Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 747: Jerry Robinson's Financial Fitness Wake-Up Call

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mite, op, mite, op with your hosts. Salda Stefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. How did you end up hearing about Jerry? Was it through Everett? Yeah, so Everett is, I mean, he's been doing, he's been training stocks. He got into day training at that long ago. He worked for a financial company for a couple of years and he's been working that way for a while. He's the one who also got me on to cryptocurrency way back when.

Starting point is 00:00:32 Much of the research that I was reading was coming originally from him. Then I started asking him, like, where are you getting this information? Before I go start investing my money, I was like, was he being successful with his choices and stuff? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so that's- So I was interested enough with that, and then- But I'm not the type of person, and as much as I love my brother, ever it, like I don't just like go throw my money at something without doing my own homework and research. So he sent me over one day, he sends me

Starting point is 00:01:00 over this podcast, and I listened to it it and it's a follow the money. And I'm listening to the podcast and I really like the host, Jerry Robinson. And so then I kind of go down the rabbit hole of like listening to other episodes of his and other episodes that he was on other shows and he was getting interviewed one time and they're talking about his book,

Starting point is 00:01:22 bankruptcy of our nation. And I was like, fuck, this is right up my alley. Like, I want to read this. So I picked it up, bought it and read it a couple of months ago. I haven't posted it on my Instagram yet because I've been waiting for when we were going to do the interview. So I'll post the picture in my review on the book. The book was incredible. And I, after that, instantly wanted to get them on the show and Everett totally fan-boyed out when he found out that he was in here just. He was so excited.

Starting point is 00:01:48 In this episode, we talked to him about economics, cryptocurrencies, where you should invest. There was some conspiracy theory we kind of went over a little bit. I enjoyed that. Yeah, it was a little controversial. He's got a, doesn't he have an online group, right? We have a discount set. Yeah, so Everett actually belongs that all right. So Everett pays for his, he says got a, doesn't he have an online group, right? We have a discount set. Yeah, so that average actually belongs to that already.

Starting point is 00:02:06 So ever it pays for his, he says it's incredible. He goes, I basically, because when he was killing it and doing so well, again, I was asking where he's getting his information. And then when after we had him, he's like, Oh, yeah, no, I've been a part of his group. He's like, I'm on all his trades, whatever trades he's doing, I've been following for a long time and I've done really well that way. So he has this, this paid group that he does, which part of the deal was when we talked to him

Starting point is 00:02:28 and had him on here, he said he would hook that up for our audience and stuff. So this is like a group where you can learn about investments, learn about the decisions you make and all that stuff. It's important information. So Jerry Robinson, his book is bankruptcy of our nation. You can find him on Twitter at FTM Daily.

Starting point is 00:02:46 And then if you end up liking what he has to say and you wanna join his group, if you go to mindpumpmedia.com-fourslash-f-t-m, you get hooked up, you get a discount. And then there's another link there, Doug, why are there two there? Well, because either one of them works. So you can either do follow the, forward slash follow the money. So it's www.minempummedia.com forward slash,

Starting point is 00:03:09 follow the money or forward slash FTM, both of them, or either way, and you get kind of hooked up. Yeah. And it's in the show notes. So if someone's interested in this, if you're looking to invest, like you can click those show notes links, it'll take you directly over there. Now speaking of investments, there is no better investment. You can make the investment in your health. When you are healthy, you are happier, you produce more, you probably do better at work, you have better sex. It's just a great investment. And the problem is a lot of times people invest a lot of time in their fitness and don't

Starting point is 00:03:38 get a lot in return. And that's because their training programming isn't good, it's subpar. Now maps programs are designed by very experienced personal trainers, myself, Adam and Justin. They're very effective to go read the reviews for yourself. They give great results. You spend less time in the gym, you get better results. Let me give you a quick rundown. If you're interested in maximum strength and muscle, that's maps and a ballac.

Starting point is 00:04:03 If you want to train like an athlete and you want functional performance, that's maps for performance. If you want to sculpt and shape your body like a bodybuilder, physique competitor, or bikini competitor, or even if you want to get on stage and compete, that's maps aesthetic. If you want to work out at home without equipment or on the road without equipment, that's maps anywhere. And finally, if you need correctional exercise because of pain or joint dysfunction or if you're a personal trainer and you want some tools that you can utilize on your clients

Starting point is 00:04:31 to increase your value as a trainer, that's maps prime and prime pro. You can find all of these programs at mindpumpmedia.com. And without any further ado, here we are interviewing Jerry Robinson. So Jerry, if you don't mind just a quick background, your background, just quick before we get into the interview and we talk about what we're going to talk about. Yeah. My background is funny. I mean, religiously speaking, I was born as a Jehovah's Witness, which was kind of a

Starting point is 00:04:58 weird experience. I was knocking on doors, people's doors that fit, you know, 12 and 13 and 14. So I got, I don't have any nervousness anymore. Right. So sales skills. Yeah, exactly. So whenever I turned 18, you know, kind of got job, started doing some corporate stuff, started my own business, started my very first dot com in 2000.

Starting point is 00:05:19 It failed pretty miserably. And then I started another business that succeeded. And then in 2010, 2006, seven, I started writing this book. It got published finally after the market crashed. Cause nobody knew who I was, nobody cared. This bankruptcy of our nation in 2007. Everything was going great. Free money everywhere.

Starting point is 00:05:41 So I couldn't sell a book. And then of course, I got the book sold and it did really well. And so that changed my life, the book changed my life. So we went on to speaking to where I was on, you know, all the big networks and everything doing all that. And then after that, I decided to focus

Starting point is 00:05:56 on teaching people these principles because I really desired to kind of help people, not just to write more books and write more books. I wanted it really one-on-one. So we created the website and the membership. Follow the money.com. And my wife and I have been building it ever since, about eight years now. And we now live off the grid and believe that the worst is yet to come.

Starting point is 00:06:19 Oh wow. Where did you, what drove you to learn so much about economics and our money system and all that? 9-11 yeah 9-11 I was a pretty big I Think because of my religious upbringing I was really pro-Republican Mm-hmm, and so when the Iraq war began I was really pro-Arrak war said you know sadly when I look back now I think gosh what was I thinking? And in about 2003, 2004, I woke up, I started doing a whole lot of research, and it drove me into a lot of economics. And so I went back to college late in life and got an economics degree, so I could understand. And it didn't really help

Starting point is 00:07:02 me, but the periphery stuff that I learned on my own that helped me so All the textbooks didn't tell me nothing, you know Supply to man curves, but whenever I started digging a little deeper. I started finding things like the petrodollar system You know that are in the book that I'm gonna we can talk about today. I think it's very important. All right So yeah, and I think So, yeah, and I think, and economics always interested me because my mother was a stockbroker and I helped her study for the Series 7 when I was a kid. So I was already very familiar with the stock market and really was attracted to financial and numbers and everything.

Starting point is 00:07:39 But yeah, economics, I think, when I remember where I was talking to the college entrance counselor, I said, I don't know finance or economics. You know, which one should I, when I remember where I was talking to the college entrance counselor, I said, I don't know if finance or economics. Which one should I do? I remember this one I was younger. And she said, well, she said, financial guys work in the back of companies and they create reports. And she said, economists rule the world. Okay, I'll do economics. Very true. I got into economics about 10 years ago.

Starting point is 00:08:06 It wasn't because I loved economics. It was because I realized that that's, if I could understand economics, I could understand the system. I could understand politics. I could understand policy. Without that, it was just, which one felt better or who was making

Starting point is 00:08:22 the other guy look worse type of deal? Were you along that, or you're in that same? Yes, absolutely. What was the first thing you learned that blew your mind? Probably the fact that I think it was the early recognition of the fact of the 1971 polling of the gold standard for the dollar. I think that was whenever I learned that probably in 2003, and I think when I fully went down that rabbit hole, is where I woke up. When I realized that the dollar itself, I got one here, I'll talk about it in a minute,

Starting point is 00:08:57 but the dollar itself is not backed up by anything. It's just a whole faith and credit of the federal government. And so I think that helped me realize that we were in some sort of problem. Some sort of problem here. So explain that for a second because I want to assume that a lot of our audience has no idea what you mean by tying the money to the gold standard. How was money or the value of money dictated before and then what happened, you know, because there was a bit of, there was a process, right?

Starting point is 00:09:26 That was the last string connecting it to the gold standard. You know, I think the first, the first time that the government took a blow at that, I think, was when, who was it that was telling people to turn in their gold? Uh, it was a bell.

Starting point is 00:09:40 It was Roosevelt, right? So, let's talk about that for a second. What do you mean, you know, gold standard and what happened in 1971 and what is it now? Well, you know, there's, I think when you think about money, there's four stages of money. We talk about in the book, bankruptcy of our nation.

Starting point is 00:09:54 And the first stage is commodity money. So let's say that you and I, we all decide to start a new society. We started to decide, you know, to create a commune. Well, we're gonna have to decide on something to trade, something to be the mechanism. And in times past, going back thousands of years, that's always been some sort of commodity,

Starting point is 00:10:13 whether it's shells or sand or cows or gold or silver or whatever, but whatever we decide doesn't matter. And then over time, as the society advances, money moves into a next stage. And that next stage is where we move into receipt money. And so, you know, carrying around eight cows or hoarding, you know, a whole bunch of gold or whatever becomes dangerous or impractical or whatever. And so at that point, goldsmiths step in, kind of like the early banking.

Starting point is 00:10:43 That's like our first bank, right? It's our first bank, exactly. And these Goldsmiths start showing up and they hold your gold and they give you a paper receipt that is as good as gold. And so now you can transact in your village or your community and you have a slip and you don't have to carry out all this gold and you're not at risk. And then of course, government step in.

Starting point is 00:11:02 This is number three. This is step three of the evolution of money. Government step in and try to regulate the receipt money. They say, now we don't know, we had all these different receipts, this guy's issuing receipts, this guy's issuing receipts, and we had a problem with this guy, we got to regulate this. It's like a free market for money receipts at this point.

Starting point is 00:11:20 Exactly. Which is what, you know, which is what today I think there's a lot of people who would like to see competing currencies, that's kind of what Bitcoin is. I mean, there's competing currencies. But, and so when government steps in, they tend to regulate, and they tend to over-regulate. And that's exactly what they did. And of course, in the case of the United States,

Starting point is 00:11:37 they put forth a US dollar, you know, and they got rid of the receipt money based on commodities. And over time The United States dollar was based upon something like a commodity was based on gold But in 1933 that changed right in the depths of the Great Depression Franklin D Roosevelt basically ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold for you and I, for people like you and I. So before this, you could go to the bank, $20, give me $20 worth of gold and they would have to

Starting point is 00:12:12 give it to you. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. So you could actually trade these things and why would you want to trade these things for gold? Well, what if your government started doing crazy things, right? What if your government started bombing other countries and then borrowing all the money to do it on a credit card? You know, you know, you know, you might want to say, well, maybe I don't feel comfortable holding this. I'd rather hold gold and wait this out. Right?

Starting point is 00:12:34 And so you can certainly do that, but you don't have the same convertibility today as you did back then. And then this lasted for even though the people like you and I lost the ability to convert to gold internationally, the international gold standard was still in place. The international gold standard ends August 15, 1971. There's a great banana show on and here comes Nixon to interrupt the banana show to tell

Starting point is 00:13:02 us on live television, President president Nixon that that's over. The gold window has been closed. And so that means that all nations around the world, France, Germany, anybody could no longer take their dollars and trade them for gold on the international standard. And this, of course, was, you know, to shot her around the world, so to speak. And since that time, since 1971, we have been living in a totally pure fiat world. And the word fiat means, by edict. In other words, this currency is not based upon anything at all, like it has been for thousands of years, the currencies that we used today, they're backed up by the full faith and credit

Starting point is 00:13:44 of the federal government. So 1971 was the year that everything changed. And since that time, the value of the dollar has fallen tremendously. Inflation has risen dramatically. We've seen stock markets, especially the stock market here in the United States, boom, bust, cycle, galore, because we're in this new crazy brave new world. So yeah. What is the success rate of fiat money? Well, I think a lot of people don't know this.

