Shaun Newman Podcast - #757 - Alex Zoltan

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Alex Zoltan a.k.a “Amazing Zoltan” is a Canadian documentarian, political pundit, and citizen journalist. He engages with political commentary, often focusing on Canadian politics and issues, and shares his views through platforms like X where he has a significant following. We discuss COVID, mortgage rates, and the housing crisis. Cornerstone Forum ‘25 https://www.showpass.com/cornerstone25/ Clothing Link: ⁠⁠⁠https://snp-8.creator-spring.com/listing/the-mashup-collection⁠⁠ Text Shaun 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast E-transfer here: [e-mail] Silver Gold Bull Links: Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/ Email: [e-mail] Text Grahame: [phone]

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know, we're going to show you a little piece of each of the episodes that have come out during the week. And then there's a little paid portion if you're interested in becoming a paid subscriber. And we've been, uh, we've got a little project going on for the podcast in the background. Yes. And the only way to find out about that and see some pictures of it is to become a paid subscriber. So if that's something you're interested in, you want a little behind the scenes of what's happening with the podcast head over there. Cornerstone Forum, 2025 heading to Calgary. Alberta, that's right. We're going to be live at the

wind sport this year, May 10th. And we got some things on the go, which I'm hoping I can unveil, you know, in the coming weeks. Certainly, early bird tickets right now to the end of December. If you're going to buy a ticket, just go buy it right now. It ain't going to be

any cheaper. Do not do the Sean thing and wait until like a month out to the show and go, why did I wait this long? I could have just, I knew I was coming. I knew I was going to go to the show anyways. Right now it's the cheapest it's going to be. You're going to get a meal. Oh, actually two meal.

You're going to get lunch. You're going to get supper. You're going to get some entertainment. You're going to get all the speakers. Oh, all the speakers? Tom Longo, Alex Craner, Chuck Prada, Kailen, Ford, Matt, Erich, Chase, Barber, guest host, Chris Sims, Tom Bodrovics. I just confirmed that Marty up north and Yak-Stack and Sheila Gunn-Reed

and a whole bunch of other characters are going to be in attendance as well. So we're going to be working on that. So it is going to be a fun day with a lot of information. Early Bird tickets on until December. 31st then the prices are going up and the tables to sit with individual speakers are going up as well so if you're waiting for that i completely understand also trade show there's going to be a trade show portion that information is going to be coming out right away as well so that way if you're like oh i'm a business i want to get that you know want to get in on uh maybe a booth you can do that as well we're

going to have uh info on that right away go down the show notes and um i think it's showpass dot com backslash Cortersone 25, if memory serves me correct, I could be off on that. But regardless, down on the show notes, folks, down on the show notes. Or head over to, I just posted about it on social media too. So if you're, you know, so inclined, go look at the trailer from last year and see what it's all about. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you're listening or watching on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, Brumble, make sure to leave a review. There's a way to hit out on how many stars you think.

Right? You like it. You don't like it. I don't know. Leave a star. Can we leave, can we, if you're watching on X today, right? You're sitting here. Yeah, I am.

Oh, here we are. Hit the retweet button. Let's blow this thing up. Let's hit a few more eyes. All right. On to that tale of the tape. He's a documentarian, political pundit, citizen journalist. I'm talking about Alex Zoltan, aka the amazing Zoltan.

So buckle up. Here we go. Welcome to the Sean Numa podcast today. I'm joined by Alex Soltan. Sir, thanks for hopping on. Thanks for having me. Now, you have an interesting way of getting on this podcast.

Most people come on first and then they enter into a different realm. You come on to the BC Live election and then the, what was it, the SaaS collection or the US election? I forget now. US election. Right. And I'm like, so you've been on twice, but if people, there's been no solo cast. So I'm like, all right, we got to rectify this. And then you came up as a suggestion yesterday or the day before.

Either way, it doesn't matter. Thanks for answering the call. Now, I want to, I want to just go back. Who the heck is Alex? And just give me this story because I want to hear the origin story of how the heck you get to where you're, you're wandering around different parts of Seattle and everything else. Yeah. So I am just a normal Canadian, well, somewhat normal.

and I answered the call today because I believe we were discussing mortgages. So I graduated university in 2010. I did a history degree there and then I went into finance. And I did mortgages for the better part of the last decade. So I worked in the financial world for most of my adult life. And now I make a living, writing jokes about politicians sticking drugs up their butt. basically the long and short of it have you always been from uh british columbia then yep yep and forgive me like you know i go like okay go back to when you're a kid to to now how much of a transformation

have you seen in british columbia like has it been lots little has it always been that crazy uh do you mean in terms of the real estate or just generally i mean general i mean free drugs and and and carbon tax and all the stupidity. Well, I grew up in Surrey, so I had kind of a warped perception of what is normal. Because Surrey, like, it just hasn't really changed all that much, frankly, over the last 30 years. I think it's gotten nicer.

If you can believe that. I mean, yeah, Vancouver is, it really hasn't changed much at all. So you would say it hasn't changed. It's just been that warped forever. Yeah, yeah, basically. I mean, we had an open-air drug down. on the downtown east side my entire life growing up and now you just have more places where you

can do drugs indoors it's about really like the only change that's occurred in the last 20 years and do people find that stranger like ah it just is what it is yeah you just get used to it you just become desensitized towards it right and then you really don't even notice i mean seattle is very similar it's kind of like a sister city to vancouver has a lot of the same problems i think a lot of like you know the west coast is just very leftist because people who are running away from all their problems just run into the ocean and there's nowhere else left to go so they just kind of you went to like when we talked to you last you went to um a damn walk me through election night because i was like what what the heck is happening right now i was i told tuesday afterwards i'm like what was that yeah so i

yeah i went to seattle and i wanted to uh capture the election result reaction from the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, which famously had that big protest in 2020 in alignment with the Black Lives Matter movement. It kind of turned into like a big Occupy Wall Street type thing, and they occupied this rather large dog park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Unfortunately, the police precinct was then occupied by these protesters. The police actually abandoned the neighborhood, gave it up to the protesters, took a knee famously, and then three people were shot and killed because it was just completely lawless. Anyway, I skipped fast forward to 2024.

I went there thinking that there would be a similar meltdown of sorts in that neighborhood. So I went and hung out there for three days during the election. It actually turned out to be kind of a nothing burger. It was just a dog park. There really wasn't much exciting going on at all. So I went down to a bar just next to the Chaz, and I met some lobbyists for the Democrat Party, and they were going to the Democrat Convention Center for Washington State.

So they snuck me in and I got a wristband and I got to go watch some old people cry at the election results, which was kind of amusing. Did you ever go like, you know, during the 2020 area of this autonomous zone? Did you ever go down there during that time? No, we were all locked down, as you may recall, right, with COVID. And so it was really tough to travel at that time. And I was working in finance and we were quite busy at that time. So I would have loved to have seen it.

It was really quite chaotic. You know, well, I mean, and I just didn't understand it. I was like, this doesn't make any sense, right? Like, I don't know. From where I sit, I'm like, I can't imagine just giving up a place and being like, well, that's no more. Yeah, I mean, there was like riots going on in 12 cities at once. You could have 12 different monitors up and watch these riots occurring at the same time.

So it was really, really wild. And I guess in 2024, one thing I was really shocked by in Seattle was just that there was no, there was none of that. It was just a complete sense of apathy. Nobody cared about the election at all. So it was just totally contrasted with the 2020 election cycle. I found that very interesting. What do you mean nobody cared?

