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June 18, 2025 22 mins
We comment on Dave Smith’s assessment that Elon Musk is dedicated to two big issues. One is free speech and the other is government spending.

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Dave Smith | Trump VS. Musk | Part Of The Problem 1272
By: @PartOfTheProblem


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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
You're listening to the podcast Coffee with Mike and Juliet
Libertarians Talk Psychology. This is current commentary from an NBA
businessman and a PhD psychologist.

Speaker 2 (00:15):
I want to call this episode Elon's two Big Issues,
and I want to comment that this latest stuff with
Elon Musk has revealed to me how deep the deep
state really is. That I was really hopeful that Elon
Musk would turn our government around. I don't know why.

(00:39):
In hindsight, that seems pretty naive of me to think that,
but I really did. I was hopeful. And now with shows,
just with those, I think that those was his proof
that government was out of control, and I think Elon
hoped that everyone would follow that lead and correct the system.

(01:00):
I'll see that the system's way too big and powerful.
I think, for one shot, I'm guessing that our system
has to fail before it'll be ficked.

Speaker 3 (01:09):
God, you're such a pessimist.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Okay, then let me just get into the issue.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Without without me criticizing it.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Yeah, without your criticized, and without me spending too much
time being a pessist.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
Before you go on, you make a point that a
system that can't self correct, the self correction is the failure.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
That's a good way to put it.

Speaker 3 (01:28):
So I haven't given up on self correction, Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
I'm with Trump, Okay, So let me you.

Speaker 3 (01:33):
Make the point that failure is a correction.

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Okay. So I like the way Dave Smith addresses this issue.
So let me do the first clip and we can
comment on the first part of it.

Speaker 4 (01:45):
Elon Musk has has essentially attached his brands to has said, Look,
this is what I stand for, this is what i'm
this is what I oppose, this is what I'm fighting for.
These two issues were free speech that this was the
whole his stated reason for buying Twitter. So really, Elon

(02:08):
Musk has attached himself to free speech and out of
control government spending. And on these two issues, Elon Musk
has picked two of, if not the two most important
issues of our time, and he is one hundred percent
on the right side of both of them. Now, if

(02:31):
you want to sit here and argue with me that
there is some conspiracy in the background, that he is
trying to collect data, he's partnering up with Palanteer, he's
trying to usher in this new oligarchy. I mean, look,
I'm not I don't know. Maybe you're right again, I can't.
You know, it's enough of a challenge to read your

(02:52):
own heart and soul, that is, it is a near
impossibility for me to do that with like Elon Musk,
who I've never met, So I you know that I'm
not denying that that is possibly the case. I'm simply
saying if you listen to what Elon Musk is saying,

(03:12):
he's telling you that these are his key two issues.
They are maybe maybe the number one and number two
most important issues of our time. They are certainly up there,
certainly both in the top five. And he is absolutely
correct on the issue, absolutely correct. I mean, what was
released in the Twitter files should if if we weren't

(03:36):
living in such crazy times, they would it would be
the number one scandal of our generation. It's it's not
probably because there's been so many others, you know, but
that's not That doesn't take away from the importance of
the issue. It just happens to be that the government
shut the world down over a virus that they made
and then lied about. But whatever, then that happens to
be that they've started, you know, seven mass murder campaigns

(03:57):
based on lies in the last twenty five years, and
they framed the current president of the United States for treason.
So like, okay, there were other things that happened that
might take the cake, but oh my god, what a
scandal it was that the government was suppressing free speech
through social media companies, pressuring the social media companies to
ban certain people, pressuring them to kill certain stories explicitly

(04:20):
for political reasons. Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and cleaned
up at least a lot of that. Now. I'm not
saying he's cleaned up all of it, and I'm not
saying that we have pure, unbridled free speech on social media,
but it is much much better than it was. Dissidents
of the regime have a real fighting shot now to

(04:45):
voice their opinion. And if there is one person who
deserves the most credit for that, it is Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
Okay. So that's issue number one is free speech. And
I think Elon Musk has gotten us over the top.

Speaker 3 (04:58):
On there, my life what Dave Smith is saying, because
he really points out that Elon must really put his
money where his values were. Oh yeah, And I don't
know if he's coming out ahead monetarily. I mean, he's
probably being okay monetarily, but the fact is the guy
put it all on the line. I want to make
a comment about free speech and the two most important

(05:21):
issues there is. The most important issue is free speech
because that is the detection system. There's nothing else that
competes with that.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
That's a good point. You're saying, the first step to
correct any problem is free speech.

