1897: Housing Inventory Shortage, Rudyard Lynch, Geo-politics, Investing In The Future

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You know, Jason, I've been following you for a long time. Ten years ago is when I first saw your course and I've been investing, gone to several Meet the Masters. And man, I'm telling you, the way that things have played out are way better than you projected. For me personally, obviously it's been, you know, a good six years, but now I'm ready to kick it into high gear. As you know, I want to really build a portfolio that's, you know, four or five times what I have already. My wife and I have 12 properties.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He he's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1897. 1897. I am back from a fantastic collective mastermind vacation in beautiful Playa del Carmen, Mexico. What a fantastic trip. I just have to tell you, few things are more stimulating than being with great people. And we have a whole bunch of new members in the collective and all the great old members that have been there since the beginning and just had such a great time. So many great adventures and dinners and meals and breakfast and lunch and adventures and, you know, going out on the ocean and hanging out by the pool and the speakers we had Chris McIntosh, Robert Kiyosaki, you know, just an awesome time. So I just highly recommend you check that out. And if you're looking for a stepping stone to that, a great stepping stone would be our upcoming virtual event, our recession proof investing summit, and then also our empowered investor pro group because you'll be hanging out with us on Zoom a couple of times a month. You get big discounts for all of our events. We are about to announce a live event. I know I've been saying that for a while, but it's coming. Don't worry, it's coming. And just A great time to engage with us, engage with other investors, engage with people doing big things. Expand the mind. That's what it's all about, mind expansion. But anyway, it's great to be home. And I am off again. I've got another master. Well, two other mastermind meetings in a row. I'm literally sleeping in my own bed about I guess four nights this month. Not too many. But yeah, just a great time this last week and really want to encourage all of you to check that out. By the way, our next meeting will be in Scottsdale in November in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. Now our guest today is the founder of a fantastic YouTube channel that I really like. And it's what if alt history, what if alternate history. He will be with us today. And wow, what a young guy and a brilliant guy. Just has a really interesting understanding of the world. And he will be with us in just a few minutes. But first I want to tell you about inventory, which is declining. Yes, you heard that right. Inventory is declining. And it's rather surprising and it's rather significant in terms of the inventory declines in terms of housing inventory. Now our friends at Altos just published their latest report showing about 547,000 homes for sale in the United States. Again, this includes all geographies, all price ranges. The shortage is much more acute in the entry level housing segment. And this is a 1% decline in just one week. So that's pretty significant. Just one week, a 1% decline in inventory. And what's behind this? Let's take a look at another one of their charts. And this is showing weekly new inventory of single family home listings. Okay. And it's comparing this to what they call immediate sales, in other words, where properties are selling very, very quickly as soon as they go on the market. Right. And the immediate sales numbers have declined a bit since the crazy peak of the market. But there are dramatically fewer homes for sale. If you're watching this on video, look at the chart with me. And look at that last chart by the way as well. So it just shows the narrative here is still a handful of transactions happening very, very quickly. So you know, that's a pretty good number at the fastest point in the market, about 115,000 listings selling lickety split. Now a lower number than that. You know, looking at these charts, you gotta kinda estimate the number that looks like about 76,000 homes selling very, very quickly. But at the other time in say May of this year, right, where we had very high quick sale numbers, we also had much higher inventory numbers. And it's really surprising. But the inventory decline is very significant here. Take a look at this. Dramatically fewer new listings coming on the market. And that number is below. Well, right. About 60,000 new listings coming on the market. Well, about 76,000 are selling very, very quickly. This is the immediate sales metric. And I've shared with you before the forecast on inventory and where they are forecasting that we will end the year in terms of housing inventory. And guess what? They have lowered that forecast saying that there will be less inventory than originally expected as we round out the end of the year. Now, I know it' we got a whole nother quarter left, right? A little more than a quarter before the end of the year. But this is a big deal, folks, and it proves, it proves that we're going to need sound effects for this. So let me just grab them here. It proves that yours truly, Jason Hartman predicted this back in February of 2020. And he's right. Yep, I am right again. I'm taking credit here, folks. I'm right again. Why? Why am I right? Well, remember when I told you over two years ago that people are not going to want to part with those cheap mortgages? Those mortgages that are such a big part of their housing asset? Well, that's exactly what's going on here, folks. This is the dynamic we're experiencing. The poison pill that the Federal Reserve and the unholy alliance with the government put into the market over two years ago. And that poison pill is going to create a housing inventory shortage for decades to come.