Starting point is 00:14:15 Historically speaking, yes. Historically speaking, what's the success rate? We're not using the Greek drop man anymore. We're not using the Roman denari anymore. We aren't using the, we can go back and think of all of these different currencies that existed through time. They're no longer here.

Starting point is 00:14:28 They're 100% fail. They 100% fail. That's the thing. I think I remember hearing that when reading your book, right, and that was one of the things that just kind of resonated with me that blew my mind is that historically speaking, we've never seen it succeed. What makes us think that it's going to succeed?

Starting point is 00:14:43 No, I think it's important that we let people know why a government would even want to have a fiat currency. If there's a fail rate of 100%, because I know people are thinking, well, why would we, what's the reasoning behind that? Why would the government even want something to be fiat? And I think it's important to communicate that before it being fiat the government couldn't just print money because it had to be Connected to a solid commodity gold. So that means if the government wants to you know Come out with a new government program that they promised or they want to start a war which you know

Starting point is 00:15:19 Incidentally we had war war you know to after that. That was very expensive or whatever That they can't just print money to pay for these wars, but if it's FIAW and they control it, well, and that's what inflation is, right? Inflation is just flooding the market with a bunch of paper that doesn't, and when the value of it's based on how much of it's available, that means if you have $10,000,

Starting point is 00:15:41 and there's, say, a million dollars of paper dollars that are out there, government doubles that, your $10,000 now worth $5,000 and there's, say, a million dollars of paper dollars that are out there. Government doubles that. You're $10,000 now worth $5,000. That's right. That's exactly right. And I think when you go back in time thinking about through history, you have the conquistadors. Remember in history, they would go out and many nations would sail the seas and they

Starting point is 00:15:59 would try to conquer a new land and then they would take the gold. Well, the gold was important because it allowed them to create more money, right? To, that's what they were basing all of their currency on. So, the way you grew your economy back and the 1500s was to go invade other countries, take their gold, use that gold to print more money and then you have a bigger economy. Well, we don't have that today.

Starting point is 00:16:20 It's very different. In fact, in 1971, we said that the dollar went off the gold standard. In 1973, that was replaced. This was a problem. I mean, many people don't, if you haven't studied this, this is a really big problem because in 1971, the international economy was in a state of chaos. The French and the Germans and many other foreign nations were dumping the dollar, trading it for gold. Why? Because all through the 60s, you had LBJs and Kennedys and of course Nixon's ongoing war in Vietnam, which was not being paid for. You had the great society spending by LBJ. I mean, all of the war on poverty had all of these things going on in countries around

Starting point is 00:17:11 the world who still had convertibility said, we're not interested in this. We want to trade in these dollars for this crazy deficit spending is insane. We want our gold back. And that's why Nixon finally had to close the gold windows because everybody wanted their gold window. It was because everybody wanted their gold back. And so he said, if we continue this path, then we're going to lose all of our gold, and then we're going to be a paper tiger.

Starting point is 00:17:32 So he shut it down. In 1970, that was in 1971. If we fast forward just a couple of years, the dollar is sinking because countries are quite frankly their pissed. I mean, this is a big deal. And so by 1973 in order to shore up demand for the dollar, we see the advent of the petrodollar system, which we can get into later today. But that basically delayed the pain, so to speak. It is actually a brilliant move.

Starting point is 00:18:07 Because now it's backed by oil instead of gold, right? Exactly. Well backed by military. Well, yeah. To be more accurate, I would say. Well, it's plain, it's plain that what a petro dollar is to our audience. Yeah, well, let's first, and you had mentioned inflation,

Starting point is 00:18:20 I think this is so important because all of these ideas and concepts are so convoluted and they seem sometimes irrelevant to people. They say, why do I have to care about this? This doesn't make any sense. When you think about working out, you get tangible benefits from it. I mean, if you start taking a pill or taking a supplement or do a certain exercise, you're going to get a benefit from it.

Starting point is 00:18:36 But thinking about this, you think, what's the benefit to me? How do I benefit from this? Well, this is what our book is about. If you understand these concepts, you can actually leverage them to your own benefit. And this is what we teach in the book, how to live in this debt-based economy. But back to inflation, let's assume something. Let's assume that all of us are on a deserted island.

Starting point is 00:18:56 We are going out to play golf. We all have golf balls and golf clubs, that's all we got. And we end up on this deserted island, and you got 10 golf balls. We all got 10 golf balls each, it's just four of us. All right, so we got. And we end up on this deserted island and you got 10 golf balls, we all got 10 golf balls each, those four of us. All right, so we got 40 golf balls and we decide, hey, we're gonna have to probably be here. Nobody's gonna find us.

Starting point is 00:19:13 We gotta use money of some sort. And so we decide to use the golf balls as money. Okay, so the next thing that happens is maybe I find some shelter, maybe I find a cave and I say, look, I'll let you guys have some, but you gotta give me, you know, let you have some shelter, but you gotta give me some golf balls, that's our money.

Starting point is 00:19:30 And let's say I charge each of you five, right? So it'll take half of your money. As you're getting ready to hand those golf balls to me, and as I'm getting ready to give you entrance into my shelter that I've discovered, we hear a loud sound in the sky, and we all look up and we see a helicopter, big helicopter, and there's a big crate falling from the sky.

Starting point is 00:19:51 Full of golf balls, that lands right on the beach, right in front of us, and there it is, and it says golf balls, one million count. What does that do to the price? Do I still want five? No, no, because now we've got a million to share. So inflation is the injection of fresh currency into the system whereby the prices of everything can then rise. You can't have, I could not charge you, for example, a million golf balls for that cave

Starting point is 00:20:22 before the box landed because that would be impossible. You would say that's insane. Of course, we could not do that. But once we have the new influx of golf balls, the price of everything can rise. Therefore, if the money supply rises, the cost of everything can rise. If the money supply shrinks, everything goes down in price. And so this is a very important thing to the petrodollar system. So with that laid, what the petrodollar system in essence did in 1973 was it was, it

Starting point is 00:20:52 was a extension, a deeper extension thanks to President Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger that basically took the oil coming out of the ground in Saudi Arabia. And we made a deal with the Saudis, the United States made a deal with the Saudis, that basically said every barrel of oil that is extracted in Saudi Arabia must be priced in US dollars. This is in 1973. Automatic increase in demand for dollars. Exactly. Automatic increase in demand for US dollars.

Starting point is 00:21:24 And this is key because how else can you print money unless you have some extra artificial sources of demand that exist out there. So this was brilliant on the part of Kissinger and Nixon. And what did the Saudis gain from this? Why would the Saudis do this? Why wouldn't they charge their own currency? Well, because the US said, look, there's big bad Israel here right next to you, and they really don't like you. You've already invaded them several times, and they want to take you out. We'll protect you from Israel. In addition to that, we'll give you some weapons. We'll give you some weapons about that, and we'll give you some military support. And so they started basically offering military support aid and protection to the Saudis in exchange for a simple task

Starting point is 00:22:06 of discharging dollars for the oil. Pretty soon, other countries, other oil producing countries in the Gulf region said, hey, this sounds like a great idea. So by the time we reach 1975, pretty much all of OPEC in the Middle East, all the OPEC nations are in the petrodollar system. And basically what they do is they take the dollars that they receive for the barrel of oil, they turn around and they plow them right back into U.S. treasuries. So it's a double loan to the United States.

Starting point is 00:22:38 And in exchange, Saudis get the kind of treatment that you see them get now on the television every single day of the week. They get prime press. Anytime they want to say something negative about their enemies, the red carpet gets rolled out. Iran doesn't participate in the petrodollar system. Did you know that? You know who else doesn't? Venezuela.

Starting point is 00:22:56 You know who else doesn't? North Korea. You know who else doesn't? Syria. You know who there's your asses of evil. All the countries that we fight. All the asses of evil. So but what this does for the United States is so powerful is that because everybody needs

Starting point is 00:23:10 oil and because they have to buy from these big, big, oil-producing countries, because they use dollars, it takes those dollars and it kind of moves them out of the system, but they still exist. And so it creates the ability for the Fed to print money when we end up in a problem. If we didn't have all of these artificial sources of demand, i.e. through the petrodollar, then the Fed couldn't just print money every time there was a problem because it would create what? It would create that golf ball situation. It would be in massive inflation. But because those golf balls get dispersed

Starting point is 00:23:45 throughout the whole world and because every country has to hold these golf balls or the dollars, by oil, they, it allows us a great, what one great economist is called an exorbitant privilege. That's what we enjoy today as the global reserve currency. Over time, countries don't always maintain the global reserve currency. Over time, countries don't always maintain the global reserve currency.

Starting point is 00:24:07 Britain had the pound, which was the global reserve currency of the 19th century. The 20th century was certainly ruled by the United States. Who will rule the 21st century? That's a big question. I don't think it's gonna be the US, predominantly because we have massive amounts of debt. Our national debt is $21 trillion

Starting point is 00:24:26 or unfunded obligations are through the roof. Our entitlement spending is out of whack and there is absolutely positively no sacrifice or a will for sacrifice. So in this environment, you simply see other nations that are a bit more clever and discerning using our weaknesses to their benefit. I see this in China, I see this. Explain that a little bit. Well, even Russia, Russia's even been toying with the idea of creating their own gold back currency,

Starting point is 00:24:58 or buying oil through their own currency, which he won't startle it. That's the beginning to war. There's two statements I wanna make before I, you continue, the first is, I mean, Osama bin Laden, who by the way, used to work for the US when Afghanistan was fighting against the Soviets,

Starting point is 00:25:18 said explicitly the reason why he al-Qaeda attacked the US is because we have bases in, you know, these Islamic countries like Saudi Arabia. So a lot of this, this is a lot of the stuff that's happened in the Middle East is backlash from us being in there and because of the petrodollar. Because of the petrodollar making these deals. And the second thing with inflation is, again, because I think when we say inflation,

Starting point is 00:25:41 people, a lot of people just have no idea. I think economics, one of the biggest, the worst ignorance that we have in this country is just lack of basic understanding of economics. And so we end up getting screwed without even realizing it. Inflation is literally no different than a tax or someone taking your money. So if you have $10,000 and that money in the bank,

Starting point is 00:26:02 it's just sitting in the bank, you got 10 grand. But a year from now, it can only buy $8,000 and that money in the bank, it's just sitting in the bank, you got 10 grand, but a year from now It can only buy 8,000 dollars worth of stuff. You've lost $2,000 So inflation is literally stealing your money It's and it's it's attacks that people Don't realize because they're not paying attacks like they do when they pay taxes That's right, but it's actually no different. Well, we could argue that federal reserve is the biggest gangsters in the world Well, I was just going to go there.

Starting point is 00:26:25 Right. I wanted to go there with you, because you mentioned the Fed, the Fed, the Fed. Let's talk about the federal reserve for a second. I was blown away 10 years ago when I learned that the federal reserve was not a federal entity. It's privately owned.

Starting point is 00:26:39 It's as federal as federal express. So what is the federal reserve? Like, how did they become become like, okay, first talk about who they are and how they became what they are? Well, this is this is this was the death of Britain. This was the death of Britain. This is with the rise of the United States. Central banking has been a problem for four or five hundred years. The central bank of England, the bank of England began back in the 1600s. What these banks do is they've come up with a very clever kind of mechanism that they

Starting point is 00:27:10 call fractional reserve banking. Our banking system today, our monetary system, is extremely creative. Let's just call it that way. It's very creative. It's almost alchemy. You can almost compare it to that. So let's first begin by just taking a look. If you have a dollar bill in your pocket,

Starting point is 00:27:29 you can really just literally take one out and look at the dollar. Many people have never looked at a US dollar closely. And at the very top, that's very interesting because in, well, maybe several decades ago, at the very top, it said silver certificate. Now at the very top of your dollar bill, if you pull one out, you look at the very top it said silver certificate Now at the very top of your dollar bill if you pull one out you look at the very top it says federal reserve

Starting point is 00:27:49 What the word says Federal reserve what basically is that my tender Federal reserve note no, so if I say have a car note, you know what that is When I'm holding this I'm holding a federal reserve note, not a bank note as if it's something that's of value to me. It's actually a piece of debt that has been provided to us by the federal reserve. So the federal reserve, even though an article on Section 8 of the Constitution, the coinage of money and the circulation of money is an

Starting point is 00:28:25 express right of the Congress and not for anyone else. They outsource this in the 1913 to the Federal Reserve and they let them do it. And so the Federal Reserve, a bunch of banksters, put out dollar bills that are notes. This is the most crazy thing that I've ever discovered in economics and I still cannot get my head around it. But if you're listening to this and you're wondering, think about this for a moment. The Federal Reserve note is a Federal Reserve debt. This means that this thing is a piece of debt.

