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Interview with Jeremy Cordon

38m 54s

Interview with Jeremy Cordon

In this episode of *Part of the Problem*, host Dave Smith and guest Jeremy Corden of Goldback Incorporated discuss the devastating impact of monetary inflation and central banking on American life. They argue that the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency system is the root cause of unaffordability, with the median first-time homebuyer now 40 years old and real inflation since COVID exceeding 30%. The host stresses that measuring wealth by hours worked for goods, like a chicken, reveals a declining standard of living despite higher nominal incomes. The guest notes that 80% of all money ever created was printed since George W. Bush, distorting economic perceptions. A major threat is the push for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which could enable government surveillance and debanking of dissidents, as seen with Canadian truckers. Using gold as a stable measure, the dollar has lost 99.6% of its value over a century, while gold preserves purchasing power. Inflation transfers wealth upward, benefiting the rich and debtors while harming fixed-income earners and the middle class. The conversation concludes that returning to a gold standard is impractical due to industrial metal demand and historical token coinage issues, but the need for sound money remains urgent.

Transcription

7177 Words, 38081 Characters

English
[MUSIC] What's up everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. As always, thank you for tuning in. We have a very special show for you guys tonight that I'm excited about. We have our special guest here tonight is from Goldback Incorporated Jeremy Corden. How are you, sir? >> Doing great. Thanks for having me here. >> Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. I wanted to talk to you specifically because I do feel that, as I've said several times on the show, I spend a lot of time talking about the news of the day and a lot of time on foreign policy. And I probably don't spend enough time talking about monetary policy and economics, which is a real passion of mine. So thank you very much because I know this is the world you live in. So thanks for joining us to talk about it. >> Awesome. Super excited to be here. Well, you know, one of the reasons why I've really tried to commit to talking more about this stuff, particularly this year, is that it really is the case that monetary inflation, central banking, is in many ways really the worst problem that we have in America. It's really the issue of our time. And now you even notice all the democratic candidates are running on unaffordability, but they're very vague with what exactly that means. And of course, the solution is a government program. The median first time homeowner in this country is now 40 years old. You got to be 40 before you can buy a house and then start thinking about having a family at that point, I guess. And now everybody's spending hundreds of thousands, you know, to even just try to have a baby. Because nobody can afford to get ahead in this world. And that just seems to be more and more kind of the experience of the average American. And I think one of the points that I've always been trying to make is that this is because of this model of central banking and fiat currency and the inflationary environment we live in where we have a government that we can't afford. So we have to print the money to make it up. And everybody, all regular people end up putting the bill for that essentially. Is that right? >> Yeah. No, it's exactly right. We pay for it with a lower standard living. I think I was reading today that to have the equivalent of a six figure salary from 1995, you'd have to be making about $350,000 a year today. >> Yeah, that's right. It's like literally it's right in front of you. And as you know, I was talking about this with my buddy Keith Knight the other day that really, if you want to measure wealth or if you want to measure a standard of living, the only measurement that really makes sense is like how long you have to work for a given product or a given sort of, you know, like how many hours do you have to work for a chicken? And that's how you measure wealth. It's the only meaningful way to measure wealth. You can look at the GDP or the stock market, but what difference does that make? If you don't have stock and you're not participating in the growing GDP. And yeah, I mean, as you put out, we pay for it in our standard of living lowering. And so my father-in-law tells me about this all the time when he bought his first house in like 1971 and he only made $13,000 a year, but the house was $13.5,000. It doesn't matter if you're now making $150,000 a year, but the house cost $800,000. And you are poorer than you were making $13,000 a year. But they've got everybody telling themselves, oh, but I make $13 times the amount of money that I made 50 years ago. Right. Or that my grandparents made. And, you know, if I have a six figure salary now, that's making it because when I was growing up, that's what making it look like. And it's kind of this crazy world where we use the dollars in measuring stick. And imagine, imagine we use, let's say we use the metric system. But every year, they recalibrated the meter to be a little bit shorter. Right. And then people started saying ludicrous things like, oh, my house grew 5% this year. We're all getting taller. And like, they just, you know, it's so confusing. It's like, you almost don't, it distorts what's really happening when the dollar loses so much value so fast. And it tricks the average person and that's why we have shrink flation. You can buy less and less and the grocery companies are like, oh, shoot, we got to raise our prices. But