Jason Hartman welcomes George Gammon to the show to discuss some economic conspiracy theories, including the repo market and the Great Reset. George gives more details about artificial intelligence and explains the benefits of a central bank digital currency. Lastly, the two also talk about Communism as the next stage of Capitalism.
Announcer 0:01
This show is produced by the Hartman media company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit Hartman media.com.
Announcer 0:11
Welcome to the Holistic Survival Show with Jason Hartman. The economic storm brewing around the world is set to spill into all aspects of our lives. Are you prepared? Where are you going to turn for the critical life skills necessary to survive and prosper? The holistic survival show is your family’s insurance for a better life. Jason will teach you to think independently to understand threats and how to create the ultimate action plan. sudden change or worst case scenario, you’ll be ready. Welcome to ballistic survival, your key resource for protecting the people, places and profits you care about in uncertain times. Ladies and gentlemen, your hosts, Jason Hartman.
Jason Hartman 0:59
Hey, it’s my pleasure to have my friend George gammon back on the show. And today I asked him to talk about three things. The repo market, which you haven’t heard too much about lately, but last year, about this time, a little a little bit before this time last year, that was a big deal that George was leading the pack on sharing that information with the public. And then isn’t it interesting, we rolled right into a pandemic. And then now we’re rolling into this talk about something called the Great reset. And I don’t know if that’s too great for any of us. But for the elite class, it might be really great. So let’s hope they don’t achieve it. George, welcome back. How you doing?
George Gammon 1:43
I’m doing well, buddy. Thanks for having me. Can’t wait to dive in. always excited to talk to you.
Jason Hartman 1:48
Always good to have you. So, you know, we share a follower in common that is commenting on my YouTube videos and your YouTube videos. And his handle, if you will, is my tinfoil hat. I’m talking about. It’s just an awesome handle. So let’s put on our tinfoil hats for a moment. And you know, I find it to be really rather dismissive and unfair. When you hear these people kind of trying to marginalize people by saying, Oh, that’s a conspiracy theory. You know, there’s tons of conspiracies happening every day. It’s you know, so what, that’s no normal conspiracies are going on all the time. It’s no big deal. It’s just, it’s just two or more people planning something that is in secret. And that’s all a conspiracy is.
George Gammon 2:37
Finding needles on me that I was a conspiracy theorist back in January when I was talking about the cereza seconds.
Jason Hartman 2:43
Yeah, right. Right. And here we are. And now you know, we’ve got all these crazy lockdowns and, and all this kind of stuff. Which by the way, George, I don’t know if you saw it. But speaking of those in Belgium, I mean, it is absolutely beyond the the insanity. I mean, the rules they are implementing There are so restrictive. And you know, we ought to we ought to actually talk about one more thing today, if we can fit this all into one interview, because I could talk to you for a month. But that’s the coming digital currency, that’s a digital dollar fed coin, whatever you want to call it.
George Gammon 3:17
I think it actually plays into the great reset,
Jason Hartman 3:20
I think so too. So I’ll let you take it away. But why don’t you just give our listeners for those may not know, tell him what the repo market is? What does that even mean? You know, it’s kind of this behind the scenes thing that happens. And you know, a lot of people don’t know what it is. And you were teaching a lot of people about it last year?
George Gammon 3:38
Yes, it’s kind of the plumbing of the financial system. And so a lot of countries that repo markets, the United States is kind of the focal repo market, because of the world reserve currency. So if you’re a bank, and let’s say I’m a hedge fund, and I need cash for XYZ, what I’ll do is I’ll say, okay, Jason, I’ve got these treasuries that I’ll put up as collateral, or maybe mortgage backed securities, and I will pay you back in three days or 30 days, you know, they can have term repos. But most of them are overnight, but they can have a specific term. And then I give you the collateral, you give me the cash, and at the end of the term, we just trade back and you get a little bit of a spread. And that’s it. And that’s a repo transaction,
Jason Hartman 4:26
What was happening last year that caused concern that signaled concern in the economy.
