The Breakdown - ‘It Sure Doesn’t Feel Like the Greatest Economy of All Time,’ Feat. George Gammon

Episode Date: July 1, 2020

What would you do if you were approaching your 40s, burned out and realizing the type of financial success you had been pursuing wasn’t actually serving your true goal of freedom?  If you were George Gammon, the answer would be to change everything and start globetrotting in search of new opportunities.  George Gammon is the host of the rapidly growing George Gammon YouTube channel and Rebel Capitalist podcast. He is rapidly building one of the most rapid macro and investing fanbases around. In this Free Ideas Festival conversation, he and NLW discuss: The pursuit of personal freedom Producing a home-flipping TV show in Colombia  Why inflation is at the heart of people’s economic discontent  How crony capitalism is driving young people to Communism  Building a rapidly growing podcast and YouTube empire

Around them, they just see that, my gosh, my standard of living is not improving. I turn on the TV, and it's supposedly the greatest economy of all time in human history. It sure doesn't feel like the greatest economy of all time in human history. And then we're going through all these boom and bus cycles. I mean, I used to be relatively well off on paper. This is maybe a baby boomer. in my 401k, and then that got crushed in the dot-com bust. And then I tried to go into real estate because that was the smart thing to do.

And then I got completely wiped out there. And so then I went back into the market. Fortunately, it's gone up. But now I'm 70 years old, and I just can't afford for this market to go down again. Welcome back to the Breakdowns Free Ideas Festival, a 4th of July exploration of ideas with the potential to shape the future of the economy. This episode is sponsored by Bit Stamp and Cipher Trace. The Breakdown is produced and distributed by Coin Desk. And now here's your host, NLW. Welcome back to the breakdown. It is Tuesday, June 30th,

and as you just heard, I'm kicking off a week of what I'm calling the Free Ideas Festival to celebrate the 4th of July Independence Day in America. Most of the episodes this week will be a deep dive with a guest on a single idea that I think has the potential to reshape the world around us, and we're kicking off the week with someone who's story embodies the entrepreneurial side of the American dream. George Gammon is a perennial entrepreneur. He built businesses throughout his 20s and 30s until soft retiring at 38 when he realized that entrepreneurship was giving him money, but not freedom. Since then, he's followed his nose around the world for a variety of different opportunities from real estate to macro investing. He's gone deep into macroeconomics,

and over the last year or so, he has built one of the absolute best YouTube channels and one of the most popular new podcasts in the macro and investing space, which is called The Rebel Capitalist Show. It is a show for people who feel like something in our economy is fundamentally off, and I know you're going to love hearing from him. In this interview, we talk about everything from his journey as an entrepreneur to why George believes that the economic force underlying all of this frustration and dislocation that we're seeing is inflation. Buckle up because this one is wild. All right. I am here with George Gammon, George. Thanks so much for making time today.

Thank you for having me. I'm super excited to hopefully deliver some value to your audience. I have no doubt about that. I've been really, really enjoying. rebel capitalist. I want to talk to you a bunch about that. I want to talk to you about a number of the topics that are kind of common themes on that show, which I think listeners of the breakdown will find some commonality with as well. But by way of starting, I'd love to have just a little bit of your story because, you know, I'm kicking off this free ideas festival with this conversation. And I feel like your very non-traditional career path is a testament to the opportunities for for people who are willing to kind of follow their nose and put themselves out there.

For sure. Yeah, I got out of college in the late 90s. And the first thing I did is took a gig at the Golden Nugget working valet in Vegas. Amazing. And I did that because I was working graveyard or I could work graveyard. So at the Nugget in that time, graveyard was 10p to 8A. and then you'd work four tens, four ten hour days. So I would take all the tip money and my main purpose for getting a gig there is I had a t-shirt business that I started and I was just taking all my tip money from Working Valley at the Nugget

and putting it right into my t-shirt business trying to grow that on my own. And obviously I was doing everything. I was trying to build my own website. I was designing all the t-shirts. I was trying to do all the photography, sell them, yada, yada. bottom line, the T-shirt business didn't pan out. But that kind of got me on my way. And I worked for a couple people, did some consulting work, and then just entrepreneur until 2012,

where I decided to retire at the ripe old age of 38. I had some winners, I had some losers, just as every entrepreneur does. You kind of throw everything up against a wall and see what sticks. But toward the end there, I kind of, I wouldn't say I figured it out, but I kind of understood myself well enough to know how to make more than I was losing, I think is a better way of saying it. But then I found out that, or it kind of dawned on me. I was in a flight to Australia. I remember extremely well, it's late 2011.

And I was just, I was trying to grow the business overseas, which we had actually done into Australia, pretty much every English-speaking country in the world. But it required me to do a lot of traveling. So on one of these 14-hour flights, and it just dawned on me that I had a lot less freedom then after I built this business, so you're doing 24 million in revenues. You got over 100 employees with the full-time part-time. And you're just like, okay, I'm making all this money. This is great, but I have less freedom.

than I did in college when I didn't have two nickels to rub together. And the whole point of going out there and making money is so you have more freedom. One of the guys, the older guys that I worked with, I partnered with on a deal, he was, I guess you could call him a mentor. He was a CEO in Silicon Valley for many years. And he always said to me, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it buys you a hell a lot of freedom. And if freedom makes you happy, then there's an indirect correlation there. So anyway, after that flight, I kind of decided to take a time out and I never went back.

And that's kind of when I got into studying macro at that time, I knew how to make money. I was really good at that. But I didn't know what the Fed was. I didn't know really. what the bond market was. I mean, I knew nothing. I knew absolutely nothing. And I got, I was in the Marina Bay Sand in Singapore. And I was about 15 minutes before a dinner date. And I was just scrolling through YouTube, ironically enough.

