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March 30, 2022 - Viva & Barnes

01:57:05

Sidebar with George Gammon! Viva & Barnes LIVE!

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	Lindsay Duncombe, CBC News.
	Following up on the idea of the fossil fuel industry, why make the call to hold oil and gas to just over 30% instead of going the full way and having them go over 40% as the rest of the economy is?
	We lost 10 years on our path to 2030 because for 10 years, under the Harper Conservatives, nothing got done.
	On fighting climate change, on reducing emissions from the oil and gas sector, on preparing for the future that everyone saw clearly was coming.
	And that's why the work we have to do, yes, is ambitious, but is also realizable.
	We're going to reach that 40% cut in Canada's emissions by asking all different sectors, including oil and gas, to be incredibly ambitious and Concrete in their ability to do that.
	This is the plan that's going to get us to net zero by 50 and 40% by 2030.
	Still special rules though, right?
	All right, people.
	Let me remove that.
	Does anyone want to watch it again and feel their stomach turn yet again?
	I just want to play one thing.
	Just one thing.
	The beginning.
	Deflection.
	He was asked a question.
	Immediate deflection.
	Like a child.
	Quite literally like a child that has got caught doing something wrong and their answer is, but Timmy did something worse.
	Lindsey Duncombe, CBC News.
	Following up on the idea of the fossil fuel industry, why make the call to hold oil and gas to just over 30% instead of going the full way and having them go over 40% as the rest of the economy is?
	Deflect and blame someone else.
	We lost 10 years on our path to 2030.
	We lost 10 years.
	You know what, by the way?
	We just lost 6 years because Trudeau has been in power.
	Power with a minority government since 2016 or 2015.
	But don't worry.
	We'll do.
	We will do.
	We'll do.
	Six years.
	By the way, I still believe there are water-boiling advisories for the indigenous population of Canada.
	For many, many reserves.
	Six years.
	This guy's been in power.
	I'd say the only thing he's done well at an exponential rate...
	Is destroy the very fabric of Canadian society.
	And I say it tongue-in-cheek, the tear is not from sadness.
	Ouch.
	He has done nothing well other than destroy the very fabric of our country.
	He does corruption well, I should say that.
	He does break his ethics code very well.
	He gets away with it well also sometimes.
	Pays off the media well.
	Controls the narrative through state-sponsored media well.
	But I guess that all fits under destroying the fabric of Canadian society.
	Back when the trucker convoy was about to get broken up with the very militaristic police response, Kian Bextie on Twitter said, I have a feeling Justin Trudeau is going to do something that's going to shred the very fabric of Canadian society.
	And I had envisions of, you know, egregious things.
	I didn't appreciate maybe Kian actually knew what was coming.
	But Justin Trudeau, in addition to basically destroying, dividing, pitting Canadians against Canadians, he's done one thing well in his six years in power, and that is destroy Canada.
	Never thought one politician could do it quite so well and efficiently, but I've been wrong before and I'll be wrong again.
	All right, and as if that were not...
	It's among the more depressing intros.
	I'm not saying that you're going to get depressed from what we're going to discuss with George Gammon and Barnes.
	But you might.
	I was doing homework today in between streams.
	I was boning up on George's material.
	Going back from a video a little over a month ago saying inflation's probably going to go down.
	And that was one week before Russia invaded Ukraine, which led to the month-long war that we've been living through now and the political fallout, political consequences from that, which then led into the latest video that he put out about hyperinflation.
	Food shortages.
	Because now you got Joe Biden literally telling people, I'm not being hyperbolic.
	I'm not trying to be dramatic.
	Literally telling people there's going to be food shortages.
	And once upon a time, I remember being young and naive and saying, we live in modern times.
	We live with technology, civility, the rule of law.
	Things like what happened 50 years ago can't happen again.
	Things that happened 30 years ago can't happen again.
	Because we're a civilized, educated...
	Highly evolved technological society.
	Surely it can't happen again.
	George Gammon might think otherwise.
	Now, I see George in the backdrop.
	I'm going to have to go with the headphones, peeps, because there was some echo earlier.
	But by the way, the avatar on the headphones, I mean, if I grow my mustache, I might have to find this brand and partner up.
	Okay, hold on.
	I'm going to bring Barnes in.
	I'm going to bring George in.
	I'm going to plug in the headphones.
	So that we don't have very bad audio.
	George, can you hear me?
	Yeah, I can.
	But I still hear the echo.
	And I think you might need earbuds.
	Yeah, it's on my end.
	Let me just go over to my computer, Mike, and that'll solve the problem.
	Alright, while I do that, I'm going to bring in Robert.
	Alright.
	Okay, that should have solved the problem there.
	Let's see, Mike check.
	Test, test, test.
	Let me see.
	No, I definitely hear echo.
	Oh, is it on my end still?
	I think so.
	Let me try it again.
	Wow, your headphones are...
	It can't be me.
	Hold on.
	I'm going to unplug it.
	Now, mic check one, two.
	How's that, guys?
	That should be better.
	That is better.
	Unless I need to wear these things.
	I'm not going to, people.
	It was not a fashion statement, and I don't like wearing headphones.
	My ears sweat.
	It puts pressure on my glasses.
	I love you platonically, Viva, but God, I hope you're prepared for the worst.
	Take care and Godspeed, bud.
	Step on SNCC.
	Well, I think what you've been covering, George, has been great.
	I think the way I describe it is back in 1997, you had a young graduate student in St. Petersburg in between jobs as a deputy mayor, deputy of the mayor of St. Petersburg, and as an advisor.
	To President Yeltsin, between those jobs, wrote a paper that was about the future of wealth and resources and real power.
	And it was distinct because it differentiated from the then Davos crowd.
	The Davos crowd's view was that we could create an international order of a new globalist post-Soviet economy, post-Cold War economy, in which all nations would be interdependent.
	And at the top would be this elite order of international monetary institutions and individuals.
	It was George Soros' dream of how power should work in the world, and he was articulating it at that time.
	And that they could, through their control of the banking system, the financial system, and currencies, dictate to the rest of the world how they would behave and how the world would be governed.
	This research paper in 1997 that was...
	Mostly plagiarized, by the way, from two economists at the University of Pittsburgh, but laid out, said, no, no, real wealth is real resources.
	Real wealth is food.
	Real wealth is fuel.
	And if you control that, Russia could rebuild itself and be an independent, sovereign country dictating its own economic future, its own political and cultural future, and not be dependent upon these global elites who at the time were ravaging and raping the Russian continent and treating it as a de facto colony.
	That grad student, of course, was one Vladimir Putin.
	And what's interesting is this.
	I've been shocked to see so many of the think tank types really believe what Obama said back in 2014 when he said Russia doesn't matter.
	Its GDP is 1.6% of the world's GDP.
	And further articulating their whole viewpoint is that Russia doesn't even really matter.
	China doesn't even really matter.
	Latin America, they're all Brazil, India.
	All these countries have to obey us.
	Because we control the currency, we control the financial system, we control the monetary system, and that real wealth is measured by stock markets and GDP, not measured by food, by fuel, by actual goods or actual services.
	Could you explain why that might not be the most well-taken idea?
	You want me to chime in here?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Okay.
	I think we've got to go back even further, Robert.
	I'd like to start, if I may, in the 1800s, I believe the early 1800s, with Thomas Malthus, or Malthus, some people say his name differently.
	He really came up with this idea that now people that have adopted it, the Malthusians, believe that, and rightfully so, that the world has limited resources.
	And therefore, we should try to curtail population growth and /or we should try to reduce consumption of those limited resources if we're to allow the population to grow uncontrolled, let's say.
	So he had basically two levers to do this that he suggested in one of his many papers.
	And this was to increase the death rate or decrease the birth rate.
	And now fast forward to 1971.
	This is when a Klaus Schwab sets up the World Economic Forum.
	Now back then it was called something different.
	It escapes me what he called it.
	But this is the first World Economic Forum.
	Then in 1972, there's a company called, or excuse me, an organization that formed in actually 1968, excuse me, that was called the Club of Rome.
	Now, the Club of Rome was just basically a reincarnation of Thomas Malthus and his ideas.
	And they had a spin on it where they would try to curtail consumption.
	And the pitch for controlling consumption was not just, hey, you need to do this because, you know, 100 years from now, They did this under the guise of climate change.
	This was way back in the 1970s, right?
	Then in 72, they came out with a paper called Limits to Growth.
	And then someone at MIT I took this idea and turned it into a computer program.
	And this computer basically told them when the world would run out of resources.
	And if the population was on pace to grow at this level, then the pollution would grow at this level.
	The resources would be depleted at this level.
	And kind of just, you know, pointing out, of course, they had to get the algorithm right, which they didn't.
	Ammunition to claim that we needed to proactively reduce population growth.
	And they came right out and explicitly said this.
	Now, they weren't saying that we need to kill people and do all these things, but we need to limit population growth.
	We need to encourage people to have fewer children.
	Very similar to the policies that they enacted in China.
	And so fast forward to 1973, one Klaus Schwab invites the gentleman who started the Club of Rome to be the keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum that year.
	And of course, he goes over his ideas, which he really got from Thomas Malthus, and this paper and this MIT computer program.
	And again, he would argue that we have to limit the use of or reduce The use of resources.
	And we also need to, I don't know if you went so far to say increase the death rate, but allow the death rate to happen through famine, war, etc.
	Sound familiar?
	And then we need to do whatever we can to reduce the birth rate.
	All right.
	So what you have to understand when we fast forward to today.
	With the World Economic Forum obviously still around, now they've got the same ideas, but they've just repackaged them, right?
	They've just repackaged them into the Great Reset Agenda, or what Viva was saying earlier, or what Trudeau was saying earlier, on how they need to get to carbon.
	net zero by 2050, or they need to reduce carbon emissions by 40%.
	That's just all smoke and mirrors.
	Listen, the global elite and the politicians don't care about the world temperature increasing by 2% or 2 degrees or 3%.
	That's all complete BS.
	What they care about is reducing consumption.
	Now, the problem there is they realize that energy equals the economy.
	Okay, it's that literal.
	And if you reduce energy consumption, you're going to reduce economic activity.
	If you reduce economic activity, you're going to lower the standard of living.
	And that's most likely going to kill potentially hundreds of millions of people globally, if not more.
	So what do you do if you're one of these globally?
	Well, you don't want to lower your standard of living.
	So you need to figure out some way to get everyone to lower their standard of living.
	All the plebs, all the rubes, all the average Joes and Janes out there, they need to lower their standard of living so you can maintain yours, if not increase your consumption of these limited resources.
	And I want to point out also that going back to 1968, when the Club of Rome was founded, Do you know who one of their first members was?
	Klaus Schwab can be the only one I can think of.
	Pierre Trudeau.
	Oh, their dad.
	One of the founding members, or one of the first members of the Club of Rome.
	So Trudeau's, Justin Trudeau's father, right?