George Gammon 4:36
So the we all know the federal funds rate, that’s the rate of interest. We always hear the Fed talking about the Fed controls the overnight rate. So when Jerome Powell drops raise, as they say, from let’s say, 1% to 0%. That’s the Fed funds rate. Okay, that’s a very, very crucial crew, to say the least, is a wild understatement. interest rate. So what happened back in September 2019, is the repo rates were about boy rods off my head probably 2.5%, right around there, and they spiked overnight to almost 10%. And that just doesn’t happen. And why that’s bad is because if the repo rate spikes to 10%, that means it pulls up all interest rates with it, including the Fed funds rate. And we all think the Fed has total control over that rate. But they didn’t back in September, their overnight rate, their target was between 2% and the high, the ceiling was 2.25%. my memory serves me correctly. And because of that, repost by rate went rates went up to 2.3, maybe even 2.4%. And so for most people as well, it doesn’t sound like a big deal. Okay. But that means that all interest rates in the economy would have adjusted up by let’s say, let’s just say 10%. Make the math easy. So that 3% mortgage that you’re getting, would now be 13%, that 22% interest rate given your credit card would now be 32%. Wow, it goes to get stoked student loans, exact same car loans, your car loan would go from call maybe 1%, to 11%. And I’m not talking about new loans, of course, or if you’re rolling loans over your existing if you’ve got a fixed rate wouldn’t, wouldn’t be applicable. But so you see how that would completely crush the US economy, which is really built on asset prices, debt, and confidence, it pretty much destroys all three of those. So that’s a big problem, the Fed has to come in. And basically, I won’t go into the day they print bank reserves, why not they had to fix the problem by creating all of this new additional base money at the Fed, which can have unintended consequences. Of course, nothing happens in a vacuum. So that really was like giving a patient a thermometer, and they have 105 temperature, and you’re like, Okay, something’s wrong here, and something majorly majorly wrong. We might not know exactly what it is, but we can tell definitively that this patient is incredibly sick. So we knew that prior to the I don’t know how fragile your channel is YouTube, but we’ll call it the virus for lack of a better word, right? Yeah.
Jason Hartman 7:49
So this is because the, the the algorithms that scam every word said, you know, decided to demote or promote or demonetize your videos.
George Gammon 8:04
Demonetize. Yeah. Or they did. They were. I don’t know if they’re still doing it. That’s why it’s called cerveza sickness. So sure, moving forward, you guys know,
Jason Hartman 8:08
and I had a few people ask me, What is he talking about when he says the cerveza sickness?
George Gammon 8:15
Figure it out. Corona explains surveys is easy. Yes. We get it. We get it now. Anyway, that was prior. So to your point, what happened might have been a catalyst to bring the system back to where it was in September. But it wasn’t, it didn’t wasn’t 100% of the reason the system collapsed. So then the Fed had to come in and take extraordinary measures unprecedented, quite like that word gets thrown around a lot. But that was definitely true, accurate back then. But what’s very interesting, and most people don’t realize this is back in March, when the stock market was just completely collapse. The Fed came in with an emergency meeting. They’re supposed to meet on a Wednesday, they met on a Sunday, where they dropped the rates from 1% all the way down to zero. They committed to doing QE infinity. Yep. And to the to
Jason Hartman 9:18
infinity and beyond.
George Gammon 9:19
Yeah, literally, I’m, we’re I’m not exaggerating. I know. And they committed to doing 1,000,000,000,001 trillion dollars a day.
Jason Hartman 9:30
So a trillion a day, a trillion a day, keeps the economic consequences away.
George Gammon 9:38
Dude, yeah, you gotta use that. That’s a good one. You can
Jason Hartman 9:41
use it to George go. Yeah.
George Gammon 9:45
trillion a day in the repo market. Now. This doesn’t mean that they did a trillion dollars a day worth of repo transactions, but they committed to doing that. But what happened the next day when the market opened up, we’re still down by Over 1000 points. So the market just said that you were not playing your game anymore, there is no longer a Fed. But the Fed cannot backstop the market is kind of the signal we got from the stock market. But what happened that Wednesday is the government came out announcing their stimulus package, then what happened, the market started to go back up, and then continue to up and up and up to where we are today. So it’s likely gone from this bed back stopping the market, to the government back stopping the market, which is far more inflationary, which is why we shouldn’t be in a 30 year fixed rate mortgage that you always talk about. But that’s kind of what happened during that episode. So
Jason Hartman 10:44
now we have the Klaus and bigglesworth. And everyone at the World Economic Forum coming in saying this these are these are the elites that fly their private jets to Davos, Switzerland, correct. And talk about how to fix the environment and how everybody else needs to reduce their carbon footprint. Except them. They’re excluded from the big plan. But
George Gammon 11:07
yeah, they get off their g five and hop into their Tesla. Yeah, you’re saving the planet.
Jason Hartman 11:15
Total hypocrites. In fact, one year, George, I think there were over 1000 private jets that flew to Davos, for economic flight on Delta. And the carbon footprint on that is insane. I mean, it’s absolutely insane. But yeah, go ahead with
George Gammon 11:34
the World Economic Forum is the IMF, the World Bank, all these these people there. Now, to be clear, though, they’ve been talking about this great reset for years. So this isn’t something that they just thought of everything, which makes it even more interesting, if you want to put on your tinfoil hat. They were talking about this way back in 2016, maybe even earlier. So I think that, you know, if you want to put on a conspiracy hat, because they always maybe there was a little something more to this racist thing is, but if you want to take it off, and you can say, Well, at the very least, it presented a fantastic opportunity. And they say that they say the thing is a great opportunity for us to have a global reset of the entire system.
