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Speaker 2: And welcome you are listening to and watching the Financial
Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Letz. Well with us
today is Adam Taggart. Your reputation, Adam precedes you huge,
huge presence out there in the thoughtful money business, and
that's your website, thoughtful Money dot com. And hey, we've
had this huge run up in metals. Now we're getting
the inevitable party hangover, if you will. Amazing at it
looks like silver will retrace almost exactly fifty percent a
little what do you call that contrati if number or whatever,
and then we're.
Speaker 3: Back to the races right well, from your lips to
God's ears. Look, there's a lot of reasons to still
be really bullish on silver's price in the long term,
and it has certainly been club like a turkey BLT.
I said an X last night. Now, you know, we
are hopefully seeing some pretty good entry points here for
folks that want to add to their exposure. Or if
you missed the run up the first time and we're
kicking yourself, you know, this may be a great gift
from the universe to get in. That said, you know,
could it go lower?
Speaker 4: Sure?
Speaker 3: And you know, I think anything is possible.
Speaker 4: I think.
Speaker 3: Let me put this way, I think I think as
long as the war situation continues to sus stain, and
if it becomes even more kinnectic. More concerning, if oil
prices go even higher, or at least even just stay
high at these prices for longer than folks are currently expecting,
that may still have some negative knock on effects on
the precious metals. So I don't want to sell the
story that I think. You know, solber is going to
take off to the moon tomorrow necessarily. And you were
asking me before we turned the camera on, Kerrie, if
I expected the medals to follow this much, And I
think the answer, honest answer is is I was totally
open to it. And the reason for that was I've
been a long term precious metal investor like you I
nineteen eighty I was nine years old, so I wasn't
following that one super closely, but certainly it was pretty
heavily in the precious metals when twenty eleven came along
and so saw that, you know, bull off spike and
then what happened after that, and so when we were
try to remember when I did this, I think it
was June of twenty twenty five, June of last year.
There were a preponderance of events happening that made me
exceptionally bullish on you know, the prices of the precious metals,
but in particular sober and you know, Carrie, I'm not
a financial guru. I don't put myself out there as one.
If anything, I'm sort of a guru of gurus.
Speaker 4: I do what you do for.
Speaker 3: A living, which is I talked to a lot of
the best minds of money in the markets. And if
I have any value from that, it's the fact that
I get to talk to so many people and I
get to synthesize, you know, what they say. And one
of the things that I look for and what I
do is when I hear the same conclusion coming up
in conversation after conversation with experts who use different methodologies,
so they're all taking different paths, but their paths are
leading to the same destination. And when I hear that happen,
I start to think, Okay, the probability of that can
illusion is probably higher than normal because so many people
are getting there with different methodologies. And I was hearing
that around silver so much to the point that, like
I said, I don't put myself out there as a
as a financial guru, but I remember when bitcoin was
really taking off and everybody in social media was giving
themselves laser eyes as a way to indicate that I'm
on the bitcoin train. So June of last year, I
gave myself silver eyes. So I just put these two
Solber eagles, you know, coins over the eye of my
profile avatar and said, hey, folks, I'm getting really bullish
on silver. And then fortunately one of my followers very
quickly added like silber laser beams coming out of the eyes, right,
So I had silver laser eyes, and I you know,
there's probably a lot of luck in this, folks. But
that was basically when sober you know, basically went from
I don't know that twenty eight, you know, from then
on it went off to the ra and early this year,
when it got to one hundred dollars an ounce, I
took the silver eyes off and I told folks, look,
I hope this thing continues to go higher. I'll cheer
it if it does. But I'm getting really nervous that
silver is just getting incredibly over sold, sorry, overbought, just
because it's price action. I mean, Carrie, you know that
no asset goes vertical forever, and the more vertical the
price action becomes, the more likely not only that it's
going to pull back sometime soon, but the pullback is
going to be probably pretty violent. And I got a
lot of flak initially from this, you know, the Silver bros.
