rights and legal stuff and, you know, governments and whatever. So there's like a pathway out there that he didn't foresee. I don't think he was disingenuous. I think he was wide-eyed. And maybe that kind of attracts something in people who want to see that. We have been examining risk capital and the economics of failure from startups to Elizabeth Holmes and Theronauts. When we return, John Tammany and I move to the larger question, why progress depends on somebody's being willing to finance what

17:54may never work. I'm Dr. Randall Bach. You're listening to America out loud. Pulse always be to head. One in three people will face cancer and most never see it coming. I'm Dr. Kelly Victory with the wellness company and I know this personally. I exercised daily, avoided processed foods and had no symptoms when a routine mammogram resulted in a cancer diagnosis. And modern medicine is often reactive instead of preventative. That's why I formulated SHIELD, a two-part system designed to support immune health and antioxidant defense. A chemical-free cocoa mix and soft gels. Prevention is power. Visit TWC.Health slash out loud and use code out loud for an exclusive discount. During treatment, the structure of tap water gets messed up. Yes, we have to purify water, but what are we doing to fix the water structure so the body can actually absorb it? That is why we created our lab-certified structured water devices. These devices restore water molecules back to their natural structure just like a mountain stream, making them highly absorbable. It's not how much you drink. It's how much you absorb that counts. Better hydration, better energy all day.

18:59Get one for your home or on the go at chemicalfreebody.com-forthslash-out loud for an exclusive discount. That's chemicalfreebody.com-forthslash-out loud. Well, to just see Google quietly updated its AI principles removing its pledge not to use AI for women's or surveillance. They promised they agreed to in 2018. When American people have seen Google's track record prompting the question, is Google an untrustworthy player in the AI race? Now is our time, my fellow Americans, AmericaOutmau.News, Liberty and Justice for all. I'm Dr. Rina Bock back with John Tamney. Of real-player markets, we pick up with aspiration why human beings conceive futures that do not yet exist and why capital determines whether those visions become companies, technologies, or nothing at all.

20:02The poet Robert Browning wrote, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for? It's stretching for the impossible gives life and human ambition to higher spiritual meaning. We are aspirational creatures and we have DNA, literally, but I think our kind of parlance is storytelling. We are storytelling creatures. We want to have that narrative. So we fall into it, but those narratives are also what would make us be able to build things that walruses, they don't have opposable thumbs, but primates too, and they don't build the things we have because we are able to have this kind of meta-aspective speech. We're able to conjure visions that aren't just alert, alarm, something coming, hunger, hate you, whatever. We are able to weave stories and then we are able to create things out of those things. It's like if Elon Musk has that aspirational aspect to go to Mars, I don't know if it's real or not,

21:04but he's building toward it. It's like if you don't get there without throwing the rope ladder up in the sky and doesn't grab on, I forget who invented the sky hook. Not Kareem Abduldje bars or magic joneses, but you throw a hook up in the sky and grab it and it holds on and then you pull to yourself up. It does not make any sense, but stranger things have happened. It's kind of like a lot of the space stuff that happens is things that people didn't conceive of before, like having kind of geosynchronic orbitals and having stage, whatever, propulsion, whatnot. They're just things that happened because people have these ideas. And we need more of it. And again, to me, it's always the scene is the most prosperous country on earth with all these amazing advances. But the unseen is staggering. Just think how much more advanced we would be, how much better living standards would be. If not the Democrats,

22:07if not Democrats, Republicans, supply-siders and libertarians didn't all agree that, oh yeah, the rich because they're rich, they should either pay a flat tax, which is a wealth tax, or they should just pay a graduated income tax and they should pay a lot more. Wealth is so heavily taxed in this country to the detriment of progress because the rich uniquely can fund new ideas. The pork can't do it, the middle class can't do it. I get so mad when Republicans say, hey, look, our tax cut largely went to people earning under $500,000 and I say, okay, it's your admitting, your tax cut had nothing to do with growth. Absolutely nothing. When you do want growth and let's presume we do, we can talk about why we want growth and what growth is. Because my house isn't growing, it's kind of just, yeah, I'm not growing. Personally, probably I'm shrinking gradually. We can talk about what growth is. More people, more things around us, better facility, greater ease. What is growth A, and then how do we