Jason Hartman 12:22
So it’s back to you know, rahm emanuel popularized it, but it was actually Winston Churchill, who I’m a fan of, who said, you know, never let a good crisis go to waste. And then rahm emanuel brought it back. And everybody was outraged, rightfully so I think, you know, when he was Chief of Staff for Obama, but these guys are the interesting thing is they’re openly saying it, like, you know, I guess it’s not a conspiracy when it’s out in the open, right. So
George Gammon 12:49
yeah, I mean, it’s on their website, they’ve got videos on it. You can check it out on YouTube, if you just Google or YouTube great reset, or their website, we’re like, kind of like form that the head guy is Klaus Schwab. And he’s gotten several blog posts on it’s done a lot of interviews actually wrote a book on it as well. So what is the great reset, this is basically central planning. And they won’t really admit it, but they kind of in a roundabout way. And then what will happen is, if you’ve read just one article, it may seem it’ll seem creepy, by definitely. But it may seem rather benign, but once you start to read a lot of them, and start putting the pieces of the puzzle together, it becomes crystal clear that they want central planning, and they want more central planning. And they want us all to live in it by the way, they call it an agenda,
Jason Hartman 13:41
agenda 21.
George Gammon 13:43
They call it the great reset agenda. That’s not my words. Those are their words anyway, they want us all to be urbanized living in cities. They really don’t like cars, they don’t like vehicles. You know, they like maybe the electric ones, but they’d much prefer us to be riding around on bicycles. They don’t want us eating meat. They want everything to be digitized. They want there to be a fusion between robotics, artificial intelligence, and human beings. And that goes down a very weird path. They want everything pretty much analyzed. They want big data. So they want everything feeding in to the central computers, right? That’s right. So imagine if you were if you had a chip on your phone or, or a chip in your skin, that would of course this is for your safety. Jason, yes. This is for your it’s always for our safety and our brand. Safety so you don’t have to spend money, you can just swipe your wrist at Starbucks, or when you go into XYZ store. You know if you’ve been vaccinated, it will just it will get a green light so you don’t have to worry about that. You go into a venue you know, you go down to the laundry, but it also sends
Jason Hartman 14:59
vital You’ll have a social score like China eventually that’ll come bail.
George Gammon 15:04
Please believe it or not, I’ve heard them talk about a social sport. I regret coming.
Jason Hartman 15:08
They can’t do it all in one storage they got
George Gammon 15:10
directly indirectly, though, indirectly they have because you read about the great reset, they always talk about more inclusion. Okay, well, that sounds good. But what do they mean by inclusion, and that is just straight down the social justice warrior type of we then that’s one thing that’s also consistent is they don’t want equality of opportunity. They want equality of outcome. Yeah. And they explicitly say that, so they want to, they want to re engineer how society is structured. And they really want anyway, so I don’t want to get too into the weeds there. But but that’s what their their vision is. And they’re very, very into climate change. And they’re into green energy. They’re in the big data, and they’re into artificial intelligence. So going back to what you were saying about the chip, all of the transactions that you do on a daily basis, go to this central cloud, all of your vital signs, go into the cloud via this chip, to the point where they’re even talking about your thoughts going into the cloud, including your dreams. So and again, it sounds like bizarre stuff, don’t take my word on it, go to their website, watch one of my videos, I put I show the, the blog post, right on their website. So why would what’s the argument for this? What would be the benefit in their eyes? Or in their words, right? Well, the benefit would be that you’d have access to all of this information, there was this information would go into the cloud in real time, it could give you all of this data that would improve your life. So as an example, let’s say you’re just thinking that you want spaghetti for dinner. Okay, well, that goes into the cloud. And when you go back home, then you on your front doors, everything that you need to make spaghetti, or maybe spaghetti delivered by your favorite restaurant, and you don’t even have to get out your phone, all you have to do is think the thoughts and it just appears and it gets delivered by a drone. And in their utopian vision. Of course, because they’re central planners, you don’t own anything. You don’t own your note, literally, nobody owns anything. You don’t own your car, you don’t own your house. So the question becomes who does own it? Of course, that’s them, they own everything. And you just rent everything you need, including your clothing. Yeah, right. And then you don’t go to the store, because you don’t need to because the artificial intelligence is crunching all of your thoughts, therefore, it knows what jacket you want. Yep, before you even want it. And then that jacket just magically shows up at your front door delivered by drone. And they charge the chip that’s implanted in your wrist for the drone delivery. And basically, if you read their their posts, they kind of want us to live like a very similar to like a third grader, where we’re riding our bicycle around everywhere we come home, our parents, which is the government prepares everything for us provides everything for us. And all we do is run around all day kind of playing on our bicycle and finger painting. And if it sounds like I’m being sarcastic, a believer, I’m not. Yeah, and I pulled up blog posts where they talk about this, this lifestyle where we would be free all day to just dream and imagine and to draw pictures and to cook our favorite foods. And it’s just this again, it takes creepy to a whole whole new level. And then there’s there’s several other components of it, the main being this fourth industrial revolution, which is all about the technology and artificial intelligence component coming into the mix, so to speak, and they have this timeline where they achieve these objectives by the year 2030. And so then the question becomes, okay, well, why? Well, there’s several, you know, hypotheses that you could go through one I think is the candle on effect makes a lot of sense, because
Jason Hartman 19:36
Richard can tell you, and we’ve been talking a lot about him lately. Yeah.
