Latest / Financial Survival Network / Is Elon Musk the Most Powerful Man on Earth — John Rubino #5865

Transcript

Is Elon Musk the Most Powerful Man on Earth — John Rubino #5865 · Financial Survival Network

0:00
All right, and now we're going to end with the lead, which is
0:03
a no no in journalism. Right, is Elon Musk the most powerful person
0:08
on Earth? And let's just look at what's going on article today. The
0:12
guy basically owns space all right. Half of the satellites floating around up there,
0:18
we're put up there by Musk. Well, actually I should say I
0:22
should rephrase that half of the satellites floating around are owned by Musk, by
0:27
SpaceX. A lot of the rest of them were sent up there on his
0:32
rockets. And now we find out that the Internet, satellite Internet was basically
0:39
the only thing that kept Ukraine in this war. Throughout the entire time,
0:44
you were listening to Carrie Let's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information
0:50
you just can't find anywhere else to thrive in today's trying times. You need
0:55
the Financial Survival Network now more than ever. Go to Financial Survival and Network
1:00
dot com and get your free newsletter in gift Financial Survival Network now more than
1:07
ever, And welcome. You are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network.
1:15
I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. With us is our good friend John Robino.
1:21
You find him at Robino dot substack dot com and hey, John could
1:26
have you back with Missie a couple of weeks ago. But there's certainly no
1:30
shortage of things to discuss. I guess first and foremost is what is going
1:36
on with Japan? Hey Kara, Yeah, you know, this might be
1:38
the sum summer girl doldrums for the stock market, but there's a lot of
1:42
other stuff going on out there, and Japan is a good one to start
1:46
with. With a little bit of background. They cut themselves an amazingly sweet
1:51
deal. The Japanese government did a while back by pushing interest rates into negative
1:55
territory so they could issue bonds which people had to pay them for the chance
2:04
to own them. So the more the Japanese government borrowed, the better it's
2:07
cash flow was because people were paying them, you know, negative interests on
2:12
these bonds and stuff. So that was a great deal, and it went
2:14
on for a long time and allowed them to borrow even more money than they
2:16
had already borrowed. And now debt to GDP for the Japanese government is the
2:22
highest per capita in the history of the human race. No, no country
2:24
has ever borrowed like this because and like, yes, yeah, you had
2:30
to pay them if you wanted to own their bonds. But anyhow, that
2:35
that's starting to end now because of inflation. You know, twenty twenty two
2:38
was ten percent inflation for Japan, just like everybody else, and you can't
2:42
really have negative interest rate bonds in a double digit inflation world. So they've
2:46
had to allow the interest rate on their ten year bonds to drift up,
2:50
first two point two five percent, then to point five percent, and just
2:54
this past week they widened the band to allow that interest rate to go up
3:00
to one percent, and so the rate on ten year bonds instantly shot up
3:05
to point six percent, which is seen by the whole world as kind of
3:08
a capitulation. And so the yen is falling now, so so Japan is
3:13
in this box where the higher interest rates go, the more they owe on
3:19
their interest and it could be they you know, they have so much debt
3:22
out there that interest rates rising appreciably from here would be a debilitating interest bill
3:28
for them. But they need interest rates to go up in order to keep
3:30
the yen from collapsing, which would cause massive inflation, which would send their
3:35
interest rates up regardless, So they're kind of stuck in the place that all
3:39
profligate governments end up being stuck. And it's not clear what the timing of
3:44
all this is, but they're not far from a tipping point where if the
3:50
end keeps dropping from here, interest rates have to go up. But rates
3:53
go up much from here, interest costs eat the government alive. So this
3:57
is a thing to watch because it's completely possible that relatively modest moves in the
4:03
end and or interest rates pushed Japan off a cliff here financially. So it
4:10
might go on for a long time, or it might happen sooner rather than
4:13
later. We'll just have to see it. But they're definitely heading that way,
4:15
you know. That cliff is looming and they're walking towards it. Yeah.
4:18
Yeah, well we always knew this was going to come, but who
4:21
could believe that it could take thirty years? John, Well, you know,
4:26
the really extreme borrowing has happened pretty recently. But yeah, they had
4:30
a real estate bubble burst in the nineteen nineties and ever since they've been running
4:35
big deficits and you know, in introducing liquidity programs for various industries and stuff
4:42
like that. So so it's been expanding, you know, But they went
4:44
from having not terrible debt levels in the nineteen nineties, two pretty bad debt
4:50
levels a decade after, an extremely scary debt levels a decade after that,
4:56
to today's unearthly debt levels. You know, they so much money on a
5:00
per capita basis that there's absolutely no way out. But no other government is
5:06
even going to be able to get close to these levels without blowing up,
5:10
you know, because Japan had one specific advantage, which is that they ran
5:14
a massive trade surplus this whole time, so they had all kinds of money
5:16
coming in from the rest of the world, which allowed them to kind of
5:21
limp along, keep their zombie industries from falling apart, and take on a
5:28
whole lot more depth than they would have been able to do otherwise. So
5:30
the you know, the US, for instance, with our massive trade deficit,
5:34
we can't get that far into debt accumulation of Japan did, so we
5:40
have a shorter lease on this whole thing, although we've already borrowed, you
5:46
know, more than it ever seemed like we could. We're in the US,
5:48
we're the world's biggest debtor nation already, but on a per capita basis,
5:54
we don't touch Japan, so they're the one to watch as an example
5:58
of what's coming, or the US and Europe in a bunch of other countries.
6:02
So where does this leave us? Like, if Japan goes, then
6:06
you've got to believe the euro is going to go, everything's going to go
6:10
right, Yeah, and field currency world, the dollar in the euro in
6:15
the end only exists because we have faith in how well they're managed. But
6:18
you let one of them go, and then we start looking around and going,
6:21
well, you know, Europe's not that well managed either. You know,
6:26
are they going to have you know, the next crisis or will it
6:29
be the US? Or you know, does the US have to start World
6:31
War three in order to elevate the dollar? You know what's going to happen.
6:35
But the process of looking around and going what's next and who's next won't
6:41
be pleasant for the financial markets because once people start looking, they find all
6:45
kinds of problems out there. That's just kind of how human psychology works.
6:49
And what you feel like are good times, you're able to overlook the bad
6:54
stuff that's going on. But as soon as your mindset flips and you start
6:58
thinking, well, it's bad times, and then you notice bad things everywhere.
7:01
The financial markets will do that after one of the big fe arc currencies
7:05
collapses. And it does feel like now that it could be Japan. But
7:11
Europe that's a whole separate subject of mismanagement and stupidity and the imminent collapse,
7:17
because there's a lot of things going on over there that could make them first
7:20
instead of Japan. But if the Euro goes, it'll take the end down
7:25
with it, so the Japan won't get that much of a reprieve. Yeah,
7:28
I think you are correct there. So you know, there's just so
7:32
much going on. But Wall Street keeps going up. John, we're having
7:38
the return of the bull, however aboarded it might be. The market's been
7:42
doing pretty good. Yeah. Well, I posted a thing on substack a
7:46
while ago comparing the interest rate and stock market trends from the nineteen nineties and
7:53
the two thousands and today, And what happened in those two previous booms followed
7:58
by Big Bus was that the stock market started to go up and interest rates
8:03
went up to and then they went up in tandem for quite a while.
8:07
In other words, stocks kept getting more and more richly priced and interest rates
8:13
kept getting higher and higher, and then it reached a point where high interest
8:16
rates broke the economy and caused a big stock market crash, and so we're
8:20
basically replicating that pattern. Interest rates are going up, stocks continue to rise,
8:26
But there's a point at which interest rates will be high enough to choke
8:31
off economic activity, which means lower corporate earnings, which means crashing stock prices.
8:35
So that's all coming, and I think the reason why it hasn't come
8:39
already because interest rates are high enough now to theoretically do that. For instance,
8:43
it's already choking off commercial real estate and it's caused the housing market to
8:48
basically be frozen, but it hasn't crashed the overall economy. And the reason
8:50
for that is that we're running insanely high government deficits. You know, people
8:54
aren't paying attention to deficits anymore, but two trillion dollars or a year is
9:01
not an unusual deficit for US right now, and so that's massive fiscal stimulus.
9:05
So monetary policy is tightening, but fiscal policy is remaining extremely loose,
9:11
and that's allowing the economy to continue to grow in the face of higher interest
9:16
rates longer than it would be able to do otherwise. But you know,
9:20
there's a limit to that, because at some point interest rates are high enough
9:24
that you just can't justify borrowing anymore. It doesn't matter what the government's doing,
9:28
whether they're they're subsidizing you a little bit, or or whether they're keeping
9:33
taxes low or whatever. You just can't justify borrowing when your internal rate of
9:39
return is below the cost of capital. And you get there when interest rates
9:43
go up a little bit higher from here. So we are headed that way,
9:46
and I think it's it's possible that commercial real estate is the thing that
9:50
breaks first, but there's no way to know because there's lots of you know,
9:54
they call this the everything bubble for a reason. There's a lot of
9:56
bubble delicious stuff going on out there, and any of it conversed at any
10:01
time. And just when you thought it was safe to go to your ATM,
10:07
we get another bank collapse. This time though the Fed handled it and
10:11
Treasury handled it the way it's supposed to be. Where the bank closes over
10:16
the weekend, everything's fine, and then you wake up and you're now dealing
10:20
with their successor. And they called it, I can't remember a take under
10:26
or an overtake whatever, something like that, an overtakeover Kerry. I didn't
10:31
even see this. I didn't know there was another bank failure this weekend that
10:33
really happened last weekend. But the point is that the banking failure, you
10:41
know it, I think it was last weekend that it happened, and you
10:46
know it was. I can't remember the name of it now, but it
10:52
just happened last week and it was a California bank and it got taken over
10:58
by the Bank of the California or something like that, and it was actually
11:03
a smaller bank. Okay, we'll look it up. We'll post it in
11:07
the show notes. See these things we're talking about slowing down me I forgot
11:11
to mention. Manufacturing is slowing down all the pm I indices or are slowing.
11:16
But you take commercial, real estate, housing and small business activity.
11:22
Those are things that local and regional banks depend on. That's their business base,
11:28
and high interest rates are choking off so much of that and making bond
11:31
prices go down because higher interest rates are just the reciprocal bond prices, which
11:37
means that on the balance sheet of a lot of these little banks is a
11:41
whole bunch of bad paper and a lot of loans that haven't been taken yet,
11:45
So we could easily see a banking crisis re emerge when a few of
11:48
these banks are forced one way or another to take the losses that are right
11:52
now just paper losses and convert them into actual losses, and then that spreads,
11:58
that contagion spreads to the rest of the states and local banks, and
12:03
the federal government has come in and bail them out. You know that that's
12:07
something that is very high on the list of possibilities, and that could be
12:11
a domino that knocks down a lot of other dominoes because the small banks are
12:18
so intertwined with everything else in the country that you can't have a hundred small
12:22
banks fail, and that could easily happen without it affecting the rest of the
12:28
economy. Good luck trying to get a mortgage if a couple of your local
12:31
banks fail, because nobody else is going to want to deal with you while
12:35
that mess has been cleaned up. So, yeah, there's all kinds of
12:39
things could happen. That all of them are getting closer to a point at
12:43
which they become a crisis. Instead of a leading problem, they become a
12:48
here and now crisis. And there's no way to know which we'll go first,
12:50
but there's a bunch that will go at some point in the next year
12:54
or two. Yeah. Here it is a pack West Bank, or this
12:58
was the twenty sixth I think it was. It's taken over by Bank of
13:03
California. And it was actually a smaller bank in the Bank of California.
13:09
So they took it over. And it happened not this weekend, the weekend
13:15
before last, and nobody was any of the wiser this weekend a bank was
13:22
tiny, little nothing bank. State Bank in Kansas was pretty much closed down,
13:28
and the FTIC took it over one hundred thirty nine million dollars in assets.
13:33
So that's a pimple on the banking system. And I'm sure everybody's glad
13:37
it's gone. Now. Remember when one hundred and thirty million dollars was real
13:41
money? Everic Dirk said and said, I used to say he was a
13:48
speaker of the Senate or a majority leader of the Senate, and he was
13:52
the one who coined the phrase a billion here, a billion there. Pretty
13:54
soon you're talking about real money. Yeah, that's so offensive when the government
14:01
but yeah, yeah, but that was a while ago. Now and nounced
14:03
trillions instead of billions. Yeah, and pretty soon it'll probably be quadrillion.
14:09
So look like we got the economy slowing, we've got bank lending, bank
14:18
credit creation to business is hitting the skids, and housing is like the anomaly
14:26
here because actually the housing stocks a couple of weeks ago made new five year
14:31
highs. Um you know, guys like Lenar, like Poulty Homes, Kby
14:39
Homes, Dr Horton, they all hit new highs, even Tall Brothers,
14:43
which is on the luxury end of new housing. But there was an article
14:48
today in zero Hedge. I don't know if you caught it where they talked
14:52
about how they're cutting back. The price of new homes is going down and
14:56
they're putting less stuff in them, so less extras, which is where the
15:01
builders make all their money, and extras the actual house itself. You know,
15:05
there's a profit built in, but the real profit on a house is
15:09
when you want that fancy kitchen, cabinets and you want all this other stuff.
15:13
That's where they make the bucks. Yeah, the housing stocks went down
15:18
today and they're vulnerable to high interest rates just like anybody else in the real
15:24
estate market. But one of the reasons why they've been looking so good for
15:28
so long is that there's a shortage of houses out there because the people who
15:31
own houses and have mortgages from prior years are locked in to their three percent
15:37
mortgages. You know, they can't sell their house and then go buy something
15:41
else because they got to pay seven point two percent on the mortgage. So
15:45
there's very little inventory coming onto the market, which means home builders have a
15:50
better pitch. They can say, well, you can you can buy this
15:52
crappy use house over here or this one over here, but that's all that's
15:56
your inventory. But let me build you the perfect dream house. So true
16:00
that yeah, and so that's working for him, but that isn't the kind
16:03
of thing that lasts forever. If interrust rates go up beyond the point of
16:07
new home buyers being able to afford buying a nice, new, luxurious house
16:12
with all the bells and whistles, then the home builders suffer too. And
16:17
normally in a housing bus the home builders get crushed. They just hanked down
16:22
the near zero in two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. So
16:26
the idea that somehow they're immune to the normal dynamic and real estate is probably
16:33
misplaced. I think they'll they'll suffer eventually, maybe just not yet on the
16:37
scale that they previously did. Ye I thought about like, you know,
16:41
I got my house at exactly the right time. Honestly, it's way more
16:45
space than I need. It's just me said, maybe I'll go to Lake
16:49
a two three bedroom condo. But then, even if that condo is worth
16:55
half of what my house is here, unless I buy it for cash,
16:59
I'm going to wind up making a mortgage payment that's the same as what I'm
17:03
paying now or even more. So I've got to be crazy to go downsizing.
17:07
So this is what's keeping a lot of older people in their homes because
17:11
they yeah, they can sell their home, take a big profit, but
17:15
then they got to put that all into the new place because prices have gone
17:18
up. Otherwise, if they have a mortgage, they would have to have
17:22
a mortgage fifty percent of the size of the mortgage there existing mortgage to pay
17:27
the same same debt service, same monthly payment, maybe a little bit less
17:33
in the taxes. So you can so you can downsize. It doesn't make
17:37
any sense. So you know, there's another interesting story in the housing market,
17:44
and that is demographic remember when home prices were going to collapse because baby
17:48
boomers were going to sell their McMansions when they turn sixty one, and that's
17:53
not happening. Part of it. It's probably that dynamic that you're talking about
17:56
that right now where you know boomers are, they're sitting in their mcmansion's going,
18:00
oh, man, if I sell it now, I'm going to have
18:03
to take out a monster mortgage. I don't want to do that. Maybe
18:04
I'll sit tight for another few years. And what that implies is that if
18:11
the FED were to force interest rates back down a little bit, but it
18:15
could open up a massive wave of supply in the real estate market because all
18:22
these boomers, you know, it's no fun having a four thousand or five
18:27
thousand square foot house when you're seventy years old. That's just a lot of
18:32
dusting of empty rooms that you got to do. That's a lot of plumbing
18:37
and electric that always needs to be repaired. Yeah. Yeah, So the
18:40
boomers, if they're like any other generation in human history, are going to
18:44
want to downsize when they can and as soon as as soon as the environment
18:49
is such that that's possible, then this market is just going to kind of
18:52
spass them with all the new you know, all this new inventory is going
18:56
to come on and the price of houses will probably ten even as interest rates
19:02
go down, which would normally be a good thing for house prices. So
19:04
we'll see it. But that's just another wild card in a housing market that's
19:10
very unusual right now. It's not behaving the way it normally does. Yeah,
19:14
totally. So. So we have a coup in Niger, or an
19:19
attempted coup, and they're a major resource producing country in Africa, particularly uranium,
19:27
which has really royaled the uranium market. Yeah. Well, this is
19:33
a good lesson or resource stock investors, and that is that political risk is
19:40
a real thing. A country or a company can have a great resource that
19:45
looks like it's going to be super profitable, but in a place that has
19:48
a coup or a civil war and any number of other things that fall under
19:52
the political risk umbrella, and it screws up your market. And it also
20:00
illustrates how companies that have resources in stable jurisdictions tend to respond very well to
20:10
political risk in other places. Because if you look at the uranium stocks right
20:14
now, most of them popped today. They're doing great because of this potential
20:18
disruption in the uranium supply. But there's one or two uranium miners in Nagier
20:25
who are not doing so well today because they might be cut off from world
20:30
markets for a while. So political risk is a thing, and it can
20:33
cut both ways. It can benefit you if it happens somewhere else, that
20:38
can hurt you if you're where it's happening. So pay attention to that with
20:42
your resource stock in dusting. Hey, let's not forget the new government might
20:48
not look so favorably on the existing concessions and they might just terminate them,
20:56
all right, take us to the World Court, or take us to whatever
20:59
arbitration there is, and we're just going to be at it out to new
21:03
company, and maybe we'll do it to uranium one, right whoever owns it
21:08
today. I think it might be Uranium one, but I'm not one hundred
21:11
percent sure, but yeah, that's that's a possibility. And in meanwhile,
21:15
there are a lot of other countries out there that are looking at the extractive
21:22
industries that are operating in within their borders and they're thinking they want a bigger
21:26
cut of the profits. So they're changing the terms of the concessions that happened,
21:32
and I think it might have just happened in Mexico with taxi in Chile
21:36
m with the percentage that the government takes from minds that operate there. So
21:42
so so you know, investing in resource stocks is complicated. That's the takeaways
21:49
A lot to think about. Well, that's the case. You need to
21:52
geographical diversity as well as diversity over the over the metal and minerals that you're
22:02
looking at the resources, you need to diversify them too. You know,
22:06
it's it's like anything else. But probably if you have twelve stocks in different
22:11
places with different things that are in tight supply. So you're a nickel,
22:15
you're in some platinum, you're in lithium perhaps, or any one of a
22:23
number of other ones, and then you're in Canada, you're in Nevada.
22:27
At least for now, North America compared to the rest of the world,
22:32
is a stable jurisdiction and we'll see how that turns out. But at least
22:37
then you have a shot and lots of uranium produced in Canada. So I
22:42
just find it fascinating that you know a country like Niger that of the world
22:49
cannot find on a map, John, they can't find it on a map
22:53
all of a sudden is like the tail wagging the dog and messing up the
23:00
market. But it was inevitable because production has been cut back and prices that
23:04
were kept artificially low by whatever means, for whatever reasons, by whomever,
23:11
conspiracy of the week you think might be controlling the prices. This is what
23:15
happens when you monkey with the market artificially over protracted periods of time, you
23:22
get these these disruptions. Yeah, yeah, and right now you pay a
23:29
premium or assets that are in North America, so that has to be factored
23:33
into you. You get resources in risky countries at a discount, and you
23:41
pay up to get them in Canada or you know, there's a lot there's
23:44
some gold mining going on in Nevada right now, which is a really good
23:47
arrosection for gold mining. So you do pay up a little bit for something
23:51
like that. So, um, there are a lot of moving parts and
23:55
you have to make a lot of judgment calls in this market. And up
24:00
Rick Rule, for instance, says that he likes risky countries because they tend
24:04
to be underpriced. And of the words the discount or yeah, the discount
24:11
that you got to pay. Wait, how does that work? You pay
24:14
a premium? Okay, yeah, discount, Yeah you get it. Yeah,
24:19
you're buying it a discount, and it's a it's an attractive enough discount
24:26
to make it worth his while. And he should know. You know,
24:30
Rick Rule says something about resource investing. You should take it as almost a
24:33
guarantee fact, you know. Yeah, but we're seeing the downside of that
24:38
now with the uranium thing in Africa. But yeah, interesting market. I
24:44
still think, well, the uranium stocks that are in safer jurisdictions have been
24:48
doing great and it looks like they're going to continue to do well. So
24:52
that's still a very interesting part of the recent roust market, and I think
25:00
any weakness in uranium stocks going forward should be a buying opportunity for people who
25:03
understand that market. And today, while we're talking about it, the first
25:10
new nuclear power plant went online in the United States in Georgia. I'm not
25:17
sure if as the modular designed one or not. My friends actually worked on
25:21
that and helped develop it. But first time in like, you know,
25:26
twenty thirty years, a new nuclear power plant has come onto the grid in
25:32
the United States, nuclear I used to be opposed to nuclear power because it
25:38
because it had an embedded risk where every ten years a nuclear plant melts down
25:47
and then nobody wants to touch those stocks for the next eight years. Yeah,
25:51
but I've kind of changed my mind lately because nothing really seriously bad happened.
25:56
When you look back at those nuclear accidents, Chernobyl is the only one
26:00
that was where there was a loss of a lot of lives. Loss pretty
26:07
messy, it's incredibly messy, but nobody died. They're they're gradually cleaning it
26:14
up and everything. So anyway, right, Yeah, and yeah, I
26:17
know when they told us about and when you put that against the incredible economics
26:25
of nuclear power. It takes you know, a beer can size amount of
26:30
uranium to basically power your life for your lifetime. Um and um, there's
26:41
so much you can do with power that is is that steady. For instance,
26:47
you can set up a nuclear plant and at night you don't need all
26:49
that power. You run it at capacity or whatever continuously, and at night
26:55
when no one needs that power, you can mind bitcoin, you can you
27:00
can create hydrogen and then use the hydrogen to run cars and then bypass the
27:06
whole electric battery thing, which is an environmental nightmare. So there are a
27:11
lot of upsides to nuclear that I think people are just beginning to grasp.
27:17
And I think that as more and more people figure it out, it moves
27:22
back into favor. And there's nowhere near enough uranium coming out of today's minds
27:26
to satisfy the resulting demand. So uranium is one of those things where there's
27:30
going to be panic buying at some point and it's whatever it is, sixty
27:36
five dollars right now. It no, No, that's still not enough,
27:42
not enough to satisfy the next decades demand. So it has to go up.
27:48
And as long as there's not another food Kushima in the near term,
27:52
a lot of countries are going to make the decision that while windpower didn't work
27:56
out as well as we thought it, well, natural gases is day jurisic.
28:00
We get it from Russia, and you know, so let's do nuclear
28:03
because we can control that. So I think that's the dynamic, and I
28:07
think it's going to get bigger and bigger barring that big accident that's out there,
28:12
and it's going to be a really successful segment of the commodities investing universe.
28:18
For quite a while, all right, and now we're going to end
28:21
with the lead, which is a no no in journalism, right, is
28:26
Elon Musk the most powerful person on Earth? And let's just look at what's
28:30
going on article today. The guy basically owns space all right, half of
28:36
the satellites floating around up there, we're put up there by Musk. Well,
28:40
actually I should say I should rephrase that half of the satellites floating around
28:45
are owned by Musk, by SpaceX. A lot of the rest of them
28:49
were sent up there on his rockets. And now we find out that the
28:56
internet, satellite Internet was basically the only thing that kept Ukraine in this war
29:02
throughout the entire time, because you know, it's just there was no other
29:07
way to communicate. Their whole communications infrastructure was targeted by the Rasans, blown
29:14
up in day one of the war. And yet because of Starlink, they're
29:18
able to run all their drones have military communications. And he's not within the
29:26
control at least in theory of any particular country. It's up to him whether
29:30
you know, if he says to Ukraine, you know you can have Internet
29:36
service, but I'm geo fencing crimea because we don't want to get involved in
29:38
crimea what are they supposed to do? And there's multiple countries and boats and
29:45
planes and everything else. All their internet connectivity comes down to Musk So that's
29:52
he owns the infrastructure for launching satellites. He owns the satellites for communication.
29:59
And then he owns a little car company called Tesla, which appears to be,
30:03
if not the most profitable car company, it is on the brink of
30:08
becoming the dominant automaker in the world. He goes around making deals with India,
30:15
with Indonesia, you know, with China, and you know he cowtows
30:22
to the shrine of Chairman Mao to keep good relations with China because half the
30:27
productions there. You know, the question though, is he the most powerful
30:33
person on earth right now? He does seem to be, doesn't he.
30:37
And you know, as rich as he is, they don't necessarily count SpaceX
30:44
in his net worth. And when that goes public SpaceX the owner of Starling,
30:51
Yeah, that's gonna be a really valuable company. So he's going to
30:53
add another fifty billion dollars or so to his network. But this um low
30:59
war but satellite internet thing, you know, it wasn't that intuitively obvious to
31:06
begin with, at least to most people, But I guess it was to
31:08
Musk. But it's like the Internet because you you can you can take out
31:14
a big communication satellite, but if you take out a hundred of his lower
31:18
Earth orbit tiny satellites, he'll just route around you, because it's the same
31:22
way the Internet. If you know, one note of the Internet goes down,
31:25
the signal still gets there. So it's very robust and that makes it
31:30
militarily really important. Now, at the same time that's happening, Jeff Bezos
31:36
is doing the same thing. He's using his space company to put up a
31:41
competitor of Starlinks, So you know, it's late to the game. Yeah,
31:47
yeah, it could be could be that he was waiting to see what
31:52
kind of beginner's mistakes Elon Musk would make. But it looks like he didn't
31:55
make very money. So Bezos is definitely late to the game. But you
32:00
know, we could could end up having some kind of a space war up
32:02
there between private sector companies with their Internet communications networks and stuff, because it
32:09
wouldn't be hard to weaponize those things, just like we were talking about with
32:14
drones. A bunch of small satellites that where you don't care what happens to
32:19
them. Yes, the very dangerous weapons up there. Yeah, so we're
32:24
entering a world where a lot of things that were inconceivable a few years ago
32:28
are suddenly not science fiction anymore. You know, that's just something that could
32:32
possibly happen. And who would win, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, you
32:36
know, you know, you don't even have to blow up the satellites.
32:39
You just have to bang one into another one. They're very sensitive, you'll
32:44
knock it out of operation. You know. It's also the things tied in
32:49
with the drone wars, So that to me, of everything that's happened in
32:54
Ukraine, you know, all this nuclear saber rattling and all that their own
33:00
wars are the most terrifying and significant advance in modern warfare. We already talked
33:08
about how like, you know, all of the US and Western military industrial
33:14
entities, and there are many of them out there, a lot of them
33:16
you don't even know who they are. But the big ones, Raytheon,
33:22
You've got Boeing obviously, Lockheed, a whole bunch of them. Well,
33:31
what we found out was that the whole thing that Russia was a threat during
33:37
the Cold War other than being a nuclear threat with missiles. It's just totally
33:43
false because you see how their weapons have performed in every war since the Arab
33:49
Israeli War nineteen seventy two. Every time there's been a confrontation between US Western
33:58
military technology in Russian Eastern military technology, they've been destroyed. So to me,
34:07
like this whole Ukraine war has just pointed up the fallacy the Cold War
34:12
that it was just a psi op to get us to keep spending more and
34:15
more money on this stuff. And now they're in their golden years of the
34:21
military industrial complex because all of the Russian arms, like in Ukraine, now
34:27
everybody sent them their Russian arms, they're all destroyed. They're all laying out
34:30
there. They'll be there a scrap. So now we're going to see is
34:35
the rearmament phase and all of these military industrial entities are going to clean up
34:43
on it. You know. But getting back the drone thing is is kind
34:45
of frightening. Yeah, Well, each new conflict now is you know,
34:52
it has its own objective, but it's also a way to test cutting edge
34:58
weaponry, and drones clearly are an idea that whose time has come, and
35:04
it gets more so as they get smaller, the more you can miniaturize these
35:07
things, the more terrifying they become. I'll tell you what a trend is
35:10
gonna be starting not too far into the future, is for rich people to
35:15
build drone proof houses. So in other words, you can't use a drone
35:22
to see inside the house, you can't break its windows because the windows are
35:27
reinforced, and so you were safe inside your drone proof house. But yeah,
35:34
you're you're right about the Cold War being one gigantic scam, and most
35:38
of what the US military industrial complex has done since has basically been business scams,
35:44
because the dirty secret to war is that you can make a fortune by
35:47
rebuilding what you've destroyed, and it's always the US military industrial complex that makes
35:55
that fortune. So we're, you know, we're increasing our military it's like
36:00
crazy, and we're destroying things all over the world that have to be rebuilt
36:05
with US weaponry. So yeah, we're we're running a business scam right now.
36:10
And you could say that other crises in the recent past have also been
36:15
business scams. We're on YouTube, so I won't name any names, but
36:20
conceptually, It's the same thing where you destroy something and then they have to
36:27
pay you to rebuild what you destroy it. So, yeah, you know
36:31
we're we are an evil empire. Let's just put it out there, and
36:36
we're behaving like one right out of Star Wars or something. It's like if
36:39
Tall Brothers could do a housing development, get everyone to move in, and
36:45
then burn it down and get you to pay them for the privilege of burning
36:49
it down, and then buy new houses from you, so that because you're
36:53
homeless, you've got to have a place to live, right, I mean,
36:55
that's that's what's happening here. It is such a scam. And as
37:01
much as I have misgivings about RFK, Bobby Junior, he was in a
37:08
town hall with Sean Hannity, not my favorite quote unquote journalist, and he
37:15
eviscerated him by explaining the history of the Ukraine War that evidently this informed journalist
37:23
had no idea about that. When Baker, basically James Baker, who was
37:30
a Secretary of State, negotiated the uh the deconstruction of the Soviet Empire,
37:37
he said, NATO will not take one more inch, and NATO's whole purpose
37:44
was fighting the Cold War. Once the Cold War was gone, there was
37:47
really no need for NATO. Maybe a rolled backed, scaled back NATO,
37:52
right, but there was no need for it. And yet now it's expanded
37:58
to twenty countries. It's Russia's worst nightmare. Now look a lot of mere
38:04
Putin and I think there's a he's not a nice guy. I think he's
38:09
a stone cold killer. He was KGB all the way and uh, you
38:15
know basically what they used to call on that that cartoon Rocky and Bullwinkle.
38:22
He was a member. There was Boris and Natasha and it basically, uh,
38:27
Putin is a no good nick. That's what they used to call them.
38:30
You know, good nick and you know all of that. But on
38:35
the other hand, they want to dismount, they want to dismantle, they
38:39
want to deconstruct Russia and they want to split it up. It's like it's
38:45
like World War One with the Ottoman Turk Empire and the Austro Hungarian Empire,
38:52
two empires declining, and all World War One was was a feeding frenzy by
38:59
the excess and the Allied powers to try to get their peace. And now
39:04
they see they're trying to do the same thing with Russia deconstructed destroy it.
39:08
And in fact, a guy, a Russian politician whose name escapes me,
39:14
said it has become an existential war for Russia. And that's what this is
39:21
all about, a battle of resources. China wants the half of Russia that
39:27
abuts China because they got too many people and not enough places, and the
39:31
resources, the largest untapped you know, basket of resources in the world is
39:39
all over Russia. There's so much of it that hasn't been exploited yet.
39:44
There's a resource battle with the ultimate goal of carving up Russia. Yep,
39:50
that is exactly Amato's. NATO's purpose shifted from defending against Russia to expanding and
39:58
strangling and dismembering Russia. Um. And you know, Russia and China are
40:05
emerging powers that are a threat to the US economically at least, you know,
40:10
if not militarily. They weren't ntil recently. Yeah yeah, yea.
40:15
So the Empire is striking back against these emerging powers. And I think the
40:22
goal of the US, both with China and with Russia is besides the resources
40:25
that it will gain from taking over Russia, but to take a couple of
40:29
competitors off the playing field. So yeah, this is this is great power
40:35
politics in the nuclear age, and it's insane because you cannot translate that kind
40:42
of mindset into a world where you've got weapons capable of destroying the human race.
40:46
So this is very scary because you've got basically crazy people in charge of
40:52
the US, and you know that a RFKAS. Yeah, but that interview
40:55
with Sean Hannity that that you talked about was a perfect illustration of that.
40:59
You had Sean Hannity, who is this moron neo Khan who has like three
41:02
blunt, forced talking points, that's all he knows about the subject. And
41:07
RFK who knows the names and the dates and the motivations and the timeline for
41:14
all of this stuff and can paint a picture of the US as the predator
41:19
in this story. So you know, RFK, I think he's he's a
41:24
very brave guy who's waking a lot of people up. I think. I
41:29
mean, the odds of him getting the Democrat nomination are about negative one hundred.
41:35
But he's doing a real public service by drawing a lot of eyeballs and
41:42
telling the correct story about art history. And because you don't see it anywhere
41:47
else, No, no, and hey, by the way, the President
41:52
declined to extend a secret service protection to RFK Junior over the weekend. Uh
42:00
you can. You can infer what you like from that, just as a
42:06
off the cuff note of interest. Well that's it. I think we're done.
42:09
We could so much news, John, We could go on for two
42:13
more hours. Probably a lot of you out there would like us too.
42:15
But in the meantime, till two weeks from now, go over to John
42:22
site, to Robino dot substack dot com, US Financial Survival Network dot com.
42:28
Questions, comments from on the YouTube channels, send us emails k l
42:32
atcarry Lutz dot com. We'll raise them next time. If we missed anything
42:36
that you'd like us to cover, please tell us. If you disagree with
42:39
anything that we covered, please tell us that John. We'll talk to you
42:44
in a couple of weeks. Thanks, Garious. Yeah, thanks for listening
42:47
to carry Lutz's Financial Survival Network your solution to today's trying times. For the
42:53
latest, go to Financial Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever