And this was sort of the big point that Brad made that he's going to
talk about a treatom Fest, and that is it increases productivity and reduces costs
in so many different areas, and this is an exciting development. You're listening
to Carrie Letz's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you just can't
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Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com and get your
free newsletter and gift. Financial Survival Network now more than ever ed. Welcome
you are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie
Lutz got a real treat today. Mark Skousen, the founder of Freedom Fest,
is on with us as well as a well known author and all around
flaming libertarian much like yours. True and Mark, it's really great to have
you back. I missed freedom Fest for the first time in ten years last
summer due to a prior commitment, but I'm going to be there this year.
And it looks like you know, for a while, interest looked like
it was kind of waning, but then a lot of things happened and now
you guys are back stronger than ever. Well, yeah, we had.
We were forced to cancel by Governor Cisselak in Las Vegas in twenty twenty,
and he gave us a notice like two weeks before. He kept promising that
we'll be able to do it, and then he said, well, yeah,
you can do it if you have no more than fifty people in any
room, including the general sessions. And that was laughable. So in Essa's
they shut us down. But you know, it's interesting. We still did
some smaller conferences at the Ahern Hotel and so on during twenty twenty and then
we can't. After that happened, we decided, well, every other year
we're going to go to a different city. We're going to be in Vegas
every other year, and then the rest of the time we're going to be
going We were in twenty twenty twenty one, I guess we were in South
Dakota. We went to Mount Rushmore and we had a huge, huge turnout.
Half the people had never been to Mount Rushmore before, so it was
quite popular. And Kevin O'Leary is our keynote speaker, and it was really
a lot of fun. And then the next year we were back in Vegas.
We had John Cleeese, the British comedian, We had a big crowd.
It was really a lot of fun. And then this last year we
were in Memphis and we had Mike Row come and he was just fantastic.
And we always have a big name speaker. So this year we're back in
Vegas, and I can reveal to you at some point in the program where
we're going to be next year, because it's raised a lot of eyebrows and
so we might as well talk about that right now. So next year we're
going to be in Palm Springs and in California. That's our first time,
perhaps our only time in California went into the fri But Palm Springs is really
an interesting story because that's where the Hollywood crowd and the rat pack and so
forth went to write uh screenplays. I mean Frank Capra of It's a Wonderful
Life every time he said, let's go to Palm Springs and perform or come
up with the screenplay. So that's that's quite famous for. In fact,
I was talking to Van Simmons, the coin dealer, and he says that
there's more concentrated wealth in Palm Springs than any other part of the world,
which kind of surprised me. So that's next year, and it's going to
be in June rather than July, so we're saving ourselves a little bit on
the heat in Bold Springs. But so this year we're in Vegas. We
have as our keynote speaker, well, we have a couple of them.
We have Stephen Pinker from Harvard, who is foremost I would call him the
public intellectual number one in America in his books on on violence, how violence
has gradually declined. He's got some really work there, and so we're looking
forward to hearing what he has to say about the enlightenment and rational thinking and
are we going to are we headed for a new World War three? If
you will. We have also have the wrapper Iced Tea coming, who's been
making quite a few little here statements. Yeah, so I stee he's the
longest standing actor in law and order. Uh. And of course he's has
tremendous experien sperience with the black community, and so it's going to be interesting
to hear him or maybe hear him rap about what's happening in the world today.
And of course Lisa Kennedy from Fox News is going to be back as
our MC and we just confirm Matt Ridley, Lord Matt Ridley Ridley from the
UK, so he's probably public ellectual number one of the UK who's coming and
talking about innovation. We're going to have a debate, by the way,
uh carry, I don't know if you're familiar with this big debate among libertarians,
primarily about whether intellectual property rights is an actual property right that should be
enforced by law. We're talking about patents, trademarks, conky right and there's
a lot of h I have a libertarians. You say, now there shouldn't
be any laws on this, and you're on your own once you invet something.
I think it's pretty crazy. Lord Ridley and has written about this saying
his book How Innovation Works. And we're going to have a debate on this
topic. Well, remember Steve Jobs was a big defender of intellectual property if
it was Apple's, but when it came to everyone else's intellectual property, he
couldn't have cared less. And Apple had the resources to fight any fight out
there. So yeah, I know that fight has been out there and it's
one of those kind of balancing things, whereas if you have too much intellectual
property rights, it will stifle innovation. But then again, we've all heard
the stories about the car companies, and I don't know if it's true or
not, but it sure sounds interesting where they there's a two hundred mile per
hour corburetor that they've bought up, and they've stolen intellectual property and suppressed it.