Starting point is 00:28:57 It is nothing else but a piece of debt. This has to go back to who? It has to go back to the Federal Reserve. It belongs to the Federal Reserve. It even says at the very top it belongs to the Federal Reserve. So they've lent this to us at interest who charges the interest. It's the biggest swindle of all time. It's a great swindle. And who gets to set the interest rate on what they're going to get paid? They set the interest rate on it. So it's a total scam. But these dollar bills,

Starting point is 00:29:22 when you really think about it, they're not backed up by anything. So they're pieces of debt. Money itself is debt. That is the hardest possible thing for us to get our minds around. But money itself is debt. And this is why we wrote a book called Bankruptcy of Our Nation because in the end,

Starting point is 00:29:38 this is unsustainable. We think that in the long run, the Federal Reserve really should be ended. It has no real mandate in the Constitution at all. It was simply written in through clever policies, but the Federal Reserve, as you stated, is it's not federal. As federal as federal express,

Starting point is 00:30:00 it is basically a bunch of private banks that work together that make a nice living off of being a leech on the US economy, providing us with a debt-based currency that has no value in the long run. Now, other countries know this and other countries operate in the same way. So we shouldn't necessarily suggest that somehow America is worse than all the other nations, but it is in this respect in the fact that it is the dominant one. So when you look around the globe, most currencies are fiat, but the United States is the largest fiat currency.

Starting point is 00:30:35 It's the largest currency of this type. And so the bigger they are, the harder they fall, so to speak. Do you think that ours, if ours were to collapse, it would make everybody else's collapse too? I think that you would see runs into gold. I think you would see runs into Bitcoin. I'm a, I gotta admit, I'm kind of a crypto fan. I started investing in cryptos back in 2013. I bought Ripple and Bitcoin and Ethereum later on. I started buying anything

Starting point is 00:31:08 that came on Coinbase. As soon as it would come out on Coinbase, I'd start buying it. And so, you know, this was Ethereum, you know, Bitcoin, Litecoin. So we have about 10 different cryptocurrencies now in our portfolio. And many of them have done fantastically well. I think that you're going to see movements into cryptocurrencies and other competing currencies over time. But I think if the dollar suddenly sunk, yeah, it would definitely hit the whole world. But I think other nations could capitalize on it. I think that's what you're saying. As you had mentioned, the Chinese and the Russians are moving together to form kind of a competitor to the United States dollar. And I don't think that it's gonna take,

Starting point is 00:31:56 but it may be a few more decades before the dollar really reaches the end of the road. I'm not one who thinks it's gonna end tomorrow. I don't think that the US dollar is gonna fall end of the road. I'm not one who thinks it's gonna end tomorrow. I don't think that the US dollar is gonna fall off of a cliff. It's far too integrated, but it's gonna be a slow, in other words, let me say it this way.

Starting point is 00:32:13 If you have to die, how would you rather die? Would you rather fall off of a cliff and it be over instantly or would you rather roll down a slow grade and hit every rock on the way down? That's what's gonna happen to the dollar and that's what's happening lately. It's a slow, and hit every rock on the way down. That's what's gonna happen to the dollar. And that's what's happening lately. It's a slow, steady, humiliating grind down.

Starting point is 00:32:30 And that's what's happening to us. And it's a very sad thing. Most people won't wake up. We were just talking about the cost of living out here in San Jose. It's that way many places of the world are many places of the United States. People can't make ends meet.

Starting point is 00:32:44 It's a time bomb. Corporate debts at all time highs. US consumer debts at all time highs. of the world, are many places of the United States, you know, people can't make ends meet. It's a time bomb. Corporate debts at all time highs, US consumer debts at all time highs, student loan debts, mortgage debt, corporate, as I mentioned corporate debt, federal government debt, you know, we have a national debt of 21 trillion, it's just debt galore, and our money is debt. So it's a time bomb. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize just how important the money system is. Money system literally, if that goes down,

Starting point is 00:33:10 that is the destruction of modern societies, we know it. If it collapses, that's how, when you look at the collapse of societies, that's how it begins, Rome, the empire of Rome had a problem like this. And there's a very predictable sequence of events towards the very end, what usually happens is the government runs up debt more and more

Starting point is 00:33:32 because they're trying to squeeze out everything they possibly can because a lot of this printed money first goes to the big player. So before we see inflation, the banks and stuff, they get to spend all that money. And then when it hits regular people's when the shit really starts to hit the fan. And you had mentioned that the government has the legal authority in the Constitution to

Starting point is 00:33:53 mint its own money. And people are always like, well, why haven't they? Why don't they? The last person who tried to do that was, I think it was Kennedy, if I'm not mistaken. And it was a few months later, we know what happened to him. So it's a very, nobody approaches it. In fact, the Federal Reserve, have they ever been audited? No.

Starting point is 00:34:12 I don't think they've never been audited. And we have no idea what they do, because they could actually, they print the money, they could actually do whatever they want with this money. They can do whatever they want to do with the money. In 2008, we discovered from research, they were given money away to foreign banks that they it was all kinds of stuff but you know who else has never been ordered is the

Starting point is 00:34:29 Pentagon and that's another mass and they in by the way president trump once did somebody say or maybe to your book i think i read this are the roughly but i had on that point isn't the pentagon the one that's like every year on average they have like a five hundred million dollars like missing something million yeah things billion it's billion i think there are trillions now of money that we don't the pentagon is the biggest welfare queen in the united states oh shit biggest welfare queen in the united states pentagon six hundred and six hundred six hundred and eighty six billion dollars uh is in the trumps fiscal year 2019 budget for the Department of Defense.

Starting point is 00:35:06 No audit, no question of where the money goes, no concern of where the money goes. You and I, by the way, are financing and funding the bombing of people all over the world, whether we like it or not. Drone, I mean, I've talked to some of these guys who operate these things. This thing is very real. And it's why many people are, this is why we pushing our luck with a federal reserve note. This is why we're pushing our luck with the petrodollar system

Starting point is 00:35:34 and pushing our luck with bases all over the world to protect our economy, is that the people at one point are gonna rise up. And they're gonna rise up against us. You and I don't see that from where we stand. Everything seems fine. And when you go overseas, you find that most people don't hate Americans. They hate the American government. They hate what the American government represents. They hate they resent, you know, our military. They they resent our aggressive economics. And so I think one of the things in the book we really help people do is to

Starting point is 00:36:07 wake up to this mentality that we've all been kind of lulled to sleep in this very cozy environment where it seems like everything's okay. But it's not okay in other parts of the world, but it's okay here. And I think one of the things that people can do is they can wake up and realize, A, money is debt. so I've got to be a little more cautious about how I'm thinking about my financial life. Secondly, they need to be thinking about how to be a producer instead of a consumer. One of the things we talk about in the book is the consumption trap. And this is so unbelievably important.

Starting point is 00:36:43 I was in Houston, Texas in 2012. I was sitting in my massive home in Houston, Texas, beautiful house right on the water. We were living the American dream, you know, in Houston, my wife and I, in Houston, Texas, Jennifer and I. And I was sitting in my chair, my lazy boy watching television. And I had this moment. I was holding a bottle, I never forget this. I was holding a bottle of water in my hand

Starting point is 00:37:08 and I literally had this thought. I looked at the bottle of water in my hand, I was the commercial came on or whatever and I was looking at the bottle of water in my hand and it said like made in Mexico. And I started thinking about the chair I was sitting in and I thought this was probably not made anywhere near here. You know, I don't know clue where this was made.

Starting point is 00:37:24 I looked at the television and I saw this stuff beaming at me. I thought, no, this is all out, so I'm outsourcing my entertainment. So I got up and I started looking around my house and said, now what have I made in this house? Because 100 years ago, 200 years ago, three, everything you had was what you made or what you had spent a lot of time working hard to get. Today we have everything in our fingertips

Starting point is 00:37:47 and we make nothing. And so I walked around my house, I looked in the fridge, I looked in the cupboard, I looked in my closets, I mean, everything was made somewhere else. And I realized that I was not really a producer. I was an expert consumer. And so what I did was I started thinking, what in my life

Starting point is 00:38:06 Can I begin to produce instead of simply just outsourcing? It seems as if the richer we get in America the more we outsource our production outsourcing production is how you end up on the hamster wheel So we're born in this society today where Everything around you is just kind of default. So if you're going to be a success in America, you have to go live in a big city, right? It's very expensive. Everybody gets running water, right?

Starting point is 00:38:34 Even though you, maybe you shouldn't even be able to afford it, you got to have running water, you got to have a car, you got to have transportation, you got to have this, you got to have that, you got to have clothes, you got a shirt, thinking about all the things you got to do, and you never break have that, you got to have clothes, you got to think about all the things you got to do. And you never break free financially because you're stuck in the game. And so what we teach is the importance of breaking free from the consumption trap. Thinking about what is it that I consume on a regular basis that I could actually produce and maybe even push it a little further and say, not just produce for me, but maybe produce

Starting point is 00:39:03 for others and turn this thing on its head. And so one of the things we teach our members at FollowTheMoney.com and of course readers of the book is to be a producer, no, and think more like a producer, not like a consumer. It's a little challenging at first, but that's why my wife and I after this experience, we really had a good talk. We decided to move away from the city. We moved out in the middle of a rural area.

Starting point is 00:39:29 We started raising our two young boys there. We have a couple of small boys and we are growing food. We're getting off of the grid. We see the thing coming down the pike. There was just a story that came out last week about how Russia, which is all over the news, has actually gotten access to all of our power grids, you know, to our power grids and many in the electricity. And, you know, it's just a matter of time before the lights go out. That's my opinion. The lights will go out. And when the lights

Starting point is 00:40:02 go out, you're going to find out real quickly. Who's a producer and who's a consumer? I've always thought like, you know, if we have another war that it's not going to be fought with missiles and rockets, it's going to be more shit like that where somebody finds a way to shut all of our tech down, you know, like what the fuck do we all do if we woke up and our computer and our phone didn't work? I mean, how many people would literally just, just chaos would freak out. So I really think that the future of war

Starting point is 00:40:29 will look something more like that. It's money wars, it's trade wars. It's, you know, that's kind of how it all starts. But talking more about cryptocurrencies, because those are, they're all over the news right now. They seem to be getting more and more popular. Is it cryptocurrency, a fiat currency? Is it also backed by nothing?

Starting point is 00:40:49 Or why would I invest in a cryptocurrency versus, just a dollar? Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a lot of hesitation towards cryptocurrencies today, and I think it's understandable, but there really should be hesitation about this. There really should be more hesitation about this.

Starting point is 00:41:08 And what I'm saying this, I'm referring to the US dollar. Cryptocurrencies, think about Bitcoin, for example, there's 21 million that'll be mined, total, 21 million. That's all that will ever be mined. And that's the blockchain technology, right? If you can't possibly make more or what? I can't make more. Now you can fork it and you can make more. You can make another type of coin, which is where they split, kind of like a stock split or something.

Starting point is 00:41:31 So you can make a different currency out of Bitcoin, but Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin proper, will never have more than 21 million. And so you think to yourself, well, gosh, if there's only 21 million of them and we live in this world of ever increasing money, well, eventually money is going to flow into those because those will be considered assets and we're slowly seeing financial advisors tell their high net worth clients to move into Bitcoin. So you think, gosh, how many people, how many high net worth individuals really need to buy up one or two Bitcoins before you have some real high prices?

Starting point is 00:42:03 So I think we've seen some really big moves in cryptocurrencies. December of 2017, our cryptocurrency portfolio reached its height. It then crashed in January and of 2018 and even in deFebruary. I think we're setting up for another boom bust in that area. And I think the boom bust in crypto currencies is largely determined by faith in the United States dollar. So as you see, the faith in the currency go down, you're gonna see these alternatives rise. Gold, silver, and cryptos.

