American Thought Leaders - America’s $36 Trillion Debt, Musk’s DOGE Cuts, and Tracking Real-Time Inflation: Stefan Rust

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

“In the last four years, we’ve seen an aggregate inflation of about 26 percent. So that’s a quarter of your purchasing power—phoosh gone—just disappeared across the board,” says Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Truflation, a blockchain-based financial data service that provides real-time economic and inflation data.What will be the impact of DOGE’s aggressive cost-cutting? Could it cause a short-term reduction in the size of the U.S. economy?Some people have been talking about risks of deflation—is that really a concern? And what will be the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

So in the last four years, we've seen an aggregate inflation of about 26%. So that's a quarter of your purchasing power, fush, gone, just disappeared across the board. So $11 trillion get printed in the last four years. In this episode, I sit down with Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Truflation, a blockchain-based financial data service that provides real-time economic and inflation data. The budget deficit has just gone out of control, where the debt has been accumulated nearly $40 trillion.

I think it's so hard to even fathom the magnitude of $40 trillion. How big is that? What will be the impact of Doge's aggressive cost cutting? Will it cause a short-term reduction in the size of the U.S. economy? Some people have been talking about the risks of deflation. Is that really a concern? And what will be the impact of Trump's tariffs? This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Stefan Rust, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Stefan Rust Thank you very much for having me. Look forward to this.

Will Barron There's been a lot of interesting things happening in the U.S., specifically at the U.S. Treasury with the Doge efforts of Elon Musk and a number of others. What's your reaction to this? Fantastic. Yeah, no, in summary, I think, you know, it's long needed. I think budget deficits have been just growing and accumulating. Regulations and bureaucracy has just been layered on top of each other every single year, every single new administration. There's never an extraction of old laws. And ultimately, this is a good thing. It's cleaning up shop, really, and tightening up the budget again

and trying to get back to normal household management and budget management, which is a good thing. Well, so lay out for me what that actually means, right? Getting back to normal household management, how is it different? So we at home, we all have to manage a budget, right? We cannot spend more than we have, or there are times where we can spend a bit more and extend our, you know, our sort of habits. And there are times where we need to retract them and save a bit of on our, you know, expenditures. And I think, you know, the government hasn't done that. I think in a lot of the West, we've constantly expanded, and there's never been a budget decline, a dropping of

specific departments, there's only been growth. And especially in the government area, departments have grown, employees have grown, regulations have grown, legislation's grown, and the whole sort of institutions as such has also grown. And so when does it stop? And when does it start leveraging technology to really start improving efficiency and driving efficiency in terms of streamlining processes, using technology to minimize increase in labor, execution speeds? How do I increase that using technology? standardization in terms of once you've submitted, I have an identity, it's already applicable on a permission basis across all the different government departments, etc. So many angles. When we were speaking offline, you said that you actually see a future where the US economy could grow quite a bit more due to such efforts. But explain to me

how that's connected. So there are two elements there that I really highlight. One is efficiency, right? So having a bill, a mandate, a budget that actually gets converted into infrastructural improvement so that the actual allocation of funds gets deployed and gets input into the economy, number one. And number two, the economy can reap the benefits of that new infrastructure in the marketplace thereafter. So that's one element. And then the other element is just the elimination of red tape. As new businesses evolve and start up, they don't necessarily always have all the resources needed with legal compliance obligations that are set upon startups, let alone sort of small, medium businesses, how do we let them innovate? How do we let them build new products, drive new opportunities forward? And I think with a lot of red tape in place, it becomes extremely difficult,

very expensive for new startups to really innovate. And I think that out of the way will allow entrepreneurs who already have an extremely difficult challenge to try and penetrate into new markets and disrupt existing industries. All of a sudden now they have the right to move and they have one burden less on the list of challenges in front of them as they launch new businesses or even start new companies. Makes me think of how there's a rule that for any new regulation that is to come in place, 10 must be cut. That's how Trump is rolling right now. And I think that's the right way. I mean, I also think that we should have time limits on new rulings. So this new ruling should be in place for five years. And then we revisit after five years how it's going.