George Gammon 19:40
So if you look at how that works, and just to make things very simple, it says when the Fed prints money, and the government spends money, the people closest to the money. So the insiders, the political
Jason Hartman 19:52
insiders, the financial the Wall Streeters and the banksters, too. Yeah,
George Gammon 19:56
that’s right. They’re the ones that get the money first, before It can create price inflation in the real economy. So if you really want to put on your dr evil hat, and say, how would I accumulate maximum amount of, I guess we’ll call it wealth and power? Well as I’m someone that’s right next to mine, someone at Davos, that’s really where the world I’m informed, it’s right next to one of the spigots, the money spigots, right? I know that if I, the more I destroy the current economic system, the more money they’re going to have to spend. And that means more money is going to go through my back pocket. And so that’s that’s one kind of idea. But then you combine that with the fact that they just think central planning is superior. So I think the average viewer would say, Oh, that’s ridiculous. Just look at China just look at communist Russia’s, we can see that that doesn’t work or look at Cuba. Well, you have to really dive into the mind of a Marxist to understand how they view Communist China. And Marx believed that capitalism was a vital component of the growth of a society. He did not believe that capitalism actually competed with communism, he felt as though communism was the next stage of capitalism is kind of like a button that you would hand off. So you could not go from feudalism to communism, that would be an utter disaster, because the capitalists have not been able to do what even Marx acknowledges they do really well, which is build growing economy, create technology, and advanced society forward through industry. So the whole point is, when the Chinese went and studied, what happened to communist Russia, their conclusion was not that communism failed. Their conclusion is that Russia just tried it too early in the cycle.
Jason Hartman 21:57
That, you know, that’s always the powers that be the elitist tyrants. They always want to do a new sort of a new version, they just say, Well, you know, communism, Marxism, socialism, these other folks tried it back in history or in other geographies around the world, and they just didn’t do it. Right. We’ll do it. We’ll do it the right way. And it’ll be utopia. Right. You know, it’s
George Gammon 22:21
Yeah. So I think that’s where they could be going with this. So if we think this through, we talked about central bank, digital currencies. So if we understand kind of everything that’s brought us up to where we are right now in the conversation, and then we think about these global elites, that they are at heart, they’re their central planners, they think that all of us are just stupid, idiotic ruse that left to our own devices, we completely destroy the economy and the planet. And therefore, George,
Jason Hartman 22:52
were to say that I’m not sure they think that or not, but it doesn’t matter if they think that, you know, the point is central planning is great for central planners, and communism, and implies big government. And big government is great for the inner circle, the people that run it, it’s a fantastic system for them. Because there, they get their closest to the money. They have the power, and they can just control and allocate all the resources, however they see fit. Yeah,
George Gammon 23:27
probably actually giving them too much credit for assuming that their intentions couldn’t be altruistic. Good, be good. Probably.
Jason Hartman 23:38
I’m not, for instance, yeah.
George Gammon 23:40
Probably a stretch. Right. So but we know that there’s central bank that that is that is for sure. So if you think you know, if you and I were central planners, let’s say but we did. Let’s just say that we did have good intentions, we really wanted the world to advance in society to move forward. If you ask me how I would get the job. Here’s how I do, I would recognize that the problem with Russia, one of the main problems was that they didn’t have any price signals. Okay, so why is that important? price signals help you allocate resources efficiently. So if there’s a high price in something, you know that more resources have to be allocated to that. If there’s low prices in something, you know, that fewer prices have to be allocated.
Jason Hartman 24:32
That’s one of the main reasons fewer resources, resources you meant to say,
George Gammon 24:36
yeah, so if the price goes down, then fewer resources needed to be allocated to whatever that is, or whatever area of the economy that is, you know, of course, capitalism does this free market capitalism, I should say, does this fantastically well. One of the main reasons that Russia collapse because they didn’t have any prices, so they didn’t really know how to allocate resources,
Jason Hartman 24:57
DNA, you know, what’s interesting, George about that. And there are some fantastic old videos on YouTube about this, where I saw one where they did an interview inside the, I don’t know what it’s called, but the pricing office right in in Moscow, okay. And they pulled out these big, you know, books, right? This was in the early era of computer. So it was mostly on paper, these big books that told them the price of things, and what the former Soviet Union had to do, because they had no price discovery mechanism under their stupid system, their failed system, they had to look to the west. And to figure out what something should should cost, they have no way to figure it out, except to look at mostly our economy and look at the capitals. Yeah.
