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March 4, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
50:49
Financial expert John Rubino issues warning...
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Welcome to today's interview on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and I'm thrilled to be joined by John Rubino, someone who I've really admired.
I consider him to be an outstanding analyst of what's going on.
He's the original founder of DollarCollapse.com, and now he's best known for Rubino.Substack.com, which is his Substack page. And given that we have some really fascinating inflation numbers that were just released, this is the perfect time to invite Mr. Rubino back to the show. Welcome, John. It's great to have you on today.
Hey Mike, great to talk to you again.
Good to hear from you.
Now, it's been, I don't know, a couple of months or whatever, but core inflation numbers don't tell the whole story.
0.4% month over month for January according to official numbers.
But it looks like this means the Fed will not pivot, so everybody that's factoring in lower inflation or lower interest rates is probably going to be disappointed.
Is that how you read this as well, or what are your thoughts?
Yeah, two big thoughts here.
One generally is that you should never trust the headline number in a government economic report, because that's not where the real action is.
Basically, for instance, employment is the big one.
They'll report a really good jobs number, and then...
Later on, they'll either revise that number lower to the point where it would be a disappointment if they actually reported that number, or people dig into the report and say, oh, you know what?
Actually, part-time jobs went up, but full-time jobs went down, and then they find all this other stuff that implies that it was actually a bad number, despite the good headline.
Same thing with inflation.
You know, they give you a completely acceptable number, And then people go in and look at how they arrived at that number, and they find all kinds of dirt there.
In the case of our recent inflation numbers, the headlines haven't been bad, but when you dig a little deeper, you find things like the core services inflation measure is up at 8% a year or something like that.
And that's why the Fed can't...
Lower interest rates yet because real inflation, rather than just the headline number they report, is actually much worse.
So the general thought is don't trust those numbers that they give you.
Always look into the fine print.
And the second point is that what we've got going on now in the stock market It's not unique, but it would be unique if the Fed started cutting interest rates in the face of it, because we've got stocks just rocketing lately.
Pretty much every big index is near a record high, and a lot of these sub-indexes are much higher.
It's basically another tech bubble driven by artificial intelligence.
In just the last year or so, this stuff came out of nowhere.
And gave us basically a new dot com bubble where anything with AI in its name suddenly attracts a ton of capital.
And the big AI stocks are trading at valuations that rival, you know, Google and Amazon and America Online from back in 1999, you know, right before the crash.
So I wouldn't trust this at all.
But when the Fed looks at this, they can't have just a rocking record high, wildly overvalued stock market and then start cutting interest rates because that would just make the stock market overvaluation worse, give us an even bigger bust somewhere out there in the future.
So the Fed's hands are kind of tied right now.
So we're kind of in higher for longer, for a while at least.
You know, it's going to be more months.
And then, you know, you get into the fact that it's an election year, and the Fed is under immense pressure from the incumbents in Washington to produce a robustly growing economy in time for the election.
So they can't be...
You know, they can't be leaving interest rates where they are because interest rates at this level are liable to break a lot of things, which we can go into in a minute.
But they can't really cut either.
But you know where they're getting calls from the White House saying, you know what, if you want any future in Washington, D.C., you need to be cutting interest rates right now.
So they're under pressure.
And since they never really understood what it was they were doing to begin with, This must be doubly confusing for those poor guys.
You know, bad models, incomprehensible economic theory, and now political pressure.
So, you know, it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
You still can sympathize, I guess, with the place they found themselves in.
Well, I do want to ask you about the implications for commercial real estate and bank failures, because that now seems to be in the mix for 2024.
But also, the Fed's stance on interest rates as the Fed is wielding the dollar as a competition against the euro.
I want to ask you about the euro implications of more expensive dollar loans.
But real quick, before we get to both of those issues...
About AI. I've been tracking the NVIDIA bubble in the market, and I was talking about it months ago because we launched an AI project internally right after Thanksgiving last year.
And when it became apparent to me, this is an interesting argument.
I agree with your assessment that there's a major bubble and people are just throwing money into this without understanding what it is.
But at the same time, I have found that we have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on NVIDIA microchips in the last few months because we're building out an AI infrastructure ourselves.
Because I've reached the conclusion, evidence-based conclusion here, that this AI technology that exists today, large language models, really is a game changer.
And I believe that independent publishers that don't learn how to harness it are going to be obsolete in the next one to two years because of what I've seen and what we have with our own internal kind of early stage AI right now.
So this is a case where...
In my mind, something different from the dot-com boom, where the dot-com boom was just like, oh, eyeballs are all we need.
We don't need to make any money.
But NVIDIA actually makes microprocessors that build AI systems that enhance productivity of people.
So I see like a reality-based value proposition.
And I don't own any NVIDIA stock, by the way, just to be clear.
I don't play the stock market at all.
I'm too busy.
But what do you think about that, John?
Yeah.
Well, I think AI is obviously real, and it's got nowhere to go but up.
It's going to be this booming thing, basically, until quantum computers come along and then AI running on quantum computers makes humanity obsolete.
You know, that's probably where this is going to go.
But, you know, the Internet was completely real back during the dot-com bubble, so it wasn't like what was happening wasn't a game-changer.
It's just that the valuations got way out of line and competition became very intense for every niche.
I think that's one of the risks with AI is that every major computer company in the world has to start making these chips, right?
And NVIDIA has a huge lead because they were making them before the bubble started blowing up.
But there's no reason to think Intel and about 20 other computer or computer chip companies aren't going to be able to make AI chips And that adds an element of uncertainty because, you know, the big names in the beginning of a bubble tend not to be the companies that actually win in the end.
So I think NVIDIA is highly likely to be one of the winners.
But I think a lot will change as this thing really expands.
And I don't think the NASDAQ as a whole, NASDAQ is the index where all the tech stocks live.
And I don't think NASDAQ's valuation should be as high as it is, even with this sector, AI, that's doing really well within.
So I think shorting the NASDAQ, rather than trying to short individual AI companies, is probably the way you approach this if you want to try to make money right now.
Instead of trying to ride the wave, you assume that a lot of other tech companies have been bid up along with this central bubble.
And that they're wildly overvalued for whatever it is they do.
And, you know, you've got a big short kind of scenario here at some point.
The question is, what's the entry point?
You know, where do you start shorting the NASDAQ? Well, there's also a society-wide big short happening because AI replaces human workers, especially currently human white-collar workers.
So, you know, we've seen this.
The generative AI systems can replace graphic designers or...
When I say replace, let me be clear.
Let's say you're in a company and you have five graphic designers and you were thinking of hiring five more.
But then AI comes along and you give these AI tools to your existing five graphic designers and you're like, wow, those five can do the work of ten.
So now I no longer need to hire the other five.
That's, I think, how this works.
It's not like people are being fired because there's still a human element there.
Or I guess in some cases, it could be like a customer service.
But for the most part, these AI tools are making existing people more productive, which means that a lot of companies don't have to hire new people for a lot of generative type of positions.
Does that make sense?
Well, yeah.
The way automation works is that it eats a sector from below.
In other words, it starts with the easiest stuff, and those people get replaced and laid off and everything.
But there's still a lot of human value-added work being done.
And those guys aren't immediately affected.
So the question with AI is how far can it go?
You know, are we going to reach a point where the New York Times doesn't need reporters anymore?
Yes, we are.
We're going to reach that in less than 18 months.
Yeah.
And that's what's really scary because then you're eating up whole sectors.
You're not just eating the, you know, the paralegals, but leaving the lawyers.
You're basically replacing huge swaths of people out there.
And this is uncharted territory.
Factory automation was a big deal, but nothing like AI in the knowledge-based world.
So we'll just have to see where it goes.
But I'll tell you what, if I had a couple of...
14-year-old kids right now, I would be advising them to become plumbers or handymen or something like that.
Things that you physically do in the moment.
That AI is not going to steal right away.
Right.
And I would tell them, don't become lawyers.
You know, be careful about what you do in the medical field or the journalistic field because those things, or computer programming.
It used to be that, I mean, two years ago, not even way back when, but two years ago, you had job security if you knew two or three programming languages, right?
And now you take a legal pad and you sketch out some parameters, hand it to an AI, and it creates your website for you.
So a lot of the formerly untouchable parts of tech are at serious risk now.
Yeah, you're right.
With Microsoft Copilot on GitHub, Copilot writes incredible code.
I've used it myself in Python, and it's crazy.
You just tell it what you want, and it writes code, copy and paste the code, and you're good to go.
We used to say, learn to code, you know that saying?
Now you don't even have to learn to code.
You just have to learn to describe your code.
It writes the code for you.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, there's no way to overstate how big that is, because this is just a huge transition that we're going through right now.
Can teach themselves.
So there's a takeoff point at which they leave their programmers behind and just start evolving at an accelerating rate.
And that's the singularity, you know?
We're kind of looking at that right now, at least in prospect.
It's not here yet.
And then you get into...
You know, what are these emerging intelligences going to think about the world?
You know, you saw what happened with Google's AI just lately.
Right, right.
All of history is people of color, apparently.
There are no whites in history anymore.
They programmed a completely woke AI and unleashed it on the world.
And, you know, I'd be really curious about what they were thinking because there's only a few explanations for it.
None of them are flattering to Google, right?
They might have thought that it was great what their AI was doing.
Well, it was consistent with the philosophy of the Google managers who are anti-white.
And let's be honest, that system functioned exactly as programmed.
Yeah.
Yeah, but that means they weren't smart enough to read the room.
They didn't understand the world in which they were unleashing that woke AI. They thought it was going to be received favorably.
Yeah, but from what I'm told, Google engineers, they don't read the world.
They think they are the world.
They're so arrogant.
The Google managers and project managers, they think they create the world.
They shape the world.
Yes.
Well, it seems like that.
I mean, they're in a little bubble where the only people they talk to are other people just like them.
That's right.
I mean, you know, I think everybody, all libertarians and conservatives have been out to dinner or something like that with somebody who just blurts out, The most offensive kind of thing, and the reason for that is that they only talk to people with whom that's a completely normal thing to say.
And I think the Google programming staff is that kind of a thing writ large.
You know, there's 5,000 of them there, and they only talk to each other.
But, you know, they lost, what, $60 billion of market cap?
So this was a wake-up call for these guys, just like with Hollywood.
I mean, Hollywood is losing his shirt right now because they hired people like that.
They made movies for each other, which nobody went to see.
And the same thing happened with Google's Gemini AI. It just got pammed right away, and they had to take it off the market.
Yeah, Google's being described as the Bud Light of tech now, which I think is really funny.
Let's shift gears, although I do want to mention AMD... Intel is probably next in line behind NVIDIA on AI microchips.
Intel is behind the curve, but they make the general CPUs that power the systems that have the GPUs.
So Intel is going to do well no matter what.
But let's shift gears over to EVs, because I think EVs is another example of where we had government-mandated policies that were trying to force a product solution onto a marketplace.
And it has completely bombed at this point.
Apple just canceled its plans for the EV. Volvo has shifted away from EV design and manufacturing.
And all the other car companies that are making EVs are realizing they can't really sell them, and the dealers don't like them, and they're expensive to insure.
The insurance companies don't want to insure them, and they're hard to repair.
You know, what's not to like, right?
And it takes hours to charge it.
Yeah, yeah.
They turned out to be kind of a bust, very surprisingly, because Teslas are just so much fun to drive, you know, that anybody who drives one comes out of thinking, oh, my God, I want this experience for the rest of my life.
But then, you know, you have one of those cars for two years and their batteries start to wear out and you find out you have to spend $40,000.
To get a new battery pack, which with an internal combustion car, $40,000 is 20 years of maintenance, if not more, you know?
And so all of a sudden, the used car prices for EVs are plunging.
Which is kind of tempting me.
I'm thinking maybe it would be good to get an electric pickup truck at some really cut-rate price.
Just to have it around the farm or something?
Yes, exactly.
But that's not a recipe for success if you want to sell your cars at full price when they're new.
Because if the difference between a new Tesla and a three-year-old one is like $50,000, clearly you're going to Buy the three-year-old one and be able to put a new battery pack in it.
Anyhow, yeah, I'm going to go out on a limb with EVs and say they still do have a future, but as driven by hydrogen fuel cells, because they don't have to be replaced.
What you do is you have nuclear power.
Running all day long and at night when that power is not needed, you use that power to make hydrogen.
You use the hydrogen to fuel fuel cells.
And that's the next generation of electric cars without a lot of the flaws in today's.
And, you know, that's a much cleaner process.
Than having thousands of 10-year-old kids working in lithium mines and cobalt mines.
And so I think it's defensible, too.
You can make a case for it from environmental grounds.
So I think we might look at today's EVs as sort of a growing pains first pass that didn't quite work, but that EVs still might survive and thrive somewhere in the future.
Well, that's interesting that you say that.
I agree with your assessment, although, of course, the The formulation of the hydrogen fuel cell tech is not well commercialized at scale yet, although it could be.
But that sounds like a decade-long project to do.
But I love the fact that that would release us from the ties to dirty lithium and cobalt mining, as you mentioned, especially in a lot of...
Let's say not so politically stable countries where that's taking place.
And also all the water usage that's used for lithium mining is destroying water resources in a lot of these countries which is affecting food and farming.
But if you think about the creation of hydrogen, let's say locally, let's say you have a unit in your garage that actually creates hydrogen.
I don't know if they're cracking water or where they're getting the hydrogen from, but let's say you have a process that separates hydrogen, and then that can go into your car's hydrogen tank to power the fuel cells.
That sounds all great, but you're still going to need energy to generate the hydrogen or to separate the hydrogen.
You're going to need a hydrogen separator in your garage, and that's going to be powered by something, probably fossil fuels, you know, natural gas.
What's your understanding of it?
Well, if you're in Arizona, you do that with solar panels on your roof, but that's a really expensive proposition right there if you have to have all the gear yourself.
mass produced electricity.
I mean, there are places where you could do it with solar because there's so much extra sunlight that you can't use it all in the daytime.
So you have this excess power that's essentially kind of sort of free.
But I think that it has to be in the end, probably nuclear with today's technology, because that's baseline power that just, or baseload power that just runs forever.
And it runs all night long.
And if you run it continuously, it's extremely cheap.
Are you talking about like micro nuclear power stations or just mainstream nuclear power plants?
I mean, whatever nuclear evolves into right now, it's these massive plants, these gigawatt plants.
technology, but the small modular reactors, if they come along and they run, say, a small town or a neighborhood or something like that, it's possible that they're cost-effective for something like that, too.
We don't know where it's heading, but we do know that solar and wind won't do it at scale.
You know, rooftop solar is a very cool idea because the real estate's already there.
You don't have to take away any farmland or anything to generate power.
But it's intermittent, so it's not ideal.
So you need some other kind of a power source that just runs continuously.
You could probably do it with natural gas.
And coal, you do it with coal, but coal's incredibly dirty, and that's a very hard sell.
Although, it sounds like Germany's bought it.
Germany's back to burning coal and cutting trees.
Even just burning trees for heat.
Let me bring up the website here for my producers.
Westinghouse had announced the Evinci microreactor.
We covered this, I don't know, six months ago or something.
And this microreactor fits in the space of what you might call like a garage bay.
Even this picture is a little large, but there's a microreactor, and I remember that you have to swap out the fuel, here it is, eight or more full power years before refueling.
So basically, you would get fuel rods from Westinghouse.
It produces a certain number of megawatts ongoing continuously for eight years, and then you have to swap out the fuel.
Presumably, there would be a Westinghouse nuclear technician who would come and swap it out for you.
This technology exists right now.
It's not for home use yet, but it's probably for military bases and high-end vehicles.
Let's say national governments using it for off-grid type of applications, but this technology exists.
So John, you're absolutely right.
Why aren't we using this all over?
Well, after Fukushima, nuclear needed 10 more years before people got over that.
See, that's the big risk with nuclear is that every 15 years, some plant melts down somewhere and then people are freaked out about radiation and stuff for such a long time that all the new plants get delayed and the existing ones get mothballed.
The huge risk hanging over nuclear is another Fukushima.
And it's hard to say that that won't happen, but it could be that if we become rational about energy and see the flaws of all the other energy sources, that we accept that risk.
And go forward with nuclear.
And then there's a lot of innovation coming out there.
Like you said, those small reactor designs are interesting.
They're not mass market yet, but a decade from now they might be.
Now, if you're hearing this and you want to invest in companies that make those things, it's still very bleeding edge.
You just don't know who's going to be the one who makes them, whether it's Westinghouse or one of the 20 other companies that are bringing things like that to market.
So it's a difficult investment thesis still.
But it's something that's probably...
I mean, you never know for sure until something actually happens.
But this looks doable.
You know, it looks like something that a decade from now will be normal.
And it'll change the world for the better.
It'll give us a very consistent, very reliable energy source that can go pretty much anywhere.
And I think that's a hugely positive thing if it happens.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
I was reminding people recently that U.S. aircraft carriers have two nuclear power plants on board, and that fuel lasts 25 years, because otherwise you'd have to dock every day and reload with diesel.
It doesn't work in a war, right?
So that's why they're nuclear.
Same thing with submarines and so on.
But let's move over to commercial real estate because the implications of the Fed not pivoting, not plunging interest rates, those implications are enormous for the commercial real estate sector and how it has to refund or refinance its loans, right?
Yeah, so basically what happened in commercial real estate is that we had 10 years of extremely low interest rates, and everybody put up office buildings and warehouses.
You know, the warehouse thing was a boom because everybody assumed that e-commerce would create the need for infinite warehouses, right?
Same thing with office buildings.
And now a few things happen.
One is we didn't really need that many warehouses.
And during the pandemic, a lot of people found out that they really like working from home.
And so not that many people went back to their offices.
So a lot of office buildings are not full enough to generate the cash flow required to pay off their debts.
So you're seeing a lot of these buildings have to be refinanced Because their debt is coming due at much higher interest rates.
But those interest rates make the buildings unprofitable.
And so the buildings are being sold at massive discounts.
And the big problem, you know, it could be just a small sector or a relatively small sector that blows up and doesn't cause any collateral damage.
But all that paper is on the balance sheets of banks, insurance companies and Pension funds, especially local and regional banks.
So as this gets going, you're gonna have small banks have to report big real estate losses, which scares away their depositors, which forces the banks to sell even more of their depreciated assets in order to pay their depositors back, which means they have to report even bigger losses and so on until the whole sector implodes.
Right, right.
Let me show this while you're talking, John.
From Bloomberg, office tower deal for $1 reveals anxiety among long-time buyers.
I mean, they sold an office tower for $1.
I assume the buyer had to take on some percentage of the outstanding debt to make the debt payments, I would imagine.
But $1?
You can buy an office building for $1?
Yes, you can.
If you'll take on $90 million of that in the process.
Yeah.
And if you look at, like, San Francisco, okay, to take the real basket case example, they've got hundreds of billions of dollars of embedded losses in their office buildings because nobody wants to work in an office in downtown San Francisco anymore.
That's for sure.
And so those losses have not been taken and publicized yet.
But they will at some point.
And so the end result of this is that the federal government is going to have to step in and bail out the small banks.
Yeah, that's my question.
Isn't it mostly regional banks that have issued a lot of the commercial real estate loans?
Yeah, they got like 60% of the paper.
And the rest of it is spread around throughout the financial system.
But each of those banks is small enough that that's 60%.
Oh, and meanwhile, okay, they've got this bad real estate debt, and they also bought a bunch of government bonds, these small banks, which they thought they were buying a totally risk-free asset.
But in the last few years, when interest rates went up, when interest rates go up, that's the same thing as saying bond prices go down because they're reciprocal of each other.
So they have all these embedded losses in their government bond portfolios, too, which at some point they might have to sell.
If deposit outflows reach a certain point, because they can't turn around necessarily and sell their real estate assets because they're illiquid.
So they don't have to sell what's liquid, which is their government bonds, and they might have to take a 40% loss on long-term U.S. Treasury bonds.
Wow.
So these banks are in trouble.
They know they're in trouble.
Now, here's where it spreads to the rest of the economy, because banks are big lenders to small businesses and other real estate ventures.
But they're tightening their lending standards because they're so terrified about what's on their existing balance sheets.
So if you're a small business, it's very hard to get a loan now, which is, you know, very recessionary, right?
So we've got these good GDP numbers coming out, but under the surface, we've got all these small businesses that are being starved for capital, all these banks that are on the verge of imploding in an industry-wide Debacle and a bunch of other entities out there that can't handle their current interest rates or won't do well in a slowing economy.
You've got all kinds of zombie companies out there that will fall when these other entities like the small banks and commercial real estate fall.
So we're looking at the everything bubble blowing up in the next couple of years and there's really no solution.
Okay, so the domino effect here, the ripple effect of the everything bubble is going to impact many different industries, but what do you suppose is going to happen with these physical office buildings?
Let's suppose that the government bails out the banks so the banks can write off the paper losses, but there's still a concrete structure there.
Many of them in these cities, cities like San Francisco, where nobody wants to even walk around because the streets are covered with feces and needles.
So what do you suppose is going to happen with all these buildings?
Oh, well, capitalism is great at recycling no longer clearly rightly valued assets, right?
You just...
Go bankrupt if you're the owner of the building.
Somebody buys it out of bankruptcy at one-fourth the original cost, and all of a sudden their costs are low enough that even if they're only 70% full, they still make positive cash flow.
So basically those buildings, they won't go away, they'll just be handed From their previous owners to new owners at much lower valuations, and then somebody out there has to eat those losses.
See, that's the banking crisis.
The process of these buildings being handed from one set of owners to another set, generating these big losses which fall on the banks.
So that's the process.
Buildings won't go away.
They'll be used usefully and productively sometime in the future.
just with different owners who have way less skin in the game.
I have a follow-up question on that.
I think society, the structure of work has changed permanently.
People are not willing to go back to the office to work in very large numbers since COVID.
And also many of the cities that host these buildings have degraded substantially and are too dangerous.
There's so much violent crime now that it's hard for people to even physically go to work there without being accosted, let's say.
So I don't see that...
These buildings will ever reach even 50% occupancy in the years ahead.
I've seen some ideas of turning them into residential buildings, but that doesn't really work.
They're not set up with electrical and plumbing and security and so on for residential.
Is there some other use of commercial buildings?
Can they be turned into something else useful that you think might work?
I think people will be looking for ideas like that.
And at a certain price, a lot of things that we're not thinking of right now will be viable.
It's all about the price.
I mean, if somebody gave you a skyscraper for $1,000, no debt attached to it or anything, you could probably find something to do with it that would make you $2,000 a year.
A giant haunted house.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, I think one thing that's already happening is governments are stashing illegal immigrants in empty office buildings and empty buildings in general.
So I don't think that's a good long-term use because I don't think we should have that many illegals here in the U.S. to fill up skyscrapers downtown.
Yeah.
It looks like a dystopian sci-fi movie where you used to have a building full of American workers in tech.
Now it's completely populated by illegals who, based on what they've done to the hotels in New York City, I would imagine they're crapping in the stairwells, you know, and they're base jumping off the roof.
And it's just, you know, prostitutes and weapons trafficking and child trafficking and drug trafficking rampant throughout the building.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure we've seen movies like that before, and they were not good movies.
I mean, they were horrifying depictions.
Well, yeah, you know, looking at the broader picture, we're killing our cities.
And we really have to change policies.
Mike, I don't know where you stand on the are they people running things morons or evil geniuses question.
I think it's a combination, actually.
But it sure looks like This is a plan.
You know, open borders wouldn't happen unless the intention was basically to destroy a society from the bottom up.
And that absolutely looks like that's the plan right now.
And I know that sounds, you know, to a lot of your listeners maybe, it sounds kind of tinfoil hat crazy to say that our government is literally actively I think our audience already understands that.
It's becoming irrefutable.
When you look at the evidence, why would you keep the border wide open?
Why would you keep printing so much money and sending it to other countries and not using it for home?
There are not good answers to this other than it's a plan.
Yeah.
I mean, at the same time, you know, the destruction of civilization is one avenue of the plan.
And I think there are other avenues which are the enrichment of big sectors of the aristocracy.
You know, you look at what happens in our foreign policy.
Why are we invading dozens of other countries and bombing everybody and inviting everybody else into NATO?
It's because every one of those things involves upgrading of weaponry, which flows back into the arms makers who then finance the campaigns of the politicians who send us off to war.
You know, so that that's an understandable thing.
Yes.
It's kind of a closed circuit where a handful of extremely rich people get even richer by doing horrible things in the world.
And, you know, then you have to think, well, can there be that many sociopaths up there?
And the answer is, oh yeah, absolutely.
That's how they rise.
They demonstrate their sociopathy and then Then they get pushed up into positions of more power and influence.
Yes, exactly.
Today's system filters for sociopaths and lets them into the upper reaches.
It's the same thing with pharmaceuticals and the health system and with big food and the banks.
The banks do exactly the same thing.
They destroy the financial system and get very rich in the process while impoverishing everybody else.
You know, what's happening in politics right now is a slow process of the peasants waking up to the fact that they're being harvested by an aristocracy.
And it's getting very interesting right now because you see...
Populist politicians like in El Salvador and Venezuela winning and Trump.
You know, who would have thought Donald Trump would be seen as a savior by 47% of the population?
The reason for that is that we're cluing into the fact that there's an aristocracy running things to their benefit and to our detriment.
Let me bring this up.
Mayor Eric Adams is now requesting, I'm going to search for this, that the laws be changed in New York to allow deportation of violent illegals because the sanctuary city status has made it impossible.
So, I mean, here's an example.
The open borders thing.
There it is.
New York Times.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, see, it's totally backfired on them because basically they let in, what is it, 10 million people right now.
With the assumption that those illegals would stay mostly in the border states and some of them would filter up to swing states, but that they wouldn't go to the blue states.
But then the red state governors started bussing all the illegals up to New York and San Francisco and Chicago.
And so that's brought home the reality of open borders to the voters and to the politicians in these big northern cities.
And they're freaking out.
They see their doom written on the wall because there's no way you get reelected if you're Eric Adams, right, in this world.
So you need to do something about it.
Well, it's wild because, I mean, this shows what happens when you have complete fiscal illiteracy among bureaucrats.
So Eric Adams says months ago that New York City is going to collapse because of the burden of illegals.
And then, about a month ago, he says, hey, here's $50 million in debit cards we're going to hand out to illegals, some of them getting up to $10,000 each to spend on anything.
It's like, whoa, you just created an incentive for more illegals to come in.
And then, this week, he's like, hey, we have to change sanctuary laws because we're being overrun by violent illegals and we can't deport them.
It's like, do you not even look in the mirror, Eric Adams?
How do you not see that you...
And people like you have created this problem.
Well, he's watching his worldview crumble right in front of him.
And he really doesn't have any kind of a solution because to do anything substantively to fix the problems that he's created would mean to join forces with people that he thinks are evil.
Right now, what's happening is we've got some weird coalitions being built out there between Christian conservatives and big city liberals who both see the danger now of open borders.
And so they're kind of voting the same way in some cases.
They're voting for closed borders, basically.
So that's, you know, all these weird bedfellows are starting to emerge out there.
And basically, it's populism.
You know, these...
Working class people on the left and working class people on the right are seeing that it's in their interest to back the same populist candidates and the same policies in a lot of cases.
And they're swamping the country club conservative Republicans and the extreme progressives.
Because neither one of those guys gets close to a working majority now.
And the big populist middle can do it, you know?
So I think this is a huge, fascinating change.
And it's also happening in the media.
You're watching the legacy mainstream media shrink down to this little nub of what it used to be.
Oh, yeah.
And independent media like you and like Joe Rogan and Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.
I can go on for about 30 more names because there are a lot of really successful people in the independent media space who are attracting audiences that dwarf CNN. Oh, I mean, our audience dwarfs see it in.
We're not even that big.
No, and you look at Russell Brand, and see, then, you know, they try to destroy these guys.
Like, they've actively tried to destroy Joe Rogan and Russell Brand, and they really want to get rid of Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi.
But they can't, because those guys, you know, once you've got...
5 or 10 million people reading your Substack and watching your YouTube videos, you're kind of untouchable.
You've got to commit a major crime on camera And even then it's like, oh no, that was created by AI. You know, you're really insulated from attacks from the mainstream media.
So these guys have no power left.
You know, MSNBC would love to be able to destroy Joe Rogan.
They can't touch him.
You know, he's 10 times as big as them.
So that's interesting because if media becomes populist and it basically just swamps the remaining corporate media, I'm actually glad you brought that up, because we know the answer.
They're going to criminalize dissent.
And so in the US, they call it, of course, misinformation.
So if you question the establishment narrative, they say it's misinformation and that you're a threat to democracy.
Okay?
Now, with Israel, we've seen the same thing.
If you question anything that Israel's doing, whether you agree or disagree, if you question it, well, that's anti-Semitism.
And they're calling for that to be outlawed globally.
You can't question Israel.
In France, if you question the mRNA jabs, that's called an attack on medicine and science.
And that's been criminalized already now.
Now, that's a criminal offense.
So this is their answer, is to outlaw speech that they don't approve of.
Yeah, well, and add candidate of that, where I think they just, they either are in the process of, or they just made it illegal to say nice things about fossil fuels.
Yeah, right, right.
That's incredible.
It is incredible.
You can't say hydrocarbons have a lot of energy density.
You go to jail.
So in order to do that, they have to steal every major election, Going forward, right?
Because you can't win 51% of the vote while you're censoring basically reasonable points of view from reasonable people.
So this is where the rubber really meets the road here because, you know, they're willing to do pretty much anything to keep Trump out in the U.S. Clearly.
And so, but at the same time, the Republicans are going to be watching this next election like hawks because they realize that it's completely possible they got cheated last time.
You know, I'm not saying that's definitively true because I have no personal way of judging that, but a lot of people feel like the election was stolen and they're motivated not to let it happen again.
So you're going to have, you know, it's going to be very difficult to cheat this time and it's going to really be really contentious when a lot of accusations start flying back You know, that's...
Oh, go ahead.
Yeah, well, Tucker Carlson now even says the 2020 election was completely stolen.
It's become a mainstream talking point.
Now, just in the interest of time, I appreciate you sticking with us here.
I want to give you an opportunity to talk about your Substack page, rubino.substack.com.
We're bringing it up here.
What can people learn from you on your Substack?
It's basically a newsletter that starts from the kind of gloom and doomy premise that you and I have talked about here, and then asks, what can we do to prepare for it?
So it's about actionable stuff.
In other words, how do you change your finances to not just be protected from a gigantic currency crisis, but to make a lot of serious money when it happens?
And how do you protect your career?
How do you manage to be sure that you have enough food on hand?
And how do you...
How do you become as healthy as possible?
Because the best prepping is good health, right?
You know, if you're healthy, you're partially immune to crazy stuff when it happens.
How should you be approaching firearms?
Should you be looking at ways to defend yourself and exactly how you do that?
How do you do it if you haven't already?
So all of those questions.
And so far, so good.
It's a one-year-old newsletter that's developing kind of a nice community there.
People who are trying to answer these same questions.
And so, so far it's been a success and it's been a real pleasure to publish.
Well, that's great.
That's great, John.
I mean, you had a lot of success already with dollarcollapse.com, and now with your Substack page, you're educating a lot of people and bringing them up to speed.
This has been a great conversation, although I'm a little offended that you described our conversation as doom and gloom.
I thought it was a really great idea to turn office buildings into, like, base-jumping zombie haunted house experiences.
If someone wants to give me an office tower, that's what I'll do with it.
It'll be lots of fun.
You're doing exactly what I was talking about.
You're finding a way to prepare for a horrible situation that is good for you.
It could be like a survival training camp for urban environments, right?
You could set up office tower zombie encounter training.
Oh yeah, you could have shooting ranges and things and clear out a whole floor.
Yeah, that could all work.
Just don't aim for the windows because those bullets fly downrange and who knows what happens.
We buy bulletproof windows on Elon Musk's trucks.
That's right, to keep the bullets in.
Because there's so much gunfire in this office building, we have to keep the bullets in.
Okay, John, always a pleasure to speak with you.
Thank you for spending time with us today.
Thanks, Mike.
Enjoyed it.
All right, take care.
All right, everybody, that was John Rubino from rubino.substack.com.
Be sure to check out his Substack page and subscribe there if you'd like to learn about his practical solutions.
I've known Rubino for many years, and his analysis has been spot on.
Take his words seriously.
He's not known to exaggeration or sensationalism.
He just tells it like it is.
And it is pretty bad.
That's where we are right now in history.
So get prepared.
Thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com.
Take care.
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