Like you walked around and talked to people and they were just kind of like, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, they were just like, oh, I got so many of my own personal problems. Like you wouldn't believe. really oh yeah people just just had no interest in the election at all i think maybe i don't know my theory was that because we already went through one election cycle but we already went through one four-year term with donald trump as president there was no longer that fear of the unknown right people knew exactly what they were getting into and kamala harris had sort of served as well

in her own capacity so it was kind of you know everybody i guess was of the assumption that the more things changed, the more they stay the same, and the election outcome didn't really matter too much to them. And Seattle is such a blue city, and Washington has such a blue state, that the outcome for the state is pretty much predetermined anywhere. They know that they're going to go Democrat. While you're walking around in city,

did you run into any Republicans? Did you run into like, or? Yeah. They were from Florida. But they were there. I mean, they were nice enough. All right. Well, let's rewind the clock, a clock, clock a little bit. You mentioned you went to school for degree in history.

You come out after that with some economics in there. You work in the financial industry. I'm curious. Like, this amazing Zoltan, and if people aren't on Twitter, then they have no idea what the heck I'm talking about. But this amazing Zoltan handle, and where does that begin? Like, if you're working in the financial industry, is it just kind of, you know, like you're not in it anymore.

So, like, at what point does this become like, I'm just having a little bit of fun? And how does that even start to where you're at now? Yeah, so I just started writing on there. I had just come back. I was in Greece for a few months. I had taken a sabbatical from the finance world. And I was in Greece and I was doing busking in Monaster, Aki Square, to make money. And that's where the amazing Zoltan nickname came from.

It's originally based off of the Amazing Zoltar, which is that fortune-telling. coin machine in Las Vegas. Okay. Yeah, I was busking in Monasteraki Square with a bunch of gypsies. And then I just started writing. When I came back to work in finance, it was just basically a side hobby. Then I started making documentaries and videos and eventually. Documentaries on what?

All sorts of things. The Coots guys, they did one on them. The Freedom Convoy. Done documentaries in the Air India Bomb. lots of different kind of random subjects. I would say the Coot's story was the one that really made me just go after this full time because it was such a bizarre story. And I got a call from the jail.

One of the accused called me, and that was pretty neat. And that kind of inspired just doing this full time to some extent. Well, you know, when you go back to the Coot's story in particular, let's talk about that for a few seconds. From your angle or from your lens, maybe not angle, what did you see and what, you know, as you unfolded the story, you know, what started to stick out to? Oh, just how completely removed the CBC's narrative was from reality. So they had published an article on February 14th, 2022. That was the day of the four arrests.

Well, there were 13 arrests originally that posited this theory that all of these people were members of this organization called Diagelon. I'd never heard of Diagelon. and then when the guys called me from jail, they said they had never heard of Diagon. And at that point, I knew, I had something that is just not right here. This doesn't add up. And, yeah,

it just kind of became a bit of an obsession for me. And where did that lead you to? I went to the courthouse. I went and I attended the trial. That was really interesting. Again, it was just completely detached from anything that you saw in the news. So I guess that kind of gave me a sense,

of obligation because the media, I'm really shocked at how much they lie. And I don't know if it's willful or if it's just incompetence. I don't know. But it was really, really shocking. When you were at the courthouse, did you see, like with CB, I feel like I've asked several different people, but, you know, was CBC, CTV, global, any of those there? No, there's one gentleman there named Bill Graveland. He works for the Canadian press.

And Gord always calls him. Gordon McGill calls him massive comorbidities Graveland. Because he's a little, he's not the healthiest fella. And honestly, like, court reporter is the worst job in the world. When I was looking at journalism jobs, when I first started doing this, I noticed that court reporter was always available. I couldn't figure out why. And then I went and did it for a couple of weeks, and I quickly figured it out.

It's because the wheels of justice grind slowly, right? So it's very, very frustrating. time consuming and there's constantly delays. They'll come up with any reason to delay court for two or three days. So if you're traveling, it's very expensive. Yeah, it's just, it's depressing. It's dangerous. Dangerous.

Yeah. Well, you're sitting in a courtroom. I mean, the Coots situation is a little different because these guys were hardly like hardened criminals. You have to imagine if you're dealing with drug traffickers or murderers. You're sitting in the courtroom. There's no anonymity in the courtroom. And if people know you're a reporter, people are burning a hole through you, right?

I mean, you're the person. You know, I interviewed a guy named Byron Christopher and showed up to Byron wherever he is. He always said he trusted criminals, but more than he trusted the media. And I feel like that has rang true. The more I interview people, the more that, like, I'm like, I get what he's meaning. He talked about doing documentaries with, was it Discovery? I think it was Discovery. Because he had, he has an amazing story out of Eminton.

right, journalist used to work for the CBC once upon a time and on and on it goes and very interesting individual. And he talked about going and interviewing different prisoners and how, you know, don't get me wrong. They're dangerous people, like a whole bunch of them, right? We said, still, they tell you the truth. And he goes, you get around media, even on my own documentary. And he's like, I don't know, I don't trust a single one of them. They're all ready to stab you in the back. I'm like, isn't that an interesting, you know, kind of perspective, I guess, from a guy who's been around all the different sides. He's worked for the CBC.

Now he's just an independently. He taught at, was it Grant McEwen? I have, forgive me, folks. I'm spacing on where he taught, right? And he's been in all these different sides. So I guess I just didn't, you know, court reporter to dangerous. I guess, you know, to me, I can do one plus two. Well, I mean, it's not certainly about as dangerous as being a,

a war correspondent, that's for sure. But it's not fun. It's not a great job by any means. I wouldn't recommend it as a career. So I can see how media becomes very jaded. Right. And the novelty of being in court wears off pretty quickly too. I can't imagine doing that for the better part of 20 or 30 years as someone like Bill

Gravelyn has. I'd be miserable as well. True. But you think, you know, like if I, I don't know. what your thoughts are on this. But like when I do, I think it was Holly Done. And I think Chris Sims has talked about it.

I think Trish Woods talked about it. I think Tom Korski's talked about it. So that's what, Blacklocks, that's obviously the Canadian taxpayers, Federation folks. And then Trish Wood was what, fifth estate at one point.

They've talked about how. Basically they're, they don't have enough people and they don't have enough senior people who've done the work to help, like kind of shepherd these new reporters through how to do things. So you go like, how are they getting coots so wrong?

Well, one, you go nefarious, right? They want to get it wrong because they're seeding a story. And two, you've already pointed out, you only have the one guy there and nobody else. So that's who you're getting the story from. And you can understand how like, well, that's going to paint one picture. And that's how they could probably get it so wrong, right? You know, it was interesting. When we were watching the Fifth Estate documentary conspiracy and Coots that they just put out,

there was a few times where they would show evidence from the trial, and they would do kind of these close zoom-in shots of the evidence, you know, spin around it or whatever. And it occurred to us watching that. We thought, oh, well, there must have been someone else other than Gravelyne there, because, you know, Gravelyn wouldn't take this type of, he's not a cameraman or anything like that. And so there were, I guess there were people there.

They just didn't make themselves known. I probably wouldn't have either if I were a CBC journalist at the Coots trial. I wouldn't exactly be, you know, waving that from a flag either. So, yeah, I mean, they got so far removed from what actually occurred that it wasn't even like not having a grip on reality. It's like floating in outer space. Like, it's just completely living in an alternative universe. Watching that CBC documentary, it felt like living in like a David Bowie.

Sorry, I called it a hallucinogenic fever dream. it's just completely bizarre. So I don't think that there's, typically I ascribed by the theory that don't attribute incompetence or malice where incompetence will suffice. Yeah. But you think this one added everything in. It has to be. It has to be.

It has to be malicious. There was certainly no attempt to change the narrative that they presented on February 14th, 22. I mean, we're virtually three years removed from that. Yeah. And they made no effort to, to tell the truth at all. It's really, really shocking.

Well, they're all complicit in it, aren't they not? Like, seeding the story, not doing any journalistic, anything. I mean, that goes back before the Coots boys get arrested. That goes back to COVID itself. But I mean, certainly the convoy. Like, I mean, all these things, I'm like, only, I used to say, I'll still say, I guess. You know, I got to ride in the convoy. So there I am filming.

I'm with Pretty Boy. I'm riding, I'm like, bawling my eyes out. And he's saying, you don't, you know, I'm trying to be like, he's like, you don't hide that shit. I got a young kid. Forgive me, pretty boy. I forget, were you 25, 24? It doesn't matter.

And, you know, here I am. I'm just leaking tears because, I mean, it's the most beautiful thing that, you know, minus getting married and my children, they're probably ever seen. Like, it's just insane. I mean, you take video of that. And CBC, you know, their ratings could have went through the roof. They weren't there. And they're probably, you know, like when I watch Pierre Poliev talk, you know, keep his, his, uh, conservatives in line.

I'm like, I'm sure it came from top down. I'm waiting to hear the memo unless Alex can tell me different. I haven't heard of like the head of CBC had a memo go out saying nobody show up to this. Um, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Uh, because like after like two days of it, you could see the fever pitch. You could go on any social media and just see it everywhere. you know, like, maybe we should just go film it. Just see what it is, right?

I mean, you could have rode in the convoy for like two straight days live streamed it and had just like millions of people watching. It would have been insane. But they didn't do that. So like at some point, they're kind of complicit in the situation they're at to where I can almost see that they don't want to report on it. Right? Because people are jumping ship all the time from the CBC and others, for that matter.

Very true. And like, you know, all the old guard of the CBC that I've talked to, you mentioned Trishwood. Terry Maluski would be another one. They're amazing. I think that they had a, they had a full suite of really, really intelligent, sophisticated people at one time. I don't know if it was a lack of succession plan, as you've noted, right? Maybe they just didn't mentor enough young people. I wonder, too, if these younger people who would have been in charge of the coverage during the convoy and still are, I wonder if they may be like a little bit ideologically possessed. We know that there's some issues going on at the university level.

So I also wonder if maybe they had some antisocial personality problems related to the lockdowns, right? That's a very pivotal time in your development in your mid-20s, right, to be left inside for three years. So there's a whole bunch of reasons and theories I have for why the CBC has become the provd-like hellscape that it is. Is it possible, too? We could just add in. They're getting funded by the government. and that's kept it on life support, right? Because, like, if my, if my viewership goes to where it's at, I don't have a job.

Yeah. I'm just like, I'm just, like, nobody's, nobody's supporting this. It's done. I am back in the oil patch tomorrow and I got to go find a new job. But, you know, like, they're finding ways to, you know, like, is everything the CBC does terrible? I can just imagine two sitting beside me. He's going to say, yes. And I'm going to say, there's probably a couple of things.

things that are probably pretty decent. It probably is. I don't know of them. But I'm sure there are a couple. That's nice of you to extend the benefit of the debt. I'm going to extend the benefit a little bit. But like overall, if they didn't have the life support funding them, they'd be gone. Like I don't, like I was listening to Chris Sims was testifying this week and just listen to her talk and all the, you know, like it's like one point some percent.

And at times it's less than a percentage of the. population is watching at any given, I'm like, this is terrible. The year is six billion dollars. Give me and May's Zolt in a billion dollars and see what we bring up for you. I tell you what, that would be some entertaining stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at how far programs like yours have gone with, with very little funding whatsoever, right?

I mean, this is the crazy thing about new media is that the bar to entry is quite, it's quite accessible for anybody who wants to do it. it. And so we really don't need the CBC at all anymore, frankly. I think that it's just kind of a relic of the money I've spent, Alex, on advertising. Like, actually, I don't know, like, I don't know, traditional advertising, a billboard. I don't know, even spending money on social media, right, to like get your, uh, I, and this is, I'm not, I'm proud of this and also like, I probably should spend a bit of money advertising. But like, I don't know. Maybe. $150 over the course of five plus years.

This has been all shared by people. People are amazing who listen to the show, right? And I mean, obviously social media makes it easier to do that. But like, you see how much money the CBC spends on advertising. They still can't garner anyone to go watch it. I think the viewership rate for CBC prime time is something like 1% of all Canadians. So it's, it's exceptionally low. Now, mind you, I used to love the CBC.

I'm from Vancouver, so I'm pretty left. I love the CBC. You loved the CBC at one point? I used to, as kids, we used to watch Sunday night, the Sunday night movie. I forget how it, what the heck they called that. I remember just, and being annoyed when it was a crappy movie and turning it off and going to something else.

But I remember Sunday nights that, and everybody, I don't know, everybody in our area, Saturday nights. You tuned in Don Cherry and Rahm McLean every Saturday. and Sunday night they had the movie and you know like I've interviewed they had a winning formula like it was

you could have just ran with that forever and they'd probably be successful they screwed that up somehow well they lost they lost hockey hockey and Canada right and that was a huge blow like I don't think I think I understood

but I don't you know truthfully can anyone imagine how huge of a blow that was and you know like things like Netflix came along and nobody watches a movie on traditional cable anymore. Like when was the last time you sat down, unless you're in a hotel room maybe.

Yeah. And even then, the accessibility of Netflix and everything now, I just don't see it. And so, you know, they're trying to compete with the gym app with Netflix and Prime and all the seasons.

But was the last time you listened to a program on the radio? Uh, I don't, I don't, I don't know if I ever have from start to finish. You know, but if I go back, Judy Reeves, episode 110, which, you know, still is one of these surreal moments. I got to interview Judy Reeves.

She survived the perfect storm. So the perfect storm was 1992, I think, than anyone. Anyways, they made a movie about it. She was one of the ladies who got trapped on a Chinese fishing vessel that couldn't steer in 100-foot waves, thought she's going to die. And who was she talking to on the radio or on the phone and the satellite phone? CBC was interviewing her as it was going on. And so for her, the CBC has been, I would say,

immortalized as like it can never do any wrong. But her story is like, that's what the CBC was. They were front lines interviewing people on it. If you've watched any of their election coverage, you're just like, I watch it for the laugh. I don't watch it to, right? They're doing election coverage on Trump. And it's just like,

these are all people I could care less to ever listen to. It became more of a meme the next day of how silly they are more than this is credible news talk. Well, and it's strange. Like I got into a little spab on X with Evan Dyer. He's a senior reporter at the CBC. So he accused me of being an disinformation agent for the Indian government. So I sent in a complaint to the obdisman. I said, well, you know, like you really shouldn't have your journalist defaming and libel.

people online from their official accounts, like just a heads up. I don't want to see the guy get in trouble or anything. I don't really care. Just a retraction would be nice. They told me that they would get back to me in 20 business days. So in finance, in the private sector, the typical response time for a complaint is 72 hours maximum. I calculated it out 20 business days is 840 hours. Why do they need 840 hours to get back to a one paragraph complaint?

I mean, this is just ridiculous levels of inefficiency, and I think that that's probably endemic of the entire organization. You think it gets defunded in less than a year? I don't know. I mean, the nice thing about the CBC, and I can't believe that I'm going to extend an olive branch here, is somebody had pointed out to me, Buck, I think he's been on your show as well. So I would did some access to information requests,

on the Coots documentary, that'll be another 30 business days, but they are gathering the documents for me, which I appreciate. You can only do that with a public broadcaster. You can't do that with a CTV or a global news or any of these private organizations. So I would be fine if the CBC had its budget slashed and found a way to be more efficient, but also found a way to continue operations. Because I think there is still some value to a public broadcaster, maybe just a more bare-bones version.