George Gammon 25:50
Right, they joined to borrow our rising discovery, right. So that I would understand that that’s the big problem for the big hurdle that is between me and us achieving our objectives. Okay, so if you and I are thinking about how to solve that problem, what I would say is, first and foremost, we need all of the data that’s produced just normally, by the free market capitalist economy, meaning that we need all the data that the individuals in the economy have making the transactions that they make for themselves and their family, on their needs and wants on a daily basis. That’s, that’s billions and billions and billions of transactions and decisions. That’s why a top down approach doesn’t work. Because they’re just not that smart. There’s no group of humans that can possibly have that much data. And even if they did have it, they couldn’t make any sense of it. Right. And so I understand that’s the problem. So what I would do is I would have a central bank, digital currency. So why is that been in order to implement a central bank digital currency, we would all need to have an account with the central governing bodies, whether it’s the Fed, whether it’s the Treasury fill in the blank, we would all have to have an account, just like we have an account with called Wells Fargo or Bank of America. So that would be every American and every business. So now all of a sudden, every single transaction is going into a database into they can figure it all out out, while they can figure it out when they combine it with artificial intelligence, that can self learn. And you combine that with when you’re not only giving you when you combine that with the fact that you’re not only getting the transaction history, but you’re getting the thoughts of every single person in the entire economy in real time. Right? And then you could I think, if you and I are these central planners that are somehow benevolent, we would say, Aha, that’s it. That’s it, that’s going to solve the problem of price discovery. And it’s going to do even better than the capitalist system, because the capitals, the free market capitalist system, relied on human beings. We’re gonna rely on artificial intelligence. And that is when
Jason Hartman 28:20
guests Guess who they will be, by the way, guess who the elites will be in business with on this Google, the company that their stated goal was to organize the world’s information, right. And Google will get all sorts of government favoritism, because there’ll be in partnership with the government and the central planners there. It’s the perfect company to do all this.
George Gammon 28:42
Yeah. So I think that’s how if at least, and again, Klaus and bigglesworth, and everything, they haven’t explicitly talked about that plan, you just have to kind of put the pieces of the puzzle together by reading everything else. But my point was, that is to say that if I was trying to they came to me and said, Jordan, I’ve probably given the bird first and foremost, but assuming that I had, I tried to think that through on a whiteboard, if I was in their position, how would I get the job done? That’s exactly that’s how I do it. Yeah.
Jason Hartman 29:15
Yeah. Interesting. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit more about the coming digital currency, we’ll call it the digital dollar. But you know, some called fed coin, you know, whatever it’s called, it doesn’t matter. But we’re definitely moving toward a digital currency. 100 Yeah, and certainly China is doing that too. And I’ve always said, the one that’s going to win the game is the one that’s backed by governments and central banks, namely the US government and the US Central Bank, the Federal Reserve, because they have standing armies, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum don’t have standing armies. So you know, they, they can’t force people to use it. Right, which, you know, that’s a whole nother discussion. We don’t have Get into but but the thing is, this offers the central planners such a handy tool, doesn’t it? Because think about it, if they want to create inflation or deflation, you know they can put the money you’ll you’ll be dependent on government for some sort of handout, right? Most people will most people are already and you know, or it’ll be maybe it won’t be like a direct handout, but we’d like a tax credit if you’re more successful person will be some kind of tax benefit. And guess what, you’ll get it on your on your phone, right? When you get that they could like a gift card, they could engineer the heck out of it, they could make that money expire, right? They could say you’ve got to spend it within 30 or 90 days, thus increasing the velocity of money, which could certainly create inflation,
George Gammon 30:52
right. And let me just interject one thing, remember, there, they’re getting all of your vital signs as well. So obviously, they would be providing health care.
Jason Hartman 31:00
So not not just that they’re you know, what you didn’t say at the beginning, when you talked about all this tracking? Right? This is, you know, this originally came with the quantified self movement, right. But now it’s going to go to the next, you know, scary step, right. But they’re also going to be analyzing what goes in your toilet. You know, that’s, that’s part of your healthcare is, you know, what, what’s coming out, right?
George Gammon 31:24
Well, yeah, the bottom line. The bottom line is they’re analyzing what say, what makes up your healthcare was the toilet, they but let’s just say they’re getting all of the data necessary. So then what happens is they say, this is all going to the cloud. So they could say they could restrict your spending. Right? Jason, your blood sugar level has been a little too high robber these last couple of weeks. So therefore, the next time you go down to Krispy Kreme, you’re fed coins don’t work,
Jason Hartman 31:55
right? Or they don’t work there. They can engineer where they work and where they don’t work.
