we're so glad could join us for what is going be just an excellent event. we were so excited to have carol roth with us today. my name is wayne winegarden am a senior fellow with the pacific research institute. for those who aware pride, we're a think tank advance free market policy across a number of areas health care, education we have a whole new free cities project. you can learn about all of these and more at pacific dot org. okay. i just mentioned today really honored to have with us a new york times bestselling author and as she to say, a recovering invest ment banker, a carol roth. and we will also welcome your

questions. so please any questions you have for carol about fantastic book please and to those in the chat box and we're going to try to get to those at toward the end of our are our together and carol you know you've written really what is an incredibly it's an important book it's provocative it's also especially the title it's terrifying and you will own nothing but the book is you really just also correct me if i'm wrong the point of the book is you're trying to help people be aware of these trends and so that they can navigate what is, in a sense, an emerging global financial issue. how do we preserve and grow wealth kind of given all of that so i guess to just throw something in in that big kind of 40,000 foot level, let's why is private ownership so important for individuals and families. well, wayne, thank you so for having me here. and for pr. i do wonderful work and

everybody should supporting the work that you're doing out and i take the whole of ownership and the american dream very serious firstly i came from a blue collar family and neither of my parents from college and they worked their way up and had the opportunity for me to go out and seize that american dream and. i wanted to make sure that we preserve for for everybody and over my more than quarter of a century of experience in working with people and helping them create wealth and go after wealth creation opportunities and preserve the wealth that they've created. there's one thing that i've learned above. there's just one complete truth out there, and that is that wealth comes ownership. you have own assets and, particularly those assets have the opportunity to retain value and to appreciate in value. so the first time i see this

meme, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy across social media several years and i saw ads tied the world economic forum, which is littered with the business and political leads. i thought like, this has to be raw, right? we know that wealth comes from ownership. why would the business and political lead who have benefited from being owners, why would they be the end of private property by 2030? somebody must have taken this out of context as. often happens right on social media. and it took very little research for this particular case to find the video which is still on the world economic forum's twitter stream, at least as we're having conversation. and you know, you get that first prediction of aids all eight, by the way, are fairly terrifying. the first one, which came from global futures council, that's it says on the video, is that you'll own nothing and you'll be

happy. and so there are a few things that struck me from that. you know, one was obviously the barriers to ownership that we're talking about. the second the phrase it was, you'll own nothing. it wasn't will or nothing they weren't predicting that outcome. they gave the tell in the way that put that out there that that somehow there is a class of people who will still be owning many things, but you just won't be owning anything. so that sort of struck me and then you'll be happy and this idea that if you could buy in to this concept of what a free life you would have wouldn't it be great? couldn't just be the instagram, yolo lifestyle of i, you know, i'm just to traipse around the world and nothing it's one of those pipe dreams that we know people throughout history who have not had ownership of property and haven't had their private property rights enforce.

they have been unfree, they have been unhappy and. many cases, they've lost their lives. so you have to ask yourself why, you know, why is that that they're pushing you're not only the non ownership but the buy in piece and. i think as we see the global financial stakes shifting, which can get into and you have people who see that happening, you know, they want to make sure that they stay wealthy and powerful, but the will that was left out of the ya'll and if they can get you to buy into that concept, you just go along with this and that you're going to rent your life as a subscription or a service and become the product. it makes it much easier them. if you're going along willingly versus them trying to have to force upon you is the justification that you'll be happy they it's like a carefree, no responsibility lifestyle. i mean, how do you justify you'll be happy.

so i don't justify at all. i the the literature that i have seen whether is you know from organizations like the wef or the media cover is this concept that yes it's very carefree. you won't have a trouble in the world it's sort of what the government does you know come in and depend on government and will take care of you instead of going out there and finding your own way and getting your success. it's a very different mentality that obviously has outcomes. and as we know that, you know, that doesn't really work out in reality. but the dream sounds amazing. you know, it great that you'll have this wonderful place to live and you know, if is a leak in the roof, someone else will come fix it and you don't have to worry about mowing the lawn because it's somebody else's problem. but the implications of that are many. and i think for a lot of people

who's battling sheets have been racked by, i'm sure many of the things that we'll talk about and certainly a lot of things i talk about and you will know nothing, i think there's a psychological mechanism going on. if you've been told that you're a victim or you've been told that the american dream is no attainable for you, or it's to be really challenging you see your balance sheets, you see the cost of everything that have been inflated by policy, and you're just not feeling really great about it. it's much easier you to lie to yourself and, to others and say, well, this isn't something i wanted anyway. i to have this detached life, right? and it's really actually sad. you know, you want young people to be excited to be going out in the world and, say, yes, i want it to own things they also particular that the younger generations have been trained for non ownership they're living in these digital where they have