that makes us look like the bad guy. Right. We're the bad guy because we can't, we can't keep up. And then you get your 2% raise or your 3% raise at work or you get your little raise and social security. But, you know, real inflation, they think just since COVID with all the money printing has been at least 30% and that was just trillions of dollars that went to what fraud? Yeah. Yeah. That's right. And I mean, it's, it's one of these interesting things because I say this a lot of times on the show, but you know, inflation is one of those things that you kind of can't hide from people. You can attempt to, but everybody sees it. Everybody feels it. You can, you know, you can, you can even attempt to tell people that Joe Biden isn't senile and keep him away from them as much as possible. You can tell people that we're winning a war over in Afghanistan when we're really losing it and they don't really see it. So maybe they'll believe you, but try telling people that their grocery bills aren't going up. And try telling them that like anybody who goes to the supermarket and has been for the last five, six years knows how much poorer you're getting every week. And I guess I just think that in a weird way, you watch people, particularly progressives who are trying to seize on this moment, you watch them spin it in different ways. You know, the problem is that corporate greed spiked so they'd kind of go along with, with that perception that yeah, the problem is the supermarket or the supermarket chain is raising their prices. And I do think it's really important for some of us to come along and go, yeah, but you know how like since George W. Bush, they've printed 80% of the money that ever existed. I think that might have something to do with that. Like just, just maybe your, your dollars being less valuable might have something to do with the injection of tens of trillions of dollars of new money, which you would think would be kind of intuitive for people to understand. You know, I'm old enough where I remember where people used to talk about the national debt, but people would take turns talking about it. It was kind of this political football. When your guy was in office, if you didn't talk about it, the other party talked about it. And when your guy was out of office, you talked about it again. And I remember, you know, during Bush, during Obama, there's kind of this back and forth of who's fought the national debt was and who's made it worse. And you know, really it's just the dollars is going down and down and down and down. And now there's new threats. You know, they're, they're trying to push through central bank digital currencies now. And they've already done that in parts of the world, like in China, where you have a social credit score and you cannot bank or use your money if your score falls below a certain threshold. Right. Yeah. And this is, there wasn't, there was just recently a bill about this, right? Yeah. What is it? There was a bill in the Senate. And I think it got defeated, but it is worth pointing out that they are still trying to push this central bank digital currency. Yeah. And the threat is if cash is gone completely, like physical cash, then you can only use central bank digital tokens. So everybody's in the system. There's no privacy. There's nowhere to run. If, you know, the government doesn't like your show. They don't like, you know, they did this, even without central bank digital currencies, to like the Canadian trucker protestor. For that, they'd be banked them for, for their protest. Yeah. And I think it's one of the things that's very concerning. And I think perhaps that because this was more of a democratic party idea and I guess Donald Trump had, there was enough noise from the grassroots that Donald Trump had said in his campaign, one of his promises was, I guarantee, we'll never have a central bank digital currency. Then again, he also said no new wars. But, you know, so Donald Trump had at least brought this up and that maybe then creates the illusion for people where it's like, all right, well, at least that concern is kind of tabled for now. But of course, you know, even if Donald Trump doesn't break that promise, him breaking the promise on the war has been enough to make him very unpopular and almost guarantee that the Democrats are going to come back into power now. And so that whole threat comes, comes right back to the forefront. And I got to say that's one that I'm particularly concerned about because first of all, well, there's a couple things. Number one, clearly our monetary policy is unsustainable. And so we're coming up to kind of like a turning of a chapter here where this can't keep going forever. And so they're going to try to supplement it with something new. And the regime is well aware that they have this major problem right now, which is free speech on the internet. And the fact that the tech censorship has kind of not worked and rolled back. And that now all of the most popular voices are challenging government propaganda. They've got a real issue with this on their hand. And this is one where you go, shoot how are you going to rein that in? I mean, trying to do tech censorship again is going to be very tough. Where are these websites like Rumble and Places where people. can go at this point. And also even if you shut me up or you shut Tucker Carlson up or you shut whoever up, is their audience really going back to Jake Tapper? No, probably not. They're going to find other voices in this space. But you know what really does solve that problem for the regime very nicely is a central bank digital currency where all the sudden they can monitor, well, what have you been saying online? What have you been doing? You know, wherever, and if they have that, they don't even need to pass an amendment