The Economy Feels Fake Right Now

➡ The speaker discusses various economic theories, including the idea that the current boom in artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers is a deliberate strategy to avoid an economic crash. They also touch on the potential for a surveillance state and the creation of a simulated environment that could offer new economies and jobs. The speaker also mentions the importance of investing in solid assets like gold and silver during turbulent times, and the potential implications of Iran allowing vessels through the Strait of Hormuz if they pay in Chinese yuan.
➡ The article discusses the current employment crisis, where job numbers are misleading due to part-time work and inaccurate surveys. It also explores the potential of virtual worlds as a solution, where jobs could be created in an artificial environment. However, the author expresses concerns about the societal implications of such a shift, including the impact on human relationships and the potential for increased surveillance.
➡ This discussion covers the rapid technological changes we’re experiencing, particularly in artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. It highlights concerns about privacy and control in a digital world, where AI can monitor and potentially influence our behavior. The conversation also touches on the potential for a social credit system, where our online actions could impact our real-world opportunities. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of maintaining some aspects of our lives outside of this digital surveillance.
➡ The text discusses the impact of social media on the mental health of young people, suggesting it can be damaging due to issues like cyberbullying and the pressure to present a perfect image. It also mentions the potential dangers of a surveillance state that can track and predict behavior based on a person’s digital footprint. The author expresses concern about the increasing use of antidepressants among young people and the challenges they face growing up in a world dominated by technology. The text ends with a discussion about the shift from being producers to consumers, and the potential problems this could cause.
➡ The article discusses the economic and political strategies of various countries, focusing on the U.S., China, and Iran. It highlights the U.S.’s heavy spending on surveillance and China’s strategic partnerships and investments, such as their trade deals with the UAE and spending in Brazil. The article also mentions concerns about the U.S.’s declining influence and potential issues with the London Metals Exchange. Lastly, it criticizes the U.S.’s handling of domestic issues, including immigration and law enforcement, and suggests that these issues are part of a larger plan to turn the U.S. into a socialist country.
➡ The speaker emphasizes the importance of open-mindedness and civil discourse, even when people have differing views. They believe that understanding others’ perspectives can help strengthen one’s own arguments and promote personal growth. They also criticize the divisive nature of current society and the ‘cancel culture’ mentality. Lastly, they encourage their audience to listen to different viewpoints, even if they don’t fully agree with them, as it can provide valuable insights.

I think they’re trying to go in some direction like this. It could simply be it’s a way to control us in the surveillance state. It’s a theory I have. I don’t know. Well, I think, you know, desperate times call for desperate measures. I find on one hand I find it disconcerting that a country that was founded upon, you know, manufacturing and ingenuity and making producing more than we consume has succumbed to the point of trying to find jobs in a make believe world. Foreign. Business Game changers. Our Friday night economic review with Andy Schekman. And we are going to kind of free flow this conversation.

I have some theories on what’s happening with the AI data centers and maybe some of the future of tech and where their manufacturing booms. Right. Because anytime the monetary system is at risk and there’s major power shifts going on, usually you have war, which is what we’re seeing. But if you want to create peace, you have to manufacture something different than war. You need to manufacture a boom. And I think some of that’s going on. So we’re going to explore that and what that means. And on top of that I do think that there’s economic development behind that.

I would rather see us exploring things and building and new innovation than than a surveillance state or something that’s not real. But I do think that there’s some real that can be in there too. But along with some things that aren’t so great. Right. We’re going to talk about that. This is a new chapter in human development in humankind and where we’re going. And those of you who care about the younger generations, you know, me and Andy talk a little bit about a new study that came out in California where they claim that 100% of kids have mental health issues.

I mean a hundred percent, even if it’s close, it’s saying that there’s some serious issues here. So we’re going to dive into all that. We’re also going to talk about the straight of Hormuz and the fact that Iran’s letting vessels through if they pay in the Chinese yuan. What does that mean? And of course you need to get yourself some silver and gold just as a hedge against this really turbulent time. I realize that there’s other investments that you can invest into, whether it’s crypto, the stock market, of course there’s always good companies that you can invest in.

And a good company, even During World War II when everything collapsed, there were stocks that and the companies that withstood and those investments made it through and ended up being solid. So there are always, there’s always that. And so you want to be very careful on what you invest in in that direction. And as things hyper inflate, you’re going to do well. But you got to get out of those companies before they collapse. You won’t want to be in the solid ones that can make it through. But regardless, silver and gold will make it through. I like silver because I think it’s way, way undervalued.

Not only is it a hedge against the volatility that’s happening and all the questions, it also itself, I believe, is a wonderful investment. I think it’s way undervalued, not just based on historical ratios of gold and silver, but the fact that it’s the most conducive metal planet. None of that has been factored into its price. It’s like having a product that is in the highest demand and none of that has factored into its price. None, none of it. So that’s still waiting to be factored in. That’s why I think it’s one of the best investments on the planet if it also is a hedge against the volatility.

