TRIGGERnometry - Jim Rickards: Recession is Coming

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

James Rickards is an American lawyer, economist, investment banker, speaker, media commentator, and author on matters of finance and precious metals. He is the author of seven books including his latest, 'Sold Out: How Broken Supply Chains, Surging Inflation, and Political Instability Will Sink the Global Economy.' SPONSORED BY: easyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:36 Inflation is Here! What Now? 08:26 Debt in The United States 16:24 Modern Monetary Theory 26:37 The Need for Diversification  31:30 Payment Currency & Reserve Currency 32:44 Bitcoin & Digital Currency 41:17 Sponsor Message: easyDNS 42:30 Is the Climate Crisis Real? 48:22 The Impact of Globalisation 52:46 What Do the Global Elite Want? 57:35 Central Bank Digital Currencies 1:01:53 What Can The Average Person Do About CBDC? 1:03:13 Was The Pandemic Used to Get Rid of Cash? 1:05:40 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first question, distinguishes what's next. Disinflation may be deflation. Where should dry powder if you actually did have a big war tomorrow with China and invading Taiwan? You're going to take it up to 200%. And by the way, 130% who's at that lunch table? It's Lebanon, Greece, and Italy. I mean, is that the group you want to be having lunch with in the cafeteria?

I mean, the food would be good. So you're saying to diversify, which is obviously you've said gold, You've said cash, particularly in the case of deflation, and you're saying stocks and auctions. Now, there's a lot of people who would look at things like Bitcoin and would look at digital currencies. Look at Jim's face. It's kind of thought control because using inference, I can tell by what you're reading, what you're buying, what you're attending, et cetera, kind of what you're thinking. Combine that with artificial intelligence and GPT technology, and now you've got a target on your back and expect. to knock on the door from the FBI goon squads.

Well, you gotta get rid of cash and crypto, hurt everybody into the digital world, then you can whack them politically, and that's what's going on. People are more obedient than I would have expected. So if those two things are true, then you run the climate change playbook, and you get world control. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry on the road from the USA.

I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations, with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today has been on the show about 57 times. At this point, he could be the chief economic correspondent for trigonometry. Jim Rickers, welcome back.

Thank you, Cassidy. You're of course an author, and we're going to talk about your latest book and everything else. As we were joking before we started, you're always full of optimism and cheer. Your latest book is called Sold Out, How Broken Supply Chain, Surging Inflation, and political instability will sink the global economy. It's a good news. It's all good. And you are known, at least to us, as the author of a number of books, which predict some pretty

bad things. Sure. And a few of the times you've been on the show during the pandemic, I remember we had you and our good friend, Pippa Moundgram, on the show, and you both said inflation is coming. Right. Inflation is here. What's coming now? Well, we're actually heading into something disinflation, definition, but maybe even deflation

is the opposite, at least for the time being. is the end game. It has to be because there's no way out from under the debt. But right now, and people are still worried about inflation. Prices are still going up. I put gas in my car just like everyone else. I'm well aware of it, eggs, bacon, etc. But inflation has been coming down steadily since June of 2022. So about seven months in a row, eight months in a row. It peaked then. We all know what guest prices we're doing and so forth. But the reason is kind of interesting. and it does go to the book and the supply chain disruption.

Inflation anomalies, prices are going up. Okay, so that's inflation. But it can come from two sources that are opposite. One is from supply-side shock, supply chain disruption, that's what the book is about. We saw that in 1973 with the Arab oil embargo over the Arab-Israeli war at the time, the price of oil quadrupled, et cetera.

That was a supply shock. The thing about supply-side inflation is it's self-negating. It burns a self-out. You know, the old saying, and it's true, the cure for high oil prices is high oil prices. In other words, when things get too expensive because of supply disruption, people can't afford them. Business is closed. You get layoffs.

You go into recession. And prices come down pretty quickly after that. The other source of inflation is from the demand side. And this is a completely different dynamic. We saw this in the late 70s where prices are going up, but people have some bargaining power. So unions are on strike. They were getting higher wages. I worked at Citibank in the late 70s, early 80s.

They used to give us raises without asking. They just say, here, here's another $20,000, because they knew that the cost of living was gone up. We would all change jobs if they didn't pay us more. But that feeds on the stuff. So the supply side disruption tends to snuff itself out. The demand side inflation tends to feed on the self. It gets out of control.

And then we saw what Paul Walker did with interest rates in 1981. We took him to 20%. He caused a recession in terms of tight monetary policy to snuff out the inflation. But otherwise, if you don't do that, that just runs away. Now, the inflation we saw in 2022, late 2021, 2021, it was real.

It wasn't transitory the way Jay Powell said. And the price of gasoline doubled, more than doubled, and all the other complaints you hear, you know, the filling up your Ford F-150 pickup truck went from $70 to $140. Which for a lot of people that meant they couldn't eat or couldn't go out. It was killing demand and entertainment, shopping, retail, a lot of other things, which again, tends to snuff it up.

So that has happened to a great extent. Starting in June 2020, that was the peak and this inflation is coming down. Now it's still too high. The Fed's not done. We're going to see at least one more interest rate hike. But they're going to leave one more on the table. We'll see what happens in June. I'm not forecasting June, but I would not rule out another

interstate hike in June after the May hike. So because they, and they, Jay Powell is like thinking, how many times would I have to say this? He's given nine speeches since August 22, August 26 of the Jackson Hole, then September FMC meeting, November FMC meeting, the end of November's speech at the Brookings Institution, December FMC, congressional testimony, etc. And every time he said the same thing.

inflation is job one. We've got to get unemployment up, believe it or not. We're going to have a recession, and unemployment's going to go out. Sorry about that, but we've got to get inflation under control. Until we do, what's under control mean? Well, it's 2%. That's their goal. Well, it's come down from 9 to 5.

Nice job, but 5 is still a far cry from 2, and it gets harder as you go along. And they're searching for what they call the terminal rate. So the terminal rate, no one knows what the number is. I don't know because J-PAL doesn't know. But the terminal rate by definition is it's a rate that's high enough that it brings inflation down on its own without further rate hikes. Because so far, they've been raising rates and inflation's been coming down.

Okay, that makes sense. And they can keep raising rates and it will come down more. But is there a level where, you know, we're there, now we can sit tight, the famous pause, and inflation will keep coming down. Now you don't know because it's not a controlled experiment. You can't like do it twice. But they're getting close. So whether it's five and a quarter, five and a half,

or it managed to be seen, but that's the terminal rate. But then Wall Street came up with this narrative. Oh, yeah, as soon as they're done hiking rates, they're going to cut them. This is the famous pivot we've been hearing about for over a year at this point. No, as far as they're concerned, forget rate cuts in 2023. Maybe mid-2024, we'll get back to you on that.