basic take in what i call roi return on investment. it's a it with roic return on equity or return on ego are we redress ego and they're trading the investment aspect for clicks and like x and you know i'm going to go and spend all my time to generate, you know, a lot of attention for myself. i get that dopamine hit and i feel but i don't know how many likes it takes to pay your rent or to then actually invest in a house. i think it's an infinite number. so we've had this sort of training for young people and we've seen the implications for that is that many of them aren't getting driver's licenses or getting them later than you previous generations did. and they're struggling with things like home ownership. and so, you know, there is this this training under, you know, many different facets, whether

it's from big tech, whether it's from the the climate catastrophize or whatnot, that that keeps reinforce, saying that, oh, yeah, no, it's good, good. you definitely don't want to own things. you're going to be so much happier. and if they don't think, you know, they can actually things to begin with, they just start to go along with that narrative. right. and know. and the irony of course being that the ownership creates the growth innovation to address the of global climate change of these other issues that we're dealing with. one of the things that struck me and looked at to turn our conversation toward is you mentioned this earlier, the obstacles, because one of the things i think your book does excellent, you will own nothing. i'll keep talking by the title. but the the that there's lots of different unrelated obstacles that are out there there actually when you kind of put the picture together and connect the dots you see that there's all of these obstacles. sure. just class, family to gain wealth to have outside

ownership. one of those and i'm an economist, go straight for the fiscal policy and, national debt, and you have a whole chapter about this where our national debt for the first time, which about size of our entire economy and this is one of those kind of warning bells that typically go off when you have that much debt. that's the size of the economy, people start to really get concerned. so i guess this is thought open to you, you know, because you have a great chapter talking how debt impacts our prosperity, our national power and from an individual perspective ability to to amass well so i love to kind of hear your your thoughts on that though ends up being even more timely expected at the time that we're recording this is right after the us is just received a credit downgrade from. fitch just the second one in history, the first one in 2011. you're still being in from s&p and fitch issued. a warning at that time. and now they have gone and said, okay, we're going to we're going to take action and it's funny

because that year, the rumblings everybody's incredibly surprised this. but as you said, we've got debt to gdp on public basis that is exceeded 100%. i think it's almost 125% as we're having a discussion. the imf has put out numbers which to janet yellen, the treasury secretary, has noted previous slave seems to have forgot about them in recent that the debt to gdp reload becomes unwieldy somewhere in the 70 to 80% range as the, you know, many of us would like to see it much lower, but that's the place where it really starts to top out and become a concern. we, the treasury and the cbo has put out many charts and many analysis that has said we're on an unsustainable fiscal path. so the idea that all of a sudden we're waking up and going, oh, wait, you know, the fiscal situation of the united states isn't great, is a little crazy. and i think it's one of the

reasons why we're seeing shift in the global order because you know with debt comes because the people who are power at the governments and at the federal reserve, they only have so many things they can so many levers that they can pull and then they're out of options. so if you think about the government know everybody likes to think that they money because they collect it and because they can also make up money. but it's you know, if you think about money as the proxy for productivity, they're not actually producing anything value. so it's not like they're out creating something and adding to the productivity to to back up that money. so they only have so many choices right? they can take more. they can extract from us via taxes or, fees or whatever direct amounts. and at some point, you know, not only does that become politically unpopular, but we know it has impact on the economy. you know, you can't keep taking

money away from people and not have that have an impact their own receipts. in fact, we've seen as we've had these temporary tax cuts outside of a little blip for covid that the government has actually increased the receipts that they've collected when, they've cut taxes. so that's one mechanism that they could they can use they can cut services, which is also very politically unpopular. and i used services. many of them are promises, you know, things that we could have other. but the things that the government has promised you we could cut back on that we saw how well that out for france several months ago when they decided they were going to the retirement age from 62 to 64 and a bunch of people decided to burn down paris and response. so that's a challenging road that a lot politicians don't really have the backbone. and then their option is

basically issue debt, which at this point you're not only takes away from your basically our our productivity in wealth because you have to have more money going towards debt service and whatnot. but we're at a point where there's nobody left to that debt. you know, it's not like there's this huge demand from other countries. we have some of the biggest countries in the world that have actually been getting rid of their treasury, albeit, you know, we have some renewed investor demand for low duration treasuries like t-bills because interest rates are super high from a long term financing standpoint. there isn't just, you know, tons of interest in having that finance thing. and if you look at some of the work that's been done by other economists, you'll see that before 2014, you'd have other central banks that are we're

financing our deficits. but really, since 2014, we've been financing it ourselves. so the fed has been monetizing the debt, coming up with money out of nowhere and purchasing the debt. we saw that via a covid. and then we've seen the outcome of what happened when the fed did that, they added $9 trillion to their balance sheets and we have been paying the price for that quite literally in terms of a decrease in purchasing power in massive increase in inflation. so all of those mean have some sort of an impact from you you know that direct grab of your wealth the decrease of your purchasing power or the cutting of promises and. those are the only choices that they and so it becomes desperate and they do things that more ridiculous. and when look back at the changes and, you know, kind of major financial over time, it's

