Aug. 27, 2023 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| So I'm sure it's probably like your reaction, Dave. | ||
| When you first see this pop up on Twitter, people are going, you'll owe nothing, you'll be happy. | ||
| And it's associated with the World Economic Forum. | ||
| It's their eight predictions for the world in 2030. | ||
| It's from their Global Futures Council. | ||
| And people are passing it around. | ||
| And usually when I see something like that, I'm like, you know, the WEF, that's the world's business elite. | ||
| It's the political elite. | ||
| They couldn't possibly be predicting the end of private property, right? | ||
| Like that doesn't make sense. | ||
| So you go and you do a little extra research. | ||
| And it doesn't take very much to find their video that's right on their Twitter stream. | ||
| You can access it today. | ||
| That does, as you said, show that handsome young man. | ||
| You'll owe nothing. | ||
| You'll be happy at number one. | ||
| With, by the way, seven other really crazy predictions as well. | ||
| Number two is that the US will no longer be the leading superpower. | ||
| But for whatever reason, nobody got far enough to number two to be freaked out about that. | ||
| We were all too busy eating bugs to get to number two. | ||
| Yes, we talk about that a little bit in the book. | ||
| But if you think about it, you know, somebody who's helped people create wealth and generate wealth for over 25 years, I know that wealth comes from ownership. | ||
| You have to have assets that have the opportunity to retain value or appreciate value. | ||
| So the idea that the global elite don't want you to have private property is incredibly scary, | ||
| especially since throughout history the people who didn't have property | ||
| were unfree, unhappy, and probably not alive. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a recovering investment banker, | ||
| an entrepreneur, and author of the new book, You Will Own Nothing, Your War with a New | ||
| Financial World Order, and How to Fight Back, Carol Roth. | ||
| Carol, we have crossed paths many times, but you've never been on The Rubin Report. | ||
| Welcome! | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| It's so great to finally be here. | ||
| I feel like, you know, I've watched so many of them. | ||
| I've, like, put myself into the show so many times, but it's nice to actually have the conversation. | ||
| Our friend Bridget gave us the, Bridget Phetasy, connected us like right before I moved from Los Angeles, and I've pretty much washed my hands of that entire coast at this point, but I'm letting you back in the circle over here. | ||
| In the fray, just because Bridget's so awesome, so I appreciate the making the exception for me. | ||
| All right, well I want to dive into the book because you're hitting in this book between centralized currencies and ESG and woke corporations, you're hitting so many of the things that I talk about on a political level every day, you're talking about in this book here. | ||
| But real quick for the people that do not know you, can you give me Carol Roth 101 in about one to two minutes and then we will dive into the meat? | ||
| Yeah, so I came from a blue-collar background. | ||
| Neither of my parents went to college. | ||
| My dad was an electrician. | ||
| And I had the opportunity to go to a fabulous school and to take on a lot of debt. | ||
| And my dad said, if you're going to take on a lot of debt, you have to pay it down quickly. | ||
| So that led me into investment banking and obviously never wanted to be the world's best investment banker. | ||
| I really just wanted to be a game show host. | ||
| But along the way, I've collected lots of experiences. | ||
| Wait, did you really want to be a game show host? | ||
| I still do, Dave. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| Was it Bob Barker? | ||
| Was it John Eubanks? | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| I mean, I really like the Steve Harvey approach, where it's sort of like a comedy show where you can kind of banter and play and do the improv. | ||
| Because that was one of the things that I've done in collecting my experiences. | ||
| I actually trained with Second City for a little while in Chicago. | ||
| But I am the sort of collector of experiences. | ||
| But sort of the through line is that I've always advocated for the little guy, the average American, the creation of wealth, because I was so fortunate to have that opportunity to seize the American dream. | ||
| And we see it shifting so much since my time, you know, helping companies raise money and do mergers and acquisitions and the like, that, you know, it's really frustrating to me to see it move in the other direction. | ||
| So one of the things I've been talking about on the show a lot when I bring up ESG and all of this stuff is that it's a real combination of government and corporate power that is kind of crashing down on everyone at the moment, which is why wokeism seems to be everywhere. | ||