Speaker 3 (05:38):
Exactly. There is nothing else but free speech. When you
don't have free speech, you can't get anything else straightened out.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
And we did not have free I mean. And Dave
Smith does a good job, you.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Know he does. He does list the stuff. There's apparently
Scott Adams list. We really need a complete list of
the deep state, what's been uncovered, all the corruption. When
somebody goes down the list, you just think, my god,
it shocks you every time, no matter how many times
you've heard the list, it's shocking to realize there's so

(06:13):
much corruption. I mean, it just shocks you to hear
the damn list. And that's only what's been uncovered.

Speaker 2 (06:20):
Yeah, and even when we see, like Jeffrey Epstein, big problem,
even with the tools that we now have to talk
about stuff, we still don't know what's going on with Jeffrey.

Speaker 3 (06:32):
I don't believe him that he killed himself.

Speaker 2 (06:34):
God it didn't, just that it's his whole network and
stuff that he had going. We don't know anything about it.
We still don't know anything about the JFK stuff. They
keep talking about how we've released the files. If you
released the files, then why was it so important to
keep everything secret for fifty years?

Speaker 3 (06:54):
Yeah, it just doesn't.

Speaker 2 (06:55):
It just makes sense. We still don't have complete free speech,
but I do think Elon Musk has really maybe put
us over the top, and we still have a lot
of work to do to get true free speech. But
I am pleasing.

Speaker 3 (07:11):
And the Internet as a whole, that free speech is
an emergent process. People will always want say their mind,
give their side of a story. They will always want
there's an instinct to want a level. I mean, it's
part of the reciprocal altruism system. You have a tendency

(07:32):
to want to tattle on people. You don't like people
who keep secrets. The secret is the crime. Usually you
know you can't commit a crime without keeping it secret.
So free speech is everything, and I think it was emerging.
I always said that they can't keep it down now
that there's an Internet.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Well, the Internet is a very important thing. But as
long as there were only three big nets works, Yeah,
and the networks had control of what was said, and
then they were able to shut down what was expressed
even on the Internet, they were able to shut it down. Now,

(08:13):
that was shocking. And Elon Musk blew a hole through that.

Speaker 3 (08:18):
He did blow a hole on it with buying Twitter
and that from that jackass.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
So that's the first issue. The second issue is out
of control government spending, and Dave Smith is out.

Speaker 3 (08:31):
Of control government cheating. He's pointing out that people are
getting money away, giving other people's money away for all
kinds of stuff. That's just kickbacks and good old boy
system and our value system we're paying for our value
system just waste and fraud.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Yeah, and I'm going to let Dave Smith come in
on that. But Dave Smith, this is an economics lesson here,
and this is important.

Speaker 3 (08:57):
And he doesn't what he has to say.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
Yeah, and he does a good job with it. But
he points out that government has three ways to spend money.
They can get taxes and spend money, they can borrow
and spend money. And then he puts a lot of
effort into point out they can print money and spend money. Yeah,
and so I'm going to let him.

Speaker 3 (09:18):
They they have three ways to corrupt the financial system.

Speaker 4 (09:22):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
His point is that there are limits on how much
you can tax and how much you can borrow, but
there's no real limit on how much you can print.
And he's going to get into that.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
That's a good that I'm interested in hearing what he has.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
And this is all from Milton Friedman, by the way.

Speaker 3 (09:39):
Yeah, your hero.

Speaker 2 (09:40):
My hero even more than Dave Smith, even bigger hero
is Milton.

Speaker 3 (09:45):
Freed Well, he's a source. He wrote the book on it.

Speaker 2 (09:49):
Okay, I want to let him talk about it from
this point forward.

Speaker 4 (09:53):
Because you know, most of the money printing at this
point is not even actually printed. It's just zeros on
a computer. The Federal Reserve just sentence them over to
JP Morgan Chase. It's nothing. As many zeros as you
can type, that's what you're limited to. And so that
is the preferred or one of the preferred methods of
how governments maintain this level of spending. And this is

(10:16):
what has wrecked our society, not just wrecked our economy,
wrecked our society. This is the reason why prices are
out of control. It's the reason why young people can't
afford to own a home and to send kids to
college and to you know whatever, all of the things
that you'd need to do. If you think about it,
there is absolutely no reason why we should have this

(10:37):
affordability crisis. Now. This is something that I think is
lost on a lot of people because if you don't
spend time thinking about this, it's very easy to just
take it for granted. And especially since we've lived in
an inflationary economy for you know, one hundred and twelve

(10:57):
years or whatever it's been since nineteenth when the Federal
Reserve was created, and it becomes this thing where almost everybody,
just like regular people who aren't even paying attention to
politics at all, You, just as as I once did too,
you just take it for granted. It's almost like a
given that prices rise over time. That's what they do, right,

