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In this explosive back-to-back breakdown, Tara tackles two of America's most urgent threats: the looming insolvency of Social Security and the escalating standoff with Iran. First, she exposes how decades of bad policy, IOUs, and congressional theft have turned Social Security into a raw deal for Americans—costing retirees real freedom and financial security. Then, the spotlight shifts to Trump's high-risk “two-week” delay in the Israeli-Iranian conflict. Is it brilliant disinformation or a countdown to war? Featuring sharp military insight and geopolitical warnings, Tara lays out how Iran's weakened regime, nuclear ambitions, and assassination plots against Trump pose a clear and present danger. This is a raw look at how bad leadership—both domestic and foreign—has put America on the edge.
Tara and Lee dive into the coming collapse of Social Security, now projected to go bust by 2034. With biting sarcasm and sobering facts, they expose how Congress raided the so-called “lockbox,” replacing real money with IOUs and creating a $6 trillion shortfall. The discussion unpacks how privatization—once proposed by George W. Bush and Paul Ryan—could have yielded five times the returns for Americans if enacted. Tara connects the crisis to broader systemic failures, including illegal immigration's impact on unpaid taxes and the misuse of Medicaid. Plus, a breakdown of Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill,” featuring 100% factory expensing and the potential for a blue-collar boom. A must-hear warning and call to action on America's financial future.
Cam Richardson, founder of PaySquad, gives us a peek behind the curtain at the tech, brands and strategies that keep him ahead. He shares his admiration for Craft Club, the fast-growing Australian brand redefining social shopping, and how AI-driven productivity hacks help him run a scaling fintech business. Cam also reveals why LinkedIn is his go-to platform for ecommerce insights, why This Day in AI is worth a listen, and his biggest challenge in navigating PaySquad's rapid growth. Whether you're an ecommerce pro or just looking for smarter ways to work, this chat is chock full of gold.Check out our full-length interview with Cam Ricahrdson here:Main episode linksThis episode was brought to you by… KlaviyoAbout your guest:Cam Richardson is a faith-driven entrepreneur on a mission to change the way we pay. Founder & CEO of Paysquad, Cam is pioneering a “buy now, pay together” solution that makes group purchases seamless, eliminating awkward IOUs and making big-ticket buys, gifts and experiences more accessible.With a background spanning entrepreneurship, retail and business strategy, Cam thrives at the intersection of innovation and impact. A proud Kiwi-American, Cam blends his New Zealand grit with boundless U.S. optimism, embodying an unstoppable drive to challenge the status quo.About your host:Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia's Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.Please contact us if you: Want to come on board as an Add To Cart sponsor Are interested in joining Add To Cart as a co-host Have any feedback or suggestions on how to make Add To Cart betterEmail hello@addtocart.com.au We look forward to hearing from you! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Stephan & Gilded Pleb, a developer who created StackMath, a financial calculator for Bitcoin, discuss Gilded's personal journey with Bitcoin, its potential impact on homelessness, and the importance of understanding financial models for retirement planning. Gilded explains how traditional financial calculators often fail to account for the volatility of Bitcoin and introduces the Monte Carlo simulation as a more effective tool for predicting financial outcomes. The conversation also touches on inflation, retirement strategies, and the significance of model selection in financial planning. They also explore the emerging role of Bitcoin treasury companies and how they can provide access to fiat leverage, while also emphasizing the importance of self-custody. The discussion shifts to risk management strategies, including the allocation of portfolios between Bitcoin and high-risk investments. Takeaways
This week, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg analyze the global repercussions of Trump's broad tariff policies, critique misconceptions about trade deficits, and explore the economic fallout and potential policy responses. – SPONSORS: NetSuite More than 41,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE proven platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine learning: https://netsuite.com/102 AdQuick The easiest way to book out-of-home ads (like billboards, vehicle wraps, and airport displays) the same way you would order an Uber. Ready to get your brand the attention it deserves? Visit https://adquick.com/ today to start reaching your customers in the real world. – SEND US YOUR Q's FOR NOAH TO ANSWER ON AIR: Econ102@Turpentine.co – FOLLOW ON X: @noahpinion @eriktorenberg @turpentinemedia – RECOMMENDED IN THIS EPISODE: Noahpinion: https://www.noahpinion.blog/ All the arguments for Trumps Tariffs are wrong and bad: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-for-tariffs-are This is called Capital Flight: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/this-is-called-capital-flight – TAKEAWAYS: Tariff Policy Analysis: They discuss the implementation of widespread tariffs, particularly focusing on how the administration set tariff rates without sound economic methodology, possibly using AI to generate justifications. Trade Deficit Misconception: Noah explains that trade deficits are often misunderstood - they're essentially loans where a country buys goods and provides IOUs (bonds) in return, not necessarily harmful to an economy. Manufacturing Impact: They argue that tariffs may actually harm domestic manufacturing by making imported components, machinery, and raw materials more expensive, potentially leading to de-industrialization rather than re-industrialization. International Relations: The discussion covers how trading partners are responding, with China imposing reciprocal high tariffs, while noting that many countries will likely seek alternative export markets rather than capitulate to demands. Long-term Economic Outlook: The discussion paints a concerning picture of potential rising unemployment, continued market volatility, and possible inflation depending on which economic forces (panic or inefficiency) prove stronger.
In this episode of Add To Cart, we explore group payments and social commerce with Cam Richardson founder of PaySquad. Cam reveals how retailers like Baby Village and Rugby Bricks are using PaySquad to turn one sale into ten customers, unlocking a powerful new channel for customer acquisition. With an average order value of over $850 and a 95% completion rate on group purchases, PaySquad is proving that the future of ecommerce isn't just selling to individuals—it's selling to squads. Cam also shares why younger gens are ditching credit cards, how retailers are leveraging group buying to boost AOV and the creative ways merchants are rethinking checkout. This episode was brought to you by: Shopify PlusKlaviyoAbout your guest:Cam Richardson is a faith-driven entrepreneur on a mission to change the way we pay. Founder & CEO of Paysquad, Cam is pioneering a “buy now, pay together” solution that makes group purchases seamless, eliminating awkward IOUs and making big-ticket buys, gifts and experiences more accessible.With a background spanning entrepreneurship, retail and business strategy, Cam thrives at the intersection of innovation and impact. A proud Kiwi-American, Cam blends his New Zealand grit with boundless U.S. optimism, embodying an unstoppable drive to challenge the status quo.About your host:Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia's Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, Twitter or via email.Please contact us if you: Want to come on board as an Add To Cart sponsor Are interested in joining Add To Cart as a co-host Have any feedback or suggestions on how to make Add To Cart betterEmail hello@addtocart.com.au We look forward to hearing from you! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
On the latest episode of the Debtwire Municipals Muni Lowdown podcast, Managing Editor Paul Greaves speaks with Debtwire North America Credit Analyst John Sinna on the latest developments with Hawaiian Electric and Edison International.The podcast covers the situations in the aftermath of wildfires for Hawaiian Electric and Edison International by “comparing and contrasting” where things stand by delving into five (5) topics.The first topic discussed is how governance has been handled in each situation. John discusses the actions taken by Hawaii Governor Josh Green and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.The second topic discusses legislative efforts in Hawaii and California.The third topic details the litigation against Hawaiian Electric and Edison International because of the wildfire damages.With the fourth topic, John segues into possible responses by the insurance market from a national perspective as well as specifically in Hawaii and California.The podcast closes with John discussing his near-term expectations in each situation.#insurance #power #IOUs #muniland #risk
The episode explores recent rumors about Coinbase and BlackRock allegedly manipulating Bitcoin prices through IOUs and other market schemes. Both companies vehemently deny these claims, emphasizing their commitment to transparency and adherence to regulatory standards. Analysts discuss how institutional moves, like Bitcoin ETFs, are likely to stabilize the crypto market rather than destabilize it. The conversation also touches on the emergence of new players like Mpeppe Coin, the growing influence of meme coins like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin, and regulatory challenges facing the industry. A key theme is the importance of maintaining trust through transparency, audits, and collaboration with regulatory bodies. Additionally, the rise of AI and blockchain synergy hints at the future of decentralized computing and the potential evolution of the crypto market.
Feb. 5, 2025 - Association of School Business Officials of New York Executive Director Brian Cechnicki talks about the governor's proposed allocation of state education aid and makes the case for school districts recouping money owed by the state.
We see an overabundance of fear and rage porn these days from our government and media. The American Radicals Podcast looks at some examples and considers if there is some misdirection afoot. See you in the chat at 10:30ET! Steve's Book: https://a.co/d/7OHXrrp The O'Boyle Sweatshop: https://The-Suspendables.Com Check out True Earth Farmacy and use promo code "AMRAD24" for a 10% discount site-wide: https://trueearth.co/collections/farmacy Visit M-Clip and use promo code "SUSPENDABLE" for a 10% discount site-wide:
In today's episode, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg answer listeners' questions and discuss global economic issues such as China's demographic challenges, currency crises, GDP vs. GDP per capita, the efficacy of long prison sentences, and the risks and benefits of economic stimulus, currency depreciation, and trade imbalances. --
More on people who have the same name -- and a need for a scribe to write an IOU -- with a third approach to making the deal work, including, if both parties are present at the scribe. Also, a new mishnah! When one of many (or even 2) IOUs has been paid back - and the holder of them doesn't know which of them is paid back -- the mishnah says to act stringently, to ensure nobody would be paying back twice. Also, another new mishnah! On the role of a guarantor - and how one might cheat via the guarantor, or cheat him. But what if the original signatory has the funds to pay? Plus, the supporting story of Benjamin and the cup in leaving the halls of Egypt (for a different kind of guarantor), including a biblical prooftext.
No, it's not real. The Social Security trust fund is a gimmick. And if it were real, it would be full of IOUs. Romina Boccia lays to rest several fictions surrounding Social Security. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Get the 11 questions to change your life now (free gift for yt subs): https://www.clarkkegley.com/free-ques... At the time of making this, I'm 33 years old. If I could go back and give my 20-year-old self some advice, here's what I'd say. 0:00 - Intro 0:10 - Don't kill the cringe, kill the part that cringes 0:30 - If you're thinking too much you're not acting enough 1:05 - Get really good at something 1:38 - Stop waiting for life to get easier 2:05 - You will regret inaction more than failure 2:31 - What really makes us happy 3:03 - People aren't against you, they're for themselves 3:26 - Burnout isn't about doing too much 3:40 - You teach people how to treat you 4:03 - Keep a journal 4:34 - Focus on big wins around money 5:12 - Put a 10% tax on yourself 5:50 - Be mindful with alcohol 6:25 - Healthy looks boring 7:06 - Invest in your sleep 7:26 - You'll never be good enough for the wrong person 7:37 - You don't need energy to workout, you get energy by working out 8:03 - You are the main character of your movie 8:23 - The best relationship advice no one ever told you 9:00 - Get a dog 9:17 - If you're going to compare, you need the full context 9:56 - Start making weekly to-do lists 10:12 - Practice zero-based thinking 10:43 - Find a way to travel 11:18 - It's okay if you don't know what you're doing with your life 11:42 - Your biggest problems can't be solved, only outgrown 11:46 - Don't believe everything you think 12:02 - Credit cards are more than IOUs 12:30 - Hard choices, easy life. Easy choices, hard life 13:02 - How you make money is more important than how much money you make 13:31 - Anxiety is living in the future, depression is living in the past 13:40 - Resentment is like drinking poison 14:03 - Advice is just opinions Thanks for the inspiration @danfounder • I'm 44. If you're in your 20's watch ... The Best of Series | 10-years In The Making: • THE BEST OF - Clark Kegley | Top Vide... MY FAVORITE TOOLS
(Note: Sorry about the audio quality, your boy accidentally had it set to the wrong microphone, whoops) Bananas the pot stirring villain is officially back! Plus: a vacation alliance handshake, the biggest strangest balloons I've ever seen, Derrick maybe breaks his leg, Devin and Michele face their first relationship hurdle, Laurel somehow is just skating by, Cory and Rachel get big elimination wins, and Josh has way too many friends and way too many IOUs and no idea how to handle this situation! It's The Challenge Battle of the Eras Episode 6 recap, topics include:Cold Open (00:00)Intro & Agenda (00:42)Strategy Sessions Galore (03:28)Daily Challenge (08:23)Villain Bananas, Josh Blows It (16:06)Eliminations (29:39)Awards (34:56)Targets & Predictions (37:18)#TheChallenge #TheChallenge40 #BattleoftheEras #WeWantOGs #RoadRules #TheChallengeHistory #TheChallengeHistorian #RealityTV #RealityTVHistory
The Challenge is back on our screens for season 40 of the MTV flagship show with a brand new season - The Challenge: Battle of the Eras! And with a new season of The Challenge comes a new season of The Challenge: Roundtable Reacts Podcast! This season sees 40 Challengers from 4 different eras travel to Vietnam to compete against each other to see which era of The Challenge is truly the greatest! The challengers will battle through TJ's game of twists and turns for their share of $1 million! Join the Roundtable team of Levi, George, Brian, Lauren and Ryan as we sit down to discuss our thoughts on episode six of The Challenge: Battle of the Eras! Watch or listen as this week we discuss, TJ's Cloud Catcher 'save the balloons' daily challenge, Era 4's victory, Jenny's alignment with Bananas, Josh's long list of IOUs, Devin and Michele's relationship and the To The Point elimination between Cory and Brad, and Rachel and Jonna, as we break down episode six of The Challenge 40: Battle of the Eras! If you enjoy the show, follow the Instagram (@ChallengeReact) and continue the conversation about our favourite show, The Challenge.
California homeowners face a complex puzzle in decarbonizing their homes: electrification without rooftop solar could increase bills due to expensive electricity, while installing solar first risks oversizing or underutilizing the system. Balto Energy, a startup founded by James Quazi, uses AI to analyze utility bills and recommend the most cost-effective clean energy strategy. In this episode, we discuss Balto's tool, its potential to empower contractors, and what California's situation reveals about the future of clean energy policy nationwide.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsHello everyone. This is Volts for September 13, 2024, "A tool that enables solar first home electrification." I'm your host, David Roberts. Californians who want to decarbonize their homes face something of a conundrum. If they electrify their cars and appliances without getting rooftop solar, they could end up paying higher overall bills thanks to California's notoriously expensive electricity and cheap natural gas. If they install rooftop solar before electrifying their cars and appliances, they could either undersize the system for their eventual needs or oversize it and over-produce and export solar power to the California grid. Thanks to California's recent NEM 3.0 decision on rooftop solar compensation, utilities pay much less for that exported rooftop solar power than they used to.The most economical strategy for most homeowners is likely to be some mix of electrification, batteries, and rooftop solar. The more a California homeowner stores and consumes their own cheap rooftop solar power, the more value they get out of that solar and the lower their total bills. It is a complex calculation, though, that most homeowners are in no position to make. That's where the startup Balto Energy comes in. Founder James Quazi, a longtime energy modeler and entrepreneur, has built a tool that can use a home's utility bills to create a model of its consumption patterns, predict what they will be as appliances are electrified, and recommend the maximally economical approach.It's part of a larger effort to help contractors and solar companies navigate a post-net-metering world. I'm excited to talk to Quazi about why his tool is needed and how it works, how it will empower contractors, and what California's present says about the future of clean energy policy in the rest of the country.With no further ado, James Quazi, welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.James QuaziThank you for having me. That was a great intro.David RobertsThanks. So, you know, I sort of went over it a little quickly in the intro there. But let's talk a little bit about this conundrum for Californians who are trying to decarbonize. So, just by background — I don't even know if everyone's been following the California rooftop solar wars, I kind of assume everybody has — but just by way of background, California recently basically issued a new policy on rooftop solar, and the long and short of it is that they're going to compensate homeowners much less. It used to be that basically you could get paid the retail rate for your excess solar, and now they're just going to pay much, much less than that.On the surface, this really damages the economical case for solar for homeowners, they'll get compensated much less. This has resulted in a huge blow to the solar industry in California. There are solar companies shutting down, jobs being lost, etcetera, etcetera. So, talk a little bit about the conundrum and how you think about solving it.James QuaziYeah, so about a year ago, the net energy metering policy in California changed from NEM 2.0 to NEM 3.0, now called Net Billing Tariff. The difference is, as you mentioned, that now customers get paid on a schedule. Each hour per year is a different rate. But generally, you can think of it as between like $0.05 and $0.08 for exported energy, while imported energy for me in San Diego is between $0.38 and $0.52 an hour. So it degrades the value proposition for residential solar for a homeowner. For contractors, it's also proven really difficult. So in the past, it was really easy to have rule of thumb sizing or heuristics, or if you took annual energy over the last twelve months and you designed a system that produced around that same amount of energy, it was generally going to be a good value proposition for the homeowner.But now, what you need to understand is, like, how much of that solar production is actually coincident with the load on the house, because the export of energy is devalued.David RobertsRight. So, the economics now have shifted to make it so that, I mean, maybe this was true already, but more true now that the ideal thing for Californians with rooftop solar to do is to consume as much of the generated power as conceivably possible.James QuaziThat's absolutely correct. So, if you can think of it as, and I'm sure your listeners are familiar with the terminology, like LCOE. So, the cost of solar, residential rooftop solar, is somewhere between, let's say, $0.10 and $0.12 a kilowatt-hour to produce, whereas the retail rate is much higher depending on the IOU that you're a part of. To the extent that you can consume cheap on-site electricity, you are hugely benefited as a customer.David RobertsRight. So then the question becomes, well, there's a bunch of different ways of approaching this question, but from this sort of like, if I'm trying to sell solar, right, I need a little bit of a new pitch, right? Because before, with full retail compensation, it's kind of a no-brainer, you could make a lot of money, but now you can make a lot less money. So this changes the value proposition for solar. So, explain exactly how the sort of calculation shifts.James QuaziSure, I would actually reframe it a little bit in terms of, like, I believe so in the previous net metering paradigm. We often saw simple solar paybacks in the five to seven years. I believe that those paybacks are still available to homeowners, but it's just a different set of products and services than simply rooftop solar on the roof. So, I think our goal is to help retool the solar industries, to help look at a house as a whole, maybe converting a lot of the energy on site that we previously ignored, whether that's natural gas or gasoline, and then power that all with cheap onsite renewables, and that will drive the value proposition for that homeowner.David RobertsRight. It's still worthwhile getting solar, even maybe still a comparable payoff period, but a different approach. And basically, it's going to be a little bit more of a complicated approach. Right? Like, it's one thing just to stick solar on the roof. Like, how much energy do I use, let's stick that much solar on the roof. Pretty easy. Once you bring in the whole home, just the combinatorial, you know what I mean? Just the calculations get a lot more complicated.James QuaziFor sure. So, like, I think in two respects. One, it's more complicated for the contractor to feel confident in the system that they're proposing and the financial outcome for the homeowner. And then two, from a homeowner's perspective, it's more complicated to understand and digest and comprehend a suite of services that might include solar and a battery and a heat pump and an EV, than it is simply like panels on a roof. Our goal at Balto Energy is to sort of do the modeling and ingest the complexity and then deliver it in a way that's consumable for both a contractor and a homeowner.David RobertsRight. So, talk briefly about what your tool does. What is the outcome supposed to be? What is it trying to accomplish?James QuaziYeah, so our perspective on it is that oftentimes in the past, if you asked for a solar quote, you would get maybe one option, two options, or three options, max. Really, like, if I take my own house as an example, so I live in San Diego, I can fit up to 30 panels on the roof, which is constrained by roof geometry, area shading, what have you. So let's call it maybe 20 to 30 different flavors of solar systems that I could possibly engage in. If I layer on batteries, I could have 1, 2, 3, 4 batteries. And then EVs, one or two EVs, and heat pump or not heat pump, water heater or not water heater.And our first step in the process is to ingest an address and then interval bill data. So, we need hourly electric reads and daily gas.David RobertsAnd that, just to be clear, this is the sort of raw information that's going into the model?James QuaziYeah, that's correct.David RobertsIt's utility bills. And this, these are available from the utility. There's no, it's not difficult to get this information.James QuaziSomewhat loaded question. It should be available. I just finished listening to your podcast on "Free the energy data." I have —David RobertsThat's why I ask. I'm wondering how straightforward it is to get the raw data that you need.James QuaziI would say that having been in this industry for 20 years, it's much easier now than it has ever been before. That being the case, there are still hurdles. There's a lot of missing intervals. There's patchwork to be done. There are services that provide synthetic intervals. It's not as clean of a dataset as I would ideally like, but it's generally like the authorization, and there are a couple of third-party companies now that do it and are making it easier.David RobertsIs it notably easier in California than it is in other states? Different in California than in other states? Or is this just a utility by utility thing across the country?James QuaziOur focus is in California right now. So, I have the most depth and experience there for this problem. Even within California and the IOUs, it is utility by utility.David RobertsSo are you restricted geographically where you can sell your product based on the utilities, whether you can get these to utility information or not?James QuaziOur position is that to accurately model a home's energy use and consumption profiles, you need two things. One is you need a physics-based model of the building, and then you need to be able to calibrate that with what is actually happening in the home. I've done a lot of energy modeling, auditing, that sort of thing. I think the one definitive thing that I've learned is that the best site observed data is actually bills. It will help you ferret out how people use their home, what their preferences are, and is actually the ground truth data.So, our position as a company is because we want to be able to confidently project — like, let's say if I converted a gas furnace to a heat pump, and I want to know on an hourly basis, what is the energy input to that system. To do that accurately, I believe that you need interval data.David RobertsSo you are in some sense beholden to utilities here or dependent on utilities to be forthcoming?James QuaziYeah, I think, unfortunately. And then to "Free the energy data" podcast. Yes, this is true, and it is being in some ways held hostage, and that's not great for the industry. I would say that our success rate right now is like, it's significant enough that we see this as somewhat of a hurdle, but not a deal breaker.David RobertsRight, right. So, I mean, getting utility bills seems straightforward enough. You just ask the homeowner and they give them to you. But when you say a physics-based model of the house, you have to go do that in person. Can you construct that from publicly available data?James QuaziYes, you can. We've done this in several iterations in the past. So, the background engine that does this is an NREL product called EnergyPlus. And it has, let's say, a full set of data requirements, which you can imagine has a lot of physical attributes of the specific house. And what we do ourselves and through partners, is comb, let's say, permit record databases and MLS listings. And we can get close enough with that set of information to build the first model. And then it's really, in comparing that model to the billing data, what's actually happening on an hourly basis, that allows us to calibrate it.David RobertsInteresting. So, you don't have to do a site visit to do any of this, really. You could theoretically do all of this modeling remotely?James QuaziYep. Everything like roof geometry, shading, building modeling, tariff engines, all the things that are sort of the processes to get to an output, can be done remotely.David RobertsAll right. And so, you put all this information into the model, and then what is the model supposed to do? And here's a question I had also: Am I the homeowner, interacting with this model in any way, or is the model a tool for contractors?James QuaziOur plan, at the very start, we're working with a set of contractors, and we're in Napa and Sonoma to start, most notably Northern Pacific. Our plan is to deliver a tool to a solar contractor that they can use to propose a wide range of solutions that a homeowner might want. I think that this will become a customer-facing tool or exploratory tool in the future, but we are definitely starting with solar contractors.David RobertsInteresting. Yeah, because one of the questions I had about this is just that I'm sure I'm not telling you anything as someone who's worked in energy for a long time, but just like, people are pretty lazy, and the way people make decisions about appliances and stuff like that is generally to ignore it until it breaks and then go to Home Depot. So, like this comprehensive, long-term, holistic planning, I'm just like, wondering, like, how many homeowners are really that committed?James QuaziSo, let me give you an idea of, like, what the output of the tool is, then where I see this going. So, you know, back to my house, 30 panels, batteries, EV's, all the things. What we want to do is expand the solution set for all possible outcomes for that house. So, if I permutate those things, it ends up being a set of maybe like a couple hundred to a thousand different individual pathways. It could be 28 panels —David