The Housing Crisis, Private Equity & the Death of the American Dream | Zach Faust

What if the reason that so many people are struggling financially is not because they're not working hard enough, but because the system was never designed for you to win? For generations, Americans were promised, hey, if you work hard, you'd be able to buy a home, you can raise a family and build a better future for you and your kids. But today, it feels like that dream is slipping away. And according to today's guest, Zach Faust, it's not an accident. It was built that way. From the Federal Reserve and government money printing to billionaire investors buying up American homes, Zach argues that the people controlling our economy have created a system that makes the rich richer, while everyone else is just struggling to survive. So if you're interested in who's really benefiting from your financial struggles, how we got here, and what you can actually do about it, well, you're in the right place. Is society rigged? Zach's about to break it all down. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. Zach Faust, how are you? My guy. What's going on, brother? Dude, thanks so much for being here, man. Thank you for bringing me here. Of course, dude. I think I've said this three different times, so I'm going to have to apologize to the last two. This is officially the coolest podcast. You mean that? I do. I've never been in a tent for a podcast. We're deep in the woods in upstate New York right now. No one knows where we are. We're far, far away. Undisclosed locations. Yeah, not in Brooklyn. Of course not. We are far away in the woods. And I want to ask you a question. I want to give you an answer. Is society rigged? What do you mean by society? We have to go deeper on that. It feels like economically, we're at a point where people are feeling hopeless. I know I do sometimes. You know what I mean? I'm like 29 years old. I work hard and I try to look at housing prices. I'm like, it seems difficult to buy a house. And then I talk to my parents or, heaven forbid, my grandparents. Sometimes I have to talk to them. And they're like, yeah, just do this. Just buy municipal bonds and then just buy a house. It's easy. It feels like- Work hard. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. Yeah, exactly. It feels like we've gotten to a point where, I don't know, people are losing hope. Do you feel that? I see it every day. I mean, I work in real estate. I've been doing it 10 years, run a team in Delaware. I got started by helping idiots like me who didn't get through college, decided to go to the military because they didn't have a job. I got started by helping people who didn't have any other options and, you know, make 50K a year. And as long as they don't have a stupid Mustang, I could get them into a house. A $200,000 house, $1,000 a month house. That's awesome. And that's Delaware. But I think all across the country, the grind is almost forced now. Where the grind used to be an option. That is, I think, where a lot of people are losing hope because you are going to have people out there who will say, well, if you just work hard and you grind, I was able to do it. Yeah. And that is still going to be- Statistically true. That's still going to happen. But when I had gotten started in real estate, which was 2016, I didn't have to grind for us to be able to live our life. Which isn't even that long ago. No. Like sometimes people think like, oh yeah, houses were cheaper in the 90s. And it's like, well, that is true. Yeah. But you're talking about within the last 10 years. Yeah. 2018, if you made 50K, had a 620 credit score and about maybe 5K in the bank, I could get you a house. No problem. I wasn't even blinking. Less than that, we got a little bit of work to do. More than that, choice is yours. Mm-hmm. Now, NAR has it set, which is the National Association of Realtors. I think the most recent number is $104,000 is what you need to make per year in order to afford the median home in America, which is more than double what it used to be. It used to be $46,000 is what you needed to make. Wow. So the hopelessness, I think, comes from the stark statistical reality that working a normal job no longer affords you the opportunity to home in America. You now have to grind. You have to go hard. Yeah. You have to put in the weekends. You have to do the holidays. You got to do the extra hours. And that used to be an option. And for some, especially in fixed income positions, they're working 60, 70 hours, and they still are just scraping by. I mean, heck, what was our electric bill just this last month? $560, $516. That's like the second one we've gotten over 500. It used to be under 200. So I think across the board, everything's gotten more expensive. Meanwhile, jobs, wages, nothing's improved to help us. Yeah. I mean, what is the median income in the United States right now? Maybe the average. So the median per household is about $84,000 as it's listed, which is very similar to actually 2019. It really hasn't moved too much. We actually went down 2020, 2021, and 22, and then recently started going back up. I believe the median per household is about $84,000. So I think that's a big difference. I think the median per household is about $84,000. I think the median per household is about I think the median per household is about $84,000. I think the median per household is about 50 range, which again is half of what's required to be able to get the median home. Yeah. Yeah. It feels like there's a, I even think looks maxing is a part of this genuinely. Let me hear. So my, oh yeah, it says here 45,000 individuals, 15 and older in 2024. Uh, there's an experiment that was done. I forget the guy's name, but it was called clavicular. Yeah, it was clavicular. No, it was this guy. It was, uh, it was universe like 20 or 25 universe, 25 mouse experiment. Cause you looked that up Christos. And, uh, it basically was this experiment where he basically got like a giant mouse enclosure and he put like five mice in there. And he was like, how big can the population get in this confined space with unlimited resources until it falls apart? Universe 25 mouse experiment, this guy, John Calhoun. And it was this closed off enclosure with unlimited food, unlimited water. Unlimited, like all the resources you need and technically a lot of space. And it got to a certain number until it completely collapsed. And the collapse is just like, basically it showed the social collapse of like overcrowding and just not even by on resource competition, just by like being near each other. There was a moment where they were like, we're done. And what's interesting is that in that experiment, he noticed antisocial behavior from the mice. Now, again, mouse experiments, animal experiments to humans is not exactly perfect, but it's an interesting little point that there's a subset of the mice that he called the beautiful ones. So dominant males became hyper aggressive. Other males withdrew completely refused to engage in social or mating behavior and spent compulsive time grooming. Huh? And then the female mice were, uh, extremely like anti-maternal. They neglected their young and caused high infant mortality rates again with unlimited food and water. And so to me, the interesting part here is like by this, uh, immense source of like overcrowding and I guess I don't even know exactly what you would call it. This behavioral sink, you have some of these mice just going into like hyper grooming behavior and like trying to like basically like perfect their external like, uh, appearance. And he's made connections here and other people made the connections that like the looks maxing trend is an attempt to raise your status on an interpersonal level in the way that you can control that. Like your, your options for buying a house. Your options for like creating financial independence or like retiring at a certain rate feel so far away. You went to college, you did all the right things. And the kind of economic life that you were promised isn't really there. So all of a sudden it's like, well, what can I control? What are the ways I can improve my status just on an interpersonal level? And I'm low key convinced the clavicles and clavicles of the world is a response to this feeling of like, I don't have really an economic response. That's interesting. Yeah. And I'm like, again, this is a kind of crackpot. Yeah, I think, but I think there's something to it too, because there's also a large rise in people getting more spiritual. Yeah. Which is another variation of let's detach from what's going on in this world and actually get more internal figure out what makes me, me, what makes my emotions fire, what makes my brain do what it does. Yeah. I do see more of that happening. Yeah. Do you think the mouse experiment could be akin to like the overstimulation of media that we have today? Possibly that it's not like a physical overcrowding, but it is like sort of a social perceptive overcrowding that happens from just like a constant stimulation. Yeah. We walked here to the podcast and saw one guy scrolling on two phones. Oh yeah. It's impressive. Yeah. What the heck is going on? But now you don't even have to do that with the new iPhone. It's just one. It's so you can do both in one phone. That's why they're doing it so you can have two for you pages. Exactly, dude. And you can just goon and double time. Jesus. You can get like a crypto thing on one side, prop bets on the other. It's kind of perfect, you know? And it just used to be a little simpler in the economy. Now you do have all these, you know, people are talking stable coins and we're going to digitize everything and now everything's going to be in the cloud. It's like, man, can we play football? Exactly. I think I think there is this little bit of a sense of wanting to go more analog. Like my video guy, Sean, been with me, geez, almost almost a full 10 years I've been in real estate. I see it every day with him. Works hard. One of the nicest, most moral kids I've ever met. Always has been. And I pay him really well. But getting into a house just really isn't an option economically for him. And he does get deeper into the physiological, psychological, spiritual, going on walks, traveling to go to the mountains. And I think that movement is happening amongst Gen Z where they're seeking more analog activities rather so than just going just head on. head deep in this social media atmosphere. I think a lot of people are tired of it. Yeah, it's kind of a detachment. Hey, real quick. Most people who watch this channel aren't subscribed. And when you subscribe, you help the channel grow and you stay in the loop with every new drop. Religion camp, history camp, and camp Gagnon. Well, let's get back to it. And I guess it's interesting your vantage point, your perspective, because you saw the change. As you see people like being able to get houses, then all of a sudden it switches. Yeah, I got a front row seat to it. And for a few years, because I really started making the content and making the day towards the end, 2022, beginning of 2023. And I started with just some light takes. Just some like, hey, this is a little odd. This guy just walked in my open house. He makes 130K and we couldn't qualify him for it. Like, what's going on there? And I remember just getting all this hate immediately of, well, no, it's not. Things are blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're just not working hard enough. Man, their debt must be too high, blah, blah. So I don't think so. I've worked with these people. This doesn't seem the same. And it was that realization. It kind of started me into, well, how did this happen? Who's controlling these rates? Why are rates the way that they are? How did home prices get so high? Now, when people bring this up, they always show like income versus housing prices. And they'll show like these two charts and or two lines rather on the same chart. And they're very similar. And then at some point they diverge and wages basically stay the same. And then housing prices go crazy. And it's one that's always brought up, but it's just one metric. So why is the cost of housing? So. So important. Like why is buying a house like obviously it's like, okay, shelter, dah, dah, dah. But like, what is so foundational about that kind of like wealth transfer? I think it breeds into everything else is, is, would be my answer. The starting of a family starts usually with home ownership. We see the child or the birth rate is at a dangerous level at this moment. People aren't getting married nearly as often. You also brought up crypto. I'll bring up sports gambling. We see a lot of more frivolous spending. Or gambling instead of saving. Why? Because there's no real thing to save for they look at the math and they're like, well, if I did this for 17 years, I still wouldn't have enough money. Might as well blow it. I think the house is so instrumental in feeling like you're a part of this. You have dirt, you can grow a garden. You can have memories and HOA and HOA who doesn't want an HOA or just the boomer dream of, they got to buy a house for a blueberry cobbler. In the 60s and now they're millionaires and all they had to do was have a job, put 5 to 10% of money aside and keep their mortgage paid and their mortgage was 450. So I think everybody grew up hearing the tales of work hard, get the degree, get the house, do the right thing for 25 years. And Hey, you may be able to get what I got. And now we look at the math and we look at the path that we have in front of us. And we're like, Hmm, I don't know if that's going to happen and housing and I've said this, before, I don't think it's the end all be all asset. There's several different ways you can grow your money without owning physical dirt, but none of those assets can you live in, grow in, make memories and raise a family and have a dog. And, you know, unless you get a lot of gold, you can't really build a house out of it. Right. So before I ask you how to fix it or what people can do on an interpersonal level in terms of like your actual agency, okay. Like if you're someone that's in this position, we're going to hit that. Cause that's, what's most important. Well, I, well, like this thing is like, I don't know. That's what we can control. Exactly. Yeah. And before we get to that point, how does this happen? That's how that's a loaded question. How far back do you want to go in order to like kind of paint this picture? Well, so for everyone listening, if you want to hear the interpersonal stuff, check back in, in an hour. Um, that's a tough question. I think some people would immediately point to 2008. I think some people would look at things like NAFTA and glass, the Eagle in the nineties. Some people will immediately run the Reaganomics. Uh, I think he could go as far. Back as even the 1800s or the early 1900s with the founding of the federal reserve, we are in a world where the rich want to get richer. And if I'm the sum up, the entire reason why we're here, it's just greed. It's it's greed. They want more money. They want more power. And when I say they talking about the people that are in charge, it is the politicians. It is the bankers. It is the corporations. And now we have these hyper-scaling oligarchs that are trying to AI fi everything. Yeah. It's always kind of. Been that way though. Like for example, 1913, we have a federal reserve bank. That's instituted that by its own name, it's not federal and it doesn't hold reserves. So it's a terrible name, but it was put in place as a way to keep the oligarchs from having to continually bail out our country. Because in 1907, we had a humongous state bank panic because we didn't have a federal reserve bank. We were state banked and in, I believe it was 1895, same exact thing. Both times, JP Morgan stepped up and bailed out the entire country. In fact, in 1890, I think it was 1895. You could look it up. We were about to go insolvent. We didn't know what to do. As a nation. Yeah. It was, it was like post civil war. There were, uh, locusts, a huge locust problem was actually eating up crops for a few years. It was, we were an agricultural economy. Yeah. It feels like God, right? Like it seems like God was like, no, no, we're gonna, we're gonna clean this up. 1895. There you go. During a severe financial crisis, the treasury's gold reserves were nearly. Exhausted Morgan organized a syndicate that supplied the government with about $65 million in gold in exchange for 62 million in government bonds to help preserve the gold standard and prevent a default like crisis. It was nice of him. Oh, and he also helped rescue the us financial system in 2000, uh, 1907. And that's what led to, wow, this prompt really just nailed it led to the federal reserve. And that federal reserve was put in place so that they could control the monetary system so that they could benefit and profit off of it and technically bail out our country. When needed without having to have the headlines of another oligarch bailed out America, which seems like a good idea. Cause that's not, yeah, that's not a good headline to keep doing. And people in 1907 were furious around what was how, how that bank panic was caused. And then in 19, I believe 12, when the federal reserve plan was initially presented by Senator Nelson Aldrich, it was an upheaval. They had a whole Pujo committee put together to investigate why they're even doing this. And this Pujo committee found that there was a money trust that was doing it. And it still happened. What do you mean? Uh, so I believe the number was, so they did a, they did a, it was another Senator who put together a committee to see whether or not this federal reserve action was an act of oligarchs attempting to consolidate financial power. And they ran this whole, whatever, I think they looked through about 180 different entities and they found that essentially about 20 to 25% of all entities in America were owned by the same people. And that the majority of all the financing of the major corporations, all centered, the same four or five banks. So they found, yeah, there's, there's a money trust happening, but then nothing happened. And the federal reserve came anyway. And then we walk into the 20, the roaring twenties. We have mass wall street speculation that leads to the great depression, 1933. They ripped the gold back from Americans and then resell their own debt by raising the gold price after they've gotten it back from Americans. I mean, again, the rigging of our economy has always come from the top. It's always been about power and greed. And if you were to ask me what's happening today, it's like, we're trying to survive. They're trying to keep the game going. The game has been set up many, many, many, many, many decades before this. And now we're living in this, you know, it's, it's kind of corny to say at this point, because everyone says it, but like late stage capitalism, we're towards the end of how can this continue to sustain itself? And, you know, then you can speculate into, well, what is the answer? What happens next? I don't know. But what I do know is happening right now is many, many young men, especially feel downtrodden economically. They don't have any mission. They don't have any passion. Nobody's going to work a 25 year job at Sears anymore. Like nobody's doing that because they don't feel that they're going to be able to raise a family, live a good life, be a good American. And I think there's a lot of people that want to do that. They don't see that option on the table. Yeah. Even like the big, like corporate sort of lives that my, like my wife's grandfather, for example, was at like Boeing or something and was helping design planes. And did that for legit like 50 years. That was the only job he ever had. And then retired, got a pension and like sailed off into the sunset. Great life. Had a good time. I don't know really anyone that's been in a company longer than like four years. Oh, today. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like we're kind of crazy. It is. And now we have people that are getting laid off because of AI and tech. And of course, now the economy because of this war, higher prices in oil, the consistent inflation we've seen since COVID. And it's tightening corporations balance sheets too. And they're having to make tough decisions. So it's not just us. It's also the corporations that give us the wages that we need. So when we're in a world where we need higher wages and we're in a high interest debt situation where these corporations can't afford to pay the higher wages, even though some of them are having record profits and record profits are stolen wages. It kind of puts us in this juxtaposition of, well, the corporations aren't going to raise the wages and inflation wise, these assets probably aren't going to come down in price. So what happens in the future if this K shaped economy keeps, looking more and more like a capital K instead of a lowercase K? Yeah, it's a little sketchy, you know, it feels a little scary for everyone involved. I a hundred percent agree. And I never intended that by the way, when I started talking about this style of content, I never intended to be a fear monger. I never intended to be this black pill guy. I'll get messages all the time of like, tell us something good. Like brother, if I saw something in legislation that was upcoming or this person said this, they want to work toward that. And I was like, yeah, we should focus that. that that would solve a lot of the problems. But no one wants to talk about Zoning problems. No one wants to talk about the illegal immigration that's hurt in certain states. No one wants to talk about how interest rates since the 2008 crash ran way too low. We ran it too hot, too long. And the speculation around investing in real estate really picked up in 2008. You probably wouldn't be able to find this graph, but institutional investing in real estate, buying up 10, 20, 100 rental properties didn't really become a thing until post 2008 and all those deals hit the market. And then they're like, this is a really good thing. Interesting. So now one out of every three homes that's purchased in America is purchased by an investor. Really? And it used to be one out of 10. Wow. Now it's one out of three. They for the last two years, they have now for the first time beaten first time homebuyers in purchase share. Is that like corporate investors? It's a mixture. So almost all investors are technically corporate investors because they're going to set up an LLC. Sure. But the percentage that are like institutional banking, like people bring a BlackRock. Yeah. I'm talking about the BlackRock versus like Steve that has three. Right. So BlackRock actually doesn't own real estate. That's a really big misconception. It's Blackstone. Okay. I feel like you set me up. No, but that's a big headline. That's a big. Cut that from the record. Okay. Cut it. This is why we're not live streaming. Okay. Because I sound like a freaking idiot. No, no. But that's what everybody goes to is BlackRock. And BlackRock has been the bane of HVAC's existence. It's been the bane of nursing homes existence. It's been the bane of several different corporate existences. But for housing specifically, housing is an interesting entity because it doesn't have a CEO. There's no C-suite of executive directors that are deciding, what are we going to do next with housing? That doesn't exist. So with housing, Blackstone does own a significant amount. I think it's 80,000 single family homes they own, somewhere in that range. All private equity in these gigantic monstrosities, which, by the way, just to make the record clear, should own zero homes, don't own a humongous share. It's somewhere in like the 0.6% that they technically own. Majority of these homes that are being purchased by investors are being purchased by people that own one to 10 properties. Interesting. Now, to devil's advocate, my own statement there is very, very easy through just like what I just said, that LLC that you can make to make it look like you don't own a bunch of other properties. So is that stat skewed? Probably. Is it one guy with 10 LLCs that all own 10 properties? Exactly. I have two clients right now. One's in Jersey, one's in New York that buy properties in Delaware. They also have properties in New York and Jersey. But between them, I think in total, they own well over a thousand homes. Wow. And for each and every one of them, they have a separate LLC. Wow. So on paper, they would all fall into that one to 10 range. But they're not BlackRock. They're not Blackstone. Right. They don't own too many properties when normal everyday people are struggling. They're struggling to find one. Yes. And do investors typically buy the affordable homes that normal everyday first-time homebuyers would have wanted? Yes. But we don't do anything to solve the problem. We don't create any legislation. We don't create any restrictions. We don't create any caps. We don't create any divestment programs. We don't do anything. We don't even create federal first-time homebuyer programs. So that's why I'm saying like, hey, if I saw one of these things starting to happen, I will blast it. But we're not. What about the people that are like, hey, New York City is expensive. You want to buy here? This is what it costs to get. And if you want to buy a place for the first time, like, go to Iowa. Go to Oklahoma. Yeah, go to Arkansas. Go to Alabama, West Virginia. But that argument's always been there. The median home price in New York has always been much higher than the median home price in Delaware. The median home price in Boston has always been higher than the median home price of Tallahassee. But the problem is the tide throughout the entire country has gone like this. The entire country has gone up dramatically. The majority of that has to do with money printing, by the way. The majority of that is we infused way too much money way too fast with extremely low rates after 2008. And we don't talk about that enough. The 2008 really locked us in this position where if we don't print, we fall. And we decided in 2008 we were going to print instead of eat our medicine. And so now the medicine is money printing, which is why I've told everybody and their mother for the past three years. Buy silver, buy gold. If it's your thing, buy Bitcoin. Separate yourself from the dollar because the dollar is going to continue to weaken because we have to keep printing. And there's no better evidence of this right now than what's going on in the bond market, which is not to bore everybody. But the bond market is more important than the stock market. The bond market is the actual feelings of investors throughout the world and how they want to move their money. And as we shoot this right now, it's sitting at 5% for the 10-year treasury yield, which means a mortgage rate is going to be 7%. Can you explain to a eighth grader what the bond market is? Yes. So a bond is debt. Our country needs more money. They sell more bonds. Companies do this. Apple, all these hyperscalers right now trying to build AI, they're selling bonds. They're selling corporate bonds to raise money for AI projects. America does the same thing. Every time we run a deficit, I think currently we're running a 400 billion monthly deficit. We need to print money to make up for it. Instead of actually physically printing it, we sell off bonds that allow for an investment. We need more money. So here's the deal. We'll make it. You hold it. And every single year for your holding it, we'll give you a slight dividend. We'll give you a yield. We'll give you a percentage of ROI, return on their investment. Now, typically bonds have been just the most boring, mundane, low interest yielding products because they're bonds. They're government-backed debt. It's guaranteed money. Yeah. What that is signaling is investors are scared of our economy. They're freaked out by inflation. They're moving their money elsewhere and they're demanding a higher return on their investment. And it's almost like a drug. When you have that higher yield, it's tough to get them used to a lower yield. So at this moment, it's not even just America, Japan, Australia, Germany, France, Britain, China, all these different bond issuers are having to issue their debt at high rates. Higher yields because investors are demanding more because the currencies all across the world have inflated because of the dollar, because the dollar is the world reserve currency. 60% of the world reserves are held in the dollar. So when we expand our money supply, our monetary base, it inflates everything. And so when the dollar gets weaker, investors demand more. When investors demand more, it puts more strain on us because it becomes more expensive to borrow. So getting a car, getting a home, financing a burrito on DoorDash. Yeah. All more expensive because of the bond market. Now, what is the typical yield for bonds? Right now, the going rate for institutional bonds, because we don't get access to those. We get old bonds if we want to go buy it. Ten years sitting at 5%. But what was it 20 years ago? So actually, that's a great question. 20 years ago, it was actually in a similar number. We when we printed money in 2008 is when it started to drop significantly. And people think, well, how did that happen? The reason we did that was because. Because we had two problems in 2008. Well, we have multiple problems. But one was we had a liquidity issue. We couldn't solve the problem without more money entering the system. One. Two, rates were actually sitting at a about 4.5 ish rate, four to 4.5 ish, even peaking to that five ish range on the 10 year. And so you had all these people that needed to sell because they didn't have jobs in the retirement accounts were jacked up. And rates were too high for buyers to come up and snag up the deals. So their solution was. Let's print money from the Federal Reserve and use that money to buy the bonds that nobody wants. And that's exactly what they did. They bought up. It's like you ever heard the phrase, you don't get high on your own supply. Yeah, I mean, it feels like a scam. That's what our government did. Like the way you're describing it sounds like who would think this would work? Then we're going to explain it properly. We're going to print our own money to then buy our own debt. Yes. And we as of just recently, we just expanded our debt buyback program. We said we were going to double it from two billion. The. Four billion. And then I think it was a week ago. We actually tripled it. We didn't even announce we were going to triple it. We just tripled it. So the consistent need to buy up our own debt, like I'll put it in your perspective. If you had a lemonade stand and you were selling lemonade, everyone loved your lemonade, your lemonade, the hot lemonade on the street. And then all of a sudden you weren't getting as much lemonade sales. Well, you have a few options. I could lower my prices, lower your prices, market it better. You'd be better customer service. I don't know. Maybe your dick. I don't know. Probably get the lemonade. Yeah. Or you just have your mom come out and buy the lemonade. That's a good idea. So pretty much we just have our parents coming out and buying the lemonade. Nobody wants our debt. China, for example, has been a humongous purchaser of our debt. They've been a net seller for the last 10 years and a net accumulator of gold. Same for Japan. Same for Britain. Same for Germany. Nobody wants to hold our bonds anymore because they're worried about the future. They're worried about the future of our economy. And Japan's a great example. They want to be more nationalist. They don't want to be the world's ATM anymore. So with all these countries, like ourselves, too, trying to be more nationally focused, we're stuck in a catch-22. We tried to globalize the dollar in 1944 through what was called the Bretton Woods Agreement. Post-World War II, or at least leading towards the end of World War II, through the decimation of everything going on in Europe, we needed to figure out how we were going to solve our world's economic problems. Right. So America stepped up and said, Hey, we're going to tie our dollar to gold. $45 equals one ounce. All of you get to hold these dollars. Now we're going to be able to support the world's economy. So as we fast forward now to today, we're kind of reaping the cons of that because we are a international economy through trade, through services, through the petrol dollar and oil. And now all these other countries are looking at us through things like the war, the Epstein files and all these other economic problems and thinking, should we be holding these? Should we be accumulating this debt? Yeah. Hey, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I want to tell you about Brunt Workwear. Yeah, right here, I got the Marin boot. And honestly, what I love about them, what impressed me is just how immediately comfortable they were right out of the box. They look great. They're solidly built and you don't have to suffer through a long break in period for them to actually feel good on your feet. Now, look, I'm a standup comedian and a podcaster. I'm not pretending that I'm on a work site, but this gear is made for people that actually put their boots through real punishment. 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Make sure you tell them Mark and Christos from the campsite sent you. Now let's get back to the show. But doesn't Fort Knox have all the gold, you know? You know, that's an interesting one. I was really excited to hear that we were going to get a tour of Fort Knox at the beginning of this campaign. I've still yet to see it. Yeah. No one wants to talk about that one though. That one always, why haven't we done that? Is there any gold in Fort Knox? Wasn't that the whole thing? That's the thing. I think that the be my cockamamie prediction. Okay. We're in speculation. Speculation mode. There's this group called BRICS, B-R-I-C-S. It stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and I think South Africa. And a bunch of other countries have joined it. I think there's 20 or 30 at this point that are involved. It's just too long of an acronym. They just kept it at BRICS. It would have been way too long. Yeah. It is a good acronym actually. And BRICS wants to essentially destroy the dollar. It's their whole mission. They don't want the dollar to be the world reserve currency anymore. Now, do they have a good backup at this point? Not really. Not really. So my theory is eventually these countries, they have enough buy-in that eventually they can create their own gold-backed standard. More like a Western version of the world's gold standard so that they can detach from the need from the dollar. They can trade without the dollar. They can sell oil without the dollar. They don't need America's imports and exports. And things like the tariffs have helped things like this along. Look at ground beef. Look at what happened with soybeans. We started seeing these countries like China find other options. So we're speeding that process along of them being able to detach themselves from us trade-wise, all while they're accumulating gold. Here's the thing. What if they played a fun little chess move and said, we're going to create a gold-backed currency? Maybe it's the yuan, China's. And then they came in and said, America, you can do this too. You need you to do what all of us did. You need to show us how much gold you have. But you have so much gold, so that'll be fine. Yeah. Take a word for it. And then we'll be in the position of having to actually disclose our gold. And I don't think we have it. Not nearly as much as we claim to have. How much do we claim to have? I mean, what happened to all the gold? 147.3 million troy ounces of gold or 4,583 metric tons. That's pretty good. I like the sound of that. And then the last major public inspection was in 1974. So it's been 52 years, since the public is late. I mean, they sent the boys over in 2017 to check it out. Yeah. Yeah. As long as the government says it's good, then as long as the government, everything the government has set up into this point in my life has been true. So great. Same. What happens to like, where does it go? Do they just like, heck if I know, dude, rats, there's some people say people are skimming it off the top. There's some people that say, uh, from 1944, when we instituted Bretton woods to 1971, when we detached ourselves from the gold standard, that we were running way hotter in debt than we claimed we were. And we actually never had the amount of gold that we claim to have. And that's why we had to come off the gold standard. The French literally sent a battleship. I believe it was in 1972, the Harbor of New York to get their gold. Cause they, they started running the math and they were like, we don't think you have it. And within months, we were like, get rid of this gold standard thing. We can't do that. There were other countries starting to sniff us out. I mean, good for the French, right? We give them a lot of shit, but the fact that they were like, nah, pull up. Yeah. And we just saw Hamilton. They're the ones that helped us in the revolutionary war. And now they're like, Hey, gold. What if they came and took the statue of Liberty back? That would be, that would be so embarrassing. We fell behind on our payments for the statue of Liberty. Yeah. Actually we're going to repo the statue of Liberty. Yeah. And they sound like a French tow truck driver over just to take it off the lot. I mean, that would be crazy. I mean, wow. I didn't, that was 1971. I think it was 1971. You can look that up. I think it was right in the same zeitgeist. Of when we removed ourselves from this, like around, like Michael Jackson was alive. Michael Jackson was indeed alive during this time. Yes. That is, that's kind of how I measure everything. Time. You measure your timelines and when Michael Jackson was alive. Yeah, exactly. It's like, I do like BM and AM. Yeah. It's all Michael Jackson's. It's just kind of the modern era in my mind. If they're singing ABC, then it's like, Oh, this is like pretty reasonable. You know, like that's how I just feel like AD and BC is just so long ago that it actually doesn't really help. I feel like we need to, when was that 2007 passed? I think so. If he was alive, maybe we never would have printed money. That's a good point. Think about that. I think I may have to do a whole other. It was right before the financial crisis. Right before the financial crisis. And all of a sudden he's gone. Look what happens. What would Michael have done? Not bail out the banks. He definitely, definitely wouldn't have bailed out the banks. Are you kidding me? He hated that. Exactly. The Michael Jackson rabbit hole is, that was actually my first rabbit hole. Really? When, okay. So I was never like a conspiracy guy. Sports, sports, sports. My first word was ball. It was soccer. It was basketball. It was football, professional sports, college sports, playing sports all day, every day. Yeah. Not a political vein in my body. Nothing. And I was a huge Michael Jackson fan because of my parents. So was my brother still are. And when he died, it was just like, Whoa, that's, that's wild. That's wild. And I think there's a lot of, uh, reasonable, uh, discussion now around why he was ousted and why his, uh, power in the music industry was so untouchable. And you start to listen to more and more and more and more of the guy talk. And he's like, man, this really doesn't line up with the way that he was portrayed. And maybe they knew that he was going to keep them from printing money. I think that might've actually been it. Yeah. Also this episode is sponsored by Sony. So we're not going to say anything about, about Sony and Michael Jackson's relationship. We can't do that. Yeah. Because a friend of the show. So friend of the show. Yeah. No, dude, he was, uh, oh, he died in 2000, 2009. So he could have, he could have stopped the bank. But I think he saw what happened and it killed him. He was prepping for his tour. Yeah. Also that he's prepping the tour Europe. He didn't have time for this. He was too busy. He was super busy. That's crazy. They sent the ship over. Yeah. Are we able to confirm that? What did the ship even do? They just pulled up and they were like, they could have flew, right? Yeah. Well, how do you bring, you can't bring back the gold on a plane. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah. You can't even bring two bags on a plane without being overweight. You can't bring all those metric tons of gold. Yeah. And you're going to spend the gold Yeah. It was a battleship. Yeah. Right. Like the baggage. Yeah. Check this bag is 480 pounds. We got extra fee. Yeah. It was a warship or a battleship. But again, that, that, that puts us in a position where the dollar now in 1971 became Fiat, which you can remember from another four letter F word fake or whichever one you want. And we were in a position where we didn't have any kind of backing then in 1973. Uh, okay. So between 1963, it is not an urban legend. Please do not listen to Google on this one. I promise you. I had a debate around Jeffrey Epstein and the ownership line of his property with Claude the other day, five different times. It told me I was being a conspiracy theorist. And then I gave it the deed that I already had and said, Oh, my bad. This actually checks out. And I found it in the records. No way. This did 100% happen just to be clear, even though Gemini is making it seem like there's no, there's no, no evidence. Chill. I mean, it's hilarious. I will send you, I have a whole Figma document of all of these sourced things. I will send it to you. Many history books claim that, uh, the French president Pompidou sent a battleship to New York in 1971 to receive French gold. It wasn't, it wasn't an August and it wasn't even the French president. It was, it was, uh, it wasn't George's. I can't remember the name of the guy, but it wasn't that name either. The fact that it says in many history books, but it is a rumor. It's like, well, the history books are pretty good. Yeah. Right. And the French weren't the only ones. And that was one of the main reasons we had to detach ourselves from the gold standard is because we had speculators and we had all these people trying to retrieve the gold. Yeah. Charles de Gaulle. There you go. Wow. 1965, France would exchange its access to the U S dollar for gold under the Bretton woods system. Okay. France reduced substantial dollar holdings and transported French owned gold from the federal reserve back to France. Interesting. And they did 1000% send a ship to, I have a picture of it actually that was the first time I've ever seen a ship. I've never seen a ship. I've never seen a ship that was this big. I've never seen a ship that was this thing. But that that's a minor detail in the whole. Sure. It just shows sort of like the level that it's like, OK, we are sort of developing this, you know, U.S. backed dollar system and it's pegged to gold and everything is level. And then speculation gets out of control. People are starting to look for the gold. And then we go, don't worry about the gold. More importantly, we're not using gold anymore. Right. And some people will look back and say, well, 1971 wasn't the cause of the big problems that we have. It was actually 1974 when we had the Fair Credit Act. And now a black man and a Mexican man and a woman can get a mortgage. And that expanded credit. Or it was 1975 when we allowed women to work and that expanded the workforce. And there's a lot that happened in the 70s. So I'm not directly pegging it to that. But it was by no short venture within three years, we found a new backing for our dollar. By 1974, we had the petrol dollar, which now meant that oil and the velocity, of oil sales was what kept the dollar's strength. It becomes a new gold standard. Right. And it makes you wonder why we've been in so many wars since then and why they've all been in these oil producing countries. Yeah. Makes you wonder about that. Yeah. Well, not Venezuela. All right. Okay. I guess that's a good point. Yeah, it is. It is suspicious, right? That all of a sudden, the second we're on the petrol dollar, it's like, oh, what are they doing over there? Right. Right. Oh. What's Mohamed Mosaddegh doing? What's he been up to? Yeah. And interestingly enough, the petrol dollar was spurred along by the Yom Kippur War, which was an October 7th attack of Israelis by, I believe it was Egypt and Syria over the Suez Canal. And it was a surprise attack on October 7th in 1973, which is very similar to what happened in 2023. Wow. Yeah. It's like history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes kind of thing. Yeah. And then that led to us stepping in to defend Israel. And when we stepped in, the oil producing countries said, these guys are literally trying to kill us and take our land. Why are you supporting them? And so we sent this guy named Kissinger over to the oil producing countries and struck up this deal. And though the details of the deal kind of remain, you know, in the room where it happened to go to Hamilton, my wife and I just saw we were talking about that for the podcast. And I largely thought that the deal was, hey, we're going to keep doing what we're doing in our relationship here with Israel and the Middle East. But in exchange for us creating this petrol dollar, we're going to defend the oil industry of which you profit so much from. And as long as we put our military industrial complex behind the oil industry, you profit, we profit. Let's walk away from this. Mm. And as far as that's service to America, would you say that the petrol dollar has increased America's. Is influence and wealth on an interpersonal basis? Or has it been a disaster? No, it absolutely is. It's been the foundation of our economy really since then is the petrol dollar. Every time that petrol dollar is getting utilized overseas for trade, like I said, all these countries hold the dollar. A lot of them hold the dollar for trading oil. So it is absolutely one of the larger linchpins in us remaining the hegemonic power of the world, which is why this war that is happening right now is so important. I mean, one of the things that was happening in Venezuela before we went in, they were starting to sell their oil in other currencies. One of the things that's happening in Iran right now is they're utilizing the yuan for oil sales out of the Strait of Hormuz, and they're removing us from the equation. That is a humongous deal. And one thing, again, BRICS and these other countries want, they're 38 now still talking about it. Yeah. But we won World War Two. Okay. We can't win a simple war in Iran now. We are not the cool kid anymore. And all these other countries just, I think, are tired of our forced swagger as a country. Wasn't Russia also exporting lots of oil? Yeah, from Iran and China as well. But China and Russia also have a, especially Russia, have a heavy supply of their own oil. It does require refining. Of course, they're also at war. There's a lot going on in that. But China is an interesting one because they've actually been on a decrease year over year over year, I think, for the last eight years in their oil usage because they've been going so heavy in the solar and wind. So when we say, oh, this thing in Iran is really actually hemorrhaging China and Russia, it's definitely throwing a speed bump down. Don't get me wrong, but we're the ones who benefit from the petrol dollar. When we see oil per barrel at that's hurting us. We can play it however we want. That's hurting us. And we can talk about Iran as much as we want. I've been on it for six and a half months stating that this is not going to be quick. We're probably going to be here. I have a podcast from March where I said we're probably going to still be here next year because there's no out at this moment. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what the out is, right? Like it would be us walking with our tail between our legs and saying, sorry, and just leaving. But we're not going to do that because we can't get the straight open if we could have. All right. We could say that they're militaries at the bottom of the ocean. My counter to the argument is why haven't we taken the straight back then yet if they have no military power? Right. And the economic factor, I mean, just recently within the last three days, the east to west pipeline in Saudi Arabia was destroyed by the apparently an Iraqi drone. So this is a huge deal because the way that and could we pull up a map real quick of just the Saudi Saudi Arabian map of both the Bab al-Mandeb Strait and the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz, about 20 to 25% of the oil for the entire world comes out of that Strait. So that's been eliminated from the market for about six months. Yeah. The way that we have been getting some, this is perfect. Thank you, brother. The way that we've been getting some oil, or I say we, Saudi Arabia has been getting their oil out is they've actually been utilizing their pipeline, which runs from the eastern side of Saudi Arabia to the western side so they can get it to the Red Sea. Nice. And then they run it from the Red Sea out from the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, which is at the bottom. And then they were able to get it out to the ocean and get it through the Gulf of Aden, out to the Arabian Sea, out to the global market. Perfect. They just bombed it. Damn it. So now that oil is not getting out. Just when you think you got them. So the Bab al-Mandeb Strait is currently being attacked also by the Houthis. They're going at it with Saudi Arabia. Like literally right now. Yeah. And then they're going to be attacking Saudi Arabia. And then they're going to be attacking this has been the last two weeks of just bubbling over, becoming more and more chaotic. There's more fronts to this war. It's escalating past what we can control. If we ever had control, Israel's bombing Lebanon. I mean, there's so much going on over there. Turkey's being threatened. We saw what recently happened with all the immigration randomly that happened in Spain. Yeah. So there's a lot that's that's that's outside of our control. And the funny part about it is all of it was within our control before the war started. Everyone was using the petrol dollar through there. Everything was getting through. And now the main goal of this war is to simply get it back open. And it was open before it. Yeah. Yeah. It's, in my opinion, the biggest military L will have ever taken ever more than Afghanistan. As someone who's in Afghanistan. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the win the hearts and minds was the mission at that point of of Afghanistan and protecting poppy fields. And and largely that was going well. There was less violence going on. There was less revolt that was going on. And there was less violence going on. And largely probably had to do with just the presence patrol of us being there. Were we there too long? Do we spend too much money? Yeah. Did we leave way too quick and non strategically? Absolutely. The morning Biden said that I felt like I was like, OK, cool. Everything I was there for was for nothing. They just took over Bagram. I was in Bagram. Yeah. Yeah. That's a shit show. But that didn't alter the normal everyday person's life the way that this straight of Hormuz is altering. Everyday life, because not just oil comes out of that straight. Also, we get urea from that straight and urea is fertilizer. It's a nitrides, a nitrogenous gas that gets utilized as fertilizer. And we had a spike, I believe, of triple or quadruple the price of fertilizer in spring. So what does that mean for America? I mean, it's foods about to be a lot more expensive. And it's already starting to go up. And we talked about this month as it was happening of guys. You have to understand. You need to start gardening. You need to start gathering food for yourself, because if it's not this year, it's next. And this crisis of food is not getting talked about right now. Right now, it's oil, oil, oil. Food prices are going to keep going up. Wheat, corn, anything from a field because there's less fertilizer. We're already seeing so many different farmers go under from bankruptcy. We're seeing so many farms getting sold off to corporations because they can no it's also hurting the very person who's trying to sell off that crop. And so they have to make more. There's no real solution to the food problem right now, because if we can't get enough fertilizer in to make the food, it don't matter. And if this war is still going on, which I believe it will be by December, that is actually when it gets worse for next year. Because here's something I learned when researching this and this war started, is most farmers order the majority of their fertilizer early. They preorder it in December and November, about 70 to 80% of them. So there is about a 20 to 30%. and there's plenty of interviews with these farmers you can go back and look like yeah i didn't order enough i thought i could order it later now i'm screwed like whoa yeah because it's not available yeah it's never really been an issue the whole pricing thing so some farmers just didn't do it they got bit in the butt all while tariffs biting a lot of them in the butt and this is leading to more bankruptcies it's leading to more foreclosures of farms selling off to the mega corporate farms and frankly it's going to be worse next year if this is still going on when they go to pre-order now because it probably means they'll wait and then if it's still going on by next spring they'll be forced to purchase maybe have to purchase less or have to purchase at a higher price meaning they have to sell their food for a higher price even though the the mechanism of how they can sell off their food it is capped but basically what that means is the farmer is going to be hemorrhaged and they're not going to be able to profit and then we get another situation of mega corporations buying up people that can't right is the is it possible that the global oil economy could function without the petrodollar as we know it well it did before i'm sure it could i mean what does that look like i mean right now it would just simply mean possibly possibly something like the digitization of currency could do that creating a form of stable coin that is specifically for oil transfer i don't know uh as long as i've been alive and my parents have been alive the petrodollar has been a thing right but other countries are are transacting oil and other currencies and doing just fine the problem is it takes america out of the head seat and that's what we don't want because if we're not the ones benefiting from all this oil sales and why are we going all these wars right it's such a weird thing for me on a personal basis because i'm like i hate these wars dude as we all do i mean you more than anyone but like i have family well not me more than anyone i joined the army like i mean but you were in it and you had to actually deal with it and realize it was kind of all for not yes which is difficult i imagine i have family members right now currently deployed yeah and they're kind of like dude what are we doing i got i know somebody right now it's in the straight sitting on a boat yeah and i'm like i hate that for you and he's like yeah i hate it for me too yeah it's crazy so all that to say it's like i don't like it but then i also feel weirdly as an american citizen that truly loves america because it's like i do benefit from the petrodollar and our sort of vehement defense of oil transacting in u.s dollars then i'm like well i'm sort of the judiciary of this system that is kind of corrupt we all are yeah and i'm like what does it look like if we go off it like how bad is my kid's life gonna be and then i'm in this weird sort of moral quandary i'm like okay well i know technically the right thing to do is here but is that going to be the best thing for like the flourishing of our nation what would you define as the best thing for you well in my mind it's like okay well how do we stop these wars oh if we get less of a vested interest in the oil being traded in u.s dollars but then what does that do to our lives as americans well i mean at this point we've benefited severely from the petrodollar i mean we are the wealthiest country in the world which back to your mouse experiment i mean they had all the resources they needed for everyone to eat everyone to drink everyone to have a decent life and yet they weren't able to figure it out yeah it's kind of where america is at this moment yeah we have all we're the number one economy on the planet but yet we have some of the higher mental health rate issues we have so many that are living homeless especially veterans living homeless we have families that are making more than what they made pre-covid to feel broker we have kids that are graduating from college not finding jobs right now the unemployment rate for the first time ever for college grads is higher than the general population which to me is a leading indicator of what corporations are thinking they're thinking we don't need this we don't need this fresh energetic educated labor we don't at least need as much of it and these are engineers pharmaceutical tech especially yeah these are not poetry majors that we're talking exactly exactly like one of the when we had a list pulled up on the pod like one of them was fine arts i'm like yeah i get that one all right yeah well we can expunge that well i get the fine arts one yeah and and what we said on the pod too like one of them was fine arts another one was like uh it wasn't poetry but somewhere in like the language arts a lot of those people are going there for the sake of learning they're they're they're in and they love it they want to learn more they want to get better at their craft which is awesome yeah which is awesome but for those that are looking at college as a way to get a job it's it's a weird world right now because they're not finding jobs the uh the right now the application to hire rate is one to five hundred there's five hundred applications and this is a stat from 2025 500 applications per job so there's 500 people that want one one person and inevitably it's going to be one person and it's going to be one person and it's going to be one and then there's a report that comes out earlier this year that they have had ai running ghost listings on job sites to see how people react to different income offerings different bonuses different benefits what kind of resumes do they submit and they're starting to create a scoring system almost like a credit score system for applicants