This is huge and it's something you can benefit from as an investor if you play your cards right. And no better way than to get the inside information on this than to join us for our recession proof investing Summit. That's a virtual event. It's coming up in just a few weeks here. And go ahead and get your tickets@jasonhartman.com that's jasonhartman.com get your tickets for that event. We're going to take a deep dive into the marketplace. We're going to have our local market specialists from several areas there. We're going to have some good financing information there because I know every. Everybody's worried about financing right now and that's the hard part. No question about it. We're just gonna have a bunch of resources. Our investment counseling team will be there. It's gonna be a fantastic event. So join us for that coming up in just a couple of weeks. And if you're an empowered investor pro member, if you're in Our Pro membership, you get a big discount on that, but if not, just join it. Go to Jason hartman.com, it's right at the top of the page. Make sure you join this event. Get your tickets for that today. Looks like we have about 50 people registered so far. That and purchase tickets and don't miss out on that. Okay. These are really nice, really easy virtual events. Friday evening, Saturday, for about five hours on Saturday. You can also purchase the recordings as well, so you can review them at your leisure after the event. And we're going to have Noah St. John will be speaking and he's got some really good stuff on Mindset. So it's just going to be a great event. Join us. Virtual event, very easy to attend. Okay, let's look at these inventory numbers, these projections and the past numbers. Okay. For the past few years. So housing inventory really drives what is going on. No question about it. But, oh, gosh, I don't know if you follow me on Twitter. I've got over 30,000 people following me on Twitter. But take a look at my tweet from last night. Okay, take a look at last night's tweet where I talked about how so many investors are myopically focused on prices. They're worried, are prices going up, are prices coming down, what's going on? What's going to happen with the market. Right. They're all focused on this stuff when they should be focused on yield or return on investment. That's what investing is about. That's what investing is about. So when we look at yield, that's a component of rents and expenses and prices and interest rates, of course. Right. And we look at the overall ROI on your investment properties. But so many people concerned about prices and they're just myopically focused on the wrong, wrong thing. Don't make that mistake. Don't make that mistake. Okay, so here is the lowered inventory projection. Remember now, right. Now, let's go back and let's just look at the prior number. 547,000 homes for sale, decline of about 1% since last week. Dramatically fewer new listings coming on the market. And then the projection here is to end the year with less than 470,000 homes for sale. Less than 470,000 homes for sale. Now, the question is always, compared to what? How did we end 2021? Well, that was even lower, about 310,000 homes. So we're going to have more inventory than that by a small margin. But compared to what? If we look at any other prior year going back to 20002016 inventory still dramatically lower. Dramatically lower. Okay. The recent normal number in quotes, what is considered normal is 850,000 homes for sale. So we're going to be about half that at the end of this year. Folks, if you're waiting for a housing crash, don't hold your breath. It's not the time to be holding your breath unless you are invested in these high flying. Well, they're not high flying anymore, but cyclical markets in the west coast of the United States, the expensive northeastern markets, these are the markets that are going to suffer more. Not entry level housing. You want entry level housing in good, solid, linear and hybrid markets. If you want to know what these markets are, all you have to do is go to jason hartman.com click on the Properties page and you will see those markets that we recommend. Jason hartman.com, click on properties after you get your ticket for our recession proof investing summit. And you'll see it there. All right, let's get to our guest. Let's talk about geopolitics, the economy, alternate history, and here we go.

