CW 509 – Jason’s Mom – The Chinese & American Economies plus ‘The Death of Money’ by Author James Rickards

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This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors. Hey, welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. This is episode number 509. 509. You know what that means. A tenth show is next. A tenth episode show. And that will be a flashback Friday at the same time. So we're going to have the very famous, very renowned author and speaker and business coach Jack Canfield on the show. And you know, that was really just a great interview. I really enjoyed talking to Jack. So that will be our next show, but for this show we've got someone even more famous and that is my mom. Hi, mom, how you doing?

Hi, Jason.

Now, so here, listeners, I gotta give you a little background on this. First of all, I'm twisting my mom's arm to be on the show again because she's always reading. My mom is a voracious reader. I think she instilled that in me. It was a very good trait if you did, because I have this insatiable curiosity. I've just kind of always had that ever since I can remember. And Mom, I cannot believe how many books you read. I mean, I even told you that you should start your own podcast and just call it, I don't know, Joyce's Book of the Week Club. You probably get through more than one book per week, don't you?

Sometimes.

That's amazing. I wish I could do that. If it wasn't for audible, I could never do that. But so I read and I listen to stuff and I love the audio format because it's, you know, it's portable. You know, you've been reading James Rickards, you've been reading Harry Dent, you've been reading I don't know, what are you reading now? And you're always asking me about you know the Fed and inflation and deflation and you know, Harry Dent predicting a real estate bubble and all of this stuff. And I'm saying, mom, I am turning on the recorder because this is a great conversation. The listeners would love to talk about this stuff. And listeners also, you know that I want to invite you on the show as well. So anyway, you know, you're welcome to be on the show too. Listeners. We love having listener call ins and many of those conversations that we think is just going to be a five minute call, they turn into an entire episode or at least an entire intro portion of the show. So before we started recording, mom. And it is late there. So I really appreciate you being on the show. It's like 10:40pm there, I believe in Gulf Shores, Alabama. So thank you for being on the show. I appreciate it. So what are you reading now? What book do you have in your hand? And we were starting to talk about that as we were having a conversation. What book?

I'm reading the Death of Money by James Rickard.

Oh yeah, that was so good, by the way. I really enjoyed that one, Jay. I just got to get James Rickards on the show. You know, I thought I had him on the show. And you know, that's the problem when you have like 2500 guest interviews, you actually forget who you've had on the show. It's awful. But you know, I just like to get a lot of quantity out there. So what were you asking me about a few minutes ago and what did you want to talk about? I thought that was really interesting and I think the listeners will like it.

You know, when I really started to like his book a lot was when he started talking about China. And you know, everyone thinks that, you know, the growth rate in China of 7%, which used to be 9%, you know, other nations would, their tongue would be, they would be drooling to have a 7% growth rate. But according to Mr. Rickards, China is not in such a strong position. As a matter of fact, the whole thing is a little bit fragile. And the reason why, according to him, is that the oligarchs and the party run the country and they run the country to benefit themselves. For example, building all of the see through cities. You know, there's city after city that nobody is really living in.

These sort of ghost town cities that we've talked about on the show.

Yeah, yeah. And why they keep building all of this is that because all of the things that they use to build cities, concrete and all of the machinery and everything that Benefits all of the oligarchs who have those businesses and the oligarchs and the party that is in power are so intertwined that it just keeps going on and on and they can't do something to benefit the country.

I thought that that was very interesting. And, and then he was saying about how that one child policy that I always kind of thought that the Chinese population was young, but he said in a few years the working population is really going to decline terrifically.

