Latest / Financial Survival Network / Why Inflation Is A Problem - And Why It's Only Going To Get Worse -- John Rubino #5896

Transcript

Why Inflation Is A Problem - And Why It's Only Going To Get Worse -- John Rubino #5896 · Financial Survival Network

0:00
So this is an issue for me every year because gold has this seasonal pattern
0:04
that is, it's not perfect, but it's fairly reliable. Yeah, eighty
0:09
plus percent. But every year, because I've known about gold seasonality from let's
0:14
say a decade, it's been at least a decade, and every year I
0:17
look at the where a share where there should be an inflection point, and
0:20
I think, God, yeah, but there's all these big macro things happening,
0:24
you know, I think those are more important than gold seasonality, And
0:27
most years, gold seasonality turns out to be true. You're listening to Carrie
0:31
Let's Financial Survival Network, where you get valuable information you just can't find anywhere
0:37
else to thrive in today's trying times. You need the Financial Survival Network now
0:43
more than ever. Go to Financial Survival and Network dot com and get your
0:48
free newsletter in gift Financial Survival Network now more than ever, and welcome you
0:59
are listening to watching the Financial Survival Network. It's time where our biweekly meet
1:03
up with John Robino. Find him at Robino dot substack dot com. Make
1:10
sure you send any comments to me kl at Kerrlutz dot com. H Well,
1:15
I don't know if you caught it, John, But American Airlines,
1:19
all of the flight attendants we used to call them stewardesses in a less politically
1:23
correct era, all of them have voted ninety nine point four percent voted to
1:30
authorize a strike, and they want a third increase I think twenty six percent
1:37
or thirty percent payroll increase, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And
1:42
then you've got an article here about the Autoworkers Union there. I can't UAW
1:48
is authorizing a strike against the Big three and sounds like we might have some
1:53
inflation coming here. Huh yeah. And it's the kind of inflation that the
1:59
fan thinks is real inflation. Unlike stock sponds and real estate going up.
2:02
They think wage inflation is a real thing and that scares them. And basically,
2:08
unions have gotten their power back, which you know, in most of
2:13
our adult lifetimes unions were meaningless. Private sector unions anyhow, public sector unions
2:17
have gotten more powerful, but private sector unions have been broken by globalization,
2:24
and now that we're trying to bring everything back home, the unions are figuring
2:30
out that they can they can strike for higher wages and get serious settlements.
2:36
Because the pilots have already gotten there's United and American Airline was Yeah, forty
2:40
percent over four years, forty some percent over four years, plus pension increases
2:46
and things like that benefits. And I think it was the you and I
2:52
that we're talking about the UPS drivers. How I had to ask you if
2:57
that was a real number, because UPS drivers, at least some of them
3:01
now, yeah, get one hundred and seventy thousand dollars a year. Oh
3:06
no, that's true. They're always I paid. You know, they're getting
3:09
paid more now than the mail carriers. Yeah. Yeah, So so you
3:15
know, these guys who are living are delivering our packages are now in the
3:19
top like five percent burgers in the country. They're making more money than most
3:23
of the people that they deliver packages too. And now it's working its way
3:29
down. It was the pilots before, and now it's the flight attendants,
3:32
and it's going to be basically everybody else who who has any kind of union
3:39
representation at all. They're going to be talking about striking. Well, they
3:43
the UAW, you know, the United Auto Workers are striking or intending to
3:46
strike, and it looks kind of inevitable in the next two weeks and that
3:52
means they'll end up with what seemed to us to be a very big number
3:59
increase in pay. So, yeah, this is a big change. And
4:02
you know who's not going to strike the Tesla because they're not union. They're
4:09
non union because one of the reasons why is that for when the unions come
4:14
in, you can't get stock options if you're a factory worker. Only the
4:19
big management non unionized. They don't want their employee sharing in the ultimate financial
4:29
success of their of their host company. And you know, to some extent,
4:33
unions in this day and age are really parasitic creations. It is that
4:41
really why they they won't allow stock options? Who won't allow the new aw
4:49
If Tesla's employees were to vote to join the union, they would not be
4:54
able to get stock options. And many of those people working on the floors
4:58
of Tesla, the ones that have been since the beginning, are multi multi
5:02
millionaires as a result of their stock options. Yeah, well see, you
5:06
think everybody would would make that part of their bargaining. You would want stock
5:11
options in the company that you work for. And and you know everybody wins
5:15
when that happens, because if the if the workers have a stake in the
5:18
success of the company. Then they're they're probably going to moderate some of their
5:25
demands because that's going to hurt earnings, which hurts their their options. And
5:30
that's the union rational for not wanting options. But god, you know you
5:33
should, if you're a big company, you should. You should be handing
5:38
out stock options like Halloween candy to the people that work there. Is that
5:43
puts them all on the same page with management in a good way, you
5:48
know, not in a self destructive way. So anyhow, you know where
5:57
they don't want it. They don't want the workers loyalties divided. Like,
6:02
hey, if we go on strike, my stock options will be worth twenty
6:06
percent less. They're only going to give me five thousand dollars a year more,
6:13
but my stock options might be worth one hundred fifty thousand, so I'll
6:16
lose thirty thousand dollars if we go on strike. Maybe that's not such a
6:21
good idea, and then the unions lose their power. That's the theory.