Now you got something that’s really good to invest in. So if you are interested in getting some of that for your portfolio, silver or gold, buy from a company you can trust. Miles Franklin has proven that they’re trustworthy based on all the hundreds of people that they’ve helped get out of the scams. They don’t overprice the metals. They treat you like a sophisticated buyer. Even if you’re paying 1% higher premiums than you should. If you’re paying 1% higher premiums on $100,000 IRA, that’s a good thousand dollars more than you should be paying. If you have a million dollars, you’re paying ten grand more than you should be paying.

If somebody says they can give you $15,000 worth of free silver, that means that you paid that much higher in a premium that they’re turning around and giving to you in silver. You’re paying for it anyways. Just get the lower premium. Don’t go with the free silver. Get the lower premium. Okay. Sarah westall.com Miles Franklin sarawestell.com Miles Franklin fill out that form and you can also get access to their private price list, which is better pricing than you’re going to find online. Okay, let’s get into this Friday night economic review with my friend Andy Schectman. Hi, Andy.

Welcome back to the program. Sarah always A delight to see you. Thanks for having me back. Okay, I want to, I want to go with a theory. Okay. I’m going to just throw this at you. Recessions happen normally on a cycle. We haven’t had a recession in a while. Right. So obviously they have the powers that be, whoever they are. You know, the, the globalist money power are getting really good at controlling recessions. Right. Because it’s not happening to the level that it should. The cycle isn’t happening. But I, I’m going to go with this theory.

Usually wars, whenever there’s a currency reset and it’s major change in financial power, a global monetary system. War is a company. It’s, it’s usually always there’s war because people, that is a vacuum and people are trying rabbit. And war is, is a very good way of doing it. It also is a way of manufacturing product manufacturing economic growth. Right. War is, it’s awful, but it works for that purpose. My theory is part of the. The Trump campaign was always. We don’t want. He wanted to be a peace president. Right. He cares a lot about presenting himself the way he talks about.

He does. He has a huge ego, if you haven’t noticed. But I think the manufacturing boom of the AI data centers. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s way overbuilt for what we need. It’s past what we need to develop jobs and infrastructure and things. It’s really a surveillance state, but it’s beyond even the surveillance state. It looks like they’re building a whole simulation environment, which maybe they are, but, but it’s a manufactured boom. We really could be investing in exploratory things out in space or other areas to build these, you know, like what the LaRouche organization has been talking about forever.

He is starting to do some of that with trading, you know, trade between countries and changing the perspective of how a company or how a country’s economy functions. But my theory is this is what’s going on. That’s why we’re seeing Nvidia being the most powerful. The $4 trillion company now larger than any other country because the computer chips, it’s all run by this AI development. 67 to 70% of all new investment is going into this AI. It’s a manufactured boom. Even though it will be. It’s, it’s. There’s a lot of money in this industry. I think it’s to avoid the economic crash.

What do you think? Well, you know, I don’t know. I mean, that’s an interesting Theory, I could go with it. One of either way. The Devil’s advocate side of me would be you create maximum efficiency, maximum profitability at the expense of high paying jobs as people are displaced through artificial intelligence. The surveillance state certainly is an interesting angle. The question really becomes, you’re building all of this infrastructure. The infrastructure, once it’s built, the jobs in that area cease to exist. Where do the next, where do the next layer of jobs come and are peeled back? I mean, this is the big concern, right? I mean, this is a major concern.

Unless you’re going for the Metaverse. Unless what is what meta was trying to go for. Unless you’re trying to create a simulation environment where there could be all sorts of new economies and jobs. I don’t know, I’m just throwing that out there. This is really a theory and just something to talk about. Well, I mean, when you talk about those kinds of jobs, it’s important. And again, you know, I don’t want to shoot holes in any theory. I think that what makes people smart is listening to other people’s ideas and theories and growing from it. If I were to play devil’s advocate, I would say the one issue you got Ray Dalio saying 60% of America has a literacy rate under the sixth grade.

So when you talk about Metaverse and this high tech environment certainly comes with a good amount of education, the opposite side of that, you don’t need to be classically educated to learn this type of what if there’s jobs inside the Metaverse? What if it’s like a whole nother environment? Wow, you know, I know I’m going out there, that’s mind expanding and you know, like, I guess I don’t know enough about the Metaverse. But I will say this. You know, I mean, we could spin it this way and said there was a World Economic Forum paper that was not too long ago, and it said that the next crisis would be what’s called the poly crisis.

The idea is basically, if society faces multiple overlapping crises at once, war, cyber attacks, pandemics, financial instability, et cetera, populations would be more willing to accept extraordinary economic measures. And maybe that’s kind of where we’re going here, is trying to find extraordinary measures to bring back full employment. Because when you take a look at what’s happening right now with employment, it’s really very bad. And although we’re being told that it’s really very good, something needs to be done about it. Let me give you an example. What I mean by they say it’s really good. But I would argue it’s not really good.

So the government issues two types of surveys, right? They issue one survey that says the headline numbers look great. 115,000 jobs were added in April. And that’s when they asked the businesses, how many payroll jobs do you have? How many did you add? Survey said we added 115,000 jobs. But the other survey asks households, are you actually employed? And that survey showed 226,000 fewer people were working. So the labor force is shrinking. More people perhaps simply just leaving the workforce. So the household employment number says jobs decreased by 226,000 and at the same time 445,000 more part time jobs were created, rising to almost 5 million.

So one person working two jobs can show up as two payroll jobs, in other words. And that’s only one employed person. And a lot of times that’s at the expense of a full time job being replaced by part time work. Creating an illusion of the number of jobs is the point. Well, here’s the real illusion. They have this stupid thing called the birth death model. And if you think back over the last few years, all of the job revisions a couple months after the fact, they cite the numbers to make the economy look good, to make the numbers look good, to make the end of quarter look good.

And then the quietly two months later say yeah, we were off by 80%. Sorry about that. So they have something called this birth death model, which is the birth and death of companies. For April, the birth death model added an estimated 391,000 jobs on a non seasonally adjusted basis. So the headline number says 115,000. The number from the household survey says, well no, we lost 226,000. If you take 226 and add 115,000, you get real darn close to that 391,000 jobs that they said were added. In other words, if you take the 115,000 and subtract the jobs that they just mysteriously added, you are way, way negative.

And so you know, we’ll come back. That’s a serious issue. Of course it is. So we do need to do something to your point. And it scares me a know I’m just going off. Maybe this is more entertainment, but okay. When I was in grad school in the 90s business school, I wrote a thesis on the, the next big boom will be these artificial online worlds where people will be part of. I wrote a whole thesis and it’s, it’s a massive market like massive. And that people naturally will want to be Part of it. And it was, I don’t know, I just figured this was going to be and it never materialized.

How do you make money in an artificial world? Well, it would be. Well, yeah, that’s a great question. It would be like the, the holodeck, right? People, people will, it’s Player one, remember the movie Player One. How do you make money? Well, you would have to, I don’t know how you, you would have to create jobs in this other world. The money would be different. You could use cryptocurrencies, you’d be paying for things that aren’t necessarily real, but you could create this whole illusionary environment. I am not saying that it’s necessarily a good thing. I just know that people have this need for it for some reason when people really get into these environments, they crave it, right? That’s why the gaming world is huge.

This thing just hasn’t taken off like I thought it would. And I think that’s why Meta really invested billions of dollars in it because they know this is a future huge booming market and people partaking in it. I’ve had people pitch shows to me where they want to in and use the metaverse to start doing classrooms, right. They’re starting to do some of these early stage usage usages of this metaverse concept. And I’m just, you know, things, things they plan things out for. Like you said, when there’s, when there’s serious job losses. We’re talking serious societal changing issues right now that it’s probably the, the biggest that we’re going to have to confront in, not only in our lifetime, but probably humanity has ever had to deal with with these loss of jobs.

And I think they’re thinking about every solution under the sun and I, I think they’re trying to go in some direction like this. It could simply be it’s a way to control us in a surveillance state. It’s a theory I have. I don’t know. Well, I think, you know, desperate times call for desperate measures. On one hand, I find it disconcerting that a country that was founded upon, you know, manufacturing and ingenuity and making producing more than we consume, has succumbed to the point of trying to find jobs in a make believe world in order to put people back to work.

I mean, it does, it does, but I wouldn’t put it, it’s not ridiculous. I think the way that people, you become smart is to listen to every viewpoint, take as much from it as you can. There’s truth in all of these things. Well, they’re talking about doing classrooms, which I think is a viable thing. You do classrooms from. With people around the world in a metaverse type environment. And I don’t like to use meta because that’s the. But in that kind of. They called it that for a reason, because metaverse is a technology term and they wanted to use that for their term.

But I honestly think, I mean, and think of it, if you. This is where it could get really cool. I’m getting kind of nerdy here. But if you could get. Go to Antarctica or you could go under the ocean, or you could go to Mars and you could attach yourself in a virtual reality thing, you could literally be on Mars exploring, as if it’s coming through your own eyes and feel like you’re there. I mean, there are so many opportunities. It’s incredible. Well, I think there’s a lot to be said for quantum computing and advanced artificial intelligence and the proliferation of this advanced technology where these things would be very useful, such as underwater exploration or any of these things that you first have to get a camera down there or plot it or get it and then to be able to.

As an example. And it’s far from the Metaverse. But the point is, and I don’t know if the metaverse ever again, pardon my being so naive, I don’t know if they ever collide with the real world. But I remember playing golf in Las Vegas many years ago and met a guy that I got paired up with and asked him what he did. He said he worked for the US Air Force, and he works for him out of Grand Forks, North Dakota, flying drones in Afghanistan with a joystick. In essence, you know, he’s playing a video game, so to speak, with real world implications.

I don’t know if that’s kind of what you’re getting at, is finding a way to connect the two. But certainly the rise of sophisticated computing, it’s real, and it’s becoming more and more and more real. Let’s imagine. Well, let’s imagine I want to play tennis. Let’s go play a tennis match. This afternoon at three, me and you, we go into our little holodeck and we’re literally playing a tennis match against each other with a racket and actually swinging, but you’re wearing glasses and so to speak. And it would feel so realistic. Yeah, I wonder, you know, how far that goes down the road.

And you know, what it’s like. You wonder what that would do to relationships if young guys are able to have relationships with a beautiful woman in the metaverse. What’s that gonna do to the two, to our population? You know what I mean? It’s not necessarily good. We’re already shutting down because we’re realizing that this technology is not helpful for kids. It’s Pandora’s box, maybe, right? Yeah, I think there’s useful usages of it. But if we get away from humans interacting with each other like we did when we were kids, right when we were in high school, we didn’t have any of this stuff.

We were hanging out. I was just thinking before I got on this, I said, God, I kind of wish I could see the world like I did when I was a teenager. It was a better world back then. You know, maybe every generation says that, but this generation has lived through more change than all the generations combined in a very short period of time. And it’s accelerating. The rate of change is accelerating in every single way. I was on a podcast early this morning with Kyle Chasse and we were talking about quantum computing. We were talking about artificial intelligence and the ramifications of what that means in the real world.

It’s definitely extraordinary. And you’re right, there has been this huge build out of AI infrastructure. It’s funny too. We talk about when Bitcoin came out. There was this big thrust of people saying it’s so reliant upon energy, it’s such a drain on energy, it’s bad for the, for the environment. You look at what artificial intelligence uses in terms of energy drag. It’s many times what Bitcoin mining is. And so we are moving into this very, very high tech computing, quantum computing environment. If they decided to move towards plasma, they could handle this. They couldn’t handle maybe some of the pollution issues.

I mean, there’s more to it. But the plasma energy, we could. There’s some demands and some things that we could do to meet that need. I don’t like the whole surveillance state. That bothers me a lot. Let’s not invest all of our money in creating a surveillance state. Well, what the heck does that do for. We’re already there. We have the digital ID in January. We have digital money through the, through the Genius Act. The Genius act through the Clarity act did not limit or ban programability. They already have kyt, KYC and AML Technology Anti money laundering.

Know your client, know your transaction. And we saw Tether blacklisted two IRGC wallets recently because they were linked to the Iranian government. And Tether was able to flag it and block it at the stablecoin level. At the smart contract Level. So those contracts, even if they left the wallet, they can never be sold because they’re blacklisted. Well, if that’s how easy it is for them to do that, what does it mean? Do we get to a social credit score type of system? And you’re right, we are moving in that direction, at least in terms of a digital environment.

Well, get this, get this. We’re already moving in that direction because, for example, YouTube. I’m going to use YouTube as an example. This is what Gemini told me. So YouTube’s company Google told me this, that there’s two ledgers going on and that what it’s doing on this is them telling me. So don’t censor me because you guys told me this. Two ledgers going on. And what’s happening is that those who are using VPNs, who are using ad blockers and any other kind of. Oh, and a Brave browser, if you’re doing any of those three, and maybe the what browser, The Brave browser, which gets around, it has a lot more problems.

Privacy built in. So if you’re doing some of those things, and then there’s other things too, but it doesn’t count towards views. They have two ledgers. So what you see publicly is the people that are using it without those privacy constraints, which could be up to 40%, especially in our field, a lot of people want the privacy. And then that’s a separate ledger. And they get. The real numbers are behind the scenes on a separate ledger. And the ones who aren’t using the privacy numbers, they’re publishing all of those numbers. So it gives two different. So that’s already a social score.

They kind of put you in a different bucket if you’re using any of those tools. It doesn’t surprise me. A lot of times the numbers just don’t add up when you’re doing things the right way. And you can tell that I’ve talked to a lot of people about this, yourself included, that you’re getting shadow banned. I’ve talked with Kerry Lutz about that a lot. Who, like you, has taken up suit against Google for the shadow banning. This is all reality. These are all the things that can happen within an AI infrastructure, within a digital infrastructure that is becoming more and more digital by the day, that will be sold to everyone as opportunistic, as efficient.

