 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, 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 trading stocks. He got into day trading that long ago. He worked for a financial company for a couple of years and he's been working that way for a while. And he's the one who also got me on to cryptocurrency way back when. And so, much of the research that I was reading was coming originally from him. And then I started asking him, like, well, where are you getting this information, right? Before I go, I started investing my money. Was he being successful with his choices and stuff? Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So I was interested enough with that. But I'm not the type of person, and as much as I love my brother, Everett, 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 over this podcast and I listened to 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, 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're going to do the interview. So I'll post the picture in my review on the book. The book was incredible. And after that, I instantly wanted to get him on the show and Everett totally fanboyed out when he found out. Yeah, he was in here. Yeah. He was so excited. In this episode, we talked to him about like, you know, 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, he has an online group, right? We have a discount set. Yeah. So that Everett's actually belongs to that already. So Everett pays for his month. 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 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 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, you know, 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. And then if you end up liking what he has to say and you want to join his group, if you go to mindpumpmedia.com forward slash FTM, you get, 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.mindpumpmedia.com forward slash, follow the money or forward slash FTM, both of them will work. 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 than the investment in your health. On yourself. 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 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. 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 anabolic. If you want to train like an athlete and you want functional performance, that's MAPS 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 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 the 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 weird experience. I was knocking on doors, people's doors, you know, 12 and 13 or 14. So I got, I don't have any nervousness anymore. You get sales skills. 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. It failed pretty miserably. And then I started another business that succeeded. And then in 2010, 2006, 7, I started writing this book. It got published finally after the market crashed. Because nobody knew who I was, nobody cared. You know, it was bankruptcy of our nation in 2007. Yeah, when everything was going great, free money everywhere. So I couldn't sell a book. And then, of course, the book sold and it did really well. And so that changed my life. The book changed my life. So we went on a speaking tour. I was on all the big networks and everything doing all that. And then after that, I decided to focus 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, the membership, followthemoney.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. 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. And so when the Iraq War began, I was really pro-Iraq War. Sadly, when I look back now, I think, gosh, what was I thinking? 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 me, but the periphery stuff that I learned on my own, that helped me. So all the textbooks didn't tell me nothing. Supply to man curves, but whenever I started digging a little deeper, I started finding things like the petrodollar system that are in the book that we can talk about today. I think it's very important. Right. 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. 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 do? I remember this when 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. I said, okay, I'll do economics. Very true. I got into economics about 10 years ago. 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, you know, which one felt better or who was making the other guy look worse type of deal. Were you along that? Were you 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, 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, but the dollar itself is not backed up by anything. It's the whole faith and credit of the federal government, you know? And so I think that helped me realize that we were in some sort of problem. You know, there was some sort of problem here. So explain that for a second because, you know, I wanna 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? That was the last string connecting it to the gold standard. I think 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. Roosevelt. 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. 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 to, you know, to create a commune. Well, we're gonna have to decide on something to trade, you know, something to be the mechanism. And in times past, going back thousands of years, that's always been some sort of commodity, whether it's shells or sand or cows or, you know, gold or silver or whatever. I mean, whatever we decide, it 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, you know, 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. That's like our first bank, right? 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 on all this gold and you're not at risk. And then, of course, government step in. 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. 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. 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, 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. It 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 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? Good example. You might want to say, well, maybe I don't feel comfortable holding this. I'd rather hold gold and wait this out, right? 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 15th, 1971. There's a great Bonanza show on, and here comes Nixon to interrupt the Bonanza show to tell us on live television, 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, the 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 use today, they're backed up by the full faith and credit 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? I think a lot of people don't know this. Historically speaking? Yes, historically speaking, what's the success rate? We're not using the Greek drachma anymore. We're not using the Roman Denare 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. They 100% fail. They 100% fail. That's, 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? 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, incidentally we had World War II after that, that was very expensive or whatever, that they can't just print money to pay for these wars. But if it's fiat 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 and there's let's say a million dollars of paper dollars that are out there, government doubles that your $10,000 now worth $5,000. That's right. That's exactly right. And I think, you know, when you go back in time, thinking about through history, you have like the conquistadors. Remember in history, they would go out and many nations would, you know, sail the seas and they would try to conquer a new land and then they would take the gold. Well, the gold was important because it allowed them to what, 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 in 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. 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, you know, 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, you had all of these things going on in countries around the world who still had convertibility said, we're not interested in this. We wanna trade in these dollars for this crazy deficit spending's insane. We want our gold back. And that's why Nixon finally had to close the gold windows because everybody wanted their gold back. And so he said, if we continue this path, then we're gonna lose all of our gold and then we're gonna be a paper tiger. 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, they're 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. Because now it's backed by oil instead of gold, right? Exactly. It's backed by our military. Well, yeah. To be more accurate, I would say. Well, explain it. Explain what a Petrodollar is to our audience. Yeah, well, let's first, and you had mentioned inflation. 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 start taking a supplement or do a certain exercise, you're gonna get a benefit from it. 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. 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, so there's 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. 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, let's have some shelter, but you gotta give me some golf balls. That's our money. 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. 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 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 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 that it was an 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 1973. Automatic increase in demand for dollars. Exactly. Automatic increase in demand for US dollars. 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. How 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 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 US treasuries. So it's a double loan to the United States. 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. You know who else doesn't? North Korea. You know who else doesn't? Syria. You know who? All the countries that we fight. All the acts of the evil. So, but what this does for the United States is so powerful is that because everybody needs oil and because they have to buy from these 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 throughout the whole world and because every country has to hold these golf balls or the dollars to buy oil, they, it allows us a great, what one great economist has 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. 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 U.S. predominantly because we have massive amounts of debt. Our national debt is $21 trillion. Our 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 goldback currency or buying oil through their own currency, which, that's a beginning to war. There's two statements I wanna make before you continue. The first is Osama bin Laden, who by the way used to work for the U.S. when Afghanistan was fighting against the Soviets, said explicitly the reason why he hit Al-Qaeda, attacked the U.S. is because we have bases in 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, a lot of people just have no idea. I think economics, one of the biggest, the worst ignorances that we have in this country is just lack of basic understanding of economics. And so we ended 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, it's just sitting in the bank, you got 10 grand, but a year from now, it can only buy $8,000 worth of stuff, you've lost $2,000. So inflation is literally stealing your money. It's a tax that people don't realize because they're not paying a tax like they do when they pay taxes. But it's actually no different. Well, we could argue the Federal Reserve is the biggest gangsters in the world. Well, I was just gonna go there. 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. That's privately owned. It's as federal as federal express. So what is the Federal Reserve? How did they become like, okay, first talk about who they are and how they became what they are. Well, 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 500 years. The central bank of England, the Bank of England, began back in the 1600s. And what these banks do is they've come up with a very clever kind of mechanism that they call fractional reserve banking. And so 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 could almost compare it to that. So let's first begin by just taking a look. If you have a dollar bill in your pocket, 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, 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 says federal reserve, know what the word says? Death. No, federal reserve, basically. Yeah, it is death, but tender. Federal reserve note. No, yeah. So if I say I have a car note, you know what that is, right? Yeah. 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 one section eight of the constitution, the coinage of money and the circulation of money is an express right of the Congress and not for anyone else. They outsourced this in 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. 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, 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 gonna get paid? They set the interest rate on. So it's a total scam. But these dollar bills, 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, 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, right? It's federal is federal express. It has, it is basically a bunch of private banks that work together that make a nice living off of being a leech on the U.S. 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, you know, 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. 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 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. You know, 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 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 crypto currencies now in our portfolio. And many of them have done fantastically well. I think that you're gonna 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, that Chinese and the Russians are moving together to form, you know, kind of a competitor to the United States dollar. And I don't think that it's gonna take, 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 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. 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, steady, humiliating grind down. 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. 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. 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, 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 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 is when the shit really starts to hit the fan. And you had mentioned that the government has the legal authority in the Constitution to 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. I don't think they've never been audited. 