that moves with you from application to application right so a third of these job listings theoretically are going to be job listings theoretically weren't even real and we have this high rate of applicants per job and we're all the job listings even real many people say they weren't or that they were met with an ai hiring agent when they got into it it's it's i feel strongly for this younger generation because i feel like that action movie guy you know when they're robbing the bank and the star of the movie's like oh my god we just tripped it they hit the red laser or something like that yeah and then and then the wall starts closing down slow and they got to get out and the star gets out first and he helps the other person out i feel like the guy that had the like slide underneath at the last second yeah before it closed and now this other generation's sitting on the other side saying well how did you get over there i'm like i don't know i didn't have to go through a titanium wall i didn't have to do that part so i don't i don't know i mean with the applications of is it possible that some of those are redundant again sure the amount i don't know sure but let's say it's one two hundred and let's say that out of the 500 300 weren't even qualified right yeah no absolutely and numbers like that i'm sure you know have been in similar ranges i'm sure there's been hundreds of applications for jobs and similar times before but but right now it's an interesting time too because a lot of the jobs are on those sites aren't even offering half of the median income needed to buy a home in that area that they're going to work right so what's the motivation for doing so i saw an interesting uh video clip from you know mike rowe yeah yeah like cockroach mythbusters dirty job the cockroach episode yeah he gets to go down to like a sewer or something and he gets like cockroaches all up in like his boots and stuff i remember as a kid being like that's the craziest job ever that's the crazy and then i see like actual i want to see actual dirty jobs where he goes like a cobalt mine like i want to see that one he's like this is a kid that's like mining for your phone you're like oh that's a little too dirty we're gonna have to get mr beast on that one i don't think micro will touch that yeah yeah but micro had a um i don't think he was with sean ryan and i don't know exactly what he does but he oversees some form of uh labor for just contracting style jobs electricians plumbers trades and there was this conversation around well what is this young generation doing are they lazy are they unintelligent he said you know and i'm paraphrasing him by saying that he was like there's so many mechanic jobs available i just talked to the ford ceo and they need mechanics and they're offering 120k a year why aren't they taking these jobs well the easy answer is because they're not offering 120k you can go right to their website their job listing it's listed at 62 000 so a the number that they tout isn't the actual number b a lot of these trade positions electricians plumbers it's not as simple as applying and getting the job it takes years of training apprenticeship uh my brother-in-law and my brother both work in positions where they have to work and they have to work and they have to own their own tools purchase stuff when it gets broken upgrade you know that's expensive all while you're hardly making do at home your electric bill's going higher child care is fourteen hundred dollars a month and a median car off the lot for a used car is five hundred dollars a month according to experience all of these things combined and you're getting gas lit about how much you're going to get paid by this position and told that you're lazy i can't stand it for this younger generation yeah i would drive me crazy the idea of like i you hear it all the time where people are like yeah gen z they don't want to work they don't want to work and that's like i don't know but there were millennials that didn't want to work yeah i remember plenty of millennials that didn't want to work i got i got to do the thing you know i got to do the grind i got to attach myself to a non-fixed income position in real estate and knew that every hour i do some form of work i'm gaining some form of income and i'm able to do that as much as i would like yeah weekends holidays i mean my wife knows i'm closing homes on christmas eve and i'm like i could do that and we were getting money from it extremely motivated it absolutely i was running towards something i had a goal i want to start a team i want to do x i want to do this on social media i want the market this way i wanted to coach and i was doing all these things but i was able to run towards it it was motivating like you wake up at 5 a.m or 6 a.m to go to the gym in the morning you're writing your affirmations i'm like you know money's attracted to me like energy i was doing all that stuff right but now it feels like the running is like less optional it's it's not this running towards something it it's like running from something you're still running but now it's not optional and it's a lot scarier. Yeah. Whereas one, I'm choosing this. I feel virtuous in doing this. I'm choosing the tougher option and I'm gaining something from it. Yeah. What's up guys. We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you something. I had one of those days recently where I woke up super tired. I drank coffee and then I drank more coffee because I was tired. I trained badly because I had too much coffee and then I couldn't sleep because I had too much coffee. And the frustrating part is I'm doing all the things I'm lifting. I'm eating protein. I'm taking creatine. I'm trying to sleep. I'm occasionally fasting because someone on YouTube told me it was good, but sometimes I'm still walking around feeling like I'm only charged to like 60%. And that is what got me thinking so seriously about testosterone. Like I think about testosterone a lot because it's the thing that makes me feel amazing. And that's why I've been taking Mars Men. Here's what I learned. 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Now, let's get back to the show. And I can understand there's a bias, I guess, where there are naturally entrepreneurial people who are probably doing all right. And they're like, I made it work. And that's awesome. But I also recognize that not everyone is an entrepreneur, right? And I don't want to necessarily live in a place where you have to be an entrepreneur in order to pay rent, right? Right? Like, ideally, you can just work for an entrepreneur and still have a pretty great life. Yeah, I had a guy. He worked at Subway. I'm sorry, not Subway. He made subs for Wawa. Do you have Wawa up here? Yeah. Is there Wawa in New York? None in Jersey? None like in the Hoboken? Because that's kind of New York. Yeah, we have them all through Florida. Do you guys treat Hoboken like New York? No. No? It's so similar. You can see everything. It's not even close. Not even remote. I got to be honest. I really like Hoboken, though. Yeah, it actually is quite nice. I mean, as someone that's not even a New Yorker, I just I'm from Florida. And I just live here for the past six years. Jersey is not even funny. Those are bridge and tunnel people. Bridge and tunnel people, not train people. Yeah. See, I'm a more bridge and tunnel guy. Yeah, these bridge and tunnel folks, they come to this. I come from a place where one minute equals one mile on the road. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of how Florida is. Yeah, we're here. We're what 3.4 miles from your location. It'll be 46 minutes to get there. It really is bizarre. Like going to the beach down in Florida, it is 60 miles and it takes one hour to get there. Right. And then here, you'll look like my wife and I'll be like, oh, this place is like two miles away. Let's get an Uber an hour later. What is going on? It's crazy. I'll tell you a funny thing about Florida and Delaware in a second. But I forgot the top of the Uber. I knew you forgot. I was literally about to fill the words as you were going. Yeah, you saw my brain spinning. You're describing Hoboken how you like it. You like Hoboken? What were we talking about before? And then let's go one step farther back. We're one cart back. Wawa. No. Oh, yeah. My guy, Wawa. Your friend. My friend working at Wawa. There we go. Now we're back. That's why we increased us. Everyone listening like, God damn. So my buddy at Wawa, he actually worked in corrections with him. I was a prison guard for like a year. Which is a hilarious ripple in this whole thing. Yeah, I was not good at it. I got in the most trouble because I would just be chatting with him all the time. I heard you talking to Julian about this. Yeah, about sports and all that. Yeah, dude, you saw Kyrie last night? And like, that's why he lost his job as a corrections officer. They're like, dude, you can't be nice to them. We're supposed to brutalize these people. This is our free labor. What are you doing? Incarceration is about humiliation. Don't encourage them. Yeah. I didn't get in trouble. Well, one time I had this real long conversation with a guy I'd been in for 25 plus years for being a drug king bin. And I was just so enamored with it. I'm like, I'm trying to sell homes. Like, I was just getting started part-time in real estate. I'm trying to sell something that's legal and I can publicize it. You're doing something completely black. How did you do this? Tell me your secrets. Yeah, I was enamored with it. But he works at Wawa making in around $38,000, $42,000. Okay. Base level. Making subs. And I got him a house. About $1,000 mortgage. He didn't even have to pay anything to get it. We got the seller to cover all of his closing costs and we utilize a mortgage program. It's very common in rural areas called USDA. Good for him. The same ones that grade your beef can also give you a mortgage. Really? Yeah. And it's 100% financing. As long as you're buying in a rural area. So between that and the closing cost assistance, no dollars out of his pocket. That's awesome. $1,000 mortgage. $180,000 home. I ran into him last year at Wawa. He is now the shift manager. He makes way more. I couldn't qualify him for his own home. Now. Correct. Whoa. He wouldn't even come close to qualifying for his current house. And even if he did, the mortgage would have gone up 1.5%. He would have been closer to that 2250 $2,500 range because now is 180 homes now worth 350, 360 taxes have gone up. Insurance has gone up. And of course, just the median income requirements gone up. He wouldn't qualify no matter what he did, no matter how many savings he had, no matter what his credit score was. And it was just because he bought a specific time, which, you know, you'll see comment sections on talking about the housing market. Like, man, I should have bought when I was in middle school. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's, it's, it's true. Like there was a time. Frame where it was much easier to buy. And that was 2008 to 2022. And if you didn't buy in that range, I don't know what the future looks like. Cause rates are remaining high price points are remaining high. And some people say, well, Zach, that means it's going to crash guys. You got to look at the history of housing market crashes. The people that struggle the most are us. It's the labor class that gets jacked up by crashes. People romanticize. Oh, I'm going to buy my McMansion when the crash happens again, y'all the unemployment rate. In 2008 was plus 10%. That's more than double what it is now. That's not the oligarch struggling. That's you. The great depression was the only other time home prices crashed. And there was 25% unemployment. People were trading in seashells because they didn't have enough dollars. There's no time in history where housing has corrected and it didn't directly affect the spine of the labor class economy because investors, they have a lot more wiggle room. Right. Corporations. There's a lot more wiggle room boomers. Did you know 40% of homes in America right now, the style blow your mind, 40% of homes in America right now, single family don't have a mortgage. So how would we get into an economic scenario where that person is like, I can't afford this anymore. Yeah, I can't afford to have this paid off house where the bankers and the corporations own these hundred thousands bumps, how do we get them to an economic position where they have to sell? And then let me ask, what situation are you in economically if they're in that scenario? Yeah, I get it. I want affordable housing too. And I think there's ways that we can do it. I don't pray for a housing market crash, nor do I think one will happen. I know it's debated and it's all speculation. The bank, the bus that kills you is the one you don't see coming. So I'm not going to pretend I know. But historically speaking, it wouldn't be good for the labor class if it did. Right. Yeah. 2008. I like, I don't, I don't. There's no stories of regular people being like, yeah, I bought my house in 2009. It's people being like, dude, we lost our house. Yeah. Right? Like that's the story you hear way more. Lost my job, lost my business. Yeah. My family, you know, we were homeless for a little bit. Yeah. You hear those stories all the time. Is there no way to get a correction without a calamity? It would have to take a long period of time. Yeah. It would have to take a long period of time, which some could argue we're, we're in that phase right now for the past two and a half years prices, I think on median peaked at about 435. Now we're about 410. So it's, it's coming down, but at that pace, we're talking 10 years, 15 years to get back to a pace where it's on pace with income. And what does that do to wealth creation for the working class over the next 10, 15 years? Yeah. Because boomers who will claim to be the financial savants of their time just survived and became millionaires. Yeah. They put 10% of their money away, didn't get fired and paid their mortgage and they're millionaires. Yeah. That's all you had to do if you were buying a home in the sixties, seventies, eighties, that's not possible. That's not the way it is today. In fact, I, I have this conversation with my parents all the time, 1993 to 1997 was the most affordable time in American history. Really? According to the stats that I put together. Yeah. Sure. Some people will say it was the late, uh, late eighties. Some people will say it was actually the 2000 to 2004 range, but it all depends on what you're looking at. I created a basket, which was like food, childcare, rent, the car payment, and just say living the normal American lifestyle, 1993 to 1997 was the most affordable. And if I put an end to it, index on that meaning a hundred is really just baseline anything above a hundred is very affordable and everything below a hundred is unaffordable the baseline of a hundred is hit almost all the way from 2008 to 2022 if not above it 1993 to 1997 we sat at about 112 today we sit at 78 so it's significantly less affordable not just for housing to raise a kid to buy a car to just live a lifestyle and i think a lot of people are feeling that they'll get told they're lazy for that they'll get told they're complaining for that they'll get told that they're just looking at the negative for that i say you're just looking at the facts for that you're looking at a unbiased view on the financial standing of this country and the financial standing of your own balance sheet for your own home and seeing i can't afford this no matter how many subscriptions i put to the side no matter how much avocado toast i don't eat no matter how much coffee i make at home which by the way it's almost the same price now that coffee's gone up and cost it there's nothing you can do to really cut back to double your income right and that's what a lot of people are feeling right now and they want solutions which is why i think a lot of people um get behind these politicians so heavily because they make such audacious promises heck we just saw trump make his third dividend uh check promise for five thousand dollars if the republicans win the midterms which is bribery yeah and in my opinion i in my opinion all to buy more time yeah and that's why again i think we're in this point where they all know what's happening kevin warsh at the federal reserve knows what's happening scott besant at the treasury knows what's happening trump vance they know what's happening in my opinion the people that know what's happening and know that they're going to benefit from what's happening are the real people in charge which in my opinion are the tech bros those are the individuals who see the future is bright they're the ones that see a collapse of something that would benefit them actually and frankly between the lobbyists and the lobbying money that they put into it i i firmly believe they're behind most of the decision making how do you feel like the tech oligarchs would benefit from i mean the massive increase in housing prices the wage stagnation like would that not create some type of economic fallout that also influences them negatively sure so the the short answer would be just like the great depression who benefited in the 30s and 40s from the great depression the most it was the tech lords or the tech lords of the time the bank leaders the oligarchs they were able to buy things at discount businesses assets all different kinds of things they were able to buy at a lower cost because the people that could no longer afford to hold on to it were selling at lower prices similar thing happened in 2008 but we we kind of stopped the bleeding with all the bank bailouts and the money printing that we brought in we could have allowed it to fall we didn't what causes crime i mean desperation desperation perfect answer i agree what causes the most desperation in our country usually economic desperation they don't have anything to live for they don't have anything to work for they don't have anything to do yeah not as simple as like oh i don't have food so i'm going to like steal a woman's purse i think that's like too simple of an explanation i think it's more of like hope yeah and that if you're in a position where you're like okay there's no way out of my circumstance there's no way out of my town that i live in and everyone i know is like on drugs precisely i don't care about life just the same exact conversation i have with that guy in the prison that was a drug kingpin i believe he and i were very similar and that was kind of a a moment for me it's like we're very similar in the way that we're thinking about these things and you're very astute in talking about it you know the dynamics of business it's just where we started yeah the situation that we were handed the situation that we were handed the situation that we were handed the choices that we made that led us there right a person would carry out i guess more likely to carry out like a senseless act of violence to like join into a gang if they felt like they had no hope for the future right like they just don't care if they live or die and that one guy he talked about the because i said why did you do it and the first thing he said was his family he wanted to support his family and that could be an excuse but support his family economic disparity traditionally leads to higher crime so this is just one caveat in the whole ecosystem of what the tech world could look like but isn't that a really good opportunity to bring in more surveillance when there's more crime doesn't give you more of an argument flock benefits flock