| It maybe isn't in your day-to-day, but it's just being hit at the bank and at the store and when you turn on Netflix and everything else. | ||
| Can you just kind of give me a beginning of when all this woke craziness kind of leaked into the system? | ||
| Well, I don't have to go back. | ||
| You know, I tie the woke-ism into ESG, which I'm sure that you do on a regular basis as well. | ||
| And I kind of think about that as business social credit. | ||
| You've got a bunch of people who are sitting around going, you know, they've got these companies and their shareholders, you know, want them to do certain things. | ||
| They want them to benefit them for taking the risk. | ||
| Their board of directors have a fiduciary duty to do what's right for the shareholders. | ||
| So what can we do to manipulate these companies and to bully them and to hold them hostage into doing the things that we want them to do? | ||
| And really this started, you know, decades and decades ago with the UN, and I would even offer that it started back in 1971. | ||
| When Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum first called it the European Management Forum before then and brought out the idea of stakeholders and stakeholder capitalism, which are these weasel words that really stand in opposition to ownership. | ||
| You know, if you think about what a shareholder is. | ||
| There's somebody who has gotten a piece of the business through either their blood, sweat and tears or taking on risk and making an investment. | ||
| And so they've got skin in the game. | ||
| And it makes sense that the businesses run for their benefit. | ||
| Stakeholders could be anyone. | ||
| You know, I can come up and go, I'm a stakeholder. | ||
| And it means nothing. | ||
| You're not related to the business. | ||
| The free market kind of sorts out all these other things that they're talking about. | ||
| So it really is an opportunity to hold these businesses hostage. | ||
| And the language that they use, which is so interesting, are these weasel words and weasel phrases that don't mean anything. | ||
| Like, I can't actually define ESG other than the acronym for you because they change what ESG stands for based on their whims and objectives. | ||
| I mean, the fact that Elon Musk who has a green vehicle company, | ||
| was kicked out of the S&P 500 ESG index because he bought Twitter | ||
| and they were worried about his free speech stance, but they left ExxonMobil in, | ||
| just kind of goes to show you that this is very fungible based on whoever's on the inside making that decision. | ||
| So the basics though, are that generally you want your ESG score to be high | ||
| so that you will have access to more credit and I guess new markets and things like that | ||
| as a corporation. | ||
| And when people are talking about, well, what do you have to do to get that high score? | ||
| You have to have these crazy diversity, equity, and inclusion departments. | ||
| You have to have a climate policy, all of these things that in most cases probably have absolutely nothing to do with the core competency or purpose of the corporation in the first place, right? | ||
| Yes, taking the eye off the ball for the corporation. | ||
| So if you're a shareholder, you're losing out because your CEO and management team is no longer entirely focused on driving value for you as a shareholder. | ||
| They're trying to, you know, play this like gamified system to figure out how they can get a score up or at least not have it sink down so low that they're no longer able to access the capital markets. | ||
| At the same time, you have these companies like BlackRock, which is the largest asset manager in the world, who's basically using your capital. | ||
| They're representing a pension fund or retirement fund, and it's your capital that's being used to bully the companies and you don't have the say in it. | ||
| As an individual shareholder, somebody who's trying to have your wealth increased, is getting hit twice. | ||
| And by the way, there's also kind of a profiteering aspect to this. | ||
| Part of the reason ESG is so entrenched is that there's a huge profiteering infrastructure. | ||
| So whether you're a fund that has an exchange traded fund or an ETF that maybe is a very low margin business, now you can slap ESG on it and you can charge a higher percentage rate for that ETF. | ||
| Or if you're an accountant or a consultant or whatnot, You need to help these companies figure out how they can get their better ESG score. | ||
| So there's this financial scam piece on one side from a profiteering standpoint and the financial scam piece in terms of hurting your wealth. | ||
| And overall, you know, it's not good really on any of those points. | ||
