"Gold Just Had Its Worst Day In History — Here's Why That Should Terrify You" | Jaspreet Singh

Right now, you've got central banks all over the world that are hoarding gold. When you have the people that control the monetary system actually shorting essentially their own currency and our currency quite frankly, what is it that the average investor needs to understand and fast that those guys already understand? >> When you invest your money, the question is what money are you investing? If you're in the United States, you're investing dollars. And so when you invest dollars into the stock market and you get the news that the stock market has grown by 10%. You feel good. But that's only relative to the dollar. And the reason why that's so important is because we assume that if the stock market is growing, my investments are growing and becoming more wealthy. But the question is, what is the measuring stick that you're using to see is this a 10% return actually good or not? Because if I got a 10% return in the stock market, but my cost of living has grown by 20%. >> Now all of a sudden that 10% doesn't look so good. If the stock market grows by 10%. But a different currency, say gold grows by 20%. Now all of a sudden that return doesn't look as good because compared to an other currency, and I'm going to call gold a currency because it has been the historical currency. Now that 10% return doesn't look so good either. And what we're seeing happening today is that gold prices have been growing faster than the stock market. And that's not normal because gold doesn't produce real economic value the way that say Amazon stock does or Chipotle stock. Now you might say, well Jasp, I can use gold to build a table. I can use gold to build jewelry. I can use gold in electronics. Sure. But gold, when you purchase gold as an investor, it sits there in a drawer and it looks back at you. It doesn't really do anything. You buy gold as a hedge against inflation. Meaning, I buy gold because I'm worried that my dollar is going to lose value. >> So, you think that the central banks are worried the dollar is going to lose value? >> I don't think I know. Uh, in fact, in 2025, it was one of the worst years for the United States dollar in the last century. Sorry, in the last decade. But it's not just the United States. You mentioned there's current countries around the world. China has been buying up gold. Poland has been buying gold. Turkey has been buying gold. And there's a reason why. Number one is they're concerned about what is going to happen to the value of the United States dollar because the dollar is known as the world's reserve currency. We can talk about what that means in a second. But the second issue is they want to now strengthen their currencies. That way, if the dollar does lose value, that they're not the ones that are picking up the tab for the dollar collapsing. And they want to protect themselves by having more assets, by having more collateral, by having more wealth. And that wealth now is not a fiat currency like the dollar. It is gold >> because gold has been money for longer than we've been alive. [snorts] Now, walk me through what what exactly is happening that's made everybody have almost a universal consensus that the dollar's in trouble. Let's start with why is the United States dollar the world's reserve currency to know how we built our strength. That way you can see how we're losing the value. Because the United States dollar wasn't always the world's reserve currency. We became the world's reserve currency in the mid 1990s. Around 1944, we became known as the world's reserve currency because now we were a growing economy. We were a growing superpower and this dollar was very powerful because we as a country did not have a lot of debt while we had a very strong economy at the same time. So now the world started to look as the United States dollar as the world's reserve currency which means a lot of global trade was now happening in the dollar which includes things like oil. So if you wanted to buy oil doesn't matter if you're in the United States or not you were buying it in dollars. And then things started to change over time because back in the mid 1900s that dollar that we had was backed by physical gold which meant that if I spent $100 I was spending gold. It was just a dollar representation a paper representation of physical gold. But then things changed on August 15th 1971 because then President Richard Nixon was facing economic troubles. We had a lot of debts. countries around the world were saying pay us back because we lent money to you. We didn't have enough money and remember money was gold to pay back all these countries. So we had two options. We could declare default meaning bankruptcy and have a huge economic crisis >> or do something unique. And President Richard Nixon decided to do something unique. And what the unique thing was is he took the dollar off of the gold standard, which meant now we said, "Okay, we owe you, let's just say hypothetically, a billion dollars. Right now we don't have a billion dollars worth of gold. So how about we just take the dollar off of the gold standard. We can print a billion dollars with the push of a button. Here's your billion dollars. We get to keep all of our gold." >> And in the beginning, it felt great. We could pay off all of our debts. We could stimulate our economy because now the government could spend money like crazy because all of a sudden we have a money printer that doesn't need more wealth which is gold and we can just keep printing money or what we thought was money and now we can spend it in the economy. We can create jobs. The economy starts to boom. The markets are booming. But then there was a consequence because the most expensive kind of money is free money and that consequence is inflation. So in the late 1970s now we went through what was called a stagflation era. This was the highest reported inflation rates that we've seen in the last century even higher than the pandemic because we were spending so much money we didn't have. And now the cost of living has gone up so much while the economy is slowing which means wages are falling. People don't have jobs but prices keep going up. That's what stagflation is. And then we had to fix this problem. And by we, I mean our central bank here in the United States, the Federal Reserve Bank had to fix the problem. And what they did was then chairman Paul Vulkar raised interest rates significantly, close to 20%. So we talk about during the pandemic era, we raised interest rates to 3, four, 5%. We're talking about near 20% during the early 1980s, which meant when you go to get a 30-year mortgage, you weren't paying five, six, or 7%. You're paying 15, 16, 17, 18, 19% on that mortgage. >> But they had to do that to save the dollar because there was concerns about the dollar collapsing, hyperinflation, about the dollar not being a reserve currency anymore. And so we had to raise interest rates to to save the value of the dollar. And that was when we went through a very deep recession. But then our money printing problems did not go away because we continued to spend money we didn't have. And that accelerated during the 2008 crash when the great financial crisis happened in 2008. The economy was in freefall. Wall Street was collapsing. We had firms just going bankrupt everywhere. And now to save this, we had the Federal Reserve Bank start doing what's called quantitative easing, which is money printing. They started printing money and lowering interest rates. Lowering interest rates make it cheaper for people to borrow money. So you can get a mortgage cheaper. You can borrow money for a car cheaper. institutions can go borrow money and invest it in the stock market cheaper while the Federal Reserve Bank is printing money and then they're injecting it into the economy as a way to stimulate the economy. Now, the concern when that happened during the 2008 crisis was we're printing so much money because we printed over a trillion dollars which was unheard of during the 2008 crisis. That that was unheard of. >> And so the concern was we're going to destroy the value of the dollar. we're going to have hyperinflation. So during the 2008 crash time, we saw the stock market go down. We saw real estate prices go down. Gold prices were shooting up because people said, "If the dollar collapses, I want to own real real money." What's real money? Gold. So investors are buying up gold like crazy. And then 2012 came and remember 2012 was when real estate prices bottomed and they started to go back up. The stock market started hitting new highs. The economy finally feel it started feeling like it was recovering. So 2012 came and now investors said, "Oh, we're not going to have hyperinflation. It looks like we survived this crisis. We don't need gold. We need real assets." So in 2012, gold prices crashed. Stocks started to go up. Real estate started to go up. And gold prices stayed low. 2013, 2014, 2015 until 2020. 2020 hit. The pandemic happened, the economy gets shut down, and now all of a sudden we started quantitative easing again, but not one trillion dollars. We're talking about multi- trillion dollars. And what happened to gold? Gold prices started shooting up because now the same concerns happened. We are printing money like crazy. We are diluting the value of the dollar. It's dollar devaluation. And if this happens, if the dollar loses value, we need a real money to save. And so people started buying up gold again. And so in 2020, yes, we saw markets collapse. And then markets started to go up again because we were pumping money into the markets at a rate we've never seen before. But gold prices also started to go up. And that happened in 2021 through 2020, the early part of 2026. All because of concerns about the dollar. And then a lot of things happened in 2026 which completely shifted the dollar again because President Trump made just made one of the I shouldn't say one of the biggest economic decision of his presidency yet. And that change is going to impact the dollar, gold, silver, stocks, and the value of your 401k as well. We'll be back to the show in just a second, but let's first talk about a system that was not built for the world that we're currently living in. The traditional retirement playbook was designed for a different era. Bonds were safe. 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And this is that concept that now a lot of people need to understand, which is what is the Federal Reserve Bank? because President Trump just appointed a new chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank. And how is that going to impact your investments? So, let's break that down. >> So, you think the Fed chair is the most consequential decision he's made so far? >> Because that is going to directly impact every single person. And the reason why it's so consequential is because the Federal Reserve Bank, although they're called the Federal Reserve Bank, they're not a bank because you and I can't go there to deposit money. They're not a reserve because they're not sitting on any cash reserves and they're not federal. They're not a part of the United States government. And so over the last since Trump entered the White House in 2025, President Trump has been very critical of the Federal Reserve Bank. You may have heard him say, "We need lower interest rates. Too late. Powell is not cutting interest rates." Well, he couldn't do anything about it. meaning President Trump, he couldn't tell pres uh Jerome Powell, who was the chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank, the head of it, to lower interest rates. He can't tell them what to do. He couldn't even fire Jerome Powell >> because they are separate from the United States government. And the central bank >> has such a big influence not just on our economy, but the global economy because the dollar is the world's reserve currency. So when the Federal Reserve Bank makes any decision, whether it's cutting or raising interest rates or money printing, the entire world watches and the entire global economy reacts to that, not just the United States. So now when President Trump has the ability to appoint a new chairman because Jerome Powell's term is expiring on May 15th, 2026, which means because he's expiring, President Trump has the ability to appoint a new chairman. That's the only reason why. And so because that time is happening today, President Trump gets to appoint a new chairman. And he has said time and time again in 2025. He said, "I'm going to appoint somebody who will do what I say." And what does President Trump want? He wants the lowest interest rates of any developed nation in the world. Number two, he does not want Federal Reserve Bank independence. He wants the Federal Reserve Bank to do what the White House wants. He wants the Federal Reserve Bank to come into the White House and to be there for meetings on what decisions need to be made about the economy. The reason why that's so significant is because if President Trump wants more money printing, he wants more stimulus, he wants lower interest rates, that could influence now the entire global economy. But there's a few nuances that really need to be made aware of. So in the early part of 2026, gold prices were booming, silver prices were booming because of exactly this. We did not know who President Trump was going to pick. And President Trump said again and again and again, I want somebody who is going to aggressively cut interest rates, who is going to aggressively print money because President Trump says he wants a weaker dollar. Which might sound weird, but the reason why he wants a weaker dollar is because a weaker dollar means a stronger stock market. It means foreign countries can buy more stuff in the United States. And so while it's not good if I'm trying to buy groceries, if I have a weaker dollar, it's good for the wealthy, the investors, because now my assets keep going up. And so President Trump says, "I want a weaker dollar. I want more uh stimulus and I want more cutting of interest rates because that means asset prices are going to rise." So, as we kept getting closer to President Trump announcing who he wants to lead the Federal Reserve Bank, gold prices, silver prices were skyrocketing. Bitcoin prices were skyrocketing because we didn't know who he was going to pick. But if he picks somebody like he says, that person who's going to lead the Federal Reserve Bank is going to lead to a weaker dollar. It could lead to a dollar collapse. It could lead to more inflation. It could lead to all these problems. The hedge is clearly gold. maybe Bitcoin, maybe silver. And then President Trump came out and he announced a guy by the name of Kevin Worsh to lead the Federal Reserve Bank. And that many investors did not expect. The reason why I say that is because as soon as he was nominated by President Trump, gold prices fell, Bitcoin prices fell, silver prices fell. In fact, it was one of the worst days for Bitcoin in years. It was one of the worst days for gold in the history of time. Why? Because Kevin Worsh, and again, we don't know what he's going to do yet. This is just based off of his previous experience. >> Kevin Worsh used to work at the Federal Reserve Bank during the 2008 crash. And during that time, under Ben Bernaki, who was the chairman of the Fed, Kevin Wars said, "Stop quantitative easing. It's going to destroy the dollar." Kevin War said, "Stop