George Gammon 32:01
Right, right. That’s what I’m saying. So whenever you try to buy some sort of product, that would have mostly sugar or something that would be bad for your health, that might make you a higher risk for the overall healthcare system. say they would cut you off from that spending, and why are they doing it? They’re doing it for the greater good. And Jason?
Jason Hartman 32:19
Yeah, I know. So it’s always for our protection, isn’t it, George?
George Gammon 32:23
So then the next question as investors and real estate investors more specifically, is, okay. First and foremost, what are the probabilities of this coming to fruition? Because obviously, there are no certainties. This is not 100%. This is not something that you lose sleep over. This is something just to understand that this is their their objective? And then you got to figure out, okay, what’s the probability of this coming to fruition? And most people would kind of dismiss it. But I would remind those people that Jerome Powell himself, the head of our Federal Reserve has been talking and you can just look it up on YouTube has been talking about central bank digital currencies. So what Jason and I are talking about isn’t too far fetched. And then you say, well, that’ll never happen in the United States. Okay, whoever has that rebuttal, I would challenge you to go through the thought experiment of going back to 2019. And hearing Jason and I talk about the United States going into a full lockdown, where they would not allow you out of your house, they wouldn’t allow you to open your own business, they wouldn’t allow you to walk on the beach or walk your dog. And if you didn’t, they did allow you. They would force you to wear a mask. indoors, if not outdoors. What would people be saying back then? In 2019? They’d be saying the exact same thing. Oh, that’ll never happen in the face. Never happened. Never had happened. It’ll never happen in the country with 300 million guns. Yeah, not in my country. Also, too, and I don’t want to be too harsh on these people. But you hear it all the time in the comments. You know, to a certain degree, I feel the same and I feel, you know, a lot of sympathy and empathy for the people but they’ll say, you know, that’ll never happen here because they’ll get my lead before they’ll get my goal or they’ll get my lead before
Jason Hartman 34:16
they’ll get my freedom. In other words, the lead bullet
George Gammon 34:18
Yeah, I got it. That’s right. That’s right. Meaning we will go to a civil war. The the people in Texas and the good old boys and the people living off the country with their guns, they will revolt and they will, you know, go back to, you know, the revolutionary days or they’ll come up and revolt against government. But how many people did that? Yeah, none that I know. I haven’t seen any on the news. How many people were bolted against the lockdowns?
Jason Hartman 34:43
None, by the way, by the way, George, here’s the formula for that, you know, the powers that be want to keep people just comfortable enough and you know, have their standard of living just high enough so they won’t take to the streets so they won’t revolt. It’s basically You know what the what they all do they want to just keep it good enough. So it’s it’s not so bad that everybody just you know, they just take over and there’s a coup. Right?
George Gammon 35:09
Now what you’ll notice is people really don’t revolt until they don’t revolt over a decrease in their freedom. Very rarely, very rarely. What they do is they revolt when they can’t put food on the table. Right? That’s usually if you look at history, that’s the catalyst is when people can’t put food on the table. That’s something grabbed the pitchforks and the guns, if you will. But it’s not when they lose their freedom.
Jason Hartman 35:36
Yeah, that’s pretty scary. Now, I want to mention something I just tweeted about this. But global food prices are way up. Okay, global food prices just hit a six year high. Okay, so who says there’s no inflation, right?
