06-16-26 Part Two - Who Wants To Be a Trillionaire?

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Goethe's, for all of us. Now it's Red Eye Radio, Gary McNamara, and Eric Hurley, talk about everything from politics to social issues, and news of the day, whether you're up late or you're just starting your day. Welcome to the show, from the Relief Factor Studios.

This is Red Eye Radio. All across America, we are Red Eye Radio. He is Eric Hurley, and I'm Gary McNamara. Welcome. Good morning.

Hi. Hi. Just a couple more comments here on the, the whole Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire, and what happened over the weekend on social media with a left just went bonkers on it, looking at John Puries' column in National Review, saying America is not as interested

as the Democrats are, you know, when it comes to the whole billionaire trillionaire thing.

And he said, this isn't the first time the Democrats have lined up to endorse taxing the

rich during the presidential primaries of 2019 when the economy was humming along nicely, virtually every candidate advocated raising taxes on high earners and corporations, several supported a federal wealth tax, but these proposals were presented in service of the field's main agenda, a laundry list of new entitlements to health care, child care, college education, and more. Things are different today.

This is really interesting. Democrats and Thai wealth animus is self-supporting pure class envy is the point where the money from new taxes will go towards funding is an afterthought. Presumably, the party believes that Americans would not just like to seize billionaires wealth for this or that government program, rather they simply want billionaires to not exist.

“That's what all this economic doom and gloom is really about, right?”

A billionaires wealth magically evaporated or of corporate ownership were less concentrated. People would rejoice. That's an odd theory given that the economic discontents of most voters have nothing to do whatsoever with billionaires. Americans are worried instead about things that normal people care about.

They want things they buy to cost less or at least for them not to cost so much more year after year. They are probably displeased to consumer prices have risen more than workers' average earnings over the past half decade for some, like quite a lot, and households are not in love with their record high debt, say that every penny's worth of value owned by US billionaires

disappeared, it would help precisely no one. Nobody else's income would be any higher, no one's cost of living would be any lower. We know this in part because, between Friday morning and that evening, no one was made any worse off by Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire. Hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth were created or more accurately existing wealth

was recognized at a higher valuation. And unless you were following the news, you didn't even notice. SpaceX's stock collapsed today and Musk was no longer a trillionaire. There would be many financial losers, but there would be no winners.

“Why are democratic politicians so obsessed with billionaires then?”

Because their base shares the obsession even a few others do. And he talks about a project he did for college, he goes, I wrote a section of an actually representative survey conducted by more in common, a nonprofit polling agency. Two questions.

I sought to identify America's principal economic concerns and policy priorities in the first

question I asked whether respondents, greatest obstacle to their financial well-being, was the high cost of living, a lack of good-paying jobs, or an unfair economic system that

In the second, I asked whether respondents thought the government's priority should be

“reducing cost, creating jobs, or reducing inequality between the richest and poorest Americans.”

The results showed that about 20% of Americans are primarily concerned with structural unfairness or inequality, far behind the cost of living and job creation. Unsurprisingly, this group was driven by those who described themselves as liberal, for the largest ideological group, self-described moderates who Democrats must persuade in general elections, inequality was a distant third priority at 19% of respondents after reducing cost,

53% and job creation, 28%.

Gallup polling backs up by findings, just 3% of Americans say the gap between the rich and the poor is a country's top problem.

“Officers are down the rabbit hole on wealth distribution.”

They are increasingly throwing out conspiracy theories on the matter, insisting that billionaires are inflicting pain despite offering no logical thread between some people's wealth and everyone else's living standards, such a connection does exist, but it's in the opposite direction of what progressives claim. One lofty's net worth is usually evidence of immense value creation for other people, but it's just interesting.

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“And we've talked about it. Clearly, that's why I asked the question yesterday and asked”

it again today. Do these people actually believe there's a finite amount of money and if you become a trillionaire, you're taking money from them. No, I do believe a significant number of them, too. I don't have data in front of me. I would, has anybody ever pulled that? I don't know if anybody that's ever pulled that. Do you believe there's a finite amount of money?

If a trillionaire, if did Elon Musk become a trillionaire, take money out of the system? Yeah, take money from others. Take money from the total money tree. Yeah, because it wouldn't be taking money from others, because people did invest. That's not taking money. It's voluntary. But I'd love to know the answer because they argue as if it is, as if they believe it is finite. And that there's a finite set of

billionaires. Now, there are some mega billionaires that are always going to be billionaires.