Yeah, and we've talked about that many times on the show. You know, the whole movement of what's called ZPG or zero population growth, which is promoted by the environmentalist. And since we recently had Earth Day, I just want to. This is kind of a bit of a tangent, but you know me, listeners, I'm always going on a tangent. And mom, you'll probably enjoy this one too. But you know, I mean, if you want to celebrate Earth Day by turning out your lights, why don't you just move to North Korea? I mean, that's the darkest place on the planet. You know, you look at the. You like that one? I thought you'd like it. It's Earth Day every day in North Korea, okay? I mean, just Google it, okay? Satellite images of, you know, north and South Korea and the contrast is seriously scary. It is the dimmest place on earth. So environmentally friendly. I assume you'd think that, right, listeners, who are these Earth Day fanatics and the whole ZPG concept, zero population growth, which is another idea promoted by the environmental movement. And by the way, I finished a really, really interesting book last week called the bet. And the BET profiled, who was it? Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon. And all through like the 60s and 70s and the, the uprising of the, the environmental movement and how it gained so much strength and how they tried to control the population and you know, even bordering on like eugenics and frankly genocide. Okay, but you see what's happened to tie it back in. Look at China. When you have this, you know, this one child policy, this is going to be the death of China. And I don't mean, you know, China will necessarily completely end, but it's going to, it's going to retract dramatically. And when you talk about 7 to 9% GDP, 7 to 9% growth, growth rates, you know, with an economy that has a population of 1.6 billion people who, they're trying to move into the middle class, you've got to have those kind of growth rates. And then you have these make work projects and listen The United States is not immune to this kind of corruption either, but at least here it's questioned. Look at California and this disgusting high speed rail contract. Do you know Dianne Feinstein, California Senator? And you know, I'll say it criminal. Just my humble opinion, okay? And I don't mean criminal necessarily in the criminal sense, if you get my drift, but legalized criminal behavior, that should be criminal, okay? Dianne Feinstein's husband, coincidentally, you know, politics makes strange bedfellows, okay, Wins a near billion dollar contract for the high speed rail in California. And this of course like the bridge to nowhere is the train to nowhere. That probably will be a, it's already way over budget and it's, it's going to be probably something that nobody will ever really use. It will never, it would never really work in the free market. It would never survive if it wasn't for a, a bunch of disgusting government bureaucrats. And this article in, what's this article in? I don't know. Where is oh by, by news editor, it says, oh, Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker. Right. They call it corruptifornia. You know, so it's the same thing. You know, all those Chinese politicians that run the party, you know, of course they're brothers in the cement business and another brothers in the steel business and another one makes traffic lights and you know, whatever. Another one does sewer. And of course they're all lining their own family's pockets. It's completely disgusting at every level. So that's what you have. But yes, the one child policy and zpg, that whole concept is a really scary thing for economies and for people. You know, back in the early days of Paul Ehrlich who wanted to control the population size and Julian Simon, his arguments won over and over. He was the rational guy against, frankly the environmental wacko. And listen, I like a nice environment. Nobody will argue with that. The only question is by what method do we use to get there? They thought that the earth could not support more than 2 billion people.

Look at us now, you know, I mean this Malthusian alarmist crap views people as the problem. When people are the solution, people are the resource. And it's, you know, I'm so passionate about this because this is a scary idea, okay? This is a scary evil idea. When, when Chinese parents would kill daughters because they wanted sons. I mean.

This is just insanity. Like literally, I have read stories about rural, you know, poverty stricken Chinese farmers. This is disgusting. They would eat their daughters. I mean this is cannibalism. I kid you not. This kind of disrespect for human life is just scary. I mean, it is like the kind of thing where people say that, you know, these disgusting genocidal people like Stalin, Hitler and Mao are, you know, what are they, environmental heroes? I mean, this is where that logic leads. It is a scary thought. But back to real estate investing and economics. Okay, I will shut up now. Get off my soapbox. I apologize, listeners, but you know, this is a scary idea. I'm telling you, this kind of stuff is scary. One child policies, you know, this whole thinking that the population is too big and that people are the scourge of the earth, that, that is a scary line of thinking because, you know, who's next, you or me?