What's the progress? What clauses do we have in here that are too many? What are too few? How do we adjust it and tweak it and then put in place for the next five years a better, more improved, more time adjusted legislation? And so that's ultimately, I think, where ideally we go to. And that actually means, yeah, a lot of the governments are continuously optimizing and tweaking and improving their processes. How do you understand kind of their reaction to these efforts at Treasury and also now at USAID? Yeah, look, it's never nice. You know, and as a founder and a CEO of a company, you know, it's always challenging. You want to keep as many of the team members you possibly can, but you're always also looking to forward the business. And, you know, reductions in headcount

are never nice. It's always tough. And especially at big scales, right? And you look at, you know, sort of Fortune 500 companies, when they have to cut, they cut 10,000, 20,000, 5% of their workforce. That's a significant impact. And now I think for the first time, a government is experiencing what that feels like. We have to offload this department. We have to shed this product unit. Those are all sort of decisions that leaders have to make when forced with financial limitations that are put upon them, either for not achieving revenue targets, for overexpending in specific areas, or not hitting the P&L targets that you wanted to hit. And for the first time, the budget deficit has just gone out of control where the debt has been accumulated nearly $40 trillion. I think it's so hard to even

fathom the magnitude of $40 trillion. How big is that? I mean, nobody can even imagine what that means in scale. Well, so let's talk about the company that you are the founder and CEO of Truflation. And so, of course, you look at inflation, this is your bread and butter. What is the connection between that $40 trillion debt and inflation? So in the last four years, we've seen an aggregate inflation of about 26%. So that's a quarter of your purchasing power, push gone just

disappeared across the board. And what does that mean? That means that people that go to the grocery stores 10 times a month are witnessing every single day, the increase in the price cost of eggs in the cost of goods in the gasoline at the gas pump. So people are beginning to experience that and are feeling that. And if you're hitting 25% thresholds over a four-year period, that's a lot. And I think it hurts a lot of people. And also, you saw the same time, you saw $11 trillion get printed in the last four years. That's a lot of new money coming into the market, which debases the existing dollars in circulation. So whatever you held would just get

lost in value. At the same time, that is solely related to consumer price index. Another element that people forget is asset price appreciation. We saw a very large increase in asset prices. So everything started to become a lot more expensive. That's why the stocks, the S&P 500 is now at an all-time high. Where are people putting that liquidity? Not in new roads, not in new trains, not in better infrastructure, updating the IT systems available. Instead, we're buying S&P 500, we're buying gold, we're buying Bitcoin, we're buying all these other assets in order to hide and store value, which we couldn't find in the dollar. Well, so you've started talking about my next question, because this is actually somewhat of a debate. Where does inflation actually come from?

Give me the picture. So it really comes from overspending, right? So I've overspent. How do I overspend? I need to print more money to keep up my spending habits. And so in order to print more money, I drive up, I debase the existing value of amount of dollars in circulation. And so now, ultimately, $11 trillion of new printing to feed the budget deficit over the last four years has resulted in a significant increase in money supply, which ultimately means cost of goods go up in order to make up for that new supply and the assets that have been appreciated over time. So the bottom line is balancing the budget solves the problem? Is that what you're saying? Yeah, because money is not free. The new money that gets printed comes at

a cost at 5% interest in order to hold inflation down. And so that 11 trillion costs more money. So I'm spending more, but I'm actually paying more for that additional spending. It's like your credit card bills. When you spend more money at home, you need more money in order to pay off the credit card bill or the debt that's accumulated on the credit card bill. And it's not just the income to cover your day-to-day costs, but it's the income to cover your day-to-day costs and the interest on the Treasury, going at department after department, that actually kind of reduces the size of the economy deficit and ultimately puts new people out of work, which means that they will have less spending power because they don't have an income. However, I don't think they're out of work. I think they're given a nice package to give them enough time to find new jobs. I don't know the details associated with that, but I'm a big believer in

leaning in. I think there will be a whole new set of jobs that will come up over the next year or two, despite AI and everybody's looking at other technologies that are coming there that are going to increase productivity. But there will be a whole new set of infrastructure that's going to be deployed. And one thing we know and what we've learned over the last centuries is that every new revolution brings out new types of jobs that we never thought of five years ago or 10 years ago. Fascinating. Tell me a bit more about your background. How is it that you came to be the CEO of a company that focuses on measuring inflation? I studied economics and maths at university in Switzerland. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I really got into technology really early on

