use they were saying things? Well if it's inciting it's going to be everybody. I'll tell you my interpretation of this is that Democrats mostly are looking for any excuse to increase the number of Republicans they're putting in jail which I call hunting. This to me looks like lawfare hunting where they're literally looking for Republicans that they can jail to make sure that Republicans stay in line in the future. I think it's not so much about punishing anybody. I think it's about creating a standard of fear so that Republicans will know that if they get anywhere near a line they're going to jail.

Do you know I consider my biggest risk in my life, I consider my biggest risk being jailed for a crime I did not commit. It's 2023 in America. Literally my biggest risk. And there are plenty of things that can be risky but my biggest risk is going to jail for a crime I didn't commit. That's the reality of America in 2023. And you know if you've watched Mike Lindell tweeting lately he would be an obvious target for the bad guys to want to invent a crime and charge him with it. I think they would be sorry if they did that. That would be way more push back than they understand. But I think we're all at risk at this point. Anybody who's talking about the news in a way the Democrats don't like I think we're all at risk. That's America 2023.

All right I asked on the X platform can you describe any way in the world that the national debt could be paid off and we are not running as fast as we can toward certain doom and nobody could do it. But I saw one suggestion that made me think it might be possible. Now I'm going to go to the whiteboard. I'm going to explain maybe the best case scenario for paying off the debt. Now there are things that you can do when the debt is small that you can't do when the debt is enormous and growing at an enormous rate. The normal way if you've got a crushing debt or just debt in general you either have to create money from nothing or inflate it away. And there are basically three ways to get rid of a debt. And by the way this is my first draft, sort of a first take. So if anybody knows more than I do about this topic tell me to add something or subtract something right. So we're just getting the conversation going.

The reason I'm doing this by the way is I've seen no serious person describe how you even could possibly, like even in the best case scenario, how could we get off of this train to doom which is the debt. I've heard nobody do it. Have you? Has anybody heard anybody serious describe any scenario where we're not doomed from debt? Right you haven't heard it. So I'm going to give you what I think is the first possibility. I think it's possible but boy would it take some things to go right. I think they might actually. But here are the options.

There could be some kind of weird crypto trickery. By trickery I mean something that I can't quite imagine and I wouldn't know how it works but the basic idea is that crypto can create an artificial value from nothing right. So that's the only thing I'm starting with. We've got this huge debt and we don't have the money to pay it but what if we just invented money? Now you say to yourself but Scott that creates 10 new problems. Maybe but I'm just saying is there any play? Not one that I can quite describe but is there anything you could do that would one time only, now here's the key, one time only create a bunch of money and pay off the debt? Is there any way to do it? Now before you say haha it's obvious that it won't work I would bet that you know less than me not more. If you believe it's obvious there's no way to do it I can't take you seriously at all. I'm not saying I know how to do it. I'm saying that crypto literally creates money that people will accept out of nothing. So maybe there's a play there. I just don't know how I would do it.

All right here's the other things. I believe the debt is too big to inflate away. Meaning you could try to inflate it away but remember it's growing two trillion a year. How much inflation would you need to inflate it away? I believe the answer is too much. Meaning that that rate of inflation would just destroy the country basically. Your standard of living would just go to crap. Now so can we all agree that inflating it away if that's the only thing you're doing won't work? Do you think that's true? Now in the past a smaller debt you could actually inflate away. In fact that's where we were at a few years ago. This can't be inflated away.

So the other way to go would be a massive improvement in GDP. Normally our GDP grows what 2 to 4% a year. That is nowhere near enough to pay down the debt. Not even in the same universe. You would need something like, and this is just sort of the economist off the top of my head, it feels like you would need something like a very rapid 40% increase in our GDP. How many of you would accept that as sort of a ballpark for just talking about the topic? A 40% increase. Is there anything in the world that would make the economy increase by that rate? War? War is the wrong answer because war creates more debt. Yeah war creates a lot of activity but it also creates more debt.

