1807: Supply Shortages, National Association of Realtors, Coaching Program, Doomberg Predicts Scary Food Shortage Crisis Ahead

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Welcome investors. I hope you are doing well today. Our guest will be Doomberg and this is episode 1807. Just the intro portion for 1807 and Doomberg will be our guest. We're going to talk about pending food shortages and shortages of all sorts of.

Materials, preparedness, what you should do about these crazy times in which we are living.

Things really are at an inflection point. I think it's extremely, extremely important that people be prepared and be responsible because there's just a lot of stuff going on in the world and I know you agree with that and I know.

You already know that.

So this is a time where you cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.

Preparedness is key and at the times where we have all these converging things.

That are out to hurt us and.

To reduce the standard of living, we.

Have a lot of opportunities at the same time. So let's look at a couple stats.

Before we start and then we will.

Get to our guest today, Doomberg.

By the way, Doomberg is a pseudonym obviously for an anonymous guest that we.

Will have on the show here. If you're not familiar with Doomberg, they've got some great content out there.

So national association of Realtors NAR is out with their Realtor confidence survey. And this is an interesting one because for those of you waiting for a market crash, I think you might be.

Waiting a long, long time.

Of course, anything can happen. The future is unpredictable. As Yogi Berra said, the future ain't.

What it used to be. And that is for sure. That is for sure.

So let's take a look at this. And it shows that first time buyers were responsible for 27% of the sales in January. But investors, now this is just individual investors. It doesn't include the institutional investors. They accounted for 22% of all homes purchased and all cash sales. Very important, 27% of all transactions were all cash. So here's the thing. If people are waiting for a crash like what we experienced in 2007, 2008, you're going to be waiting a long time. Because back then people were leveraged to the hilt. They were buying properties that simply could not be afforded. They were just mortgaging beyond comprehension. You know, we've all heard the stories.

Of the, you know, the NINJA loans.

Where people had no income that they could prove, no documentation, no savings, nothing, Right? And we heard the stories of, you know, the janitor who was making $50,000 a year buying a $900,000 house. Absolutely ridiculous, of course, but that isn't happening this time around, folks, and it hasn't happened. And coming out of the Great Recession, the underwriting criteria for these mortgages, I would say, has overcorrected. It's still overcorrected. It's still ridiculous. And the pendulum obviously swings back and forth, but they have been so careful and so restrictive on these mortgages. You have to have properties in distress, you have to have high inventory levels, you have to have very high days on market and a very low number of people buying with all cash in order to have a crash. These ingredients are absolutely necessary. So when you look at the chart here, distress sales, non existent. I mean there's just nothing in terms of distressed sales. Okay? It's just, it's, it's just not even worth mentioning. Where are the distressed sales? Where are the foreclosures? Where are the short sales?

They're not here.

And then we look at days on market, extremely low. I mean, you know, look at it. Last year we had 19 days on market. This year we have 21 days on market.

Or sorry, the other way around.

The days on market are lower this.

Year than they were last year.

So you know, cash sales are way up this year. And a year ago they were only 19% sales to investors way up. That's a bullish sign that the smart money is still buying like crazy.

First time buyers sadly are down. Why? Because they've been pushed out of the market by the investment class. And here, here's that chart a little bit bigger so you can really see it.

But this doesn't even include the institutional investors, okay, that have essentially free money from Wall street that are just buying.

Up properties in mass.

So you know, well, we'll see what happens.

But I think if people are trying.

To time the market, if they're waiting.

For a crash, they're going to be waiting quite a while. We've got a free report@pandemicinvesting.com make sure to take advantage of that. If you're watching on video it's scrolling across the bottom.

And if you are interested in individual coaching or small group coaching, reach out to us through Jason Hartman dot com. We've got some great programs especially in.

The world of management optimization and self management.

You know it's really sexy to buy properties, right?

To know how to analyze a deal.

To get a good deal. That's the really sexy, intriguing part of.

Real estate investing, right?

But the boring mundane part where the rubber meets the road, where the money is really made is in management. And we have a program, our management.

Optimization program where if you'd like to fire your property manager, if you'd like.

To get rid of that manager who is skimming the profits off the top, who is probably double dipping, probably ripping you off. There are certainly some good managers out there, but they are small in number. We try to find them through our.

Network and refer those to our clients who buy properties through our network.

But again, you are just going to do much better with your portfolio if.

You are self managing and if you're not interested in self managing, which by.

The way can actually be easier than having a manager. I know that may sound surprising because when you remove that middleman that has a inherent conflict of interest by trying to serve the tenant and the investor and themselves.

You know, there's an old saying, you.

Can'T serve two masters.

That is definitely true. It's a conflict of interest just by.

The nature of the beast. We can help you with that. We have a program where we actually do it with you. It is a done with you program to convert to self management. Or to just optimize your relationship with your property manager that is unique in all the world, in all the industry. Nobody else is offering this incredibly unique.

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This is a program that probably will not continue for very long because it is not scalable. But it's just something I want to try because I want to help people.

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If you only have one investment property, this will more than pay for itself. But if you have multiple investment properties, 6, 10, 20, 50, 100 investment properties, this is a windfall of epic proportions for you. So take advantage of it. Reach out to any of our investment counselors through the contact forms@jason hartman.com and.

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So check that out through Jason hartman.com and we'll be glad to help you with that.

And without further ado, let's get to our guest. Let's talk to Doomberg and discover how we can prepare for the crazy, uncertain.

Times we are in already. But of course, the more and more crazy and more uncertain times we are moving into.

So here we go. Let's, let's get to our guest. It is my pleasure to welcome the famous, or maybe infamous depending on who you're talking to.

Doomberg. And we are going to talk about the economy, the market and the commodities market specifically.

So I can't wait to dive into this conversation. He is coming to us from the.

Midwest, a very general location and it's great to have him on.

Doomberg, welcome.

How are you, Jason? I'm fantastic and it's a real honor to be on your show. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, it's great to have you and.

You know, I just want to maybe start by asking you a very big broad general question and take it wherever you like. But in this crazy time in which we are living. What's going on? What should we expect from the new year? I mean, wow, there are so many cross currents, so many conflicting data points. The economy, if, if you never believed.

It before, you'd have to agree that it's a big giant Ponzi scheme. You know, what are you thinking about and working on nowadays? And what's your thought for our very delicate future?

Yes. So I'd say the number one thing that is on our radar and that we write the most about is the ongoing train wreck of the energy crisis that started in Europe and has sort of snapped through our delicate just in time supply chains like a whip and found its way over to China, which through a lot of economic mismanagement has become the manufacturing center of the world. And China's response to the energy crisis that started in Europe is creating even more supply chain issues. We think that energy crisis is going to feed into substantial price shocks in the food space. We've been writing about this for several months. The world is just sort of catching up to it now. You're scrolling through a piece that we put out recently called There's Not Enough oil, Right. Part of the genesis of the energy crisis that we are experiencing today is due to the fact that the environmental movement and global warming anti fossil fuel movement has successfully created a scenario where funding for development and exploration has been choked off in these sectors. And one of our overarching themes is energy is life. And if you choke off energy supply, you're really deciding who lives and dies. Because the price elasticity for demand of energy is really just the price elasticity of demand for life and who can afford to pay it.

And so absolutely, energy is in everything.

That cost is embedded in every product and service. It hits the poor and the lower end, the lower middle of the economic spectrum the hardest.

Just in the driving element alone is interesting. You know, you look at these rich.

Areas around the US and probably around the world, I guess, but around the US it's very obvious. You look at a place like Aspen, Colorado, beautiful place, been there many times. I have friends that live there.

And you know, all of the people that serve the wealthy in Aspen are commuting from what's called Down Valley. You know, the housekeepers, the gardeners, the handyman, the everything. When I used to live in Newport Beach, California, Southern California, all of the people serving us rich people in Newport beach were coming from what's called the Inland Empire. And when the price of gas goes up, they are affected. You know, your gardener who has to Drive an hour to get to his customer base.

Because that's where the money is, right?

Go where the money is. That's what they do. That is a huge impact on them. It's so unfair the way they are literally depriving these people of life. As you say, energy is life.

It's absolutely true.

And it's going to get a lot worse, I think. So the charts we're looking at on the piece that you've pulled up, the top chart is US crude oil production, which looks like it's on the way to potentially recovering to pre Covid levels, but it's still substantially behind. But that's actually a bit of a mirage because the next chart down shows you that because of this anti funding for the anti fossil fuel movement has led to a choking off of funds and all of these Wall street money managers are committing to not investing in the fossil fuel industry. What you're actually seeing is a decapitalization of pre existing wells that were drilled but not complete. And so the analogy we used in this piece was if you're going to, let's say, mine for gold, you have to open up a cut, you have to strip. What you're looking at in this chart is since COVID the industry is no longer opening up new cuts. They're just mining cuts that are already opened. And in this case they are completing wells that have already been drilled. And the inventory of they're called ducks drilled but uncompleted wells has been shrinking at an alarming rate. And this is de facto by definition it's not sustainable. So if you scroll back up to the US production chart, now the US is not the world, but it's an important player in the world. It's one of the largest oil producers in the world, might be still the largest oil and gas producer for sure. Even maintaining this declined level of production post Covid is going to be more and more challenging because it's very clear you can just do the math. The industry is not spending the capital for a variety of reasons, not just anti fossil fuel movement, but also they destroyed a lot of investor capital before COVID And some of this is sort of rationalizing that out. But if you combine what's going on here, which is sort of an artificial production sort of mirage, with the energy policy in Europe, which has caused this huge spike in the price of natural gas internationally, it really is a pretty scary time. Of course, it's called Doomberg for a reason. We tend to be, let's say we tend to focus on the Prepared side of things.

Right.

We have risk management, see what the potential doom is that might be coming. And energy is the big, big story. And so we've written dozens of pieces on the consequences of the energy shock. The most important one being that the price of fertilizer has skyrocketed. 3, 4, 5, 600%.

Yeah. And that's going to lead to what I believe is an engineered food shortage and inflation. If we think it's been bad in the last year or so, it's going to get a lot worse. Worse, in my opinion.

Well, what you're going to see is because of this natural gas price skyrocketing in Europe and then Asia following suit because they're basically bidding for the same LNG carriers. You literally can see LNG carriers turn around on the way to Asia, turning around and going to Europe as Europe decides to pay more. And they fall in, the captains of these ships and say, okay, now you're going to go to, to Europe. The natural gas is a key input into fertilizer. The fertilizer facilities in Europe are uncompetitive. The US Has a crazy energy policy of its own. We have enormous amounts of natural gas that is basically stranded here because we have limited LNG export capacity. So the big winners in this market are US Manufacturers who rely on natural gas as an input, but can export their products globally because they get to charge the global price. But they have this stranded natural gas in the us so just to benchmark you, Jason, as we record this, natural gas in Europe is trading for $32 per million BTU, roughly. In the US it's trading for 4.

Wow.

And in Asia, it's trading for $38 per million BTU. But another big trend from this is that because of mismanaged economic policy for decades, we allowed China to take over the manufacturing of almost everything. And China now is experiencing this energy crisis and deciding which industries will get turned off and which ones get to remain. And they're doing so through the lens of their own domestic stability.

Right.

And so if you go back to some of the other, like we've put a piece out recently called magnesium PI. And if you pull that one up, this is sort of a classic story of how the US exited. If you scroll down, the US Exited the production of magnesium. We have one facility left. That's it right there. And China took over. And so in 1998, the largest magnesium facility in the US shut down in part because of a tropical storm, but in reality, it was the straw that broke the camel's back. And from then on, magnesium got taken over by the Chinese. It's a tough metal to make, but it's a critically important one and nobody knows, almost nobody knows about it. But you can't make aluminum alloys without magnesium.

Right. So that's what I was going to ask you. Tell us about the importance of magnesium.

Scrolling.

I want to go back to a couple of other things you said there a moment ago, but yeah, if you.

Scroll up a bit, I'll show you. There's a mega trend in the automotive sector around lightweighting. And the reason why lightweighting matters is because that drives fuel efficiency.

And as you know, and Tesla did it first with their Model S. You know, they did an all aluminum car, which is sure interesting.

I don't know that they did it first, but they did it.

And oh, I mean, in a big way. I'm not.

Yeah, sure, all the automotive producers have taken out hundreds of pounds by replacing steel with high strength aluminum alloys. But you need magnesium for those aluminum alloys. And without magnesium you can't run your automotive factory. And If China produces 85% of the world's magnesium now, and they do, and if you scroll down, you can see what happened to the price of magnesium when China decided that they weren't going to allow magnesium producers to hog the energy. Keep going down. There's the price of magnesium.

Oh, wow, wow.

And so that has to find its way down the supply chain. You can't have the price of magnesium go up 5x and then stabilize at 3 1/2x without those prices being passed on down the chain. And this is 85% of the market, Jason. This is not just LNG boats representing a small percentage of the energy crisis. We close the piece by saying, look, certain critical raw materials are difficult to make, but we should do it here. Yes, they're environmentally challenging. We should help the producers offset those costs. Nobody wants a big dirty factory polluting the rivers and lakes. They do in China. I mean, they're allowed to in how they take the market over. But allowing China to abuse its environment so it can flood the world with cheap goods and put our manufacturers out of business is just simply dumb policy.

Yeah, it's terrible policy.

We did it. Now we have to live with the consequences of it. And the question after this rolling wave of supply chain crises driven primarily by the energy crisis, once we're all done with this, I think we have to have some hard questions. We need to look inward. You can't just blame the Chinese. We let them do it.

Yeah, you're reminding me when you talk about aluminum, you're reminding me of the story of Napoleon and how the special guests would come over to a dinner party at Napoleon's home and they would have aluminum silverware, but the servants ate with the gold. Isn't that funny?

Yeah.

Maybe we're going back into that world, right?

Yeah. The gold bugs would say the price of gold is suppressed, and so maybe we might get there.

Yeah, yeah, of course. Well, yeah, check out, by the way, on that note, check out the GATA website, the Gold Antitrust Action Committee. It's. It's pretty interesting stuff. Well, that. To the listeners before. Yeah.

So when is the jig up from this?

You know, there's always sort of a supply demand curve when we talk about this stuff. You've laid out the case, and I agree with you that this is very disconcerting.

But when does it hit?

I mean, you reminded me of when candidate Obama back in 2008 said that he hoped gasoline would become seven or eight dollars a gallon. You know, and the agenda there was to get everyone to drive his proletariat electric cars.

I mean, when does this really hit?

How long does this take to hurt, to feel this pain?

You're touching on the answer, which is ultimately, it ends in political revolution if you take it to the extreme. So even Joe Biden has realized early on. You know, we wrote a piece called America's Energy Strategy is Bonkers. It's an old one, no need to pull it up. But President Biden and his team started their presidency by. The very first thing he did, symbolically, was kill the Keystone pipeline, which would have brought, I would say, a friendly oil from a trusted trading partner, Canada. That's fine. They put a federal moratorium on drilling on federal lands. A national moratorium, sorry. On drilling for oil and gas on federal lands. They've since undone that. But at the same time, Biden realizes that the political consequences of an energy price spike, most notably in the cost of gasoline, what we see is that he very quickly pivoted and demanded that OPEC begin producing more, begging them to produce more, and released oil from the National Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is sort of a bonkers way. Like, if we're going to crimp supply at home and then beg OPEC to supply and fill the supply gap to keep the price of gas down. The logical consequence of that is we're ceding control over life to people that don't like us.

Yeah.

And so the answer to your question of how it ends is it ends in a Political revolt of some kind, either through the ballot box or through violence. One of the things we think is underreported is that the entire future of the European Union, if they had had a record cold snap at the beginning of this month, doesn't look like the forecasts are going to have that materialized, thankfully. But if they did, and they're depleting their natural gas supply so quickly, they're turning off nuclear power plants and they're beholden to Vladimir Putin for supplying the gas that they need, they're one violent cold snap away from political uprising. And I just think physics is undefeated. We're putting out a piece tomorrow on the New England energy market. It's no different than Europe. Physics is just undefeated. And ultimately the bill has to be paid. And I think the bill will be paid in political terms.

Couldn't agree more. However, that wasn't my exact question. My question was, when do we really feel this pain? From the factors you mentioned, I agree with you on how it ends.

But when does this hit?

Like, how far off in the future is it?

And it gets difficult to interpret a lot of these price signals and supply.

Demand shock signals right now because of the COVID oriented supply chain issues. It's hard to sort things out with.

I think it's. I think so. First of all, the US Is buffered by the fact that we have enormous amounts of natural gas. And the price of natural gas is still very reasonable here and is in fact making a huge advantage for our domestic manufacturing capability. Where you'll see it is in the spring planting and in food. And that is only months away because even the US Abundant supply of natural gas does not insulate American farmers from the fertilizer costs, because fertilizer is a global market and the US doesn't make much of it. Now, the few facilities we do have that are making fertilizer are enjoying robust profits because they get to sell at the global price. And we're already seeing demands from the Senate that fertilizer makers be investigated for gouging, when in reality it's nothing more than a response to, you know, bundled energy policy in Europe. So I think in early 2022, we are going to see first in the poorer countries, but eventually finding its way to sort of the Western democracies. We're going to see massive price spikes in food. And history teaches us that nine meals to crazy is the old expression from the prepper community. Once people can't afford to pay food, forget about the landscaper that can't afford to pay the Gas to get to his or her clients. When you can't feed your family, that's when it gets real. And I believe we're already beginning to see some of the consequences of that. So I think the story of 2022 will be a food inflation and food supply crisis story that is directly born from the energy crisis that we're seeing today.

Any idea what those inflation numbers look like? I know it's a speculation of course.

But if you want to pull up a piece that we wrote called Starvation Diet.

Okay. I wanted to ask you about copper there. So maybe we'll get back to that if we have time.

Scroll up. There it is right there. Yeah. So starvation diet is our prediction all the way back in October. By the way, this piece was published in October. So you stop right there. That's the 20 year chart of the price of fertilizer. It's now at 1150 on this chart, if you can believe it. So just compared to this is North American fertilizer has tripled in price since pre Covid. And so what you're going to see is farmers planting less or farmers using less fertilizer and therefore yields being lower and the price of food skyrocketing. And this is, you know, I don't know how high it could go. Like it it the price elasticity of demand for food is, is infinite and the richest people will pay anything. Jason Hartman is going to buy groceries. The price when you check out is you're not wouldn't say you're agnostic to it, but you will prioritize food over anything. And so you will pay the price.

I'll simply complain about it, but other people will be deeply affected by it.

Well, they will die. This is what happens. The reason why this piece is called Starvation Diet is because it's going to starve hundreds of millions of people. And we're joking here. This is Larry Fink, who's the head of Blackrock, who has been part of the defund the fossil fuel industry.

They own everything.

Well and this piece in particular points out that as a consequence of the energy crisis in China, China blocked all phosphate exports because they want to make sure that their domestic farmers have the supply they need first. And so you're going to see this. What's the price of corn, what's the price of wheat, what's the price of cotton? And there's second and tertiary orders of, of, of damage here that we haven't even written about yet. Like certain herbicides are becoming really expensive to make because they too rely on some of these key raw materials. And that will be a two year from now problem because the weeds will proliferate this year and then they become even harder to knock down next year. And so there's all of these phenomenon that are going to find their way in. And we see it, it feels like the beginning of the housing crisis where people were screaming that the market is about to collapse and nobody heard or realized it until it was too late. That's how we feel. I mean, we published this piece back in October.

Very scary.

Doomberg, you may not know this about.

Me, but I have another podcast that used to be my number two show. I haven't looked at the rankings lately, but it's called the holistic Survival show. And I launched it during the Great Recession about, you know, 12, 13 years ago. And I've done hundreds of interviews with preppers. I want to learn this stuff, right? And I know you're into it. And look, listeners and viewers, please hear this. You don't have to become a nut job. You don't have to, you know, stock up on refried beans and live in the woods to just be smart and responsible.

And this is also just an economic thing. It's an inflation hedge. I don't think there's any doubt that.

To one degree or another what you say is going to come true. I mean, we just have general inflation, so food's going to go with that. But I think food will be much more severely impacted as you do.

So look, all you have to do today, tomorrow, the next day, whenever you.

Go to the grocery store is just.

Buy more stuff that's non perishable and rotate it, you know, put it in your pantry and just buy extra. This is not complicated.

You don't have to learn much. You know, what is non perishable?

Just buy more of it and store it.

You know, this is not wacky.

It's just being responsible and it's hedging inflation. Because in a survival scenario, just remember the rules and you alluded to it.

The nine meals from Crazy. I love that, by the way. It's an interesting way to say it, but it's. It's three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, and everybody's dead. And you know, that's the rule.

So if you have enough to last.

More than three weeks, that's the survival strategy.

And in the bugout bag, which is.

Your portable supply, that should be in the trunk of your car and also a couple of them, one for each family member, you have three Days worth of food and water. And that's what gets you through a crisis. This is just smart.

It's not the end of the world necessarily. It's. Maybe the power goes out, maybe the.

Supply chains stop, maybe the truckers won't truck. In Canada right now, there's a whole.

Group of truckers, or maybe in the northeastern United States too, that are on.

The verge of striking over vaccine mandates. And you know, if the truckers stop.

The food is gone. And if you've ever lived in a crisis, hurricane, whatever, you have seen how fast the store shelves just empty. They'll just empty.

It happens in hours sometimes.

So the way we frame it, Jason, and I'm sure this will resonate with you, we wrote a piece called One Flew over the Prepper's Nest.

I saw that one.

Basically, we view the fact that the retailers are willing to store inventory. The just in time supply chain means that you have to increase the working capital of your home. We view our homes as a factory. And the product of our factory is the health and well being of our family. And the inputs to our factory are food and water and supplies and natural gas, electricity. Pick your favorite. And the outputs are waste and surge. And you have to be prepared for losing all of those things. Our motto is 30 days. We eat what we store, we store what we eat. And we view not only is it a hedge against inflation, it's an insurance policy that comes with a free hedge against inflation. And so we are basically just increasing the working capital of our home factories because there's insufficient working capital in the gizm time supply chains to guarantee that my family and the friends that I love and care about will be fine during a crisis. And you know, the tail risk is much fatter than people realize. We have a way of sort of ignoring risks until they materialize. And it only makes sense for you to increase the working capital of your home. And in fact, we wrote a piece about the Australian trucker situation called how to break an entire economy. It turns out that fertilizer, basically a form of fertilizer, urea, is used in the pollution abatement of these diesel trucks. And without urea, the diesel trucks stop operating. And Australia is on the verge of running out of urea. Why? Because China blocked exports. And so the entire economy of Australia is at risk of collapsing. Not saying that it will, but the odds of it are much higher than they were three months ago.

And Australia has become a prison camp. It's unbelievable what's going on there.

Whole other issues there, but If I lived in Australia and I had a family that I loved and cared about, I would be increasing the working capital of my home. It's just funny because there's a counter push against preppers like you. Like you saying like even the fact that you have to sort of pre apologize for saying like you know, crazy.

It's ridiculous.

That's, that's. It used to be that families stored enough food to get through the winter and that. It used to be that family members took pride in being self sufficient. I don't know why that became like a conspiracy theory tinfoil hat because some.

Leftist news media personality probably helped convince the whole entire media to paint it it that way. It's, you're absolutely right, it's ridiculous. I mean this is just being responsible.

Yes. And in fact we got some hate mail when we published that piece. Like some of the comments to it were like how you're so selfish, you should only have exactly what you need. It's people like you that are causing the shortages. And no, the response is we're not the ones panic buying because we're prepared. We buy. In normal times, the last thing I want to be is in a gas line. The last thing I want to be is fighting it out for the last can of beans at the, at the supermarket. I'm going to go down to my basement and get the can of beans that I bought just for this moment. You know, we don't buy and store things we don't eat, so we're not wasting stuff. It's just a simple matter, as you say, of increasing the working capital of our pantry and storing a few things in the long term for an emergency. I'll tell a quick story. We had a natural disaster in my community last year and we were very well prepared for it. And at peak we hosted nine people in our home and got them through the worst of that emergency which lasted the better part of four days. We were able to provide them with food, with drink, with extra clothes, with a warm place to be, or in this case it was in the summer. So a cool place to be. The air conditioning work, we had extra generators to lend out to people, we had extra supplies. We helped people restore their homes. We're not selfish, we're just prepared.

I couldn't agree more.

I can assure you that the most.

Selfish thing to do is to not be prepared and to make other be a burden on someone else. That's the selfish thing.

Yeah. And these nine people, you can bet, have a far superior emergency plan today. Having lived It. And I don't blame them. They're my friends. I love them. Our family was happy to welcome them into our home. And I know that if the situation were reversed that they would do the same for us. It's part of being responsible and being a contributing member of your local community.

Absolutely.

And just on the prepping, you know, the basic, in my opinion, I mean, you can do this to whatever level you want, folks, but you can do a basic, decent amount of prepping minus the food. Just buying more food. Right? That's simple. Just go to the store next time and buy double of the non perishables and then just rotate them and eat the oldest ones first. Right. And the newest ones last.

But 300 bucks will make you pretty.

Prepared, believe it or not. It doesn't take a ton of money. And if you want to go to the generator route, let me just say a couple of things about that. I bought a generator when I moved to Florida. I've never used it, but I live in hurricane country, so you never know. But you must buy gas cans and I recommend that you don't keep them filled. You'll have probably enough warning when you see sense of disaster coming to fill them because it's dangerous to store gas.

You may disagree with me, but also have a siphon, a $20 siphon that.

You can buy so you can siphon the gas out of your fuel tank in your car or somebody else's car if you're making a trade or something.

This is just simple basic stuff.

I have a pro tip for you which we talked about in the piece.

Oh, and extension cords.

You need lots of extension cords.

Well, yes, two points. So first of all, we prefer to have. So we have a whole house generator which runs on natural gas, which is great as our primary line of defense. Not everybody can afford that and certainly not today. Those have gone up 2, 3 times in price. But we have generators that run on propane and you can store propane indefinitely, unlike gasoline. And propane burns cleaner, which means you have to change the oil less often. And also, generally speaking, we have observed that when the gasoline goes short and there's an energy crisis, you can still in the early days go to the hardware store and pick up some propane tanks.

Right.

While everyone is distracted getting gasoline. The second part that you just talked about is, you know, getting extension cords and so on. Here's a very important rule. If you're, if you're going to enter the preparedness mindset, stuff isn't preps. Stuff only becomes preps when you have successfully used them in the intended way that you bought them for. So a generator that you've never used is, is, is not a prep. It's just a thing. And so you will learn. Oh, I don't have enough extension cords to run the fridge in my kitchen. By trying to run the fridge on your generator in a non emergency situation.

Good point. Yeah.

And so there's lots of preppers who buy a lot of stuff, but stuff doesn't become preps until you've used it for its intended purpose. And we.

Fair enough. I just haven't gotten around to it, but.

Well, there you go.

But I have tons of extension cords.

I do have that.

Well, I can tell you that this is a real story. During that emergency that I referred to earlier, went to a friend's house who had a generator but had never used it. And the generator did not come with oil and you didn't have oil. And luckily the neighbor who also needed to borrow part of the generator had oil and we got the generator started. But if you had put that generator together and used it for its intended purpose, like I'm going to use this generator to run my sump pump so my basement doesn't flood when the power goes out. Okay. Have you used that generator to run your sump? Because if you haven't, it's just a thing. So. Yeah, that's just one of the.

Agreed.

And fair enough. Absolutely. With the portable generators, one of my friends says you should make a double male cord. And you know, I'm kind of scared to use that. They don't sell them.

I wouldn't do that.

Yeah, I think that's risky.

Anything that circumvents the need for a professional electrician is not something I'm willing to do.

I didn't make one, but, you know, at least I know how.

I mean, we have, with the whole house generator, we have an entire, you know, second set of electricity network basically that flips on automatically. But even that won't last but for a few days. And, and our whole strategy is we're prepared for 30 days because if the world's gotten to the point where that's not good enough, we probably don't want to participate in it anyway.

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. That's. That's true. And you know, a lot of this stuff becomes a bartering tool in a survival situation. So that's the other thing. And have a sense of community so that you have people you can rely on. That's important. One thing I notice in the Process prepping world people always seem to forget is communication. I recommend everybody buy a ham radio. But interestingly, don't get a license because when you get that license, you give the government a preemptive search warrant to come in and inspect your equipment. And I don't want to do that. You're allowed to use the ham radio in emergencies, legally. And I recommend everybody should have a ham radio. Just a small basic ham radio that doesn't rely on cell phone towers or cell phone networks or anything like that so that you have some communication.

Yeah, yeah. And we could go, you and I, I'm sure, could speak for hours on the topic.

We could, we could, we could. But let's wrap it up with some action steps. We talked about the prepping stuff. Let's. We don't need to do that anymore. But you know, economically and financially, what.

Should some of the listeners do?

Doomberg to prepare for the upcoming year? This is obviously a time of crisis and I think the worst of the economic side hasn't hit yet.

But interestingly, at the same time, I.

Think this asset bubble is just going to continue for the foreseeable future because they're just going to pump more money into the system and the rich are going to get richer even if there is a massive food shortage and a crisis and all of that. You know, it's like conflicting stuff. You know, both can happen at the same time at least I think. What do you think about that?

Yeah, I think we don't give investment advice on Bloomberg, but we would advise people to consider that they should sharpen and diversify their skills. It never hurts to learn something new, including some of the basic skills of life like woodworking and welding and, you know, understand how all of the key systems in your home work and how to repair them in the absence of, you know, external help. Because when Covid first hit, you know, the garbage stopped coming and you needed a plan. The garbage man stopped coming in our neighborhood for three weeks and people literally didn't know how to deal with that. And then as we say, like, you know, the best time to panic is to panic early. And so, you know, a little bit of a pre panic buying before inflation comes and especially of the key goods. One thing we always advise people is especially for prescription drugs, if the pharmacy isn't open and you have certain drugs that you need that are life critical, it'd be wise to have a robust supply of that. And then from an investment perspective, I would say we have a strategy of we earn in fiat, we save in real assets and we invest privately where we can affect the outcome. We're not big participants in the stock market. We're not very good timers of it. And I personally can't be motivated to buy something that I know is essentially a greater fool's trade. And so we don't mind earning in the fiat system. We save by buying real assets like land and gold. And then we invest privately where our skills can directly impact the outcome. And that's the strategy that we execute. And then since we're not in the stock market, it's very difficult for us to give sort of direct financial advice. And by the way, we're not registered financial advisors. We hold no licenses and it would be illegal for us to do so. So we don't.

Yep, good stuff. Well, of course people should subscribe to.

The newsletter you have. How many subscribers do you have now?

We're approaching 20,000 on doomberg.substack.com and the other place where we produce a lot of original content is on Twitter. You can find us at Doomberg T. Just add the letter T to the end of Doomberg T as in Tom. We're crossed 26 and a half thousand followers on Twitter. We have a highly engaged set of followers there. We love the content creation business. We love participating in it very, very much. Admire the prolific amount of material that you put out and big fans of yours and really was a great, great honor to be on your show. Jason, I can't, can't thank you enough for having us on.

Well, Doomberg, it was great to have.

You and I learned a lot and look forward to learning more, reading your articles and seeing you on Twitter as well. So thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate it.

Happy to come back anytime.

So George Gammon, Jason Hartman and I, we've created a high level mastermind group called the Collective. The goal of the Collective is for you to learn from, from the three of us as well as of course the other members on how to build and more importantly, how to maintain your wealth. In this video we're going to go into detail about what the Collective is and what it can do for you. Enjoy. So I'm Ken McElroy. I've been in real estate for over 30 years. Started with a two bedroom, two bath using my own money and now I own over a billion dollars worth of real estate that I bought over the years. Built a big company. We have a construction company, a development company, a property management company and of course an investment company. And typically now we syndicate and work with large, both private and public institutions for the equity and the debt. And so what I bring to the collective is how to scale, how to grow. Starting with one really small property with no experience at all and growing it into an organization which I've been able to do that basically runs almost without me. So that's what I'm going to bring to the collective. We decided to start the collective because one I met George Gammon and George brings a very interesting perspective about the economy and the Fed and the way money works and Bitcoin. Bitcoin and alternative types of investments, which quite honestly I was super focused on real estate almost the entire time and even I want to be a little bit more diverse. So when I talk to George and to Jason, they're always doing very, very different things. On the investment side, Jason specifically is more focused on the single family housing and what's going on in that market so that we could collaborate and have different viewpoints on different things. And so that's why I thought the collective would be good because I think everybody's kind of searching for the same kinds of answers. So the collective means to me basically the collective group, the whole. And I've always been a big believer of team and collaboration. So for me it really means collaboration of everyone kind of coming into a room and learning from each other based on their individual highs and their individual lows and to be very, very respectful of all their independent views on things and to be more open minded, transparent and authentic. So I cannot wait for the group to get together each and every quarter because we all have very different walks of life that we're going through. And so it's very, very cool to get in into one room with like minded people. I think the right person for the collective is somebody who's into personal development, somebody who's trying to be a better individual, somebody who's trying to have that work life balance, trying to figure out good decision making on the investment side specifically good decision making on the personal side perhaps certainly on their health and on their wealth. The members that have already said signed up are people typically that have businesses that they're growing, businesses that they've started or businesses that they've sold. So typically they're higher net worth and they're trying to figure out what to do with their money. They're probably a little bit afraid of inflation, they're probably a little bit concerned about where to invest and they're obviously looking at real estate as one component component. Somebody that's trying to do the right things both on the personal side and on the financial side. So some of the experiences that members can expect to get out of the collective are certainly the network, and I think that's always super powerful. I've been involved in groups like this before like EO and ypo, the Entrepreneurs Organization, and ypo, which is Young President's Organization, which is kind of a peer to peer network. And I that's what I envisioned and I think people are going to certainly get that out of there. They're going to have lifelong friends for sure from this, and they're going to meet people at every single event. But also we're going to have fun. So as an example, things like race car driving and doing all kinds of really cool things and meeting celebrities and things like that, and fashion shows are going to be part of it. So it's kind of a how do we have fun and learn together? And we're going to have that at each and every event. So thanks for watching. If you guys are interested, there's a link below you can click on. It'll take you right to the website, which has a load of information on exactly what the Collective is, where the next events are, and what exactly you'll be getting if you become a member. Thanks for watching.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review for the show. We would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.