Ray Madoff (on how billionaires avoid taxes & threaten capitalism)

My name is Daniel Shepherd, and I'm joined by Monica Badman.

- Wow, what if your name was Daniel? You would be so different. - I would be a claims adjuster.

“- Yeah, and you'd be still wearing those glasses, though.”

- Well, I'd only have these glasses on, because I'd have to look at a lot of claims, and I can't see any anymore. Okay, our guest today. And this was, if people listened to Ezra Klein episode,

she was suggested to us by Ezra. And boy was he right, great lead. I'll take more suggestions from you. - Send him over Ezra. - Our guest today is Ray Matof,

and she is a professor at Boston College Law School, where she teaches in rights, and tax law and policy wills in trust law. And a state planning, she is co-founder and director of the Boston College Law School Forum on philanthropy

and the public good. Now hold on the old guys, don't run. It's not a tax law. - No. - It's session so interesting.

- It's one of the most interesting guys we've ever had.

Her book is called The Second A State,

how the tax code made in American aristocracy.

“So everyone's very understandable frustration”

with the huge income inequality. You know, one guy's got a trillion dollars, and we find out what these people pay in taxes. It's infuriating. Well, we find out how that's happening.

- Yes, it's a really necessary, 'cause she breaks it all down. How this, what the loopholes are, how this happened. - And if you like capitalism, so many don't, that's fine.

I happen to like it. This is an enormous threat to capitalism. - The billionaires not paying is unrivaling the trust. - Yes, yes. - It makes capitalism not work as a system,

and our system has to work for everybody. - Yep. - So anyways, this is fascinating. The numbers in this are gonna absolutely make your head spin. - Yeah.

- Please enjoy Rae Matoff. ♪ He's in a chance for ♪ ♪ He's in a chance for ♪ ♪ He's in a chance for ♪ - Oh God, oh, you two are in uniform right there.

I went and tried on 50 pairs of sneakers. - Okay. - I just look like a man. - You look so cute. - You look so cute.

- Let's start there. - Thank you. - It's an important thing. - And you have a savage team. - Is this something I was treating you?

- I was treating you. - Okay. And here is the conversation that I didn't hear myself, but a good friend of mine heard, at the beach plumbing. I grew up going there, my whole life.

My friend of mine was eating breakfast at the beach plumbing, and she heard somebody say to the guy that was running the breakfast, you look just like Dax Shepherd. And he goes, oh my God, that's a huge compliment.

- Oh, yeah. - So cute. - He's my favorite podcaster. - No. - Oh, I'm so done. - I know it.

Is that nice?

“Is there anything better than a compliment heard behind your back?”

- Wait, how come you've been going there since you were young? Are you from Boston? - I'm from Boston. - Well, see you're from Boston, you teach in Boston. - And even worse, I'm from Newton.

I teach in Newton, and I live in Newton, really make me like the guy

that was working at the gas station never left.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - How do you end up with Ray? - Disclosure, we have a historically male name given to our daughter. So I love to. - Lincoln, our first born in Boston. - Wow, okay, here's the weird thing about Ray.

So I was actually named after my grandmother, who is a sort of a huge figure in our family writ large. And she came to this country, and she was like, Rifke, a Rishke, or something like that, but everyone called her Ray, and then she spelled it, R.A.Y.

The weird thing is, I have yet to meet a single ray in my whole life, spelled R.A.Y. as a woman. And it's weird because women are named everything. Women are named Joseph, women are named Frank. You know women are named R.A.Y.

You think it would be a good name? - They name it R.A.Y. - A.E. or it's like, you know, Norma Ray, like a second one, yeah, yeah, he's a Ray. - And here's the really weird thing.

So there was a movie. It was one of these really lame rom-coms where somebody had to go into the witness protection program. A couple had to go to the witness protection program. They were about to get a divorce, and they witnessed a crime.

Together they had to go to the witness protection program. - Great premise. - And they went to Ray Wyoming, okay, spelled R.A.Y. The pen ultimate line in the movie, 'cause of course they end up getting together.

- Obviously they have a baby, obviously they have a little girl. And the pen ultimate line is, and we'll call her Ray, and the ultimate line, we'll spell it R.A.E.

- It would be impossible.

- It was very plausible, but the idea that the name of girl R.A.Y. that was just too much beyond the limit. - That is so funny. - Well, for suspension of disbelief would have been violated.

So yeah, even the town was spelled presumably R.A.Y. - Yeah, they could have changed the name of the town. I made it really a fictional town. Somebody obviously swept and last met and said, "Whoa, this can no one will believe it."

- It'll be an outrage. - Before everyone, totally believe it. - 'Cause they believed it all. - Do you walk into a lot of rooms and people expect to see a male?

- Yes, well, here's the problem. - So originally, of course, and I think you're being very deft about this and nothing I wouldn't have done. - I'm positive I know the definition of death.

- Okay, so you'll get there with the story. - Yeah, because you're like, "Wow, you're named. Tell me about Ray and not your name, are you related to the biggest crook in the history of the world?" - Well, that's to put that string for me.

That's on a silver platter, made up.

“- I mean, that's what everyone's gonna say.”

- Of course, that's what everyone's thinking. No, no, they don't say it. They just think it. So let me just clear it up. So the mid-eves and the mega-dow skis

all came through Ellis Island and they gave us both the name, MA-D-O-F-F.

We have always been mad off.

We then found out, back in the day when we wanted to be related to them because my uncle wanted to get madoff.com, madoff.org. Remember, early in the internet, you could get them. And they said, "This guy from New York has hovered up

"all of the MA-D-O-F-F-F, yes. "But we didn't know who he was." - And then-- - Yeah, the thing. - Yes, the plot there. - So it's mad off.

- We're mad off, yes, but the problem is this, when I say it's mad off, not mad off. Basically, it sounds like I'm saying that's Frankenstein. Like literally, I'm definitely trying. - Well, it would be great if I had dug up an interview

from the early '90s of you where you were. - Oh, we're not saying that. - You were saying mad off. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - That's exactly what I thought. I can't even correct people

because I just sound like I'm being a big jerk and trying to be like, "No, that's not us." We're mad off, not mad off.

- Okay, my first question is,

I would say it's kind of unconventional for you to be drawn to the field that you're in. You're a law professor in specialized in tax law, in a state law. How do we explain that interest?

- Yeah, I know it. First of all, I mean, to say, I'm a proud member of the Highly Media Ocar High School student. - Oh, good for you. - Good for you. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Thank you. - Yeah, yeah. - Super, you eat each, eat each. - I think I probably am because all of the things like I do better if I'm doing two activities at once and that type of thing. Okay, so I was a highly mediocre high school student,

barely in the top half of my public school class, mediocre scores. I somehow thought that the SATs were sort of like a blood test and I thought, well, I'm smart and it tests smart. Therefore, like any piece of crap answer I give

“must be the right answer because that's what it's testing.”

- Yeah. - I was really out of it. And so I started at UMass, which was the best thing that ever happened to me because I found this philosophy class with this professor who was just tremendously influential in my life.

And all of a sudden, I found this area that really spoke to me. I loved it. I loved everything about philosophy. I then had an identity. I became a really good college student

because I, like, totally was into the subject. - You're a fire for me. - I was, yeah, I loved it. I had an identity and it was great. And I eventually graduate a college with a degree in philosophy

and wanted to go on in philosophy and be a philosophy professor. But it was the era where somebody said to me like, you're insane. If you're lucky, you'll get a two-year position in no place, no way.

- So lots of competition fuse slots for philosophy. lots for philosophy, professors when I graduated college.

“And so I did what I think probably 50% of my college”

class did, which is I went to law school. After a year of like, I don't want to go. I'm not going to go to law school. I'm not going to be pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre- I'm not going to be pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre

what types of jobs were available, which were things like a note from my supervisor who said, please call information and get the phone number for this person is like, okay, you could have done this in the time that you told me to do this stupid task.

Anyway, but law school very intellectually engaging, but the thing is I thought that the value of law school for me was I would be able to do good, because philosophy I liked, but I also had that feeling

- Yeah. - Also, the questions even in philosophy were like, does redness exist? - Yeah, it's not solving any. - You're not solving any problems, exactly.

And so then I went to law school, I thought, I'm gonna like, and the issues back in the day were like saving the whales and battered women. I'm like, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna be like a hip litigator.

I'm gonna be so hip in law school, applying my analytic philosophical skills and fighting the good fight.

And in my second year of law school,

I did a litigation clinic. And I also took corporate tax. I took it because it was in the 80s. And I was in at NYU law school where everybody was doing like a one-head two-head test for the big law firms.

Very easy to walk into the big law firms. And they were like, just take corporate anyway. So I took corporate tax and I was shocked to find that I had no feel for litigation because you couldn't just think your way through.

My husband's a litigator.

“You have to get a deposition that has someone say it.”

Then you have to get a case that says it. Then you have to do something else. It's so much for somebody who's like a little-- Is it with a feel tedious? It felt tedious and like I did not have the patience

for that type of thing. Yeah. Tidium to me is that's my answer. No, no, no. It's absolutely absolutely.

My bed bar being board, I cannot tolerate it. I mean, come on, I have diagnosed you. This is great.

I didn't even realize I should never have gone to anybody else.

But yeah. So are you also on the same personality time? I mean, at this point, it seems like every single person has it. First of all, it's not like I don't know.

I guess we all have it. I was actually thinking that one of the things I was looking for it to is I'm getting like a two-hour break from my phone here. Yeah, I think it's huge.

I don't know if it's age or I think it's just the times. We can't focus. None of us can focus. It's very hard. Our brains have been hacked with stimuli and the responding

recording. It's hard to know what's in you and what exactly. I didn't like litigation, but what was particularly destabilizing was I found that I loved corporatex. Now, one thing is I had a woman professor in corporatex. So that does.

I think make a difference. She made me think like, OK, this is for you. You could do this. Yeah. But also, it turns out that it's really very similar question.

So like a big question in corporatex is what's debt and what's equity? That's a lot like what is redness. Does redness exist? Sure.

Because it depends right where you're viewing that from. You can change on a dime. What are the parameters? How do we conceptualize the world is a lot of what tax laws about?

And I went off to Wall Street because that's sort of what everybody did super easy at the time. And I was probably one of the worst tax lawyers ever. I could do it. But I could not care less if my clients pay taxes or didn't

pay taxes. Like, you know, what you want is a tax lawyer or somebody really they treat your money, like their money, their way. For me, it was like a little intellectual exercise. Super interesting.

And I definitely didn't have a preference one where the hardly interest it in the outcome. Not at all. That was you want to pay for a lawyer. Exactly.

If someone finds it intellectual engagement, yeah. I see that you're having fun with you. Have any sense of how this is going to end? No. Exactly.

Nor do I care. You may out $10 million. I don't care. But very, very luckily, I got a position in teaching, which I had long wanted to do.

“If you remember back in philosophy, I love school.”

I love fall in New England. I love that you put on your plaid. You go back to school. The whole thing about it, I love students. Campus, campus, now it's coffee.

Now you walk around with your coffee all day long. What's the best? It gets the best. Yeah, yeah, it's dreamy. OK, so we must get into your book.

I'm going to start with the title because my first question

has to do with the title. The second estate, how the tax code made in American aristocracy. So I think my first question for you is, can you tell us a little bit about pre-revolution France, where this term originates? The second estate.

Can I tell you a little bit about how what the book was supposed to be called. You're my first original. Yes. That's right. That's right.

Yes. So when I put in my proposal for the book, it was called "Why You Pay More Taxes Than Billionaires." Cut straight to the chart. That's what I thought.

Uh-huh. And my editor, the person would become my editor. He said, "Love the book, but if you insist on this title, I will not use it." And it's all I'm like, "Alright, I want to publish with you." Was he himself a billionaire and he felt offended?

He felt... I don't think so. No.

“He didn't really give me a reason, but he did say, "I think you should call it this,"”

the second estate, how the tax code made in American aristocracy. This was like in our original correspondence. And I thought to myself, "There is no way I'm calling it that," like, "Yes, him to death," and say, "Yeah, sounds great." Kick it down the road.

Exactly. But I was thinking, "Forget it, it's bad enough that it's a book about taxes." And now I'm going to lay around that it is a title that you don't understand at all.

claiming to be worked for me. But what happened was, I began to look more and more into

this whole thing about the second estate.

And I realized how unbelievably apt it was. And it actually came to me to be like, "One of my favorite things," because he liked the idea that the title was a bit of a mystery.

“And in fact, I think if it had been why you pay more taxes than billionaires, it just”

would have looked like every other book on this subject. We're going to get into it towards the end of this, but yeah, there is a climate right now. And people, a lot of people hate billionaires across the board. They're the villains. So this book is more substantive than that.

If I'm looking at, I'm like, "Oh, here we go, there's another, let's kill all billionaires." Exactly. I'm off put by it. It doesn't feel thorough. That's right.

So the second estate, let me go back to that for people who don't know, because I myself. And the most often thing people say to me is, second estate, like, the fourth estate is the journalist. That's all anyone knows. The fourth estate is the journalist.

And that's true. The fourth estate here in the United States of the journalist.

But basically, in France, in pre-revolutionary France, the first estate was the clergy,

the second estate, or is the aristocracy. And the third estate was pretty much everyone else, right? Your bourgeoisie, your peasants, all of those people. And what was interesting about it was that the clergy, of course, didn't pay taxes and owned a whole bunch of land, but also under the explicit French rules.

The aristocracy had these special privileges, like they were the only ones who could carry swords. And they were the only ones that could hunt in certain places. And their best privilege was they were explicitly written out of the tax system. So they didn't have to pay taxes just because they were aristocracy.

And what's interesting is that you didn't have to be born into an aristocracy. You could actually buy your way into an aristocracy because people would sell their title. And so basically, there was this guy named DuPont, who was an economist in France.

“And he said, the only way to avoid taxes is to become very rich.”