I certainly don't think it needs to be upwards of a billion dollars. I haven't completely abandoned the concept of a state broadcaster yet. I'm getting there. I've, me and I've hashed this idea out with Tews multiple times. If I had, how much money would it cost to buy the CBC once it's like throwing to the wolves? And then I'm like, what would the CBC look like if Sean and Tews were at the helm of it? And what can we do with that? I'm like, I feel like, make something, right?

I just, to me, I'm like, that makes, I'm like, I'm just, I'm like, I'm not. I don't know. It's like when they said Musk, hey, you want to buy, what was it, CNBC or MSNBC, I think it was? MSNBC, yeah, one of those. Yeah. What would that look like? That would be interesting. Yeah, I mean, like Chorus Entertainment, which I think they run global.

They're the parent company for global, if I'm not mistaken. Their entire market cap, you could buy the whole company for like the cost of a few houses in Vancouver right now. Like, I'm not even exaggerating. I think their market cap is like 20 million or something like that. That's four houses. It's two duplexes in Vancouver. I'm glad you slid in the housing. This is where it started, folks.

I put out on Twitter, I said, who should I talk to about the housing market in Canada? And a whole bunch of suggestions came in. And your name came out. Of course. I should have had amazing Zoltan on, you know, like two months ago. That's probably not a subject you would have guessed that I knew anything. I 100% one of them. I know.

Honestly, I was, I was, when Ron Butler came across my feed multiple times I'm like oh yeah I've been following Ron and and Tuesday tried to get him on I think the mashup at one point I'm like yeah sure and so like there's some names there but it's cool when you throw that out on Twitter like on X there was a whole bunch of names I'd never heard of and yours and Ron were the two I'm like oh yeah all right sure so like when you look at the housing

market with your background what is it you think people don't understand There's a few different things. I don't know if it's exclusive to the housing market or if this is true of investments generally, but people have a tendency to look at price fluctuations in a very short time span and then base their assumptions off of that. And it's typically whatever time span is convenient for that person's ego. So I'll give you an example. People will look at somebody who bought a house in 2021 in Metro Vancouver.

Let's say they spent a million dollars. and now the house is worth 900,000. And they'll say, oh, look at that idiot. You know, they've already lost 10% of the value of the house, you know, because they got it in 2021. But if you, that's just a very selective perspective on the housing market. If you had looked at that person purchasing at home at any other point in the last 70, 80, well, really at the last century, they would have come out as a winner.

Right. So the housing market, I find it's like the opposite of the casino. the casino, like, nobody ever tells you about their losses. And in the housing market, I find that homeowners are almost feel a little guilty about all of the equity that they've accumulated due to the high housing prices. And they just won't tell you about their gains. So, yeah, you just have like a lot of copium, I guess, people call it, in the finance world. For people that don't own.

For people that do own, I think it's actually like a little bit almost of guilt there. Just on the rapid increase. When you see people come out as a winner in the last seven years, what do you mean? I hear, like, you're talking how much they've made off their house? Or what do you mean by that? Because I go like, you know, a house being worth a million dollars, isn't that insane? Well, I mean, if you bought the house for $100,000 and now it's a million dollars, it's a $10 million. Yeah, that's a winner.

Yeah. Okay, fair. But does that mean anything to most people? Not really. So there's this also this myth out there. that homeowners want the value of their home to continue going up. And I actually don't find that that's the case at all. I mean, the only thing for most people, if the value of your house goes up,

well, it doesn't really matter. You're not selling it tomorrow. So it just means your property tax goes up. Most people would be very, very comfortable if the value of their home went down. The only people I find that really care a lot about the value of the home at any given time are people that are highly leveraged. People that are flipping homes. They are planning on selling the next day.

There are people who are on heaven's door, right? Like they're leaving it as an asset legacy to their kids. That's not a ton of people, right? Everybody else doesn't really care much at all about the value of their home because you can't use that equity like an ATM as much as people think you can. Do you think, okay, so if I go back, we're in 2024. We're about to hit 2025. I think we still have, you know, every year, forgive me, Alex will be able to be able to,

to explain this way better than I ever will folks. But, you know, in Canada, for the most part, we have a lot of people on variable. And then we have people that do three-year fixed, five-year fixed, and the very rare 10-year fixed. And so I remember talking to lots of different people through the course of the last, probably year, right? Because when you start to do the math, you go,

did I lose you for a second? No, no, I'm here. Oh, okay, sorry. 2019 in between you know so if you sign up for five year you your your your mortgage came back up here in 2024 and and on and on it goes and up until i think it's 2021 um late 2021 maybe early 2020 too you could have got like a smoking deal on interest rate at what 1.49 9 i think was the lowest i saw but give or take and then it jumped up to 5% and you know in people's houses worth a lot and and on and on. And I remember thinking, and then I've had different people come on talking about, like,

well, this is getting it really bad in 2024, 2025, 2026, because all these people are going to be coming up for renewal if they weren't already on variable rate. Would you agree with that?

And do you think there is an issue coming? Not really, no. So if you got a mortgage in 2019, you're pretty much renewing at the rate, you got the original mortgage at, which would be about three and a half to four percent. you've also paid down the principal for the last five years if you're on a five-year fixed term. So the payment shock is negligible.

The reason that I recommend that most young people buy homes is because I don't know where I got this phrase from. I must have read it somewhere, but I call it the scissor effect. So the way that the scissor effect works is as you're paying down the principal, the value of the home theoretically will go up over time. So I always say like the rent that you pay when you own a home is the interest that you pay on your mortgage. All of the principal is really just a savings account that you get back later. And over time, you know, your payment goes down through ownership. That never occurs with rent. Rent always goes up.

It's just a product of inflation. So, no, I'm not particularly concerned at all. One thing that really shocked me during the variable rate crush was how resilient people. people were. People just picked up their bootstraps and just worked more hours or they spent less. And the residential mortgage default rate in Canada is barely more than zero. I believe it's 0.14% right now. So Canadians will do pretty much anything to stay in their homes. And then this is a little trade secret that the bank probably doesn't want me to tell people. But the bank will also do just about anything to keep a borrower in their home. And the reason for that is not because the bank is particularly nice, the reason is that the cost of foreclosure is very high.

So if an individual can't make payments, the bank will let them defer. Almost endlessly, I've seen in certain circumstances, you know, if somebody's going through a health problem and they can't get to work or, you know, they're struck by a sudden disability and their income is disrupted, the bank is very, very generous with just rolling over interest or reducing payments. Again, they don't really want you to know this. But the bank is a lot more forgiving than a landlord. Could you imagine a landlord just saying, oh, you know, just don't pay me rent for three months? Like, that's never going to happen. So, yeah, I mean, there's always risk to owning a home. But I think that it's a lot more stable and a lot less risky to be a homeowner than to be a renter generally.

I always thought, well, I guess what's made up my mindset over the last little bit has been it's a small, cuts. So, you know, like if all of a sudden you didn't catch, you know, the 2019 to now, I find that interesting that it's roughly in, from where you're sitting, roughly the same to lock back in for five years. That's, that's what I heard out of that, correct? Yeah, give or take. I mean, there's maybe a little variable here or there. You also don't re-qualify at renewal, right? So the bank will just renew you. You don't, it doesn't matter what your income is. True. I just, you know, in my brain, if you're, Payment goes up by, you know, $200, $300,000, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, like, that's money that you get to do things with. And now it's going into a payment that, you know, it's kind of like paying off for my, for my wife and I. She had student loans coming out of college, getting to pay those off. Now you're not sending all this money off to Never Neverland and never seeing any return from it, right? Like it's just gone. It's just boom. And then as soon as that's done, now you just have a little breathing room, you know. And when you talk about resiliency, I find that very interesting because I think most Canadians are pretty resilient.