You know, that's, that's why that kind of thinking scares me. So anyway, you've got to have a big growth rate when you want to pull so many people out of poverty, right? I mean, China, a lot of its growth is an illusion, okay? They don't have the reserve currency and they've got an aging population. And if you look at what happened to Japan with the lost two decades, okay, Really a large part of that Japanese problem, of course, in the 80s, you know, I remember in, you know, 19, circa 1989, everybody thought Japan would take over the world. And they, you know, we, we saw.

Japanese companies, they were buying all our trophy properties and everything.

Oh yeah, Rockefeller center and all of this stuff. And everybody was, you know, xenophobic about Japan, right? And you know, they bought Sony and, or not Sony, but Sony bought one of the big movie studios or a couple of them. You know, I remember all these stories, right? And of course that was a bubble. So bubbles come and go and that's just the flow of an economy, unfortunately, and the business cycle to some extent, right? And so you have bubbles, right?

Well, but you know what they say, what Rickard says about China is that they do so much investment rather than consumption. Their people don't consume. And so they have, because they don't have any money.

There's no consumer class. It's too small. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, they're, you know, it is getting better, but they need to do things so that their people, instead of saving, saving, saving, will start to consume, consume, consume. I mean, the Americans don't have any trouble with that. We consume too much, you know.

We over consume. But that would be one of the helps to China.

So this is a precarious balance because look, if you don't have savings and you don't have capital Formation, an economy ultimately hurts from that. But at the same time, you know, if you look at the s and P500, you know, about. What do they say? 72% of the S and P is just, you know, consumption, okay? It's just consumer consumption, right? And so the consumer is vital to the American economy. The big problem with China, I don't think, is not the fact that they save money. Saving is good to some extent. It's the fact that they don't have enough money, okay? And they have this problem of the one child policy. And so just to finish my Japanese thought, the. The part of the big problem with Japan is none, nothing less than a demographic problem because they're a very insular country. And so we're talking about Japan, not China, okay? A very insular country that doesn't really allow much immigration, if any. I mean, it's very insular there, okay? And the people don't have kids, and you just have people aging and aging, and then later they start to depend on public assistance instead of producing, okay? And you have a recipe for disaster. So you've got to have population growth. Now this has to be somewhat tempered, probably. Okay? So Paul Ehrlich wasn't totally nuts, okay? You know, it just shouldn't be controlled by a government program, you know, And I'll give you an example. Jimmy Carter's mother, by the way, on this book, you know, she would do permanent birth control operations in India, okay? And they talked about that. Lillian Carter, okay? And you know, every day when she could stop 30 people from ever having kids again in India, you know, she would consider that a success. Now, I mean, I don't know. There's some of. This is kind of draconian. It really is. You know, who gets to make these decisions? They would withhold public assistance.

And only give it to people if they would be sterilized. I mean, that's just. Wow. I don't know, you know, maybe one of those people born would have been the next Steve Jobs or, you know, Jonas Salk. I don't know, the next, you know, it could have been the next Gandhi. You know, people are not the scourge of the earth, okay? Anyway, I told the listeners I would shut up about that. So I'm going to. For five more minutes, okay? So anyway, yes, I agree with you completely and with Rickards that China is not the next big thing. America is the next big thing, okay? It really is. There's just too many things that the US has going for it. So all this irrational fear about The US Coming to an end and all this stuff is just, in my opinion, it's just not nonsensical. But let's talk about the scamminess of the U.S. federal Reserve, because you were asking about that in the IRS and the inflation equation, because that's something we've talked about a lot on the show, and I think you had an interesting take on that, Mom. So what were you saying about that a few minutes ago?

Well, I was amazed when I was reading his book that.

The government subtly.

Promotes inflation.

Now, the average citizen doesn't want inflation because it eats up his earnings, but the government cannot live without inflation. And, you know.

I just didn't realize that.

Most people don't realize that. So inflation is the insidious.