6:27
The reality I think would be a bit different. But nonetheless, the policy
6:30
is no stock options for the factory workers in most of these big auto entities.
6:40
So all right, well, then they'll just demand really big raises that
6:44
standing around, and so they'll you know. But anyhow, the point of
6:46
this is that this is wage inflation, which is looking very real here and
6:51
which will spook the Fed into staying tighter for longer because they're they're gonna have
6:56
to try and choke that off. Eight. You can't have workers making fifteen
7:00
present war every year. That's bad for the country, even if it's winning
7:04
them. Hey yeah, So the speaking of interest rates, Bank of Japan,
7:11
you think they can afford to let their interest rates float. Well,
7:15
they just had a Bank of Japan official making kind of hawkish statements just lately
7:21
here about doing away with the negative interest rates at the short end of the
7:29
yield curve and letting interest rates generally rise. And today the ten year the
7:34
yield and ten year Japanese government bond went up to set point seven percent now,
7:39
which it used to be negative, and now it's up to point seven
7:43
percent. That's still incredibly low by our standards, but for a country with
7:47
the debt that Japan is carrying, it's already starting to become a budget line
7:55
problem for the government. In other words, their interest costs they're starting to
8:00
eyes to the point where it's becoming painful. And if they let rates keep
8:03
going up, the pain is going to increase. You know, if you
8:05
have a you have three government data that is three hundred percent of GDP,
8:11
which Japan is headed that way fast, and the average interest rate goes just
8:16
one percent, that's three percent of GDP just going out, you know,
8:20
in terms of interest, and that's you know, bordering on unsustainable. That's
8:26
the kind of thing that will blow up your currency. So Japan is kind
8:30
of blazing that trail. But most of the rest of the big few currency
8:35
countries are headed that way fast too, because we're you know, in the
8:37
US, are our interest cost exceeds at earlion dollars a year now and here
8:43
a trillion there. Yeah, considering that if we have a twenty four trillion
8:48
dollar economy, that's nearly five percent of the GDP, four percent, four
8:54
and a half percent of GDP that goes just to interest. Thanks like that,
8:58
right, bank, well in banks don't like those higher interest rates,
9:05
or at least a lot of banks don't because they have big bond portfolios and
9:09
that lowers the price of the bonds on their books, which forces them to
9:16
report you know, some kind of a loss, even if it's just a
9:20
paper loss, and that spooks the depositors and leads to bank runs. So
9:26
that's the kind of thing that we're looking at now. As interest rates go
9:31
up in the US, these less than well reported losses on bank balance sheets
9:39
get bigger and bigger. And if a bank has to raise cash to pay
9:45
off depositor outflows by selling its bonds, then those paper losses become real losses
9:50
and they have to report actual negative earnings for a quarter or for a year
9:56
or whatever. In that that accelerates the out low of deposits and so on,
10:01
and so we get a bank round and the bank crashes. So there
10:05
are hundreds of if not thousands, of banks in the US that are in
10:09
that position right now, and that's a very big deal if it if it
10:13
gets going. We stopped the leading with the Silicon Valley bank crisis, but
10:20
there's a lot of other banks in that same position. So yeah, higher
10:24
interest rates are good for savers and good for retirees, and bad for everybody
10:31
else in the country who depends on cheap debt in order to do what they're
10:35
doing. And that's the majority now. So higher interest rates are a bad
10:39
thing from the standpoint of economic growth, the government finances and financial stability.
10:46
But they're not going away. It looks like because of wage increases and because
10:52
of energy, cause you know oil is way up now too, which is
10:56
a very inflationary thing. So the inflation that that's well, that's inflation that
11:03
spreads everywhere. Well so do wages though I mean core yeah, but or
11:07
though according to the Settle Reserve energy. But right now as we're talking,
11:13
and it's nine to eleven crude oils at eighty seven bucks a barrel, which
11:18
is at the near highs for the year. See that's you know, the
11:22
people need to understand that the inflation numbers are fake because of fad emphasis.