But as times get tougher and your money buys less stuff, you know, like, I don't know. I guess I just see issues there. But I find it interesting when, you know, here's Alex going, I don't see an interest or any issues. No, not at all. And actually, like, you know, if we're talking about hyperinflation and your money buying less stuff, another little trade secret that bankers know that they maybe don't want the rest of the public to know is that your greatest hedge against hyperinflation is debt so there's a famous story from the 1930s in well in 1920s in weimar germany where a fella took out a mortgage anticipating hyperinflation

and 10 years later he sold a marble and the cash was worth so little that the value of the marble was enough to pay off his mortgage with the bank so this is what a lot of of really, really financially savvy people did in 2020 when they saw the money printing machine working on overdrive as they just took out a whole bunch of debt because the debt also becomes worthless along with the dollar. So $100,000 feels like, you know, $50,000 did five years ago. Well, that's true if you got $100,000 loan as much as it is if you had $100,000 buried under your mattress. Tell me the story of Wymer again with the guy who buys a house. Say that again. Yeah, so this is just like an illustration that people use.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. So he, the story goes that somebody bought a home, let's say for the sake of simple math, that he bought it for $100,000 and whatever the currency was at that time, $100,000 would have been, let's say, five years worth of salary. So, so you made $20,000 a year. But the currency hyperinflated. So all of a sudden, you know, you weren't making $20,000 a year. You're making $200,000 a year, which felt like $20,000.

So that means that if you were to sell just a small little thing like a marble, it may now carry a dollar value that's equal to the debt that you use to purchase the home. So you just pay off the mortgage now by selling a marble. And this is a lot of people did in 2020. It's one of the reasons that the housing market went as crazy as it did because these financially savvy people were like, well, I'm just going to buy four homes. You know, because I'll take out a million dollars in mortgage. A million dollars isn't going to feel like that much in 10 years. and they were pretty right about that, I think. That's an interesting thought.

I don't know if I've ever had it framed that way before. Yeah, that's takeout debt when you're in a hyperinflationary environment is one of the smartest things that you can do. It's very counterintuitive, though. Well, I hear, you know, from where I sit, farmers and, well, small business owners, I guess. They always talk about get rid of debt. Yeah, yeah, we also have a very, Americanized view of the world in Canada.

So like, you know, a lot of people think about like the big short and the great recession in 2008. But our banking regimes could not be more different. Canadian banking systems are notoriously stringent and strict when it comes to lending. It doesn't mean that we don't have fraud and we don't have our own problems. But yeah, Canadian banks, it's very hard to lend money to people, actually. that was kind of the frustration that I've got into as interest rates went up but that's a whole other story we can get into well I I think we should I'm like I'm like wait a second okay now I'm like okay Alex is saying things folks and I'm like eh right because I like I like movies I like the big

short that made sense great movie like that's that's really interesting but you're saying Canada can be way different than what went on even in that movie because i assume you brought that movie up in particular for a reason yeah like it couldn't be more different so in 2020 23 that was when interest rates kind of skyrocketed they went up i think about 480% over a very short amount of time and you know having been a product of that time period myself i'm a millennial i guess i was in college during 2008 the memory is still pretty fresh and working at the bank i was really expecting people to come in with the keys to the house and just like drop them off on my desk because the value is going down, the mortgage was higher than the property value.

You know, they were underwater effectively. But what I realized is that Canada is so different because we have such a housing shortage that it costs more to rent than it does to own. So nobody is going to come and drop off the keys. Who's going to opt to rent for $2,500 a month when they could own for $1,600 a month? No one. The value of the house is secondary. to the payment. People ultimately think about cash flow before they think about their net worth

statement. So people didn't really particularly care about the value of the house at all. So yeah, it's very different than 2008. And this is, forgive me, this is only going to get worse. I'm right in this thinking that our housing shortage is only getting worse, not better. Yes, so the statistic is that we build one house per 1.4. We used to build one house per 1.4 people. now we build one house for every five people in Canada. So when you think about that, housing evaluation, like they're going up. Oh yeah, absolutely.

It's just a law of supply and demand. Right. And it's mostly a supply problem, not a demand problem. And that's because developers right now, it's very, very hard to extend credit to developers. And so there's just so much risk for that. developer that just people aren't interested in building homes and I don't blame them I

think that that's a pretty bad business in Canada right now just because you've got so much bureaucracy and red tape and taxes and just it's a nightmare commercial development right now in Canada why did you quit why did you quit that world like I I I'm sitting here and I'm finding Alex is pointing something out interesting You sound like you're a very astute. You know, you probably came down. What year did you graduate from college? I left in 2015, I want to say.

So I assume a few years younger than me. Yeah, yeah. But I graduate 2011. That's, you know, I'm doing, once again, simple math and going, I'm probably a smidge older than you, but not by much. Regardless, you go into it, and you have, similar things that my brainwave goes on and then you go but that didn't happen actually why would you go rent a place for 2500 that makes complete sense and oh wait the bank isn't just oh you miss one

payment you're out on your ass like that isn't what they're going to do and it's funny in 2000 uh sorry in 1980s here i interviewed a whole whole ton of people that went through the 80s and you know 20% or 18% interest rates and all these different things and these stories we get told about and they talked about Peter Kulak, I think it was his name. People have to go back and check me on this in the archive interviews. I interviewed once again, I got hired by the city of Lloyd to interview kind of the pillars of the community and they talked about how tough the 80s were. And then a banker came and found ways for them to keep their homes and their businesses

and on and on. And what you're talking about kind of lends to that thought process. But I guess going back to where I was leading is, so why did you leave? Yeah, like, why, why not stay in that industry if you're, you know, you, oh, that isn't what it's happening? And why get out of there? I just felt cooped up. I couldn't be in an office for much longer.

I mean, like, I think it would be a great job if I was in maybe my late 40s or my 50s, because at that point my legs will get sore. But I actually thought about this when I was in Seattle. I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off. And it was quite exhausting. And, you know, I'm getting into my mid-30s and late 30s now. And I've occurred to me as like, well, I'm glad that I did this now. Because if I'd waited like five or ten more years, I really don't think that my body could do this.

So I'll probably go back to banking, you know, once I get tired of running around all day. But really, it's just that simple. I just didn't like being cooped up in an office all day. I just didn't want to do that for the rest of my youth or what's barely left of it. I don't know. You're late. How old are you? I'm 35.

Yeah, 35. You get, I don't know, I used to, I apologize for this, so I'm going to apologize again. I used to say 60 was old. And then I had a whole bunch of listeners say 60 is an old. I feel fantastic. I'm like, okay, I'm going to stop putting a number on youth and how I feel. Certainly there's different points that different men have talked about where your body starts to, you know, like you start to have a few different issues. But there's people that are pretty sharp at 60s.

You know, you go right. You're right. But I mean, you start to feel it like every day. You just get a little bit old. I know I'm 35 like that. It's sounding like talking like I'm 80. But it's just, it's nice when you're young to be able to run around an adventure. I don't think that that's going to be as fun when I'm in my 50s as it is now.