Well, here's the thing. The banks, you know, the government has to have higher and higher taxes to continue to live because it spends at higher and higher levels all the time. So the government can tax the higher salary that the worker gets, but the government cannot tax the savings that the worker will get if prices start to fall. And so therefore, the government does not care anything about the citizen. They care about themselves.

And they always will oppose deflation. They absolutely. The government will collapse if we have deflation. They will not be able to pay their debt.

You are absolutely right. Because in a deflation environment, the cost of debt and debt servicing increases. Now, the thing I wanted to say is that, remember, inflation is the insidious hidden tax that destroys our purchasing power, our savings, the value of our stocks and our bonds, okay? And thankfully, our debt, as well as the government's debt. So my general thesis is, as an investor, when you invest in income property, especially when you do it with leverage, with debt, you align your interest with those of the most powerful entities on earth, central banks, especially our central bank, the Federal Reserve, okay? And our government, see, the IRS does not recognize how to tax inflation or deflation properly. So in an inflationary environment, they win. And economists have even created a whole philosophy for this to give them an excuse to do it. It's called the Phillips Curve, okay? And right from Wikipedia here in front of me. I looked it up as you were talking. It says in economics, the Phillips Curve Curve is a historical inverse relationship between rates of unemployment and corresponding rates of inflation that result in an economy, simply stated, decreased unemployment, okay? I, I. E. Increased levels of employment, okay, in an economy will correlate with higher rates of inflation, okay? So the government wants to see more employment because that means more taxes and less government aid, right? So it costs Them less money. The government wants people to have jobs, unless they're Democrats. Then they want them to not have a job and be dependent on the government, so they'll vote for them.

You know, the permanent underclass argument. Okay, so that's another one. But, you know, Milne, Milton Friedman talked a lot about the Phillips Curve and said that it was only applicable in the short run, that in the long run, inflationary policies will not decrease unemployment. And I agree with Milton Friedman. Okay? Milton Friedman was right about that. But they've even got this justification for it. So the Fed targets an inflation rate. Officially, they officially bless inflation of around 2%, which, remember, will always be understated because the government has a big incentive to understate inflation. The real inflation rate is a good 50%, maybe even more higher than the official stated rate.

Just like the unemployment rate.

Yeah, unemployment rate, too, you know. Yeah. I had the founder of Shadowstats.com which, you know, sort of exposes the truth in these numbers. Very interesting website. And yeah, they understate unemployment and they understate inflation. Just a reminder, of course, we've talked about this many times in the past, but how do they understate inflation? They do it through the primary ways in which they calculate the consumer price index, weighting how much they weight each item in the basket of goods in the consumer price index, hedonics. And that means the amount of, you know, the root word hedonism, the amount of pleasure you get from your purchases. Okay, And I can explain these in more detail. And then substitution. So substitution just says that, you know, if the price of beef goes up, then everybody will just convert to chicken. And, you know, maybe you don't like chicken. Maybe you think chicken is a dirty bird. Okay? And so, you know, they just assume everybody will convert and they just substitute things around in there. But, you know, maybe we don't want to convert as consumers. Right? And then they have something they call the core rate or core inflation, where in doing that, they strip out the cost of food and energy because those they say are too volatile.

But those are the major things that the consumption consumer has to pay for.

Of course, the cost of food and. Or the cost of energy is in every single product or service anybody ever buys. Energy is baked into the equation. And food, of course, we need that to live. Food and energy, we can't live without those things, you know, right now, much to Obama's chagrin, energy's. Well, not all energy, but it's kind of cheap, you know, so that's interesting. Which reminds Me, I got to tell you about another book, listeners. And, mom, you'll love this book, okay? It's got a funny title, so I gotta just look it up, okay? It's called Smaller, Faster, Lighter, Denser, Cheaper by Robert Bryce. Really fascinating book. And again, it blows the Malthusian argument away about, you know, scarcity and all of this silliness, okay. That we've had around for a few hundred years, since Malthus, unfortunately walked the planet. You know, it just talks about energy and how, you know, this whole concept of, like, you know, getting energy from wind, at least with current, and, you know, the next couple iterations of technology, it just doesn't work. You can't get. There's just not enough energy in the wind compared to what's the amount of energy in oil. It's really a pretty good thing. I mean, there are really only two major things on Earth, and I knew this before, before finishing this book, and they are, you know, they're. They're nuclear and they're petroleum and those are the sources of energy that work. And of course, you know, candidate Obama back in 2007, his stated goal. I'm sure you can find this if you search it. Okay? I'm sure there's gotta be a video clip out there because I have seen it with my own eyes. Okay. Don't have it handy or I'd play it for you. But his stated goal was to see gas prices go up to six to seven dollars per gallon so that people would be forced to drive his proletariat cars, you know, his hybrid or electric cars. Okay, you like that? My snarkiness. The proletariat, yes, the car that the hoi polloi has to drive. Well, I'm sure, I'm sure his presidential limo is still going to run on gas or diesel. Right. No matter what. But, but we, us little people have to drive, you know, his electric stuff. And, you know, I just read an article about that recently that, you know, people, when they trade in their hybrid or their electric cars, they're not really rebuying. They're buying, oh, good old internal combustion, you know.

Oh, yeah, right. They're buying big cars.

Yeah, right, right. So, you know, nobody cares. And, you know, of course, maybe someday in the future, battery technology, and it's. There are some really promising signs, will get a lot better and electric motors will get a lot more efficient to where that all makes more sense. Okay? But for now, you know, oil is still not bad and it's really gotten very, very clean. I mean, listen, if, if the environment is your concern. You know, there's a great study that the Wall Street Journal did about the Tesla, which I think, by the way, Tesla's a beautiful car. I mean, I almost bought one about a year ago myself. I just think it's like 30, $35,000 overpriced. And our listener, our dear Christina, who's listening, I'm sure. Hi, Christina. She loves the Tesla. I always see her posting stuff on Facebook and they're a gorgeous car. I will be the first to agree, but the Tesla is actually a dirtier car than a comparable gasoline powered car. So, you know, I mean, it's not like this. Electricity is produced out of thin air and then you've got to deliver it to the location and you've got to make the batteries and there's all sorts of environmental sins that come with battery manufacturing and disposal. And, you know, this is just not as simple as it looks on the surface sometimes. So really interesting stuff. But what does this all have to do with real estate investing? Okay, it has a lot to do with it because number one, when we see government corruption, which we started off talking about, talking about the show, we see inflationary pressures, we see higher taxes, and that affects us as investors. And the most historically proven, the most historically favored asset as far as taxes go, is what? Income, property. It's the most tax friendly asset in America. Also, when we see these, we know that inflation is baked into the equation. So no matter what, no matter what goes on in the economy, no matter how much deleveraging there is, no matter how much pressure there is to have deflation, the government can always create inflation out of thin air. And they want to do it because, mom, as you correctly pointed out, they.

Have to do it.

Yeah, they got to do it. Otherwise the government debt becomes onerous. And the government's obligations to pay for government programs, welfare, Social Security, all of this stuff gets more expensive. So you want. Inflation is the best business plan for a government and it is the home run for real estate investors because you take advantage of what I call inflation induced debt destruction, where your debt is paid off by inflation and commodity prices appreciate in inflationary times. So remember, you get this double whammy when you own income property because income property is nothing more than a set of commodities. Land, that's a commodity. The ingredients of the house, the copper wire, the glass, the steel, the lumber, the petroleum products, the concrete, those are all commodities that are indexed thankfully to inflation. So their prices increase with inflation, rents increase with inflation, and debt is debased or diminished or paid off through inflation. And this is part of what I call the ultimate investing equation. It's quite literally the E equals MC squared. Einstein's theory of relativity. To investors, I mean, it is a phenomenally powerful concept. So. And, Mom, I know you've taken advantage of that. And you know what? We've never talked about this on the show, but I want to just take you back. You may not even remember this. I'm going to see. You know, it's funny. People always say I have a great memory. It's only long term. When you ask me what I did last weekend, I forgot. I got to really think about it. But if you want to know what happened 30 years ago, man, I can tell you. Okay. It's weird how that is. So when we bought. Well, when you bought our first house in Los Angeles, I remember that you paid $62,500 for that house. You bought it from a guy named Jerry who never bought any new in his life. He was a garage sale junkie, and he did everything himself. And that house, of course, was in terrible condition. Do you remember when we ripped that really weird wood molding off the wall?