to abolish the first amendment, they can just say, no, you have the right to say whatever you want to, but we have the right to shut off your bank account. I don't even be the government doing it. It'll be there. It'll be their partners. It'll be the banks. And they already kind of happens like it, you know, get operation choke point under Obama, where precious metals dealers and firearms dealers, they were getting debanked and they had to run from bank to bank to bank to, you know, try to figure it out. You know, if we've dealt with this problem at gold back where the bank just says, gee, the regulators are putting a lot of pressure on us. We don't know if we can continue this banking relationship. And I know it happens to influencers too. But you know, we have some, at least we have like a bunch of different banks, but if you centralize that control and you make it uniform, like in China, you can just bankrupt all of your opponents and make it so scary. You know, China, they don't even talk about politics. It's too dangerous to talk about politics. It's just, you know, it's not safe. You're looking at being homeless and not being able to feed your family and on and on and on. So, you know, there's the central bank digital currency threat. But even if we don't go there, like even if that doesn't happen and we can save that off, if you were to measure the value of the dollar in gold, so 100 years ago, an ounce of gold was about $20. And it was a $20 gold piece. It wasn't exactly an ounce, but it was about that. It was the double legal. And that was just the money. And today, I want to say gold's like $4,500. So just measuring the dollar in gold, it's lost like what 99.6% of its value. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is fast growing trees. I love this company, whether you're in a house or an apartment, whether you have a green thumb or you're like me and you're completely helpless, you need to know about fast growing trees. They're America's largest and most trusted online nursery with thousands of trees and plants to choose from and experts available every day to help you plan design or just learn how to care for them. So I know if you're anything like me, you've spent weekends driving to the nursery and lugging plants around just to try to plant them yourselves and not know what you're doing. And then six months later, the things like half brown and it's not doing good. But now you have fast growing trees. They make it easy. You order online. You schedule it to be delivered to your door and with their alive and thrive guarantee, it promises your plants arrive happy and healthy. I love this company. Me and my wife have already ordered a couple things from them and we're very happy with it. And right now they have great deals on spring planting essentials with up to half off on selects plants. And if you use my promo code problem at checkout, you'll get 20% off your first purchase. That's in additional 20% off at fastgrowingtrees.com when you use the promo code problem at checkout. Now is the perfect now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together fastgrowingtrees.com promo code problem offer is only valid for a limited time terms and conditions may apply. All right, let's get back into the show. And just and just to give people some perspective on that. No, that's exactly right. And also just if you could just measure like so you're going a hundred years ago, you're putting it at about $30 an ounce. And then by the Bretton Woods agreement, right? So this is like what 1944. So 20 years and it's at $35 an ounce. Then by the year 2000, it's at like $300 an ounce. So like, oh, wow, it's 10 times less. But you could see how and then how rapidly the dollar has been destroyed recently that we're now between four and $5,000 for an ounce. And then and I don't know, this is going back a while that I had read this. But there's these interesting thing. The reason why measuring it in gold is not just like an arbitrary measure is that gold is very unique in the fact that it preserves its its purchasing power. Like there's it's I know it people would say like, you know, like an ounce of gold, they say an ancient Rome would get you like a toga and a headpiece and a pair of shoes. Like it would essentially get you like a suit for that time. And in 1948, $35 would like get you a nice suit and a hat and a pair of shoes. And then the year 2026, an ounce of gold will get you like a suit and a hat and a pair of shoes. It's like it does it is almost like representing us almost the same amount of purchasing power. And so man, is it creepy to look at that and then go, yeah, that's literally what this policy has done. They've robbed 99% of the wealth of your dollar that you're holding. Yeah, they they robbed 99% and then another 60% after that. So if you had a if you had a hundred dollar, if you had a one dollar, if you have a hundred dollar build a day, it would be like less than a dollar a hundred years ago in purchasing power. Or another way to look at that, like the penny, the wheat penny, that guy had about two dollars in 50 cents worth of purchasing power. And that was the smallest amount of money that even bothered with. It was less than 250, like forget it. And in that context, all of our changes obsolete. Quarters are obsolete, half dollars obsolete, dimes, nickels, all of its obsolete. I mean, when was the last time you've, you know, cared to count up and add up your change? No, it's like a thing that my kids put in their piggy bank as like a game, but it's not really like, you know what I mean? It's just like, oh, that's what I do anytime I have a coin, which is rare that I have them. And it's, you know, it's also worth pointing out that, you know, when, when you have this inflationary economy, right? So like when you