So I want to see that as a recovering attorney, and in fact,
as America's top recovering attorney, I personally want to want to view that
debate because you know, it really is unsettled in my mind. And look,
the Chinese have been ignoring intellectual property rights since they started their assent.
It doesn't look like it's doing them much good now though. No. In
fact, my wife has an experience. He wrote a book called Matriarchs of
the Messiah about the women in the Bible, and street bound on online on
Amazon, four different books that had her exact It was her book. They
just changed the title and changed the author, but it was her book.
I mean, are we supposed to just walk away and just let that happen?
I don't know. It seemed a little bit bizarre, and Amazon took
him down when when we pointed that out that they had stolen uh this intellectual
property copyright violight in our copyright. And by the way, we have the
same problem with Freedom Fest. There's quite a few organizations, primarily around the
July fourth holiday that call themselves Freedom Fest. Do we write them a polite
letter saying listen, we have a trademark on this, so we'd prefer that
you not use it, and most most of them have been quite cooperative,
but it is an issue. And anybody who's written a book or as a
patent, if you spend billions of dollars developing a drug, I mean,
should you have an exclusive rite for a certain period of time at least for
that It sounds like a legitimate argument to me. So this will be a
fun debate for sure. And I've had the same thing happen to me on
YouTube, where people have ripped off my shows more than fair comment, put
them with a bunch of other shows, and they wind up getting more reviews
than me because they're not restricted by YouTube. But because of my prior political
pronouncements, I'm in the YouTube sandbox, you know, I'm throttled and god
forbid, I get more than five thousand views on a video, then they
start suppressing it. Hey, but you know what, look this fits into
AI really will because anything that you produced from AI doesn't have any copyright protection.
Well, and by the way, we had someone that we've invited to
Freedom Fest, so we are going to have a big session on AI.
And this guy, Bradana Kastanio I think is his name, and he's from
San Diego. We've invited him to speak at freedom Fest and he gives an
incredible presentation on all the positive aspects of AI. And one of the examples
he in years was he gave he said, now let me show you a
lecture that I gave, and he just shows a little snippet from his lecture
that he gave in English, and then he said, now let me show
you what AI has done to create this lecture in Spanish. So it's his
voice, it's but it's all in Spanish, and his lips now look like
he's saying it in Spanish. You know, when they have that problem of
translation, that's often a problem the lips are moving one way in the language
is another. Well that's been solved with AI, and so he goes to
a whole litany of all of these positive things that are coming out of AI
instead of just the negative that the chat GBT will allow students to plagiarize without
impunity. These are the issues that I have as a professor, of course,
because we want people to do their own original work. But chat GBT,
the Tyler Cowen of marginal Revolution, he did a chat GBT what is
Mark Skelezan's greatest contribution to economics? And it was absolutely one hundred percent accurate
and beatifully Britton. I was really shocked because I've heard heard all these statements
that they come up with a lot of false information and that's all the truth
my case, it wasn't all right. Well, hey, I am going
to run it as we speak, because I got to see this. I
put in Peter Schiff one time and it was fairly accurate. I put in
like top ten gold bugs, and his name came up, so and I
subscribed to it because look, I'm gonna like make a little personal disclosure here.
I used to have somebody writing show notes to these interviews cost me a
good amount of money. She was definitely worth it, really English scholar.