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 wanna do with the money. In 2008, we discovered from research they were giving money away to foreign banks. It was all kinds of stuff. But you know who else hasn't ever been audited? It is the Pentagon. And that's another mass. And by the way, President Trump once, didn't somebody say, or maybe it's your book, I think I read this, sorry to interrupt you, but on that point, isn't the Pentagon the one that's like, every year on average, they have like a $500 million, like missing something. A million, I think it's billion. I think there are trillions now of money that we don't dollars. The Pentagon is the biggest welfare queen in the United States. Oh, shit. The biggest welfare queen in the United States, the Pentagon. $686 billion is in Trump's fiscal year 2019 budget for the Department of Defense. 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. Drones, 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 many people, this is why we're pushing our luck with a Federal Reserve note. This is why we're pushing our luck with the petrodollar system 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 our military. They resent our aggressive economics. And so I think one of the things in the book we really help people do is to 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 gotta 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. 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 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, I'll never forget this. I was holding a bottle of water in my hand 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 is probably not made anywhere near here. You know, I have no clue where this was made. 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 a hundred years ago, 200 years ago, three years, everything you had was what you made or what you had spent a lot of time working hard to get. Today we have everything at our fingertips 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, 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 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 gonna be a success in America, you have to go live in a big city, right? It's very expensive. Everybody gets running water, right? Even though maybe you shouldn't even be able to afford it, you gotta have running water, you gotta have a car, you gotta have transportation, you gotta have this, you gotta have that, you gotta have clothes, you gotta start thinking about all the things you gotta 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 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 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. 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, to our power grids and many in the electricity. And 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 go out, you're gonna find out real quickly who's a producer and who's a consumer. I've always thought if we have another war that it's not gonna be fought with missiles and rockets and it's gonna be more shit like that where somebody finds a way to shut all of our tech down. What the fuck would we all do if we woke up and our computer and our phone didn't work? I mean, how many people would literally just, chaos would freak out. So I really think that the future of war will look something more like that. It's money wars, it's trade wars. 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 a cryptocurrency a fiat currency? Is it also backed by nothing? Or why would I invest in a cryptocurrency versus just a dollar? 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. And what I was 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'll ever be mined. And that's the blockchain technology, right? Like the blockchain. You can't possibly make more or whatever. Can't make more. And 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. 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's gonna 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? 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 of 2018 and even into February. I think we're setting up for another boom bust in that area. And I think the boom bust in cryptocurrencies 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. 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. And in fact, that's one of the things that I've 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 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, and you have cryptocurrencies rising alongside them both rising. I think when you see that, that is indicating to everybody who has eyes to see that the United States dollar's 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. 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. That's the investable assets I have. I took 5% of them and put them in cryptos. So if they all go to zero, I mean, I'll be all right. I guess 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. 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? I think you should buy both. 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 long-term, but I still want exposure to cryptos. So I don't think it's an either or. I think you should have both. 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 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, everything can be printed. It's one of the few things that 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 in it, hardly anybody was talking about it. It was very little. It seemed like 2017, everybody started talking about it. 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 gold. 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, yeah, 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, and which we've been buying from when it was just a fraction of a penny, also Cardano, which is currently trading for like 20 cents. We see that one 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, as far as the platforms that 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. I mean, that's the one I'm worried most about, is the regulation, is I feel like... Yeah, because I feel like the Fed is gonna, if they see this being used as, because what just came out, articles just came out talking about how, and I forgot who talked about this, who said that they're worried about Bitcoin being used to finance terrorism in the black market for drugs, because Bitcoin also has the attribute that it's untraceable or hard to trace. And so people are buying drugs online with them, buying weapons online, and they're, whenever I see they use the word terrorism, I know, like, oh, okay, here we go, here goes the war now on crypto currencies. Yeah, the bad guys are using it, so therefore we're gonna try and shut it down. And I think it was at Google and Facebook stopped advertising crypto currencies. So, yeah, what do you think the war's gonna look like? Because I, for sure, how are they gonna possibly sit around? Bitcoin continues, if that starts to out-compete, or look like it's gonna out-compete the dollar, they have to do something, right? They do, yeah, there's gonna be a war, 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. Come 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. Now you can get my gold, you could take it out of my vault, you could find out I have a vault. Bitcoin is, this, Bitcoin was created, if you read the white paper, it was created 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 was gonna say, isn't there 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 responsible for it, 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. I think if you got all your money in Bitcoin, you did something wrong, but if you got a small amount in it and you're just speculating, and you're spread out across a few of them, I think over time you might be real surprised and might help that retirement plan. It's a small gamble. Well, I was just, who was it we were just talking to and 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 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 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 is doing something in this kind of gray area, I would rather put my money in something like that that I know it's protected. So, and I'm talking about an example of just like medical marijuana, 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 recreationally uses drugs every now and then or does something that you want to protect yourself and you want it safe, like I want to know this is the best place that it was a, what was that company? It was a guy off of which. You talking about that website? Yeah, Silk Road. Yeah, 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 Bitcoin. It actually increased demand on Silk Road and that guy got arrested. 