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All In Interview - Rand Paul - Recap and Notes September 5 2025

September 5 2025

  • Friedberg interviews Rand Paul
  • Intro
    • Followed in his dad’s footsteps - Doctor and then lawmaker
    • Family of doctors
  • Politics
    • Libertarian, Tea Party, Deficit hawk
    • Free trade
    • Globalization
    • human progress . org
    • Doesn’t think China ripped us off
    • Tariffs are a tax - sales tax instead of income tax
    • Opposed to Big Beautiful Bill
    • Social Security age increase?
  • Finance and Economy
    • Democrats just want to tax rich people
    • Modern Monetary Theory did work briefly for about 10-15 years
    • COLA = Cost of Living Allowance
    • Fed interest payment games are interesting and obscure - do they benefit the rich more?
    • In economics, things don’t happen gradually - they happen in 2 days
    • Risks of fractional reserve banking
    • Government should spend what is coming in - instead we are overspending $2T extra per year
    • Debt to GDP is getting worse
    • 40-50% of employees earn from fed, state, local govt or govt contractor or get a check from the government in some form
    • Can’t have illegals not come but also pay 40% of people to not come to work
    • Population helps economic growth
  • AI
    • Cannot be luddites - the people breaking the looms were wrong
    • Everyone in America should work - for the reward, not as a punishment - hopefully we can get to that future
    • Believes in Adam Smith model of prosperity - extent of our prosperity is the extent of our division of labor - AI can accelerate that potentially
  • DOGE
    • Congress should return extra money to the treasury - especially when we are in a $2T deficit - if the money is appropriated then spend it when you have a balanced budget
  • Covid coverup book
    • Conspiracy just requires convergence of interests, and not just a secret cabal
    • People involved were saying in public the opposite of what they were saying in private
    • Business of science vs doing science
    • NIH related foundation has about $1.2T in funding from Big Pharma
    • Gain of function vs studying how viruses can evolve
    • Lots of classified research funded by fear of China - but what about us getting into a bad accident as a result?
  • China rivalry
    • Steel industry in the US was killed not by globalization but anti-trust - made them smaller and they couldn’t compete with China
    • Diplomacy needs to be better - Blinken and Yellen did a bad job of this when they went to China

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