I was just thinking of that. He did those slats in a diagonal fashion on all the walls of that bedroom. And I was dead. I was standing there on a pile of wood. I mean, it was all over the place, floor.

I remember we used to do that every weekend. We used to fix that house up, you and I. Yeah, it was amazing. Well, you paid 62,500 for that house from Jerry. And I remember you. This is the part you may not remember. I remember you stressing out about your mortgage payment of $416 per month.

Do you remember that?

Well, I began to not like the job I was doing.

You were working for the Leukemia Society.

Right. You know, the luster had gone from that job, and I thought, oh, my word, how am I ever going to pay this mortgage?

Do you remember the amount, though? It was $416.

Yeah, I totally remember it.

Now. A car payment is a lot more than that. Although you wouldn't know because your car has. It's going to be in a Toyota commercial soon with your 200,000 miles.

It has no payments, Jason.

Well, at least I can say you do live in a mansion and you have a lot of nice clothing and jewelry and stuff, but you're just not into cars, are you?

Not really.

My mom's car is embarrassing. Folks.

I'm convinced that you just want to be in a Toyota commercial. You know, like one of those people with the longest lasting Toyota.

It's mind boggling. Anyway, so yeah, you had a $416 payment. And here's the point I want to illustrate to the listeners about that is that over time, you know, when it was five years later, okay, that $416 payment didn't seem like much. And when it was 10 years later, I mean, you didn't refinance that house for many years as I recall, okay, when it was 10 years later, it seemed like nothing because inflation was debasing the value of your debt. And listen people, it debases it in two ways. One way is the monthly payment, otherwise known as the debt service or the debt servicing the monthly payment. And the other way is in the balance, the overall balance of that mortgage. Okay, so you're, you're getting inflation induced debt destruction. And this is a wonderful thing.

Just like the Fed.

Yeah, just like the Fed. And just like look at, we owe over a trillion dollars to China. And by golly, don't you think our very powerful, most powerful government on planet earth, most powerful military, most powerful government the human race has ever known, the United States is having the reserve currency of the world and the military to keep it that way no matter what anybody says.

Okay.

But you know, a lot of people are thinking that in 10 years the US is not going to have the results reserve, the leading reserve. I mean there are a lot of other reserve currencies, but we are the leading one.

I wouldn't put my money on that. Okay, you know, when you, when you look at a country as powerful as the U.S. okay, you know, I just would not bet against the U.S. i think that's a crazy bet. So all these people that say, oh, we're going to lose our reserve currency status because we're so mine mismanaged and our debt is so high. The first question I ask them is compared to what? Compared to what country are we so bad?

Well, compared to China, their, their debt is two or not to China, but to Japan their debt is like 220.

Japan is insane. In fact, there are many people that want to short Japan's debt. But see, I don't know that that's a wise bet either because Japan, Japan's just gonna get bailed out.

Okay, well the new leader of Japan is doing the same things that we are doing now. You know, he's printing money like crazy.

That's Abenomics, right? That's the Abenomics idea.

Yeah.

Right, right, yeah. So they've got QE going on like crazy. Money printing, AKA qe. It sounds like a nicer way to say it, right? Quantitative easing. But this, the. All these other countries are limited because they don't have their reserve currency. The US does. So the US can kick that can down the road for decades. It's just not.