RobertsAnd these are like mixes of the number of panels, the number of batteries, what kind of appliances, that kind of thing.James QuaziThat's absolutely correct. And then what we've created is sort of a decision-making framework that allows you to search that space for the thing that's right for you. At first, contextualized in one of three goal seeks. So the first one being a very standard solar approach, which is "Deliver me the best financial outcome." The second one, which we're seeing a sort of increasing adoption around, is like, "Yeah, I want a great financial outcome, but I also want to power this set of critical loads or my entire house through an outage of this duration. And I'm not cost-sensitive around that."So, like, if I need to add a battery or two batteries and it provides that service, that's fine. And then the third one is a sort of immersion. Ten years ago, when I was in the solar industry, it was like there was a time when we thought we had to deliver day one savings to get adoption. And it turned out there was a segment of the population, mostly retirees or people that were about to retire, who, let's say, had a $150 utility bill. And they're like, "You know, saving money isn't as important to me as, you know, I experienced the grid cost is volatile, but always volatile in the upward direction.And if you are going to put on the system and it has a 20-year lifespan, can you lock in this $150 for 20 years? And I don't experience any increase in costs." So those are starting points. I will say that I think there's more out there. So, there are a segment of customers that could be interested in just like the environmental outcome, and there's ways to calculate that based on grid dynamics. That's where we're starting, and I think we'll kind of learn our way into the solution.David RobertsRight, so you can tweak the model depending on what your goals are, depending on what your aims are. And I guess one of the questions I had about it is, like, in California at least, grid electricity is so expensive and natural gas is so cheap, and solar compensation is now so low, that it seems like the most economical outcome for homeowners is always going to be to electrify all your appliances and put a bunch of rooftop solar to power your appliances. It seems like that's always going to be the cheapest outcome, is it not? And that's also always going to be the most environmentally preferable outcome, right?Because it's zero carbon. In other words, what if I, as a contractor, just came to you and said, "Look, I can do all these complicated calculations, but trust me, you want to electrify all your appliances and put rooftop solar on your roof. That's what it's going to end up showing you." Does it ever show otherwise?James QuaziSo, if we were to implement generalized or rules of thumb, I think that would be a good one. What I have seen is there are time when your're roof constrained, so you might not have the roof capacity to power all the things, and then you'd want to make better decisions. To the extent that you have vast plains of south-facing, west-facing roof area, we want to make sure that we're installing the right amount of solar and batteries. So, I think that there's an optimization problem there. But, I think you're right in the sense that to the extent that you can self-consume a ton of energy that you generated on-site, that will be the best outcome for you.David RobertsSo then, if I'm a homeowner and I run this model, or a contractor comes to me and runs this model, and the outcome of the model is the most economical approach for you, the homeowner, is to buy a heat pump, buy a heat pump water heater, buy an induction stove, et cetera, buy a bunch of batteries and put a bunch of rooftop solar on the roof. On the one hand, I might believe, I might find it perfectly plausible that that is the end state that will yield the lowest ongoing operating costs for my house. But on the other hand, that's a daunting upfront investment. Do you know what I mean?In a sense, if I'm a homeowner and a contractor comes to me, he's like, "I'm selling solar. And by the way, I have this fancy tool that shows me that you also need to buy a bunch of other stuff from me." I guess I'm just a little suspicious.James QuaziI think the intent of the tool is to allow a homeowner to make the best decision for them. To the extent that the best decision is, in fact, a larger PV system, more batteries, maybe a heat pump, and all of those things in aggregate end up being expensive directionally , but have great payback. I think that hits on like sort of the second vein of Balto. So the first is like, how do we create a decision framework and compute engine to give you the scenarios and help you make a decision? Once you've made a decision —David RobertsWill the model also crank out a preferred order of operations for that? You know what I mean? Not just like an end state that would be best, but like, what steps in what order are economical?James QuaziThis is getting back to the solar-led electrification vision for this. Our position is that solar and storage should lead always , and we should be building 20 or 25-year products for the future energy consumption. The tool is there to say, can we share a vision of the future and what applies and things you'll be engaged in, whether that's EVs or heat pumps or whatever. Once we have that, can we build 25-year renewable infrastructure on site to support those things over time? We think that there are interesting ways. And I'll touch on the financing in a little bit about how to transact this and make it consistent.David RobertsYeah, I want to get to the financing in a minute, but before I leave this question. So, why always solar and batteries first? Or put it this way, why shouldn't I put a little bit of solar and batteries on, enough to power my current appliances? And then, you know, when I switch out my furnace for a heat pump, just stick a couple more solar panels on the roof. Why not do it incrementally like that?James QuaziYes, I myself have a background, and then we've got some deep partnerships with contractors. They are not a fan of that approach for a number of reasons. One is if I take a five-kilowatt system and then I append a three-kilowatt system on later, that is not the cost of an eight-kilowatt system. It's much more costly.David RobertsBecause just coming out to the site again and all—James QuaziRedesign, permitting. Yeah, all the things. And then separately, depending on the time lag between system one and system two, there are at times, compatibility issues with modules that make it more difficult. I think solar's gotten inexpensive enough where if you were going to engage in one of maybe the three big electrification projects, which would be EV, heat pump, heat pump water heater, I mean, you should be sizing for at bare minimum that. And I would argue for the whole thing if that's what you intend to do, on day one. And then if you're doing other things, let's say that have a more de minimis impact on your meter or your electrical consumption, like a stove, then maybe it's fine to wait.But to the extent that, like, you're considering solar and storage and one of the other things, I think it makes a lot of sense to size appropriately for future loads.David RobertsSo, you would say to any homeowner contemplating solar that the financially smartest thing to do is to size a system for your projected total need in the future, not your current need.James QuaziYeah, no, I feel strongly that that is the case. I will take myself as an example again. I have an EV. I am considering a heat pump. I have a tankless hot water heater that is in a closet and is not easily replaceable with a heat pump water heater given form factor. But given those things, I did size the PV to the anticipated heat pump. Even if that doesn't happen on day one, it might happen on year one, three, five, or seven, right?David RobertsSo, are you not then, while you have the solar that's oversized for your current needs, are you not sort of financially losing out in the interim, in the meantime?James QuaziSo, I think that again, the export value for solar today directionally is much lower. So, there is some value, it's not a lot. I would categorize it as you're not optimizing the system today.David RobertsSuboptimal, then let's see.James QuaziBut I think that what you're really doing is putting together the infrastructure to adopt more products in the future.David RobertsRight. A contractor comes to me as a homeowner, says, "Let's look at how much solar you will need once you've electrified your home," basically, and install that amount. Do you envision these same contractors who are trying to sell solar, selling these other things to homeowners as well? Sort of like offering, like moving beyond solar to offer kind of total home electrification packages type of things.James QuaziI think there's going to be a couple of different flavors, and we'll see what sorts out. In San Diego, one of the biggest residential installers actually has historically had a heat pump division of their company. That's probably not the norm. I do see a lot of solar installers — I mean, certainly, a solar installer is now installing storage by default. A lot of them install EV chargers. I've seen some interest in heat pump water heaters as the installation is quite a bit easier than heat pumps, HVAC. So, I think that we'll see some adoption of product over time.I do believe that the heat pump is probably the one thing that is a set of expertise that is probably different than what solar providers have in-house. What they can do, and we anticipate doing, is a lot of pre-wiring work. It's taken as an industry axiom that HVAC products get replaced when they break. To the extent that that infrastructure, whether it's a 240 circuit to the existing furnace location, is not in place, it's very likely that the existing thing gets replaced with something very similar, and then we're locked into this pattern for 15 years.So, we're very interested in, again, sizing appropriately, but then also doing some of the pre-work that allows these things to be adopted.David RobertsTrey, interesting. And so, from your perspective, you're going to put the tool in the hands of contractors, and then to some extent, the contractors are going to figure out exactly how best to use it and what kind of packages to offer and stuff like that. Is Balto out being a contractor, like running this, interacting with homeowners?James QuaziNo, we are not. So, what we're doing is providing a toolset, which is computational tools, finance tools that allow existing contractors today to be more effective.David RobertsGot it. And so, talk about the financial side of this. So, I'm guessing I'm borderline illiterate when it comes to money issues. But I'm guessing that part of the promise of this is that if you can more accurately and reliably project future energy needs in a home, you're going to have an easier time financing the sort of oversized solar system that you want in anticipation of those loads. Is that right? Part of this is like giving confidence to financial institutions to finance these things, right?James QuaziYeah, that's exactly right. So, I would say that the first step is having a shared vision of what the future of this home looks like. So, what are the appliances that are on the list and off the list? EVs, whatever the case is. And then, from past learnings at Solar City and Dandelion, really what you have to do is package it in a way that people can experience the savings at the same rate as they chunk off the capital cost of these projects. And then, in terms of energy savings over time and confidence, I think the goal there is, and we could think of it as if you were getting a loan.One factor in the loan might be your debt-to-income ratio. How much debt do you have, and can you actually service this loan over time? And our position is, to the extent that these suite of products actually lowers your obligations to pay, so your utility bills, that should be factored into any financial product as well. Does that make sense?David RobertsYeah. So, it's almost like future income increases, almost like.James QuaziYeah, so if I had, like, if my obligations to pay a loan provider were $1,000 a month, just randomly, and I made x amount of income, if the obligation was less, if it was $500 a month, given all these energy savings, I would have a greater ability to pay back that loan, and that should be factored in.David RobertsOh, I see, I see. So, is the idea here just for this tool you've created to give confidence to homeowners who are going to banks and stuff, or are you getting in the finance game at all?James QuaziOur intention is to provide the financing for it as well. I mean, like, I think any time we're trying to make the process as seamless as possible. So, it's sort of like a one-stop shop in terms of assessing what's right, what's the best fit for you in terms of these projects, and then packaging it in a way that — we're hoping it incentivizes people to do more sooner, but to the extent that they want to do things over time, it is also like a flexible facility that allows you to adopt a heat pump water heater in year three, if that's what you want.David RobertsSo the contractors are the ones offering the homeowners this sort of financing package?James QuaziYep, that's correct.David RobertsRight. And the contractors are able to do it because they have this information from your tool that gives them confidence?James QuaziHand in glove.David RobertsRight. So, just having gone over all this, let's rewind and just imagine I'm a homeowner, and a contractor knocks on my door. What do you envision the contractor sort of like, what is the homeowner facing pitch from the contractor? Because there's a lot of complicated stuff going on behind the scenes for the contractor. What is the homeowner hearing? What is the pitch to the homeowner?James QuaziYeah, we see it as a stepwise process. So, because our go-to market is through solar contractors, the first step is to say, if I were any other solar contractor, and you called me for a solar and potentially storage system, what I would have done is looked at your current electrical bills and size the system this way, and this is what... "You want a five kilowatt solar array and one battery, 110 kilowatt hour battery." The next step is to say, "Hey, listen, we're actually in that world. We're only looking at one of probably three silos of energy that you're using."So, we're ignoring the natural gas side of the bill. We're ignoring everything that's happening at the pump. But, if we look at your energy spend holistically, here are a suite of options that are available to you. And this is the differential sort of financial outcome versus just a solar system, versus, like, resiliency versus bill stability kind of thing.David RobertsSo, the idea here is, I go to the contractor and say, "Hey, I've been thinking about solar and battery," and the contractor says to me, "Well, hey, what about this larger package? You could have even bigger savings, and you could have resilience," and stuff like this. So, it's a little bit like an upsell for a contractor.James QuaziYeah, I mean, I would think of it as like, being able to more holistically address energy spend. Like, that's our goal, is to say, "It's not just one flavor that we're dealing with. We're looking at the entire house and things, and we want the best solution for you."David RobertsIt makes me wonder how long it will be before homeowners think that way, or if they ever will. Because homeowners just think of products as separate products. I don't know that a lot of homeowners, especially outside our world, even sort of think of the home as a system, right? With certain energetic inputs and outputs that should be dealt with as a holistic system. Like, that's just — I'm not even sure homeowners are at all accustomed to thinking that way.James QuaziI wonder if I myself am, like, blinded by sort of a friend group or whatever the case is. But I would say that, like, I don't know of a lot of people that aren't at least considering an EV, right? Even if they're not, like, actively join in. But it's like, "Hey, listen, this is actually a real option." I don't think that heat pumps are very far behind that curve. It's interesting, like when people, like historically, when people inquire about solar, we often times have thought of that as they want bill savings. But I am not entirely sure that that is the reason.David RobertsDo we know? Have we done surveys and polls? I'm so curious. I would also assume, just out of a sort of, I guess, a low, like a background degree of cynicism, that that's going to be the dominant motivation. But is it? Like, I don't feel confident about that at all.James QuaziWell, I don't either. My belief is that bill savings are part of a decision-making process, but probably very rarely the primary driver. And that is the thing. And even if you look at, like, the funnel conversion metrics of, like, the solar industry as a whole, it's just like, for every hundred people that inquire, single-digit people actually do the things. And our perspective is like, you know, they're getting stuck somewhere in the process. And it's oftentimes with questions that cannot be answered, and that's when they stall out. And that is our reason for expanding the set to everything that's possible in your home and letting you search that, because we think we'll figure out what are the motivations. I think that there's a strong cohort of people that are just anti-utility.David RobertsThat's a piece of it. There's an environmental piece of it. There's a sort of independence, anti-utility piece of it. There's a vague mix. There's just social contagion, there's just peer pressure. You see it around you. It's the whole stew of motivations. I'd love to understand that better. So, I mean, it kind of seems like what you'd want is for your tool to be in the hands of everybody involved in any of those products. Do you know what I mean? Like, if I want an EV and I go to the car dealership, you know, it'd be cool if the car dealer could say to me, "Hey, you know, save even more money if you threw in a heat pump with this and a solar panel."You know, like if, or the heat pump, people are like, "Hey, throw in an EV and solar panels." Like, it'd be nice if homeowners confronted the idea of total electrification everywhere they looked, right? I mean, that'd be ideal.James QuaziYeah, 100%. I really think that's the vision, and that's where we're going. I think the entry point into a lot of this stuff will be varied. Like, it will be through an EV at the start, or a broken furnace that gets replaced by a heat pump or whatever the case is. I think our goal is to engage homeowners in a way where we have a persistent bill connection. I think that this is why that episode resonated so much with me. If we have an address and a persistent daily, hourly, monthly, whatever the case is, bill connection, you can drive insights over time to a homeowner at very meaningful times to intercept them.Right now, I think this business, like solar in general, is very transactional. We think of it as like, we get leads in the top of the funnel, we set them at this rate, we convert them at this rate, we install them. It's a 30% gross margin, and then that's the end. Whereas, I don't believe that that's the way the products will be adopted and people will have to, I mean, internally we call it energy literacy. Like, how do I start to understand the problem and the solutions?David RobertsRight. So, in the same way, you sort of have a financial advisor, you could have like a home advisor, basically. A home energy advisor.James QuaziAnd we also think it's got to be low impact, so it can't be like, "Hey, you've got to go do this detailed sort of appliance audit or whatever the case is." So it's bills and address, and then, you know, this is a great state of change problem where utility rates are constantly changing, prices of products are changing, incentives are changing, and there's always a chance to message. I very viscerally feel this in the sense that, like, when I took four years off and then reengaged with the industry, I was like, "Wow, we like, crossed the threshold, like, the point of no return, where electrification now makes sense for everyone," and I had missed it, and this is the only thing I'd ever done.David RobertsYeah, I mean, it's moving so quickly. I will say, though, one thing I hear from, you know, and there's been articles written about this. It's just like, it's all out there from people who have tried to do this total electrification thing. It's just incredibly difficult, just incredibly difficult to synchronize everything and arrange everything. And so, in that context, the idea of having a kind of home advisor where, like, your hot water heater breaks and you just call your home advisor, you figure out, like, what's the right approach here, what's the economical approach, where to look, what kind of thing to get?A lot of people would very much welcome having one of those, I feel like.James QuaziAnd I think that this speaks to the general funnel conversion in the industry, but generally, a lead comes in, and then what we're trying to do is furiously convert them to a sale and install as quickly as possible, hopefully within 30 days, hopefully in one set. And I just don't believe that that's the way that people will consume products. It will be through a bunch of different experiences over time. And I think that's a meaningful difference. Like, you know, we're in such a rush to do all the things. Like, I'm in a rush to do all the things at once, but I think we have to also meet people where they are and, like, engage them in some way over time so they can make a decision, so they can make another decision.David RobertsI hope it changes because, honestly, like, you know, I've thought about solar. Ten years ago, we did one of those sort of, like, online audit things, and it was like, "No, you're too shaded." But I think it's just changed since then. Uh, just like, what's possible. But, like, I know that if I got a solar contractor and sat down at a table with that person, that they would just be sweaty and desperate, you know what I mean? To sell me just like it, exactly like I feel at the auto dealership, which is just like, "Ew," kind of uncomfortable, you know what I mean?And rushed and don't feel like I have a full sense of all the pieces in play, and that I can't trust the person I'm talking to, to help me out, you know what I mean? I'm sort of, like, adversarial. I hate that whole model, you know what I mean? And just like, I would be, I don't know how representative I am, but I'd be inclined to spend more money if I just had a person who was like, had the big picture, had the model, had the data in hand, said, "You know, like whenever you're ready, this is the right first step."Just like a better environment for homeowners to deal with these things and think about these things.James QuaziYeah, no, I get it. I feel very similarly. I totally understand from the other perspective, like solar sales reps are expensive and they're hired to do one thing. I just don't know that it's the way that most people want to adopt the things.David RobertsYeah, I can't believe that it's going to go to truly, truly mass penetration running on this model. It's going to have to evolve into something else. As we near the end here, let's pull the camera back a little bit and talk about the Agile Electrification project. My understanding basically is that the NEM 3.0 decision in California threw the solar contracting world into a bit of a tizzy. And there are efforts now to organize and figure out how to move forward and how to help contractors and what the right approach for contractors is in this new world.So, tell us a little bit about what the Agile Electrification project is.James QuaziIt is an industry-sponsored project that's hosted at the Design and Innovation Center at UCSD. The genesis of it was a lot of, quite honestly, hammering around NEM 3.0. It was like if you read Canary or any of these publications, a lot of it is doom and gloom. This industry is down 70%.David RobertsYeah, there's a lot of "sky is falling" sentiment flying around.James QuaziYeah, I think there have been. And you know, a lot of people are like, "Hey, listen, a lot of the bad actors are going to get flushed out with this," which I believe. I also believe a lot of some good actors will go out of business. So this is like a real issue. In times of turmoil, there's oftentimes opportunity and there's a group of people, contractors, manufacturers, investors, who have come together in this venue where sometimes it would be competitive or driven by business interests and they're coming together to solve problems for the industry. So right now it's a series of three projects to expand from there.One is like energy modeling for the entire state of California. It's something that everyone needs. We want to do it and open source it. Another one that we touched on earlier is understanding customer motivations and understanding where they got stuck and how to unstick them, because our general sense is they want to save money. And I don't know if that's the primary motivation. And then the third one is around incentives and rebates and how to, like, it's a constantly evolving landscape and just staying on top of it is like a challenge and maybe a full-time job.So, it's how to open-source that aspect of it, and how to qualify people for rebates and make sure that they're up to date, make sure they're not over-allocated, and deliver that information to the people on the ground that are actually installing the systems.David RobertsRight. And so, I'm stuck on this point. I just wanted to reiterate one more time. So, it's your belief that, because I think this sort of popular belief is that the NEM 3.0 decision has radically reduced homeowner incentives to get solar power, that it's just not as worth it anymore to get solar power. What you're saying is, with the right holistic approach, solar power is as valuable as ever and just as worth getting as ever. Is that your position?James QuaziThat is my position, yes.David RobertsDo you think that that is widely, like solar contractors believe that, or are you having to sort of buck them up and convince them of that?James QuaziWell, I think we're in a stage right now where, I mean, we set up the simplest possible website, have done very little marketing. We've had directionally 75 to 100 contractors sign up and say they're interested. I believe that the contractors are looking for solutions. For sure. That is definitively true. I think they should believe this because it is true that there is a great value proposition in homeowners. I think the issue here, maybe the persistent issue that's undeniable, is that it's more complex. Describing the value proposition has become more complex. For sure. There's no way around that.So, we're trying to find ways to — I mean, the back-end compute engine is great. The real challenge is finding ways to deliver that information to customers in a way that's actionable.David RobertsFor sure. Final question then. A lot of this seems very Californian. The fears and the solutions and all of it seems sort of very customized to California's current circumstances. How applicable is all of this, do you think, outside of California? Would your model be helpful to a homeowner in, I don't know, like Arkansas?James QuaziYeah. So, I would take it in two flavors. One is, I think there's the expectation, for good reason, that these policies in California will get exported to other states. So, it will become hugely relevant soon.David RobertsYou mean rooftop solar compensation getting cut way back? It's already happened in a couple of other states. I mean, it's definitely a trend.James QuaziYeah. So, that's true. NEM 3.0, or like the difference between export energy valuation and import and parity, does not have to be true for this general value proposition to hold true. So, to that extent, I would say that it's portable anywhere. We chose to start in California because it is by far the biggest solar market. It accounts for about 50% of solar and there was a demonstrated need. I will say that it's a very complex problem to solve and it has geographic sides to it. So, as you move location, utilities change and their tariffs change and the way that they charge and weather changes.David RobertsThe information they make available.James QuaziExactly, exactly. So, we've tactically started it in California for those reasons and constrained it. But there's no reason why this shouldn't be applicable to, like, any other place.David RobertsRight. It's sort of interesting. The big fear, or I guess the thing that solar people used to say to utilities when warning them away from NEM 3.0, is like, "Look, if you cut compensation too much, we're just going to self-consume and then install more electric appliances and then slowly wean ourselves off the grid and then not need the grid anymore. And then you're losing customers." The much-fabled death spiral. It seems like you're organizing to make that real, to make that happen.James QuaziI have some thoughts on this. I really do think, and I don't know the answer, but at some point down the road, we're going to have a fork. That fork will be either we find a way to use essentially distribution resources to cooperate, and I think that is the best societal outcome, or we find that we can't cooperate and everyone has to be their own, like a little micro picogrid, and that we have to build the infrastructure to do it. And, you know, I think that it's probably more likely that that's going to happen, which is unfortunate, but I do think that, as always, the affluent will serve themselves first and make good decisions and the rest of the costs will be pushed on to everyone else. And actually, in my heart of hearts, what I think will happen is we'll find a way to cooperate, but only after we've sort of incurred a huge amount of pain.David RobertsThat sounds like the American approach that I know and love. We'll stumble through some disasters and then eventually get our act together.James QuaziYeah, you end up doing the right thing when you're forced to. So, I think that that's the way I see it happening.David RobertsAll right, well, cool. James, this is really interesting. I've been meaning to look into solar in California, how they're dealing with all this. And this is a really interesting approach. I mean, it's never funny. Until I sort of read about this, it never occurred to me, even though it's really obvious, that like, of course, electrifying your appliances and getting your battery and getting your solar panels are — that's like the same thing. You know what I mean? Like, that's all one. That's all one thing. Like I said, it's like a switch that kind of flips in your mind.You're like, "Oh, like, it's a holistic system." It would be interesting to try to train homeowners to think that way more. Thank you so much, James. Thanks for taking the time.James QuaziThank you. Appreciate it.David RobertsThank you for listening to Volts. It takes a village to make this podcast work. Shout out, especially to my super producer, Kyle McDonald, who makes my guests and I sound smart every week. And it is all supported entirely by listeners like you. So, if you value conversations like this, please consider joining our community of paid subscribers at volts.wtf. Or, leaving a nice review or telling a friend about Volts, or all three. Thanks so much, and I'll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe
Asset prices are near all-time highs for almost everything: real estate, stocks, gold, bitcoin, and more. This is because in a wave of high inflation, investors chase yields. Legendary investor Jim Rogers joins us. Jim gives dire warnings about US debt levels. Meet me and one of our Investment Coaches in-person at FreedomFest in Las Vegas, July 10th to 13th. I put $1T into perspective. A trillion seconds ago was 31,700 years ago. That's when neanderthals roamed the plains of Europe. The dollar is a monopoly. The US government has no competition for their product, the dollar. Jim Rogers believes that higher inflation and interest rates are here to stay. He says: “Before this is over, interest rates in the US are going to go much, much higher.” Resources mentioned: For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review” GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold (00:00:01) - Welcome to GRE. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. I'll tell you about a chance to meet me in person. Then we're joined by a renowned and legendary investor for his sage like wisdom on how you should respond to record US debt levels for forecast the future direction of inflation and interest rates, plus a taste of the Singapore real estate market today and get rich education. Robert Syslo (00:00:27) - Since 2014, the powerful Get Rich Education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate, investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad Advisors, and delivers a new show every week. Since 2014, there's been millions of listeners downloads and 188 world nations. He has A-list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get Rich Education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus has had its own dedicated Apple and Android listener. Phone apps. Robert Syslo (00:01:02) - Build wealth on the go with the Get Rich Education podcast. Sign up now for the get Rich education podcast or visit get Rich education.com. Corey Coates (00:01:13) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. Keith Weinhold (00:01:29) - Welcome to GRE. From Sydney, Australia, to Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold and you're listening to Get Rich Education. Why are our values of almost every asset so high? Well, one reason is because we've had that high wave of inflation. When that happens, savvy investors, people just like you, they ensure that money must flow into assets. And that's because you seek a real return above and beyond inflation. If inflation were low, investors wouldn't have to chase yields this way. I've got more on asset values in a moment. But first, on today's guest, legendary investor Jim Rogers, who will hear from as a returning guest here soon in early 2019. So more than five years ago, he told us right here on the show that interest rates are going to go much, much, much higher over the next few decades and that is going to ruin a lot of people. Keith Weinhold (00:02:32) - In fact, let's listen into that. Here it is. This is from get Rich education podcast episode 224, which you heard here in January 2019. This is Jim Rogers. Jim Rogers (00:02:43) - And interest rates are going to go go much, much, much higher over the next few decades. And it's going to ruin a lot of people. Keith Weinhold (00:02:50) - And then from there, he went on to tell us at that time, rising interest rates will set in for a long time. And this was back when the fed funds rate was just half of what it is today in mortgage rates were 4.5% back there in early 2019. So Jim Rogers made that firm prediction even before we knew about Covid. Then. And on that episode, we talked about getting your debt and locking it in. And then two years later in 2021, he was back here on the show to warn us to expect high inflation. Well, we sure got that too. And as you listen to Jim Rogers on today's episode, consider that, you know, he just often speaks with this sort of, I suppose, nonchalance that I think can make it easy to dismiss what he says. Keith Weinhold (00:03:46) - But don't do that because countless people have benefited from his guidance for decades. Just like I hope that you do today in the real estate world. Now, agencies agree that the national year over year home price appreciation rate is 6%. That's today per the FHFA, the NAR and Case-Shiller 6% home price appreciation. What about rents? Today, Single-Family rents are up 5%. Nationally, multifamily rents up 2.7%. So why are Single-Family rents growing faster than multifamily rents? Well, it's partly because 2023 saw the biggest surge in new apartment supply since 1987. Yes, that's back when Madonna was the hottest music artist and Reagan met with Gorbachev. But there's less apartment construction this year, so expect a lot of that to get absorbed. Available inventory of Single-Family Rentals is going to stay more scarce than apartments for quite some time, but long term they both expect to be in really great shape. Residential rental demand is sustainable now. Back in 2022, available single family home inventory that was an astoundingly paltry one quarter of what was needed. Keith Weinhold (00:05:20) - Well, now it's up to half. Some inventory has definitely been added. In fact, I was recently on television being asked about that. But this still means that demand handily exceeds supply. There's not nearly enough housing, especially on the single family end. And what about those perpetually just around the corner, always, constantly just around the corner, fed interest rate cuts. They keep getting delayed beyond a lot of people's expectations. Well, per the CME's Fed Watch tool, here is the chance given of when the first rate cut will occur by the end of July. 10% September 60th 4%. November 70th 7% December 90th 3%. You know, personally, I think the chances are lower than all of those currently inflation's at 3.3%. But here's the thing. Even when it hits the Fed's target of 2%, that doesn't mean that rates must be cut. All right. That's a reality that a lot of people seem to forget. Now here on the show, not after every quarter, but sometimes when a quarter ends, just like one did a week ago, we take a quick look at other asset class moves outside of real estate in order to get a relative perspective. Keith Weinhold (00:06:43) - Some comparison here. If you're listening to this episode ten years from now, this is really going to help mark this era for you to is we do have many listeners that listen to every single episode. The 30 year mortgage rate is near 7%. Now, all these next figures are year to date through the first half of the year. So this is just the performance of the first half. Stocks have soared. The S&P is up 15%. One way that US stocks changed last quarter is the trades are now going to settle faster. Investors will see their purchases and sales finalized in just one day instead of two. Gold is up 13% to over 2300 bucks. Bitcoin up 44%, oil up 16% to $82. And again, that's performance for just the first half of this year. The world's three largest companies Apple, Microsoft and Nvidia have a combined value of over $9 trillion. Now, a company's total value is known as its market cap, and that is simply found by multiplying share price and shares outstanding. By comparison, all the gold in the world is worth 15 trillion. Keith Weinhold (00:07:54) - Hey, if you're familiar with an event called Freedom Fest, I have some cool news for you. It's an annual conference that. How would I describe it? Well, I haven't attended it before, but there you can learn to expect more about free thinking and ideas about the size of government. Well, it starts in two days. It's July 10th to 13th in Las Vegas. You can meet one of Gre's investment coaches in person there and you can also meet me. Yes, we'll both be there. If you see us, be sure to say hi. We'd both like to meet you. Hashtag IRL in real life, some of the Freedom Fest speakers include our frequent great guest, Robert Kiyosaki, as well as some other guests that you've heard with me here on the show. Also, Steve Forbes, Iced Tea, the comedian Rob Schneider, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, Whole Foods founder John Mackey and the congressman that wants to end the fed, Thomas Massie and more. They're all speaking. So yes, not a lot of notice, but if you're going, it's a way to meet me in real life, perhaps just in a casual way, in two days at Freedom Fest. Keith Weinhold (00:09:08) - Well, it is public information that the net worth of this week's guest is $300 million. He's been influential for a long time. Let's talk to legendary investor Jim Rogers. This week's guest needs a little introduction. He is a legendary business and investing mogul of our time. He's a Yale educated, prolific author. He co-founded the Quantum Fund, and he even has his own commodities index and ETF. He's also a prolific traveler. He wrote a very well known book about his world travels, visiting some 116 nations. Hey, welcome back to gray. It's Jim Rogers. Jim Rogers (00:09:51) - I'm delighted to be here. Okay, let's get rich. I need to get rich. I want to get rich. Keith Weinhold (00:09:56) - Hey. Well, your guidance helps us do that. That's why you're here. And Jim is joining us remotely from his home nation city of Singapore today. And it's always interesting syncing up our times of day here. Jim, where to begin? You've been with us here. I think this is the fourth time you're here and about the last five years, and we're at a time when asset prices of seemingly everything are near their all time highs, maybe even in their inflation adjusted all time highs in some cases. Keith Weinhold (00:10:25) - What are your thoughts with asset price levels? Jim Rogers (00:10:29) - Keith. You it's very perceptive of you and insightful. Yes. This is one of the few times in world history that I know about where nearly everything is making new eyes. I think China is probably the only country. It's not making new eyes, but nearly everything else is. Now it's wonderful. It's great. A lot of people are having a lot of fun, but unfortunately, I've been around long enough to know that when things get this good, when everybody's having so much fun, we're getting closer to the end. I am not selling short or anything yet, but I see the signs that this is going to come to an end, as it always does, and it's going to be a mess. And the reason this is going to be a big mess this time. You remember what happened in 2008 because of too much debt each. That's 2009. The debt everywhere has skyrocketed. I mean, even China has a lot of debt now. China bailed us out before, but everybody has a lot of debt now. Jim Rogers (00:11:31) - Maybe not North Korea, but everybody else does. Keith Weinhold (00:11:34) - And that sure includes us. I mean, we have these asset prices at all time highs. Yet here we are, still the largest detonation in the history of the world in the United States now at 35 trillion. And we're spending dollars on others wars, something that we couldn't say when you and I talked a few years ago. The biggest line item of our national budget anymore is about $1 trillion in annual interest payments alone in. Jim, we're really on this course now where soon the US annual tax receipts won't even cover the interest payments on our debt, and we may have to borrow just to pay the interest. So where do we reach the breaking point here? With this world in debt led by the United States? Jim Rogers (00:12:20) - You one makes some very good points. Unfortunately. I wish you didn't. I wish you couldn't make those points right. It's simple arithmetic. Just look at the numbers. And the numbers you recite are just what they admit, what they write. Jim Rogers (00:12:34) - There's a lot of off balance sheet debt that they don't even talk about. I mean, the numbers, if you try to get out of pencil on a piece of paper, you will realize that the market can never pay this debt. Never. Countries that have gotten into this situation in the past have had big problems. Now it's a good time to be an old American. I don't have to worry about all this for too many years, but I have young children. Oh my gosh. The problem is that their country is going to face in their lifetime. I was staggering. You look back at previous countries that have done this kind of thing. In the 19 to 100 years ago, Britain was the richest, most powerful country in the world. 50 years later, it was bankrupt. IMF had to fly to London and pay their bills. It wasn't fun. It was terrible what Britain went through. But other countries have done the same thing. Maybe we don't like what I'm saying or what's happening, but just read the history and you will see how it winds up. Jim Rogers (00:13:38) - I certainly don't like it, but I have to deal with facts. If I don't deal with facts, I'll go bankrupt. To which I don't want to do. Keith Weinhold (00:13:48) - Yeah, sometimes let's laugh to keep from crying. Right? When you talk about how certain government figures are just what the government is willing to admit to, I think that's the right lens to look through. When you look at any government figures. Well, at least that's the part that they're willing to admit to. It's interesting that they're willing to admit to this is interesting that they're willing to admit to 9% inflation like we peaked at two years ago. But when you talk about the future and this huge debt load and children or grandchildren, could austerity be part of it, something that's very politically unpopular. But if we lived in an austere state, wouldn't that really be sort of like the downfall of the American empire at that point? Jim Rogers (00:14:30) - Well, that's what happened to the British. As I said 100 years ago, they were the richest, most powerful country in the world. Jim Rogers (00:14:36) - There was no number two. Then if two years later, completely bankrupt, I happened to be in England during part of that time and it was a mess. Wretched. So I don't like saying any of this, but I have to deal with the reality and the numbers you cite or what they admit. You know, the numbers are much worse. I don't know if anybody in Washington really knows. I don't even know if they care enough to check to see how bad things are. But every time a someone from Washington, a politician or a bureaucrat says something, they say, don't worry, everything's okay. We have a Janet Yellen who's a secretary of the Treasury. Are you or two ago said, don't worry, we have everything under control. Keith Weinhold (00:15:20) - Reassuring isn't it? Not really. Jim Rogers (00:15:22) - Oh my gosh. He's got a couple of fancy Ivy League degrees, but she still says, don't worry, it's okay. Well, I worry, I'm probably not as smart as she is, but I worry. Keith Weinhold (00:15:36) - Well, it's interesting that you bring up the fact about the things that we don't know and these numbers, these debt levels and even the deficit gets so big, we're just throwing around this word trillion anymore. Keith Weinhold (00:15:48) - For some perspective, I happen to know that 1,000,000,000,000 seconds is 31,700 years. In order to help put this into perspective, well, 31,700 years ago, that's just about as far back as when the planes of Europe were being roamed by Neanderthals. That's 1,000,000,000,000 seconds ago. And again, we are $35 trillion in debt, and we have a deficit of at least $1 trillion. The annual thing. Jim Rogers (00:16:21) - I'm glad you're putting some perspective on this, but I don't need it. I know it's a staggering whatever number you want to look at, whether it's the one they report or the one that's they hide whatever it is, I know, because I can add and subtract. I know that America has a gigantic problem that is going to end up like every other country that's done this sort of thing. It's going to end up badly. America is going to lose its status, not this month. Don't worry. July is okay. But no, I can read, I can add, I can subtract. I know how it's going to wind up. Jim Rogers (00:17:02) - It's not good for young Americans. Keith Weinhold (00:17:06) - I mean, we think of the fall of the Roman Empire. You bring up the UK. The UK is still part of the G7, but they're no longer the one predominant power in the world. Jim, when I look at history and I think about sort of the powers that be and how they create and debase the currency, and how those problems percolate into so many parts of the society. I think if the United States is basically they have a monopoly on creating currency, and I just wonder if that's part of the problem. Lennar builds houses, but they have competition from KB homes. John Deere makes tractors and they have competition from New Holland. Heinz makes ketchup and they have competition from hunts. See, when there's competition, there's sort of this incentive to produce quality and provide others with value. But since the U.S. has no substantial competition to the dollar, I wonder if we can think of this as a de facto monopoly from its dilution of the purchasing power of the dollar. Keith Weinhold (00:18:06) - Its quality is suffering because the dollar doesn't have any substantial competition. So I guess what I'm leading up to, what I'm getting at, is we think about currency creation as a de facto US monopoly. I mean, does the government have to be the exclusive money printer where all this just ends up in the debt column here? Jim Rogers (00:18:24) - You raise some very good points. But back to the first main point. The main point is there is no way that America can ever pay these debts except by default, Which is one horrible way. Or by printing gigantic amounts of money, which is another horrible way. This is not the first time countries have done this. If you just go back and look, it is never ended well. Never ended well. Yes, England is still there, but nobody thinks about England the way they did 100 years ago. And nobody in England lives like they did 100 years ago, and many people left. I don't know what's going to happen to the US, except I know it's not going to end well because I can add and you can add and subtract. Jim Rogers (00:19:15) - I wish we could subtract. There's nothing to subtract because the debt just keeps high and higher and higher. And the numbers are very simple. If you get out the amount of debt we have and see the possible income, it just doesn't work. If you have fifth grade education, fifth grade arithmetic, you know it doesn't work. Keith Weinhold (00:19:39) - Jim, I don't know if you remember this, but the first time you were with us, it was January of 2019. That was more than five years ago. And at that time you said interest rates are going to go much, much, much higher. That was your direct quote, three matches. And you said that it's going to ruin a lot of people. And here we are with a lot of people ruined in the commercial real estate world and the apartment syndication world and so on. So if you continue to think there's going to be more currency creation to make it easier to pay back our debt, does that mean you believe that higher interest rates and higher inflation are going to be a persistent condition, say, just till the end of this decade, which is about another five years? What do you think about inflation and interest rates for these next five years? Jim Rogers (00:20:27) - I know that in Washington they will print money. Jim Rogers (00:20:31) - That's all they know. They want to keep their jobs. They don't care about you. I don't care about any of us. They care about keeping their job. And they will do whatever they have to to keep their job the easy way. Now, the proper way, of course, is to buckle up, buckle down, and start doing something about the rendus situation we were in. They don't care. They think they'll be gone by the time those times come, if they're ever coming, and they will say, but we're America. We cannot have problems like that. Well, that's what the British said, too. Once upon a time. And as I say, there was no number two to the British. They were that power. They were that much on top. It's not that I don't like saying. I don't like thinking it. I don't like living with it. But I do hope I can prepare so that I don't go down the tubes like some other people will. But I may just do the arithmetic. Jim Rogers (00:21:32) - It's very simple. The numbers just cannot work. I didn't say the numbers do not work. I said they cannot work because the situation is that dire. They can hold it off for a while by printing money. Great. But then not for you and me. Certainly not for our children. Keith Weinhold (00:21:51) - I think that's all they're going to keep doing. That's the most expedient way to do it, to keep printing any politician that proposes austerity. And you having soup for breakfast, lunch and dinner is not very likely to get re-elected. Does that mean in the next five years you foresee historically elevated interest rates and inflation, which is basically where we actually still are now? Jim Rogers (00:22:14) - Well, of course I do. I mean, there's the market. The problem is right now the central banks still think they're in control, and they pretty much are. But there will come a time. And there always has in history when the market says, wait a minute, we know you're lying. We know this cannot work. And then when the market takes over and the market starts setting interest rates and other conditions, that's called disaster. Jim Rogers (00:22:41) - That's a real, real serious problem. The market will know how bad things are, and the Treasury secretary can sit there and say all day long, don't worry, don't worry. We have it under control. And the Marquis will say, thanks, but we know better. Keith Weinhold (00:22:59) - Well, we've got more coming up with Jim, including. He spent some 60 plus years abroad. I want to learn more about what he thinks with living and traveling so much about the United States. You're listening to get Rich education. Our guest is legendary investor Jim Rogers. When we come back, I'm your host, Keith White. Hope your bank is getting rich off of you. The national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings. If your money isn't making 4%, you're losing your hard earned cash to inflation. Let the liquidity fund help you put your money to work with minimum risk. Your cash generates up to an 8% return with compound interest year in and year out. 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Start at Ridge Lending group.com Ridge lending group.com. Speaker 5 (00:25:08) - This is The Real World Network's Kathy Petke, and you are listening to the always valuable get Rich education with Keith Reinhold. Keith Weinhold (00:25:26) - Welcome back to get Rich. university. So we're talking with investing mogul legendary Jim Rogers. Keith Weinhold (00:25:32) - He's joining us from Singapore today. He's joined us a few times over the past five years. And with what he said in what's coming, he's really been remarkably accurate. Sometimes he just gives a pretty casual delivery, but you really want to listen in to what he's saying. A lot of people have hung on his every word for decades here. And Jim, part of that is all your worldly experience. From so many of your travels and visiting over 100 nations. I've only visited about 35 so far myself. What do you think that we can learn about the United States from living and traveling abroad? Jim Rogers (00:26:07) - First of all, I used to tell you I have made many mistakes in my life. I don't think I don't know how to get things wrong. I have many times. But yes, living abroad, I certainly even traveling abroad is an eye opening experience. It's a fabulous education. Rudyard Kipling, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, once had a line and a poem. The name of the poem was The English flag and the lion was. Jim Rogers (00:26:36) - What can he know of England? Who only England knows. One is you'll know a lot about your own country if you know about the rest of the world. And you will you. If you go to country X and you see they eat different food or wear different clothes, it'll make you realize a lot about America. So my point is it's a fabulous education to see other places. I don't know if it's helped me. I in my view, it has helped me a lot to understand the world and to understand other people. Keith Weinhold (00:27:11) - Now, in my international travels, which are a fraction of yours, a lot of times I get a reminder that life in the United States is still pretty clean and efficient. We have an abundance of potable water all the way to an amenity like fast Wi-Fi. And you know if someone abroad is traveling in the United States, they get to experience those things, and they probably don't even realize or understand that we're the greatest detonation in the history of the world. It's actually pretty difficult to know. Jim Rogers (00:27:40) - There are signs that even those travelers will see. If you go to JFK airport, you will see the huge difference in JFK and say, the Japanese Narita Airport. You know your intuitive world when you visit some international airports outside of the US. But it's not just that America. Five star hotels do not compare with five star hotels in other countries. Listen, I don't like any of this because I have to live it. But the facts are. Yes. And you make a very good point that most people do not notice or does not affect them much at all if it affects them at all. But that just makes the eventual problem worse, because it hits us out of the blue and we don't know what happened. At least if we're worried, we can prepare. But you know, if you ride down the highway, most people think everything. It's okay. This is a nice interstate layout of potholes. They think everything is great. I hope that this all changes. I hope I'm wrong, but I have seen enough to dough that it's not going to end well. Keith Weinhold (00:28:55) - Tell us about where you've lived for a long time. I mean, you come from the United States, but you've lived abroad for a long time. You've been there in Singapore for a while. Singapore, which is a place I haven't traveled to, has a reputation for being prosperous and enterprising in a really clean place. So will you tell us a little bit more about why Singapore is prosperous, including what its real estate markets like? Jim Rogers (00:29:20) - Singapore is a tiny country. There are only 5 or 6 million people here. So yes, it has been a remarkable success story. It's probably been one of the greatest success stories in the world in the past 40 or 50 years. It still amazes me to see how efficient and how well everything works here. And they don't have yet the getting debt now, but they don't have the staggering debts that some other countries do. I mean, Japan, America. You look at some of the great success stories that come to people's minds. Japan did it by borrowing staggering amounts of money. Jim Rogers (00:29:57) - Every day, the Bank of Japan borrows huge amounts of money it's going to have a problem to someday. I mean, it's just very simple. I don't want it to sound like some crazy fear monger, but I can read. And I know how this is always wound up. Now there's some very exciting and successful places in the world. And if you go to some parts of the United States, you say, oh my gosh, what a wonderful place. And it is. But underneath seems to me that there are problems developing. If you come to Singapore, you'll say, oh my gosh, and I'm not the only one who knows it all. The international surveys show that Singapore is one of the very top. Keith Weinhold (00:30:42) - Now in Singapore, is it more of an owner society where most of the residents own the home they live in or like you find in a lot of urban areas? Is there a disproportionately high amount of renters there in Singapore? Jim Rogers (00:30:55) - Over 80% of the people at Singapore own their own home. Jim Rogers (00:31:00) - The guy who set out to build Singapore new and he especially because in his lifetime there had been a lot of riots in Asia. And he somehow knew that if people own their own home, they had a huge stake in the country, right? Had a reason to make sure, to try to make sure everything went well. So in this country, over 80% of the people own their own home. Yeah, he may have a mortgage, but still they own their own home. That's part of the reason for the success. I mean, for what it's worth, I'll also tell you he was a huge believer in education. He made sure that everybody spoke at least two languages. I mean, he knew what it took to be successful and he did it. Yeah. Keith Weinhold (00:31:49) - Homeownership is generally good for communities like you touched on. You just have more of a stake in making sure your neighborhood stays quiet. Or you might show more interested enthusiasm in new clean mass transit coming into your area. You're more likely to be a voter when you own your home, and so on. Keith Weinhold (00:32:06) - So sure, that gives the residents a more vested stake in their own community, which is good for everybody. Does Singapore have one problem that we have here with United States housing? Do you have any idea if there's a substantial housing shortage there in Singapore, like we're seeing in so many places? Jim Rogers (00:32:21) - Do not shortage in the sense that you probably mean it? Yes. At times prices go high because there's not an abundance of housing and people keep moving to Singapore because it has been a successful place. So no, it's not like many places that we both know, but there are more immigrants coming here. The population is rising and they got a little somewhere. Yes, people are building homes and so it's not a gigantic problem at the moment. Can it be? Yes, of course it can be. And maybe it will be someday, but not at the moment. One thing I'll quickly say. Many societies, many countries, have a saying that families go from rags to rags and three generations. And there are many reasons for that. Jim Rogers (00:33:11) - So social reasons. I will point out that Singapore is now on its fourth new government. So maybe if human wisdom is correct, maybe Singapore is going to have some problems in the future. You don't see them now. They might though. Keith Weinhold (00:33:28) - Well, that's an interesting way to think about it. We've talked about problems in a few nations, Jim. I wonder, do you see there being a bright next up, incoming nation because you have this relative perspective from all your travels. Jim Rogers (00:33:43) - There are places that are trying to change and do better. Yet, Nam is a perfect example. I mean, what a nightmare it was 40 or 50 years ago. Right now it's on the rise. South Korea is one of the most successful, prosperous nations in the world. And in 1970, North Korea was richer than South Korea. That, of course, is not true anymore. So countries can change and can develop. And it has worked. I'm interested in Uzbekistan now, in Central Asia. It was ruined by the communists. Jim Rogers (00:34:20) - over 600 years ago. Uzbekistan conquered a lot of the world. I mean, then the communists came along and ruined it. But now they're changing again. So there's always somebody on the rise, and I'll be somebody on the decline. That's key, of course, is to be in the place where things are getting better, not getting worse. Keith Weinhold (00:34:42) - With that in mind is we're about to wrap up here. Jim, you know, I like an actionable takeaway for the audience. And before I ask you that, if I can share with you what we do here in a nation and a world of expanding debt, Grey's take on debt here is the way that we can borrow large amounts prudently and get our own debt is to buy income producing real estate. If you borrow more, you can only control more and both inflation and tenants passively debase your mortgage debt for you, which enriches that borrower as long as they can control their cash flow. So really, that's one thing that we're doing to play things here in a world of inflation. Keith Weinhold (00:35:25) - What are your thoughts with that? Or if you think that there's something else that the everyday person can really do to protect themselves in the future. Jim Rogers (00:35:33) - It's pretty clear that there have been, if you understand that and if you manage it properly, oh my gosh, you can become unbelievably successful and unbelievably rich. The proper words are though, if you handle it properly. History also showed that many people have been ruined by debt, so I hope that everybody understands that debt is not as simple as it looks, but if you handle it properly, oh my gosh, the returns and the rewards are huge. And yes, there are many, many throughout history, throughout the world, many people that made gigantic fortunes from property, from real estate. So I hope you're doing it right. I hope all of your viewers are doing it right. It's not as easy as it looks, but it can lead to great success and great disaster. So yes. Don't stop. Make sure that everybody understands the potential problems and the potential rewards and they don't get overextended. Jim Rogers (00:36:37) - Oh my gosh, you'll be very, very rich. Keith Weinhold (00:36:40) - Yeah, that's a little bit like fire. If used inappropriately, could burn down your house. But if you know how to use fire, you can cook meals for the rest of your life. Do you have any last thoughts overall, anything you'd like to share? Anything we really want to know? Jim Rogers (00:36:54) - I will tell you again that before this is over, interest rates in the US are going to go much, much higher. The debt is staggering. It is just whenever I look at the numbers and think about them, it shocks me, stuns me because I know it's going to lead to huge, huge, huge problems. But the people who are aware and understand what's happening and thrive. So this is not some kind of disaster for everybody, but some people will do extremely well. I hope that everybody you know does extremely well. Keith Weinhold (00:37:31) - Well, Jim Rogers, it's been a pleasure hearing from you again. As always. Thanks so much for coming out of the show. Jim Rogers (00:37:37) - My pleasure. I hope we can do it again sometime. Keith Weinhold (00:37:45) - Oh yes. It's good to get the bigger picture. Sage like wisdom. I'm not sure if you caught it early in the interview, but Jim is not selling short. That means he's not betting that stocks are about to take a big fall. He expects even higher interest rates when it comes to America's swelling debt. Most agree that they're just going to keep inflating their way out of it, rather than default on it. I do, too, but consider that the US actually does have a history of defaulting, like in 1971 when we told the world that you can no longer redeem our debt, IOUs for your gold, that there was defaulting on a promise, we weren't going to give them the gold anymore. Singapore is still growing fast. In fact, it's averaged about 2% annual growth over the last decade. If you discard pandemic aberrations, the value of the median Singapore condo is $1.7 million, and it is 1000ft² in size. That sort of makes you think about New York City real estate. Keith Weinhold (00:38:52) - And in fact, I had a trip planned to Singapore in February 2020. It was a cruise, but I didn't go. That part of the itinerary got cancelled. If you remember, Covid heated up in Southeast Asia early on, so I ended up spending more of that trip in India and Dubai. As it turned out, with our accelerated expansion of the supply of dollars that have been created since 2020. Here's one result today, more than 43% of Americans have been forced to cut back over the past year, and nearly 20% have had to borrow from family or friends in order to make ends meet. And you know when politicians brag about government funding. Just remember this. They're actually expecting you to give them credit for spending your money. That's what that means. And unfortunately, no one is immune from Congress's spending, which can be reckless at times. If you don't pay for something with taxes, then you pay for it with inflation. And that's exactly the type of issue that we expect to study on at Freedom Fest, where I might be fortunate enough to meet you in two days. Keith Weinhold (00:40:10) - Big thanks to the iconic Jim Rogers today. His website is Jim rogers.com. Coming up on the show here in future episodes soon, we're going to discuss a few components that add value to your residential real estate that really don't get discussed very often. Garages and also the vacant land that your property sits on. Also, the King of Commercial real estate is set to make his Get Rich Education debut. We'll learn about commercial real estate turmoil and the commercial sectors that higher interest rates have blown up. Well, hey, do you have family or friends that are into investing or real estate? I love it when you hit the share button on your podcasting device or whatever platform you're listening on. Everything that we do here is free, and the share button really helps the show. And be sure to follow or subscribe to the get Rich educational podcast yourself if you haven't already. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Reinhold. Don't quit your daydream. Speaker 6 (00:41:19) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Speaker 6 (00:41:29) - Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss the host is operating on behalf of get Rich education LLC exclusively. Keith Weinhold (00:41:47) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get Rich education.com.
We're joined by President Ronald Reagan's Budget Director, David Stockman. He tells us what real estate investors and everyday people need to know. Stockman served as Reagan's Director of Office, Management and Budget from 1981 to 1985. He tells us to expect higher inflation and interest rates for longer, maybe even the rest of the decade. Don't expect rate cuts for a long time. The US is moving toward an unsustainable debt situation, with $100T in public debt expected within twenty-five years. We have embedded deficits. Learn why the recession has been postponed. David also reveals what will inevitably pull the trigger to potentially start the recession. Hint: Household budgets. Pandemic stimulus programs gave citizens $3T. Half of it has now been spent. He was also one of the founding partners of Blackstone. David Stockman tells a story about President Reagan's personal touch with him. You can subscribe to David Stockman's Contra Corner for free here. Resources mentioned: David Stockman's Contra Corner For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text FAMILY to 66866 For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review” GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold (00:00:01) - Welcome to our Ivory Coast, Keith Whitehill. There are some dire warning signs for the future of our economy. We're joined by none other than the father of Reaganomics. To break it down with us. Today is late. President Ronald Reagan's budget director joins us. When is this perpetually postponed recession coming? Why? Inflation and high interest rates could carry on for the rest of the decade. And what it all means to your finances and real estate today on get Rich education. Robert Syslo (00:00:34) - Since 2014, the powerful get Rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from past real estate, investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show host Keith Wine, who writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad Advisors and delivers a new show every week. Since 2014, there's been millions of listeners downloads and 188 world nations. He has A-list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get Rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener. Robert Syslo (00:01:08) - Phone apps build wealth on the go with the get Rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get Rich education podcast or visit get Rich education.com. Corey Coates (00:01:19) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. Keith Weinhold (00:01:35) - We're going to drive from Glen Burnie, Maryland, to Glen County, California and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Reinhold, and you're listening to get Rich education. We're going bigger picture this week before we talk to President Reagan's money guy in the white House. Understand that today's guest was also one of the founding partners of Blackstone, and they are in the real estate business. You're going to get a lot of deep, uniquely qualified insights today. And I'll tell you what's going on around here. Lately, things have been feeling awfully presidential between last week's program and now this week's program. Hey. Stars and stripes forever. Semper fi. Rah! Now, as the greatest detonation in the history of the world, how in the heck are we, as the United States, going to keep financing our debt now, you can think of a treasury, also known as a bond, as an IOU, as we take on debt to fund our government spending programs. Keith Weinhold (00:02:42) - Really, what we do is issue then these IOUs to the rest of the world and then down the road. We need to pay back these IOU holders, treasuries, holders, whatever we've borrowed with interest on top of that. That's a really simple way to describe how it works. Think of a Treasury as an IOU. Well, we have $9 trillion in treasuries that need to be rolled over at higher interest rates just this year alone. Okay. Well, how does the market look for that sort of thing? Well, a lot like before you decide to sell a piece of real estate, you would want to know how that buyer's market looks. How is the buyer's market for us selling more treasuries, which is basically us issuing more IOUs? How is that world interest level in our treasuries? Well, this is a time when the world is selling treasuries. We're trying to get rid of them. Well, why would they buy more when we keep printing like crazy, debasing the dollars that they will eventually get their treasuries repaid in down the road? Case in point, China is down to just over 700 billion of treasuries that they're holding. Keith Weinhold (00:04:01) - Well, they were 3 trillion not too long ago, more than four times that Russia and Iran sold all of their treasuries. Other countries are shedding them too, like Japan. It gets even worse than that because the number one holder of our own debt is our own fed. And then it gets even worse than that. Yet, because even our own fed is rolling treasuries off of their balance sheet. So who is going to finance this often irresponsible US spending the 10 trillion or $11 trillion every single year for the next ten years that we have obligations toward already, and it looks like all those are going to be at higher interest rates, too. Now, I am not telling you how to think about us as the United States, for example, sending foreign aid to multiple nations. That's up to you to decide whether it's Ukraine or the Middle East or Taiwan that gets political. And that is beyond the scope of GR. We are an investing show. What I'm saying is that backdrop that I just gave you, that's something that you need to take into consideration, is you weigh those foreign aid decision types. Keith Weinhold (00:05:20) - Speaking of getting worse, do we at least have competent decision makers today? Now, as we'll talk to the father of Reaganomics here shortly, someone that served in an earlier era. Here's a clip from this era that really went viral lately, but it's apropos to play it here. This is Jared Bernstein today. He chairs President Joe Biden's Council of Economic Advisers. How much confidence does this instill? And remember, this guy chairs the economic advisers to today's president. Jared Bernstein (00:05:56) - The US government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money. Voice (00:06:00) - Like you said, they print the dollar. So why? Why does the government even borrow? Jared Bernstein (00:06:04) - Well, the, so the I mean, again, some of this stuff gets some of the language that the, some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why the government definitely prints money. And then it lends that money by, by selling bonds. Is that what they do? They they, the. Jared Bernstein (00:06:34) - Yeah. They, they they sell bonds. Yeah. They sell bonds. Right. Because they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah. So a lot of times, a lot of times at least to my year with MMT, the, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing. But there is no question that the government prints money and then it uses that money to so, yeah, I guess I'm just I don't, I can't really, I don't, I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking about. Keith Weinhold (00:07:08) - Well geez. How's that for clarity and confidence from today's major decision makers on our economy? Gosh. Now, in my opinion, back in 2020, our government, they set up the wrong incentive structure to deal with the pandemic. Remember things like the PGP, the Paycheck Protection Program, remember mortgage loan forbearance and the eviction moratorium. See when that type of aid is given, well, then the result is that citizens don't learn that they need to keep some cash handy, and then that behavior that gets rewarded gets repeated in that behavior is handouts. Keith Weinhold (00:07:53) - And then the expectation for more handouts. 56% of Americans don't even have $1,000 for an emergency expense. Well, see, they're not really incentivized to in the future. If in a crisis, everyone just gets another taxpayer funded handout, but then see those same people that got that handout get hurt in the long run. Anyway, with the longer run inflation that the handout created, don't let there be one day of austerity for the least prepared American, I guess. Instead, bail them out and add on to everyone's debt load, which you know that right there. That seems to be the playbook. Like that is the protocol of the day that is not responsible, in my view. Now, the minutes of the latest fed meeting, they said that some fed officials would be open to raising interest rates if inflation doesn't let up. I mean, that news alone that sent stocks plunging like they were riding the Tower of Terror, giving the Dow its worst day in a while. I'll discuss that more with the father of Reaganomics, David Stockman, today. Keith Weinhold (00:09:01) - It's the kind of episode that can stretch your thinking here. Now, what is Reaganomics? Well, one thing that you should know is that it's committed to the doctrine of supply side economics. You probably heard that term before. And really what that's all about is lowering taxes, decreasing regulation, and allowing free trade and what was called the Reagan budget. That's something that his budget director Stockman expected would help curtail the welfare state. And he gained a reputation as a tough negotiator for that. He lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan today, and it's kind of funny with macroeconomic discussions. You'll notice something here, the word million, that doesn't even come up that much anymore. It's simply a number that is too small. It is more like billion and trillion. And hey, let's see if the term three orders of magnitude above trillion comes up today. Quadrillion, or even the one after that quintillion. Is that where we're going next? We'll see. before we meet David Simon, I've gotten more questions about something, because the national average bank account pays less than 1% on your savings. Keith Weinhold (00:10:18) - And where do you really get a decent yield on your savings, even beyond the 5% in an online only savings account or a CD, which that does not outpace true inflation? For years now, I've reliably been getting 8%. What I do is keep my dollars in a private liquidity fund. You can do this to your cash generates up to an 8% return. The minimum investment amount is just 25 K, and you keep getting paid until you decide that you want your money back. And the private liquidity fund has a decade plus track record, and they've always paid their investors 100% in full and on time. And I would know this because I am an investor with them myself. So see what it feels like to earn 8%. A lot of other great listeners are any investing involves risk, even dollars at a brick and mortar bank. So to learn more, just text the word family to 66866. Learn more about the liquidity fund. Get 8% interest. Just do it right now while you're thinking about it. Keith Weinhold (00:11:23) - Text family to 66866. Let's meet David Stockman. A Wall Street and Washington insider and Harvard grad. Today's guest is a former two time congressman from Michigan, a prolific author, and he is none other than the man known as the father of Reaganomics. He was indeed President Ronald Reagan's budget advisor. Welcome to the show, David Stockman. David Stockman (00:11:54) - Great to be with you. And, that was a while back. But I think there's some lessons from that time that we would be well advised to try to apply today, that's for sure. Keith Weinhold (00:12:05) - Well, it's an illustrious title that you'll never shake. It's a pleasure to have you here. And David is a real estate investing show. At times we need to step back and look at the bigger picture. And now on the economy, one seems to get a different answer depending on who they speak with. You have a highly qualified opinion. What do both investors and citizens need to know today about the condition of the American economy? David Stockman (00:12:29) - I don't think the outlook is very promising, but I think it's important to understand what that means for real estate investors, because the fact is, if you're in real estate and I know many of your listeners or viewers are very knowledgeable and sophisticated, there's really two ways to look at real estate. David Stockman (00:12:49) - One is as a property that generates a flow of cash or income that is highly reliable, and that you can count on and produces a rate of return on the invested capital that's attractive. That's one way. The second way is that if you invest at the right time, when perhaps interest rates are falling and therefore multiples or cap rates are becoming more attractive and property values are rising rapidly, mainly because of easy money and lower interest rates, then there's a huge opportunity for capital gains. As another way of generating return on capital. But those are two obviously very different tracks. The capital gains route by old invest, improve flip flop the gain and move on or the, you know, income based rent and earnings based, approach to property. Now, I think the reason I went through this is pretty elementary, of course, is that the macro environment is very different between the first strategy and the second strategy. And therefore, the important thing to understand about the macro environment is which environment are you in and is it conducive to strategy a the income strategy or b the capital gains strategy? I would say right now we're totally in an incomes strategy environment, the first route. David Stockman (00:14:34) - And that's because as we've gone through several decades of easy money, of rapidly rising asset values, of ultra low interest rates, very high multiples, in terms of property values to income that has generated trillions and trillions of capital gains for smart real estate investors. But I think we're out of that environment, and we're in an environment now where we're stuck with massive public debt and deficits. We're stuck with a, central bank that is, basically painted itself into a corner, created so much fiat credit, generated so much liquidity into the economy that now it will be struggling with inflation for years to come. Which means, notwithstanding Wall Street's constant belief that rate cuts are coming tomorrow, there won't be rate cuts for a long time to come. And what we're facing, therefore, there is likely higher rates for longer. A environment in which property values are flat if not declining, and therefore the capital gains route is not going to work very well. But if you have good properties with good tenants and good cash flows and, rental flows, real estate mine works out pretty well. David Stockman (00:16:05) - But you have to understand the macro environment. And that's one of the things that I work on daily when I, publish my daily newsletter, which is called, David Stockman's Contra Corner. Keith Weinhold (00:16:19) - You can learn more about Contra Corner, David's blog, before we're done today. David, you have a lot of interesting things to say. There we are in this environment where rates have been higher, longer. It sounds like you believe that is going to continue to be the. Case is rate cuts will be postponed is a little more difficult question. It's some crystal ball stuff. But can you tell us more about that? What can we expect for inflation in interest rates for the rest of this 2020s decade, which has about six years to go? David Stockman (00:16:48) - There's going to be high rates for most of this decade because we have so much inflation and excess demand built into the economy. We really went overboard, especially after 2020 with the pandemic lockdowns and then these massive stimulus program, something like $6 trillion of added stimulus, was injected into the economy in less than 12 months. David Stockman (00:17:16) - That created a undertow of inflation that is still with us. And despite all the hopeful commentary that comes from Wall Street, if you look at it year to date, I don't look at just the CPI because the headline number is somewhat volatile and can be pushed and pulled a lot from a month to month based on nonrecurring conditions. But if you look at something called the 16% trimmed mean CPI, it's just the same CPI, but it takes out the lowest 8%, the highest 8% of price observations each month out of the thousands in the market basket. What it does is basically takes the extreme volatility out of the top and the bottom, and gives you a trend that is more reliable if you're looking like on a quarter by quarter or year by year or even multi year basis, well, I mentioned this is important because the trim means CPI is still running at about 4.3% during the first four months of this year to date. That's not a victory over inflation. That's double what the fed says his target is. And frankly, the Fed's target is a little bit phony. David Stockman (00:18:35) - I mean, what's so great about 2% inflation if you're a saver and your savings are, you know, shrinking by 30% over the course of a decade, so they're going to have a tremendous wrestling match with inflation, not just for a few more months, but I think for several more years in this decade, I don't see the federal funds rate, which is kind of the benchmark rate for overnight money coming down below 5% very soon, or if at all. And that's because with inflation running at 4% or better, if you have a 5% money market rate, you're barely getting a return on capital, especially if you factor in taxes. You know, it's like it's a rounding error and that doesn't work over time. I mean, you're not going to get long term savings. You're not going to get long term capital investment. If the return is after inflation and taxes are either non-existent or negative, as they've been for quite a while. So even though everybody would like to hope we're going back to the good old days of 0% over 90 money or 1% money, which they got so used to over the last couple of decades. David Stockman (00:19:55) - It was bad policy. It wasn't sustainable. It caused a huge amount of bubbles and distortions in our economy. But once we finally got to the end of that in March 2022, when the fed had to finally pivot and say, yeah, inflation isn't transitory, it's, embedded, we got to do something about it. People think we're going right back to where we were, and that's the key thing to understand. We are not going right back to where we were, in part because of all this inflation business I've talked about, but also in part because they got so used to borrowing money on Capitol Hill and practically zero interest rates that they are now, you know, they have built in deficits of 2 trillion or more a year. And, we are going to be pushing into the bond pits, massive amounts of new government debt. There's no consensus to do anything about it. You know, if the Republicans talk about reforming the entitlements, the Democrats say you're throwing grandma out the snow. If the Democrats talk about raising revenue, the Republicans talked about, you're going to get slaughtered with higher taxes. David Stockman (00:21:12) - And then everybody's for more wars and more defense and the bigger and bigger national security budget. And that's all she wrote. If you don't do with revenue, you don't do it national defense and entitlements. The rest of it is rounding errors. And so we're stuck with these massive additions to the debt. Now, everybody knows the public debt. Is 34 trillion. Ready? Yeah. What I'd say they don't understand is that by the end of this decade, you ask about the decade, right? Will we close to 60 trillion of debt. And, if you look at the last CBO, projection they do every year at long term projection, and CBO actually is more optimistic than it is warranted in any way. In other words, their long term assumptions I call rosy scenario. There's no more recessions for the next couple of decades. Inflation is well-behaved, interest rates stay low. Full employment lasts indefinitely and forever. Well, this doesn't happen. Look at the real world. Over the last 20 or 30 years, we've been all over the lot. David Stockman (00:22:18) - So if you look at the CBO forecast, which is I'm just saying here is exceedingly optimistic. They never are the less are projecting that the public debt and they don't even write this number down in their report because it's too scary, will be $100 trillion before the middle of this century. Keith Weinhold (00:22:41) - That's a. David Stockman (00:22:42) - Trillion. Yeah. Now, if you ask people today who are market savvy, I like a lot of your viewers. Where are the Treasury bills, notes and bonds today? Well, if you average it all out, it's about 5%. I don't think it's going to come down much. It'll vary a little bit up and down over time, but let's just say it stays at 5%. That means the carry cost of the public debt of a couple decades will be 5 trillion a year. The interest okay. It's staggering. That's almost as much as the whole federal budget is spending this today at, you know, about 6.6 6.7 trillion. So that's where we're heading, a massive debt crisis because they built in a structural deficit that the politicians and I call it the unite party. David Stockman (00:23:33) - They fight about silly things, but they agree on the big things which are leading to this outcome. The unit party has no ability to do anything about this structural deficit or the march from the 34 trillion that we're at today to 60 trillion by the end of the decade, and 100 trillion of public debt by mid-century. Now, for a real estate investor, that's probably the most important number you're going to hear. You know, at least this week or maybe this month or even this year, because what it means is that the amount of new government debt flowing into the bond pits, that'll have to be financed and that can't be monetized by the fed anymore because there's too much inflation, is going to put constant, enormous pressure upward on interest rates. And of course, higher interest rates mean lower property values. That's just basic real estate math. That's the environment we're heading into, which means good properties with good income and good rental flows are really the only way to go. Keith Weinhold (00:24:55) - Yeah, well, there's an awful lot there. Keith Weinhold (00:24:57) - And with this persistent higher inflation that you expect, the way I think about it is the higher the rate of inflation, the more that moves a person's dollars out of a savings account and instead out onto the risk curve. Well, David alluded to a problematic economy. We're going to come back and talk about more of those warning signs and what you can do about it. You're listening to Get Resuscitation, the father of Reaganomics and Ronald Reagan's budget director, David Stockman, I'm your host, Keith Reinhold. Role under this specific expert with income property, you need Ridge Lending Group and MLS for 256 injury history from beginners to veterans. They provided our listeners with more mortgages than anyone. It's where I get my own loans for single family rentals up to four Plex's. Start your pre-qualification and chat with President Charlie Ridge. Personally, they'll even customize a plan tailored to you for growing your portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending group.com Ridge lending group.com. Speaker 7 (00:26:06) - This is author Jim Rickards. Listen to get Rich education with Keith Reinhold and don't quit your day dream. Keith Weinhold (00:26:23) - Welcome back to Get Ready. So we're talking with the father of Reaganomics. His name is David Stockman, President Reagan's budget advisor. David, you've been talking about a problematic economy and places we can look and the outcomes that that can create. Why don't we talk about some more of those where we're here in a period where we feel like it's an official recession postponed, for example, are there other places that we should be looking? Is it the sustained inverted yield curve that we had for almost two years, the longest one ever, and a Great Recession predictor? Or is it that we're on the precipice of implosion from a debt to GDP ratio that's at 122%. It actually spiked to 133% when Covid first hit. Or for example, is it something and you've already touched on it a bit, is it more of that federal spending on our debts, interest payments alone each year, which had almost $900 billion for that interest line item that now even exceeds the massive $800 billion that we spend each year on national defense, or should we be looking at somewhere else? So what's out there that's really problematic and what's overblown? David Stockman (00:27:28) - Okay. David Stockman (00:27:29) - That's great. And all of those things you mentioned you should be looking at, it depends on your time frame. But I think on the initial question, where is this postponed recession? Why hasn't that happened? The place to look is somewhere that I think most Wall Street analysts aren't focused on, but they should be. And that's a series published by the Federal Reserve that tracks household balance sheets, in other words, liabilities and assets. But there's a particular series that I think is critically important to look at, and it's basically bank deposits, checking account savings accounts plus money market funds. This is all the liquid cash accounts of the household sector, not long term investments in real estate or stocks or bonds, but the short term money. It's the spendable money that households have now, what happened during the pandemic and lockdowns. And then the 6 trillion Is stems that were injected into the economy, like some kind of fiscal madness was going on in Washington, created a total aberration in the amount of cash in the economy, in the household sector, in these accounts that I just mentioned, normally right before the lockdown started and the stimulus was injected, you know, the level of cash accounts was about 12 trillion. David Stockman (00:29:00) - Within two years it was up to 18 trillion. And normally that cash balance grows about the same rate as the economy. In other words, as incomes go up, people save a small share of their income that goes into various bank accounts. There tends to be a lock step relationship. But what happened during that two year period was there was so much extra cash sent out to the households with the $2,000 checks in the $600 a week extra stimulus money, and then the, trillions that went, you know, for things like the Small Business Administration loan program, which was all forgivable, was about almost upwards of $1 trillion. You know, we could itemize all the others. But this enormous government, unusual cash flow into the economy added to these bank accounts enormously. And then something else happened. The geniuses in Washington, led by Doctor Fauci, decided to shut down half of the service sector, the economy. I'm talking with restaurants and bars and gyms, malls and movies and and all the rest of it. David Stockman (00:30:09) - So all of a sudden, the normal money that people would have been spending on the service venues, which is a big part of total spending, was stopped. It was kind of forced into artificial savings, sort of government mandated savings. Now, if you put the two together, there was about 2 trillion, extra transfer payments sent out to the public during that two year period. And there was a little over a trillion of normal service spending, restaurants in, etc. that didn't happen because there was a closed sign on the door, compliments of Doctor Fauci, or people were scared to death to go out because, you know, they created all this fear that Covid was some form of black death, which it really wasn't for 95% of the population. In any event, if you put the extra free stuff from the government, 2 trillion and the for savings because of these lockdowns, trillion, you have 3 trillion of unusual cash that flowed into the economy on top of the normal production. Income and profits and spending that would have otherwise gone on. David Stockman (00:31:26) - Now that 3 trillion temporarily ended up in this account, that I'm just talking about the cash balances of the household sector and its peak, there was about 2.8 trillion extra compared to what would been be the normal case in a regular economy. In a normal economy, that money has been slowly spent down by the household sector, even as the fed has tried to put the screws to the economy. In other words, there was so much extra cash in the system that even as the fed raised interest rates from 0 to 5% and did their darndest to slow things down, all of that excess that was built up during the pandemic period was available to spend. It was spent. And here's the key point. About half of it is now been spent. In other words, there's only about a trillion and a half of the nearest 3 trillion left. Now that is what's delayed the recession. If that big, massive 3 trillion nest egg had been there and the fed began to push rates up as it normally did in a normal cycle, we would have been in recession months ago. David Stockman (00:32:41) - But what has delayed or deferred the recession is this, cushion, this huge macro piggybank of cash that the government inadvertently or adversely is the case may be generated, during the pandemic period. So that's new. See that? Nobody looks at that because normally it's not a factor. You know, the cash balances are a pretty, prosaic, neutral part of the economy. They're not where you look for the leading edge of where the cycle was going or where new developments may turn up tomorrow. But this time, because of this total aberration of what happened to government transfer payments plus the lockdowns, we have a, X factor, let's call it in the macro picture that is confusing people. It's leading a lot of people to abdicate this no landing scenario. In other words, you know, there's not going to be a recession. We're just going to go on to bigger and better things. And, the fed will get inflation under control and then we can be back to happy times again. No, they're missing. David Stockman (00:33:56) - The elephant in the room is this massive aberrational unusual one time cash balance that was, generated by these policies. And that still has a little ways to go now. I think at the rate it's being run down, you can almost calculate it a couple hundred billion dollars, a quarter sometime next year, all of that extra cash will be out of the system. And then people will be back to spending only what they're earning. And frankly, earnings they're not. I'm talking about wage and salary earnings, are advancing barely at the inflation rate at the present time. So when we get back to about zero real growth in earnings, we're going to finally see the recession. Keith Weinhold (00:34:45) - I think one of the big takeaways here is that all these artificial economic injections really take time to unwind. David Stockman (00:34:56) - Exactly. You have to look at, you know, they always say, well, when the government changes policy, fiscal policy, you tighten or you loosen or monetary policy they raise or lower interest rates. They got QE or they got cute putting money in or taking money out that there's lag and lead times in all of this. David Stockman (00:35:18) - The problem is, none of the great economic gurus who talk about this really know whether the lag time is 12 months, 25 months, 50 or 5, and it varies. I mean, the circumstance has changed so much in a world GDP of 104 trillion, a domestic economy with 28 trillion of GDP, and all the complex factors that are moving back and forth in today's world, especially as it's enabled by technology and global trade and the internet and all the rest of it, nobody knows the lag times. And as a result, it's very hard to predict when the, brown stuff is going to hit the fan, so to speak. On the other hand, you don't have to know the exact date. You really need to understand the direction, the flow of things. And if you're in an environment that isn't sustainable because you're borrowing like crazy or interest rates or artificially. Low or stock price multiples are way the L2 ie or cap rates on real estate or you know, abnormally low. Then what you have to say is we're going to a different state. David Stockman (00:36:35) - It's not going to be as conducive as the current state, and we have to be prepared for it, even if we are not sure whether that's 12 months from now or 24 months. But it's going to change. So one thing you can be sure of, there is a famous economist back in my day when I worked on Capitol Hill earlier on, he was Nixon's chief economic adviser in the early 70s. And he famously formulated an aphorism, I guess, which said anything that is unsustainable tends to stop. Okay, that's what I know about the lag times. We're in unsustainable financial, fiscal and monetary environment. And the trends that it has given rise to are going to stop and and not in a good way. Keith Weinhold (00:37:24) - He even fed Chair Jerome Powell has confessed as much as that. This situation is indeed unsustainable, the exact word that he used. Well, David, this has been great in winding down as Ronald Reagan's budget director. Can you share any anecdote, story or quote from you spending time personally with Ronald Reagan? And the reason I ask is because he is perhaps the most revered president of the past few generations. Keith Weinhold (00:37:52) - That might mean a lot to our listeners here. David Stockman (00:37:54) - He should be revered, and not only because he was a great president and a great communicator, and did a lot of important things in policy. Some of them got implemented, and a lot of them were frustrated by Washington and the politicians and the Democrats and everybody else. But also, he was a great human being. And my story about that was when I was budget director, in the fifth year of the Reagan administration, we had our first child, and my wife was in the hospital. At that point in time, President Reagan was in Europe on a very important big international, series of meetings. But, somebody in the white House told him that our daughter had been born. And so he took the time out of his schedule for a call from Germany, the hospital where my wife was, and said he would like to talk to her and, congratulate us on our new arrival. But my wife was in a room with another, a new mother. David Stockman (00:38:53) - She the other person answered the phone and she said to my wife, there's some joker on the phone with President Reagan. And sure enough, he was there. and he took the time to congratulate my wife. And, so that's the kind of, person he was. He really was a great human being. Keith Weinhold (00:39:13) - Wow. Yeah. That really shows that he can still be warm and heartfelt, even while doing some key international negotiations there. Potentially. Well, we mentioned it earlier. I can tell you, the audience, that David is a regular author and contributor to his Contra Corner blog and letter, and you can get access to that for free. This is information coming from the father of Reaganomics to you. If you think you would find it a value. David, tell us how our audience can connect with you there. David Stockman (00:39:44) - Just Google David Stockman Contra corner I publish, I have a website, issues a newsletter every day. It comes automatically in the email. I also have a Substack version. You can sign up for either one, the email from my site or from Substack. David Stockman (00:40:02) - And every day we try to publish something on these issues that we've been talking about. One day it might be Wall Street, another day it might be Capitol Hill, another day it might be, you know, the war in Ukraine. All of these things matter. All of these things influence the environment that investors have to function in. So we try to comment on a variety of those issues based on, you know, the long experience that I've had, both not only in Washington, but also I was on Wall Street, for about 20 years. I was one of the founding partners of Blackstone, for instance. And we were in the real estate business in a major way, even then. Keith Weinhold (00:40:44) - Well, we absolutely love that. And I sure am appreciative of your time. It was great connecting with you. And thanks for being on the program today, David. David Stockman (00:40:53) - Very good. Enjoyed it. Keith Weinhold (00:41:01) - Yeah. Deep insights from the father of Reaganomics. Stockman thinks we'll be struggling with inflation for years to come. Keith Weinhold (00:41:08) - There won't be rate cuts for a long time. He sees real estate values as flat or declining, so have good tenants with steady income streams. Of course, in our favoured real estate segment here, residential 1 to 4 units where you can get 30 year fixed rate debt. Higher mortgage rates tend to correlate with higher prices, just like it has for the last three years and almost every period before that too. But there could be more pain for the commercial sector then, and assets that are tied to floating rate debt. And if you're aligned with David Stockman on that, you might want to look at your helocs, because after a fixed rate period, their rates tend to float along with the fed funds rate. So be cautious with Helocs and ask David for specifics. He doesn't see the federal funds rate coming down below 5% anytime soon, and you probably know that is the interest rate that a whole bunch of other interest rates are based off of. And that rate is currently at about 5.3%. By the way, there is projected to be more than 100 t more than $100 trillion of public debt before the middle of this century. Keith Weinhold (00:42:22) - That's less than 25 years away. I mean, these figures just become unfathomable sometimes. Pandemic wrought inflation that really occurred due to this greater supply of dollars that was introduced chasing a reduced supply of goods. And there were fewer goods because people got paid to stay at home not producing anything. Plus, what had been produced often could not be shipped either. David discussed the 16% trimmed mean CPI, and I've got to say, as much as I am a student devotee in studying inflation, I had never heard of that from his vantage point to find recession signs, look at household balance sheets and what's delayed the recession is that those pandemic measures put an extra 3 trillion bucks into households, and households still have about 1.5 trillion left to spend, which could further delay a recession. He projects that it's sometime next year that all of that extra cash will be out of the system. When you talk to how many people got this recession predictions so horribly wrong? Back in October 2022, Bloomberg Economics forecast a 100% chance of a recession by the following fall, which is almost a year ago now. Keith Weinhold (00:43:48) - Well, a 100% chance that left no room for anything else to happen. And they really whiffed on that one. Now, you know, I've got to add something here. A personal note if I can, but I'll give you a lesson along with it. And that is that at times like today, where I found myself one degree of separation from one of the most revered presidents in all of American history, I sometimes have some difficulty understanding how I keep having the opportunity to share time with people like today's guest. Now, I'm certainly not a PhD economist. And in fact, on the flip side, I've also never been a person that's been so poor and destitute that I was dying of hunger. But I do come from a modest place. When I flew the coop and left my parents home, I rented my first pathetic place to live a $325 a month pool house in the back of my landlord's property at 852 Spruce Avenue in Westchester, Pennsylvania. Yeah, a pathetic little pool house right next to the landlord's swimming pool. Keith Weinhold (00:45:04) - I mean, I was living really pathetically there for a while as I was struggling just to do things like find gainful employment and figure out the world and find a steady income. Yeah, it was 325 a month plus electric and the one small heater that was there, it was electric and it was really expensive to run. And on the coldest days, it wouldn't even adequately heat my pathetic little pool house that I ended up living in for 18 months. And just because I couldn't figure a way out of that situation for a while, I mean, I was too ashamed to ever bring a girl back there to that sad pool house. It was just one sink for the whole place. Combined kitchen and bathroom sink in the bathroom. I mean, most of my friends, they got their driver's license at age 16 and they soon had their own car. I didn't own a car until I was aged 22 or 23, and it's not because I lived in an urban area and walked. Everywhere use public transit there in Pennsylvania. Keith Weinhold (00:46:02) - It just took me a long time to afford a beater car and pay for insurance. I really needed a car and couldn't afford one. So really my point here is that sometimes I have to wonder how I got here from there. And I think what it is is taking an interest in real estate and investing. And despite just having a humble bachelor's degree in geography, it's really about becoming an autodidact, meaning self-taught. And it's easy to teach yourself when you find what interests you. And let me point to two other things besides adopting an auto didactic ethic to help me turn the corner into being in a place where I can have conversations like the one that I've had today. It was getting around aspirational friends. Like I've mentioned before, that showed me how I can start with a bang buy with little money. On my first home, I could put a 3.5% down payment on a fourplex, live in one unit and rent out the other three. And I will give myself some credit for doing those things. And then really, the third thing is that stroke of luck element, like just 4% of world inhabitants have been. Keith Weinhold (00:47:15) - I was one of that 4% that was born in the United States. And then I had two great, married, stable, supportive parents to cultivate the right environment for me. And well, today was just one of those days where I sort of nudged myself and I'm glad that it happened. Most importantly, I trust that you got value from today's show and that you do every single week here. Check out David Stockman's Contra Corner. Next week, we'll look for signs of distress in real estate as we delve inside the foreclosure market and how you can find discounted deals there. Until then, Idaho's Keith Wayne hold don't quit your day trip. Speaker 8 (00:48:02) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get Rich education LLC exclusively. The. Keith Weinhold (00:48:30) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Keith Weinhold (00:48:34) - Get rich education.com.
Summary: The meeting covered a range of topics, including the global economy, Bitcoin, and artificial intelligence (AI). Kerry Lutz and Darryl reflected on the 14-year journey of economic uncertainty, the struggles of central bankers to restore stability, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy. They also discussed the potential implications for China's economy, the psychology of market participants, and the role of gold as a barometer of systemic distress. The conversation then shifted to Bitcoin, with Lutz discussing the institutional adoption of the cryptocurrency and suggesting that institutions are being sold debt and IOUs. He expressed skepticism about the motives behind institutional investment in Bitcoin, portraying it as a way for the fast boys to profit at the expense of the slow boys. The meeting also covered the potential impact of AI, with participants expressing concerns about the environmental and societal implications of AI technology, as well as the ethical and philosophical aspects of AI development. They discussed the potential negative consequences of creating machines that mimic human actions and the dangers of creating machines that are similar to humans but lack the ability to make ethical decisions. Find Darryl here: drschoon.com Find Kerry here: FSN and here: Inflaton.Cafe
Pilate's soul hangs in the balance as he puts Jesus Christ on trial and declares the innocent one guilty. The question lingers... are you doing the same? - SERMON TRANSCRIPT - This morning I had the privilege to sit again in the “Discovering Christ” class, which is a class we have every week to study the person and work of Christ based on the Gospel of Mark. I was struck again as we began the cycle. We're looking at infinite majesty of the person of Christ. That's the purpose of the Gospel of Mark. It depicts Jesus in His remarkable person, His authority, declared to be the son of God at His baptism by a voice that came from heaven when heaven was torn apart and a dove came down and a voice said, "This is My Son whom I love; with Him, I'm well pleased." Then Jesus begins his ministry, teaching in a way that no one had ever heard before with authority, the ability to speak the truth of God in a powerful way, authoritative way- “You have heard that it was said, but I say to you.” Then as a demon possessed young man is there, to be able to instantly drive out the demon with a word. The demons were terrified of Jesus. He had no fear of them; He absolute authority over demons. Then there was every disease and sickness known to man. There was no disease or sickness He could not cure effortlessly, instantaneously, personally, effectively, every disease and sickness. We see His ability to control the wind and the waves when He was in the boat. A raging storm came down and the boat was filling with water. Jesus was asleep, then got up and stretched His hand over the wind and the waves and said, "Peace, be still." Instantly they obeyed His voice. “What kind of man is this? Even the wind in the waves obey him.” He revealed power over death as He raised Jairus's daughter from the dead. He said, "Talitha Cumi, little girl, I say to you, get up,” and her spirit returned to her and she got up. For Him, death and sleep were no different. It's just the same as waking a girl up from sleep. That's how powerful Jesus is over death, but even more, His authority over sin, His ability to declare to a sinner, your sins are forgiven and they are. This man that we've been learning about now in fourteen chapters now going into the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel of Mark is on trial before Pontius Pilate, on trial for His life, the only perfectly good man that's ever been. On trial for what? What did He do except love God with all of His heart, soul, mind and strength and love His neighbor perfectly as Himself and didn't break any of God's laws or man's laws ever. He's on trial before Pontius Pilate. Things are not, however, as they appear. If we had been transported back in time and we were there, we'd see this prisoner arrested on trial before the Roman procurator, on trial for his life. But the reality is much different. It was determined in the mind of God that Jesus should die for the sins of the world and that that would be the process whereby it would happen. It was a foregone conclusion. What's really going on in this account of Jesus before Pilot is that Pilot's on trial, actually. Pilot's on trial. In order to make that case and to make it then relevant to us, I'm going to... often I just stick with the words of Mark. But this morning I'm going to be reaching out to all four Gospels. I would say especially John 18:28-19:16 which probably puts the trial of Pilot himself more clearly than any of the other gospels. I'll be leaning on that, but also some things from Matthew. Whereas Pilot thought that he was evaluating and judging Jesus, the reality was that he was on trial and through him, all of us are, we all have a decision to make about Jesus because the Bible reveals that someday we're going to stand before his Judgment Seat. The only way we're going to survive that is if in this world, in this time now we have, come to personal faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord. Only that way will we survive judgment day, only that way. So here's Pilot judging, the only perfectly innocent man that has ever lived and by condemning Jesus to death, a man Pilot again and again asserts publicly that He is innocent. A man he may well have believed was supernatural and incarnation of sorts. We'll talk about that. He was actually destroying his conscience and condemning his own soul, he did it, we're told in the text, to please the crowd. Behind that we can say, he was trying to save his life and his job. But Jesus put it so plainly in Mark 8:36, "What would it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul?" I don't know if Pilate ever did repent of his sins and trust in Jesus as his Lord and Savior, I have no idea. But if he didn't, he'll spend all eternity wishing for this moment back. The real question in front of all of us, what about us? What about you? Not just that personal moment of repentance and faith in Jesus, but understanding really what this passage teaches us. There's so many lessons here. We're going to see how God orchestrated in providence the condemnation of Jesus before the Roman procurator, before any of these things came to be, that God moved providential wheels to give the Jews, the chief priests, the Sanhedrin power over Pilate, so he would do what they wanted him to do, though he didn't want to do it. We're going to walk through that and learn providence. Now overall, the purpose of this account, like any account in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is summed up in John's purpose statement in John 20:31, "These are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God and believing may have life in His name." So that's the purpose today. 1. The Charge Against the Silent Jesus: “King of the Jews” Let's walk through the trial. Let's see what happens in Mark's account, but then looking at the others as well. In the charge against Jesus... Jesus is arraigned before Pilate, the religious phase of the trial is over. The Jewish leaders had come to their decision. Look at verse 1, “Very early in the morning the chief priests with the elders, the teacher of the law and the whole Sanhedrin, reached a decision. They bound Jesus, led Him away and delivered Him over to Pilate.” They have condemned Jesus to death, but they can't kill him, as much as they would like to. The Romans took away the power of that local body to execute people. The Romans retain that right, so they needed Pilate's involvement. They deeply wanted to put Jesus to death. They wanted him killed. Now we notice in John's account the hypocrisy of these Jewish religious leaders. In John 18:28, "Then the Jews led Jesus from Caiaphas to the palace of the Roman governor. By now it was early morning and to avoid ceremonial uncleanness, the Jews did not enter the palace because they wanted to be able to eat the Passover.” This is disgusting, religious hypocrisy. They maintained an outward appearance of spirituality and legality, but their whole purpose that morning was to murder an innocent man and not just any innocent man but to kill the glorious Son of God. But they're maintaining a certain pattern of religiosity so they can go through their rituals. Pilate asks Him this question, verse 2, "Are you the King of the Jews?" That's how it begins. This was the charge the Jews had figured would work with the Roman governor. They had tried to get him, as we know earlier in Mark's Gospel, on tax evasion, saying you don't need to pay taxes to Caesar, but Jesus openly asserted that they did. "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God, the things that are God's." So that didn't work out, but this “King of the Jews” charge was weighty because it implied a threat to Roman interest in the area. In Luke's Gospel, Jesus’ enemies took another approach. In Luke 23:5, they insisted, "He stirs up the people all over Judea by his teaching. He started in Galilee and has come all the way here." That basically is a charge that He's a rabble rouser, He's an insurrectionist. Ironically, Barabbas, the very one they chose instead of Jesus, was openly an insurrectionist. So are you for or against insurrectionists? In Luke 23:19, "Barabbas had been thrown into prison for an insurrection in the city and for murder." Pilate zeroes in on this question, this charge, "Are you the King of the Jews?" Jesus gives a very interesting answer. In verse 2, "You have said it," or, "Yes, it is as you say," there are different translations. In Matthew 27:11, "You have said it." What does that mean? It’s somewhat mysterious. Perhaps Jesus meant the words like this, “Yes, it is as you say, but it's not what you mean or not how you mean. Or, you have said it but you really don't understand it.” In John 18, he goes into it in more detail. In John 18:36-38, "'My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews, but now my kingdom is from another place.' 'You are a king then,' said Pilate. Jesus answered, 'You are right in saying that I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born and for this I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.' 'What is truth?' Pilate asked." That's a more in-depth conversation on Jesus's kingship. Jesus's kingdom is infinitely more powerful and more complex, more spiritual than Pilate could possibly imagine, but it's an entirely different thing than he was thinking when he asked, "Are you the King of the Jews?" So was He? Was Jesus King of the Jews? Answer: Absolutely, yes. As a matter of fact, that's the purpose of the beginning of the Gospel of Matthew, the record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. The first thing taught in the New Testament about Jesus is that He is the son of David, meaning King of the Jews. That's true, yes, He was King of the Jews, but not the way anyone thought, not the way His disciples thought, not the way anybody on earth thought. Yes, He's King of the Jews, but certainly not the way Pilate thought. Actually, Jesus is more than just King of the Jews. In Zechariah 9:10 it says, "He will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth." So not just King of the Jews, but yes, King of the Jews. Was Jesus a threat? Was Jesus a threat to Pilate? Was Jesus a threat to Caesar? Was Jesus a threat to Rome? Answer: yes and no. Let's say no and yes. Jesus is no threat to lead an immediate political insurrection against Pontius Pilate and Judea or Caesar and the Roman Empire. But Jesus threatened Pilate and Caesar with eternal damnation. Jesus' kingdom is vastly more powerful than any earthly ruler could ever imagine. When Christ returns, He will set up a kingdom that will destroy all other kingdoms and will itself never be destroyed. This is the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar's dream in Daniel 2, it says, "In the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but will itself endure forever.” This is the meaning of the vision of a rock cut out of a mountain, but not by human hands. The rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold to pieces. Those represent empires. All empires come to an end at the Second Coming of Christ, and Jesus's kingdom established will reign forever and ever. The account is given in Revelation 19 of the Second Coming, "Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. He will rule him with an iron scepter. He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty and on his robe and on his thigh, he has this name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords." "Jesus is no threat to lead an immediate political insurrection against Pontius Pilate and Judea or Caesar and the Roman Empire. But Jesus threatened Pilate and Caesar with eternal damnation." Is Jesus a threat? Absolutely. Just not the way the Pilate was thinking. Jesus responds in silence, in direct fulfillment of prophecy. Look at verses 3-5, the chief priests accused Him of many things. Again, Pilate asked him, "Aren't you going to answer? See how many things they're accusing you of." But Jesus still made no reply, and Pilate was amazed. This is in direct fulfillment of course, of Isaiah 53:7, "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth." Why not? Why was Jesus silent? There's a horizontal and a vertical aspect of Jesus' silence. Horizontally, He's silent because the trial is completely corrupt and unjust, and there's nothing He can say that will change it, and He's very aware of that. There's no point in Him saying anything. As He says in Luke 22:67-68, "'If you are the Christ,' they said, 'tell us.' Jesus answered, 'If I tell you, you will not believe me, and if I asked you a question, you would not answer.'" So He's openly saying, "What's the point?” Horizontally, there's no point in Him answering. Vertically, He must be silent because He's our sin bearer and there's nothing we can say in response to defend ourselves. We are guilty. We have broken God's laws and He has taken our sins on Himself and cannot reply to Almighty God, and so He must be silent, vertically. Pilate was amazed at the silence. He had never seen any prisoner behave like this man. As procurator with the power of life, death, he was used to seeing prisoners in many different states. Some might beg and plead for their lives, groveling on the ground. Some might be terrified, unable to speak because of terror, paralyzed. Some might be sullen or defiant or louder defiant. But Jesus had a supernatural calm to Him and a peace to Him. In the Gospel account, especially in John, there's a sense that He's in charge of the whole process. He has no fear at all. “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.” Pilot's never seen a man like this before. Never. Proverbs 16:32, "Better a patient man than a warrior. A man who controls his temper than one who takes a city." Jesus was in absolute control of Himself, of His emotions, of His reactions at every moment. He was infinitely strong. 2. Pontius Pilate on Trial It really is Pontius Pilate on trial. Look at verses 6-15, “That was the custom at the feast to release a prisoner whom the people requested. A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists who had committed murder in the uprising. The crowd came up and asked Pilot to do for them what he usually did. ‘Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews,’ asked Pilot, knowing it was out of envy that the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. But the chief priests stirred up the crowd to have Pilot release Barabbas instead. ‘What shall I do then with the one you call King of the Jews,’ Pilot asked them. ‘Crucify him,’ they answered. ‘Why? What crime has he committed,’ asked Pilate. But they shouted all the louder, ‘Crucify him!’ Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilot released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged and handed him over to be crucified.” Pilot's on trial here, though he doesn't know it. As we look at John's account, we can see that Pilot again and again and again tries to release Jesus. It's his top priority it seems, below self-interest. He wants to release Jesus, he wants to set him free. Pilot knows that Jesus is innocent. In our text he says he knew it was out of envy that they had handed Jesus over to him. Pilot has undoubtedly heard about Jesus's miracles and the power that surrounded His ministry. Thirdly, Greeks and Romans frequently believed that the gods and goddesses took on human bodies and mucked around in human life and did human things and got into human affairs, and they believed this. There's biblical support of this conception. In the book of Acts, in Acts 14:11-12 when Paul and Barnabas were ministering in Lystra and did a healing miracle, it says, "When the crowd saw what Paul had done, they shouted in Lyconian language, 'The Gods have come down to us in human form.'" That's it right there. Barnabas, they called Zeus, and Paul, they called Hermes. They tried to offer sacrifices to them. This idea of gods taking on human bodies was well established in Greek and Roman culture. Fourthly, we have Pilate's wife who had a dream about Jesus and sends him a message during the trial about the dream, and we'll get back to that in a moment. John's Gospel, therefore, makes it plain that Pontius Pilate was afraid of Jesus. Most of the depictions of the trial do not show this aspect of Pilate, but he was afraid of Jesus. In John 19:7-9, “The Jews insisted, ‘We have a law, and according to that law, he must die because he claimed to be the Son of God.’ When Pilate heard this, he was even more afraid and he went back inside the palace. ‘Where do you come from,’ he asked Jesus, but Jesus gave him no answer.” What do you think was in his mind when he asked him that question? Are you a God? That's what he's asking. But however afraid he was of Jesus, he was even more afraid of what the Jews would do to him if he didn't do what they wanted. Now to get this background, we have to turn to a Jewish historian named Josephus, who tells us what the early stages of Pontius Pilate's rule was like in Judea. It was bad. Josephus was a Jewish historian who lived shortly after Jesus, and he gives us insights. Pilate ruled the Roman province of Judea from 26-36 AD. Once he was established in his position, he quickly offended the Jews multiple times by his high-handed and arrogant treatment of the Jewish people. Right away he marches into Jerusalem and sets up the Roman Eagles in the temple itself. The Roman Eagles were looked on by the Romans and therefore by the Jews as idols, representatives of Caesar's power. For him to put them physically in the temple was incredibly offensive to the Jews. They assembled and demanded that he remove the Eagles. Pilate refused and threatened the Jewish mob with slaughter if they didn't disperse. Undaunted, the Jews bared their necks and said, "Go ahead and kill us. We're not leaving." So Pilate backed down, losing face and authority with them. Soon after that, he offended the Jews again with his handling of a public aqueduct conflict. Again, the Jews assembled a protest. Pilot had the crowd infiltrated with plain clothes Romans, bearing swords. When the Jews refused to disperse again, Pilot gave the signal and the soldiers slaughtered many of the Jews. Jesus talks about this, how Pilot had mingled their blood with their sacrifices. He killed a lot of Jews that day. But the Emperor Tiberius was so angry at Pilot for his mismanagement because if he's stirring up trouble, Caesar will have to send more troops to the region. This is key. He was under orders to keep things quiet and orderly and get along with the Jews. These two things happened before Jesus's trial. Do you not see the hand of God in all this? He's giving to the Jewish Sanhedrin, the high priests, the chief priests, power over Pilot and they traded it in, in John's Gospel. No doubt about it. It says in John 19:12, "From then on Pilot tried to set Jesus free." You see that statement? He wants to set Jesus free, but the Jews kept shouting, "If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar's. Anyone who claims to be a king, opposes Caesar." They're clearly threatening to go to Tiberius, to go over his head. There's no doubt about it. Now, as I said, Pilot's conviction is that Jesus was completely innocent. He knew it was out of envy that the chief priest had handed Jesus over to him. Three times in John's Gospel, he declares publicly that Jesus was innocent of any charge at all. John 18:38, "I find no fault in him." John 19:4, "Look, I'm bringing you out to let you know I find no fault in him." And then verse 6, "You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against." That's three times a public assertion of Jesus's innocence. Set him free, you’re in charge. Set him free if he's innocent. This whole conviction is even more greatly strengthened by his wife's dream. Matthew 27:19, "While Pilot was sitting on the judge's seat, his wife sent him this message. 'Don't have anything to do with that innocent man.'" Innocent man. "For I have suffered a great deal today in a dream because of him." What effect do you think that message would've had on Pilot in the middle of this? In John's account, he goes out to the Jews and back to Jesus. He goes out. He's going back and forth. He doesn't know what to do. He's like a trapped animal. All of this was orchestrated by God. Why? Because He wanted to give His only-begotten son, in your place, as an atonement for your sins to bring you to heaven. That's why, and Jesus was equally determined to die for you and me. That's why all this was happening. Now he tries the clever attempt. One of the things he tries is, "Oh wait, yeah, it's the feast. I can release a prisoner. I got an idea. Let's do that.” It was the custom at the feast to release a prisoner whom the people had requested. A man called Barabbas was in prison with the insurrectionists, who had committed murder in the uprising. The crowd came up and asked Pilate to do for them what he usually did. Pilate brings it up in John's Gospel. They both remember this custom. "Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews," asked Pilate, knowing it was out of envy the chief priests had handed Jesus over to him. However, this clever attempt to get out of this whole thing was thwarted by the Jewish leaders. In verse 11, the chief priest stirred up the crowd to have Pilate release Barabbas instead. I don't know how they did that, but they were running the show here. They had infiltrated the crowd. They had whispered, they'd called in IOUs, maybe bribed some people, got some people to shout things out for Barabbas and then shout, "Crucify!" for Jesus. They manipulate the crowd into a maniacal frenzy. "What shall I do then with the one you call King of the Jews," Pilate asked them. "Crucify him!" they shouted. "Why? What crime has he committed? He's innocent." But they shouted all the louder, "Crucify him!” In Matthew's account, "Pilate saw he was getting nowhere, but instead an uproar was starting." It's a frenzy. Satan must've been stirring this whole thing on as well. It was Satan that was in Judas Iscariot to orchestrate this whole thing. Satan's fanning this whole thing into a flame because he was a murderer and he hates the Son of God and wants him killed. The sinlessness of Jesus is clearly established. The roots of the chief priests and elders, their wicked hatred for Jesus was envy, greed, and power. The crowd vacillating just a week before shouting, "Hosanna, Hosanna!" Now they're yelling, "Crucify, crucify!" This is the culmination of Jesus's rejection by His own people. He's been officially rejected by the chief priests and the Sanhedrin. He's officially condemned to death, but now the people are shouting for His death. "He came to his own and his own did not receive him." [John 1:11]. In Matthew 27, this stunning statement is made, "When Pilot saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. 'I'm innocent of this man's blood,' he said. 'It's your responsibility.' And all the people answered, 'Let his blood be on us and on our children.’" 3. Jesus’ Blood on the Jewish Nation (Matthew’s Gospel) Wow, what a statement. What does that mean? “Let his blood be on us,” mean we'll take responsibility. It's a common Jewish expression. Like in Leviticus 20:9, "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death. He has cursed his father and mother and his blood will be on his own head." In other words, he's responsible for what's coming to him. That's their way of saying, "We will take responsibility, let his blood be on us and on our children." This is the very thing that Jesus said would happen in Matthew 23, after the seven-fold woes. "Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees." After all that He says, "'Therefore, I'm sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you'll kill and crucify. Others, you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town and so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah, son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you the truth, all this will come down on this generation.’" They are going to be responsible for it all. They're willing to take responsibility for the death of Jesus. Later they try to shirk this responsibility. In Acts 5, they said to the apostles, "You filled Jerusalem with your teaching and to determine to make us guilty of this man's blood." Well, you are, you are. So that's the first sense, that's the darkest sense. But there's another sense of “Let his blood be on us and on our children,” a much better sense. Because it is only by the blood of Jesus shed on the cross that our sins are forgiven, that our sins are forgiven. At present through unbelief, the blood of Jesus is upon them and their children for condemnation and for guilt, but if any individual Jewish person repents of his or her sins and trusts in Christ, His blood will be on them to cleanse them from all their sins, just as it's on us for salvation and cleansing. For God delivered Jesus over as a propitiation, a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood. It is by the blood of Jesus, by the shedding of blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins. I believe that at the end of history, there'll be a massive turning of ethnic Jews physically descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to faith in Jesus, and His blood will be on Abraham's children for salvation. As it says in Romans 11, "And so all Israel be saved, as it is written. The deliverer will come from Zion; he'll turn godlessness away from Jacob. And this is my covenant with them when I take away their sins.” "For God delivered Jesus over as a propitiation, a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood. It is by the blood of Jesus, by the shedding of blood. Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins." IV. The Final Verdict The final verdict is given by Pilot. In verse 15, "Wanting to satisfy the crowd, Pilot released Barabbas to them. He had Jesus flogged and handed them over to be crucified." Pilot could not evade responsibility. He washes his hands, but he's responsible for what he did. He rendered a verdict, guilty, death on a cross, but it violated his conscience. He knew he wasn't guilty. Was it really Pilot who handed Jesus over to be crucified? It was at the human level, but as I've already said, Romans 8:32, "He who did not spare His own son but delivered Him up for us all. How will He not also along with Him, graciously give us all things?" Interesting, at the moment that He was delivered over to be crucified, Barabbas was set free. That's marvelous, isn't it? It's an interesting picture. The guilty set free, the innocent dies. This is a picture of substitutionary atonement. As 1 Peter 3:18 says, "For Christ died for sins once for all the righteous, for the unrighteous to bring you to God." Barabbas represents a disgusting, vile murderous sinner who's set free from condemnation death by Jesus. I'm not saying Barabbas is in heaven. I hope so. Wouldn't it be great to meet him and say, "Generations have been talking about you, now here you are." But we don't know. We have no knowledge, but I'm just saying he's a picture of a guilty person set free and not having to pay the penalty that we deserve. Concerning the flogging, it was a hideous punishment. Picture a rod of wood and long leather straps with bits of bone and metal at the end, like a whip, only enhanced. The straps would wrap around the victim's body and then rip flesh off that victim's back. It was a hideous torture. If done enough, it would be lethal. It was done to weaken the victim before the crucifixion, so he ordered that it be done. Why? He was innocent. In John's Gospel, it was used as one of the steps that he tried to appease the people, but it didn't work. Here it is written at the end. It's beautiful because in Isaiah 53:5 it says, "He was pierced for our transgressions. He was crushed for our inequities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon him. And by his wounds, sometimes translated stripes, we are healed.” As 1 Peter 2:24 says, "He himself bore our sins in His body on the tree that we might die to sin and live for righteousness; by His wounds you have been healed.” V. Applications First of all, the judgment theme. You've heard the evidence, you have the information. You're sitting, in some sense, in judgment on Jesus. You're deciding about Jesus. God gives you that time to do that. Make a right judgment. Evaluate Him properly. Look at the evidence. I began the sermon with the marvels of the person of Jesus as depicted in the Gospel of Mark. Make a right judgment about Jesus and trust in Him for the forgiveness of your sins and the salvation of your soul. Don't do what Pilate did. Make a right judgment about Jesus. Secondly, understand what's going on here. I've said it two or three times, I'll say it one final time. This account is evidence of God's sovereign control over human history, His orchestration of events, His maneuvering of people and positioning of people because He's sovereign over everything that happens on earth. What He was doing was giving the Jews power over Pontius Pilate so that he would condemn an innocent man to death. What God's intention was to give Jesus as a Savior for your sin. Again here, Romans 8:32, "He who did not spare His own Son but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also along with Him graciously give us all things?" What is the “all things”? I've been thinking about different pastoral circumstances that I'm walking through right now with different people in the church. It could be medical, it could be relational, it could be a sin problem, it could be financial. There's all kinds of things going on all the time in the life of the church. I don't know what's happening in all your lives.The things that you're yearning for are significant, they’re important. Romans 8:32 doesn't minimize. It's just saying, "With God already having given his only-begotten Son, everything else in the universe is lesser than that to Him. He would not withhold from you anything that would further His purpose in your life, which is to save your soul, use you in this world, and then take you to heaven.” Understand that's what's going on in this trial here. Thirdly, rejoice in God's sovereignty over wicked, unjust human governments. As we go through a political process in this nation, and we wonder who's going to get elected president or lesser roles, and not just our country, but around the world, we can see evidence of this kind of selfishness and weakness and caving into the crowd and injustice. Isn't it wonderful to know that God is sovereign over that whole thing and rules actively over it for His own purposes, for His own glory, and for the good of His people? Fourth, look at the fickleness of the crowd here. "Hosanna," one week, a week later, “Crucify," and distrust your own loyalty to Jesus. Say, "Prone to wander. Lord, I feel it. Prone to leave the God I love. Here's my heart, Lord. Take and seal it. Seal it for thy courts above. Help me not to be fickle and weak and vacillating in my love for Jesus." Finally, it's time now to get our hearts ready for the Lord's Supper. I'm going to close the sermon time and prayer ,and we're going to transition to the Lord's Supper. Father, we thank you for the word of God. We thank you for its power. We thank you for this account of the trial of Jesus before Pontius Pilate. Now as we give our attention to the Lord's Supper, we pray that you would be with us in this time. In Jesus' name, Amen.
The landscape of the East has been altered. With the MVP --- or M-Vi-Biid's return, can the Sixers season be saved? We discuss. And as the sun shines in Philly, a storm is brewing in Milwaukee. Why Giannis and Bucks could be headed for an early exit. Plus, we all know Wemby will have a VERY crowded trophy case when it's all said and done, but Perk thinks he deserves something even bigger than just Rookie of the Year... next on NBA Today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The landscape of the East has been altered. With the MVP --- or M-Vi-Biid's return, can the Sixers season be saved? We discuss. And as the sun shines in Philly, a storm is brewing in Milwaukee. Why Giannis and Bucks could be headed for an early exit. Plus, we all know Wemby will have a VERY crowded trophy case when it's all said and done, but Perk thinks he deserves something even bigger than just Rookie of the Year... next on NBA Today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Clint Coombs joined Charlie and Todd to discuss Godzilla X Kong: The new empire The Neverending Story isn't overTim Burton's First Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Trailer Joker 2 Is Apparently Aiming to Be Jukebox MusicalHappy Gilmore 2: Senior TourMarvel Zombies "Pretty Intense, Not Pulling PunchesThe Geek Easy: Shogun on FX, Live Action Avatar on netflix, Halo Season 2 finale (no spoilers), X-Men ‘97 E3; Bad Batch S3 first halfThe Thunderdome: Our Spoiler filled discussion of Godzilla X Kong: The new empire Our Patreon Producers are Sean, Stella and Henry Nyhus, Missy MerchantGet a free one week trial of our Patreon and check out our new member tiers at Secret Friends Unite Patreon Use our special link https://zen.ai/tW9w96GHjJl0oOlORlg-afOO0JOcbUkaBnWlklytL0c to save 30% off your first month of any #Zencastr paid plan.Visit www.secretfriendsunite.com for all things SFUSubscribe to our Youtube channelFollow us on Twitter, Threads & Instagram: @secretfriendsu, @Toxtra, @Secret.Friends.Unite, @toxtra, @CeeThreeCarpenter, @Ryuketsu2043Join our discord server to be part of the community
Embark on a journey of self-discovery and relationship mastery in this episode, perfect for anyone craving insights on navigating life's conflicts with grace, finding peace in chaos, and adding a dash of creativity to the art of reconciliation. Tune in, because even tacos fall apart, but the wisdom shared here is bound to keep your spirits together! Mental Health Resources, Ways to Connect & More About Keith: https://www.tacosfallapart.com/podcast-live-show/podcast-guests/keith-wilson In this insightful episode of Even Tacos Fall Apart, MommaFoxFire engages in a thought-provoking conversation with therapist and author Keith Wilson, exploring the nuanced topic of "The Art of Finding Peace and Reconciliation." Throughout the interview, they emphasize the importance of navigating conflicts, offering genuine apologies, fostering creativity, and recognizing the significance of connection. Conflicts are acknowledged as natural components of relationships, with the potential to spur personal and relational growth if handled effectively. Keith emphasizes strategies for conflict resolution, such as summarizing the other person's perspective and implementing breaks when emotions intensify. Genuine apologies are characterized as IOUs for making amends, requiring subsequent actions to repair and strengthen relationships. Establishing a system for resolving conflicts is deemed crucial, along with the ability to distinguish between healthy and detrimental conflicts. The importance of taking concrete actions to change behavior and repair relationships is emphasized as an integral part of making amends. The conversation delves into the intricacies of reconciliation, highlighting the role of creativity in encouraging individuals to find unique solutions and perspectives. Addressing peace in chaotic environments, Keith emphasizes the need to create a sense of safety and develop escape plans. The discussion broadens to include internal conflicts, urging individuals to understand the origins of negative thoughts and create distance from self-critical voices. Feedback is a central theme in therapy and personal relationships, and Keith emphasizes its role in fostering open communication and facilitating growth. The reflective eclectic approach to psychotherapy is introduced, emphasizing the importance of drawing from various techniques and focusing on the therapeutic relationship. The interview touches upon the significance of self-exercises in enhancing personal growth and well-being. Relaxation techniques and active imagination are highlighted as valuable tools. Keith shares a personal anecdote illustrating the impact of simple yet effective exercises, like square breathing, in managing anxiety. Connection is a cornerstone of mental health, and Keith eloquently expresses the interdependency inherent in the human experience. This conversation with Keith Wilson provides a comprehensive exploration of the art of finding peace and reconciliation. You will find practical strategies for conflict resolution as you delve into the deeper layers of personal growth, creativity, and the importance of connection in fostering mental well-being. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mommafoxfire/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/mommafoxfire/support
Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.These industrious immigrants would soon go from peddling trinkets and buying up shopkeepers' IOUs to forming what would become some of the largest investment banks in the world—Goldman Sachs, Kuhn Loeb, Lehman Brothers, J. & W. Seligman & Co. They would clash and collaborate with J. P. Morgan, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, and other famed tycoons of the era. And their firms would help to transform the United States from a debtor nation into a financial superpower, capitalizing American industry and underwriting some of the twentieth century's quintessential companies, like General Motors, Macy's, and Sears. Along the way, they would shape the destiny not just of American finance but of the millions of Eastern European Jews who spilled off steamships in New York Harbor in the early 1900s, including Daniel Schulman's paternal grandparents.Today's guest is Dan Schulman, author of “The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America.” We trace the interconnected origin stories of these financial dynasties from the Gilded Age to the Civil War, World War I, and the Zionist movement that tested both their burgeoning empires and their identities as Americans, Germans, and Jews.