not usually an outside force that has made them collapse you know, it may be part of the final straw or the catalyst, but these empire is all collapsed from the inside you know, whether it's the roman empire or the or the british, it's because they do the same things, the same pattern that rhymes over and over again with these governments getting to bed big and taking on too much debt. and then they can't fund the military and it weakens. and it's the same pattern over and over again. so this scenario sets up the whole not only for the shifts in the global financial order, but also for the implication and for your wealth. some which we have started to live through, some of which, you know, may be coming, but none of which are great. the prosperity of the middle and working class and and to one of the things that really reinforces what you were saying in the book is the idea that with these higher interest rates

we're now going to be or soon will be spending more on interest than national defense. and that when you talk about the british empire the book and in the dutch and the romans that really the rhyming of that is kind scary. it is. i mean, one of the things i like to share on a frequent basis is that think because technology evolves that your civilization has evolved as human nature has evolved the background may have evolved, but human nature remains very constant, which is why we see rhymes throughout history. and these things. oh, i feel like i've seen this movie before. oh, then i saw the sequel. now we're in the trilogy. i kind of know how this ends and it it's staggering and know, unfortunately, even though many of us have seen this along the way of seeing the signposts the nature of who have that power is to just wait until somebody

else's problem so they're just to prolong it as long as and do what they can to get what there is and get out of the way even though theoretically, you know, the system comes down in meaningful way or changes in a meaningful it really will impact, i believe, to everyone's detriment. but the short term myopia that we see, whether it's wall street or with, you know, some of these global central planners, just ends up being the same thing every time. and i know everyone wants to think it's a big and there's some big master, honestly. it's just basic human nature and human nature. unfortunately, is just highly, highly predictable. it's like a swarm of bees just of going for the waterfall. no one directing it, but here we go. this this really kind of dovetails well into this thing. you you talk about in the book called the good ideas the bad outcomes. because i think that we talk about excessive government spending or excessive

regulation, it really comes from that or something you could kind of tell our listeners kind of what that and why it's so important. yeah. so i actually got this in part from peter teal. i was at an event, alex epstein, his great book, fossil future and they were having a discussion and peter put this great framework around it that resonated with some of the other frameworks that i had used. but a lot of the things come out of there's an issue or perceived and people really believe in it or some some heartfelt thing that they want to do and. it's a it's a good idea. and i'll take the climate scenario of the environmental. it's like we all to be good stewards of the planet we want to breathe clean air. we all want to make sure that the animals are weak while taking care of. i think that, you know, that's pretty universal. so maybe there are a couple of anarchists that don't want it, but most of us can can believe it. the challenge is that it ends up

morphing into this model when you have central planning and so it starts out with this good idea and then there is a class of till called them racketeers i call them profiteers just because think that that's slightly more generous but he might be more right in that and there ends up being a whole class of people who really rise that by jumping on this idea and really trying to shape it and control that. there's a ton of to be made. and again, very human nature. and it's somewhat in nature, but have to kind of understand the reality of it is that, okay, we see this as green movement. think about all of the money that we can make around this. it's a normas and it puts us in the position that if we get in early and we it and it's to our benefit, of course we're going to go along with it. we can't go along with something else even something else makes more sense because we haven't figured out how to make money

from that. so know we know who is beating us and we're to be on that team and you get these, what i call he called them, i believe the useful and it goes back to that are we return on ego people who then entrench this into society and they're not necessarily getting the benefit but they're getting other benefits right. they get to put in a moji in their bio and they can wear a t shirt, put a sign on their lawn, they get a pat on the head. they might even get invitation to the white house for a photo because they are on the right side of the narrative dictated by these group of people who are saying, doing this for the good of society and for the children, it always is. and it's really just been co into something that is a cash grab at and i think the best and worst becomes really damaging because you know everything gets viewed through this very myopic

lens. we saw this during covid. we we've had this conversation before where it's like, oh, we're so focused. this one thing that we kind of have forgotten about, like the entire ecosystems that's impacted. and so i feel like this happens over and over again where you have something where we like we basically all agree it's a good idea and market forces you could solve for it very nicely. and then it gets co-opted into central planning and it ends up turning out with these outcomes and a lot of the extraction in the interim. yeah. and when i was reading you would really kind of approach as it rewards the crony ists right you're one that taught me this i'm not going to call crony capitalism because it's not capitalism, it's cronyism. but that's if you look at the global change and solar power in electric vehicles and there's a lot of reason to believe that neither one of those is the solution we need to address because they're highly polluting

they are ineffective they're wasteful, they're expensive i mean, these these are not ready for at bare minimum yet acrimonious. right. they make a lot of money of it. and this falls kind of right into that that kind of that framework you were setting up that people the chicano ego. i'm driving a tesla so i'm of the solution when you're probably part of the problem. but if good and elon is making a lot of money he's always you know people may like and may hate him but it a corniest in that he makes all of his money selling things that the government seems best he's the best at it. yeah he's the best. and that's that's really terrifying because that denies the opportunities that you you've been talking about so important. yeah, i want to say, you know, it also begets these control mechanisms because part of making things stick is you putting this infrastructure of control and in place and if