23:14facilitate it? And why do we want it? Well, we want it because I know you know we want it because we haven't scratched the surface of our potential to this day and you know this better than I. If I get a pancreatic cancer diagnosis, odds are really high that I'm going to die. I know there's a new drug out there from a California company that has seemingly slowed its ability to kill. But as we know from our friendship with George Gilbert, everything on Earth that's needed to solve pancreatic cancer in all manner of other things already exists, we just don't have to use it. The only way you can learn how to use it is through investment. We need more Elizabeth Holmes. We need people with such grandiose visions that they can attract enormous amounts of capital. And it just horrifies me once again that both sides agreed the rich should pay all the taxes because what they're saying is that we should slow progress immensely by growth. I mean progress, by investment in new ideas. As George Gilbert would say, we need more information. We don't have

24:17a fraction of the information that we should. And it's an amazing thing. I think about that thought of yours oftentimes when I'm doing some odd tasks around the house. I don't know. For instance, screen door just broke. The handle fell off. I mean, I don't know why. The metal fatigued as do we all. And it just fell off in my hand. So I need to get into one thinking about the best ways to do it. Now, I can sit right there. I used to be, I'd have to run to the hardware store and find the right thing, bring it back, doesn't fit wrong size door, wasn't thinking about whatever. I can, I, basically take a picture of the thing I have, get the, you know, SKU, SKU code off it, find out that thing, find out the better ones of that thing. Everything's kind of inferred from it. And I haven't like moved from my seat. Now, I will be able to move from my seat when I want to. But I won't

25:19have to do it at the command of things. Now, I just a side story. Back in 1987, my wife and I, we were not married yet. Man, she trusted me enough. We've met friends in Spain. She had tried, a long story. She had been traveling. We kind of had an indirect, I was between jobs and she was as well. And she went to France with a friend. We, the boyfriends met them in Spain, Madrid, we flew over, I brought bicycles. And then we left them at Barcelona or someplace. She and I traveled, you know, kind of eastward. I saw my Auschwitz surviving great uncle in Zurich. And then off we were behind the iron curtain. We bicycleed from Vienna to Dior, GYOR in Hungary. And we went through the iron curtain. And at that place, one piece of the bicycle broke. And it was the easy kind of thing. You go into hardware store and you find the part. Here, this is like a thousand drawers. You just pick the thing out. You find your thing, almost contemplating what I did with the screen

26:23door. And anyway, but this, I just need a nut and bowl. And so I go into the hardware, this is a hardware store in town. And you can see cartoons like this are hand drawn images. But it literally was true. I go in this place, shelves were empty. Up and down, this place was pre-Soviet, a pre-Soviet era store that had existed until the, I guess, kind of the 40s. The Russians came in, whatnot. And there was nothing there. So I spoke German and I managed to converse with the guy. And he's like, oh, yeah, nuts and bolts. You want those things, whatever. And I go down there and there is a box, one box on the shelf. And it's just unlabeled. None of the niceties, whatever, no signs and pleasant colors, whatever. Just like a brownish box. I open the thing up and there's, there is a nut and bowl. But it's about five, four inches long, maybe metric. And that was it. That's the only one

27:25they had in the whole store. That was their nut and bowl supply. And so the information part is, you know, here we kind of can find the things. And there's kind of the reflex of ability for people to supply those things. Somebody who makes that thing from my screen doors, it doesn't wake up and say, oh my god, I hope Randy is able to find this someday when his screen, they make this stuff on the intuition and aspiration as well that people are going to continue to need these kind of things, continue to need the screen doors. In the Soviet model, now there's no need for that. The store owner, I don't know how he's existing. I mean, you know, he had a certain price for that thing and whatever. But, but, you know, it's like, you know, the old Soviet joke, they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work. And it's like the whole plate, I mean, there was, you know, that story, obviously, stuck with me. And there were many items like that over the course of the trip. And you just can't get them. And nobody had the interest in doing it because everything had been stifled.