It's, it is my pleasure to welcome someone I am a big fan of and you are going to be so impressed with this guy. Rudyard lynch is the founder of a fantastic YouTube channel called Whatifalth hist. In other words, what if alternate history. And the most amazing thing about him is not that he's so knowledgeable, but he's only 21 years old. So he is way beyond his years. And it's just a pleasure to have him here. I've been watching his channel for quite a while and just love his videos. They're so in depth and so fascinating. Rudyard, welcome. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you for the compliment and it's a pleasure to be here.

You know, one of the things you've done with your channel is you sort of took it from an alternate history channel to a channel that's actually about the future. Right. And about a lot of predictions that you make. And your massive historical knowledge informs those predictions. So maybe we'll start with that. And of course, this audience is most interested in economics and so forth. We are at a time of uncertainty. Maybe big transitions tell us what you think is in store.

Well, it's a tremendous amount. I think I probably put 20 hours of content for prediction. So it's difficult for me to congeal it all into a short answer. But I guess the best one I can give is that you look across history and you see these cycles of eras of greater wealth. And then people construct the world in a way that makes sense to them. But then over time, as the world changes, you see crises every 200 or so years. And the last couple examples of this are the French Revolution, the wars of religion in the 1600s, and the black Death. And there's a series of metrics that you can use to predict these. And the brilliant historians like David Hackett Fisher and Peter. And Peter Zeihan does something similar and yet different, and Peter Turchin, and there's about 20 metrics you can use to predict when there's going to be a world crisis. And almost all of them line up and it's stuff like average age of marriage inequality, inflation and all that stuff. And we are perfectly lined up for a crisis like this. And it's going to take different results around different parts of the world. And in a lot of ways, my channel is predicting what will happen in different areas in the economy with Chinese politics, because the more I study history, the more I realize reality is a web. And so, for example, Africa's grain prices will influence the American stock market. And it's all unified and I just don't think it'll be good. But I'm not a doomer where I don't think the world's going to end, but I think we will go through hard times and then we'll have good times.

Yeah. And from talking off air before we started today, part of that equation is inflation, which is on everybody's mind nowadays. We're all just so shocked at the prices of everything. Now, of course in the US but even more so around the world. I mean, you look at Turkey and the inflation they're going through is off the charts. Sri Lanka as well, and others. But tell us how you think that plays out and let's take a deeper dive into some of these metrics that sort of inform from these crises. And how does it play out, especially.

In the U.S. okay, the translation for inflation basically means that governments inflate currencies when their wants are greater than what their actual capabilities are. And so if you look at the 19th century, there was absolutely no inflation from 1790 to World War I. And actually a lot of governments at the time thought inflation was a moral evil. And that was because of the Industrial Revolution. The economy grew faster than anything else, so no one had to inflate anything. And across history, inflation and economic competition, which is in a lot of ways similar to population growth, predict inflation. We see cycles of inflation going back to the time of before Hammurabi. And what happens is that as there's more competition, and this is the modern world where Americans are undercut by Mexicans, Mexicans are undercut by Venezuelans, Americans are undercut by Chinese, Chinese are undercut by Vietnamese, and governments are even in dictatorships, are accountable to their own populations. So they inflate their currencies as a way to basically to keep their population satisfied. And if we look at.

And Hugo Chavez was famous for that, by the way, a lot of people abs, a lot of Venezuelans loved him because he gave out the goodies.