I'm guessing Elon Musk will not be going and buying a bunch of scratch. A trillion scratch off. Would you even get that? He's guaranteed to win if he did. But he's not going to be blowing that money. What's he going to be doing? He's going to be reinvesting the money. You, you, you find quite often that the people that got there took everything that they had. Jeff Bezos was selling books out of his garage. Imagine

he's your next door neighbor. Hey, Jeff, how you doing? Doing it. Doing it. Doing all right. What's got there selling selling some books out of your garage? Yeah, but one day, I'm going to be selling anything and everything to the world. Okay. If you believe so. And he eventually and keep in mind, Amazon was not successful for the longest time. And I don't mean the

if I, I was a word, when it became a legitimate company and started to become a household name, there issues with earnings. And he catapulted that and partly that into something massive. And I don't know how many different subdivisions of Amazon there are now with all the offerings

that they had. And you look at Elon Musk, SpaceX is his sixth most important job. So

I made that joke the other day, I stole it from them. It's, look at how many things he's

“doing. I think he's cloned himself. I think it's going to come out one day that he's cloned”

himself. There's no way that one human can have. How many jobs does he have? He runs X. He's always posting during our show. He's always up, always posting. He's always talking about SpaceX. He's always talking about Tesla. How many jobs can you have? And we go back to you and I go back to the guy that called us in the middle of the night. Well, you know, my wife and I are sitting here in our apartment and we're worried about how we're going

to end this week. Well, if you're going to stay up all night, you might as well get a second

job. But shouldn't be that way. That's the difference. Is that those individuals like Elon Musk are driven because they have a mission to achieve certain things. And it's not a financial goal they're trying to achieve. Now they may have financial goals. But that's not the point of their efforts. Otherwise Warren Buffett would have retired 20 years ago. He's still chairman of the board. He's still on the board for virtue half the way, even

though he's no longer the CEO. Why? Because he loves what he does. He has a passion. He's driven to do to be successful in accomplishing those types of goals. And if you look at the

way, he's done it. You look at the way that innovators have brought about. I mean, think

“about Zuckerberg is say would you will about him? Yeah, I think he's kind of odd. If aliens”

are here, he's one of them. And but you think about where it started. It started in college where it was going to be kind of a, you know, slam another person kind of approach on social media, right? Like it was like, you know, you're going to, you're going to kind of say some things that are maybe not so complimentary about other people on campus. Next thing, you know, Facebook is a household name. And when you look at those things,

I can live without Facebook. In fact, I pretty much do. But ask the world, ask, you know, more importantly, people here in the U.S. since our lawmakers are the ones trying to win, who, actually across the world, they're trying to do this, too. But, but here at home, trying to do away with billionaires. Great. Turn in all that technology, turn in your smartphone, turn in your car, especially in EV. Turn in everything that you benefited

from in terms of their innovations. And if you don't like it, you know, I, I look at the Walton family. The Walton because, you know, my existence, okay, that Walton family. Yeah, not the ones on the mountain. Right. Okay. But that, what they have a saw mill. Yeah.

“It's, it's important. Yeah. Very important. Yeah. But it was small business. You know,”

I mean, look, it's a John Boy wanted to be a right, but they had a 112 people in their family. So I don't know how they got in that, you know, that house was big. I still don't know how many people. Good night, job. We can, we all just say good night at once. Anyway, so you look at Sam Walton and, and, and what was he trying to do? Still today, the business models in place. You control your supply chain of proprietary supply chain that controls

the cost of what Jeff Bezos copied. And if I can control my supply chain on how I get these products to the people. In that case, for Walmart, it was to the shelves. In this case, it's to the door from Amazon. You control those costs. You pass those costs. You can be a discount retailer and a discount retailer because Amazon, because Walmart exists Amazon exists because Walmart exists. Dollar general exists because Walmart exists. Other discount retailers

exists and you don't ever have to step put in Walmart. And if you don't want to, that's your choice for whatever reason. And you look at their existence that has saved families, countless

where they were trying to make the most money they could and not pass on those savings of be a discount retailer to their customers. What I find fascinating and really you start, we saw the real push forward after Occupy Wall Street when Bernie Sanders was going bonkers

“that billionaires basically are the reason that you can't make it. And we remember when”

we discussed it, we actually got the call for that one college student. And a billionaire, a billionaire has no effect on your life at all. No, zero. Right. And the fact, I mean, they can have a positive impact. But I mean, in your goals in which you, you're right.

Wanted, which as a result of them having a billion dollars, your life doesn't change.

But it was the, it's the demonization, the implication that if you're a billionaire that you're evil without any empirical evidence to back it up, that's where it is. That's where you get the rage, the jealousy, the envy, the selfishness. Yeah. And even though in his research that he did, where he said America isn't behind it, America is behind no other people besides them paying taxes. Oh, yeah. The polls all show that all day. So

even though they may not have the, you know, the same thought process that the thought

“process of billionaires being evil. Therefore, you need to take their wealth away from them,”

which again, is pure envy, jealousy, and selfishness. The majority of Americans still are based on economics, which is incentive. Well, I'd rather you tax than than me. Well, it's they, they, they not only make mega eudos in money, eudos is the word of the day. They also pay mega eudos in taxes. I don't know how many zeros are in an eudos, but it's a lot too. We are right, I radio. Let's cross you by FPPF, fuel power max. The IFTA tax program redistributes tax revenue

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Weird when I read you, and these are probably not very macro. We got one audio cut that we want to play here and this is interesting and relates to everything that we've been talking about. This is British comedian Jimmy Carr on NV and just about how people look at life and this is all the jealousy and envy and selfishness that people have, you know, the billionaires are evil and everything else. Here we go.

So I think that we suffer in the West a little bit from life dysmorphia.

“A lot of people think their life is terrible because there's kind of the hedonic treadmill.”

You get used to how great your life is. No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago. So I try and do this thing when you stand in a hot shower, George Mac and my friend pointed this out to me. When you stand in a hot shower just for a moment, just go, "Well, no one that you were mine from 100 years ago had this simple pleasure in life." And when you look at the world

that we live in, we're like you're doing this being 100 billion people, ever. Right?

We are in the top top percentile.

We are in our radio. He's her crony and I'm very Mac and a mirror.

All right, I want to play that full audio because my fault, I timed it wrong. It is your fault. We're just talking about it in the break room. You weren't in there, but we were talking about it. It was like, man, he really screwed that up. You know, you need to respect your elders. Do I? Yes. Not when they're wrong. I mean, I'm, I'm, I think it is respecting when you tell them they're wrong. That way they can

correct their mistakes, which is what you're about to do, right? I am a, we're hopeful that you are. I'm a frail, elderly femme frail frail, elderly femme. You're, you're an F. E. F.

“That's what you are. Don't you put that in diesel engines? I'm not sure. I think it is.”

You got an F. E. F. Tank. Yeah, drivers, let us know about that. Yeah. But this, we're, again, talking about the, the envy and jealousy and selfishness that exist in our society and the article that was written in national review by John Puri about, you know, his research on it shows really. It's, it's, it's Democrats. It's liberals where the, you know, the rage, the, the anger, the jealousy, the demonization of billionaires without any empirical evidence to, to prove it. Right.

But the acceptance of that and, you know, by the left and I started playing this audio from, from Jimmy Carr, the comedian in Great Britain. Now he did say, because he's talking about, we don't even know how good we have it. And he said 50 years ago, and I'm thinking, what? And Great Britain, they didn't have showers. It could be the course over there. Or showers in 1975. He then said 100 years. I think it corrected it. Yeah. Yeah. 100 years later. Yeah. But it's really interesting what he said,

because it is true. It is, and, and I remember after I watched the, the, the history series channel, the men that built America. Yeah. And I realized at that point when I saw that and these, these were, I'm, I'm guessing back then, even though they were, you know, whatever. They were billionaires. I mean, I don't know if you take the, the, the, the currency exchange rate back there and put it today, what they would be, but they were massively rich. And it was like, wow.

Okay. They own more real estate. Yeah. They probably could take a, maybe a nicer cabinet in a train. But the fact is, we live the average person in the United States lives the life of a billionaire from that time period. Yeah. Food, medicine, recreation, technology. And so I just want to play this from, from Jimmy Carr because it really is so true that people really don't understand

how technology has made such an incredible difference in our life. Here it is. Yeah. So I think that

“we suffer in the West a little bit from life dysmorphia. A lot of people think their life is terrible.”