and things like that benefit overall surveillance benefits digital id benefits you know when crime's going up you have this opportunity to step in and provide the solution when people are desperate and you provide a solution it oftentimes is is easier for the general population to swallow when they know they're in a tough position like for example we just passed the anniversary of 9-11 what happened directly after 9-11 that probably most people wouldn't have signed up for hadn't not happened the patriot act uh yeah which stated hey we're gonna look at all your information right but it's because we don't want terrorism right right hey we're gonna print all this money 2008 but it's because the economy's collapsed whenever we get in these positions of disparity they can present solutions that benefit them 1907 bank panic leads to a federal reserve world war ii leads to the bretton woods agreement i think that that type of situation is what they're banking on i think this is a not to be black billy a either structured and planned or allowed for economic collapse of america so they can come back and buy for parts and orchestrate their own ideology that isn't as much based off of legislation and the like so i think that's a good idea i think that's a good idea because they've already paid off a great majority of them but now they wouldn't even have to go through them the elon musk's and peter teal's and the alex karp's are the ones that would be making the decisions and as we see right now i mean this war the beginning of this war when we bombed a school was because of an ai mistake it was it was a program called lavender which is created by palantir which is alex karp and peter teal the same exact people who lobbied and created jd vance that was the school in iran that got bombed it was an ai mistake yep there was a there were actually ai mistakes the other one was not lethal we bombed a park on accident because we were trying to a police station the park's name was police park no so yes that's why give me a better reason the we're utilizing ai for targeting it the program's called lavender it's very well known peter teal the one who's co-owning out with alex karp for palantir has been asked multiple times and he won't really give a straight answer as to how he feels morally about it but more so than it's just what they do what the fuck and it's disgusting dude like i'm even having a moment last night we're watching hamilton in this beautiful theater in this beautiful city in this country that is just operating like you come to new york city and you all the systems that are running all at once just fluently from the subway system to the marketing of times square to just the amount of businesses and people that are flooding in from all over types of walks of life that are here and it operates and it works that's incredible for us to be in this ecosystem is such a blessing for me to have been born in this ecosystem is such a blessing and here i am enjoying this play about american history meanwhile there are people in palestine right now that are going back to their rubble created house with no electricity no power and no hope of food in the near future and it's because of us and that hurts it it does put me and this isn't a good thing probably especially long term but it does put me in the position of like man i kind of feel guilty for enjoying this sometimes yeah because we are enjoying it on the backs of other countries inflate like india right now they've had 10 plus food inflation for the last three months and that's been because of the war last three months yeah the philippines they're on a four-day work week and have been for the last six and a half months to keep their oil usage down and i have uh two workers have been working with me uh for seven years i love them that don't know what the future of the philippines looks like because of this war causing so many global issues for a dick waving contest and kind of unaware of it at least i yeah because i know smart people they don't cover it well not even not even no i wouldn't say smart people i think there's plenty of smart people that don't look at this stuff and quite honestly don't look at it because they know it's dark yeah they don't want to and i get that like sometimes did you ever watch the movie bird box no you never watched bird box no no do you watch bird box okay so the concept of bird box was it's like this apocalyptic i think it was like an alien or something like that that was up in the sky and everyone had to start wearing blindfolds because if they looked at it they were like oh my god it's so beautiful and then they killed themselves whoa i sometimes feel like the guy that's doing that to that lady i sometimes feel like i'm like look at it it's right there and if we all look at it together we could do something about it but instead we're so divided into our tribes we're so divided into left first right while they take green it's it's always been that way it's always been that way and as someone who didn't grow up in the political zeitgeist i do feel like i kind of have a more neutral point of view i have my bias just like everybody has their bias i have my own theories just like anyone else has their theories but i don't really abide by oh i'm blue oh i'm red and i think the whole thing is kind of silly and it creates more or more problems and does solutions and it kind of sets us back because we spend so much time arguing over the nuances instead of solving the core problems yeah and then on top of that like all the cultural they're like of course i i think it's funny like i'll make jokes about it because like i'm a comic but at the same time like i don't really and a good comic too by the way i appreciate that thank you but like i just don't care really like if i'm looking at like what actually matters for the average person like i just don't really think like trans athletes like are changing anyone's lives or like these other cultural issues like sure it's interesting and like there's certain things that need to be assessed for like the protection of kids whatever but like generally it's like well how much does it cost to go to the doctor yeah that's what i think generally matters for the average person like will how long does it take to be able to see one yeah exactly can i retire do i have to work until the day i die like things like that that i think are probably more pressing which is why i think by the way just on that point i think boomers are so apathetic to all this hmm think about it we had like i think it was the late 50s we had the church committee church committee was when i believe it was the cia had to come out and state all these insane things we had been doing i think mk ultra came out mk ultra we had a heart attack gun yeah all this crazy stuff right they saw jfk get assassinated they watched hitler reign over the planet like all this wildness and evil but then when they came back from the war they were given a house yeah and they could afford groceries and they could raise a kid on one income i personally think when the economic state of our country is healthy people do tend to care less about what's going on in the world because everything's fine everything's fine here whatever we're doing out there okay it's working but now it doesn't seem to be working which is why i think so many more people are looking at it oh interesting that's that's personally why i think so many more people are looking at it like people even like my brother who again was never a political guy at all he's in the situation where he's younger than i and stuck in that zeitgeist of i should have bought a home when i was in high school and i you know i couldn't yeah so what else do you look at will you look at what caused it how could we solve it and then you realize well this is what's caused it it's been greed it's been corruption it's been bribery it's been all this shit and then what could solve it sits there unattended and is deemed socialism because it's handouts but didn't we hand out trillions of dollars to banks yeah didn't we hand out billions when they were struggling yeah isn't that socialism isn't isn't that a handout when it goes to the banks yeah but when you need a handout to be able to afford a home like a first-time home buyer we don't have the money for that but we can give the money to the banks and the socialists and the socialists and the banks and the socialists and the socialists and the socialists and the socialists and the socialists billion dollars to iran for a war that we shouldn't have been in now you're talking yeah now that's easy money we got that you know or or this dividend check five thousand for every working american that would be 1.3 to 1.7 trillion dollars to be able to do depending on the definition of a working uh working american it depends yeah we don't have it so if the republicans win the the midterm how much money is it you said one point it'd be 1.3 to 1.7 depending on the debt and we don't have it we're in a 500 billion a month close to deficit we we don't have anybody buying our debt anymore so it's not like we could just issue debt and say hey buy up our bonds and we're going to use that to support this no one's buying them there's a reason why america and the cayman islands are two of the largest holders of american debt it's because it's us buying it and us in the disguise buying it yeah i mean it's hilarious to be like hey if the republicans win the midterms we will go into more debt like that's basically what he's saying yeah and then people are like oh that's cool yeah that's that's great and to my knowledge it's the first time because like when biden was running for office he uh obviously kovitz going on congress was already talking about a 600 stimulus and he campaigned on i'm gonna up that to 1400 if i win or if these two senators and i win so people like well that's the same thing well not really because it was already being congressionally spoken about and he was attempting to gain office for himself many politicians have made promises many empty promises to get into office i don't know if i've ever seen somebody in office trying to get somebody else in office with one of these empty promises yeah i don't know if i've ever seen that one yeah i mean to me i'm like not even surprised i guess where i'm like i just don't trust you don't color me surprised but yes i haven't seen it before what do you think about the zorons and the dsa sort of uh uptick i completely understand why it's popular why this capitalist thing isn't working why not we haven't had a man try this before why not this guy's young he knows how to talk he hates israel he checks all the boxes now i don't have any skin in the game with new york city right at all whether it fails whether it succeeds no offense doesn't matter delaware is still there we got our chickens we're good yeah as a economics nerd i'm geeked i want to see if it works yeah i want to see if this whole bus program food program rent lock program which i think historically has never worked i want to see if it works it's the largest economy in america i want to see if it works and if it does work if four years down the road things have improved crime's gone down prosperity's gone up well maybe now we have something to rip off and duplicate yeah and if it fails never again sure this is a great opportunity personally in my opinion some people are on the side of this is one step from communism and he's going to institute sharia law before you know it yeah and i think that's a bit crazy right and other people think oh well this is going to create no wealth gap in new york and everyone's going to be fine it's i also think that's crazy right i think it'll be a little bit of a nothing sandwich at the end of the day but the dsa side um abdul maheen up i don't think i'm pronouncing his name right up in michigan yeah similar stance uh obviously hassan piker who i generally like a lot of his takes i don't agree with all of them but i i can always appreciate someone who's willing to walk against the grain and speak about something confidently and speak about something with uh passion is against the grain because you're gonna catch flack for it you're gonna catch flack for it as he is i can appreciate someone who's doing that do again do i have a stance as to whether i like it or don't like it i am not enough in the political zeitgeist to to tell you as a nerd for economics i'd love to see how it works out yeah it's going to be interesting to see what the the play out is because again i see he's filling a lot of potholes i hear which is nice yeah he's filling a lot of potholes that actually is nice that's pretty cool christa have you driven over any of the fixed still gotta work on it but like there's little things even just like i don't know like water fountains and shit like that which like maybe is uh him like altruistically trying to care for the city or someone would make that argument yeah maybe it's uh smart politics to be like yeah let's just fix a bunch of superficial stuff either way yeah let's fix the cheap stuff that people have been ignoring for a long time also nice though yeah yeah as a new yorker what is your thought on him i have no idea again i like i recognize that he's a very competent politician yeah and he's played a excellent game agreed the outcome of that game is yet to be seen and i generally just have no faith in politicians amen so it's difficult for me to be like like i i try to do this as a bit i never really got to work but like anyone that's ever bought like uh a politician's merch shouldn't be allowed to vote like if you think like this guy's gonna save you you're you're out you're done no you can't be a part of it because like like and i don't know if it's a good thing to do but like i don't know if it's a good thing to do care what it is it's a mega hat if it's like i'm with her sticker it's like you're these people i don't know like i just have zero faith great take like i'm just like great take like i don't you can't you can vote for these people you can like support one or the other but the idea that like this person's my guy like they don't care about us i completely get that i don't know but also i'm kind of nihilistic with this uh yeah i i it's like for me i do feel nihilistic about it but not because they're solutions it's because i don't think we're ever going to go after them what do you think are the macro solutions like again for america yeah gonna get to like the individual agent in a minute but like from a top-down perspective like what could be instituted in the next year on the big scale that you think would dramatically improve things well first state it wouldn't be the first year and nor do i think many of much of it's realistic um but logically speaking i i think we got to start from where the water's getting into the house i think we gotta start from where the water's getting into the house i think we gotta start from where the water's getting into the house congress a lot of the reasons we're in the situation is due to legislation things like nafta 93 glass steagle in 99 and sec marginal shift in 2004 the supreme court ruling which i know is in congress of citizens united in 2010 and the decision by the fed to print money the decision by congress to bail out banks a lot of it stems from government we need to ban lobbying immediately we need politicians who are after people's prosperity non-profit can't have profit so if we got that instituted immediately i think that the people who want to run for office are going to be of a different tenure if you took that away from them if they're not going to be able to be career politicians if they're not gonna be able to pick up an executive board position when they're done with this done stock trading insider trading stock exactly if we got the financial benefits of being a public servant out of it and stop making it a position of of wealth gain and we got back to it's a public servant by one of our own peers that would immediately put the bright people in that position once they're there i think immediately you have to solve the housing problem i think at a local level zoning is constraining builders it's not allowing them to build vertically this is the ezra klein sort of abundance perspective of like we should build more we should create a situation where we can build more uh more effectively and quicker quicker and correctly because at this moment most of the homes that are being built are these those are the homes that are being built by the government and the neighborhoods the single family 2500 square foot four bed two and a half baths You know, you look at D.R. Horton, Ryan Homes, KB Homes, all them, Polte, they're just building standard McMansion neighborhoods that no first time home buyer wants. So we're not building the inventory that's needed. We're not in a supply crisis. We're in an affordable supply crisis. So zoning is really constricting as to where you can build, what you can build. And then you have these things called infrastructure costs that also tally up to about 25 percent. Hear this about 25 percent of the cost of building a home happens before they've even hired a labor or ordered a shingle. It's from the cost of getting the engineers out there, the cost of getting the sewer line built out for the homes that are coming in and the streets that are going to come in. And the 25 percent right there is raising the bar for what they're going to have to charge. Then we have inflation that's affecting laborers. They got to get paid more to survive. That's affecting its supply tariffs. That's all affecting the price. So we have to find a way to build more efficiently. So we got to build more vertically, especially in a place like Delaware. I know in New York you don't have that problem. But in rural areas, we need to build more vertically. We need to be able to build tiny homes. We need to learn how to 3D print homes. We need to get out of this world where we're consistently leaning on. The gigantic builders to make the decision is that the type of supply that we need. The second thing I would say to solve the supply crisis is we need to force divestment from macro investors. Trump recently and Congress passed a road to affordable housing act, which as a nerd, I read from top to bottom. Really? Yeah, it's what I do at this point in my life. And in my opinion, it's not going to do anything except for low income rent and low income buying. Everywhere in the middle and above, not really going to affect it. One of the parts of that bill, which was largely headlined, was we're going to ban banks from buying more rentals. That's cool. Yeah. So the definition was set at anyone who owns, I believe, more than 350 homes. Okay. Now, I think that's a good start. But not only should they not be able to buy, we need to force anyone who owns more than that to sell down to that level. And in my opinion, the level is going to be higher. The level should actually be 50, because there's no walking human in this country who would not be able to comfortably retire and supply for their family and their future kin a lifestyle with less than 50 or with 50 homes. Come on, as people are trying to get one forced divestment from investors would actually force the proper supply to the market because investors buy the affordable homes that for some homebuyers would want. They're buying the 1200 square foot bungalow. They're buying the row of townhouses. They're buying the small properties that we're looking for. So if we forced divestment, we'd force the supply into the market. So that's the supply side. Then