11:28
You know, they don't consider stock bond and real estate increases inflation at all.
11:33
And like you said, they don't include energy in the core inflation number
11:39
that everybody thinks is the real number. So they're leaving out an awful lot
11:43
of important stuff in a way that makes inflation look less severe than it is.
11:48
So now, okay, having said all that, pretty pretty good chance
11:52
we're in inflation in another six months, in any event, because so many
11:58
things, so many indicators or pointing towards a very nasty recession. In twenty
12:01
twenty four, this thing could just flip on its head, where now we're
12:07
worried about a certain certain kind of boomy kinds of things, you know,
12:11
wages going up too fast, inflation accelerating pretty soon, we'll be worried about
12:16
the the inverse of that, with real deflation pretty soon. And what that'll
12:22
take is crisis in the real estate market, equities, bear market, and
12:28
a bunch of layoffs in the affected country companies, and then maybe plunging commodity
12:35
prices because of all of that. That's that could be a twenty twenty four
12:37
story, and it could be you know that we will be having completely different
12:43
conversations in another six or nine months. So this is a crazy world,
12:48
nothing like what's happening in China here. So, yeah, so you've got
12:54
an issue here. Will gold's seasonality matter this time? What do you think,
13:00
king here? Well, so this is an issue for me every year
13:03
because gold has this seasonal pattern, that is, it's not perfect, but
13:07
it's fairly reliable. Yeah, eighty percent. But every year, because I've
13:13
known about gold seasonality from let's say a decade, it's been at least a
13:16
decade, and every year I look at the where share where there should be
13:20
an inflection point, and I think, God, yeah, but there's all
13:22
these big macro things happening, you know, I think those are more important
13:26
than gold seasonality. And most years, gold seasonality turns out to be true,
13:31
meaning all I had to do was act on that one way or the
13:35
other, buy or sell and you know, or buyer go short, and
13:39
it would have been a really profitable trade. But it's really hard psychologically to
13:43
look beyond the big macro things and accept that gold seasonality is a real thing.
13:50
So will it be a real thing again this year? And let's say
13:54
that it will be that that's completely possible, and it means that right now
14:00
is a good time to be grabbing for more gold and silver or the mining
14:03
stocks or whatever, because normally there's a nice run from September through January and
14:11
maybe February. That's how the historical seasonality works. So if somebody wants to
14:16
take a chance on it, they're they're, you know, on the calendar,
14:20
they're at a pretty good entry point or a long trade in gold and
14:26
silver. So so let's see, you know, we'll revisit this maybe in
14:31
January and see if it worked out. And just as a point of information,
14:35
in twenty twenty two two three, gold was up twenty two percent in
14:41
that quarter alone. So it's about eight out of ten times. Problem as
14:48
you never know when it's going to be that two times out of ten that
14:52
it doesn't happen, but it really is an established trend kind of like what
14:58
happened or still happens times when gold goes down, right when nonfarm payroll numbers
15:05
or released. It's the funny coincidence, It just happens, right. There
15:11
are a lot of things, lots of things happen in the gold market that
15:15
are haha, funny coincidences, you know, like how gold's price will tank
15:20
at four o'clock in the morning, which is the finnest point in the twenty
15:26
four hour trading day, when the fewest traders are paying attention. Somebody comes
15:33
in and wants to dump a bunch of futures contracts. Well, dumping,
15:37
you know, selling a bunch of stuff at the thinnest point of the market
15:41
is the exact wrong way to get a good price for it, right,
15:46
So that's probably not their not their objective. They're not trying to get the
15:50
highest price. They're trying to smack gold down, and you know, nobody
15:54
goes to jail for this, but it does seem like a form of fraud
15:58
if there's a government doing it or a big bank doing it or something like
16:02
that, because basically, what they're trying to do is take the sales out
16:07
of bulls in that market. In other words, people who are just optimistic
16:11
about the price of gold and want to keep buying and tell everybody else to
16:14
do it. You smack gold down by twenty or thirty dollars announced at four
16:18
o'clock in the morning, and then it opens way down the next day,
16:22
and that moderates the animal spirits in that market. And I think that's an
16:29
objective of governments around the world. They don't want gold to be rocking,
16:33
because that's the exact same thing as saying that their currencies are tanking. This
16:37
gold is a competing form of money, so you want gold movements to be
16:42
smoothed out and buy us towards the downside as much as possible. And you
16:48
know, a lot of trading activity and gold kind of looks like somebody's trying
16:52
to make that happen. Certainly does. I don't know who would do such
16:56
a thing, but it certainly does. Hey, so we got one here
17:02
about offshore wind farms are killing whales. I mean, hey, it's like
17:08
we spent the past twenty thirty years trying to bring these whales back from near
17:14
extinction and now they want to kill them off again. What is that about?