Welcome to Stay Cure-ious! Join Juniper Owens, licensed clinical social worker and mental health educator, as we dive deep into the world of self-help and wellness. In this episode, we're unraveling the Law of Attraction (LOA), a belief system with wide-reaching influence.
Thank you for tuning into the last service from 2023! Today, Gregory and Jackie Pope give a word on forgiving others and starting 2024 with a fresh slate absent of any IOUs.If you're a new friend, click on this link to fill out a new friend card online!https://oneconnection.org/new-friendsCheck out our new Covenant Merch at https://https://www.oneconnection.org/shopMake sure to follow us on Facebook and Instagram, @covenantchurch2.Subscribe to our YouTube Channel here: https://rebrand.ly/fcw9jxaDownload our Covenant Church App here:Apple Devices: https://rebrand.ly/s3nb5hqAndroid Devices: https://rebrand.ly/7w1r1txGive Online: https://covenantchurchdouglas.churchcenter.com/giving
Dive deep into a thought-provoking discussion with Aleks Svetski, co-author of "The Uncommunist Manifesto" and the mind behind "The Bitcoin Times," on the latest episode of the Mark Moss Show. In this revealing conversation, we explore the concepts of leadership, societal growth, and the impact of strong individuals on shaping the future. Svetski challenges conventional wisdom by discussing the need for discomfort in pursuit of growth, the importance of solving higher-quality problems, and the potential of Bitcoin to influence a new playbook for society. From discussing Argentina's surprising political shift under President Miele to the philosophical underpinnings of money as a network of IOUs, this episode is packed with insights on how individuals and society can navigate the challenges of our time. Tune in for a stimulating discourse on the dynamics of power, excellence, and the journey towards creating a civilization that values strength, virtue, and excellence.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this special episode, our CTC hosts reflect on the wheel-turning events, the curd-inary highlights, and the fon-due moments that shaped the cheese-scape this past year.We explore it all with a sprinkle of humor, a dash of clever insight, and a dollop of cheesy charm. Unpack the stories behind the latest cheese trends, hear again about the curd-preneurs making waves, and laugh along as we recount the unforgettable, and sometimes amusing, moments that defined the year.Get ready for a flavorful blend of nostalgia, cheese wisdom, and a hint of cheesy humor as we slice through the curd-ious and unexpected happenings that made 2023 a vintage year in the world of curd exploration. So, grab your favorite cheese board, pour a glass of wine, and join us for a gouda time as we wrap up the year that was on Cutting the Curd!
Welcome to the 'Stay Cure-ious' series, where we embark on an investigative journey through the complex modern mental health landscape. Join us as we delve deep into individuals, products, companies, and theories within the mental health arena, all of which boldly proclaim to be the ultimate "cure-all" or a one-size-fits-all intervention. In each episode, we scrutinize the evidence, separate fact from fiction, and explore the potential impact of these claims on mental well-being. Tune in for insightful conversations, expert perspectives, and evidence-based insights to help you make informed decisions about your mental health practice or personal journey. This series encourages a balanced and skeptical approach to media consumption, news and evidence regarding mental health treatment. In this episode of Stay Cure-ious, we delve deep into the world of Dr. Daniel Amen and the Amen Clinics, exploring their claims about brain health, mental illness and the various products and services they offer. We critically examine Dr. Amen's use of brain scans (SPECT scans) for diagnosing mental health issues, his language and methodology, and his emphasis on lifestyle interventions. The podcast also highlights the importance of a nuanced, integrative, evidence-based mental health and wellness approach. It raises questions about the validity of Dr. Amen's claims and the potential ethical considerations in his practices.Key Points:Dr. Daniel Amen and the Amen Clinics are known for their claims about brain health and their use of SPECT scans for diagnosing mental health issues.The podcast explores Dr. Amen's language and methodology, which often polarizes issues and emphasizes "right" and "wrong" concerning human brains and behavior.Dr. Amen's background in evangelical Christianity and its influence on his work and practices are discussed.The podcast highlights the controversy surrounding SPECT scans and their validity in diagnosing mental health conditions.The role of placebo effects and the need for a critical perspective when evaluating claims about mental health interventions are emphasized.Dr. Amen's approach to nutrition, exercise, and supplements as potential solutions to mental health issues is discussed.The podcast encourages a balanced and skeptical approach to media consumption and news.The complexity of mental health and the importance of considering multiple factors in addressing mental well-being are underscored.The podcast does not provide definitive answers but encourages listeners to approach the subject with an open and critical mindset, recognizing the complexities of mental health and wellness.Support the showPlease share your voice with us! We would love to hear from you! Record a voice message here. Send us a comment here.Apply to be a guest on this podcast here. Would you like to share your work with the Conscious Mental Health Community ? We offer both paid and free sponsorship opportunities. To apply click here.
Is Bitcoin destined to become another fiat system? Where we end up in a world where the dominant instrument isn't Bitcoin at all, but just more IOUs? Where Bitcoin substitutes replace real Bitcoin? Does it not just become another fiat system, or are there fundamental incentives and technological trends that prevent this and push us ever closer to total sovereignty? With smaller and smaller communities and institutions able to organize and exit in an independent way... where a Bitcoin world means a free world? It's time for a follow-up to Eric Yake's and Axiom BTC's amazing piece, "Banks without bankers." Get ready for another "Guys Take" episode. Keep an ear out for the 1000th episode of the show! I'll have details soon, you don't want to miss it. Follow AxiomBTC and Eric Yakes on Twitter Other great sources mentioned in this episode: -The 7th Property -Broken Money -The Fiat Standard -Freedom & Exit Found this and all the other great recommendations that I regularly share on the show on the Bitcoin audible page at Prodcast.io A huge thanks to our sponsors, and don't forget to check out the offers for the listeners of this show! 9% off the Coldcard with code BITCOINAUDIBLE, bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard Check out the KYC Free, simple, no management, Bitcoin merchant solution, Nodeless.io/guy. Use my link to go to bitcoinaudible.com/nodeless and setup your donation page for free, then share it out on Nostr or Twitter and tag me, and I'll throw 10,000 sats your way! Get 50,000 free sats, plus sats back on everything you buy by signing up with Fold and the Spin+ Debit Card. bitcoinaudible.com/fold -------------------------------------------------------------------- "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bitcoinaudible/message
Dive into the complexities of the swinging lifestyle as we explore the controversial topic of "Taking one for the team". How do you solve the four-way connection problem? In this eye-opening episode, we share personal experiences and survey insights from a wide spectrum of lifestylers, unraveling the intricacies of consent, boundaries, and the art of saying 'no' or 'yes' in the swinging community. Key Topics:Team 'No': Unyielding standards, the evolution of preferences, and the power of saying 'no' confidently.Team 'Yes': Embracing enthusiastic and lukewarm yeses, the beauty of diverse experiences, and the flexibility of boundaries.Keeping Score: The controversial practice of tallying encounters, the potential pitfalls, and ways to navigate this delicate territory.IOUs and Obligations: Exploring the thin line between consent and obligation, the impact on relationships, and the importance of open communication.Respect and Guilt: Unpacking feelings of resentment, guilt, and the role of respect in the self, relationships, and with play partners. Call-to-Action:Explore the nuances of the swinging lifestyle with us! Like, subscribe, and share your thoughts in the comments below. What are your experiences with Team 'No' and Team 'Yes'? Let's continue this conversation and build a community where open communication and respect thrive. #SwingingLifestyle #ConsentInSwinging #OpenCommunication #RelationshipAgreements #PodcastDiscussionSupport the showOur Links: Patreon - Want to help support us? - plus you get sexy bonus and behind-the-scenes content Shameless Care - Risk matched, at-home STI testing, and ED Medication SDC - 7-day free trial membership, and join our group YouTube - Like to watch? We need your Likes, and shares, and be sure to subscribe Website - Contact/Call us, sexy products, educational articles, and a FREE Kasidie trial SwingLinks.club - See all our links in one place, including the spicy ones
Is Bitcoin destined to become another fiat system? Where we end up in a world where the dominant instrument isn't Bitcoin at all, but just more IOUs? Where Bitcoin substitutes replace real Bitcoin? Does it not just become another fiat system, or are there fundamental incentives and technological trends that prevent this and push us ever closer to total sovereignty? With smaller and smaller communities and institutions able to organize and exit in an independent way... where a Bitcoin world means a free world? It's time for a follow-up to Eric Yake's and Axiom BTC's amazing piece, "Banks without bankers." Get ready for another "Guys Take" episode. Keep an ear out for the 1000th episode of the show! I'll have details soon, you don't want to miss it. Follow AxiomBTC and Eric Yakes on Twitter Other great sources mentioned in this episode: -The 7th Property -Broken Money -The Fiat Standard -Freedom & Exit Found this and all the other great recommendations that I regularly share on the show on the Bitcoin audible page at Prodcast.io A huge thanks to our sponsors, and don't forget to check out the offers for the listeners of this show! 9% off the Coldcard with code BITCOINAUDIBLE, bitcoinaudible.com/coldcard Check out the KYC Free, simple, no management, Bitcoin merchant solution, Nodeless.io/guy. Use my link to go to bitcoinaudible.com/nodeless and setup your donation page for free, then share it out on Nostr or Twitter and tag me, and I'll throw 10,000 sats your way! Get 50,000 free sats, plus sats back on everything you buy by signing up with Fold and the Spin+ Debit Card. bitcoinaudible.com/fold -------------------------------------------------------------------- "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bitcoinaudible/message
If it is true that our money has no actual value, and it is true that the notes we call money are nothing more than IOUs, then it follows that when we “buy” something, nothing of value has been exchanged for actual value. This line of logic dictates that anyone using money to buy property (more...)
In this episode of "Joining Me Now" Chad & Rob discuss the complexities of the bond market and the differences between short-term and long-term bonds. Chad explains that bonds are essentially IOUs where investors lend money to the government or corporations in exchange for a rate of return. To gauge the performance of the bond market, Burton suggests looking at the total return of different ETFs. Timestamps: [00:02:14] Bond market performance. [00:04:00] Reinvestment risk and bond portfolio. [00:07:55] The vibe in the bond market. [00:11:32] Long-term care insurance. [00:14:20] Long-term care insurance complexities. [00:18:27] Spending habits and retirement. [00:21:20] Long-term care tax. [00:25:02] Inter-family reverse mortgage [00:29:13] Viatical settlements and life insurance. [00:33:09] FTX bankruptcy and Bitcoin. Email your money question to chad@chadburton.com Call 1-888-762-2423 for Wealth Management and Financial Planning services or visit www.ChadBurton.com
GET TIM'S FREE Portfolio Review HERE: https://bit.ly/redpilladvisor And become a client of Tim's at https://www.TheLibertyAdvisor.comGET HEIRLOOM SEEDS & NON GMO SURVIVAL FOOD HERE: https://heavensharvest.com/ USE Code WAM to get FREE shipping in the United States! GET YOUR APRICOT SEEDS at the life-saving Richardson Nutritional Center HERE: https://rncstore.com/r?id=bg8qc1 HELP SUPPORT US AS WE DOCUMENT HISTORY HERE: https://gogetfunding.com/help-wam-cover-history/ Josh Sigurdson talks with Tim Picciott, The Liberty Advisor about the massive decisions made at the BRICS summit in South Africa as Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE join BRICS, leaving the dollar behind. We've been warning about this for over a year and now it's finalized. Saudi Arabia is the country behind the US petro dollar system. Without them, the dollar fails. This shift is exactly what one should expect when the world order is purposely collapsing its own economies, causing a world war, demoralizing children and destroying supply chains and energy grids. This is the new new world order. This is the Great Reset. The replacement from one tyrannical system to an even more technocratic tyrannical system. The BRICS world reserve currency will be cashless, though based on gold IOUs. No one will be able to hold the gold however. Most will be enslaved to a CBDC with social and carbon credits attached. What are you going to do about it? Stay tuned for more from WAM! GET AN EXTENDED FREE TRIAL FOR ICKONIC WHEN YOU SIGN UP HERE: https://www.ickonic.com/affiliate/josh10 BUY YOUR PRIVATE CLEARPHONE HERE: https://www.r1kln3trk.com/3PC4ZXC/F9D3HK/LION ENERGY: Never Run Out Of Power! PREPARE NOW! https://www.r1kln3trk.com/3PC4ZXC/D2N14D/GET VITAMINS AND SUPPLEMENTS FROM DR. ZELENKO HERE: https://zstacklife.com/?ref=WAMSTOCK UP ON STOREABLE FOODS HERE: http://wamsurvival.com/OUR GOGETFUNDING CAMPAIGN: https://gogetfunding.com/help-keep-wam-alive/OUR PODBEAN CHANNEL: https://worldaltmedia.podbean.com/ Or SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/5JWtlXypfL8iR8gGMg9MMEFind us on Vigilante TV HERE: https://vigilante.tv/c/world_alternative_media/videos?s=1FIND US on Rokfin HERE: https://rokfin.com/worldalternativemediaFIND US on Gettr HERE: https://www.gettr.com/user/worldaltmediaSee our EPICFUNDME HERE: https://epicfundme.com/251-world-alternative-mediaJOIN OUR NEWSLETTER HERE: https://www.iambanned.com/JOIN our Telegram Group HERE: https://t.me/worldalternativemediaJOIN US on Rumble Here: https://rumble.com/c/c-312314FIND WAM MERCHANDISE HERE: https://teespring.com/stores/world-alternative-mediaFIND OUR CoinTree page here: https://cointr.ee/joshsigurdsonJOIN US on SubscribeStar here: https://www.subscribestar.com/world-alternative-media We will soon be doing subscriber only content! Follow us on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/WorldAltMedia Help keep independent media alive! Pledge here! Just a dollar a month can help us alive! https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2652072&ty=h&u=2652072 BITCOIN ADDRESS: 18d1WEnYYhBRgZVbeyLr6UfiJhrQygcgNU World Alternative Media 2023
In this electrifying episode of The Adams Archive, we plunge into the profound depths of 'Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars,' a document whose enigmatic existence challenges our perceptions of reality. This isn't just any document – it's a manifesto, a blueprint, that reveals a grand design of societal manipulation on an unprecedented scale. This piece of evidence has spent too long in the shadows, obscured by skepticism and disinformation. We're bringing it to light and giving it the critical analysis it deserves. It speaks of control via economics, technology, education - seemingly ordinary facets of society that, according to this document, are in fact weapons in a silent war waged on humanity. As we traverse the labyrinth of cryptic language and unnerve ourselves with the chilling implications, we question: what if this is real? What does it mean for our world as we know it? We explore theories, inspect connections to clandestine organizations, and investigate the practical implications of the strategies outlined in this document. Join us as we unmask the unthinkable truths hidden within 'Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. ----more---- All Links- Https://linktr.ee/theaustinjadams Substack: https://austinadams.substack.com Merch: https://antielite.club ----more---- Full Transcription: Adams Archive. Hello, you beautiful people and welcome to the Adams Archive. My name is Austin Adams, and thank you so much for listening today. On today's episode, we are going to be discussing what I would say is the single most terrifying document I've ever laid eyes on. And maybe not just that. I mean, and this, this says a lot because I've done a lot of deep dives into different, uh, documents that have come out that were top secret, that were c I A documents, whether it was about MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods. And in MK Ultra, they were literally taking people and electrocuting their brains to try to manipulate them or get rid of their memory. They were drugging people with L S D while they were. With prostitutes and watching the reactions there, there, there's so many things that they were doing that were horrifying. But the document I'm about to show you is the most terrifying, least discussed, top secret document that has ever gotten into the hands of a civilian. And the reason I say that is not on the individual basis, right? The, the documents like the MK Ultra documents are terrifying because it could have been you, it could have been me. But the document I'm about to show you was you. It was me. It was everybody on this planet was affected by this document. By this plan that was implemented to perfection. And as I start to walk through this with you, you'll realize more and more how this has been seeded deeply into the fabric of our reality. Regardless of what country you're in, regardless of where you went to school, how much money you think you have in the bank. Every single one of us has been affected by this document. And that is what it makes it so terrifying. Okay. The document that I'm about to show you and I'm about to walk you through in this deep dive is called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. Now, this document was produced. Found in 1986, July 7th by somebody from the IB who who purchased a copier. Okay? This document came from somebody who purchased a copier from the surplus sale by I B M. They reached inside of it and took this out in 1986. Now, this document was originally used at the very first known Bilderberg meeting in 1954. And adopted by the policy committee. Now, the reason that we have eyes on this today and the way that we do, the way that this document is broken down is based on the idea that the people that looked at this document were a part of a c i, a small group who were chosen for reasons that we'll find out in just a moment, but it was to catch them up to speed on the worldwide conspiracy that was happening and unfolding. Right in front of our eyes and has continued to and will continue to for a very long time. So let's go ahead and read through the preface. And again, this document is called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars. I. Before we do that, go ahead and subscribe. Leave a five star review. Head over to the ck Austin Adams sub stack.com. I'm actually going to be reviewing a document that I went through and highlighted every single piece of it that I found to be the most interesting. This is a 40 po, 45 page document, so it's not a light read, but I went through and highlighted everything that I found to be of value in this document for you, and I will include this document in this. Weeks' sub that will be sent out. Okay? So you'll actually be able to look at the highlights that I found, value the annotations to them. The exact document that I'm reading from this will be in that sub stack, so Austin Adams sub stack.com. Go ahead and subscribe. Leave a five star review. And if I could ask you within this podcast episode, if you find this to be of interest, if you find the things that I'm talking about here to be held true in your life and it shocks you just as shocked as I was, please share this episode, share it with two people, and have those people share it with two people. Okay? I would appreciate it from the bottom of my heart. Just share it, send it to two people, and you go, this is wild. That's all you have to say. This is wild. Go ahead and hit that share button and send it to two people that you wanna discuss this with 'cause they should hear about it too. And if everybody does that, this will reach the masses and we will start to get the word out. Because like I said, this is one of the most terrifying, least discussed, top secret documents that has ever gotten in the hands of a civilian. Alright. All right. On that note, let's. Jump into it. The Adams archive. Oh, all right. Let's jump into it. We're gonna start with the preface here, and this is again, is silent weapons for quiet wars, and we'll find out the meaning of that in just a moment. But I will tell you at certain points, this is somewhat technical in the way that it reads. So I will do my best to read the document to you. Reformat it for you in a simple way so you can understand the sentiment. 'cause I'm sure even just listening to it is even more tough than reading it. But I will take the analysis that I've done up until this point and give you it once I read through it. So if it sounds a little bit technical, stay with me. 'cause I will give you my simplistic version of what it actually means right after. Okay. So, Here is the preface of this document. Conspiracy theories are nothing new to history plots, to kill Caesar and overthrown Rome abounded, for instance. However, it is seldom that concrete clues to such plots come to light and are generally known. Silent weapons for quiet wars, an introduction programming manual. Was uncovered quite by accident on July 7th, 1986 when an employee of Boeing Aircraft co purchased a surplus I B M copier for scrap parts at a sale, and discovered inside details of a plan hatched in the embryonic days of the Cold War, which called for control of the masses through manipulation of industry, people's pastimes, education, and political leanings. It called for a quiet revolution, putting brother against Brother. Diverting the public's attention from what is really going on. The document you're about to read is real. It is reprinted in its virgin form with diagrams as a touch of reality. Now, where I found this document, you guys was a dark corner of a dark corner of a dark corner. Of the internet to say the least. Okay. Now there has been many, many conversations in other dark corners of the internet about this document, but it has not gone into the mainstream psyche. This has not been a topic of conversation to the extent that it should be because this document lays out all of it, and we talked about it in the last episode, how Yuval Harri a World Economic Forum advisor. Also the author of Sapiens, the book, the Worldwide Phenomenon nonfiction book. Historical uh, book Sapiens came out and said, how ridiculous is it that there's a globe? People think there's a small group of people who control everybody. Hmm. Well, we're about to find out just how ridiculous that is. It's very systematic. Okay. So where I found this document was very, uh, I would say, So, so where I found this document had a list of other documents that were around it, so I kind of had to sift through it. But there's the, the way that this is so meticulously because some people, you know, will try to give illegitimacy to this document, but it's, it's, it's been, uh, it's been said to be true by people who have seen so many top secret government documents. This outlines who it was approved or, or thought to be true by, and everything that we talk about here. Even if this document wasn't written up by the c i a, which again, if you read it, it very clearly, I believe that to be the case. Um, well, not, not even the ccia A, but the, the heads of these Bilderberg groups and then reformatted into the ccia A so that they could catch them up to speed on this conspiracy. It outlines everything perfectly. It's, it's all about social engineering of the masses. So it says, And it, it is patently impossible to discuss social engineering or the automation of society, the engineering of social automation systems. I e silent weapons on a national or worldwide scale without implying extensive objectives of social control and destruct destruction of human life, i e slavery and genocide. This manual is in itself an analog declaration of intent. Such a writing must be secured from public scrutiny. Otherwise it might be recognized as a technically formal declaration of domestic war. Furthermore, wherever any person or group or person's in a position of great power and without full knowledge and consent of the public uses such knowledge and methodologies for economic conquest, it must be understood that a state of domestic warfare exists between said person or group of persons in the public. The solution of today's problems require an approach which is ruthlessly Ruth ruthlessly candid with no agonizing over religious, moral, or cultural values. Now, here's the part where it talks about how they qualify for this project. You have qualified for this project because of your ability to look at human society with cold. Objectivity and yet analyze and discuss your observations and conclusions with others of similar intellectual capacity without the loss of discretion or humility. Now I'm actually gonna go ahead and share my screen with you guys. So you can see what I am looking at while I'm walking you through this. Uh, so here you go. Um, it is actually up there. So if you're not following on the video, if you're just listening on the podcast, you can have head over to YouTube, you can have head over to Rumble. If you should go to the sub stack, it'll be embedded on there for you as well. So you'll be able to actually look through the document when I'm looking at it and talking you through it. So it is up on the screen now. This goes on to say, uh, Uh, of similar intellect, intellectual capacity. Without the loss of discretion or humility, such virtues are exercised in your own best interest. Do not deviate from them. In other words, this document should scare the shit out of you, but you are a psychopath, so it doesn't. Continue being a psychopath, and that is why we have chosen you for this position. Uh, historical introduction. This says, silent weapon technology was evolved from operations research, a strategic and tactical methodology developed under the military management in England during World War ii. The original purpose of operations research was to study the strategic and tactical problems of heir and land defense with the objective of effective use of limited military resources against foreign enemies. It was soon recognized by those in positions of power that the same methods might be useful for totally controlling a society, but better tools were necessary. So when they found this out in the, let's say 19 43, 19 42, uh, they did not have the technology to. Implement the theories that were laid out during this findings of operations research. Right? So operations research was, how can we infiltrate and degrade a country without having to go in there with tanks? How? Where can we get these silent weapons? And we see this play across our society today, whether it's through social engineering of social media, which is obviously one of the most complex things of this. The algorithms, Google searches, all of those things are now a part of this social engineering censorship. All of those things, but back then they didn't even have the computer yet, so they couldn't, even if they had the data sets that they needed to analyze, which we'll find out what they were analyzing it for in just a minute, they wouldn't have had a way to calculate it in in enough time. So they needed further technology is what it was talking about. But better tools were necessary. It said social engineering. The analysis and automation of a society requires the correlation of great amounts of constantly changing economic information or data. So a high speed computerized data processing system was necessary, which could race ahead of the society and predict when society would arrive at Ululation Relay. Computers were slow, but the electronic computer invented in 1946 by J Presper Eckert, and John w Mackley filled the bill. The next breakthrough was the development of the Simplex method of linear programming in 1947 by the mathematician George b Danzig. Then in 1948, the transistor invented by Jay Bardeen, W H Britain and W Shockley promised great expansion of the computer field by reducing space and power requirements. Now with these three inventions under their direction, those in positions of power strongly suspected that it was possible for them to control the whole world with the push of a button, is what this document says. Now, immediately, once this was found out, so they started to formulate this economic theory of data and how they could predict both how people would act for economic gain and for power gains. They couldn't have the technology yet to allow them to analyze the data, even if they had it as soon as they had the technology. In 1948 with the transistor, the Rockefeller Foundation got in at the ground floor. They did this by making four year, a four year grant to Harvard College funding the Harvard Economic Research Project. For the study of the structure of the American