#32 Getting to Know the Next Rush Limbaugh | Zachary Foust ( @ZacharyLoft )​

I don't think Trump's an idiot. I mean, I don't know. I've never met the guy. I call figurehead, you know. I call place a placed person. I call plant uh astroturf, whatever you want to call him. But again, I I'm far past the thought process and here's why of the political party system. In fact, I've seen scenes of how he will actually stop his speeches and say, "No, no, no. I need to say it this way, blah, blah, blah." And again from Hollywood, the way that he could stop and be like, "No, I needed to say this and I need I didn't move my hands that way." It's like, "Oh, a this is orchestrated obviously." Why why does he show zero emotional intelligence? You know, it it doesn't it doesn't click with me. How does somebody who's so financially astute not understand the economic turmoil we're walking towards? Zachary FA, welcome to the Awesome Matt podcast. Thanks for having me. I wanted to start out. I was talking with Gemini about you and it said it sort of accused you of having at least as much swagger as Rush Limbaugh. I wanted to give you a chance to defend yourself. What did Gemini actually say that? It did. It did. I may have let it into that, but it it did feel that way. I'm honored. I'm honored. Actually, though, I'm I'm kind of curious like where do you see yourself as you're sort of you're rising in the ranks on social media? Where do where would you see yourself sort of fitting in in in your generation in political commentary right now? Uh I think I'm I'm a real estate agent turned economic analyst uh who has a fascination with video content creation. Um I adapted into learning more how to talk to people from my sales job in the past and you know then I got to speak on stage and I got to learn from some of the best and and how to communicate and what not to communicate. So, I think that all bled into a world where some would say that the veil was dropped from the eyes. Like, you kind of saw the the elephant in the room and you weren't just staring at the leg anymore. And and, you know, combine everything with with just my craving to learn and grow. I started diving down rabbit holes and I felt there's no better place than for me to document and let people know what I'm finding as I go. And you know that's kind of led us to today where now we have a a picture painted of what the undertides of the society really are and we can use that filter to understand what's being told to us and propagandized toward us on a day-to-day basis. For our audience, can you paint that picture briefly? So I mean the overarching belief is that man at its core lusts for money and power and at a micro level that's controllable. But give that same man limitless assets and what more does he want? And I believe that the billionaire's complete goal is at this point not financial but to be able to orchestrate their own ideology onto the people at scale. If they can make it profitable, that's cool, too. But it it's about money and power. You can go back to 1913 and and the founding of the central bank. You could go all the way back to the dual funding of both sides and the Napoleonic wars. I mean, you can walk in a billion different directions, but as of most recently, you know, we're a post gold standard petrod dollarbacked regonomics affected. uh NAFTA leaving all the jobs across the borders, glass deagall letting banks be whatever they want. Our margin rules changes at the SEC in 2004 to let banks invest money they didn't really have. Uh the way we reacted to the GFC by socializing the losses, banks got bailouts, people, family got foreclosures, and then you get Citizens United. It's kind of like, okay, is that the nail in the coffin for any opportunity for our voice to make its way into Congress into change when we're saying money is speech and the volume at which you have it gives you that much more volume of speech. I I don't think there's anything that's that's uh a true democracy about money. uh and we become a moneyhungry money creating company of a country and I I think it's two sides of the same coin as they would say it's it's blue and red distracting people so they can take the green and how much do you look at international politics as well like right now I know that Russia for example's got this shadow fleet of oil ships going it's sort of interacting with Venezuela how much of that do you keep an eye on as well it's definitely trending on like Twitter and things of that nature it's hard not to see. Um, yeah, they launched like a submarine out too or something like that. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it's hard to keep up. It It is. It is. But when you're talking about this billionaire class, do you feel that there's factions amongst the billionaire class or do you think that right now billionaires it's just kind of becoming a class warfare sort of thing where where the upper class and lower class really that's where the divide is? Well, you know, we we people demonize like a pyramid scheme, right? They say don't get yourself involved in a pyramid scheme. But like if you were to like break out a notebook and draw the the staff layouts of any given company and you know you say okay you got your your bottom line workers and then you got your first layer of management and then upper management and then the director board and the CEO. Oh look at that it's a triangle. Like that's how businesses are formed. I think the only question isn't is there that worldwide hierarchy pyramid. I think that's that's a given that it is just who and where is that top layer is is really what the question is right it's not a question of is there corruption in government the question to voters who brought in Trump was is Trump the person who could be above and dismantle the corruption while the other side was like no he's he's like a part he's a layer under the total con orchestration Um, I couldn't give you a flat answer because there's there's one of two things at play when you talk about countries going at it. Is is this orchestrated some form of chaos for a larger gains, a larger means on the other side? You know, are they playing puppeteer right in our face with stuff like this? Or like when China had their submarines, nuclear submarines off the coast of Florida just like I think it was over the summer or something like that. Is this just like orchestrated puppetry or are we actually watching people with limitless access and lust for power go at it? Because that's scarier like that that might be scarier than the latter. And in a situation like that, how do you feel having Trump at the helm? I mean, I don't know. I've never met the guy. I I I don't know. Uh I I call figurehead, you know. I call place a placed person. I call plant uh astroturf, whatever you want to call him. And it's pretty shitty astroturf, too, because, you know, he's a guy from Hollywood. He's been bankrupt many times. He's bailed up by Russia in 93. He's already super kuxed up with Robert Maxwell and Epstein and everybody involved in these weird circles, right? He he doesn't seem to be the clear and obvious pick, but who better to assign a really really tough job than to, you know, dismantle our economy than to pick somebody who's an overall, you know, shitty person who has a notorious background. You know, if they got someone cleancut like a JD Vance in behind him, well then when this guy gets taken out, we have someone cleancut right behind Palunteer fund funded that can uh take the helm. And that's just conspiracy. But again, I I'm far past the thought process. And here's why. of of the political party system because I don't think Trump's an idiot. In fact, I've seen scenes of him. In fact, I just shared