start from that point and you keep diluting the currency until we get to where we are today, this of course is essentially an effect, a giant welfare program for the rich. You just transfer money upward and upward and upward because if the value of the dollar is going down, well, then people who own things are benefiting from that. If you're, or at least, at least you're keeping up if you own something because the thing you own is worth a lot more than it previously was. So that's okay for people who own a lot of stuff. It's great for people who are in huge amounts of debt. And when I say debt, I don't mean you have a little bit of credit card debt. I mean, debt like you have borrowed billions of dollars from the bank, but to start some, you know, new enterprise. And now you only really, in effect, got to pay back millions. But for people on a fixed income for working class people from middle class people, as everybody around them can see, it's just absolute death. The guy who was making 70 grand a year was doing great 10 years ago. And now he's struggling to get by. It's just ruined. And I'm afraid of the lives. It's hard to even diagnose the problem. It's just like man, like costs have gone up. I don't know why houses, you know, everyone's so greedy on their houses. If you were to measure housing in gold, if you looked at the US stock market, measured in gold, the US stock market has been down since like your 2000. Right. If you measure it in gold, it's just the value is not there. The prices are overinflated because everyone's pushing their IRA money into it. And, you know, in terms of real value, it's just, it really changes what the economics landscape looks like. We're not hitting all time records in the stock market if you measure it in something that isn't constantly losing value. And, you know, we talk about this and maybe the reason why you don't talk about it more is because there's not, there's not like really a whole lot to be done about it. So like you come from a similar background. You know, I came into this whole thing as a Ron Paul guy. I was 21 years old when he ran for president the second time and I went and got elected to be a Ron Paul delegate. And one of the things that he talked about a lot was just this issue. He had the book and the Fed. You know, central banking is the biggest issue. And there's a problem because you can't really return to the gold standard. This is something I've been super obsessed with and I've researched it a lot. There's a few problems. Even if we, you know, Libertarians won, Congress is full of, you know, Massey's, we got Ron Paul into the Fed or some Ron Paul type guy into the Fed. He's a little old now. Maybe Ron Paul doesn't want to talk. Give him a break. Let him relax. But yes, I like him. Yeah, I'm not a relaxed. But, you know, you figure you win. Going back to the gold standard that we had 100 years ago, it used up all of the nation's copper. It used up 90% of the nation's silver. And now 80% of silver is tied up in industrial demand. 99% of copper is tied up in industrial demand. And even then like bricks countries that are like looking to go to the gold standard, they can't figure out how to do it because the gold standard essentially failed because it's main central point of failure was, does, is it in the vault? Does Fort Knox even have the gold? Is the gold even there? They couldn't figure out how to divide an ounce of gold. So what you you had to divide it with was copper tokens, which were sold to like 4,000% above their melt value. Silver tokens that were bigger, and I call them tokens because you'd take two cents worth of silver, and mint it into a coin that said 10 cents on it. That's essentially what constitutional silver was. So there was a huge markup and a profit to be had and making coinage. And you'd think of anything should be profitable, it should be literally making money, right? Yeah, right. And then a lot of those $20 gold coins out there that were to kind of back up the whole system, there just weren't a lot of them. The banks didn't have a lot of them. You had a lot of bills, $100 bills, there's $10,000 bills, $50,000, there's a $100,000 bill. You know how valuable that is, considering that gold was $20 an ounce? And they would use these for like interbank transfers in the US. So they didn't have the gold. I mean, like if you were to measure all the gold that the gold standard actually had, it might be like five to 10% of the gold standard was backed by actual gold at the melt value. But that was it. So you can't really go back to that 'cause the trust isn't there. Right, right. Like so, you know, the bridge is burned. So then what do you do? You just stay in central bank inflationary hell. You know, like there's not a great solution, so it's not, it's almost like something that's not really people talk about. 'Cause it's like, what do you do? You know, like what do we, what do we do? How do we fix it? - Right, right. All right, so where does your company, where does gold back come in on that? - Okay, so what we do is we go out and the 1,000, 2,000 year old problem with gold. So this isn't just a problem 100 years ago or 50 years ago. In Roman times, it was a problem. 'Cause you can't really fractionalize gold down that small. You have to use bronze, you have to use silver, you have to do something else because the gold is just so valuable. What gold back has done, what we've done with gold back, is we've taken that one ounce and we've split it with microchip technology into 4,000 pieces. And in a way that has never been counterfeited and wouldn't be easy to counterfeit. So it's, you know, this is a-- - Which as much as you can say for any paper currency, it's not, you know, like not easy. Anything I guess is theoretically possible to counterfeit, but you make it very hard to do so. Yeah. - We raised the bar really, really high. You're not looking at $100,000 worth of equipment. You're looking at $20 million worth of equipment and 10 years of dicking around to try to, you know, make it look the same. So, you know, you want to raise that bar all the time to just make it like more obnoxious for counterfeiters. So the quarter gold back has the same value as a wheat penny did 100 years ago. So there's like a $2.50 gold product. It's the cheapest gold product in the entire world. We mass produce it. We've got the one gold back. And the idea here, the drive with gold back is we're trying to kind of reimagine and restore the gold standard in the private sector and invite people to participate. And so far, it's gone really well. There are more places in the United States that take payment in gold, you know, all the gold back. Then there are locations that take Walmart gift cards. - And so the idea, so the idea is here to essentially create a gold standard for a private currency. And so that there's, you know, like you at least, in a sense, it's like an opt out option from the dollar, but potentially ultimately. - Yeah, 'cause if you, there are people today that do 70, 80% of their financial life in gold. - Yeah. - There are cities today that have dozens of industries that participate, you know, grocery stores, gas stations, entertainment, healthcare insurance, you know, contractors, dollar stores, you name it. People that do your yard, you know, landscaping people, they all take payment in gold backs and they're all driving distance. So they're, it's becoming more and more possible, you know, the more and more we grow the network. And you know, you imagine you get debanked and it's like, hey, you're kind of screwed if there's no cash alternative and you just, there's nothing you can do. And you don't really wanna come up with a solution on that day, you don't wanna say, okay, you know, we have a big problem. We're all bankrupt and, but we have things that we can trade, you know, like what if we, you know, you wanna start building up solutions well in advance. And, you know, I think the reason why gold bullion and silver bullion haven't really taken off, like that was the first thing I tried to do. The reason why they haven't really taken off is because they're not, they're not really a system of money. So if you buy an ounce of gold, that doesn't have an equal value to 10, 10 pounds coins. - Right. - They have different premiums, they have different values. A lot of gold coins are fake. You have to have an $800 sigma machine to like really know for sure if it's real. You know, and it's not an easy enough system where people actually do that. So we wanted to make something that looked and felt like cash that people could intuitively understand and get on board with where, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like some high friction transaction. - Yeah. Well, it's a really interesting idea because I, you know, and part of the reason why I'm interested in this stuff is that, yeah, like you said, we really do, we have to begin to look for solutions to this kind of coming problem. And as I'm sure you also being an old school, Ron Paul guy, I came in an '08, I'm a little older than you, but, or a lot older than you, but it makes older people sound good very, "Ah, a little bit older than you." But, you know, we can't look to government to be the ones who are gonna create this type of stuff because that'll, that's a game that you'll die waiting if you're waiting for the government. - You're not gonna vote yourself out of the central bank problem. - Yeah. - If you get to the system that primarily benefits people with massive amounts of debt and assets, who do you think the donor class is? Why would they ever change the game? 'Cause it's the donor class getting richer and richer and richer and richer and the average person getting more and more and more poor. And if there's labor shortage, like, let's just import tens of millions of people. You know, like, let's, you know, just be poor, you know, like, suck it up, you know, like that seems to be the advantage. - Yeah, it's, no, you're absolutely right. And look, I mean, we're, as we're recording this, it's the day after Thomas Massey lost his primary. And it does kind of show you something about like, you get out of this guy who's an enormously popular congressman in his district who gets in trouble for taking enormously popular stances on big issues, like opposing the war and around or being for the Epstein files, being declassified. I mean, these are like 80% of the American people are with him on this. But the money isn't, and so they've pumped $32 million into his district and they get him out. So again, to your point, when there's a system that benefits those who hold tremendous debt and those who hold tremendous assets, if you wanna go one-on-one versus Goldman Sachs, they're gonna come out having more debt assets than you and they're gonna come out having a whole lot more political influence than you. And so these, like I'm not against government solutions, but I think sometimes there is this, almost like a bias people have where they go, if you try to come up with some private solution to the problem, they go, oh, that's a little pie in the sky. You know, what are the odds that we're actually gonna get people all trading in these gold backs? But then you go, as opposed to what? As opposed to thinking that the democratic process is gonna yield some type of results where you have to directly take on all these big money interests that are always gonna have more influence than you. I mean, seems to me like going, trying to come up with some type of private solution is the only viable. - So we're not, we're not the first company to do this. There has been, according to Wikipedia, as much as you can trust that, over 2,000 local currency projects in the United States. And a lot of those, you know, they're around for 10, 20 years and they disappear. Hundreds of these things popped up during the Great Depression, happened in Greece during their banking crisis 'cause if the money doesn't work and it doesn't work for everybody, you know, the bottom comes out and I was gonna ask you, I mean, if we lost 99.6 something percent of our value in the last 100 years, what's the next 100 years gonna look like? - And we seem to be going at a faster pace. - Right, this is right now. - It's probably worse. I mean, 99.6 is like, but even if that's like, just as good, you know, is what happened the last 100 years? Like, what does that mean for your savings? - Yeah. - No, absolutely. - Did you just not save? Do you just invest in every speculative thing and just, you know, have a whole society of people like that and then, you know, we kind of drift? 'Cause here's the thing, you can boycott a central bank digital currency with cash today. Cash is another central bank product. - Yep. - Yeah, that's all you have. - It's almost kind of like sad watching Libertarians be like, "No, don't get rid of cash." It's like still the central bank guys. Yeah, that was the last thing we were against. Now we're begging to keep it. Yeah, it's like, and it's better than like, you know, being out of the frying pan and into the fire, but like you're still begging for the frying pan. Yeah. Yeah, you're still trading in federal reserve notes, you know? And so yeah, no, that's a fair point. And of course, as everybody knows, you know, like in all those scenarios, you know, wheelbarrow full of cash, hyperinflation type scenarios, people want your jewelry or they want your products or something, right? You have to find some other way to trade. And so it does seem like you want to give people at least the best fighting chance they have. Yeah, you make the best possible product you can, you know, at say, gold back. If you're going to own a thousandth of an ounce of gold, this is the cheapest way to do it. It's not even close. We have the cheapest kind of hyper fractional gold. And, you know, like the high denomination gold backs, once you get up to like the 50 or the 100, there are cheaper ways to own gold, closer to spot, but then you're not really part of like a system of like interchangeable money. Right. And there's not say like in the scenario, because almost like just from like the preparedness aspect of it, it's like, you know, if you're going to, if you're waiting for the moment when the dollar crashes and you have a whole bunch of gold bars in your, in your, in your safe or something like that, you know, forget if you're having it like professionally stored or own a fund or something, forget that. But you have, yeah, yeah, that's not going to cut it. But if you, but if you, um, you know, if you, if you just have a bunch of gold bars, you're still going to have the problem of like, but how are you going to effectively trade that for something? Because what you got like a $5,000 gold bars up there, like, you know, you're going to, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. You're going to have, you're going to find, yeah, you're going to find yourself in a tough situation. So that is, that is very interesting. Well, let people know. So if they wanted to purchase these, where do they go? So if you want to buy them, they're, we have about 600 dealers that sell goldbacks. We have a list on goldback.com. Uh, if you want to sign up your business, if you want to take payment in gold, you could also sign up your business on goldback.com and give credit to Dave that supports the show. Um, so there, there's a few different ways to get involved. And, you know, in terms of local currencies, most local currencies cap out about a hundred businesses and like a little regional area that participate. Um, you know, goldback, we have, I want to say we have like 5,500, 5,400 right now in the United States. And we're primarily concentrated in specific states. We've got California coming out. We started and we've got started in states like New Hampshire and Utah. We've got a goldback in Florida. But people are starting to trade these all over the country. And we're seeing more and more business networks getting developed in places where we don't even have like a main series. It's very interesting, very interesting. And so, and because also right, so like even if you're not in one of those areas, people can still know what it is. They can verify that it's real. They can look it up. Like there's a system of being of people being able to verify that like, oh, okay, this is legit. And yeah, I just, I really like the implications of it for like, I don't know, as, um, as I just start, as I get older, I do think more and more about preparedness and stuff like that. And as the world gets crazier and crazier. And it is the type of thing that like in a real disaster scenario, you would like to have some of these. Absolutely. I mean, as a preparedness thing, absolutely. And that, that's kind of where we started the company. It was kind of like, hey, you should have food storage and you should have some spendable gold. Right. And we didn't, I wasn't like that worried about getting people to do it. I thought, hey, maybe, maybe we can go out and we can sign up some businesses. Just because too many people ask, oh, what would I do with it? It's like, well, you know, I mean, it's gold. You could trade it with people like, yeah, but who would ever take that? Who would ever accept gold? You know, you can just hear it, right? Yeah. Like the, who's the, who's the guy that that did like the gold bar in, uh, where was it? Like in California? And he was like asking people if they wanted a gold bar or like a Hershey's bar. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I've seen people do that with Bitcoin, do that with gold bars. And then people, yeah, I think we remember what you're talking about. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, you know, like a lot of people don't know. And I thought, hey, you know, maybe there's like 10% of business owners are queued in and, you know, they're, they're going to do this and we can sign them up and we can kind of at least have someone we can point at and say, hey, these 10 businesses or these 100 businesses will do it at the value that, you know, these guys have in a given day. And what we've quickly found out is something like half of small business owners will take payment and gold. It's not five or 10% it's like half. Well, they're entrepreneurs. And then, you know, there are experts at taking appropriate risks. Right. Yeah. No, and, and that's, uh, that's without the dollar crashing, you know, I mean, like even more that's, that's without us being in an even worse state than we are now. No, I mean, I really do think a lot about this. Like people, we're going to have to come up with solutions because like I said, like you can't sit around waiting for the government on this. And as you were kind of getting at, you know, as bad as things are now, what happens when we just keep devaluing the currency even more? And if there's one thing that is clear in the political landscape of America today, it's that we're going to continue devaluing the currency. That's simply as there simply is no other option. We cannot afford the government that we have. We can't afford even close to it. And currently we have the Republicans who are asking for a $1.5 trillion defense budget. No one is thinking about talking about entitlement reform, let alone, you know, entitlement abolition. And as long as that's the case and Democrats are promising even more social services, they're going to keep doing this. So where do we go when the median, you know, household, the first time household buyer isn't 40, but they're 50 or 60. Where do we go? Yeah. If something can't continue forever, then at some point it has to stop. Yeah. When old folks came out, they came out seven years ago. They were like two bucks. And now they're like nine dollars. Yeah. Like that's I didn't think it was going to be that much. There's a third of a billion dollars worth of gold backs out there. So it's it's like really big and like really small at the same time. That's that's not huge compared to the whole gold market. But if you measure it by units, gold backs are the number one most produced gold product in the entire world now in seven years. Wow. That is pretty incredible. Well, Jeremy, I really appreciate you taking the time today. Is there anything else you want to tell people about before we go? You know, something else that's encouraging is most of the people buying gold backs, they're our age. 70% of buyers are between the ages of 20 and like 45. Yeah. Well, that's another that is another encouraging sign. It's nothing I've been thinking about with the Thomas Massey race just because you know, there was such a big split by age. Oh, it's a huge split. Yeah. Oh, that was the whole thing. Yeah. I was the whole the whole election was like how old you are. And you do think that like, you know, this this whole system is is kind of married to the boomers. And it's it's guys in that age bracket that you just said who are going to be coming into that slot over the next few years. And it's going to be on us to be looking for these for these solutions. Absolutely. I mean, that generation, they're going to age out and that that's probably the most encouraging thing. You know, as a libertarian like, you know, we kind of lose a lot. You know, we sure do. And it sucks. But you know, long term like decades down the road, we're going to I think we're going to be fine. There's just if we can make it that far, you know, if we can make it 10, 20 years, like a lot of these people, you know, the polosies and the the the shumours and the mcconnells and, you know, Trump so the world, the Biden's, they're they're all gone. No, that's right. And people who are much more open to these ideas are left behind. So that is an encouraging that is an encouraging thought that we needed. So Jeremy Corden, thank you so much. I really enjoyed this. Thanks. All right. Have a good one. Thanks for tuning in guys. Catch you next time. Peace.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The host and guest argue that monetary inflation and central banking are the root cause of unaffordability in America, citing that the median first-time homebuyer is now 40 years old.
  2. They emphasize that measuring wealth by hours worked for goods (e.g., a chicken) reveals a declining standard of living, despite rising nominal incomes, due to the dollar losing purchasing power.
  3. The guest highlights that since COVID, real inflation has been at least 30%, and that 80% of all money ever created was printed since George W. Bush, distorting economic perceptions.
  4. A key concern is the threat of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which could enable government surveillance and control, potentially debanking dissidents and undermining free speech.
  5. Using gold as a stable measure, the dollar has lost 99.6% of its value over 100 years, while gold preserves purchasing power (e.g., an ounce still buys a suit, as in ancient Rome).
  6. Inflation acts as a wealth transfer from the poor and middle class to the rich, benefiting debtors and asset owners, while fixed-income earners suffer.
  7. Returning to a gold standard is impractical due to industrial demand for metals and historical issues with token coinage and vault verification.

Summary:

In this episode of *Part of the Problem*, host Dave Smith and guest Jeremy Corden of Goldback Incorporated discuss the devastating impact of monetary inflation and central banking on American life. They argue that the Federal Reserve’s fiat currency system is the root cause of unaffordability, with the median first-time homebuyer now 40 years old and real inflation since COVID exceeding 30%. The host stresses that measuring wealth by hours worked for goods, like a chicken, reveals a declining standard of living despite higher nominal incomes.

The guest notes that 80% of all money ever created was printed since George W. Bush, distorting economic perceptions. A major threat is the push for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), which could enable government surveillance and debanking of dissidents, as seen with Canadian truckers.

6% of its value over a century, while gold preserves purchasing power. Inflation transfers wealth upward, benefiting the rich and debtors while harming fixed-income earners and the middle class. The conversation concludes that returning to a gold standard is impractical due to industrial metal demand and historical token coinage issues, but the need for sound money remains urgent.

FAQs

The main problem is monetary inflation and central banking, which leads to a lower standard of living for average Americans as the dollar loses value over time.

Wealth should be measured by how many hours you have to work for a given product, like a chicken, rather than GDP or stock market values.

A CBDC is a digital form of government-issued money that could eliminate cash, allowing the government to monitor transactions and shut off bank accounts based on behavior, threatening privacy and free speech.

The dollar has lost about 99.6% of its value since 100 years ago when gold was $20 per ounce, compared to around $4,500 today.

Inflation transfers wealth upward because people who own assets benefit from rising prices, while those on fixed incomes or with savings see their purchasing power decrease.

Goldback Incorporated provides a way to use gold as a practical currency, addressing issues like dividing gold into small amounts for everyday transactions.

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