And then to Oxford, and you know, but she didn't really have an
in depth understanding of what it was I was about. When I put it
through, I use an AI, NotI it taker, which I'm doing on
this show, and then I put it through chat GPT. I make a
few edits because it's kind of it's kind of predisposed to some relatives and trite
statements, so I cut them out. But you know, I'm able to
do it in a matter of minutes. It's speeded up my workflow by about
three hundred percent and saving me money at the same time. So if you
read in these show notes, take note they were written by two ais,
because I don't think one AI is enough. Mark. Yeah, but you
raise the important point, and this was sort of the big point that Brad
made that it's going to talk about a free invest and that is it increases
productivity and it reduces costs in so many different areas, and this is an
exciting development. So I think we're afraid of it. We're afraid that computers
and robots are going to take over the world and so forth. This is
a genuine fear, I think. But and who wants to play I don't
know if you've played computer chess at all, but it's almost impossible to beat
these cases. Yeah, you just can't beat them at all, even at
the lowest level. I have a hard time beating the computers. So it
takes away some of the fun of playing chess and other games. Yeah,
well, you know, that's that's technology for you. Well, here you
are Mark Scouts and It is an American economist, investment analyst, and author
who has made significant contributions to the field of economics, particularly in the areas
of free market theory, investment strategies, and historical economic analysis. His work
spans over several decades and has influenced not only academic circles, but also investment
practices in public policy. Well, it's telling me things I didn't even know
about you, Mark, And I didn't even know about it either. Thought
on the one that Tyler Cowen did for me, who said my gross output
GOO is my major contribution, and that was definitely back it's here. Yeah,
yeah, exactly. So it's nice to see that kind of thing.
I mean, I think overall this is really very exciting. The problem is
that you know, it's going to get to the point on in politics where
they can create characters that look just like the politician saying things that he never
said. That's going to happen, and that has probably already happened. In
fact, we might have had an AI in the White House for years and
not even known about it. Not Mark right, Well, he's been cloned.
But why would why would you clone someone who's half asleep? Hey,
if this is AI, that it could be the biggest ad to like put
the genie back in the bottle that there is. Hey, so talking about
economic theory, about advancements, did you ever think he would live to see
a major Latin American country rightfully elect a libertarian who in twelve I think,
in less than ninety days made an economy that was in chronic deficit for the
past dozen years into surplus, closing down government entities left and right. And
this is like the greatest libertarian experiment. Mark that a country's undertaken, probably
in your life and mine, I think we have. We have just now
recognized how significant this paradigm shift is in Latin American politics and perhaps around the
world. So you look back at Salad Oiende, the Marxist too one in
Chile. He won with there was a three way race, so he never
had a majority support for his Marxist vision of Chile, and of course it
ended very badly. Here you have a candidate who has won the majority.
I think he won with fifty six percent of a vote, and he's got
very widespread support. I've talked to a number of Argentines. In fact,
my son in law is Argentinian, and so he keeps me informed of what
people are thinking and so forth, and so far he has still very strong
support. Although in the legislature he has his own party is an extremely small
minority, and that is something has to deal with. He has to deal
with the Pedinistas and the unions, which are still very strong in maintaining their
conservative let's keep it the way it is, of corruption and excessive government regulation
and size. Do you know, from what I understand, over half the
people, half the Argentinians, to get some kind of compensation from the government,
either in payment one sort or another. They're working for the government,
and so it's a tall order for Malay Hobbier Malaye, I wish his first
name was Salvador. Like Ende could see he could be the savior of Latin
America and the world. The jurious. You know, the jury is still
out on this guy because he could be handcuffed and he could end up resigning.
I mean, you just never know if he's not able to achieve the
goals that he has. And it is political, I mean, it's everything
is as you know, you can have your own strong libertarian views. I
mean, he's called himself an anarcher, anarchist, and I think he named
his dog Murray Rothbart or something, so obviously he's not an anarchist because he's
having to deal with real world problems. The biggest issue there with Malay is
the dollarization that he has proposed, and he has not delivered on that yet.
Steve Hanke of Johns Hopkins, who's the world's expert on dollarization, he's
helped Ecuador dollariz and other and currency boards and that sort of thing. He
says that Malay is making a big mistake postponing the dollarsation. But of course
you have to have you have to have plenty of dollars to dollarize, because
if you dollarize at a high exchange rate in order to cover your dollarization,
that could be quite a burden on the average person. Ecuador did this.
They converted the escudo at twenty five thousand escudos to the dollar. Well,
I mean I was in Ecuador recently and they told me when this happened ten
years ago that the four of the middle class are really slammed because they didn't
have dollars. They had to turn in twenty five thousand isscudos to get one
dollar. The tax and attack difficult. So for Argentina this could be a
problem. Is what is the exchange rate that you're going to do this as
And I don't know if you can do it right away or not. Hanky
says yes, and the others are saying we need to accumulate more dollars.
So talking about currencies, and I didn't have this on our list of things
to talk about. But now that you raised it, we got this bitcoin
right. I was a skeptic for many years. I'm still skeptical because I
know that it can be shut down. Should the powers that be really regarded
as a major threat, and yet to performance wise lately, I mean,
it is the best performing asset of twenty twenty four. Well, not only
that, but I have a chart in my latest newsletter. This chart will
blow you away. I can't I don't think I can. It'd be nice
to put up on the screen. But it's a chart showing the performance of
various assets year by year since twenty and eleven. And that's so we're looking
at yeah, we're looking at eleven. It's it's eleven years or something,
maybe since twenty thirteen. So eight out of the eleven years, guess what
asset is out performed at the top. It's bitcoin. Yeah, and then
also the three years and it underperformed. It was the worst performing. So
it was just up and down like a yo yo, you know, or
at all away. It's the new inflation edge. It's just remarkable. It
is performance, and all of us kind of missed it. Yeah, yeah,
well I had the opportunity. I followed it. And I'm an expert
at figuring out when bitcoin peaks, but I'm really bad at figuring out when
it when at bottoms and buying. But so what I've done is all I
did was just set up automatically on a site. I buy X amount of
bitcoin every Monday, and then when I believe it's peaked, I dump it
and then I begin the acquisition again. And you know, I'm I don't
you know, Hey, I'm no investment gurger like you, but it's proven
to be an effective way to play this thing because it's much easier to pick
a peek than it is to pick a bottom, at least in my experience
in markets. You know, I think that. I mean, my son
Tim and I put together. We have this TNT trader. It's a short
term trading system, and we are all in bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology
and all of this sort of thing. I mean they are. We are
printing money right now virtually. Mean is because we have call options on top
of the bitcoin. And what you talked about the government shutting it down,
Well, guess what the government did. And one reason the market has taken
off when the SEC approved all the ETFs in bitcoin. That was the bottom,
that was a messing song. Hey, the government's actually approved this,
and you you the returns have just been spectactuar and we actually think it could
hit one hundred thousand before overhud a thousand before it's over. We will see
these kind of products jet to be careful of because you never know when some
kind of event is going to occur to the causes it to collapse. How
do I sign up for your TNT Trader stock investor. Mark. Well,
you go to Mark skalsend dot com and TNT Trader is there, and it's
a rather expensive service. But we do have an introductory offer of ninety nine
dollars for the first quarter, but then it's two hundred and seventy five dollars
every quarter after that. Mark. If it worked, it's chop chamber,
chop change order for those are here want to make money. Mark. Obviously
you didn't hear that we're having this thing called inflation. You should be getting
at least five hundred dollars a quarter for this because if it works. Hey,
people always say, well, if the system really worked, if the
guy knew what he was doing, particularly with gambling systems, he wouldn't be
selling it to the public. He'd just be out there printing money. But
there is a boat that I have it in my own portfolio as well,
so we're doing both. But I'm signing up today. Yes, yes,
sir, I'm signing up, and I will have a link in the show
out to this interview that the AI will be gracious enough to write for you.
Oh, thank you, because one thing I've learned is the system may
be good or it may be bad, but it's better than not having any
system at all, because the only way to make money over the long run
is discipline, because discipline will get you in there when you should be in,
it'll get you out when you need to be out emotions. If you
don't have a system, then you're only running on emotions. I think.
Also, we have protective stops so that we move the trailing stop up as
we're making money and we get stopped out because you never know when the market's
going to turn against you, especially in the option area, and we do
out of the money call options, which is a high risk, but you
know you can't lose more than an hundred percent, but you have upside potential
that's unlimited. So that's our approach, all right, I love it.
Hey, we'll have two links there linked to Mark site and TNT Trader as
well as to freedomfest dot com. I am definitely going to be there this
time. Mark, appreciate your taking time out from your pursuits here to touch
base with us and bring us up to date. If you got a question
for Mark myself the email mail addresses k Lfcarrie Lutz dot com and make sure
you go to the site Financial Survival Network dot com and sign up for our
free newsletter Mark always a pleasure. We'll see you in Vegas, all right.
Take care, Thank you, Carrie, Thanks for listening to Carrie Lutz's
Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the latest,
go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever,