lizabeth Dwoskin who's writing for the New York Times. And she tweeted that for a month she had been working on a big story about Peter Thiel and about how he left Facebook et cetera and it morphed into an examination of the ambitions to be an architect of the new American right. I don't know if that's true. Do you think Peter Thiel wants to be an architect of the new American right? I don't know that seems a little bit hyperbolic but I think he's one of the people who would like to influence things in this country. So maybe it's a little bit true but you should read it because there's just sort of an interesting behind-the-scenes look. I'll just call your attention to that because it's a longer thing than I want to summarize.

You know I've got a larger philosophy that says no one understands economics, especially economists, and that the more you know about economics the less you understand it. It's like the people who are sure about economics are the people who know the least about it. The more you know the more you go I'm not so sure. And unfortunately I'm in the category. You know I have a degree in economics and I have an MBA and I'm in the category of knowing just enough that I don't think anybody knows anything. Now I'm exaggerating a little bit but here's one.

I think I'll on my live streams I'll just show you different points of view so I can make this point over time how different people's opinions are about the economy right now. And these are smart people. You know I'm not talking about your average idiot. I'm talking about smart people don't seem to have any grasp of what the economy is about.

But Joey Politano tweets, if you thought that households needed a negative wealth shock to get spending down — in other words if households feel they have less money they'll spend less and that should make inflation go down. So he's saying that we have that now because crypto's down over 50 percent, stocks are in the bear market, it's hard to refinance anything because interest rates are up, and the housing market is cooling off. So is that all you need? If the households stop spending money or they cut back drastically and it looks like the external shocks that cause that are all there, it should be — I mean I feel I'm cutting back on expenses.

Let me ask you, how many of you are cutting back on expenses? Because even at my income level I'm actually cutting back substantially on expenses because mine comes down maybe a third. So when I think yeah, look at all the yeses coming by, basically I think all of us are cutting back our expenses.

But let me ask the same question and don't just say yes or no so I'll know which question you're answering. So say a little bit more than yes or no. But did you also spend more as soon as you got freed from the lockdown? Like there was a period where you spent more, right? You had a little pent-up vacation money, a little pent-up entertainment money. So didn't most of you go from suddenly spending more? And I think I did as well. I know I did. Yeah I definitely spent more like a lot more right after the pandemic sort of loosened up. But now I'm definitely into spending less mode by far.

So are we? Is it self-correcting? So here's one thing I think I know about the economy. I believe the modern economy is self-correcting and that believe it or not when the Biden administration says inflation is transitory I actually think that's true. I actually think that's true. It's just that transitory is not defined. I think transitory is three to five years. Would you accept three to five years as transitory or not? I mean that's not permanent. I think it's three to five years because it's going to take that long to try to spin up any additional resources. And that's even too fast. You're not going to build a refinery in three to five years are you? But maybe you could get something going.

But in the meantime between now and the time that we can spin up — I love that phrase because it sounds like you can do things really easily. We'll just spin up some more factories. Let's spin up some extra capacity. It's easy. It's just two words. Just spin it up. Don't tell me it's hard. Just spin it up. But if we stop spending, inflation should come somewhat under control and then the economy will do what the economy does which is market competition should do exactly what Biden wants.

Here's something you're really going to hate. Biden putting the squeeze on all of the traditional energy sources might actually work. Because even though I wouldn't have chosen it, I would never have chosen hey do bad things to our energy situation at the same time the bad things are happening to it anyway from external shocks. I never would have recommended it. But it is nonetheless true that emergencies and crises cause you to act faster and in ways that you wouldn't have otherwise. It basically breaks red tape and logjams.

So I believe that Biden has created accidentally a greater energy emergency than there would have been. But I'm not sure it didn't get us to a better place faster. We're not there so yeah that's still speculative. Could we get there? But it does seem to me that it is entirely true that if you were somebody looking into investing in let's say a battery farm, you know a farm of batteries just to store energy, you weren't sure that was a good investment. Sure looks like it now. At the moment it looks like a good investment. So there's probably a whole bunch of investment that is being unleashed because Biden destroyed the traditional energy market.

So in theory this is all self-correcting in three to five years. So I think I'm gonna die on that hill or hopefully triumph on that hill and raise my flag.

Remember during the pandemic and it looked like everything was going to go to hell and we were going to run out of toilet paper? And what did I tell you? What did I tell you at the very beginning of the pandemic when it looked the most scary? I told you everything would be fine. And basically it was. We figured it out. We didn't run out of food. Same thing now. Same thing now. We will figure it out. There will be some dislocation. Currently I have to use a shampoo that I don't like. Yes I use shampoo, shut up. And you know so there'll be adjustments like that. We might be using our currency for the toilet paper for a while. Just small adjustments like that. But I think we'll figure it out.

And the reason is that we have a self-adjusting economy like we've never had before. So when anybody looks at history and says in the past when we had these factors in play you could predict that the next thing that would happen would be X, that doesn't work anymore. Because take Juneteenth as the model of why history doesn't repeat anymore. The reason that Juneteenth is a holiday is because slaves in two states didn't know that they were emancipated for however many years. They didn't know because there was no internet. So in the old days you could emancipate the slaves and the slaves wouldn't even know it for a long time. You can't compare that world to anything in which you have instant communication everywhere and everything's fungible. You can move pretty much everything to everywhere, right?

So we can adjust and adjust our environmental standards and create rare earth minerals where before only China could do it because they had relaxed standards. But it's an emergency so you relax your standards or you find a better way to do it that doesn't require that. So I've got a feeling that all of this stress we're feeling on the system is a lot like the World War II stress. This feels like a World War II level stress on the system. And what World War II produced after all the tragedy was sort of a clean slate to rebuild. So Japan and Germany did well because they unfortunately were so destroyed that they could start from something closer to scratch.

And so I think we're in an extended period of destroying what we have but productively because we have a system that can destroy and then fix without even human interaction. As Ian Bremmer pointed out in a tweet that if you look at the various governments of the world that have high inflation right now — now these are his interpretations of these governments but people argue the left and right parts — but he says we've got a left-leaning government in the U.S. with high inflation. The UK he says is a right-leaning government with high inflation. Germany is a centrist government with high inflation. Italy is everyone in government with high inflation. So his point is that every kind of government gave you high inflation and therefore he says wild guess it's not the government.

Now this is an extension of my prediction that I made at the beginning of the pandemic. The strangest prediction that I've made probably yet and also perfectly accurate. I said before the pandemic like when it was just starting that leadership in different countries would not be the variable that made a difference in the outcomes. And that was crazy, right? I don't think anybody took that seriously. It sounded like such a ridiculous prediction that you didn't even have to address it. You didn't have to agree with it. You didn't even have to disagree with it because it was just ridiculous. It was more like absurd. And I said it over and over and over again in the beginning and I was always surprised that people didn't react to it. They didn't agree and they didn't disagree. It just was sort of just weird.

And here we are. The pandemic's over and you can't tell the difference in terms of leadership decisions. There's no difference. Why did South Korea do well? Was it because of leadership? Probably not. It's probably because they had access to rapid tests, maybe a cultural difference, maybe because of their isolation, whatever. But it probably had nothing to do with their leadership, right? So and here we have another example. Inflation is high with all these different governments with all these different philosophies of government and probably you can't tell the difference. Can you tell me that Germany's leadership is why they have high inflation but ours is not? It just looks like there is a global element to the inflation and that's all there is to it. Everything's disrupted everywhere so why wouldn't it affect everybody?

Now I did see Shannon Bream take down a Biden administration advisor type for essentially being part of the inflation especially the energy problem. And she did a really good job. I tweeted that so check out Shannon Bream really giving it to one of the Biden apologists I guess. I ain't using that word but it seems to fit in this case.

Now to his credit one of the arguments that the Biden administration is making is that a survey showed that when you talk to the CEOs who do investment in energy that 90 some percent of them said that it wasn't the government that was stopping them from investing. And I didn't see Shannon Bream address that point