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 the new currency, I think no matter what, it's here to stay just for those reasons. I think this is an example of what 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 known that it would have existed. If they'd known, they would have regulated it and it would have never come out. But because Uber happened so quickly, 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 out-compete the government's ability to even legislate it. It's kind of what it looks like. Any thoughts on that? I think it's true. I mean, I think it's gonna 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 mean, I think it's worth the time spent investing a small amount. I certainly don't have any outsized hopes for whether they'll survive or not in the long run. But I think it's a wise gamble for a small amount of money. 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 of course if the stock market is doing bad then 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? 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 so interesting as I think back at this. When I wrote the book bankruptcy of our nation, I wrote this book back in, I was writing the manuscript in 2006, 2007. And I could not sell this book to any publisher. First they're like, we don't know who you are. We used Jerry Robinson. And second of all, why will we publish a book? In fact, 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 bankruptcy of America. But the publisher said, now we don't want to call it bankruptcy of America because that's awful, I don't know. Let's call it 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 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. And we use a trend trading system. So we were calling a new buy signal on the market back in August of 2009. 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. 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 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, the latest one I saw was about 8.4%. So double. So double. Now why are they different? You had mentioned discouraged workers all that. 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 a consumer price index. It's the same thing they do with inflation. It's all what they measure. So they'll measure how fast are the prices rising? Everything but food and energy, except the things we use every day. And so I think 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 the GDP. How is the GDP growing? I think 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, 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. We are a debt financed government. And this is why you say it's unsustainable. It's unsustainable. That just keeps going. In China, if they want to create a dollar worth of growth, they have to borrow 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, have you seen their corporate debt statements? The corporate debt has never been this high. And why has 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 going to do to their balance sheets? What's that going to do to their net income? What's it going to do to their earnings? Well, we saw what it did to the housing market. Exactly. 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 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, you've got to take credit. That's right. And so Trump is very interesting in the fact that he's taking credit for the stock market rally. And so when it goes down, it'll probably be some sort of fake news when it goes down. We're also sitting on a massive student loan debt 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 going to go to college for? Well, I'm just going to go get my basics out of the way. Business. Yeah. I'm going to go get my basics out of the way, and then I'll figure it out after that. Look, 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. 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 as a third party seller and made money doing that, you know, while I was going to college. But student loans are out of control. They dangle these low interest rates in front of these, you know, 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. 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. With student debt, it's important to note 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 a year. At that rate, even if you're the best saver in the world, it's inevitable you'll almost never pay that off. It'll take you 30 years before you even come close to... Well, I think people, so it's important to say that, how interest rates work and interest rates in a market-based system are calculated based on 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 are loaning you money. And so they're saying it's always competitive. So they're going to make a little bit, but they can't try and make too much because the guy next to you is going to loan it for a lower rate and agree to make a little bit less. And so markets create accurate 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. 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. So it's super easy for some 17-year-old kid to get a loan. So now you go get a loan for $100,000 for a political science degree. No way in hell are you going to 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 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 in the market that's inaccurate. 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 petroleum engineering or something where you know you're going to make tons of money. There's no way in hell. 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 you said, oh, I'm going to get a 40-degree in women's studies, they'd say, we're not going to give you money because we know how much that's worth. Instead, they give you money regardless. And so we've created this whole problem. Do you think that there's going to be a competitive educational system in the future? I'm already there, right? 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 the conveyor belt from, okay, here, literally when you think about education at an elementary school, or they start very early, they teach you. You have to get here at 8 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 going to have recess, and then you're going, 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 8, 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 documented. I mean, you can go back and discover even who funded and payrolled the schools to make 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. We need people to build houses. 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 it. 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. If I'm motivated and I want to learn a subject, I could do it for free because the internet provides all that. You can take Stanford courses or UCLA courses online for free. 