And I thought, ding ding ding ding ding, because that is exactly the situation here in the United States. I think what makes this a very good title, if I may, is because the public doesn't really know this. The public doesn't know that the rich have been written out of the tax system because

by its appearances, it seems to be heavily burning the rich because it's heavily burning a portion of the rich, but the real rich, it's giving a free pass. And I think even in your book interchangeably, and I think we could use it going forward as like there's rich, and then there's wealth. Often what we're talking about is like wealth being exempt from taxing, and I think

that one problem that we've had is that there has been a conflation of high income earners and high wealth owners. And this has been caused by a lot of different people in part, Democrats had a role to play in it. I think what they were trying to say was we're not going to raise taxes for people who

earn less than 400 million, but people heard it as if you earned 400 million, you're

the problem, and that is not the problem. People with high incomes are paying lots and lots of taxes, and it's politically, I think, been a big mistake not to recognize the high burden carried by high earners. I agree.

“What do we qualify then as wealth versus high earners?”

Right. The issue is that if you earn money through work, you have a podcast, you have an actor, you know? No matter what you do when you earn money, you pay a lot of taxes, and it used to be the case prior to 1986 that there were all sorts of ways that people with high income could

avoid taxes because we had tax shelters. Remember there was a lot of talk about tax shelters, you're giving me the fake nod of money, and you're giving me a lot of money. You're giving me a lot of money. You're giving me a lot of money.

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It's gone.

“And so the country is entirely relying on terrorist.”

So the early part of the 20th century. So let's place ourselves where the world is. We're post civil war. And then we have the rise of the industrial age. And with the rise of the industrial age,

we all of a sudden have the super rich people that we didn't have before. We have Vanderbilt. We have Carnegie. And then their kids are getting the money. And they are acting like royalty.

They're building mansions all over Newport, New York. This is really relevant, right? Because that was this unheard of explosion of wealth that the common people got to witness. And I'm like, hold on. What's going on?

And that's currently happening again. Yes. In a very dramatic way. So these are very parallel. That was the time you might have heard the phrase conspicuous consumption.

Because there was a book written by a very blend of called the theory of the leisure class. And it described about how they proved their worth. In the social world by showing off their wealth. And they had these extraordinarily lavish parties. They had elephant serving champagne.

They had cigars. They'd give you as a little party gift, a cigar that's wrapped in a hundred dollar bill. Yeah. So you had this lavish lifestyle. But at the time, people were thinking, this is very un-American.

America is a place of equality. And America is a place without dinastic wealth. It's a meritocracy. And Jefferson wrote about his concern about this false aristocracy of wealth. We should have an aristocracy of merit, not an aristocracy of wealth.

And yet the country had become a place where we had this massive accumulation of wealth of people who were running around wearing crowns. There also was the time where under our constitution, you can't have a title of aristocracy.

“But what they would do is because they so loved aristocratic life is they'd sell off their daughters.”

Right? Down now, be all these other shows. They were going England and they were marrying off their daughters so they could bring royal titles to their family. And Cornel, yeah, Vanderbilt or a crown around New York City. Okay.

So the problem is that there came to be a concern about the stability of the country.

And about capitalism itself surviving. And if you remember, McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist. Right? There was real concern that the country would be thrown over because socialism was so big. Right?

Socialism was running through Europe and Russia and leaders who are being overthrown. What was this country going to do? And because of that, there was a big push to let's make sure we don't have this aristocracy anymore. Let's bring taxes into the picture. Because the other thing is, is that tariffs are an interesting type of tax.

Because tariffs, what they do is they raise prices. And so they really affect, back at the day, they really affected farmers and regular consumers. Both because of things that were imported. But also because of things in the United States that were produced in the United States. Now they could raise their rates because their competition was knocked out by the terror.

And it's asymmetrically painful for lower class people. This is my issue with the gas tax in California. I'm like, this is a liberal state. Why are all the taxes are punishing the people that it affects the most? Yeah. Like you're rid of the frickin' gas tax.

Exactly. Okay. So that was the mess we were in. You had Carnegie writing in the gospel of wealth. We've got to do something because we need to maintain the alliance between rich and poor. Everybody has to be in this thing together.

And he said, but what we need to do is we need to have really, really heavy taxes on transfers to death. To make sure that we don't have a bunch of rich people running around and not taking and not contributing to the public. Well, it starts to threaten the core of capitalism. Exactly. Because we're all playing monopoly.

Anyone who's played knows once you have boardwalking these other ones, the game can't be played. So if someone's starting life, owning boardwalk, how is this now capitalism? Exactly. So it's an effort to save capitalism. It's an effort to save capitalism.

“And that's why Teddy Roosevelt also advocated for taxes because he was worried that capitalism would crumble.”

I think we're in it back to the peril. You believe it exactly. Yeah. And so, you know what? I think what we have had until now is scary.

Yeah. I think that this might be a solution. But I don't want to continue. Yeah, I don't want to do that.

That's the end. But right now, you have got all these people very concerned. Even the Wall Street Journal wrote, we got to do something about taxes here. We have to, because we have all these rich people. And there, and a front to what it means to be an American.

Because what it means to be an American is to work hard. Even to Tocqueville, who is that, you know, famously reflected us about what the American culture was said, like, what makes America America is that everybody values work. Now we get a bunch of rich kids sitting around and they're showing off their money. And this is very destabilizing.

So, the answer, even though Teddy Roosevelt was a big advocate for it, he never got it through.

It wasn't until 1913 that we got first the constitutional amendment that allowed the new income tax. And then three years later, the estate tax, and then in 2024, the gift tax to back up the estate tax. So now we had a way that we were actually going to tax rich people.

“You have to realize that they had all these investments and the investments produced dividends.”

And so they were taxed on their investments during their life. And they also produced interest. So like the two ways of profiting from your investments were to get interest in dividends. And then on top of it, there was this additional tax that was imposed whenever the property was transferred. And together, these taxes were designed to impose taxes on the richest Americans based on their capacity to pay.

And was it always progressive? Well, originally it was just a tax that only applied to the richest 5% of Americans. So 95% of Americans were completely exempt. Then when it came time to funding World War II, we had to do another round of tax raising. And so they say it changed from a class tax to a mass tax.

But then we had to keep it that it was based on capacity to pay. We had these progressive rates, which meant that the later dollars that you earned, the higher dollars were taxed at a higher rate than the earlier dollars. So this was working pretty well, right?

“We had kind of a golden Arab between World War II and the 70s and things started to change.”

Yeah, they started to change, yeah. Stay tuned for our share expert. If you dare, we are supported by all state checking all state first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your teeth before walking into a meeting. You smile that six people in the hallway, confidently, full teeth. You felt great about it until you caught your reflection and realized you'd been carrying a piece of spinach like an accessory sense lunch.

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So there were a couple of things that were going on that helped fortify this system. One of them is the fact is I said that there was a threat of socialism. And then in the 1940s, like when FDR is doing it, there's now a threat of communists. Yeah, he was scary. Yeah, and it was scary. And so there was a real understanding.

If we want to have a capitalist country, capitalism has to prove that it serves the country as a whole. And the way that it serves the country as a whole is that when somebody makes a load of money, they share the wealth through taxes. And so that's the legitimacy taxes serve to legitimate a capitalist system when it's working right.

“And that's why it is so disturbing and concerning what's going on now.”

Yeah, it's very much threatening capitalism. Yes, and in a way, this threat to capitalism, I think, is going to be the thing that saves us. Because without a threat to capitalism, you're not going to get the broad public support to actually impose meaningful taxes. People are going to grab as much as they can get away with. We've seen this over the past 40 years.

This is what's happened. So what happened? Why did this change? This system worked well enough, right? We had high taxes on income. And we had taxes on a state's and gifts. Like a state meaning you've accumulated all these assets in wealth when you die that's getting passed on.

That's the estate. So at that point, the government would like to take 40 percent of that.

This only applies to like the richest one to two percent of Americans. Yeah, small slice of the country. Yeah, even currently, you can give away up to $15 million. So this all is active after $15 million. Exactly.

The current state tax, $30 million per couple. But we'll see how it's not even active for that. And sorry, gift is just giving any money. Yeah, except for, there's a bunch of exceptions. So you can give, this is a subject I teach.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll explain to you a state and gift tax in just three minutes.

So basically, it applies to all transfers at a 40 percent rate, right, with a 15 million exemption.

So for example, you can make unlimited transfers to a spouse, unlimited transfers to charity. And then you can give to as many people as you want every year, $19,000 per person per year. So the idea of it is to keep it out of regular people's lives. So regular people can live their lives. But when we start talking about transferring massive amounts of wealth, we're going to have this system.

“And the important thing to be aware of that I want to say a front, because I think the public has been dupped about some of these things,”

is that the income tax system entirely exempts all money received by gift, inheritance, and life insurance. The biggest scam going. So for example, to say somebody earns like, you know, $200,000 or $100,000. They pay about $30,000 in taxes. Okay, between payroll and income taxes.

Somebody else is handed $100 million out of a life insurance policy.

That person doesn't even have to tell anyone. Yeah. They pay no taxes that don't report it to anybody. It is entirely free. This is your business.

Wow. So the system is so unfair on the income tax side. Because the other thing is, if somebody finds a hundred bucks on the street, they're supposed to pay taxes. That's interesting. So if you find money, that treasure will not be your supposed to.

Yes. Or you have a gold mine, you find the gold you have. Treasure trove, we call it in the law.

“If you win a prize, if you win the lottery, if you get unemployment insurance, social security, right?”

You're forced to pay taxes on every way if you do a barter exchange.

If a plumber does plumbing for a web developer and a web developer creates a web page for the plumber, they are both supposed to report taxable income on their tax returns. And the IRS has all sorts of, like, here's how you do the barter exchange information. They have a table you can go to. Exactly.

In one area, it's like we're closing and we sing a loophole. And another one, right? This way, tax free. No worries. It's the real velvet road world for the people who are lucky enough to get gifts inherited into the life insurance.

And like, who are those people? Those are the super rich. Those are not regular people. Yeah. And there's been a big duping of the public about this.

They have not been educated about, which is sort of why I'm a little bit of a crazy zealot these days. Because I do think that when the public knows, then they see how unfair it is and they're less likely to be duped. Yeah. So we're in the period where we have this system where we have this estate and gift tax system. The income tax system gives a free pass because we count on this estate tax system to do a good enough job with the richest America.

Right? We carve out 99% of the public. And then we say, here's where you're going to be paying the tax. We'll collect it at the person who's transferring it.

“Now, I think the reason for that is because back in the day,”

the way people transferred property, when they transferred property at death, it went through probate court. It was kind of an easy convenient time to collect this information. Right? We weren't living in the modern information age where we track everything.

And so it kind of made sense to impose it on the person who died. But I think that that had a little bit of an Achilles heel in it. Because then, as we'll see in the 1990s, as we're coming up to this point, it made it vulnerable because you're like taxing dead people. For some people, they'll already have paid a lot of taxes on it.

Right? So if you think of like Paul McCartney, he's probably a billionaire. But he's probably paid taxes along the way on the royalties and on all the things that he gets. And they really marketed it very successfully. So basically, let's talk about what happened.

Yeah. What happened to make this thing fall apart? And it's a couple of different things. I would say the most significant thing was the attack on the estate tax.

So here's what's interesting is that the estate tax was very non-controversial.

And Congress used to do its job keeping it up. So in 1976 and 1986, one of the problems with the estate tax was that people had avoided by creating multi-generational trusts and that would go from generation to generation. And so Congress enacted a new tax called the Generation Skipping Transfer Tax. That was designed to impose a tax at each generation.

1986, 1990 Congress was added again. And they enacted attacks because people were finding a way to squeeze the value of their assets. So they were hiding value. Congress said we can fix it. And they enacted something called special valuation rules.

And what's interesting is both of these things happened under Republican presidents.

This was a, this is a tax.

“We got to fund this enormous government of ours.”

We have to find that. Exactly. And it's appropriate to have this tax and to maintain it. In 1990, what happened was a group of 18 of the country's richest families. The gold and the marres.

The gold's right. All of the, all of the favorites, the water all around. Still today, they funded this campaign to turn the public against the estate tax. Because if you think about it, they were already able to avoid the income tax by avoiding salary. So one way people avoid his salaries are for suckers.

You don't want to salary. And then the other way was through investments, which we'll talk about. They avoided, they stopped getting dividends. And they started to do a stock buybacks. All of this type of stuff.

They've gained all the other. This was the last stubborn one. And so they started to campaign. What was the man's name? Chester Thigpen.

What a name. Chester Thigpen. A grandson of slaves who had a Christmas tree farm. Kids would come play in the farm, and the neighbors would hunt. As my son said to me, I hope not at the same time.

But even he was his very idyllic figure. Very sympathetic. He testified in Congress. Matter of fact, he testified many, many times in Congress. Because he was a favorite.

He said, I have worked my whole life for this Christmas tree farm. And it's beautiful. And I love it. I want to pass it to my family. And I'm going to be hit with the estate tax.

It's going to become timber. It's going to be a whole farm. It's going to be destroyed. And this was tremendously effective. I mean, just also just picking that farming is so manipulative.

Yeah. And I want to get back to that point. Because it's really important. By focusing on family farms and businesses. If we think back to this whole thing, remember when I said that in the early part of the 20th century,

there was a concern because we had all these rich people running around. And people thought of Americans as being people who had family farms and businesses. That's what it meant. But it was because it supported a livelihood.

“People would work on the farm and then their kid would work on the farm, right?”

Yeah. But what's happened is that the Mars, the coax, all of these people, they're trying to say that their companies, they're not saying it directly because they know it won't sell. It's like a family farm right. We're just a family business, right?

It would be like Carnegie saying that US deals just a family business. Yeah. Yeah. That was crazy. But this is what they have pulled over the American public's eye.

And as it turns out, thick pen would have not been affected at all because the state tax already preempted that. Yes. When he died, he was not subject to the tax. Because he didn't make enough money. Because it was under the threshold.

He had a Christmas tree. Exactly. Yeah. The exception was big. It was wholesome.

Yeah. Down homesy. And also, we have all sorts of protections for family farms and businesses in the tax code for real family farms and businesses. That provide low interest rates and special valuation. And we could easily exempt real family farms and businesses.

And back in the day, I testified in Congress. It was obviously a Republican Congress at the time because it was called the impact of the death tax on family farms and businesses anyway. And I got a call from some Democrats like when you go testify in this thing. And that was why it was ugly. Also, they've now rebranded it as death tax.