17:18
See, this falls under the shrinking trust horizon category where the number of
17:25
institutions that we think are trustworthy is shrinking so dramatically. And you know,
17:30
it used to be that the environmentalists were They might have been misguided, but
17:36
they were well intentioned, right, And that includes the guys building solar farms
17:41
and and wind farms and offshore wind farms and things like that. But apparently
17:45
this is from Michael Shellenberger, who has a substat called public News. Apparently,
17:53
we were building lots of wind farms off the east coast of the US.
17:59
And part of the that is that, you know, it's windy out
18:02
there, so it's free energy. Part of it is that nobody wants wind
18:06
farms on their farms or in their neighborhoods or anywhere that they can see them,
18:12
because it's it's noisy, it's it's disturbing to look at. Yeah.
18:18
Yeah, So so we put them off shore. I think that's a good
18:19
solution because it doesn't doesn't take up any geographic footprint. It's not taking up
18:23
any not in anybody's backyard. The ocean that is nobody's backyard. But it
18:30
turns out you make so much noise when you're putting in wind turbines. You
18:36
know, you've got to rill down into the into the floor of the ocean
18:41
to make you Yeah, and that is pusing a huge uptick in the number
18:49
of dead whales they're finding on the East coast beaches and it's threatening to it's
18:56
threatening to cause the or push the right whale species to extinction. And the
19:04
government is lying about the amount of noise, for instance, that they're making
19:08
with all the shipping and all the pile drivers and stuff like that. And
19:12
there's a a documentary that just came out where they actually went into the water
19:18
with sensitive acoustic gear and the noise that they pick up is just astounding.
19:23
No no whale that's trying to echo locate, we'll be able to echolocate in
19:29
that And that the government has been lying about it, so you know,
19:32
would think such a thing. Well, you know, you you would have.
19:37
I would have thought that the environmental guys were at least honest people,
19:41
even if they didn't always get the science right. And now here we go
19:45
it's just oh and the mainstream media, it's the government line. They say,
19:52
oh, no government scientists have investigated this, and and there's no otherwise,
19:56
you know, there's nothing to see or here here in And they were
20:00
lying too, So we're you know, we're talking in the New York Times
20:03
and the Guardian and that level of mainstream media lying at the best. Yeah,
20:10
well you just about can't. And that's until I got the solution.
20:15
I got the solution. Get them earplugs and GPS and they'll find their way,
20:22
right. Yeah, whales are smart. They should be able to figure
20:25
out GPS. Right. But you know, the important point in all this,
20:29
well there's a political point and a financial point, is that that the
20:33
fewer people we trust out there, the more we tend to bring our trust
20:38
horizon back home to two people we can see, farmers whose food we can
20:45
actually buy directly, and politicians who we can shake hands with and who we've
20:48
known for years, and people like that, and we don't trust anybody else
20:52
anywhere beyond that, And of course, since money is managed very distantly by
20:59
big institutions, one we stopped trusting all the other institutions, we of course
21:03
stopped trusting the guys who run our money, and that brings us one step
21:07
closer to that gigantic financial crisis slash currency reset that we keep thinking is imminent
21:15
and hasn't been so far, but maybe pretty soon, because you know,
21:18
you just don't trust anybody, and whatever the government tells you about your money
21:22
is going to be seen as a lie, right, and you're going to
21:26
act accordingly. So we're headed for that day as we kick more and more
21:32
institutions off the list of the people who we can trust. And you know,
21:34
the FBI is long gone, the CIA was never really on the list,
21:38
except unless you're Rachel Maddow or somebody like that, or what's his name,
21:45
Anderson Cooper, who just happened to work as an analyst for the CIA,
21:48
Right, Yeah, so he knows they're honest because he used to work
21:52
there. But yeah, the mainstream corporate media is still captured by these big
21:56
institutions, but more and more people are starting to figure out that the big
22:02
media conglomerates are actually just other institutions that should never be trusted. And that's
22:08
that's why the princess cable news networks are losing viewers in such a dramatic rate.