you're somebody who's really about the environment and you look at what the people who are the purveyors of i'm so concerned about the environment there's a climate emergency all the climate emergency people live in waterfront mansions and are flying on private jets to, eat steaks and tell us that the water levels are rising and, you know, we should be cutting back on fossil fuels and you shouldn't eat meat. so you really have to pay attention to what they're doing. but then think about the stupid things that they're making us do in lives. you know, you can't have a gas stove or you know you can't have a ceiling fan when like there whole countries like china that now because we're turning away from fossil fuels are trying to ramp up both on the fossil fuel and in mining of minerals that are you know is very disruptive for the environment for some of these green solutions. and there's none of this, you

know, things that will actually the needle if you believe the thesis begin with that's being addressed it's all these small stupid that would move the you know even if we all into them but now established the control mechanism and have taken away our our sovereignty, our quality of life for no real outcome and so i think that that's something to be very aware of as you know, next time somebody wants to take your straw or whatever it is it is this what are they really trying to move the needle or is there something else going on here? and i've yet to see anything that was really trying to move the needle and or that the people who are pushing this narrative are actually doing in their day to day lives when they start acting like a climate emergency, then perhaps i'll believe there's a climate emergency. but first, walk the walk.

yes. now you know what also struck me and this is an issue we've been researching right at a prize i something near and dear to my heart, environmental, social and governance is both in investing and in management paradigm. people probably have heard the acronym esg and this is really that seeing phenomena that we're talking about with the government but the private sector isn't immune from this either. so i was hoping you could spend a little talking about kind of your take on esg and kind of what how that kind dovetails into the same story or get my take. and then i want to get your take. you guys appear i've done a phenomenal job. i know this has been a passion point and we need more people, more advocates bringing it to light. i to tell everybody who's watching what esg is but i actually can't because there is no clear standard for it and that's by design i mean we know what environmental social and governance theoretically mean but terms of what actually constitutes it changes and.

that's really the point here. i call it business social credit that basically a bunch of people who aren't taking any risks, they don't have any skin in the game they're not actual stakeholders, but they like to call themselves stakeholders, but they're nuts and they want to outcomes and they're that by bullying businesses as with hey, you're not going to get access to capital or we're going to hurt your share price we're going to remove you from management team or the directors know some very mafia esque types of scenarios and a lot of times it's using our capital it's using money that you know hardworking people have paid in to pension funds and funds is being managed by these these big companies that are throwing out these directives and it's basically like a bunch of planners wealthy well-connected people say, well how do we get businesses to do the things that we want to do? you know, we don't want to spend a bunch money.

we don't actually make the investments. you know, how do we bully them into doing these things? and that's what esg has become. and has been a lot of pushback, a lot of areas, because it has a little bit of that bad outcome model on both sides. and case you have the profiteering issue with, you know, a lot of individuals who are saying that a word esg fund just slapping an esg label on things to extract and there have been many, you know, across the globe entities that have been slapped with what call greenwashing based, equally saying that you're doing something in a esg manner, but indistinguishable from anything you have done before. but now, you know, whatever etf you were running or fund, you were running, extracting enough fees and you have to put a highlight around it with this label, you're extracting more fees. so that's one piece that's just, you know, just a basic

profiteering extraction of fees. but the scarier part for me is the fact that it's impact ing the investment outcomes and, you know, the innovation that comes with with more free market principles. companies are being distracted from doing what is in the best interest. shareholders, people either are through their, you know, blood, sweat and, tears, their hard work or by risking their capital who evade investment in the business and our shareholders of the business, they're that that's the fiduciary of the board of directors is as opposed to be making sure the company is doing what is in the best interest of those people and it always sort of aligns is right because if you are doing what's for the customers and what's good for the employees, that ends up being a healthy business that up being good for the business now chasing this like weird and moving targets that you know is something different like oh, weapons are bad.

oh wait ukraine war weapons are good, you know, but private jets are bad. oh, but amazon to deliver packages. okay, but those ones are good. you know, it's just so hypocritical and flimsy as it is. but if it was a strict standard, i mean, who gets to make that standard that your accounting firm is at blackrock? is it, you know, a bunch of weirdos in davos? like why did why should they you know, why are the shareholders and the customer owners and the real stakeholders of the business actually making those decisions? and so that has a lot of implications for individual wealth in terms of the fact that your company is will do worse and it is the statistics have shown they do worse when they're not focused on driving the shareholder value. and we can make some discussions about, you know, they should be focusing more long term on the short term. there are some issues in there. but, you know, esg just further corrupts that and that they're

using your capital as a way to to do this bullying. and so it's really putting, you know, your investments at risk. then we're not getting the innovation from the companies. so it's just net net a really bad outcome for creation opportunities and of the the fundamental factor and foundation that have driven the success of the united states. i agree with everything you just said. so it's huge i would say better what i would in this was, you know, i've been on this issue and show myself to be really old here. but back in late nineties, early 2000 it corporate social responsibility csr and you had to triple bottom line and so to me the esg is that went away we had the dot com bust and people realized okay well now let's talking about silly time because you had csr funds and icr funds outperformed in the late nineties.