Well, except that, you know, a lot of countries like China is making, you know, deals with the Latin American countries which they deal with, which they get oil from and things, and they. They just bypass the US dollar. And also Russia does the same thing or as you know, and there was a meeting that they had that they didn't invite the US to.

But you know what? I don't care. Because guess what? The US has so much power that it can basically. And I'm not saying this is right, okay? This is bullying, it's philosophically wrong. But I just know it's the way it's going to go down, okay? The US can force them to. If they, if that starts happening in any big way. You know, it's kind of like, look, you had a teenager. Me, okay. Yeah. You know.

Yes. And I was a rebellious one. So, you know, it's like you got to give your teenager a little bit of leeway, right? Because if you, if you restrict them and, you know, can try to control them all the time, they're just going to mass, massively rebel. Okay? You know, same with your spouse, right? You got to give your spouse a little bit of leeway or they're just gonna run away, okay? That's what the US Is doing. So what? So they have a meeting and don't invite the US and they're, you know, gonna do a little trading on the side in their own currency, or who knows, maybe they'll use Bitcoin or some other failed idea like that. Okay? That's a prediction, okay? Which I wish I would be wrong on, by the way. I would love to see Bitcoin succeed, but my prediction is that it will never succeed in any big way. But so what? You know, when. When push comes to shove and we want to inflate our debts away, when the US wants to do that, we're going to force our reserve currency down everybody's throat. Not saying it's right. I'm just saying that's the way it's going to happen. It has to, okay? And we can do it because we can have sanctions, we can have military movements and, you know, they do those military things mostly as an excuse. Right. It's never the cause you think it is. It's an excuse. Right. So they make up all kinds of reasons. We have to invade someone or control someone or cut someone off or, you know, stop their ships or do a blockade or what. There's just a million things that can be done to force other countries to use our reserve currency to maintain that. It's endless. There are endless number of things. Economic hitmen like John Perkins, who you didn't like very much.

All right, I remember that book.

Remember? Yeah, I had him on the show. I should have him back on the show, and you can interview him. You don't like that guy. By the way, listeners, that's John Perkins, who wrote the book. And he wrote several books. One is called Confidence Professions of an Economic Hitman. It's very interesting.

Yeah, well, he went into all of those countries and he made ridiculous deals with them. I mean, favor of the United States against that country. And then he turned on the United States, who was paying him hefty sums to do that. And I thought that is. That was absolutely traitorous.

Yep. Well, you know, it's unappreciative, to say the least. Right. But. But anyway, that's the way it is. So, yeah, you know, there's economic hitmen. Another one of his book is called A Game As Old as Empire by John Perkins, and he's got a few others. But, yeah, there's all kinds of things that can be done. So I wouldn't bet against the reserve currency being held by the US for quite a long time. That's all I'll say on that. So, hey, should we let the listeners go? Yeah, 40 minutes. I think we've gone long enough. Okay. So, mom, thanks for being on the show.

Well, you're welcome. It was interesting.

Let's talk again soon. And hey, listeners, you know, let me know if you think my mom should start her own podcast, because I offered to do it for her and she would just talk about all the books she reads. You're in the book club and you're always reading books. I mean, it's amazing.

I don't think it'd be very interesting to everyone.

Oh, I think it'd be better than you think. You know, what else is on your book list? What else do you have? Even if it's, you know, not related to the show, you know, fiction, whatever you're reading for your book club or whatever.

The one for next month is the Storyteller. But I don't know what the. What it's about, even.

What was this month or last month's book?

This month. Was it was about Nazi Germany and you know, how they took.

You know. Well, it was the war in Nazi Germany.

Okay. And what was the one before that?

And the one before that was defending Jacob, which was my choice. It was a father who found who was the deputy district attorney and it was his son who committed the crime, who killed another student. So that was really interesting.

Yeah, that's a tough one, defending Jacob. Good stuff. All right, well, hey, start your own podcast. I'll help you do it. And thanks for being on the show, Mom.

You're welcome, Jason.

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