Maybe I'm wrong. What do you, you know, like, okay. So my brain, I see the housing and I just, I was looking at it. I find your perspective very interesting. When you look at Canada as a whole, what do you think the biggest issues then we're going to face are going to be, you know, in the next, is it the next, I don't know, next five years? 2025 to 2030. What do you think is going to be coming down the pipe? Oh, I don't.

Can you hear me? Okay. I think my videos frozen for some reason. Your video is frozen, but I can hear you just fine. Perfect. So I don't know. I mean, I think that it's very, very predictable in the sense that the housing market will almost certainly continue. you to go up. I think that that's inevitable just based off of supply and demand, as we were

discussing earlier. We're just not building enough houses per person. So that's inevitable. Yeah, there's this great saying in finance from Templeton who said, the biggest mistake you can make in finance is thinking this time it's going to be different. It's never different. History just always repeats itself. So sorry, I know that's not a very exciting answer, but I assume that the more things change, the more they still, they'll stay the same. I would agree. I would say you can look into history then and see what's coming next, right? I guess that's why I go, like, I agree with it. The more you talk about it and you go, we were at one house for every 1.4 and now we're at 1 to every 5. And from the conversations I've had, that number isn't going to get better. It may get

worse, but even if it stays at one for every five, I think any homeowner listening is going, well, looks like I'm holding on to my house because it's going to be worth a lot more in a couple years than what it is even today, right? Like that number isn't going, it isn't going down, even if it just stayed the same. It's not going down. No, and most people don't own their home as an investment. And I don't recommend buying homes as an investment. I just recommend, I believe that homeownership is the central pillar of financial stability. I find it very sad that it's so difficult for young people to buy homes. But I'm also a little frustrated.

I got frustrated as a lender with people who, you know, in their mid-20s would say, well, I want a house with the yard. And I'd say, oh, do you have kids? I'd say, no. Oh, do you have a dog? No. Why do you need a house, like a four-bedroom house with a yard? I mean, you're a single person.

And they'd say, oh, I just want it. right and this sense of entitlement kind of bothered me that I found was very common and pervasive amongst millennials and gen zes like you're not entitled to purchase a home as your first property and then so I would tell them well you should do what I call it the property ladder that's what I call it or I call it the leapfrog method sometimes so you buy the worst place in the best location and then when you build up enough equity you sell that place and you move up And eventually, you can quite easily actually purchase a home with the yard. You just have to do it in three or four steps.

But young people want things fast and easy, and I guess that's not going to happen. That's interesting because that makes complete sense to me. Or I would just interject and say, or move to a place that has cheaper spots for, you know, like you want to live downtown Vancouver and have a yard. Have fun with that. Have fun with that, right? You're going to spend like $3 million. You want to move out to Lloyd Minster?

I bet you you could, tomorrow. You can have a house with the yard. Don. You can buy a house with the yard in the Fraser Canyon, which is a four-hour drive outside of Vancouver with a fairly modest salary. And people say, well, four hours. That's ridiculous. That would be eight hours of commute every day.

Well, that was Chilliwack and Abbotsford 30 years ago. And those properties are worth a million dollars now. So those people who purchased those four or five decades, decades ago, you know, they were taking on risk and they did well. So there's just just, yeah, this overwhelming sense of entitlement really bugs me. But, yeah, there's not much. What do you think of 25 to 30 years now? Used to be. Oh, yeah. Are you for that, against that? Oh, I'm totally for it. So this is another thing that the bank doesn't want you to know is that the only time that you're restricted on the amortization of your mortgage is at the time of purchasing the home.

Once you own the home, if you have sufficient equity, you can refinance into perpetuity. You can have a 150-year mortgage, practically speaking, if you want to. You could also have a 25-year mortgage that you pay off in five years. So most mortgages have something called a prepayment clause, and typically it's anywhere between 10 and 20%. So for the sake of simple math, let's say that you buy a house for 500 grand and you get a mortgage on it for 400 at 80% loan to value. The bank will let you pay off $80,000 in principle every year, which means that you could have the whole thing paid off, theoretically speaking, because very few people have that kind of money in their bank account in the first five-year term. Similarly, or actually alternatively, what you could do is you could at renewal time say, well, actually, I'd like to extend my amortization back out to 25 years or 30 years.

So now what effectively you've done is you've given yourself a 45-year mortgage. And I find there's two types of borrowers. There's the people who will pay down the principle as quickly and as aggressively as they can. It's the farmer types that you were talking about, the anti-debt people. And then there's the other group of people who will just roll over the equity and just they really don't mind the debt. And they'll basically pay it off forever. They don't have any intention of being mortgage-free whatsoever. So this idea that, you know, like amortization is set in stone is a myth.

That's not the case at all. People have a lot of freedom about how quickly or slowly they pay back to debt. I'm not sure if you speak French or not, if you're bilingual, but there's a great word in French for mortgage, and it's EPO tech, which is like, it just kind of cracks me up. Because it reminds me of like a hypothetical, right? Mortgages, the word mortgage in English, it kind of. from the Latin mort, which is to die. So it's like this thing that you hold on to forever in English. And anyway, it's just very interesting how these different linguistic cultures have different attitudes.

And what is the French word mean? Epotech. It just means mortgage. It's just a much nicer word. Epotech. It's like very cute. And so I don't know. I always found that interesting.

Like mortgage is a very ugly word in epotech. is a very happy word. So if you're sitting there, homeowner, are you, because like, why the heck would you want to do it over 80 years? That doesn't, why would you never want to pay off your mortgage? That doesn't, that doesn't compute on my side, I guess. I can understand taking out, I need to do it over 30 years. I can understand pushing it out a little bit, but like, why would you never pay off your, why would you ever pay them in town? Well, that would just be a lack of discipline, right?

Or somebody just doesn't, actually, there's a few examples. A lot of single people with no kids, right? I mean, it's not an asset legacy that you're going to be leaving to anyone. So ultimately, if you keep extending out the amortization, all it does is it keeps your payment low. I mean, you are giving more money to the bank, but what do you care? I mean, if you die and the house has no equity left to it, it doesn't matter, you're not leaving it to anybody, right? There's no asset legacy. So that would be one example.

Another example would be people who are leveraging. So they're just taking out new debt so that they can invest in other things. you know, whether that be stocks or bonds or mutual funds or what have you. So there's a few different circumstances. People might extend the amortization or extend the debt on their mortgage so that they can help their kids get their own mortgage. They can help them with the down payment on another property. There's an endless number of scenarios in which somebody would take on more debt or extend their amortization. And then, of course, you just have the people who lack discipline and just overspend.

Yeah, I'm like, I don't want a mortgage. I would like to have that money come back into my account, too, so I can go do things with it, you know? Like, I mean, I am doing something with it. I get that. But it's like, if I could, I can't. If I could, I'd probably pay it off tomorrow.

I can't. So it's like, you know, it's like, if I had 80 grand just chilling and I could do that over, I'm like, I probably would. Now, in fairness, if I had 80 grand just chilling there, I'd probably be doing a lot of other things as well. So, you know, in fairness, like, that's probably not the right way to frame that on my side of things, but like, I just don't understand if I could pay it off in 17, I might, but that takes discipline too, right? To take extra bits of money to put to your mortgage.