28:26So this is kind of like what you talk about growth. The anti-growth model is where nobody cares. And it's like everyone's kind of left alone. And there you are. Yep. There just, there's the anti-growth model is stasis. It's just, it's things stay the same. And it's not politicians see it. That's why I hate government spending so much. Uh, politicians see the known and want to maintain it. Um, entrepreneurs look at the known and say, oh, this is ridiculous. We're going to fix it. But see precisely because they're this minuscule part of the population, no one agrees with them. Most people see the known. It's not just politicians. And so you got to have these crazies. But it's expensive to fund crazies. And I'll just add that for the your economist friends who worry about the debt, what they, what they refuse to see is that if we didn't overtax the rich so much, we would not have debt. The debt is an effect of market confidence that the rich will continuously

29:28be overtaxed such that it's easy to lend to a country like this. If you remove the rich from, imagine if the United States was just Alabama and Mississippi and Vermont, would it have a lot of debt? No, it'd have almost no debt because there's no billionaires there. There's no, there's no centimillionaires there. There's no trillionaires there. There'd be no debt. The US has lots of debt because it's got taxable access to the richest people on earth. If you remove, if you say that we're not going to, we're not going to treat them differently from others, suddenly there's no debt. But there's a lot more growth because they're investing rather than paying taxes. I'm a big fan of the late PGO works book, Eat the Rich. You talk about one of your recent articles about the rock that was Hong Kong that, you know, kind of conservatives like concept of Hong Kong with no resources, and you're comparing it to men as well. But there are other rocks out there that have some resources, you know, basically around the

30:30Persian slash Arabian Gulf. UAE, I mean, what happens when our billionaires and trillionaires decide to expite patriarchy or wherever and, you know, hang out in Dubai. And what does Dubai's business model right now? I assume it's not oil anymore. And do they collect taxes and how much? Well, Dubai is interesting. I, you know, I'm curious what you think about that. I've been once and it fascinated me. And what I learned from it is that there's a lot of people from Europe and all over the world there because they can't get here. They're talented educated people. It's just too impossible to get to the US. Dubai's only rule is the chief of the work. You don't go to Dubai and to retire. It's a working city. And so it's kind of cool. There's just all these people working. That's all they do. So what the business model is, I feel like it's exceeding a matter of what? Certainly oil helped it, but people say, oh, it's rich because of oil, but well, explain to me Nigeria. Explain to me Venezuela. It's not just oil informing some of these locations. There

31:36is, there are brains at work. Yeah, that's a reasonable point. You know, there's so many things squatter. Getting back to the Venezuela concept. You're unhappy with Donald Trump's recent actions there. Do you explain? Well, because we could be 100% bereft of oil in the United States. The United States could be a barren rock on its own. Zero oil. We could also be a war wither embargoed by every oil producing nation on earth. Yet we'd still consume all of the world's oils, though it had bubbled up in West Texas. And we would be as we're the most productive people on earth. And no one passes up market that productive. There's just too much money to be made in it. I never forget that in the 1973 Arab-Opec embargo, which means it didn't include Iran. It's not an Arab country. We still bought the oil from the Arab countries. We just bought it from those they sold it to. They weren't going to give up that market anymore. Then the Chinese would give up the US's

32:38or earth market. You're not going to give up such an enormous place economically. And so, why would we want to be, quote, energy independent? What an economically backwards notion? You just employ things that you don't have or that it's not worth your time to extract the most important from others. And they're believing they're going to sell it to you. So we want to get into the oil business. Why? What's the value there? And in Let's Add, remember conservatives want limited governor. At least they claim they do. What are the large oil companies in the world? It's certainly not ExxonMobile. It's state-run. Well, why are they state-run? Because oil can be taken. I can't take Randy Box Mine, but government's been taking oil for as long as it's had an economic value. Why do we want the US to own more of our economy? Well, the Congress would be that, you know, I think it was more geopolitical, frankly. I mean, I think, you know, we are in,

33:43I know which world war we're in right now, whether it's four or five, but they're geopolitical interests. And Venezuela had, say, a bad actor running a series of bad actors running it. And this was, you know, we did this, you know, very swift maneuver to decapitate partially or and slightly recapitate with the del C Rodriguez, whatever their name is. And, you know, this is, I think, kind of a parental maneuver rather than an entrepreneurial maneuver, per se, and that you have this, you know, aspect where the money won't just be siphoned off into the oligarchs there who are not doing well and doing disservice to their own population and take away the breeding ground for kind of Chinese beachhead close to our country, as well as power there. Clearly, people I think are interested in oil, they're interested in the control they're on, and the fact that