If you look at the Biden administration, for example, they said they'll deal with inflation by printing more money because the Democratic Party has built its ability to win elections by basically telling different constituencies, we will give you money. And so that's what happens where groups get stuck in deadlocks where they have to keep providing services. And over. It's the whole thing that I think has a lot of truth, that bad times make strong men, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times. And we're in an era of weak men. And we are in the era of the highest money printing of any era in history by a truly massive margin. And as a person who studied inflation in the four big inflationary periods of the last thousand years of Western civilization, this is a lot bigger than anything we've seen before. But the reason governments are printing so much money and it's not biting them back is because of the way the US Dollar works, where, let's say, if Egypt and South Africa want to trade to each other, they need to do it in dollars. And so everyone is incentivized to keep the dollar system going. And the thing is, we're totally abusing that system. And the world's an inherently chaotic place. And you can either design systems to deal with the world's chaos, or those systems will collapse. And we've designed our current financial system so that the slightest things happen, they fall apart. And that's not just the case for the dollar. The Chinese print their currency to a far greater deal than the dollar. And so what I think will happen is that at some point something will go wrong. And because the world's so inherently chaotic now just due to a bunch of reasons that something goes wrong, we see horrible inflation, and people say this is unimaginable. But if you look across history, there is no precedent of the money printing we are having now that will not result in horrible inflation. And it's really the far stranger Opinion to think everything will be okay, in my opinion. And then what happens? High peacetime inflation like this is a perfect correlation of political crises and the last great good example being the French Revolution. And what will happen is that we'll see this broad political and social crisis around the world and things will get really bad. We'll see incredibly high inflation, and then we'll start to see more strong men and we will see the world system rebuild itself on new principles that make more sense for the new world. And then what happens after these cycles of inflation, like those for The French Revolution, 17th century, Black Death, Fall of Rome, is that you see a lengthy period of stable population and stable currencies as well. So I'd expect high inflation and then deflation for an extended period.

As we were talking before we actually started this show, you were saying that high inflation would probably last about a decade. Right. So 10 years of inflation and then you think there would be deflation after that? Huh?

Yeah, it's difficult to say because I'm taking this from Peter Turchin, who's a brilliant historian. He was able, he's able to look at these patterns and plug them into computer models through using a couple metrics like inequality, wage stagnation, et cetera.

And when you say inequality, you're talking about income or economic inequality mostly.

I mean, wealth inequality is always greater than.

Salary inequality. But before these crises, you see inequality in both salary and wealth inequality.

Why does that lead to inflation for 10 years and then deflation after that? But I do want to make a point on that. At the end of the inflationary cycle, if it goes a decade, we would have seen massive inflation. So some deflation after that would still possibly leave us massively above where we are today.

It's really difficult to say because all this stuff is so intertwined with politics where once the economy goes really bad, it becomes a political issue. And what Peter Turchin found is that we have varying lengths of cycles depending on the society. So the Roman Republic took 500 years to get through its cycle. Modern America is on trajectory for 100 and the normal European cycle is like 250 years. So if the Roman Republic takes 500 years to get through its cycle, its crisis period was over 100 years. But if we're operating at one fifth the speed of the Roman Republic, we're looking 10 to 20 years. And it's hard to say because in a lot of these countries they just make a new currency. Where Russia in the last cycle, where the Russians had all the problems we had, now and then they had the communist revolution. The communist system was so different.

They barely even had a currency. Same with the French Revolution. And I'm picking some of the more drastic examples, but the French just made a whole new currency. And so I think if it's $3,000 to get groceries, then I think we'll just make a new dollar.

Yeah, well, people have talked about the Amero or central bank digital currencies, et cetera, et cetera. And by the way, I'm curious, I don't know that you've ever talked about this on any of your videos, but what do you think of cryptocurrency and bitcoin and so forth?

That's really complicated. I deal with a lot of people in crypto in my daily life because I'm involved in the whole tech scene and I'm helping my best friend make a tech company right now. But with crypto I think most of it won't work. And it reminds me a lot of the financial crises that Europe saw in the early 18th century where what happened was that you got these speculative schemes. And the way these schemes worked is that people invested in something because they thought someone else would invest in it. And in most cases it was about a colony in the new world. So this is the South Sea bubble, the Mississippi scheme and the Darien scheme. Do you know about these?

Yeah, well, South Sea in Mississippi, sure. The Darien one, I don't.