Yeah, I mean, I really have a big proponent of goal-based financial planning. So it ultimately depends on what your goal is. If your goal is, I want to retire at X number of years, then maybe it does make sense to pay it down the debt. Maybe it doesn't, because there's a opportunity cost to everything. So if you have 80 grand and you use it to pay down your mortgage at 1.5%, well, the opportunity cost is what you could have done with that money alternatively. So if you had taken that 80 grand and you had put it into your TFSA and you had invested in, let's just say, the S&P 500 and got a compound return of 10% year over year for seven years, you would have come out much, much further ahead than paying down the mortgage. So people tend to

get tunnel vision when it comes to death and they they kind of miss the bigger picture sometimes so are you like i'm curious now like are you guy that's for bitcoin gold uh those type of things are you like yeah whatever not really no because they're they're we call speculative nonproductive assets. So like, you're just dealing with sentiment. They've been great investments for people, and I'm super happy for anybody that made money on them, but it's not genuinely my thing. I have invested, and I've done quite well on Nvidia, which is a bit of a Bitcoin play. Peter Lynch was the manager of the Magellan Fund for Fidelity for 25 years, and he was probably the top performing fund manager in the world. He came up with this idea called the Pickax

Theory. So the Pickax Theory, the principle there, is that in the 1900s, in the end of the 19th century, in the turn of the 20th century, there was the gold rush, and everybody was mining for gold, and very few people actually struck gold. But the people who sold the pickaxes, the blue jeans, and the shovels always made money. So I think that investors would be wise to take a similar approach to Bitcoin. Rather than buying the Bitcoin and mining for the gold,

just buy the pickaxe, which would be the GPU companies that you need to mine the Bitcoin. So it would be NVIDIA and. MD, Intel, companies like that. Because it's theoretically an endless number of alt coins as well. So how do you know, how do you pick the right coin? I mean, I actually don't really know much about cryptocurrency at all. I just know that you need GPs to make it. So I think that that's a pretty wise investment.

If I were to not officially financial advice, but if somebody is looking for a stock tip, that would be it. Forgive me, Bitcoiners, I'm going to blow this next line real fast, but I'm going to hopefully get the right sentiment across. Bitcoiners say fix the money supply and you fix, I can't remember if they say the world or if they fix like essentially war or government because, you know, it isn't an endless money supply anymore. It isn't that you can go print whenever you want to. I'm curious your thoughts on that. Yeah, I don't buy that at all because if you have a finite money supply, eventually you'd run into deflationary problems. I don't know. I don't know a ton about it.

central banking is really, really effective in its simplicity. So central banking is so effective, in fact, at being able to manipulate economies for better, ideally, but sometimes worse, that even North Korea has a central bank. I mean, every country on earth has a central bank. It's a very simple system, but it does work to some extent. You can't make the perfect, the enemy of the good. You're saying, like, I'm chuckling on this side, right? Because, I mean, folks, for how long have we heard central banks are evil?

And they probably are. But in fairness, how long have we heard that? I got Zoltad saying, I mean, she even wanted North Korea. Yeah, that's probably not a great example. I don't know. I wonder what the central bank is like in North Korea. But they do have one. And people, I, oh, gosh, I hesitate to say this because I don't want to come off as being

condescending or anything. But people, quite. rightly question whether the central banking system is effective in controlling human behavior. And when you work at a bank and you see it from a top-down perspective, you realize that those tiny little incremental changes and interest rates radically change human behavior. So that's a very effective thing if you're looking to control the population. I can see why people would find that creepy. Well, in a pretty wild experience, I would think, sitting there watching it happen in front of your eyes.

Yes? Yeah, very strange. So walk me through this because I find that fascinating. If incremental change up, right, you're making things, I don't know, interest rates higher. What did you, like, what happens? What is human tendency? People stop borrowing money, essentially, right? Or they reduce how much they borrow because it's just more expensive to borrow.

People make decisions at the margin, right? So it's like when you go to the grocery store, you typically, if you're anybody like me, I think most people are like this, you'll look for things that are on sale. Right. So when debt is cheap, people will flock to the bank to purchase homes, purchase vehicles, make other types of investments, start their own business with some debt. And then when interest rates go up, you just see people kind of hibernate and kind of wait for the storm to end. it's very, very interesting seeing how, yeah, I think they call like mass formation psychosis or whatever.

That's what they were talking about with COVID. And something kind of similar happens with interest rates, people's behavior changes. And people have very much flock behavior. So, I mean, obviously I can assume the same, which, or I mean, the opposite, but the same. When interest rates go down, all of a sudden people start borne money like crazy. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Especially people that already have it.

right because it's obviously easier to get credit if you have money to pay it back and that's a very wise thing for people to do i think in the hyperinflationary environment now zoltan hasn't listened to martin armstrong okay folks so like you've you've come from Armstrong economics in the states to now zoltan here and i'm just i'm like this is really interesting i can just i almost want to go do it myself maybe i will go listen to armstrong and then come listen to zoltan because I'm like, this is interesting. So he talks about default. Like governments are going to start defaulting on their debt.

And what are your thoughts on that? He's talking mainly about Europe to begin with, but you know that it's going to spread. And depression hitting. Yeah, I mean, like there are definitely some places that I probably wouldn't be buying government bonds in. You know, Greece comes to mind. I spent some time there. So I can tell you that it's interesting place. It's beautiful that recommend people go there.

But for the most part, like government debt is about, it's so low risk that you almost get no return on owning it. I mean, that's been the case for Canadian government bonds for a very long time. So, no, I'm not particularly concerned about that either. I think that the biggest, there was a saying that I used to use in finance all the time, which is 99% of the things you worry about never happen. and the 1% of the things you ought to have worried about never cross your mind until it's just too late. So what is the 1% of things I'm not worried about

that haven't crossed my mind until it's too late? What is that right now? That's the Black Swan events that nobody can predict, that nobody sees coming. COVID, 9-11. I would say, well, okay, forgive me. I've done this way too long now, 7507 episodes i think today's 7757 um i think people saw a covid coming now 99% of us probably 99.9% of us

did not so if that's what you mean fair enough but i think people saw it coming and i think people see different events coming um even even the 9-11 i think people saw that coming like i'm changing my whole brain around this xoltan i'm i'm like yeah people have i mean high Hindsight is 2020. People have a selective memory about these things. I mean, I'm humble enough to admit that I definitely did not see COVID coming. No, no, no. Whoa, I didn't see COVID coming either.

Let's be very clear. I was buying Carnival Cruise Line stocks in February of 2020, thinking, oh, this will just blow over. That was the worst investment I ever made. It's funny. It's funny when you say that, though, when COVID first hit on, and everybody locked down, I put a bunch of money for the first time ever into the stock market.

Like, what's going to come back up? And I contemplated Carnival. I did. I was like, well, people are going to go on cruises, right? Like, this is a grand. And I can't remember why I didn't choose it. I really can't remember. I chose a couple other things, mainly oil.

That would have been a great investment at that time. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. Anyways, I just go back to it and I go, I've talked to way too many people that saw a COVID coming. I mean, not the way it all played out. I'll agree there, but like, I think people saw COVID coming long before.

Now, how many? I'll give you that. I don't know how many of that is true. I certainly didn't. I had to take until 2021 to start talking to people to like, if anything, I was a complete nut or moron, folks. And at times, I still am. Well, I mean, like, nobody can predict what's going to happen

with human behavior. was very unpredictable. So I was in Vegas when the whole thing started, the COVID thing. I remember I was on the elevator with this fellow. He was in a wheelchair. And he was an old guy at the casino. And we were talking about the stock market. It was in March of 2020 during the breakout of COVID.

And I said, I think this is all going to blow over in a few weeks. So I'm going to invest in carnival cruise lines and casinos and whatever. And he says, oh, you're an idiot. He goes, they're going to shut down the whole world. Because you should invest in Zoom and Microsoft and Netflix. I should have listened to that old guy. So what did, so when you think, when you think back on that conversation, what do you think he knew?