(11:22):
Prices go up. I mean, you know, your grandma will
have some story about how a bottle of coke used
to cost a nickel, and you're like, yeah, that same
bottle of coke costs two dollars and fifty cents now.
But like, that's what prices do. They go up, they
go from being a nickel to being two dollars and
fifty cents. But that's not organic. That is, there's no
law of nature that says that prices just go up,

(11:44):
that things just get more expensive. That's not like written
into stone anywhere. And in fact, the natural order of
a productive economy is for prices to fall. Now people
don't know this, but in nineteen thirty, if you were
talking to your grandma, she would have been telling you

(12:04):
how expensive something was to buy back in her day
and how much cheaper it is to buy today because
we didn't live in an inflationary economy. We lived in
a productive economy. And when you live in a productive economy,
prices tend to fall. It's the natural path because you
get better at producing things and therefore you can produce
them more efficiently, and therefore you don't have to charge

(12:26):
as much for them. Like obviously if you you know,
if you just think about this on a basic level, right,
like if you have technological improvements. If I if the
job were, say, like to make a man made lake,
and I had to do it with men with shovels,
I'm gonna have to charge you a lot more than

(12:47):
if I were to do it with an excavator. If
I have the machinery and the technology, one man can
now do the work of like one hundred men. It's
just much cheaper to produce things. You can charge less
for them. But we don't live in that world, because
we live in this world of insane government spending and
they can't tax us enough and they can't borrow enough,
so they have to print up the money. And when

(13:08):
they print up the money, who ends up getting the
money first? Because that's what the whole game is about
when you print new money, right, theoretically, theoretically, if you
were to print money and evenly distribute it along the
lines of how people already have money. So like, if
you were to double the money supply but just give
it out, you know, double everybody's individual net worth, then

(13:32):
you're not going to have a huge transfer of wealth.
It should be more or less around the same. But
that's not how it works. Who gets the money first?
When you print all this new money, who gets it first? Well,
it's government's cronies and Wall Street. But I repeat myself,
and this is where someone like Bernie Sanders can come

(13:53):
in with whatever his numbers exactly are, whether they're exactly
accurate or not. But where he says of the new
wealth that's created, ninety nine percent of it went to
the top one percent of millionaires and billionaires, well he's
not completely wrong about that. He doesn't know he doesn't
understand who the real culprit is here. He always just
thinks it's greed and corporations, but that's not actually true.

(14:15):
It's a government banking apparatus that is specifically designed to
print money and give the new money to their friends first.
Because of course when new money is printed, the prices
don't immediately rise. It takes time for the money to
get into the economy. That drives upward pressure on prices.
And so if you get the new money immediately, you

(14:37):
buy stuff at the price that it used to be
and then you sell it at the new artificially increased price.
And so essentially the bottom line here is that when
it comes down to it, Elon Musk has staked his
reputation on two issues that he is absolutely correct on

(14:58):
and are in enormously important issues. And I got to say,
of all the reasons to walk away from the Donald
Trump administration, of all the reasons to like say no,
this is too much for me. I won't cross this line.
This is a pretty damn good one.

Speaker 3 (15:15):
Okay, that's a good lesson in economics, just like you said,
pretty good. So we have this baked in inflation because
of the FED, who prints money as a way of cheating.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
As a way of allowing Congress to spend as much
as they want to spend.

Speaker 3 (15:30):
Yeah. So but let me say the good news. Okay,
Elon Musk is causing people to talk about it.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
That's true, and talking.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
About it is free speech. And the more people that
understand it, you know, I've heard Milton Friedman talk about
the FED. I've heard Ron Paul talking about the FED.
But now Dave Smith is talking about the FED. The
word is getting out slowly. Educating the public is slow,
but the public is being educated. So that's the good news.

(16:00):
The hope is in the number of people that understand
who's cheating them.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
And it's to me, the key of his little presentation
there is to point out exactly how the transfer of
wealth is happening, because it didn't real clear when you'd
live it on an everyday basis.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
I did question that when he said that they print
money and then they give it to their friends, I mean,
who's printing it and who's giving it to the friends?
How does that work?

Speaker 2 (16:28):
I'm not going to be able to describe again, help
thinking that how that happens.

Speaker 3 (16:33):
Printing more money and then giving it to your cronies.

Speaker 2 (16:36):
It goes to I just know it goes to the banks,
So the banks have more money.

Speaker 3 (16:42):
The banks are really getting.

Speaker 2 (16:43):
The prices have not increased yet, so the banks have
a lot of latitude to spend high quality money before
prices increase, so.