That was with the Scottish. To build a colony in Panama, to basically build the Panama canal in like 1698. And the problem was this is there's a wonderful book called Mosquito Empires about this. The Scottish landed, 80% of them died of malaria in a six month period. And I see a lot of crypto in the same way, like crypto people, most people do not think NFTs are actually the way of the future. People invest in NFTs because they think other people think it's a good asset. And you get economic crashes when the difference between the fundamental reality and what people are betting on the stock market is so wide that it erases capital. And with most crypto I think that'll be the case. It reminds me of one of my good high school friends. He would mine dogecoin during class when he was bored, when dogecoin had absolutely no value, but he didn't keep a wallet. But through mining dogecoin out of boredom, he would have had several thousand dollars if he had kept it. And stuff like that is absolutely insane. And I think with crypto one form of crypto will eventually gain dominance. And I'm not optimistic about current crypto because let's say the US dollar collapses and as we've seen in the last couple months, crypto hasn't acted as a good hedge against inflation. And let's say if US dollar collapses, the government will just crack down in bitcoin users and probably say bitcoin users are all pedophiles or trying to buy child pornography or lambast them in some really.

Or drugs or arms or whatever.

Lambast them in some really disgusting way because the US needs dollar hegemony maintain its world status. And as my father once said, fiat currency is bullshit backed by aircraft carriers and nukes and ethereum is bullshit backed by neckbeards. And that's partial. But I do think there's an element of truth to it.

I've basically said the same thing ever. I do think bitcoin is in a class by itself compared to any of the others. That is really truly a different concept, of course. But the two most powerful entities the human race has ever known are governments and central banks today. Right. Their main product is their fiat currency. And they don't like competition. Why would they tolerate. I mean, they're tolerating it, but ultimately I think they're going to do whatever they can to squash it.

And the reason I think I agree with that and the reason I think crypto will in the end.

And I hope I'm wrong about that.

Yeah, I hope you're wrong too. I don't.

I want to be wrong. I want bitcoin to take over the world. But I agree, I don't think it's going to.

And the reason I think crypto will, in 100 years or something, or 50 years, end up being successful for two reasons. The first is that you see fluctuating eras of fiat currencies and hard currencies like gold. And it's very hard to keep a fiat currency for a long period of time because every time governments end up abusing it. And I don't think we'll switch back to a hard metal currency over the next 200 years because due to asteroid mining, all of those minerals will end up becoming so common, very cheap.

Yeah, yeah.

And so unless we find a new mineral in the asteroids that we can have as be a substitute for gold or silver, I think we'll create artificial gold or silver. And that's one of the things I hear a lot in tech.

Well, that's what the alchemists tried to do for eons, right? You know, I mean, look, they're creating artificial diamonds. Maybe they will be able to do it with gold at some point. So, yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not a metals bug. You know, it is what it is. But, you know, back to the inflation question, and you've got some visual aids, some great maps I want you to share too. But how bad do you think it will get? And I don't know if you agree with my philosophy. I'll just tell you what it is. But it's no matter how bad everything gets, I think the US is in a very enviable position with the reserve currency, the military, to keep the reserve currency status. And I think people in the States are going to fare pretty well comparatively. There's a lot of hardship in for a lot of places around the world. We're already seeing that with, you know, we saw it with Venezuela, we're still seeing it, of course, Sri Lanka now. And I think there's a lot more to go. I think Russia's going to suffer dramatically and, you know, maybe Europe's going to have a tough winter if Russia doesn't let the gas go, you know, so we'll see how that works out.

I agree fundamentally and I think Zeihan does a great job of breaking this down and going through all the reasons. And I agree with him on basically all the tenets, where in one of my last videos I talk about how if the data I'm looking at is correct and stuff like this can often be wrong, the Middle east and Africa will starve this winter. And these are areas that have had their populations grow by over 10 times in the last hundred years. And they can't support their populations without external inputs. And the Eurasian countries like China, Europe, Japan, their populations will halve over the next 70 years. And the thing you've got to keep in mind is that in most of these countries there will be two retirees for every one worker.

And that's a collapsing system waiting to happen.

I was talking to a climate change friend and I told him, a friend who's very much into climate change, and I told him that there would be a nuclear war between India and China before Greenland, before Greenland melts, because the world order is so intertwined that by the time you get to the place where there are two retirees for every single worker, you've already had a civil war, you've already had a massive recession. And when you're looking at something like that, you're looking at areas with truly endemic problems. And for the Reasons Zeihan says of stable population, stable internal oil, massive food exporter, good capitalist entrepreneurial culture. I think America is going to stand to be a massive winner. And I say this in other videos, but you can pick other people who will win from this European disorder. I think a new caliphate will probably form, but really all of them will be operating at a massive disadvantage compared to the United States.

Yeah, yeah. Well, so lucky Americans for sure. Show us some of your maps, if you would, and let's talk about those.

Sure thing. This is my map of the various civilizations around the world where one of the things I do is I make although I talk about the future, I talk about the past. And I have a series called Understanding Civilizations where I go through why Western civilization have the attributes it does, what separates it from other civilizations, what resulted in it becoming successful, and what are its strengths and weaknesses. And I always try to view civil different civilizations almost like different video game factions with strengths and weaknesses and their own inherent characters. So this is my map of different civilizations around the world today.

And so for those listening on audio only, just explain this if you would.

Yeah, I have about 15 different civilizations, or that's I'm sure you can count and find a different number, but I've covered, you've got Western civilization, that's North America and Western Europe and Australia. And for reasons I explained in those videos, I split Latin America, the Greeks and the Romans and the Russians off from Western civilization because I think they all have different attributes. And one of the things I say is that I don't especially care because people, it very gets very controversial with stuff like this. I say I don't especially care if turquoise is a shade of blue or green, but it has to act differently. And the fact of the matter is that Colombia doesn't act like Germany or Argentina doesn't act like the United States. So I split Latin America and Russia off. I have Islamic civilization, which is pretty obvious. I have Indian, Chinese and then a bunch of Southeast Asia has a variety of different civilizations and I covered them in a previous video. And I have Russia and the Orthodox world as its own civilization. And in my civilization videos I also cover past civilizations and I try to use this. They're my favorite videos to make actually. I covered Mesopotamia, I covered the Greeks and the Romans. India is next on the list.

So what does this map tell us though? What's the takeaway here?

The brilliant historian Oswald Spengler developed an idea of civilizations and it's basically a tent on how you view the world. So for the west, or it's a paradigm or a way of viewing the world that encompasses everything. So if you were to ask a Westerner what the meaning of life is, they will get a very different answer from an Indian, because Westerners have a series of cultural assumptions that come from the Romans, the Germanic barbarians, and the Christians. And so you can predict how a country will act based off the civilizational inputs it goes in. And for Islam, Islam's always tried to become a pan Islamic theocracy because that's what Muhammad wanted it to be in the first, the Islamic golden ages they worship, they look back upon that caliphate as the most beautiful thing. So if you try to predict what a Muslim country is going to do, that's your first guess. For the Chinese, they've always alternated between viewing themselves as the Middle Kingdom, needing nothing else, and then being attacked by outsiders and feeling the need to build an empire to basically overcompensate. And so from looking at all these different civilizations and what their attributes, their religions, their cultures and histories have been, you can predict what's going to happen in the world. I think that's something that's very valuable to people in business and investors, because.

What if all this. My YouTube channel is its own business. I work with four or five agencies. And it's very interesting to talk to companies of different cultures because you need different negotiating styles, or if you're managing a good friend of mine, minutes a factory in China, or he used to, before obvious problems happened. And just you need to. And in the modern world, what I think we do is that we act as if everyone is the same. But if you go to Africa, you have to understand how the local cultures operate and what their histories do. And it's why people set up factories in Thailand rather than Kenya, because Thailand has a history of being a urban, developed society stretching back 1500 years. And so they have a lot of stuff that makes it a lot easier. And in Africa, that's not there.

Okay, but. But you said a map like this could tell us what's going to happen. So I want to ask you the question, what's going to happen?

You're asking me questions that take two hours to answer.

I know, I understand. Your videos have just. They're like huge data dumps. There's just so much to them. You know, tell us what you can in the next, you know, five, six minutes.

So what I say about the future is that we're living through the industrial world, and we've only had industrialized societies for the last 200 years. And with that, we have to figure out how the world will move forward and how to reorganize our thoughts on the world. And each civilization has to figure out a new ideology to push itself forward that pulls on its previous traditions. And so for China, for example, I think they'll go for totalitarianism, then they'll try some variety of Confucianism, then China will probably end up founding its own religion. For India, Hinduism is, I think, a lot of ways one of the best designed religions in the world, because it appeals to everyone and it's so, so deep. And so I think India will find a new form of Hinduism. I think Islam, in a lot of ways, is projected to become, to industrialize, because what normally happens is that a single country in a civilization industrializes. And industrialization is really a cultural. And for the west, in Western civilization, your degree of industrialization is determined by how culturally close to Britain you are. So America, Germany, more industrialized, Italy and Brazil less. In the east, it's your cultural similarity to Japan determines your industrialization. And since we've seen Turkey industrialize, I think the Muslim world will industrialize, with cultural similarity to Turkey being the guiding variable.

What about the West?

This will actually bring me into a video I'm about to make where I think the west is going through a massive crisis of confidence caused by the World wars, because the World wars were extremely traumatic, because the west has spent the last thousand years building up cultural attributes that made sense to it, cultural technologies. And the thing to keep in mind is that, like businesses, almost all governments and things in history failed. So if you get a system that works, you should keep it. And with the west, that was a combination, for better or for worse, science, Christianity, capitalism, the nation state, and white supremacy. And you went to the World Wars. The west firmly believed in that. And then we committed all these horrible atrocities, and I think we have some version of ptsd. And so if you look at the modern Western left, what they're doing is they're going against all of that. They're trying to completely do the opposite of what the west has done for its entire history. And so they're trying to be transnational rather than operate through the nation state. They hate Christianity, they hate capitalism, want to go for socialism, they're trying to bring minority groups in to make the Western countries less white. And so they're trying to do the opposite. And the west is going through a crisis like that. And another thing is that as civilizations age, bureaucrats gain more power. And this is something that happened in the Asian civilizations thousands of years ago. But we're seeing that in the west now, where Europe in a lot of ways, and I hate to say stuff like this because it's a 40 minute video. Europe is a society by bureaucrats, whether through the European Union, through their government, management of the economy. And America is in its own crisis. Where does. Since America never had the world wars in as acute a way as Europe, we're choosing between do we want to go down this path of going against everything that has worked across the West's history and a conscious rejection of it, or are we going to stick to what our current values are and we never had the bureaucrats win. And so that's the crisis that's going on in America right now. And I'm actually reading a video I'm working on right now is that there's five or six values you can use to determine how a society will operate. There's guilt, which is most of Western Christian countries. There is shame, which is Asian countries. There's fear, which is tribal peoples. And I invented one which is honor, which is are you willing to use force to protect your value system? And then there's anxiety. And I'm reading a fabulous book right now about how the dominant value system that's developing in the west is that of anxiety. And if you look at young people, they're incredibly anxious and you're seeing this struggle between are you going to use Christianity and guilt to propel a society or are you going to use anxiety and the desire to basically have a. I don't want to simplify this. Have your peer group and have your peer group approve of you and have. And basically make the community more agreeable, more kind, more sympathetic, all that stuff.

Yeah, and that's an interesting observation. I would agree with you that anxiety is the word of the day, for sure. We've got a few more minutes. What else do you want to share? What do you want people to know?

I will share different maps. I think I've got several that your audience would find fascinating. This is my map of the worlds in 100 years. And this video. And a lot of ways I feel this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe where explaining my predictions of the future are like going through. Then there's an Iron man movie.

And by the way, for those not seeing this because some are just listening on audio, it appears that in 100 years the US has expanded quite a bit.

Yes, in a hundred. And I feel like just there's so much going on here. But some of my Short things. I think America is like the Roman Empire where we're going through a crisis right now. But the Romans went through so many crises and they always pulled themselves together and grew again. And so I think in a hundred years the US will conquer, the US will annex a good deal of Canada. And that's for a bunch of reasons. I think Europe will gradually become an American colony and the US will build stronger relations with the Latin American countries through our own Hispanic population as it becomes wealthier. I think China goes through warlord periods where they have a successful dynasty for a while and I include the Communist Party in that and they grow decadent and there's warlords. I think China going through a long period of losing population will probably under a new religion reform and create a powerful empire in East Asia. And I think I said this before, I think the Turks will form a caliphate in the Middle East. And I think the big story to look at going forward is partially America being remarkably successful through all the reasons we've talked about before, but also the Asian countries being able to catch up technologically with the Western world.

Yeah, very interesting. Okay, so any action steps you want to share with people, especially as it relates to economics, money, etc. What would you recommend people be doing at this time?

I want to warn you, I'm a 21 year old with no credentials.

I get it, but you have a lot more credentials than you think.

I've invested in stable assets and things the government has to support. So resources, for example, the government always has to make sure Agriculture, the government will do anything to make sure people are fed. Military, if the world's going to become a more stressful place, then military stocks will do very well. Stuff like railroads, things always have to move around the country. And I mean, let's see, if you invest in mining, all of the machinery that goes into that mine still has to be there if there's a world crisis. And I would hedge against inflation. And we talked before we started talking about how I think real estate is a fabulous investment in the short term because we're going to have horrible inflation and that's a great hedge. And then after that, as the Internet makes it easier to work remotely, places where people want to move to places like Florida, like Texas, like the Grand Tetons, like Niagara, the top winners there are real estate for college towns and tourist centers.

That's interesting about college towns. You know, we used to be a big fan of student housing, by the way, but I am not bullish on it anymore because I think the College, the university debt enslavement complex is cracking up right before our eyes. And you know, one of the things that really helped make that happen was Covid and Zoom and Harvard saying that it's still $49,000 a year or semester. I can't remember which one to go to Harvard on Zoom. And everybody thought that was so ridiculous. It's just that they still have the bottleneck on Accred. I know, but I think that's really ending. I think they are losing their foothold. The college thing.

I'm not saying college for that reason, but I fully agree with you. I'm a college dropout. I dropped that after a semester because my YouTube channel, my YouTube channel is a successful business. And I see college really losing its influence because when I look at successful young people like, like, I. I know a lot of tech CEOs. Most, a lot of them are dropouts. The most impressive young people I know are dropouts. And when I hire, I hire people. And I know a lot of other people who are in my demographic. I don't look at college credentials at all. Like my right hand man who manages my business side, my emails, all that stuff never went to college. And, and so I. And the colleges, through their sheer expense and through their ideological corruption in which they've become echo chambers in a lot of ways are really losing the population's trust. And people are realizing that it's not, in a lot of ways, an incredibly good system. The reason I said college towns is that they tend to be pleasant rural areas. So, like, from where I'm from, Pennsylvania, Carlisle, Pennsylvania is where Dickinson College isn't based around. It's pretty cheap. It's out in the countryside, but you can get like Nepalese food there. And so I would think that as colleges decline, people would choose to move to college counts to work remotely, since they're rural and pleasant.

Yeah, good. Good stuff. That makes sense. Rudyard, do you want to share a website or just direct people to your YouTube channel? Which, by the way, I'd highly recommend.

Yeah, my YouTube channel is whatifalthist. It stands for what if Alternate History. I've been doing it for eight years. I have about 400,000 subscribers and about 3 million viewers a month. If you like this conversation, I'm sure you'll love my channel. I release about an hour of video content a week peak. So stay tuned.

Yeah, fantastic. The channel is fantastic. I'd highly recommend it. I love your videos. You're doing a great job. Thanks for coming on. And we'd love to have you back sometime in the future. Just keep up the good work. I'd highly recommend people check out your videos.

It's been a pleasure. I'd love to come back in the future and as always thank you.

Thanks Rudyard. Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out this 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.