I don't know. I mean, I guess like, I wonder looking back on it because he was in a wheelchair and he was older, if maybe he had some insight because he was like immunocompromise, as we like to call them. Sure. So he thought, oh, yeah, like it makes sense to shut down society to protect someone like myself, whereas I'm younger, right? So we always see the world through our, like, objective.

our subjective biases, right? I'm thinking, why would we shut down the whole world just to protect this guy in the elevator? I guess my brain, I mean, certainly that could be part of it, right? Like, I mean, fairness, that could be part of it. But maybe I've been down this rabbit hole too long, folks. I don't know. I don't even know if I can come back up.

I'm like, no, I'm positive, positive. People knew they were going to shut down the whole world. like well before and if I just it's actually I do I do the Cornerstone Forum so you know like if people are interested May 10th in Calgary Alberta

I bring in speakers from you know across the world but you know a healthy contingent of Canadians on trying to foresee what is coming in the next year essentially because I think certain things if you pay close enough attention

you can see that things happening in Europe, for the most part, happen before they get here. And there's, and there's this, this trend and this, and you, you start to see it. You're like, oh, that's going to lead there and that's going to lead there. You know, like Bitcoin, when it went down to 10 grand, Bitcoin is like, oh, no, it's going way higher. And these are why. And there was tons of people that never going higher. And now it's at, you know, close to 100 grand. And then it drops a bit and people are like, oh, it's going to crash. It's like, it ain't going to crash. Come on. I mean, he's going to go. There's a. There's a. There's a.

joke in finance where it's like an economist have correctly predicted 15 of the last two recessions because what they'll do is they'll just predict a recession every year. And nobody remembers the ones that they got wrong but every 10 or 15 years if you put out a thousand predictions

you're eventually going to get a cut up a couple right. That's what you're saying. Absolutely. Yeah, people just spitballed right and they just make wild predictions and eventually you'll hit a bull's eye if you throw enough darts. And I while I agree with you I still think like I think COVID was nefarious I don't I don't think COVID was just oh I think so too okay so if it was a nefarious that means it had plans and if it

had plans that means it leaked and if you go back through it you go yeah right had plans and there there was signs all over the place they were basically telling you that they were going to do a couple things and it took it took a couple months and then it and then it just progressed and I didn't think it was going to last as long as it did, and I certainly didn't think it was going to get as insane as it did, and I thought for sure we hit 50% of the population vaccination will be fine. I thought all those things. Well, I remember the whole thing started kind of in December

because that was when there was that Princess Diamond cruise in Japan. And I was working in finance at the time. We used to have these morning meetings where we'd all kind of just chat about whatever was going on in the world. And I was looking very closely at that cruise, because we hadn't shut down the world yet due to COVID. And I said to my boss, I said, well, you know, like, everybody that's dying is like in their 90s. Like if it wasn't COVID that got them, it could have been a gust of wind while they were like standing on the deck of the ship.

She goes, Alex, that's terrible. How could you say something like that? You know, like we should protect these people. And that is true. But I just thought it was, there's no way because this was, we knew from day one from the Princess Diamond Cruz, Jay Bottacharya was one of the first people to point this out that this disproportionately, affected people who are basically over the life expectancy anyway. And I love seniors. I love old people. No, no, no. I don't think if a senior. I don't want to kill grandma.

Like, I love my grandma. If a seniors being realistic, they're like, you know, like you hit a certain age, is it, well,

I don't know. I'm not going to throw it out there because every time I throw it an age, I get people yelling at me. But at a certain point, you start looking at life just a little bit differently, right? Where it's like, you know, flu season's coming back around.

What does history tell us? That's, that's a dangerous time. as the older you get it's dangerous for a lot of younger kids do right like having infants and stuff it's a dangerous time I just never looked at it like that modern medicine has given us this kind of like invincibility thought process nothing's gonna get us so when you look at elderly yeah they probably you know if they're being realistic it's not a cruel thing to say like as you get older there's a better

chance of you getting taken out by the flu or pneumonia or or all these different things. Yeah, so I just thought there's no way that the world is so irrational that they would shut down everything to protect people over the age of, let's say, 80. I quickly realized how rar I was about that when the Serb came out in Canada, because what we were doing is we were paying 20-year-olds, what was it, two grand a month to sit in their mother's basement playing video games, and then we had 80-year-olds working as Walmart graders, getting no support at all. And it just made it made no scientific sense whatsoever. So that really shocked me.

I thought that as human beings, we would kind of advance past that, and we were more rational than we really were. Because it made perfect focus. Protection made sense. Just leave the 80-year-olds at home. Everybody else just continue on with your lives. Yeah, but that doesn't make sense either,

because the elderly need to move too. They need to get out. They need to socially interact. You can't keep people locked up. It doesn't matter the age demographic. You're right. human beings were social creatures. So if you lock us up, there's going to be other things to get you.

Yeah. And you also run into, you're absolutely right. And you run into the issue of multi-generational households too, right? Just because the 80-year-old isn't leaving the house, doesn't mean that a 20-year-old can't bring the COVID in with them, I suppose. It's just, to me, the whole, like, the world is a dangerous place. Right. And when you go through COVID, you go, was it nefarious?

It was nefarious. I did this point. I don't know if anyone convinced me otherwise. If there's an affairs, it had plans. If there was plans, they leaked because they always leak. And if they leaked, you could pay attention, and you could have saw maybe not how crazy it would get, right? Because, I mean, they're trying with monkey box

and all these different things to try and whip up the same frenzy. But people are different now. People can be dying a lot more right now. They ain't going back. It doesn't matter if you took the shot, didn't take the shot. There's only a small percentage that want to go back. A very infinitely small percentage. the rest of the world don't want it and they ain't going and no matter what what happens here over

the next little bit they don't want it they're not going back they're not going back to to what exactly sorry maybe i lost lockdowns oh okay yeah forced vaccination i mean you'll call it vaccination but i mean it got to insane levels locking a bank accounts like nobody wants that nobody wants to go back to that for sure yeah being a banker was like a very interesting thing as well in the sense that you're kind of like I mean I was in a town it was a senior's town at the time I think the average median ages and maybe like the mid-60s and you're kind of like a mortitian you see all of the statistics about who's dying because you have to do the estate work for the account so I remember during the peak of COVID

I was noticing that people just weren't dying as much as I would have thought they were especially older people. I imagine a lot of that had to do with how manic we were all being about washing our hands and, you know, making sure that we were transferring germs to grandma and all that kind of stuff. Maybe we went a little overboard there, but just nobody was dying. And then my sister was working as a pediatric nurse at the time. So I remember I called her and I said, you know, none of these old people are dying. Like, what's happening with the babies? And she goes, oh, no no kids get sick from COVID. And that was the weirdest thing.

You're going to say, like, the kids aren't getting sick. The old people aren't getting sick. Like, what is going on here? I still don't really know. So maybe that, like, I think that's the nefarious element of it is how blown out of proportion, the media maybe made the whole thing. I apologize. I've been really enjoying this conversation.

But what people don't understand is I'm like, I'm slowly running out of time. And I'm like, I don't want to start. new things and then not have enough time to talk about it because they i got a hard out and i haven't had a hard out folks for quite some time um zoltan i really have appreciated talking you have you have given me some things to think about and if the audience just came off martin armstrong to amazing zoltan they're like what was that and uh that is what i'm all about i mean that in the best possible way right because you have one you have one mindset on like this is where the world's going and you just contradicted it in a in like really a good way and i think that's what we need

more of we need more of like well now that isn't going to happen you're yeah that's too much and i think people uh well myself included need that for the brain i need to i need to huh that's interesting you've just given me some things to think about and i appreciate that a lot um thanks for thanks for hopping on this morning thanks for having me that was my pleasure