	So you can imagine that Trudeau, the junior Trudeau, got a lot of his ideas.
	From his father.
	And his father obviously adopted a lot of these Malthusian ideas from the Club of Rome.
	So it's no surprise when the Biden types, the Macron, the Angela Merkels, the Justin Trudeaus, the Klaus Schwab's come out and say that our number one problem is climate change.
	What they're really saying is their number one problem is that you plebs are consuming too much and your standard of living is too high.
	And there's too many of you.
	George, that's what they're saying.
	Well, speaking of that, because this ties all the way back to eugenics.
	There's one name that's connected to the leading eugenics advocates of the 1920s, co-founded the Council on Foreign Relations, was one of the co-founders of the Club of Rome.
	Was one of the lead co-founders of the World Economic Forum.
	Was one of the co-founders of the Bilderberg Group.
	Named after the hotel they first formed.
	And it's the same person who's been a leader on this issue with Bill Gates.
	And that Bill Gates looks up to the most.
	And that's the Rockefeller family.
	On every single one of them.
	They're boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	It's like if you just follow David Rockefeller around, you can find out what a lot of people are up to.
	But the...
	Go ahead.
	I'm sorry.
	You know, another thing that I wanted to mention that just came to mind is one of the other quote-unquote big ideas, let's say, that the Club of Rome had back in 1972, and they still maintain this.
	Every paper that they come out with, it's the same idea, just kind of rebranded over and over and over again, and they still exist today, by the way.
	But one of their big ideas is that, yes, we had this problem with a constraint on resources.
	And therefore, we couldn't have just this uncontrolled population growth.
	But they also stated that this was not something that could be solved.
	This was not a problem that could be solved by individuals.
	This was not a problem that could be solved by free market capitalism.
	This was not a problem that could be solved by cities, not by states, and not even by countries.
	It had to be solved.
	By a group of elite, a complete centralized approach toward this group of elite, Robert, to your earlier point, would control pretty much the entire globe, the entire global society and the entire global economy.
	And this was the only way that you could solve these problems.
	And this goes back to Kissinger.
	Who was one of Klaus Schwab's teachers at Harvard, I believe in 67 or 68. So it's not just the belief system that we need to reduce consumption, we need to maybe increase death rate, reduce birth rate, but it's also that this cannot be solved by the free market.
	This cannot be solved by the rubes.
	It can't be solved by the average Joe and Jane.
	It can only be solved by the global elite, the intelligentsia of the chosen few.
	This is a question for both Robert and George, because talk about noobs like myself who had never heard of the World Economic Forum until the concept of Great Reset started floating around the internet, and we were told it was all conspiracy theory back then.
	How did the World Economic Forum get its clout?
	How does it get its influence, and how does it operate in terms of...
	We know that they have their young leaders clubs.
	They infiltrate governments.
	But how did the World Economic Forum become a thing that actually had international influence by manipulating national politicians?
	Well, it started kind of with Bilderberg.
	Well, I mean, it started before that.
	But it's one manifestation of a group of people getting together.
	I call it cotton ball society.
	So, I mean, in the South, in order to acculturate the young and up-and-coming upper class of the South, they would come out at a cotton ball.
	Coming out meant something a little different back then.
	You know, at 16, 17, and they would be sort of immersed into, hey, we're part of a different cast.
	We're part of a different group.
	We're here to govern the rest of these people.
	And Klaus Schwab got his support from a lot of the people that were associated with Bilderberg.
	And he wrote the right script.
	You know, he was speaking their language.
	And he was there to sort of be the intellectual marketer.
	The academic face of this elite that has had the same set of shared values now for centuries.
	They believe that they alone need to control and govern the world, and they have certain fundamental assumptions about how that world should look.
	Little Ruskies are not supposed to stick their head up any more than the Trumps of the world are supposed to stick their head up.
	And so what everyone thinks of either Putin or Trump, there's a reason why George Soros hates both of them with a deep passion, is they propose a very different worldview, a different perspective that, yeah, we'll let the rubes govern the world instead of you guys.
	And I think one thing that...
	George mentioned, I've said from the get-go that this conflict is really a much different—it's not really about Ukraine.
	Ukraine is just the terrain upon which a fight between a nationalist view of the world and a globalist view of the world, a real resource used for the benefit of the people view of the world versus a financial elite governed view of the world, That's really what's happening sort of behind the stage, if you will.
	That's what set the stage for this particular conflict.
	And one of them was the tools of this global elite for it to have dictate policies on the world has been the dollar as a reserve currency and has been their control of the banking system.
	And that much of what's been in...
	Well, everybody's focused on which battle is happening here and, you know, what Zelensky's...
	It's not a given example of where Zelensky and Ukraine is on this.
	Zelensky was giving a great Thunberg speech the other day about how Europe and the U.S. needs to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels.
	Which, by the way, Ukraine's only economic future is some of its natural gas that hasn't developed yet and the gas pipelines that go through the country.
	So this is a guy who...
	Was with Klaus Schwab on the stage talking about implementing a digital ID plan just about six months ago for all the people.
	This guy's just up front for that operation.
	Whereas Putin is a face of a very different worldview, a very different world vision.
	And that's what we're seeing a real conflict on.
	And the economic conflict that's taking place is probably more consequential than the other.
	But yeah, the way these organizations get power is who?
	And it's getting the patronage of a political class.
	Bilderberg was designed in part by the CIA in the early 1950s.
	They came up with the list of who was going to be there.
	They tapped old royalty, high-ranking economic industrialists in Europe, and so forth.
	And Club of Rome is a spinoff.
	It's who is there, right?
	It's not Joe Schmo.
	It's people with disparate economic, cultural, and political influence.
	And they acculturate people to their worldview.
	They fund think tanks.
	They help infiltrate the media.
	They help infiltrate academia.
	And this goes all the way back to Cecil Rhodes' Roundtable, the way he did it in Britain.
	You know, create a small group of people that infiltrates academia, infiltrates the media, infiltrates political class.
	Often they come from those places.
	They're already the George Soros of the world.
	They're already very wealthy and have a lot of power and think that they should run the world.
	But I think what you've been talking about that has been missed a lot is that...
	If Russia's objective here isn't about what territory they have in Ukraine, but is about beating down the dollar as this tool of global control, is in fact the real battle that's taking place.
	And they're actually, on that battlefield, they've won a lot more than is expected, at least so far.
	Absolutely.
	This is something that I've been trying to bring to people's attention, especially over the last couple of days.
	And you see tons of news coming out about it.
	In fact, just today, well, let me go back to last week.
	Russia came out and said that they would start to settle or start to demand rubles for the settlement of a lot of their natural gas exports.
	To certain countries.
	So they're doing a few things there.
	You know, to your point, they're chipping away at the petrodollar system because, you know, going back to, in fact, Kissinger in the early 1970s, same time frame, we set up something called the petrodollar system.
	And that basically means that all of these oil exporters like Saudi Arabia would settle their oil for dollars.
	And this would create excess demand for the dollar.
	They'd take those dollars, they'd buy our treasuries, which keeps interest rates low, which allows us to basically consume more than we produce here in the United States.
	And so this gives, so when you look at the sanctions that the United States has put on Russia, this is what gives sanctions the teeth.
	It's because the dollar, to your earlier point, is the global reserve currency.
	And again, one of the main reasons is because of the petrodollar.
	So you've got to put yourself in the position of Putin, right?
	Like if you could have a choice, number one, do you want to reduce the power of Ukraine?
	Or number two, would you prefer to reduce the power of the United States dollar, therefore the United States?
	It's obviously going to be the latter.
	Because if you reduce the power of the United States and the dollar, then you can pretty much have your way with Ukraine because then the United States can't issue these sanctions.
	They can't do all of these things.
	So I think this seems to be the long-term objective of Putin.
	And so now fast forward to today, Putin's administration, if you want to call it that, they came out and said that they're not only going to price Their natural gas for a lot of countries in rubles, but they were also going to price pretty much every single commodity they export.
	So we're talking about natural gas.
	We're talking about oil.
	We're talking about something probably even more importantly, or just as important, is fertilizer.
	Potash, something you guys know a lot about in Canada.
	Timber.
	I mean, you go down the list of commodities they export, and they're saying, okay, well, now we're thinking about just pricing all of them in rubles.
	Now, the European countries have pushed back, said, oh, well, we're not going to pay you in rubles.
	That's kind of where we're at the stalemate right now.
	But I think the European countries are going to learn very, very quickly that you can have all the dollars or euros or yen or whatever you want.
	But if you don't have resources, if you don't have food, You've got big, big problems.
	And whoever has the control over the energy and the food, that's the person, in the end, that's most likely going to have a significant amount of leverage.
	So to add to that, over the last couple of weeks, we've heard Saudi Arabia come out and say, oh, yeah, well, we're going to start selling some of our oil, not for dollars, but for yuan.
	If we're doing a transaction directly with China, which, by the way, is one of their biggest customers, we'll just go ahead and settle that transaction in yuan.
	Now, also, India and Russia came out with an agreement that they're going to start to settle trade back and forth in a currency other than dollars or the euro.
	So I'm not saying that the dollar is going to lose reserve status tomorrow.
	But I am saying that Putin, if this is his objective, or even if it's not, it doesn't really matter, the net result is still the same, that they are chipping away at this petrodollar system.
	And it's slowly deteriorating.
	And, you know, another big thing there is that the United States froze the Russian central bank's FX reserves.
	So if you're another country, even if you're friendly with the United States, You see that happen, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, time out.
	That was like the no-fly zone.
	No matter what happened, you didn't do that, regardless of what type of war was happening.
	So that was like the nuclear financial option.
	And they hit that button.
	So this is going to prompt other countries, not just Saudi Arabia, India, China, Russia, but it's going to prompt a lot of countries that are friendly.
	With the United States to potentially start abandoning the dollar slowly, at least, and the dollar might maintain its reserve status for quite some time, but the reserve assets that these countries hold might change significantly over the next five years.
	So you can imagine if you're China, as an example, and normally you would want to hold U.S. treasuries.
	Now you're going to say, okay, Well, maybe I don't want those treasuries so much because that's a liability of the United States government, where I would much prefer to have gold because that's no one's liability.
	And also, too, now that the United States is employing this policy of financial repression through negative real interest rates, if they're holding all these dollars...
	Why are they holding those dollars?
	One of the main reasons is because they produce a lot of stuff.
	I'm referring to China.
	But they don't have much energy.
	So they're holding on to those dollars to buy energy in the future.
	Well, if the monetary policy and fiscal policy in the United States is to devalue those dollars against oil or goods and services moving forward by having negative real rates, then that means that the United States is...
	So again, why would you want to hold that reserve asset?
	And I think what we've done to freezing their FX reserves and then what Russia is doing, denominating or selling a lot of their commodities for rubles, and then China and other countries waking up that they have this counterparty risk in dollars or treasuries.
	This is going to prompt the change out of the dollar and into other reserve assets such as gold.
