led the simultaneous sip, and it happens now.

Oh God, that's good. Sublime.

Well, let's jump right into the news. According to an article in the BBC, retiring in your 60s is becoming an impossible thing, and 75 is the new 65, and people are going to work longer. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You tell me.

Suppose people start retiring at 75 instead of 65. Good for the world or bad for the world? I say good. I say good because there are several things behind that. Number one, everybody knows that people retire and do nothing and tend to die, and if your brain is inactive you get Alzheimer's faster. Basically it's really unhealthy for people to retire.

Now when I say retire, I think retirement means a different thing than it used to, because I consider myself retired right now. I work, I don't know, 65 hours a week or something, but I consider myself retired because close to 100% of what I do is my choice. I don't have to do any of it. So if you're doing what you want to do, it's a completely different experience. You know, work is not work when you want to be there.

So if you can manage to build up at least enough assets so that when you're over 60 you're doing something that you like instead of something you can't stand, then I'd say working is better than not working. I mean, I'm the perfect example. I have every ability to completely retire and sit on the beach, and when I think about it I think, oh, imagine myself on the beach in Maui, and the sun is warm and I've got the sand in my toes. And has it been five minutes? Because I'm really bored. I can't just sit in the sun on a pile of dirt all afternoon. I have to do something useful or I'm not going to feel good by the time I go to bed. So I'd much rather be doing this than being on the beach, frankly.

Just in the US, inflation rates are not as good as we expected. It's being called hot. The inflation rate is hot. It's hot. It doesn't look that much worse. It increased to 3.8 compared to a forecast of 3.7. The US CPI annual inflation rate is 3.5, above expectations of 3.4. I mean, directionally it's the wrong direction, but it's not like a catastrophe.

Yeah, here's another question for you. Are we better off with more inflation or less? It seems obvious you want less inflation, right? But is it? If you have a crushing national debt, how are you going to get rid of it without inflating it away? Inflation is the only possibility of survival. If we didn't have inflation we could not survive. The math just doesn't work.

Now here's a question I ask about our budget death spiral. Can anybody answer this question off the top of your head? And if you can't, ask yourself why. I'm going to say, do you know the most important number in the whole world? And you're not going to know the answer, I bet. Nobody knows the number one most important number to understand if we will survive as a species.

Hypothetically, what percentage would America need to reduce its annual budget to have a chance of surviving the debt? What percentage? 3% or 40%? People are saying 42. You act like you know it. I'm seeing the number 42 go by a lot. Now remember, you don't have to get to the point where the debt is zero, and you don't have to get to the point where the debt doesn't grow. You do have to get to the point where the economy is growing faster.

A lot of people are saying 40%. If it's 40%, we don't have a chance of survival. You know that, right? If the only way we could survive is by cutting the budget 40%, we're already dead. That's not recoverable. That's way too much. But you're probably doing the math wrong.

Here's what I think you're doing. I think you're saying we're spending way more than we bring in in taxes in a given year. That's not exactly what you need to measure. What you need to measure is the growth rate or reduction rate of the total debt. That's the thing you've got to look at. So if you could reduce the total debt with, let's say, a 4% inflation, and then you've also got more growth, that reduces how much you have to reduce your budget, right?

So if your bud