But there's one wild card in the deck, which is, that's the Fed's plan. gave you the Fed's game plan. It's not, you know, you don't need a crystal while they tell you what they're going to do. All you have to do is listen, although a lot of people don't. Wall Street makes up their own version of that. But the idea of rate cuts following, hitting the terminal rate is, well, rate cuts go down, so dividends or so buy stocks. You know, Wall Street is always buy stocks. That's the, that's always the punchline. But they might cut rates late in the year, not because it's their planned, not because they want

to, but we could be in a very severe recession. And at which point, because the feds always late, they're always following the market, they never lead the market. If they've already raised, let's say they may already be at the terminal rate not know it. And so if they keep raising, which I expect they will, they may throw this economy into a very severe recession, at which point they may have to cut rates. Not because it's in the playbook, but because unemployment goes up to 7%. But that gets back to the first question consisting, which is what's next. disinflation may be deflation. And you mentioned, however, that despite that, and obviously we'll talk about the short term,

and remember, Jim, most of our audience are not financial experts. But so far, what they've heard from you is it's a very unstable situation. It's going to go fluctuate wildly from one end to the other. We're probably going to have a recession and inflation is coming down now, but the interest rates are probably going to stay quite high. Correct. So that's the consumer takeaway from what you've said. But the longer-term thing, and this is a recurring theme of our discussions, you said right at the beginning of your answer, which is inflation is the only solution to the problems that we've built up.

Sure. Which is we have these gigantic debts, both the U.S. and the U.K., there's just no other way to pay off, particularly given the gridlock of our political system where we can't ever seem to cut spending because cutting spending, quote, and quite kills people. Right. Well, we actually had a pretty good track record of cutting spending for the first 220 years. Right. From the CEO, Alexander Hamilton, bent at the government bond market. And the debate at the time was, the United States is formed. We have a constitution.

George Washington has sworn in. But we had all these revolutionary war debts where we issued all these IOUs to fight the revolutionary war. And they couldn't be paid. So the question is, what do we do with the Revolutionary War debt? So the Congress naturally said, screw them. We're not paying that. That was a different country.

We're now the United States of America. It's the American way. But Alexander Hamilton said, no, here's what you do. Borrow more money, pay off the debts, you'll have good credit, and when the new money comes to you can borrow more and pay that off and just keep going. In other words, credit is more valuable than writing off a bunch of creditors at one time, because you ruin your credit. So he said, borrow more and establish your credit and then just keep it going.

And that was the creation of the government bond market, and it's been gone strong for for 230 years. But I studied this and the pattern was very consistent. The United States would run up the debt to fight a war, every war, war of 1812, obviously the Civil War, or Mexican-American War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War, World War II. Every time we ran out the debt, we fought,

we paid for the war, won, and then after the war we took the debt back down again. So it was never, it never went straight up. It was not a straight line from George Washington, to Joe Biden, it's a signway up and down and up and down. We did a very good job of paying off the debt in times apiece so you'd have dry powder and effect so you could run up the debt in wartime. So it's a tool.

It's a tool you use to deal with the challenges of the moment, but then the most important thing is you put the tool back in the box and you polish it and you get it ready for the next time. Sharpen up, sharpen up, get it ready for the next time. And that's why there's so much confusion about John Mayer Canes. I believe Keynes was maybe the best or second or third best after Irving Fisher may be economists of the 20th century. But Keynesianism is bankrupt. Neo-Kainzianism was really bastardized by Paul Samuelson and MIT after World War II.

King died in, I think, 1946. So Paul Samuelson and others, the big brains in MIT, they had spent World War II as logistics experts doing linear programming, before computers. some machines, but you know, we're not D-Day, okay, where the supply is coming from, where's the fuel coming from, where's the ammunition coming from, what's the best way to deploy bombers, et cetera. And they solved all this problems. So then in peace, they said, well, we can take all those wonderful tools we developed to win World War II and apply them to economics and we'll start with Keynes, but we'll actually

turn it into a machine and we can fine-tune the economy. I remember the phrase in the 60s. No more recessions, they used to say, because we can fine-tune the economy. It was all before it ran off the rails in the 1970s. I don't blame Keynes for that, because he was not an ideal law. He was a pragmatist. He believed in doing whatever worked. And in a depression, in a liquidity trap, when people were hoarding money, hoarding gold, not spending it,

he said, well, if people won't spend, the government can and get the economy moving. But then he was the first one to say, yeah, once you get there, pay it back, and then you'll let the economy run on in the sum. Same idea. So the classic case, end of World War II, the U.S. debt to GDP ratio. By the way, Constantine, people said we have a big debt. If you throw out $25 trillion, $31 trillion, these are... No one understands this. Well, they don't, but I don't care.

Here's what I mean by that. The number doesn't mean anything. What you have to calculate is the debt to GDP ratio. What is your payment ability? So I say, if I owe $50,000 on a MasterCard and I'm making $20,000 a year, I'm probably going broke. If I owe $50,000 and I'm making half a million a year, I can write a $1,000. So in the case, the debt can only be considered dangerous or not in relation to the income. So you look at the debt to GDP ratio.

In 1945, the US debt to GDP ratio was 120% all-time high. What does that mean, Jim? Well, it means that it's extremely high and you have to pay it off, but my point is we won the war. And we were a global hedgeman. I remember in elementary school, US produces half the cars, three quarters of the cars of the world, half the iron, we have the whole thing. We won the war.

But then what happened next was. even more interesting. Between 1945 and 1980, that debt to GDP ratio went down from 120% to 30%, which is completely manageable. And it was bipartisan. You had Democrats like Harry Truman, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Republicans like Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford. It was not a partisan issue. Everybody thought it was a good idea. And then so along comes Reagan. He's handed a debt to GDP ratio of 30%. Now Reagan has his reputation as, you know, the tight tough fist, you know, tight-fisted conservative. No, he ran it back up again to 50%.

But we won the Cold War. And we won another war. In 1989, the Berlin Wall comes down, 1991, the dissolution of Soviet Union. I know that was George H.W. Bush, but Reagan laid the groundwork with Star Wars and a lot else. So it's okay, round it up again, but we won the Cold War, which I never thought would end.

I thought the next 50 years be talking about the Cold War. But then you're supposed to take it down again. And that didn't happen. Under George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, they didn't run it up, but they didn't take it down. It stayed around 50, 60%. And even under George W. Bush, with Iraq and everything else, it didn't go much above that. But where it exploded was Obama and Trump and Biden. So Obama was handed about 105%.

Between Obama and Trump, they took it up to 131%, which is where it is now, and Biden as well. So they broke the mold, that 220-year mold I just described. There were no, pardon me, no existential wars. Yeah, we're in kind of a long-jorn-out thing in Afghanistan, but it wasn't nearly as costly as the other things we're talking about. The US didn't win anything, by the way. But they ran it up to 130%. Now that's first of all the highest of all time.