	How long does this transition take?
	That I don't know.
	But I definitely believe that it has started.
	And I think that Putin was a big catalyst to that start.
	And can you explain for people like two things?
	One, you made a good video and good conversation with Luke Groman talking about the difference between a reserve currency for transactional purposes and a reserve currency for asset purposes.
	And as an example, like today the Germans are pretending that they're not paying in rubles, but they actually are.
	What they did is they agreed with Russia.
	They would use the Russia's German bank, the Gazprom bank in Germany.
	Correspondent bank, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	They'll pay them in euros.
	Then that bank in Germany will convert it to rubles before it goes to Russia.
	They're paying in rubles.
	They're just, you know, papering over it.
	But there's a big difference between those two.
	And can you explain part of that?
	But also, what is that?
	Like the ordinary American hears dollar reserve currency, but I don't think they know how it translates to their everyday life.
	They don't realize that's why I'm able to buy certain things cheaper than I'm able to buy.
	It's the kind of thing that's really holding up.
	Bubbles in the asset market in terms of stocks and real estate.
	They don't understand all.
	It's not just geopolitical power could dramatically decline if the dollar is no longer the reserve asset of the world because we decided to weaponize it over this conflict of all things.
	But also, it's everyday impact on everyday Americans.
	Like long-term, it might be good.
	Like Lynn Alden and others articulate, it rebuilds the industry.
	Yeah, because it could bring manufacturing back.
	Listen, the dollar right now is, let's say, at 100 on the DXY.
	And that's just a measurement of the dollar against other currencies.
	So let's just say that the dollar went down to 50 or 30, which isn't outrageous.
	We've got to remember in 2011, it was right around 70. So this means the dollar gets extremely weak against other currencies, which would give us an advantage as far as exporting the stuff that we produce.
	Unfortunately, we don't produce anything.
	But this would encourage manufacturing to come back to the United States.
	But in the interim...
	There would be a significant amount of pain and a massive reduction in the standard of living in the United States.
	But going back to your earlier question, I think you've got to realize, first and foremost, as just the average American, that the price of money is an interest rate.
	And money is one half of every single transaction.
	Therefore, if you are artificially lowering the interest rate, you're making money a lot easier to access, therefore increasing the ability to consume or to buy assets, like real estate is an example.
	So another thought experiment that everyone can do is just think about what would happen if interest rates tomorrow went from, let's say, you know, Fed funds.
	They raised it to whatever it is, 25 basis points or a window between 25 and 50 basis points.
	What if they raised Fed funds to 10%?
	Okay, well, that would mean mortgages probably go to 15, 16%.
	And then what would happen to the stock market?
	Because we know if interest rates are low, then the PE multiples will go higher.
	So if interest rates go high, the PE multiples go lower.
	Which means the prices of those stocks go down significantly.
	So if the stock market, let's just say, goes down, so interest rates rise, stock market goes down by, let's say, 50%.
	The housing market goes down by 50% and stays there.
	Not that we have the Fed put, we don't have any of these things, just like Japan, 1990.
	The markets go down by 50% and stay there for the next 15 years.
	For the person listening right now, or in Canada, let's say the housing market went down by 75% and stayed there.
	What do you think would happen to the level of consumption or the purchasing power in aggregate total for society at large?
	Now, obviously, it's a rhetorical question.
	Obviously, it would absolutely plummet.
	It would plummet.
	Okay, so what does that have to do with the petrodollar?
	What does this mean to the average American?
	Well, going back to what we were saying with the reserve asset, if a country sells or does a transaction with the United States right now, like China, let's say, and they send us the stuff they produce, we send them our dollars.
	Okay, well, normally what would happen is they would say, okay, well, we don't want these dollars because our expenses aren't denominated in dollars, they're denominated in yuan.
	So we're going to get these dollars, but then we're going to sell them into the market.
	So this is going to increase the supply of dollars, and it's going to increase the demand for yuan, right?
	So this is going to make the dollar go down in value.
	And it's going to increase interest rates because they're not taking those dollars to buy treasuries.
	Because remember, there's an inverse relationship between the price And the actual interest rate on a bond.
	So if there's artificial demand from China, from Saudi Arabia, from all of these other countries that run trade surpluses, they're buying our treasuries.
	That's the reserve asset that they want to hold because the dollars, the world reserve currency, and they need oil, going back to the petrodollar.
	So that means that there's going to be all this artificial demand.
	Well, if there's artificial demand for treasuries, that increases the price.
	If that increases the price, that lowers the interest rate.
	If it lowers the interest rate, which is the price of money, throughout the entire U.S. economy, that increases asset prices, such as stocks and such as housing, real estate.
	You see?
	What it boils down to is it allows us, by them buying up all of our treasuries and artificially lowering the interest rates here, it allows us to borrow a lot more money in the real economy and at a sovereign level.
	And it allows us to consume a lot more than we produce.
	So what would happen if they didn't buy all of those treasuries, if it wasn't the reserve asset, then we would be stuck.
	You see?
	Now think about that.
	Now, I want most of your viewers to imagine the last time they went to Walmart or to Target or Home Depot.
	How much of that stuff in there did we produce in the United States or Canada?
	5%.
	If that.
	If that, right?
	So if we could only consume what we produce in the United States or in Canada, Or in the West?
	Well, mostly the United States of Canada.
	What would our standard of living be?
	Obviously far, far, far lower.
	This is why it's important for the average Joe and Jane.
	Either the standard of living goes down or the cost of living goes up if we have to start making our own microchips at extreme cost under Canadian regulations and whatever.
	But there again, Viva, let's back up.
	How are you going to make those microchips?
	You're going to make them with neon.
	Where does 90% of the neon come from?
	Ukraine.
	I mean, that's the...
	And you did a good dive into people that asked questions on our locals board about this, about what's happening also in farming.
	So people are like, oh, we're America, we can produce our own food.
	No question we can.
	But what goes into that producing the food in the modern era, some of which is for environmental regulatory purposes, includes a range of fertilizers and a range of other products that are essential to do it.
	And many of those fertilizers are in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, or Kazakhstan.
	I mean, they're in countries under Russia's umbrella of current control.
	And you did a good breakdown of what's happening to farmers at every level.
	Things like if you can't get a certain kind of chip that you have to for environmental regulatory purposes, then you got a quarter of a million dollar paperweight for a tractor sitting outside your lawn.
	Can you explain some of how integral all of these aspects are?
	And it shows how real power...
	Is who has the resources?
	Like, you did a good description of, you know, you want to protest all the restaurants in town, and you think you as a consumer, and this is the Western mindset of a lot of our policy decision makers, you think you as the consumer have the power.
	And, you know, what happens if all the restaurants say, screw you, we're not going to produce for you.
	All of a sudden, who has the real power?
	And it's a reminder of it.
	What's happening in the food side of the equation that's also problematic, independent of the fuel and the dollar side of the equation?
	Yeah, well, it all ties in.
	And so if you're a farmer, you've got several inputs to producing food.
	First and foremost, you've got fertilizer.
	So that's really three main components.
	And it would be potassium, I believe phosphorus and nitrogen.
	Okay, well, how is nitrogen produced?
	Well, that would be natural gas.
	Where do we get most of the natural gas or a lot of it?
	Well, that would be Russia.
	And even if you want to say, oh, well, Russia is only X amount, let's say 20%, 30%, and we could get it from somewhere else.
	Right, but you got to remember the price is set at the margin.
	That's how you take out 20% or 30%, and the price is going to absolutely skyrocket.
	And then, of course, you're going to have shortages.
	And if you have shortages of nitrogen, then you've got shortages of fertilizer.
	And no matter how much awesome growable land you have here in the United States, if you don't have fertilizer, you're not going to grow any food.
	And you need that fertilizer, from my limited research, at least twice per year.
	Okay, so now let's go down to potassium.
	Or a derivative of potassium is potash, which you guys have a lot of in Canada.
	But then also, another 40% of worldwide supply is via Belarus and Russia.
	So if they've got control of those strings, if you will, that's going to be another input problem for these farmers that is going to lead up to this perfect storm.
	And the next thing would be phosphorus.
	A lot of that comes from China.
	And if you go back about, I don't know if it was 12, 8 months ago, China cut off all exports of phosphorus.
	Isn't that interesting?
	Maybe, just maybe, they knew that this was coming and they wanted to save all that phosphorus for their domestic use.
	Because one thing that China's really good at is understanding that you...
	The highest priority is making sure that your country has food and energy.
	That is the highest priority above anything else.
	You can be as green.
	You can be as woke.
	You can be as politically correct as you want.
	You can have 5,000 different genders.
	But if you don't have food and energy, you've got big problems.
	So that's what China is really good at prioritizing.
	Okay, so then you, so that's, and there's, it goes a lot deeper than that.
	But that's kind of the fertilizer component of it.
	And then you go down to the fuel side of things.
	Okay, well, we talked about natural gas, but it's not just that.
	Because if they're going to cut off the supply of oil, oil prices skyrocket.
	And especially if politicians come out and say, oh, well, you know what, the cure for inflation is just to give you more money.
	Right?
	Which, of course, just exacerbates the problem because the problem of inflation is not a result of a lack of money.
	It's a result of a lack of stuff.
	That's what you got to remember.
	So the politicians come out, give all their gas stimmies, let's say, which I think they've talked about in Quebec.
	I know they've talked about in California.
	Oh, yeah.
	Quebec, Legault promised 500 bucks just to counter inflation.
	You're saying stimmies, though?
	Is that a stimulus?
	I'm just saying that short for stimulus check.
	Stimulus check, okay.
	Sorry about that.
	So what happens is that increases the price of fuel.
	Okay, well, what does that do?
	Well, that increases the price of diesel.
	Well, diesel is a main component to put into a tractor to produce the food that these farmers need.
	So then you say, okay, well, my goodness gracious, they're getting hit with the fertilizer, they're getting hit with the natural gas, they're getting hit with the fuel, with the diesel.
	I mean, what else could go wrong?
	Well, let's talk about propane.
	You talked about, you know, in the United States, the average American says, oh, we got no problem with food.
	We grow all of our food here.
	It's no issue whatsoever.
	Well, okay, most of the farms that are in the United States are...
	Not really off-grid, but they don't have access to these pipelines of natural gas.
	Therefore, most of the energy they use is through propane.
	And it's not just the energy use, but they have to dry the grain once they harvest it.
	And they use propane to do that.
	So what do we have shortages of, along with every other energy source?
	That would be propane.
	So now let's talk about the labor shortage that we have in the United States.
	We all have heard about this going all the way back to 2020, 2021, where there's, what, 12 million job openings in the United States at an all-time high.
	You can't get people to work at pretty much any price.
	And why is that?
	Because the Fed comes in and, along with the government, let's say, quote-unquote, prints money, to use that term loosely.
	And it sends out stimmy checks, does PPP, all these things.
	So asset prices go up to a level where people don't have to go back to work.