George Gammon 35:52
Yeah, I’m just going back in my head. I wish we were like the early Americans where we actually would revolt when the government’s increased our taxes and our freedom. But that’s a whole. That’s a whole other story. Yeah, so we’re definitely seeing consumer price inflation, which goes back to what you were talking about with the great reset, because if they were able to achieve their objective, let’s just say, climate change and being off of fossil fuels in the next three years, or even by 2030. Now, I’m not going to debate whether that’s good or bad for the environment, obviously, I think it would be good for the environment. And I like clean air just as much as anyone else. So it’s not like I want to go around rolling coal with these big diesel trucks and just trying to create as much chaos to the environment as I can. I’m, nobody
Jason Hartman 36:39
wants that. But then
George Gammon 36:42
I like clean air, I like going outside more than anybody. But the bottom line is you eat and I understand that electricity is being created more efficiently. And it can be potentially created at a profit, but it’s not as dense. And there at no time in history, have we have human beings gone from a high density source of energy to a lower density. So
Jason Hartman 37:14
let me just let me just expand on that a little bit. I read a book on this about two or three years ago, and it’s got a funny long title, like bigger, faster, cheaper, some, some something like that. And it was fascinating, because, you know, it talked about electricity, as energy. And it basically, you know, compared all these sources, it said, Look, the two energy dense things are number one is the atom, right, you know, in splitting the atom or fusing the atom. And then the other one is petroleum, it’s oil, it’s gas, right? And then after that, you go way down the list, and you look at like solar and wind, there’s just not at or battery storage for it. There’s just not enough density, you know, based on weight and cost of, of result out of those things. They’re just not that efficient. The producing power is nuclear, there’s no question about it. It’s the same idea. And people may have
George Gammon 38:12
an argument that, well, we have to do it, or else we won’t have a planet in 50 years, right. And while I would say to that argument that, okay, that’s fine if you believe that, but what you have to understand is, there is no chance that we maintain our current standard of living. If you want to move to green energy, you know, 100% within
Jason Hartman 38:34
five years, there’s no change. The green energy, by the way, is largely a myth, the environmental sins that are created in the production of solar panels and covering up land with panels, and windmills, those go guillotines, the amount of materials that goes into those windmills and the solar panels is insane. The sins created the environmental sins created in building those things are unbelievable. They really believe
George Gammon 39:04
you know, our Berman is art Berman. Yeah, he’s a geologist. I mean, he’s been one of the most prominent geologists in the United States for decades. And I interview him on my show periodically, great guy, but he walked me through how much petroleum is used to put a solar panel on someone’s house in California. I mean, it is staggering, because you’re like, Okay, let’s
Jason Hartman 39:34
make this stuff up. It’s the most illogical thing ever, but you can’t get a leftist to hear it. They just he starts
George Gammon 39:41
right at the mining process. It’s like okay, well, what do you need in the solar panel? You ba bam, bam, bam, bam. Okay, where’s that mind? Most likely South America. Okay, how is that wine? That’s mine with diesel engines. Okay, well, then what happens once you mine it? Great. Now it’s sent to China to be manufactured in the different components. Okay, great. How does it get China on a giant ship that uses my massive amounts of diesel and then you go well, that process
Jason Hartman 40:06
but But wait, there’s more. And when you talk about batteries and all the materials that go into batteries, it’s basically slave child slave labor in Africa, mining the materials that make batteries that go into Tesla’s. Okay. So there you go. That’s
George Gammon 40:23
the whole point is it goes back to Dr. Thomas Sol, who’s I think probably your maybe your favorite I interviewed him he
Jason Hartman 40:29
was fantastic. I love him.
George Gammon 40:31
Yeah. And there are no solutions. There are only trade offs. Yeah. And then we have to understand that with green energy, it’s not a solution. It’s a trade off, just like petroleum. So the trade off would be that our standard of living would would plummet and I’m talking about and I talked to our cuz he’s, you know, this kind of his words, not mine. I’m regurgitating a lot of what he said in our conversations, I said, Okay, what’s that mean? So basically, the standard of living in the United States would probably go back down to where it was, maybe in the 1940s, or something like that, you know, we wouldn’t be living in caves or anything, but probably like the 1940s. So is that something that you’re okay with that in fine, May, let’s have a discussion. But the people that want to move in that direction, they assume that we’re going to move in that direction without having to take a step down. And that’s just completely unrealistic. And then you have to ask yourself, if that is fair, to developing economies, right, such as Colombia, because there’s no better way to increase productive economic productivity fast and with the highest density energy source possible. So if you came in and said, okay, Colombia, or Tanzania, in Africa, you know, okay, no more petroleum products have right? Well, now, you’re basically saying that we’re locking you in your economy, as it is, right now, we’re gonna bring it down a few notches, several notches, lower than it already is. And we’re going to keep you there for a long, long time, and you’re not going to get back up to even where you were for the next 10 or 20 years. So basically, what that’s doing is it’s almost like the giant corporation, kind of creating a monopoly. But in this case, it’s just a country and they’re doing so by lowering their standard of living, but at the same time, lowering the standard of living of the rest of the world, which puts them into a position where they’re the only ones that are able to provide goods and services, think of World War Two, the end of World War Two, you know, one of the reasons why our economy boomed is because we’re the last one standing. So you have to put that in. My whole point in going over this, though, is that if you move in that direction, it’s not just with the green energy, if you if you look at the majority of what they’re outlining, with the central planning, it’s a destruction of the supply chains in the global supply chains. And it’s going to be a reduction in the amount of goods and services the economy produces. Okay. And by definition, the amount of goods and services in the economy produces is as well, yeah, it’s not the currency units we produce, it’s not the goal. It’s the amount of stuff
Jason Hartman 43:20
the currency is, is fake news.