Because there's kind of the, the hedonic treadmill. You get used to how great your life is. No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago. So I try and do this thing when you stand in a hot shower, George Mac, my friend pointed this out to me when, well, when you stand in a hot shower, just for a moment, just go, well, no one that you would buy from a hundred years ago had this simple pleasure in life. And when you look at the world that we live in, where we're like,

you're doing this being a hundred billion people ever. Right? We are in the top top percentile in terms of the luck that we have had. But the lives, like the, the color of the intake that we just take for granted, the fact that our children don't die, you know, in the first year, the modern medicine and our lives and our entertainment that we get, we're living like kings. And yet,

life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse. Because the nature of humanity is

our desires are magnetic. So we've got this thing where we sort of, you know, how happy are you?

“Well, it's, it's your quality of life minus envy. That's how happy you are. And it's easy”

to look at everyone else and how they're doing. And I'm not taking pleasure in what you have. Yeah, you know, it's, um, back when, I don't know if they're still doing it on Facebook, on social media, each month of November or each day of November, you would give thanks for something different every day leading up to Thanksgiving. And one of my dear cousins, Chris, she wrote one day, it was

it's not just, you know, walking around, you know, being clean and not offending someone

or everyone, it's, it's your help. It's everything, indoor plumbing, water, it's, you know, it's, if you think about what we have available to us, if you don't feel like cooking, you can click a button on a device, you hold in your hand. And within minutes, a person will have that on your porch, whatever you want to order. Eh, it's expensive. The people do it because the business is thriving. So people are doing it

“voluntarily, but I think of this. Here's what I think of. My mom and dad are not mobile.”

Dad can get up, he can get around the house, he can do things, going out of the house for him

is a bit of a task. And usually one of us goes with him. He can drive. But they're limited. And he's becoming more, more limited. Mom cannot drive and she's extremely limited. And rarely leaves the house unless they're going to the doctor. And I think of the availability of what, you know, beyond the luxuries that we have, the conveniences that change the lives of people who are not, who don't have mobility or have

limited mobility. That when you can get your groceries delivered to you, when you can get the things you need brought to your doorstep. And in some cases, Walmart plus actually has a thing where they'll come into the house and put them up for you. That's designed for people who have limited mobility. My dad actually, I mean, it's a task we're him to go and get something off of the porch. He's dealing with a blood cancer that he's

been fighting since November 22. And so it takes it all of his energy every day. And so to get up and go to the porch and bring it a package from Amazon and, you know, go through it, whatever it is or groceries that are delivered from wherever, you know, he's got to go to the door and sometimes he'll ask the delivery driver. Hey, do you mind setting this in the four year, you'll open the door

“for them? Do you mind setting this in the four year if it's a bigger package or something?”

Those are things that I look at and it's again not just the convenience of the things that we want, but creating a or closing a gap for those who have limited or no mobility.

That to me is amazing. It's amazing technology that should be greatly appreciated, should be

celebrated and it's also voluntary. If you don't wish to participate in it, you don't have to any of this, any of this technology. You don't have to take a hot shower. If you wanted, I would recommend it. Well, I would recommend it. We're in a pretty closed environment, so I don't want you going too far. I don't want to. I'm a two-shower a day, guys. Okay, let's be clear about it. Sometimes three. I would do more if I had time. Well, after I visited

France, I just once a month for me. Yeah, it's the, yeah, I made that up. Yeah, you also quit shaving your armpits. So this is the problem that we fam. So here's the problem. The running theme of this show. Well, just different. But it's, you know, when you don't appreciate those, my point is, when you don't appreciate, appreciate those things to their fullest of, not what they provide us. A single mom trying to get her kids fed.

“Whatever it might be, being able to find the information you need right there that is crucial,”

that you need right now to make a decision right now based on the device that is in your hand, those are things that change lives. Well, when you look at the, the quality of life and how you take it for granted, I had, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day who a close friend that I've, that I've known for, well, probably, okay, 50 years now. Not one of my best friends, but somebody else, and he just asked me and he just told me, he just said, "God, you do so much."

I go, "Not way past." A couple years past. But he said, "You're way past retirement age." He goes,

“"You still work out." He goes, "You do, you do an national radio show, a podcast. You fly”

all over the country. You still work out." Now you're doing, you know, redoing your entire house. He goes, "How do you, and he goes, and still, you have relaxation time. How do you find time?" And I went technology. Technology has changed everything. It's changed everything in all of our lives. Example, because I was talking about, you know, that I'm redoing so much, my house turned 20 years old and once it turned, you know, well, it's turning 20 in January. And that's the time where

everything starts going. So I'm redoing everything. I've got, if you walk into my house right now, I got two new doors coming in front and back door here, and I dealing with those people yesterday, going to be putting new windows in, probably redoing the bathroom, got a bunch of pool work, you know, to do just wear and tear on everything. Got some new appliances this year. But if you walk into my house right now, the front door, there's like 30 boxes sitting there.

I've stopped that I have to unpack and things that I'm putting in and using for my master plan.

“If you know, and that's what's sitting there right now. I've been doing this the last month. I”

think I'm done with Amazon for a while. Do you know how long it would have taken me to go and

purchase those things? Oh my gosh. Well, first of all, you got to go look for them and see the

store has them. Exactly. And where do you find them? What stores have them? And then does that particular store carry them or are they out of stock? Well, no, imagine, and I've said this before, imagine driving down the street, you're going shopping, and all of a sudden, countless stores magically appear on that street that carry the thing you're looking for. Right now, right now. Well, give you an example. I've just, again, been so busy. About a year and a half ago, I've got,

you know, one of the thermostats that connects to the Wi-Fi, so you have the app to your phone, so you can control the temperature. And we're not about a year and a half ago.

Yeah. And I forgot the last time they came, you know, they come every six months to check by AC and

and my furnace. And I forgot to ask them about it. Yeah. And there's a mine right there. Yeah. Okay, there. Right there. And it just won't connect to the Wi-Fi. And I just asked them. I said, can I just order one? I said, I saw an Amazon. Can I just order that one? And he goes, just make sure it's the same right model number. He goes, here's a model number. And everything else goes, yeah, he just, you know, as long as it goes, the template and everything else is same. We just

snap it back in and that one should hook up. Yeah. That should be no problem. If it doesn't, I can put it back in the box within 30 days and ship it back to Amazon. Yeah. And it's no hassle to do that at all. Right. And, and I'm just like, it's unbelievable that, you know, that that you can do all of those, those things. And you know how much time I used to spend at radio shack. Yeah, trying to find plugs and mail and female this and everything else. And yeah, are you dating people? That's that

radio shack. Oh, because I'm a fan. Are we bringing the mail to people? Oh, that's right, you're fan.

“Well, here's here's the thing. The other just goes back about six months ago. I've got this big”

box that go into this big box. And it's all of my all the electronics from all the old cable stuff. Oh, and stuff. Yeah. And you're looking, you go, no one's used this in 20 years. Well, this is completely useless. And I go, no, I've been using this in a couple of years. What is eight hundred years? What is HDMI even stand for? Well, I still have an HDMI, but I still have. But the coaxle ones. Oh, my gosh. I've got all these things. And, and you go into it and you look at it and you go, whatever all these

one trial, what did I even use that one for? Right. You're sort of forget with it. But, I mean, technology is just really, it's changed everything and people should appreciate it. You might as well found a horse and a pulling a a plow in your closet. What was this? I would use this at the long time. We are right, I radio. Coming up more with Gary McNamara and Eric Carly, it's what I radio. We are what I radio. He is Eric Carly and I'm Gary McNamara. You know, I just found

and we'll probably talk about it tomorrow and Thursday. Oh, great. I just found, no, Bernard Goldberg just did an interview on the, on making the book bias. And I was just listening,

But he was talking about, and I'm like, thinking to myself, how good is my memory on that book?

And he's pointing out everything that we have talked about before as to why he wrote bias and the

contractor that worked on his house. You've got to play that. And that's where it all came from,

“where he realized there was bias in the media. And I think it's the, it's one of the, the”

Reagan caucused Reagan caucus dot org that did the interview. Okay. And I've only,

listen, like three minutes, I was like a 50-minute long interview. But it's why he wrote bias.

“Oh, we got it. We got to play some of that.”

Yep. See his red eye radio, on Westwood One.