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Jan. 22, 2025 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:33:48

Decentralize TV interview with John Rubino about Reverse Wealth Effect and Financial Crisis

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	Welcome to today's decentralized TV interview here on Brighteon.com.
	I'm Mike Adams with my co-host Todd Pitner today, and I have to say, this is now, we're coming up on two years of this show.
	So welcome, Todd.
	Can you believe it's almost been two years already?
	Yant.
	I mean, I literally think back to when I got a call from you, and I'm like, it just seems like yesterday.
	So time flies when you're...
	You know, interviewing great guests.
	Yeah, and speaking of great guests, today he's one of my favorite people.
	I've been interviewing him over the years many times.
	He is the original founder of DollarCollapse.com, but he's best known today for his outstanding articles and coverage and analysis at rubino.substack.com.
	His name is John Rubino.
	Welcome, John Rubino, to the show today.
	It's great to see you again.
	Hey, Mike.
	Hey, Todd.
	It's great to see you guys, too.
	Hola.
	Well, as you know, John, I think this is your first time on this show, Decentralized TV, and we teach decentralization strategies and knowledge for people.
	And right now, we are suffering quite an economic catastrophe in California, but also it happened in North Carolina, where a lot of homeowners are finding that either they did not have insurance or that they are now uninsurable.
	So along the lines, John, of people having more self-empowerment over their own financial future and control over their assets, what do people need to know, in your view, about what's happening with disasters, insurance, and possible default by either states or insurance companies? and possible default by either states or insurance companies?
	Yeah, this is turning out to be a fascinating story, and it just came out of the blue in the last year or so.
	To go back just a bit, For a long time now, people have been kind of speculating about what was going to be the catalyst that brought on the next big financial crisis.
	And there's no end to the possibilities out there.
	But nobody really thought it would be homeowner's insurance.
	And it's looking like it might end up being that because, again, to go back a little ways, we spent the last 50 years...
	Moving tens of millions of people into the southeast and the southwest in the U.S. without really thinking through the fact that those places are absolutely unsuited for tens of millions of people.
	You know, the southeast is Hurricane Alley.
	You get periodic hurricanes that come through there.
	And eventually, you know, maybe next year, maybe longer, further out, but whatever, Miami is due for a direct hit from a Cat 5 hurricane.
	And that's going to be hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage and lots of lost lives.
	And these hurricanes that hit the East Coast just lately caused massive, surprisingly massive damage.
	Well, Todd survived one of those hurricanes, by the way.
	The eye went so close to your house, Todd.
	And this is very timely that you talk about homeowner's insurance because I'm having to sue one of the major...
	Insurance companies, because they're screwing with me so badly.
	And you know me, Mike.
	I'm kind of one of those, no, you move.
	I'm not taking it.
	Is this about your roof?
	It's about my roof.
	It's about my fence.
	It's about everything.
	It's horrible how I'm being treated.
	So this is very raw for me.
	So I'm digging the topic.
	All right.
	Well, yeah, continue, John.
	I'm sorry.
	Todd, I think it's going to get even worse for you before it gets better, unfortunately.
	But now move over to California, and they have periodic brush fires.
	That's just natural to that environment.
	Yet how many people have we moved into California since World War II? Probably 20 million in Southern California alone.
	So these fires get more and more damaging, not because of climate change, but because so many more people are living in incredibly expensive houses.
	In the, you know, the path of these periodic natural fires.
	So this is horrible for the people who are directly affected by it, but it's a catastrophe for the insurance industry.
	Because homeowners insurance companies have to, they have to pay off on insurance policies that replace these multi-million dollar houses.
	Florida and the Carolinas and Southern California.
	And it's bordering on bankruptcy for a lot of these guys.
	So they're pulling out of these markets, which means now you've got tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of people with expensive, uninsurable, and therefore unsellable houses in Southern California and the East Coast.
	Wait a second, John.
	So uninsurable, so they're going to get rebuilt because the payouts have to happen.
	But after the homes are rebuilt, they are not sellable probably because banks won't loan money for homes that cannot be insured.
	That's what you're saying, correct?
	The insurance companies are pulling out because they can't turn a profit insuring multi-million dollar houses in Hurricane Alley or Southern California.
	So there's nobody left to insure your house.
	Say if you're in Santa Monica and you get the $7 million check to rebuild your house, well, fine.
	But going forward, you can't insure it, which means next time it burns, you're on the hook for the whole thing.
	One more thing, John.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but the state of California has their fair plan, which is the insurance of last resort.
	And Bloomberg analysis showed that California may be on the hook for $437 billion.
	I mean, we're talking almost half a trillion dollars that the state of California may have to pay out.
	AccuWeather analysis shows the economic and property damage at a quarter of a trillion dollars and rising.
	These are not small numbers.
	These are numbers bigger than the budgets of most nations.
	And this is just California.
	Yeah, and so one alternative is, like you said, for the states to step in and be the insurer of last resort.
	But that just means the states, and by implication, taxpayers are bankrupted by the next big natural disaster.
	You know, that doesn't solve the problem.
	It changes the names on the bill.
	So anyhow, when that happens, when you've got, say, 100,000 people who have uninsurable and unsaleable houses and are terrified about the future, you get a thing called the reverse wealth effect.
	Now, the wealth effect is this process that when, for instance, your stocks go up, you feel richer and smarter, so you're more likely to take a nice vacation or buy a Tesla or whatever, and that stimulates the economy.
	But when you feel poor and stupid, then you tend to spend less, and that slows the economy down.
	So that's the catalyst for the next financial crisis, is a massive reverse wealth effect that starts with homeowners insurance and then just spreads like a brush fire through the rest of the economy.
	And suddenly, that's a real possibility.
	You know, two years ago, nobody would have thought that that was going to be the thing that blows up.
	Okay.
	This expansion.
	But, John, this reminds me, actually, of 2008 and the subprime mortgage collapse.
	A lot of similarities there.
	And, Todd, feel free to chime in, of course.
	Just interrupt me wherever it's necessary.
	But think about what happened there.
	Everybody was overextended, or the banks were overextended on the loans.
	Homes are being sold to people who could not make the payments.
	Well, now we're talking about homes are going to be rebuilt for people who cannot sell them.
	What happens to the real estate valuations in these places, John?
	I mean, it seems obvious where it's going.
	Well, if a house can't be insured, then it's not worth nearly the prices that have prevailed for the last decade, right?
	So prices have to plunge.
	If you want to clear the market, these houses have to sell for 20% of their previous value, or 30% or 40%.
	I'm pulling that number out of thin air, but a massively lower price.
	Alright, so you're saying possibly a home that currently in the Palisades used to sell for $10 million, it might be unloaded at $2 or $3 million at some point.
	Yeah, if anybody would be willing to buy it under any circumstances, that's the thing.
	I mean...
	Would you put $3 million into a house in Pacific Palisades after what just happened, knowing that it could happen again next year, you know?
	Not a flammable house, I certainly wouldn't.
	What do you think, Todd?
	Give me like a concrete house.
	That's different.
	Exactly.
	That might be what people go to now.
	We'll be building cement block, metal roofed houses all over the Sunbelt.
	But, you know, as it stands now...
	A lot of the houses that still exist and the ones that are going to be rebuilt, they're going to be wood, you know?
	And they're going to be the same kind of houses that were destroyed by the last set of natural disasters.
	So nothing is fixed.
	And the only question is how you allocate the pain and the losses.
	And however you do it, it's really dangerous for the broader economy.
	Wow, Todd.
	Jump on in here.
	What's on your mind?
	What's on my mind is I self-identify as a conspiracy factualist.
	And I think arson may also have a bit to do with what's happening in California.
	And you could go so, so deep on the fact that the insurance companies were informed before last year, I think it was, that they may want to exit, you know, the state.
	And many have.
	And so, what do you think about that, John?
	Do you think that there is this massive conspiracy to where, hey, maybe the state ends up getting a half a trillion dollars from Papa government over there, and there's lots of brown paper bags to go around?
	Do you think this is really all just natural disaster, John?
	Or maybe somebody has their thumb on the scale.
	Well, I'm always happy to look into any kind of conspiracy theory these days, just because so many of them have turned out to be true lately.
	The conspiracy theorists are on a winning streak right now.
	So almost anything you say is plausible in light of the last couple of decades, right?
	So yeah, there could completely be some kind of a financial deal going on.
	You know, Southern California is a little harder.
	For me to put into that kind of a framework because so many rich people had their houses burned down here.
	You know, a lot of billionaires and millionaires lost their properties, although, of course, it was just one of their many properties, but they still lost.
	But, you know, the Hawaiian thing that happened a couple of years ago, that's easier to fit into the conspiratorial framework because it spared a lot of billionaires.
	Wiped out a lot of people who the billionaires wanted to buy out but couldn't.
	That makes perfect sense.
	But let me chime in on this, please.
	I believe that the insurance companies pulling out of California is rational.
	It's completely rational because it's clear that the state of California sets the allowable framework of algorithms that insurance companies are allowed to use to calculate risk.
	And so, I mean, that sounded crazy to me when I first learned about that, but I was just reading quotes from...
	CEOs of insurance companies saying, well, we need the state to allow us to factor in wildfire risk.
	I'm like, whoa, I thought we had a free market here.
	I thought insurance companies could compete, charge whatever they want, and consumers can take the best deal.
	But no.
	No, the state determines how you are even allowed to do the math.
	So if you're Wells Fargo or, let's say, State Farm, if you're State Farm, aren't you going to say, I mean, John, question to you, if you're State Farm, Aren't you going to look at the risk assessment and the government edict that says you can't factor this in?
	Aren't you going to say we're exiting the state?
	Isn't that rational?
	Yeah.
	What the states are doing is they're taking steps to keep premiums on homeowners' policies low enough to be affordable.
	And in so doing, they're chasing the insurance companies out of the state.
	Exactly.
	That's kind of how I'm reading it.
	But it's rational for insurance companies not to want to participate in a place that's incredibly crowded with expensive houses.
	And frequent natural disasters.
	We have to mention inflation as part of this process, too, because we've been debasing the dollar for the past 50 years.
	And one of the effects of that is that it makes property more expensive.
	Houses go up when the dollar goes down.
	So when houses go up, insurance companies have a bigger bill that they have to pay off when that house burns down.
	So inflation...
	Is part of the process of making these houses uninsurable.
	Same thing is happening with cars, by the way.
	Cars are getting more expensive and auto insurance is going through the roof.
	So the insurance companies, I mean, by definition, they have to turn a profit.
	The premiums have to be high enough to allow them to pay off on policies.
	And when we inflate the value of financial assets and real assets that have to be insured.
	We make premiums go up.
	That's one of the side effects of inflation that nobody thinks about.
	But, you know, it's turning out to be one of the really pernicious ones.
	This is brutal for a lot of people because it kind of spells the difference between whether they can stay in their house or not.
	Well, because if this gets factored in...
	Oh, I'm sorry, Todd.
	If this gets factored into the insurance premiums that are charged moving forward in California, then, you know, the quarter to half a trillion dollars in damage...
	It means that home insurance, property insurance, commercial insurance rates are clearly going to absolutely skyrocket in the region.
	But shouldn't they?
	Shouldn't rates reflect the local risks of damage?
	Yes.
	In a market-based economy, they should.
	Now, kind of what happened was this wasn't as big a problem as all those people were moving in.
	We actually had a fairly benign couple of decades of hurricanes on the East Coast.
	And the California fires have always happened, but they haven't been as brutal as they probably were in the past and could be in the future.
	We just had a nice stretch when we were fooled into thinking that those places were more benign than they are.
	So tens of millions of people poured in.
	The government inflated house prices up to ridiculous levels.
	And now here we are with maybe nature just reasserting itself.
	You know, it could just be that...
	The combination of normal fluctuation in wildfires in California is swinging back to a, you know, a bigger few years or few decades or whatever.
	And more and more people tend to mean more and more fires in any event because people start fires.
	You know, we accidentally throw a cigarette butt out the window.
	We let a campfire get out of control, things like that.
	So the more people there are, the more fires there are going to be.
	That people didn't see coming in.
	The market didn't work because consumers didn't have complete information.
	We didn't know what the number of fires were going to be, the number of hurricanes were going to be.
	And now, 50 million people are stuck.
	They're stuck in places that aren't hospitable.
	And where it's not possible for them to maintain the same lifestyle that they had in the past.
	And nobody really seems to know what to do about it because market forces from here on out would say, well, everybody will just move away, right?
	They'll go to the Midwest where their winter is hard, but it's understandable.
	It's not a natural disaster.
	And yeah, that would normally happen.
	But the process of getting from here to there is going to be insanely expensive.
	I mean, it's trillions of dollars that have to vaporize in order to make that market movement possible.
	And I want to ask Todd to chime in on the fact that this is also why you don't store your crypto wallet seed phrase on paper.
	Right?
	Because your computer burned up, your paper burned up.
	You're screwed, man, right?
	Exactly.
	You got it.
	You got it.
	Well, I want to ask, John, do you give any credence to the conspiracy, again, of weather weaponization?
	Because it's almost like the weather has somehow been weaponized, and they are hitting these certain targets.
	And hey, if you cause a currency clap...
	Collapse through hyperinflation.
	Might that be a way for the government to swoop in, be able to bail out these amazing areas of the country, and build their 15-minute cities?
	What do you think about that?
	You know, it's all possible.
	And there's a question I get asked frequently, and that is, is this all...
	Part of a plan run by evil geniuses, or are they just such morons that they're blundering off a cliff?
	And there's evidence for both of those worldviews.
	And I don't have any inside information.
	I would say that there are probably people within the U.S. government who would not only do all the stuff that you just mentioned, but they would throw World War III in on top of it as a way of creating a crisis that they can exploit.
	As a way of pursuing this master plan for world domination.
	You know what?
	Given what we've seen in the last few decades, it's completely possible.
	But it's also possible that these guys are just a bunch of Ivy League-educated morons who have no idea how the real world works, and all they know how to do is do deals.
	They just don't see a lot of the financial stuff that's coming.
	I think that's possible, too.
	You listen to people running the Fed speak, and those are not evil geniuses.
	That's true.
	Those are morons.
	Hey, John, I have one question that I know you're going to be able to just swing at and hit it out of the park.
	I want to talk about currency collapse, because part of what we offer are decentralized solutions, and we should wargame some of these things.
	And I was thinking about this as I was preparing for this interview.
	Would the dollar collapsing due to hyperinflation be so bad for folks who are up to their ears in debt?
	I mean, what would happen to our debts if the dollar collapsed?
	You know what I mean?
	Well, there is one theory, and it is intuitively sensible, and that is to say that if we're destroying the currency, then the logical thing to do would be to borrow as much money as you possibly can, mortgage your house, take on every kind of personal loan imaginable, max out credit cards, because you know you're going to be paying those debts back in depreciating currency.
	Now, two problems with that.
	One is that You know, you've got to be able to make the payments until that happens, and we don't know when the dollar just falls off its cliff.
	So you could be bankrupted before that happens, and then you would lose everything, and then your plan would not work.
	The other is that governments are capable of changing the terms of debt contracts when things really get going.
	One of the crazy things they might do is they might just index debt so that if your interest rate was 6% last year, It becomes 8% or 10% this year as a way of offsetting the fall on the value of the currency.
	And you don't make out that way either.
	So the only thing I would say, if you're going to borrow money to invest against the global fiat currency system, then you would borrow money to buy gold.
	And you own that gold or some other real asset that's going to go up dramatically as the currency goes down.
	And that protects you against the government's redoing your contract so you actually owe more because the gold in that circumstance would probably go up more than the interest rate on your debt under the government changing the contract terms.
	So, you know, that would be a thing that would probably work.
	But it's still, you know, that is a speculation.
	Sure.
	And I think we should be advising people against taking bets that can come back to bite them less.
	You don't want to do anything where the worst case scenario is catastrophe if you're trying to protect yourself against chaotic times.
	Along those lines, John, some people are being told today, not by us, but they're being told to mortgage their homes and buy Bitcoin.
	I think that's horrifically bad and risky advice.
	This is part of our show.
	Decentralization means you need to have...
	Financial assets that you can always count on, that can't vanish, that can't disappear.
	And by the way, gold and silver don't burn, it turns out.
	So if people had gold in those homes, they still have the gold.
	It might have possibly melted if it got to crazy, crazy high temperatures.
	But guess what?
	Gold has a value by the ounce, as long as they weren't historical numismatic coins.
	Which we don't recommend anyway.
	But John, I mean, speak about that.
	Gold and silver survive hurricanes, floods, fires.