The death tax. So they called it the death tax.

And they basically made it seem they'd rent such an effective campaign that even today, a huge portion of the public believes it primarily hurts low in middle income people.

I mean, it's crazy. It was a tremendously effective campaign. So what we look at what happened since this campaign in 1990. Right. One thing that happened was, was a bush was the big leader of repeal the death tax.

I hear his voice in my head. I know George Jubby Bush. Yeah.

“Ace W Bush actually was the one under who we had the special valuation actually fortifying the estate tax, right?”

But George W Bush, he was part of this campaign. It was the era of government is bad. Let's kick everyone off our back. I get it. It was also trying to keep right to all this stuff.

But when George W Bush enacted this thing, what he did was he said, okay, let's have a gradual increase of the exemption amount and a decrease in the tax rate. And in one year, we're going to have no estate tax at all. This was, I mean, I don't even really know, functionally how this happened. Yeah. It just went away for one year.

Because he didn't have the votes to have permanent repeal because we have this rule set. Anything that costs the government money has to be resolved within 10 years. This would have cost the government a lot of money. And so, yeah, to fit it within the 10 years. So we had one year, we called the Jubilee year for rich people to die.

Wow. And rich people got lucky. Yeah. Some people got lucky. Yeah.

Some people had Steinburner got lucky.

One of them had 20 billion dollars or something.

Yeah. Steinburner had a load of money. God bless those kids, man.

Did anyone kill themselves? No. Well, that was a year by the way.

“There was a lot of humor amongst the estate planners of, like,”

things to get your relatives in that year. Which were like, you know, warm chicken salad. Right. Gliding less and yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We could have had our day. The estate planners had their day. Gliding. Let's get grandpa's hang like this.

Also, Grandia, did you ever try to heroin? You shouldn't leave the plan out. Try that one time. But the next year, Obama was in office.

The estate tax was scheduled to revert to its $1 million exemption

and, like, a 60% tax. Right. But Obama, he ended up just kind of continuing. He made a $5 million exemption. He continued it.

Because he knew the public had been turned against the estate tax. Mm-hmm. But then, of course, Trump came in and he doubled it to $10 million. And now it's $15 million. But that's not the real issue.

And this is a super interesting part of the story. Which is that the real way that they succeeded was that Congress stopped closing Lupals. The last time Congress has closed a Lupal in the estate and Giff-Tax was 1990.

36 years ago. And so the thing is the way tax rules work is you count on Congress.

Basically, Congress provides rules.

Tax payers find their way around rules. Congress is supposed to close the Lupals. Tax right into dance. Yeah. And the tax payers and Congress and the IRS.

Yes. But all of a sudden, Congress has engaged in quite quitting. They are doing nothing. And so as a result, there has been an explosion. And so what's happened to the estate tax is instead of it being a well-maintained tax.

It in fact has become a tax that is a tax in name only. And I'm going to give you two reasons why we know this is the case. One of it is because it raises basically nothing. I just hit you with those numbers. In 2000, there was 122,000 estate tax returns.

In 2010, there was 47,000. In 2013, there was 32,000. And in 2021, there was only 2,584. Yeah. So the number has gone way way down of estate tax returns.

If it even more concerning is the tiny, tiny amount it raises. It raises hardly anything. Now only 28 billion. And amount that Elon Musk easily gains and loses in a single day. Yeah.

Multiple days. It's nothing. But here is the biggest in case you need any further proof that the estate tax now works for the benefit of the rich people rather than as a harm.

“Is the fact that in 2025, when Trump is an office, he has the capacity to have whatever tax bill he wants?”

Because he has the Senate, the House, and he is in the executives. So they can pass anything there. He says in his campaign, he's supposed to the death tax, the immoral double death tax, right? But guess what? Doesn't even mention it.

He doesn't get rid of it. He keeps it in the books. And the reason is by keeping the estate tax. Believe me, if rich people had wanted it repealed, it would have been repealed. But what happened is is that rich people realize they benefit because if you actually repealed the estate tax.

People would wonder, "Wait, I don't understand.

You can get $100 billion tax free, never pay anything on it."

It's only because they're pretending the subjects to the estate tax. Yeah. It provides cover for the rich, no real estate tax. Yeah, look. I'm counting on 10%.

Yeah. And that's sort of the tricky, super interesting part of the story. Okay. So this is what I think the headline of all of it is. So in 2021, public published leaked IRS returns. Yeah, by Charles Little John, who is now--

His names are great. His names are great. I know it. You think I'd made it up? If I was like a fiction writer, I'd be so proud.

His name is Dickens, all of them. So in this article, what was revealed is that the true tax rate that Warren Buffett was paying.

“Remember, the highest rate on income is 37%.”

Yeah. He was paying 0.1%. Basos was paying 0.98%. Michael Bloomberg was paying 1.3%. And Elon Musk was paying 3.27%.

And now this is my favorite part of the book. Is how the mechanics work of them not paying any taxes. Somebody who earns $60,000 a year pays in just federal taxes for $10,000 in taxes. Okay, can you imagine that you're getting by on $60,000 a year. That can be the difference between having a car or paying your rent or buying food or health.

I mean, plus than that, but it's reasonable. You can't live like that. No, you absolutely can't. And yet, these people with their massive wealth are like, we're doing such good for society. I mean, or what they say is, I don't know if you saw the recent interview with,

There's a lot of perpetrating of this baloney.

“And they go, look, the top 1% are already paying 40% of the taxes, right?”

You hear this all the time. Which is true. Which is true. But they're not talking about that. You know, talking about everyone in Beverly Hills, all these neighbors here.

Talking about people with high income. Yes. The high wealth owners hide behind the high income earners. And make it seem like their paying taxes when they're not. So I think we should go slow here and lay out some terms.

But you have a couple different kinds of taxes. One of them is income tax. Everyone listening virtually will be paying income tax. You receive a check on Friday. They've withheld money.

That is your taxes. The other kind of taxes capital gains. Oh, oh, but I thought you're going to talk about the other very important tax. The hidden tax for the person who earns the payroll tax. Which is 15%, 15.3%.

Right. It's a significant. When I talk about our person who earned $60,000, most of those taxes are payroll taxes. Payroll taxes start at $1.

They're really burdened some.

“And they're entirely hidden from the public.”

Because the view. Look on your paced up. They're called like contributions. Have you ever been confused by that? Yeah.

And it's social curries in there. Don't leave a break down fight. They call them fight. Yeah. You did break it into a few categories.

Yeah. They put up in different pockets. You don't know what the hack there. But they make it sound like because they call it contributions. And then you get from social security.

Sometimes they'll send you these periodic statements. This is how much you have. They make you feel like you've somehow set this money aside for your own saving. And now when they're going, we got to cut social security. Hey, all these people that are paying social security now for current retirees.

You're saying like we're going to screw these people after they paid for everybody else. It is so unfair. Yeah. So anyway, payroll taxes. I just want to make sure that we mention those.

“Because those are very burdened some end.”

As you might recall, when Mitt Romney said 47% of makers, they're takers, not makers. And they're going to vote for Obama no matter what, because they're not giving to society. And they were not paying income taxes, but almost all of them were paying payroll taxes. And payroll taxes are so burdensome. When you actually look at the figure of non-pairs, including payroll taxes,

the number is like 16% of non-pairs, which is basically the same number of people we have over the age of 70.

So this story about the non-pairs and the Republicans love this story. We have to have a skin in the game tax. I mean, these are the people who are actually paying taxes. These are the people who are actually paying double taxes. Not the inherited wealth people who are paying no taxes.

And that's the thing that the public, again, is being misled about. Okay. So you have ceiling of 37% federal income tax, and then you have the payroll tax. And then you also have capital gains tax. And that is set at 20% plus 3.5% I'm not sure about that.

3.8, yeah. 3.8. And that is if you sold a house, you might have dealt with capital gains. You bought a house for 100 grain. You sold for 150, you have $50,000 of income, but that's capital gains tax.

Yeah. And then the other place capital gains applies is investment. So I bought in video. I ten X my money. I'm going to pay on that 90% of, you know.

And that's set at the 20% and then the 3%. We could debate all day long. Why that is kept at 20%. You're going to find that all dance. I'm not full alignment with you. I do think there's a global thing where we do need to protect people.

But we'll get to that. You might think you're not in the line with me. But maybe maybe. Maybe you are. Okay.

So at any rate. Now, there are incredible ways that are so inventive to get around these. Which is why we're seeing someone like Buffet Pay Point 1%.

So if you never sell the stock,

you've never realized the gain. There's nothing to apply the 20% tax too. So anyone who's livelihood comes from ownership of a company. Ownership of all these different stocks. As long as they don't sell it, they're not going to be tax on it.

Which again, I can make a great argument for. We'll get to that down the road. But explain how people are living. How is Bayzos have a yacht in many homes. Yeah.

How they have any liquid money. Yeah. This is incredible. Let's talk about Larry Ellison because he's been spending like crazy. 30 billion dollars.

He's has in loans or something like that. Maybe more because he actually had to incur another 40 billion on his purchase of Paramount, which he's also been backing. So Larry Ellison is somebody who spends a lot. He bought the island of Lennon and Hawaii just for fun.

By the way, on the island of Lennon, he bought all the businesses on the island. And he also owns all the property. And he put into his contracts. If you get fired from your job, I am throwing you out of your house.

Oh, my God. Yeah, that's the kind of nice guy he is. Anyway, so he runs this island, right? How is he doing? I can't.

I know. On the plus side, there's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island.

There's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island.

There's two four seasons on that island. There's two four seasons on that island. Interesting, actually, because I met somebody from Malachi. And they said that a rich person tried to acquire Malachi in a similar way. And the island of Malachi fought against it.

And they're getting back at them by leaving everything just to be like waste. They're not taking care of the property there. They've bought it all. They have abandoned theaters and everything else. And they won't sell it back sort of like nice island.

You got here. You better get out of here. Be ashamed if we didn't keep it up. That's just another story of Billionaire's run a mock. And he owns Oracle.

He owns Oracle. A chunk of Oracle. And he's about 30.

Always in the top 10 richest people in the world.

Yes, exactly. Super rich. He owns tons of Oracle. He buys tons of stuff. He never sells his Oracle stock.

But what he does is he uses his Oracle stock as collateral. And it enables him to buy loans. And because it allows him to get money to buy everything he wants to buy. I want everyone to go step by step. So Larry Ellison walks into a bank.

And he says to them, hey, I'd like a billion dollars. And I will secure it with a billion dollars of equity of my stock. Yeah. Or $1.5 billion of my securities. Yeah.

So a banks primary mission is to loan out money. The risk they encourage. What if the people don't pay? How do we get money back? And that's all done with collateral when you buy a house.

The house is theirs, right? So he says, let me just put this stock up as the collateral. I'm going to borrow a billion dollars. And then when happens, he starts receiving. Does he get it all in one chunk, right?

But whatever. Whatever. You know, I'm sure whatever he needs. Because remember, these people are in the business of lending money. The banks, the banks or private lenders.

You don't have to be a bank to, you know, all sorts of people. They lend.

“And that's what their business model is.”

And they want to lend to Larry Ellison. It's risk free. It's well, is it though? Because even the collateral is in a asset. Does an tangible asset?

Well, they talk about it. So what happens is they retain the right. And this has happened with some other owners of companies. And Oracle, by the way, it's gone down about 50% in value. In part because of over leveraging of Oracle.

And then add on to it, Ellison's stream leverage. The lender holds the stock. And so then they're going to make a margin call if it falls. And value, they're going to be like, give us more stock. Or sell your stock.

Or we're going to sell your stock because we're going to sell it. They're going to sell it. They can sell it. So the bank can sell it. He doesn't return it to the bank.

So they are well secured. They're very well protected. And they get more stock than they need to cover their price. So step by step, he goes with the bank.

I want a billion dollars.

Great. Here's this amount of elephant here it is. Here's this amount of stock is collateral. He gets a billion dollars. He spends it now.

He's on some schedule. What's the average terms of these loans? They won your loans five year loans 20 year loans.

“I think the point is that they can be demand loan.”

So most Americans think about loans in connection with their mortgages. Or their student loans. Okay. We're lending you money for some set period of time. Then we want to get our money back.

But there's another way of lending money. Which is called the demand loan, which is like we're giving you money. No set time. You just pay the interest. And that's fine with us.

Great. So he borrows a billion dollars. It's at three percent. And so every year he's got to give him 30 million dollars back of this billion dollars.

Now, at some point, he can then go to bank B and say, hey, oh, this bank of billion dollars.

I need a billion and a half. I pay off that loan. Yeah. He gets his securities back. He gives him not a this bank.

He can just leap frog endlessly. And he doesn't need to leap frog. And because if you think about it, you're in the business of lending money. Who would you rather lend money to that? You don't want it back.

If you get a back, you got to find another rich person to lend it to you. You said this on Ezra Klein's podcast. Like, they don't want them on the back. Keep them back to the bank and ask him for more money. Exactly.

They love you to do this. So my question in all this was, I am unclear. Eventually, the bill comes due. Says you. Well, at some point, either the banks can have to sell those securities.

I'm saying when he dies. Why? I mean, the point is this, you're living in a world where you are imagining that this amount that he's borrowing is like bumping up against the total money that he owns. Right.

I think a more accurate way to think about it is like, imagine you needed $10.

“And you need to borrow $10 and you need to be able to pay back $10.”

And then maybe you needed to increase it to $80. There would be no difficulty with you paying it back or passing that loan on and having your kids take over the loan, right? You have to realize the amount as much as they borrow. I mean, this is crazy.

Because of course, he's borrowing enough literally to buy power amount. I lent everything. But his wealth is extraordinary. Yes, but here's my only question. So he borrows a billion eventually.

He goes through that, right? He borrows a billion. And now he's got to borrow another billion.

Because now he's just still making the interest payment on the original billion. And it's bad. He's by not having sold his stock. Oracle's an interesting case because it did plummet and value. That's why I like like bezos.

Right. That's an example. He wants to get all sorts of credit for not borrowing against his stock. He's actually occasionally sells his stock. He thinks that he should get a big pat on the back.