Secondly, it broke the wool that you should pay it down in times apiece. Third, where's your dry powder if you actually did have a, a big war tomorrow with China invading Taiwan. You're going to take it up to 200%. And by the way, 130%? Who's at that lunch table? It's Lebanon, Greece, and Italy. I mean, is that the group you want to be having lunch with

in the cafeteria? I mean, the food would be good. The food would be no one to pay for it, though. Well, actually, we make food is pretty good, but yeah, maybe we could pay for it in Lira. But that's where we are. So this is untrusted in it. It's never been this high.

It breaks the pattern. of running it up in war and paying it down in peace. No one roots for war, but they happen. And it's worse than that because of modern monetary theory. Here's where my friend Stephanie Kelton comes in. She's a professor at State University of New York, Stony Brook campus. She's the big brain of MMT. And she was an economic advisor to Bernie Sanders

when he was on the Senate Budget Committee and in both of his campaigns, 2016, 2020. Again, her book, The Deficit Myth, I highly recommend it. I disagree with every word. But if you want to win the debate or you want to understand what's going on, you have to read her book. And I never put words in anyone's mouth. These are her words. She says, what's the problem?

The Faye can print unlimited amounts of money, which is true. The Treasury can issue unlimited amounts of debt. Not quite true. You have to raise the debt ceiling, but it always has been raised, so that's never acted as a constraint. She says, right from her book, she said, the only reason we have a bond market is a favor to investors to give them a place to put their money. We don't actually need to borrow any money.

All you have to do, you want to buy 10 F-35 jets, give the Fed wire instructions to Lockheed, just wire them the money. What's this business up? Issuing debt and having underwriters and primary dealers and Treasury gets the money, they deposit the Fed, and they pay Lockheed. Just cut out all the middlemen,

just had the Fed wire the money directly to Lockheed. And so yeah, so we don't even need a tax system. We have it because we're trying to engineer income equality, but we don't actually need taxes or bonds because we can just print the money and send it wherever we want. What's the problem? Well, when you frame it that way, you actually start out agreeing with her. I mean, I'm a lawyer.

I dealt with the Fed for decades. One's physically threatened by a Fed official. He started to come across the table at me. But that was back in the day where they were a lot tougher than they are. He's an Irish guy, very well-known. But I did what he said. But the point is, the Fed actually can print unlimited amounts of money. That is the law.

The Treasury can issue all the dead at once, subject to debt ceiling increases. That's the law. And you can send the wires. So why not? So this is one of these issues where I knew that it wasn't right. I knew this was really bad advice. I knew that modern monetary theory will fail.

But I didn't immediately know how to rebut those points because she's right. So I said, well, the failure must lie elsewhere. It must be not that you can't print the money or you can't send the money to Lockheed. There must be something else. And here's where I arrived at. I was trying to crack the goat on Bitcoin. It took 10 years also. People say, well, Bitcoin's not backed by anything.

Or the dollar's not backed by anything. Or the euro's not backed by anything. And I say, yes, they are. They're all backed by the same thing. It's just confidence. Right. If I think something's money and you think it's money and I tender it to you for goods and services and you think you're confident, you can give it to Francis for goods and services and

we have a large enough group, it's money. It could be, we were kids, we did this with baseball cards and bottle caps, you know, so anything can be money if there's confidence. But confidence is fragile, it's easily lost and when you lose it, it's very, very difficult to regain. And I've had this debate, I've been in vaults in the Pentagon. We're doing a tabletop financial war game and like 10 people sitting around the table. Here's the Treasury and the CIA and the three-star general and, you know, a couple thing tank people.

And we're doing this. And I told the Pentagon, well, the group, but including the Treasury, this seven or eight years ago. Because we were weaponizing the dollar against Iran. Don't get me starting in Russia. Well, actually, I'll start myself in Russia. But the point is, I said, sanctions work to a point. You're weaponizing the dollar, but you're doing it too much too frequently and you're relying on it too much. And what's going to happen is you're going to drive people away from the dollar.

You're going to drive people out of the dollar system because they're not going to take it anymore. I was, well, there's one guy who's sitting one place away from me. There was somebody in between this. He was a very senior treasury official, specifically tasked with managing foreign exchange relationships with Asian, Japan and Jada, basically. But the senior guy, his name is actually David Dollar. He takes both hands, slams him on the table. The dollar is the global reserve currency. It always has been the global reserve currency,

and it will always be the global reserve currency. And I said, David, I feel like I'm in Whitehall in 1913, listening to John Bulls say, you know, Sterling is the global reserve currency, and it always will be. And, of course, it was dead by 1944. Started to die in early November, 1914, at the beginning of World War I. So I've warned them, I've explained it to them,

but now we're at the point where that's actually happening. The kinds of things I describe, so it's like you hit the punching bag, you hit it, you hit it, at some point the punching bag and something walks away. It's like I'm not gonna stand for this. And the key thing, there's always a snowflake that starts the avalanches I've described, was when we froze the reserves of the central banker Russia.

And there's a war on, got it, financial sanctions, yeah, they were probably inevitable. But Russia's not Syria. It's the largest landmass in the world. It's the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. It's the 12th largest economy in the world. It has the best gold-to-GDP ratio in the world, which is another metric we can talk about.

But if you want to back up your economy with real money, their gold in GDP ratio is four times what the United States has. The list of strategic metals, grain exports, oil, of course, one of the three large... fertilizers, fertilizer, nitraces, et cetera, that they export. And they're only one of only two countries, the other one being France, that will give you nuclear technology if you want to build a nuclear, not a weapon, but a nuclear power plant.

The U.S. is kind of out of that game. So it's not some punk country. And they had over $150 billion in U.S. Treasury notes. They've been getting away from them. And Avira Nebula, who's the head of the Central Bank of Russia, She's the only central bank of the world who knows her job. She very prudently has quadrupled the Russian gold reserves since 2009. So 13, 14 years, she's taken up from 600 tons to close to 3,000 tons.

They did it very transparently. They had dealers in London. They had standing orders. They said, we don't want to disrupt the market. By the way, don't try calling up and ordering 400 tons of gold. You'll just hang up the phone. But 10 tons a month, sometimes 30 tons a month. for over 10 years, it added up to the position we're in today.

Guess what? It's physical gold. It's in safe storage near Moscow. You can't, it's not digital. You can't freeze it. You can't seize it. But it's money good. But we confiscated or froze their U.S. Treasury securities, because they are digital.

There hasn't been a paper treasury security since 1980. And the ledger is maintained by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. By the way, keep that in mind. if we talk about central bank digital currencies because you're back to who runs the ledger. But for U.S. Treasury securities, that ledger's digital is run in the United States. You know, people, you know, we're in a debt ceiling debate right now.

The Congress is debating, raising the debt ceiling. And if you didn't do anything, you know, ex-state, when the Treasury actually goes broke, and we default on the debt. Everyone's all spun up about this. The U.S. defaults those debt all the time. And people don't seem to notice. If you're Russia and you buy treasury notes and bills in good faith and they're supposed to pay as agreed at maturity and all of a sudden the issuer says, sorry, I'm not paying you.

If that's not a default, I don't know what it is. You know, it may be selective. Maybe I'm just picking on you and not the whole market, but that's the default. 1933 when Roosevelt devalued the dollar by 75% and took gold from $20 an ounce to $35 an ounce, confiscated all the gold and some paper money. was no longer redeemable into gold. That's a default. I mean, that's a default because Treasury securities at the time used to have a gold equivalent and FDR just tore it up.

So, and then 1977 to 1981, inflation was 50%. You know, all my Austrian libertarian friends, you go, well, since 1913, the dollar has lost 95% of his purchasing power, which is true, but so what? I mean, incomes are higher. But there was a five-year period, not a hundred years. where the dollar lost 50% of its purchasing power, which meant if you held a bond, the real value of your bond was cut in half.

That's a default. There's just lots of different ways to default. The U.S. does it all the time, getting back to your other question, Constantine, about inflation being the real endgame. So anyway, so we pushed Russia, and by the way, Russia's held up very well. The economy is going to outperform the United States in 2023,

according to the IMF and others, World Bank. The ruple is strong. It was for a long time stronger than it was before the war. So they're feeling the pain. I'm not saying there's no pain at all, but they're getting through it brilliantly and they're going to outperform the U.S. this year. But the rest of the world took notice.

So let's say you're China or Saudi Arabia or Turkey or Brazil. And these are major countries. They're saying, hey, the US just froze the reserves of the central bank of Russia. What if, you know, Janet Yellen gets out of the wrong side of the bed and, frightening thought, but says they don't like me, they don't like my policy, they don't like what I'm doing in Taiwan or the Kurds or, you know, women's right, whatever, pick a topic. They could do that to me. And so people are like, okay, now we really do have to get out of the dollar.

as an economic matter, but as a national security matter from their perspective. Jim, we've been talking at the macro level now. But I want to focus in on the ordinary American, the ordinary British person. They're looking at an economy, which is lurching, like you said, from one end extreme to the other. They're looking at their savings being depleted. They're looking at prices going through the roof. What should they do in order to weather the storm that is coming within the next few months? Well, there is a lot they can do.

And I'm going to give you an answer, and everyone rolls their eyes to go, well, it's obvious. The answer is diversification. Everyone goes, oh, we know that, you know, diversification. But they know the term, but they actually don't know what diversification is. And I'll give you an example. I run into people all the time. They go, well, Jim, I'm fully diversified. I have 50 stocks in 10 different sectors, telecommunications, semiconductors,

consumer non-durables, metals and mining. And I go, you're not diversified. You may have 50 stocks, but you're, you're not diversified. you're in one asset class called stocks or equities. And they're all going to go up together or they're all going to go down together. And the more stressful the condition, the more reason you have to be concerned about it, the higher the correlation. You know, at any given day, some stocks go up and stocks go down.

But when you dial the stress meter up, they all tend to move together. So that's, I don't care about your 50 stocks, your 10 sectors. That's not diversified. So what does real diversification look like? Have a sleeve of equities, if you want. That's fine. I look hard at oil and natural gas, natural resources, agriculture, again, kind of equities that have hard assets behind them that will do well in inflationary times or even in recessionary

times because you need all those things no matter what. Then a slice of real estate. I wouldn't be in commercial real estate, but you know, residential real estate, income producing real estate, farms, etc. That's good. I have a big slug of cash and people go, well, cash doesn't have any yield. lately deals, you can get 2, 3%, you know, in like a CD. But even in a simple savings account, you know, it is quite low.

It's kind of less than 1%. But people don't understand the value of cash in a couple of respects. Number one, in a deflationary environment, we're not there yet, but we could hit that if the recession gets bad enough. Cash could be your best performing asset. It doesn't go up in nominal terms, but it goes up in real terms. If you have 2% deflation, your cash is worth 2% more in terms of purchasing power. But the real value of cash is optionality.

And this is not well understood. I shared an office with Myron Scholes for six years, so I see options under the pillow, so to speak. But if you're the one with cash, first of all, it'll definitely preserve wealth. So if things are falling all around, your cash will be what it's worth unless you're in Silicon Valley Bank. It's a separate issue. although they got bailed out.

So it'll preserve wealth, even if it's not a high performer, it'll do very well in deflation. But the real benefit is when everything else is falling apart, you're the one who can go shopping. So it's kind of an at-the-money call option on every asset class in the world. Everyone's selling everything in a panic. You can buy your time, watch it go down, look for a bottom, and then say, okay, now I'll buy these things down 30% or 40% or 50% from where they were. Some alternatives. I have a number of investments in, you know, private equity and venture type situations. And yeah, they're risky and they're not liquid.

But some of them will do very well. Some of them have done well, so that's nice. And then a slice of gold. And I recommend 10% because people, you know, they put worse in your mouth, they go, Jim Bigger says, sell everything and buy gold. I've never said that, not a good strategy. But 10%, yeah. First of all, there's your inflation hedge, but also it's a money hedge, meaning if, going back

to what we said earlier, about confidence, see, I've said all along that Russia, China, Iran, you know, I don't care who they are. They can't destroy the US dollar, but the US can. We are our own worst enemy. Janet Yellen is the greatest enemy of the dollar because the way she's throwing sanctions around, she may destroy confidence. And the reason, like, hey, if the dollar is so shaky, or there's all this downside by being invested in it,

why don't I go to another reserve currency? There aren't any. This is a key distinction that gets glossed over in the debate. You see people on TV all the time talking about, you know, Saudi Arabia is doing a Chinese Yuan deal with China or Brazil is doing a bilateral deal with China and, you know, and Yuan and Iran. and there's no dollars involved.

But they, and that's the end of the dollars of reserve currency. People are not, people are not distinguished between a payment currency and a reserve currency. Two different things. Payment currency is anything you're willing to accept or I'm willing to accept. And it's important. And that's where the dollar is under attack. Watch what happens in August. The BRICS Plus, they've got a 19 member waiting list.

They're going to be more than half the global population, more than half global GDP in a matter of months. they are working on their own payment currency, payment channels, etc. They haven't announced what it is yet, but they're working on it. All these other countries, as I mentioned, doing bilateral deals, sharing high-cooperation organization is working on an alternate currency. But all those deals are payment currencies. And again, you can use baseball cards if everybody's in on the deal. Reserve currency is different because there actually are no reserve currencies.

People's Bank of China doesn't have pallets of $100 billion. in the basement. It's a reserve is a security denominated in a currency. So people say 60% of global reserves are in dollars. They're in US Treasury securities denominated in dollars. The key to the reserve currency is the security, not the dollar, although it is denominated in dollars. But just holding on there a second, Jim, so you're saying to diversify, which is obviously

you've said gold, you've said cash, particularly in the case of deflation, and you're saying stocks and options. Now, there's a lot of people who would look at things like Bitcoin and would look at digital currencies. Look at Jim's face. Now, I know you're a big Bitcoin guy, Jim. You're a huge fan. Huge fan. Could you please explain to people why? Particularly this applies to younger men who see these types of cryptocurrencies as a shortcut to wealth and to generate money for themselves. Right. Why this might not be a good idea? Well, sure.