And I came across Milton Friedman, his series, Free to Choose. And I just completely blew me away because it was just, he was articulating everything that I had in my mind for so long. And that took me right down the rabbit hole from Friedman. I went to Thomas Sol, who is still my favorite economist. Don't agree with them on everything, but still my favorite. And then I started studying the investing greats like Jim Rogers, went on Peter Schiff, Jim Rickards, Drucken Miller. I was reading all the Market Wizards books and just trying to come to my own conclusions on the best way to invest. my own money, so I wouldn't have to go back to work. And that was kind of the initial

genesis of the whole macro side of my world. And when I dove into it, I just became obsessed, absolutely obsessed. And even to this day, whenever I'm in the shower, jogging, whatever I'm doing, eating dinner, eating breakfast, it's nothing but macro. I'm listening to podcasts. I'm listening to podcast. I'm watching other YouTube channels. I'm listening to audio books. It's just, it's nonstop. So regardless of the YouTube channel or any of that, I'd still be doing this stuff. I think that's kind of the way it should be. But going back to 2012, I got into real estate then because I looked at a chart of Japanese real estate market going back to 1990. And I saw that when they had their crash, they went down by 60%. I saw similarities looking at the charts of the U.S.

housing market. Remember this was back in 2012. And so I thought that would be a good time to go into the U.S. market. And I thought my downside was maybe 10% or so. But I was really looking at it from a standpoint of cash flow. But I wouldn't have came to that point if it wasn't for Jim Rogers and understanding how he tackles investment problems and how he, you know, his type of strategy, but learning from everything. And then I, I, I, didn't go into it, but I played blackjack. I counted cards and that had a lot to do with my business success and that I think has had a lot to do with my investing success as well. So since 2012, I've done a lot of real estate. I made a lot of money overseas as an entrepreneur. So once I

understood the real estate game in the United States, I started looking overseas for better returns. And that's what brought me to South America. Originally coming to Columbia was a play on oil. It was a macro play. So back in 2015 or so, as oil dropped down below 30. And I wanted to go long oil, but I didn't know a thing about it. And I looked into the currencies and I saw that the Colombian peso was loosely correlated to oil or loosely tied to oil. And so I thought, well, if I can buy some Colombian peso denominated assets, maybe that's a way to go long oil in something that I know better than just how to play futures. And then I said, well, I know a lot about real estate.

So why don't I just do real estate in Columbia? And that's a way to go long the peso and basically go long oil. So that's why I came to Columbia to start investing here. Now, on paper, I haven't made any money on the peso. In fact, I lost it. For the majority of the time, I was ahead. I was quite a ways ahead. But the dollar's been so strong lately that the pesos, you know, I'm in and about

34. The pace is at 3,700 or so right now. But fortunately, I stuck with what I knew. So I've made a lot of money on the actual real estate and building equity through remodeling and buying cheap and selling expensive and all the stuff I talk about on my channel. But the original reason I came here hasn't really played out ironically enough. So that brings us to current day. I started a TV show in 2019 because I was doing all these remodels and I thought man if these shows are so popular back in the United States why wouldn't they be popular in Colombia? Why wouldn't they be popular for the Spanish speaking market? And I mean these shows I mean shows like flip or flop or fixer upper just where they go in and they remodel it and then you do this big reveal and stuff like that. So I pitched the local

station here on doing the show they thought it was a good idea we came up with a deal where i would produce the show myself and they would air it so i i had to figure out how to become a tv producer in about three weeks and it's a typical entrepreneurial mindset where you kind of shoot sure three weeks okay great exactly i went in there pitching them like oh yeah no problem tv show this is going to blow you away. And then when we get done, I'm like, don't shit. How do you, how do you produce a TV show? Let me figure that out real quick. But anyway, it was really popular, but I didn't really like dealing with the network too much. And we were kind of in between first season and second season. And that's when I started the YouTube channel because I had these great editors and camera guys

and gals. And the YouTube channel just completely took off. And so I never went back to the TV show. You know, it's really interesting. There's two convergent trends, which I think you are living in, which are really interesting. The first is this interest in macro, and it sounds weird to say, because obviously, you know, macroeconomics has been around forever and, you know, macroeconomics is a discipline. It's an AP test in high school and all those sort of things. But I still feel like, and I don't know if you feel the same, there's definitely in the era

of podcasts, a little bit of a renaissance going on where people who weren't in into that sort of academic discipline or that business discipline are now being invited in. Instead of it being something that's really far and abstract and that you're not allowed to know if you didn't learn it in high school or college, it's something that people can start to pick up. And certainly coming from the Bitcoin world, we see that as well. I like to say that everyone who's interested in Bitcoin is interested in macro, whether they realize it or not yet. And I feel really strongly about that.

And so it's interesting to see how that passion developed for you. The other part that I think is so fascinated about your story is that it's really interesting to see how you've leveraged your willingness to go actually be in places where their charts look interesting to you and figure out what the real opportunity is rather than just being, you know, 3,000, 6,000, 10,000 miles away. I feel like that's a, it certainly gives you an edge relative to other people. It's a mindset that I developed way back in early 2000s. and I say we because it was me and a couple other gentlemen. We just knew that in this particular venture, we would just go where the money was. That's how we said it. You know, back then we weren't overly sophisticated in our terminology.

You just go where the money is. And if you can make a lot more money in this state, well, go to that state. If you can make a lot more money in this country, go to that country. There was really no hangups about it. It was just first and foremost work and I make the most money. And that's what kind of led the decision-making process from there. So let's talk about Rebel Capitalist because the YouTube channel is blowing up. The podcast has been surging.

I've noticed numerous people that I like to spend a lot of time trying to find voices that I think are under-indexed relative to other people. I almost always will find them having had their first big show on Rebel Capitalist, it seems like. Were you surprised when people started to pick it up so fast? Because it hasn't been around very long for the type of audience that you've built. I wasn't that surprised with the Rebel Capitalist show, but as far as the George Gammon YouTube channel, I'm still surprised. And I studied the kind of online, I don't, well, it is kind of a game in a sense. It's kind of a strategy game.

And I looked and researched, just like I did with Macro, these guys that were really good and the professionals at YouTube. And I understood that it was a numbers game. and it was based on analytics. And once I understood it was all about analytics, then I'm like, okay, I think I like this a lot more than I did before. And that's really kind of why the main catalyst to me kind of hanging up the TV show and focusing on YouTube, because I'm like, this is great. This is just like blackjack. This is just like all the businesses that I set up where as long as you hit your numbers,

the money or the viewers or the subscribers or whatever, that's just a foregone conclusion. So it's all back end, this, and what I mean by that, it's all about click through rates, it's all about retention rates. And if you can hit those metrics, then it's just a matter of time before the YouTube algorithm picks you up and just shoots you out to every single person's homepage or a suggested feed that would have an interest in your content. So you really got to, that's the hard part with YouTube is you've got to really put your nose to the grindstone and work just tirelessly when your whole entire channel is getting like five views a day. And four of those views are employees or family members.

But you know that you just got to keep doing that. And then when the algorithm picks it up, if you got content to back it up, then it's going to explode. And that's exactly what the channel did. It went from having like literally 200 views a day, the whole entire channel, to a week later, having 40, 50,000 views a day. And ever since then, you know, you just get the subscribers and whatnot. So that was the thing that was most shocking. Now, as far as the Rebel Capitalist show, I didn't start doing that until, I think, January or so. And the main reason I started doing it is because I was doing the whiteboard videos.

five days a week. And I almost killed myself doing that because I mean, I was literally working five in the morning until sometimes midnight trying to figure out not only do the videos, produce them, then get them edited. And then a lot of people see like a 10 or 20 minute whiteboard video and they think that it took me like 10 or 20 minutes. And they don't understand that no, no, no. It takes me 12 hours to do that when you include the shooting and then managing the editing because I'm that my editors will go through a rough draft and I'll approve it and whatnot. But it's very time-consuming. So my point is I'm like, okay, I want to continue to produce content daily, but it cannot be

these whiteboard videos. So that's what I'm like, well, maybe I'll do the Rebel Capitalist show and then interview people because that's a lot less time-consuming. And fortunately, and this may be another. I don't know if you've got a lot of entrepreneurs in your audience or maybe people who are just trying to start a side hustle or maybe they're in college and they're trying to figure out how to kind of get their foot in the front door. This would be a great story for them. Back in 2018, I was listening to Macro Voices, which is one of my favorite podcasts. And now my good buddy Eric Townsend is the host with Patrick Suresna.

They were talking about potentially doing a live show. And they said, well, we're thinking about it. but we really don't know anything. They kind of just threw it out there. So I don't know how I did it, but I think I emailed him and got his phone number. And I called him. I said, Eric, I said, listen, if you're looking for someone to help you figure out how to do a live event, look no further. Because prior to me retiring, the last business I had that we grew up to 24 million in revenues was a convention business.

And I do two to three conventions per year with 6,000 people in each convention. And so I'm like, listen, you know, what you're talking about. It's like 200 people. That's child's play. I can do that my sleep. So my point is I volunteered to do the whole event for him for free. And I just did it because I loved it. But what happened is just a little weekend event is in Vancouver, Canada.

And he had six or seven of these amazing professionals there. The guys and gals that everyone knows that are in the space are, Fin twit such as Brent Johnson, Juliette de Clerk, Jeff Snyder, Art Berman. And there's a few others that I haven't interviewed yet, but I hopefully will in the future. So with Rebel Capitalist show, those people were the first people that I reached out to. And I think I had a huge edge because they already knew me. So I went out and I gave all this value, basically, free of charge. and I was able to network and get all of these, I guess, contacts.

And so then when I started the show, I think the first person I reached out to was Brent Johnson. And I just said, hey, you know, I don't know if you remember me from MacroVoVoces Live, but I've got this new show and YouTube channel. And he DM me back on Twitter. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, George, what's up? Yeah, I'd love to do the show. And so from Brent, I got, you know, he introduced me to Luke Chrome. And then you just start to network from there.

But it never would have happened. And it wouldn't have happened as quickly for sure unless I would have given that value to macrovoices free of charge. And so I think that's a good lesson for maybe people who are younger and maybe aspiring to get into an industry or maybe some type of profession. And then what I did is I was leveraging the keywords for YouTube with their names, right? So if you do keyword research in YouTube, just like Google, you see that a keyword such as Peter Schiff, there's like 400,000, 500,000 people per month searching that keyword phrase in YouTube. So if you can get Peter Schiff on your show, and then you've got, again, the metrics have to be good. click-through rate, the retention rate, then YouTube is going to promote that to a lot of people because there's a lot of people interested in Peter Schiff, those keywords.

So it was the same thing with Jeff Snyder, with Brent Johnson, with all the people, Rick Rule, Doug Casey. I've spoken to Peter Schiff, Jim Rogers. All these people have been on the show. And that's a way you're kind of leveraging their brand to get those. views and just continue to build and build and build and build and build. And the more you build the show, the more popular is, again, you've got to be producing great content, then you're just going to get bigger and bigger people on the show. Just the other day, I interviewed Robert Kiyosaki

as an example. And that was great. Obviously, it doesn't get much more, you can't really get more of a famous person in the space than Robert, especially when you look at the size of his following on social media and just how many people know his name. And then what happened from there, Robert turned out to be a big fan of the Rebel Capitalist show and of the George Gammon channel. So he invited me on his show, the Rich Dad Radio. And so I went on his show. That was up maybe two weeks ago. He had that go live. And then that gives your channel another huge boost and just brings on more people. So I think that's, I guess, the takeaway is you start giving as much value as you can. And sooner or later, you're going to be able to grow and probably exceed your goals.