Starting point is 00:42:40 Are they following the same, like is gold and Bitcoin follow a same kind of up and down path? No, no, they're not. but that's what I'm looking for. In fact, that's one of the things that I forecast is that I think when you see because right now the dollar has been sinking. It's been sinking for a lot of reasons, but but whenever we finally see gold gold has been stuck in a sideways grind for a while silver has been stuck in a sideways grind for a long time when those both begin to break out again

Starting point is 00:43:11 and you have cryptocurrencies rising along side them both rising I think when you see that that is indicating to everybody who has eyes to see that the United States dollars on this last leg so I think you'll see people moving into other alternatives. And again, gold and silver had a huge run in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011. And then people kind of forget and they go back to the dollar again

Starting point is 00:43:36 and things kind of got back to the same. But I think cryptocurrencies, for sure, if you don't have any in your portfolio, I'll tell you what I've done, I've taken 5%, 5% of my total investable assets, that's money I could put into real estate or stocks, or I could put it into my own business or whatever, this is the investable assets I have,

Starting point is 00:43:56 took 5% of them and put them in cryptos. So if they all go to zero, I mean, I'll be all right. I still got 95% of my investments, but that 5% that I put into cryptocurrencies since 2013 has become unbelievably large compared to what I would have expected. It was one of the best places I could have put it in retrospect.

Starting point is 00:44:17 I think that's going to continue to be a story, especially if you stick with the high quality ones. Again, Litecoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Ripple, I think some of these are the ones that you wanna focus on. Now, what are some of the, I guess, the benefits of using a cryptocurrency versus just buying gold and hedging like that?

Starting point is 00:44:38 Thank you, should buy both. Okay. Yeah, I mean, currently I have about 15% of my total investable assets in physical gold, physical silver, another 5% as I mentioned in cryptocurrencies. So I'm more bullish, of course, on gold and silver longterm, but I still want exposure to cryptos. So I don't think it's an either or I think you should have both.

Starting point is 00:44:59 What are the benefits of Bitcoin? Like why would anybody, is it easier to use? Is it easier to, like what are the benefits of it or what are the benefits of Bitcoin? Why would anybody, is it easier to use, is it easier to, what are the benefits of it, or what are the trademarks? Yeah, there's lots of benefits to it, but I think the main takeaway is that it's finite, and in a world where nothing is finite, and everything can be printed,

Starting point is 00:45:19 it's one of the few things I can't. And so I think that gives it a tremendous attractive value in this environment. And Bitcoin over time, again, I don't think it's gonna go anywhere. I mean, think about Bitcoin. I mean, back in 2013, when we first started investing and hardly anybody was talking about it, it was very little. It seemed like 2017 everybody started talking about.

Starting point is 00:45:42 Bitcoin is known everywhere in the world everywhere I mean, there's hardly any country that you can go to where they have not at least heard about Bitcoin How many brands can say that? I mean, so it's a brand that's never gonna go away in my opinion and there's only 21 million of them So you're gonna see throughout time you're gonna see speculative manias in this small, because you can corner it. Just like you could corner silver, you could corner go, you can corner this market. So I think over time, you're gonna see a lot of booms and busts. And I think that if you like to speculate, it's an easy place to go. There's a lot of cheap cryptocurrencies too. You can look at some of my favorite cheap ones are ones like Tron, which we've been buying from when it was just a fraction of a penny,

Starting point is 00:46:28 also Cardano, which is currently trading for like 20 cents. We see that when going to five or $10 easily over the course of the next few years. So I mean, there's a lot of opportunities in cryptos. Is there any worry that people have about the accessibility to it? You know, as far as the platforms that, you know, you can access your Bitcoin from. Yeah, well, I think, yeah, and I think there's worries about regulation and all of this, and we should be worried about that.

Starting point is 00:46:51 I mean, that's the one I'm worried most about. Yeah, regulation is, I feel like. Yeah, because I feel like the Fed is going to, if they see this being used as, you know, because what just came out, articles just came out talking about how, and I forgot who talked about this, who said that, you know, they're worried about Bitcoin being used to finance terrorism and the black market for drugs because Bitcoin also has the attribute that it's untraceable or hard to trace.

Starting point is 00:47:14 And so, you know, people are buying drugs online with them, buying weapons online. And whenever I see they use the word terrorism, I know like, okay, here we go. Here goes the war now on. Cryptocurrency issues. Yeah, the bad guys are using it, so therefore we're gonna try and shut it down. And I think was it Google and Facebook stopped advertising?

Starting point is 00:47:31 They did. Cryptocurrency, so yeah, what do you think the war's gonna look like? Cause I, for sure, how are they gonna possibly sit around? Bitcoin continues, if that starts to outcompete, or look like it's gonna outcompete the dollar, they have to do something, right? They do, yeah. There's going to be a war.

Starting point is 00:47:46 The war's already started. We expect the war to be brutal. But in the end, it doesn't matter because with Bitcoin, do I have any Bitcoin? Try to find out. Try to take my Bitcoin. Just try to. Just try to. Come out to my house with a gun and say, I'm going to take all of your Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:48:03 Just try it. How are you going to get it? You can't get it. You can get my gold. You could take it out to my house with a gun and say, I'm gonna take all of your Bitcoin. Just try it. How are you gonna get it? You can't get it. You can get my gold. You could take it out of my vault. You could find out I have a vault. Bitcoin is, Bitcoin was created. If you read the Y-paper, it was created

Starting point is 00:48:15 because of the Federal Reserve. It was literally created because of the Federal Reserve. They said, we want a finite amount of money that cannot be hijacked, and that cannot be duplicated or printed now It has a mysterious origin to it. I'm gonna say isn't yeah There's still mystery around who actually is the creator and there's like I think I've read There's like a collection of 12 or 20 of these brilliant free market minds that all came together And they play this kind of game of charade so you can't tell who's

Starting point is 00:48:48 Who's responsible for is that how that worked? That's right and I think for that reason It's important for you to be diversified and not to put all your money into it You know, I think if you got all your money in Bitcoin you did something wrong You know, but if you got a small amount in it and you're dispeculating and you're spread out across a few of them I think over time you might be real surprised it might help that retirement plan. It's a small gamble. Well, I was just, who was it we were just talking to in my argument to this was, I don't care if the Fed comes in and we see crazy regulation, I think it's already a proven model that the black market will make it survive alone

Starting point is 00:49:20 by itself. And I say this just being somebody who I came from before we did Mind Pump. For about four years, I was around the medical marijuana industry and I was a part of it during a very, very gray area. And that if that was an option for me, then 100% because I lost a lot of money dealing with it because there was a lot of theft and a lot of bad stuff that was going on. And even being somebody who was doing something in this kind of gray area I would rather put my money and something like that that I know it's protected so and I and I'm talking about an example of just like medical marijuana

Starting point is 00:49:54 I know the black market is freaking huge worldwide and so I think that regardless of what regulation we see if you're somebody who of what regulation we see. If you're somebody who recreationally uses drugs every now and then, or does something that you want to protect yourself and say, and you want it safe, like I want to know, this is the best place that was, what was that company? It was the guy off of, which,

Starting point is 00:50:14 you tell me about that website? Yeah, what was it, Silk Road? Silk Road was an example of this, that of course we tried to demonize that and make it look so bad, and that, oh, that's what everyone's buying this big point. That's the increased demand on Silk Road and that guy got arrested.

Starting point is 00:50:27 Right, right, increased demand and what we found out was actually it was now safer, it was better, we saw less crime, you see all these other things that were a positive thing, even in something as dark as the black market. So I think regardless of what we see happening with regulation and whether this goes global for us and becomes a new currency. I think no matter what, it's here to stay just for those reasons.

Starting point is 00:50:48 I think this is an example of the problem that because government operates through policy, right? Politicians get together, they try to legislate, create a law, that becomes law, and then they regulate industries. And I think the problem that tech presents to government is that tech advances way faster than they have time to legislate. So for example, Uber, no way in hell Uber would have existed had they know that it would have existed. They know and they would have regulated it and it would have never come out. But because Uber happened so quickly,

Starting point is 00:51:26 there was no legislations or regulations around it. So it opened in this kind of gray market. Now they try to legislate it. Well, people like it now, so good luck. Same thing with Airbnb and all these other, so I feel like cryptocurrencies are gonna outcompete the government's ability to even legislate it. It's kind of what it looks like.

Starting point is 00:51:44 Any thoughts on that? I think that's true. I mean even legislate it's kind of what it looks like. Any thoughts on that? I think it's true. I mean, I think it's going to be a constant battle. It's hard to say who will win in the end, but I do think that it's worth the gamble. I think it's worth the time spent investing a small amount. I certainly don't have any, you know, outsized hopes for whether they'll survive or not in the long run. But I think, you know, I think it's a, I think it's a, it's a wise gamble for a small amount of money.

Starting point is 00:52:12 So I have a question for you. A lot of times when presidents get into office, they will use if the stock market is doing well, they'll use that as a way to show how well the economy is doing. Like, look at the stock market. I went up and I, of course, that's the stock market is doing bad and they look at other things. How good of an indicator or what are some good indicators that you can recommend people look at to determine kind of the health of our economy? Is the stock market a great sole indicator or is that just a piece?

Starting point is 00:52:40 No, it's a terrible indicator. And in fact, if you look at the bottom that we hit in 2009 in the stock market, it's a terrible indicator. And in fact, if you look at the bottom that we hit in 2009 in the stock market, it's so interesting, as I think back at this, when I wrote the book bankruptcy of our nation, I wrote this book back and I was writing the manuscript in 2006, 2007, and I could not sell this book to any publisher.

Starting point is 00:53:01 First, they're like, we don't know who you are, who's Jerry Robinson. And second of all, why will we publish a book? In fact, the, I think the title I was using was bankruptcy of America. And they thought, why would we even publish this book? This was in 2007. And I finally found an agent, I started talking to him. He got me a deal only after the market crashed. So it was in 2008 when the market imploded. We got like five or six offers from book, we want a bankruptcy of America.

Starting point is 00:53:31 But the publisher said, now we don't want to call it bankruptcy of America because that's awful. I don't know if we, let's call bankruptcy of our nation. So it shows you how far we've come. Now we say all kinds of things about this and it's no big deal. So back in this time, now, the stock market

Starting point is 00:53:47 are cratered, and it really hit its low in March of 2009. At that time, people were fleeing the stock market. We've seen the stock market rally from that bottom, all the way up to where we are now. It's been an unbelievable ride in the stock market. And we use a trend trading system. So we were calling a new buy signal on the market back in August of 2009.

Starting point is 00:54:11 So this has been an unbelievable rally for our members and for us personally. Now, the stock market went up underneath President Barack Obama 235%. So if we judge presidents strictly by the stock market, he was one of the best presidents who ever existed, right? Underneath President Trump so far, we've seen the stock market rally about 28% since he came into office. So again, that's a really good return for the short time He's been in office, but the stock market is not a good indicator because really how many people are really invested

Starting point is 00:54:47 in the stock market. A much better indicator to look at would actually be things like the U6 unemployment rate, which is a much more important unemployment rate than the one that usually hits the headlines. This includes all of the discouraged workers, workers that have just given up on looking for jobs. We see that number rising right now. It's not falling. It's rising. So compare that with the unemployment number that they use, that they like to report. What's the difference between the two? Like the U3, the headline number they put out is about 4.1%, the U6, and the latest one I saw was about 8.4%. So double rising. So double. Now why are they different?

Starting point is 00:55:24 You had mentioned the spread. Yeah, yeah, it's how economists lie with numbers and they are so good with lying with statistics. So they just focus on certain things, so they lump certain things in. Same thing they do with consumer price index, it's the same thing they do with inflation. It's all what they measure. So they'll measure, you know, how fast are the prices rising? Everything but food

Starting point is 00:55:45 and energy makes up the things we use every day. And so I think that, you know, they simply use things like that. So the U3 and the U6, I think that's an interesting comparison. Other things to pay attention to are, you know, the GDP. How is the GDP growing? I think that's a, that's a helpful number. Yeah, the GDP is growing, but look at the national debt. It's outpacing the GDP. So our debt growth, I think across the board, is problematic. If we go back and we look at the United States

Starting point is 00:56:16 for every single dollar of growth, every single dollar of growth that we want to create, we have to create two to three dollars of debt. That's we are a debt finance government. And this is why you say it's unsustainable. It's unsustainable. And that just keeps going. In China, in China, if they want to create a dollar worth of growth, they have to borrow

Starting point is 00:56:38 four or five dollars. So in other words, all of our growth is debt financed, all of it, every bit of it, every single bit of it. When you look from 2009 all the way out to 2018 for nine years, you think, well, look at the stock market, look how much it's grown, look at all these corporations, look how much, have you seen their corporate debt, have you seen the corporate debt statements, the debt, the corporate debt has never been this high. So, and why has the corporate debt never been this high?