I've spent, I've been dragged into a whole bunch of gold versus Bitcoin debates. And to me it's like, you know, fish versus bicycles. They're two separate things. But if I'm going to be the gold side and debate somebody on the Bitcoin side, I'm going to be certain to know more about it than they do. I don't want any surprises. So I've actually studied Bitcoin from the beginning. I read Satoshi Nakamoto's paper less than a year after it came out.

came out. I've studied it very closely ever since. And I, I guess it spent 10 years working on the problem, like there is no there. But I see the price action. I know people who bought Bitcoin at $2 and sold out at $20,000 and paid their taxes like good citizens and walked away with $20 million. You know, those stories are real. They're also suicides from people who bought Bitcoin in $70,000 and went to $15 and they'd hawk their inventory. and they're out of business and commit suicide. So that's the other side of the trade.

But yeah, the profit-making stories are real. We can all look at the price action. It was $68,000 in November 2021. That was a real number. I talked to Mark Saylor. He had made about $6 billion at that point. I think he was underwater briefly. He's back up to a billion.

He lost $5 billion when I went down to $13,000. That's rallied recently. I get all that. But I'm like, What is it? And why? So I've come up with two explanations. Actually, if I work on an issue for 10 years or so and I solve it, I move on.

I'm like, okay, I got to. I don't have to think of that anymore because they solved the problem. And so here's the thing on Bitcoin. The best way to understand it, if I go into the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, I put $5,000 down the roulette table, Kupia gives me a big stack of chips, and I gamble. And I could make money or I could lose money.

I know the odds and all that. I'm working on a roulette system. So is everybody. But you can make or lose money. But let's see you make money. You can't take those chips and walk out on the boulevard and buy dinner. You have to go to the cashier

and change them for dollars and then you can take your dollars and treat your friends to dinner, whatever you want. In those words, there's a portal between crypto world and the main banking world or the dollar world or euros or anything else, that you have to go through in order to find any utility in the sense of money.

So I've thought of it as a casino chip where the crypto world, I don't know Ether and Ripple and all these other ones. They're the casino. You can go in, put your dollars up, get your chips, gamble, make money or lose money, but you can't go anywhere else. You can't do anything else.

You're just in the casino. And if you want to get out of the casino, back in the real world, you've got to go to the cashier. Now, interesting footnote on that, on March 10th, this is funny, the FDIC shut down Silicon Valley Bank. And not to get too far afield, but when they did it, they followed the Brisbane, Australia, November 2014 bail-in rules.

Remember, after 2008, what happened in 2008? The Fed bailed out everybody. So Jamie Diamond kept his job. All these guys kept their jobs. They got their bonuses. They didn't lose anything. The stock market went down, but it came back. Nobody was out accountable.

Nobody went to jail. They all made more money than ever. They kept their bonuses. And the taxpayers, you know, everyday American or everyday British subject is sitting there saying, wait a second, I financed this. And you guys got rich and I didn't get anything except my retirement, you know, accounts sort of blew up. So the elites were aware of that. They said, we can't let that happen again.

There will be other financial panic. In Brisbane, the G20 came up with the bail-in plan. They said, okay, we're not going to do it with taxpayer money. We can't. That people won't tolerate it. So when an institution fails, here's what happens. Equity gets wiped out. I think I need bankruptcy.

Equity gets wiped out. Bondholders get wiped out to the extent there's a hole in the balance sheet. You might get 20 cents on the dollar or whatever. And then we're going to turn to depositors. And if you have an insurance scheme, we're going to pay the insurance, $250,000 in the U.S., I believe it's $100,000 in the EU. UK has something similar. We're going to pay that, but that's it.

And then we're going to whack the depositors, and they're going to suffer. And not until every credit or deposit, whatever, has been hit, will we even think about using taxpayer money? So that's the bail-in. You as a depositor bailed into saving the institution as opposed to a government bailout. Well, there were no major failures between 2014 and 2023.

So here we are, March 10, 2023. gets out the bail-in playbook and says, okay, equity's gone. Insured deposits are being paid $250, your money will be good Monday morning, no problem. And all you other depositors, you $140 billion of depositors, you're wiped out. They didn't say we're freezing your accounts or, you know, they said you're gone. And they gave them a receivership certificate because the company was technically put into receivership. You got a receivership certificate. What was it?

No idea. When will I get cash? We're working on it. We'll sell the assets and we'll pay you as and when we get proceeds. We'll pay you. But we don't know when. And the RTC in 1990s, same kind of deal took two years. I thought they did a good job. I was doing deals to the RTC. We were sitting on boxes because their furniture hadn't arrived yet.

But they were wheeling a deal and trying to get the stuff out of the door. Well, all the billionaire crybaby spent the weekend banging on the White House door saying, you can't do this. This is entrepreneurs all over. Come Valley, this is their startup capital. They can't meet payroll. They can't pay the rent. You're going to shut down technology, et cetera, et cetera.

You can't do this basically. So the first time was 6 o'clock Friday. At 6 p.m. on Sunday, the 12th, the FDIC and the Fed came out with a statement. He said, just kidding. All the deposits are good. Unlimited amounts. I know a guy was moving $8 billion out of it. He said, he told me, he said, we put the wire instructions on Thursday,

but from Thursday to Sunday, we didn't know where the money was. Nobody did. But it came through. One of the crypto exchanges had $3 billion. And I think the circle, the one that backs one of the stable coins, they had $3 billion. But they had Cisco, Roku, Etsy. They had a ton of big names in there. And then the whole startup thing was a bit of a fraud because, first of all, most startups

fail anyway. So you were just kind of accelerating the timeline. But it was a climate bank. And that's why the White House caved, because these were not new apps or cryptocurrencies or things that maybe make life a little bit simpler. It was all climate change. They were working on battery technology, wind turbines, battery chemistry, carbon capture, et cetera.

There is no climate crisis. That's made up to run a separate agenda of world control. But that's who was in it. Of course, if you're at the White House, the greener scam is your number one priority. So that's why they got bailed out. So they just took the bail-in thing and tore it up, threw it away, insured all the depositors. They did more than that.

The Fed created a facility. They would take every underwater bond in the country if you're a member bank and give you par. So if your bonds were worth 80, they'll give you 100. I wouldn't mind getting in on that deal for one year at low interest, and I'm sure they'll extend it when the year's up. So that's kind of the world we're living in today, and then people don't know about if their deposits are insured or not.