22:15
They're shrinking relative to Joe Rogan and to Russell Brand and then you know
22:22
the other big podcasters out there like you. You know that people are shifting
22:27
their points and to substack. You know, people are canceling their New York
22:33
Times subscription and then subscribing to ten substack writers or whatever on something that they
22:40
get a lot more. Hopefully Robino dot substack dot com is one of them
22:44
that they're canceling in favor of. But I would love to show up on
22:49
that list people. But New York Times is losing out to Let's not forget
22:56
that one of the main reasons for building those farms offshore, besides while the
23:03
avoiding the NIMBI people, is the tax credits. So basically the government is
23:08
paying to kill wales, right. That is basically the follow the money solution
23:15
to all this is yeah, because that's where the money comes from, comes
23:18
from the government that, by the way, is being paid off via campaign
23:26
contributions by the wind industry, so it's a circular flow of money. The
23:32
wind industry buys a bunch of politicians who allocate a bunch of taxpayer money to
23:37
the wind industry. And since you know, the wind industry might pay a
23:41
few million dollars to buy politicians, but they get back billions of dollars,
23:45
So it's a really good invest ROI. Yeah, great, great roli.
23:51
And it comes at our expense basically, or it comes at the expense of
23:53
people who trust the Fed to maintain the value of the dollar because basically,
23:59
yeah, because basically that money comes from inflation. It's just printed out.
24:02
If in air makes the money less valuable, and it hurts the people who
24:07
have big dollar bank accounts and money under the mattress and things like that,
24:11
and own government bond funds. So basically the government is taking from them,
24:18
getting to the wind industry and to many many other industries. You know,
24:22
the defense contractors, the big banks, et cetera, et cetera, who
24:25
took around and finance the politicians campaigns. So in effect, it's basically regular
24:33
people financing the political campaigns of people who are impoverishing. You know, it's
24:40
a system that historians once they untangle it all are not going to be kind
24:45
to later on. Right now, it's working beautifully for the guys who are
24:48
profiting from it. All. Right, So we didn't have this on the
24:52
list, but it got to bring it up because I know you saw it
24:56
and it's good for a couple of laughs, but when you think about it
24:59
more, it's not. Finally, the obesity epidemic is paying huge dividends to
25:06
big pharma because they're coming up with cures for what government policies like the Food
25:12
Pyramid caused in the first place by taking fat out of food and encouraging you
25:19
to consume refined, refined carbohydrates and processed foods, which is directly attributable to
25:29
the obesity epidemic. Now, companies like Eli Lilly up six hundred percent since
25:36
twenty twenty on the strength of their drug Wagovi and Novartis has a market cap
25:47
over four hundred billion dollars thanks to Ozepic. And then the theme song on
25:53
the ads for ozepic is going back to I think it was Orleans and their
26:00
hit song from the eighties or nineties. It's magic and they're just creating money
26:06
out of thin air. It's magical. What's happening here? John and all
26:10
the other pharmacy companies are rushing to get in on this obesity gold rush.
26:15
Well, it is magic for those guys, in the sense that a perpetual
26:19
motion machine is magic. You create a lot of lifestyle diseases, which are
26:25
basically chronic diseases that never go away. Then instead of insisting that people adopt
26:30
better lifestyles, you hand them pills or injections that manage the symptoms of the
26:37
lifestyle diseases that you cause. If you're a big right or big food and
26:41
yeah, and it's it goes on forever. I mean obesity. You get
26:47
a you know, a twelve year old to make up, make a twelve
26:51
year old obese. They will be obese for a lifetime because they're they're too
26:56
fat to exercise and they're the minds don't work right well enough for them to
27:00
actually understand nutrition. So you got them for lifetime. It's it's the same
27:04
formula that was used with smoking, where you you know, you get a
27:08
nineteen year old hooked on cigarettes and they never get off, and they smoke
27:14
and smoke and smoke until they get lung cancer. And then a different part
27:18
of big pharma. It makes money treat treating the lung cancer until the guy
27:22
you know, it just goes on and on. So it's it's a gold
27:26
mine for everybody concerned except regular people. Yeah, by no business model.
27:32
That's white a business model, and it's a great business model. You know,
27:37
to the most profitable department of every hospital out there, jaw do you
27:41
know the most web serveth Let me guess, I would say the cancer right,
27:45
chemotherapy inmotherapy, Yeah, it gas not much labor involved, high margin
27:51
item, and it doesn't work, so they have to keep Yeah, well
27:56
we know it doesn't work. It might work, and some people are cured
28:02
or effectively treated by chemotherapy, but invariably at a large number of cases that
28:08
I don't know, because each cancer is different. Like leuchemia they cure it,
28:14
or non Hodgkins lymphoma they cure it and it's basically forever. But in
28:19
many other types they cure it for a few years and then it comes back.