Because they didn't want me to send a signal that
the party was ending. And of course, Silver, you know,
over the next week and a half, you know, went
to one hundred and twenty an ounce, and so for
a very brief moment, a lot of people were saying, Adam,
you're totally missing the boat here. But then, of course
we had this correction, and if you look at the
price action the last two times Silver did this two
thousand in nineteen eighty, the replacements were just brutal. By
the time they were done, not only had they given
up pretty much all the gains that Sover had made
over the run, but then Sober was like dead money
for like a decade or more. And so I don't
think that's going to be the case this time. But
I think you have to respect the price action and
just know that there's a non zero probability that the
price could continue following the shape of the previous two corrections.
Now that being said, Sober is many many different things
going on this time. You know, nineteen eighty essentially was
a response to the Hunt Brothers trying to corner the market.
It was, you know, one actor that then just got
beaten in the submission. This time, it's the whole world
that is going after physical very different story. I interview
precious metals experts.
Speaker 4: I like to.
Speaker 3: Interview dealers, you know, the guys that are actually there
with their hands on the pulse of what's going on
in the physical world. And I interview any Scheckment a
lot Andy. But Andy is saying that, you know, over
the course of his like, you know, thirty plus year
career in this industry, the volumes we're seeing right now
in terms of the demand for physical silver unprecedented, and
and the volumes that are being taken for delivery out
of the comes totally unprecedented. And they're at such levels that,
I mean, tens of millions of ounces a month that
it's hard to imagine anybody other than a sovereign player taking,
you know, being able to take delivery of those volumes.
You get to remember, you to take delivery of it.
You you get stored somewhere, you got to ship it,
you know, ship it and shi securely.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So so that's very different obviously with the central banks
that have turned into the very big net buyers of
the precious metals in recent years. It's now been declared
an essential mineral by the US government and has a
similar status and an increasing number of governments out there.
As you know, Andy likes to say, you know, a
US missile, you know, takes I don't know how many
hundreds of bounces of sober, but but several hundred ounces
a sober per missile. We're vaporizing on a sober right
now over in the Middle East. That all needs to
get restocked. If you just look at the commercial demand
for everything from UH electronics to you know, the data
centers that we're building.
Speaker 4: In an AI world.
Speaker 3: You know you're going to need the world's most conductive
element for all that. So there's all sorts of reasons
to be really quite bullish this time and say, yes,
it is different than it was in the previous two
price bikes that that that then disappated away. So you know,
long story short, I think you can make some pretty
good technical conclusions here in the near term that sober
is pretty short term over sold, and that at the
minute we get some relief in the world's fears about
the war, that silver could have a really violent reaction
to the upside. And one of the big things that's
going on right now, Kerrie, is you know there is
forced selling going on in the world right now because
of the I oil pricess liquidation in a couple of ways,
a couple of ways. You know, big players countries even
right they're having to spend a lot more in oil
suddenly than they were before. So to fund that, they're
selling their assets that have value, and precious metals have
been in a great run, so there's a lot of
profit and old There also one one question for you
which everybody's been reading about it.
Speaker 2: I know it's out there. I don't really like to
follow the trend because that's how they get you the narrative.
But we do have this private credit crack up. Now
my feeling is it already happened six months to a
year ago. It's just like when a star explodes and
turns into a black hole and twenty light years later
we see it happen. That's what happens in the markets.
How real is is the private credit crackup? Is that
leading to liquidation in the markets? What's your work say
on that? And sorry for.
Speaker 3: Cap do you I think it works as we're still
we're still finding out. But that's it's a great segue
to the point out was I was making, which is
not only is oil just forcing you know, large players
to sell assets to fund the higher oil, but it's
also you know, weight on the markets we've had We've
had a lot of market weakness because of the knock
kind of effects of the war here and there. You
get forced margin calls right where you get investors who
are leving me or whatnot. You're literally just hey, you know,
either either you get to put more money in today
or we are selling your positions. Whether you like it
or not, right, So I think that's pushing this down
to now, how much of that is due to potentially
private credit? I don't know is the real answer. And
I just telled my Spring conference this past week and
carry so I had I don't know. You know, fifteen
presenters talk a lot about private credit throughout the day,
and you know what I took from that is is
there's definitely real there there, just FYI. I don't think
any of them thinks that this is as existential a
threat to kind of the financial system the way that
subprime was. But they're all saying, but I could be wrong.
I think a big hedge, yeah, but a really interesting ques.
So one of the reasons why we don't know how
big it is is because private credits willpaque. Right, So,
unlike the public banking system, we don't have visibility into
these loans.
Speaker 4: We don't know what.
Speaker 3: Loans weren't made, we don't know whether they were good
loans or not. We're just not going to find out
until the bodies start floating to the surface, which they
are starting to do now. So I kind of like
your analogy about the supernovas. We you know, we only
see it long after. We only see the damage long
after it was actually inflicted. But one really interesting point
that was raised during this conference was, you know a
lot of these private equity funds are gating the funds
right So, I'm a private equity investor, I'm stressed, I'm
now worried about this. I'm reading the headlines, I'm worried,
and i want to take my money out of these funds. Well,
the funds that we can't do that, and as a
matter of fact, we're going to totally gate all withdrawals
right now. So you know, we'll tell you when at
some point in the future you might be able to
get access to this again. So if you're that investor
in your A you know, freaked out, and b perhaps
you've got some stress now in your portfolio so you
need you want to or need to liquidate things, Well,
you can't liquidate it from the private market right now,
So where can you liquid it from the public market?
So you have to go over and sell, which you
can on the public side. So, in addition to the
margin call issue we were talking about, I think there
also is this knock on effect of private credit where
private credit investors who are stressed are having to sell
their private sorry, their public assets, you know to Surbien.
Speaker 2: Yep, Well, we call this the Hunter the liquidator, Hunter
the securitizer, who then becomes Hunter the liquidator. And you
know Hunter, he's a twenty something wall streeter and he
drives around it a neon green Lamborghini. That's Hunter the securitizer.
And Hunter is always looking for the next greatest cash flow.
Secure cash flow, uninterruptable, gets better in bad times. And
the last I heard he was throwing coins over his
shoulder at the Trevy Fountain in Rome, looking for the
next great payment stream, everything securitized. Haven't we learned anything here? Well,
I know I know the answer to the question of
that question. It's redundant. But haven't we weren't learned anything
since eight nine and the Great financial Crash? I mean, really,
aren't we doing exactly the same things?
Speaker 4: Well? So, uh I.
Speaker 3: My answer is not going to surprise you at all,
but it's probably under depression even more. No, I don't
think we have and in private credit. I think many
of us watched this sort of train wreck happening in
disbelief saying, hey, didn't don't we know how this ends?
And and uh, you know a number of these companies.
I remember I was probably about six months ago calling
out Blue Owl, which at the time was was.
Speaker 4: You know, riding high. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And they what they were doing is they were buying
the books of a lot of the buy now, pay
later lenders, which Carrie to me, buy now, pay later
is like the epitome of the we didn't learn our
lesson you know, yeah, I love it. Basically loading to
people who were who were taking out an inst alment
plan to buy, you know, burritos from Chipotle.
Speaker 4: We could go wrong, what could go wrong? Right?
Speaker 3: But just to depress you. So, one of the guests
at my conference was Matt tabe oh Sud, the journalist,
the fellow who who you know, was sort of our
generation's chronicler of the two thousand and eight crash, right,
the guy that really made it understandable over the masses.
So I asked him that exact same question and he
just said no. And it's like, I can't believe it.
I mean, for as much time as we spent forensically
picking apart what went wrong last time, the little amount
that we learned from it and the little amount of
change of behavior is just staggering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're securitizing everything and in giving it a triple
A bond rating. And you know, I was thinking that
Hunter should go to a new field called the aa
NS allowance anticipation notes, where it allows kids to sell
off up to ten years of their allows so they
can buy an Xbox or a e bike or whatever
it is they want. Because that's when you get down
to it, I don't that's how absurd this thing is.
Speaker 3: Right, we joke about that, but you know, carry that
might happen. As you're saying that, I'm thinking like, oh
my god, maybe they'll securitize people's inheritances, right, like, hey,
we'll give you a loan today, you know, for a
claim on your inheritance once your parents die, right yeah.
Speaker 2: Or or we'll give it to you on your life
insurance so you can collect your policy before you die.
Isn't that the ultimate?
Speaker 3: I mean, it's it's it's so I'm sure we're just
enraging the viewers here, but yeah, we learned so very
little from this, and of course, to a certain extent,
it's not their fault, Carrie, right, I mean, like, what
did we teach Wall Street and y'uring the GFC you'll
get bailed out, you know, and the losses will get socialized.
I mean, some people forget the big Wall Street banks.
They pay themselves record bonuses in two thousand and nine,
right in the depths of the despair of the GFC.
They were just completely toned after this, and they didn't
pay a price.
Speaker 2: For it, really totally, And yeah, it's no better this time.
What's worse in a way is when you got like
eight million foreclosures taking place or whatever the actual number was.
You can't hide that stuff with this besides the funds gating,
you actually can hide it, just like we hid during
the Great Financial Crisis, sixteen trillion that went out the
door to bail out European banks, right right, it's the
same thing because now under dot Frank, it's supposed to
be a bill and well, you know that's never going
to happen because nobody's going to put up with that.
Speaker 4: We'll have a revolution.
Speaker 2: So instead you just stealthily write some checks behind the scenes.
Problem gone, and then onto the next disaster.
Speaker 4: Right, I think that's likely true.
Speaker 3: And then you know, I was complaining about the opacity
of the private credit space, but I think that that
was probably very intentional one because it helps them on
in the good days because they just have less requirements,
less constraints. But I think to your point, it helps
them on the bad days where it lets these backdoor
bailouts happen in the darkness so that the public can't
get enraged about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's exactly what's going to happen here. I
don't know, they're not in the US government is not
letting Black Rock take a hit. And this is the
same exact thing as seven eight nine, where initially it's
the sub subprime, then it goes to the subprime, then
it goes to the alta, and then it goes to
prime and to a lesser degree. But it was a contagion.
It's a contagion, yep. And all this private financing, and
then the people who are taking advantage of it, the
mid size companies that are basically zombie companies, they can't
go on anymore if this private credit market seizes up, right.
Speaker 3: And so I think that's totally true. Now, let me
make a statement that might not be popular here.
Speaker 4: So you know, I.
Speaker 3: I interview lots of professional investors. I was interviewing Jan Vneck,
you know, the CEO of X Funds a quarter ago,
and he was basically, you know, pointing out some of
the troubles in private equity and said, hey, you know,
you should you should maybe be a little bit cautious here.
He said, I like these business development corporations, but I
don't think they're I don't think they're going to fare
very well here.
Speaker 4: For a while.
Speaker 3: And he, you know, was proven to be very true.
You know, he and others I talked to are now saying, hey,
you know a lot of these things are being priced
as if they're going out of business, and for a
lot of these a lot of these funds that they're
highly likely not going to just from a management and
diversification standpoint. And remember with credit, you know, you you
the only risk you have is the existential credit of
the company dying. As long as it can survive and
make its payments, you know, you're going to get paid
on your on the debt that you're holding. So the
his point in others is, hey, we may actually be
starting to see some pretty good valuations in some of
these private credit funds that are kind of getting left
for dead right now. And so while I am standing
hip to hip with you and railing against you know,
kind of the pernicious effect I think they have on
the system. Overall, some of them may actually be proved,
may prove to be some pretty good investments right now,
if we're looking forward, you know, if.
Speaker 4: We want to check in again in three to six months,
I agree.
Speaker 2: But I remember at the start of the financial collapse,
I went to a talk in the ninety second Street
Why in New York City, this guy Ralph Winter, who
ran the Winter Fund. I don't even know if it's
still around or dot. And at that point, like the
banks had been clobbered, City Bank was trading it like
single digits. And one of the people asked Ralph, said,
is City Bank a goodbye now? And he said, look,
if you look at their financial statements, there could be
footnote number one eighty seven, which you have no idea
what it means because they're so opaque, and that one
footnote could blow up the entire bank. So is it
a good deal? Well, yeah, it's a good deal from
the standpoint you know that the government isn't going to
let City Bank go bust. They might let the layman,
but not City Bank because that touches too many individual
and savers, not just investors, but savers.
Speaker 4: We could very.
Speaker 2: Well be in the same situation now where those funds
look attractive now, in six more months, they could look
way more attractive, couldn't they.
Speaker 4: They could.
Speaker 3: And honestly, Kerrie, I mean, this is a multifactorial world
we live in, but I think kind of the big
factor right now is what happens with the war here.
You know, at my conference, the keynote speaker was the
great Lacy Hunt, great economist Lacy Hunt, and you know,
Lacy sort of you know, hit a number of slides
that showed how the economy was challenged, we'll say, heading
into this year anyways, you know, looking at things like
the decline of the savings rate, looking at weakness in
the labor market, looking at contraction in the flows of
actual shipped goods, factory capacity Utilization's got a whole bunch
of factors here that basically show an economy that is stumbling.
We'll put it that way. Then he said, okay, and
then you put on top of that the stresses of
an oil price shock is like, you know, that's like
taking you know, a drunk house stumbling home and take
a baseball bat to his knees. Right, So what he
did is he compared the previous major oil price shocks
over the past fifty years and then what happened afterwards,
And in most cases, the economy was similarly challenged before
those oil price shocks hit. And the Crib notes is
is that nothing good happens when you add an oil
price shock onto an economy that is not robust. So
you know, you get guys like Lacey ed Doud a
few others who are like, oh my god, like definitely
I'm making my forecast even more pessimistic given what's going
on right now. But of course the big factor there
is is okay, but is this a price shock that
lasts for, you know, a couple of weeks a month,
or is this a price shock that gets extended at
another six, nine, twelve months? Right, We don't know yet,
And it's going to totally depend on how long the
war goes on, and it's going to depend on how
much damage is done long term damage has done infrastructure
in the Gulf right now, So so first and foremost,
I think that's really what's going to depend and the
longer that goes on, not just private credit, Kerry, I
mean everything is going to get tracked, and that that
could be we could be looking back in a year
and saying, well, that was the clear catalyst that brought
on the next recession and the next big market correction,
all that stuff, and if it lasts for long enough,
it will.
Speaker 4: I think you can have a I'm not.
Speaker 3: A geopolitical strategist, so take everything with a big grain
of salt.
Speaker 4: I do.
Speaker 3: I have interviewed a couple for the show. I would
just say, don't put a negative probability on the war
being over sooner rather than later. And the reason for
that is, and I know a lot of people don't
like this is you know, this isn't a popular opinion
with everybody. But if you look at President Trump's track
record in any way, he's willing to gamble, but in
many ways what he is playing for is better than
what I had before. Right, So he might put out
these grandiose statements of what he's trying to accomplish, but
really I think always looking for is just a better
situation than I had before. And so, for example, when
he went in to take out Maduro, I think his
thinking was, all right, I'm going to try the strike.
If it fails, I'm no worse often I was before
Sam Guy's in office, and that was there the day before.
Didn't get worse. If I take him out and the
new regime plays ball with me a little bit better,
well that's better than what we had before.
Speaker 4: Everybody, you know, I got what I needed.
Speaker 2: I've been following Trump since his first real estate deal
in New York City the common way.
Speaker 4: You're super familiar with this, Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, and I've actually called every single thing that happened.
The only thing I thought was going to happen was
a cessation of the Russia Ukraine War. And it's kind
of like yesterday's news. You just don't hear much about
it anymore. It's like, imagine if they had a war
and nobody came.
Speaker 4: But I knew.
Speaker 2: I knew that he was going to take out Maduro
because he really summed up his philosophy in the art
of the deal.
Speaker 4: And that is when I.
Speaker 2: Look at a deal, I don't look at what can
go right. I look at what can go wrong. I
always look at my downside first, because I know that
the upside of the deal will take care of itself,
and the downside deal of pulling out Maduro. If it
didn't work, Eh, wasn't so bad. The downside of blowing
up narco terrorist boats, if that's what they really are,
and I assume they are, but we don't really know,
you know, downside, not so bad. Downside going into Iran. Yeah, well,
maybe I won't be able to get regime change, but
I will so cripple them that they'll wish that they
had regime change. So each move that he's made has
always been with an eye to the downside, not to
the upside. Necessarily, Yes, if it worked out, the upside
would be great. And I go back to the first
triumph of his second term, which was re retaking or
reimposing US influence over the Panama Canal. Now, yeah, that
was the first thing that happened. I knew exactly what
the path was the second I saw that, because you know,
from this geopolitical standpoint, strategic standpoint, you have to have
the canal, right, because that's the gateway and that protects
the entire hemisphere. But it also made clear that Venezuela
was going And then he had a meeting with G
and G actually did cut back somewhat on fentanyl trafficking,
and I knew there was a deal that basically Russia
and China, but particularly China, we're basically going to look
the other way when we hit Venezuela and Iran. Now
China will rue the day they ever let us go
back into Iran.
Speaker 4: But you know.
Speaker 2: It's gone exactly. I wrote an article about it. Eight
calls I made since May of last year that all
came to pass. The only one I was wrong about
was ending the Ukraine War, but it actually worked to
the benefit of Trump's strategy not ending it because it'll
mobilized them and they couldn't do anything about Iran or Cuba.
I also called Cuba almost to the day. There was
no question it was going to happen. So I will
take the call and say that Silver we're going to
be through this thing probably the next eight weeks, mid June,
and not that we'll live happily ever after. Because one
thing I wanted to talk to you about, and this
was ahead of all this stuff kind of got away
with it. What about AI All right, I know you
use it, I know you're into it. What do you
see it's potential impact, especially on the white collar economy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I so want to talk about that with you,
and I have very strong opinions. If I can, let
me just sure bow and what we were talking about,
and then we'll jump topics. So it sounds like you
see through the lens that I'm looking through. Absolutely. And again, look, folks,
this could totally go south. It could totally go a
different way than I'm predicting. So I'm not saying I've
got it. I'm just saying, don't discount this. I think Carrie,
who is a greater student of Trump than I am,
is saying, hey, this is this is probably the likely probability.
But two things, so, uh, you know, first off, when
you when you tile these things together that you mentioned, right, Panama, Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran,
you know, yes, there's immediate benefits we get from each
one of those. But also they help us in securing
America's interests versus China. I think it's a big part
of the sure I have spoken to a Chinese analyst.
That's another interview I did last week, which, folks, if
you don't know a lot about China, ad how do
they recommend you go listen to that?
Speaker 4: I learned a ton we'll put that link up in
the show notes.
Speaker 3: Oh great, thanks that analyst, a guy named Peter Alexander
is a westernerbody's lived in China for the years. He
he is a high belief that basically China and the
US have had this backdoor agreement where they've basically said,
you know what, we're going to kind of carve up
the world a bit. You know, America will will let
you kind of do them in a row doctrine two
do oh thing if you let us achieve you know,
our aspirations more on our side of the world. So obviously,
you know, a lot of this sort of plays to that.
A lot of it's going on place to that, and
also somewhat increases the US's bargaining power in those discussions
because remember, we don't really we don't. Is the US
don't depend on an oil coming out of the golf.
We care about it because the oil price is a
global commodity, but we don't necessarily care so much about
the barrels that go out of there. China absolutely does, right,
So it's all part of that, It's all part of
that big grand game. Also, one other thing too, is
carry one of the upsides of this is. I mean,
some people think, look, Trump wants to just you know,
his goal is to get rid of the regime, take
over carg Island and have the US can you know,
start to play a role and controlling a flow of
oil out of there. I don't know if that's the case.
I don't necessarily think that's the case. But we'll see
what happens. But even if this war ends tomorrow, there's
going to be a premium, a risk premium now put
on oil coming out of the Golf, oil and gas
coming out of the Golf that wasn't there before. And
so you're already starting to see a bunch of countries say,
you know what, I was buying the cheap oil out
of the golf and the cheap gas out of the Golf.
I think I want to buy it from a safer
country now, a country that I'm not going to have
to worry about it going into you know, getting into
kinetic quagmire. I'm not going to worry about my tankers
getting shot at or whatever. And so just last week,
the administration announced that it signed I like fifty six
billion in oil and gas contracts with Indo Pacific countries.
So they're already starting to do that. You know, if
you're Japan, it takes you twenty five days to get
a tanker from the Persian Gulf, it only takes you
eight to get it from Alaska. And you can be
pretty sure that Alaska is not going to be embroiled
in some you know, multinational, you.
Speaker 4: Know war zone.
Speaker 3: So there are additional long term benefits that could come
to America and some of its allies from what's going
on in the golf right now that are second or
third orders. That are effects that I don't think a
lot of people are thinking about right now.
Speaker 2: And as long as you mentioned Alaska, let's talk about Canada.
Speaker 4: It's fracturing now.
Speaker 2: I don't think we're actually going to march into Alberta
in Saskatchewan, right yeah. I don't think we're really going
to annex them as states. I think they will become
semi autonomous regions of Canada and they will adopt the
US dollar. And think about what that does. It gives
us a corridor from Alaska down to the Upper Midwest,
the oil, everything else. And then when we follow that
down and we think about what could potentially happen in Mexico,
we have what I call the North American Resource Corridor
goes straight down the US into Mexico.
Speaker 4: That's the gate.
Speaker 2: That's the thing, And we don't have to talk about
AI and everything it's going to do.
Speaker 4: I'm happy to go there because I've got.
Speaker 2: But what is happening now that nobody out there sees
is AI is responsible for large amounts of decisions that
are taking place in the government.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: It's not that it's making the decision that Trump just
says AI, what I call a Trump GPT, what should
I do? And it gives him an answer and he says, okay,
do that. No, it's like you use it, you know,
you have to. It has to get to know you,
your decision making style, your language. Although I can't imagine
a Trump GPT with language, but that's got to be
a trip in itself. So the point is AI. The
US is at the forefront of AI governance, meaning using
AI to adjust the governance model. Bring it, because we
basically got like twenty first century technology infrastructure, and we
got an eighteen sixties government right it. You know, they
got some iPads and some workstations, but they basically do
everything the same way.
Speaker 4: That's changing.
Speaker 2: And I don't think really anybody understands this, that it's
actually happening this way.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think, like all things with AI, it's
going to happen way faster than people expect, and probably
already is. Just read an article this morning about how pallenteers,
you know, AI contributions to the strike decisions that have
been made in US around war sort of started off
as a beta project and very quickly became just the
general operating policy. It was like, oh my gosh, this
thing is so much more accurate than we've been in
previous conflicts that they're now saying, we get to scale
this to everything, right, And I think that's kind of
just one example of what you're talking about.
Speaker 2: Hey, I can tell you in the law like the
Billable hour is going to be a thing of the past.
I'm involved in a lawsuit right now, kind of like
a little hobby. But we call the book. I should
show you the book. I think you'll get a kick
out of it. It's called America America's Great Parking Scam.
You've been robbed and you can actually scan that QR code.
It will take you to parkscam dot com. You can
buy the book, whatever. But I'm up against six municipalities
and three app companies parking app companies because I just
got fed up with the Grift, And I said, you know,
I've been bitching about the Grift my whole life at them,
my whole life. And if I don't do anything now
that I actually can do it and I have the time,
then I'm full of it. You know, everything I said
is bull if I don't actually take the chance when
I see the opening of a system that is completely corrupt,
it's gone way way past the bounds of governmental propriety.
So you know, in the meantime, I've gone asymmetric warfare
with these guys. I have six or seven regulatory complaints
and they're real, and I've got a lawsuit and one
hundred paid complaint and I can move so quick and
the billable hour people then even the regular lawyers who
don't use it, they're like trying to catch up, trying
to think of what is his next move going to be?
Speaker 3: Okay, because you're using AI on your end, Yeah, yeah,
you know, And it's interesting. So first off, kudos to
you for for standing on your integrity there, Carrie and
fighting the system.
Speaker 4: You see is corrupt.
Speaker 3: You know, there's one of the things I really appreciate
about what's happened in the past year and a half
has been the we've tipped into common knowledge that there
is a ton of waste, fraud and abuse in government spending.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I mean, we all kind of generally knew it. You
think it didn't really we couldn't really scope at or
size it. There was no target to go after the
whole doze thing. What folks, whether you liked it or not,
I think it did a really good service to our
right side by putting this conversation front and center and
your point about AI. I actually have a lot of
optimism that it's going to be a lot harder to
conduct this type of waste fraud and abuse in a
world where the government income statement is audited by AI. Now,
it may take us, you know, more years than I'd
like for us to get there, but my guess is
we're going to get there sooner than most people probably
expect we could, and it's going to be just really
hard for the type of abuses that we're hearing about,
whether it's the daycare said that the leaders's in Minnesota,
or whether it's the hospice in LA And those are
just you know, two examples of stuff I'm sure doing
across all over the country.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so it.
Speaker 2: Is an epicenter of Medicare medicaid fraud here. I mean, forget,
I got so many old people.
Speaker 3: Well exactly, And look, the government is always going to
spend more money than it should. But I finger to
the wind. My kind of guesstimate is if we could
magically get rid of the fraud, we probably wouldn't have
a deficit.
Speaker 4: Like it's it's that.
Speaker 2: Large, all right, no question, I've always said. And the
government wastes a third to fifty percent of the money
that we send it, and no greater target than the
Pentagon you know, the Pentagon Lake is Lalla Land. But
it's every it's every program because like the New Deal
wasn't built on fraud, the Great Society was built upon fraud.
It was designed to be fraudulent from its very inception. Anyways,
we've been at it so long. I could go on
another hour, but I don't have the time. Just tell
us again where we find you these days? How we
connect with you on the web.
Speaker 3: Sure, so you can go to thoughtful money dot com
and you know what you'll find there is you'll find
my interviews, which is I do, like what Carrie does,
I interview. I get you five interviews a week of
interviewing the top minds and investing. But one of the
things that I do is I try to make that
information actionable and connect people with ways to take that
information and then actually apply it to their imply it
intelligently to their investing decisions. And so if you're a
DOI investor, we've got DIY solutions to refer you to.
Speaker 4: If you'd rather.
Speaker 3: Have a live financial professional advisor, you can, you can
talk with them, meet with them for free. We've got
solutions for buying precious metals. There's just a whole bunch
of other solutions you'll find there at that same site. Carrie,
Can I talk for sixty seconds about that AI thing?
Speaker 4: But sure?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 3: So this is for when we have more time in
the future. But as optimistic as I am about what
AI may hopefully be able to do for us, I
have huge concerns for it in the practicality of its rollout.
I think the rollout is going to happen way faster
than we're ready for, and the job's displacement is going
to that job's displacement rate. I fear is going to
totally overwhelm our ability to repurpose that placed labor into
additional constructive, productive use. And so I don't see how
we avoid a massive underemployment or unemployment problem that could
last for years, and the cost of that societal injury
may actually be higher than the immediate benefits we get
from the AI. But that's something we can talk about
in the future. I just didn't want folks to think
I was a total AI fanboy.
Speaker 2: No, No, I see the same dangers as do you,
but I don't really see any way around it. That's
like the scary part. Anyway, we'll pick up next time.
Let's do this in a few weeks. Be well, thanks
for coming on Real Pleasure, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: On, Garry, Thanks for listening to carry Letz'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
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