It depends if your bank's systemically important, according to Janet Yellen, and that's undefined. Right. I was going to talk about supply change, but you did mention the non-existent climate crisis and that it's a ploy for world control. And we hear this argument from people a lot, and you and I had a few messages about my Oxford speech so you understand how I feel about, you know, if we're being told that, you know, carbon is the problem. Why are we doing things that don't seem to really do anything about that? So I get what you're saying. But I always get wary when people get into this sort of like

there's a group of people who secretly have an agenda. Now, we see with the Davos people, whatever, they all believe their stuff and they all think it's important. And because they think it's important, they think a global problem requires global solution. Correct. But are you saying that these aren't just a bunch of, you know, slightly deluded, well-intentioned people, but actually they don't believe the thing that they're saying in the first place? Some of them do.

The less intelligent ones do. You know, the John Curries and the Al Gore's and, you know, then you got some true believers, you know, Gillian Ted, you know, knocked heads with her a few times, at the financial times. But some of them do. But the vast majority of American, and I'll just say people, you know, Western Europe, maybe more so, who buy into this,

you ask him a simple question, like, what percentage of the atmosphere of CO2? I have no idea. Do you know that CO2, the main reason it's around is plant food? If you get rid of CO2, all the plants will die and we'll charge. No, I didn't think of that. It's poison, really? I just exhale some CO2.

Sorry, I didn't mean to poison the room. I mean, these people don't know anything about chemistry. They don't know anything about physics. They don't know anything about climate. I mean, I am a complexity theorist. My ability to kind of understand capital markets is based on applying complexity theory for over here in the physics world,

bringing it to capital markets. They are complex dynamic systems, non-Parel. And it works beautifully. But probably the most complex system you can think of is the climate, is climatology. And so there's kind of a reign of terror going on in that world where, you know, this guy at Penn State, you know, his big thing is just to sue you

mention his name. Well, let's not mention his name. We're not as rich as you remember, Jim. Well, he's backed by the state of Pennsylvania. But we're not, Jim. Exactly. So, but my point is, my point is they will, so you're an up-and-coming climate researcher or physicist, whatever.

You will not get tenure. You will not get published. You will not get research grants. if you deviate in any way from the narrative, which is that CO2 is poison, methane is poisoned, there's, you know, if global temperatures go up, whatever, whether it's 1.5 centigrade before a certain time, the oceans are going to rise, New York City, subways will be flooded. None of that is true. There is no evidence that shows conclusively the CO2 has anything to do with global warming, number one. You can speculate on it. It is a greenhouse gas. It does trap

But the system is so complex that other factors come into play that tend to reverse have recursive functions and tend to reverse whatever it was that started The causes of climate change are actually very well known Sun cycles volcanoes ocean currents the location of the jet stream There are there are a set of factors you know La Niña el Niño that you know oceanic subduction where you know cold is it warms more warm, saltier water from the Gulf Stream gets up near Iceland, and it goes under the fresh water, but sometimes it doesn't, and then that'll make it warmer there and cause the jet stream to dip and be colder in Europe, et cetera. The medieval warm period from around about the 10th century

to the 12th century, they were growing grapes in Greenland. I mean, they had farms, they had colonies, and then today they're all under ice. The little ice age, which wasn't a true ice age, but it was an intense period of global cooling. The Thames was frozen. They didn't need the bridges. You could walk across the Thames on ice, and they had what they call frost fairs in early 17th century London,

where the merchants were set up their booths on the Thames, and people would go out ice skating, and you could go shopping. That's how cold it was. And that lasted for several hundred years. So, of course, the climate changes, you know, and say, you're a climate deniers. I'm not a climate change all the time.

I just deny bad science. I deny your hoax. I deny your lies. That's, yeah. All right. Well, this video is not demonetized. Thanks to you, Jim. But, you know, it is, it's weird because matters of science, you could be completely wrong about this, right?

I'm not saying you are, but you could be. And we should still be able to have the conversation. But if it does feel like, to me, I feel it inside of hosting the show right now. I feel like I have to sort of acknowledge the fact that you've expressed a controversial view that goes against what we all, No, I have not expressed an opinion. Everything I said is based on science. I can be happy to, pardon me, w-jew with the peer-review papers.

What's interesting is that the true experts, they're talking about Princeton physicists, University of Colorado, by the way, the one of the top of research universities in this field. The guys and women, mostly guys, who are retired, who aren't worried about all the things, they're writing papers that completely refute the climate change narrative.

I should call it the global warming, CO2 narrative because everyone anyone who knows anything knows that climate's changed. I live 10 years on Long Island. Let's not spend too long on this because I just wanted to point that out. But the thing I really wanted to talk about as well, James, is one of the things

that defined the politics of the last eight to nine years, I would argue, is globalization. And the impact that that process had on particular subsets of our population. Correct. The Brexit and Trump

votes had a lot to do with that. Yes. And part of the way that that impacted politics was that this is the argument, I don't know whether you agree with it, but people would argue globalization was a net good in terms of making everybody richer around the world. However, it had, you don't agree with this part. Well, let me get the rest of the argument now. However, it had a very bad impact on certain groups of the population in certain countries. In the West, that meant that basically lower skilled people lost their jobs and manufacturing jobs in particular.

And around the world, it meant people working in terrible conditions and blah, blah, and it may still have been an improvement on what they were doing before, but nonetheless. Right. That's right. Now what we saw as a result of COVID and other things to do with the pandemic and now the war in Ukraine, the world is going through a process of de-globalization. Correct. And this is what you call.

broken supply chains. That's basically what that means, right? Yeah. The broken supply chains are part of it, and that's going to continue. And we are de-globalizing or decoupling as another where it's the same thing. We're busting up globalization. So does that, my question to you is, does that not mean that

we're all going to, well, except for the super rich, you're always going to get rich. It seems like, we're all going to get poorer now. Well, when you're going back to what you said a couple minutes ago, constantly, where, you know, whether they're winners, or losers, et cetera, and of course they were, we're all better off.

That's true on average. Average is hide more than they reveal. You have to get behind the average and look at the degree distribution. So the old joke, I hate to use cliches, but I'll use one now. 20 guys are in a bar and Bill Gates walks in and on average, everyone's a billionaire.

Well, you're actually the same guy you were before he walked in the bar. So you can't do whatever you want, but to me it's not meaningful to talk about higher average income, higher per capita income without looking at the degree distribution, the genie coefficient, the income inequality. That's where it matters. Because I spend a lot of time in China. The sliver of the population, who are multi-billionaires, brings up the average. So yeah,

okay, people left the farm, they went to the city. It's still rough, but it's better than where they were, and they are better off. I don't dispute that. But you can't look at the average number. or the global numbers without understanding the fact that people are a little bit better off, some of them. But the income inequality is extreme. And it's also extreme. The U.S. geneal coefficient is a measure of income inequality, so a higher number means you're more unequal.