| So to connect this to the politics of the day for some of the people that might be missing some of this, when you see Bud Light do a partnership with Dylan Mulvaney, this is in essence because of ESG. | ||
| When you see Target put the tucking clothes in that they know no one's going to buy, it's because they want to maintain that high score. | ||
| Do you know of any instances where shareholders have actually sued the board or sued the companies because they're basically not doing their fiduciary responsibility as opposed to doing this responsibility to the social credit gods? | ||
| We haven't seen it yet at a shareholder level, you know, whether that's directly to the companies | ||
| or to the pension funds or whatnot, but we have seen it at the state level, you know, | ||
| whether it's governors or attorney generals or treasurers or whatnot have all been pushing | ||
| back and basically saying you need to drop this nonsense. | ||
| And if you don't, then you can't do business with our state. | ||
| What that has done, and this is probably not entirely surprising, is you have people like | ||
| Larry Fink, who's the CEO of BlackRock, who's big mad that we figured this out. | ||
| And so he says, I'm not going to say ESG anymore because it's been politicized. | ||
| It wasn't you saying it. | ||
| It's not the letters. | ||
| It's the issue. | ||
| It's the underlying action. | ||
| So if you change the name to Impact Investing or Sustainable Investing or whatever it is, it's still the same underlying issue. | ||
| Is there any company that has been more outwardly affected by ESG than Disney in terms of what they create and just sort of like the craziness around it? | ||
| You know, all the leaked videos that Chris Ruffo put out where the employees basically saying they're putting their secret gay agenda and they want more asexual characters and just like the litany of craziness that has nothing to do with creating good stories or ultimately making profit for the people that own stock in Disney. | ||
| So I'm a financial person, so I tend to view everything through a financial lens and a little bit less through the cultural lens. | ||
| I would say the companies that have been most impacted by it are the fossil fuel companies. | ||
| And obviously we have been paying the price quite literally for a long time from it. | ||
| Because what has happened is that they have directed, you know, billions and billions of dollars that are really needed in terms of investment in fossil fuels away from that industry, which means that we are less economically secure today and in the future, not just directly for something like oil, but the 6,000 derivative products that come from it, as well as all of the transportation that happens from it. | ||
| And that just kind of goes to show you that this is almost like a mafia-esque Operation, right, is that we're going to use our muscle and you're either with us or against us. | ||
| You know, Dave, one of the things I did in You Will Own Nothing is I really tried to take the conspiracy element out of this and the politicization out of this, because I do think that this starts getting into this camp or this camp. | ||
| When you go to BlackRock's shareholder letter and you see them say these things in their own words, Hey, you know, we're going to be inclined to vote against directors who don't, you know, follow what we're saying on the environment or this or that. | ||
| You know, it's basically putting out there, you're either with us or you're against us, and that is going to cost you. | ||
| And I find that to be very impactful. | ||
| But one of the interesting things, especially with these financial companies, is all the ones who say that they're ESG, and remember that S is the social piece, They have no problem in terms of investing in Wall Street companies that help take away your home from you. | ||
| So now you've got corporations that have come in to compete in the single family home market. | ||
| And socially, somehow they think it's fine to rent you the American dream and take that wealth creation opportunity. | ||
| I'm not sure how that plays into their pitch that they care about, you know, being a good social company. | ||
| Can you, we could do like five hours on ESG obviously, but I want to get to a couple of the other topics here. | ||
| Can you just quickly, so I love the title of the book and I really love the cover of the book because the words that are crossed out are, so it was, the title of the book is You Will Own Nothing, but the words that are crossed out are, it would have read, you will own a house, a car, a business, stocks, your life. | ||
| So you can see those words. | ||
| Blocked out because that was the American dream and now they're leading us to you will own nothing. | ||
| Can you talk about that line, you will own nothing, because it does get us to that conspiracy part of the WEF and that promo video that they put out and that young kid owning nothing but he's smiling and probably not living a great life as he's eating bugs in the future. | ||