Speaker 3 (16:53):
To give loans, I don't know. That doesn't sound right,
but anyway, in other words, we don't know the details.
Neither of you nor are very detail oriented, so we
don't really know the details. So we're taking I.

Speaker 2 (17:05):
Should know it because I've listened to this presentation many times.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Well, I listened to one on the FED and I
was completely confused. I listened to a guy I try
to describe the Federal Reserve, then they'll get and I
just got overwhelmed.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
And that's what the system depends on the system depends
on it being stupidity, Well, it depends on it being
complicated and taking place over time, so it's easy for
them to kick the can down the road. It's easy
for them to borrow money and print money, and the
next generation has to suffer the consequences. Yeah, well, that's

(17:45):
easy for them to do because it's complicated.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
Do you think Trump knows all this is going on.

Speaker 2 (17:51):
I do think he knows it now, and that's I'm
glad you brought up Trump. Elon Musk doesn't have the
political sense that Trump does. I think Trump has made
a conscious decision that he's going to make political accomplishments
before he's going to make economic accomplishments.

Speaker 3 (18:09):
I think he's thinking he's going to juice the system
before he puts in the cuts. I think he's trying
to juice the system so that the business of America
is in tall cotton, and then he's going to bring
the hammer down and pass a budget, a balance budget
bill or something. My guess is he knows he has
to lay the table.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Yeah. See. By argument against that is there'd be no
incentive for people to vote to tighten their belts if
his economics increases the profitability of the country. There is
absolutely no incentive for them to fix the system to.

Speaker 3 (18:46):
Balance the budget. Right, Well, I see the problem there.
I mean, at some point in time, you have to
do the honorable thing, no matter if it's easy to
do the easy thing. But I agree with you, that's
the risk. That's risk. It always is.

Speaker 2 (19:01):
So anyway, that's what this whole thing is about. For me.
It is opening to me for Dave Smith to point
out these two important issues, just.

Speaker 3 (19:10):
Like Milton Friedman pointed them out, just.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
Like Milton Well, Milton Friedman is the one who pointed
out the one about government spend. Dave Smith is just.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
He's standing up Milton's standing on the shoulders of giants.
Ron Paul tried to bring this.

Speaker 2 (19:25):
Paul was good when he described He's pretty good too.
But it helps me to look back over time see
how the system is so corrupted and has no incentive
to fix itself until some big failure takes place. They
have no incentive to fix it. So I just don't
see it.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
And on that note, on that upbeat positive note.

Speaker 2 (19:49):
Well, I think maybe Trump is thinking that it isn't
up to him to inform people and have them understand
that it's got to be fixed. He he will do
the political stuff, make big political changes that improve the system,
and then as the public becomes aware that there's a problem,

(20:10):
then he'll fix He'll do his best to fix up.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
Well that's your thinking on it, and you may be right.
My hope from what I see is Trump is in
generativity when he won the second election, and he even
touches on it that he's here because of a denning purpose,
that his life was saved because like that wonderful black preacher,
that God had a reason to save his life to

(20:34):
preserve him. I do believe Trump is going to do
things that are not like I believe he's the one
president I've seen in my lifetime who can do things
that are uncomfortable.

Speaker 2 (20:47):
These tariffs are a good example of what you're talking about.
Trump is big on threatening, and tariffs look like they're
going to bring our country down to its knees. But
that isn't what Trump's doing. He's using the tariffs.

Speaker 3 (21:01):
To bring them to the nation to try.

Speaker 2 (21:03):
To improve trade around I mean, it looks obvious now
if you judge him by his behavior, it's obvious that's
what he's doing. He's using it to improve trade around
the world, even though he's threatening to bring every country ruin.
Every country. That's he threatens to do, but that's not

(21:24):
what he is.

Speaker 3 (21:25):
Yeah, he caused a ten percent drop in the stock market,
and he was comfortable. He said, just wait, just wait,
It'll be okay. He's capable of doing unpleasant things that
are good for you. Now will he do it with
the debt and the inflation and all that? Will he
do that? I don't know, but I still have hope.

(21:47):
You don't have hope, but I have hope.

Speaker 2 (21:48):
Well, I don't. I don't think you ought to quote
me that way. You do. You just speak for what
you believe. I'm just saying, we're still speeding toward the cliff. Yeah,
he has not changed the direction of the car. Elon
Musk has helped us slow the car down a little bit,
but we are still speeding toward the cliff. We have

(22:09):
not made a turn. But I'll remain hopeful too. Trump
has been kind of encouraging what he's been able to do.
That's pretty much all I had to say. Do you
want to come Okay, Well let's just end it there.
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