This is what he was telling Andrew Rossock. And me, I sold some stock. I mean, I guess that is better than. Yeah, but the point isn't whether people sometimes pay capital. Yeah.

The point is that we have people with multiple hundred billions of dollars. And they are able to choose whether or not to pay taxes.

“When nobody in this room can decide, you know what?”

I don't feel like paying. There's no game for me to even play. There's no game for you to play.

Here's what I want to do.

And actually I have a little gift for you guys. Even to a few like them. Okay. No. It's important to let people know from that original story.

We just told them about the borrowing. That you pay no income on a loan. Yes. That's really important. So he gets a billion dollars from the bank.

That's a loan presumably has to pay a back. So that's not income. Right. Because we might have missed that. People may not realize.

Yeah, that billion dollars. He doesn't pay one penny. Right. Your congresswoman actually is working on a bill right now to tax borrowings. Same that then should be taxed.

Some people think that that's way. I think there's other ways of solving it. Okay. But so we're talking about like debunking myths. Right.

“One of the myths is like the top one percent are already paying 40 percent.”

No. That's high earners.

And the other is 40 percent paying no taxes.

No. They're paying payroll taxes. Okay. That's your debunk today here now. Yeah.

Is this idea that the rich don't have enough money to make a difference. We're going to have to tax the middle class. You hear this all the time. Yeah. Right.

We have to go after the middle class because the rich simply don't have enough. So here I want to give some numbers. I'm going to give broad general numbers in twenty twenty five. The government took in about five trillion dollars. They spent six point nine.

They actually four point nine six. So they had to borrow one point eight at it to our death. By the way, this year today just came out of no if you saw this. The highest interest rates. The government has ever had to pay on thirty five point two percent.

We are paying so much money. A trillion dollars a year just to maintain this debt. This is when we have seven trillion dollars of expenses five trillion of income. Right. We are spending a full trillion just to maintain this debt.

And the other thing is by the way, if we go to back in the day. You used to not be able to go to war and not raise taxes in the twenty. We raised taxes when we went to war. Now it's in the twenty first century. We're going to war push it on to our kids our grandkids and pay for it.

We don't have to pay for it. Okay. Big problem. But so we had to borrow because we didn't raise enough money from the richest one percent. And as people like the Wall Street Journal and now the Washington Post.

Like to say in the economists like to say, that's because the rich people are already being heavily taxed not true. And in any event they don't have enough money. You know this already. So I can't say I'd like to say, yes, how much?

Maybe I can go. Let Monica. Yeah. Guess how much? We had to borrow just under two trillion dollars.

Guess how much the richest one percent owned at the end of twenty twenty five. Guess how much the richest one percent owned. Okay. From all sources. This is from corporations, payroll taxes, tariffs, estate and get the whole.

This is so mean if you put my phone on. The whole. Okay.

“So how much wealth do you think the richest one percent owned?”

Nobody knows the answer to this. By the way, so don't feel bad. I'm scared. I know. But you say a reasonable number.

What do you think is the real reason? Not trick, which is what do you think the total value of the assets of all one percent are? But including the wealthy people. Does that mean? No, no.

I'm sorry. The top one percent of wealth owners. Not in commenters. The top one. Well, good.

Okay. Monica, you're in A student. Oh, no. You do not have A. No.

You're like. You're paying very not just jumping. Some obvious answer. No. But yes.

Go on. You know what? 50 trillion. Yeah. Is it 47 or 50?

It was 47 when I wrote the book. Because it was 2024. Okay. 5 trillion and 2025. 55 trillion.

Now, their wealth is growing astronomically.

By the way, 50 percent of the country owned under five trillion.

So right out of the gates, you just say a lot of the person would say, okay, with a 40 percent state tax. If the youngest person in this lot is 40, in 40 years minimally, we are going to get back 20 trillion dollars in a state tax. That's what the number should be.

If there's 50 trillion out there, we should get 20 trillion in the estate tax.

Yeah.

“But just alone that, that could solve the gap for 10 years.”

Stay tuned for more armchair experts if you dare. The other thing is it's going on. There's been enormous gifting that's going. Because that's where all the action is. And Jita, how much the estate tax raised from this 50 trillion, not 50, but when it was 50

trillion, we had that number, 28 billion out of 50 trillion.

No, yeah. The trillion is 1,000 billion. Yes. So the middle class is making up for that other. Yes, five trillion.

I feel that this chart, this is the idea that it doesn't matter if these people pay taxes. We had to borrow 1.8 trillion dollars. And we know that many people in the top 1 percent of wealth owners don't have to pay taxes because they don't have taxable income. Which, by the way, is the reason why the Buffett rule was such a snow job on the public.

What's that? Yes. So back in the day, Warren Buffett said when Obama's running and even before then, Buffett says, "This is so unfair. I pay taxes at such a lower rate than my secretary."

My secretary pays payroll taxes and income taxes. I pay capital gains taxes. But he was hiding the lead when he said that. Because the problem, well, yes, it's true, rates probably should be the same. We might disagree about that.

But the bigger point is that he didn't have any taxable income because he only earned his total salary was $100,000, including bonus.

He would never take more than that.

And he even reduced his salary for the private use of his office. He was like, I got to pay the company back for that. So we got like a $90,000 salary. Right? What was he living up?

Was he selling? Well, he had a little bit of side investments that was on private things. But Trump, yeah. But in then, Berkshire Hathaway, he had as the policy of Berkshire Hathaway to never issue dividends. If he was issuing dividends, he would have had regular taxable income.

But he knew not to issue dividends because just as salaries are for suckers, dividends, particularly in the 20th century when they were subject to tax like ordinary income. We're also for suckers. So now he didn't issue dividends.

“And that's why he didn't have any taxable income.”

So a rate differential wouldn't have made any difference with him. Yeah. So the two things that blew my mind about this book was a how they function, learning about

this borrowing against your money, never really paying.

That was startling. But what's crazy is how the tentacles of this change everything about the whole financial sector, which is dividends. Right. So you had an investment in a GE.

They profited ax amount of money. Well, they don't keep it. They distribute that to the shareholders in the form of dividends, which get taxed as income tax at the highest 37%. So slowly these companies,

disciple shit, our shareholders don't really want to pay that income tax on these dividends. We don't want to pay taxes on it. What if we take that profit? We buy back shares from people. Let's just stop for a second though.

“Up until 1982, the only way a company was allowed to share profits with its shareholders”

was to issue dividends. That was it. So a dividend is simply the way that the company earns money. They're worth a hundred. They earned ten.

They distribute ten. And that was how companies worked. And then it was subject to. And when I was growing up, when you were buying a stock and you were a middle class person, you were looking for a company that had a great dividend.

That was the whole game. And in the 1970s, 70% of returns of stock value. I think it was 74%. 74% came from dividends. It was all dividends.

And what's really interesting is what the stock market looked like. It looked like a jiggly, like a sign curve that went in a very narrow margin. So in 1982, the stock market was at about 3,000. It was also about 3,000 in the 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s. So all the way back to the 20s, it had been 3,000.

This is inflation adjusted. So the stock market just looked like a squiggly line. And that's because every time the company shared profits. It became profitable and their value went up. They shared the profits and the value went down because the money was sent out to people.

Yes. Okay. But then in 1982, something happened, which is that under Reagan, he had a dean-witter executive, be the head of the SEC. And one thing that companies were not allowed to do was to go out into the market

and buy their own shares of stock because when they did,

And they said, this is price manipulation. Yeah. You can't just distort the value. But in 1982, pretty much on his own, this dean-witter executive that became head of the SEC said, it's okay.

We know it's price manipulation. We believe it's popped. We're just going to let people do it because they want to do it.

And as a result, since 1982, it has never been more than like 16%.

Maybe 17% of profits have been shared through dividend. Because instead, companies are buying back their own shares like crazy. And last year, more than a trillion dollars was spent buying back your own shares. And when you buy back your own shares, rather than the stock price going down, the stock price stays up and maybe even goes up a little higher.

Right? Because you've reduced the total number of shares that are outstanding. More demandless supply.

“And that's why one of my favorite charts in the book is this chart that shows”

the stock market from 1915 to 1982, looking like the squiggle line. And then in 1982, it takes off like a hockey stick. Because of course, there's a lot of reasons. This is not the only reason I don't want to get like. No, we've learned from food.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But before, if you had boobs, you'd be sharing profit. Yeah. They still had to share the profit somehow. And also executives began to be compensated with stock and based on the value of stock price.

So a lot of things happened to cause stock prices to increase. But the point is that from tax world view that we used to have a system that taxed the big theme. We used to have a system that taxed people according to their capacity to pay. Now we have written the rich out of the tax system. We've created our very own second estate.

Yeah. Nice pivot. Beautiful. The wing wrapped it up. You took all the loose ends and braided it like Rapunzel.

I want to bring one more terrible thing that's happening into it. And then I want to have some just fun questions. And then maybe it'll be pushed back, maybe it won't be. But the other huge thing that has to be addressed is step up in basis.

No. No. Okay.

“Isn't that what ultimately they're getting out of the estate tax with?”

No. Step up in basis is a super give away that we shouldn't have. But it's not the nature of the problem. It's just like the what we call in Boston the Jimmy's on the ice cream. Jimmy's is the chocolate sprinkles.

It's the garnish. Yeah. I'm going to explain what step up in basis is people love to say the problem. Step up in basis. Let's fix step up in basis.

That would be letting the biggest problems remain. Okay.

So here's what we explain was step up in basis.

And we also call it the angel of death loophole. Okay. So that let's say bought in video stock. And it went up to $10 million. He bought it for like 50 cents and then which worth $10 million.

You sell it. You'd have to pay this 23.8%. And instead if you pass it onto your kids at death, they're treated as if they bought it for $10 million. Even though nobody's paying any taxes on it because we have an exemption amount.

There's no estate taxes on it. How is this not the most enormous if I'm trying to get 50 billion dollars out of this person? And their 50 billion dollars is solely held in stocks that have appreciated. And they pass it under their children. The children inherit it. They're not saying oh 40 billion of that is profit.

Am I not understanding?

You're misunderstanding because the example that I gave was $10 million.

Okay. So let's do that. This creates a problem because it creates this problem of lock and effect. Nobody wants to sell anything. People don't want to sell their homes. They don't want to sell their stock.

They want to pass it onto their kids because they can avoid taxes.

“The thing is the cost of it is you have to pass it at death.”

And if you're passing property at death it's much harder to avoid the estate tax. All of those things that arose. Remember I said a whole bunch of loopholes arose in their call like crats and crats and grats and grats and intentionally defective grant or crats and the flourishing of all of those things. They are all dependent on gifting.

And gifting when you give property your kids get the same basis that you had or whoever you give it to. It's plain basis. So you bought your Nvidia stock for $50. It's now worth $10 million. If you make it as a gift to Monica, of course, just because you love her. She has your basis, which is the amount that you paid for at $50.

So when she sells it, she would have to pay gains based on subtracting $50 as the amount that she invested. If instead you gave it to Monica when you died, she would get a $10 million basis so she could sell it for $10 million and she'd have no tax. Yeah. Okay, but when we're talking about where the real money is, which is our very rich people and all of our private equity people, we haven't even talked about them right.

They are doing zero dot grats and all these different things that will be too boring to explain. But basically what they're doing is they're finding a way to transfer property. Make it look like it's worth nothing and then it pops up and the other person's worth all this money. But you can only do those during life. Very hard to do them at death.

“And that's why the step up in basis is something that people love to point to like as it's such an outrage.”

Where the real problem lay is in the fact that somebody can start a company or do something they're worth nothing. They become worth several hundred billion dollars.

They never pay taxes during their life.

They give it away. They never pay taxes. They give it a death. They don't pay income taxes, right? There's never a tallying of the gains.

And that's the problem. It's not the step up in basis, which is kind of yes, that's so egregious. But the bigger problem is that we should be taxing those gains to the person who earned them. And this was proposed by both Richard Nixon and Barack Obama. That is how common.

And it's the rule in Canada, right? When you transfer property, that's the person who enjoyed the gains. Mark Zuckerberg has enjoyed the gains. Larry Ellison has enjoyed the gains. Let them pay the gains when they transfer the property, not just when they sell it.

“That's how we should be addressing that.”

So we've seen a huge impact on economies when they raise their lower business taxes, right? This is like pretty well-established. England had a horrendous business tax for a while. And then that tree has slashed that. And they kind of revitalize their financial sector.

We are competing in a global economy with other countries that can host companies. I'm using just business taxes as an example because it's a global economy. Because many of these multinational companies can put themselves anywhere. Countries have had to compete with business tax rates, right? What's a business tax rate?

15% or something or 20%. It's small, right? But it's small. Corporate taxes raise their own complexity. And there's a lot of reasons why they're complex.

One is this issue of competing, right? But there are movements that there would be a global agreement to have a minimum. And the absence of that, though, we have to be competitive as the point I'm making. I'm going to leave that aside because the point is that when you're talking about an individual, I mean, do you want to move to cutter?

Because you'll get lower taxes there. I don't think we have to worry about Americans.

First of all, we have a big exit tax for somebody who leaves the country.

You can't just pack up all these stuff. Yeah, right. And they track you down. Big exit tax. And then you give up your U.S. citizenship.

Is that really something somebody wants to do? That's a big move. I don't think we have to compete globally when we talk about personal taxes. But the reason I bring it up is we're now starting to see attempts at that within the country, right? That's an entirely different story.

So this is the big question I'm glad we're turning to it. Because this is obviously the question of the day is wealth taxes both on the national level and on the state level. So we have talked about the fact that people are able to acquire 55 trillion dollars of wealth. And there are all sorts of rates and not pay any taxes. Yeah, yeah.

And so what are we going to do about it? And so a logical thing is let's have a wealth tax. And first we heard it on the national level. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and other people are now pushing for wealth tax on the national level.

On the national level, the problem is there's a very real risk that the current Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional for some very boring reason.

And you're great at illustrating how almost impossible it would be to evaluate someone's total assets. What's that pain worth? What's that property worth? It's almost impossible. It's very difficult to do it on an annual basis and there'll be a lot of incentives for people to start hiding their value on an annual basis. If you have an annual tax on all the people's wealth, people might find it's invasive. People might move out of the stock market.