| So I'm sure it's probably like your reaction, Dave. | ||
| When you first see this pop up on Twitter, people are going, you'll owe nothing, you'll be happy. | ||
| And it's associated with the World Economic Forum. | ||
| It's their eight predictions for the world in 2030. | ||
| It's from their Global Futures Council. | ||
| And people are passing it around. | ||
| And usually when I see something like that, I'm like, you know, the WEF, that's the world's business elite. | ||
| It's the political elite. | ||
| They couldn't possibly be predicting the end of private property, right? | ||
| Like, that doesn't make sense. | ||
| So you go and you do a little extra research, and it doesn't take very much to find their video that's right on their Twitter stream. | ||
| You can access it today. | ||
| That does, as you said, show that handsome young man. | ||
| You'll owe nothing. | ||
| You'll be happy at number one. | ||
| With, by the way, seven other really crazy predictions as well. | ||
| Number two is that the U.S. | ||
| will no longer be the leading superpower. | ||
| But for whatever reason, nobody got far enough to number two to be freaked out about that. | ||
| We were all too busy eating bugs to get to number two. | ||
| Yes, we talk about that a little bit in the book. | ||
| But if you think about it, you know, somebody who's helped people create wealth and generate wealth for over 25 years, I know that wealth comes from ownership. | ||
| You have to have assets that have the opportunity to retain value or appreciate value. | ||
| So the idea that the global elite don't want you to have private property is incredibly scary, especially since throughout history the people who didn't have property were unfree, unhappy, and probably not alive. | ||
| And if you think about just that phrase, you'll owe nothing, there's two really interesting sort of psychological elements to it. | ||
| One is that you will own nothing. | ||
| It's not we. | ||
| Yeah, they're going to own an awful lot. | ||
| They're not included, right? | ||
| They're fine. | ||
| They're going to be great. | ||
| So it's not we'll own nothing or I'll own nothing. | ||
| It's you will own nothing. | ||
| And then you'll be happy. | ||
| And I think that as the global financial stakes continue to shift, we're obviously very late stage in the US's financial cycle as these sort of middle of the global financial empire and these elites | ||
| start to see that they're really concerned. | ||
| They're jockeying to control every resource because they want to stay in power and they want to keep the wealth. | ||
| So if they get you to buy into the concept that you are happy about this, it makes it a lot easier. | ||
| If you think it's great to rent the American dream instead of own the American dream because, you know, | ||
| you don't want to call the plumber or whatever reason and take away that number one asset on balance sheets | ||
| across households in the US. | ||
| It just makes it easier. | ||
| They don't have to do this by force. | ||
| It's like, hey, you bought in. | ||
| You wanted you wanted a good life. | ||
| You're going to be happy. | ||
| You mentioned the late-stage situation that we might be in as sort of the center of the financial world. | ||
| Is there any way, do you think, any way out of that? | ||
| I mean, it seems to me, for all our faults, if we're not the center of most of what goes on on this planet, that it's going to be someone worse. | ||
| The chance is that it's going to be someone better, and maybe that's already been outsourced, and maybe the globalists already have us, for all we know. | ||
| But do you see a way out, actually? | ||
| So it's a really scary proposition what you said is incredibly insightful because, you know, as the British stepped into the Dutch's position and the U.S. | ||
| stepped into the British position, there was always sort of an improvement, you know, more of a bastion of protection of property rights and opportunity of free markets. | ||
| And you look at the groups that are waiting in the wings that, you know, kind of want to step into the U.S.' 's position and it's frightening, right? | ||
| They're tyrannical and dictatorial. | ||
| So this idea of trying to salvage the current world order and doing it For our own benefit, as well as the heirs coming up behind us, as well as the benefit of the world is really important. | ||
| I do think there are things that we can do to at least delay it, right? | ||
| In history, there's always a shift, but could we delay it 50 or 100 years? | ||
| Absolutely! | ||
| But the question is, will anybody who has the ability to do that have the fortitude to do so? | ||
| You have a Federal Reserve that hasn't held the currency stable, either for the good of the world or for the United States, which is pretty incredible. | ||
| Usually it's one or the other, a trade-off. | ||