you have the demand side. Well, people don't make enough money. There's a lot of discussion as to how we fix the wage problem. But specifically for first time buying, I think there's two ways that we could do it. One, I think we create a program on the backs of the investors. So I'm a military vet. I've used my VA mortgage now twice. When you use your VA mortgage, it's 100% financing. But you have to pay a VA funding fee. It can be anywhere between 1.25 all the way up to like 3%, depending on how many times you've used it. If you've been injured or something like that, it's waived. But you have to pay a fee to use that mortgage. So investors get to buy their homes with absolutely zero fee. Why should a veteran have to pay a fee? I think there should be an investor fee. I think if you have plans to profit, and that's what should be all the plan for profit policy, if you have plans to profit, you don't plan to live in it. There needs to be a fee. The fee won't be month to month. We won't jack up your cash flow. All right. And some people say, well, Zach, they already have to pay a higher mortgage rate. Most of the marketing mortgages. So shut up. Right. They're buying cash. Exactly. And when they are, they don't give a shit. They're fine. So if we put a 2% to 4% fee on every investor purchase, and we're also forcing them to divest anything that they had over a certain cap, we would force supply back onto the market. And we build up a state-run fund that could supply closing cost assistance to first-time buyers because the first argument. is, well, we don't have the money. Great. Get it from the investor. The other side that I think we could fix the demand side with is a national first-time homebuyer program. I believe Harris had spoken about it in her campaigning. She wanted to give $20,000 in a first-time homebuyer program. I hated it because she never actually gave a plan for where the money was going to come from or how it was going to be disseminated. And everyone's like, she had a plan. I'm like, no, she didn't. She didn't really have a plan. You may have liked her words a bit more, but she didn't have a plan. Neither did he. But I think we could do that, but it would force us to print money. And I'm all for it because we've always printed money for the oligarch. We should print money for the regular American. If we can print for war, if we can print for oil, if we can print for the Epstein class, we can print for the regular everyday American. And it would cost not nearly as much as it would be to support this military industrial complex. So I think that would solve the supply and demand complex of housing. But of course, there's so many other issues. How do we get teachers paid more? Care workers working? How do we keep AI from ruining jobs? How do we get people making more so they can actually afford a lifestyle? How do we get child care costs down? How do we get private equity out of Wall Street? How do we get private equity out of child care? All these different problems that I think, again, stem from if we got real people that were real public servants in office, we would get real solutions. But instead, it's all just a big posturing act for lobbyists and donors and their constituents when in reality, they're not acting in our best interest. They hardly ever are. I think there was a stat that said, regardless of what America thinks, there's a 20% likelihood that it will get passed, whether or not we like it or not. Yeah. Hey, guys, we're gonna take a break really quick because I want to tell you about ultra focus pouches. Now, if you know anything about me, I love nicotine. I also love caffeine. Now, the thing that I didn't consider with nicotine is that around workouts, I'm actually doing myself a disservice because nicotine is a vasoconstrictor. It literally narrows your blood vessels, which gives you a little boost. You feel good, but it actually raises your heart rate, which is the exact opposite of what I want when I'm going to the gym. And that's why I reached out to ultra. I literally saw them online and I was like, this is cool. So I reached out to them. And what I liked about them is that it's a nicotine free pouch with zero nicotine and zero caffeine. It literally uses nootropics and adaptogens to provide a smooth energy and focus mental clarity without leaving me like overstimulated or feeling like I'm going to crash. So I put one in like five minutes before I work out or before I do a podcast or before I go do standup. And if I feel calm, I feel steady. It lasts for about, like one to two hours. My favorite flavor is watermelon, but the blue raspberry is making a real comeback. I love that one. And so if you want focused energy without nicotine or caffeine, I'm telling you, ultra is the way to go. Ultra pouches are awesome. It is the guilt-free pouch. Even if you just like putting in a pouch because it feels nice, ultra has something for you. New customers can even use the code camp, C-A-M-P to get 15% off at takeultra.com. That is free. You purchase. They're going to ask where you heard about ultra. Tell them that Mark and Christos here at the campsite sent you. That's why I get nihilistic because I'm like untangling citizens United. Right. Just seems complete. Like the, which for those, yeah. For those that don't know that, do you want to explain that one? I think you got it. Oh, sure. Uh, Supreme court ruling that basically allowed for money to be invested infinitely through. We've all heard at this point, super packs to invest into political campaigns, which has allowed, you know, a pack is probably the most, talked about one at this point to have so much influence, even the national association of realtors, huge lobbying impact. Yeah. Cause they want to keep the realtor infrastructure going. Right. There's all this lobbying that's coming in from black rock, private equity firms, big tech oligarchs in the AI space that are basically getting these people to vote specific ways. I'll give an example. Uh, the carried interest loophole carried interest is essentially what's allowing these private equity firms to be so profitable when they, uh, the way that they make money. One of the ways that they make money is through what's called a leveraged buyout. They'll buy a company using bank financing and other investors, money, a little bit of their own money. And that's the important part to buy up a company though. Usually in one fund buy up anywhere from 10 to 12, I think eight to 12 was the lowest eight was the lowest I've seen eight to 12 companies in this fund. And the job of them is now to create a more profitable business of these eight to 12 businesses. So that means they're going to rip apart the labor. That means they're going to rip apart infrastructure. In fact, we saw the ripping apart of warehouses is one of the main reasons as the Hoyser Russ went out of business. Oh, really? Yeah. They re leveraged their warehouse infrastructure, the real estate they held in their warehouses, and they took what they were normally paying, bought it, then re rented it back to Toys R Us for an exorbitant amount, forcing them into bankruptcy. And so it was private equity that came in. Yes. Oh, I didn't realize. Yes. That's interesting. And that's the same reason. I think Joanne fabrics is the one that had recently gone out of business. I think Hooters has gone out of business. I mean, they weren't really a staple in our economy, but I guess for some, but the, uh, the, the private equity benefit or profit for them is when they sell it, they sell it back. And when they sell it, they don't get taxed like you and I on income. They get taxed on capital gains, which is essentially for those who don't know, if you were to buy a house and you were to sell it within two to three years for a higher margin, you have to pay capital gains tax on that because it's your own personal asset because they put a little bit of their own money into that initial fund. They're able to claim it's one of their personal assets. And so they're able to do this thing called two and 20. As long as they hold these companies, they get to reap a 2% gain off of whatever's being made. And whenever it's sold, hold they take on 20 of the profit and then from there goes the interest loophole because now they don't get taxed on that income at the same rate that they should so they have all these different ways of making the money now they're not taxed on the money and then they just recycle it back into doing the same exact thing and that's why they own the hilton hotels and jersey mics and all these other businesses they're buying up at a higher uh higher frequency and not even just american businesses we got the ports in the panama canal we got energy uh energy in australia we got power grids in virginia they just started a real estate investment trust the largest ever in india they're buying up wind turbines in germany they invest in blacklisted country uh companies in china they're all over the world and they i believe the number is 85 percent of the stock market has a 10 to 20 ownership of one of the three big companies which are blackrock vanguard and state street those three companies have their claws in the entire economic infrastructure of america wow we have to rip them out and it will be painful because we waited too long when they say a bank is too big to fail it's because it would infrastructurally cause pandemonium if they did we've built that system we allowed for these banks to be too big to fail and now we have to either wean them off of the drug they've been on of money or allow it to crash because our only other option is allowing them to continue to grow and blackrock i think has 15 trillion in assets and they're not going to be able to do that they're going to have to under its management? Yeah. And growing? And how much more can it go at this rate, right? That's a great question. I mean, as long as the dollar keeps getting printed, and as long as things keep getting more expensive, there's going to be more liquidity available for these giant oligarchs. Because there's this old 1700s economic theory called the canteen effect. It says whenever you add money to a monetary base, add money, only three people benefit the government, the banks and asset holders. So the asset holders being 15 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock benefits heavily from money printing, which is why it's so significant that when the Federal Reserve was deciding whether or not they should print money in 2008, they called BlackRock to help them make that decision. I wonder what they said. I wonder. And guess what? When we printed $4 trillion in March of 2020, they called in BlackRock to help them with that decision. I think it'd be a good idea. Yeah. Why not bring in someone who's fully invested worldwide into this? Yeah. To help us make it. And I won't go too deep into the rabbit hole. But interestingly enough, Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, gets called in 2008 to help clean up the 2008 housing market crash. 2008 housing market crash was caused by these things called collateralized debt obligations. Right. CDOs. CDOs. My guy. I know that one. Yeah. So CDOs is essentially just this really diversified way to invest in an asset. So a collateralized mortgage obligation is when they package together 400, 500, 1,000 different mortgage notes into one investment. And they say as long as these people are paying on their mortgage, and seeing as there's so many of them, a great majority will, you're going to get a percentage of the interest as long as you hold it. Similar to the bond. You hold it, you get the interest. Then they started to become toxic. Why? People stopped paying their mortgages. Why? Because from 2004 to 2007, they were given teaser rates of 2% and 3% that would slowly bubble up. We had adjustable rates. They weren't checking income. They also weren't guaranteeing they had a job. So a bunch of people that have mortgages shouldn't have had them. You know, one of the people who was a big proponent for those collateralized debt obligations? Larry Fink. Do you know at first Boston in 1984, who helped invent the collateralized debt obligation? No. Larry Fink. And then who was called in in 2008 to fix the mess that his own tool caused? Larry Fink. Wow. Which I find very interesting. Wow. Yeah. It's the same names pop up all throughout history, like the owner of Blackstone. He's passed now. Peter G. Peterson, who sounds like a Spider-Man villain. Yeah. Seems not real. He was on the board with Nixon when Nixon decided to get us off the gold standard. He was the person who created the document in April of 1971 that convinced him we were falling behind in global trade and we needed to. And then he went on to create Blackstone and Blackstone would create BlackRock. And then BlackRock is BlackRock. Yeah. When people say the Illuminati, I feel like this is what they're talking about without knowing they're talking about it. Right. Right. Wow. I did not know that it was the same guy that drafted up. They pop up all throughout history, man. The same names, same connects. I mean, I mentioned Nelson Aldrich, right? I'll say a name here in a second that pretty much everyone will know. My wife laughed about it as we saw the building for it. Nelson Aldrich, the senator who would inevitably create the Federal Reserve through it, went over to Europe to study other central banks and how they were doing it. His daughter, a few years prior to that, her name was Abby, married John D. Rockefeller's son. They would name their son Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller. He was a Rockefeller. He was in the family. And who does this directly benefit this Federal Reserve thing? And who was you mentioned earlier, the creature of Jekyll Island, who were one of the two, two of the six people presented there, the Rockefellers. Wow. So again, you see similar names tied around and be like, oh, it's conspiracy. How many times you got to see it in a row to still call it that? Right. Yeah. It's not really a conspiracy if there's one, a paper trail. Yes. Which is pretty obvious. Because to be clear, conspiracy simply means somebody behind closed doors outside of public light is making decisions for their own benefit. Yeah. I mean, that's just that's it. It's not really a conspiracy. It's just that they put two things together and they make sense. There's there's evidence. So a conspiracy theorist is simply someone who's putting evidence together to say these people are acting behind closed doors in their own benefit. Yeah. And when you see the names pop up so often and you see where the money's been going for so many decades, again, I don't bring it to just it is a quote unquote conspiracy theory. But I hate that that word is being used as some tinfoil cockamamie. He must also believe the aliens run the world. Right. Theory, which maybe they don't. I would feel almost more comfortable if that was the aliens were in charge. It would help me sleep at night. Yeah. Because then I knew the GOP wasn't. Yeah. Yeah. The alternative is kind of way scarier. Yeah. Aliens over Peter Thiel. I'm I'm secured. Yeah. Maybe they're the same. Dude, Peter Thiel's a weird looking dude. At this rate. You know, the men in black theory of all the weird looking people are secretly aliens. Yeah. I mean, Peter fits that vibe. Dude. I mean, it's like it's unsettling. Like, what is the I guess what is the individual like? What am I? Yeah, let's shift this. What can I do? I was getting depressed sitting here. I'm officially doomed. Okay. I have been in the last year or so focused, especially on a private level of a little small group going right now we're doing a 90 day challenge together on separating herself from the consumerist mindset of this country. This entire country is obsessed with everything that makes us worse as humans, especially as men. Whether it's gambling, which is been rampant from Cal she sports betting these prediction markets. It's draining the people that target who are the younger individuals in America, the ones that already don't have anything. They're targeting them to get more of their money. Pornography is free, easy to access. I mean, we're walking through Times Square. What's her name again? Sweet Sweeney Sweeney and her ad, which is basically naked on Times Square. Why am I looking at a naked person with a football in Times Square? The amount of that are holding us back from the doom scrolling to what we eat to what we do with our day-to-day lives is just formatted around things that are not making us better we're getting drained of our energy we're being drained of our testosterone we're being drained of any hope we have in our country and we're like what do we do i think we revolt by taking control of our own path we don't have to follow the path that is making everybody rich we don't have to continually give money to all these mega corporations we don't have to continue to ingest all this food that's poisoning us we don't have to indulge in all of these comfort items because that's all it is we're trying to comfort ourselves we're trying to distract ourselves we're trying to convince ourselves we're doing it for one reason but in reality it's to cover up a version of ourselves we don't like or some trauma we haven't dealt with or a relationship that was still in flux like there's so many issues we have internally that we don't have the time to even work on because there's so many other external issues to focus on and then you get this muzzle velocity in the past two three years of headline headline headline headline headline i mean we've had 17 water gates in a year and a half yeah they don't even matter they don't even matter yeah right so the the the amount of of things to focus on i think the number one thing we could do for ourselves is go analog read a book journal breathing exercises meditation getting in the gym having conversation going more local going to your farmers markets these are the things that could actually grow us as people but nothing in the in the in the media landscape would convince you that that's what you want yeah instead we're force-fed things that make us degenerates yeah yeah professor jang i don't know if you follow yeah yeah i find him fascinating very entertaining fascinating chinese plant there yeah exactly many of his takes i disagree with but he did have one that i thought was great that basically the current sort of consumer economy that we've developed like really since like the 70s but for a long time is the perfection of slavery because we don't know it right like as long as we are trying to buy things to keep up appearances on social media to look cool to compete with people that are leasing bugattis anyway it's like we've put ourselves into a position where we are continuing to work to earn a small wage to then spend immediately and we never need to revolt because we think that we're achieving right like we're in this position we're like oh no i bought the new gucci sweatpants so i'm good until the next year and then you just are on this flywheel this hamster wheel of just purchasing and trying to consume and fill the the negative space inside you the gap that you have to make yourself feel good and you never turn around and say like hey what is this what am i doing yeah how long have i been just searching for dopamine hits my whole life yeah and it's it's the perfection of slavery because the issue with literal slavery is that you have slave rebellions you have people saying hey i'm not going to take it this anymore but our current situation where it's like well we can buy a big enough