28:25
And imagine if the chemotherapy got reimbursed on the success of the outcome.
28:32
Imagine college is got money from the government based on the success of their alumni.
28:38
Right, we would have a lot less problems if if you got paid
28:44
for results rather than for efforts. Yeah, well, you're right that chemotherapy
28:51
cures some versions of cancer, but it has no effect or negative effects on
28:56
a lot of other kinds of cancer. But they use it for everything because
29:00
they get paid for everything, so there's no there's no correlation between the efficacy
29:07
and usage or something like chemo. And yeah, and once again follow the
29:12
money. Who profits from this? And you know there is there's another aspect
29:18
of this too, because there's another player in this game, which is the
29:22
government, which has to pay out a lot of people live alone time.
29:27
So the government actually benefits from pharmaceuticals that kill people before they stick around and
29:36
collect thirty years of Social Security or something like that. So a lot of
29:40
the drugs, maybe it could be, could well be the part of the
29:42
chemo story is that it's designed to kill off a lot of cancer sufferers before
29:51
they've you know, taken thousands of thousands of dollars out of care. And
29:56
I would prefer to think that they got to do some thing to help these
30:00
people, and they don't know what else to do, and you know,
30:04
holistic stuff is very questionable it might work, it might not work, but
30:11
yeah, it's And again, a lot of these are lifestyle diseases brought on
30:18
by a lifetime of consuming impure foods, processed foods, and not consuming whole
30:26
foods. But I just thought that was interesting and along those lines. So
30:30
what's the deal here with Bill Gates funding the cutting down and burying of trees
30:33
to sequestric carbon. I mean, I thought trees and plants took CO two
30:40
out of the air. They breathed it in at night as we breathed it
30:44
out during the day. Well, I think the stated rational might be that
30:49
old trees stop taking carbon out of the air, so you cut them down,
30:55
you bury them, and then you plant new trees on the graveyard of
31:00
the old real Well okay, but but you know that's not the real reason.
31:04
There's another deeper purpose to what he's doing, Just like with buying all
31:10
that farmland. You know he's blinds farmland and a lot of timberland or I
31:17
guess not timber it was timberland. They would buy the or they would cut
31:19
down the forest and then use it for lumber. Yeah, right, these
31:23
this isn't the case. They're just going to bury the trees. So something
31:27
else is going on here. We have to figure out what it is,
31:30
and you know, it's going to be incredibly sinister and disturbing when we figure
31:33
out what the real reason is. You know, you know, something occurred
31:38
to me lately though, that a lot of the guys who scare us the
31:42
most, like George Soros and Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates. Yeah, they're
31:45
they're really old. So they're going to be dying off here pretty soon,
31:48
unless they're killing yeah well maybe, yeah, it was just buried Bill Gates
31:53
with his trees. But but there's going to be a whole new generation of
31:57
people for us to worry about here pretty so we'll see if the new guys
32:01
are as sinister and as scary oh as the old guys. But because George
32:07
Soros a son, sounds like he's taken over for George Soros, he sounds
32:10
pretty scary. I think he's an underachiever, though you know, tons of
32:15
wealthy ski ons of wealthy capitalists are basically slackers and underachievers. He might buy
32:22
into the whole thing, but I guarantee he won't work twenty four to seven
32:27
like his dad, trying to make his nightmarish dystopian future reality, so we
32:32
can only hope. So what about AI. It's like it's the AI dot
32:37
com three point zero. I mean, this is amazing. Well, remember
32:44
back in the nineteen nineties that companies completely unrelated to the Internet would just slap
32:50
dot com under interne names and there's stock press with quadruple. Well it's starting
32:54
to seem like that now because every big tech company is announcing, oh yeah,
32:58
we've got our AI object. And today there there's two of them in
33:02
the news, Tesla and Meta. Yeah yeah, but well today there's stock
33:08
price will way up. Somebody upgraded them because of Dojo the program. Yeah
33:15
yeah, and see that. It's it's like with the dot coms. You
33:20
can't all be a superstar Internet company, and you know, all the grocery
33:22
stores can't be you know, successful dot com And so it's probable that you
33:30
can't have fifty different awesome AI companies out there, right, And you can
33:36
have some some big chip makers, and you can have some companies that use
33:38
the anist, but they all can't be the Amazon of AI. So we're
33:45
going to have a bloodbath at some point when when there's the shakeout and a
33:51
handful of AI companies end up winning. So this this is a dangerous investment
33:57
time for AI because you can't know ahead of time. You know, look
34:00
at computers back in the day, there were a lot of big name computer
34:04
companies that are gone now, but people didn't know at the time that they
34:08
were going to disappear because somebody else was going to come along. I think
34:12
that's the same thing with the But ais themselves obviously are going to have an
34:15
impact. You know when once the the robodog with a fifty caliber rifle it's
34:22
back becomes sentient. See, that'll be a big deal, you know.
34:27
And it's not clear who'se AI is going to be the one that awakens in
34:30
time to set loose the robodogs. But well, well we'll see about that.
34:35
But it's thought he was then the Ukraine already shooting up Russians, right.
34:39
He also flies around, you know, dropping grenades on them too,
34:45
right. Well, you know that the US wishes it was just ten ten
34:52
years further along with with droids because they then they would be unleashing them in
34:59
Ukraine. But you know, we've got a lot of drone related things that
35:02
we can do. But it doesn't look like we've got enough to be decisive
35:08
in in a big war just yet. But that day is coming. You
35:12
know. Did you see the story about Ukraine had its drone submarine fleet already?
35:21
Yeah? Yeah, Well he just refused to turn on starlink to let
35:24
them navigate. It wasn't that he turned it off or anything. He just
35:29
hadn't gone live yet, and he didn't. He didn't accelerate the process.
35:32
I've been going live to let that happen. But but yes, there was
35:36
going to be an attack by a fleet of drone submarines on a navy that
35:42
was almost gonna happen. Wants to get involved? Can you blame him?
35:46
Oh? God? Or doing that? Really? And you blame him even
35:51
though they're making him out to be unpatriotic and everything else. But like,
35:55
it's enough that he already gave the Ukrainians access to starlink, all right,
36:00
well because the Russians had cut their communications lines. Now he's supposed to facilitate
36:07
active attacks. And don't get me wrong, I mean I don't particularly like
36:13
the Russians either, but I kind of see Musk's point, don't you?
36:16
Oh god, yeah, you don't want to be involved in the middle of
36:20
something like I have you can help it, I would think, I mean,
36:22
just such a such a mess, and hey, what are we supposed
36:28
to do? All right? Well, one more major major story. The
36:31
Fifth Circuit partially affirmed Judge Derry Dowdy's July fourth ruling against government sponsorship government censoring
36:43
big tech, and basically they cut back some of his ruling. It was
36:49
a preliminary injunction, but they out and out ruled that US government is violating
36:57
the First Amendment censoring you know, engaging in the censorship of the big tech.
37:02
Yeah, they scaled back the original ruling, but they kept the concept,
37:07
which means well, Actually, Matt Tayibi had an article on this where
37:12
he analyzed what got scaled bag got kept. He said, it's possible that
37:15
the federal government will will settle for this and not take it to the Supreme
37:20
Court because they might be able to get around, you know, the current
37:24
scope of that ruling. But if they take the Supreme Court, that would
37:28
be hilarious because you've got to think that this Supreme Court is going to rule
37:32
against or in favor of the First Amendment and against government agencies being able to
37:40
circumvent the First Amendment by by threatening big tech companies to censor, you know,
37:45
and that would be fun to watch. And I really hope that it
37:51
does go to the Supreme Court just because that would be definitive. I think
37:53
I would think that they would they wouldn't want to make it ironclad, and
37:58
they would just shut that whole process us down of governments working with hope private
38:02
sector companies to censor other private sector actors. So we'll see, you know,
38:07
the process is still ongoing. But so far, so good for the
38:12
First Amendment. So what about you know, what about the other side,
38:16
the plaintiffs appealing the Fifth Circuit ruling, They can appeal it too, because
38:22
they got to you know, they're infringed effectively, I don't want to say
38:27
infringed, but part of their victory in the lower court was was kind of
38:34
rolled back. So it makes sense for them to appeal it as well.
38:37
And it seems like it's just the kind of case the Supreme Court would take
38:43
one of first impression and puts them finally where they can you know, end
38:50
big big tech censorship if they so desire. Even what it hasn't been brought
38:54
up in this case, which is the platform seemingly desire to censor speech,
39:02
particularly on the right, when it offends them. And maybe you know,
39:09
I was thinking now that they've found that that big tech, you know,
39:15
that the government is effectively using big tech to censor, that we're all infringed.
39:22
I got a cause of action and they can't even fight it because it's
39:27
a court has held that the government is censoring big tech. Therefore that big
39:34
tech is working hand in hand with the US government. I don't need to
39:37
prove that anymore. I just got to prove that they were doing it to
39:40
me, right then used to the government for money in a situation like that,
39:45
because well, a lot of people lost a lot of money by being
39:51
censored. I mean a lot of people lost their jobs. Yeah, damages
39:54
are in order for that. Yeah, So there could be a class action
40:00
lawsuit the you know, the one million most heavily censored people in the country
40:07
against the US government. That would be oh yeah, that would be a
40:09
great lawsuit. God. You can you imagine the the lawyers lining up to
40:15
to try that case. Yeah, I think they could easily do it.
40:22
It opens up a whole can of worms. What about when the when a
40:28
certain company that follows the alphabet. What about when they just take somebody off,
40:36
they deep platform them and the government didn't ask for it. Well,
40:39
you gotta wonder all this d platforming that took place, was it at the
40:44
behest of the government, because we didn't get the full They did discovery,
40:49
but they didn't do full discovery of every single person who got d platformed.
40:54
And was it at the behest of the government. I mean, we don't
41:00
know that. We thought, I personally thought they're just a bunch of lefties
41:04
and they're censoring righties, you know, But maybe there's more to it than
41:09
we even thought that it was at the behest of the government that all of
41:14
this censorship started in the first place, in which case they're effectively carrying out
41:21
the government's will by doing it. So they're agents of the government. So
41:25
the government really is infringing on your First Amendment rights, which the court has
41:31
said they are. Well, you would think too that right now liberals are
41:37
appalled by this process, right because they're in their current incarnation. The Democrats
41:44
are pro censorship, so oh yeah, not happy bars pro censorship. You
41:47
would think that the left in general, because they're they're the ones who get
41:52
censored most often, at least historically. So you would think that they would
41:55
be kind of relieved by this because sooner or later, you know, the
42:00
American Communist Party and all the socialist offshoots and pretty much everybody on the left
42:08
are going to be censored again. You know, they're going to be picked
42:10
on by a conservative government at some point in the future and that deep platformed
42:15
and imprisoned and whatever. You know, it's the usual thing that has happened
42:20
to the left over the years because they were usually the ones opposing wars.
42:23
So you would think that they would have a good feeling about where this is
42:29
going, and they would want it to get to the Supreme Court, and
42:30
they would want the Supreme Court rule that censorship by the government is on constitutional
42:37
full stop and the story. But it was so far that's not the case.
42:42
Yeah, you would think, but you know, they were the ones
42:45
that were behind it. Hey, you would think they were anti war if
42:49
I seem to remember Vietnam and Iraq, not so much Afghanistan. They were
42:54
always against it. And now in Ukraine everything is good, right, Yeah,
43:00
it's been quite a transition. I mean there is even are you you
43:02
know who Mary Ann Williamson. Oh, yeah, sure, she's a new
43:07
age. Yeah, well, she's a presidential candidate now. I know.
43:12
I subscribe to her email list because I like to get a good laugh every
43:17
morning at her. You know, even she is in favor of the Ukraine
43:23
War. Really see, she and Bernie Sanders are in favor of the Ukraine
43:30
War and in favor of supporting You can really check it out. Yeah,
43:35
it's astounding. Yeah. So yeah, so it's coming to it's well,
43:40
Donald Trump broke the left, that's all, you know, that's that's the
43:44
sentence that explains at all. He He terrified an awful lot of people on
43:49
the other end of the political spectrum to the point where the owns justify the
43:52
means. You know, you can do anything as long as it's in the
43:57
service of putting Donald Trump in prison and inpendent, you know, do prop
44:05
be damned well. And Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are are so closely intertwined
44:10
in the minds of people on the left now that that you can also do
44:16
anything to get rid of Putin, including right up to and including starting a
44:22
nuclear war. So we you know, a big part of the country has
44:27
gone absolutely crazy, and uh, and you know Trump did that. It's
44:31
all Trump's bault. Well, we're getting a warning of a child kidnapping in
44:37
Palm Beach County. I think that's our cue to let it go. John.
44:40
Make sure you go over to John's site Rabino dot substack dot com.
44:45
Subscribe to his material. A lot of interesting things about portfolio performance I've witnessed
44:53
lately. Hey, check out our site Financial Survival Network dot com. Make
44:58
sure you sign up for your free newsletter, John. We will catch up
45:01
with you in a couple of weeks. Take care. Thanks for listening to
45:05
carry Lens's Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For the
45:10
latest, go to Financial Survival Network dot com. Financial Survival Network now more than ever