But in reality, you have to wonder, for all of its efficiency and all its opportunity is the lack of privacy, the ability to curtail behavior, to monitor it, to censor it, to blacklist it, just on information Alone. Could that move towards, you know, your lifestyle and ramifications for it? For example, you know, we talked about this new kill switch in the automobiles. Well, AI again, is going to monitor your heart rate, your eye movement, your breath. Does it smell like alcohol? Is there any, you know, was that mouthwash you drank too? Have a little bit of alcohol in it? Too strong? Were you up all night? Are you acting erratic? These things will make decisions for you on your behalf.

This is the world we are moving into. That’s why I think it’s always important to have something analog outside of this digital state. So whether we are moving in that direction with a metaverse or it’s just being used to. That’s right. You know, being sold as efficient and forward thinking, but it’s actually being used to curtail our movements and to catalog our behavior. Well, that’s a discussion for another day. But I would simply say that, you know, I find it all very frightening and concerning, and I think there’s nothing wrong with trying to find a little bit of analog in this rapidly, rapidly encroaching digital world we find ourselves in.

But it is real. Sit down with Katharine Austin Fitz for an afternoon and you will understand just how real it really is. Or you who’s talked an awful lot about it. But I don’t know, I’m going to have to dig into that one because for an old school guy like me to try and even extrapolate and vision envision productivity within a fake world is a little bit difficult for me to make that cross across the Rubicon, I guess. Well, think about it, because they’re already talking about classrooms, they’re talking about exploration, and there’s some really good stuff, simulations.

I mean, there’s so many things that they are doing, but they’re also selling a different environment, I would say. There’s a lot of positives and there’s a. There’s a lot of negatives. And those of us who just like to be free, we don’t want people to control us, we immediately are like, I don’t want you making any decisions for that. And then there’s other people who are just. They’re kind of almost like, you know, their nannies. They cut the nanny state’s actually a great word for them. They love the fact that they can control somebody and keep them from hurting themselves and others, which that does make sense.

But they want to control it so that you don’t drink and drive. And I’m like, well, God, there is some sense to that. But that level of control is kind of evil. I mean, we’re entering into this really scary time where free will is being taken away from us. Yeah, well, you have to understand that. I mean, that’s true. And we live in one of the more free places on the planet. But yeah, it is true. And so too will be the monitoring. And I don’t know, I’ll butcher it, but Ben Franklin said something to the extent when you give up freedom or liberty in the name of safety, you never get it back.

And so you can see that with 9, 11, taking your shoes off at the airport or things like that with tsa, it’ll never come back the way that it once was because they’re protecting us. Well, you move into something else. Well, you move into a world, a digital world that is far more efficient, which makes our lives supposedly much easier. With that comes the ability to track and monitor. You look at the kill switch in the automobile and they talk about that. Information is kept and can be given to law enforcement, can be sold to potentially to insurance companies to track driving record.

And yeah, I think it’s very important and again highlights why having some of your wealth outside the system really is very important. You can see it by all the central banks, they’re doing that. They’re showing you how important it is. In a world that is becoming increasingly digital and monitored before it becomes a surveillance state, it’s not a bad idea to have something outside that surveillance. Just a short break from the program to share with you an amazing peptide to help you lose weight. It’s stronger than Ozempic and why it’s because it not only reduces your appetite, but it also burns fat.

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It is easy and straightforward. Go to sarah wessel.com under shop or use the link below and remember to use coupon code. Sarah. Well, what do you think? There was a new report that came out of California. I never can trust anything really that comes out of California or any state for that matter. But it does have some, it has to have some kind of meaning to it and it was nearly 100% of the kids have some kind of mental health issue. You know, how do we get to a point where almost all the kids. It’s because they’re all using social media, I think and social media in your development years is so incredibly damaging.

Well, kids are. Kids can be mean. You know, I’ve had three kids and I was a kid once too. So you know, they can be mean inclusion or not inclusive. You know, used to be if there was a get together you may not have found out about it. If you did, you might have heard about it a day or two later at school. Now everything is posted immediately. You can see it, it’s in your face. You make a mistake and it gets posted. That’s not good. You know, there’s a lot of young kids who do stupid things and, and save it to their private story on Snapchat or whatnot and those things get hacked.

And when that happens, then what? And now all your friends see it and your family sees it. I don’t know. I think it’s far less healthy than it was growing up in a world that we did. But that’s a time gone by. So yeah, I think it is. I think it’s very difficult and challenging to be a young person these days. You have more opportunity for knowledge and information at your fingertips. Sure there is good with that. But you also have the ramifications of, you know, everything that ever goes on social media is there forever. And I think a lot of kids are learning that the hard way both in future what the world will think of them down the road when they look at this stuff and also in terms of just mental health when they see what they’re missing in real time or see things that are very difficult to deal with in their peer Groups, whether it be bullying, cyberbullying, or just missing out on what everyone is doing, not being invited.

I think it’s very difficult to be a kid these days. It was much easier to not have a digital leash attached to you. Remember all your friends phone numbers, not have your face buried in the phone every day, which is an amazing amount of power and technology that cuts both ways. You know, it does. And if it’s at the expense of our kids 100%. I mean, if that stat is even close, you know, we got a problem, Houston. Well, we do, and I think we do. You know, and if you’re a parent, you know, it’s hard.

It’s easy to give your kid an iPad to shut them up when you’re at the restaurant so you can enjoy five minutes of quiet right after working all day, coming home to chaos that leads down to a bad place. The kids are just growing up. You know, I watch my daughters with their. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. My daughter could be an Olympic thumb typer and win the gold medal. It’s almost frightening. And she hardly even looks at it. She’s got long fingernails, and, I mean, she doesn’t miss a beat. Me, I’m kind of like, you know, but this is the world they grew up in.

And so there’s good and there’s bad. But I think it. I would think that, you know, I’ll give you an example. Like, mental health problems are growing. I was at my daughter’s college graduation, and the gentleman that was speaking at her graduation made some comment about Lexapro, and then someone clapped. He’s like, yay, Lexapro. Here you’re talking about, you know, taking antidepressants. And the amount of claps that he got in the audience from the kids was insane. Like, how many of these kids are taking antidepressants? Because the world they’re growing up in, it’s very demanding. It’s demanding in a different way.

It’s demanding of fitting in in a world that is right there in everyone’s face. Never was that way. When you have to be perfect and it’s always polished and you’re presenting yourself different than you really, really are. And all the. We just never had to worry about it. We could just be us. And. Well, now if you make a mistake along the way, you are branded with that mistake across your forehead for the rest of your life. So I do think it’s. And these are the issues when you talk about a surveillance State potentially that can gather your entire digital footprint, put it into a, you know, into a AI model that will, you know, be able to probably predict and track, monitor, predict for sure and in some cases penalize if you make the wrong decision.

So it’s a panopticon in real life, ongoing at a detailed level. Never heard that word. What’s a pan? It’s the Jerry Bertham. What is that? Batham. It’s a. He created this drawing of a prison system, Jeremy Batham, I think. And it was in the 1800s. God, I can’t remember the exact details but he drew this prison where the guards could watch the prisoners. It was a circle prison where they were monitored 247 and the concept and they wanted to see how it would change the prisoner’s behavior. And when they’re monitored non stop it changes their behavior and it creates almost an anxiety level.

And it was this whole research and it really is what we’re dealing with today. But in real time and people are going to butcher it. No, Sarah, was this at this time so someone will put it. Your point is taken. And I’ve seen, you know, I listened to my daughter’s friends when they were younger and they would be sad that they didn’t get enough likes and all this stuff. But that’s what’s happening in a world where these kids have grown up with more change and more technology improvements which cut both ways than in any generation in history.

Right. Well, it’s the anxiety of always scrolling through versus just sitting with yourself and being you. I think that’s, that’s impossibility. They can’t do it. They can’t do it. And the attention spans are too short because of the. I remember when I was teaching class at the University of Minnesota, I actually, I’m like these kids can’t pay attention. And so I did a whole like section on learning how to pay attention. I didn’t call it let’s all get them on ADHD drugs and get them all drugged up by the time they’re 12 years old. You know, and these are all the problems that we are facing and you know, I think they’re real problems.

So to your point about a metaverse, maybe that’s where we’re going because you know, I see a K shaped economy where the rich get richer with greater proficiency at the expense of millions of jobs. So where are you going to put people back to work? That’s an important and important issue. So I don’t know, let’s make a make believe world and Put them all back to work. If you can do that. Well, you know, I don’t know. You’ll own nothing and be happy. I don’t know. In a world that is prosperous, one consumes more than they produce.

Excuse me, produces more than they consume. And you know, now we’re called consumers. We used to be called something else. I forgot the term that it was. You know, it would have been like, gosh, I don’t even know what the word was before they changed it to consumers. It would have been like, oh, I don’t know, what would it have been? It would have been like, we weren’t producers. We were. No, like when they describe the community at large, we’re now consumers rather than people. I don’t know what the word they use, I used to know it, it skips me right now.

But we consume more than we produce. Therefore you continually run deficits in a world to be productive, you have to produce more than you consume. What would trouble me is producing things in a make believe world doesn’t contribute to society at large. And same with spending all your development dollars on surveillance, which they’ve done. Like we said, 90 to 100 billion. I think I said million in the last show. It’s billion. They’ve spent 90 to 100 billion every year for decades on this building out the surveillance system. What does that do to productivity? What does that do to help us materially? It doesn’t do anything.

That’s the point. You know, before we end this, I want to get into something hardcore economic that is serious. The Strait of Hormuz is the most strategic, most important strait on the planet when it comes to transferring goods. And that’s why you’re seeing Trump go ballistic trying to get it open, because it’s. Or at least that’s what it looks like. And now he’s in China. I think he’s in China because Iran is teamed up with China. They’re letting ships through. If they pay in yuan, if they play in Chinese currency, what does that mean? I think that there’s something serious developing with that that we are not paying attention to.

Well, I mean, China to me is the winner of all of this as the United States, as our. Perhaps our influence is not what it once was. You look at, for example, Taiwan, we’ve blown through so much in the way of munitions. They look at the way we’ve handled things here, the way we’ve handled things in Afghanistan, and realize their position has gotten much stronger in Taiwan. But the real benefit is in the way that they do things in a cooperative manner. And when was the last time you saw China in a war? And when I look at what they’re doing across the globe, UAE and China just made 25 or 26 trade deals and they publicly came out and said most of them are based on parallel trade channels settled in yuan to your point, instead of dollars.

The three that really stuck out to me, one was petroleum for renminbi or digital yuan instead of dollars. The second one jumped off the page and they flat out said part of these meetings were de dollarization of financial channels. The third one, I had to do a little digging. I didn’t quite understand. It was non oil trade at the billion yuan level. It sounds very straightforward. Basically it’s explained as the relationship beyond just oil and the scale is becoming large, like bigger than a billion yuan. You have these new energy megaprojects which now are representing major breakthroughs for China and uae.

But you have to remember for decades, and this would go to the same thing here by allowing these ships to go through with either yuan manifests or ping and yuan. For decades, all global trade, especially energy, flowed through the US dollar system. But the more trade that settles outside the dollar system, the less automatic global demand exists for dollars and more importantly, Treasuries over time. And I think that’s why you’re seeing countries simultaneously increasing gold reserves, as gold is the one neutral reserve collateral in this fragmented world. Well, they went further than that. They understand this.

China does. And they understand that this next world will be built around resources and manufacturing while we’re fooling with the metaverse. Now again, I’m not raining on anything you say. I put stock in what you’re saying. But you look at what the other side is doing and instead of building a world where it’s not the here and now, it’s wearing AI glasses instead of building accumulating natural resources, manufacturing supply chains, et cetera. China just spent $6.1 billion in Brazil in one year. That’s more than any other country on earth. That’s a real thing. That’s why I’ve said manufactured boom.

Well, yeah, that’s what I mean by manufactured. It’s like you need to be. And that’s China’s been doing that for years. But we also just got done with a four year stint with Biden who is doing on the world stage. It made us who would trust us. We get something so stupid and it looks like the American people are being bamboozled to. You might not like Trump, but we do need Something smart economically in. We can’t have that much stupidity running our country. I mean, that was so bad it was too stupid to be stupid. It was done to bring the United States down, in my opinion.

You don’t whitewash the culture of the most prominent revered country on the planet, wide out in the open, unless you’re trying to do something underhanded. You don’t denigrate the electoral system, the judicial system, the immigration system. You don’t present a two tiered status of justice. You don’t allow lawlessness in your cities where cops are getting beaten up in Times Square in broad daylight. You don’t allow people come into stores and steal. As long as it’s under 200 bucks, you can steal. No big deal. And what is the result of that? Look at San Francisco. Whole Foods pulls out all the pharmacies, pulled out the biggest hotel in the state, gave the keys, or in the city gave the keys back to the bank saying the upkeep is more than the value because no one’s coming here anymore.

How can the American people go back to supporting that? Not that I realize there’s issues with the current administration, but how can you go back to that? I don’t know. You know, there’s something called the Cloward Piven theory that people should check out. I might have talked on your show a year or two ago about it. The Cloward Piven theory is what they were doing. Cloward and Piven were husband and wife, professor who taught at Columbia University and who went to Columbia. Madeleine Albright, Bill Barr, Obama, Eric Holder, his previous chief of staff, forgot his name.

But the guy that always seemed there, always war, would always pop up every time he went somewhere. But the point of it is that the whole premise of the class was how to overthrow the United States and turn it into a socialist country. The first is to have mass immigration that overtakes the entitlement system. You end up having a whole group of people and their children who once born here, then become citizens just by default, which made no sense to me. You’re here illegally, you have a kid and that kid can stay. How about you’re here illegally, therefore your offspring is here illegally.

But that’s neither here nor there. I’m all about immigration, but do it the right way because we all came from somewhere else, our families did, and do it the right way. But you create this serfdom of people that will never vote Republican ever again because of the handouts. And it talks about how you do this and that’s exactly what they were doing and destroying the country. Bringing it down to a socialist agenda where you do own nothing and you are on the dole and you are reliant upon it, brings in universal basic income and all of these things, subsistence.

That’s what they were doing. It is a system you can barely survive because now that administration or that party never leaves. Because why would you bring in the party of change that wants to normalize entitlements and get rid of all of this nonsense and go back to more of a constitutionalized form of law? You wouldn’t. That’s what they were doing. And now God bless Trump. What he’s trying to do, you know, he does things in a buffoonery kind of way, which undermines his. What he’s trying to get accomplished. You, you wish he was a little bit more statesmanlike, but.

And I wish Israel wasn’t involved. I wish we didn’t have to deal with the Israel. Well, you know, I’ll tell you who you should have on your show is Tom Luongo. And I, I was in Atlanta with Tom, had some great conversations and he more or less said that Israel has been made to be the scapegoat by the United Kingdom, by Great Britain. And he goes into really. The city of London. Yeah, the city of London. He goes in a deep story about it, and he says they have been villainized purposely to misdirect the real culprit, but they’re still bombing and they’re still doing stuff.

So they’re saying that really behind this is the city of London. And that goes along with what. He also says the same thing Charlie Schlanger is saying. Well, he also says the same thing about what’s going on in Iran. It’s the city of London. And Trump is pushing back against this. Pushing back against the city of London is in essence what he is saying. And you could say the same thing about what is happening to the London Metals Exchange or the lbma, which is being bled dry to the point of approaching, you know, some form of a crisis or default where there’s 2 billion ounces in outstanding contracts with only 140 million ounces of silver standing behind it.

We got a problem. If everyone stands for delivery. Well, who would be left on the hook? The theory is most of the banks in the United States have gone net long in London, leaving exposed the banks in Canada and Europe, who he believes in particular the bank of England is behind all of these things, finding scapegoats to run cover for what they are doing. And he’s a very fascinating man. You should have show. I can make the introduction if you like. Do the introduction. I’ll have them on. That’s great. I’m always looking for the best minds I could possibly have, you know, and I like.

I like talking about bigger topics like this here. We don’t always have to talk about gold and silver because to me, it’s the why that matters. It’s less the what. When you come to the conclusion that you want to protect yourself with metal, we can help you do that. That’s the easy part. It’s the fun part. Psychology. Deciding I got to spend the money to buy a car. Picking out the make and the model is the fun part. It’s the why that matters. And all of these things that you talk about, so diverse and so well read you are.

And so many topics, put them all together and they have far greater weight than looking at them individually. And that’s why I like going deep and talking about all of these things. And if you never talk and you never learn and you never go outside your comfort zone, you never grow. And that to me, is very valuable. I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me. And they’re all very valid. And this is what is missing. Part of what is missing is the ability, even if we don’t always align, to talk about it civilly, to take pieces of what you’re saying and to put it into my thought process.

And you take stuff, I say, put it in your thought. We don’t always have to agree, but we can talk and we can learn from one another and do it in a civil manner, where now you’re. You’re identified by who you voted for. And, you know, it’s less about civility and unity of a country and more of this divisiveness where everyone’s viewpoint is all that matters. And if you’re, you know, the cancel culture type of mentality that we saw in the previous administration, if you don’t, if you’re not part of our thought process, well, you’re canceled.

Those are the things that we need to get away from and to have these conversations. Conversations. And for your people to listen to these conversations and mine, because we post these shows too. Open their eyes, open their perspective. It’s how you learn. I just had Kyle Chasse on my show. He’s a bitcoin guy. My people don’t like bitcoin at all, but I more or less admonish them and said, open your eyes and listen to what this serially successful young man is talking about, you don’t have to agree with everything, but listen, learn, take pieces and grow from there.

And so because it might not be a completely, you might not completely agree, but there’s little things that they’re saying you really need because there’s facts in that and you really need to start paying attention to what others are saying. That’s why. And sometimes I can’t stand it. That’s why I listen to NPR at times because I’m like, okay, I want to hear what they’re saying. I learned some stuff from there, but I know a lot of it’s propaganda, but about 70% of it isn’t. The only thing I can’t get myself to do is listen to CNN or Late Night.

I used to love David Letterman. I used to love David Letterman when I was in college and early in being married, way back when I loved it. And now since 2016, I can’t stomach watching one of these buffoons on late night tv. But yeah, you know, I get it. And that’s what, what you should do is, is have if, if you were accused of killing your husband, you didn’t do it, but you were accused of it. And you get the highest price attorney around and he says, sarah, I don’t need to understand what, what the state, the plaintiff, what, what they’re alleging you did.

I’m not even going to open the folder. I just want to know your side. I wouldn’t feel real comfortable going into court knowing they didn’t even read the other side and understand what their argument is. So you want to have a broader perspective because it allows you not only to understand what they’re thinking, but to strengthen your own argument by pushing back against theirs. You just want to know theirs better than theirs. Of course, that’s the point. And that’s why I like having these conversations. And I thank you for it. And it is Sarah Westall, forward slash Miles Franklin.

It is. You’ve got it. Sarahwestall.com it only took me about a year, so thank you. You’re amazing. Thank you so much. We’ll see you in another two weeks. This was great. Sa.
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