The U.S. just passed Mexico. I mean, Mexico is always, for Americans at least, you've got oligarchs in Mexico. Well, we got them here, and we got plenty of them. So, first of all, real incomes of Americans have been declining for 30 years, for working class Americans. Now, they're off the charts. So the averages still look bad, by the way, but they don't look as bad as the everyday American who has been in a losing race for 30 years.

But, yes, a small sliver, they're much better off. and they're the ones with the biggest interest in keeping the game going. But I also disagree constantly when you said, you know, talk about secret cabot. You didn't quite put it that way, but that was sort of, you know, aren't we into conspiracy theory land?

It's not a secret. I can name them all. You know, it's Christine Lagarde and Janet Owen and Tim Geither and Mark Carney, probably the number one villain in the whole thing. You know, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, you know, the heads of the major tech companies, Mark Zuckerberg, the Davos crowd, but more than that.

And they totally get it. These are smart people in addition to being immensely powerful. But they want this because... Sorry, Jim. What do they want? Well, what they want, and I talk about this in my book, The Road to Ruin, 2016 book The Road to Ruin. I explained this in great detail. The problem of being 10 years ahead of your time is when it comes true,

everyone forgot you said it, but pick up that book and you'll get the blueprint. Look, what they want in a nutshell is world government, world money, world taxation with a small group in control. That's what they want. The question is, how do you get there? The answer is, and Carl Popper explained this 70, 80 years ago, and George Soros adopted it. It's called piecemeal social engineering. It's like slicing salaminy.

Don't take the whole thing it wants to slice, slice, slice, people don't notice, or give yourself enough time and you'll eventually get to where you're going to do that. you want to be. So the euro was a big step in that direction because no more lira, no more Joppa, no more Pesitos, French Franks. And now, you know, NAFTA, it was a big step in that

direction, no more, you know, no more borders. So they want to eliminate borders, they want to eliminate different kinds of money. The central bank digital currencies, even if you do it, you know, there's a CBDC, Euro, it's not a cryptocurrency, by the way. It's The message traffic is encrypted. It is digital, but it's not a cryptocurrency because there's a single ledger controlled by the government.

They can see what you're doing. This is the ultimate social control tool. Where are they traveling? How are they traveling? What are they eating? What are they consuming on the platform? So individual carbon footprint tracker. Stay tuned.

We don't have it operational yet, but this is something that we're working on. So right now, I'm in an airport. I want a candy bar, I go to a retail place, I buy a candy bar, use a credit card. The merchant, how does he get paid? Well, he sells that receivable to somebody called a merchant-acquire. These are factoring businesses that buy up hundreds of millions of dollars of receivables. So the merchant gets paid. Then the merchant acquirer delivers it to MasterCard or Visa.

He gets paid MasterCard Visa, distributes it to the issuing banks. They get paid. The bank sends me a bill and I pay the bank. Okay, why do we need five intermediaries and three percent discount, three percent of fees for me to buy a candy bar? So the Central Bank digital currency where you have a single ledger, you know, QR code on your on your smartphone, no intermediaries. It's better, faster, cheaper. And that's true. That's actually true.

They always sell stuff by giving you the benefits. They never tell you the other side. The other side is, oh, now I'm in a bookstore. I buy the new book by Ronda Sannis, you know. Well, right now that's between me and MasterCard. You need, under the Fourth Amendment, you need a subpoena and a warrant to get that information from MasterCard. And if you're not wrong to ever, they shouldn't be able to get it. But with the Central Bank digital currency, the government knows that they know I bought a book by Ronda's Sett.

They know I gave a contribution to Elise Stefaniuk, who's the number three Republican in the House. They know I travel to, you know, Florida, you know, Red State, whatever. And then you combine what I just said, that ledger, with... artificial intelligence with the gpt generative pre-trained transformer technology you've got to target on your back with that information which the government will now have firsthand they're not stealing it you're giving it to them by using their central bank digital currency combined with gpt artificial intelligence technology they can develop a profile of you and go back to Joe Biden's speech and independent soul in september 22 just ahead of the midterm elections are directed by

by Lenny Riefenstahl, I mean, might as well have been. Everything that they use that she invented at the Nuremberg rallies, putting the leader up on a pedestal. She was the one who dug trenches, put the cameras in the trenches so you'd be looking up even higher at the leader, the vertical lights, the blood red backdrop.

Everything about the art direction of that speech was right out of Nuremberg. And, you know, she was a great art director. And more. So, but what did Biden say? He said half the country are enemies of the people. He said, not all your Republicans, but you maggy Republicans,

well, that's majority of the Republican Party, are enemies of the people. So now you got Biden telling you you're an enemy of the state. You got the government knowing, actually, it's a kind of thought control because using inference, I can tell by what you're reading, what you're buying, what you're attending, et cetera, kind of what you're thinking. Combine that with artificial intelligence and GPT technology,

and now you've got a target on your back and explain. to knock on the door from the FBI goon squads. So that's- I'm off to buy a copy of white fragility, just to balance things up. That's where we're going with this. Yeah. But so, look, so that being the case,

but let's look at it in practical terms. So you've got the dollar, which is pretty much a digital currency, and so is a sterling as where we are now. Correct. So that's as digital currency. We've got a CBDC. What is the difference? Is the CBDC, is that going to be a new currency,

or is that just going to be the dollar? And if it is the dollar, How are they going to transition from everybody using this system to everybody using CBDC? Well, the transition is already underway. There's new... That's comforting, Jim. Thank you. Oh, sorry.

You know, and when you frame a question, like, you know, can we bring this down to the everyday American or Brit or citizen around the world? I completely agree with that. That's a good approach. But what I am talking to that audience. I'm talking to you, but I understand the audience. I'm saying if the elites are working on something that would... make George Orwell blush, which it would. That is something that affects everyday people.

You ought to pay attention to that. And the difference, Francis, is, as Central Bank digital currency is not a new currency. It's still a dollar, still a euro, still you want, or whatever. It's a new payment channel. But here are the differences, number one. Here's the biggest one. The government controls the ledger, not MasterCard, not Visa.

The government controls the ledger. And right now, she, MasterCard has product codes. And so, you know, there's like, probably like books get thrown in with like, you know, retail or, you know, consumer doerables. They're kind of broad categories. They do sort them that way and they give you your own statement and all that. But interestingly, MasterCard recently came up with a separate code for guns, guns and ammunition. Now, there used to be sporting goods. You know, you wouldn't necessarily know if I bought a fly rod or AR-15.

But now you will because they break it out. And I was at the government's behest. That's the beginning, but you'll see that in an extreme form with central bank digital companies. So they're going to know what you're buying? Correct. But yes, but from that, with artificial intelligence, they can know what you're thinking. That's really my point.

But combine that with these other developments that are taking place. But the Fed is you're only on a system called Fed now. It's going into kind of testing in a few months, actually, I think, this summer. They've announced this and this is the inner bank version. So it's not going to be on my smartphone or it's not going to be at retail yet, but they want to make sure it all works between the banks, the interbank payment system and then they'll kind of roll it up. But they also got to get rid of cash because you say, all right, I don't like this system.