34:45their government entities holding it points to the kind of centrality of the power there, and that it becomes a power lever. And so in order to have our nice libertarian ish world and free markets and whatnot, we have to have them pleased. You know, I can, you know, claim my house as a free market for stock, but people can come in and rampage and root pillager and whatnot. So I need some protection of it. You know, the United States of America, you know, kind of wanted commerce between the states, but they also need protection from other states and state actors. So I think there's that aspect you have to have, you know, guardrails or some kind of like, you know, system of protection. Yeah, I don't know what the protection was from Venezuela. I didn't go to sleep at night worried about what Maduro was going to do. Now I think it was horrifying what he is doing to his own people. Do we have a dog in that fight? Look, it's hard to say that I suppose that that's many ways of different debate. But what I think it's

35:47important to point out is that oil got as low as $7 a barrel during the Reagan years. It got as low as $12 a barrel during the Clinton years was OPEC feeling generous at the time, but they just think, oh, no, we really like the United States right now. We're going to know OPEC never controlled the price of oil. The biggest driver of the price of oil is the value of the US dollar. And if anyone doubts this, just Google oil price history. Notice how if you, a chart will come up and notice how it's kind of flat like this. And then after 1971, it's up and down. Also, what does that tell you when we destabilized the value of the dollar in 1971, we took the oil price on a roller coaster. But what's important is during the Reagan and Clinton years, the US was largely energy dependent and we were because it's not economic to extract oil in the United States at such low prices per barrel. Where we worse off, no, I love paying less than a dollar per gallon. Did they, they

36:53were a strength hold it from us? No, the price go up, no, went down. America extracts quite a bit more oil today. Yeah, no surprise. Of course, it does be as oil is so expensive right now. So for the United States to be in the business of something governments do around the world, Americans have to pay quadruple or more than that per gallon of gas. I find it so insulting. John Tamini has taken us from entrepreneurship and economic growth to win as well, oil, in his case against energy independence. When we, when we return, we will follow his claim that oil prices are inseparable from the dollar and move into gold, Bitcoin, private money, and his contrarian case for California. I'm Dr. Randall Bach. This is America. I'll pulse always a beat ahead. You wouldn't go a day without brushing your teeth or washing your hands. What about washing your nose? I mean, your nose does filter the air you breathe. Air loaded with bacteria, viruses, and irritants. Make nasal hygiene part of your routine with clear. No messy bottles to fill, no drowning sensation.

37:56Clear is a natural drug-free sailing with the added benefit of zyletal, which blocks bacterial and viral adhesion. Available in stores and online at clear.com. That is x-al-e-a-r.com. Have you been looking for a healthy snack from the go? Well, not all energy bars are soft and sugary. Bear bars are a crunchy, savory bar made from just six simple natural ingredients. Bear bars are plant-based. Organic gluten-free contains six grams of protein and are low temperature dried for a unique crunch. Most energy bars are based on chocolate or fruit and are held together with serps or sweeteners. To learn more, just visit bearbar.com-slash-outloud. Welcome back for our third and final segment. I'm Dr. Randall Bach, back with John Tamney. He left with his claim that expensive oil says as much about the dollar as it does about petroleum. Now we follow that argument into presidential currency, policy, gold, crypto, and why

38:59Tamney thinks California's obituary has been written far too early. And I find it so frustrating that conservatives who used to be of the Robert Bartley, I bring them up because you know him or no of them through your friend Jim Malone. His father was the deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal and her Bartley. Bartley wrote a book about the Reagan years saying that yeah, well in the 1970s, oil didn't become expensive. The dollar became cheap. There are no Republicans talking about that today. And I find it exasperating beyond belief. So how did the dollar become cheap as a cheap now? Well, presidents get the dollar they want. They get it in different ways. President Nixon decided to delink the dollar from gold. I'm not going to have a gold discussion. That would turn off all the economists. They hate it because gold would mean that they wouldn't have as much to do. But they economists including Milton Friedman said Nixon, you got to get off the gold stand. Okay, well, so that was devaluation. And so with the dollar and decline, commodities priced in