	And so, again, this is a government economic distortion that has created these massive labor shortages that we have.
	Okay, well, do you think those labor shortages don't affect farmers as well?
	Of course they do.
	So then this limits their ability to grow food.
	And then Robert was talking.
	About the chip shortages.
	And we discussed that NEON is one of the main components of these computer chips, or semiconductors, I guess they're called, that are made in Taiwan.
	So everyone looks at Taiwan and says, well, that's the problem.
	That's where they're coming from.
	No, no, no, no, no, no.
	You've got to go much further back.
	And you've got to figure out where they're resourcing the components, those inputs to the semiconductors.
	And you find out that that's coming from an area that Russia most likely will have control over in the future as well.
	And therefore, you know, if you're waiting on semiconductors for the Ford pickups, if this is why used car prices have doubled, tripled whatever they've done, this is why there's no new cars on the lot.
	Well, there's going to be no new tractors either.
	And those tractors that you do have, they're going to need replacements for these semiconductors, which they can't get because they can't get them from Taiwan because Taiwan can't get the neon.
	From Ukraine.
	And so you've got the labor shortage.
	Then you've got your equipment that if it breaks down, you can't fix it.
	Therefore, you can't use it and you can't buy new equipment.
	So, I mean, I could go on, but this gives you an idea of the perfect storm that the farmers are having to deal with, even in the United States.
	So now I did that video on Biden talking about the food shortages and how they're going to be real.
	That's one thing I actually do agree with him.
	I agree with him very rarely, but I do agree with him there, that's for sure.
	And so I don't know that there's going to be lines at the grocery store like we saw gas lines in the 1970s, although that is a possibility, absolutely a possibility.
	But I think what happens is...
	The government will give out food stimulus checks, just like they're giving out gas stimulus checks.
	And because they're not increasing the supply of stuff, they're only increasing the supply of money, this will only make it worse globally, but it'll at least give the, let's say, Canadians and people in the United States the ability to buy some food.
	So what happens is the price goes up, up, up here, so that sucks supply away from all these other countries.
	That don't have the ability to give the STEMI checks.
	And let's remember why we have the ability to give the STEMI checks.
	Because the dollar's the global reserve currency.
	You see?
	If it wasn't the global reserve currency, we couldn't do the STEMIs.
	But since we can do the STEMIs now, then the price goes way, way up.
	All that supply comes into the United States.
	So although we're really being stretched thin, our standard of living is going down.
	We're at least able to put food on the table, but that's taking food off the table from all these other countries.
	So you have this situation where you have mass starvation throughout many countries around the globe as a result of this perfect storm that the farmers are going to be dealing with in pretty much every single country.
	And then that goes back to the Club of Rome.
	That goes back to Thomas Malthus.
	That goes back to Pierre Trudeau.
	That goes back to all these people that we're talking about, where their three objectives is to lower consumption, increase the death rate, or decrease the birth rate.
	I heard another great solution, aside from the Venezuelan solution of...
	Just print, print, and send checks.
	The solution of price controls is being discussed in parts of Europe.
	It's even being discussed amongst think tanks in the US, which I thought after the 1970s, we might have figured out that doesn't work so well.
	But could you explain to people why is price controls not exactly going to be the solution that these policymakers are proposing?
	If I can venture a guess, George, I mean, price controls is not going to increase quantity or increase product.
	Boom.
	It's going to decrease it.
	And there's a very, very easy to understand explanation.
	Let's say you're a farmer and it costs you $10 to produce a bushel of wheat, let's say.
	If your cost to produce the bushel of wheat goes up to $15, but you can only sell it for $10 because of price controls, are you going to continue to produce the wheat?
	Or are you going to continue to sell it on the legit market as opposed to just holding it and then selling it on a dark market, a black market?
	Well, that's Colombian Venezuela right now.
	People go across the border to get stuff.
	And what you're going to do is you're going to hold it as much as you can fit in storage.
	And then once you can't fit it in storage, you're either going to sell it on the black market or you're just going to not produce anything, fire everyone.
	Tell them to go home and just hope that you can stay in business.
	And again, you see, we've got to look at some of these policies that they have implemented in a lot of countries, especially in Europe, where they pay the farmers not to grow food.
	I mean, in Europe, there's a significant percentage of their farmland that they don't even use.
	The government won't let them use it because they think it's going to destroy the environment.
	Or, you know, the climate change thing.
	So this goes back to reducing the levels of consumption.
	And if they're putting in price controls, then they're reducing the level of supply, increasing the price, and therefore, you know, reducing the level of consumption all in one swoop.
	And by the way, if they're increasing the level of inflation, the prices, theoretically, that can increase their tax revenue.
	Which helps them potentially pay down their debt.
	Now, I don't think it will, but that could be the idea from a standpoint of Keynesian economics.
	Yeah, well, one thing that you mentioned is the new Biden proposal that they're floating, which is, you know, aside from we're going to print more money to solve the problem of inflation, we're going to do price control to solve the problem of supply, but we're going to impose taxes to solve the problem of deficits.
	But one of the interesting things is that they're proposing is they are describing it as a billionaire tax.
	What it really is, is a property tax.
	And Elizabeth Warren called it a wealth tax.
	Now, historically in the U.S., you can't constitutionally impose a property tax because it's a direct tax that's not apportioned or it's an indirect tax that's not uniform.
	It's practically impossible to actually use apportionment in the modern age.
	At the time of our founding, everybody was paranoid of a centralized federal government.
	Coming and imposing the equivalent of a head tax on them.
	So the goal was to never allow this to happen.
	But they passed the 16th Amendment, and originally they were going to try to have an expansive definition of income.
	But the Supreme Court came in and said, no, no, income has this very limited definition.
	It's the gain separate and severed from the source.
	Well, ever since then, Congress has chosen never to define the word income.
	This is where tax protesters actually have a point.
	They're like, how is it I'm being taxed on something that's never defined?
	It's like, what is income?
	Income is all the income that comes from income that's around income.
	It's self-referential and circular.
	They don't define the actual word.
	It's like a bad Abbott and Costello episode.
	Who's on first and what's on second?
	And so in that dynamic, the reason why they've kept it elastic is they've always wanted to sneak in a property tax and call it an income tax.
	And they've tried now and then, but then backed off.
	The wealth tax was floated, but there was too much pushback on it in political legal circles.
	So they came up with a new one.
	We'll call it a billionaire's tax.
	That doesn't actually just tax billionaires, of course, because there's not enough of them.
	So it's anybody with $100 million worth of wealth.
	But that's basically a property tax.
	And the goal is to get people.
	Accustomed to the idea of a property tax.
	Because as you mentioned, the probability, if you have more than $100 million in net worth, You're not paying much in tax right now anyway, and you're not going to be paying any more because Joe Biden passes something.
	You'll find 100 ways around it.
	But the goal is to condition people to get that foot in the door and get people, oh, okay, you can tax property.
	Because the goal is to tax somebody's home.
	I mean, if you're taxing unrealized gains, that's taxing property.
	That's what that is.
	And what is the biggest unrealized gain for the country last year?
	People's home value.
	That's the biggest unrealized gain.
	The goal is for a national property tax.
	Back in the 30s, they actually proposed taxing people for cooking your own food.
	An IRS commissioner said people shouldn't be mad about what we do tax.
	They should be thankful for what we don't tax.
	He actually said that in a congressional hearing.
	This is about control, control, control.
	And that's where they're going to go next.
	But in that aspect, why is it that price controls, taxation, giving people just random checks, why is it that that does not work in terms of producing the desired economic effect?
	Well, because you just, in order to produce something, you've got to, yes, have capital.
	But then you've got to be willing to take risk.
	You have to have a skill set.
	You've got to have resources.
	You have to have these inputs.
	You can have all the paper currency that you want, but it doesn't mean that you're...
	I mean, you could get, as an example, you could give the three of us $100 trillion to build a space shuttle.
	Oh, okay.
	We're not going to be able to really do anything with it, you know?
	So you need these components in order to create the stuff.
	And the entrepreneurs need to be incentivized to create the stuff.
	And if they're taxed to high heaven, they're not going to be incentivized.
	But another thing that I wanted to point out on that note, Robert, is, yes, it starts with $100 million.
	But as you said, that's just a way to condition people.
	And once they get conditioned, then it'll mysteriously or magically go down to 50 million, and then it'll go down to 5 million.
	And at the same time, they are doing everything that they can to create inflation.
	Right?
	So, this goes back to the dollar losing, or at least losing the status of the preferred reserve asset, right, or the petrodollar.
	Well, that means, like we discussed, that the prices go up, inflation goes up.
	Well, that means that your income might go up, but it won't go up as fast.
	But if your income goes up, what happens to your tax bracket?
	You go from a 25% tax bracket to a 30% tax bracket.
	Now, you could, you maybe...
	Don't have any more purchasing power, but yet you're paying a higher and higher tax rate just because of inflation.
	So I think the same thing could happen with the wealth tax or the unrealized capital gains tax in the sense that people aren't worried about it now, but all of a sudden it gets down to $5 million and inflation goes so high between now and let's say the next three or four years that even the lowest price house.
	Is $5 million.
	Or let's say the minimum wage is $5 million a year or something like that.
	Now, all of a sudden, pretty much everyone gets caught up in this tax net.
	And I know that might sound funny to a lot of people listening.
	I don't have...
	No, I'm just checking my back pocket here.
	So I'm in Columbia right now.
	And the bills here, like I've got, let's say, a 50. But it just says 50 on it, but then it says mil.
	So what that is, is that's 50,000 pesos.
	And that's about the equivalent of maybe 12 bucks in the US, right?
	50,000 pesos.
	Now, do you think that when they started...
	Creating currency in Colombia.
	They just started with that many zeros.
	They said, oh, we love huge numbers.
	And we all want to be billionaires.
	So we're just going to start with these.
	No, they started with a 1, a 5, a 10, a 50. But then they just kept adding zero after zero after zero after zero.
	So now the minimum wage here in Colombia is literally, I'm not exaggerating, is literally 1 million pesos per month.
	Per month!
	That's the minimum wage.
	Speaking of your point about the taxation issue, back when they passed the income tax, congressmen said this tax will never tax the hair on a working man's head.
	So that didn't last very long before that was there.
	And they used World War II inflation to grab a lot of those people by jacking them up in a different tax bracket.
	That's right.
	Can you also explain the impact if the dollar loses its reserve status?
	How that impacts the debt markets, but also the government debt markets.
	We've already seen T-bills have taken a big hit in the first quarter.
	The bond market as a whole has been taking a hit.
	We saw the yield rate inverted.
	I was curious how many of the mainstream media would cover the yield curve inverting.
	Exactly.
	I mean, all of them did.
	And that's been, what, a 90-95% predictor that recession's knocking on the door?
	While the Fed's going to keep jacking up interest rates, while the mortgage rates are going up, while inflation continues to escalate, while these supply chains develop.