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, to become a doctor, there's lots of things you have to pass and tests 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, the cost of your education is still going to probably run you $100,000 to $150,000. But a family practice doctor is going to make 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 going to go to school the same amount of time as that orthopedic surgeon or that specialist, and I'm only going to 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 start to dry up, where a lot of people entering medical school, you're not seeing a lot of people who want to be- Or the malpractice insurance. Yeah, and a lot of people aren't doing those types of positions now because it's just not making any sense. Now, on the topic of debt, when we talk about our government being in debt, and it's like, how many trillions are we now? 21 trillion. Which, by the way, to give you an idea of how much money that is, that's so much money, we can't pay it back at this point. I don't think we can ever pay it back, because we 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? Because I have people tell me that, well, debt, what does that mean? Like, it's such an abstract thought. Or if we're at 21 trillion, 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 combined. So it's a total amount. It's owed to China. It's owed to Japan. It's owed to Europe. It's owned to many of the Gulf states. It's owed to a lot of little old ladies who loan money to the government. It's owned to many bankers. 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 taxed for it, basically. Exactly. So if we say, okay, 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 what? 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 is he going to do it? Is he going 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 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 and 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 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. And 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. I mean, this has to soak in. I mean, I know for some people listening to this, 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 debt. And so much of what we see when we drive down the road, almost everything we see is leveraged. You know that. 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? Yes. So in fractional reserve banking, maybe 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. But that money that 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 creating. It's alchemy. It's modern alchemy. It's modern magic. The banksters are the alchemists today. I mean, they're the ones who make things up out of thin air. 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, which kind of plays some restraints upon the banks in the post crisis, post 2008 crash. They've been kind of loosening those up a little bit. 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. Doesn't matter. We don't care. Dude, this is so true. I went to go get a loan and the guy's like, well, don't you want to buy a house that's more expensive? Like, I can't afford it. He's like, it doesn't matter. We'll just put down some. That's literally how it was. My very 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, OK, well, they wanted just a few documents. The second house I bought was a no-dock loan. So it literally just no docs. They did not need any information. Now, of course, they reigned that in 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. And if you happen to be retiring in 2008, how sad. 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. 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 my political views are libertarian-ish, 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, the chair of the Federal Reserve is talking about how the economy is stronger than ever. We have nothing to worry about. Every 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 not a good idea. We're kicking the can down the road. And it's gonna be much worse the second time around. You believe the same thing? Oh, yeah, absolutely. We handled this completely wrong. We took a debt problem and added more debt to it. That's all we did. I mean, they did try to put some seatbelts 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. He was one of the top bigwigs over there. And he replaced him with Larry Kudlow. I don't know if you've heard of this guy, but 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 gonna be a recession. 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 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? Towards the beginning? Where do you think we're at? 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. 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, 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 through this uptrend since 2009. We had a couple of hiccups. In 2011, it looked like we were going to crash and start the whole thing over again. It didn't happen. In 2016, we saw something similar. It got real funny. We thought we were going to have a crash. We didn't. And then 2017, of course, as soon as 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, but it also seems as if there's 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 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 anything like it. It's unprecedented. 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 or the economic numbers are just OK. 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. And 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 crash. 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. I said, I've said it's going to happen, but I haven't put my neck out and said, it's going to 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 going to happen. It's identifiable. And that's one of the things 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 hell's market crashed. Oh, man. 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, billions of dollars on the 1929 crash. In fact, J.P. Morgan actually called him up on the phone and said, stop shorting the market. You're destroying the market. So I mean, literally, you can make a lot of money in a downtrend, 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. 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? It's made up basically of put options. 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. Is 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. You have to pick some that are better than others. Economically speaking, I would say that President Barack Obama was dealt obviously a harsh hand. I disagree with many of his policies. So I would say that economically speaking, and again, speaking strictly economically. 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. 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. But what you don't see is how he financed that, which was a massive increase in the national debt. It's the same thing that's happening underneath Donald Trump. President Trump is crowing about how he's going to make America great again with the economy. But when you actually look at how it's being funded, it's being funded with a credit card. I mean, who's paying for these tax cuts? Who's paying for these wars that we're fighting? Who's paying? No, 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. I know a lot of people think Republicans 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. I mean, Clinton actually was probably more free market than Bush was. I know he spent less. He cut, I think, wasn't it him who said it is when he- He was the one who made the claim about going after the debt, right? Well, he did. And he's because he cut spending. And 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 Democrat, it really doesn't matter. 