I was in mobile technology at the beginning I launched a mobile business we sold that to yeah I launched it in China actually and we sold it to China Unicom which needed the assets in order to do their IPO

so we sold out of that and then I joined Sun Microsystems where we were trying to bring software to mobile phones, where all of a sudden these applications using Java could run on mobile phones. Yeah. And then ultimately, always looking for how technology is going to lead innovation and what innovation is being adopted, I had a very good sense of identifying which technologies are going to be the ones that are going to with shared Bitcoin and told me about Bitcoin. So I read up about it. But what I was really enamored by was the fact that somebody on the other end of the planet, I could send money to on a peer-to-peer basis instantly with no fees.

And that at the time was impossible through the banking network. It took you seven days. It cost you hundreds of dollars just to wire funds to somebody on the other side of the planet. And that was just amazing to me. Yeah. And so just saw how many middlemen are across a lot of the economies that we took for granted payment systems. There are seven toll takers across every time you do a payment when you go to the merchant with your credit card. There's the POS vendor, there's the remitting bank, there's the emission, you know, the card, you know, the card issuer, there's the card recipient,

then there's the master, the credit card company in the middle. And so it's like always seven toll takers. What does that do? That adds fees along the way. And somebody covers that fees or pays for that. That's usually the consumer that it gets passed on to. And that's another inflationary asset that we haven't learned to take out of the economy and build more efficient systems. And I think blockchain is providing an amazingly efficient system. And I hope to see more adoption of that. And I think blockchain is providing an amazingly efficient system. And I hope to see more adoption of that. And I wanted to bring inflation calculation to the blockchain and make it more transparent, more efficient, and more real time, instead of using six month old data,

how do we do it on a real time basis?? How do we make it more transparent so everybody can see? How do we put the calculation agent of the methodology that is stipulated and explained? How do we put that on the blockchain and get that verified by multiple parties? Those are all things that we have put in place with the Truth Network, which is the underlying infrastructure supporting truthflation, what you see on the website today. So, of course, consumers feel inflation. We were just talking about 26% over the last four years. That's quite a sizable number. You've been remarkably effective at forecasting what

this will look like through your system. I'm going to get you in a moment to tell me how it works exactly. But why is there a market for this information, like beyond the obvious consumer pain? So inflation impacts everybody, or inflation drives interest rates, and interest rates drive the cost of capital. And so as we have the cost of capital, loans, there are about $5.5 trillion worth of loans outstanding tied to inflation or have inflation protection in them. So e.g., should inflation hit a certain threshold, the interest rate on that loan will go either up or down if it whichever direction it goes. And so that's a core benchmark that's out there. A lot of pension funds, endowments store and lend money out or know they have funding requirements because their capital is working somewhere else.

I need funding requirements to pay out certain obligations that I have over the course of the next 10, 20 years. So I want to hedge myself against the exposure of inflation and the dollar losing in terms of purchasing power so that I will be able to meet my obligations that I have to the constituents underlying the loans that I'm taking out or the savings that I have or the endowments that I'm overseeing. And so as a result, interest rates really matter and inflation becomes a very tradable item, e.g. inflation swaps, where you hedge yourself against inflation, or even TIPS, Treasury Inflation Protected Securities. all look to understand where inflation is going so that they can ultimately make alternative investments in inflation correlated assets or the securities that I was mentioning earlier. The bottom line is if you can forecast inflation effectively, as you have shown that you are

remarkably well able to do, there's a huge market for that. I hear you now. Yeah, no, I mean, we've managed to work with a number of very big investors that look at where the market's trying to go. And we have the ability to, I mean, a very high accuracy. Yeah, pretty much 99.96% accuracy to forecast where the government number is going to land and what's the impact that will have on interest rates. when they do a change in methodology. And so when they do that every January, how do you deal with that? And what does that look like? Because they only announce the changes

post announcing inflation in December or in January for the December month. So in other words, January for you every year is kind of a mad scramble. Is that what you're telling me here? Pretty much. We don't actually predict the January. We just say this is the band.

This is the, we give a bracket for January just because we know that they're going to change the methodology and there's no point trying to forecast what changes they're going to make because they don't announce anything in advance. But ultimately, your measures are kind of independent of how the government chooses to measure, right? Yeah. So we have two sort of methodologies. One is we build the true flation.

What is the true inflation? And there we aggregate over 100 million items from 30 different, 80 different providers. And we have three price feeds per item that we track. And we do that in real time. So we update it every single day. And we put that on the website so everybody can see. And that is different to the way that the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, which is the government entity that tracks inflation across the US. And so they track 80,000 items in contrast to the 100 million items. And they have six categories in which they bundle those 80, items we bundle it in across 12 different categories and they use you know sort of up to six month old data versus and they go back

and edit the data and so what we said is we have to have it immutable so it gets written to the blockchain and we can't change it and then number two is we want to update it every single day with the latest, freshest data we can possibly get. And so those are the significant differences. When we talk about funds and clients and the $5.5 trillion in inflation protected securities out there, they're not interested in Truflation. What they're interested in is the Truflation.com's ability to calibrate the 100 million price feeds into the same categories that the Bureau of Labor and Statistics have

and then be able to predict and calculate with fresh, real-time data sets, what is the Bureau of Labor and Statistics going to come out and say inflation will be last month. And so that's what Truflation.com and the team over there, Oliver, and all our data scientists have been able to really pull together. You know, and this is really fascinating. On one hand, what someone like me is most interested in is what's really happening. The other question is, depending on what the Bureau of Labor and Statistics does,

people stand to win or lose a lot of money. And so this is the other part of your game here. Yep. And they're the ones that pay us a significant amount of money to help them in the prediction. I mean, you can see trend shifts and even we make it available to anybody, by the way. So you can go to inflation, trueflation.com, and you can actually see significant trend shifts. And we give you a 45-day lead time on average with significant shifts or movements in the market as it relates to cost of goods compared to the year before. So remember, if you go to truflation.com right now, you will see the cost difference between the same time last year, not the same time last month, the same time last year, not the same time four years ago, the same time last year. And I think a lot of people we found through the last four years of

evolving trueflation.com is that understanding that inflation is calculated year on year basis and not over other metrics. But there are ways to play around with that. So I just highlight month on month growth. So that always looks shorter than year on year. And then ultimately, four years, over four years, you see a very different picture once you extend it beyond just last year. So what does it mean when your Truflation Index diverges significantly from your Bureau of Labor and Statistics Index? And how often does that happen? So it happens in, I mean, over time, it happens pretty consistently. I mean, we're 45 days ahead of where they're at.

We tend to peak higher than the Bureau of Labor and Statistics and trough lower than the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So, but the swings are more or less the 45 days ahead of where the Bureau of Labor and Statistics come out. So just think of it, right? We've already announced today's numbers, or this week, when the government announces the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, we will have already updated it with the latest numbers today, 15 days into February, they're telling you, sorry, what's happened in January. And so because of that, you've got a 15

day time lag. And then the data that they're using is mostly from December or November, some of the data that they've got in their CPI calculation. So they won't have the freshest data sets out there, giving you January's inflation number. So what do you make of the fact that inflation basically since inauguration, since January 20th in the US, seems to be down? And that just seems to be unexpected or i actually you tell me what you think yeah no we all right it's definitely down that's down generally you see a consistent pattern um around the world every beginning of the year um everybody's sort of spent their funds and excess during the holiday season. So we are now retracting, trying to pay off some of the bills that we had during the holiday season. We have dry January where nobody drinks too much alcohol in January, things like that. So those are all having a small

impact and they add up. Hotel bookings are down. Other lodgings are down significantly. Fashion season, fashion, clothes, clothing items have all dropped significantly in pricing. So those are all things that accumulate and sort of provide that drop in inflation since, yeah, I guess, since mid January, right? That's when people come back from their holidays and start realizing, oh, I had a bit too much turkey, or I had a bit too much cake during the holidays. And I didn't go to the gym that often as I wanted to. And yeah, things

like that. Aidan McCullen, So in other words, this drop in your mind is something that just happens year on year. And if we look back, we would see the same thing. It doesn't have something to do specifically with new policy or just the fact that there's a new administration. No, we don't see any. It's pretty consistent. Every year you see this activity.

It might be exacerbating, you know, we might be experiencing a slightly higher decline, mainly because people will be spending less because of the known changes that are coming about. Think about it. Throughout the whole campaign, we knew that there was a doge, you know, that the doge was created. We knew there were going to be significant changes coming. And that's why Trump got elected on the basis of these changes that he was going to bring about.

And maybe people were taking precautionary measures or people are now realizing that these changes are actually kicking in right from day one, that these changes are coming. Let's save a little. Let's spend less. And so in order to attract you into the stores, we're going to drop our prices a little. And so those are things. Or maybe more housing is going to be developed. So the cost of rent is going to come down as a result of more housing coming onto the market, things like that. One thing that I've been tracking is eggs, which seems to be like a massive outlier. Have you followed that?

Yep. I mean, eggs has gone up, up and down twice. We had a really big cycle. I think it was about a year ago. I don't know if you saw across Twitter, we saw all the memes with eggs. Eggs are now up at, I think, like $7 or $8 a dozen of eggs. So it's like really it's moved up nearly 80% or nearly up to 100% in the last, less than last 12 months. So it's quite a significant increase.

It could be also change in diets, right? People are looking for more protein. And then ultimately, they find it in eggs. I don't know the exact cause for that, why that is the case. But yeah, that's definitely we're experiencing that. How does your system, you know, include these kind of, you know, outliers? I don't know how significant it is to the overall numbers. So food is a big expenditure. It's a big category. People go to the grocery stores 10 times a month on average. And food, I think, is about 18% of household spending. Rent and shelter is about 25%. And then transportation is another 15%. So those are the real big brackets. Eggs, obviously, is a smaller contributor to within the food category.

And then there's food at home and food away from home. And so we look at the food at home. And then the eggs fall under the dairies bracket. So that's how the team sort of breaks down all the different costs of goods. And yeah, so eggs fits in there. And then that gets weighted based on a census algorithm that we have.

You can actually go to truflation.com slash calculator and calculate your own personal inflation. How is inflation impacting you directly? And what does that mean over the last year? How much have you lost in purchasing power? And we've had over 200,000 people on every two months, so about 100,000 on average, complete that calculator, which gives us a balance to offset against the credit card spending

patterns that we're seeing across the board, which we map and correlate against. But what does that mean exactly, a balanced offset against the credit card data? So we have credit card insights. So we get aggregated credit card data in terms of spending patterns. And then we track those in terms of where, which merchant and which merchant categories are people spending their funds. And then we balance that off against the calculator that we see. When 100,000 people are filling out the calculator, we're trying to measure, okay, of the 100,000, realistically, we can use only 20,000 because they seem to be, okay, of the 100,000, realistically, we can use only 20,000,

because they seem to be an accurate reflection of the reality. And so how do we set that off against what we're seeing on the credit card? Is that realistic? Is that not? How do we balance that and weigh those two off against each other? You know, one thing that I've heard raised, I'm curious what your thought is, is there any risk or perhaps benefit of deflation happening anytime in the near future? How does that grab you? That's definitely a lot of debate. Is there deflation? Are we going to see disinflation? Are we going to see stagflation? You know, our view is we don't see any signs of deflation. We actually see the opposite. We think the new normal will be three. So we won't see 2% of inflation. We'll see 3% of inflation.

Why? Because we just see the economy is really strong. The markets, we're going to see more money printing. We're going to see more investment into infrastructure. We're going to see better allocation in funds. We're going to see follow through into the market, which will generate income and increased income of the people in the workforce. And so as a result, prices are going to stay at a pretty high level or at the level that they are today. They're unlikely to go down and drop. And the economy is going to pick up.

And we think the economy last year grew at about, I think, inflation adjusted about two and a half percent. So still really strong, the economy. And that's, bear in mind, that's a whole Sweden a year. The US grew a whole Sweden last year. So that's a significant growth that comes on top into the market, which is pretty phenomenal as the world's largest economy. You know, to someone that's simple like myself, the idea of having some deflation, having your assets kind of grow a bit, it's kind of attractive. Yeah, I mean, assets, we're going to see asset prices have been increasing. We've seen the stock market is at a pretty strong high. We're seeing technology companies outperform and continue to do of those initial technology companies. So I think assets are going to appreciate. Housing markets, we'll see with the housing markets. We're just about to issue a report and we work very closely with Penn State University on trying to predict and forecast where the housing market is going. We've changed the whole methodology in terms of how housing market should be calculated and tracked from a performance perspective.

And so we'll have a new report on that coming out as well. So we'll stay tuned and track our websites and our socials to be able to get a good insight into that. I love hearing how bullish you are on the economy, by the way, because that's certainly not where my head has been at. Just looking at basically as we started talking about the size of the debt and the growth of the debt and the cost of the interest payments themselves being greater than major departments in the U.S. government. And then, of course, the whole impact of that on the overall system, not just the U.S.

Canada, my home country, and of course, Switzerland and Hong Kong and everywhere else. You're not concerned? No, I think as long as these implementations can take place and the infrastructure investments and the commitments to improving infrastructure get put into place and red tape gets taken away, no, I think this is going to be a phenomenal acceleration that we will see in the market that I think will herald, yeah, the golden age. I'm a firm believer in that taking place. And I think the rest of the world is experiencing, and we've seen it happen in El Salvador. We've seen it happen in Argentina, what that impact can have on an economy and how all of a sudden it is attracting

investment. It is attracting capital into those markets where capital can have a much higher conversion rate from money to energy and ultimately yield the return from that energy. And I think that's ultimately what drives growth. And if the US and Trump and the Doge team and the whole administration can turn that around, then I think we're going to see really, you know, the next four years, maybe even the rest of this decade, see very attractive times in the market. I was looking recently at a graph which showed relative tariff rates, U.S. on various countries and those countries on the U.S. And of course, we know that the president is quite interested in using tariffs as a tool, as a way to raise money, perhaps as a political tool as well. There's a lot of thoughts about why and how. There's some concern that these tariffs

could have a negative impact economically. Where do you stand on this? So look, I experienced firsthand as an entrepreneur building businesses in China, the benefit of tariffs and joint ventures and how China elevated itself from a developing country where everybody was riding around in bicycles to leading, you know, in terms of electric vehicles, modern cities, amazing airports, fantastic transportation systems, all of that infrastructure was built off the back of tariffs. And the only way you could invest in China was you had to build out a joint venture. And so as a joint venture, you needed a local partner. And that way don't hit their plan, whoever is fired or executed, which is not very nice, but that's ultimately how they enforce the achievement of their plan. Reciprocity, I think, is the word that Trump and in terms of trade. We want, trade is about, is two-way or multi-party, but it's always two ways. One part is a buyer, the other part is a seller. And at the exchange, a successful exchange, both parties leave happy. I got money, you got goods. You got goods, I got money. And so ultimately, we're both happy with that outcome,

we got to know each other, we negotiated with each other, we communicated with each other, we tried to understand each other's values. And thereby we executed on a trade once we managed to understand each other's values. And what the Yeah, and we communicated along that way. So how and that's ultimately where I think tariffs are going to be a good thing. Not a blanket another time, but I would argue that communist China's umpteen trillions of dollars worth of intellectual property theft over the last decades probably contributed more than the joint ventures, although the joint ventures were a very smart idea on how to further transfer technology. Yeah, I mean, definitely. But the joint ventures, think about it, you're hiring local team members to support the development within that joint venture, whatever that joint venture may be doing. As a result, you're educating those team members

on how you're doing your manufacturing processes, on the designs, on the architecture, and all the information that travels with the manufacturing of a given product. And so as a result, not only you're educating and you're driving your intellectual property into those new team members. So JVs have really turned out to be a very favorable long-term investment on part of the Chinese into acquiring Western talent, Western methods, and Western practices, and Western intellectual property. A hundred percent, because part of that deal is also the full transfer of that technology into the joint venture. And it's kind of astonishing where we're at when it comes to the abject lack of reciprocity,

as you outlined earlier. And this graph that I was looking at indeed actually showed that, it just in terms of tariffs, basically. Yeah, and I think we're going to see a very, I don't think tariffs are going to happen, a blanket on they're going to go very targeted at specific components that are embedded in specific technologies. And how do we then target aspects of that? Or are they going to go after

very select technologies themselves? But it's really hard. I mean, think about it today. China is the world's technologies themselves. But it's really hard. I mean, think about it today. China is the world's manufacturing hub. They are producing everything for everybody and they do it way better than everybody else today. And so how are we going to train our youth to go back to factories and work on the factory floors and worry about the little widget and making sure that that widget twists and turns optimally.

It's going to be a very big change. And what is it that we want to leverage the next generations for? And how can we train them to be ready for a new age? And what is that new age, right? Is it the AI age? Is it an agentic age? How do they participate in that? And what will their roles be?

And how do we prepare them? As a father of four children, how do I prepare my children coming into the workforce in the next three to four years? How do we prepare them to be ready and astute for this new change, this new world and global order and technology that's coming into this new order? We'll have to come back and have a whole deeper discussion on the Chinese reality. I'm looking forward to that because I hadn't thought about this whole dimension of your own background. I've been thinking about US inflation and its impact on the global economy and local economy and global economy, frankly.

It's going to impact the globe, for sure. The US economy is the steam engine. And I think it's not only the US economy, it's the way of life. It's the whole frontier, the new frontier, the can-do attitude, the we-must-do attitude, the pursuit of happiness, at least that's what I love. And that's why I'm, you know, so pro the US being successful in this turnaround, and why we have to give all the energy we can to help the West move in that same direction and follow that pursuit. Well, and if I may comment for a moment, since we're juxtaposing these two systems, one thrives ultimately on this freedom, liberty, as you say, the can-do attitude of the totalitarian communist party that still, even as it unleashed the economy, politically still holds this iron grip and can't let go. Yeah, those are the big differences. One is very much top-down. The other one is sort of trying to to get consensus and find the best possible solution for a given need or create a whole new need, right?

I mean, we didn't even know we needed X, Y, Z and boom, we create that whole market for this. And I think that ability is very hard. I mean, incremental innovation is one thing, but leapfrog innovation is a whole nother thing. And I think that's where that, you know, the Western spirit needs to live strong and continue to break through and disrupt barriers. And Europe doesn't have that. Europe doesn't want disruption. They want to be, you know, the elites want to sort of still control as well in their own way in sort of a more, yeah, I don't know what the right word is, but some sort of happy, you know, we're in charge and we've all got 15 to actually help regenerate and create a whole new economy will tax you instead. Well, Stefan, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.

Any final thoughts as we finish? It is just really how do we keep this culture alive of continuous pursuit for improvement and creating a world that is better for the next generation than extracting value out of what we have created or what our previous generations have created? How do we add new value into the economy? And I think it's a golden age. We have so many opportunities, technology, we've got blockchain, we've got AI, we've got genetics, biotech, we've got so many different robotics. We've got all these innovations that are taking place that represent so many opportunities? How do we lean in and create and build and find

new, better lives for the next generations around those technologies? And very quickly, Stefan, tell me where people can find the Truflation numbers. So you can go to truflation.com, follow us on Twitter, and you can get everything. And we have Twitter spaces as well, where we host spaces with key influencers across the macroeconomic landscape and investor circles to sort of highlight what we believe is the lay of the land in the US economy. And by the way, we do the same for Argentina, UK, and India as well already today. Well, Stefan Rust, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you very much. Really nice being here, Jan, and really enjoyed this a lot as well.

Thank you all for joining Stefan Rust and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.