now mind you, csr funds were just basically investing in all the tech stocks. so you were basically saying if are overweighted in tech during tech bubble, you will outperform. go figure, go for exactly. go figure. so you know moving to today, you know to me it's the same it's the same concept. but what's really happening is there's a political agenda and that political agenda is not getting through congress where it belongs, rightly or wrongly. right. take global climate change, perhaps we should have cap and trade. i don't think so. but perhaps we should perhaps we should have carbon taxes. i don't think so. perhaps we should that needs to be debated in congress. who is setting the policy? environmental policy of the united states? that's is kind of that that's their purview. yeah. the not getting that done through congress. so what's happening? well, we're going to try to go the back door and get companies to actually act as if policies were passed and we're going to

pressure them. and again, it's the same thing. we're going to use that scarlet concept, save humanity, kind of the same throughout time. we're going to we're going to put that scarlet letter on you. if you're not actually compliant with what we deem to be it, who is this? we you know, that's a really good question. but that's what you see is now you see oil who do an incredibly important role in society. right. we have our modern lifestyle oil. and it's not just about powering cars and natural gas and it's also about, you know, i've, you know containers, right. we don't have plastic without oil you don't have i you know it is it's complete pletely pervasive in our lives and yet you're having oil companies saying oh well we're beyond all bp was was beyond petroleum. i think they've they've given up on that moniker. hopefully, they have. but it's so i see it as a political kind of end around

proper processes. and then what you're then doing undermining kind of way corporations operate, you do create again. cronyism creates opportunities for profits and the economy is about incentives. if the incentives in the economy are set so that can make more money being produced, then i can in terms of trying to serve my you're going to see more people become cronies. and so that's what we've seen you've seen it with, you know, financial firms. you've seen it with public pension funds. they're all going that way it's their fault, their incentives. so don't be surprised. you know if you if you if you put me down on the floor, i don't be surprised. the dogs come in and eat it. it's the thing that you know and so we're again undermining, the efficiency of our companies in the name of what's really a indefinable concept and because you can't define it then expose it can be anything oh look he has to outperform because that outperformed but it's just a

broad based fund that doesn't in firearms but you know it's and so and first of all i'm so glad that you added to that because as i said, you've done so much work, but one of the things that really stood out to me is the fact that you said you've been following this for so long. and that's one of the very interesting pieces of information that i uncovered my research. is that so many of these good ideas gone bad are the same ideas that have been repackaged over and over again. i mean, even esg, you know, larry fink, who is the ceo of blackrock, the largest asset manager of the world, who has been a huge, quote unquote catalyst, which is a very kind word in terms of ensuring that companies comply because of his his ability to or not allocate cap at all and to vote for directors and the like. he's been very that we've all figured out what esg is and said add a recent retreat that okay

well i'm going to use the esg anymore because it's been politicized now he didn't say he's going to stop doing the things that he was doing that that wasn't his problem, which is my problem. i don't care what you call it, but it was oh, i'm mad that you figured out this. and so we've already some changes to impact investing in sustainable development and you're just going to keep seeing this cycle and through with different words and phrases. so i think it's really important for people to understand the underlying concept because it's going to come with some lipstick and a new bow and it's going to be the same old tired. another thing that's been. since nine, 1071 is this concept of stakeholders which is kind of central to this. klaus, the head of the world economic forum, when he first started the pretest tester, which was called the european

management, he did it in concert with a book. and this concept of a stakeholder, which, again, somebody who isn't actually the vested in anything but is trying to weasel in and say, i'm important, you need to listen to me. it's something that he has been pushing. now for more than 50 years. so the persistence of, these ideas and obviously the ability profiteer around them, which is allowed to continue on, is staggering. and so we just keep seeing them come up in different ways. that's why we know when somebody is like, oh, you know this, you will nothing thing as as a new thing. it's a new thing. you know, it's marxism, it's communism. it's something that, you know, klaus schwab pushing in 1971, the between a stakeholder versus a shareholder, somebody who does it alone versus somebody who does own. so, you know, maybe you haven't heard this particular word or phrase before this packaging, but these really bad, damaging

concepts have been there. the difference today. and i think why it's more impactful, as we said, is because of these shifts, the global financial order, the fact that the is financial house is disarray, the fact that the fed has not kept the dollar stable on an international stage and people are getting very of playing the game and letting the u.s. to be at the at the head of the table running the game. so it feels different and it has more urgency now. but the the infrastructure that's been trying to push this, the people who are trying to push this, many of them have been at it for quite a long time. and there was a question from from someone who was listening in. he was asking about whether this is just coming from the un agenda 2030. i think you kind just answered that in the sense that the agenda kind of is another factor that's adding to the pressure. it's obviously not the only. but now and i think that's something that's different this time than previously is now we have these the world economic

four, the un, all of these of international bodies who are in effect advocating for the exact same type of let me give you a date and you can go back and source this in the book. but so that's was part of my research is that the un un has been pushing this agenda the nineties in concert with the world economic forum under different names and so they had people sign on to their principles for response investing and other sustainable goals. so they have been pushing way before the number 2030 ever popped up. you know, now that's the target. but this has been going for a long time and, you know, some people may say, well, why do you pick the other wef or whatnot when a name of a person or a name of a group or a couple groups up once or twice, maybe even three times, i can go, well, it's a coincidence, you know, these are big groups when

every bad idea that i look into ends up with the same groups of people can no longer say it's a coincidence it's a coordination, right? i mean, this the same groups of people over and over, to the extent that i see somebody who is to re-imagine, rethink or change something that's pretty darn well, i always go back and i look to see if they're affiliated with the wef and every time, except for once they are, there was one time there's a group that you're doing that's super weird and they're doing this development, this that was in person development that has no parking spaces in tempe, a suburb of phenix. they want you to to have a walking city in tempe, arizona, the suburbs of phenix. and so i went through their people and they did not i did not see any ties there. but that was the only time when

i haven't got up yet, of course these people are all connected and walking city in tempe may make sense in but in august quite apparently nobody can visit you like you can't even have there's guest parking the whole thing is just it looked like a prison complex it was like kind of stagger but very on trend and why i was alerted to it because now i've been talking about these zero nothing concepts. i've got people saying like every crazy thing that they see and sending it to me on social media and i have to kind of ferret through it. so you i came across that from somebody is lead and went wow this is this is pretty scary but right on trend with exactly all the things that we're talking i would love steer our conversation to the federal reserve because you talk about them in a number of different chapters and there's there's a lot to talk about because they're getting into digital currencies right.

and that's that's an issue. they're actually. they're subsidizing to compete with people directly when they're trying to purchase their homes. and so but, you know, both of those, not to mention the inflation we about earlier, all of these are working against our ability to gain assets because you're undervalue you're in the currency. you're you're you're inflating demand for houses. cbdcs are central bank currencies. that's a real issue. so i don't know which one you want to take on first, but i'd love to start talking about some of those things. yeah. so i mean the federal reserve, the takeaway for with after, you know, having been studying them for a very long time is that in concert with the but very much driven by monetary policy they have been the biggest enablers of non merit based inequality. i don't my end inequality for you know michael jordan's the best basketball star and you know so he should get paid a lot more than you know somebody who isn't very good but when it's by

monetary policy, it's done by government policy. and that's who's getting to pick the winners and losers, the merits and the talents and the free that's a huge problem. and they have driven trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth from main street to wall street. and i think that's a huge, huge takeaway. one thing that you mentioned is this idea of a central bank, digital currency. and when i'm out talking to people in my sphere, many of them who, you know, tend to be a little bit more financial inclined, it is the number one concern of people because there has been a movement towards bitcoin and cryptocurrency on the basis that those who have been the quote unquote stewards of the dollar and have supposed to they're supposed to keep it. right. that's part of their official one. one of two pieces of that, both

on an international stage and on a domestic stage. right. because we have, the world's reserve currency, they're in charge of that they have imagined. they've managed to do absolutely neither. usually you have to make a choice. okay. well, going to favor the domestic for the global or the global for the domestic and just managed to do neither which is creating massive issues for our wealth and has has been this epic transfer of money. so the idea that these people who have our house down, the arsonists are now coming to help and now they've got a little water bottle and they want to throw it on there and put out the fire. it's just just so frustrating to me. but they want to take this idea, these these bitcoin and cryptocurrency people who want to decentralize the currency, they don't want to have the government and the fed have all of this control over the monetary system. they want to just, you know, be able to have something that's

more free, whether or not. you agree with their thesis. you know that that issue underpins it. what the fed wants to do is capitalize on that interest with a bunch of people who don't know anything. decentralization versus centralization, and have a fully centralized currency. and there a video that was making the rounds the other day a professor from cornell who was at the world economic forum, and he was talking about all these things that could be done with the cbdc, including the ability to probe around them and to track it and to basically restrict whatever it was that the government wanted to restrict. so if you know that the climate agenda burgers are bad, meat is bad. and carol and wayne go out for a burger and we both had, you know, more than three that month then, you know, can't pay anymore or they to control inflation you know basically now their tool we're going to change interest rates their tool could

be we want to just restrict demand we're just going to turn off access to spending. you can't spend the money or with the cronyism we're talking we're going to give you more if you spend it at these approved places which have to be happened to be the approved places, our friends who extract wealth and it's just increased doubly sinister and given the the issues we've been through there are so many carrots that they can use to get people who aren't financially literate to grant this approval needs to happen to push to this happen if you saw what happened with the stimulus checks right. there were people like you wayne, like me, who were standing up and going, don't take this money. you don't want the thousand dollars. you don't want the 1200 dollars you're going to pay $10,000 a year for the rest of your life. minimum by taking this. don't do it. it doesn't work. and the people are. no, you know, i need stimulus. i need my donny and my bucks.

you know, i need to have that. they're to do the same thing with cbd, right? they're going to say, i'm going give you a hundred digital us dollars if you just give me one. and people going to go, wow, i'm a this is amazing. it was that old saturday night live skit which i referenced in the book with dan aykroyd pretending to be jimmy carter during inflation and being like, wouldn't you like to have a multimillion dollar house and wear a $75,000 dude? it's great because, you know, they actually understood the concepts like money printing back then that have been lost the conversation and so you could see that you could see the inflation control being a target you could see ubi, hey, come on the digital dollar is the only way that give you a guaranteed income. all of these things that are going to further destroy the value of the dollar, the wealth creation opportunity, but give them tool to potentially pay

down their debts by just devaluing everything. and so that's a really scary outcome and it becomes even more scary. and i talk about in this the book as i marry it with things like social credit, whether it's on the beat side with esg or on the individual side, a formal or informal social credit system. but again, you say something on social media or we don't want you to have access to a firearm or whatever is now they have the mechanism to fully control access to the money that represent us your productivity, your hard work, your investing bent and there is nothing that i can think of that has more of a potential to kill our individual freedoms our personal sovereignty, our agency, more than a central bank, digital currency. it's just ironic, it seems, that the unbanked, which is supposedly something we're concerned about, would actually get have even more issues under

a cbdc because they're really outside of the financial. i mean, i don't expect you to respond to that because i'm not sure there is a response beyond just the irony of, you know, the is not just hurting things in the future too, though you talked about and i learned this reading your book and i thought that that's really amazing that there actually the basically subsidizing corporate nations to compete with you to buy your own homes you don't mind if we if we want to actually get ahead if you want to gain wealth how does the middle gain wealth. well to homeownership i mean that's the primary asset in most. and now the federal reserve is subsidizing companies to inflate the value which i guess is good if you own a home. but if you don't, you're never getting in. yeah. so this is a huge point of frustration and i also learned several things in this research. so i'm glad that that it was new to you as well but this idea that you can rent the american dream where we started, you know, the biggest asset as you noted on households balance

sheet is long term driver of family and legacy is staggering and what happens coming out of the great recession financial crisis this has all been done by policy. obviously most people know that wall street got to bail out wall six people, 6 million people lost their homes to foreclosures, short sales. and there was a complete favoring there. but i don't think people realize the implications of the policy that followed you there's this 15 year period of, you know, interface variance by the fed nine of that with zero interest rate policy gave abundant cheap capital to wall street and they inflated the assets of everybody everything every asset class. and you that was great as you said for them for the holders. but if you were somebody who was a saver or a retiree or you didn't want to take on that risk, you didn't get that benefits. so that all went to them. and when they ran out of assets

classes and said, well, you know, where are we going to find a return on our investment, we're to find yields, you know, at this point, without taking on more risk, all of a sudden do do, do, do, do. they started looking single family homes and 2010 this was an amazing statistic i found in the research before 2010 there was no meaningful institutional capital in the single family home market, none. it didn't exist there. certainly corporate entities that were mom and pops that, you know, did did some of that. but it wasn't this effort where you had wall street investors that backed by jp morgan chase and blackrock and capital and whatnot, going out and buying tens of thousands of homes. fast forward to the end of 2022. very period of time. corelogic said that one in every five homes has been purchased by a corporate investor. and again, these are flush with,

cheap capital. they can make all cash offers they don't have to do a walk through. they don't care what it looks like because they not looking to live in their and consume it and build that wealth. they're looking to take it and fix up a little bit and rent it they don't want to flip it back to a family. they want to rent you. the american dream. and they are you look at their financials, they're ten ks. they're annual reports. you will see their language that. they like the middle class because they're stable and they've got great jobs and they're perfect to extract runs from. and that see this as a golden asset class a once in a year generational asset opportunity which is crazy because you're now taking that opportunity that is the biggest way that families create general wealth and you're taking that away from them and it's coming on both sides coming from you know, the up of the assets and the the cheap

capital, the competitors and then you've got these completely wrecked balance sheets on the other side personal balance sheets that have been wrecked, inflation. so you've got these consumers who have increased their debt loads and credit card debt loads and have dipped into their savings. and for the young people you have balance sheets that are wrecked by debt from what call the largest predatory lender in the world. the us government who ties up minors and people who are 18 years old with and six figures of debts for many cases degrees that don't produce a return investment. and basically it's a huge wholesale transfer wealth from young people to colleges and their administrators. so you got the balance sheet issues on one side, you have the increasing prices on the other and then sprinkle in your government regulation adds almost $100,000 to the cost of every new and all of the state and local nimby policies and the