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. 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 housing and school and so with that, what are some of the greatest economic lessons that we've had in our time? Well, I think, first of all, to- Good and bad, right? It could be either way. Because I know we've had a lot of bad lessons, right? Economic lessons. I would say, first of all, that you simply cannot get away with not sacrificing. Let's go back to World War II. Back in World War II, you had people who literally said, we're going to war. 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 Hirohito in Japan. So what are we going to do about it? We're going to ration, right? We're not going to buy as many groceries. We're not going to buy as much gas. We're not going to 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 want to do that. They don't want to know we're at war. Don't tell them we're at war. And so just go drop bombs and tell the people 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. We had a little bit of a gold standard. We had a little bit of a gold standard. So they couldn't just inflate the shit out of the currency like that. What a much better way to do things that we all have to come to. If we're all going to decide we're going to 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, 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 a very destructive, terrible one. And that's that war is good for the economy. That's a very common one you hear. Like what got us out of the Great Depression? You know, oh, World War II or, you know, oh, war is good for the economy. It creates jobs. That is a, 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 going to blow up. 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 that the market would be asking for. One of the greatest decorated generals in the United States history, Dwight D. Eisenhower, president, warned in his outgoing speech. 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 to say anything negative about a military man or a military service man. 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 are fighting four wars or 85 wars. It all depends how you define them. So we have massive conflicts going on 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 wants to maintain its high budgets. 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, Raytheon. These companies, what do they do? They make bombs. They make military grade equipment. What do people make stuff for? They make it to be used, right? So you have investors into these companies that make bombs. 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 had 2018 models are getting old. They're sitting on the shelf. 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. And the investing community demands profit. And so therefore, bombs get dropped all 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. 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 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 literally the front man for the military industrial complex. Commander-in-chief. 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 really... And there's the other side of it too, which is if you want a country that promotes or at least values somewhat freedom 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 where you have entire towns that are supported by these military, you know, 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 going to go lobby your other... 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 going to be fought against terrorists or whatever. And we don't need these types of weapons. Well, we can't just shut down that plant because now it's going to 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, 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. 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 is just a bunch of bullshit waste that we're just throwing around. And just to show you how bent the American mind has become, imagine if we learned this morning, let's say one of the big headlines on the news today was that the welfare office in the United States lost, you know, $5 billion, so they were scammed out of it by poor people, $5 billion. Poor people took $5 billion 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 or trillions of dollars. You know, drop bombs on foreign countries, you know, do whatever you got to do. That's not a big deal. Give the Pentagon as much money as they want. That's fine. Let the Fed run away with 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 is scary. This is why economics interested me so much is 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, this person 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 taglines, 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. 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 glasses. Like I remember learning economics and I put them on and was 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. I don't know what a credit card was. I don't know how bank loans worked. None of that stuff. I learned none of that stuff in school. It's the same way with 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? 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. But I think it's intentional. I mean, think about the medical community today and how, you know, every time I go into the doc 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 how are you exercising? Or are you working that out? It's just a pill every single time. Now, who does that benefit? It benefits the 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 to sell. He's got a pill. He's got something from the corporations 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, you leverage your debt, get more debt to leverage that debt. I have a lot of family that's in banking and finance, a lot of investment bankers and brokers. And when I bring up things like cryptocurrencies, they're like, no, don't total waste your money, don't do that. And I look at them like, of course, you're going to say that first off 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 who were 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 on all these adjustable rates? And they're like, oh, that's not going to happen, man. Property keeps going up. And these same people now are all of them when bankrupt. All of them. And I'm guessing if you went into your doctor and explained to him all the things you guys do, they would probably say the same thing. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't do this. Oh, we talk about it all the time. It's the same way. Yeah, we talk about it. 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. Well, I'd love for you to share a little bit about your, we off air, we were talking about your membership website 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, you know, 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 stopped working and I sit at home and watch prices right and do whatever I want, you know, drive around in my RV. And I don't have to work anymore. And but the kids really aren't going to really help me because they're off doing their thing. And so I've got to take care of my kids. I 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 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. 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, right? Or they want the parents to give them money, right? 