Here's what I think and this is partly a borrowed idea. Suppose you get a President Trump or a President Ramaswamy. I'll just take two Republicans as my example. Both deal makers, both understand capitalism, both know how to get rid of regulations, both know the value of fossil fuels in the short term right. So they're basically the right people for the job. Imagine them coming in and doing something so radical that the cost of energy drops to almost trivial. Is that possible? Absolutely. You just remove the prohibitions against small nuclear reactors. That's day one. You just say look we're not even going to have state standards. There's going to be a federal standard and it's going to be friendly to the industry because we don't have an option now. So you build a bunch of nuclear reactors. Is there a risk? Probably. But it's way better than the risk of just spending yourself into a certain doom. If those are your two options you're going to take a little extra risk on your nuclear development because even if you get a meltdown on a small reactor it's going to be way less problem than spending yourself into oblivion.

So given that energy is such a large portion of our total expenses, if you could just subtract that from our expenses suddenly everybody has more money. That's a reverse inflation per GDP thing. Now it's not just that it reduces your current expenses. If you could take energy from its current level to closer to zero then there's a whole bunch of businesses that become economical that could not have been done before because they would be too energy intensive. One of them would be desalinization right. Imagine the number of companies that would immediately go into the small nuclear reactor plus desalinization business. I mean that alone would be a trillion dollar business and it wouldn't be practical until you had that power source. So imagine drilling like crazy, getting rid of regulations, building nuclear. Building. Elon Musk says if you build a 100 mile by 100 mile solar facility you could power the entire United States. Does anybody want to check his work? Does anybody want to take a chance that he got the numbers wrong? I don't think I'm going to go down that path. And actually I do think there's an argument there. If you listen to some the critics will say you can't get there with solar but I'd like to have that conversation. But I'd also like to see robots build facilities because the robots can do it cheaper. So if you've got cheap electricity and energy suddenly robots are way more practical because the cost of your robot is probably going to be half energy cost and half material cost. You know at some point if you could take the half of the energy cost closer to zero suddenly I'm buying two robots.

Elon Musk said that he thought the Tesla robots that already can be taught skills, you can already teach them to fold the laundry and stuff, that he might sell more of those than anything else he's doing. Bigger than Tesla, bigger than SpaceX. I don't know if it'll ever be bigger than SpaceX but so robots plus AI plus cheap energy creates an industrial type revolution greater than anything we've ever experienced yet. And there are probably two candidates who could give this world to you and they're both Republicans. There is no chance that a Democrat could ever pay off the debt because Democrats are limited in their options. They're not going to remove regulations. They're not going to do anything that hurts one blade of grass in the environment and they're not going to do anything that their base reflexively doesn't like such as nuclear power. So there's no way that a Democrat can get you to anything that's not total doom. And there is a way and I think it's a stretch honestly. None of this is easy. None of it's predictable but it's there. It's there. Yeah we could all have solar roof tiles and be powering our own homes and making our own water and yeah the only thing left is good waste treatment which I think will turn into some kind of like laser beam that turns all of your waste into CO2 that gets used in the steam engine or something. But that's coming. That's coming.

All right is this the best explanation of debt repayment options you've ever seen? It is isn't it? I saw one person say no. If there's somebody who did a better job of explaining the options can you send me a link because I've never seen one. I've never seen anybody get close. Now when you say it's not the best description is it because the crypto part? Which part are you complaining about? Just the crypto part? Because the rest is very ordinary. Everybody would agree that we can't inflate it away. Everybody would agree that more GDP would work. Everybody would agree that more energy would be good. Everybody would agree that robots are good right? So it's really the crypto part that you don't like right? Crypto equals tulips. Well here's something I think you don't understand about crypto. The United States could make any crypto immediately valuable by saying they would accept it for tax payments. On day one they can make any crypto valuable because the only thing that makes a crypto valuable is if somebody's willing to take it as their payment. If the United States says we'll accept it for tax payments you're there. Day one it has permanent value and it won't become less or I guess it could. So for those of you who think the crypto option is magic and crazy you might be right but you cannot deny that is a way to create money out of nothing. It might have some other problems with it.

All right well I thought I'd take a run at that. Remember this is a first draft. What are the things I think I can add as value to the public conversation is when the public is not being served. I think I do a good job of explaining what we haven't been told. I always think that's my greatest value is that I do a good job of telling you what they haven't told you and how that's important and you better find that out. So with the debt we are letting all of our politicians off the hook. Let me ask you this question. This is going to blow your mind. Watch your head just explode. Watch this. Number one would you agree that our debt problem probably is our biggest one? Would you agree with that? First of all you see some no's because you might have some other things that you think are bigger problems. Well if you think no then that would suggest you know that there's some way to pay it off but you don't. So there's one problem we have where we can't conceive of a solution. There's a bunch of problems we have that could become really bad but we can totally conceive of solutions. For example the border is open. Can you conceive of a solution? Let me see. Close the border. Yes. We might have a world war. Can you conceive of some way to avoid it? Yes negotiating and the usual stuff yes. Now I would agree with you that some surprise thing like a nuclear war could happen suddenly. Anything could happen but there's only one thing we have where the straight line is to doom and that's the debt. The debt because it's going up two trillion a year. If the debt were just stable then I wouldn't worry about it. We've just inflated away but it's also going up two trillion a year so it's unsustainable and growing quickly. That's definitely the biggest risk by far. That's the biggest risk. All right that's my opinion.

All right here's the part that's going to blow your mind. Now remember all the news you've watched and try to remember anytime that a top politician was asked this question how would you handle the debt. I don't remember it once. I can't think of it once. Can you? Do you know why they don't ask that question? They don't ask it on the right and they don't ask it on the left. Do you know why? Probably because the reporters don't understand the topic. Your average reporter would not really quite understand how debt works because some people make the mistake of saying national debt is like personal debt. You know if anybody makes that analogy like if you bought this house and you know the interest rate was this and you had made this much money what would you do. That's not the right model. Anybody who thinks that a mortgage of your house is a good thing to learn about how to handle the national debt you should immediately stop talking to them because they don't understand the basics of anything. So you've got reporters, if they're not the business reporters, the regular generic reporters they don't know how to ask the question or they wouldn't understand the answer. Because here's the answer a politician would give you. Mr. Politician let me say Mr. Republican how are you going to pay off the debt? Well we've got to get these omnibus spending bills under control. And then what does the reporter say? Well how will you do that? Well you know we'll try to break them up. The Speaker of the House blah blah blah. And then the reporter goes to the next question. Do you think that breaking up our bills into individual spending bills is going to solve the national debt? Not even close. It's not even in the zip code of a solution. It's simply better than what we were doing. It's a small tweak to improve the quality of the budgeting. It's not going to solve the national debt or even close. And nobody serious believes it would. But I'll bet you the Republicans get away with saying that. I'll bet the reporter stops asking questions when they say oh we've got to cut our budget. There's no way to cut the budget enough to pay off this debt. You'd have to cut it like 70% or something. You'd have to give up the military right. You're not going to cut the budget enough at all. So we have reporters who don't know how to ask the question. Would you agree with that? Our reporters do not know how to ask the question. And you have politicians who on the Democrat side apparently have never been asked. Let me say it again. I don't think a Democrat's ever been asked what would they say because Democrats can't say we're going to reduce social services and if they say we're going to reduce the military well just ask them to show you the math because that doesn't work out either if you want to actually have a national defense. So we have a reporter problem primarily. The reporters refuse to know what is the important stuff. So with TikTok they don't know that influence is the important thing as opposed to data security. So because our reporters can't tell the story right it gives Congress a way to ignore it. Because our reporters don't tell the story right it gives them a free pass. If nobody's reporting it correctly they're just going to ignore it. That's what they do with TikTok. So nobody reports the national debt story accurately or even close. Nobody knows how to even ask the question of a politician and if they did they would allow the politician to get away with oh yeah yeah we got to we're going to have to have a national conversation about these spending. What how's that going to help? Yes we're going to have to cut one of these big expenses. It won't help. Yeah it's a complete abdication of responsibility by the press and it allows the politicians to just kick the can.

So here's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see Vivek come up with a specific plan even if it's a long shot for solving the debt a