40:02terms of gold, an oil wheat meat soybeans, they all went up in the 1970s. Inflation, devaluations, inflation. Ronald Reagan ran on returning to the gold standard. That was in his every stump speech. After he won New Hampshire in 1980 in February, notice how the gold price starts going down. Well, markets anticipate and they anticipated a Reagan victory. Reagan, again, was talking about reviving the dollar as a measure in gold. Well, he didn't get that to his everlasting regret he could have, but he didn't get it. But the dollar strengthened quite a bit under him. And so oil prices collapsed. Commodities collapsed. What was Bill Clinton's Treasury Secretary? There's most famous one, Robert Rubin. What did Robert Rubin say? Adnazium, a strong dollar is in the interests of the American people. He never job owned the Japanese about the value of the yen. He was a strong dollar guy. Is it any surprise that oil was cheaper in those years? George W. Bush gets into office. I would argue to you that he's the worst president in my

41:08lifetime. And I was born when Nixon was president. George W. Bush was all for a week dollar. And he got it. And here we are. We're still there to this day. So when you say he's four a week dollar, what are the marrying industries you have to pull to that? They don't have to be busy. Remember, Treasury is the dollar's mouthpiece. The Fed has never been the dollar's mouthpiece. And so Nixon took us off the gold standards. That tells you the power of a president to change the value of the dollar. FDR famously devalued the dollar in his bathtub from 120th of a gold ounce to 135th. He just said, from here going forward, the dollar is worth this. And what can the markets do about it? That's the that's the issue of the currency. So just the same someone like Reagan could have put us back on the gold standard. And so markets responded to his belief in a strong dollar by saying he could do a lot of things. They moved it back upwards. Again, Dylan Clinton's Treasury was all about

42:10a strong dollar is so important. And they conveyed it through not all the job only and even under the Reagan years about the dollar yen and everything. George W. Bush wanted a weak dollar. His Treasury Secretary is kept saying that Donald Trump says a weak dollar is great. You know, I had the strongest dollar of all the presidents during the 21st century Joe Biden. Yet he's blamed for inflation, which is just so ridiculous. It's just so thoroughly minus. I'm not a Democrat. I've always voted Republican. But the dollar was strong and Biden. It's been an incredibly weak under Trump. President Trump wants a weak dollar. Okay. So we're seeing this in prices. So so wanting, you know, I want to be taller. You know, my watch. But you don't have the power. You don't. President Trump can once again, he can say, right, okay, going forward the dollars worth one, we will redeem dollars at $2,500 worth of gold. We will redeem dollars at one to one rate for the for the euro. And no one can do anything about that. And so you don't have the power

43:15of the president, Trump or any president has over the top. Okay. So so literally what what did George W. Do like aside from wishing it and what what literally has Donald Trump done aside from wanting it? Well, he's continuously said a weak dollar is great, which is a signal to the markets that it's that that there are things add into that the US Treasury has an exchange stabilization fund. So if it wants to at any time, it can enter the markets to sell dollars to to to shrink their value to buy dollars. And so for a president to say what he wants, that president is back by tens of billions of dollars that can enter the marketplace and affect the price assuming they want to. We also have like a strategic oil reserve. And at times those things get used like pre-election, what not to to bring down the price of gasoline at the pump. I think Joe Biden did that during the the run up to 2024 if I'm not mistaken. And I would just make that as an analogy, not I'm not

44:20making it. It's a good analogy. All right. But if I if I have my rainy day fund or I have some insurance payout on my house, whatever, I don't get to use that over and over again. I use that once or even the threat of it, whatever. But it's like I really don't see how the jaw boning works repeatedly. You know, I mean, I can I can yell at the dog across the street. And maybe the first time I recoil is any finds I'm just yelling at him and comes and bites me. You know, it's like I don't see how just the wish that it become weak because you structure of all that are happening. True, but you have words. Donald Trump has the whole of the federal government. Okay. So so what are those actions that are dispositive between the tre- again, the tre- look at up treasurye has an exchange stabilization fund that that exists to move against the markets one way or the other on the direction of the dollar. Treasurye theoretically can print

45:21just the same for this did you agree that when President Nixon severed the dollars length to gold but the dollar shrunken value, do you agree that there was inflation in the 1970s? Well, you know, I was in medical school, well, I was probably in high school then college at the time. I didn't follow this. So I have to go look. I mean, this is a new concept for me. I've not researched. So I'm not going to. Well, yeah, but explicitly the dollar was worth one-thirty-fifth of a gold ounce in when the 1970s began. By 1974 after Nixon severed the length, a gold price bought a dollar bought one-130th of an ounce of gold. By 1980, a dollar bought was worth one-eight hundred seventy-fifth of an ounce of gold. So that was the substantial devaluation of the dollar. But it could also be the reflexive revaluation of gold. I mean, people know, but see

46:24gold, you know why that's not true is gold is a constant and that's not me saying it. Notice and this this would be confirmed. I can footnote this all to you. It's in all my books. Before 1971, there were no currency markets. And why were there no currency markets? Well, the dollar was defined as one-thirty-fifth of a gold ounce and the world's currencies were pegged the dollar. There was no gold market because there's no reason to trade currencies. There's no currency market because a currency defined in terms of the constant that was gold was so stable that what was there to trade? Yet today as George Gilder will tell you it's seven to ten trillion dollars a day in currency trading. That is the market's telling you the immense stability that the gold price gave the dollar that we didn't just happen upon gold. It was thousands of years of people trying to figure out what would and be you a currency with stability. And so they happened upon gold. It's

47:25the most stable commodity in the world. And so when the president when Nixon says the dollar's no longer to fight as one-thirty-fifth of a gold ounce, that was a devaluation. So for the same reason, the president Nixon could devalue the dollar by leaving the gold link. A president can mess around with the currency's value now because the markets know the power of the president has. He can put us back in the gold standard. He could put us on a euro standard. He could put us on a yen standard. There's all sorts of things you can do. So I mean, I don't really mind those markets because I think everything is a market and there's going to be an exchange one way or another whether it's ideas or is there a market for a foot or an inch? Do we trade that? Oh, the foot's too strong right now. Americans are too short. So let's devalue the foot so Americans can be taller. Well, the currency is not a market. A currency is a concept. It's a measure of value. And so economists, your economist friends will say, yeah, if we devalue the dollar, American goods will

48:28become more competitive globally, which is just utter nonsense. Never forget the vast majority of goods, including American made goods, are informed by inputs from around the world. And so if suddenly we shrink the value of the dollar, imported inputs to make anything that we create, the cost of it's going to go up. And so no, currencies are not a market. They're just a concept of value. They sadly become a market because people like Milton Friedman said, you know, we really need to give more economists jobs. And so the dollars should float around. As Jim Malone's father used to say, the Friedman policy was an absence of policy. Just floating money, just going every which way, which again, it'd be like saying, yeah, it's funny. I just think the inches too strong or I really feel short today. Well, I'm going to devalue it. I want to be 12 feet tall. So we're going to shrink the foot in half. Interesting. I'll have to ponder that one. You know, the absent, absent gold, you know, people

49:30have been trading one way or another forever, right? I mean, isn't that literally the oldest profession? Yes. And so if they're trading things by which they trade. So now there's obviously all these kind of, you know, ethereal coins out there. What do you think about that as a marketplace and kind of superimposition on these fiat currencies? And does that reimpose any other type of value? And does it kind of the original Bitcoin in fur? Can you confer some stability given that is a fixed amount? And even gold can be mined when a ring-killed gold presumably can be diluted and faked, metallurgically, that we can't perceive. So, you know, how does that work on a background to your thoughts? Well, Bitcoin's not money can never be money precisely because its supply is fixed. Again, why would you put a supply limit on a constant? But because its supply is fixed, it has no

50:33purpose. Hey, Dr. Randy, come fix my bathroom. One Bitcoin now, one in six months, you'd say, okay, well, which Bitcoin? The one that was trading for 120,000, the one that was near 60,000, which is it? So Bitcoin's absurd. It's a cool idea. It's revolutionary. What fascinates me is they say, well, and so I think crypto ultimately take over. But those trying to take over it right now, I don't think they will be the ones because what's the most circulated cryptocurrency? It's called stablecoin. So, it's a currency that has, or it's a digital money that has one to one relationship with the dollar, but wasn't the whole point of crypto to get away from governments and their persistent evaluations of money. And so you're not getting a stable currency there. The notion of stablecoins is stable. It's just so ridiculous. And see, this was always known. So the Chinese invented the theot currency in the seventh century. And that was the debate at the time. The Confucian said,

51:36well, don't let government issue it. They'll devalue it. And so the Confucians were saying at the time, let's have a private currency. And so that's where I think crypto is ultimately going to win. Whereas governments have always devalued their currencies. What if Amazon issued a dollar or JP Morgan? Well, they can't devalue because if they did, they lose customers. And so I think that's where we're headed. But it's not going to be a one-to-one currency or relationship with the dollar. Why not just during dollars? Someone's going to recognize that what people have always wanted. People of been trading as long as mankind has existed. They used to have the barter. Money became a way, a concept, a measure of value for products to exchange for products. Someone's going to say if we really want a currency to circulate a lot, it's going to hold its value really and truly. And it could be that they just returned gold in that way.

52:36So tell us, we're rounding out our hour here. It's been fascinating as always. I like you to maybe tell us your next book and how you decide what the demand is for your ideas and where you decide directionally to go. Well, no one's ever demanding my ideas as my book sales, sales would confirm to you, but you never know. This book is called California Freedom, how the golden state is igniting and growth, parenting, education, and retirement revolution. I make a case in the book that California's economy is not just large, but it's massive, and it's holding up the world economy, and it's only going to get better and better. That while the right is out now confirming that California is in decline, that it's been a state run into the ground, and while the left are kind of hedging their bets, and we don't think California can do as well. It's always done. I make a case in the book that California's wealth today,

53:39which is unrivaled anywhere else in the world, is a fraction of what it will be, that the talent that's coming into the state so overshadows the lesser talent leaving, that the future is going to be unbelievable, and it's going to transform how we all live, how we all work, regardless of where we live, how we retire, everything. So what's the basis of that optimism? I mean, there is Elon, our views, left California for green or brown or sirtier pastures, Texas, which brains are coming into California, and how does that work? Are you talking about from internationally or are growing there? Internationally and domestically. I make a case that taxes are not not the driver of people out of California. In fact, the biggest inflows in the California nationally are New Yorkers, where you could hardly call them tax exiles. The reason Californians

54:46are leaving is not because of taxes, but because there are so many rich and productive people there that housing is impossible to get. And so even in the bad areas, you're looking at a starter house, the thousand square feet, and neighborhoods that if I took you to you'd say, oh my gosh, they started a million dollars. That's not a sign of people leaving. So who's coming in? Well, I point out in the book, in its statistical Harvard Business School grads are flowing into California on mass, same with Stanford, same with Wharton. I'll bet you anything that exponentially Harvard Medical School grads are flowing to California and they are to Texas. What I point out in the book is that this outflow talent and inflow into Texas and Florida is just not occurring. The superstar talent continues to go to New York, California, Massachusetts. Undeniably

55:47statistically, factually true. There are a lot of people who want more house who are leaving California, but why can they leave California? Because of the genius technology created out there that makes it possible for people to leave anywhere. It's really fascinating to look at. And medically though, people say, doors, doctors shortage. I think a lot of them, and you would know this better than I would talk about a subject. I'm guessing that the majority of geniuses like you, they're just in northern California now. They're no longer treating patients. They're creating drugs to treat exponentially more people and save their lives. But they're just not moving to Texas and Florida. They're there. Well, we shall find out. Thanks so much, John, for being with us. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. That's all for today. Remember every myth has a solution, and every truth has the power to transform your health. Find us on America, out of our pulse radio every Friday at 5 p.m. Eastern or on demand. Wherever you get your podcasts, secure your assistant with one, and we'll see you next week. America, out of our pulse,

56:49always be the head.