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 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, 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 shell that out. So you've got to think to yourself, you know, I 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. 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. 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. 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 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 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, 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, right? 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, 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 followthemoney.com forward slash debt. 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 debt. So if you're facing debt, you know that 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. 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 there's a survey, you find out they don't have two pennies rubbed 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. 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 in savings, not investment. Investments are when you take that money and you lock it away somewhere. No, this is savings. This is hard cash. This is in case shit hits the fan, right? Absolutely. And you're ready. Now, what could happen? Well, you know, you could lose your job. The market could tank. All kinds of things could happen. So many people back in 2008, when the market tanked, they lost their job. They had to cash out their 401K at the bottom, because they don't have any money. They didn't have their six months of liquidity. So I think 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. They say, you know, you can have a little bit of savings, but you know, always have a Visa on hand. 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, I'll just maybe spend it, put a little money in there. But usually they have a 401K in 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. Now what's wrong with 401Ks? What's wrong with IRAs? You know what's terrible about 401Ks and IRAs? They're government controlled. Do you own your 401K? No. You want to know how you know how I know that? Go try to use it for collateral. You cannot use something for collateral that you do not own. So if you go down to the bank and you say, hey, I have a 401K with $100,000 or $25,000, and they're going to 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. 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, right? 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 for it 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 and a 401K is doomed to failure. So we think you got to be more diversified than that. 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 of 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, whenever you're before you make too much money, you can stuff money in that 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. 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 got to be rich first here. Yeah, yeah. But you know, in many parts, Texas, Oklahoma, I mean, kind of the middle of America, guys who live out there, it's a great income stream. They can buy houses cheap, hold on to them, let the renter pay them off. And by the time they retire, they have five, six, seven houses that they can then sell or rent out, continue to rent. So I think real estate is a fantastic one. Online marketing. I discovered online marketing in the mid-1990s and I started making money online about 2000. Online marketing is powerful. It's very powerful. Anybody can do it. And having done it for 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 in our membership. 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. I want somebody maybe to 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. There's all kinds of stuff in our membership. So you can go to followthemoney.com forward slash subscriptions. And there they can see the different plans. And the membership fee is really minimal, right? Oh yeah. I mean, it's anywhere from 10 bucks a month to 100 bucks a month, all depending on what they're wanting to do. But the education, I think, is priceless because 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 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 it 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. Like, OK, I want to, and you should when you're young. If you're young and you're smart about it, you could end up with a really, really nice retirement and in 10 years makes a big difference. So you don't have to put a lot of money. 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 that of course you have people like yourself where people can get their information from. Jerry, are there any companies right now that you're fascinated by or that you follow? 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 new people. You can just literally sell books. I remember this is how I found out. I bought a Beetle CD at a garage sale back back in 2000, something early 2000, like maybe 2000, maybe the year 2000, 2001, whatever. And I bought this Beetle CD, I ripped it, and then I said, I'll put it up on Amazon. 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 The Handbook of Pest Control. Paid like a quarter or four, 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. Fiction books don't sell well on Amazon, but non-fiction books, especially real nichey 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 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 2008s, 2009s. That's where you look for those opportunities. Now, at the stratospheric level we are in 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 is going to happen with... I mean, I just saw this article on, you know, 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, I think we're going to see eliminated and replaced 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, you know, a skill, and I say most. I mean, literally most of the people that these people's jobs... 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. And 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. Get the government to give all these people money because we're going to automate 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 $2,000 or whatever they decide. I think we're going to 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 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 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 going to give. Something's going to give. And I think AI aggravates that problem. Unless it figures it out for us. Yeah, maybe they're smarter than us. Well, hey, man. Great time. Yeah. It's been great time on the show. I appreciate the conversation. Absolutely. Definitely. And your podcast? 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 themoney.com is where they can find everything. We got a podcast. We 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. 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. Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, Jerry. Absolutely. What a great pleasure. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy, and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes MAPS anabolic, 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 blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers, but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money back guaranteed, and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. 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