tv that we never need to do anything because we're pretty placated and uh i thought it was an interesting point i hadn't really heard in that framing before that's no that's an interesting one and it's uh yeah i find it especially like just the incest of slavery yeah that's the way he framed it it's like because there's no revolt there's no you can't rally the troops because everyone's sort of like drinking the soma you know i mean as huxley would say like yeah everyone's sort of happy with this sort of opiate to say like yeah there's no everything's fine when really it's like well your life could be better right like you could potentially own something like you could get married you could have multiple kids like that fulfillment is so much greater than this conspicuous consumption the world's sort of obsessed with so that in its own right i think is like fantastic and then in general it's like yeah i think the constant state of like paralysis and anxiety that we're in from consuming on social and just like headlines and other shit yeah which like living other people's top moments consistently yeah exactly like all of that stuff and then like i'm glad you brought that up because a lot of people don't really like to bring it up but it's something that i even feel strongly about where i'm like this shit is bad not only is it bad it's not only bad for the the people that are subjected to it like that are actually like producing this stuff but just for like the consumer which is mostly sex slavery yeah right i mean like hey like we'll pay you this amount and your life is now over and we're gonna it's a modeling contract but really it's a hundred percent hardcore and they're being assaulted and they're being yeah yeah and like drugs and the whole thing absolutely but on top of that like the consumer themselves like right i don't think it i don't think it drives you towards a fulfilling relationship i don't think it drives you towards like building a family no no because you're you're replacing again the the feeling of connection with a screen or or like back in the day i guess a magazine like you're replacing that highway in your brain for genuine connection with instantaneous release yeah and when you're able to do that you're able to do it and you're able to do it and you're able to access that freely 24 7 i heard someone say the other day like when somebody has a point addiction it's like a someone with a cigarette addiction except the cigarette pack is attached to their body yeah i was like yeah i guess that's a pretty good way of putting it yeah so and it literally costs nothing like at least with gambling you you've reached a point where you're like well i'm done yeah i don't have money yeah but with this it's like it's just non-stop yeah i i i don't have a further take on i think i think it is one of the things that is holding a lot of young men back it's accessibility and and just the fact of the matter of at at the time i guess in the 70s you weren't able to just roll right straight into another dopamine feeding activity you can do that and you can go right to doom scrolling you can go right to this and right to that right to drinking right to your vape and right and just you've you've gone weeks months years without having a free thought that wasn't surrounded by how do i get my next hit you may not feel like an addict but if you actually sit back and look at i mean i had this moment in my life a few years ago i was like i've just been a constant pattern of fulfillment and that means i'm not fulfilled in myself because i'm constantly looking for it externally and then you look at it internally and at the same exact time like a year prior to that i'd already pretty much had my entire worldview shattered yeah i was like god like this is all fake it's all set up for us to fail in a way and it's all for the benefit of a small group of people yeah so i'm gonna start talking about this now what about like trying to own a home that's like it's weird because i i think i'm not going to be able to do it i'm not going to be able to do it i got like immigrant brain you know what i mean like my parents i mean granted not really immigrants they came from canada but like they bought a house and that like for my dad it was like yeah like we like that's funny how we don't count canadians as immigrants but we count mexicans as immigrants you got to go north to be an immigrant right and uh but like yeah he he got a house and he was like nice and i think about that where i'm like if everything else goes to shit if i just owned a place that i could live in yeah i would way better because there's the peace of mind too of if all of this keeps happening and we keep printing in this credit-based usury fractional reserve lending system that we have that needs to create more credit my house is going to be worth more so i'm going to be richer in the long term i have a place to stay yeah i completely agree with that that's why i think it is the the one of the foundations of our problem is people don't have hope but if we could get a home and we can get like the life started and gears moving it probably brings more hope like you said yeah so is there hope for the generation below me like someone that's like 18 19 in college now to buy a home what would you advise them to do outside of the obvious things of like you know save money yada yada is it just like wait for rates to go down um so i would give a five-year plan i would give a five-year plan and i'll lay it out like this this is just in my opinion the path of least resistance um no i don't think it's number one when it comes to a mortgage program uh rates may come down they may not but one thing you are guaranteed is two things your state and or your county could be both have first-time homebuyer programs country does not offer one but they do you can look up like for example delaware state housing authority or new york state housing authority fill in your state look it up fill in your county look it up even some big cities look it up see what's being offered utah had a crazy good program in 2023 through 2020 and they're not going to be able to get a homebuyer in 2025 helped a lot of people get in their first home helped a lot of builders build small homes really worked they did the supply they did the demand boom so in my opinion uh the easiest way to get that mortgage is through either a your state housing authorities for some homebuyer or b and this is the one that some people be like oh i don't want that new construction because new construction actually has their own mortgage programs they don't actually have to base it off of a standard bank rate they have their own private financing and oftentimes offer significantly better rates so that leads in step number two step number two get a townhome i don't want you to look at single family housing i i want you to look at a townhome for a couple reasons one you're getting more square footage for your buck two you're also probably buying in an area that's in or around the economic sun you go out to the boonies of idaho you will not find townhomes okay you're gonna find a townhome like near downtown exactly you're gonna be in an area that economically is kind of insulated so you're gonna be in an area that more than likely your home value is gonna go up so that's another one but frankly they're just cheaper so you're gonna have a better opportunity to get into them in delaware you could still get a townhome maybe 310 to 320 i know here that's probably 499 to 650 uh but in that area for whatever area you're in that's going to be your cheapest option the second thing i would say is we are in a market where negotiations are working and i think in the next three four or five years that's not going to go away i think we are slipping deeper and deeper and i think we're going to have a better opportunity to get into them in the near future so we're going to have a better opportunity to get into them in the near future so into a buyer's market uh right now we're in a frozen market we wouldn't really define it as a seller or a buyer in fact technically we're still by definition in a seller's market because the seller's market's defined as homes are selling at median in three months or less right now for the country we're selling in 75 days or less so we're still in a seller's market could that shift quickly yeah so in that sense i would say that with a new construction owner or a personal owner walking in and saying i don't want to pay any closing cost is the number one game and i don't care if you have to go through a hundred homes to get it do not pay closing costs because you're not getting your money back those are one-time fees that you'll never see again that's twelve thousand dollars you will never see again and i would much rather if you did have it put it into your down payment now for those of you who say i don't have either of those again i would point you toward new construction with your state housing authority because your state housing authority usually offers a lower rate and or assistance with money if not both with that you could also use that from that program and use it on a new construction home and take advantage of this private financing as well so you can get money from both the last thing i would say in terms of getting into a home is it is going to be hard financially more than likely you're going to have to put money aside you're going to have to have a job where when you do inevitably get that mortgage you're not hemorrhaged which means you probably need to make about three times your mortgage so if you're looking at a two thousand dollar mortgage you need to make about six thousand dollars a month and you're going to have to put money aside and you're going to have to make about six thousand dollars a month which is seventy two k a year minimum i won't sell you a home if i'm going to be selling your home again in two years i've never wanted to do it never have done it our whole team operates by that we won't do it uh and it's just a math game so you have to have the job you don't necessarily need to have the savings especially as we walk into a buyer's market banks are becoming a little bit more lenient corporations companies building the homes more lenient and in a buyer's market sellers start lowering the price and they negotiate a little bit more. And then if you have the backing of a lower interest rate program by your state, by your County, it's going to be a bit more affordable. So that those are the main pieces of advice, but ultimately don't forget the first part five-year plan. Yeah. It's, it's probably not going to be something you're able to walk into fix up my credit a little bit, which, you know, you need to have it above a six 20, six 40. Uh, it's not going to be as easy as it used to be. And I'll caveat all of that with my favorite form of homeownership right now is your parents' home living with your family. If they rock with you and you rock with them is the most propagandized thing in America. You're a bomb. If you still live with your mom, like dog, she makes pancakes and I cover the groceries. This is a great opportunity. I buy them. She makes them, you know, or I'm doing the chores around the house or I'm helping with the rent or I'm doing X and Y and I get to live with people that love me. Yeah. Kicking your kids out at 18 feels like a sigh up. Doesn't it? Yeah. Dog. It's a death sentence today. Yeah. The opportunity to live with family. I have like, I did, um, uh, a live show for a bit where I just took in questions and that would get brought up a lot of I'm making X trying to buy a home. I live with my family and be like, do you like your family? Yeah. Does your family want to kick you out? No. Like then just stay with your family. Save there. Cause most people will say, well, rent and save. But when you're paying $2,500 a month for a two bedroom apartment, how can you save? Yeah. When you're paying $500 a month for a home, you're paying $500 a month for a two bedroom electric. How can you save? Yeah. I love the idea of compounds, family compounds, homesteading. I know that's foreign and impossible in New York and New Jersey, but the amount of people that are going toward friend compounds, family compounds, living. I've seen those. I rock with that so heavily. And I, I'm, I'm, I'm hopeful that in the future financing programs will make that more abundantly optional or a more abundant option, I should say for people. Cause right now it's a little tougher to do it financing wise. Yeah. Uh, but if we made that easier, I think a lot of people Yeah. I've seen cases where like four families come together and buy a building. Heck yeah. I was like, that's really cool. Heck yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. I love that. There's a couple of people I know in Milford where they own the building and they let their sons rent the above a room. Yeah. Like, and they've just been there for three, four years. Oh, they're lazy. Nah, he makes, he's a paralegal. Like he's, he's got a great job, but like, for example, me in the before taxes, about $56,000 and we were able to buy a house and we bought under our budget and we got an acre for 180 K. Yeah. That's just not possible today. Yeah. So again, it comes down to you. You have to go the optimal route and the optimal route is through new construction, a town home and state or County financing to get the best benefits. And I think there will be more in the forthcoming future because we have a huge problem right now. The government's finally looking at it and saying, okay, yeah, we have a real freaking problem. I think the initial solutions of a 50 year mortgage are the dumbest things possible because neither would work. 50 year mortgage is like basically renting from the bank and a portable mortgage only works in Canada and in Japan because their mortgages actually re up every few years. You're not locked in for the 30 year program. Yeah. You have to requalify for your mortgage. Oh, interesting. So it's a different ecosystem. Right. And so when that stuff gets thrown out, it's like, guys, like that's no, it's not the way our mortgage program works. What else gives you hope? Like when you're, like, why do we live in America? Like what is the thing that you see on the horizon that you are optimistic about for her? Probably her, probably her. Yeah. Like, honestly, like the next generation of people that are going to inspire whatever the future is going to be. And I do see it in the Gen Z generation. I'll bring up Sean again that want people to thrive even when he's not thriving. They want people to genuinely be good people, even when they're in a situation where they have every reason to be better. Um, it's, it's, it's akin to this video I watched the other day of, of these 80 year cycles that we go through as a country. You could see it through the dawn of time till now that most countries operate in these like 80 year cycles where you have your initial startup and it's tough and then you get going and things are really good and then you hit your peak and things are a little too good and then you have your inevitable collapse, which normally lasts anywhere from 15 to 20 years. And some would say we're in that zone. 80 years ago, we were looking at world war two and the coming out of that before that we're looking at coming out of the revolutionary was a 18. Yeah, we're looking at, that's right. We're looking at the civil war. And then before that, we're looking at the revolutionary wars. Thank you. So it does seem to ring true and different things will fall into different cycles. Not everything's picture perfect, but I do believe we're going to hit that next version of the cycle where there's a next growth period. There's a next Renaissance. There's a next group of people that see the problems that our past generations have caused and they're going to aim to solve them. I think that's already blossoming now. And I think that the way that me and my wife want to raise our daughter is to be one of the people that aren't contributing to the problem and aren't being a part of this consumeristic economy and can be a free thinker and she can decide whatever she wants to do with her life. And if we guide her enough, uh, morally that she'll want to do something that's for the betterment of the people to her left and to her right. And just like on the airplane, they tell you, you got to put on your mask first, if this thing starts falling. So we got to raise ourselves up to be a better person. I think we need to be worthy and, and internally solid enough that when the time comes to fight for the people to our left and right, we actually are capable of doing it. Yeah. Uh, so she gives me hope. The next generation gives me hope. I think the, uh, the current status we're in is we're in the boomer economy. We're, we're in the, the boomer created economy from the legislation that was created through the apathy throughout the decades that led us to this moment where they're just telling you to stop buying avocado toast and you'll be able to find a home. Yeah. Do you agree with that? No. At all? None. Because you talk sort of like a politician in terms of, uh, expertise. And I, I don't mean that as a slur. I, I, I, I recognize actually, it comes across almost as a pejorative, but in terms of like plan, like you feel that you have a conviction, like, Hey, there's things that are fundamentally broken and there are ways to fix them. And it strikes me as like, oh, should we give this guy a shot? Like, would you, was, is there any part of it? I'm sure people have brought this up to you before, but even on like a local level, you would have no interest. Not at the moment. Thank God. Not at the moment. Yeah. Unfortunately, you probably would do a good job, but maybe, uh, but, but how many politicians can we look at in the past that are technically doing good jobs, but aren't creating any results because they're just in a system that doesn't breed that, you know, the people that actually try to run against the grain and do it get offed. Yeah. They get ousted whether by media propaganda or, I mean, for example, and people can have things about him left or right, but Thomas Massey, he was somebody that I looked at as someone was like, okay, he's standing up for a few things that I'm also standing up for. He's looking at housing affordability. He's looking at the wars. He's looking at the Epstein list. He's looking at how this campaign that Trump had run on, which I didn't vote for Trump either time, but I know a lot of people were bamboozled by what he claimed was going to happen versus what's actually happening. And so he invited me and a few other creators out to Kentucky when he was fighting for his position in the primaries, I think back in, April, March, somewhere in that range. And I got to see firsthand what the media can do to change the minds of people quickly. You have a guy that's been in office for 14 years, never had an issue getting elected, never had somebody running against him that stood any chance. And then all of a sudden you throw $30 million into false advertising about the man saying he's in a relationship with AOC. It's a throuple. He's cheating. He hates Trump. You're actually against Trump if you're for mass and the way that they were able to convince the 65 plus demographic to come out and vote, to not vote for ed gallery, which most people don't know that name. That's who beat Thomas Massey. And I'm convinced most of the boomers didn't even know his name. Cause when I went there, I'm a data nerd. So when all these creators are in there, like we're going