I don't want them knowing what books I'm buying, whatever. I'm going to use cash. You've got to get rid of cash. You're seeing that already. How many places have you've seen no cash accepted? So they'll do that. And then the other thing they got to whack. is Bitcoin. Now, I'm not a Bitcoin fan, but it is what it is. If people want to knock yourself out.

But that's not good enough for the government. So going back to our banking crisis discussion, on the same night, Sunday, March 12th, when they said all the deposits are protected, they also wax signature bank. They took out a bank called Signature Bank. And Barney Frank was on the board of directors. I was in Dodd-Frank, you know, so that didn't do a lot of good. But Frank said, and he was correct, he said, if you had just let us go until Monday when the Fed announced Sunday night that they would buy all the underwater bonds apart, we would have been fine. Why did you take us out?

Why were we any different than any other medium-sized bank, which were all in the same condition? The answer is they had a portal, going back to my casino metaphor, to the crypto world called CigNet, and they were very active in converting cryptocurrencies into mainstream banking. They were regular bank, member bank, FTC insured, but they had this portal between the banking world and the crypto world. That's what they wanted to kill. And that's why they took out the signature bank and didn't give them one day's grace to survive.

So they got to whack Bitcoin. They got to whack cash. And I always say if you want to slaughter cattle, you got to hurt them into the slaughterhouse, get them in a pen and get them in a shoot. Well, you got to get rid of cash and crypto, hurt everybody into the digital world. Then you can whack them politically. And that's what's going on. Okay.

Jim, we've got to wrap up. But before we do our final question and our locals question, there is an obvious question here, which is if you're an ordinary person listening to the this and you haven't jumped out of a window yet. What do you do about it? Well, a couple of things. This gets back. I guess I digressed a little bit when I said have gold in your portfolio and going back

further to the reserve currency thing. There is no alternative to the dollar as a reserve currency in terms of bond markets. There's no bond market with all derivatives and futures and options and settlement and clearance and rule of law and all that stuff. But there is an alternative called gold. So gold will be where countries go, and it should be where investors go, follow the money, as they say. And central banks have been net buyers for the last 13 years. So they're about the best in foreign players, you can imagine.

So I'd have some gold for that reason, not because it's shiny and pretty, but because central banks are huge net buyers, and it is the alternative to the dollar. There's no other currency that comes close, but gold does. So that's the reason to have some gold in your portfolio and also this loss of confidence in the dollar that we've been talking about Independent of what other countries are doing It'll preserve wealth. It'll be fine the next day You know if there's some kind of panic or collapse or Revolition against the dollar that's how currencies die your gold will hold up just fine and

Before we go do you think they use a pandemic to get rid of cash? They used a pandemic for for a lot of things. And we'll need another hour on that. Maybe you can invite me back in due course. But the pandemic was a dry run for the climate change panic that they're trying to promote. So my biggest shock at the pandemic

when they say, we're at mess don't work, the research is clear. By the way, these are not opinions. I'm happy to give anybody 50 peer reviewed academic papers that back this up. Mess don't work. Lockdowns don't work. The guy who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom

for eradicating smallpox, wrote a paper in 2006. D.A. Henderson, greatest virologist in history said lockdowns don't work. But, of course, that was ignored by Anthony Fauci because he had covered up his own crimes in Wuhan. There's a lot of truth bombs being dropped in this episode. We know all this. Yeah, okay.

But my point is, it was a really good job with, you know what shocked me the most? Not that the government would lie, not that they would use fear, but that people would go along with it. That's what shock me. I was the same. That's what shock me.

You're wearing a mask. A cop had to basically accost me to get me to put a mask on, and then as soon as he was gone, I'd pull it down under my chin. I never wore a mask. Best treatment for COVID was get outside, get some sunshine, fresh air, maybe a little vitamin C, exercise, lose a few pounds. That was the right therapy, and we did the opposite. Put a mask on and stay inside.

So as a dry run, it worked. Fear works, and people are more obedient than that. I would have expected. So if those two things are true, then you run the climate change playbook and you get world control. Well, I mean, the fact that people responded the way they did was absolutely terrifying. And that's what I always say to people, you know, people who complained about the COVID authoritarianism. They're like, oh, yeah, the government went all tyrannical and it wasn't Democrat. I was like, no, no, the government was looking at the people losing their shit and giving them what they wanted.

Right. Now, in fairness to the people, they were terrified into it by the government and the media. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But you put all that together and the people will willingly give away their freedom. Correct. And that is terrifying. And on that happy note, Jim, as always, thank you for coming on the show. Obviously, we recommend everybody to check out, sold out among your many other books. And we always end with the same question.

Which is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? We're we can actually look everyone's like AI is the end and chat Jupit is the end of the search engine, which it is. That's why Google is in such a panic and they're rolling out their AI. But we can look beyond AI to the end of AI. AI is the end of the search engine. We can look beyond that to AI. And the reason I promise to be brief, we're coming out the end of a 2,300-year-old tunnel. Plato was a transitional figure

between the Homeric society. Homer never wrote a word. He composed it orally. He was a recited or so people learned it. It wasn't a poem in their minds. It was the encyclopedia of Greek behavior. Plato started writing things down using the phonetic alphabet,

which was brand new at the time. And we've been using phonetic alphabet ever since. We are now coming at the other end of that into an oral, acoustic, tactile society. And everyone likes emojis. They think they're cute. Emotions are hieroglyphics.

They're not phonic. And the same thing with universal signs, hip-hop, I'm not thinking hip-hop. I'm just saying it's all acoustic. And kids are getting an education. They're absorbing it electronically. They're not sitting in class. They should be, but they're not. So what does that mean for the whole computer world, where we just taught?

Chat GPT trains a computer to read a billion pages of the text. What does it mean when we don't read anymore? What does it mean? We're not ingesting information properly. Well, we're ingesting it in an electronic way. You know, Marshall McLuhan said when the first Sputnik went up, the entire world became a human artifact because we wrapped it in aluminum foil. So some of this is just kind of updating McLuhan for the chat GPT world.

But it's, he came up with the phrase global village. Everyone says, oh, it sounds kind of nice global village. He says, no, villages are brutal, violent, tribal. So it was an accurate description, good choice of words. They said, don't think that means warm and fuzzy. It's we are becoming more tribal. And that's what acoustic environment, electronic environment is doing to us. And we don't know it.

It's, you know, I would say the fish, we don't know who discovered water, but we're sure it was not the fish, because the fish is in the water. You have to take the fish out of the water. Oh, where's the water? Well, we're in this electronic environment. We don't even know. Yeah. We can do another hour on that as well.

And I have no doubt that we will. Jim, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. And that's why you should head over to locals. Join us there for the bonus questions that you've already submitted that only you will get to see the answers to. Take care and see you soon. Will you be putting money on Trump to win the election next year? Oh, what a question.