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Jan. 18, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
50:56
Mike Adams interviews John Williams on Financial trends, debt, and AI displacement
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
And today we're joined by John Williams, who has a company called Great Credit Fast.
And I love his videos on Brighteon.
And he talks about finance and banking and, of course, credit from time to time, but also a lot of...
Much bigger issues like what's happening with housing prices and Federal Reserve changes in interest rates and things like that.
I think he's a brilliant guy and a great communicator.
I've been watching his videos for quite some time.
This is the first chance I've had an opportunity to speak with him.
So, Mr.
John Williams, welcome to the show.
It's great to have you on.
Thanks a lot, Mike.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely.
Really, I'm a fan of your videos.
I love watching your videos.
I think you have a great communication style and you're educating people on a lot of topics.
Can you give us a little bit of just an introduction and background for our audience since this is the first time you've been on my show?
Yeah, sure.
I was a real estate agent at Beverly Hills from 2009 to 2019.
Saved up money and became a real estate investor.
And about 2017, picked up a deal that turned out very well.
And then from there, just continued to invest and grew on social media and stopped working in terms of as an agent and got into e-commerce, building out a personal brand and online businesses.
Okay, well, that's a great resume.
And yet, you know, what you talk about goes beyond, way beyond, like a typical real estate investor.
Because we've all seen videos of just sort of mainstream real estate investors.
You know, it's like, buy these disheveled homes and put in a few thousand dollars and fix them up and sell it, you know, before the cheap new carpet starts to show where.
You know, that kind of thing.
But you go way beyond that.
I mean, you're talking about personal financial strategies for people to help them get through, I think, some pretty crazy scenarios that...
I believe are coming.
Why do you dare to talk about more than just a typical real estate investor?
Well, I think typical real estate investors are going to walk into a big problem.
I think the entire economy is fake and everything that we've seen since, you know, even 2008, some could argue, but especially 2020 with eviction moratoriums and all these quote unquote tenant protections and all these different protections that have come across the economy.
All they've done is paint a false sense of security that a lot of people have used to take on excess debt.
And as they continue to increase interest rates, what's ultimately going to happen is I think probably the greatest rug pull in American history is in front of us.
Oh, wow.
So you believe then, I assume, that interest rates are going to continue to actually climb?
You don't think the Fed's close to a pivot?
I think they're going to stay higher for longer.
I see.
And every month that they stay high is pain for anybody on credit.
Yeah, I mean, you have $2 trillion in corporate debt that has to get refied or $1.8 trillion over the next 18 months.
You have $2.7 trillion in commercial real estate that has to get refinanced or worked out from now until 2027.
You have a lot of stress that's being held right now from local regional banks.
And I think we're going to probably see a lot of consolidations out of banking as well.
So I think we're going to walk into a pretty decent sized storm here.
Do you think a lot of commercial real estate investors and holders are going to lose their bags, so to speak, and then the banks are going to have to end up repossessing a lot of that property?
Are we going to see fire sales, things like that?
I don't think it will be traditional fire sales like what we saw in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
I think what we're going to start seeing here is a lot of capital coming in from BlackRock, Blackstone, a lot of these very, very deep-pocketed institutional players that are going to step in and start buying a lot of that bad debt.
Okay, so that's going to centralize more power over commercial real estate into the hands of the few once again.
Yeah.
And so what, the small investors are going to be the first to be kind of shaken out of this system?
What I believe is going to happen is the next one to three years are going to be the most important for everyday Americans that are looking to build out a little bit of wealth.
They have to be really strategic with what they do and make sure they can get their slice of the American dream before...
I mean, it's almost too late, but after 2027, 2028, when this starts hitting, we're going to start seeing a lot of challenges for those looking to build wealth.
And we're going to start seeing the middle class is going to essentially get eliminated.
Okay, I want to talk about that in more detail.
First, let me just plug your website.
And for our audience, this is not a sponsored interview or anything, but I just want to, as a courtesy, talk about your website, Great Credit Fast.
I'm not a customer of your website.
I don't use any credit, but I imagine most people do.
So tell us about your service.
How do you help people with their credit?
Yeah, so in 2020 and 2021, if you had bad credit, it really didn't impact you that much.
You could easily get funding and financing.
You could buy a car.
You could buy a house in most cases.
It wasn't that important.
But now what's starting to happen is banks and lenders are starting to tighten up.
And as they tighten up, if you have bad credit, it gets a lot harder to get funding and financing.
And what I think is going to happen is I believe as banks start to suffer more losses, they're going to be even more careful with who they lend money to.
And so having the best credit score and putting yourself into a position to where you're able to get funding is going to be one of the easiest ways for people to level up.
If you have bad credit and you're viewed as high risk, it's going to be pretty hard to go out there and invest when things start to get a little bit more dicey.
So what kinds of strategies do you teach people in order to improve their credit?
Well, so what we do is we handle the entire credit repair process for them.
So we don't teach how to fix credit.
We actually do that for you.
So we handle the entire repair process.
What we handle is late payments, medical bills, charge-offs, foreclosures, bankruptcies, repossessions, anything like that.
Any negative item on your credit report will assist with the disputing process.
How it works is we have a five-day free trial.
So the first five days, we don't charge anything.
The first 24 hours of that five-day trial, they'll have a consultation with someone on the team.
We just hired a couple people from Equifax.
They'll review the report.
They'll tell them what they think the likelihood of getting these items removed would be in roughly how long.
And if it makes sense, you know, we'd love to help.
And if not, then we would just cancel.
We wouldn't charge anything.
And then do you, when you do start charging, do you charge, I'm just, I don't know, but is it like a percentage of what you're able to write off for the customer or is it a flat fee or how does it work?
We charge $229 per month.
No contract, no commitment, no hidden fees, nothing like that.
And we give the client access to a portal where they can see everything that we're doing, all the letters that we're sending out 24-7 in real time.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
And then I've heard a lot of stories of people being able to discharge substantial medical bills, for example.
What kinds of successes are you able to achieve or your company for people?
We're getting great success, but we're also very strategic with the clients which we work with.
So if a client comes to us with a situation that we think we might not be able to help with, we would rather not take that client on.
So we're careful with the clients that we pick, and so we choose the right clients based on their specific circumstance and what we think we can do for them.
So the clients which we take on, we get great results for.
But we also turn down about 20% of clients.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Well, I'm curious too then, what are your clients saying to you when they contact you for your services?
Like, what got them into credit trouble in the first place?
Believe it or not, we see a mixed bag, but one of the main things is a bad relationship.
You know, a boyfriend, a girlfriend, someone over, you know, maybe not conveying, you know, when a bill comes in or a statement comes in or something happens.
But it's a lot in the relationship department.
We see a lot of issues there.
Okay, that was an unexpected answer, but yeah, so it's kind of like a little bit of marriage counseling along with the credit repair, right?
They have an issue that comes in to us.
Their credit ended up getting impacted negatively because of that.
Right, no, I've heard of that.
A variety of them.
I know someone who was married.
It's a woman I know who married a guy, and then they consolidated all their student debt, for example.
It's like federal student debt.
But the husband had the most debt, but now it became their joint debt, and then they got divorced, and he walked away and left and refused to pay, so she had to pay all the student debt bills.
Otherwise, her credit would be impacted.
So that's the kind of thing you're talking about.
Yeah.
So it sounds like a one-off situation, but that's pretty common.
We see that a lot.
And also debt consolidations.
People believe that, hey, I have $50,000 in credit card debt.
I'll just do a consolidation.
What that actually means is when you have a debt consolidation and you bring in a company to negotiate that debt down, they're negotiating on behalf of you with the creditor so that that creditor will take X amount and they'll write off Y, the difference.
But the consumer, they no longer have to deal with the threat of being sued.
But you still have that negative item that goes on one's credit report for seven years.
So there's still a really big negative impact and a big ding to somebody's credit report when they do a debt consolidation in most cases.
What about credit card debt?
Because I hear that there's record debt now.
I mean, we see it in the news headlines.
Most Americans are putting more on credit cards than they ever have in their lives, including groceries and things like that.
What are you seeing in the credit card arena?
Yeah, I mean, what we're seeing now, retail credit card interest rates are over 30%.
So like a Mason card, the Nordstrom card, like it's pretty crazy.
And the average right now, the average American has about $6,000 in credit card debt.
So it's substantial.
Now, in 2008, right before the, or right as the great financial crisis started happening, interest rates on credit cards are about 12 and a half percent.
So now, you know, you're 25, 26%.
People might think, oh, it just means double interest.
It doesn't.
If you use a credit card interest calculator and you put in $5,000, $10,000 in debt and you type in your minimum payment, people will be shocked when they see that it's 10 years, 15 years, 18 years to get out of debt.
Wow.
Yeah, exactly.
And are you also advising people to do things like make extra payments on their home mortgages or accelerate the payment schedule where they can to get out of debt?
Yeah, I mean, my advice is always to pay off the highest interest rate credit card first.
Makes sense.
You focus on getting out of the highest interest rate card.
And if you have a great credit score, let's say a 720, 730, 740, in many cases you could qualify for something called a balanced transfer credit card, where you can transfer high interest rate credit card debt to a 0% APR card for between 12 and 21 months, no interest.
So if you can transfer debt from, you know, 20 or 25% interest to zero, you know, that's always a win.
Alright, let's talk about macroeconomics then.
One of the things that's causing people to experience so much debt is the declining value of the dollar.
And they're losing purchasing power.
And I know you've talked about this with all the money printing and the dollar losing its global dominant position as the world's reserve currency.
That's slipping away very rapidly with the rise of BRICS nations and so on.
Do the people that you talk to, your customers and so on, do they realize that even when they're not in debt, if they're just holding dollars, that they're also losing money every day?
Yeah, they are.
I mean, a lot of people that watch my channel know where I stand on this.
And I talk a lot about BRICS and I talk a lot about what's happened with the dollar.
I mean, they say that 17% is the number.
That's how much the dollar has lost in value since 2020.
I think it's probably greater than that.
Oh, yeah.
25% or 30% or more, depending on, of course, what you're buying, but 20%, 30% is probably what we've lost in purchasing power the last three years.
So you have to ask yourself, if we're walking into this green agenda and all these different things, these are all inflationary pressures and a lot of headwind for the dollar.
So then I'm curious, do your clients ever ask you, like, what should I do with my savings?
Is the answer smart real estate investments, or do you ever even get into that area?
Yeah, I would always suggest gold, silver, land.
You can't go wrong.
Especially land if you have a water source associated.
And then personal brands, website.
If you have online equity, that's definitely going to help as well.
If you have an online business.
But putting yourself into a position to where you're just not sitting all in fiat and you're putting yourself in a place to where you can pivot.
It's going to be of real value.
We're walking into an era, I believe, over the next five years that will be unlike anything we've ever seen before in history.
In the past, people's parents would tell them, save money for a rainy day.
If you save $100,000 today, in two years you might have $30,000, $40,000 in purchasing power, $50,000 in purchasing power.
And what is that going to get you?
A used car?
Well, I mean, you're talking about a very rapid devaluation with those numbers that you were just spitting out, like a 50% decline over two years.
So, you know, what would that be?
That would be like a 36% devaluation per year, right?
Something like that.
So that, I mean, really?
Are you thinking it's going to get that bad?
So here's what I'm looking at.
So in 2021, there were 11 cities in America that had pilot programs for universal basic income.
In 2022, there's 82 cities across 29 states.
Right now, there's hundreds of cities working in these different universal basic income pilot programs.
What we're walking into is a situation where the affordability crisis is getting much, much, much worse every single month.
And we're going to start to see a scenario over Sometime this year, where we're going to likely see more people demanding government assistance.
And as that starts to happen, and universal basic income becomes more and more and more mainstream, how are they going to fund it?
They're going to fund it through printing more money, taxes.
They're going to continue pushing this.
So, if you look at 2005, 6, 7, 8, what happens?
It was basically a disaster created by humans and solved by humans.
What we're walking into is we're going to walk into a problem created by humans, solved by AI and technology.
And that's going to be a situation where a lot of people are going to be pushed out of work.
And I think that's all going to be coupled in with a universal basic income coming very, very, very soon.
Okay, I want to talk to you about that in particular.
I'm really glad you brought that up.
But first, let me just remind our audience, we're talking with John Williams, whose website is greatcreditfast.com.
And John Williams also has a very popular channel on brighteon.com, which is our video platform, as well as YouTube.
He's got quite a few hundred thousand subscribers on YouTube as well.
So you can follow him.
What's your channel name on YouTube, just for the audience here?
This is John Williams.
Okay, this is John Williams.
Got it.
Because, yeah, because your name is actually pretty common.
And there's also another, you know, the shadow, what's it called?
Shadow stats?
That's another John Williams that talks about the real interest rates, right?
So...
Yeah, and there's also John Williams, the famous composer.
Composer, exactly, right.
Yeah, okay, so you probably get all those questions.
Are you this John Williams?
No.
All right, so greatcreditfast.com is the website.
You know, just as a disclaimer, again, this is not a paid promotion.
I haven't used your service, but it sounds really effective to me, and it sounds like you know what you're talking about, and I listen to your videos, and I think that you offer really great financial advice.
So let me ask you the next question here.
We see a trend right now where more and more people are taking on debt to buy small everyday things.
And we see, for example, the self-checkout lanes at Walmarts offer like a buy now, pay later for things like toilet paper and Pop-Tarts and whatever.
And there are a lot of finance your pizza services.
You need a pizza today and you can pay for it over the next six weeks.
How concerning should we be about this trend?
This trend is here to stay.
Imagine if someone were to tell you you could finance a pizza two years ago, three years ago, four years ago.
You would have thought that was crazy.
We're going to walk into this and it's just going to get crazier and crazier.
We're probably going to see a 15-year auto loan.
We're going to see a 60-year home loan.
We're going to start seeing more and more and more of this.
But yeah, it's going to be, I think, something that people need to be very, very weary of and very cautious of.
When you ask yourself, should I take on this debt?
If that debt is not going to make you more money, the answer is no.
You want to reduce your expenses as much as possible to try to get a hold of the situation, not make it worse.
Because as inflation gets worse and interest rates probably stay higher for longer, That little pizza, that little issue here and there, is just going to get harder and harder and harder to manage down the road.
Absolutely.
And it seems like, as the WEF would say, you will own nothing and be happy.
But maybe I think we should change that.
You will own nothing and rent everything.
You will rent everything.
And it's never a good deal in the long run to do that.
Because you end up owning nothing, but you've already paid out all this cash.
And 10 years later, what do you have to show for it?
Nothing.
Yeah.
And your assets aren't working for you.
But I see...
Well, kind of next question.
I see a real lack of education in money and finance.
A lack of literacy.
You know, the typical person does not understand compounding interest or the rule of 72 or anything like this.
They don't know how money works over time.
Is that something...
I mean, I know you've talked about this, but...
What are your thoughts on how big of a deal that is that the average consumer doesn't understand how money works?
Yeah, I mean, the last thing I think anyone wants to be or should be right now is average, especially considering that the bar is so low.
And most people, I mean, most people, they just swipe all day long.
They go on TikTok and they just swipe, swipe, swipe.
Learning or taking in new information becomes a real challenge.
What you're looking at is you're looking at an erosion of society that's happening and people need to look around everyone around you as they're starting to get softer now's the time to get sharper and smarter and save more and try to earn more and do everything you could possibly do to get into a better and better position because as people are going to start to be you know Pushed off the edge financially, they're going to start selling off assets.
So the more you learn, the more you can earn, really.
It's cliche, but the more you're sitting there learning and studying and advancing yourself, the better off you're going to be.
Well, and especially then, you mentioned the rise of AI and perhaps a universal basic income that will be paid to people who are displaced by AI jobs.
So that's a great segue.
Let's go right into that.
I've talked about this quite a bit in my podcast as well.
And I'm working on an AI project right now.
Literally, I was doing that at 1 in the morning last night with a couple of devs.
And I've come to realize that right now, today, 50% of white-collar jobs are obsolete.
But the AI agents just haven't been rolled out yet across all those corporations to displace those jobs.
But the tech exists, which means, in my mind, over the next 24 months, we're going to see 50% of white-collar workers just giving a pink slip out the door.
We can replace a person who costs $30 an hour with electricity on a machine that costs like $0.10 an hour.
That's here.
Now, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, Google just replaced 30,000 employees in their ad department, right?
You have IBM replaced 7,400 employees.
Bill Gates came out saying between 18 to 24 months, you're going to start seeing massive, massive disruption with AI. The big question is, some people say that we're not going to see a crash and we're not going to see any problem.
How can people hold on to assets such as homes and second homes and even their cars?
How can they hold on to all these different things if real wages are going to continue to erode and inflation is going to get worse and there's going to be massive job loss?
I don't see it.
I think we're going to see AI really kind of throw gas in this fire.
So, I mean, you've alluded to this, but one path for the worker who is displaced, which initially that will tend to be people who engage in generative content creation processes, such as graphic artists and script writers and email writers and business proposal authors and so on.
But also document classifiers, right?
People who look at documents and see, you know, does this fit in this category?
Is this a consumer complaint or whatever?
Or this form coming in, you know, has the person filled out the form correctly?
Like, all of that's going to be obsolete.
But one path is that these people can learn new skills.
They can learn how to maybe use AI or they can take advantage, they can harness this technology and uplift themselves to things like project managers, but there are only so many project manager positions in the customer service department, right?
Yep.
Yeah, we're going to see...
A lot of people being forced to pivot in their jobs and their careers.
If you're a business owner and you're not finding ways in which you could reduce your expenses with AI, that could be a mistake.
Because as the business owner, the goal for the business is to supply a superior product to market and to do so at a profitable stand, right?
Like being able to reduce your overall expenses and invest in the customer experience.
You're going to see a lot of companies focusing more and more and more on that As people are going to demand such high wages just for basic work, that is over.
We're going to start seeing a lot more cost-cutting walking into this.
Yeah, and it's not like the employee can even say, okay, I'll work for 10% less because the business owner is like, no, I can pay 99.9% less.
For a machine to do the job.
Or maybe the machine is like 20 grand up front, but then it pays itself off in one week versus paying this human worker, right?
So of course the business owner is just going to buy the machine.
I mean, look at what's happening right now in California.
They have a $20 an hour fast food minimum wage.
You could buy one of those flippies, the AI. I think it was like $24,000.
It pays itself off.
I mean, this thing's going to work 24-7.
It's not going to call up sick.
It's not going to sue you.
It's not going to have any type of legal problems.
And within a few months, this thing's probably going to pay itself off.
Because he's probably going to be able to do the job of two or three people compared to a $20 an hour minimum wage worker.
Well, that brings me to the next question.
Thanks for bringing that up, John, which is the replacement of the blue-collar workers.
So we're talking about software AI agents right now, office jobs and composing emails and things like that.
But fast forward a couple more years, China's going to be rolling these humanoid robots off their production lines in 2025.
They have this massive strategic ministry blueprint of what they're going to do.
We're going to have millions of humanoid robots and also companies in the US.
You've got Tesla and you've got Boston Robotics and so on – Is it Boston Research or Boston Robotics?
But you know who I'm talking about.
But we're going to see humanoid robots everywhere in four years' time, for sure.
And then what about all the Amazon fulfillment workers?
You know, what about all the packers?
What about the restockers at the grocery store, right?
Obsolete.
Obsolete.
You know how many little robots Amazon just brought in?
750,000.
They have 750,000 robots.
They have 1.6 million employees, right?
You look at how fast this is growing.
Going from 1.6 million employees to bringing 750,000 robots in essentially overnight.
We're walking into a situation where they're going to go from 1.6 million to maybe in five, six years, maybe they have a couple hundred thousand employees.
Several million robots basically running all the fulfillment centers.
And the fulfillment centers will probably never run better.
And it'll run like a clock, like an old clock.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's clear.
But you always hear these businesses like Amazon saying, oh, we're not going to replace any humans.
We value every human worker.
We're just going to augment them.
It's BS. Of course you're going to replace the human workers.
Of course you are.
You can't wait to replace those workers.
I mean, in some way, I don't blame a lot of companies for looking at AI, because if you look at what's happened to the American worker over the last five years, the demands are almost not justifiable for the employer.
Many employees want to be paid such an exorbitant wage, but they want to sit on their phone all day, or they want to call off last second.
We've seen a pretty big erosion in performance.
But what I find very fascinating is where we're actually headed.
They're saying that this is actually a good thing, that people should work less, and people should...
Like Elon Musk came out with a...
What did he call it?
A high universal basic income.
It was like several thousand dollars a month.
And then they're also talking about a three-day work week and a four-day work week.
So yeah, I mean, we're in, I think, the beginning stages of this big push.
Alright, so let's talk about exactly that scenario.
So with all these millions of displaced workers, there won't be enough jobs for most of them.
I mean, a few of them will innovate, they'll be entrepreneurial, you know, like you, and they'll find new ways to contribute to society that robots can't replicate.
But the vast majority are going to be obsolete.
So now you have, let's say, tens of millions of Americans You know, eventually, jobless, homeless, can't pay their bills.
So you're saying, and you just quoted Elon Musk, that they're going to roll out a UBI. And they're just going to put money into people's hands so that people can continue to purchase.
They can be consumers, but not producers.
But, you know, come on, Austrian economics tells us that that whole system doesn't last very long.
It's not sustainable.
Where do you think it goes?
Yeah, so here's what I think is going to happen.
If you go to C40.org, which I'm sure you've probably visited that website before, they say how many new properties they need to develop, how many homes they need, right?
But what they're saying is that a lot of people are going to be living in these cities, right?
And you're aware of that, right?
When you look at the office problem right now with office real estate, Before someone would buy a building, let's just call it a hundred million dollar building, right?
A hundred million dollar deal.
If you go up to the top and then you click on what we do, then you go to energy and buildings.
Energy and buildings.
To the right.
Energy and buildings.
Oh, I got it.
Okay.
And then it says cities will pledge new cities will be net zero carbon by 2030.
But scroll down a little bit, a little bit more.
And it says right up top, a little bit higher.
It will tell you the need for buildings, the second paragraph, the need for buildings and infrastructure will only intensify by 2025.
We will need to build 1 billion new homes, about 60% of buildings that will exist by 2050 haven't been built yet.
Now, many people say that's never going to happen, you know, this crazy.
But if you click on who we are, you'll see it's the World Bank.
It is Google.
It is every big company.
And so what's going to happen?
When you look at what Joe Biden is doing right now, he's issuing $35 billion in dry powder to developers and builders to convert these office buildings to residential affordable housing.
And so when you click on our cities, what it shows you, San Francisco, L.A., New York City, Boston, Philly, all the big cities are all part of it.
Well, John, I would say, and I mean, you're free to disagree, but you've heard my podcast.
I would say this is all theater because they don't plan to have these people around.
I mean, honestly, they're not going to pay people to sit around and build new cities for them.
They're going to exterminate them.
Yeah, the last few years are interesting.
And if you look at what's happened since 2020 and the chain of events that are unfolding, we're walking into probably that scenario.
But there's a lot of people that are still going to get pushed into a lot of these cities.
Yeah, I mean, this could be the cover story for a while, I would imagine.
But ultimately, you know, if you're a globalist and you're running planet Earth, let's say, and you're probably looking at history like, wow, you know, human cognition was really great.
It got us to this point where humans could create microchips and AI systems and language models.
And now, you know, thanks, humans.
See you later.
We're done.
From this point on, they're like, we'll just do artificial data, artificial intelligence, AGI, all of it.
Like, the cognition phase is here.
Why do they even need humans around any longer, right?
Yeah.
What do you see, like, in terms of timeline, how do you see it planning out?
Well, of course, I think depopulation has already begun in one way.
But it's interesting, I interviewed Zach Voorhees just the other day, and he said that he thinks that the globalists tell themselves that they're being very polite and nice in the soft kill, because something far worse, some far worse fate...
Humanity would be facing a very violent die-off, mass impoverishment and disease and war and so on that would kill many more people more harshly.
So the globalists tell themselves that they're actually doing a gentle euthanasia.
Clearly, it's already begun at some level.
It has already begun.
It hasn't really taken off yet.
We're not looking at billions of people dead.
But I can't look at this plan and say that I believe anybody in a position of power gives one single crap about human beings.
They don't care.
If you're to live in one of those office buildings that are converted into affordable housing, when you look at what's happening with the border, all the millions of people that are coming across, you have to ask yourself, where are they going?
They're all going to cities, right?
So as people start losing their homes and they start walking into You know, a bad spot financially.
They're going to have no choice but to do some type of welfare type of subsidy.
But it would not surprise me to where we see some type of UBI connected with you have to take certain things and do certain things to be able to qualify.
Well, see, that's the ticket right there.
So if someone watching this, you know, if you don't get out of debt and you end up dependent on a UBI, then basically you're going to be in a contract with the government that's giving you that money.
You're going to have to behave in ways that they demand.
Like you could be cut off.
I mean, we've seen this and like Brazil has cut off welfare for families that refuse to vaccinate their children.
So vaccine compliance, or who knows what else, speech compliance probably, is going to be part of you receiving your UBI. That's coming.
Yeah, I mean, so when has the government ever given anyone anything for free?
No, I mean, they had to take it from someone else first.
Right.
Or print the money, which is stealing from everybody at the same time.
But kind of getting back to the practical matters here then, Our audience, they're typically very savvy people, many very successful people, some quite wealthy people.
And they're trying to project what's going to happen here so they can stay out of trouble in all of this.
How do you think a person listening to this interview should strategize their own financial portfolio plans for the next few years?
Yes, I think that money is options and options as well.
Like having a second passport might be something that I think will be of tremendous value down the road.
If America continues to go into this direction, probably a direction that's going to be far worse.
Having an option to where you can go to a second country and being a resident there, that might be nice.
Having land in which you can grow food, you can drink off land, that's probably going to obviously have substantial value.
Having not just dollars, but potentially even maybe even some Swiss francs, having some gold, some silver, some crypto, having ways you can make money outside of your former employer, current employer, but putting yourself into a position where you can pivot and move.
Yeah, exactly.
I think that makes perfect sense.
Be really nimble because we don't know what's coming.
Do you think that there's a risk of bank bail-ins?
I do.
Yeah, if you look at Dodd-Frank, how that was written, we're walking into...
They've mentioned, Janet Yellen's mentioned, issuing some type of protections.
Even in Switzerland, they were talking about putting caps on how much people can take out of their accounts and putting in fees and potentially doing different things to prevent people from accessing their money.
I think that this could very well happen.
I don't know if they're going to bail in on everybody's deposits.
People always say, oh, you know, they have the FDIC. FDIC has about 1% of deposits at that.
So the FDIC, that's not going to do anything for anybody.
And even if it did, they're going to bail out the top, you know, the top, top 1%.
They're not going to bail out the 99%.
They're not going to, yeah.
So I would not write it off as something that's not going to happen.
I always suggest have enough money to last a couple months at least somewhere that you get access outside of your bank.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
All right, let me ask you about real estate price variations in different areas of the country and city versus rural living.
Because I'm in Central Texas.
We saw a big real estate boom in Texas for the last few years.
A lot of people wanting to come to Texas to basically flee New York and California and so on.
But real estate prices, especially for larger land, have really started to come down in Texas.
I've seen like 25% reductions recently, perhaps due to rising interest rates.
But what's your take on how real estate is going to behave in cities versus rural areas and in blue states versus red states potentially?
Yeah, I think some very interesting things are happening right now in real estate that we've never before seen, one of which is this insurance crisis that's unfolding, mainly hitting states like Florida and Texas, also places in California as well.
Insurance is becoming a very, very, very big problem in many areas, and it wasn't something that was as much of an issue years ago.
Insurance prices were relatively stable.
But I think insurance is going to continue to rise.
And so the big question is, people on fixed incomes, how are they going to be able to offset these costs?
Are you talking about, let's say, home insurance or commercial building insurance or both?
Home insurance.
Just home insurance.
Okay.
Yep.
Home insurance, like in Florida where I am right now, it's through the roof.
Yeah.
Same thing in Texas.
I'm hearing a lot about insurance premiums skyrocketing.
I'm not sure if you're seeing that where you're at right now.
Well, I don't know.
I don't own any insurance except whatever is legally required for my car because I can do math.
But yeah, I mean, in many areas you're required to buy insurance.
If you have a mortgage on your real estate, the lender will require...
True.
That's right.
That's right.
So most people are paying insurance.
I've heard health care insurance is through the roof, you know, and home care insurance.
But what are you actually seeing in terms of home insurance?
Like, how much is it going up?
In certain places in Florida, I mean, it's going up 20-30% a year.
The last couple of years, I mean, it's skyrocketed.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah, we're seeing a mass consolidation of insurance companies here in Florida.
Now Citizens is essentially the government-backed insurance company.
They're acquiring a lot of these smaller insurance companies.
They have 20, 26% market share, somewhere in that range.
It keeps going up.
Well, so wait a minute.
What are they saying is the reason behind their rate increases?
Because I'm not aware of some massive event that wiped out a bunch of homes.
Yeah, so they said Fort Myers, Fort Lauderdale flood, Miami building collapse is what they said.
Then they had Hurricane Lee.
So those four things were in the last 18 months.
But then they also said a lot of roofing scams and things like that are forcing people or insurance companies to increase rates.
But I personally think it's just one big sham.
Insurance companies are rug pull in the housing market.
And so the big question is, if you have a situation where the entire real estate market, you have 40% of all mortgages in America taken up between 2020 and 2021, at the height of the market, You have so much debt sitting, and then you have insurance and taxes continuing to rise, yet real wages are softening.
You have to ask yourself, how?
How is this going to, you know, be able to maintain itself?
Right.
I don't think it's going to.
It seems like we're headed for the big short 2.0.
Yeah, bigger.
Yeah, the bigger short.
Yeah, so like in 2007, you know how much the average home price in America was, Mike?
250?
217.
Pretty close, right?
217.
Okay.
And the average home now, $4.19.
Wow.
So it's literally doubled in price.
Yeah, real wages basically haven't moved.
No.
Right?
You know how much a used car was in 2007?
$7,900.
Used car now is a grand.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah, exactly.
Everything is so inflated.
We're in the silent depression right now.
And a lot of people are looking at their home like they have all this equity in it.
The big thing is, you know, when you have a...
If you look at the national home inventory...
Every single month it's been increasing, walking into the winter.
When do you see more homes for sale?
In December.
Walking into Christmas than you do in June and July and August.
This is not a healthy housing market.
We're walking into a market where people are getting scared.
They need to try to get up under these homes.
And the other thing is that the so-called equity that people think they have in their homes is not what they think it is.
There was an elderly person I know who had a house for more than 30 years.
I guess, let's say, purchased it around 1988 or something like that.
Sold it last year.
I think she purchased it for...
I don't know, $250 or something and sold it for a million dollars.
Thought, oh, I've got three quarters of a million dollars in gain.
I'm like, no, wait a second.
First of all, all that so-called gain, the IRS is going to take a big chunk of capital gains out of that.
And then what you're left with, if you take the 1988 dollar versus the purchasing power today, you haven't gained anything.
You've lost money.
You've lost purchasing power in your home over 30 years.
You thought you gained, but you didn't.
And like, whoa, that is so true.
It's not equity.
Yeah, just like it's this false sense of wealth that people have.
Yeah.
And they actually go into cash.
Yeah, I mean we're told that – I mean a home used to be the best single investment that a person would ever make in their life.
And it was the biggest piece of equity that they would ever have.
But now if you're talking about insurance rates continuing to skyrocket, in some cases 30 percent a year, my goodness.
And also property taxes are going up considerably in many areas that are receiving a lot of influx.
I know people who are paying, let's say, $5,000 a month on property tax.
And I mean granted that's a pretty nice home to own.
But if you're at $60,000 a year or whatever for property taxes, you don't own the place.
You're renting it from the county.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
I mean, my advice is if someone's looking to buy a home or to buy something, you don't want a mortgage, ideally.
You obviously want to self-insure that property.
You don't want the insurance company to be able to dictate if you can afford to live in that property anymore.
If you have a property in Texas or Florida and you can homestead it, that would be great.
But you want to be strategic about all these moving variables.
A lot of things that might have seemed far-fetched a couple years ago are now happening, and I think it's just going to get more radical and crazy as the coming couple years come.
Well, I'm glad you mentioned gold and silver because I mention that all the time as well – Gold and silver are one of the big answers.
And it's interesting, John, your video isn't matching your audio right now, by the way.
So there's an interesting effect happening there.
But we can hear you just fine.
But if you think about it through all of this, like from 1988 to today, if you bought gold in 1988, how much was gold in 1988?
200 an ounce or something like that.
And I'm just guessing.
And now it's 2,000 an ounce.
So it went up 10 times.
That's real wealth.
That's real asset protection in gold and silver.
Whereas your home, you thought it went up, but at the end of the day, it didn't really help you.
Interesting.
Yeah.
I mean, the next couple of years, if people are really smart and strategic, they're going to be able to We're good to go.
All right.
Well, great advice, great information, John.
And I apologize.
We're having a synchronization issue with your audio and video.
But it doesn't take away from the value of the information that you just shared with us here.
Let me give out your website, greatcreditfast.com.
And it says here, revolutionize your credit score with AI. And you help people resolve credit disputes and foreclosures and things that you mentioned.
Is there anything else you want to say before we wrap this up today?
I mean, this has been fascinating, but the floor is yours.
Yeah, Mike, it's been great connecting with you.
I've watched you for several years.
I think you've got some really, really great content, and it was a pleasure.
Well, the pleasure has been mine.
You're a really bright guy.
You get it.
You're a great communicator.
I think you're helping a lot of people right now.
I want to encourage people to watch your videos on brighttown.com as well as YouTube.
And you said you're on Instagram, too.
What's your Instagram channel?
This is John Williams.
Okay.
Same as your YouTube name.
Alright, this is John Williams.
So check out John Williams, everybody.
You're going to learn a lot every day.
You're going to have fun doing it.
And I like the...
The signal-to-noise ratio of John Williams is really, really strong.
He doesn't have a lot of fluff.
He's got a lot of information.
You can tell he's answering the questions here in a very compact manner.
So that was John Williams, everybody.
Thank you for watching today here on Brighton.com.
I'm Mike Adams, and I'm the founder of Brighton, and I'm also fiscally very conservative, I believe, in getting out of debt, owning your own assets, And being smart with your money.
And don't let the banks exploit you because they will.
And also don't end up holding dollars when the music stops.
Alright.
Thanks for watching today, everybody.
Take care.
Today's program is brought to you by Goldbacks and you can go to my website verifiedgoldbacks.com in order to see all our lab testing results of these really innovative bills that have physical gold embedded in them.
I've got a little stack of them in my hands here.
These are the one Goldbacks.
Each of these contains quite literally one one-thousandth of a troy ounce of gold inside the bill.
The gold is actually in there.
And there are other denominations, 5s, 10s, 25s, and 50s.
The 50, of course, contains 51 thousandths of an ounce of gold.
And I didn't even believe that at first, and so I acquired a bunch of these, and I did the testing.
If you go to my website, verifiedgoldbacks.com, you can see the laboratory testing that we did.
And here I am.
I bought a kiln.
I did the meltdowns.
We use acid also.
Nitric acid here did a dissolving into mass spec analysis in my laboratory.
Here's some of the melted gold that came out of the kiln test.
And here's some of the weights and so on.
On this website, you can see, let me scroll down, you can see the actual recoveries.
There's some of the gold foil that comes out in the first melting process.
There's the picture of the kiln.
And there's, well, different photos of the dust and everything that comes out.
Bottom line is in this chart right here.
The recovery that we got, the amount of gold that we got out of these bills, it was over 100% of the claimed amount in every single case.
The lowest we got was 102%, the highest we got was 107%, and then we did ICP-MS testing here, and these are the results we got showing that it is better than 99.99% atomic gold, which makes it better than 24 karat gold.
So, bottom line.
Not only are the goldbacks real, not only do they contain the gold that they claim to contain, and it's pure gold or 24 karat plus in purity, but they're highly divisible.
So I can take these and I can give somebody or I can pay for something with one one-thousandth of an ounce of gold.
I can't do that with a coin.
Here I have silver coins, but I can't take a pair of scissors and cut off one one-thousandth of an ounce of silver or gold.
It just doesn't work that way, and I would ruin the coin.
So goldbacks make gold really usable, divisible, and it works in an off-grid situation.
Power grid goes down.
You may not have access to your crypto.
You certainly won't have access to your bank account in that grid-down scenario.
These work.
These work and the gold is instantly visible.
Gold backs are becoming increasingly recognizable and people love the way they look and they love to hold on to these and more and more people are willing to take them even as merchants for purchases.
So go to verifiedgoldbacks.com to learn about these.
This is an affiliate site.
We do earn a small commission on the sales of these at no additional cost to you, so it does help support this platform, but you'll get these in your hands.
Now you might ask, well, what's the price of these compared to the price of actual gold?
Okay, it is cheaper to buy raw gold by itself per ounce if you just want a gold coin or a gold bar.
This has a premium over the price of gold because of the format and the divisibility and the precision and the printing technology and all of that.
But it also means these have value over gold as they are accepted and recognized by merchants.
So if you just want raw gold, you know, get gold coins.
But how are you going to divide them up?
How are you going to really use them in day-to-day transactions?
If you want usable gold, goldbacks are a great solution for that.
And I think these can be part of every person's preparedness.
If you already have gold and silver, maybe you already have garden seeds, maybe you already have other assets, but do you have goldbacks yet?
This is something important to add.
And they also make really incredible, highly educational investments I've been tipping waiters and waitresses at restaurants with this, and then I have a little conversation with them about real money.
Like, this was real gold, you know, versus fiat currency.
And you can give them as gifts to family members, you know, birthdays and holidays and whatever else.
And you can teach children or grandchildren about what is real money.
And they will hold on to these because the artwork is amazing, they're beautiful.
People will hold on to these and they'll see the value rise as the value of gold rises because these contain physical gold.
As gold goes up, goldbacks go up versus the dollar that's going down.
And who knows in how many years what these will be worth versus the increasingly collapsing dollar.
So I don't encourage speculation, just to be clear.
I'm not saying speculate in it, but just to hold on to value that you have right now, just to kind of freeze your savings.
I don't trust that the dollar is going to be here 10 years down the road.
I mean, I know the dollar is not going to hold its own value.
But I have absolute certainty that gold is going to continue to hold value.
And as dollars drop, that means the price of gold in dollars will be rising, even if gold itself is still worth the same in terms of purchasing power.
But in dollar denominations, gold will appear to be going up in terms of dollars.
So that's something to keep in mind.
Now, do your own research.
I'm not your financial advisor, obviously.
Do your own research.
Get your own experts.
Do what's right for you.
Only you know your financial situation and your risk and so on.
And could these go down in value?
Well, if gold goes down, these will go down in value.
If you think gold's going to go down...
Over the next 10 years, then, you know, maybe you can buy Apple stock or something.
I don't know.
But if you think gold is going to go up or hold its own, then this is a great way to have physical gold in a usable form.
So check it out at verifiedgoldbacks.com.
And thank you for supporting us also.
But more importantly, you know, thank you for protecting your own assets.
We're going into some very interesting times in the years ahead.
Thanks for watching.
I'm Mike Adams for brighteon.com.
Take care.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
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