another one today of how he will actually stop his speeches and say, "No, no, no. I need to say it this way." Blah, blah, blah. And and again, from Hollywood, the way that he could stop and be like, "No, I need to say this and I need I didn't move my hands that way." It's like, oh, A, this is orchestrated obviously, but B, he's pointing out really smart things as another content creator to another. I'm like, oh, he really gets this. Like, he's a great communicator. So, why is he such a you know, why why does he show zero emotional intelligence? You know, it it doesn't it doesn't click with me? How does somebody who's so financially astute not understand the economic turmoil we're walking toward, not understand the numbers you're you're bragging on are a lagged bad or just simple simply not true? It does make me well one of the things that I think a lot of people forget is that Trump was a lifelong Democrat and so to even look past politics I mean he was a Democrat forever and then he switched and so it's hard to kind of blame one party or the other in some ways because he it almost just to your point it seems like it's it's it's a populist it's now the bourgeoisi versus the populist much more so than left versus right. we seem to be sort of diverging more in that direction now because you know and and and they all can talk rhetoric but then you see them off camera and they're all laughing and joking and shaking hands like they don't actually hate each other. They don't actually there's no animosity. They know it's just a game and they're both winning. So, you know, I I think I think you're right. I think it's definitely like um uh I think we're heading towards a weird place where it's sort of endgame capitalism to me because capitalism in its sheer idea was taking the assumption that man is greedy and that greed let's but let's let's monetize greed. Let's motivate with greed. Let's let every man work for themselves and be greedy in a in a sense. And so we're hitting some like larger scale multiundred-year roll out of that. One one thing I don't see in the in-game capitalism, one puzzle piece that hasn't fit in for me is where does where does CBDC's come in, Zach? And I want to ask you about this. How how are you viewing the role of CBDC's? So, I'm still thinking about what you said, Matt, about the the feeding of greed. I would almost substitute that for pride, right? Everything they sell to us is to try to make you feel better about yourself, be liked, be like everyone else, or be superior to others. uh you know sex that gives you pride, drugs make you feel good about yourself. Like everything is pushed on us as some form of extra externally artificial form of like security or or just vanity in consumerism because a lot of it is like the buying of cars, the bigger home, the the lot of land. like it's all for some form of like status and feeling that you can gain on within yourself. But it it's it's like they weaponize us feeling bad. It's like they weaponize our dopamine sensors to make us feel awful about ourselves so that we have to fill it with a a food item or we have to fill it with an experience or we have to fill it with a Netflix subscription. And if enough people were able to go inward, I think a lot more people would actually create lasting change but were so distracted and beaten down externally, it just seems weaponized because it seems obvious when you really look back. Well, I think that it's also I agree with you, but I think that also demand meets supply. Like I think if they were supplying something that nobody wanted, then nobody would do it. So there is some nature. It's like when China was fully communist and their rice crops were just abysmal and then the government changed the rules to say, "Okay, you have to make this much and you get to keep 10% of everything above it." And in a year, their rice output like tripled like because they let the farmers kind of be greedy. Rather than thinking of the greatest good, you get to be a little greedy. You get 10% of everything you make and all of a sudden output like doubles and triples and famine is gone in the country for forever. And so like there is this thing where you can just motivate people because there is that internal motivation, right? I mean it is a little bit of like gaming the system, but I'm with you. I mean that's why you then look into things like um the Stoics and you know there's there's writings about this all over the place where it is about going internal and understanding your own motivations. But it's also hard to do that at scale. Like I'll give a a homeless man 20 bucks, but when you say, "Hey, give $1,000 to this nonprofit way over there and 100% goes to feed a thousand kids," it just doesn't feel as good. For some reason, I don't feel as good giving to a thousand kids as to one homeless man in front of me because proximity creates that emotion. It creates that sort of connection, right? And so like the bigger you get and when you have hundreds of millions of people and billions of dollars of scale, the emotion behind it just kind of evaporates I think. So or you know it's harder it's harder to maintain. Yeah. It's it's like a it's a micro it's it's we're talking consciousness. We're talking understanding we're alive. That's really the crux of it is is understanding you're alive and breathing in the miracle of this present moment on a marble in the middle of the vacuum of space. Like let's stop arguing about who created it and can we just sit and understand like whoa this is nuts. Like we're like flying through space right now and spinning really fast and like we speak the same sounds out of our throats and I happen to understand yours through these holes in my head. Like it's all crazy when you really sit and soak it in. But we're just so externally driven. Uh it it it's frustrating. But you're right at scale. How do how do you sort of implement that and show people that? Well, one motivation for me in the content I make today now is is truly I I want people to understand what's behind this curtain. So you can start to process that your entire identity, your sports team, your political party, way you view gay marriage, all this. I need you to understand all of that's a lie and you're more important and you're hanging on to these identities that you've attached to your ideology or these ideologies you've attached to your identity. It's not really your identity. It's just like it's like clothes. Like let's spiritually like yo get naked like understand thine self or whatever stoic quote you want to make it. What sort of practices do you have for going internal? Meditation. Love meditation. Um I think guided meditations just for gratitude like from Tony Robbins and all that are great. I think breathing meditations from like Wimhof are fantastic. Um uh uh oh god I forgot his name. We'll come back to him. Um I think that Dr. Joe Despensza though a nut fantastic spiritually in-depth but also sciencebacked uh practitioner. Uh Andrew Huberman that was the guy. He does a fantastic breathing uh deep rest meditation that I highly suggest. Yeah. The Monroe Institute. Also a little bit more on the loopy side. I went through a good five months were at a daily practice of the gateway experience which are old CIA tapes. Uh and I Yes. And I still to this day I on the daily utilize the I have brain tool set up like I have a tool tool shop in my head now from those tapes. Did you have a number of out-of- body experiences? No, I didn't have any. Oh, okay. No encounters with like other beings or things like that? Not to my knowledge. Maybe I'm not maybe I'm not woke enough for that. But yeah, it sounds like you're still underdeveloped. What What kind of experiences did you have with