| They've managed to do both. | ||
| Could we remove some of the Fed's powers and get stability? | ||
| Absolutely we could do that. | ||
| Could we stop our government from weaponizing the dollar? | ||
| I mean, we had the Biden administration freeze Russia's access to its reserves. | ||
| Who's going to allow the U.S. | ||
| to be the global reserve currency if you can't access the reserves at the U.S.' 's whim? | ||
| In our own house, we have 125 percent debt to GDP on a public basis. | ||
| Could we make some reforms and just bring our spending back to 2018 or 2019 levels? | ||
| I'm not even talking about like rolling back to 2010, just a few years before COVID. | ||
| Could we do that, run a surplus and start to pay down our debt so that we weren't in such a desperate situation and the government didn't make such these bad decisions? | ||
| We absolutely could do all of those things, but I think you and I both | ||
| understand the reality and the likelihood given the political leaders that we have of | ||
| that happening. | ||
| So what's important and one of the key reasons why I wrote the book and tied this all together | ||
| is that you have to prepare because we don't know the duration. | ||
| This could be 12 months, this could be 12 years, this could be 50 years, but it's kind | ||
| You don't have your escape plan and buy insurance for a fire the day that you see the fire in the attic. | ||
| You have to prepare ahead of time for that. | ||
| So you don't want to be caught if the global financial order shifts and there's certainly enough non-conspiratorial, clear data points and signposts for this that you've thought through all of these different elements and come up with a plan so that you're not the one standing there going, what's happening to me? | ||
| All right, so I definitely want to spend the last few minutes talking about some of those solutions and some of the ways you can prepare. | ||
| But I wonder, do you find that the political parties are equally at fault here? | ||
| Like, to me, almost everything you're describing is completely in lockstep with virtually everything the Democrats want. | ||
| Now, plenty of Republicans end up voting for this stuff, but at least there is some pushback. | ||
| Certainly here in Florida. | ||
| We have gotten ESG out of all of our government institutions, obviously the woke stuff, Disney, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| There are some other Republican governors doing some things. | ||
| You hear Rand Paul and Ted Cruz talking about this stuff. | ||
| But do you think even the Republicans are sort of useless for the most part when it comes to this? | ||
| Or do you think that my commentary on the Democrats was fair? | ||
| So I always liken it to playing a game. | ||
| The Democrats are the kids who, when they're losing the game, they just change the rules and make them up as they go along, where the Republicans tell you how good they are at playing the game, and then when you play them, they actually suck. | ||
| So the ideas really do come, in many cases, from the Democratic side of the aisle, the things like modern monetary theory and the overspending and whatnot. | ||
| But when the Republicans have the opportunity to step in and change things, They never really do on a financial standpoint. | ||
| I mean, just look at this fight that we had over the debt ceiling where we had some really serious leverage and we certainly weren't going to fix the whole thing. | ||
| But there was a hope to maybe call back spending in a meaningful way. | ||
| And they just gave up. | ||
|
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They choked at the 11th hour. | |
| And I know that there are a lot of people saying, well, you know, we didn't have that. | ||
| No, you had a lot of leverage. | ||
| And at what point in time do you step up and, you know, say enough's enough? | ||
| The reality is that the debt has grown substantially under Republican and Democratic Congresses and their presidents. | ||
| So there's something baked into the big government system that's an issue, and I would love to see more right-of-center people standing up and really taking issue in addressing these things. | ||
| There are a couple really easy things that they could do that would start to put us on the path, and things that would protect the wealth. | ||
| Talk about, you know, you will owe nothing of the younger generation. | ||
| are fighting over student debt repayment, how about just restructuring that system | ||
| so that the government's no longer the biggest predatory lender in the country | ||
| and they stop transferring wealth from teenagers to colleges and their administrators? | ||
| Like where are the Republican candidates saying like day one | ||
| I'm gonna get the government out of student lending and bring back underwriting and bring back bankruptcy | ||
| and have colleges have skin in the game? | ||
| Like that's an easy win. | ||