cutting interest rates. We need higher interest rates to save the dollar." So when you look at that, if that person comes in with any of that type of mentality of, I want a stronger dollar, now you're going to say, "Wait, does he want to save the dollar?" Because if he wants to save the dollar, maybe I don't need gold as much. Maybe I need more stocks or real estate or other assets because maybe the dollar is going to be okay. Then Kevin Borsch addressed this whole idea of the Federal Reserve Bank independence because the reason why, and we'll get into more of this in a little bit, but the the the the reason why the Federal Reserve Bank wants to be independent is because no president is going to want a recession on their hands. If I'm a president, I get to control economic policy. I'm going to say, "Cut interest rates and print money >> because under my presidency, the economy is going to boom. the next president will deal with the inflation problem, but at least under my presidency, it's going to boom. That's why the Federal Reserve Bank wants to be independent from the Federal Reserve Bank. So now when you get the news that this Kevin Worsh is going to come in and he addresses this independency by saying, I want to maintain Fed independency, although we can get general advice from the White House. >> That was a very different tone from what President Trump said because President Trump said, "I want the Fed to do what I say. I want them in my meetings and I want them to do as I tell them. Kevin War said, "Maybe not." >> Do you have a sense of why Trump went with WSH? >> I don't know. I really don't know because the funny part is, you know, Peter Schiff has talked about this too that hey, when President Trump elected Kevin Worsh, do you not know that this guy's a hawk? Hawks are people that want higher interest rates. That's not what you've been saying. Maybe President Trump wants somebody that he can blame if he doesn't get the things he wants his way because remember Jerome Powell was also appointed by President Trump during his first term in 2017. So President Trump picked him 2017 and 2018 President Trump started criticizing Jerome Powell. >> Could there be something to do with it? Maybe. But what Kevin Worsh is saying up until now, again, this is contingent upon what actually happens in May is he says we can do two things simultaneously. We can do lower interest rates without causing inflation if we tighten the balance sheet. Tightening the balance sheet means removing money from our economy. So when the Federal Reserve Bank says we want a looser balance sheet, it's fancy Wall Street jargon for saying we want to print more money. When they say we want to tighten the balance sheet, it means we want to pull money out of the economy. So what Kevin Worsh has said up until today is we want to pull money out of the economy, but we also want to cut interest rates because if we cut interest rates, getting a mortgage will be cheaper. People can buy more houses. Wall Street institutions can refinance their debt at a lower interest rate and they'll be able to borrow more money and inject it into the stock market. But if we also make the balance sheet lower, we pull money out of the economy, we should be able to manage inflation. We'll see how true that is. >> What mechanism is he going to use to lower the balance sheet? So let's start by understanding how you expand the balance sheet and that way you can easily understand what it means to tighten the balance sheet because expanding the balance sheet it's what started on December 1st 2025. So between 2020 to 2022 we went through quantitative easing. Quantitative easing is money printing. So the Federal Reserve Bank in 2020 turned on the money printer and they started injecting money trillions of dollars into the economy to boost markets. Then in 2022, it became clear that inflation was not going away. So then they started what was called quantitative tightening. And if quantitative easing is injecting money into the markets, meaning buying assets, buying securities, more specifically giving lending money to the United States government, quantitative tightening is the opposite. It is selling these treasuries. So let's back up and explain. >> How's it going to get? So I I definitely understand that mechanism. I think most of my audience will as well, but >> um how's he going to make sure that there's an appetite for the treasuries? Like if you're trying to sell into the market, typically you would raise interest rates. So people are like, "Hey, risk-free rate of returns going up. Yep. I'll take some of that." >> So has he signaled how exactly he plans to both lower the interest rate and create demand for what he wants to sell into the market? >> That's the problem that we have right now is the demand for United States Treasuries is already falling. Yeah, that's why in 2026, the Federal Reserve Bank has begun buying more United States treasuries because we're losing those buyers. And now with everything going on in Japan, we might have even less United States buyers. >> So that's going to be >> So Wsh hasn't signaled anything about how he actually plans to do that. He's just said, "Hey, you can like if we can lower the interest rates and get people to buy, cool, all good." But he's not dumb. Like I've seen him. He is very shrewd on the economy. So either he has a plan that he's not indicating or and by the way I can't imagine what that is. Doesn't mean it's not there. Uh or he is Trump is getting a one-two punch of Bessant saying you don't understand. You've got to get this guy. He's the most he's not going to be political. So he's not going to be like Powell. uh but at the same time he understands that this is a very dynamic situation and to both protect the overall economy and the dollar he's going to have to walk a fine line and so there may be times where he tightens and you don't want him to but trust that he's going to have the whole economy uh in mind I can't see anything other than him getting to war saying listen I'm going to be reasonable I understand what you're trying to get to I want that as well and then Bessant saying, "Trump, you can't always have the thing that you want right now in this moment. We have to protect the overall thing." Can you imagine like even if it's a thought exercise, like what else he might be saying? >> I think there's two things. Number one, people talk, actions speak very differently than what people do. So, let's see what he actually does if >> Trump actually nominated him. So, you think that there's the behind the scenes he's like, "Listen, bro. I'm going to lower rates. Don't worry about it." >> There's there's a very high possibility. But I think the second part of that is economic policy because President Trump has been very involved with foreign countries and foreign investors to get them to invest money in the United States. So maybe there is some idea that President Trump is going to be working with these countries, investors around the world to get them to invest money into treasuries. Maybe there are some ideas or we can call them games that will be played there because we've already seen a number of other ideas slashgames that are being played by the United States government to boost assets in other places. Let's start with crypto. In 2025, the p the United States government launched a new executive order relating to crypto, which is when we now seize Bitcoin, we're no longer going to sell it. we're going to start holding this Bitcoin. The idea being that number one, if we hold this Bitcoin instead of selling it, we as the United States can increase the number of assets that we have, so we can borrow more money. And number two, if we own more of these Bitcoin assets, we might be able to revalue this Bitcoin at some point in the future, which will allow us to borrow more money. Now, you might say, well, what does revaluing Bitcoin mean? Let me explain that with gold because the second thing that we're seeing that could happen is the revaluation of gold. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank announced that they are considering revaluing our gold reserves in the United States. What that means is right now it is reported, not confirmed, but reported that we own around 261 million ounces of gold. This gold is valued at around $42 per ounce, which means on our assets, our balance sheet, we own approximately 11 or so billion dollars worth of gold as the United States government. Well, when gold is at three, four, $5,000 an ounce, there's a big delta between what our gold is currently valued at and what it's actually valued at. So now we have the Federal Reserve Bank saying, "What if we revalue our gold instead of $42 an ounce at $3,000 or $3,300 an ounce? Now all of a sudden, we can increase the amount of assets that we own on our balance sheet by over $800 billion without actually buying another penny of gold just by changing our accounting, which allows us now to borrow more money and show other investors, hey, our collateral is worth more." Because the whole idea of people not investing money into the United States, not lending money, not buying treasuries, is because people are concerned about the United States dollar's ability to pay it back. Well, if we can show, hey, we are actually much wealthier than you might think. We own way more assets than you might think. And because we own all these more assets, you're getting a bargain rate. And that can then incentivize more people to lend money or invest money in the United States because now all of a sudden it's a much more creditworthy investment >> and that's going to be part of the economic policy that we need to show that we have more assets in order to justify more people to invest money here. >> Interesting. Okay. So an international play war is a part of that. He has a good reputation. He's somebody that people trust. And so there's and I'm putting words in your mouth, but this at least makes sense to me that in some ways we're using we being I think this is a play largely of Bessant. I again could be making that up. But if I'm looking from the outside in, I'm going all right Bessant communicating to the world. Listen, I understand how you guys perceive Trump. He's radical. He's erratic. We've got WS steady hand hawk. He gets it. Um he's going to be far more communicative with the government. We're going to be working in lock step to grow the economy. And so he's going to make sure that we don't get eaten alive by our debt. He's going to make sure that he's deafed with the value of the dollar. I'll leave that vague. Um and we're going to structure some interesting deals where as you guys invest some of that we're going to put into treasuries to make sure that we have global appetite. So instead of the treasury having to buy it, you guys making all these investments for chip manufacturing, whatever. We give you breaks, tax incentives, yada yada. You funnel some of that money into the treasury and then I know they have big plans for crypto in terms of forcing them to back things onetoone with US treasuries. So you open up that appetite and voila, we've got a steady hand in the Fed who's playing ball but is not reckless with the dollar or the interest rates. And now we look better to an international investor who feels, okay, cool. I don't need to hedge everything in gold. you guys are making sense. >> Yeah, that's >> it's very interesting. Um I had not extrapolated that far. We'll see. Obviously, any of that could break down. There's a lot of assumptions and as you said, paying attention what they do versus what they say is very wise, but there's internal logic to what you're saying. Okay. Um I want to put another thing on the table when it comes to the um the central banks buying up gold. I think that China is unquestionably trying to march towards backing the yuan with gold. Now, this is maybe giving XI way too much credit, but I think what he's doing is going, "Okay, listen. I understand my international uh reputation is that I'm a dictator, which I am, and so at any time I could seize your assets. So, what I'm going to do is build the gold corridor. I'm going to partner with some country as yet to be named that will hold the gold." And we're going to say, "Listen, I do not control the gold. So, at any time if you guys want to reclaim your gold, you can. I can't pull a Nixon because I'm not the one holding the gold. I can't break my tether to gold. Um, and now the yuan, which he literally just made the call. He didn't he didn't mention gold, but he did make the call for the world to start using the yuan as the world's reserve currency. And so you put those together with them being I think the largest buyer of gold at the central bank level and it's like, okay, I get it. This is rising China, declining US, Xi making a play to be the world's reserve currency to replace the US, but he understands the reality that he's got to prove to people that he's a safe place for capital. Um, you didn't mention that in the breakdown other than that China's one of the people buying. Do you feel that that's a part of this, a small part, a big part? >> No, it's a it's a it's a big part, but it goes beyond just gold. The United States and China are fighting very close to a war, but it's not with tanks and guns. It's with the economy. And the reason why is exactly what you're saying. Right now, the United States economy is significantly larger than China's economy. But the Chinese economy is growing faster than the United States economy. And so now we have a lot of reports saying that we're not too far away if this continues that the Chinese economy is going to be larger than the United States economy which poses a threat not just to our economy but now to the United States dollar and reserve status of our currency. And that would have a huge colossal effect not just on the dollar but our entire economy here because our entire economy is is supported through money printing and stimulus because the government is spending trillions of dollars every year. And our economy is addicted to the government's money printing. But the only reason why we can do that is because people have faith in the dollar. And the reason why they have faith in the dollar is because of the reserve status. So now we have China that's saying let's strengthen our currency. How? Let's keep buying gold. Let's keep trying to grow our economy. Now China's economy is facing issues, but their economy has been growing faster than the United States's economy. And now you have to wonder, well, what is going to happen next? And now we we can see what's happening in economic policy, which is what's the real reason behind tariffs? Because you might say, what do you mean? And it's to generate tariff revenue. No, it's not. Because why is it that not every country is tariffed equally? Not just that, why is it that tariffs are being used to get people to not do business with specific countries. So when we start to look at what's happening with China and Russia, we'll focus on China. A big reason why the United States government is putting tariffs on China rather than just generating tariff revenue is to get US businesses out of China >> as a way to hurt China. Why is it that the United States government went into Venezuela and captured the president of Venezuela? Because China was one of the not one of was the biggest buyer of Venezuelan oil. We want to weaken China's ability to get that oil to be able to get access into Latin America. But by getting US businesses out of China, that hurts their economy, makes them grow slower. Because if they continue growing, if their currency continues growing, while the United States and the United States dollar is not, that puts us in a very tough situation because if we ever lose our status as the world's reserve currency, we're going to go through a very deep recession that will make the 2008 crisis feel almost like a walk in the park. because it won't just be a recession, it'll also be a dollar crisis. And that's something that we really we've never seen. And that's the type of problem that now we want to start being proactive to to think about. How do we how do we protect ourselves from that? >> We'll be right back to the show in a second, but right now, I want to talk about what [music] a mis call can actually cost you. Every mis call is a customer choosing your competitor. It's revenue walking out the door. And if your team can't see the full conversation history, you are making customers [music] repeat themselves. That's how you lose trust and annoy your customers. Most businesses are still [music] running on systems that were designed for 2010. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo. Quo [music] is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews built for how modern teams [music] actually work. Over 90,000 businesses trust Quo to stay connected and consistently [music] reachable. Quo's AI automatically logs calls, generates summaries, and highlights next steps so nothing slips through the cracks. Try [music] Quo for free. Plus, get 20% off your first 6 months at quo.com/impact. [music] That's spelled quo.com/impact. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. And now, let's get back to the show. >> Yeah. So, for me, um, there are two things that are going to really play out over the next 10 years. You've got USV China, you've got AI. Um, I'll set aside the AI thing for a minute because what we're about to talk about, I think AI could invalidate, but I want to explore it as a thought exercise. Okay. So, as the US and China are doing battle economically, how do you see this playing out? So Trump is claiming that we've got all these investments flooding into the US, trillions and trillions of dollars. It's all going to start manifesting. We're deregulating. That's going to unlock all this growth. Um and China has its own sort of 2008 maybe on steroids crisis with what happened to their housing market. Um demographic question marks depending on if you're in the Peter Zion camp or the Peter Zion is a camp. Uh there's a lot of battle there in terms of what their economic outlook looks like going forward. Um do you see the US doing things what I'll call pressing their latestage advantage? So Trump is being ultraaggressive trying to hurt China. Um showing the world we have the most powerful military um playing the hand of being the world's reserve currency to continue to print money and do things. We're printing $40 billion a month right now. So, we're we're still playing that age-old game. Um, is that going to make us stronger or is that going to weaken us in the face of a China that's being more consiliatory, reaching out to the world, trying to establish its dominance in its own hemisphere, which it does not look like the US is going to offer a serious challenge, maybe via Japan, but um, how do you see that playing out? Well, money printing never makes you stronger. It It makes you weaker. But what I think is going to happen, and I think the more important thing that the average person needs to understand is that it's going to create new opportunities to put your money, >> investment opportunities. >> Investment opportunities. >> Walk me through that because this feels like I look at the economy and it's skittish because it doesn't even understand the world order anymore. >> Yeah. So every financially savvy investor wants to invest where the money is moving, not where it was. So anytime you see money move, that can create opportunity. The biggest spender in our economy, it's not you or me or Amazon or Nvidia, it's the United States government because they're spending our tax dollars and then some with all the borrowing and and money printing that they're spending. So now when you hear the news that the United States is trying to distance themselves from China, that changes a lot of things in our economy because we've been so heavily reliant on China. I'll give you one specific example. We start putting tariffs on China. China then responds obviously with tariffs and then they say something about rare earth minerals. We say no more rare earth minerals for you. And prior to the year 2025, the average person has no idea what the heck a rare earth mineral was. True. But what are these rare earth minerals? It's a group of these metals that we use in pretty much everything. We use them in our electronics. We use them in defense. We use them in in pretty much every part of our economy. And the reason why we never thought about them is because China is the world's leading refiner and producer of these rare earth minerals. They're not the only one that can mine them, but they're the ones that are actually refining them. And so for forever essentially, we've been getting these rare earths from China. And we in the United States don't have any supply chain for these rare earths, but we need them. We need them to produce iPhones. We need them for a lot of our economy. And so when China says, "No more rare earths for you." Now all of a sudden the US says, "Oh crap, how are we going to operate if we don't have access to these rare earths?" And this is where now we start to see shifting in money and opportunities because now what's happening is we have the United States government trying to combat this by building new rare earth supply chains, passing new government policies, investing money, tax dollars into private companies, into private stocks, which is not a normal thing to do. >> Do you love or hate that? >> Well, I don't like it. Yeah. >> I mean, well, let me let me put it this way. It makes me money, but I hate the idea of it because it screws over the average person. And that's why my goal is to say, "Here's what's happening. Learn how to use it." But they're investing money into private companies that are trading on the stock market. And they're trying to now build this whole new system, the supply chain for rare earths, which has never happened before. Why does that matter? Because the investors that understand these types of things, these shifts we call them, that creates opportunity. And the people that understand that now are seeing the ability to grow their investments in [snorts] ways that were never possible before because there's so many shifts happening. And that's where there are so many opportunities. Now, here's where it gets tricky. There's a difference between investing based off of what's on the news and investing based off of research. Uh so this is what my firm specializes in. It's it's the research side because [snorts] there's a lot of things that happen on the news and a lot of emotion that happens on the news. You'll hear the news about the United States buying shares of a stock. You'll hear about these rare earth stocks benefiting. But by the time it's on the news, a lot of the real money has been made. Now when it comes to research and anybody can do this. You just have to know where and how to research. This is now where you're you're digging one layer deeper to understand what is the United States government doing? What are Wall Street institutions doing? Where are they putting their money? That way you can identify where is money moving before it hits the headlines. Now this takes more leg work and more time. >> So but talk to me about what you guys are looking at and seeing. So, what I think I'm hearing you say is uh decoupling from China is uh long-term don't know. I I don't know how it's going to play out, but I do know it's causing money to move. And what it's doing is it's pulling money into the US economy so that we can start refining and handling our own supply chain for rare earths. And if you understand what rare earths are going to win, then there's a huge investable opportunity. >> Absolutely. And that's just one shift. Uh so you said what are we doing? Let me let me give a clear example of what a shift is and I'll kind of show you how we do that research so you can kind of see the progression. When the pandemic hit, what did many Americans do? Well, they got locked in their houses and people started buying cats and dogs. When people started buying cats and dogs, why does that matter for an investor? Because when people have more cats and dogs, they need more veterary care. They need more pet toys. They need more pet food. This is a shift because now as more and more money goes into this animal pet industry those companies those stocks can benefit. That is a shift of spending money. >> So now if you can identify where money is moving that can create an investment opportunity not trading but an investment opportunity because now you can identify where money is starting to go towards. So we're talking about rare earths. Well when this whole rare earth thing was happening this was very strange because the entire rare earth industry was essentially non-existent in the United States because there there was no need for it. It wasn't profitable because you could just buy it for China for a fraction of the price. And so now all of a sudden when China says no more rare earths for you, the United States government now starts passing executive orders, putting many billions of dollars into this industry and most people have no idea what is happening. So what we started doing, my analysts were number one starting to research well what's happening and then we were invited into a congressional summit where there was a announcement of of what the White House is going to do with critical minerals and and how they're planning on building their infrastructure and and different things that they want to do. So my analysts were there and we identified, okay, based off of what the government's doing, these companies, these stocks we believe could benefit. And so we published reports on that and that was one of our our top reports in 2025 because well we can see there are certain stocks that are primed to benefit from the United States government shifting money into this rare earth supply chain and if you know that the government is paving the way for this industry the leading companies that really haven't seen any stock movement in the last number of years they have nowhere to go but up because there's so much money going into this and it is essential for our economy. So that's one type of shift that we were identifying. Another one when the tariffs were happening in you know the early part of 2025 we knew in our firm now all of a sudden the global supply chain is going to change. So where do we now invest money? Where do we identify where money is moving? And what we saw was Wall Street investment firms on Wall Street. you know, the Black Rocks, the the big institutions started shifting where they were investing their money because they were now looking for ways to own pieces of the global supply chain through areas around the Panama Canal. And so we were starting to see them quietly put money into these new companies, these new shipping companies, these new supply chain industries where it wasn't on the news. >> And so we started because they have to report this information. And so we were reading their filings. We're identifying this. And now we published that research that hey, we're seeing more and more of these institutions put a lot of money quietly into these new supply chains because now that we're seeing companies buy not from China but from other countries and to ship it in a different route that can create an investment opportunity. So that's the type of research that we're doing and we publish in our market briefs pro reports because it's all about now understanding where's the money moving. Again, I'm not trying to trade because that to me is gambling. But as an investor, >> it's all gambling. >> It's all gambling. >> Higher volatility shortterm. But yeah, I think even the long-term stuff is gambling. You're just saying, listen, I have reason to believe that 5 years, 10 years, whatever from now, this is going to be worth more. Still a gamble, whatever. I don't want to get sidetracked on that. But what I do want to understand is, okay, um I think it sounds like we're agreeing that the old world order is breaking apart. Uh, I think Trump is a symptom, not a cause, but he is certainly a um catalyst in terms of making it maybe happen a little bit faster than it otherwise would have happened. Um, if we agree on that and we agree on a rising China, what what are going to be the big moves? And I I suppose now we have to put AI on the table. What are going to be the big moves in like the the shifts, the big shifts to use your word in the next five years? So the way I like to explain it is in the form of an onion. So let's talk about AI because it's probably the easiest to understand because when we think about investing in AI, what the average person thinks about is I want to invest in chat GPT cla or maybe Nvidia because >> I really hope that's not true, but you're probably right. >> But that that's I think the average person thinks AI and that's what they think. >> Yes. >> But now that's the outer layer of the onion. That's what everybody knows. And as an investor now you want to be thinking two, three, four, five layers deeper in this onion because now when we think about okay what does AI actually mean? AI is this idea of new technologies, more data, more stuff that's going to be stored in the cloud. Okay, so now we can start to peel back this onion. So what do we need in order for AI to happen? Well, we need more semiconductors. So as we start to think about AI, we know that semiconductors are a necessary part of AI. And that now becomes the second layer of the onion you can think about is okay, if AI grows, semiconductors could also benefit. And then you start to research that a little bit more. You see that the government is investing directly into semiconductor companies. They're passing executive orders into semiconductors. So maybe this layer of the onion is already kind of exposed. It's already been on the news. So now we can start to dig a little bit deeper. Now we think, okay, so semiconductors, yes, but what else does AI actually need? Whether or not Chat GPT wins or Claude wins, we need data centers. Data centers are a requirement for AI to work because anytime you go and you enter a prompt, that information is going to be stored somewhere. >> What do you think though? So on this specifically, uh, when I hear this kind of thing, I'm like, the reason I was nervous that your description of how people think about AI, uh, is troubling is because if you're not betting on the sector and you think you're picking a winning horse, you're putting yourself in a weak position. That's my stance. My sense also when I hear this is, well, what about there's like a whole hypothesis now about onrem. So, you've got what's going on with um Open Claw. I think that was the name they finally went with. Uh where what they're doing is trying to answer the call of like, okay, listen, I know there's a lot of companies, you're terrified of people accessing your private data, so you want to run this on your own computer. Uh you don't want to have to be beholden to somebody else's API call. So, what if we did all of this on a local machine that you control? And now I don't know that that is going to come to fruition, but when you start thinking about uh a Disney or whatever who's, you know, currently suing um Seance and saying, "Okay, hold on a sec. You guys trained on our data." Now, they're denying it, but nonetheless, you can understand why they would want to control their own IP in-house, train an AI that they control inhouse that other people can only access if it's a part of their model. And so I have a feeling whether it's creating a spreadsheet or it's creating an engine to make something look like Disney, people are going to want to go on prem. So as you watch these shifts happen, how do you guys not get overextended in making a like really specific bet? Or are you saying, "Bro, this is where I've gone." Like this is we're now a deep research firm. What we do is place individual bets. >> It's a little bit of both. So, let's let's go back and understand what does an investment portfolio look like? Because if you just invest all of your money into one industry, AI, it's less of kind of you're really now dialing it into one specific play and that's not the game that we're playing. We have a number of investments that we make and >> all based on where shifts are happening. based off of shifts are happening but also we want to hedge our own bets as well. So the traditional investment was something like the 6040 portfolio. >> Yep. >> 6040 portfolio is 60% stocks, 40% bonds. But the reason why this doesn't work for the average person anymore is because number one bonds have performed so bad and stocks have become extremely volatile and many people don't know where to invest money in stocks. Not to mention that now because of inflation, that same 10% return in the S&P 500 is leading to more and more people not having enough money to be able to retire. That's why the United States is facing a retirement crisis. So now, how do we build a new modern-day portfolio that has stocks and bonds, but not in the same way as before. So what we do is in our stock side, we don't do 6040. We're more closer to the 8020. But on the 80 side, 80 stocks, >> 80 stocks. >> On the the stock side, we are analyzing different types of shifts. And we have five proprietary shifts that we are constantly studying. Wall Street shifts, which is when [snorts] a Wall Street institution like the tariffs, they're shifting where they invest their money. Main Street shifts, when people businesses spend their money differently, like people are buying cats and dogs. Uh we have innovation shifts where we're studying IP. We're studying new patents. We're studying where new types of technology is shifting, a broad market shift, when there is a recession or interest rate cut or rising. Doesn't have to be in the United States. It could be anywhere in the world. Like in 2025, in the early part of in January 2025, investing in European banks was almost in uninvestable because the European unstability that was happening in the early part of 2025. What we discovered is we have these companies or these countries that are now stimulating banks. They're printing money, stimulating banks, but their stock price hasn't seen any growth yet. Well, if they're getting all this money from the government and they're paving the way for these banks to grow, certainly these bank stocks could benefit. So, we were investing in those uh European bank stocks. Then come 12 months later, turns out that banks, European banks not only had a good year, it was their best year on record. M >> so that is identifying now a broad market shift and then finally is a government shift when there's new economic policy new legislation new government moves that also moves money so we're identifying that but then even on the bonds side there are many ways to invest in bonds without getting the crappy returns you're getting in the United States because you can invest in foreign countries around the world that als also borrow money that are backed by the United States and the United States dollar where there are many allies to the United States where we have essentially supported their economies. We've pumped money into many countries around the world and so now you're investing in these foreign countries bonds getting significantly higher rates of returns and they're essentially backed by the United States government. So there are many ways now to structure uh your portfolio. Again, I'm not I don't recommend what I do to anybody else, but the idea is now if you can get slightly better returns compounded over time, it can lead to significantly more wealth. Because for the average person, the way that you invest your money goes down a few different options. Number one is the hope and pray investor, which is just I have a 401k and I have a house. I should be good, right? Well, that worked in previous generations, but today what people are realizing is, oh, my house is not going to put food on the table. It's not going to give me an income. And if my house goes up in value, I have higher property taxes and I have higher insurance. Not that it's bad to own a house, but if you actually want to make money on the house, you have to either sell it or do a cash out refinance, but then you have to pay that back plus interest. >> And you have to sell it and downsize or go to a different market. with the 401ks. The founder of the 401k has said that the 401k was never meant to be the sole your sole retirement plan. And unfortunately, we are in the United States today are facing the biggest retirement crisis in the history of time because we have so many people that are retiring based off of their 401k and social security and their house hoping it's going to be enough. Unfortunately, for most people, that's not going to be enough statistically >> because the 401k didn't grow enough because it was a 6040 portfolio and the bonds tanked. Like what? >> Bonds didn't grow and then high fees. The average 401k in 2025 with under a million dollars in assets had a 1.26% fee. Yo, >> which is doesn't sound like a lot, but that can eat up a huge chunk of your portfolio because it compounds over time. Considering the fact that most 401ks did not even see a 8% annual return while the market did 10% a year and that's before fees, >> right? >> So now when you look at that, the average person is going into their 401k just buying a fund and not realizing that a lot of these funds are underperforming because we don't have any knowledge on how to do that. And now we have another problem which is a newer problem which I was reading an article about this very recently is one of the growing fastest growing uh economic demographics that are having facing the biggest threat right now are single women because we're seeing this larger growing demographic of women that went through life thinking my husband managed the money he invested for me I never really invested before and now for whatever reason he's no longer longer in the picture, passed away, divorced, whatever it is, and now I have no idea how to invest. And so this is the hope and pray investor that are now as they get older realizing, oh no, I don't have enough assets to be able to retire. Then it is I go to a financial adviser. It's not a bad option. It's a great option for many people, but it comes with a fee. Then the next option is I can just invest my money into the markets. The 10% return by putting it into the S&P 500. But because of inflation, that 10% return doesn't yield the same type of lifestyle that maybe it did 20 or 30 years ago. Because if you invest $500 a month for 30 years, get a 10% return, you're going to retire with a little bit under a million bucks. Well, nowadays you need closer to a million and a half to be able [snorts] to retire comfortably for the average person. So that creates now a problem where I need something more. Now unfortunately many people get caught into desperation and desperation generally does not lead to good financial decisions and so now we look for what is a way that I can make more money quickly. So we get into the >> couch poly market let's go. That's and that is the >> hear about Pokemon cards. 16 million for one card. J breed, let's go. >> This is what I call phase three of the investment cycle where people the ultra toxic phase. >> Phase one is I want to own the asset because I love the asset. I want to buy houses because I believe in the value of the house. I want to buy stocks because I believe in the value of the stock. I want to buy Bitcoin because I believe in what Bitcoin is. >> Right? got a thesis. >> Phase two is this underlying asset is great. I want more of it. So now I leverage my way to buy more. >> I want to buy more houses with more debt. I want to buy more stocks with more debt. I want to buy more Bitcoin with more debt. And maybe there are new ETFs, uh, >> whatever, more derivatives to buy more stuff. It gets fun. been. We saw this happen time and time again throughout our history because while history doesn't exactly repeat itself, it does rhyme. You can look at the 2008 crash, the 2000.com bubble bursting. We've seen this happen again and again and again. >> Phase three is I don't really care about the asset. I just want to get rich, >> right? >> And so during the >> what takes us from one to the next? >> Greed. >> That's it. Pure and simple. >> Greed and access. Greed is always there. Gre greed is a a underlying authority. But when when people in phase one start to see asset values rise and they start to make money, now the question is, how can I make even more money? Because real estate prices keep going up, stock prices keep booming, whatever. Gold prices keep booming. I want to own more of this [snorts] asset. If I just own more, I'd get richer. I just don't have more money. How about I use more debt, more leverage, more derivatives? So that's when the the phase two derivatives come out. And then phase three is I don't care about the asset. I just want to get exposure to whatever is going to make me rich. So in the 2000.com bubble, this was the growth of momentum day trading because remember this is when all these new online brokerages started coming out and all of a sudden people can now start buying whatever stock that they want and just own it for a small period of time. That way I can make a lot of money quickly. During the 2008 crash, it wasn't about the people that were buying the real estate. This is all the people that are trading the mortgage back securities, that are trading the derivatives of the mortgage back securities, that are trading the derivatives of the derivatives, the synthetic CDOS's, the synthetic mortgage back securities. And so now it's I don't even know what I'm buying. I'm just buying this thing because it's going to make me a lot of money today. Call sheet. Why would you if you think Bitcoin is going to go up to $100,000 or $150,000 instead of buying the Bitcoin? You can make 10 to 100 times more money by just buying some call sheet contracts. And so that's what we have is it's not even Bitcoin. Forget that. Let's talk about stocks. Why would you invest in stocks? And I can just bet on if the stock market's going to open higher or lower tomorrow. Now, that's kind of a weird concept because to me as as a guy thinking about investing money, you're telling me that people are just betting their money in the stock market instead of investing in the stock market. >> Yeah, >> that's kind of weird. And that has never ended well ever in the history of time. We can go back to tulipomania when people were buying derivatives of the tulip bubble which created the first financial crisis in the history of time. Financial bubble and burst. And that's what we're seeing happen today. How long will it last? I don't know. But all I know is >> you said that it's it's greed that drives that. Uh I would say yes, greed is fundamental to the human condition. So for sure that's there. But I don't think this happens without the K-shaped economy that we're in where uh if people could make ends meet and they could retire when they wanted to retire by a set and forget strategy that they put in place when they were 35 or 40 years old. Uh I don't think you'd be seeing this. I think you see this when you get a combination of Instagram telling you that everybody's life is better than yours and you can't make ends meet because the cost of everything is going up and your wages are not. >> So there's one more part to that. It's how much you're bombarded with thinking that this is normal. So you probably know I run a newsletter called market briefs where we break down what's happening in the markets. Well, we have advertisements in our newsletter. And do you want to know in the last, let's call it, nine months, which industry has come to us more than any other industry with huge sums of dollars saying, "Hey, can we advertise this in your market briefs newsletter?" >> Mhm. >> It is this polyarket industry, >> of course. >> And I haven't I don't even hear knew what that was when it first started getting these these ads. And I remember someone was telling me that it's it's a bedding industry. And I was like, "Oh, yeah, no, clearly not." Right. >> But then they started to change their advertising pitches saying, "Hey, >> we're not betting. It's a type of investment. How about you promote this?" And so now again, I don't I'm not in that industry. So I'm like, "Okay, present it to me." And I'm looking at it and I'm like, "Wait, >> so people are buying these contracts because they think the markets are going to go up. Do they actually own any stocks?" "No, no, no. They don't actually own any asset. It's just a a futures contract or something like that." And I was like, "No, keep that out of our newsletter." And then they start coming back with bigger dollar amounts, bigger contracts, more unique packages. And I'm like, "Holy crap, that's can't be good." Because they're catering to the young crowd. They're catering to people that want to make money quickly. They're catering to the people that need to make money quickly. And they're presenting it in a way as if it is a type of investment. That can't end well. I mean, we'll see. >> Yeah. Well, so I mean, to your point, we've seen this play out over and over and over and over and over. Uh, we're in a euphoric phase right now. Uh, euphoria always feels good and it always ends in a disaster. So, when I look at the economy, I may see something different than you. So, um, I look at the economy. I don't have a team of researchers, so that's probably part of this, but I see these whipssaw movements up, down, doesn't matter. down, back up, doesn't matter. Um, asset class almost doesn't matter. What I see is, uh, my money is being inflated away. I understand that the government is going to print. I understand that the government did print. So, even if right now inflation is less than 1%, we've still never come down from the 25% raise. So, I've still got to beat that hurdle. I've got to find a way to make enough money to make ends meet today, let alone in the future. Uh, I'm looking at AI coming down the road like a freight train. And I might be thinking, I've only got seven years left of my career. And then like I don't even know what the world is going to look like. So you've got massive uncertainty. You've got such reckless spending behavior on the left and the right. So no one in government is coming to save you. And if you understand anything, you recognize, oh, I'm on the bottom part of the K. I want to get to the top part of the K. And it couldn't be more simple. Asset owners are on the top. You want the right assets, but asset owners are on the top. Everybody else is on the bottom. Cool. I need to get up into that top. Awesome. Uh, gambling is a thing because it triggers the dopamine reward center. So, investing, forgive me if you don't agree with this, but investing is gambling. So, it's just a sort of different duration, but same thing. And so, people, oh, I could do that slow buffety gamble or I'm gonna do call she and just, hey, I get it. Do I What do I think? super short-term up down whatever I get it nice and easy place my bet see what happens and then on top of that if any of this stuff can be gamed then it's like you had the people standing outside the stadium while Bad Bunny was rehearsing to figure out what was the set going to be timing the woman singing the national anthem how long was that and then going and placing bets you've got people inside of companies almost certainly doing insider trading on this stuff this this is literally GameStop all over again. >> It is cultural energy >> catching people up in this euphoria that you can make all this money. We saw it with Bitcoin. We saw it with NFTTS. We see this kind of behavior over and over and over. And now it's just that the market is so bad for young people. They're so on the wrong side of the K that Yep. YOLO. Doesn't matter. I'll do whatever I can. >> Well, I wouldn't say investing is gambling. Let's fight to the death. Convince me. Why is >> investing? >> Before we do that, I do want to address what you're saying about the the entire the gambling industry being so popular because of the way the economy is because this isn't the first time we've seen something like this happen. Las Vegas didn't get built because people wanted >> to get out of a bad recession. uh when the 2008 boom and bust happened, it wasn't because people felt like they were poor. Is people wanted to get richer. During the 2000, mid2000's time, people didn't feel like I'm being left out of the economy in the sense that oh my god, everybody is rich. I can't afford life. It's I want to get richer because everybody who buys a house is getting rich. Let me go buy six houses under my cat's name because the bank is going to write any check that they want. Same thing in the 2000 crash. Not to mention, if we take a look at sports betting, the average 18-year-old, 21-year-old, 22 year old who is betting on the Lakers or the Lions, they're not that feeling, I feel like I'm left out of the economy. It's because I'm still in college. All of my friends are making money and betting on sports betting. It makes games more interesting. Uh it's it's become cultural. Yes, I do think now there is a new aspect which is I feel left out. And because I feel left out, I am desperate. And because I'm desperate, now I make stupid decisions because that has happened time and time again. Whether it's sports betting, whether it's gambling, whether it's buying get-rich quick schemes, whether it's buying random meme stocks, whether it's day trading, whether it's buying random cryptocurrencies, that's going to be the case. So I don't that's why I don't think that it's just because of the economy. I do think the economy has an impact on it. But now going back to is investing gambling or not. What is the definition of gambling? Gambling is more likely than not that I'm going to lose. In my opinion, in the investment world, if you are an actual investor who has a little bit of financial savvy, data shows that if you have a long enough time horizon, you're probably going to win. All you have to do is own some of the right assets. Stocks, real estate. You can have some speculative assets, own a little bit of gold, and over time stocks go up. Over time, real estate goes up. Over time, gold goes up. And we could take a look at any 10 to 15 year period of our economy, and you'll see that trend to be the same. You just have to hold on. The problem is we get in thinking investing is a six-month game or a two-year game. And if that's your mindset, you're probably going to lose. But when you come in as an investor thinking, I'm going to own what Warren Buffett says, I want to own something for the time period of forever. And when that's your mindset, if you believe the economy is going to grow, that in 10 years from now, the economy is going to be bigger than it is today. In 50 years from now, it's going to be bigger than it is today. As an investor, you just want to own a piece of the economy. >> Yes. Uh now, let me say why I think that it is gambling. So um gambling is betting on a future state and saying I believe it's going to be this. You can make money in the stock market on stock market going down. So I think we can agree that that kind of thing is obviously gambling because you're not value investing. You're not saying if I hold this long enough you're saying no I think I understand the direction better than somebody else. Any game where you can win and lose. Okay now we're not just value investing. So even Buffett is looking at uh an investment and he's trying to indicate a value system that he uses when he says I want to hold forever because he never holds forever. So he reads where he thinks the market is going to go and he places his bet. I think the reason that we advise people cuz like you I mean our advice sounds almost identical uh which you haven't given in this episode obviously I'm assuming people are here because they know you to speedrun it diversify across a bunch of different um economic forces hold don't try to do anything fast don't day trade don't try to outsmart people it's very good advice because on a long timeline that tends to be true however the only reason that I'm telling people to do that is because I believe on a long timeline that will end up being true. That's my bet. And so I might be trying to go into the lowest volatility game in the lowest volatility casino that I can find, but I'm not fooling myself. I will lose money if I'm wrong in that assumption. And so I don't want people to think that investing is a force of nature and it is an only up phenomenon because time is one of the variables. And if you have to sell and you've been holding for 12 years, I mean, if you bought in like the height of the dot craze and it crashed, there were some that it took 20 plus years for it to get back to break even, let alone going above. Other companies just straight went out of business. So, if you were like, "Listen, I'm not going to be reckless. I'm going to hold pets.com for 30 years." Well, they went out of business, so you. And that person is now like, uh, what happened? I was doing the things that I thought I was supposed to do. I watched a shift. I saw, hey, like this is going where it's supposed to be going. Pets and the internet. Like, how can I lose? I'm going to hold for 20 years. So, all of that, like I I have never quite been able to understand why people don't want other people to categorize that as gambling. It's just think the way I would encourage people, think of it as you want to find the depending on your personality, the lowest volatility, highest likelihood that be that you beat the house. But if you trick yourself into thinking that this isn't a gamble, you're going to get in trouble. You are 100% going to lose. Losing is a part of the process. But I think then just because they're risk doesn't make it a gamble because driving here was a risk. It's a gamble, especially on a rainy day. To you, a gamble is only a thing that you lose. >> Cuz that was your early definition. >> Gamble is something where you're more likely to lose than win. >> That's your definition. >> Where you're more like >> I don't think that is the real world definition. Let's look it up. >> Let's look it up. >> The activity of playing games of chance for money or of betting on the outcome of future events such as a result of races or games. Doesn't say anything about winning. >> Well, then in that case, me going to work is a is a gamble. >> Yeah, sure. If you want to say everything in life is a gamble, I'm on board. Now, people are oriented the right way. So, just like driving to work, you may die. Uh it's a lot safer than paragliding to work. And so, I advise you take a car and not paraglide. Uh if you're going to fly somewhere, I highly advise that you take commercial aviation. I don't think you should jump in your friend's uh airplane, single engine, single pilot, even if it has a parachute, which is real by the way. there are actual planes with parachutes. Um there are safer ways to do it and less safe ways. But getting people to understand the most dangerous thing you will do in a given day is drive. And so when you lose sight of that, you start making stupid decisions. But I think this is where now there there is a important part to remember people the importance of investing because if you don't invest >> y >> that's also a gamble and I would say that's an even bigger >> it is an even bigger gamble >> because right now if I go to the bank I think I'm earning 1% interest. >> Well the reality is you're the one that's paying the bank's interest >> which might sound weird when you say well no I put $100 in there they paid me a dollar. No. If inflation is 3%, the bank paid you a dollar. They took the $100 and they lent it out to somebody else and charged them 5%, 6%, 18% if it was a credit card and they paid you a dollar and the hundred on$1 you have today after interest buys you less stuff. So now when we think about that, if everything that you do with the money is a gamble, sure if you want to call that all a gamble you can. But as an investor, you will lose money at some point. But if you build a proper portfolio, stocks, real estate, maybe some speculative, crypto, startups, whatever you own a little bit of gold, now you have increased your odds to actually win. You're never guaranteed to win. That's a part of life. You're never guaranteed for anything. But when you invest your money in that way, you have a much higher probability by looking at history that you can actually make money and build wealth. But you got to cut out the noise, the crap, the shiny object objects, and be willing to invest on research as opposed to just news. >> Yep. All true. Um, so that becomes a question in this moment. How can people get ahead? We've got Trump who's erratic. In fact, let me start there. Do you think Trump is good or bad for the economy? >> I think for the financial savvy, he's great >> because he creates change and there's shifts. >> Absolutely. He creates change, there's shifts. And it's very clear that he wants asset prices to go up. So, if you're an investor, if you're an asset owner, Trump wants higher stock prices. Trump wants higher asset prices in general. He wants lower interest rates because lower interest rates boost up asset prices. We think lower interest rates make it cheaper for the average person to afford life. That's not true. Lower interest rates put upward pressure on asset prices, which make asset owners wealthier. higher interest rates put downward pressure. Doesn't mean that asset prices go down, but it puts downward pressure on asset prices while I'm making the average consumer who relies on cash wealthier because now your cash, your dollar that you have in the bank can buy you more stuff. So, he's made it very clear. I want a weaker dollar. I want higher asset prices. So, for the financially savvy, he's great. He's making you rich. plus a tax code which is making the rich and the financially savvy even richer. Now, for the person that doesn't understand that, it sucks because where do you win? If you're making 30 $40,000 a year, tax cuts don't make a difference because you're already barely paying anything in tax. Yeah, you you got your withholding tax. Don't forget because of the standard deduction, your your effective tax rate is very low. So taxes are not that important. You might not be getting a lot of government subsidies once you get past 30 40 $50,000 a year depending on where you live. And then if you don't own assets, you don't get to win in this economic game because our system, a capitalist system that we live in, benefits the capital owners. It benefits the people that own the assets, not the people that are working in the assets. Well, he's working to drive the capitalist system in that way, although it's not exactly a true capitalist system when the government is is buying specific stocks on the stock market. Now, we're we're playing favorites, which again, good for the people that understand, bad for everybody else. So, it's it's really now which side of the coin are you on? And so for the average person, it's horrible. For the financially savvy, it's a great opportunity. But anybody can be financially savvy. >> You said something I think is really important. And uh I'll crystallize my view, which is if Trump doesn't grow real wages, not nominal, not in number only, but in actual purchasing power, if he does not increase real wages for the average person, bring the bottom of the K up, uh he will go down as a catastrophe economically. Now, there are things that he's doing that may pay off, he may actually onshore things back to the US, bring a bunch of manufacturing jobs, which would be huge. Um, but if to make a long story short, if he does not drive the wages of the average American up, he's toast. And the average American is toast. And we are, and maybe you and I read this differently, but I feel like we are at a crisis point where I see all the unrest in the country. And I'm just like, this is an economic problem. This doesn't have anything to do with anything other than economics. And when people feel disenfranchised, when they feel that they can um they have nothing to lose by burning the system down because it has been so bad to them, then they're going to burn it down. We have a a guy in my office, Stephen, who says all the time that men without a purpose cause a lot of problems. >> Yes. >> And for many men, that purpose is what I do for work. Well, the job market sucks. Uh you can look at unemployment as one way to look at the job market, but really now when you take a look a little bit deeper, there's a concept called undermployment. underemployment is I went to college. I got a computer science degree, but I'm flipping burgers at McDonald's. I got a job. I'm not unemployed, but I'm not doing what I should be doing or what I think I'm capable of doing. We have a fast growing number of Americans that are underemployed. And now come in AI, which changes the job market drastically. And this is going to be you talk about bringing jobs back. It's not just going to be manufacturing. is going to be these AI jobs because it has drastically drastically changed the job market already >> through a reduction or just moving people from one task to another >> moving but right now a reduction AI has let is we have not created enough jobs to make up for the job losses yet the goal and the idea is that we will have more jobs in the future when is that future going to happen I don't know JPT came out in the end of 2022 too. It's only been a few years and in those few years we've seen a drastic change in the economic workforce and really a lot of that started in the last 12 to 18 months. The reason being as AI slowly starts to get smarter more and more companies are saying why do we need 10,000 human employees? What if we have 3,000 human employees and 7,000 AI agents? Actually, no. 70,000 AI agents because it's going to cost us a fraction of what it would cost us to have 7,000 other human employees. These 70,000 AI agents don't need a vacation. They don't need time off. They don't need sick days. They're not going to complain. They're going to do what I tell them to do. It's going to take a learning curve, but how about we start investing in that now? And it's starting with entry-level jobs. I mean it I don't have a solution for this but people that are in the entry level job market it has become incredibly difficult because now all of a sudden that ability to learn on the job becomes why do we need to teach a human how to learn on the job? Why don't we just teach an AI tool to learn? That way that AI tool can get smarter and it's a fraction of the cost. And so it's made it extremely difficult for the entry- level person if you are not doing something creative >> to now go get a job which means if you are in that position learn how to use AI. >> How does this influence your investing framework >> in many ways? Uh number one obviously we use AI in our research but AI cannot substitute our analysts going and attending a trade show going and attending a government summit. It cannot go and us talking to an executive because we're going out and doing that. Because what AI can only find is what's on the internet, but it can help you understand and framework your investments and find things that maybe you didn't find by itself. So, we use it to supplement what we do, but it has changed our company drastically. And so every time I talk about AI, I speak from experience because I had a oh crap moment in 2025. It was scary. Uh we were so my company Briefs Media, it was Briefs Media in 2025. We focused on only two things, news and research. And I'm not a very tech-savvy person. Like I have to have my wife tell me how to use Netflix. And I used Door Dash for the first time. And I was like, "This is the most confusing thing I've ever seen." So that's my tech knowledge. And I start to see chat TPT getting better answers and starting to get smarter. And I'm sitting at my desk and just playing around reading articles. And I realized one day, oh my god, if AI keeps getting smarter at the rate that it is, we are going to be out of business or bankrupt within 10 years because it will be able to produce content way faster. and maybe it won't be exactly as good as ours, but I mean, who cares at that rate with how fast it can produce stuff, it's going to make our business extremely difficult to run. Then I started doing some more digging and I realized, oh, AI doesn't get smarter linearly. It gets smarter exponentially. We have 5 years before we're out of business or bankrupt. And we have a team of employees in our office. We have a beautiful office. We have all this stuff. And I'm sitting there at my desk sweating bullets like, "Oh my god, what are we going to do?" >> True story. Oh, I'm intimately familiar. >> So, I'm sitting there and uh I fortunately travel for work pretty often and I'm traveling and I'm talking to business owners and stuff and I'm just like, "Oh my god, everybody's like kind of on the same boat as me." And so, we had an all hands meeting in the first half or around mid 2025 and I said, "Listen, uh this is going to be difficult to hear, but let's take a deep breath and let's go through this. We're going to be bankrupt in 10 years." Just kidding. cyber relief. It's five years. Oh my god. What are you talking about? So, we're going to transition. We're no longer going to be Briefs Media. We're going to be Brief's finance. And we're going to now not just be a media company. We're going to be a fintech company powered by media. And so now we have this news, we have this research, but we added in a core component, which is technology, which we've never ever touched before. But I said, listen, either we do this or we all lose our jobs, including me. And so we went out hired a team of developers, machine learning engineers, and people who can now help us build an software and AI tools to help investors. Because the reality is what's going to happen and what's already starting to happen is more and more investors are saying, "How about I analyze the stock? Not by going and reading the financial statements, not by listening to the earnings calls. I'll just ask Chat GPT, should I buy Chipotle stock?" This is happening very often now. Sure. >> The problem with that is chatbt is kind of a all-encompassing AI tool. You can go to it to talk to it about your emotions. You can talk to it about your job career. You can talk to it about your investments. You can talk to it about whatever the heck you want. And it has very limited financial data because if you really want to analyze a stock, you need what's called data. Now, when I say data, what the heck does that mean? I mean true numbers. Like if I'm studying the Chipotle stock, what was this cash flow in 2019? As you start to get digger deeper into these financial numbers, this is not in a lot of the or is not in the main AI tools. It doesn't have access to that. So what we determined is what we need to do is be a tool, build a tool for investors to be able to analyze an investment and understand if a good if an investment is right for them or not without getting into the we are telling you what to invest in. So we from that day forward we transitioned and we have been spending countless dollars, countless amount of hours and energy building this AI and software tool which we haven't launched yet uh but we're launching it in 2026 as a way now for people to go into our briefs terminal and say I want to invest in Chipotle. help me understand and analyze this investment. And we want to be able to give you that answer with accuracy based off of data from the last 10, 20, 30, 40 years to say here's what the data says. That way now you can analyze an investment with proper imagine you asking chatt or asking your your best investor friend that you know. Now take the best investor friend that you know, make them 100 times smarter with access to every investment book that you've ever heard of, with access to every data point of investment for the last 40 years. That's the type of tool that we want to build. It's smarter research. >> That way now when you go into analyze an investment, you can have much more knowledge to understand where money is moving. And the reason why now I'm really excited by this is because now when you think about the average the average investor, we're talking about the person that's on Robin Hood just buying random stocks. What do you do? I hear about something trending on CNBC. I hear about something on Reddit. And I'm going to say, "Oh, cool. People are making a lot of money on this. What is my research?" Well, for a lot of people, that research is it's on the news, so it must be good. And that that's why a lot of people buy high and sell low. You laugh, but it's true. >> Yeah, that's Gallow's humor, I'm afraid. The next level of research is I I see that this stock is trending. Let me try to look at the financials. But you get a little overwhelmed when you look at the financial statement because you understand that if a company has more assets than liability, that's good. The revenue is growing, the expenses are not skyrocketing. Okay, that looks good. Maybe I should buy this. But there's so much deeper analysis. I mean, why does Warren Buffett or when he was working actively, why did he spend all day reading these financial statements? because there's so much knowledge that goes into it. Well, what if you could do all that knowledge now with a few clicks of a button? And that's what we're building. >> It's not live, but briefs terminal. There's a wait list for it, but that's what we want to >> ETA. >> We're hoping summer 2026. >> Let's go. >> Let's go. It's Yeah, it's been one heck of a process because we have been working around the clock. >> And I mean around the clock because we have developers now in different parts of the world. That way we can work around the clock while I'm trying to figure out how to boost my technology knowledge because I can't be so stupid when it comes to tech anymore at least in the work in my work. And so we've been we've been trying to build this and figure it out because it doesn't exist yet >> and it's a whole new landscape. And that's why I say AI is changing the economy. And I'm telling you from firsthand experience >> because we don't have a need to hire the same entry-level journalist that we would have before. >> Yeah. >> We just don't need to. We can >> we've got to do the same thing. We um we dramatically reduce our staff a little about a year and a half ago now. >> Uh and every time if we transition somebody out, our first question is can we just have AI do this? And we can't always but I mean 30 to 40% of the time the answer is yes. So it's pretty wild. Or now one person with the help of AI can do multiple things in the same number of hours. It's it's really transformative. But you know why that matters now from the investor standpoint? Because in in all of the financial news, they talk about productivity. >> What does productivity mean? What what every company is going to want is that every individual human five years from now should be able to do what 10 humans do today, >> if not more. And so if you don't learn how to use AI to make your work more efficient, to do more work, finding or keeping a job is going to become more difficult. >> Agreed. >> I don't say this to be scary or or or kind of doomsday. I'm saying this because I'm seeing it happen in my company today. And there are companies that are anti-AI. I feel bad for everybody in that company. >> Dude, that's so crazy to me. And because I'm in the arts field with game development, I'm surrounded by a customer base that despises AI, companies that have to like say, "We we'll never use AI." And I'm just like, you literally just said, "We would like to go out of business now, please." >> I I was meeting with a window washer. I mean, as non-technical as it gets. And what he was telling me is I'm using AI in every part of my business. And I was like, "What? What are you talking about?" He's like, "Yeah, well, you know, before when I used to have to give quotes, it was I drove to somebody's house to give a quote on how much it would cost. Now there's AI tools that will give automatic quotes and they're pretty pretty good." >> But then when I have my guys go out and they they wash windows. Before it was really hard to kind of come up with go to this house first, then this house, then this house. And a lot of times there was a lot of wasted time in building that route. But also then people will go to this city, then this city, and then back to this city. So it was a lot of just wasted time on the road. And so now there are AI tools to design your route. That way you spend the least time on the road, waste the least gas, can get to more houses in a day >> to drive up revenue. >> Like oh my god. And now some there there's the the companies that are understanding, well, let me get more fivestar reviews because I don't know how to reach out to people. I can use my AI tool to get positive customer reviews, get feedback, encourage people to leave a review on Google and all these other things. And like, wow, you're you're you're innovating in this window washing business. Well, the average person say, well, AI can't take my job as a window washer. Maybe not yet. But there's there's companies that are innovating there. And that was like that. Oh my god. It's like it's really coming in every industry. >> Yeah. people turning a blind eye to AI is the most bizarre thing I've ever seen. It is exactly like people that were um saying, "Oh, the web is ridiculous and I don't even want a website." And we're telling our customers, "We'll never sell things on the web." And it's like, "Okay, good luck with that." It's such a strange way to interface with the world. The fact is culture moves on, technology moves on, innovation is real. To your point about productivity, if you want GDP to go up, then you have to get more productive, meaning you have to get more done per person or have more people. But like ultimately, if you want to increase productivity, you're really trying to get more from the same set of people or I mean, God willing, that you can get more from fewer people, which is exactly what we're going to see now. And listen, I get why people are going to panic in terms of, okay, change is scary. I don't want to lose my job. But the way that we're trying to get people to think about it is you have an opportunity to either become the greatest employee at your company if that's what you want to do because if you master AI faster than anybody else over the next few years you're going to have a tremendous advantage. The window will close but it exists now. And then alternatively if you want to start a company there has never been an easier time. You can literally start it with AI employees uh which we teach people how to do. It's it is really an incredible moment. wildly disruptive and I get the anxiety, but there's an opportunity for people that are willing to master it. >> Yeah. And I think part of the anxiety comes from how fast it's shifting. >> No doubt. >> Because uh the World Economic Forum says that we're entering the fifth industrial revolution. The first one was factories >> lasted about 100 years. The second one was electricity lasted around 50 70 years. The third one now we get into the internet. And now we can start to see the internet was you know a few decades two three decades of time where really started being launched to being implemented. Then industrial revolution number four in the 2000s was smart technologies. So taxi drivers being replaced by Uber and hotels and Airbnb and other types of smart technologies like that. And now we're already entering the next one which is the convergence of human and technology. And every time these industrial revolutions have happened whether it took a hundred years or 20 years there was unrest, economic change and a shift of wealth. Well, now it's happening so fast that that wealth shift is going to be bigger than ever. >> And it's happening so fast that the average person can't keep up with it. And so now the the ability to grasp and understand this shift there's no time which time was there before but because of how fast it's evolving that time doesn't exist anymore. And so you have to in this economy you have to get ahead of it >> or you're going to be the person on the losing end. And we've seen that happen time and time and time again. Uh whether it's the people that lost their jobs to factories, lost their jobs to the internet. I mean, I I'll tell you a funny story that my grandparents used to tell me. My grandmother's village, uh, when she was growing up, it was not a high-tech place. So, when people then had to go to the bathroom, they would go in the fields. >> My grandfather said, "No, we were advanced where he grew up because they had buckets. They had a bucket system. So, they used to go in buckets, but there was a guy that would come every week and take the bucket and and replace the bucket." Well, >> along came >> fun job. along came plumbing. Then the the crap picker upper gets laid off because now you no longer have that job because of innovation. So, you know, innovation happens in many different um ways. >> Yeah. >> But without innovation, a lot of us might still be going in buckets. >> Yeah. No doubt. Speaking of innovations, what do you think about crypto? So, um to you, is it a revolution in finance? Is it uh a scammer's paradise? like what do you think about crypto? >> Yeah, I think a little bit of both. Um I the way I treat it as an investment purely as an investment is I look it as a speculative asset. >> And the reason why I say that is when I invest my money I have five assets. My own business, real estate, stocks, speculative and then 2% gold. Now my speculative that's things like crypto, things like startups, things that can go up very fast and also fall very fast. So I am not a crypto expert but I started seeing this idea of Bitcoin back um about 10 years ago. Started buying a little bit of it and then when Bitcoin started to shoot up I started selling some of it so I can buy more real estate. But for me I understand that Bitcoin can go up very fast. It can also fall very fast. I think there's a lot of opportunity with it. I like the idea of diversifying against the dollar, but I don't it's hard to fully grasp the true value of something that you cannot see, feel, and touch because if we were to go through a recession, people need food and Bitcoin prices or crypto prices in general are a lot more volatile than other assets. Like we can look at when 2022 stocks fell by 20%, Bitcoin fell by 60%. 2020 stocks fell by 30%, Bitcoin fell by 50% and we just see a lot of big swings up and down with Bitcoin. Now that's kind of just the general nature because it's a newer asset. But if now [snorts] I run into a situation and I'm in a recession, I need to sell, there's a good chance that I'm going to sell whatever assets that I don't truly believe in for the long run, >> right? And if I don't see a immediate value with Bitcoin, I might sell that. And unfortunately, Bitcoin we know or crypto in general is much more volatile than other assets just from history. So that's where I think there's opportunity. But who knows? I mean, the next president might not be a Bitcoin enthusiast and that would not be good news for Bitcoin. I mean, when Bitcoin fell, when President Trump announced Kevin Worsh to be the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, Bitcoin prices just it got hammered. >> And then the news came out of will the Trump administration bail out Bitcoin? Will there be any stimulus for Bitcoin? Which was kind of a crazy topic to hear, but you can start to understand the why because there's, you know, people in the Trump family are involved in the Bitcoin industry. President Trump wants to make America the Bitcoin capital of the world. Could there be money going into Bitcoin? Maybe. But you have to imagine that that that that credibility given to Bitcoin has to help the value of Bitcoin because if you believe that Bitcoin has value, you're going to buy more of that Bitcoin, which helps Bitcoin go up. If the next president comes in, whoever it is, and they say Bitcoin is a scam, that's not going to be good for Bitcoin. of the world's leading economic superpower doesn't believe in Bitcoin. So that's why I look at it as a speculative asset. I think there's value, >> but I want anybody who's buying it to understand the speculative nature of it. >> It's interesting to me. Bitcoin is a it's a thesis play for me in terms of where I think the world is going. I think that right now we will look back on the way that it's perceived Bitcoin specifically, not crypto in general, but Bitcoin specifically will look back and laugh at like the question marks that were over it because kids today growing up, they just hear about it. They see the ticker, they look up the price. For them, it's like obvious that it's just a standard thing. Like if you ask a kid today, I saw a real recently where they were like asking their six-year-old daughter, do you know what the yellow pages are? And she was like, is it a boy band? And then her dad asked her, "Do you know what a collect call is?" And she said, "Is that like a group chat but for the the phone on the wall?" It was hysterical. Without the context, you just have no idea. Kids will just grow up where Bitcoin's talked about by the president. It's just a thing. It's just there. It's normal. It's not weird. Now, right now, it acts like a tech stock. So, it's out on the volat or not volatility, it's out on the risk curve. So, people aren't going to start there. They're going to start with more traditional things. And then as they're like chasing the um the flows of capital when they're trying to get a return, they're going to go more and more out on the risk curve, they'll pass through Bitcoin. Then they'll start getting into like the really hardcore speculative whether it's meme stocks or memecoins or Pokemon or my favorite One Piece. Uh like they're going to start going way way way out on the edges. And so Bitcoin used to be like about as far out on the edge as you were ever going to get. I think it's really marched its way in. Definitely consider it a mainstream asset. I think it's going to keep going to the center. Now, does it ever start responding economically like gold? Don't know. But I think that's ultimately its real value is when people say that, oh, like it has no intrinsic value. That that to me is nonsensical because if you look at silver, silver has value. It is used in technology. And so whether everybody agrees that it has value on paper or not will be completely irrelevant to the amount of silver that's being used. So gold is not like that. Gold is like 4%. It might not exactly be that, but it's a low number where its price is driven by jewelry or industry. Silver is like >> 40% or something radical and solar panels and all that. So when you start looking at, okay, there are things that matter on paper, stocks, bonds, debt, um, Bitcoin, like they're they're all they fall into that realm. They're still extraordinarily valuable. They're part of a thriving economy. But then you have physical things that matter for a different reason. Now, gold to me is a paper trade. No one's going to take the gold. Not no one, but it's going to be a very small number of people. Most people are just betting go up, go down. But silver, like when you look at China going, "Psych, we're gonna choke you guys out. We're gonna use the silver because we control the physical silver. You guys are doing derivatives and other bullshit." Like we actually control the physical silver. And so if you want to make something with it, now you're going to have to come through us. And so watching that, watching as the paper era really begins to get shaky. And now we're going into great power politics. We're going into physical things matter. or they matter a lot. Now that becomes a question of okay, maybe we stop derivative trading on Bitcoin and we start saying, yo, I actually want the Bitcoin in my wallet and now it starts behaving far more like, okay, this can't be inflated. That's why I care. >> Um, then that becomes interesting. >> That that has to actually happen for people to want to own the real Bitcoin. >> Yes. Because you know the the appeal of Bitcoin is that there's 21 million and there's nothing else and that's it. Well, today that's really not true because I can invest in the Bitcoin, but it's so much easier for me just to buy a Bitcoin ETF on the stock market. >> Or I can just buy in the Bitcoin contracts on Kshi, which essentially now means there's not really 21 million. Yeah, that's what the asset is, but I'm not really buying the Bitcoin. I'm just trying to get exposure to the Bitcoin. Yeah, if you're doing the gambling game, but like when and I can't verify that this is true or at least I haven't, but when everything was kicking off in Iran and the currency was hyperinflating, you could try to buy gold, but good luck taking delivery of that. And I personally wouldn't trust somebody that I don't know, can't see all that. Um, not in a moment of crisis. in a moment of crisis, I'm going to be much happier to go get something like Bitcoin where okay, a big part of this is if I memorize my um seed phrase, I can travel. Now, I'm not a believer that's like you can never confiscate Bitcoin. You hit somebody with a big enough hammer, they're going to tell you whatever you want. Um so, yeah, I I don't think of it like that, but it is much easier to move >> 100%. And so if you're trying to get out of a currency that's got trouble and when I hear Warren Buffett talking about yeah I [snorts] don't know that I'm gonna invest in the US dollar because I worry about the dollar uh and you hear Dallio saying the same thing it's like all of a sudden a little bit of gold little bit of uh Bitcoin goes a long way now like you my exposure well it's bigger to uh Bitcoin for sure uh but gold minimal and I'm not like constantly increasing my exposure to Bitcoin. I've distributed what I'm going to distribute and and uh it's part of a portfolio >> and and I think you're right. That's the theory that [cough] Bitcoin is much easier than gold. >> It's easier to transport. If things really go bad, I can very pick easily pick up my Bitcoin wallet and leave. I can't pick up my real estate and go. >> Yeah. Facts. Jesus. I think about that with California a lot. Which brings us to what do you think about the uh wealth tax here in California and then in the Netherlands they're really far down the path unrealized gains unrealized. >> Well, I think again the best way to understand that is just to take a look at history because when the income tax started it was 1%. on all income um don't know the exact number, but I think it was on all income under $6,000 or or sorry, all all income over $6,000 and then the top tax rate was 6%. Which meant you could make millions of dollars and pay 6% in taxes. M >> that was the whole idea in 1913 when the income tax was passed that hey we're really only going to tax the wealthy because that 1% tax wasn't on the person making if in today's dollars $50,000 a year >> it was essentially in today's dollars essentially the six figure earner when you equate the dollars for inflation. Well, that was the cell that the idea is to tax the wealthy and the average person is not going to have to worry about this income tax. Fast forward to where we are today and unfortunately the average person is was paying the income tax. The wealthy, they fall into a different bucket of taxes. Why why does Warren Buffett pay a lower tax rate than his secretary? because he has a different category of tax called portfolio income versus the average person working a job has what's called earned income, otherwise known as ordinary income. And I'm saying this as a licensed attorney who's not your attorney. So there's there's different buckets of income. And the person that's taxed the highest is the person that earns money from labor. If you work a job, you're paying the highest tax rates and you get the lowest the lowest tax breaks. when you were an investor, you get to qualify for either lower tax rates or higher tax breaks. So when you get the idea of a wealth tax, it's pitched as an idea of we need more money in order to help solve our financial problems to pay hungry people, in order to provide housing for people. Sounds good. I I think the average person would say, "I want to see less homeless people. I want to see less hungry people." Well, sometimes raising taxes can solve the problem. But let's dig a little bit deeper because before we just start increasing our income, and I'm saying this from somebody who has studied a lot of people's financial statements, we assume that if I make $50,000 a year, if I raise my income to $60,000 a year, my financial problems are going to go away. if I raise my income to $100,000 a year, my financial problems are going to be solved and I'm going to be rich. The data shows otherwise that as the average person earns more money, they dig themselves into a deeper financial hole. That's why the majority, not a general world, statistically the majority of Americans who make over $100,000 a year are broke living paycheck to paycheck. Why? As they make more money, you become more creditworthy. The bank says, "Hey, you have a good job. You're making a bigger income. How about we get you a nicer BMW? How about we get you a nicer credit card? How about we get you some more perks? How about we get you a bigger home equity line of credit?" And so, as people make more money, they start to spend more money. If you make more money and you don't raise your spending, all of a sudden, you become wealthier. So, if you tell me that we're going to do a one-time wealth tax, we're not going to increase our spending. In fact, we're going to cut our spending. we're going to be financially smart. All right. Now, we're we have at least a conversation that makes sense. But if you say just we're going to raise the wealth tax and we're going to continue spending recklessly and uh unfortunately the government, I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat, there's a lot of wasteful spending. >> Yeah. >> And that wasteful spending is not going to stop. It is going to increase. And the reason why this is important is because now when you look at an entrepreneur, you ask an entrepreneur, what would you do with an extra $5,000, $10,000, $100,000, a million dollars? Their goal, if they're smart, is going to be to be as productive as possible. How can I take this money and grow the value of my company and to grow this money into something more? I want to hire people that are not going to sit here and pick up this mug and put it in the left hand and put it back down because my goal is to be productive. The government's job and goal is not always productivity. >> My goal might be maximum employment as the government. Well, if my goal is maximum employment, Tom, I can hire you. Say, "Hey, how about you be a mug picker upper?" What's that? Pick up this mug, put it in your right hand to your left hand. I'm going to pay you $50,000 a year. And if you do it a good job for six months, I'm going to raise it to $80,000 a year. Well, I achieved my goal of maximum employment, but did I actually improve productivity? And that's the difficult part is I people equate higher taxes to helping people and I think there's a big disconnect there. I want to help people. It is in my nature. It is in my culture. The sick religion is entirely based around this concept of SA, which is selfless service helping people. I hate the idea of seeing hungry people. But I think the government has to start by stop being so stupid with money. And if you can be more efficient with money, then by all means raise taxes in order to solve some of these problems. But how are you going to solve the problems? Because if you say, "Well, people are hungry. Let's let them rob up to $950 without going to jail." That's a problem. And that does not that does not fix the problem. There's a lot of inefficiencies. Now I can't solve every problem in the world unfortunately or fortunately because depending who you ask but the hope is the idea is if I raise taxes problems will be solved. Sounds great. I like the idea of solving problems. What we've seen happen is that raising taxes number one doesn't fix the problem and then number two that ends up hurting the average person. Here's why. Let's go through history. Income taxes started off as this idea of taxing the rich have now become this idea of how do we tax the middle class. I'm telling you as an attorney that the people that have money will find ways not to pay the taxes. Period. There are many different types of loopholes. And as you have more money, you have more knowledge, you have access to better resources, you're going to find more alternatives. So what's going to happen? Well, how about we raise this wealth tax a little bit more? How about we lower the income requirements a little bit more? And then all of a sudden, what we've seen happen time and time again, this wealth tax does not become a wealth tax on the wealthy. It becomes a wealth tax on the average person while the wealthy are not paying it. And now the average person has no idea how do I my stocks went up to $10,000. How do I pay it? Because I don't have the money to pay it. So I have to sell my stocks. And now all of a sudden you start to create a lot more concerns. That is the problem with the wealth tax is what it can lead to without a proper format on how do you actually use the money. >> Longer answer to your short question. >> No, I think it's great. I want more people to understand it. It is a um suicidal behavior that somehow governments cannot stop themselves from doing. But here we find ourselves. This this is the to your point history does not repeat but it rhymes. This is a rhyming couplet that we hear all the time and governments eventually get confiscatory once they start printing money. It's like a one-way path to that because you're going to get to the point where it doesn't work anymore. You're printing money. Uh you're causing inflation. You're creating a K-shaped economy that makes people resentful. The resentment makes them want to tax people more. But taxing people more doesn't work. It often draws in less revenue because of the laughter curve. The first problem is is is just the the here's the thing. The system is rigged. >> And this is the part that a lot of people don't understand. It is rigged towards the financially savvy and the rich. >> Yeah. >> And that's why people are angry. And so we try to find what is the outlet that rich people are getting all these benefits while the average person is struggling to eat. That's unfair and that's screwed up. >> Now that's the part that maybe there are loopholes that need to be shut. Maybe there are certain things that is unfair and that needs to be worked on. The second part is how can I learn to win in this system? Because why is it that in this capitalist system >> the way you become wealthy is by owning assets yet we're never taught this. I mean I I'm telling you from firsthand experience because I did not grow up learning about money investments. >> My parents are immigrants from a state in India called Punjab. And growing up, the way you become wealthy was you study hard in school, become a doctor. Why? Because if you become a doctor, you have a high salary. If you have a high salary, you should become wealthy, right? Well, unfortunately, that's not how it works. Because when you're a doctor, you're constantly working for income. You pay the highest taxes. >> Wealthy people don't want to work for their income. They want their money to make them more money. And that concept is so foreign. I went through high school. I went through college. I went through a year of grad school. I went through law school, never once learned a thing about money or investing. The only time we got close was in law school. I started learning about tax law >> and I remember we had a more advanced tax law called partnership tax. And my professor sent out an email to the class before that the class started and she said, "Read this about how rich people are evading taxes of the whole idea of how rich people are using the tax code to pay less money in taxes." I thought that was interesting because here we are in law school learning about how the tax code works, learning about the IRS tax rule book. The tax rule book lays out different things that you can do to pay less money in taxes. Now, what the attorney and the accountant does is they just tell the person, hey, here's what the the loopholes are. And so it's the people that are financially savvy that are understanding that have access to the money that are saying, "Oh, okay. How about instead of owning this asset, we own this asset." Because if I can own real estate, I can offset this income. Or if I own a short-term rental, I can offset this income. But there are certain things that I can do to make money and pay less money in taxes. Why does that matter? Because let's go back to what we were talking about in the beginning. If you pay a 1% fee, that can dis that can eat up a quarter of your investment portfolio. What is one of the biggest expenses that the average person pays? It's taxes. It's not just your income tax. I make my income tax and then I also have to pay my payroll tax, my social security and Medicare. When I go to the store and I buy something, I have to pay my sales tax. If I buy a house, I have to pay a property tax. And if my house goes up in value, my property tax goes up. If I die with a lot of money, I have to pay an estate tax. Now, we have to think about tariff taxes. If you live in California, you have to think about your state and local taxes because some states have very high state and local taxes. >> They do. >> Don't forget about your capital gains taxes. You buy a stock and sell it for property. You have you have to pay a capital gains tax. Don't forget now about the corporate taxes that corporations have to pay. Now, on top of that, you have all the other taxes, your cigarette taxes, your alcohol taxes, your toll taxes. So, the average person is paying a lot of money in taxes. And if now you can pay a little bit less money in taxes and you have more money to invest, forget a 1% fee, you just have 25% more income just because of the tax. So now the average person is thinking, man, I'm working so hard every day for money. I'm trying to save this money. My savings are not growing. In fact, I'm becoming poorer because of my savings. But the average person doesn't know that. It's just I'm working so hard to make money and save money, but I I I keep having to struggle because now life keeps getting more expensive because inflation is outpacing your income because inflation is outpacing the interest you're getting in your savings. And so this you talk about this K-shaped recovery. It got amplified. Inflation makes the financially savvy richer, makes the average person poorer. Anytime you hear of government spending, it makes the rich richer. It makes the average person poorer >> because government spending means inflation. Yes, >> but it gets covered up with all these other terms. >> So, government spending, think inflation. Inflation means the rich get richer, asset prices go up, the average person gets poorer. And now we think, well, how can the government spend more money to fix it? Well, unfortunately, anytime the government spends an an additional dollar, they're going to need an additional dollar of debt as well. That additional dollar of debt means more inflation, which means the average person continues to get poorer. I am not a policy person. I don't care Democrat, Republican. I'm here to teach how can you win regardless of who's in the White House. Because if you're struggling with money, unfortunately, the White House is not going to fix your house. You have to care about your house. And the only way out for the average person, if we get away from the policy side, is you have to get now educated because the system is not going to teach you. Banks are going to profit off of you being financially stupid. Because if you're stupid with your money, they can send you a bigger credit card. They can sell you a nicer line of credit. They can sell you a nicer car. Corporations are going to profit if you're financially stupid because they're going to hire the the smartest and best MBAs to get you to open up your wallet and spend money with them. And the government profits if you're unfortunately financially stupid because you're going to pay the highest tax rates. And I don't say this to be mean. I say this just to make a point. Sure. >> Because these highest tax rates are paid by the person that's earning their income from their job. And then we think, oh, I just need to get educated. I need to I need to go to a good college. I need a student loan. Well, unfortunately, do you want to know the biggest asset, the number one largest asset on the United States government's balance sheet? Your balance sheet is your assets and liability statement. The number one largest asset on the United States government's balance sheet are student loans. Whoa. >> Which means these student loans, which we believe are there to help us get a good education, to become wealthy in the system, are the reason why the government is wealthy because they look at their assets and liabilities. My assets in the United States government, the largest asset are student loans. Google it if you don't believe me. I can now show we have all these assets. I can now borrow more money as the government. We can now print more money, spend more money, create more inflation. And now you start to see how this whole thing comes full circle. We're taught to do this, but the rich and the financially savvy are playing a completely different game. But who is teaching that game? Now, yes, YouTube has has thankfully helped to bridge that gap. But the average person isn't going on to YouTube to learn how do I start investing my money and build wealth in this economy. And that's that level of why can't we start teaching this? [clears throat] >> Yeah. And that now we talk about now why is the system rigged? The system profits off of being financially stupid. The system doesn't teach you to be financially smart. The system wants you to just earn money from your job. Pay the highest taxes. Save your money in the bank because now you're making the banker richer. And now when you're stuck and you stay desperate, what do you do? You can't leave your job. You can't take a break. You can't question what what's going on in your life because you need next week's paycheck to pay your bills. And now we have a bunch of people that get stuck in that situation and have no way out. I don't know the policy answer. I'm not a policy person, but I know that if you can understand money, you can start to solve your financial problems. But it's not going to happen overnight. And this is the key part is it's not going to happen in a month, two months, a year, five years. I call it a decade of sacrifice. And there's no sugar coating it that you have to go through a decade of spending less and earning more. That way you can invest like crazy. Now, I don't care where you invest. I don't care if you read my newsletter, market briefs. I don't care if you're Go do it yourself. I I just want to see you do better. But if you're willing to spend less and earn more so you can invest like crazy and you do that for a decade, you can be in a completely different financial situation. But it's hard because year one, no progress. All struggle. Year two, no progress. All struggle. Year three, a little bit of progress. Still, a lot of struggle. Year four, oh, I'm starting to see a little bit of opportunity here. I'm starting to see where this is starting to go. Hopefully. Year five, you enter a recession and now it's like, oh crap, what happened? Year six, things start to look a little bit better. Year seven, oh, I starting to see where I can go after 7 years. Year eight, you're starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Year nine, you're starting to feel a sense of relief. In year 10, now you have a whole new potential stream of income where now you can supplement your lifestyle. You can start to live a little bit easier or continue to build these assets because it takes 10 years to see that success. But when you become financially desperate, you don't want to wait 10 years. I want I want relief to my pain today. Right? When you have a pain in your shoulder, what do you want to do? You don't want to go through the PT and the exercises which might take you six months or two years to fix this problem. I want the Tylenol to fix my pain today. Now, in the financial world, unfortunately, people that are taking that painkiller is I'm looking for the get-richqu scheme. I'm looking for the easy way to grow my money. And now you become in a worse position than you were before. And now you start to resent the system. You start to hate every rich person. You start to hate every opportunity out there because you don't understand how. But the reality is slow money is not attractive. But slow money is proven. And if you're willing to do the proven route where it's hard work, I mean, there's no way around that. I mean, I'm not sitting here telling you it's a 4-hour work week. It's a it's a hard freaking work week. But if you're willing to go through it, you can see that light and see that relief because, you know, money isn't everything. Okay? You want to be physically healthy, mentally healthy, spiritually healthy, financially healthy. We put smoke screens around money because we're insecure about it. But if you don't have money, the reality is money problems are one of the leading causes of divorce. They're also one of the leading causes of suicide. >> Jesus. >> And that's why it's important for us to understand how how money plays a part in your life. I'm not here to say go and become all engrossed in money, make money your entire life, and become this full-time, you know, money person. No. No. You need money to eat. You need money to help other people, right? That's my entire spiel is that make more money so you can take better care of yourself, but also so you can help other people. We need more good people with money, period. But it takes that level of education that we're never taught. >> Where can people follow you to learn more about how to do that? Well, >> you can follow my YouTube channel, Minority Mindset. Uh you can check out my free newsletter, Market Briefs. our research reports, our market briefs pro and I have a investor workshop that I'm doing on March 18th, a live workshop uh that I started doing where we publish our research and so on these live workshops uh hopefully you can share the link. Um >> absolutely these things are killing it. >> They're they're really fun because I get to share the research that my analysts do. That way you can see how opportunities are changing. So March 18th um is my next one. If you missed the March 18th one and you're listening to this, um you can uh click on the link and sign up for the wait list for the next one. But we do this to now start showing where opportunities are changing for people that want to be more involved with their investments. >> I love it, man. These things really have grown insane. You guys should definitely check them out. And speaking of things you should definitely do, be sure to subscribe if you have not already. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace. If you like this conversation, check out this episode to learn more. This is defining moment of what it means to be human. Are we going to blow ourselves up because we couldn't decide how to share? Banks either adapt or they die. We all believe that the government is supposed to save us. Therefore, the government says, "Okay, great. We don't want to raise taxes cuz that's very unpopular." regardless of whether Democratic or not.