those? I'm so curious though. Um I it's I I would say the the experience I had was understanding um almost like you know how you climb a mountain, right? When you climb a mountain like the face of mountain, you you don't just climb the entire thing all at once. you set up stations for yourself where where you're locking in something new. You're hammering into it and that's your new anchor and that's your new level and you understand how to get there, right? And then you go to the next one and then so on and so forth. And so what this did is it kind of started building a gateway almost like a map in my brain of like, okay, we're going to do X, Y, and Z, and you're going to place yourself here in your head. Picture this as hard as you can doing this specific brain exercise. It's throwing oxygen into you and then you're going to hold it and you're going to imagine this and hold the feel there. It's very instructional. Um, and then you know you got to hum this thing and it's going to make you feel like you're vi it's it's very weird. It's off-putting. Um, once you get used to it and you get used to that rhythm, you find your body makes it so much easier for your brain to go to that place when you do those items. It's like habitual and then the feelings get deeper and deeper and deeper and then it's almost like this self-hypnosis you can put yourself under. And the experiences I had more were just um honestly like a lot of crying, a lot of emotional release, a lot of asking questions of myself. Um and and you know I say I didn't hear anything or you know see an alien or some but but you know I definitely came out of those feeling like I received uh just different feelings and different ways of interpreting life and my own internal universe that give me a bit of an edge especially in a world where there's so much division to better recognize it I suppose. Is that how old are you? Uh 32. 32. And you were in the military for a number of years, right? Yeah, I was active for four and a half, but uh originally got in just to be in the guard kind of happened into How old were you when you got out? I was uh I was out of active when I was 20, like 23 and a half. Okay. And and when you were in the military, were you already having these sort of like internal practices or was this post-military work that you did? No, I was a bag. Okay. No, no, I was I was uh No, I was uh just a jarhead. I wanted to get in the best shape I could. Didn't really care about who I was bumping into, ruffling feathers of. And because it's a different mental mode, right? Like being being a jarhead and then moving. What What burst that dam for you? Like what caused you to go sort of psychedelic? It sounds um a uh psychedelics. I I think mushrooms and and even things that aren't uh typically like uh magic mushrooms or what's known psilocybin. Um, you know, but but going in depth more on things like turkey tail and lion's mane and other neutropic products just to feed our brains, I think is especially pertinent for someone like me who's like deep in the ADHD spectrum type deal. Like to get that control. It's really about diet, nutrition. Um, especially with the [ __ ] they're trying to feed us. Like I ate three bowls of Fruity Pebbles before my school day started when I was 12 and I wondered why I couldn't pay attention, right? Um, so yeah, pizza's for lunch. Don't worry. So, oh yeah, with a brownie dessert. Yeah, it's gross. Like, why can't I focus? Um, so the the the the honest to God shift for me was the meditation practice getting me to finally reach the bottom um of, oh, I I'm a human on this earth. There's other humans on this earth that want the same exact things that I want in this life. Uh we're all figuring it out as we go. We're all a bit more egotistical about we think we know about history than we probably do. Uh we probably are much more egotistical about what we feel this life is when animals can hear and see things on different spectrums than we can. Like we're we're a bit egotistical in what we think we know. And so I defined it as surrendering, right? I I just was like, I need to surrender to whatever this is. You know, I have no control. I've been doing it myself this whole time. Uh and it was shortly thereafter that my eyes kind of woke up to what this country is. And then the research began and I discovered a new passion. And that's where I feel like if you believe in a god where the god or the energy or the universe or whatever kind of led me in this direction of kind of slum dog millionaireing my past talents together into being this weird online economic journalist and you you peeled back all the layers of your ego which I feel like sometimes people get disassembled and then they don't really have a passion but when when you came back from that you it seems like you made an active decision to care about your country. What what was the driver? Like what is it in you that cares about America? I'm I'm curious what America looks like to you now that you've been through that. I'll answer your question once I clarify what I mean uh by what you just said or or the way you interpreted what I just said. Um just to fill in the gap. I went through about a fivemonth period of unwind. I built a fence. Uh, we got chickens. I became a chicken farmer. Uh, I built them a coupe. I started gardening. Uh, I built this nice brick path. I played with my daughter every day. I went on more dates with my wife, wrote her more notes, got her more flowers. Um, I completely detached from all of the fake outside [ __ ] I wasn't listening to music. I still don't. it's high frequency sounds, podcasts, or Christian music just because I know it's not infiltrated by lack lackluster messaging is the way I'll put it. Um, when Sabrina Carpenter is my option on the radio, I'm like, "Okay, cool. More programming." Um, it's it's the combination, I think, of I have a craving for self-development. I always have. And so I I'm not going to allow understanding the system is [ __ ] to put myself in the category of, oh well, I'm just going to quit. And so I believe this country can be fantastic. And I believe that the country that I grew up in, it was different vibes, right? The post postdigital analog vibes back then were different. And, you know, getting to find out where your friends were by hearing the basketball dribbling or, you know, seldomly getting on a video game. The anticipation just of getting to play was was awesome. Like, yo, we're all four going to link up at Johnny's house. Like, that's exciting. Like, you don't feel that nearly as much anymore because it's just dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. And I just want people to wake up so they can enjoy their life. So, it's less about America as Americans because I feel they've been lied to. I don't know what the structure of this country could be like if everybody were to quote unquote wake up. I don't think it's all about having the same ideology or viewpoint. I think it's just understanding we have a lot of people that want to put other people first, but the people that are putting profit first are winning. Uh and and the people that are putting the profits first are helping other people get profits and it's this lattering system. And now we get back to the pyramid uh and and where it actually lives at the top and and we don't know. And so there's also a point where like I said during that five to six month time frame where it was kind of nihilistic you know I was really in my head and I went back to the meditations. I went back into those gateway process states. I went back into my practices and there's a weird inner piece about it now. There's a weird uh there's a weird inner piece about it. Some people be like you talk about all this [ __ ] all the time. I don't want to kill yourself. I'm like you know I've been there. But I think this life's worth living and I think this is an awesome country filled with awesome people. Dang. Couldn't agree more. If you had to change one thing about the economic situation in the country right now to move it in a better direction, something tangible, where would you where'd you move the needle? Well, let's just talk about the faucet that's flooding the system. I think we need to completely ban uh the monopolistic opportunities around lobbying, corporate and foreign especially. I think you could stop the issues right at the hose. You get lawmakers in there that actually want to pass policy for policy sake. We're always gonna have disagreements, but if you're not being funded to agree or disagree one way, I think we'll get better results. Um, if there was a specific one I and you wanted to focus on the economy, I would just want to fix the supply demand of housing right now because I feel it's locked and without some form of legislation, we're going to stay in this locked position and the only two options are frozen or inflation. No form of price is going down um at least nationally for a long period of time. So I would say to unlock because all economics is supply and demand, right? So we just got to think about those two hats. How do we create the supply, keep the bad people from buying the supply and make the supply affordable and supply financing opportunities for the right buyers, the right demand? Because right now all the demands from like investors and boomers and retirees and stuff like that. I would say Trump's already announced he wants to get institutional investors out. Okay. I'd argue, yes, this is good, but it's kind of like the police showing up to a robbery of all at at this jewelry store, right? And the robber's just been taking diamonds like all night. Like, he's been loading up. And then Trump, the police officer, get out of here. You can't be here anymore. And he runs off and he still has the diamonds. Like, he's he already got what he needed. Um, so, so I think there's a little bit of that. So, I would say you have to force divestment. three to five year time period. You could sell at market value. And if you tapped into also saying we'll also make it for you and any boomer or investor that wants to sell their property, you can sell it capital gains free during this period as long as it goes to someone who's never priorly owned real estate within the last 10 years. Boom. Now we create inventory and excited sellers to sell to first-time buyers. Now we just got to supply the opportunity of financing. I think there's a billion ways you could do this. I don't believe necessarily in handouts, but the same opportunity that was given to someone who could buy in 2020, 2021, 2026 or 2016, like these low interest rate time periods, let's at least provide the same opportunity. We can't get home prices lowered, right? And just handing someone $10,000, we know that doesn't equal great results usually, just inflation and people that mismanage. So, we should buy down rates. We should say if you're a first-time buyer, we're going to subsidize as the government $10,000 per loan. You don't get it directly. You still need to bring a down payment, qualify with income, credit, all that. But we're going to use it to buy down your rate permanently by 3%. So if it's today's 6%, you get three permanently. If it's today's five, you get a two permanently. And that fixes the mortgage payment problem because we're living in a wage crisis right now. People don't make enough money. And so when you go to buy a home, the banks want to know about your debt to income versus that mortgage. And so that interest rate is ripping that to shreds, what's already abysmal. And and that's not an a fix across the board, but I think it would start the supply demand wheels to start moving in the right direction. All while also saying you need to ban all corporate investors, not just large ones. So move inventory from Blackstone to first-time home buyers. Yeah. And not just Blackstone. Any investor should be able to qualify for this because here's the deal. Blackstone owns 306,000 units. About 80 to 85,000 are single family homes. And a lot of the single family homes aren't even theirs to sell. They own the homes via other companies. Like they own Tricon Residential and like Homebuilders of America and different companies like that. They have like a one of I think Sky Leaf over in the UK. Like they buy the company that already has the holdings. So we need to also target the Wall Street execs that got 86,000 units. And we got to target, you know, the the Airbnb horde. You know, we got to target the the people that all around are a part of this commoditization of shelter and dirt. It's the only asset that that can grow in value that you also lay your family's heads down at night in. Like it it's it's such an odd hybrid and it's it's kind of a weaponized form of a poor quality of life if you can cut people off from ever being able to access dirt in America because it is an incredible investment. I do agree. I also want to ask about I want to ask about have you heard in the about in the 2030s we're going to actually have a real estate glut because the boomers are going to start passing away and our demographics curve is inverted. Dang, that's interesting. And I've read about and that's 10 years away. So, you know, we all got to live the next 10 years. So, it's hard to plan for 10 years from now. But I I I've read that there's going to be ghost towns. I mean, just if you look at cities and how they grow from above, they kind of look like a fungus. They like they start here and they kind of grow out and you can see the veins and everything. And I think that when it contracts, you're going to see that fungus recontract back and we're going to have, you know, empty suburbia. Like we're gonna like wherever it all far in the farthest reaching areas, it may contract back in about 10 years. And I don't know if that's true or not. I don't know if you've looked into that, but I do know that our demographics curve is inverted. And so, yeah, I would d I would double down with with the birth rate on what you're saying, too. And yeah, the silver tsunami uh is set to start in 2034. Uh it's set to start at the beginning of 2034. It's a 7 to 12 year period where, like you said, the the life expectancy rate versus the current age of homeowners is going to match. But the the problem I feel with one part of this is one a I think you're right. I think we do get to that point, but at that point of what you're defining as as ghost towns, we're facing severe deflation at that point. And I think that the housing market is going to be one of the last places people are even worrying about at that point. Like that's a bad spot. That's like China's now taking over as the number one in the on the planet type deal like is an issue. Um so yes, could happen, but also housing might be a microcosm of a worry. Can can you walk us through that deflation? What why do you feel certain that there will be deflation coming? Is that just from technology? No, I don't feel certain deflation's coming. But if we're talking about this scenario of a surplus of housing uh affecting us, there there are so many issues that come with our replacement rate problem. That's one of them. But we're going to have a labor problem. We're going to have a consumer spend propping up businesses problem. We're we're going to have a how do we create enough debt to keep the ball rolling problem. We're going to have so many financial problems with this birth rate problem, which is why solving the wage crisis is so freaking important. People need to be able to afford to have families. Uh it's just core, which then you get the conspiracy theorist of, oh, it's weaponized because they want you to rent everything and be happy and they're just going to create a UBI utopia, stable coin, CBDC at all, and just make you have to live under the security of knowing you couldn't live without them. Yeah, cool. Yeah, I think that could be an option, too. But but again, I'm not super worried about housing in that world. Like we have bigger we have bigger fish to fry. Um yeah. What do you tell a young guy who's like in his early 20s? I mean, you and I are both in our 30s, so we've already been past the hurdle of just getting off the ground, getting a little bit of liftoff. If you're trying to get liftoff, get out of your parents house. Robots are coming everywhere. I mean, I was a software developer for like 15 years and now it's it's worthless. Like everybody can code. What would you what would you tell somebody to work on right now? the answer I've been giving uh has shifted over just this last year and it's it's difficult to give a flat answer that applies to all not knowing what everybody has and doesn't have. So I can only speak to what I know every single person listening does indeed have. And you have a working body that can actively hear what we're talking about, probably see what we're seeing, right? They're not impaired in those two ways. they have the uh financial ability to hold a device, connect a device, whatever they're doing to listen, right? Um so they're not living in like third world poverty. Uh could be worse. And you're you're you're breathing oxygen. You've never had to plug your body in yet. Somehow it's still charged. Can't do that with my phone yet. Like doesn't need gasoline. Like just wants to eat something that isn't from a factory. Like if it's from a from the ground, from the tree, or has parents, like eat that. uh the understanding of this greedy world just wants more and more assets, but the only asset they can't have is you. You're the number one asset. And we spend so much time consuming away that asset instead of investing in that asset. Uh the same way we'd want to invest in a stock portfolio, we need to be going and doing some form of physical activity. The same way that we would put money into a Robin Hood account, we also need to go on date nights. Uh, and that can just be taking a walk around the block, right? We need to connect with the people that matter most. We need to read. We need to understand where we are. Just like where did you come from? Like really in reality, no matter what you believe in, doesn't matter what your faith is, you got about 80 years if you're lucky of here. And then it's eternity. You could believe eternity is in paradise. You could believe eternity is just a eternal loop of living other people's lives. Like you could believe eternity is just going to be black nothingness. It's still eternity. Something's after this, right? And and I think it's just worth living this life as fully as we can, but with the understanding no one's getting out of this. Uh I I'm rounding about on a question I I'm now even spacing on what you had asked because I've rounded so far out. But yeah, I guess just what major should I pick in college right now? That's what I'm trying to figure out. I I don't have an answer for that, right? Yeah, I don't have an answer because I didn't I didn't like college education like before this, right? I I one of the most viral pre like me being a content creators was a status I said of of relationships open more doors than degrees ever will. And I was speaking from experience at the time, but it wasn't well taken. People are like, "You big idiot, blah blah blah." And yeah, I was thrown out of college in my first semester and I didn't look back. Like I get it. I'm I'm a dummy. But I if there's advice I can give to the young man, it's to do what a great lumberjack does. There's this great story about a lumberjack competition and two guys and they're all barely like I could cut down a tree bigger than you. He's like, "Okay, you know, let's let's have a tree cutting down competition." And this one guy's just strong and he doesn't actually know how to cut down trees. He's huge. And in the story it goes that the guy start they say go and the one guy starts chopping and chopping and chopping and going and going and the other guy's just sitting down and the other guy's going and going and going and like for an hour like he's just going at it and going at it and the other guy's still just sitting there and before he knows he looks it over he's like what are you doing and the whole time he's just sharpening his axe. Whole time he's just sharpening his axe and then he gets up there and within about 30 minutes history goes down. So, I I love that story because we can't fight a fight with dull weapons and and you're the sharpest, most opportune weapon you have and and so books and getting trash music out of your ears and getting trash food out of your bodies and and taking care of yourself and taking care of the people around you, that's what gives you real purpose. And you may say, "I don't have anybody around me." I guarantee you, you have somebody. You have somebody. And if you don't, you have you. Like, I want you to be proud of you. I I think especially as young men is really taught to us as weird to have any form of like real legitimate self-love and that's not true. And and I I I wish that more young males wanted more holistic wealth in their lifestyles instead of just like let me try to get rich quick. Yeah. I think it's about like you said it's sort of more don't consume but create. And anytime you think you're consuming you're just you're actually consuming someone else's creation. And so if you get into create mode and you actually start and that could be creating muscle on your body, that could be creating new thoughts in your brains and usually creation leads to more creation and consumption leads to more consumption. And so I think that it takes that sort of switch to kind of go, hey, like if I'm if you're not creating in any capacity right now, like I I think it's you work very hard creating all day and you're exhausted at night. And so yeah, you want to consume a little bit. Sure. In whatever capacity that looks like, but you kind of earn that because you're creating more than you're consuming. And I think that that leads to sort of a net positive in terms of where you go. Sure. Yeah. Creating is a good word for it. I I still like the word investing only because the I also view the the opposite of consumption to be going into a book instead of doom scrolling like I don't need you to necessarily create but I als I need you to stop like sometimes we need to just stop and count to 100 without getting distracted you know raw dog life for a little bit and stare at a wall like our brains are so just over dopamized all the time and everyone wants you to open your wallet or your brain and it's exhausting I'm going to eat this meat speed stick. Yeah, go for it. There was that there was that trend of there's there's that trend of raw dogging on flights. I don't know if you remember that where you just literally don't do anything. You every time you take a flight, you just stare at the the headrest in front of you. You don't do anything and see what that's like. And I think that it's very good. I think it's a very good practice. Can I tell you another I just did this going up to New Hampshire. I love this. I think it's an awesome opportunity like at that challenge. Another challenge you can do on an airplane. So, I fly, we were flying Southwest, so we're getting in last. Last is the best. And I because I don't want to just stand around or sit around. It'll just get me on. Then we fly off. Um I will a I love sitting at the back right next to the bathroom right next to the drinks come out. Why do people not like sitting in the back? Uh, and when I'm walking back, I play this eye contact game where I try to make and hold eye contact with as many people who are walk watching me walk through and I have to maintain eye contact until they look away. And it's like you're just building tolerance to that social anxiety. Yeah, it's just making everybody wonder if you're the plant on the plane. the agent. Yeah, he's got an agent mustache and he's just staring me in the eyes. Oh, yeah. But we're the aviators. It's done. I look like a jet pilot or a fed. Yeah, for sure. Well, this conversation is getting too wholesome for me. Can we talk about boolean? What I've I've heard you say that there is a What's going on in the Cayman Islands? I think you were talking about bonds in the Ca Cayman Islands. Can Can you tell me about that story because I hadn't heard that before. Sure. So, uh, yeah, anybody who's interested in it can look up, um, Federal Reserve October bond allocation. And what they put out was a report that said, "Hey, you know, we track where our bonds go." And our bonds, I'm sure your listeners know, are our debt. It's how we package our debt. You know, war bonds, treasury bonds, it it's how we've funded anything external for forever, not just America, like this for forever. Um, and what we do is we say, "Hey, outside investor, we need more debt created so we can fund our government. So, we're going to sell you a piece of it and you can hold it for 2 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, whatever year the maturity date is." And when they're buying it, the investor is promised a yield. The yield goes down the more valuable the bond is. Okay? And I'm going in depth because I want people to really understand what this is and why it's affecting them because the bond market is God. It's the most unpartisan way to look at the status of the economy. The bond yield goes down when the value goes up. What do I mean by that? Investors when they have a stable, worthwhile, long-term investment are willing to make less because there's less risk. So when the value of the bond goes up, it's like the trust in the government and the dollar is going up and they're willing to take less. They don't think inflation is right around the corner to rip their ROI away. The yields go up when the opposite happens. When the value is going down, when there's less trust, less in the dollar, less in our government, less in our debt, our our deficit, all of these things. And so, as our Fed rate has been cut, traditionally, so too, mortgage rates come down. But if anybody's been looking to buy a home or a car or get a credit card, you'll realize rates haven't really come down and we've cut 1.5%. So what gives? Well, the bond yields calling [ __ ] on the Fed and saying, "We think you're not nearly as strong as you are. We think that these are cuts are unnecessary and inflation is around the corner. Where can we see some evidence of this?" This is where the Cayman Islands comes in. They recently put out a report that said we track all the countries and who holds our debt, who holds our bonds, who's buying them. And traditionally, Japan, I think, then second, the United Kingdom, mainland China, and Germany, and then the Cayman Islands, which has always been funky. Why is the Cayman Islands in the top five of bond holders in the world? And Japan had over a trillion. Now they're like to 700 billionish. China's dropping two. France, Germany, they're dropping two. Like everyone's selling off bonds, which is concerning. So, if nobody's buying and they're actively selling, how is it we're running up the debt tab? Because I just walked through how we create the debt. We sell it. So, there's no buyers. How are we doing that? Well, this report kind of showed how we were doing it because in this report, it showed that we misallocated the countries and the country they missed the mark on was the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands, just again to put in perspective, was fourth out of the five. Now is number one. And it's so far in the lead that it doubles Japan. It doubles the second country. They have $1.8 trillion worth of our bond debt in hedge funds and shadow corporations and shell companies, whatever they want to deem it as. Or or foreign weapons. Like it could be being utilized as a as a financial foreign weapon if it is China or Japan. Whoever you spin it as holding it isn't a good story. It's a story of deception and fraud. So, we are not able to sell our bonds. So, we're creating artificial demand to support our limitless spending and the bond market is calling [ __ ] and that's why yields are going up. So, to be clear, the real fix is spend less. But we don't seem to have the ability to spend responsibly. It has to be spending that's within like that 3% line. like it has to rem move itself into a reasonable position against what we actually produce and and there's always going to be growth. We have to continue the growth pattern. That's just the the the tra trajectory we're on as an economy. Do you think that we're at the point of no return? I mean, we've gone through these Keynesian booms for so many years since the Feds in 1913 and we get off the go off gold in this what 78 and it you know we had 2008 we 71. Thank you. And then we have 2008, we have 2020. You know, we keep printing. You can see the parabolic nature. And I'm just wondering if it's too much now. And you know, people said it was too much. I remember everybody saying it was too much in 2008. And then that was not true cuz here we are, you know, 17 years later. That's a great point. That's a great point because when you look at a lot of graphs and a lot of correlations, you see a lot that points back to an a fracture, a a systematic shift in our economy in 2008. A lot of economists, the majority of economists would agree 2008 was supposed to be worse, right? It was supposed to be a toppling of the top, a natural cycle that happens in free market economies. In fact, Milton Freriedman, the person who helped invent regonomics, knew and understood this. Unfortunately, he passed two years before getting to see us cop out of that cycle by qeing ourselves and printing and bailing out money. Right. Yeah. Quantitative easing. Yeah. Correct. That's when we invented it. That's when it came in. So that was our that was in order to get yields down, we had to make fake money to buy bonds artificially. And that same artificial buying because we buy the bonds from banks supplied the topline bank accounts of banks and kept them afloat. So not only was there a congressional bailout, there was also a bailout that came from the Fed Reserve and we invented it and they held them off market. And to this day we have trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars in bonds and securities held off market by the Fed and now they're buying more. So when you say point of no return, I'll be clear. I think there's a point of no return for the dollar. Yes. And that's why I think things like the Marilaago accord, CBDC's, and stable coins are already being talked about. Well, and I'm not sure, you know, because I've talked about, my parents always tell me about when they were dating in college and they would go to Burger King and they would get a Whopper and a Whopper was 25 cents. And now a Whopper is like six bucks. So if you look at that, the price of a Whopper has increased 20 to 24x. And so I go, well, okay, so it's increased 24 times. So if we go 24 times from now, that was 50 years ago. In the 70s to now is 50 years ago. So in 50 more years, what if a whopper is just $144 and you know it's the equivalent of the last 50 years. And maybe you know I I think that is a realistic I in my mind I'm like no way. I would never buy a Whopper for $144, but my parents would buy a Whopper for 25 cents 50 years ago and they'll buy a Whopper now for six bucks. And somehow we tolerate it. So I think it's this method of like when does trust go away because that seems so untrustworthy and yet if everybody keeps going it sort it seems to keep going and so that's really my question is where are we at with trust in our current No you you nailed that. No, I I I think you nailed the two the the the the fork in the road that we approach every time we decide to print more money is are are we going to go ahead and fold allow America to fall back into its proper place in the world economically, wherever that means, you know, no longer the world reserve currency and have that topple over effect that will be magnitudes larger than what it would have been in '08 if we just took our medicine, right? We keep throwing band-aids on something that requires surgery and overnight stays. Like, and we're handing nicotine patches to methheads. They need more liquidity. We need more debt. But yet, the wage crisis is keeping consumer spend at bay. That's a big problem. And the way we solve it is by infusing more money. The question is, to your point, and I'll preface with I don't know, is how long can that game go on? Does it keep going until the median income is $320,000, but like you said, a cheeseburger is $150? I don't know. You know, do we get to the point where UBI and tech get to the point where we we revalue the dollar altogether? We get some form of backed currency with Bitcoin. We we're using CBDC's and it's full government control or UBI. I mean, a lot of the dystopian ways of looking at it are quite frankly all of the different ways that we could, you know, get out of this everinflating dollar because you're right, it will ever inflate. It's just a matter of how fast. I'm I'm curious, uh, like I think I think we all know that the dollar is just it's just it's dying. It's on its last breath here. Where do you position yourself? Cuz I'm I'm seeing like silver's already tripled in the last year. It seems like gold's gone up a lot recently. Is it too late to buy into those or is it just early innings? No. If if obviously not financial advice. Yeah. Not financial advice at all, right? Don't listen to anything here on the internet. It's also stupid. We have to say that. Yeah. It's it's do not buy, sell, invest anything or advise everybody of their rights with money. And now we're going to tell you what we would do though. This is stupid. And so I don't want to tell you what to do. I'm going to just tell I'll tell you what I'm doing, right? My active portfolio is 2060 20. I have 20% in cryptos, 60% in precious metals, and 20% in index funds across the stock market. Diversification is the name of the game. And within those, I'm diversified within multiple assets. Like, for example, gold and silver are insurance policies against the dollar. That's why they're going up. They're not they're still shiny rocks. They're not more valuable. Yes, we need some for tech and EVs and solar, for sure, but we're not even at the point where we need it at scale. It's it's already kind of priced in in a way. So, this has to do with the weakness of the dollar. Supply demand has to do with it too, don't get me wrong. But there is a finite supply of it on this earth and finite supplies are perfect. It can't be printed. Can be mined but it can't be printed. So holding physical gold and silver is incredible but also copper which is usually inverse of those. Uh platinum in heavy utilization palladium uh and then on the crypto side I'm Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP and then on the index funds real boring on the stock market just like spying voodoo. uh diversification and again my strategy around that is I'm going to be holding these things for 20 plus years. So the the idea of it is if the dollar is going to inflate I'm attached to the companies on the stock market that will move with it, right? And even if you think it's going to crash, guess what? It's going to recover. And then at the on the precious metal side, if I think the dollar is going away, silver and gold are going to have a large part to do with that. So I'm invested in that. And then on the crypto side of things, I think it could be either one of two things. It either has a volcanic rise and it goes absolutely crazy up into the just unforeseen amounts for each of all of the ones that I've mentioned, or it's a rugpole, and that's why it's only 20%. So, I don't think that the uh the get-richqu hold something and let it quadruple in value in a year is a healthy line of thinking. It's possible, but it the economy is going to economy. There's going to be corrections. It could be seismic. Uh but at the end of the day, most things recover. The kicker for the boolean in my opinion is the Brics nations if they can create ways to hoard because if they can if they're really teaming up and I can't tell if the Brics Nations are actually aligned or not. I can't tell if it's just like the enemy of my enemy is my friend sort of situation or probably a little of that. Yeah, probably a little bit of that. I wonder how strong that bond is because if they actually can find ways to be hoarding gold and silver, it could really do some damage, I think, to our to get a hold of physical. Well, if there were really a line, dude, you know what I would do? And this would I mean, literally be economic warfare. I mean, all those companies or companies Freudian slip. Yeah. All those all those countries could sell our bonds in the same week. That's right. Billions and hundreds of billions just flood the market with no buyer. And now all of a sudden, the Cayman Islands holds 10 trillion dollars worth of debt. Richest islands in the world. Which by the way, just to put in perspective, the Cayman Islands and how crazy that number is of them holding 1.8 trillion. So the GDP of Missouri is about 400ish billion. The GDP of the Cayman Islands is about 8 to N billion. Wow. Holy cow. That's a good comparison, man. Yeah. It opens your eyes to what's this country doing holding all that? Yeah. C can I ask you the the what's the story you understand behind XRP? I've never really been able to wrap my head around that. Yeah, it's um it's a company Ripple that created a currency cryptocurrency that they deem as superior in the forms of like transacting currency like we're talking like forex type like when you make a dollar and turn it into a euro it's expensive and timeconuming. This is instant nearly free. And so the idea behind it is when we go into a uh like the Genius Act is is big and pushed in like those XRP communities as proof that we're leaning toward a completely digital blockchained environment that banks are going to have to hold swarms worth of XRP to have on standby to be able to use as this free and nearly instant transaction model between currencies because there's going to be a lot more transfer too when everything's blockchain. Um, so but the problem with that theory and again why I'm not just like 100% bullish running through the wall like Kool-A man for it is though that model makes sense and there's going to be a requirement for that tool. There's no reason that my DeWalt power drill that I think is the best is going to be the power tool they use, right? They could easily walk in with a Black & Decker and say, "Get that [ __ ] out of here." Right? They could say, "Here's my CBDC that does that. I don't need your shit." Like, so that's the problem is we currently don't have any CBDC uh bans in place. So there's there's no stopping that potential rugpool of them just pulling out their own government stuff out of their butt and then all those things go to zero because we realize they're never going to be utilized. Is there any way for us to prevent them from banning cash in the future? No, I think it's I think it's foregone conclusion. Like once you start talking about digital ID and and Palunteer databases, it's inevitable, right? Yeah, I think it's absolutely inevitable for sure. It is going to create a black market though, right? I think we have to have cash. It's going to make a black market for I mean it depends on it depends on what that option Yeah, it would depend on what what status are we at as a country with complete digital currencies. like are we are we in full UBI infused quote unquote utopia? Uh is everyone a high income earner as as Elon Musk portrays? Like are we at that extreme or are we looking more at like cyberpunk? So like I don't know where in that sphere. I hope we don't end up in those spheres but it just seems like the inevitable option if we're going to be somewhere in this ven diagram of dystopian times. I just don't know where that lands us. Yeah, there's probably gonna be black markets for stuff like there is right now, but for currency, I don't know. Doesn't UBI also seem inevitable? Because when robots are replacing all of our jobs and you know, we're all just trying to YouTube and none of us have time to watch each other because we're too busy on our own YouTube channels, like like what where do we get money from? Like where does it come from once YouTube has paid out all the money? Where does it come from? Right. Well, I mean, UBI No, I don't think uh it's kind of inevitable. I think it's definitely inevitable. I I don't It's just a matter of how much and why and when. Because, you know, I I I actually just had a conversation with somebody the other day who works in wholesale commercial robotics. They only deal in direct large quantity sales to big companies for robots that are specific to their company's need, strictly infrastructural stuff like factories and and and uh supply chains. So, for example, he was telling me about now he's helped sell and facilitate the first permanent robot that exists in all Amazon facilities. He says like a little rolly boy with a cart and he brings thing from the person that does this and this person does that and this person does this. And he said, but they're already in works of of the three cycles of human labor that still exist of one by one having the robot being able to interact with the other and then they'll be quicker, more 24/7, never make a mistake. uh like talking about like getting stuff off the fifth level of the shelf. They're designing a robot that's basically has a grid that's attached to it and it's able to like zoom around almost like how they get the the soda out for a vending machine now the little R2-D2 looking ones. Um so like when we talk about and this is the frustration around tariffs which is a consumer tax and the benefit of the tariffs is to bring factories domestic. Well, by the time the three, four, five years times pass and this very expensive uh if it does happen because it's so expensive to move a factory and build a factory happens, we're not going to create jobs. Those are going to be done by robots at that point. Of course, there's going to be management. There's going to be people need to fix the robots. There's people need to understand AI programming. And there's going to be, you know, of course, when they created the car, now we have mechanics. But the problem is the car can drive itself that we're inventing. Um, so yeah, we can fix it, but it can do all the other jobs that we were already doing. Um, so I I do think UBI has to be a part of the conversation. Otherwise, we we can't survive 20 and 30% unemployment rate and like 75% non-participating labor rates. We can't we can't sustainably operate in that economy. No, I don't think we want to live in a society where we let the bottom third or or half or 90% fall off like that. That's just that's not where we could be. They're not going to accept it. I mean, the last I want to ask you about was how did you develop your here? I mean that that that's true. But here's the thing. We've also seen the playbook run out for attempted revolt. I mean just as early as uh you know the the civil rights movement. You guys ever heard of Operation Chaos? No. So this was uh this was a 1960s Vietnam Vietnam wars going on. The guns and butter economies going on and there there's obviously the civil rights movement as well. And the way that they were able to blackball and demonize some of these hippies at the time that were pushing against the war was by infiltrating their mobs and peaceful protests with violent agents to incite riots and have the ability to shoot back with cause and then they were able to propagandize these war-hating hippies as the enemy. And and I think you know when you get to that conversation of oh that's going to bring out pitchforks. I mean, look at how the media treats Antifa, right? An anti-fascist organization that's dressing up like frogs out up out up there in the Northwest. Like, they ain't doing nothing. They're a bunch of they're a bunch of actual real like real-time hippies. Like, they're not even punching people. They their hand would break like type deal. Like, come on. So, it it it's we label the enemy of the enemy as a threat. So, so I don't know if the pitchforks at this point work because the mass media machine works so well to demonize oppressors. Yeah, this the I don't know which agency it is, but they're so good at diffusing these things and just making it go away. It's a That one was FBI. That was That was Herbert Hoover himself. Yeah, that was FBI. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, man. Uh I just wanted to hear you. How did you develop your Trump accent, man? It's so good. Your Trump impression is pretty on point. I've I've worked on mine a little bit because he's so funny, but it's not it's not anywhere near yours. It's like my It's like my sidecar character now. It just like comes out randomly. I don't even control it. It's like it's like the the Hulk living in uh in what Bruce Banner the um I I just enjoy it. Like it's like a stem at this point. I'm definitely on a spectrum that exists somewhere and not the color spectrum. And it's it's it's fun. It's funny. I was actually on a call today and I did it and one thing I struggle with the with the accent because really it's you got to hit the mannerisms obviously and the cadence. Uh there's an actor, I can't remember his name, but he talks like this and all Christopher place and then you kind of throw the Brooklyn Christopher Walkin, right? And then you throw the Brooklyn accent on it. You put it in the back of the throat and then you start moving your hands and all of a sudden you're scattered around the convers and it just kind of morphs into it. But I'm really bad at like his mumble because he gets real low and it's so beautiful. I'm I'm not good at that part yet. I wanna I want to nail it. Well, you've got you've got many years to catch him. I'll do my best. Zachary FA, it's been a pleasure having you, man. I really appreciate hearing about your values, the way you see the world. You're a really smart guy. Just thanks for sharing some time and talking with us, man. Y'all, too. Thanks for creating this space, guys. This is an awesome time. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Right on, dude. Matt, when you hear this in about 10 seconds, love you, brother. Thank you for being here. Thanks, guys. Sorry for the delay. And there it was. And peace. That's a wrap.