| Right, or how about the politicians saying, hey, maybe you don't need a useless four-year degree | ||
| and there's plenty of other things you could do like trade schools or apprenticeships | ||
| or whatever it might be. | ||
| We still put this emphasis on, you know, these universities where you basically get a degree in lesbian dance theory and then you wonder why you're not a neuroscientist. | ||
| Let's talk about the coins, Bitcoin and centralized coins for a little bit because it does seem now that | ||
| the governments, the United States government's looking into it, certainly the World Economic Forum, | ||
| all of these big governments are looking into now centralized coins as opposed to decentralized coins, | ||
| which was the whole point of Bitcoin, that there would be nobody in between you | ||
| and the person you were exchanging goods with and you could do it all in a decentralized, | ||
| meaning no one could take it away or stop you from doing it manner. | ||
| That seems to now be going in the other direction, thanks to all of this. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, is there any scarier threat to power, to the Fed and the government, | ||
| than people being able to transact and not relying on them? | ||
| I mean, that's a huge threat. | ||
| So basically, we have a very financially illiterate population, so it's very easy for them to conflate issues. | ||
| I mean, this is a sad situation, but that's just the truth. | ||
| So, because there's so much interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency and the fact that there has been so many issues, not with the currencies, the cryptocurrencies themselves, but with things around the periphery, the infrastructure, things like the exchanges, FTX, and there's been a lot of fraud. | ||
| And to be clear, you don't even need the exchanges, right? | ||
| You don't need FTX, you don't need Coinbase or anything else. | ||
| You can do this all peer-to-peer or one-to-one, but that's sort of a separate topic. | ||
| because we've really done such a banner job in keeping the dollar stable. | ||
| You know, you want us in control. | ||
| And so- And to be clear, you don't even need the exchanges, right? | ||
| You don't need FTX, you don't need Coinbase or anything else. | ||
| You can do this all peer to peer or one-to-one, but that's sort of a separate topic, | ||
| but people just don't understand, yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they're basically saying, you know, we're going to create our own digital currency. | ||
| But as you mentioned, this would be entirely centralized and it would be under the purview of the Fed and the government to the point where they could basically track every single digital dollar that you have and everything that you spend it on. | ||
| And again, not conspiratorial. | ||
| The New York Fed, along with 12 different financial institutions, ran a pilot program and they put out their findings at the wholesale level saying, this is great. | ||
| We had the G7 come out with their principles for retail facing CBDC. | ||
| So these are not things that you do if you're not thinking about it at all. | ||
| The concern is, is that they're going to hook people in again, but with this bait and switch. | ||
| Hey, Dave, I'm going to give you a hundred digital dollars if you just give up that one dollar. | ||
| And then you're going to go, well, that's a terrible idea. | ||
| But, you know, there are people who are going to go, oh, my God, I'm going to be a millionaire. | ||
| This is going to be great. | ||
| And it goes back to that Saturday Night Live skit, which I reference in the book with Dan Aykroyd as Jimmy Carter, when they actually talked about things like monetary policy and going, Wouldn't you like to drive a $100,000 car and wear a $50,000 suit? | ||
| Hey, everyone's going to be a millionaire, not realizing that we're going to destroy the purchasing power and have hyperinflation. | ||
| Or, speaking of inflation, they could say, well, you know, if you give us a digital currency, we can really control inflation. | ||
| People not realizing that that means when they say they're going to destroy demand instead of just changing interest rates, they actually turn off your currency and you can't spend it at all. | ||
| So these are the kinds of things, and as you said in the book, we go through 10 different chapters all with kind of a different theme that you need to be aware of so that you can really plan and make sure that you fight back. | ||
| All right, so as I said, I want to get to some of the solution stuff, but can you combine ESG and what we just talked about with the sort of centralized coin and social credit to sort of what's happening in China right now, let's say, and how that could end up happening here, how they could literally be tracking your behavior and the people that you relate with and who you hang out with, how that could then literally affect, say, your ability To have a bank account and maybe if you're a trucker in Canada, instead of them having to call the bank, they can just swipe on an iPad and they've got all your cash. | ||
| Yeah, so here we have cancel culture that morphed into sort of informal social credit that is one step away from state-sponsored social credit. | ||
| But think about what happened during the pandemic. | ||
| You know, if you were somebody who was on the wrong side of things and, you know, you weren't following the prescription from the powers that be, you know, they were coming after your social standing. | ||
| They wouldn't let you participate in society. | ||
| You couldn't go into a restaurant. | ||
| You weren't wearing a mask. | ||
| They were going to take a picture. | ||
| They were going to send it to your employer. | ||
| In some cases, they shut down your business. | ||
| Like you said, the Freedom Convoy, they actually took their bank accounts and froze them for a period of time. | ||
| So, we see that this is not just about, you know, kind of going after your speech and your compliance, but really it is your financial wherewithal. | ||
| It's your social standing. | ||
| It's your ability to get opportunities. | ||
| It's your income, which is the money that you have to be able to invest. | ||
| And in some cases, it's your actual assets. | ||
| And you know, when this happens in China, there's sort of two components that I would argue we would have both of them. | ||
| One of them is the technology to be able to collect and analyze data at scale, which we certainly have. | ||
| And then the social buy-in. | ||
| In the Chinese Communist Party, you know, it's done by force and threat. | ||
| But here, basically, there are people who get what I like to call ROE, or Return On Ego, for participating, right? | ||
| You get to have your emoji, you get to have, you know, maybe get a visit to the White House, you get to wear the t-shirt, and you're considered part of the good crowd. | ||
| They've taken it to a different level in China and, you know, where we have sort of ESG and social credit as separate things. | ||
| It's basically the same thing there. | ||
| And they actually went after the businesses first because they knew if they could make sure that those people didn't get too big and weren't too out of lines and went after their financial wherewithal, it's much easier to get the individual population to fall in line. | ||
| But they have crazy things. | ||
| I mean, there's a story from NPR about a gentleman by the name of Lao Juan, who is a coal intermediary. | ||
| And he basically bought and sold coal and stored it in the meantime. | ||
| Well, the Chinese government changed their policy on coal. | ||
| And all of a sudden, the coal is now worthless and he's bankrupt. | ||
| Well, that's a bad thing, and you have to go on the blacklist, even though it's the government's fault with this policy change. | ||
| So he goes out, and he looks at this billboard, and he sees his face. | ||
| And he's got his name and his personal identification number, and it says, this is an untrustworthy person. | ||
| And as they're changing, you know, right out of an Orwell movie, as they're changing, he's seeing other people from the coal industry that he recognizes that all had befallen the same fate. | ||
| So it may seem like we're far away from that, but really, you know, how far away from that are we when we have, you know, the government who's colluding with social media and you have them doing executive orders to take your jobs away from you and they're shutting down businesses? | ||
| This is all really becoming very formalized, whether it's at the individual social credit level or at that ESG number level. | ||
| And then, like you said, with CBDC, obviously you have the currency that can control your compliance. | ||
| Please tell me that you've seen the episode of Black Mirror, right? | ||
| So I haven't seen, I haven't seen the episode of Black Mirror, but I have a good Twilight Zone episode in the book. | ||
| I'm very old school. | ||
| I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit on the older side, Dave. | ||
| Oh, listen, there is an episode with, uh, what's his name? | ||
| Howard, Bryce Dallas Howard from Jurassic Park, all about the social credit. | ||
| I think it won an Emmy. | ||
| It's all about the social credit score and what the, how dark and twisted the future will be. | ||
| Uh, but just in our remaining time, we've painted a pretty bleak picture here. | ||
| We don't want to be China. | ||
| Help us help the people feel good about the, about all of this. | ||
| Yeah, so after you understand each of these things, you really have to come up with a plan to fight back individually. | ||
| And the good news is, for people who are a little worried about this, it's the same kind of good financial advice that you should probably be doing anyway, but it just puts it in a different lens. | ||