There's all sorts of reasons that it's a problem on the national level. So now here comes California and it is proposing this thing.

“And I think there's a really important piece that we've been talking about, but I want us to bring it back.”

Which is that California is a hugely successful state. Fourth biggest economy in the world is bigger than Japan. Yes, amazing. Why the hell are roads look like this is a mask. Well that's a question.

But the point is that California should it has a high income tax, right?

I probably tax high income tax, high sales tax.

“I guess I should be able to raise a lot of money.”

What we've been talking about here is all the ways the federal government has betrayed California and every other state. And some of them has been that they have allowed a corrosion of the income tax base. So that for example, we used to have a lot of dividends. Now we don't have taxable dividends. So the other thing that California used to be able to have was in a state tax.

It's own a state tax and every state in the country had in a state tax. And the reason for it is because the federal tax allowed a credit, allowing states to raise a state taxes and people's overall tax bill wouldn't increase. What's interesting is that the federal government used to care about having strong states. And it allowed strong states by giving credits for states to be able to raise taxes and not lose its citizens.

And that is something that we've moved away from. And the estate tax allowed states to raise money from its wealthiest citizens because they had a credit for every state. George W. Bush changed the credit to a deduction. And then as a result, all the states began to run away including California stopped having estate taxes. So now California doesn't have an estate or gift tax.

The income tax, you get all these people. Mark Zuckerberg is not taking a big salary.

“Sergey Brindachting, but none of these people are taking big salaries, right?”

So they're not getting money on their salaries. They're not selling their stock. And so what is California to do? Because we don't have the rule that whenever they transfer the stock their subject to tax. We've really sold the states out because the federal government has allowed the corrosion of the base.

And so California now, which has a massive amount of wealth held in publicly traded stock, which is very easy to value. And now, by the way, the feds have just thrown in and said, "Oh, yeah, you know what? If that's not enough, we're taking your Medicaid, too." You know, we're not going to provide for anything.

And so California has been backed into a corner. And even though I write about being opposed to wealth taxes as the answer for the federal government,

and I recognize that states have this problem of people can always pick up and move to another set.

I come from a high tax state, Massachusetts. And I do think it's a problem. You know, we have this millionaires tax now. And you know, I'm a good lefty Democrat type, but I do worry that businesses are going to open in New Hampshire. And not a Massachusetts.

That's not a concern. Yes. We're taxing the income earners enough for my money as this central thing. We don't need to be raising the tax for some people paying income. Exactly.

But so then, what do you want California to do? They've got a big hole in their budget. They're not able to raise money with their high income taxes. If they continue to raise money, it's just like a leaky bucket. There's nothing that they're taxing, the taxing income enough.

So then the wealth tax, it's all this sort of there to see for the public to see the wealth. Because it's all publicly traded stock. I'm quite sympathetic to it even as I am opposed to wealth taxes generally. So I've gotten a lot of interest on the federal level on my tax proposals for moderate Democrats. And I think the reason for that is because of the pressure that's coming from the left.

And if we go back to our story that we've been telling, it was the threat of socialism. It was the threat of communism. And what I worried about was that with capitalism raining supreme, right? We no longer have real threats to capitalism. So this is something I talked about in the book, Franco Milanovic is written about this.

And Tony Jut has written about this. Capitalism no longer has to prove itself because there's nobody competing with capitalism. But now we have these Democratic Socialists, right? Yeah. And they're creating a little bit of a competition tiny with capitalism.

And it's having an impact.

“And so that's why even though I see the risks of the California wealth tax,”

I also see how we need to get a change of our federal system. We can't keep running up this debt for our kids and grandkids. It's so unfair. And so we've got to find a way of raising money. And we have to do that by fixing our tax system.

And I think that we're only going to fix our tax system when people worry that there's something worse out there. And that's something worse as well, taxes. Yeah, okay. So I was on a hike with my wife and she was like, you know, Yeah, why can't you just cap it at like a billions of most someone can have?

Which I think is a pretty common thought, especially for young people. And I was like, okay, but explain how that works mechanically to me because you're Jeff Bezos.

You start this incredible company.

Every time his value goes up, do we reduce his ownership? And should we make it so this person who started a company and is pretty responsible for it's success? Owns 0.01% of their own company so that they can be capped at a billion dollars. Like how mechanically does this work go ahead? So I want to respond to that because I think that this is exactly why we have to be careful about what conversations we're having.

Because it makes it seem like these are people who are paying lots of taxes along the way.

And now we're going to punish them because they have more than a billion dollars.

It's such a problem. That's narrative. If we start with the real narrative, which is these people have been able to acquire hundreds of billions of dollars. And so far, have contributed nothing or at least if they have they didn't have to to all of our expenses. That's the system that we have. And so that's the system that we should be trying to fix.

I want to make one argument and I just want to hear what you think about it. Amazons were $2.9 trillion. Yeah. He owns 8.2% of that stock, which means he has made other people $2.6 trillion. Yeah. So I think a lot of people are like, kill the billionaires.

And it's like, okay, you killed Jeff Bezos. But what you've also killed is $2.6 trillion that is in pension funds, retirement accounts. Other people have made $2.6 billion off of this person.

“Sometimes you've got to step back. I think and go like, okay, but what's the net result of this person we all hate?”

I'm answering the public right now. And I want your opinion on what I hear is that everyone should hate Bezos. And he shouldn't have this much money. But what I'm saying is remember, 92% of the money generated by Jeff Bezos, other Americans have it. I want your saying.

That's how they're saying. They're saying that he can make as much money. He can make all the money, but he has to give the money back. Not just to other people who will make a lot of money and also not pay taxes. Yeah, I'm not done with my point at all.

So he is made $2.6 trillion for other people. Yeah. And he's done so by having 10% of this company being very invested in it and still leading it to make these other people $2.6 trillion. My ultimate question is like, what is the mechanism by which you're going to get him to pay?

Taxes without him selling his shares of his own company to get the money. What do I think we should be doing? How are we going to get the money from Bezos without forcing him to sell? We do two things. One is that whenever he gives away the property, he should tally the game.

Dad, I'm working live for a death. Okay, that's all that I want Bezos to do. So I'm with you on all this. And the estate tax. Then the estate tax, we have to get rid of the estate tax.

“So here's the thing about the estate tax.”

The estate tax is debt. Obviously. The fact that the Republicans kept the estate tax. It is debt. And you don't think you can say it.

You can't say it. Well, not be saved because it has this Achilles heel. We are looking at the wrong person when we're looking at the dead person. The question is, if it's the case that anybody who gets money in any way gets a tax free, how much of a preference do we want to give to money received by gifts,

inheritance is in life insurance. And I think what we should decide is, like, fine. People can inherit a million or two million. Whatever you want to say tax free, noting that it is a preference for inherited wealth.

And then after that, they should pay taxes like anybody else. Great. I'm with you. So would you not have a problem with Bayzos having lived his whole life,

accumulated $200 billion, never paid taxes on while he was alive.

So long as once that movie moved up. Okay. That's the solution. Yeah. But all these people who want to immediately see Elon Musk pay taxes,

I don't think it's practical. But I don't understand, though. This seems weird to me. We have the plumber and the web designer. Each paying taxes when they're doing barter exchanges.

And you're like saying, like, I don't want Elon Musk to have to pay taxes. What do you care if Elon Musk has to pay tax? I want him to pay taxes if he borrows $2 billion to fund his lifestyle. I want that tax. But I don't want to force somebody to have their stock.

Holdings evaluated on a given day at this stock price and say, you know what? You owe half of that money to the government. But the thing is, and this is why I'm so glad you're asking these questions. Right. These are the types of arguments that are such red herrings about the actual reality of the situation.

Right. And they shifted.

“But I don't you think that's what America's demanding right now.”

I think that the problem is the American public has been duped about the amount of taxes that are paid by the wealthy.

Then they're thinking, okay, they're not paying taxes. How should we have them pay taxes? They're not tax lawyers. They don't know the details. So they're saying, like, well, let's just do this because this sounds good.

I think that people simply are like, I'm paying a load of taxes every year. I'm looking around. These people are not paying anything. What is up with that? Agreed.

The fact that Jeff Bezos claimed the child tax credit, which is what it showed, feels wrong. It feels wrong. It feels wrong. That's why they work. It's unfair.

I disagree with how pro-public it could chose to do it by saying it's this small percentage.

But the point is, how is it that we are living in a world where all of the richest people have many, many years of no tax contributions? And they're living luxuriously. And they're living in a one bedroom apartment like the other person and just keeping the money in stocks. Okay, but they're not. They have multiple houses are on yachts.

They're spending money and they're not contributing. I agree. That's a huge problem. They should get tax on that money they're spending. But to your point earlier, that money they're spending is such an insignificant piece of their wealth.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Our system to be fixed. This line of questioning was wonderfully revealing. We're in lockstep. You're not asking for them to be paying a significant portion of taxes year to year.

No, I'm not. But you are probably asking for them to pay taxes on the money that they're spending year to year.

Well, you know, it's an issue because the problem is paying taxes on borrowing.

You can't have a lot that applies to just that. It's hard to fit it into the structure of the country.

“Can it be if you borrow a certain amount you have to pay on it?”

What I worry about is sometimes you get like a fetishistic response to a problem and then the actual problem doesn't get solved. Yes. Or it's very hard for you. Yes. And so that's my concern.

There's a lot of lack of information and lack of sophistication in the public for taxes. And you can't really blame them, our system is really confusing. Confusing. Yeah. It shouldn't be so confusing.

Yeah. We have to simplify it. I think that guests then public might be speaking and broad terms, but not because it's a fundamental problem that we need to be getting at. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. No sensible person is saying that somebody should be subject to 50% tax.

Every year or not. Okay. So we have the same thing which is I want these people at the end of their life to have paid 50% of what they've made back to the government. That's what I want. Yeah.

Good. We both want that. Yeah.

And I just wanted to be clear on what mechanisms you think we're going to get that.

Yeah. I think it's counterproductive to try to do it along the ride. And I totally agree. Great. Great.

That's the point I'm making is that you can't really do it year to year. And you can't ask people to give up percentages of their company while they're running it. But I don't think that they would actually have to give up percentages of their company. They have plenty of taxes. They can borrow money just as they borrow money to buy a super yacht.

They can borrow money to pay for the taxes. So I don't think they would have to. You don't think it's impossible, but I don't think it's very plausible. It's certainly not with this 5% billionaires tax, which as I say, I'm generally opposed to billionaires taxes. But I can understand how California has been backed into a corner.

Yeah. And nobody's has going to have to give up anything. Great. I'm just counting like what's the mechanism everyone's proposing to get these people to put today? And I just don't see how that can happen.

And you can't because I do think like we talked about with Oracle, it's lost 50% of its value. And I think the public is aware property goes up and value and down value. And it's too complicated. That was the Biden proposal and minimum tax on billionaires. It's hard.

I think a lot of people had that type of reaction of like you're taking money. Then you're giving a credit and what are you doing? It feels kind of hard to do. Yeah. So in an ideal world, we would be able to do it.

But we can't do it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I love your book.

I love your message. And we could probably do another three hours together. And how neither party neither party would be so fun. It's hard that because the people who are making $40,000 a year don't have time and energy to differentiate between in that 1%. Like to them.

All of those people are on a different level. They're in a movie. Yeah. Whether you're a billionaire or you're a millionaire. Well, exactly.

“That's what I think we talked about in my book is the difference.”

It's very hard for people. And I'll tell you my own baggage and my own personal. The reasons he did for me is like people are angry at just money now. I find it very ironic. We live in a country where the promises you can make yourself in anything.

And regularly when we see people do that, everyone's mad about it. Yeah. Because they're conflating these classes that seem like the same from the outside that are dramatically different. Again, I pay 50%. Exactly.

And so don't be mad. Me. Absolutely.

And the mistake that I think that people make and this goes back to our earlier discussion is when they say the problem is billionaires.

No. The problem is, how did you acquire your wealth? Yeah. The problem is the system, not the person. A group of people.

A group of people. A group of people. All up and down the things. Yeah. We don't say to Jonas Sock, you created the polio vaccine.

They're for you never paying him taxes. No, you pay him taxes just like everybody else.

“Everybody should be paying taxes because that's how we have to support the country.”

It shouldn't matter. It's not about hating billionaires. It's about hating the system and having a fairer system. I adore you. So yeah.

I really appreciate it. I don't get to see you guys every day. I want to audit your class. I want to have lunch with you in Boston. And then I hope you'll come back for your next book.

Definitely. So fun. Thank you so much. Yeah. I have this.

Yeah. I got a big coffee for my answer being correct. You can nail that. Correct. That's correct.

You're a star. A star. All right. We'll be well.

“Everybody read the second estate of the tax code made an American aristocracy.”

All right. I get so much. Hi there.

This is Army and Permium.

You like that. You're going to love the fact that Miss Monka. How do you feel about Diana Ross? I feel good. I don't have too many opinions.

You don't. I don't. Ain't no mountain. What's that song? It's a solid one, right?

Yep. Uh, what else do we hear this morning, Aaron? Um, I'm coming. Oh, great song. Do do do do do.

Upside down. You're kind of me. Yeah. Even though I've been saying to leave. I guess I love her.

Yeah. I just came to this conclusion. This realization, too. Wow. I've been waiting for Aaron to join me on the 70s R&B training for 40 years.

Yeah. I've been rubbing off slowly over a lot of years. Oh, my gosh.

Without the ear into astrology.

Well, I know. I know. Dancing in the car or the other day to Diana Ross. That's fun. My kids are even like, like, that's happened to you.

Yeah. Speaking of legends, we brought up a little bit yesterday. But dolly passed away. And I thought it was so love. Like, just everyone is so sad universally.

Yeah.

“And I think that's like just a what an indicator of a beautiful life.”

Yeah. That's a good point. I know. She might be one of the least polarizing people in the world. Yes.

Yes. Everyone is very, like, breathed. And I think. And she deserves that. But it's like such a lovely beautiful thing.

And it was sim. This part's going to seem off color. Oh, I have a few as well. But I was at a store this weekend where they had vintage shirts. They have a very small collection of vintage shirts.

So they're insanely overpriced. Like crazy. So there was a Chanel conner shirt. That was $2,000. Oh, great.

Oh. That's crazy. That's crazy. It's crazy. My brother probably still has his from that era.

I should ask him. He might be sitting on 2K up there. Yeah. I had a call and go, good news for you. But you're sitting on 2K.

You're set for life. Okay. But there was a dolly shirt. Oh. Okay.

And we were like, oh, this one's so cute too. This is so great. And then I was like, then I whatever left. And then to yesterday was like, oh, my God. That sure's probably $10,000 today.

Oh, yeah. If I skyrocketed. What was the price? I don't know. But you weren't interested enough in it.

No. Because I didn't like love. Love the shirt itself. Like I think it was really big. Okay.

Are you looking for a thinner or thicker material? Yes. Same. Same. I want cheese.

You want it to be almost. Basically see through. That's right. And transparent. Couple holes if you can.

With a hint of the old screen print on there. Yeah. That's nice. Just a tiny hint. Done fortunate part is.

I would splash grease on it immediately. Yeah. Like having oil and the butter. Yes. Same.

Someone this shirt. This one in particular has been baking soda like five or six times. Mine has two. This shirt in particular loves to get oily stains. It sure does.

Yeah. I agree. We should almost. I didn't even think I wasn't here. The kitchen when I.

Oh, no. That's bad and doors. Yeah. That's not great. This one.

I don't find that to be the case with any of our other merch. But this one's like, every time I put it on my. Oh, my god. I did it again. And then I knew wonder how many oil scenes of my collecting on other things that are showing it.

Yeah. That's what you got to wonder. You got to sit there and wonder about it. I haven't unfortunately haven't held on to anything. From our youth.

Yeah. I was very jealous when you were. When Lincoln started wearing it. Exploitation.

“And I was safe because I think I was like getting rid of those.”

And I think Kristen was like secretly. Maybe it was like you can't be getting rid of these. No. But, um, do you know the whole thing with us in our t-shirts? This was a great hack.

Oh, you were tiny t-shirts. I weren't extra tiny t-shirts. Baby t's. You did it. You went to McDonald's and you had like tiny t-shirts.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. With a horse. A prince. Prince.

And then Aaron had these baseball pants that were way too. From when I was a little later. No, but this was a great hack for my mom who was of course on a huge budget. My brother and I love these punk rock t-shirts. And we would take a trip every year before school.

Our school shopping was going to Young Street and Toronto. Okay. And we'd spent the whole day going into all these t-shirts. Oh, my god.

It was always in the basement.

And they were all, um, what do you call them?

They were, you know, they were.

They weren't official merch from these bands. And so they were super cheap. All these shirts were like, I don't know, eight dollars or something. And I would come home with six exploited shirts. G, G, B, H, shirts, dead Kennedy shirt.

Just all these cool shirts. And of course, everyone was so jealous. Because we can't buy them anywhere. But Toronto. But then, of course, I would give Aaron some.

Yes. Oh, that's nice. And it was really the uniform of junior high. So it was cool as shirts for the most part black and white. Yeah, yeah, occasional splash of red.

Yeah. But it was a hack for my mom because she could get our whole school clothes shopping done for like $90. That's so smart. It made the trip to Toronto free back to school shopping was really fun. I only got it.

You liked it, right? Oh, my gosh. Of course. Who doesn't love it? It gave me anxiety.

Because you have one day to find every outfit you're going to wear. It's not realistic. And then you're also worried you're going to bump in. I was worried. Look, this is all luxury.

“Aaron, did you ever even go school clothes shopping?”

I don't want you to bump in. Oh, please. Yeah, no. I'm not competing. I'm saying it.

No, she loved it. But I'm going to win. Because I would go there. And it's like generally, I'm kind of picky, even though you didn't think of it. Yeah.

So it would be like, I hope there's a bum equipment sweatshirt I like. There's only three. Is that a band? No, that was like a popular brand in the early 90s, ladies. Okay.

You know, remember bum equipment, B.U.M. These oversized sweatshirts. This is back in the Z-cavery. Cheese Day. I also miss that fan.

Don't miss it. I did. You look great. I'm very busy. Oh, yeah.

You'd freak. Yeah. Because I got like a band. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Two to police. I love police. Like the fact that I was like loved a pair of jeans with tons of pleats. It's hysterical. I can't imagine you didn't even do.

The power of trends. Then I got them. One time I got the parachute pants. That was great. But anyways, I would go there and it was like, if you don't find your whole wardrobe today,

then your shit out of luck. And you go to my, there's only three stores. I like that the mall. And then you bumped up into your budget a lot. I just found it very stressful.

Was yours protracted over like multiple days? No, it was kind of. Gosh. I mean, it depends on the age. Like at some point back to school shopping was just me and Kelly going to the mall.

And you got mom's credit card. I haven't allowance twenty dollars a week. Wait, you're buying your own school clothes. Yeah. That can't be.

I was. No, I mean, I'm thinking more throughout the year. Like we maybe I bought like one. I don't think my mom and I went shopping for high school back to school.

“Like I think at that point, I was sort of on my own.”

I was buying my own stuff. What about your high school or middle school? I know. Well, yeah, limited to was the place. Yeah.

My mom never wanted to buy me anything from limited to.

So I wouldn't like be begging and pleading. Sometimes she would give me like one shirt from there. Okay. That was it. Yeah, they didn't really.

We didn't do a huge amount of back to school shopping. Yeah. But like she would. Do you guys know, Upton's? Did you have Upton?

Upton. Upton. No, was a store. And we spent all week trying to figure out Upton's. My parents when I was home.

Because I, I told my mom. She used to shop at goodies. I brought up goodies. Did you guys have goodies? These all sounds very southern to be honest.

I am good. Goodies. I don't. That's a goodies. Goodies was a.

Winky. Pinkling wings. Bigly wiggly. Yes. Bigly wiggly.

Bigly wiggly shirt that I do love. Um, anyway. Yeah. I said something about goodies.

“Because I vividly remember my mom bringing home leggings from goodies for me.”

Okay. They had hearts on. Remind me on leggings again. Because I remember I got it wrong once. Like you wore like what you called leggings.

And I thought leggings were like pantyhoes. What do you think leggings are? Well, I think it's different. No, isn't it just yoga pants? Yeah.

But, um, back then I thought it was pantyhoes. Okay. pantyhoes. It may be interesting. Did they all fit anymore?

Does anyone wear pantyhoes? I don't think people wear pantyhoes. It's disgusting. What is the hose mean? Well, is it a cheap stuff a hose?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a panty and hoses. It is sort of an extension of your panties. Cause you're not supposed to know you're wearing those.

But you are also supposed to let their nude. You're so tight. They have a grundle in them too. Yeah. Are you not supposed to wear panties with them?

I think you are. Okay. That would be bad.

They should be called second pantyhoes.

Sorry.

We are up to your account.

Sure. Everything is sexy. I don't think you would. Have you ever seen a woman with only pantyhoes on? I think I have.

I think I have. Can you? You know, then it got done to business. It was really popular in the 80s to have the woman. It was very common on the cover of playboys.

It would be pantyhoes, no top looking over the show. You couldn't show. I feel like I've seen Cindy Crawford in that look. It was a look in the 80s. Yeah.

Black, generally. Not like nude color. Because not like the pantyhoes. Yeah, nude color. I think it is.

That's what it is. It is the main color. They're invented because you like weren't supposed to have your legs exposed. So women would wear it under their skirts and also for secretaries. Also the for chillingness in the winter.

“When you want to wear skirt to work, I think it was also supposed to be a little bit.”

They added that. The warmth. Yeah. And also supposed to make your skin look smooth. It does.

Anyway. No leggings in this case were like 80s leggings. They're like thicker. They're pants. Basically.

And then they had stir-ups. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. They're really cool.

Anyway, my mom brought me some from from goodies. And I brought this up for some reason.

And she was like, no, I've never shopped a goodies.

And I said, well, you did. I know for sure. I remember you bringing the bag. And I was so excited. Because sometimes my mom would go shopping on the way home from work.

Bring me items. She had a time crunch. She has a career woman. Yeah, exactly. But she went shopping.

Then she said, no, I used to go to that one store a lot. And I was like, what? And we like couldn't figure it out. Couldn't figure it out. I was asking chat.

Oh, sure. So many questions I was asking chat.

“And my dad then got very demoralized by AI.”

He was like, yeah, no, we're not in any trouble here. Because it couldn't figure it out. It could not figure it out. And then I just went to straight up Google. I got set a few questions and it got it.

Now, what's your dad's general feeling on AI? Does he have a take? Mm-hmm. I'm sure he does. Is he using it?

My dad's back to work. Oh, oh. [LAUGHTER] Do you know those stories that I do? Yeah, yeah.

He was a retirement partner. That was even in here. When this was happening. Yeah. I'm in partying the news that work Monday was a consultant.

[LAUGHTER] Exactly. And now he's like picking up more hours. Oh, I'm so happy for him now. I'm so happy for him now.

He's good. He's got to get that fine. So I'm going to approach he. [LAUGHTER] So he figured it out.

It was uptowns with Google. Uptons. Uptons. Very specific. It's U-P-T-O-N.

K-U-P-U-P-T-O-N. K-U-P-T-O-N. That's uptown now. No, no. Tell me, U-P-T-O-W-N.

Oh, okay. We're missing it. Yeah. Okay. Uptons.

Shoutout Uptons. I mean, it was a great place. It was like, Coles before Coles. Okay. I mostly only know Ross and DJ Max.

Love DJ Max. Is the other one you just said in that category? Uptons. No, no. No, no.

Coles. Is Coles like a good luck to everyone, you know? When you walk in a Ross, it's like the Greedor should say good luck. No. Coles is much better.

Okay. It's like department store. It is. It's like a standalone department store. It doesn't have, because DJ Max and Ross are all like Resale or like, you know, like things

that didn't make it. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, my dad.

My dad. He's not that worried about it. Okay. He just thinks this is what happens. Everyone was worried with the computer and everyone, you know, and then you

figure it out. He's not too worried. Okay. Now, this is probably too nosy about his finances. But I imagine when he retired, he got a, he has a retirement package.

Yeah, probably. Yes. So this, no wonder people go back to work as a consultant, because he's probably getting some percentage of his original income. And then he gets to go in there as a consultant and also get wages there.

So he's kind of like doubled his salary. Hmm. I don't know. Let's talk. Okay.

I'm on the phone. Let's ask.

They notoriously never, ever, ever will share their finances with me.

They never told you what you're taking. That was a huge part of growing up. Like they, I would ask all the time. Well, how much money do you make if everything's so, if we're just have to be so scared of money.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you just said it's not my business.

Really? My mother very much was like, I have to turn them out into the world with some financial literacy. So like they should know what I'm bringing in, what our expenses are, how this is all working.

“No, the literacy was just you should always be like scared.”

Apparently.

Maybe like $1 you can keep.

And that's what you should do.

“But if you were to ask them now, would they tell you?”

Maybe like how much they may. How much they have saved. Oh, I think they have alluded to the number. Uh-huh. But they would want to say it on.

Okay. I have a question. Yeah, yeah. For both of the both have children. Mm-hmm.

Let's say one of your, this is like a Jonathan Height sort of. Mm-hmm. Let's say one of your children makes just a lot of money is going to be totally fine on their own.

And independent of you, right?

And then your other child, one of your other children does not. Mm-hmm. Now, when you're doing your will. This is David's at Harris. He didn't get any money.

Is that him a penny? So yeah.

“So when you're doing your will, are you guys, you're just even Stevens?”

Or are you thinking it like, well, for sure. For sure. For sure what, even Stevens. No. If one kid's struggling, the other one is totally financially set, I will tell the one

financier said, like, hey, when my dime, I'm going to leave your sister's more money because she needs more help than you do. And it's not because it's not any reflection on what I think you deserve. But it is a reflection of how well you've done in that I want to make sure you're both safe. Like, that's easy, I think.

And even I've told my mother, like, you know, I bought half my mom's house. At one point, like, one of the houses ago, a couple of houses ago. And I even said, like, so, hey, when you, when you pass, I just want my half back. You can give David and Carly the other half. If you don't have to, like, try to divide that half into thirds so that I then get 66% of it.

Like, I just want my money back. And then I even changed that. And I was like, whatever you have, give to those two. It would be insane to give me more money. I'm so hopefully your children would just offer if they're.

I mean, I guess it's okay. Why, because are you expecting 50/50? And they are going to do that. Like, they are. And so that's an interesting.

For me, it is has zero to do with the money. Yeah, whatever money I get, I probably will give it to him. Depends on where he is. This is the other thing. It's like, you don't know what's going to happen to people. Life is long, it's twisty, turvy.

Very. And if something like, what if the rich sister lost all their money? And then you've given. Well, ideally they have a good enough relationship that she goes, hey, I know dad gave you all the money, because you didn't have any. But now I don't have any.

I think, well, your children are different, but not necessarily different. But they're. This thing with money breaks up so many families. Post posthumously, yeah. Exactly. It causes so much damage. And so it's like, got to do a will, because you're.

Yeah, you're just, you're ensuring that they'll be fighting each other. Yeah, and like, and so for me, I think it's just. And it's just not necessarily to prevent a lot of that to also. Yeah, it's just, you got to go even Stevens. And my parents believe that, too.

Well, definitely, if you're divving up the money on who you like to more, that's a no-no, but, but dependent on who who needs it more. I think that's really relevant has to be taken into account. But it's just in that moment, you just don't know. Maybe it's of Aaron, because he just obviously, you'll just give it all to his son.

He has two daughters. He'll give it all as a son. Yeah, what about the son? I had a son, and maybe it's so clean. Or the husbands of your daughter. Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. It will be getting fun.

I've never thought about it besides being.

Everyone gets an even split, but if I run into some money, and these kids start doing their, you know, right now, they're teenagers, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky.

Another thing you have to factor in is, is one of your children struggling with mass addiction. Yeah. The last thing you want to do is give them enough money to kill themselves.

“So there may be a situation where you have to say to the other,”

say to the other siblings, look, I'm giving you all this money, but you got it. Of course. Of course. You know, you got to take care of your sister. Yeah.

That is, of course, a different situation. I mean, kind of just pending regular stuff.

Stay tuned for more armchair experts.

If you dare.

“You know, my brother just had a baby, cutest baby, Memphis.”

I love him. I bought him a quilt yesterday. Um, I wanted to bring that up. Okay. So I bought him a quilt that was originally,

ding, ding, ding, a thousand dollars. But it was a hundred dollars. It was on say. It was a $900 dollars. Mom.

I got a one. I got a one. That's what my wanted to bring up. I was like, do you think that was like a trick? It's a moths cut in there or something.

Aaron and I if we owned a quilt, that was a thousand dollars. We would be selling it for a hundred. We just had this conversation. Both of us are so bad at selling stuff. Like virtually every time I sell something, I meet the person.

And I go like, God, they have less money than me. Like I remember. I saw my Harley remember that. Yeah. I remember that.

I thought of that story yesterday. Dude, like, I forget what I wanted. Maybe I wanted 10 grand for it. He came and he had like six grand with him. And he's like, okay, yeah, I really wanted him.

I got a run to the bank and get a bowl of wine. I go, just fine. Yeah. He takes the bucket. Yeah.

“Because he worked at a treatment center and I was like,”

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He worked at a treatment center and I was like, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. He worked at a program. Yeah. So it's like anything he would have shown up. I would have shown up.

I agree. I'm more into the just giving. Yeah. Yeah. What ever that so quickly?

Yeah. How would you want to take it? Yeah. Just fucking get out of here. How old is that?

Yeah. But Monica, I'm so scared of making you mad. But I kind of think, like, I kind of think that they should give me a little more. I know you think that.

Just because I don't. Okay. I don't. It's a sincere point of view. It has nothing to do with the money.

And it's, it's one thing, you know, you're like, you know, we love you the most. We love you equally, but it's like, it's just hard. It's.

It's. It's too hard. That's what it is. Yeah. That's what it is about.

Yeah. He didn't like it. Yeah. It's painful. I think.

I understand logically where you are coming from. Yeah. But emotionally. I don't. I think that would just be very hard.

Regardless. There would be a lot where you'd be okay with, like, 60, 40. Again, it's not even a foul. It's not. It's not about the money.

It's not about the money. It's, it's, it's actually just a indication of, like, these are my children. They get, you know what I mean? Like they keep you out of it.

What do you think my mom should do? Because she should. I think she should split it evenly. And I think you will give it, like, it's again. It's not.

I don't think then you're going to be like, "Yeah, I got all this extra money." Like, hey.

“The only thing that's tricky though about that is your parents can pass on their money”

to you guys. But once you get it, you can't pass it to your brother without a tax penalty. I know. I'm just not all about, we, you know, we have the total money. Well, you'd have to make half of it disappear now.

So, basically, of this pot that started,

it could all go to you guys tax-free. But if you transfer it to him, now we've reduced the pot 25% of the total pot. And then it was like, "For why?" So that everyone felt good.

It should just all go to who needed it tax-free. But need, okay, again, okay. Let's, so, the need is, I guess, relevant. If someone's poor, and someone's rich. Yes.

But also, that's not right anyway. If, like, your sibling is poor, and you have a ton of money, yeah. That's already a little bit like, what are you doing? Yeah, why aren't you helping out your sibling?

But if you're, if, if, if they're fine. Uh-huh. Okay, I'm talking billionaire, obviously. But, um, even, okay, that's a good thought. So, what if it was a billionaire?

Okay. And then a, um, the brother is a lawyer. Okay. So, it does well. Yeah, yeah.

But private practice. Yeah. Okay. Um, personal injury. No, he does, uh, IP law.

Okay. He's making $300,000. Yeah, good for him. Yeah. Yeah.

Good job. Um, should the parents-- What's the other brother? A billionaire. Oh, oh.

Yeah. See. So, we got a billionaire, and then a lawyer making $300,000. No.

Okay. Okay. It's a, it's a thing. It makes no sense.

It doesn't make-- he's going to have a billion,

Yeah.

“You have to feel versus this one changing.”

What is it? You're part of the thing. I know it was, I, okay. And billionaire's situation. I guess I agree with the--

But you know, funny is I do think we all naturally go. Everything more than what we have. Mm-hmm. So, if someone only has $20,000 to their-- Or $2,000 to their--

Yeah. Yeah. And you have $2 million. That is the exact same proportion as you having two million. Someone having a billion.

No, totally.

But two million dollars is not enough to, like, never--

To feel totally safe. Depending on what age you are and where you live and how you manage the-- Well, yeah. I guess if you have two million dollars in your 80, like, great.

Because you're probably-- you won't need it all. Does remind me one of the funny things Aaron said to me. And he actually relieved me of this terrible fear I have. We were watching one of the many sports documentaries that always give me financial anxiety.

Because virtually every sports documentary you watch of a big hero in the '80s. You find out that the city was a gas that he got a million dollar contract. I know.

And I'm sitting there with Aaron. And I'm a girl. That was like the most preposterous amount of money in 1986 when Isaiah Thomas got that. But dude, 1986 was 30 years ago,

and there's no way he still has a million. Right? Yeah.

“And I'm like, that's why, like, no amount of money in 30 years.”

You know? Exactly. And then he goes, "Yeah, but you're not Isaiah Thomas. Is it your only fifth?" He like, "You're already at the finish line."

Oh, yeah. It's very relevant. It's very relevant. It's very relevant. How did it stretch?

Yes, yes. It's one doubt that I'm old. And it was like gaining great growth. It's a good idea. It's a good idea.

That being pointed out gives you a lot of relief. That is true. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. So I just think it's an interesting thought experiment.

I'm definitely on the side. How does your brother feel? Have you talked to him about it? No, he doesn't get to the side. Well, he gets to have an opinion.

I'm curious what it is. Let's call him. Okay. Is this forever changing for the parents? Like you're calling up your guy.

Lincoln's not doing well. Uh-huh. Let's change the way up. Yeah. Right.

It's a good question. So I've done a state planning. It's a lengthy thing. Right. Yeah.

And then Chris tonight is so lazy about it. We're like, "Oh, we don't want to." I'll tell you what happens in this state planning that gets tricky.

As you go, first things like what happens if one of us dies.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that's obvious what happens. And then it's okay. What have both you done?

Yeah. And then you go, "Okay. Well, I want my sister. I'm currently to take over." Sure.

Yeah. And then you go, "What happens if she dies?" Oh. Right. And then now we're on a third tier.

And now, but let me get to the fourth person. We're now arguing over who should get this. Of course. The responsibility of our children. And at that point, I go, "This is fucking nuts.

We're stressing ourselves out over something that literally statistically could not have." Which is all three people that have taken charge of our children. They're all past it. That was like who I knew in eighth grade. Like what are we talking about?

Three of you were, could be in a card together? I hate that you said that. Ah. That's like not that hard to do. So.

Okay. Where am I in line? So we kind of tabled it over this one. Like we couldn't decide on the fucking fourth person to get the kids. Yeah.

And then we just like fuck this thing. We put it off for a while. And then, of course, we're getting urged rightly so by our financial advisors to finish this. Because we fly together. I raise motorcycles.

You know, all the shit.

Anyways, we finally got through it.

But it's like it's, you know, it's like four sessions sitting with this estate planner for hours and hours and hours. And you don't like thinking about it. It's like not a topic. You're all you're talking about is like when you're dead and your kids are going to be without you and all that. And then you're also figuring out like what age should they get?

What again? What happens if one of them is an addict? You need a lot of legal language to deal with that kind of situation. You're kind of trying to forecast every conceivable thing. Yeah.

“And the only thing that I was just dead sure again.”

So as I was like, let's make this very clear. Nobody gets a fucking penny unless they sign a pre-nap. I do not want some dead. I'm like fuck dollars. And getting divorced and taking a quarter of the money.

I worked my whole life or like that to me was like, I'll come out of my grave and kill some of them. Oh, nice. Have you guys heard of doing a free? This isn't embarrassing. But I don't have a will right now.

No matter what. I don't want them to get one. No, I want him to not need it. Okay, because you're not because you don't want the thing that was just said to have. No, my noxors that they know.

They have their ambiguous of purpose. Yeah. But this has come up a lot recently. And it's, yeah, it's out of laziness. What a lot of people do, I assume.

Yeah. So lazy.

It never occurred to me because I'm like, whatever.

Just a little bit of shit. Yeah. Yeah. But it's pretty good. Yeah.

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. So we've been talking about him, but just having pulled the trigger. And I'm like, what do I do?

I go to, because I'm a fucking jackass. I don't know how to do it. And I'm like, according to chat, who? Yeah.

“But you should have chat, make your will.”

Yeah, you should. Okay. Yeah. It makes legal documents. Yeah.

And um. Yeah. So there is a way to do it without going. You're my tattoo contract. Okay.

Yeah. I had the whole contract made on chat. Sent it to my Eric, who's a lawyer. And he's like, this is like bulletproof slash aggressive. Okay.

Um, well, that's the answers that then. Yeah. Yeah. We looked into him like, oh, that's why I don't have to. Like, I just take this to a fucking older.

Now. Yeah. Yeah. Are you going to give yours? So is it so.

Okay. I like it. You're whispering. Yeah. Because this is good.

Tricky. Twicky. So are you going to leave your money to Ruthie? For your children. That gets real tricky.

It's too dangerous to answer. I know. It's for it. It even gets more dangerous. More dangerous, but um.

“This is life insurance policy on me that I don't know what it is.”

And this was bought by my ex wife. Oh. With good reason. Yeah. She had a pretty good chance of collecting.

Yes. A long time ago. Yeah. Now. Oh, yeah.

Now since I've got sober, there was this one. There was a moment early on where. I start trying to do the right. Am I okay. I have to be responsible and pay these bills and these bills and these bills.

And she's like, yeah, you got to start paying this fucking life insurance. But I've been paying it for years. And I'm like, cool. So I pay that.

But I've never asked a question.

Like, does this go to you? Yeah. And I'm like, wait. This is what I get in her mind. Rightly.

So yeah. Yeah. If you die like in the came from babies. You still have to pay for half of these kids. Yeah.

Yes. I should get it because I'm going to now assume all the paying. This is all though. So confusing. Yeah.

Because when you remarry. What? Do you have two? Can you get two? Double.

Yes. I don't know the answer to that. You could. You could certainly amend that. Policy to have multiple beneficiary.

Yeah. Yeah. Which you'll never do. But you could. I'll forget when I walk out of here.

But. Yeah. I think. Sure. I wouldn't.

Who? Who? Who? I don't know. He's not going to be able to take cameras up with that.

I'm jumping. I can't. That's better than me. I mean, this could be for. It's just 20 grand.

I have no idea when today. I've never seen details. When my dad died. Um, obviously he just mostly had a lot of dad. Yeah.

But I did get a call. That was like. Your father had a life insurance. Oh.

And I'm like, first of all, how.

And then, you know, how much. And it was like, it was 15 hundred bucks. Oh. Wow. And where did this come from?

“I think he must have like, it had to be a part of some of my life.”

Go into your mom. No, it's a David and I. But I was like, just send it to David. Fifteen hundred. Fifteen hundred.

It's. It's not a greatest. One cent. One cent. One cent.

One cent. Like, maybe he's not commercial. It was like, for 25 cents a month. You could leave your loved one. Fifteen hundred.

Oh. One thousand five hundred dollars. He's like, it's something. It is something. Sure.

I'm just like, where did this come from? I think he must have like. It had to be a part of some other thing he got that just got lobbed on to the bill. Yeah. You had to have if you had, I don't know.

Interesting. Makes no sense. I joined AARP in a. I thought. This was five.

You wait. Wait. This is definitely seven years old people. Yeah. American association of retirees.

You listen up. This probably went into your junk mail. But I got it in the mail.

“And saw that I was eligible to be a member of AARP.”

And I laughed really hard. And I was reading through it for a very small fee of like. 1499 for an annual. Oh, wow. Anyway.

So I was like, it's just can't be right. It was when I turned 50. Then it got better as I was reading. And it was like, so I'm like. Okay.

So the perks are. You can get like a coffee at the final discount of Dennis. Sure. Sure. So I'm going to end this.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Then I see you can order a second card for 799 tears for your spouse.

Which wrote these seven years younger than me. So I'm like, well, this is even fun. This is where 20 bucks. Just for the one. Yeah.

Yeah. I wonder if that part of their strategy with me? Totally doing their marketing budget. I like a lot of people are going to buy this for a laugh. Yes.

Works. So I order them. And I'm. [LAUGHTER] That is funny.

It's funny. Mr. Go. I'm taking you to that final. [LAUGHTER] So now I'm like pounded with.

Oh, no. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

No. But one I've been seeing lately. And I've set a couple of side. But in having opened them was life-inter. And I'm like, well, I don't mean I'll look into this.

But I'll be like, yeah. I might be one of those 15, but your focus is on the ARP. Yeah. I really would love to go to a holiday in at a town with my wife. And we both have to present in the cars.

Yeah. That is really fun. That is fun.

“Did they give you the sticker for the back year window in your car?”

I got a lot of stickers. You should put them all over your car. It came with a lot of stickers. I'm trying to think of a more courteous and forgiving of people when I see the sticker from angry at them.

Like, I can't remember if I'm forgiving or if the second I see it, I go, they're going

to drive bullshit. Well, you were going to be forgiving if you pulled up and saw it. It was me. How are you doing? What the fuck?

Yeah, you can't. [LAUGHTER] Is that when you see a guy jump out of his car in the hand again? Yeah. And sprint into the subway.

I know. And he's got the fucking license plate and everything. But it's legit. Wow. Congratulations.

Thank you. That's amazing. I told you my father like he loved his placards so much. So he traveled with it. And so often we would be like, we would pull up.

There's nobody there. It's like we're going to cause going. We'll have an AMA weekday. Yeah, it is knee replaced. And you know, he was obese and stuff.

“He did put the spot directly next to the hand.”

He can't put the open.

And I would start pulling you.

What are you doing? [LAUGHTER] And it's like, oh my god, why? This is now in a weird obsession. You have to be in the spot.

You can walk all of Costco. You could be. You want great. When you think there's some fucking samples of the car into this door. Oh, no.

Oh, no. I love this so much. I love it the most. It is great. Oh, man.

[LAUGHTER] Is it great, man? [LAUGHTER] Oh, my god. Oh.

Backeys? Yeah. Well, I do want to make one thing here. People might think that I'm very greedy. Okay.

Because I want to have my parents' money. But my money will go to my brother. Which is all the more reason. No. More reason than like, okay.

So, okay. I mean, all the more reason that you want them to have it all in any way. No. I want my money for my parents because I earned that money from them. Listen.

Part of the reason. [LAUGHTER] I did. I did. Part of the reason I have this money is because I was trying to make them proud.

Uh-huh. And I did it for them. Uh-huh. And then, only you. [LAUGHTER]

No, I think for you. No, for me too. But that is real. Uh-huh. And so, I deserve that.

Uh-huh. I deserve to feel equally loved and cared for. Yeah. Do you think they love you equally? I'm starting to wonder.

Now that we got a new baby. No, that's not okay. Okay. That's sort of how this started. I was like, oh, I wonder what's going to--

I wonder if this is going to change.

[SIGHS]

That baby didn't earn it?

Exactly.

“That baby earned that baby earned money from my brother and Emily.”

Well, he's made your grandparents extremely proud. They think he's a soccer star. He's a soccer star. He's a soccer star. Yeah.

He's a more than three weeks. I've had exactly-- I didn't do so. He's like a ring. He gets more than three weeks than most people doing a work tonight.

We're going to come back with A after A after A.

Get an update of shit anyway. Well, it's going to be great. Yeah. And it's not even going to happen for like 100 years. Yeah.

All right, let's do some fast. Yes. I love Ray Maddoff. Me too. Yeah.

Once in a while, these come up. I don't know.

“Every 15-20 episodes where I repeat all the data I learned in the interview every single”

person I see for the next week. Yeah. And that was this interview. Yeah. This is a--

This is an alarm call. Fantastic interview. A alarm bell. Great information. We all need to listen to this.

A alarm calls are not a thing. No, it's just an alarm bell. And a alarm bell. Yeah. Okay.

Sound the alarm. option. Yep. Okay, she said women are named all kinds of male names, you know, but not right. Yeah. She said their name shows infant Frank. I personally thank you. Frankie. I know

Frankie. Frankie. Sure for Francis. Generally. Yes. And I would say Joseph I've never heard Joe, but

that's for Joe. Yeah. Yeah. But that was just funny that she said that, but then it made me want to look up girl names were once more common for boys. Okay, great. This is from great. He knows. Uh-oh. Ding ding ding. No. That's from a previous. Yeah. Okay. Robin that used to be a boy name. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. Robinhood. Sure. Yeah. I definitely think when I here, Robinhood, I definitely think female were them. No. Yeah. Um, okay. Jocelyn was a boy name.

What? I know. Miniveled. Miniveled. Miniveled. Kim. These are good. Good job, she knows. Kim was a guy's name? Yeah. It didn't even appear on the female name charts until 1944. Whoa. At which time it was far more popular for boys. Well, Kimberly is Kim, right? Yeah. Was it Kim Bo? The boys were named Kim. They were the same Kim, Darcy. Was it boys name? Yeah. And it's such a good name. I could

just be at home and make a list. You know, I could be like Jennifer. No, he has dead. Oh, my God. They have sources. Yes. Okay. Okay. If you live in the United States, you probably think of Darcy as a girl's name. It's firmly entrenched on the feminine side consistently within the top 1,000 most popular girl names in the U.S. from 1949 to 1994, peeking at number 349 in 1968. It was on the most popular male name list in this

“country to barely consistently from 1954 to 1970. Whoa. Yeah. And when were they went?”

They went by the full jocelyn. No, Darcy. Have you said jocelyn? Yeah. Okay. I did. So it's not not nowhere that I just said jocelyn. Okay. I'm just a few behind. Yeah. Okay. Aubrey. Kim. Okay. Aubrey was a dude's name. Yeah. Okay. When? 1810. It didn't even make the list for girls until 1973. Up until then, it was far more popular for boys having been in the male top 1,000 names even prior to 1900. 1810 probably, peeked. Probably.

Dana, I know this one. You knew that one? Well, I know a male Dana. You do. He was my teacher, AP history, U.S. history, and he was awesome. Shout out. Dana. You like all your teachers, yeah? I had a lot of teachers I liked. Yeah. I got a good. That's where, like, I mean I really diverged and I'm so grateful. She likes the teachers. She's a teacher about. Yeah. Yeah. I was like the bane of most teachers existence, and I didn't like them.

Yeah. And what a terrible way to go through. And she loves her teachers so much and I'm so happy and relieved. It's so nice to be liked by your teacher. It is. Um, Riley. I had a male teacher, Mr. Shade, seventh grade science, Aaron brings us up all the time. He grabbed one of those big metal heavy chairs, right? They go whole bases, metal would back. He grabbed it and he fucking swung it and threw it right at my head, sitting at the desk. And I ducked

and hit the table behind me. He would have sent me to the hospital. What'd you do? Do you

saying, what did you do to make him throw it? Oh, I can't remember my infraction. I think I talked for the fifth time after he had worn me now, too. But we got even. We got even. You did. Yeah. He in the summer time was a park-ranger at Kensington State park

wire. Oh, no. I don't like the third chair at you, but I'm nervous. It deserves it. This

is mother-in-law almost took my head off. You can't throw a chair at a 12 year old. I know,

“you were probably being so. I wasn't mean to him. I think it was talking to Aaron. Okay.”

Park Ranger. Yeah. And we kind of knew he couldn't fuck around at that job. And so Aaron and I found him a couple different stuff at that shop and taunted him like crazy after we were out of high school. Okay. Riley. Really? Where's your pistol? Why don't you pull it? Did you give you a fist? Oh, my god. All right. Um, right. If you're with us, I don't apologize. Most people I would imagine his wife. He tried to assault a 12 year

child. No, fine with don't. We're not even, we're not even even yet. You were a bad kid. I wasn't a bad kid. I was an antsy ADHD kid who talked too much. That's not bad. Let's be, let's take you out of it, pretend it's not you. Okay. And it's just a teacher who's not good at being a teacher. You know, as all these kids and doesn't know how to control

“them. And one will always relentless. And he lost his shit. Yeah. And this is the first time”

me that he had been me in the heaven. If I can erase her one time too. And he doesn't out of money. So he has to be a park Ranger in the summer. And well, that you've had and hold on hold on. What? What do you mean? He doesn't have no money. He lived in my cheap house town. He was middle class in my town. He just had to jump because he wanted to be a park Ranger. If you were interviewing, yeah, it's okay. You can't see it in within it.

It doesn't. If it's 12, here's what you do. He stopped. You go, let's go out into the hallway.

Let's talk. No one sang he did a good thing. Okay. No one sang his behavior was appropriate all right. But we can also have compassion for his circumstance, which is what we normally do always. I, I, um, yes, there are certain folks in my history that I have a hard time extending compassion to. You're a firm stepdad, you know, you've done, you have given, you have said that before. You have given some compassion. I mean, more than I would. All I've

said, the the most I can extend is in the game of life. He suffered the most. Yeah. That I can give him. I don't want to extend him any. But I do want to extend this teachers. I don't know why. We shouldn't meet Mr. Shea. These are just, it's. Oh, it's no. I get it. It's so hard. It's too hard. But money. He cannot chuck. No, I don't know. And if that's your disposition, you cannot be a teacher. I agree. Yeah, yeah. But I don't think he, I don't

like that he got taunted. Oh, I do. I wish. I guess we would have solved it. I'm sorry. Okay. Finally, Shannon. Shannon. There's a really tough hockey player named Shannon. Yeah. Shannon is. I have heard of him. Carol. Carol. We know. You know, Carol. Girl, all these dads have

these things. So, um, Breeze father, Greg would always call for the mom. Always. It'd

“be like, this is such a family thing to do, I think. Like, stand up and go into the bet.”

You know, like, oh, no, everyone's shouting. So, I mean, he always girl. So, I always make fun of him. And I would just randomly yell, Carol all the time. Yeah. And then Chris and Zach has a great one. You've heard her imitate that one. Kelly, go. I ain't. Oh, he's very aggressive. Yeah. That's funny. He's getting heated. It's so funny. Do it, right? Yeah. We don't do it. Yeah. We don't do it. Yeah. It's very funny. Carol, more

again. We know him more again. Yeah. Love him. Morgan, Zach, it shout out. Hillary. What's a man's name? Yeah. Oh, man, that's tough. If you're like a cowboy and you walk into the saloon, I love it. I was like, uh, oh, yeah. I mean, my friend, Hillary. I think they probably go by, oh, Hill, but Hillary, yeah. Okay. That was also 19. Oh, no. I would say that that's that's tied with with with with Shell Silverstein and Johnny Cash's boy named

you. Hillary is wrong. If you name your son Hillary, like, just, you got to acknowledge you're setting him on a road. I'm going to do it. Oh, my God. I would fucking not allow it. Courtney, I have heard that. Lauren. Lauren Michaels. No, that's Lauren. You do often say Lauren,

maybe, maybe, Lauren. I mean, I don't hear the difference between what you're saying.

Lauren, Lauren. Okay. So Lauren, Lauren. No, Lauren. Lauren. Two, two syllables. Lauren. Yeah. Lauren. One syllable. Lauren. Okay. I know. It is hard. Yeah. Okay. Oh, it was split

“in tears, but yeah. Oh, really bad. We're really, really not. Sydney. I think it's”

because his last name was Michaels. They're like, let's soften it up. Sure, maybe. They're Michaels. Okay. Sydney, Sydney, point, point, point. A. Block, A. Alison, I have heard this. I have heard this. Um, Alison Crowley. Yeah. Alice Crowley. Yeah, but still still. Shelby. Shelby, um, Shelby Silverstein. Shelby from Peaky Blinders, but that's the last name, but Shelby Cobra. Carol Shelby. Carol. Carol. Carol. That's a man. Carol. Cheryl. Cheryl.

- And Carol, there's a big actor, Carol. - I'm all in the family. - Yes, yeah, uh, uh, Urby Bunkett. - No, no, Archie Bunkett. - Archie Bunkett.

- What's something? - Carol's not. - What the fuck, Carol. - Carol Bunkett. - Carol Bunkett.

(laughing) - Carol Channing. - Carol. - Oh, Connor. - Oh, Connor.

- Okay, Lindsey, Kelly, Kelly.

- Beverly. - Kelly Slater. - Beverly, I've heard it. - I can. - Uh-oh, Meredith?

- Oh my god, all right, all right, all right, all right. All right, we got a lot. - Vivienne. - Okay, if we got a lot, we got a lot, we got a lot. - Do you just name me in every single girl thing?

- No, no, no, there are a lot on this thing. - Yeah, okay, I will be that. - Okay, um, uh, Nancy, Cindy.

“- The wrong cop, what do you think is the most girly name?”

- Lily, if you name a dude, Lily. - Again, I hope he can fight, that's all I hope. - Oh, you better stick up for that guy. - I hope for his sake, he can fight if he's name a dude. - Oh, I see.

- Like boy names too. - You pray he can fight, 'cause he's gonna be in a lot of... - I think I have the girly name. - Yes. Wow, okay, um,

a movie rom com or a couple had to go into witness protection program and then they went to Ray Wyoming. That was, did you hear about the Morgan's? It was in 2009, you grant and Sarah Jessica Parker. Okay, I looked up what professors are the hardest to become.

Like what subject of being a professor is the hardest, 'cause philosophy is how we got into this. Humanities and arts is extremely, it says extreme slash brutal job market competitiveness. So it's philosophy, history, English.

Then very high job market competitor, one rung down is pure basic sciences, biology, physics, chemistry. Then moderate, accessible is professional schools, business, nursing, computer science.

“- Mm-hmm, is there anyone that says easy?”

- Nope. - I feel like physicists has gotta be up there. - No, physics is in pure basic sciences, it's very high competitive. - Mm-hmm, okay.

(laughs) - Um, okay. - I just feel like not a ton of people.

Here's what I'm, this, I just, you know, I'm doing this.

Very few people may germ physics. Everyone majors in communications. I'm just talking about how many people major in the thing that feels like a community is telling. - That might be additive,

'cause if not that many people are, well, first of all, though, everyone does kind of have to take it. - That's what I'm saying. Every college has a physics professor. - Yeah.

- Yet not a lot of people major and get their graduate degree in physics. A ton of people get their law degree. A ton of people do communications. So that's that many people you'd be competing against.

Versus, you graduate in something that very few people graduate in that would have to increase your odds. - I know, but also they just don't need as many professors and those then, if not enough people are majoring in it. - That's a solid point, but there are certain things

like they have to have a physics department. - Yeah. - We gotta have, like-- - But it might just be small. The physics department's probably smaller than sure. Anyway, whatever, um, it's Paul McCartney,

billionaire, yes. - Yeah, that catalog is valuable. Is California still the fourth biggest economy in the world? - Yes.

- Correct. - If it were-- - I wish you could do your hair that way. You keep it exactly how it is. And take a photo of you.

This would be, you should figure out it do this on Halloween. - Okay. - Yeah, hold on. - Do I be?

- March Simpson. - Oh, yes, um, a Lebanese March Simpson. - No, what? - All right, I'm gonna send this to you. - I'm gonna send this to you.

- I'm gonna send this to you. (laughing) - That's a different episode. (laughing) - Okay, you know.

- I mean, I could probably do a pipe cleaner or something.

I could help with the physics, ding ding ding.

(laughing) - Okay, um, yeah.

“Gross domestic GDP surpassing 4.1 trillion.”

- I mean, it's just nuts that a state is higher than--

- I know. - Than Japan.

- Yep, and narrowly ranking ahead

“of countries like Japan, Indian, the UK.”

But still, I'm pretty proud of it. - I think it's US China Germany. - That is right.

“- It's correct, that's what I just read.”

- You didn't read that. - I read it in my, I did, I just just say it out loud. - Okay, that's a good distinction. - All right, love you. - Love you.

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