	But what happens to the ability of the federal government to run these massive deficits if the dollar is no longer the reserve currency?
	What happens in a real market economy when the government spends too much money and they deficit spend and have to issue too many, in this case, treasuries, is the people buying those treasuries, why are they buying them?
	Well, they're buying them to get a positive return.
	So inflation expectations go into the price that you would be willing to pay for that treasury, or in other words, the yield, the interest rate.
	So if the government is spending too much money and there is no artificial demand for all these new currency units that are being created, then the inflation expectation rises.
	Well, if the inflation expectation rises, then the bondholders or the people buying those treasuries Are going to demand a higher and higher and higher and higher interest rate.
	And it's not just with sovereign debt.
	We talked about consumer debt.
	So therefore, mortgage rates go up.
	The interest rate on auto loans goes up.
	You want to talk about credit card.
	My goodness gracious.
	What's credit card interest rates now?
	Maybe 20% or something.
	We're talking about 30%, 40%, 50%.
	Rates on credit cards.
	But where it really, really gets scary is with corporate debt.
	So going back to that thought experiment before where we talked about the stock market going down by 50%, well, these are all these corporations.
	And corporate debt is at an all-time high.
	And now the Fed, if you guys don't remember, in March of 2020 came in and backstopped the corporate debt market.
	By setting up this special purpose vehicle.
	I know Robert knows that well because that was one of our initial conversations when we were talking about going after the Fed to this FOIA request.
	So they came in and propped up the market.
	So if the Fed basically signals that they're willing to buy corporate debt, now all of a sudden you've got a risk-free return.
	So the market can go up there and buy all of this debt and they realize that the Fed's got their back.
	Right?
	They can only lose so much.
	So then that allows the corporations to issue more and more and more debt at ever-decreasing interest rates.
	So then you get these overbloated companies that have all this debt, which, by the way, is one of the reasons why the stocks go up, because they just take out all this debt and buy back their own shares.
	So then it's just supply and demand.
	If you reduce the supply of the shares, well, the price is going to go up.
	You see?
	So if you had interest rates go up like they would if the dollar didn't have the world reserve currency, you'd not only have a sovereign default like Argentina or the interest rates would just be so...
	Wildly onerous.
	There's no way we would be able to pay for all of our unfunded liabilities.
	We're talking about Social Security.
	We're talking about Medicare.
	We're talking about all these things.
	We wouldn't even be able to fund our normal spending, let alone all of the future spending that we've guaranteed to Americans who have put in through Social Security payments and all of these other kind of Ponzi schemes.
	You would have sovereign debt defaults.
	You would have consumer debt defaults.
	You'd have corporate debt defaults.
	And you would just have this massive deleveraging in the system to where, I mean, what it would look like, because again, our level of consumption would have to go down to the level of production.
	The United States would look very similar to Mexico.
	And that would be where we'd have to start.
	You know, what Lynn was saying and Snyder and other really smart people saying, OK, well, this could be good for the United States.
	And I agree long term.
	But we have to get all of that excess debt out of the system.
	And we have to get all of the...
	We've got to...
	You know, right now the economy is like a heroin addict.
	And it's addicted to this monetary heroin that is made possible.
	By the dollar being the reserve currency.
	So if you get rid of that reserve currency, you get rid of the heroin.
	If you get rid of the heroin, then yes, that's going to be better for the addict long term.
	But when they're going through that withdrawal period, it gets extremely, extremely ugly.
	So again, during that withdrawal period, using that as an example, that's when the United States looks a lot like Mexico.
	Now, fortunately, we've got great infrastructure here.
	We've got great human capital.
	We used to have the rule of law.
	We used to have something called a constitution.
	And if we could get that back and reduce taxes, reduce regulation, then we could have this foundation that we could build on and then get back to a point where we're far better than we ever were.
	But that's kind of the predicament that we're in right now.
	George, you just...
	I mean, I'm looking at my face in real time.
	I've got...
	I had this wrinkle.
	Now you've caused a stress wrinkle here and a stress wrinkle here.
	There's two things.
	First of all, I pulled up a chat.
	Someone said, Bitcoin solves this.
	I mean...
	No, it doesn't.
	No, it doesn't.
	Why does Bitcoin solve this?
	Because...
	What are you going to buy with your Bitcoin?
	There's no food, there's no energy.
	What are you going to buy with your Bitcoin?
	Well, you've got to convert it into fiat in order to buy food with it unless you find online grocery stores.
	Even if Bitcoin's transactional.
	Let's just assume that Bitcoin was an actual currency that people were using and outside of the banking system and the purview of the central planners.
	Great.
	You still need energy.
	You still need food.
	Now, there could be an argument that, well, if you had sound money...
	Then you would have the ability to produce these things at a greater capacity or greater efficiency.
	And I think there is an argument there.
	But what the Bitcoiners and the Maxis miss and don't talk about is the transition.
	How do you get from A to B?
	And what does that look like?
	And again, that looks like Tijuana.
	Yeah.
	Well, one of the most popular questions on our Locals board, vivabarneslaw.locals.com, was they wanted to know, George, how are you preparing for the coming food and fuel and financial...
	Crises, including the potential, because what you're describing is some of the conditions that existed in the late 1920s, early 1930s.
	And of course, in Europe, that led to some very undesirable political, social unrest.
	Fascism, communism, both roads use that as the pretext to rise to power.
	But so what are you doing in terms of your own preparation for how to deal with that?
	What may be coming down the pipeline?
	Well, right now I'm in Medellin, Colombia.
	So you look at the benefits to Colombia, and they produce an epic amount of food here.
	And it's no mystery why they were the cocaine capital of the world.
	Cocaine wasn't the only thing that grows well here.
	Literally everything does.
	So as an example, I chartered a helicopter.
	Last weekend, and went up to this lake near Medellin called Guadapé.
	And it's maybe an hour and a half drive.
	It's just a quick, maybe 20 minutes in a helicopter.
	And when you go up out of the valley in Medellin, and you kind of go up to this level, it's about a 3,000 foot climb, if I understood the pilot right.
	And when you go from this Medellin to Guadapé, I mean, you see hundreds.
	Of farms.
	Little farms.
	And they're just growing.
	There you go.
	And they're just growing.
	Yeah, by the way, this shot from a helicopter, that's Pinal right there.
	It was absolutely jaw-dropping.
	But regardless, you know, on the way up here, and if you're driving, you just see farm after farm after farm after farm.
	Now, they're not producing the way we produce in the United States, meaning, you know, if this was the United States, every single one of those farmers would be growing one thing.
	And then in another region, every single one of those farmers would be growing one thing.
	Here, or a lot of these farms, they literally grow all of these fruits, all of these vegetables.
	And if there was a food shortage in the world, I could drive a half hour and just go to limitless local small farms there and pretty much not buy whatever I wanted, but at least buy enough.
	Whatever you need.
	Whatever I need, good way to put it.
	Yeah, good way to put it.
	And then also, Colombia is a huge producer of oil.
	So you've got the food, you've got the energy.
	And the last thing that I like about Colombia is it doesn't have 6,000 nuclear missiles pointed at it.
	That doesn't make me very comfortable, especially if I had kids.
	And I know it's a very, very low risk, but even at a 1% risk, it would be so catastrophic that even at a very, very minimal risk, I think it's something that people need to at least consider,
	think through, and have a plan B. So now, as far as the portfolio, What I'm doing, unfortunately, and it's not optimal, but it's the best thing I can think of to do, is hold a little bit more cash than I normally would.
	Now, I'm not all in cash by any stretch.
	I think commodities are a great way to hedge against this inflation.
	I do hold more cash than I normally would.
	And that goes back to what we briefly mentioned about the yield curve inverting and therefore such a high probability of the United States going into recession.
	And if they go into recession, then there's a high probability of the stock market going down and asset prices in general going down to a level that might be attractive.
	And it's not just the yield curve inverting.
	It's also the idea that the Fed is going to continue to raise rates.
	Most likely until they break the stock market, end the economy.
	And then also something that I was going to go over in a whiteboard video tomorrow.
	I'm kind of starting it there.
	I'll just give your viewers kind of the inside scoop here.
	And this is something that you'll never hear anywhere else.
	I don't know if your viewers have heard about the repo market, but the Fed has something called reverse repo.
	So they'll come in and kind of backstop that market as well.
	And what happens is there shouldn't be any interest rate for an asset that sells below reverse repo.
	Because if you are any financial institution, you could just park your money at the Fed and receive, let's say, 30 basis points.
	So that is completely risk-free.
	Completely risk-free.
	So what we've seen, though, is the one-month treasury start to trade at a steep...
	Discount or a steep or about half the interest rate or the yield of the reverse repo, which is now 30 basis points.
	The one-month treasury was trading about 15 basis points.
	So why on earth would anyone in their right mind buy a one-month treasury when you get 15 basis points, when you could just park that money at the Fed and get 30?
	The short answer, counterparty risk.
	The insiders in the monetary system realize that there is extreme amounts of systemic risk, counterparty risk, in the global monetary system right now, and they're hedging their bets.
	So that's another reason why I'm a little cash-heavy right now, even though it's not optimal because you've got such a negative carry because of inflation.
	Well, so when you say cash-heavy, if someone has a portfolio, what percentage right now should they be holding in cash?
	And then the more important question, at least for Canadians, is where do you hold the cash if it's not safe in a bank, let alone safe from inflation?
	It's not safe from government seizures or government freezing.
	What percentage of your portfolio should be in cash?
	And then what are the risks?
	I mean, if it's in the bank, you have the risk of the bank going under, I guess, or the government freezing it.
	Or if it's at your house, you have the risk of getting robbed.
	You got to factor in all those things.
	But what percentage?
	Sorry, first question.
	What percentage of your portfolio now should be in cash?
	Yeah, I think it depends on so many things like your age, your risk tolerance.
	I mean, there's a lot of factors that go into it.
	For me right now, if I had to think through, it would probably be about 30% or so of my net worth, as we speak, is in cash.
	And as far as the safest way to hold that cash, now, that said, the part of my portfolio that's not in cash, you got to own some gold there.
	You got to own maybe even some Bitcoin, some things that don't have counterparty risk, right?
	Because those dollars, no matter how you hold them, they're going to be a liability of someone else.
	And what's happened with Russia has taught us that, among many other things.
	But if you're skeptical about holding the money in the bank, especially after what you saw at the truckers in Canada, and them freezing their accounts and whatnot, I would hold it in just what the financial insiders are doing right now.
	And that's one-month treasuries.
	That's why they're holding...
	That's why the...
	The yield on the one-month treasury is 15 basis points, and they can park it at the Fed and get 30. Same reason.
	That's what they're doing, so that's what I want to do.
	Why am I not...
	Am I wrong in thinking?
	Whole treasuries, that's still seizable and freezable.
	So what's the difference between that and cash in terms of freezing?
	Oh, well, no.
	That would be optimal.
	If you just have green pieces of paper in your closet, I think that's the best.
	It's just, you know, do you want to keep a couple million dollars in your...
	Dirty clothes hamper.
	But as far as people, I think everyone should have some cash on hand for sure, meaning literally cash on hand.
	But for the amount that you're not comfortable holding in your house, then I would say T-bills.
	So you're right.
	That is someone else's liability.
	There are no perfect solutions.
	You just have to pick the least worst or the least bad.
	Robert Barnes, we've gone over that case.
	Your safety box is not safe either, people.
	No, no, no.
	I had my safe deposit box from Bank of America.
	Yeah, I could tell you that story if you want to.
	Don't think that because it's in a safe deposit box, it's safe.
	Do tell us immediately, George.
	Tell us the story because we covered a suit, but I want to know the anecdote.
	Yeah, what happened is I was buying, this was back in 2012, when I started buying Rental properties in Kansas City, Missouri.
	And I had, you know, just from doing business and I was, you can tell, I, you know, like to have a little bit of green paper here and there.
	And I had about maybe a quarter million or so in a safe deposit box in Kansas City there at Bank of America.
	And there was a house that I wanted to buy.
	And back then I was just buying everything with cash.
	And it was about, I don't know, maybe a hundred grand or so.
	I can't remember what it was.
	Let's just say a hundred thousand dollars.
	And so I just went to my, I didn't think it was a big deal, but I just went to my safe deposit box and I got out like a hundred grand.
	And then I just went to the teller and I'm like, yeah, I need a cashier's check.
	And I just, you know, I just all laid out and she almost had a heart attack.
	I mean, they, like, freaked out.
	The security guard ran over and, like, locks the door to the bank so no one could get in.
	The manager comes over and, I mean, they're just having a panic attack.
	And I'm like, it's just, I'm just getting a cashier's check.
	But the fact that it was $100,000, you know, and I'm sure they don't usually do transactions over, you know, two grand or something.
	They just completely lost their minds.
	So then they had to answer all these questions and do all this, you know, just go through the rigmarole.
	Finally, I got my cashier's check.
	But then, like, the very next day, I can't remember how they notified me.
	I think they might have called me.
	And I had a safe deposit box there in Missouri and one in Portland, Oregon as well.
	And Bank of America called me and they said, you need to have your stuff out of there within 24 hours or it's ours or you're not going to get it back.
	And I had no recourse.
	They said, don't even try to ask why because we're not going to tell you.
	And it's just, here it is.
	You get your stuff out.
	You're walking out of the bank with a briefcase full of a lot of cash and other valuables.
	Yeah, but I can't remember how I did it, but I had to have a friend of mine.
	I think I put them on as a sign or something.
	I had to have a friend of mine in Portland, Oregon go down there and fortunately get what was in that box.
	And then obviously I went down to Kansas City and got what remained in that box.
	But yeah, the point is there, guys, don't even think for one.
	Yeah, no, I mean...
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, there's other portable methods of wealth that I've recommended to people over the time.
	I mean, things like diamonds, things like jewels.
	There's a lot of things that have historically been very effective means of having disposable wealth that can be protected, that can be on your property.
	You know, people should always have a born identity box to the degree they can that has, you know, different currencies, different means of storage of wealth, things like that.
	I mean, certain kinds of watches, you know, not like too esoteric, but Rolex watches, if you're kind of where you are.
	Rolexes are perfect.
	Absolutely.
	Then you've got to wear it somewhere, Robert.
	Someone's going to chop your hand off the table.
	You don't have to.
	I mean, you don't have to wear it.
	You can have it in your bag.
	You can have it stored someplace.
	You can have eight, ten, ten watches, and you have the equivalent of a quarter million, half a million on you that isn't as physically difficult.
	I mean, the other things, the best safes are not safes.
	I had a client that figured this out years ago.
	So all of his money, his cash, was not stored.
	He had a safe in the house, but there was almost no money in it, just enough that if somebody robbed it, they'd think they'd be okay.
	But he was actually using old used VCRs.
	Old TVs.
	And those, because people just don't tend to take apart those things looking for cash.
	That's where he had all of his cash stashed out.
	Dirty clothes pile is actually perfect.
	I got a quick story about that too.
	This was maybe 2011 or so.
	I can't remember the exact date.
	But believe it or not, I had about $400,000.
	It was about $400,000 or $500,000.
	And I had it in my closet.
	And I literally had it in my dirty clothes pile.
	And that's where I would just stash it because I figured if someone came in and robbed me, no one's going to look in the dirty clothes pile.
	And I actually had a safe that I would keep a couple of watches in and stuff like that.
	But the 500 grand in cash, I kept in the dirty clothes pile.
	And I left for about a month.
	I went on a trip.
	I can't remember where I went to Singapore or something like that.
	And I came back and I opened the door.
	Sure enough, everything gone.
	I was completely robbed.
	I mean, they literally took everything.
	And, of course, I go straight back to my closet.
	I look at the dirty clothes hamper, or the dirty clothes pile, untouched.
	Exactly.
	You know, I'll show you something here.
	This is a meteorite from Campo del Cielo.
	I leave the house and I'm worried that someone's going to steal my meteorite.
	The idea of going on vacation with a half a million dollars in a dirty laundry bin.
	I mean, I don't sleep for that.
	I mean, first of all, I guess it's all relative, but this is beautiful, people.
	Speaking of, I was going to say, you know, places that they knew how to store wealth outside of the banking system was Columbia is another...
	A place that's had good history with that back in the day.
	Escobar still probably has some wealth stored in some caves that they're still searching for.
	It's a good transition to real estate in terms of what is happening and going to happen in that capacity.
	By the way, your description of Columbia, independent on food, independent on fuel, and otherwise safe from war zones, basically has been...
	Putin's 1997 strategy for Russia, using their nuclear weapons to keep them safe and building up their independent, self-sufficient food and fuel costs.
	That's when everybody was predicting mass inflation in Russia.
	I was like, not in essentials because those things are already...
	Those things are not imported.
	He didn't import food.
	He doesn't import fuel.
	He doesn't import most of his input costs.
	He doesn't import essential resources.
	He tried to be as self-sufficient as possible there.
	But in the real estate dynamic, like I'm here in Vegas, and I've looked at, as I see everything going wacky, and the house I bought has gone up three times in value since I got it like seven years ago.
	Which to me is kind of insane.
	But then I think, well, what am I going to buy with it?
	Because all the housing prices seem kind of insane.
	And then it becomes kind of a timing issue.
	Do you get out now?
	How do you get out?
	Should you get out?
	What's your sense on the real estate market in the near short term?
	Well, I think it's very risky.
	You know, the question with real estate isn't whether or not it comes down in price.
	It has to in the United States and Canada.
	The question is whether or not it comes down in nominal terms or just in real terms.
	So, you know, we could continue to go up and up and up and up in nominal terms.
	But, you know, let's just say real estate goes up by 10% per year, but the inflation is at 15% per year.
	Well, then the price is going up, but you're actually losing purchasing power.
	And the reason I say that is because at some point it's got to come back down to its historic level relative to income.
	Because the only other lever you've got there is interest rates.
	And as we can see, interest rates are going up.
	In fact, I did a whiteboard video on this the other day.
	Just in the last four months, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in the United States...
	Has gone from about 2.7% to 4.7%.
	If I can pause you there.
	Explain what that means to homeowners.
	Because in Canada, we've been at really low rates, like 1.4, 1.5, if you're lucky.
	And they're talking about hiking up rates.
	What impact does increasing interest rates have on the value of real estate itself?
	I presume it goes down, but does it?
	Well, it really affects the demand side of the equation.
	So then it's a question of supply.
	But let's just look at the demand side.
	In the video I did, I used the example of someone that could afford a $2,000 a month mortgage payment.
	At a 2.7% interest rate, they can afford about a $400,000 home.
	At a 6.5%, because the reason I got that 6.5% is because we're at 4.7% now, but the Fed is talking about raising rates, and the bond market is predicting that the Fed will be able to get up to about 2%.
	So that would mean, you know, just ballparking it, that mortgage rates would be at about 6.5%.
	So that same person that can afford $2,000 a month mortgage payments and afford a $400,000 home, that 6.5% can only afford a $275,000 home.
	So think about the demand side of the equation, how much demand and purchasing power that destroys.
	Because a lot of people, you sit there and talk about interest rates going up.
	They say, well, I don't even care because I've got a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage.
	Well, yeah, you don't care, but the buyers do.
	And if you want to ever sell that home, if you want your price to go up, then the buyers need to have more and more purchasing power.
	And if the buyers have less and less and less purchasing power, then most likely those prices come down.
	Now, then there's an issue of supply.
	Now, we have extremely low supply right now.
	Incredibly low.
	So that means that you would have to have massive demand destruction in order for it to really negatively impact the nominal price.
	But at some point along that interest rate hiking cycle, the rates will get high enough to where demand decreases enough to even at very, very low supply, prices will still come down.
	One other aspect that people sort of underexamine related to house values is that it's been used for a while and Badly so last year and the year before as really a source of additional consumer spending.
	I mean, last year was the first year that the increase in housing values for homeowners was greater than their entire annual income on average.
	And what happens when they can't go out and get that refi?
	What does that do to consumption in the economy and everything else related to the loop that that can create?
	Yeah, well, you've got an economy that's 70% consumption.
	So that would be, what's your purchasing power in addition to your income, your job?
	So this goes back to consuming what we produce.
	Now, we consume way more, and one of the reasons is because of these asset prices.
	So to your point, if we have the cash-out refi, now all of a sudden is not an option.
	And by the way, the cash-out refis, around 2006, 2005, When they were at their maximum before the crash, it was about $100 billion per quarter.
	And right now, we're ramping up to where we're about $80 or $90 per quarter.
	So we're getting very close to where we were with those cash-out refis.
	But if the people's equity goes down to zero or they're underwater...
	Now, all of a sudden, they can't pull out that equity.
	They don't have the purchasing power.
	Then they have to rely on their income.
	And by the way, this turns into another feedback loop from the standpoint of if they consume or are able to consume less, then the unemployment rate goes up.
	There's fewer jobs.
	If there's fewer jobs, then it exacerbates the problem of consumption.
	Consumption goes even lower, which makes the asset prices go down even further.
	Which makes the unemployment rate go up even higher.
	So, I mean, you're hitting the nail on the head, Robert.
	But I think, you know, we've talked about it so much, but I don't think people still really understand the impact and the domino effect of having much, much higher interest rates or actually market interest rates, especially if the dollar was not the world reserve currency.
	I'm going to bring this up.
	I don't think this is the same in the States.
	Canada liberals, I don't know that this is true, and I don't think it's 100% true, will be removing tax exemption on primary residences.
	So I have the same concern, because in Canada, you have tax-free capital gains on your primary residence.
	People do this to flip your residence.
	In the States, from what I understand, or in Florida, you don't have that, but you have deductible interest rates.
	Which comes to the same as far as smarter people than me tell me.
	George, Robert, is that about right?
	If you have taxable gains on a residence, so long as your interest is deductible, it's six of one way, half a dozen the other?
	Yeah, I think it's up to what, Robert, like 500 grand on your primary residence.
	There's no tax, but I could be wrong there.
	But the path they're moving towards, and this may be what the person is talking about in Canada, is...
	Towards minimum taxes.
	They're trying to move towards a minimum rate.
	This is the whole global minimum rate they're talking about.
	What they want is they want to require, you're going to pay X amount in tax no matter what.
	Ultimately, they want it to be on your asset valuation.
	That's where they want to go.
	Easier to achieve in Europe than it is to achieve here.
	But that's the other thing, is this sort of liberal world order.
	Where they believe that a regulatory environment, modern monetary theory, you can just print yourself out of any problem.
	Price controls will solve it.
	The government, central planners can resolve it, etc.
	This whole sort of mindset is just coming to an ultimate crisis.
	They just don't realize fully.
	They're walking into that crisis.
	But I think that's sort of what's taking place at multiple levels in society.
	But two, some of the questions about, you know, what can the ordinary person do?
	The person that doesn't.
	And I always tell people, everybody has means to increase their probability of surviving by being smart and being well informed.
	First steps, be well informed.
	But, you know, even a person on fixed income can find ways to make their life more secure and safer in any kind of environment.
	I mean, people can grow their own food.
	It's just one example.
	But can you give people some, you know, for the ordinary person, you know, I know people that, you know, bought little patches of land that they, you know, get generators for, that they have, you know, things like RVs so they can get around if they need to, get out of, you know, they're different and there's different economic levels.
	But everybody at some economic level can put themselves in a better self-sufficient position to be more immune from these things.
	You don't have to have lots of resources now.
	Yeah, I think you kind of called it right there in the sense that everyone can have some precious metals, and you've got to think that's purchasing power outside of the banking system, and it's purchasing power that's no one else's liability.
	So that's pretty much a no-brainer to start with.
	Second, you mentioned RVs.
	You can get very cheap RVs.
	And I really like the kind of the old school diesel trucks.
	The Fords are my favorite from 95 to call it 2002 because they had a motor called a 7.3 power stroke diesel, which is pretty much...
	Most people think it's the best motor ever, unless you're a Dodge Cummins person, and then you'd say it's the 12-valve or the 24-valve Cummins.
	But, you know, to have one of these trucks and then have an RV out there that's stocked full of food, I think, again, what's your downside there?
	And you've got to realize, you know, we don't really, I think this doesn't really sink in.
	In the United States and in Canada, because we've never in our lifetimes, we've never really had an issue with food.
	If anything, we have an issue with too much food.
	But people need to go back to like the Arab Spring.
	And they need to go back to these times in other countries where they have extreme amounts of civil unrest, where the people go out to the streets.
	With the torches and pitchforks.
	And if you study history, you realize that one of the main catalysts to social unrest is high food prices.
	When you can't put a roof over your head, talking about real estate prices going to the moon, or you can't, and rents going up, inflation, and you have food prices or food shortages where you can't put food on the table.
	That's when it gets ugly really, really quick.
	And what does that look like?
	I think it looks a lot like the looting and the riots we had in the United States back in 2020 or so.
	And that's when you do not want to be in a city.
	You don't want to be in an urban area.
	And now you might not have the means to buy a farm.
	Or to be able to produce things on your own.
	But if you at least have that diesel truck and an RV full of food, you can get out of the line of fire and get to a place that's a little more calm and then figure out what your next move is going to be.
	So again, I think number one, have some precious metals to get some purchasing power outside of the banking system, purchasing power that isn't someone else's liability.
	And then have that means of transportation and that ability to get out of Dodge and just sustain yourself and your family for a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and let the dust settle and kind of go from there.
	Yeah, and let me just be the doom and gloom black pill, George.
	I mean, that presumes, on the one hand, you can even get gas for your RV.
	It presumes that you can even have an RV parked on the street without it getting, you know, having the wheels stolen.
	I mean, someone emailed me.
	I get a lot of emails.
	Viva's got it all listed.
	His RV's going to be empty.
	The car that's going to be looted.
	I got an email that says, Viva, have two years of food ready.
	I'm like, dude, if that's what it comes down to, and even if I have that two years of food, well, what's the only healthy person on the street?
	How long are they going to last when everyone else doesn't have two years of food?
	I mean, when the shit hits the fan.
	And all hell breaks loose.
	Great.
	You got a nice RV.
	You can go and live in the woods for an extra two weeks.
	But like someone in the chat said, if a nuclear bomb goes off, George, somewhere else, you'll get an extra month in Colombia.
	But by that point, everyone's going down.
	I mean, how can people change this?
	I mean, people say vote, elections have consequences.
	But I mean, between you and Robert, who's got an idea?
	How do you change this?
	Can it be changed?
	Are we being controlled by forces beyond our control, beyond our say?
	I think, and I'd love to hear Robert input on this, but I think the first thing that everyone listening can do is just realize that the media is manipulating you.
	It is to the benefit of the politicians, the global elite, the World Economic Forum, and therefore the media.
	For the United States to get involved with Russia, Ukraine.
	That they are incentivized to make that happen.
	So in order to further that objective, they need public support.
	And the way that they do that is through the media.
	They want you to get hyper-emotional.
	They want to whip you up into this frenzy.
	And they want to make it seem as though this is just simply good versus evil.
	And then they also want to make Russia look weak.
	Because if you get super angry, super emotional, to where you're not even thinking straight, and you think that Russia's weak, that we can just go in there and clean their clock in two or three days.
	And you see...
	You know, the downside to allowing, you know, Putin to continue what he's doing or you just get this picture painted to you that is completely removed from nuance and reality.
	The bottom line there is it enables you to or it motivates you to support something that if you weren't as emotional and if you weren't just being fed this overly simplified kind of movie script.
	That there's just this good guy and bad guy.
	In other circumstances, there's no way you would support the United States going to war, especially if it was against someone that had access to 6,000 nuclear weapons.
	So I think that's first and foremost.
	Even if you're on social media, if you're watching Fox, CNN, I don't care what it is, just remember that you need to try to look at that objectively.
	And exclude all emotion possible and just think critically and always be hyper-skeptical of every single media source.
	You know, I spoke with one of my mentors, but my favorite investor of all time, Jim Rogers, just a couple weeks ago.
	And, you know, he gave me some great advice.
	I told him, I said, Jim, you know, we're living in this world that's just nonstop propaganda.
	I mean, it's obviously we're getting propaganda from Russia, but we're getting just as much propaganda from the West.
	And everyone knows that Jim Rogers is extremely famous for investing in all these crises type situations and understanding the political risk involved.
	And I asked Jim point blank, I said, Jim, how do you find the truth?
	Because it's so difficult to do right now.
	And he said his secret is just to, Go to multiple media sources, not in the same country, but different countries.
	So you start with the media source in the West.
	Then you read the media source in Russia that you know is propaganda.
	Then you go ahead and read a media source.
	Let's say...
	Al Jazeera or something.
	And then you read a few other media sources in other countries that are looking at this and maybe not involved.
	And then once you read these four or five media sources, then you try to strip out all the noise and distill it down to something that makes sense to you that is the actual truth.
	And I think that's the best advice I received from Jim Rogers, and I would encourage everyone doing that to make sure that they're thinking critically and not being, you know, having this emotional impulse, this reactionary impulse to support the United States getting involved with World War III.
	Yeah, I mean, I consider it like layers of self-defense.
	And the first layer of self-defense is self-education.
	Because that's the only means of self-empowerment.
	So that's the first thing, is to have a fair, reasonable sense of what your risks are, what you can do to help prepare and plan for those risks within your own capacity.
	But that first step is definitely self-education.
	And as George mentioned, it's coming up with trustworthy, reliable sources or using a methodology that allows you to get trustworthy information out of whichever sources you're looking at.
	And you'll look at people who are accurate versus inaccurate in terms of short-term predictability.
	Range of things over time.
	Look to the logic.
	How logical is their argument?
	I'm right now describing to people, if you take whatever is being said and do a confession through projection analysis, it is striking how honest some of these people are.
	Accidentally being.
	So you'll have somebody saying, like, there's a recent version where they're saying, oh, the problem with Putin is nobody's willing to tell him the truth about Russian military failure and crippling sanctions.
	And I was like, well, really, that doesn't quite make sense.
	Either in the military side, I mean, the rubles almost all the way back to where it was when it started.
	It's like, I mean, only, but Biden believed the ruble.
	He called it rubble two days ago.
	And it's like, what, is that from a month ago?
	Where did he get that analysis?
	But if you did confession through projection, These people will tell you what they're really thinking.
	Because if you just change Putin to Biden and you just changed badly to well and just did a couple of reversals, all of a sudden they're saying nobody's telling Biden that this is how it's going and that this strategy is not working and that this is backfiring.
	They're being accidentally honest.
	So there's methods of analysis where you can really get valuable information.
	And that's the first step.
	And then figure out all the different levels of self-defense.
	Like, you know, Russia did it on a...
	Nationwide level.
	And what George is talking about, Columbia already has.
	But like you as an individual, what do you need to survive?
	What is the most important to you?
	How can you put yourself in the best situation to have that even if circumstance A, B, C, or D happens?
	So you always have a plan B, as George puts it.
	That doesn't mean you don't have a plan A. And as part of plan A is arguing in the court of public opinion is critical.
	So the reality is unpopular wars politically are unsustainable.
	So that's where people push back in the public narrative.
	And you kind of have these concentric circles of influence.
	You have the politicians at the center of it.
	Then you have the press.
	Then you have what I call the persuaders.
	And then you have the partisans.
	And then you have the public.
	If enough noise comes from outside the centers of power.
	to the centers of power, then you can get them to change policy.
	Because the one useful thing about politicians looking to buy votes Is they don't want to lose votes.
	And so you have enough ability to push back that they say, hold on a second, that's not where we're going to go.
	And part of that, of course, is being self-informed, self-educated, sharing the information, and then being active.
	When people that are donors, even small donors, even when people are volunteers in political organizations and activities and other information-gathering activities, that's how the world changes.
	I mean, the world, I mean, America...
	Before the United States of America, we had a bunch of royal governance for, what, centuries?
	And all of a sudden, people got together in a tavern, read a little bit of Thomas Paine, and before then, we had the greatest democratic revolutionary experiment in world history.
	So, ordinary people can always say, you know, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he didn't exist.
	The greatest trick the system ever pulls is convincing you you cannot resist.
	He's a great example.
	Exactly.
	Now, there's a lot of...
	I'm not even saying they're jokes.
	There's people in the chat saying, yeah, firearms are necessary for protection, for fending...
	I'm always for every mechanism of self-defense that you have.
	You should train yourself also in physical ways of self-defense, too.
	I mean, at every level of it.
	So you don't look as embarrassing as Will Smith did trying to slap Chris Rock.
	Have some levels of layers.
	His footwork was great, Robert.
	I'm going to read just a few chats so I don't forget to do them.
	This is from Deuce.
	GoTechLX says, Viva, ask George, how much worse are things now than they were before the subprime crash in the 2000s?
	Oh, as far as the systemic risks, I think much, much greater.
	And so why?
	Just look at the outstanding debt.
	So if you go back to sovereign debt back then...
	Right off the top of my head, I would assume maybe 50% debt to GDP.
	Now it's at 130%.
	The corporate debt was a fraction of what it is.
	And the consumer debt was also a fraction back then compared to what it is today.
	The only thing that I would say is better right now are the United States banks have quite a bit more liquidity.
	Because of the process of quantitative easing, but we know that that can just turn on a dime because the assets on their balance sheet can be revalued, or they can just not have access to the repo market, things that we were talking about earlier.
	The Feds tried to backstop that, but who knows what type of black swan event we could get that would create this catalyst.
	To where the whole house of cards would come crashing down.
	But there's different cross currents there.
	But overall, the risks are far, far, far greater today than they were back then.
	Yeah, just an example of how over leveraged we are compared to then.
	What was the Fed balance sheet back then?
	Was it $1 trillion?
	Was it like one-tenth of what it is today?
	It was $800 billion, Robert.
	Wow.
	And was it almost $9 trillion currently?
	Almost $9 trillion.
	Right.
	And then also, you know, we were talking about that one thing the banks have going for them in the United States.
	And remember, it's a global banking system.
	But in the United States is that liquidity.
	But what's the Fed talking about doing?
	Quantitative tightening.
	So the process of quantitative tightening is where they are just not rolling over their debt.
	But bottom line is they're taking those bank reserves that really are the only thing that the banks have going for them out of the system.
	And also, let's look at the inversion of the yield curve.
	How's that for banks that make money by borrowing short and lending long?
	What does that do when the long end of the curve or the long rates are lower than the rates in which you can borrow?
	That means that the banks are getting pinched as well.
	It's not a good situation right now.
	That's why I've got a lot of cash.
	Chalmer Basham, who has a great avatar.
	It says, what effect would a digital currency have on black market activity?
	Which is where some countries...
	Yeah, great point.
	I think that's the direction we're headed here because that's the global elite realize that that's one way that people could unplug from the system is if they just used cash and all these things, you know, they could have their own kind of...
	alternate economy, let's say, or ultimate or alternate society.
	But if they ban cash and get everyone on a central bank digital currency, then that would be completely impossible.
	And I think that's another reason why they are going to push for us going to a war so they can not only usurp more power and control.
	Above and beyond what they took over the COVID crisis.
	But they can also implement a central bank digital currency.
	Because obviously, you know, the truckers was a great example of this.
	We cannot allow people to have bank accounts that are outside of the purview of the central planners because who knows what they might do.
	In fact, these people in the United States, they might even support those terrorists, meaning the truckers, you know.
	And moving forward, if we go to war with Russia.
	Well, my goodness, all of those truckers and those crazy people like Robert Barnes and Viva Frye and George Gammon, the people that love liberty, they're being funded by Putin.
	And therefore, they're going to try to take some resources and maybe send them money to further their objectives in Ukraine.
	So we can't allow that to happen.
	I mean, that's very, very dangerous.
	So therefore, we need to ban cash and we need to have every single transaction go through the central bank, therefore central bank digital currency, so we can make sure that Russia isn't being improperly funded by people who are under the influence of Russia in the United States, like George Gammon, Viva Frye, and Robert Barnes.
	Or people who simply use the letter Z, because as part of Germany is now banning the letter Z as a symbol.
	I mean, they're always going to use it as an opportunity for a power grab.
	And it has been a little unsettling.
	Like, social media was designed to amplify and manipulate emotional responses.
	And as they've, like, I look back, I mean, I'm accustomed to all the crazy war propaganda that's taken place.
	We've been lying into every major conflict.
	You could argue about World War II, but every other war we've clearly been lied into getting into, whether it's, remember the mains, the sinking of the Lusitania, the Gulf of Tonkin, incubator babies in Iraq, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you name it, it's been one lie after another after another.
	And I'm always, when you go through history, it's always unsettling how many people buy the lie, especially people that were just got, you know, just a decade ago, figured out that they'd been lied to, and then here they are.
	Cheering the lie again.
	Buying it all over again.
	But it's clear social media has made it much worse.
	That it amplifies and manipulates these emotions to a whole different level.
	That people just are completely irrational.
	Supporting a war in a place they have no idea what's going on.
	No idea what the...
	Most people have no...
	I couldn't...
	Point out Ukraine on a map, and yet they got their flag on their little Twitter feed, right after Black Lives Matter and Dr. Fauci.
	The trilogy that was built up there.
	That part's been unsettling.
	I tell people one way to...
	To get good information is also to unplug as much as practicable from large aspects of social media.
	Go to independent sources, independent platforms, independent technologies to escape the social media matrix that wants to superimpose a bad value system on you.
	I think another quick tip, Robert, is just to look at what the mainstream media is labeling disinformation.
	And that's how you know it's truth.
	Yeah, exactly.
	It's basically a truth in advertising label is what it really is.
	If they say it's disinformation, there's probably something useful there, probably something helpful there.
	Now, how much do you think Bitcoin can be a useful tool in resisting this new global digital currency kind of world order?
	I think everyone should own Bitcoin.
	Not necessarily because of the price, but because it also gives you purchasing power outside of the system.
	But you don't want to hold that at a Coinbase or something like that.
	You've got to hold it in your back pocket.
	You've got to make sure that you hold it or else you don't own it.
	And so now, short term, it's still very difficult because you're under the control of the government.
	A form of money that could compete with the government.
	See, right now, Bitcoin is just simply an asset.
	It's an electronic asset.
	It's a reserve asset.
	And because it's increasing purchasing power, therefore increasing aggregate demand, the central planners love it because this is Keynesianism 101.
	Well, if you can give them something that increases their purchasing power, aggregate demand, then that's going to increase economic activity, and that's a good thing.
	But once it becomes a currency that competes with the dollar, then it changes the game there.
	And I think it changes the overall view of Bitcoin by the central planners.
	Because inevitably, they want to go to where the global reserve asset is the electronic SDR.
	And then the transactions within the domestic economies are the central bank digital currency.
	That's the direction they want to go.
	But again, I think that it's wise for everyone to have it.
	I think longer term, the way that an economy is going to grow, the way we're going to get out of this is through a decentralized approach.
	And Bitcoin is decentralized money.
	So I think it's fantastic.
	I just would warn everybody that in order to get from the world we're in today to a world where Bitcoin is being used as the global reserve currency and therefore outside of the control of the banksters and the central planners to get from A to B, that's where you're going to need the ammunition.
	You're going to need the gasoline and the RV full of food.
	All right.
	George, we definitely do this again, right?
	I don't know who's going to try to white-pill the crowd, which has now been thoroughly black-pilled suppository.
	George, do you want to try to give some inspiration?
	Like, you know, people don't go out and drink that bottle of vodka that you're saving to barter when there's no food left.
	Who's going to do it between the two of you?
	Well, I mean, I think there's room for optimism from a standpoint of this still is within our control.
	As an aggregate total in society, if we don't allow ourselves to be manipulated into going into a war, and we, like Robert said, educate ourselves, we realize what the...
	Global elite are trying to do.
	We realize that they've got these three levers and that it's up to us to push back to maintain the freedom and liberty that we have and to also promote free market capitalism.
	We can do that.
	And at the end of the day, the politicians, to a certain degree, are at our mercy because their number one priority is being reelected.
	And then the global elite don't have that much power and control if they don't control the politicians that are elected.
	I mean, that's, like Robert was saying, that's one reason why they hate Trump.
	And so it's going to be difficult, but it's still possible.
	And I think that's what gives us that ray of hope in continuing to fight for not only our freedom and liberty and current-day free-market capitalism, but for the freedom and liberty of our kids and grandkids.
	George, people know who you are, but just in case, where can they find you?
	I will pin the comments, and then I'm going to try to go out with my own white pill in 30 seconds.
	But where can they find you?
	Oh, just, you can Google my name or go on YouTube.
	I've got a couple channels that will pop up.
	The last name, George's typical spelling last name is G-A-M-M-O-N.
	Yeah, and hopefully he keeps doing it in three simple steps.
	Because you did one in five steps and that threw me off.
	I was like, no, no, it can't be five.
	It's got to be three simple steps.
	I love the whiteboard graphics.
	It's fantastic.
	I just lost the super chat.
	I was going to say, my problem with Bitcoin is that it can't be used for everyday purchases.
	Yeah, especially if you own it on an exchange and not in a cold wallet.
	I mean, good, you've got to convert it to fiat.
	I will try to put things in perspective, perspectivize things.
	So this Meteorite, I'm just going to bring it back up.
	I got it for $400 on the interwebs in 2008.
	All of these little dimples, they're called thumbprints, as in when it comes through the atmosphere, it gets hot and breaks off into little pieces.
	It came with a certificate, so you know it's original.
	I may or may not have gotten ripped off.
	It doesn't matter.
	What it symbolizes is that this is a piece of the cosmos that landed on this little speck of a planet in the greater universe.
	And at the end of the day, I don't know what it all means.
	I think we're all effectively worthless because at one point in time we're going to burn up and our entire existence will have never occurred.
	So I try to...
	I'm not a religious person, people, but what matters only is the legacy that you leave on this planet in as much as it ever lasts.
	Hard times, good times.
	Do not become the monster that you're trying to fight.
	And do not fight as dirty as the dirty politicians fight.
	And do not become as deceitful as the deceitful politicians are trying to manipulate and deceive the masses.
	So, I say that every time I hold this beautiful piece of meteorite.
	One day I'll have it tested to see if I totally got ripped off.
	George, we do this again.
	Robert, we're doing this again Sunday night.
	We'll see what happens between now and then.
	Stick around.
	We will say our proper goodbyes.
	Everyone in the chat.
	Thank you for tuning in.
	Thank you for being here.
	Thank you.
	It's amazing.
	It's amazing.
	I'm still a little depressed.
	I'm going to start looking at an RV right now.
	That might be an RV and just drive across the country.
	I can live off elk and I'll take my chances.
	That's a good survival tick.
	Learn how to fish.
	Learn how to fish like Viva.
	Hunt.
	I've never killed anything bigger than a big pike, but I can learn if I need to eat.
	George, Robert, stick around.
	Everyone else.
	Enjoy the evening.
	Tomorrow, Robert Risch at 12.30.
	Half hour early.
	I'll send out the link tonight after I create it.
	It's going to be phenomenal.
	We're going to do it on Rumble so we can have an open dialogue.
	And Robert, we'll see each other Sunday night.
	George, we'll say goodbye afterwards.
	Everyone else, peace.

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