I want to come back to some of this a little bit later, specifically around Rebel Capitalist Pro, because I actually think that you're, I don't know how intentional it is. I imagine just hearing you talk that it's pretty intentional. But I think you're actually striking on a media model for the future that I want to talk about. BitStamp is the original global cryptocurrency exchange. Since 2011, BitStamp has been the preferred exchange for serious traders and investors, trusted by over 4 million customers, including top financial institutions. BitStamp is built on professional grade trading technology. Their platform is powered by a NASDAQ matching engine,

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Learn more at cypress.com. Part of the resonance of rebel capitalists right now is the particular moment that it's being built in. And one of the things that I hear you often reference is the sense that a lot of your audience has that something is going wrong or there's something off about the way the economy is structured, even if they can't fully explain it, right? Even if they don't have the tools yet to understand it. Can you dig a little bit more into that idea? Well, that's as far as the reason people think that. Yeah, yeah. Or your sensibility, like what is the shared kind of sense that your audience has that makes all these sort of macro voices so relevant for them?

Yeah, I think it, well, technically I think it boils down to inflation. And that's the reason. But I don't think the person that just kind of the average Joe and Jane, I don't think they see that. Around them, they just see that, my gosh, my standard of living is not improving. I turn on the TV and I look at Donald Trump's Twitter feed and it's supposedly the greatest economy of all time in human history. It sure doesn't feel like the greatest economy of all time in human history. And then we're going through all these boom and bus cycles.

I mean, I used to be relatively well off on paper. This is maybe a baby boomer. in my 401k and then that got crushed in the dot com bust and then i tried to go into real estate because that was the smart thing to do and then i got completely wiped out there and so then i went back into the market fortunately it's gone up but now i'm 70 years old and i just can't afford for this market to go down again what do i do and while at the same time i've been losing purchasing power So what I thought I needed as far as cash flow was not accurate, first and foremost. And secondly, since 2008, since the Fed has kept interest rates, basically at zero, really negative when you look at real rates.

If you've got the rate of inflation at, let's say, 5%, but the Fed funds is at 1%, that's still a negative real rate of inflation. So when you have negative real rates, it just crushes savers and people that are on fixed income. Also, the entire U.S. economy has been completely financialized. And this goes back to the late 80s in Greenspan. And so before, and what's kind of intuitive for most people is they think, all right, well, the stock market should be a reflection of the economy. And that is no longer the case. it's not even remotely close to the point where now the stock market isn't even a reflection of the underlying fundamentals of the businesses or companies in the stock market. So you have this

situation where the economy is or the stock market is no longer a reflection of the economy, but the economy is completely dependent upon the stock market. So why is that? Because no one can get ahead because of inflation. And they don't know why, but they look around them. They say, well, shoot, the only one my buddies are getting ahead is they're not getting promotions. They're not making any money in their savings account. They're just going into the stock market. So you get this kind of mentality and mindset throughout society where the only way to get ahead is invest in financial assets, but stocks, bonds, real estate. And I know Luke Groman has done several studies on this where he shows that a good majority of or a substantial percentage of U.S.

consumption is strictly based on stock market going up. And as we know, 70% of the U.S. economy is consumption. So therefore, the U.S. economy is the stock market. And you've got this tail wagging the dog type situation. And I think that's, I mean, I give you several reasons there, but I think that's the kind of the main reasons why people look around them and they feel that something just isn't right. And then I think they look at quantitative easing. They look at all the money printing and all the debt just exploding. And they're like, wait a minute.

If I did that, that wouldn't pan out. And yeah, I get it. The Fed or the government, they can print their own money. But how does that end well? Like if people just, they don't understand the economic principles. behind it, but it's just flat out common sense that you're trying to print purchasing power. So how? How do you print purchasing power?

If you were someone stranded on a desert island and you had a billion dollars, would you be rich? No, because there's nothing you can buy. The billion dollars in your suitcase is absolutely worthless other than just to maybe start a fire. I mean, that's it, right? So it all goes back to producing goods and services. So I think people just intuitively understand that an economy has to produce goods and services

to sustain itself and to become richer, you have to produce more goods and services. And you don't become richer by printing green pieces of paper. And I think that's kind of the big disconnect for most people. No, I mean, I think that that's right on. And I think you touched on a lot of important points. The idea that people are being punished for the thing that they grew up hearing, right? Save for a rainy day and do all these things. Well, that's not the way, it's not even the way to stay at parity anymore in society, right? People just keep getting pushed farther and farther out onto the risk curve. On top of that, because there is such inflation in the actual price of assets, it gets harder and harder to buy in, even if you've accepted that that's just the way the game is, right? And I think every millennial who's trying to buy a house right now feels that. It's just harder. I think it's a really, you know, important observation and the reason that I wanted to ask you about it, because if you, you know, you kind of separate everything, that disconnect, that feeling that something is off, I think is so, so acute and growing. And, you know, I think to your point about some of these big questions and maybe questions around quantitative easing, I have never seen more normies, right?

people who are not in the gold bug crowd or the Bitcoin crowd asking why the hell we pay taxes if we can just print all this money than I have in the last couple months. I don't know if you've seen this as well, but we're seeing these things that used to be kind of niche discussions spill out into the open in a big way. Yeah, it's very dangerous. And I mean, I would take it a step further. Everything that I just described and that your viewers may know from the understanding the business cycle, in the cycle of boom, bus, we all know that, uh, The middle class and the lower, call it at least 75%, in real terms, their wages really haven't done anything since the 1970s. But we know the people that hold financial assets, their wealth, at least on paper, has just continued to go up and up and up.

So you've got this huge disparity. the problem there is that a lot of people that especially you see the riots and the social unrest that's going on in the United States, they don't fall on George Gammon's YouTube channel or your podcast or anything like that to kind of make sense of things that they don't understand because we as human beings are always trying to make sense of the world around us. But unfortunately, many times we don't have complete information. And therefore, we'll just come to whatever is the most logical conclusion based on the limited amounts of data we have. And where I'm going with this is if you read marks, you see that everything that's playing out and that has played out over the past 20 years, if you really didn't understand the financial

system, if you didn't understand the Fed, it's pretty much exactly. what Marx said would happen. And so if I'm someone that's a college student, or maybe regardless of your age, maybe I didn't just initially stumble across the Austrian School of Economics or something like that. It's very easy to get into maybe one of these other narratives that totally explains what's going on. I mean, Marx nailed it with the boom bus cycle, with the, I mean, he's. He nailed what would most likely, I shouldn't say nailed it.

I should say that it looks like he called exactly what would happen because he said that capitalism is actually good to a point. But once it gets to a certain point, it cannot continue to grow unless it starts feeding basically on the workers. And then the capitalist don't have, because he thought prices would continue to go down and down and down because of capitalists. ingenuity, and therefore the margins would get squeezed. So they'd have to squeeze the workers. But once they squeeze the workers, that would be meanless customers. And therefore, the capitalists in order to expand their wealth, wouldn't reinvest their capital back into growing their business. They would invest in financial assets that would create booms and busts in financial markets. So you see where I'm going with this. And then, unfortunately, if we think about what the Fed is,

doing and the only tools that they have at their disposal actually increase the wealth gap because the only thing they can do is print money. I won't go into the definition of that to confuse your viewers. They can print bank reserves by financial assets. But really, anything they do, whether it's negative interest rates or pegging the yield curve, that's most likely going to increase asset prices. And to your point, fewer and fewer people. can buy the assets when they get more and more expensive.

And so you've got the amount of wealth being concentrated into a smaller and smaller and smaller group. Now, people like you and I know that's a result of the Fed and trying to micromanage the economy. And it's a result of a lack of capitalism. But if you're someone that doesn't have our educational background and that you just read Marx for the first time, you're like, holy cow, this. guy was a souser. This guy saw the future and it's playing out right in front of our eyes.

Yeah. I mean, and I think it's a really salient point. And it's also why creating alternative media spaces that are safe for people to come explore these things feels really important to me right now. Because my sense of how, right, we have a power dynamic in the U.S. in particular that will very happily thrust you into a kind of a named party on one side or the other because it perpetuates a sort of divisive system where people who are both correctly diagnosing that something feels off are going at each other's throats rather than actually questioning some core fundamentals of the system. And I think that the political conversation has become so toxic in most of the main channels that you don't have that space that invites people who,

to your point, have red marks, but maybe don't have they're not done necessarily, but no one's giving them a chance to dig deeper and find out what other reasons there might be for this, to your point, sort of abrogation of the capitalist system. And I think it's really important to invite people who are trying to understand to dig into these things because there actually are practical solutions with policy that just aren't being discussed. Absolutely correct. And I want to give credit where credit is due. This is not my idea. This comes straight from Jeff Snyder and Emil Kalanowski. They're good buddies of mine and they just did a podcast on this.

So I'm in the process of doing a whiteboard video, just expanding on their ideas, which is why I touched on the topic. But yeah, it's a great point. You know, unfortunately, though, I see what's going on in the United States and I'm not there, but it just seems like the ability to speak your mind or like, like, Tom Woods says to say something that's not on the approved three by five card of public opinion. The ability to do that is becoming less and less and less. And yes, on paper or legally, we as Americans have the right or the freedom of speech. But in practice, I mean, do we? I mean, try going out on

Twitter. If you're a guy or gal that's got a good corporate gig, and let's say with Coca-Cola or something like that. I mean, are you really going to go out on Twitter and speak your mind? You sure you want to do that? Not really. And the narrative, the approved narrative, I think is, it's not even what I think. I think it's an obvious fact that it's shrinking and shrinking and shrinking and shrinking by the day. And so the whole reason that these people, and this is throughout history, and Jeff and Emil talk about this, going back to the 1800s and 1820s and 1830s is this need to try to make sense of the world around you while not having adequate information, you come to the wrong conclusions. My point with that is that if we continue to restrict speech and alternative thought in the United States, it's going to get worse

and worse because we're taking the access to information and we're reducing it. Therefore, people, because we're all tribal as human beings, they'll get more ingrained in their current narrative. And then if their current narrative reduces the access to information even more, I just don't see it ending well. Hopefully it won't come to that. But looking at the election, you've got to say, okay, well, you've got one side on the right where Trump, and they're basically just Keynesians. In fact, they're like hyper-Cancyans. And then you've got the left, which I don't even know where you want to go with that as far as labeling it. But I don't see how tax rates won't go up.

And I mean skyrocket. If Trump is still there, you've got property taxes that most likely go up. If Biden gets in, then you've got, I think, corporate taxes go up. Capital gains taxes go to income. I think income goes back to where it was with Obama. I think you could potentially have a wealth tax. And these are all things that I think play right into the Marxist narrative because if you read Marx, going back to that, once capitalism has served its purpose, then for society to continue to grow

and for the standard of living to continue to improve, you've got to take the means of production away from the capitalists. And I think the easiest way to do that and the most palatable for the people who want to achieve that objective, especially in the United States, is just through higher and higher and higher taxation. And so, I mean, that goes straight into Bitcoin. It goes straight into gold. And if you see that as being kind of the end game here in five, ten years, then I think now is the time to start adjusting your portfolio accordingly. I know I went way off on a tangent there, but hopefully. No, no, listen, we live in 2020. There's no, well, one, there's no way to not go on tangents.

And two, and I believe that this is, you know, exactly on par with the conversation you've been having. Things are inherently political and we need to stop being afraid of that, right? To your point, like, we can't be afraid to have conversations about. You can't be afraid to offend people, for heaven's sakes. Yeah, I mean. What we're doing is we're, everyone is placing feelings. above everything. Like you've got this hierarchy and feelings is right at the top of the cult. It's like a religion. And that's the God that everyone is praying to. We've got to get rid of that and go back to using

our common sense, using our thinking and not using our feelings. And once we go back to using our thinking and start to try to and stop being so offended about everything and listen to other people, It's one thing going back to the Rebel Capitalist Show. I have people on there that are Keynesian MMT that don't see things from a strictly Austrian perspective. And that's fantastic. It's fantastic because it's giving everyone a different point of view and making their thought process and their intellectual journey that much more powerful. And that's what we want to do. We want to talk to everyone, just get ideas out on the table.

and expose them to the sunlight, if you will, so we can see which ideas are the best without just letting it hurt our feelings and offending everyone. I think also we do a disservice to, you know, the root idea of not hurting someone's feelings that's positive, I think, is some sense that it's a way of showing respect, but I actually think it's not. I think respect comes from trusting that someone is smart. enough and thoughtful enough and conscientious enough and considered enough that you can share what you really think without compromising or without worrying about disrespecting them. And I think

that that's lost a little bit in some of our conversations. But just, I guess, validating your point about your audience, one of the places that I really got hooked on the show is I think when you had Juliet de Clerc on. And I can't remember exactly what the context was of what she was saying. But it was about as opposite from kind of an Austrian economics point of view as you could have. And I remember you laughing and just saying, I'm trying to piece it through my head. head just what you exactly just said right there. And I know a lot of my audience is going to have questions about that too. So could you go a little bit deeper? And she did. And it didn't mean that anyone was going to necessarily agree after that conversation. But she wasn't, you didn't yell at her.

You didn't, you know, it wasn't like, oh, I end this stupid interview. You know, it was the opposite of an echo chamber. And I think that that's a really, it's an all too rare thing. But I think, frankly, you know, attribute as much as you want to kind of the methodology and building relationships in advance and borrowing some of these audiences and building a good machine with algorithms. But I think that the resonance for people is that as well, that you're having a conversation about the important stuff without kind of limiting it to one perspective. Yeah, first of all, Juliet is a genius. I mean, she is one of the top macro thinkers on the planet. And so if she's saying something that may be kind of at odds with my belief system, I want to listen. I want to figure out,

what am I missing here? Let me understand her thought process. so I can layer it over my own and maybe improve my own way of looking at macro in the world around me. And yeah, that doesn't mean that I agree with everything at the end of the date, but at least I think it through and you want to understand their position. I think that's the big key. You want to try to understand, oh, okay, I get what they're saying. And I don't know who said it, but it's so true that the person with the best mastery over their own opinion or view is someone that can argue the other side just as well.

So if you want to really say, okay, I understand Austrian economics or I understand why money printing is bad, I think you should be able to explain and debate why money printing is good just as well. And that's when you can really say, okay, I get it. No, I love that. I want to ask you a different side of the retail conversation because we're kind of talking in part the set of people who have had this sense that something is wrong and they're trying to figure it out.

But there's another set of people who had the same realization and took a very different path. And so I'm talking about Dave Portnoy. And so earlier this year, you know, this guy who's the founder of Barstool Sports and sold it for a ton of money, he obviously like a ton of Americans wasn't able to bet on sports anywhere, wasn't able to watch sports, wasn't able to follow that news. And so he decided he was going to do day trading. And this is interesting because I had seen, even before this, a lot of people, a lot, a lot of people calling for the barstool of barstool finance, right? They wanted that sort of force in financial media, which has for a long time been pretty stuffy, to put it lightly. And, you know, it was interesting because the way that he describes it, his first couple weeks, you know, he was like, well, this is going to be really tough. So he shorted Boeing. He shorted Lulu Lemon. And he took a bath. And then the way that he describes it is something to be like, You know, then I realized that the federal print as many shrewbucks as it needs forever to make sure

everything goes up. And since then, I bet on everything going up. And it's been a pretty easy game since then. So I'm interested in your take, if you've been watching that kind of the Robin Hood Revolution play out at all and just what you make of this whole, this whole kind of day trader renaissance. Well, there's a lot to unpack there. Most of my businesses that I had revolved around marketing. And I actually owned a media buying company where it was kind of a slash ad agency. So I can totally appreciate and respect what Portnoy is doing from a standpoint of marketing, which don't kid yourself. That's what he's doing. He's just, this is all about marketing for him. And so I can totally appreciate that. I get it. Now, as far as what he's proposing and what his audience most

likely is what their takeaway, I think is incredibly dangerous because, you know, he's dealing with these mostly unsophisticated investors where they don't know that his, it's all a shtick to get views and just to increase his brand recognition. So they think that he really is out there. Maybe, you know, he's taking five million, I think is what he says all the time in his portfolio. And he's making, And that's why he makes fun of Buffett and he makes fun of all these people because he knows that if he says Warren Buffett's washed up, that everyone's going to retweet that. And again, it goes back to the marketing. But unfortunately, with the people that are a little more impressionable, they're going to buy into this and say, oh, wow, yeah, all you do is just pick three letters and buy it.

You just blindfold and it's going to go up. This is easy. why am I not doing this? So then everyone gets their stimulus checks or their additional unemployment and they're like, well, okay, this, I'm playing with the house as money. I mean, I'm watching Portnoy out there make a killing or so he says. And so I'm just going to do that because I know the Fed's going to print shrewpucks and they've got my back. So everyone's buying into this Fed put. You've got the Fed put becoming more ingrained. It was just kind of ingrained in the minds of the financial industry. But now it's like it's almost as common as it just everyone knows that

that's what happens. The Fed prints money, the stock market goes up. Unfortunately, that's not what happens. It's a Pavlovian effect. And I, again, I need to give a hat tip to Jeff Snyder. Just because the Fed prints money, quote unquote, most people think that that's just dollar bills, that they spend right into the market, and they don't really understand that they're creating bank reserves. And in order for those bank reserves to increase stock market levels, the commercial banking system has to use those bank reserves to backstop other loans or to buy other financial assets.

My point is the transfer mechanism has to be the banking system. So now the Fed's starting to remove that in a sense that they're trying to go in and buy things. Technically, they're not supposed to do that based on the Federal Reserve Act if they would really abide by the spirit of that law. But the Fed really doesn't have as much control as everyone thinks they do, even the people in the financial industry, as far as this quote unquote Fed put. And you can see that going back to March when, I don't know if you recall, but we had the people in the financial industry. that Wednesday when the Fed was going to have their meeting. They had that emergency meeting on Sunday. Everything was just going to hell in a handbasket.

And they came out, they dropped the Fed funds by 100 basis points, and they announced QE Infinity, and they're going to commit to a trillion dollars a day in the repo market. And the stock market goes up for, call it three or four hours, and then just tanks. And then what really got the market going back up a few days later was the, government coming out and saying, okay, we're going to do this massive stimulus package. So it's almost like the market said, we're not buying the Fed put anymore. It's expired, if you will. But now we're going to completely rely on this government put is what I'm calling it. Now, unfortunately, the government put has a lot more severe ramifications, believe it or not,

than the actual Fed put did. But again, my point is these Robin Hood people are just assuming that what Portnoy is saying is correct because they hear it from him, they hear it on CNBC, they hear it everywhere they go, and they're playing with the house as money. So why not just put everything into buying Hertz when they've already filed for bankruptcy? That's wild. Now, I think that the sort of the flood myth, right, that Jeff Snyder calls it, I think is really acute and important in this context, for sure.

Because it is, it's once you recognize something as a self-fulfilling prophecy power, then you can choose to engage with it or not. And I think your point about that moment in March is a really good one. In fact, in some ways, it felt like really what the Fed did was just confirmed by the virtue of the fact that they called this meeting three days earlier, whatever it was, that COVID was a real thing. All it did to do is actually to spook the market to confirm that it was something that they should be concerned about, which is kind of the opposite effect of what they intended. Yeah.

When you look at the Fed's balance sheet relative to what actually happens, you see that there's often huge discrepancies. Like the Fed will come out and just say they're buying or they're thinking about buying, let's say, junk bonds or investment grade, ETFs, whatever it is. And then investment grade ETFs will just go to the moon. but the Fed's balance sheet never changes. All they did is just say that. So it's just this game of psychology. It's not really a game that's directly tied to the Fed's balance sheet. So why that's important is because if it is a game of psychology,

that psychology can be lost just boom, puff, it's gone. And then what does the Fed do? Then they go back to, well, they increase their balance sheet, but that's not really the reason, or that's not really what was moving the markets in the first place. And then we go back to our original conversation about if they do lose control of the stock market, or maybe the government put expires, then it just completely destroys the entire economy because so much of consumption is based on stock market going up. Yeah, it's really interesting.

It also reminds me of a conversation I had with Jesse Felder, a couple weeks ago, where we were discussing Jerome Powell and other folks from the Fed's repeated insistence that the Fed has no impact on wealth inequality. And Jesse's point was that he knows that that's not the case. He's just repeating it enough or he's trying to repeat it enough that people actually start to buy it. And I think that you can apply that same sort of sentiment to a lot that comes out of the Fed. Yeah. Yeah. What was, Jesse's fantastic, isn't he? First and foremost, man, He is incredible. Yeah, I interviewed him.

And I think he's, he's someone that you could, I think you could unfollow everyone else on FinTwit and still get most of what you needed to read on any given day. Yeah, yeah, his blog's so great. Just real quick to the point. But anyway, I'm sorry, could you just repeat that again? Yeah, basically, we were talking about his piece, fight the Fed. We were talking about this idea of the Fed's role in wealth inequality, something we've been talking about a bunch on this conversation as well. Right, right. And, you know, when I had a conversation with him, Jerome Powell had just said again that the Fed had no role in wealth inequality.

And Jesse's assessment was that it's the lie that you tell over and over again and hope people start to believing it because you don't even believe it yourself, right? Yeah. It's utterly ridiculous. I mean, you can go to the Bank of England's website and the report they came out with when they did a couple of videos on it as well in 2014 that explains quantitative. easing. And they say it explicitly that the goal of quantitative easing is to increase risk assets or increase the price of risk assets. They just say it right there. They've got a YouTube video on it. So it's for Jerome Powell to come out and saying that it doesn't create wealth inequality is utter nonsense. But you've got to go back to understanding that whether it's Powell or a

politician, they're just going to tell you what they think you need to hear. If you're taking power, anyone, for that matter, as far as in the political sphere, if you're taking what they say at face value, you're going to be making a lot of mistakes. You just got to try to understand what their objectives are, and then you've got to really watch what they do and just completely ignore what they say. Yeah, it's all about incentives and following the incentives, I think. I've kept you here for almost an hour. I want to wrap up with just a couple more questions.

The first is people would be mad if I didn't ask. It seems like your audience are really diverse in terms of age group, background, but what's their take on Bitcoin, would you say? Oh, I think a lot of my audience really likes Bitcoin. And, you know, you've got a certain group that likes Bitcoin. You've got a certain group that really likes gold. And you've got a group that likes both. I personally like both.

I just look at them as completely separate assets. So I always tell people that I like to set up my own portfolio in a 108010. So 10% allocated to insurance, which I just consider as physical gold, then 80% investments, which by my definition, would mean it has to pay me to own it. It's like a dividend paying stock or rental property. Then I like 10% to speculation. So then I'm just trying to buy stuff when it's changed. cheap, buy stuff that I think has a lot of asymmetry, but it doesn't necessarily pay me to own it. And that's for me where Bitcoin, it fits right into that part of my portfolio, along with gold miners,

uranium, things like that. Yeah, it's super interesting. I think this has been definitely a big year for people having a conversation about Chamath Palahapitia called it Schmuck Insurance. And it's an interesting way to describe it. Okay, so that was one question. I had to make sure to get that off the thing. But then I wanted to close, I wanted to actually ask you about Rebel Capitalist Pro.

And the reason I think it's interesting, and I swear everyone who's listening, I'm not just shilling George's product. We didn't make an agreement beforehand or anything is when you see. So I'm a huge fan of independent media and so glad that there's, you know, from, think about from when you were helping macro voices with that show to where we are now in terms of the amount of free content available, right? It's off the charts. So I'm a huge supporter of that. But usually the way that people monetize or, you know, whether it's ads or whatever or beyond ads, is they start some sort of private research service that's just them. You've done something that's actually a little bit different where you're bringing in other voices and bundling it together and giving people some optionality. But it's not just extra George, right?

So could you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Well, I can just go over quickly the product and kind of my thought process behind building it. So it's Lynn Alden, who is incredible. The consensus breakout financial superstar of 2020. I'll say that right here, like beyond a shadow of a doubt. When I first interviewed Lynn a couple months ago on my show, I said that she was a rock star on Twitter. And that is exactly what she is.

And her star, if you will, is going to be shining brighter and brighter and brighter in the future. She's incredible. And on that same level is a guy named Chris McIntosh, who likes to kind of keep a low profile, but he's just as much of a macro genius, an investing genius. And they both have their research. Chris really just has research that he has for public use. He uses it to manage his hedge fund, where Lynn just has her research as kind of an annual subscription deal. and then that she I don't think she invests people's money.

So I, when I was trying to figure out the product, I'm like, listen, I want to deliver as much value as I possibly can. And I want to build a product that I want, that George Gammon wants. So I subscribe to a few newsletters. And for me, I just don't have a lot of time. and I'm not a real good reader, to be honest with you. We didn't go over, but I almost flunked out of high school. And I've never taken an econ class or a finance class or anything like that. But I'm not a person that can sit down and like read 20 pages.

Like I have ADD. I just can't do it. And so, I mean, I can highlight some things and I can look at some charts and say, oh, that's interesting. But that's kind of how I like to consume written information. And so for these newsletter, it wasn't a real good fit for my learning style. So I thought, boy, that my ideal would be to have someone's research letter and then be able to go on a live stream and just kind of ask them questions directly after I kind of scanned their research letter and kind of highlighted things. And so I'm like, okay, well, what I can do is bring in the people that I want to read their research.

And then maybe I can set up live streams. And then it was actually Macintosh who said, listen, you need to set up. up a forum because I think people are going to find more value in the actual forum and the community driven content than they are in my research. And I think he hit the nail on the head. I just, we set things up the other day and people are starting threads and asking questions. But we have all of this aggregated, kind of decentralized brain power. One of the gentlemen, I know that just signed up has been in the gold business for like 30 years. Another gentleman is in the nuclear energy space.

So he has all these insights on uranium. But the bottom line, it was just the product that I wanted for myself. So I went ahead and built it. So again, one of the reasons that I think it's so interesting is that I am convinced that the next wave of media, right? So I think that we're starting to break out of the only model being the kind of mainstream model. We now have all these independent voices. You're seeing prominent journalists from places like Rolling Stone going off and starting their own newsletters, right? And frankly, if there's anything that gives me hope for what we were talking about before in terms of keeping the Overton window large for lots of different ideas, it's this idea of people building their own followings.

But the next step is, it seems to me, bundling, right? Finding ways to bring those things together because we can't have this. hyper fragmented perspective where what happens if there's, you know, is it just a power distribution or power law distribution where I follow, you know, one that I really follow, two that I sort of follow and then 10 that I kind of follow? Well, am I going to really pay for the 10? How am I going to engage with those other 10? You know, like people don't want just one perspective. So anyways, I just thought it was interesting how you started to build it. I think you're going to see a lot of validation of the model. I think you're going to see a lot of people building things like it.

So big kudos. And I'm really excited to dig into it as well. Yeah, thank you very much. And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to discuss it. Yeah, no for sure. Well, George, I really appreciate your time. Having you here, like I said, I think that the show's great. I think the topics that you cover on it are really resonant with this audience and also just so important for this absolutely spectacular moment that we're living through. I, you know, a student of history. And 2020 is going to be one that people look at for a very long time.

So thanks for helping us make sense of it. Yeah, no problem. could not agree with that more. We are living in fascinating times. And I think 2020 is just an example of how interesting things are going to be moving forward. And I think people have the opportunity now to get prepared. And so you can either kind of take advantage of the time you have now to educate yourself and position yourself or like I always say, you can be a victim. So listen to podcasts like this one, even if it's not my show, listen to macro voices, listen to Real Vision, listen to Jeff Snyder's show, making sense, follow these people on Twitter and really start digesting

this information so you can come to your own conclusions. You don't want to delegate your thinking to other people. You come to your own conclusions and make decisions that are going to help you not only survive, but thrive in a world of economic insanity. That most of the Most likely, we'll just continue to get even more insane. In the Bitcoin world, we say, D-Y-O-R, do your own research. There you go. George, where can people find you? My YouTube channel is George Gammon, just G-A-M-M-O-N, same Twitter handle.

And if you want to check out the product we're talking about, it's Georgegammon.com forward slash pro. Awesome. Well, thanks again for being here, and happy Fourth of July, too. Thank you very much. As I mentioned a couple times in that conversation, part of what I think is so important about George's show right now is this idea that we have to create space for people to explore why things feel so off in the economy to them without trying to railroad them into one political ideology or another. We have to create space where people can actually ask hard

questions and have hard conversations that don't presume some ideological affiliation. Until we do or if we aren't able to, I think we're in real trouble. So check out the Rebel Capitalist Show, check out George's YouTube channel. I'm sure that many of you who love The Breakdown are going to love that as well. Thanks for listening, guys, and until tomorrow, be safe and take care of each other. Peace.