Starting point is 00:57:04 Because the interest rates have never been this high. So, and why is the corporate debt never been this high? Because the interest rates have never been this low. Now, what happens when interest rates inevitably have to rise on these corporations? What's that gonna do to their balance sheets? What's that gonna do to their net income? What's that gonna do to their earnings? What we saw it did to the housing market? Exactly.

Starting point is 00:57:17 And so, that's the kind of thing that we see today as it's all debt financed. And so, many of the economic numbers that we hear about on a daily basis, and you're right, President Trump is a classic offender. In fact, I have never heard a president ever take credit for the stock market. Not even Clinton. Clinton was not even foolish enough to take credit for his, because he had the biggest

Starting point is 00:57:40 stock market gain eight years of any president in memory. And he never mentioned the stock market. He knew better because if it goes down, they'll get a credit too. That's right. And so Trump is very interesting in the fact that he's taking credit for this stock market rally. And so when it goes down,

Starting point is 00:57:57 it'll probably be some sort of fake news when it goes down. Yeah. We're also sitting on a massive student loan. Oh, heavens. Deb Bubble. Yeah, we talk about that for a second. Student loans, I mean, the cost of college has become so high and I think a lot of kids go into college. They get out of school and what do they do? They just go to college. What are you gonna go to college? Well, I'm just gonna go get my basics out of the way.

Starting point is 00:58:21 Yeah, I'm gonna go get my basics out of the way and then I'll figure it out after that. Like I think a lot of kids should maybe not go to college, you know, to be totally frank with you. And if they do, you know, they should probably pay for it. I paid my way through college. I mean, I had a little bit of student loans, but I paid my way through college working and selling books on Amazon.com.

Starting point is 00:58:40 That's another example in the book. One of the ways I paid my way through college was buying books, turn around and selling them on Amazon.com, is a third party seller, and made money doing that, while I was going to college. But student loans are out of control. They dangle these low interest rates in front of these,

Starting point is 00:59:00 mines full of mush, and they take them. The parents are happy because they don't have to pay for it now, pay for it later, everybody loves to pay for stuff later. And it's a disaster. And now we have student loan debt at all time highs, credit card debt, the same thing, mortgage debt, the same thing, I mean across the board. I think it's important.

Starting point is 00:59:19 With student debt, it's important to note like, why it's so upside down, because you get these school loans that are 50 to 100,000, and then the average person with a four year degree comes out and makes X amount of dollars, what, 60 to 80,000 dollars. You're at that rate, even if you're the best saver in the world, it's inevitable. You'll almost never pay that off.

Starting point is 00:59:40 They'll take you, yeah, 30 years before you even come close to. Well, I think people, so it's important to say that, you know, how interest rates work and interest rates in a market-based system are calculated based on, you know, banks saying, okay, if we loan you $100, we know at this interest rate, we're going to make a little bit of a profit. And I say a little bit because they're competing with other institutions that that are loaning you money and so they're saying it's always competitive So they're gonna make a little bit but they can't try and make too much because the guy next to you It's gonna loan it for a lower rate and agree to make a little bit less and so markets create accurate

Starting point is 01:00:18 interest rates But what happens with our system is the interest rates are not dictated by the market. They're dictated, well, first off, the Federal Reserve interest rates are monopoly because they're the only creator of money. So they're not competing with anybody. And student loans is another great example. There's so much regulation and government injection that says we have to loan this much or loan to these people.

Starting point is 01:00:43 We have to make it easier because you hear politicians saying, education's important, everybody should go to college. And the way that they then promote that is they make laws and stuff that make it so that banks have to loan out more. Yeah, so it's super easy for some 17 year old kid to get loans. So now you go get a loan for $100,000 for a political science degree. No way in hell you're gonna pay that back if you actually get a job in political science. So it's so skewed and this is why it becomes a bubble is that nobody then can pay back this

Starting point is 01:01:13 money. This is what happened with the housing market. Banks were basically told, you have to lend this to these people, you have to lend this much. And oh, by the way, if they default, we'll cover your backs. Well, that creates a crazy signal to the market that's inaccurate.

Starting point is 01:01:31 And prices go through the roof because you have all this free money. That's why when you go to college, it costs so much damn money. There's no way in hell if this was a pure market economy, it would cost you $20,000 to attend for a year at a university. Unless the degree you were going after was like petroleum engineering or something where you know you're going to make tons of money, there's no way in hell.

Starting point is 01:01:53 In fact, I think in a market economy, the amount of interest your loan was going to or a loan, a bank wouldn't give you a loan if your degree wasn't guaranteed. One of the ones that was going to make a lot of money. Like if you went and said, oh, I'm gonna get a 40 degree in women's studies, they'd say, we're not gonna give you money because we know how much that's worth. Instead, they give you money regardless.

Starting point is 01:02:13 And so we've created this whole problem. Do you think that there's gonna be a competitive educational system in the future? I mean, already there, right? It's something has to be done about student loans. I think what really needs to happen is, a competitive education system will be good. I mean, something where people don't just go through

Starting point is 01:02:35 the conveyor belt from, okay, here, I mean, literally when you think about education at an elementary school, or they start very early, they teach you. You have to get here at eight o'clock. You get a break at 10 o'clock or whatever. And then you're going to have a lunch at 12 o'clock and then you're gonna have recess and then you're gonna,

Starting point is 01:02:55 I mean, as you get older, when you go to work, it's the same thing. The recess is the smoke break. I mean, the lunch is at the same time. You get there at eight. You still have some time, some homework. They are training us from birth to be good corporate employees. That's really what the whole thing is. I mean, this is, this is, this is documented. I mean, you can go back and discover even who funded and payrolled the schools to make

Starting point is 01:03:19 them the way that they are. And it was a lot of the big money. So you can go to colleges and get a degree that will land you a job at a particular company and they teach you everything you need to know about that particular role. I think that we've gotten to a place where college is just default. It's default for everybody. And I think that's a terrible, terrible, terrible idea. Not because college can be good, not because college can open your mind, but because not everybody needs a four-year degree to do what they're going to do. We need mechanics.

Starting point is 01:03:56 We need people to build houses. We need people to, and those aren't bad jobs, but in our economy, we've kind of separated that. Everybody wants a job in air conditioning with Facebook on their computer, with their own desk and their own cubicle, and they want to, this is unsustainable. I mean, this is not the way the world works. It's also sold to us in the sense that it's already starting to change because I can access any information I want right now for free.

Starting point is 01:04:28 If I really, if I'm motivated and I want to learn a subject, I could do it for free. You sure can. The internet provides all that. You can take Stanford courses or UCLA courses online for free. Yep, yep. So it's, and what's happening now because the cost of education is so high, is people are actually starting to weigh it out. And what you're seeing, for example, in medicine, which medicine is highly regulated, right,

Starting point is 01:04:52 to become a doctor. There's lots of things you have to pass and test, you have to pass, and regulations that say that you can even call yourself a doctor. So it's very not free market. But what's happening with that is if you want to go and be a, and I know this because I have so many friends in the medical field, if you want to be a general practitioner, you want to be a family doctor. Your cost of your education is still going to probably run you 100 to $150,000.

Starting point is 01:05:18 But a family practice doctor is going to make maybe $100,000. And maybe if you're kicking maybe $100,000, and maybe if you're kicking ass $150,000, people are starting to do the math and say, oh, wait a minute, I'm gonna go to school. The same amount of time is that orthopedic surgeon or that specialist, and I'm only gonna make this much. There's no way I'll be able to pay back my loan, and so you're starting to see positions like that

Starting point is 01:05:43 start to dry up where a lot of you know people entering medical school You're not seeing a lot of people who want to be in the malpractice insurance, you know, all the yeah And a lot of people aren't being aren't doing those those types of positions now because it's just not Making any sense so now on the topic of debt when we talk about The you know our government being in debt and it's like something, how many trillions are we now? 21 trillions. Which, by the way, to give you an idea of how much money that is, that's so much money, I don't, we can't pay it back at this point.

Starting point is 01:06:15 I don't think we can ever pay it back. It's, we don't have to cut, I mean, we're already in such a deep hole, it's insane. But when we say debt, who do we owe that to? Like, you know, because I have people tell me that, like, well, debt, what does that mean? Like, it's such an abstract thought. Like, or if we're at 21 trillion,

Starting point is 01:06:29 what's the big difference between 21 and 40, or 100, or 500 trillion? Like, what's the difference? Who pays that back? You know what I'm saying? Well, I mean, it's an accumulation. So the national debt is every single annual deficit plus, combined.

Starting point is 01:06:44 So it's a total amount. It's owed to China. It's owed to Japan. It's owed to Europe. It's owed to many of the Gulf states. It's owed to a lot of little old ladies, so you know who loan money to the government. It's owned to many bankers.

Starting point is 01:07:04 I mean, so you have a whole lot of entities who have their hand out ready to be paid back. And the government, what they do now is they simply can create more money to pay off the debt. But here's the problem. So we get tax for it basically. Exactly. So if we say, okay, let's, this is a perfect example. Let's say that Donald Trump goes to bed tonight, has a dream. He has a dream that he has to pay off the national debt. He says, you know, I'm going to get up in the morning, I'm going to make America great again, and I'm going to pay off the $21 trillion. We're done. We're never going to have any more debt. So how's he going to do it? Is he going

Starting point is 01:07:37 to use money in the bank? No, how much money is in the bank for the government? Zero. How much money is in the bank to take care of our unfunded obligations? Zero. How much money is in the bank to take care of our unfunded obligations? Zero. How much money is in the bank to take care of your Social Security payment in 2042? Zero. There's no money. There's no money. That's why we call bankruptcy of our nation. There is no money. So it's all future. So let's say Trump says, okay, I'm going to pay off this $21 trillion. He has no money to use. So what he does is he goes to the Federal Reserve and says, let's print up $21 trillion. Let's pay this off. Well, then you have another $21 trillion loan that has to be paid back. In other words, the only way to pay it off

Starting point is 01:08:16 is with more debt. This is why it's completely unsustainable. That's fucked up. It's really bad. It's really bad. In fact, there's a statement by the former bank governor of Canada. He was the central bank, Canadian central bank governor. He made the statement, we put it in our book. He said, here's the crazy fact. He said, if all debt, if all US debt were paid off, there would be no money left. This is the reality. This has, this has to soak in. I mean, I know for some people listening to this,

Starting point is 01:08:47 you say, that's crazy. This is the reality. This is why it's so unbelievably dangerous moving forward is that this is the reality. Everything is dead. And so much of what we see when we drive down the road, almost everything we see is leveraged. You know that.

Starting point is 01:09:02 I mean, everything you see, cars that are being driven on the road, buildings that the people have, their homes, their credit cards, their lifestyle, their furniture, everything is leveraged. And when people think print money, they also think literally printing money, but isn't money created through fractional reserve banking all the time as well?

Starting point is 01:09:23 Yes. So in fractional reserve banking, the time as well. Yes. So in fractional reserve banking, it may be correct me if I'm wrong, and I don't know what the numbers are, but let's say a bank gets $1,000 in deposit, they can loan out up to $10,000 or whatever. So they can loan out more because they're only required to have a small reserve.

Starting point is 01:09:43 But that money that they then they loan out is basically they've just created that money and then that money ends up in banks as well because people don't typically take a loan and then just save it, they'll spend some of it and save some of it. That money then is in banks, that becomes more reserve to which end gets loaned out into more. So, it's a system of just perpetual... It's out of... Creating... It's out of me.