	It's on the table of elements, man.
	There's nothing more secure in the universe.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I think the...
	Step number one of moving your financial life away from financial assets like bank accounts and government bonds, which depend for their value on the value of the currency, towards real things that are going to have utility no matter what.
	But step number one is to take some dollars, turn them into gold and silver, physical gold and silver.
	You want to start with something you can actually touch.
	And then, you know, there's an intellectual challenge in figuring out where to hide it and who to tell about it and everything.
	So you need to make sure that you're good with those steps because they can ruin you if you get them wrong.
	But still, you should own physical assets that you can get to when you need it and that governments can't just inflate away on an electronic printing press.
	So you start with gold and silver coins or bars or whatever.
	You store them in a very safe place.
	And then you move on to slightly riskier things that will maybe still hold their value, like counterparty risk.
	Somebody else has to keep a promise in order for the thing to be valuable.
	You can look at those things after you've set up this base layer of wealth that nobody has to keep a promise for it to keep its value.
	You know where it is.
	You can get to it.
	And then from there, you move on to other stuff.
	But yeah, I think gold and silver are the place to start.
	What percentage, because I think through this all the time, what percentage should I be thinking about or should anybody be thinking about that you should start at that base level of precious metals, of your overall savings structure?
	I have an answer, but I'll let John answer first and then I'll follow.
	Well, my answer would be that it's different from different people.
	Everybody's circumstances are unique.
	But a nice round number for something like gold and silver bullion would be 10%.
	Okay.
	And, you know, you start there and move some bank accounts over.
	It's not hard to hit that figure.
	And then you decide whether you want to include your real estate in that calculation, you know, because maybe you've got a house that's worth a lot of money and it hasn't burned down yet.
	Right.
	And so 10% of that is a bigger number, but, you know.
	Think it through, but 10% of your financial assets, like your bank accounts and your cash and your stocks and bonds and things like that, that's reasonable as a starting point.
	So on a dollar cost averaging basis, you could think on a monthly, if we are going to get into precious metals, that just think of 10% of your disposable investment income, I guess, would go into precious metals, right?
	Yeah.
	With a goal of it accumulating to 10% of your financial assets at some point in the not crazy distant future.
	Yeah, so dollar cost averaging, you know, the process of dollar cost averaging is more important than the number because you just want to get...
	And then it builds up.
	Just let it happen over time.
	But once you've made the commitment and set up the structure so that your bank account knows to transfer a certain amount of money to a gold dealer or whatever, however you do it.
	Let me add the layer that I've come to because a lot of people have asked me this question over the years, how much gold should I have?
	And remember, our audience is mostly people who are closer to retirement than not.
	Typically earned and saved some significant amount, and they want to be able to live on it.
	And my answer has become very simple.
	Even though I always have the disclaimer, I'm not your financial advisor, etc.
	But I say, have one ounce of gold for every month that you want to live.
	Because you can always live on about an ounce of gold a month.
	You can feed yourself, you can have shelter, you can have a pair of shoes every once in a while.
	You can live a decent life on an ounce of gold a month, and that's been the same throughout most of history, actually.
	I say start there, and then if you plan to live 10 years, have 120 ounces of gold.
	That's fascinating.
	Yeah, because then you're set, right?
	Then everything else, you know you can still feed yourself and clothe yourself and have shelter.
	I love that.
	Yeah, that's a completely good target.
	And then that takes into account...
	So, John, what are some other safe assets that will rise in value when the dollar collapses?
	Okay, basically, you want to look at things that are real as opposed to financial.
	In other words, an oil well is a real thing.
	It has utility that has nothing to do with the dollar or anything.
	You can invest in something like Exxon, an oil company stock.
	Of course, there are issues with having stocks in a brokerage account that we should circle back to, but a well-chosen piece of rental real estate, something that has utility, not that you're living in and consuming, but something that gives you cash flow.
	That works.
	Energy investments in general probably fit this bill because we're always going to need energy.
	Right?
	So, uranium stocks is another really interesting thing.
	Commodities like copper are required for the electrification of the world.
	Since we apparently intend to set up AI server farms on every patch of spare land in the country, you know, that requires a ton of copper.
	And therefore, copper's price is probably going to be higher five years from now than it is now, which makes good copper miners a good investment.
	So all of those things are investments that you can make that put you in the universe of real assets as opposed to financial assets.
	And they should do better.
	But there is also a lot of investing in yourself that really pays off, too, that people sometimes don't think of when you're talking about investing.
	People think of stocks and bonds and real estate, stuff like that.
	But skill stacking is a really important thing for people to do.
	In other words, learn how to do the things that will have existential value when the time comes.
	If you can do some of the things that keep you alive when some of the big systems break down, then the value of those skills are infinite.
	If only Mike Adams had those kind of skills.
	There's anything in this world you can't do.
	I've come to that conclusion.
	Alright, so I actually co-designed a knife and I named it Escape from L.A. because the knife has this pry bar on the end that you can use to pry open doors and windows and buildings where the power has gone off and they don't function.
	But the thing is, I created this knife two years ago and called it Escape from L.A. two years ago.
	And now...
	It's becoming very practical in LA. So yeah, we're into preparedness and all of that, but I just want to remind our audience too, our expert here today, John, you and I go way back, John, and you've been right about so many things for so long.
	I want to give your website again, rubino.substack.com.
	Encourage people to sign up there, read your columns.
	It's really extraordinary.
	I think you have a very reasoned and methodical approach to what you're saying.
	And you're also a big picture thinker.
	But I have a question for you.
	I recently asked my own AI model that we're building.
	It's called Enoch.
	I asked it to list out the history of all the collapsed currencies starting from Rome.
	And it was a longer list than what I anticipated.
	Things that I didn't even realize were good examples of collapsed currencies.
	Have you always known?
	I mean, at least since you...
	Originally founded DollarCollapse.com.
	Have you always known the dollar was headed for oblivion, or is that something that you came to over time?
	Well, there's a story there, and I'll keep it super brief.
	But in the 1990s, I was a tech stock columnist for Jim Cramer's Street.com.
	You're kidding me.
	I did not know that.
	By the end, by 1998, I was the resident bear.
	I was the guy who was saying, no, these business models don't work.
	The stuff is going to go down.
	It was like two years of me being wrong on that site.
	Kramer must have given you hell for that.
	Come down to our level.
	But we had a lot of editorial things where I and an editor would have a debate and stuff like that about whether tech stocks were still a good buy.
	And so anyhow, by 2000, I was looking around for other things that might be interesting besides tech stocks because it was clear that that era had ended.
	And there was a guy named James Turk, who you guys probably have heard of.
	Who had patented some gold-backed currencies.
	And I called him up and we did a magazine article together.
	I interviewed him and wrote the magazine article and was fascinated by the idea because it sounded really plausible.
	You make a new currency that's backed by gold and it lasts forever because it's a real thing.
	It's a real kind of money.
	After doing the article, I asked him if he wanted to write a book about this stuff.
	And he said, oh, I'm too busy.
	And I said, well, you know, I'll mostly write it.
	And then you and I collaborate on a lot of it.
	And we'll put our names on it together.
	And he said, yes.
	So we wrote a book called The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit from It.
	So that's, you know, doing that one year of research into gold and fiat currencies and stuff like that with James Turk, who's a...
	You know, world-renowned expert on that stuff was basically where I learned about these things.
	But you must be, I'm sorry to interrupt, but you must be surprised by the continued ability for the powers that be to kick the can down the road.
	I'm surprised as well.
	And by the way, here's a goldback.
	I think this is some of what you refer to.
	Like there's an ounce, there's a thousandth of an ounce of gold in the goldback, right?
	But I believe in real...
	You know, metals as money as well.
	But, John, you know, here we are at $36 trillion in debt, almost $230 trillion in government obligations, which can clearly never be paid.
	I mean, it's absurd.
	You know, the question is, I get this question, how long can this charade continue?
	Well, you know, when James Turk and I were writing that book, it was 2004. And our biggest fear was that the system would collapse before we got to print.
	So the book would be obsolete.
	So we actually expected back then that the fiat currency system was ready to blow up, that the numbers were just unmanageable.
	So yeah, that it's lasted this much longer is a surprise to me too.
	And what that means is never pay attention to any of my short-term predictions because I might be off by two decades.
	Yeah, it's an interesting question of how we manage to keep this thing going for such a long time.
	And there are a couple of possible answers to that.
	And one is that in previous hyperinflations leading to currency collapses, it was one country screwing up in a sound money world.
	In other words, everybody was on the gold standard except...
	Albania or somebody that prints too much money in the system, their currency collapses, and then life goes on.
	It was not that extreme an amount of debt for a country to take on before its currency blew up because everybody else was on the gold standard.
	Well, today, everybody's on fiat currencies, which means every major government has an unlimited printing press with which to manipulate markets and create new currency to buy elections and start wars.
	And that's allowing them to keep this thing going a lot longer than it would have been able to if it was just one big country.
	Like if it was just the U.S. or just Great Britain or somebody, we'd have had our hyperinflation and crashed and we'd all be back on a gold standard.
	There are also cases in history, however, where many cases where, of course, wars ended a nation and ended a currency, obviously.
	But there are other cases where large-scale natural disasters or ecological change over time, such as deforestation or loss of soil viability, loss of crop production, these kinds of things have ended currencies as well, and that can't be solved by printing money.
	So, you know, these fires in California are, I think, it's a wake-up call.
	Like, if this were much larger, it could really threaten the viability of the whole nation.
	Yeah, well, a war or a natural disaster, they can be papered over for a while by printing money, but only until people lose faith in that money.
	And then everybody dumps the currency, and the government loses its ability to do whatever it was doing, and you have your currency crash and your reset.
	The fact that we've been able to do this for much longer than seemed reasonable back in the 2000s...
	You know, that can be explained by printing presses, I think.
	But it also means that we've been able to go a lot further in terms of debt creation and credit creation than we were able to do before.
	So the numbers are so much bigger than we've ever seen in relation to the size of economies that the crash that results from this is liable to be a lot bigger, too.
	You know, we have so much debt that has to be gotten rid of or inflated away in some other way.
	And the only way to do that Is with these fiat currencies basically just cratering.
	You know, they can't drop by 20 or 30% and then we go back to the gold standard or something.
	They really have to almost vaporize in a lot of cases, just because there's so much debt that has to be inflated away.
	So, yeah, we bought ourselves a lot of extra time, but at the cost of an even bigger crash when the time comes, when people give up on these currencies finally.
	I have a sneaky suspicion there may be a nudge out there to push the dollar into the collapse.
	And I love your perspective on the new BRICS payment system and how it might impact the dollar.
	Do you think that could be a first domino towards the collapse?
	Yeah.
	It could be.
	I mean, the BRICS are doing what they're doing because the US has the world's reserve currency and we've weaponized it.
	We use the dollar as a weapon against people who step out of line.
	So you do something the US doesn't like and the US kicks you out of the swift international bank settlement system or they put sanctions on your exports or they do any number of other things via their control of the world's reserve currency to make life hard for you.
	You know, a big chunk of the rest of the world is sick of that.
	So the BRICS thing evolved from that frustration.
	And they're gradually creating a parallel global financial system where they have their version of a central bank and their version of the International Monetary Fund and of the SWIFT bank settlement system.
	And they're talking about creating a gold-backed currency that they can use to trade among themselves.
	That doesn't need the dollar.
	So all of that stuff is kind of, you know, it's creeping.
	It's not galloping ahead, but it's happening.
	So along those lines, Trump has promised to economically punish nations that seek out BRICS alternatives.
	But at the same time, Trump is also saying that, I believe he's implying that he wants to end the Internal Revenue Service and launch an external revenue service and fund the government mostly through...
	Now, of course, we would all celebrate ending the IRS, and I've long argued that the government doesn't need taxpayer money to fund itself since it prints so much.
	So that's all been a charade this entire time.
	So yeah, end the IRS. But talk to us, John, about this idea of using tariffs alone to fund the current federal government, which I believe it's over a trillion dollars a year in interest payments on the debt.
	So it's a substantial amount they have to raise from tariffs.
	What are the implications, John?
	Well, let's start first by looking at Trump.
	You know, he has a history, so you can kind of tell what he's doing by seeing what he's done in the past.
	And he tends to start the negotiation process with some crazy thing, like he'll file a lawsuit against a competitor or ask for some insane amount of money as his opening gambit.
	But he's not after that thing, necessarily.
	He's after some other kind of a deal.
	And in global trade, he's not after financing the U.S. government via tariffs.
	He sees tariffs as a behavior change tool to use on other countries to get them to bring their factories back to the U.S. So what he's saying is, okay, we're going to tax everything that comes from your country by 30% or 50% or whatever.
	Why don't you build a factory here and then you just sell the stuff directly to us with no tariffs, you know?
	And so he wants as many countries as possible or as many companies as possible to build factories here.
	And tariffs are the mechanism for negotiating that deal.
	Right.
	So I don't think tariffs are going to end up being this huge revenue source just because, you know, it's really disruptive to do that because you're really hurting these other countries.
	And with the BRICS thing evolving the way it is, the U.S. isn't all-powerful.
	The countries in the BRICS coalition have an awful lot of natural resources, a lot of people, a lot of manufacturing capability.
	So they could, if forced to, go it alone, or at least partially alone.
	Let me point out that China can't say we're going to move our Chinese factories to America for a number of reasons.
	Number one, the manufacturing infrastructure supply chain does not exist in America for most of what China makes.
	You can't just set up a microprocessor plant out of out the middle of nowhere.
	You have to have this whole supply chain of domestic materials and interim processes to produce anything, including electronics, telecom equipment, what have you, or humanoid robots, for that matter.
	But secondly, John, and I know this is a touchy subject, but...
	but the American labor force Not that interested in working that much.
	I don't know how to put this, but what's your take?
	Well, re-industrialization is a process.
	And a lot of stuff has to happen simultaneously for it to work.
	And, you know, the employment thing.
	So think about this.
	Remember the 1970s?
	That was the last time we had a currency crisis in the U.S.
	And a big part of that was wage inflation with the unionized workers getting these massive wage increases.
	And that was inflationary.
	Well, we're attempting to go back to a time like that.
	And one of the side effects of factories coming back home to the U.S. will be that organized labor in the U.S. will gain immense power compared to what it has now.
	and they'll be able to negotiate big contracts.
	Some dock workers on the East Coast got a 60% increase over six years, I think it was, 10% a year increase in wages for six straight years.
	Spread that across the economy, and you've got a lot more people making a lot more money, which is good, because factory workers and people who work with their hands and high school-educated people in the U.S. Have been totally screwed over by globalization.
	Corporations captured all the extra wealth that was created.
	Working people didn't get any of that.
	So they deserve to make back some of what was taken from them.
	But you do reach a point where you've got to pay people to do this work so much that it's inflationary.
	See, the Fed doesn't see rising house prices or stock prices as inflationary.
	They see that as assets going up, which is good because it makes rich people more rich.
	But they see wages going up as inflationary.
	And they're more likely to raise interest rates and tighten if wages start to go up.
	And that could cause a huge crisis.
	So one of the things that we have to navigate as we re-industrialize Is this process of people making more money as they go to work at these factories and factories having to pay way up to get Americans to work there.
	And what that does to inflation and the value of the dollar and the cost of a lot of other things.
	And, you know, it's not going to be this nice linear process.
	There are going to be all kinds of hiccups and all kinds of problems.
	Re-industrialization is a good thing, but it's not going to be this seamless, smooth thing.
	There will be all kinds of things that go wrong along the way.
	John, I don't see that most of the re-industrialization of America is going to be even human.
	What I see is heavy, heavy automation.
	Because think about it, a factory can say, made in America, but the rest of the sentence...
	By robots doesn't have to go on the label.
	You know what I mean?
	By robots made in China.
	Yeah, right.
	It's made in America by robots manufactured in China.
	Exactly.
	That is true.
	And those dock workers on the East Coast, what were they opposed to?
	Automation.
	Because you can look at China's ports.
	China has, you know, freaking robotic forklifts and robotic truck unloaders and robotic cranes.
	And so they're moving cargo with extremely high cost efficiency.
	The dock workers in America are completely opposed to cost efficiency as a means of protecting jobs.
	And I understand the social arguments, but my point, and what I'd like your reaction to, is that when factories begin to set up in America, Trump announces a deal, hey, Samsung, let's say, is going to set up this massive factory, going to produce everything in America.
	Are there any humans there?
	This is a really fascinating debate that's happening in economics right now, because you've got one group of economists and demographers who are terrified of a population bust.
	You know, they're saying, oh my god, the birth rates are so low, there aren't going to be enough people left to take care of retirees in 30 years, and that's going to be a major crisis.
	Elon Musk talks like this a lot of the time.
	Then you've got another set of economists saying, oh my god, automation is moving.
	Forward at such a rapid pace that there aren't going to be any jobs left for humans and we're all going to be thrown out of work.
	So those two things can't happen simultaneously.
	Or we can't have both of those problems simultaneously.
	So, you know, I don't know which one of those forces is going to win in the end, but I think it's fascinating to watch.
	And I think it's conceivable that there's a middle way where, yeah, birth rates fall.
	The population starts to drift down.
	There are fewer and fewer workers.
	But at the same time, automation takes more and more jobs, and they balance out.
	That's by far the best-case scenario, and it's probably more hopeful than realistic.
	But I think it's conceivable.
	Lower birth rates and rising automation leave us with just the right number of people doing just the right jobs.
	You know, we can hope.
	We'll see how it goes.
	But we've never seen this kind of automation before, and we've never seen this kind of demographics before either.
	We've never had a global decline in population that wasn't caused by, like, the Black Death or World War II or something like that.
	So, just because birth rates drop.
	Okay, I'm going to let Todd chime in with the last question because we're almost on time.
	But let me just say, robot workers...
	Do not have vaccine mandates at employers.
	So as a result, they don't get sick and die off.
	But that's just my opinion.
	Todd, you get the last question for our guest today.
	Well, I just want to comment before the question.
	I think somebody that I admire a lot who was a homeless carpenter a couple thousand years ago said, go forth and multiply.
	And so...
	I don't want to bet against that.
	I kind of want to see the population grow nicely.
	But let's wargame here, if you don't mind.
	Give me both, John, the worst and best case scenarios.
	What happens to life as we know it if the dollar collapsed overnight?
	Well, if a currency collapses, a couple of things happen.
	One is the people who own real assets.
	At least have protected themselves and maybe get richer in the process.
	So, for instance, when the Roman Empire had their hyperinflation, they had gold coins and silver coins still circulating, and the people who owned those coins, plus farmland and stuff like that, they got richer, while the people who had the copper coins were impoverished.
	So society bifurcates, basically.
	The people who trusted the government...
	Are screwed over.
	They see their livelihoods and their life savings evaporate, while a smaller group of people get even richer.
	And then you get political chaos because of that, right?
	You know, Germany had its hyperinflation in the 1920s.
	It got Hitler.
	France had a hyperinflation in the late 1700s.
	They got Napoleon.
	So you end up with a very real risk of chaos leading to dictatorship.
	So that's the worst case scenario of a dollar collapse.
	The best case scenario is that the government doesn't wait for the market to impose it on everybody.
	It just announces some Sunday night that from now on the dollar is just a name for one ten thousandth of an ounce of gold.
	And the people who are really hurt by that will be protected in some specific ways by government policies.
	And then we still have chaos.
	You know, you still have a certain amount of civil unrest, a certain number of people who lose out, but you get through it and you end up with a sustainable monetary system.
	So we still have that possibility.
	There's still a chance that our people, our leaders, are wise enough to do this thing right.
	I think it's a 10% chance at best, but it's still possible.
	That was a 100% great answer.
	Thank you.
	Really good answer.
	Very informative.
	And also, what a great time to own gold if the government reattaches gold to the dollar.
	Because it won't be $35 an ounce like 1971. It'll be, like you said, John, maybe $10,000 an ounce, maybe more.
	So you quadruple your money on a Sunday night.
	Yeah.
	That would be nice.
	And you'd see a lot of very happy stackers out there.
	That's true.
	People who've been doing this for 30 years and nobody listened to them and boom.
	Monday morning they're rich.
	See, Trump is faced with this really difficult objective of how do you reassert dollar hegemony dominance in the world marketplace with the risk of BRICS, which is partially backed by gold as I understand it, which is why China's central banks are...
	Allowing U.S. Treasuries to expire and then rolling that into gold purchases largely.
	But Trump could reassert a gold-backed dollar.
	That would change the equation internationally.
	And if he also decreased the weaponization of the sanctions, which, I mean, you'd have to fire half the State Department for that to happen, but that's probably a good idea anyway.
	Victoria Nuland's already...
	John, I really admire your work.
	Thank you for fielding our sometimes off-the-wall questions.
	You handle everything expertly, and we've really enjoyed speaking with you today.
	Thanks, guys.
	This was a lot of fun.
	Let's do it again sometime.
	We will love to have you back.
	Great rest of your day, John.
	Take care.
	Thanks.
	Cheers, John.
	All right, so for everybody watching, we're going to take a quick break.
	We'll be right back after this break, Todd and I will, with the after-party discussion where we will continue this topic and talk about decentralization with precious metals and other things.
	So stay with us.
	We'll be right back after this break.
	Join the official discussion channel for this show on Telegram at t.me slash decentralized TV. Where you can ask questions or offer suggestions of who we should interview next.
	Also be sure to subscribe to the email newsletter on Decentralized.tv where you'll be alerted about one day in advance of each new upcoming episode before it gets published.
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	Check it all out at decentralized.tv.
	All right, welcome back, everybody.
	And what a great conversation.
	John Rubino is incredibly knowledgeable.
	I think he's also very reasoned in his approach, but he's not afraid to say the things that people need to hear, such as the fact that fiat currencies all eventually collapse.
	We just don't know when.
	Right.
	And he's honest about that.
	I don't know when either.
	We're all surprised it's lasted this long.
	But, Todd, this is the first time you got to co-interview him, right?
	I was entirely impressed.
	And I started getting impressed with my prep work before the show when I was researching him a bit.
	And I was like, man, I'm really looking forward to this.
	And he didn't disappoint.
	So, John, if you're watching this after-party, thank you.
	You're an awesome guest.
	Yeah, he's very knowledgeable.
	And I think, you know...
	What he recognizes and what we all recognize here, part of the show, is understanding risk.
	And he mentioned, although we didn't get a chance to go back to it, the importance of understanding counterparty risk.
	So this has to do with currency, gold, and also crypto.
	Like, Todd, you and I have always said, if you hold crypto, hold it in your own wallet.
	Self-custody.
	Why?
	You don't want the counterparty risk of having to log in somewhere and trust them to send it to you when you want it.
	Right?
	Yes.
	Yes.
	I mean, but I have to say, Mike, you also added a gem within the interview on this ounce.
	Figure out how many years you want to live and factor an ounce per month.
	I believe that's what you said, right?
	That's what I said, yeah.
	I want to see if my math is right.
	During our break, I did some math, all right?
	My dad lived to be...
	You know, in his mid-90s, so I'm going to use that as kind of my measure.
	Well, okay, but that's extraordinary.
	Most people don't live that long.
	Okay, well, I'm going to pretend I will because I'm so healthy now because I know the health ranger.
	But let's just say 95, I'm 60, so that's 35 years.
	There's 12 months, so 420 months, and I kind of like...
	To think that my wife is going to be with me.
	I don't know how you factor that in.
	Is it a total times two or not?
	Because we're sharing, you know, I don't know.
	But let me...
	It's per person.
	Yeah, it's per person.
	Okay, per person.
	So times two is 840 ounces.
	It's $2,700.
	So my math is I need about $2.2 million worth of gold.
	That's right.
	Okay, okay.
	I have some work to do, Mike.
	Because think about it, if you set aside, if you had $2.2 million in cash today, and you set that aside, what would that be worth by the time you hit 80, 85, 90?
	That cash is worth...
	I think $90,000.
	Nothing.
	Right.
	So you trade cash for gold today, the gold continues to have that value through your entire life.
	If not more, but I'm not saying speculate on it and hope it goes up.
	I'm just saying it will hold its purchasing power over time because that's what it does.
	Think about it.
	If you buried gold back in 1971, if you buried 100 ounces of gold versus 100 times $35 of cash, and then you unburied it today, you dug it up today, which would you rather have, the cash or the gold?
	Think of the gold.
	100%.
	loot the value of gold easily.
	They can play games with the ETFs and the paper contracts, but only to some extent.
	At the end of the day, they can't counterfeit physical gold.
	If they could, they would already be doing it.
	And then my question would be, what gold?
	laughter Well, that's the other beauty about it.
	If you have physical gold in your possession, right?
	You know, the government can't electronically just confiscate it from your bank account.
	They can do that with dollars or pensions or what have you.
	I know people who've just been receiving letters from their pension funds that say, well, you know, the annual interest rate increases have topped out now, so your pension is never going to go up from here forward.
	Oh my goodness.
	Yeah, which means that you're just getting less and less and less.
	And what's the real annual increase in cost of living today?
	15%, 20%?
	Right.
	You know, it's not 2% or 3%.
	Oh, heck no.
	And depending upon what segment it is, right?
	There's food, certain food groups that are 50% a year.
	And look at insurance costs.
	We were just talking about that.
	Yes, yes, yes.
	I think that's going to be nuts.
	I mean, I shared at the beginning of the show that I'm suing an insurance company.
	Because of what's going on with my roof and damage, and they're not covering, and it's just ludicrous.
	And I'm pretty sure, unless the law protects me, that there'll be a point in time to where they'll say, we don't want this guy.
	We don't want to insure this guy anymore because he causes trouble, right?
	So we'll cross that bridge when it comes to it.
	But I'm telling you, I really have a sense, Mike, when you take a look at All of our base costs, right, as a homeowner.
	Let's just say you have the darn thing paid off, right?
	You have your energy costs.
	If you're dependent upon, you know, your energy company and your electric bill, you have, we've talked about this before, you have a hot war in the Middle East and that goes up to 300. You're talking about energy costs that may have gone from $400 a month to $1,400 a month, right?
	Then you have your property taxes, which they never go down, right?
	So that's going up and up.
	And now you talk about your insurance premiums going up and up and up.
	And with that, your, and this is what I'm facing, your deductible keeps going up.
	And so it's all like almost rigged.
	To where, at the end of the day, people just aren't going to be able to afford to own their own home unless they have meaningful income coming in, right?
	And so then what happens?
	You're going to have a lot of people that are just going to have to downsize, Mike, to something and probably go rent somewhere.
	So you're converting this dream of having paid off your home.
	But still, when people are at a point in time in their lives where they're wanting to retire, enjoy life, because of those rising costs, can they ever retire?
	A. And B, if they do, is it just a matter of time before?
	They can ill afford to be in that home in Elon.
	Let's be clear.
	The system is set up as a tax farm.
	Sure it is.
	As a kind of slave plantation of the modern day.
	Although, my dog is rooting for you, by the way.
	He kept telling me during the break, roof, roof.
	So he's cheering for you.
	No, jokes aside, the system is designed to extract everything from you by the time you die.
	So you're left with nothing.
	And the dollar is the vehicle, the main vehicle through which that happens.
	So you think you're earning money.
	You think you're saving money.
	You think you're investing money.
	And it all turns out to be worth less and less and less rapidly as you age.
	And if you retire today and you have a million dollars in the bank, you're going to die impoverished because a million dollars is not enough from retirement age to live.
	with the dollar collapsing the way it is.
	Think about that.
	You need more than a million dollars.
	Oh, yeah.
	And then, you know, there are people who will never have even a million dollars because they can't get ahead in the system because they're paying the property tax, they're paying the rent, they're paying the insurance premiums.
	It's designed to trap you in that system of never-ending tax farm enslavement.
	And the only way out is an honest money system.
	Right.
	Correct.
	And good luck with that.
	Right.
	And this also speaks to why people prefer cryptocurrency, because crypto cannot be counterfeited by governments.
	Right.
	That's one of the intrinsic properties of cryptocurrency.
	And I understand there can be high risk, but there's also a lot of intrinsic properties that the dollar just can't match.
	I love the fact that the government can't fake the ledger of Bitcoin, for example.
	Correct.
	Correct.
	And again, if you do it right, there can be kind of the question, what crypto?
	Right.
	Well, you and I are into privacy crypto, and my...
	You know, my hope is I know there are a lot of amazing companies out there in the crypto space and a lot of coins and projects and specifically privacy coins to where my dream is that we can all exchange value privately and we can get out from underneath this surveillance thumb of the powers that be.
	Mike, I'll tell you, in December, I... My best friend in life, Mike Puccinelli, he reaches out to me and he's like, Toddy, Toddy needs a Blackstone Grill for Christmas.
	You gotta go research it.
	And he sent me some links, right?
	So I got on the phone with him and I started talking to him, Mike.
	And I swear, Mike, anything that I searched, accessories for Blackstone Grill were popping up.
	It's like, I'm like, these guys, excuse my language, but whore out my data.
	To everybody.
	And it's based upon them listening and watching.
	You know, this is the surveillance state that we're talking about.
	And so I yearn to be able to exchange value privately without being monitored.
	And that's what I'm hopeful for.
	This year, we're going to have some guests, Mike, that are going to be able to give us some insights, be it Xano or otherwise, of how they're going about doing this.
	And that's where I think people should just at least, if you're not crypto-savvy, at least become crypto-curious.
	Well, I know that this is going to be an epic year for sure, and I think you're going to have an announcement sometime coming up about, I think, an epic cash marketplace.
	I don't know more than that, but you've mentioned something coming up.
	That's going to be an awesome discussion.
	We're seeing crypto infrastructure.
	And you just mentioned Xano, and what they have is a privacy wrapper that can wrap up Bitcoin and then allow you to send it privately and then sort of unwrap it back into Bitcoin when you want to use it as Bitcoin.
	At least that's the way I understand it.
	I don't know all the technical details.
	But those are just a couple of examples.
	Now, Trump coming in, and then think about...
	The pressure on the SEC. You might be up on this more than me.
	What's going to happen to Gary Gensler and his whole take on crypto?
	Out the door?
	I hope.
	Yeah, I hope so too.
	Lord willing.
	We need an SEC that recognizes the role of crypto in society and doesn't try to tax unrealized crypto gains.
	Are you kidding me?
	That's crazy.
	That's crazy.
	What if they try to tax unrealized gold gains?
	They might.
	How insane would that be?
	It would be very insane, but they are insane.
	That's what we all have to remember.
	That's why, you know, Mike, just to give a bit of a plug, that's why I really encourage people to go to my website, my575e.com.
	We have streamlined it over the last two weeks.
	I'm really happy with it to where folks can go in and just watch that free video, download the PDF that talks about the 32 positive attributes and how you might be able to benefit.
	And I had a couple of guys that I went to breakfast this morning with, and they're like, well, who would benefit from operating a UNA? And I said, well, those who earn income.
	Be it 1099 or W-2, those who own property, or you don't have to own it outright.
	You can have a mortgage on your property.
	And anybody who has children and are interested in estate planning and helping your progeny keep more of what they earn, those are those who should be interested.
	And look, Mike, here's what I know.
	People go to the site.
	The video and the PDF answers 95% of their questions, but there's still a hangover out there.
	I've had consultation after consultation with people willing to invest that $150,000.
	I've talked about it before.
	You get the $150,000 back if you move forward with the UNA. Most people seem to after that consultation.
	It's like, just go and learn.
	Do not sell these, Mike.
	I present them and let people make their own informed decisions.
	But I will tell you the number of people who have acquired a UNA, I think you would say it's pretty impressive, Mike.
	And I reported last week is my rating on service after the fact is an A-plus by those who voted, Mike.
	Well, I'm showing your website here, my575e.com.
	And I just want to say, the way, at least as I understand it, the way the UNA works is the way that I think that all income should always work.
	Like, you should always be able to keep what you earn.
	You know what I mean?
	And I love the idea that Trump is at least talking about abolishing the IRS. Oh, me too.
	I would love for my website to be irrelevant.
	And, you know, Rubino didn't think possibly that...
	The IRS would really be abolished, but I think it could happen.
	And it would be an amazing thing to unleash economic prosperity for America, wouldn't it?
	Imagine.
	Oh, my goodness.
	Yeah, I mean, let people keep what they earn.
	And, yeah, maybe there could be a consumption tax.
	I would much rather have a national retail sales tax than a federal income tax, because then I could control how much tax I pay by how much I buy.
	Exactly.
	You know, it puts it back into your control.
	You don't have to do the forms and fill out the file and keep receipts and be audited and all that nonsense.
	Yes.
	Just like you buy a car, you're going to pay 20% more.
	That's it.
	Right.
	Your choice.
	Which car you want to buy.
	You want to buy that one?
	It's a lot more expensive.
	You're going to pay a lot more.
	Right.
	But the real scam, like we were just talking about the tax farms and so on.
	The real scam is that the federal government doesn't need taxpayer money at all.
	Explain that, because you're right.
	Well, because they print money at will.
	So anytime they want to do a bailout, like the subprime mortgage collapse bailout, they just print trillions of dollars.
	When they want to send money to Ukraine, or Israel, or Taiwan, what do they do?
	They just print the money.
	I mean, when I say print, it's digital.
	They open up a spreadsheet.
	They add some zeros, boom.
	The money comes into existence.
	They don't need you to file your taxes to have money.
	They just need to add another zero.
	Mike, for all of you listening right now, just think this through.
	This will break your brain, okay?
	So they create that $1 bill, right?
	It goes into circulation.
	How many times is that $1 bill taxed?
	Yes.
	Whether it is...
	For food, you're paying tax on that.
	You give that to the grocer, and then they have to pay a tax on that.
	Every dollar is taxed so many times.
	Up the supply chain.
	It's a scam, man.
	It's a total scam.
	And then you add the IRS on it, too.
	It's just nothing more than to keep us in that animal farm.
	It's incredible that we have a federal government that Illegally runs bioweapons programs using money they've created.
	Yeah.
	That uses money to build bombs that bomb children.
	That uses money to run CDC propaganda campaigns to try to terrorize the American people into taking jabs and things like that.
	But then they have the arrogance to have the IRS look at you and say, well, we think you might be dishonest about your reporting.
	No kidding.
	You want to talk about dishonesty?
	Look in Washington, D.C., for God's sake.
	Start there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, look at Congress.
	Look at the Senate.
	Who's getting kickbacks?
	How come somebody joins the House of Representatives as a relatively impoverished person, and then, you know, 10 years later, like Nancy Pelosi, they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars?
	Huh?
	How does that happen?
	Crazy.
	I don't know.
	I can't.
	It's a good gig if you can get it, I guess.
	This is why I've got to play my song at the end of this.
	I want my bailout.
	Oh, good!
	Because, yeah, we'll put that on the end.
	Awesome.
	Because everybody's been loving that song.
	And the thing is, the lyrics are from 2008. That's nuts.
	I can't wait, by the way.
	I don't think you published it, but before you do, if you could give me a sneak listen, I want to hear that country song.
	Oh, yeah.
	I am going to publish that song.
	It's not the next one, but it's coming.
	Okay, I can't wait to hear that.
	You are so talented with all of that stuff.
	It's just amazing.
	Well, thank you, Todd.
	But, you know, it's an AI engine that produces the music that we describe to it, right?
	So you tell it what to produce.
	I'm talking about Suno here.
	And you tell it what vocals to produce, and then you give it the lyrics and the style and everything.
	And, you know, the truth is...
	This is the way a lot of the world's going to work from here forward in terms of content.
	Is to become what?
	A prompt engineer.
	So those of us, all of us, this is so new that if we just dive into the shallow end headfirst and learn how to be a prompt engineer, start small, and then have fun with it, at one point in time, we all may be proficient to be able to create music just based on our imagination like you have.
	I mean, you always brave the new path here, but I'm enthused.
	Look, and Todd, every interview that we've done here has been used as training material for the engine that we're releasing.
	So Enoch is coming March 1st, and if you go to brighttown.ai, here's my update that I wrote, and you can download Enoch for free beginning March 1st, and it can power...
	Everything.
	It's a local chatbot.
	It's a research tool.
	It can power avatars.
	It can be a wellness coach.
	It can be a nutrition scientist.
	It can teach you about decentralization.
	Any question you can ask, it can give you amazing answers.
	Now, it doesn't know much about pop culture, movies and fashion and travel, because that's not what we care about.
	It knows about the things that matter.
	We're talking about economics, technology, decentralization.
	Health, wellness, disease prevention, all these things.
	It's extremely well-trained.
	So, Todd, your knowledge, your comments, everything you've ever said about crypto is in this engine, and it can be invoked by asking it the right questions.
	Wow.
	So, do you think Enoch...
	From a decentralization standpoint, if you just kind of had to give a summary of how Enoch relates to decentralized living, what would you say, Mike?
	Oh, well, it puts all information at your fingertips without censorship from Google or social media.
	Anything you ask it, it will attempt to answer.
	And since I think it's an 8 billion parameter model, So it's got a tremendous amount of human knowledge in it.
	Not everything, but a lot.
	And thus, there are no limits to what it will attempt to answer.
	You can ask it, like just the other day I was putting together some story ideas.
	I said, give me a list of every prescription medication that causes a nutritional deficiency.
	And list the medication along with the nutrient that it depletes.
	And then...
	Give a description of the symptoms of deficiency of that nutrient.
	And I hit go, and boom, it comes back.
	Here's a whole list of all that stuff.
	Wow.
	See, that's prompt engineering, everyone.
	That's prompt engineering.
	And I would love, Mike, if we could have a show in the future that would be focused on Enoch.
	And please, we don't need a guest except Enoch.
	Let's have Enoch as our guest.
	True.
	I'd love us to be able to ask some questions real-time to be able to show people how powerful this AI engine is.
	Well, we're thinking the same.
	The only thing is, I want Enoch to be able to speak.
	Oh, nice!
	So I have acquired a laptop with a high-end NVIDIA card in it that can do text-to-speech synthesis in real-time.
	Oh, that's awesome!
	Yeah, so what we're actually going to have here is a talking AI. Like a third host.
	It's awesome.
	And what I really want to do, now this is going to take a while, Todd, but I want the AI to listen to us as we're talking, and I want it to ask questions.
	Wow.
	Right?
	Like, what about this?
	But we should give it a really funny voice.
	I don't know what kind of funny voice, but something hilarious, you know?
	I'm afraid to offer some of my voices because somebody is going to knock it somehow.
	Well, I was thinking kind of something inspired by Samuel Jackson from Pulp Fiction.
	Oh, there you go.
	Right.
	Like citing scripture in a threatening manner.
	I think that would be a great co-host for us.
	Yeah, John the Baptist.
	Right.
	Totally.
	We can do whatever we want, man.
	But I'm trying to piece this together over the next few months.
	So my goal is that sometime like May or June, also in May, NVIDIA is coming out with this new supercomputer that's a $3,000 desktop system that is unbelievably powerful.
	I did the math.
	It actually replaces 31 of my current GPU workstations.
	Gosh, that's crazy.
	In one box.
	Yeah.
	What it will be able to do is, as we're talking, it will be able to produce real-time, photorealistic graphics depicting whatever we're talking about.
	Gosh, that's amazing.
	That's amazing.
	So everyone, this is why you keep staying tuned, right?
	This is a leading-edge type business here.
	Totally.
	We're going to demonstrate some AI uses this year that will be just mind-blowing.
	And the thing is, we're giving away this model free of charge.
	It's an open-source model.
	You don't pay anything.
	It's non-commercial.
	It's an Apache 2.0 license, which means it's free to use for non-commercial and commercial uses on your site.
	So if you have a business or a wellness center or whatever, you can use our model in your business and you don't have to pay us anything.
	That's what Apache 2.0 means.
	What's your revenue model, Mike?
	There is no revenue.
	The revenue model is people support us at healthrangerstore.com.
	Support us.
	Go to rangerdeals.com.
	We've got goldbacks there.
	We've got gold and silver dealers, etc.
	that are really trustworthy and so on.
	We take extra profits and we build infrastructure for humanity and then we give it back to the human race.
	That's amazing.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And everyone, and I think I've heard you share this, but if I have the number wrong, I'm sorry.
	But I know all of the investment that you've put in this is approaching, if not over, a million bucks.
	It's a little over a million into this model.
	So everyone think about that.
	We all live ourselves.
	We earn money.
	We spend money.
	But this guy right here, he invested back into what he said.
	Rightly, is our future, humanity's future.
	And Mike is so smart in his approach, and he's so selfless and willing to be able to make these investments.
	That's why I asked him what the business model is, because I know it's zero.
	It's free.
	But, you know, sometimes, Mike, people don't respect free.
	And so, I'm just signaling people, you should.
	People are right to be skeptical because Google and other tech platforms, when they give away something for free, what they're really doing is spying on you.
	It's a surveillance project.
	Gmail, for example.
	Great point.
	Or just using Google.
	But this model has zero surveillance and it works completely offline.
	In fact, it doesn't connect to the internet at all.
	It has no capability to do so.
	So you're saying that...
	I can query all mine and do it all in the private, and when I go to get a new download, when there's an update, you're not going to sweep in and grab all of my data that I've been using?
	It doesn't even store any data.
	It's impossible.
	No mechanism exists for that.
	But the reason we designed it this way is because it's designed as an off-grid survival library, like a Noah's Ark of human knowledge, so that if society collapses, Yeah.
	That people, as long as you can fire up a laptop computer, you can run this model and you can ask it questions about how do I grow food?
	How do I rebuild infrastructure?
	You know, anything.
	I'm telling you, Rob, what is the most base level of a computer that could run this well?
	Well, what's interesting is it will run on just about any Windows, Mac, or Linux system today, but it just runs slowly if you don't have a graphics card, a GPU. Okay.
	So it can produce two or three tokens a second on just a CPU like a laptop.
	And a word is typically like one and a half tokens.
	So think maybe one to two words a second on output on a CPU laptop.
	But if you have a graphics card in it, especially if you have a desktop with a graphics card, which they're not even very expensive.
	You can get a 12-gig NVIDIA card for $400 or $500.
	That will churn out.
	20 to 30 tokens a second.
	And if you spend more like $1,500 on the new NVIDIA 50 series cards that are about to be released, that will start churning out 50 to 60 tokens a second.
	And that's when you can have it write articles and chapters and summaries and everything.
	You can paste in all your own text and you can have it edit it.
	You can have it spit out corrections.
	You can, like you just sued your insurance company, right?
	You could have our engine write the lawsuit or write the complaint or write the letter to your insurance company.
	You just tell it with bullet points what you want, and it will compose the whole thing for you.
	That's astonishing.
	What I love about some of the relationships that you have created, we have created, like with Above Phone, Above Book, I envision a future where, and maybe it's already planned, where You're going to get Enoch on that machine.
	Because there's a lot of us who, Mike, just want easy.
	It's like, I don't know the first thing about tokens and GPUs and blah, blah, blah.
	I just want to acquire a simple notebook that can be my personal computer that already has it built in.
	Thank you very much, Mike Adams, right?
	That's going to be possible.
	Yeah, that's coming in the next year or so.
	NVIDIA is miniaturizing their graphics chips for laptops.
	And they've already announced a $1,200 laptop that has a really capable GPU in it to run AI models.
	Wow.
	Yeah, $1,200.
	Is that available now?
	No, they just announced it at the CES show.
	I think it's coming out in the next month or something like that.
	But it won't be long before mobile phones can also run the smaller models, like a 3 billion parameter model, quite effectively.
	So it's all coming very rapidly.
	Todd, this fits our goal of decentralization because it puts knowledge into people's hands.
	If you ask Google, tell me about all the research of big pharma companies that have been caught price-fixing or faking studies and have been charged with felony crimes.
	Google will not really give you that information because they cover for big pharma, but our model would give you all that.
	Oh, here it is.
	Here's the whole history.
	Here's the cases, the states, everything.
	The names of the companies.
	Because all that happened.
	Hey, when that $12 computer hits the market and you know about it, will you please just let me know?
	I'm serious.
	Yeah, sure.
	I want to get one.
	Yeah.
	I want to download then Enoch.
	And I want to become my own subject matter expert on it and be kind of the tip of the spear with that to be able to report back to people because that fascinates me.
	I really want to get good at that.
	I plan to replace this laptop that's on my desk right now with that laptop.
	And then that way, as we are talking or as we're interviewing a guest, at first I can type in queries in real time.
	But ultimately, like I said, we want the computer to listen.
	Wow, it's so cool.
	And do real-time transcription, and then to interrupt with questions.
	Can I ask, what's the genesis of the name Enoch?
	Well, that refers to the lost books of the Bible, or the hidden books.
	Hidden knowledge is really what it refers to.
	Oh, beautiful.
	But, you know, as you know, Todd, you've read the entire Bible, but you also know that the Bible, even though it's the Word of God, but it was assembled by men.
	Yeah, that's right.
	Men assembled the Bible, and they left parts out, and over time, certain parts were removed from certain versions of the Bible.
	Like, I found out that the Ethiopian Christian Bible has, like, 81 books or something, not the 66 that's in the New King James Version.
	Right.
	You know, so there are other cultures that are Christian that have other books that we never read.
	Yeah, that inform them.
	Right.
	And if you go do read Enoch, which I have, fascinating.
	And Book of Giants, there's a lot of lost knowledge.
	Like, all the stuff about the Giants was written out, you know?
	It was deleted.
	It's like, well, we don't want to talk about Giants.
	This censorship's been going on for thousands of years, in other words.
	You mean there were Shaq O'Neals of yesteryear, Mike?
	Even bigger.
	Even bigger Giants, yeah.
	But anyway.
	That's why it's named.
	It's all about hidden knowledge and bringing it to the forefront so you can access it.
	Which is really what our show is about, Todd.
	Right?
	I mean, every episode we cover knowledge that's not easy for people to find.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	It's pretty cool.
	Well, Todd, I guess this is a wrap for today, but I always enjoy these discussions.
	Me too.
	And I just can't wait.
	For the interviews we have coming up this year, they're going to be amazing.
	And thank you for taking the time today.
	My pleasure, Mike.
	Everybody watching, thank you.
	And we can't wait to engage with all of you further.
	And let me remind people to watch all the other episodes that you haven't seen at decentralized.tv.
	And these are really evergreen type of episodes.
	So every one of them has value, even today, right now.
	And we'll have more coming for you here all throughout the year.
	It's going to be a wild ride under a new administration.
	So we'll see what happens to crypto and gold and dollars and all that stuff.
	Wow.
	No shortage of topics.
	I'd rather be busy than bored, Mike.
	You're not going to be bored.
	That's for sure.
	All right, Todd.
	Have a great day and thank all of you for joining us today.
	Mike Adams here and Todd Pitner for Decentralize.tv.
	Here on Brighteon.com, the uncensored free speech video platform.
	Thank you for joining me today.
	Take care.
	Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.
	Cheers.
	Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers.
	Here comes the bailout money You ready for this?
	I want my bailout money Keep the bills coming Sweet green cash just dripping like honey I'm a newcomer thug with a Washington buzz Cause dealing debt pays better than dealing drugs But what you think will happen when they double the money supply?
	The falling dollar makes it harder for you to survive They take those billions and trillions and give it to their own kind Hope you don't mind being robbed blind How you think we ended up with runaway credit?
	Nothing going down unless the crooks in Washington let it Now they regret it but they still don't get it The economy is crashing so bad it needs a paramedic I want my bailout money, keep the bills coming, sweet green cash just dripping with honey.
	Gotta keep this economy running, I need another hit of my bailout money.
	Look at the stash, a mad dash for cash, yeah.
	They tell the taxpayer take it in the ass, yeah.
	The CEOs, they having a blast, while the working poor trying to make their paycheck last.
	The bailout money is created with new debt, while they rolling in their limos and private jets.
	All the workers on the street are dripping sweat, white collar hustlers are taking everything they can get.
	They put the nation on a hyperinflation track, no presidential administration can take it back.
	And now the taxpayer's picking up the slack like they put a high dollar big brother monkey on your back.
	I want my bailout money, keep the bills coming, sweet green cash just dripping with honey.
	Gotta keep this economy running, I need another hit of my bailout money.
	The prisons are filled with brothers caught on a $50 jack.
	But when insiders taking trillions of cops, they turn their back.
	The incompetent bankers, they get their jobs back.
	Cause those crankers smoking money like it was crack.
	They take your car, your home, everything that you own.
	And when you're jobless and broke, you still gotta pay the loan.
	If you're thinking of stealing some food, please don't.
	Just go to Washington and you can steal everything you want.
	How we gonna solve this?
	How we gonna solve this?
	Dissolve the big scam we resolve.
	We won't let them steal from a fellow man.
	Gotta raise our hands and ask, what is this?
	Then we put the Federal Reserve out of business.
	You take a look at a dollar bill.
	You see that eye above the pyramid looking back at you.
	That eye is laughing at you suckers.
	I want my bailout money.
	Keep the con running.
	Sweet green cash just dripping with honey.
	Gotta keep this economy running.
	I need another hit of my bailout money.
	Drowning in debt, but the Fed isn't done yet.
	What are we gonna get?
	Gonna print funny money.
	The bankers gotta stay ahead.
	Gotta make more bread.
	That's when they said print more money.
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	Thanks for watching.

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