to do podcasts together and we're going to live stream and we're going to do this. All of it was great. We got about 40 million views in a week. this topic. And I guess if he ends up running for presidential campaign, we'll more than likely do the same thing because the big problem we found was we gained a lot of views, but they were nationwide. Right. Yeah. The fourth district of Kentucky, 65 year old voters is who we needed to. So we just needed to basically just only be on Facebook and they're not on Twitch. Yeah. They're not, they're not switching too often. Yeah. So on the day of the primary, I went to one of the bigger polling stations and I conducted an exit poll because in our camp of creators, there were some people who were very optimistic. There were some that were pessimistic. I was kind of in the middle. When I left the exit poll, I was pessimistic and I pretty much said my line in the sand. He's not going to win. And here's why. Um, the marketing one, the media was convinced, or I'm sorry, the people were convinced by the media that he was unfit and the way that they ran it was very strategic. When I talked to these people and I couldn't talk to them on the way in that's interference. I could talk to him on the way out. I would just say, Hey, just out of curiosity, who'd you put your vote in for today? Which way did you lean is what I ended up shifting into. Cause when I said voted for people, you know what happens in the bedroom and the poll booth is my business. Okay. So weird. Yeah. You're determining the future of the country and you don't want to talk about it. Sure. Which way did you lean today? Well, I voted for Ed. Why'd you vote for Ed? Did I? Well, Trump said, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. Next person. Who'd you, who'd you lean towards? today oh ed why'd you vote for ed here today well he's in a trouble with you aoc that indian lady too like oh my god i can't vote for that okay gotcha shocking shocking right and that's gonna be us one day also dude we're gonna be 70 we're gonna be like dude this robot's trying to bang my daughter you know like that's what we're gonna be doing we're like dude this is crazy like we're gonna get absolutely got by some media out of my house so you can't have no ai bot in my family like we're gonna get got by it so i have empathy for these old guys but at the same time it's shocking that this stuff works and the decision making i found interesting because there was there was this one little nuance that i that i started to realize and i have my notes because i started taking notes of who people were voting for and it wasn't just the numbers that made me think okay he's gonna lose it was why they decided to make the vote out of the 200 or so people that voted for him okay when voting for ed the 58 31 went unanswered 72 said massey 58 said ed but of the 72 that said massey do you know how many of them said they were voting against ed galrein none of them every single one said they were voting for thomas massey and could state a policy or stance as to why they were voting for him okay when voting for ed the 58 33 simply said they were voting against thomas massey right and i think that's a really important thing because i think that's a really important thing because i think that's a really important thing because i think 21 of them said they were voting for ed because they are pro-trump and only four of them were pro-ed and two of them mispronounced his last name the other two couldn't name a single policy when i pressed them on it because when they said ed and they said oh yeah i love that i love he's a veteran he did this and third it's like fantastic which policy specifically stood out to you all nothing they had nothing for me yeah nothing for me so just the mindset around why they were making this vote was so like i i made a few videos after one of the videos i was tearing up i'm like this sucks we were watching the system work and many people were like oh the election was rigged it was rigged and i made another video i said yes it was rigged but it wasn't rigged not the way you think it was rigged with money and media the same exact way they're getting you on draft kings is the same exact reason ed galrein won the same exact reason they're getting porn in your face is because ed galrein won it's money it's media it's convincing if you tell a lie long enough and consistently enough eventually it becomes the truth and with all these boomers out here especially just getting just bombarded with advertising they don't they're not looking things up they're not looking things up yeah right and even when we look things up we just looked up a warship and it's like there was no warship there was a warship yeah so it's it's it's it's the reason one of the reasons i will never run for politics and i say never i shouldn't say never to anything i don't know what the plan for god in my life is it's a messy game yeah i didn't know i was gonna be doing this five years ago so right i thought i was gonna be a military career guy 10 years ago so everything's been shifting but i don't see any reason to because i see how the system works and if somebody's actually trying to make waves against the people that are actually making the choices they get pushed out and you can make probably more change from the outside exactly at least at this point exactly maybe the system changes exactly maybe things shape up differently and it's a different calculation but right now yeah i mean having an audience of almost a million people on instagram that you can talk to yeah it's almost and being completely unbiased well i have a bias everyone has a bias but i guess from uh some type of like direct outside you know sort of uh potential right i just want people to have housing and health care yeah right they shouldn't have to think where am i going to live and if my hip goes out i'm going to be bankrupt that shouldn't be it we're the wealthiest country on the planet yeah i wonder even like you seem like very convicted and very uh very sure of also is there a rhino upstairs yeah i know i probably should have mentioned that there is a soccer game happening directly above us there's a soccer game happening above i could believe it yeah i'll show you afterwards but yeah yeah it's a full-on that's not a joke no no i'll show you oh sick we can go play soccer yeah yeah yeah we're gonna you will be skins but yeah but it's a it's an interesting thing you're joking i will go play soccer right i'm gonna show you right after this but we got next it's an interesting thing because it's like i i recognize that absolute power really and i don't think that the people that are in power many of them are probably psychopaths but i imagine many of them probably went in with great intentions and they had really good policies and they had a really clear view of the world they got really distorted based off of potential threats potential you know like career and reputational damage opportunity or even opportunity and then opportunity on the other side they're like hey if you vote this way we'll give you a lot of money and if you vote the other way we'll destroy your reputation right and it's like that's becomes a very easy decision to make yeah and so if you vote this way you're going to have a lot of money and so i recognize that like when you're in it it's so hard to be objective and to be principled well it's like uh there was this um training video they played for us when we were going into corrections and anyone else is listening this has been in corrections probably got the same video and it was about an apple and it said you can ruin your life with an apple in this position and the way it broke it down was when you're working in your position and an inmate sees you have an apple that you didn't eat for lunch he says can i have that apple he said i'm not supposed to do that he said dude it's an apple give me the apple i'm hungry they're feeding me gruel and bread can i have an apple so he gives him the apple okay a week goes by you're on that shift there again now he looks at your lunch before you've eaten it so oh he brought snickers hey can i have that snicker can you split off half of that for me so if i know you gave me the apple last time i won't tell anyone about the apple i swear so you break them off i have the candy bar and then slowly but surely it keeps growing and each time you do it there's more dirt on you that this man has and then he's asking for a blade and then he's asking you to look the other way and then he's asked and then it continues to go and grow and grow and grow until you're bringing in cell phones and if you don't give me the cell phone i'm going to tell everyone about everything else exactly exactly and that happens and people get corrupted did they walk in thinking they were going to be a corrupt correctional officer that was sneaking in yeah exactly but it starts with an apple and to the same point i think many politicians probably do walk in with good aspirations i think there's plenty too that still exist that still have good aspirations that can't make momentum happen because there's just there's 535 other people that also have to agree with you or at least a majority of them have to agree with you in two different houses and it can still get vetoed and that could still get changed so even if you do make the shift is it going to end up being the shift you need it to be like the housing affordability bill looked a lot different before it actually made it to the fruition originally scott besant had said that there was a thought process of 12 was going to be the limit for the homes and then it became 350 yeah so they reached a negotiation exactly yeah so compromise yeah the lobbyists that be and one other thing that was included in that was they are allowed to buy investment properties if they're billed to rent neighborhoods and in my opinion that means they know in the future they're going to need more rentals yeah so they're going to allow for that to be okay because they know they're going to need it yeah yeah i i like again i it's easy for me to sit here and be like dude politicians are evil but i recognize human beings are evil and yes the i mean let me take the back not all human beings are inherently evil but the ability to be corrupted and the desire for personal protection is so great that given the current system it's difficult to be objective and to not fall into even just like the regular amount of greed right like the greed that people be like i get it yeah because like you said it does start with the apple i think it's a great sort of analogy and so in that regard i actually think your decision and desire to be outside of the political system it's probably better yeah it makes way more sense and we're in a weird spot right now where you're right maybe i can make more impact doing this i mean i've generated over a billion views in a few years and that's like what an eighth of the world yeah that's that's everybody in america three times yeah it's a crazy scale that's a crazy scale almost india yeah they're probably all indian bots i don't know but uh but but people come up to me and shake my hand and say keep going and i know i'm making impact and more and more people are making impact and i'm making impact and i'm importantly i know that impact is creating a ripple effect of other people that want to make an impact because i feel like a lot of us are tricked into believing we have to have money we have to have power we have to position to make a difference and we don't that's that's a lie and there's been no better time i think in social media with all the bad that can bring for us to be able to be connected and communicate and see each other for what we were i mean one of the main things that brought about the french revolution was the press the press them being able to finally write what was going on in their area and then the other people like oh we're gonna do the same thing over here that's crazy and i heard marianne over there's whoa we're being subjected by this tyrannical government we should do something about it and a few years later king louis has his head on a stick yeah and you have the rating of bastille and that canteen effect guy i brought up earlier he brought that effect in or that that theory in the early 1700s he basically predicted the french revolution wow he stated that at some point the have-nots will get separated from the have-nots and there will be revolution and it's because anytime they try to solve the problem by adding more money it only goes to these three parties and they all want the same thing yeah and we're kind of looking at that right now now does it turn into revolution i i happen to believe a lot of people put more thought into the pitchforks and torches and less into what happens afterwards right because if you look at the french and you look at rome and you look at what happened after the 1940s chinese revolution many decades that were not fun yeah yeah i mean again i know there's a lot of it's like very popular amongst like a very specific subset to be like revolution now it's like i don't want no i don't i don't want that in terms of the consequence that it brings i understand and appreciate the feeling right and the fact that we want justice for those that we feel are being given none the the victims of epstein the obvious crimes that have been committed both financially morally right under our noses the fact that we're seemingly walking toward this technocracy of of tech lords that want us to be just ai-ified with digital ids and we're gonna have a social credit score nobody wants that yeah like i don't i haven't met anyone who's like i love that yeah personally maybe they're existing maybe they're listening but i haven't met them so again it goes back to our leaders aren't doing what we want and yes is there a level to the manager knows better than the laborer and what decisions need to be made sure but at this point we can see through technology instantaneously the amount of money these people are making the stocks that are being traded the crypto mean coins that are being rug pulled for profit the oil shorting that's happening during this war the fact that a rothschild is going to be the one that's going to help evanka trump and jared kushner buy land like what's going on people are watching in live real time war we're seeing the real ramifications of war we're watching videos out of ukraine of drones flying towards people and then the video just ends and you have to sit there and realize oh i just watched somebody die yeah you know we have to look at what the west bank looks like and be like yeah i'm just gonna go to mcdonald's like there's a level of sociopathy to that so uh was that sociopathy yeah you know that to being able to look at i mean just recently it wasn't anybody's cause but what happened in nepal yeah videos of 20 30 foot waves approaching crews of 20 30 people and then the video just ends you just watch 20 30 people just lose their life yeah and then you scroll and then you dance yeah someone's dancing next one i gotta be to work in 15 minutes yeah it's weird yeah it's a head trip there are heads aren't built for it but at the same time it's showing us what's actually going on and i think there's a level of benefit to that i think our interconnectedness is is is beneficial in that manner but again it comes down to we have to be prepared to fight for the person to our left and our right so we are not internally solid we can't do anything and so we can't just keep giving the vices we can't just keep giving into these dopamine hits we have to actually create transformation in our own physical and i'll say spiritual lives because i don't know about you i mean we're sitting in a tent in the middle of a forest and another disclosed occasion i think this is a lot of i think it's all spiritual warfare yeah i think a lot of this is energy i think a lot of this is playing out because that's just the way the world is is run by satan and that we're getting the results of it yeah because we're watching satanic pedophilic child leaders run our country yeah which is would have been crazy to say four years ago it's still crazy to say bro well at least it's believable now yeah now we're in a world where we're in a world where we're in a world where we're now i don't get kicked out of dinner for saying yeah it's like well yeah yeah okay technically yeah eat your steak zach shut up anyway chargers are on yeah i gotta hit my parlay shut up well i am uh simultaneously terrified but also weirdly optimistic and uh more so grateful that you're here and also spreading uh spreading your perspective because i even if i'm sure you know many people listening don't fully agree as they should i think it's worth the conversation yes as they shouldn't we there's a weird world you know people damn i i agreed with all of your takes until this one that's fantastic you're a free thinker that's awesome yeah you're not just falling for everything that i say because you like me yeah awesome that's perfect now let's discuss the nuance of our disagreement and see where we meet yeah cool and we may not agree cool that's not normal for us to be able to agree on everything if you if you would talk to a marriage counselor and they say oh yeah the couple's just agreeing on everything is that a good sign or a bad sign they'll tell you it's a bad sign yeah there's a someone's being brainwashed yeah they're being brainwashed or they're putting themselves so far to the side for the other person that they're they're sacrificing who they are to satisfy the other person which isn't love that that's that's not having any real personality it's not having any feeling of who you are you're you your identity is in that other person and that's not healthy and so you just agree with everything because you fear what it would be if you were like without that person no and i i love when we disagree i love it because in this ecosystem we can't look at the red and blue of it you you can be red dead redemption red and if you have one thing where it's like yeah that mom donnie thing about the grocery store is kind of crazy that might work they'll hang you they'll be like no no no no no no no that's communism you commie yeah and then on the blue side you know someone could say we did have a lot of illegal immigrants flood into the country that might have had a big issue and yeah you oh my god go just suck donald trump's dick yeah it's it's weird it's weird there's nuance to the just where we're at right now but yet we try to box it into colors yeah yeah it's a shame well i'm glad that you're here and i'm glad that there's a there's a yeah you tried to wrap it up no no no i kept going no i think you're exactly right and i think that there's a an avenue where people can disagree and that the fact that you're stoking these conversations and giving people a platform to or even just like a space to do it even if it's just in your instagram comments is i think an outlet enough and it's ironic that you're using the algorithm and the tech overlords to to shit on them there's something about that that's sort of poetic at the end of the day i agree and i've thought about that a couple times hilarious it is zach you're a brother you're a man i appreciate your brother thank you so much thank you for having me on man of course thank you so much and thank you to your wonderful wife for for for being a part of the wife rachel for being a part of this out in the woods with us it's crazy you're just sitting out in the woods with us let's go check out the soccer game sounds good