Starting point is 01:10:06 It's modern out of me. It's modern... It's modern magic. The bank... The banksters are the alchemists today. I mean, they're the ones who make things up out of thin air. They produce... Nothing...

Starting point is 01:10:18 They produce something out of nothing. And that's exactly what the fractional reserve banking system is. Is that it allows banks to create money out of deposits that they would not normally have had. They can loan it. So, in other words, for example, I think the latest numbers, and these numbers are always kind of changing. The Dodd-Frank bill, which is kind of being edited now by the GOP, but which kind of place some restraints upon the banks in the post crisis, post 2008 crash, they've been kind of loosening those up a little bit.

Starting point is 01:10:51 This is the course how it works. Right now we see real estate finance, we see mortgage finance, lenders basically starting to loosen up a little bit. Remember back in 2006, 2007, if you had breath, if you could fog up a mirror, you got a loan. And you don't have any docs to prove that you make $100,000. That doesn't matter.

Starting point is 01:11:12 We don't care. Dude, this is so true. I went to go get a loan and the guys like, well, don't you want to buy a house that's more expensive? I can't afford it. He's like, it doesn't matter. We'll just put down some. That's literally how it was.

Starting point is 01:11:23 My first mortgage loan was a low dock. So they said, how much money do you make? And I just threw out a number and they said, okay, well, they wanted just a few documents. The second house I bought was a no-dock loan. So it literally just no-docks. They did not need any information. Now, of course, they reigned that in

Starting point is 01:11:41 in the post-2008 crisis time. But now we're starting to see that stuff creep up again. See, this is the cycle. If you can learn this cycle, you can profit. If you don't learn this cycle, you'll be the victim of the cycle. So it'll happen again, and it'll happen again, and it'll happen again.

Starting point is 01:11:57 And if you happen to be retiring in 2008, how sad? Right. And that's why it's so important to understand these cycles. So since the 1970s, as we talked about at the beginning, since that gold window was shut down, since the petrodollar system was put into place, we have seen these boom bus cycles accelerate. And we expect the next bust to be the biggest bust that we've ever seen, ever. And we would expect the recovery to probably be just as weak if not weaker than this recovery and longer to get back to break even.

Starting point is 01:12:29 So if you have a ton of money in the stock market and you're wildly exposed to this market and you're planning on retiring in the next five years, you could get a massive surprise. Jerry, you're not the only one that is talking like this. Now I've been following economics just as a fan for, I don't know, 10 years. And, you know, my political views are libertarian-ish,

Starting point is 01:12:52 if you will. And a lot of the people in that space were talking about before the 2008 crash that that was gonna happen. I remember Ron Paul specifically talking about where this is a big problem, this is happening. At the same time, you know, the chair of the Federal Reserve is talking about how the economy is stronger than ever.

Starting point is 01:13:10 We have nothing to worry about every, you know, investment banker on CNBC is talking about how great the economy is, invest in the stock market, everything's looking great. And then we had this massive crash. And then you had this huge injection of money into the economy under President Barack Obama. And every one of those same people said, that's not a good idea.

Starting point is 01:13:35 We're kicking the can down the road, and it's going to be much worse the second time around. You believe the same thing? Oh, yeah, absolutely. We handled this completely wrong. I mean, we took a debt problem and added more debt to it. That's all we did. I mean, they did try to put some seat belts on some things. They did get rid of the no-dock loans for a while, but they'll come back. And they're starting to come back. They got rid of some of the excesses, but they'll come back. But you know what's interesting is that President Donald Trump just got rid of his top economic advisor, Gary Cohn, who was over at Goldman Sachs.

Starting point is 01:14:11 He was one of the top big wigs over there. And he replaced him with Larry Cudlow. And I don't know if you've heard of this guy, but he was a CNBC. He's been a CNBC commentator for a long time. He was on record, just like you mentioned, back in 2007, December 7th, 2007, on record stating, there's not going to be every session. There's, you know, this is crazy. There's nothing to worry about. So this is the guy giving Donald Trump advice, is the same kind of guy who was what you just mentioned, ignoring the situation right before

Starting point is 01:14:44 the last crash. So we are so set up for another massive crash. What part of the cycle do you think we're in right now? Do you think we still have, are we towards the end of it? Or is it the beginning where do you think we're in? Yeah, so I've been trading this market and even today, like literally, I don't want to date this interview, but literally today the market was down pretty severely. I've been trading this market for a long time.

Starting point is 01:15:06 I started trading back in the mid 90s and I actually worked on a commodities trading floor and all of this in the past. And this is something that I really enjoy. So trading is something you can do from anywhere. So we were just in Mexico for three weeks. We were down there trading on the beach and stuff. It's just a wonderful kind of thing that you can do and by trading

Starting point is 01:15:25 What I mean is is investing in a stock or buying a stock and then turning around in the cell like you would flip a house You flip a stock, you know, you flip or an option. Well We've been trading for Through this uptrend since 2009 we had a couple of hiccups in 2011 It looked like we were gonna crash and start the whole thing over again It didn't happen in 2016. We saw something similar. I got real funny We thought we were going to have a crash. We didn't and then 2017 of course as soon as

Starting point is 01:15:56 Election Day as I mentioned the market's been up tremendously since Donald Trump was elected but It does feel like we're near the top Trump was elected, but it does feel like we're near the top, but it also seems as if there is still so much more catalyst. I mean, think about this. In the wake of the 2008 crash, the Federal Reserve pumped in trillions and trillions and trillions. In fact, there's never been, there's never been another intervention like what we saw in 2008 from the Fed. There's never been, there's never been another intervention like what we saw in 2008 from the Fed. There's never been anything like it. It's unprecedented.

Starting point is 01:16:29 And so the amount of money they pushed into the economy, like you said, they took on more debt to fight the debt problem, they pushed all this money in and you would expect to see something great from that. But in reality, since 2009, what 10 years later almost, we see still this kind of bumbling recovery of the economic numbers are just okay. People are still complaining about not making enough money. Wage growth is still having a hard time growing. When we see all of these problems, and it seems as if that recovery is just taking longer.

Starting point is 01:17:00 This is kind of where we're moving. I think we're moving into a place where we have massive crashes, busts followed by these prolonged, belabored booms followed by another massive crack. I think this is the world we live in. Where the top is, I don't know. That's one thing that I've been fortunate about. It's that I've said it's gonna happen,

Starting point is 01:17:20 but I haven't put my neck out and said it's gonna happen this day. There's a lot of my peers who do that for whatever reason and they ruin their reputation. I think it's kind of silly to do that, but I think it's important to realize that it is gonna happen. It's identifiable, and that's one of the things

Starting point is 01:17:35 we teach our members is if you're trading in this environment, you can make money on the way down. You make more money on the way down. Or you can make money on the way up. You can make a lot of money real fast on the way down. There were some guys that made a lot of money when the house market crashed. Oh man.

Starting point is 01:17:49 They made that movie about it. Even go back to the Great Depression. There was a fellow by the name of Jesse Livermore who was one of the top traders. And he made, I think I forget now how much he made, you know, billions of dollars on the 1929 crash. In fact, JP Morgan actually called him up on the phone and said, stop shorting the market,

Starting point is 01:18:07 you're destroying the market. So I mean, literally, you can make a lot of money on a downturn, especially today because you have these things called inverse ETFs, inverse exchange traded funds, so easy for people to buy. So you could buy an inverse ETF. An inverse ETF is simply an instrument, unlike a stock.

Starting point is 01:18:25 It's like a mutual fund, except it's just a basket of stocks that trades like a stock. And it's like a mutual fund that trades like a stock. And you can buy one that literally goes up when the market goes down. So if you thought the market was going to crash, then you could put some money into this inverse ETF that is designed to go up as the market crashes. Is it made up of a bunch of just shorts? Uh-huh. It's made up of basically of put options.

Starting point is 01:18:49 Oh, got it. So, and it's financial engineering, but they work. They work very well. So whenever you move into an environment where the market might start imploding, you could just instead of buying stocks, you could buy something that's short stocks and you can make money in that environment. That's what I want for our members. That's what I want for people.

Starting point is 01:19:08 I don't want them to be blindsided by this obvious scam that's going on in Washington, that you can protect yourself. You can insulate yourself through smart thinking, through observation, and by knowing the right tools. Who do you think are some of the best and the worst modern presidents economically with their policies? You can't say they all suck,

Starting point is 01:19:32 you have to pick some that are better. Yeah. Economically speaking, I would say that, you know, President Barack Obama was dealt obviously a harsh hand. I disagree with many of his policies. So I would say that economically speaking him and again speaking strictly economically

Starting point is 01:19:51 and I would say also President Carter. Had President Carter had maybe another four years, I think maybe what he was trying to do might have worked out but I would say those two, I would say probably negative. On the positive side, it's hard to say positive because all of them are playing in the rig game. So they may do something that looks smart, but they're really just perpetuating the scam. Even Ronald Reagan, whenever he slashed taxes across the board, that looks great on paper.

Starting point is 01:20:21 But what you don't see is how he financed that, right? Which was a massive increase in the national debt. great on paper, you know, but what you don't see is how he financed that, right, which was a massive increase in the national debt. It's the same thing that's happening underneath Donald Trump. President Trump is is a growing about how, you know, he's going to make America great again with the with the economy. But when you actually look at how it's being funded, it's being funded with credit card. I mean, who's paying for these tax cuts, right?

Starting point is 01:20:44 Who's paying for these wars that we're fighting? Who's paying? Nope, we're borrowing. So literally, we're using the people's credit card to pay. So I can't think of a single modern president that did not use the people's credit card to perpetuate their plan. Well, I know a lot of people think Republicans,

Starting point is 01:21:03 cut tax, save money, Democrats, raise taxes, spend more, but it doesn't. I don't think political party matter. You look at how they do their economic policies. And I mean, Clinton, you know, actually was probably more free market than Bush was. I know he spent less. He cut. I think it wasn't him who said it is uh...

Starting point is 01:21:25 uh... you know when he was going to make a claim about going after the debt right you well he did and he's because he cut spending and that i don't think it was because of him obviously he had a congress that was fighting him tooth and nail but nonetheless it's just interesting when you look at republican democrats really doesn't matter you get you know deficit both of them spend like crazy both of them explode the deficits uh... you know one charges a little bit more taxes one charges a little bit less You get deficit, both of them spend like crazy, both of them explode the deficits. One charges a little bit more taxes, one charges a little bit less,

Starting point is 01:21:48 and then, I don't know, we'll see what happens. What about our greatest economic lessons that we've had just in our lifetime, when you look at all the things, and we kind of touched on some of them with like housing and school and so on that, what are some of the greatest economic lessons that we've had in our time?

Starting point is 01:22:03 Well, I think first of all, to good and bad, right? It could be either, because I know we've had a lot of bad lessons. Yeah, economic lessons, I would say first of all that you simply cannot get away with not sacrificing. I mean, let's go back to World War II. Back in World War II, you had people who literally said, we're going to war.

Starting point is 01:22:23 We're going to war to fight what? We're going to war to fight evil right? We're going to fight Hitler. We're going to fight hero hero in Japan. So what are we gonna do about it? We're gonna ration right? We're not gonna buy as many groceries. We're not gonna buy as much gas We're not gonna buy and so people actually hurt themselves to help the war effort I think one of the lessons we've learned today is that people don't wanna do that. They don't wanna know where it war. Don't tell them where it war. And so just go drop bombs and tell the people

Starting point is 01:22:50 that go to Disney World or whatever. That's exactly what George W. Bush did. Just inflate the currency. I actually didn't know that's how that worked before. That's, that's, we had a little bit of gold standard. We had a little bit of gold standard. So they had to, they couldn't just inflate the shit out of the currency like this. What a much better way to do things that standard, so they had to, they couldn't just inflate the shit out of the currency

Starting point is 01:23:05 like this. What a much better way to do things that we all have to come to. If we're all gonna decide, we're gonna invade somewhere and go war. You can't wage endless wars without a fiat currency. I don't think it's possible. Here's one of the biggest myths,

Starting point is 01:23:18 one of the most destructive, biggest myths in economics, and I'll make this statement all day long. And this one really pisses me off because it's it's a It's a very destructive terrible one and that's that war is good for the economy That's a very that's a common one you hear like what got us out of the great depression, you know Oh, where were two or you know a war is good for the economy it creates jobs That is it it's so false. It's not even funny. You're creating shit that you're literally exploding. So we're creating stuff that we're gonna blow up.

Starting point is 01:23:50 So that's destructive as hell. People die, that's destructive as hell. And all of our efforts are geared towards, you know, war when we could have those geared towards other things at the market, people asking for. One of the greatest decorated generals in the United States history, Dwight D. Eisenhower president, warned in his outgoing speech.

Starting point is 01:24:09 You can watch that on YouTube, by the way. Really important. He warned about the military industrial complex and how they were fighting to take control of the government. I think that's exactly what we see today. I mean, there's no doubt about it. The military, you know, obviously we said they haven't ever been audited. This is not the saying negative about a military man or a military service man,

Starting point is 01:24:28 but what I'm saying is again, the Pentagon, the Pentagon, which has all of this money, makes all of these plans. And you know what? Interestingly enough, is the fact that in this post, as we look at what's happening now, as we just mentioned there is no sacrifice when it comes to war. So we are fighting I don't know how many wars. In fact, there was a report put out just a few months ago saying that all depends how you define war but we either fighting four wars or 85 wars. It all depends how you define them.

Starting point is 01:25:01 So we have massive conflicts going over all the world and somebody's paying for it. It's China, it's Japan. Other people are paying for our wars. And so I think when you go forward, you think about how is this sustainable? It's not the military industrial complex. Obviously, once to maintain its high budgets.

Starting point is 01:25:29 It wants to maintain. And here's the other thing. Here's the other major thing. Here's another lesson, is that whenever you have a for-profit defense contractor, let's think about Lockheed Martin. Well, let's think about some of these other big contractors

Starting point is 01:25:45 Raytheon. These companies, what do they do? They make bombs. They make military grade equipment. What are what do people make stuff for? They make it to be used, right? So you have investors into these companies that make bombs, okay? And those companies, because they're public corporations, they are under a legal obligation to maximize profits for their shareholders. Therefore, they don't care if the military drops the bombs in the sea or on people. They just want them to drop them because they have more inventory. It's 2019 bombs. They got to sell now, right? They at 2018 models are getting old. They're sitting on the self. Oh, we got the 2020 models out now. Take a look at our catalog. And so the bomb makers just keep getting propped up by our investing community

Starting point is 01:26:35 and the investing community demands profit. And so therefore, bombs get dropped over the place. And this is one of the things that I think many people don't realize also is that the United States president is the largest bomb seller in the entire world. When he, his, and this is not just Trump, it's anyone. President Trump's very first visit. You remember where it was? Was it to our greatest ally Israel? No. Was it to our greatest ally, Britain? No. Was it to, you know, go down the list. No, it was to Saudi Arabia. The very first trip President Trump makes is to Saudi Arabia. What for? Why would he go to Saudi Arabia to sign billions and billions and billions

Starting point is 01:27:15 of dollars of what? Military deals. Then he goes to Asia for what? To sign billions and billions and billions of dollars of weapons deals. Why? Because that's what the president does. The president is the is the literally the frontman for the military industrial conflict. Commander in chief. I don't I don't think Trump maybe knew that before he got in, but he has certainly played the role very well. He has sold more bombs. And of course Obama was good at it too. Sure. But Trump is. And there's is Italy. And there's the other side of it too, which is you want a country that promotes or at least values somewhat freedom

Starting point is 01:27:54 to be the most powerful nation in the world. And there's always counterbalances. And of course, other nations don't spend as much because we do, like European nations don't have huge militaries, but that's because we do. And there's that whole side of the argument, but it's so riddled with inefficiencies, it's insane because you also have situations

Starting point is 01:28:12 where you have entire towns that are supported by these military equipment contracts. So you have like this small town and wherever, and they make a bunch of tanks cold war era tanks Well now you come into office. You're the politician representing that area You're gonna go lobby your other put the the larger government and say you know We can't lose these jobs even though we're no longer in a cold war even though the next war is probably gonna be fought against Terrace or whatever and we don't need these types of weapons

Starting point is 01:28:43 Well, we can't just shut down that plant because now it's gonna be 30,000 jobs that are lost. So we literally have situations, which you can look these up, these are real, they're not hidden, I'm not, it's not a conspiracy. We actually create equipment and then park it, and sometimes fill it with cement, so nobody else can use it.

Starting point is 01:28:57 So it's like a tremendous amount of waste that we create because of just the inefficiencies of how government works. So it's not just the total amount of money we spend for the military. I bet you within that total budget, God, I bet you a scary chunk of it. It's just a bunch of bullshit ways that we're just thrown around. And just to show you how bent the American mind has become, imagine if we learned this morning.

Starting point is 01:29:21 Let's say one of the big headlines on the news today was that the welfare office in the United States lost, you know, five billion dollars or they were scammed out of it by poor people, five billion dollars. Poor people took five billion dollars from the welfare office. That would be a bigger outrage to the United States than what you just said. Yeah, and we're talking hundreds of billions of drugs a dollar. You know, drop bombs on foreign countries, you know, do whatever you got to do. That's not a big deal.

Starting point is 01:29:47 Give the, give the Pentagon as much money as they want. That's fine. Let the Fed run away with, you know, all kinds of problems. That's fine. But don't let poor people get money. It's the last possible thing. That's because it's scary. It's because terrorism's scary.

Starting point is 01:29:59 Right. This is why I always, this is why economics interested me so much. It's because when I tried to look at policy and what we were doing, but I didn't understand economics, it was very hard to make things out. It was very hard to understand things because this guy's making me scared, this person over here saying we have an enemy over there,

Starting point is 01:30:19 this person's saying these people deserve it, these people don't, and so then it becomes this, what you see in politics, it becomes that kind of a game where it's tag lines, it's short phrases that sound really cool and kind of scare people or get them excited. But when you learn economics, which is a science, which is a dismal science. It's a very, yeah, it's a very clear supply demand.

Starting point is 01:30:41 This is how much this is how much it isn't. This is, you know, if you raise this cost, this is what happens, and if you lower this cost, this is what else happens. When you look at economics, it's a filter that it's like, it's literally like, like, glasses. Like, I remember learning economics, and I put them on, and it's like, oh shit, everything makes sense now. Like, everything starts to make sense. And the one thing that people know the least about, especially kids, is economics. I don't learn a damn thing. I don't learn anything about student loans, I don't learn anything about debt,

Starting point is 01:31:08 and I don't know what a credit card was. I don't know how bank loans worked. None of that stuff, I learn none of that stuff in school. It's the same way with help, with a health. I mean, the things that you guys have learned about health since you guys have been on this journey. Oh, none of it's been through. When did you learn any of this when you were a kid?

Starting point is 01:31:24 It's the same thing that I learned when I started discovering, you know, economics and money. Like you said, I realized they don't teach this stuff. So, but I think it's intentional. I mean, think about the, think about the medical community today and how, you know, every time I go into the dock and I say, oh, I've got this or that, the very first thing, the very first thing he offers is a pill. Always. There's never like, well, what are you eating, son? Or are you, how are you exercising? Or are you working that out? It's just a pill every single time.

Starting point is 01:31:52 Now, who does that benefit? It benefits the medical, medical, industrial complex, right? So it just perpetuates that system. It's the same thing whenever I go into the stockbroker, or I go into the financial planners. Typically, he's got something that he's got a cell, he's got a pill, right? He's got something from the corporations

Starting point is 01:32:09 that he works and does business with that he has to sell. There's very little holistic kind of planning that goes on in finance, and it's the same way in medicine. Oh, it's all about, I mean, in finance, it's all about debt spending, debt spending, get more debt, leverage your debt, get more debt to leverage that debt. I have a lot of family that's all about, I mean, in finance, it's all about debt spending, debt spending, get more debt, leverage your debt, get more debt to leverage that debt.

Starting point is 01:32:26 Yeah. I have a lot of family that's in banking and finance, a lot of investment, bankers, excuse me, bankers and brokers. And when I bring up things like cryptocurrencies, they're like, no, total waste your money, don't do that. And I look at them like, you're not, of course, you're gonna say that first off,

Starting point is 01:32:43 because it's competing with the stuff that you sell. And these are the same people that we're telling people to leverage their homes and get these adjustable mortgages and whatever, and I had friends that got in the mortgage business for like, no, man, buy five houses, take money out of the first one, buy the second one, and I'm like, what happens if interest rates change and go up

Starting point is 01:33:01 on all these adjustable rates? And they're like, oh, that's not gonna happen, man, look, property keeps going up and these same people now are, you know, all of them went bankrupt. I mean, all of them. And I'm guessing if you went into your doctor and explained to him all the things you guys do,

Starting point is 01:33:17 they would probably say the same thing. You shouldn't do that, you shouldn't do this. Oh, we're talking the same way. Yeah. So what are some good basic pieces of advice you could give some of our listeners? We have a very, we have a young audience, you know, probably a lot of them don't have any money in business. I love for you to share a little bit about your, we offer, we're talking about your membership

Starting point is 01:33:39 website and exactly what you do there. Maybe you can share some of that for our audience also. Yeah. side and exactly what you do there. Maybe you can share some of that for our audience also. Yeah, well, first of all, things have changed so much. I mean, go back 100, 200 years, and retirement was a very strange concept compared to what it is today. I mean, today we think, hey, you know, when I'm 65, I stop working and I say to home and watch prices right and do whatever I want, you know, drive around to my RV. And I don't have to work anymore, but the kids really aren't going to really help me, because they're off doing their thing.

Starting point is 01:34:11 And so, I've got to take care of my kids. I've got to leave something for my kids. That's so con, that's so contrary to what it used to be in the past. Your kids were your retirement, you know, your kids took care of you. You know, so you, you, you know, you gave birth to the kids, you raised the kids. And then when you were two old to work, they took care of you. So you gave birth to the kids, you raised the kids, and then when you were too old to work, they took care of you. Well, that's not happening today. In fact, most kids don't want to take care of their parents

Starting point is 01:34:33 and they'd rather put them in a home or something like that. Sadly, that's really the truth. Or they don't have enough money to take care of them. Or they want the parents to give them money. It's a very strange dynamic we have today. So retirement, the idea of retirement has changed and so therefore you have to take control. If you don't have kids who are going to step in and take care of you, then you've got to have a plan because the government's

Starting point is 01:34:54 not going to take care of you. They're not going to be around. I mean, they're going to be around, but they're not going to have enough money to be able, I mean, think about how technology is accelerating the way that it is. It's, I mean, think about how technology is accelerating the way that it is. It's, I mean, if they could extend your life, for example, let's say you end up being 70 years old and a pill is available to you to extend your life due to some dread disease and it's going to cost you $100,000. I mean, would you want to buy it? Of course you would, but most people aren't going to be in a position to be able to

Starting point is 01:35:23 shell that out. So you've got to think to yourself, I've got to have a plan in place so that I can have a happy end of life situation. And I think there's a few ways to do that. And in the book, bankruptcy of our nation, as you have mentioned, we talk about it in the memberships.

Starting point is 01:35:39 We talk about the need to develop multiple streams of income. In fact, chapter, let's see, chapter, what's the chapter number here? 14 of the book bankruptcy of our nation is called 21 income streams you can create now and in retirement. And I think that's, that right there is very powerful.

Starting point is 01:35:58 I think the idea of thinking less like consumers, more like producers, and then saying, what can I produce? Most people today have one income stream. Most families, most couples have three income streams. Typically, the husband works, the wife works, and then they may have a CD that throws off interest. So there's three income streams. Jennifer and I, and I'm not bragging, I'm not saying, you know, I'm not showing off my muscles here, but, you know, we've worked hard to develop 20 plus income streams. I mean, it's taken a long time. It didn't happen overnight, but we, but we worked hard. We did it through online marketing. We do it through real estate. We do it through trading. We do it through, you know, investing. We'd, I mean,

Starting point is 01:36:40 all, you know, different businesses, and it takes time. But that's how we think. So we think to ourselves, we need more income streams. Instead of, I need a job. I need a job to pay my, no, you don't need a job. You need income streams. Now, that may be a job. It may be three jobs. But when you start to think in terms of income streams,

Starting point is 01:36:59 and we lay them out here in the book, bankruptcy of our nation, you can develop so many different income streams. And that's really key. The second thing that's important in addition to creating more income, obviously paying off debt. And if anybody wants to has a debt problem, we have a really cool free document. They can download on our website. It's follow the money.com forward slash debt.

Starting point is 01:37:20 And it's just a free PDF. It just literally just pops up when you go to that website. And it's a quick way to pay off debts. If you're facing debt, there's that. But once you get past debt, you have to start thinking of how am I going to be prepared for the future. And of course, that means building income streams.

Starting point is 01:37:39 It also means diversifying. Most people don't have money to take care of a simple emergency. Most people, more than 50% of Americans every single time is a survey. You find out they don't have two pennies rub together to take care of an emergency. So the very first thing we tell all of our members is you must, at absolutely must, develop a six month liquid reserve, savings reserve. You must must you simply have to have it So you have to have six months of your total salary. Let's say you make $50,000 You've got to have 25,000 of that dollars of that in saving not investment

Starting point is 01:38:16 Investments are when you take that money and you lock it away somewhere. No, this is savings. This is hard cash This is the fact that I absolutely and you're ready. Now, what could happen? Well, you could lose your job. The market could tank. All kinds of things could happen. So many people back in 2008, when the market tank, they lost their job. They had to cash out their 401k at the bottom,

Starting point is 01:38:42 because they had any money. They didn't have their six months liquidity. So I think, you know, having six months of liquidity gives you the cushion. You're driving down the road, you get a flat tire, you got six months of liquidity in the bank, you're not worried. You're not whipping out the visa. We often rely upon debt because we have no savings. And we're taught that through the big banks.

Starting point is 01:38:59 They say, you know, you can have a little bit of savings, but you know, always have a visa on it. So they want you to borrow. I think that's very important. Investment diversification. Most people think, well, you know, I guess I don't know much too much about the stock market. And so maybe if I do,

Starting point is 01:39:17 all this maybe spend, put a little money in there. But usually they have a 401k and a house. That's the typical retirement plan for the American, the average American. They have a house, which is a liability. If you've ever read Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, brilliant book, and he says, your house is a liability. And, secondly, a 401k.

Starting point is 01:39:39 Now, what's wrong with 401k's? What's wrong with IRA's? You know what's terrible about 401k's and IRA's? They're government controlled. Do you own with 401k's? What's wrong with IRA's? You know, it's terrible about 401k's and IRA's, their government controlled. Do you own your 401k? No, you wanna know how I know that? Go try to use it for collateral. You cannot use something for collateral

Starting point is 01:39:56 that you do not own. So if you go down to the bank and you say, hey, I have a 401k with $100,000 in it or $25,000 and they're gonna say, so what and laugh you out of the bank? That's not yours. How come it's not yours? Because it hasn't been taxed yet. Once it's taxed, then it's considered yours.

Starting point is 01:40:12 Now the 401K is designed for you to put money in and then when you retire, you know, later down the road, you take it out minus taxes. What are the taxes going to be on that? Well, typically they say whatever your current income tax rate is, do we think taxes are going to go higher in the future or they're going to go lower in the future? They're going to go massively higher. We think taxes are going to go much higher because the debt,

Starting point is 01:40:40 we got all the stuff we got to pay off. Somebody's got to pay for it. So the next generation will probably pay for it and they're going to pay through pay for through higher taxes. So when you go to take that 401k money out, what's the tax rate going to be? Is it going to be higher than it is today or lower than it is today? I would say if you have 20, 30 years left, it's going to be much, much higher on taxes to get that money out. So I think the typical American retirement plan of a house in a 401k is a doomed a failure. So we think you got to be more diversified than that.

Starting point is 01:41:13 First of all, if you're looking at a retirement plan, look at a Roth. A Roth IRA allows you to pay the tax man now. And then all the money that you ever make inside that Roth is tax-free. So I can trade, this is what I love to trade in a Roth. I got a Roth early because you can't qualify for them once you reach a certain place. But when you get them early, before you make too much money, you can stuff money in that

Starting point is 01:41:34 Roth and then you can trade it, speculate with it, invest in different things and grow it. And all of the growth is tax-free. So when you reach retirement, you take all of the money that you put into the Roth, and you can take it out as a tax-free payment. You never pay taxes on it. So the Roth, I think, for a young person, is a really smart idea. I'm not a financial advisor.

Starting point is 01:41:55 They would need to talk to their financial advisor, but I think that's a good route. I think owning a rental real estate is a powerful way to make money. I live in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where houses are very cheap. So it makes sense in my community, not every place I would imagine here in San Jose. It may be a tough kind of income. You've got to be rich first here. But you know, in many parts, you know, Texas, Oklahoma, I mean, it's kind of the middle of America.

Starting point is 01:42:21 Guys who live out there, it's a great income stream. You know, they can buy houses cheap, hold onto them, let the renter pay them off, and by the time they retire, they have five, six, seven houses that they can then sell, rent out, continue to rent. So I think real estate's a fantastic one, online marketing. I discovered online marketing in the mid 1990s, and I started making money online about 2000.

Starting point is 01:42:45 Online marketing is powerful. It's very powerful. Anybody can do it And having done it for you know two decades. I've learned that there are some really important tips tricks things to avoid and ways to do it cheap So we talk about some of that within our membership and And by the way, our membership is very simple. People can go to followthemoney.com. If they say, listen, I don't know too much about money, but I need a coach. I need somebody to kind of help me understand this stuff.

Starting point is 01:43:13 I want somebody maybe to talk, you know, help me with this trading. I got it maybe a few thousand I might want to do something like that, or maybe I want to learn how to do. We have a whole income university on our membership. So you can go through all different 22 different income streams and learn about them. You can use our trading software to be able to identify when to buy a stock or an ETF, when to sell the stock or ETF to make a profit.

Starting point is 01:43:37 There's all kinds of stuff on our memberships. They can go to follow the money.com forward slash subscriptions. And there they can see the different places. And the membership fee is really fees really minimal right oh yeah I mean it's anywhere from you know ten bucks a month to a hundred bucks a month all depending on what they're wanting to do but the education I think is priceless because we've we've brought together so much information that most individuals as we've stated here don't know I mean it's not common knowledge they usually get the opposite of this from knowledge. They usually get the

Starting point is 01:44:05 opposite of this from the financial advisor. They get the opposite of this from the financial complex from Wall Street. So it's information that people need, but multiple income streams, diversify your investments, focus upon thinking like a producer, not a consumer. These are some of the concepts that have made us successful, and I know that you can help other people. Well, I think we live in a time now, luckily, where you have access to so much information, I think the first step is just taking it seriously. Okay, I want to, and you should, when you're young, when you're, if you're young and you're

Starting point is 01:44:39 smart about it, you could end up with a really, really nice retirement. In, in 10 years, makes a big difference. So, and so you don't have to put a lot of money, you know, if you have up with a really, really nice retirement. And in 10 years, makes a big difference. So, and so you don't have to put a lot of money, you know, if you have 50 bucks a month even, you can even use that and grow that. And so it's a great time to find out there's a lot of free information. Of course, you have people like yourself where people can get their information from. Jerry, are you, are there any companies right now that you, that you're fascinated by, that you follow?

Starting point is 01:45:02 Are you big into watching, like all these? Sure, yeah, I mean, I've been a long time investor in Amazon Amazon.com blows my mind still I told you I made money through college selling books on Amazon. It's one of my favorite strategies for for new people You can just literally sell books. I remember it's how I found out I bought a Beatles CD at a garage sale Back back in 2000 something something, early 2000, like maybe 2000, maybe the year 2000, 2001, whatever. And I bought this Beatles CD, I ripped it, and then I said, I'll put it up on Amazon, you know?

Starting point is 01:45:35 And so I went ahead and looked on Amazon, it was selling for 10 bucks, I paid a buck for it at the garage sale, I sold it for 10 bucks. I thought this is great. What if I had like a thousand of these, you know? So I started going out to garage sales and started picking up stuff, books, and stuff I found this book called

Starting point is 01:45:49 the Handbook of Pest Control, paid like a quarter for, maybe a buck. Took it home, looked on Amazon as 150 bucks. Sold it like that. So I was addicted. So before I knew it, I was buying, but I put ads out, I was buying books, and mainly non-fiction books don't sell well on Amazon,

Starting point is 01:46:07 but nonfiction books, especially real nitchy stuff. I mean, it's a great supplemental income. People can make an extra few hundred bucks a month doing that. It's just one little strategy that we teach. But Amazon.com, I'm certainly fascinated with them. I think they have a tremendous way to go forward. There are a few other industries in particular that we're very interested in. I think one of the most compelling industries as we go forward, of course, is the artificial intelligence and AI. I mean, there's a lot

Starting point is 01:46:39 of folks focused upon that, There's many different companies. But I think when it comes to investing in companies, I think in this environment, because we may be at the top, it's smarter to think in terms of short-term opportunities, as opposed to longer-term opportunities. I think the longer-term opportunities come in the 2008, 2009.

Starting point is 01:47:03 That's where you look for those opportunities. Now at this stratospheric level, we are in the stock market. It's probably smart to be much more shorter term thinking than it was say back in 2009. Right, right. Do you think that like getting on AI, do you think what do you think's gonna happen with?

Starting point is 01:47:21 I mean, I just saw this article on, they've now got this robot able to flip the burgers at a faster rate than a human. Like, a lot of these minimum wage jobs, and I think we're going to see eliminated and replace by AI. Do you think that's going to serve us better in our economy or worse? What do you think that's going to do? No, I think it's a bad deal, especially considering that most people don't have a skill, I say

Starting point is 01:47:47 most, I mean, literally most of the people that these people's job, the people who are going to lose these jobs, they don't have the skills to go do something else. They don't have the education oftentimes. So some of the jobs that are going to be lost are going to be permanently lost. I'm not a real big fan of that. And of course, that's leading many of these guys who are promoting artificial intelligence like the co-founder of Facebook and whatnot to promote a universal basic income. They just get the government to give all these people money because we're going to automate

Starting point is 01:48:19 all the jobs. And so I think we're moving into an environment where we could see some really interesting things We're already seeing the universal basic income concept where the government just literally gives you a thousand bucks because you're breathing You know or two thousand dollars or whatever they decide I think we're gonna see many more experiments with that This is how insane our economy is now. They literally print money out of thin air and just give it to you Right because you'll go spend it and that's what that's how the whole economy works. It's all based upon consumption. 70% of the GDP in America is based upon consumption. That's unbelievable when you think about it. I mean, we are literally a country that if we stop consuming, if we stop our crazy consumption

Starting point is 01:49:03 habits, we'll destroy our economy. So we have got to keep on buying the new as seen on TV product. We have to keep buying the latest fads. And so something's gonna give, something's gonna give. And I think AI aggravates that problem. Unless it figures it out for us. Yeah. Yeah, maybe they're smarter than us. Well, hey, man,

Starting point is 01:49:27 great time. Yeah, great. Thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate the conversation. Absolutely. Definitely. And your podcasts, yeah, follow the money weekly. We've been doing that on for a long, long time since 2010. I know you guys have heard it, but follow the money.com is where they can find everything. We've got a podcast. We got a newsletter. We've got memberships. We've got a podcast, we've got a newsletter, we've got memberships, we've got a book, bankruptcy of our nation. I encourage everybody to pick up a book. They can typically find this in bookstores.

Starting point is 01:49:52 It's been out for a little bit longer, so Amazon's probably the cheapest place to get it. But yeah, bankruptcy of our nation. If you don't know anything we've talked about today, I think that's a great place to start. It'll get your mind thinking in the right direction excellent thanks for coming on thank you very much for your pleasure thank you thank you for listening to mind pump if your goal is to build shape your body

Starting point is 01:50:13 dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance check out our discounted rgb super bundle at mind pump media dot com the rgb super bundle includes maps on the ball, maps performance, and maps aesthetic. Nine months of phased, expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels, and performs. With detailed workout nutrients in over 200 videos, The RGB Superbundle is like having Sal and an Adjusting as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a 430-day money back guarantee, and you can get it now plus other

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Mind Pump: Raw Fitness Truth - 747: Jerry Robinson's Financial Fitness Wake-Up Call

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