George Gammon 43:23
It’s a measure, it’s just a measurement. So anyway, if you reduce the amount of stuff that we have, but you don’t reduce the amount of, let’s say, units, currency, units, money, whatever you want to call it, that’s chasing the stuff, you’re going to have the price of that stuff denominated in whatever currency you’re using, go up and go up significantly. So that’s where you get into this long term view that I have of stagflation, where you have high unemployment, because they’re crushing supply chain. Now, you may have like an mmt type thing where they’re like a jobs guarantee program. So official unemployment would be like 2%. But if you x out all the BS, government jobs, the productive if you just leave the productive jobs, you know, unemployment at like 30, or 40%. In fact, you know, that’s a funny thing that most people they don’t realize. And I don’t know if I told you this. But I was doing some homework for a whiteboard video one time on how bogus the unemployment rate is, just like the CPI. And I went back and looked at how they measured unemployment during the Great Depression, to see if you know, if we’re getting close to that now with, you know, when we were back in March or April, and what I found fascinating is that many prominent economists, when they measured the rate of inflation, or excuse me the rate of unemployment, they would subtract government jobs, because in their view, they didn’t
Jason Hartman 44:56
produce the 20% of the economy. Right there.
George Gammon 45:00
No, no, no, no government spending is up to 57% of the economy. Oh, I
Jason Hartman 45:04
was saying jobs. I think federal government jobs, right,
George Gammon 45:08
somewhere over 20%, maybe three years ago. I mean, now that we’re with the government spending is 57% of the economy. I will. I am with the numbers.
Jason Hartman 45:20
By the way, in a 57%, number, Georgian and by the way, we do need to be conscious of time and wrap it up here soon. But we’ll do more, of course. But do they count in that crazy insane number you just mentioned? Is that including Federal Reserve as the world’s biggest hedge fund? That’s what I call them, though. The Federal Reserve is now the world’s biggest investor and world’s biggest hedge fund.
George Gammon 45:47
Yeah. Well, that’s for sure. Well, I don’t know how they calculate. I don’t think they would calculate that up. I don’t know that. That’s a good question. But what I’m getting to that number is prior to the cerveza sickness, the government spending, if you look at total government, not federal began to look at the local government spending is about 40% of GDP. And then you look at the $5 trillion deficit in the reduction of nominal GDP this year, or even if we’re flat that thinks that number is somewhere close to 57%. So then you have to ask the question is okay, what’s 100%? government spending? That’s communist Russia. So as we get closer and closer to 100%, by definition, we’re getting closer to out all out communism, socialism, whatever
Jason Hartman 46:34
you want to wait with. Wow. Yeah, something else? It’s something else. George, we’ve talked about a lot of stuff today. wrap this up for us. Give us any financial suggestions you have for investing in such
George Gammon 46:49
a lot of gold might want to own a little Bitcoin? Definitely, definitely have a 30 year fixed rate mortgage? Yeah, I think and be aware of what’s going on. I think a lot of people are whistling by the graveyard, so to speak. And I’m not saying lose sleep over this. I’m not saying this is gonna happen. I’m not there are no certainties. There are only probabilities, I always say that over and over and over and over again, because that’s so hard, because people tend to think in black and white terms. But just try to be cognizant of this, and start, you know, thinking through the probabilities, and then maybe adjusting your personal situation or your portfolio accordingly to maybe with the baseline of what we just talked about. And if you are an American, or any person in a developed world, for heaven’s sakes, make sure you’ve got a passport. I mean, just there’s no downside to having a passport at all. And if you’ve got one think about getting another one, too, because regardless of how much gold you have, or how much Bitcoin that’s it’s not a panacea, because if you can get out of your government control the government that Bitcoin isn’t going to do any good that gold isn’t going to do any good. If you were in the middle of Venezuela right now, and you couldn’t get out. It doesn’t matter how much Bitcoin or gold you have, your life would still be absolutely miserable. So you got to have that that plan B. Yeah.
Jason Hartman 48:17
Good stuff. George, thank you so much. give out your website, or do you want to just tell people to go check out your YouTube channel or
George Gammon 48:24
Yeah, they can just go to the YouTube channel. You can just google George. And my last name is spelled ga m m o n. And everything will come up. Twitter, my YouTube channel, my website, you name it. It’s all right. Or even my podcast, the rebel capitalist show.
Jason Hartman 48:39
Good stuff. Well, George Gammon, it’s always great to talk to you, buddy. And we’ll have you back in the near future. And there’s a lot more to talk about with all of this stuff. It’s, it’s it’s pretty, it’s pretty big stuff. So we’ll have you back to talk about it more later. Awesome.
George Gammon 48:52
Thanks for having me.
Jason Hartman 48:58
Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss any episodes. Be sure to check out this shows specific website and our general website Hartman. Mediacom for appropriate disclaimers and Terms of Service. Remember that guest opinions are their own. And if you require specific legal or tax advice, or advice and any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to iTunes or Stitcher Radio or whatever platform you’re using and write a review for the show we would very much appreciate that. And be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.