disruption of the labor market by the government policies, which means you don't even have enough people to build these homes if. you could get past all of those hurdles and it's really creating a massive issue and we're getting more people feeling that america dream is out of reach or they're going to rent it, which is, you know, again, central to this thesis of we want that. we want people to be able to own things and to participate fully have that stake in the american dream. they go against it. you own nothing. it's it's policies. they restrict, they expand demand. and then worry that houses are. shocking. shocking how that works. we're kind of running out of time here. and i really want to get to what the final chapter in the book, because to me, that's it. you know, after going through all this, you can almost be a little depressed. yes. you you actually say, okay, there are some really kind tried and true sound financial things

that people should be doing that even though we have all of these headwinds, you know, until we change policies which we need to do, you know, these are the strategies we should be pursuing and it really just there's tried and true strategy. i was hoping you share kind of that final chapter with us. yeah. so the final chapter, a little easter egg for you guys. so final chapter is chapter 11 and it's a little play on the fact that chapter 11 is usually bankruptcy and releasing you of your assets and you have no ownership. and so i wanted to basically turn that its head and make chapter 11 about owning everything that you possibly can. and as you said here, i think that the advice that i give is really the same types of things that i would tell you in any scenario. but i think that going and learning about all of these issues is one, it creates a different lens to look at them through and to it creates, i hope, more of a sense of urgency. so the overarching thing, the thing i would absolutely tell

you to do is ignore what the elite are saying and watch what they're doing. every one of these people who are talking about, oh, we need to get rid ownership or we shouldn't travel. all these kinds of things are doing exactly the opposite. i mean, we live in a time when the purveyors of socialist. socialism have three houses, right? so when they're telling you not to own anything, they're predicting non ownership like go try to own everything that you possibly can because that's what they're doing they're buying homes. they're buying productive land, things, farmland, land that you could ranch on land that has timber, land that has water rights, associate with that we want to keep that decentral so if you have the wherewithal to do you have central banks around the world who are loading up on physical metals. so that may be something for you to consider. so it's looking at these different things that these these people who are smart well-connected, wealthy and

powerful and want to keep that in place are doing try to mimic that as much as possible. i do think diversification is important. one of the challenges that we have is that we never really know time frames, we don't know duration and we don't know catalysts. we can see the trajectory of these things happening when. i go back and look at previous financial world orders. it's one thing to look at a 20 year period out of a couple hundred years ago. that was a relatively short period of time. but in your life, 20 years is very meaningful. so it takes you know, it's very difficult if something today or 20 years from today, it's a very different outcome. and you don't want to, you know, all of the run up, let's say, in stocks because completely diversified away because you're worried about something like that. so you want to have a diversified portfolio that kind of sets you up and hedges you for a lot of different. i think that's really important. and then when this last thing is to sound like i'm a prepper, i've been told, and what i will

tell is there's a nuance here. i think that being a prepper in way is nothing wrong with that's, you know, a lifestyle makes sense for a lot of people. but people who are preppers live that life every single day like this is, how they live and breathe. i think the difference between that and being prepared is that when you do preparation, it's kind of like thinking about your house burning down. you know, you want to have your escape plan, you want to buy your insurance before you see the fire. you can deal with it. you do the preparation to remove that burden and know if and when something happens. you've thought through it and you're not panicking or frozen in that moment and trying to deal with that. so if we a cbd put in place and all of a sudden you have the the access to your money shut down for some period of time, that maybe there's a period of chaos, what are you going to do have you thought through getting

small denomination, precious metals? have you thought through you're talking to people, your community, you know, who's got the chicken, who can lay eggs and you know, where am i getting the medical care from again, hoping it doesn't come so we're not saying that it will, but it's not a completely chance and never going to happen, given the backdrop of the scenario. so at least think through those things come up with a plan that if, you know, a cbdc comes into play or we do some sort of global chaos that you've kind of thought through how you can manage through these periods. because, you know, as i said in the mark twain says, history doesn't repeat, but it often does rhyme. and there's a lot of rhyming that's happening now, sounding a lot like a children's poem. so make sure that you've you've through those things and you may feel a little about some of those things, but i don't know anybody who's been in an issuer or even if it doesn't happen, it's anguish i had been so

prepared. that was a a bad use of my time or care. we kind of run out of time, but i just want to thank you so much for kind of sharing wisdom. and, you know, the book is called you will own nothing. it's fantastic. it's available at amazon was i think it's still on new york times list. so please go buy it. it is worth your time and thank you everyone for for listening in. we really appreciate it. and wish everyone a goodso thi'l

been waiting for. to hear from alex tapscott, the bestselling author