| So, things like hard assets, you know, as we're talking about this concept of ownership, you know, don't be just spending on frivolous things. | ||
| Really be thinking about that level of ownership. | ||
| And one of the things that you said earlier about sort of the, you know, what it is that they're saying and what they're doing at the elite level, like, that's one of the key things. | ||
| Like, what is it that the elite are doing? | ||
| Not what they're saying, but what are they doing? | ||
| You know, they're buying up tons of productive land. | ||
| You know, the central banks are investing in gold and other precious metals. | ||
| So certainly you may not be able to do it on the same scale yet. | ||
| But if we had a CBDC, wouldn't it be great? | ||
| Whether you're a crypto person or a hard asset, precious metal person. | ||
| To have, maybe you have both, a diversified portfolio and have some things that you could barter with in case there's a period of chaos where we're underneath a system like this. | ||
| Definitely, like if you don't own a home, own a home! | ||
| And I know that the mortgages are really expensive right now and it may mean that you have to go to a different location where it's a little less expensive, but you don't want to be giving that money that you earn Over to a Wall Streeter who wants to wrench you back the American dream. | ||
| And I'm sure we could talk for hours on this, but also estate planning. | ||
| You know, there's almost $85 trillion that is set to turn over voluntarily in this country in the next 23 years. | ||
| We've heard things about non-realized capital gains, taxes, and wealth, and they always put the carrot out there. | ||
| They're just going to go after the billionaires, just like those 87,000 new IRS staff are going after the 800 billionaires, right? | ||
| So you have to not concede your principles, because once you do, they're going to come after you. | ||
| And having some estate planning may or may not, but it's worth a try, grandfather you in to some of these things that could come down the pike. | ||
| You know, on a personal note, because people ask me all the time, I think the one really smart financial thing that I've done is very much in line with what you just said, which is I've owned three houses and each one of them was a stretch. | ||
| I stretched as far as I could. | ||
| And fortunately, timing was right. | ||
| Interest rates were low. | ||
| I did really well on each one. | ||
| Each one pushed me to a new level financially. | ||
| And now I ended up in a state that also has no income tax, which is nice. | ||
| But for me, if you buy physical things, whether that's land or a house or something physical, | ||
| I know that's not the only way to do it and you want the diversified portfolio | ||
| that you're talking about. | ||
| Like, I always feel like when I'm paying my mortgage now, I'm like, I know I'm paying some interest, | ||
| but I feel like in essence, I'm paying myself. | ||
| Now, when interest rates hit six, 7%, it's a little bit different, | ||
| but everyone kind of has to figure that out for themselves, I suppose. | ||
| Yeah, everybody has sort of a different financial background | ||
| and a different risk profile. | ||
| So you wanna talk to an advisor if you can make sure that that is right for you. | ||
| But it really is a change in mindset. | ||
| I mean, the funny thing is, with this book, I have so many people who are actually buying the physical hard copies instead of Kindle or audiobook. | ||
| Just as a behavioral shift, if you just have this awareness of like, oh, you know, is this a subscription? | ||
| Do I own something? | ||
| What happens if they cut me off? | ||
| It's just a different way to go through life and it's not being a prepper. | ||
| People say like, yo, you sound like a prepper. | ||
| Being a prepper is living that lifestyle every single day, which again is fine if that's what you want to do, but being prepared is meant to take the burden off of you, right? | ||
| You think about it in the moment and then you can enjoy life because that's what it's about. | ||
| You don't want to have these burdens hanging over you. | ||
| So I believe that everybody can make these small financial and behavioral changes. | ||
| And hopefully, you know, the elite may want you to own nothing, but I want you to own everything. | ||
| So, you know, make sure you go out and start owning things. | ||
| And I proudly own a copy of the book, You Will Own Nothing. | ||
| So if I have one thing, it is the book. | ||
| The link is right down below. | ||
| Carol, it was a pleasure finally chatting with you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Thanks so much, Dave. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics, instead of mindless drivel, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist, all right over here. |
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