economy, one year later in 1949, the United States Air Force actually joined in on this. In 1952, the grand period terminated and a high level meeting of the elite was held to determine the next phase of social operations research. The Harvard project had begun very fruitful or have been very fruitful, as is born out of the publication of some of its results in 1953, suggesting the feasibility of economic. Social engineering. So this is where it leaves that paper trail, right? We know that this happened. We know the grants were funded by the Rothchild family. We know the timeframe. We know that the, the reasoning that they were doing this engineered in the last half of the decade in the forties, the new quiet war machine stood, so to speak, in sparkling gold plated hardware on the showroom floor by 1954 with the creation of the Maser. In 1954, the promise of unlocking unlimited resources of fusion atomic energy from the heavy hydrogen in seawater and the consequent availability of unlimited social power was a possibility only decades later, the combination was irresistible. So what they're talking about here is that energy was the new gold. So by unlocking these scientific endeavors, we're gonna learn about what science truly is for in just a second when they lay it out for us. But by learning and unlocking these codes to the universe, they could also unlock massive amounts of power, massive amounts of capital. So, although the silent weapon system was nearly exposed 13 years later, the evolution of the new weapon system has never suffered any major setbacks. Political introduction in 1954. It was well recognized by those in positions of authority that it was only a matter of time, only a few decades before the general public would be able to grasp and upset the cradle of power for the very elements of the new silent weapon technology were as accessible for a public utopia. As they were for providing a private utopia, meaning that if the general public had gotten a hold of this technology and used it for good, and used it for the betterment of society, it would have allowed us to thrive as, as a species, it would've allowed us to have a public utopia where everybody gained from it. But instead, a small group, a small boardroom meeting with the Bilderberg group, i e what you know, We know today as something like the World Economic Forum, and they still have these Bilderberg group meetings allowed for a private utopia. For a small group of individuals, energy is recognized as the key to all activity on earth. Natural science is the study of sources and controls of natural energy and social science, theoretically expressed as economics is the study of the sources and control of social energy. So this is where they're kind of taking this formula, this idea of energy and, and reformatting it, repositioning this theory of energy into what they. A lot what they learn to manipulate, right? They learn to manipulate energy first. Then they reformat That, reformulate that into understanding how to manipulate people because people are just energy, they're saying. Right. Uh, energy is recognized as the key to all activity, activity on earth. Social science theoretically expresses economics, right? Saying that the way that people's energy, the movement of people, the thoughts of people exposes itself through economics by the, where they spend their money, where they spend their time, and how they react to things, right? So that is the study of the sources in control of social energy. Both are bookkeeping systems. Mathematics. Therefore, mathematics is the primary energy science, and the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping. All science is a means to an end. The means is knowledge. The end is control beyond. This remains only one issue. Who is the beneficiary, and that's why. The Rothchilds realized this and they quickly sprung into action as soon as they saw the technology t itself, so that they could be the ones who were the beneficiary of the knowledge, the knowledge leading to control. And that is why we are where we are today. In 1954, this was the issue of the primary concern. Although the so-called moral issue was raised in the view of the law of natural selection, it was agreed that it is that a nation or world of people who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals who do not have intelligence at all. Such people are beasts of burden and stakes on the table by choice and consent. Did you hear that? Do you hear the way that they talk about you and I? People who will not use their intelligence are no better than animals who do not have intelligence. Such people are beasts of burden and stakes on the table by choice and consent. They said consequently is the inter interest of future world order peace and tranquility. It was decided. To privately wage, a quiet war against the American public with the ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy, wealth of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few, so they rigged the system. In order to implement this objective, it was necessary to create secure. To create, secure and apply new weapons, which as it turned out were a class of weapons so subtle and so sophisticated in their principle of operation and public appearance as to earn for themselves the name, silent weapons. In conclusion, the objective of economic research is conducted by the magnets of capital or banking in the industries of commodities or goods and services is the establishment of an economy which is totally predictable and manipulatable. So what they start to lay out here for you is that in order, Well, let's just read this says, in order to achieve a totally predictable economy, the low class elements of society must be brought under total control, right? In order for them to be able to profit both economically and power based off of this predictable economy, they need to make it predictable and to make it predictable, you have to fall in line to the programming. You must be housebroken. It says trained. And assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from a very early age before they even have an opportunity to question the propriety of the matter. Right. You wanna talk about four and five-year-olds going to have a full-time job in kindergarten, going to school to wait for a bell to tell them when to go do the next thing. Being put in the position of submission to somebody in a position of dominance. Being told everything that they have to do when they have to do it, how to draw their, how to draw something, how to dot their i's how to, you know, all of it. So you have to. Entice conformity from the very beginning, and the Rockefellers also funded the general education board in the 1920s. The general education board, which we're gonna get into in one of our next deep dives, was taking the Prussian model, which leveraged education as a system of creating obedience instead of intelligence in the 1920s. To make it so that this system of education, education through enslavement of thought was implemented nationwide. Thus started the programming of the general public, which allowed you and I to behave predictably just like they wanted. So we can be housebroken trained in assigned a yoke and long-term social duties from an early age, making everything predictable, making the general mass public move as a flock in order to achieve conformity. It says, The lower class family unit must be disintegrated by a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of government operated daycare centers for the occupationally orphaned children. That's a terrifying way of putting it, that is dead accurate. In order to achieve such conformity, the lower class family unit must be disintegrated. By a process of increasing preoccupation of the parents and the establishment of government operated daycare centers for the occupationally orphaned children, the quality of education given to the lower class must be of the poorest sort so that the moat of ignorance isolating the inferior class from the superior class is and remains incomprehensible. To the inferior class with such an initial handicap, even the bright lower class individuals have little, if any, hope of extricating themselves from their assigned lot in life. This form of slavery is essential to maintain some measure of social order, peace and tranquility for the ruling upper class. Are you terrified yet? Does this sound, does this ring true to you? This is exactly the playbook that has set up in the society for obedience, for social credit scores, for digital currency, for censorship. Exactly. And the, the United States of America was the proving grounds of this. Description or descriptive introduction of the silent weapon. It says, so now it explains how they're going to do it. Everything that is expected from an ordinary weapon is expected from a silent weapon by its creators, but only in its manner a functioning. It shoots situations instead of bullets propelled by data processing instead of chemical reactions. Originating from bits of data instead of greens of gunpowder from a computer instead of a gun operated by a computer programmer instead of a marksman under the orders of a banking magnet instead of a military general. It makes no obvious explosive noises, causes no obvious physical or mental injuries, and does not obviously interfere with anyone's daily social life. Yet it makes an unmistakable noise. Causes unmistakable, physical and mental damage, and unmistakably interferes with the daily social life i e unmistakable to a trained observer, one who knows what to look for. The public cannot comprehend this weapon and therefore cannot believe that they're being attacked and subdued by a weapon. The public might instinctively feel that something is wrong, but that is because of the technical nature of the silent weapon. They cannot express their feeling in the rational way or handle the problem with intelligence. Therefore, they do not know how to cry for help and do not know how to associate with others to defend themselves against it. When asylum weapon is applied, gradually the public adjusts and adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until the pressure. Becomes too great and they crack up. Therefore, the silent weapon is a type of biological warfare. It attacks the vitality options and mobility of the individuals of a society by knowing, understanding, manipulating, and attacking their sources of natural and social energy and their physical, mental, and emotional strengths and weaknesses. Wow. So the silent weapon is a biological warfare. It attacks the vitality options and mobility of the individuals of society by knowing, understanding, manipulating, and attacking their sources of natural and social energy and their physical, mental, and emotional strengths. And weaknesses, right? You wanna talk about big pharma, right? You wanna talk about the introduction of allopathic medicine by the rothchilds. Right. Basically eliminating osteopathic and homeopathic medicine again, right around the same time. Right in the, the early 19 hundreds. That's why the, the World War II was the precipice of change. The industrialization of our nation was really the enslavement of our nation. That's when you had the education system, uh, turn into what it is today with bells ringing, telling your children where to go and how to act. That's when you had allopathic medicine telling you that your body has nothing to do with its own state of health. That's when you had the introduction of industrialized food, which poisoned you instead of nourished you. That's when you had the introduction of the military industrial complex, which served to empower the banking elites with profitability at the detriment of your son's lives. All of this was pre-planned and written out in this document called Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, Ensuring predictability through our actions by enslaving our minds first, by poisoning us through our food, poisoning us through our entertainment, poisoning us through the indoctrination of the education system. All of this, all of this wove the fabric for what we know as modern society today, and we're reading the playbook. Here's an interesting quote by one of the Rothchilds themselves, Meyer Anhe Rothchilds, 1943 to 1812 and said, give me control over a nation's currency and I care not who makes its laws. Meyer Am shell Rothchilds. When you control the money, you already control the politicians. And when you control the politicians, you control the law and you in turn control the people. Today's silent weapons technology is an outgrowth of a simple idea discovered, succinctly expressed, and effectively applied by the quoted Mr. Meyer Amschel Rothschilds. Mr. Rothschild discovered the missing passive component of economic theory known as economic inductance. He of course did not think of this discovery in these 20th century terms. And to be sure, mathematical analysis had to wait for the second industrial revolution, the rise of the theory of mechanics and electronics, and finally the invention of the electronic computer before. Before it could be effectively applied in the control of the world economy. So this part is where it gets a little technical. Okay. Everything up in here was like theory of societal engineering. Right now we're getting into the idea of how energy and, and the, the energy of the world actually works side by side with the energy of people and by learning to manipulate one gives you the theory of how to manipulate the other. Okay, so this starts to break it down. It breaks it down technically for you. And again, I will give you my reframe of this, uh, so as to allow you to actually understand what I'm talking about without scouring this document back and forth and back and forth. Uh, so this is what a, how is lays it out. It says General Energy concepts and the study of energy systems. There always appears to be three elementary concepts. These are potential energy, kinetic energy, and energy dissipation. In corresponding to these concepts, there are three idealized, essentially pure physical counterparts called passive components. In the science of physical mechanics, the phenomenon of potential energy is associated with a physical property called elasticity or stiffness, and can be represented by a stretching spring. An electronic science potential energy is stored in a capacitor instead of a spring. This property is called accidents. Instead of elasticity or stiffness, right? Think of a rubber band, Now it goes on to say that in the science of physical mechanics, which is the second part of this, the phenomenon of kinetic energy is associated with a physical property called inertia or mass, and can be represented by a mass or a flywheel in motion and electronic science, kinetic energy is stored in an inductor in the magnetic field instead of a mass. This property called inductance instead of inertia. Alright, so bear with me here because then in just a second, it takes all three of these concepts and formulates it for societal engineering. It says In the science of physical mechanics, the phenomenon of energy dissipation is associated with a physical property called friction or resistance, and can be represented at by a dash pot or a device which can converts energy into heat. An electronic science dissipation of energy is performed by an element called either a resistor or a conductor. The term resistor being the one generally used to describe a more ideal device. Like a wire employed to convey electronic energy efficiently from one location to another. The property of a resistance or a conductor is measured as either resistance or conduct conductance. Reciprocals. Alright, now it says in economics, this is where it takes that idea of energy dissipation of conductance and cap capacitance. Right, the capacity and reformulates it into currency, right? Into how people react to things. Okay, so it talks about capital is capacitance, right? That's money, stock inventory, investments in buildings and durables, right? So the, the capacity, the capacitance is capital, the conductance. The flow of the energy is goods. That's where the exchange happens. And then the inductance, the influence of the population of industry on output is services. So the capacitance is capital, that's the money, the conductance, what where it flows from is goods, right? And then, The dissipation or the inductance is services. All of the math mathematical theory developed in the study of one energy system, right? Mechanics or electronics, can immediately be applied in the study of any other energy systems, including economics. So what Mr. Rothschilds had discovered was that the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That, that principle is when you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you. So lemme reread that for you. What Mr. Mr. Rothschilds had discovered was the basic principle of power, influence, and control over people as applied to economics. That principle is when you assume the appearance of power, people soon give it to you. Now when we start to get into this, this is where fractional banking came from, was this idea. Right. The, and, and now what we know is, you know, zero Reserve banking, but is supposed to be what fractional reserve banking was, I think, until 2021 or 22 when they changed it to zero reserve banking, which is far worse. Right? So this is where the, the creation of the Federal Reserve comes from, is this idea. So, Mr. Mr. Rothschild had discovered that currency or deposit loan accounts had the required appearance of power that. It could be used to induce people, right? The inductance with people corresponding to a magnetic field, it says into surrendering their real wealth in exchange for a promise of greater wealth, right? An instance of compensate. Of real instead of real compensation, right? So instead of giving you gold for your services, I'm gonna give you an i O U, this piece of paper that we printed out of a machine that says, you know, we got you. All you have to do is agree with somebody else that we got you and we got them, and you guys exchanged that. Gotcha. And you know, now you're, now you're, you know, exchanging currency. So they would put real collateral in exchange for a loan of promissory notes. I. Mr. Rothschild found that he could issue more notes than he had backing for fractional banking. So long as he had someone's stock of, had someone's stock of gold as a persuader to show his customers. So picture him with a big bank behind him. Or a, a big, uh, you know, um, box of gold, a a big, you know, vault of gold. And in that vault of gold, he had a million, a million dollars worth of, you know, dollars. He had a a million dollars worth of gold. And in exchange of that million dollars, he handed out $10 million to other people saying, you know, I got this million right behind me. You don't have to worry about it. If you come back to me for your 500,000, I'll give you the 500,000. Of course, I got it. Look behind me. Right, but little did they know that he doesn't have 10 million, which is what he loaned out. So he now owes more than he has in possession. So if any one time everybody comes to get it at the same time, none of it really exists. Right. Fractional banking, I. Mr. Rothschilds loaned his promissory notes to individuals and to governments. These would create overconfidence. Then he would make money scarce, tighten control on the system, and collect the collateral through the obligation of contracts. So let's say that you own, uh, a $500,000 house that I loaned you the money for, that you're paying me monthly on. Now the economy that I squeeze goes to shit, and you can't afford the mortgage. Now, I made you pay me $200,000 of the 500,000, but you couldn't pay the whole thing because I screwed the economy over, and now I own all of those assets again. Rinse and repeat the cycle. Was then repeated. These pressures could be used to ignite a war. Then he would control the availability of currency to determine who would win the war. Right? This man with all the perceived power, with all the gold in the vault behind him, told both sides of the war that I got you. I got you. But then depending on who he gave the most loans to printed the most money for. Would win the war. Of course, war is just a war of attrition. Everything's a war of attrition, right? It's just who has the most money? Who has the most, uh, shiny metal machines that are gonna blow stuff up? The government, which agreed to give him control of its economy and economic system, got his support and in turn won the war. And maybe that's what we're seeing play out right now between NATO and Russia and China and all of these things going on, is we're seeing who's going to give. The banking cartels, the control of the economic system. And whoever does that is gonna get the most money. They're gonna get the most funding, right? They're gonna get the most bombs, they're gonna get the most tanks, and in turn, they're gonna win. The war goes on to say the collection of debts was guaranteed by economic aid to the enemy of the debtor. Collection of debts was guaranteed by economic aid. To the enemy of the debtor. The profit derived from this economic methodology made by Mr. Rothschilds all the more able to expand his wealth. He found that the public greed would allow currency to be printed by government order beyond the limits of backing and precious metals, or the production of goods and services, and that's how we get to inflation, right? Public greed would allow currency to be printed by government. Order beyond the limits of backing and precious metal or the production of goods and services, right? We got off of the gold standard and immediately what happens? Inflation. Inflation, go back and ask your grandparents about it, right? How much did the car cost in this structure? Right? And so a parent ca, capital as paper inductor, right? The inductor in the structure credit presented by is a pure element called currency as the appearance of capital, but in the effect negative capital. Hence it was the appearance of service, but is in fact indebtedness or debt. It is therefore an economic inductance instead of a economic capacitance, and if balanced in no other way will be balanced by the negation of population, right? War and genocide. I. The total goods and services represent real capital called the Gross National Product, and currency may be printed up to this level and still represent economic capacitance, but currency printed beyond this level is subtractive and represents the introduction of economic inductance in constitutes notes of indebted. Alright, let's go ahead and let's do this 'cause this will be interesting if we can take this. Actually get it to, let's see here how I can do this. I wanna see if I can carry this over and have a chat. G p t write a simplistic, let's say like a, a first grade level and explain that for us. So let me go ahead and take a picture of this, copy over the text and ask it to explain it that way, because I think that's a value. This is a little bit more, uh, complex than. Then how we, uh, you know, having me over here try to explain it to you. So let me go ahead and, and put it in here. So I took it, let's go take it to chat, g b t. Please explain this at a fifth grade level. All right, so it's saying, imagine we have a system where people use something called currency as a form of credit. This currency looks like money or resources, but it's actually like negative capital because it creates debt. So it seems like a helpful service, but it actually puts people in debt, right? The currency, the money. Is all just credit, right? There's not, there's not actually backed by anything, which all it means is that, you know, you see the national debt ticker just keeps going up and up and up. So it seems like a helpful service, but it actually puts people in debt instead of being like a container that holds in stores value like a piggy bank. This currency acts more like a force that causes changes in the economy, like pushing or pulling things around. When this force gets out of balance and there's too much currency, it can lead to problems. To balance this system, something extreme like war or genocide might happen. This is because the excess currency needs to be brought back to balance. And unfortunately, throughout its history, war has been one way that this has been achieved. Uh, right. Remember, this is just an explanation of some ideas in the text. As you grow older, you'll learn more about economics and different viewpoints on these topics. Hmm. Let's see if it can try again. Alright, cool. So, where war is therefore balancing the system by killing the true creditors, the public, which we have taught to exchange true value for inflated currency, it says, and now my screen goes away. So I think that's an interesting analogy, right? Like it's not a piggy bank. The, the money that we have is not a piggy bank. It's a, it's a an i o U. And, and once there's enough IOUs out there that people hold onto, eventually you, the best way to get some of those IOUs back is by eliminating the people, apparently. Uh, so it says that Mr. Rothschild had discovered that the currency gave him the power to rearrange the economic structure to his own advantage, to shift economic inductance to those economic positions, which would encourage the greatest economic instability and oscillation. The final key to economic control had to wait until there was sufficient data and high speed computing equipment to keep close watch on the economic oscillations by creating price shocking and excess paper energy credits, paper inducted and inflation. I. Alright. Now the next part of this is talk, talking about how they test the system, right? How, how do they formulate results? Like how, how did they get the data right? And we're gonna see some of these things ring true when we think back to the time of the, uh, thinking back to. The covid situation where we had no toilet paper for a weird amount of time or maybe a few months ago when, when eggs cost $20 for fricking 12 of them, right? This is a, a form of shockwave testing, which is what we're gonna learn about right now, and it starts by learning the principle of shockwave testing again in energy and reformulating it for how we deal with people and society and societal engineering. So it says, the aviation field provided the greatest evolution in economic engineering, by the way, of its mathematical theory, which is shockwave testing. In this process, what they would do is they would take something on an airplane and they would test how much force could be applied to that, uh, that piece of technology. Right? So a projectile is fired from an airframe on the ground and the impulse. Of the recoil is monitored by vibrational transducers connected to the airframe and wired to chart recorders right? So I was trying to say, how much energy can we put on this airframe of this aircraft until it explodes? Shockwave testing, right? How, how durable is the material and how is it going to react when we impose some type of force on it? By studying the echoes and reflections of the recoil impulse in the airframe is possible to discover critical vibrations in the structure of the airframe, which either vibrations of the engine or. Olian vibrations of the wings or a combination of the two might reinforce resulting in the resonant self-destruction of the airframe in flight as an aircraft, right? So what they wanted to figure out was how much gunpowder can we put on the side of this airplane until it rips apart, right? How big are the booms that we can make until the whole thing falls apart from the standpoint of engineering, this means that the strengths and weaknesses of the structure of the airframe in terms of vibrational energy can be discovered and manipulated. Now again, here comes the application in economics to use this method of airframe shock testing. In economic engineerings, the price of commodities are shocked and the public consumer reaction is monitored Data. The resulting echoes of the economic shocker interpreted theoretically by computers and the socioeconomic structure of the economy is thus discovered. How do people react when we do this thing? We get large enough data sets. Right. Why do you think data's so important when it comes to your social media? Why do you think data's so important when it comes to all of your transactions on, on your finances? Right. Why is the digital currency important? Because the more data that they can get, the more they can realize how to manipulate you. And the more they can profit, the more power that they can have by knowing exactly how you'll react to X and y, because they want. To be more rich and more powerful. They can predict how you're gonna react. They can then invest in the commodities that they know are going to be having shortages early. Or when you, let's say get rid of toilet paper, for example. Maybe people run and buy bidets, or maybe when you have a nationwide panic, people run and buy ammunition, maybe something like that, right? So when you can predict those reactions with a large enough data set, you can then, React ahead of time and profit from those reactions because now you know, now you've shockwave tested the mass public and now you know how they're gonna react when you get rid of toilet paper. Now you know how they're gonna react when you threaten locking them down and shutting down all their businesses. Right? And if you can boil the water up into the point to where the frog's gonna jump out or revolt against you, like we saw with Covid eventually, So they, they dialed up the heat just until the point where they saw us buying ammunition just to the point where they saw people running and getting guns just until the point where people were rioting, not rioting to the extent where they were gonna overthrow the government, but when they were rioting to the point where they were, you know, breaking down in targets and stealing everything out of it. Right. They don't want a complete collapse. 'cause then they lose all of their control, but they do want to dial it up because then now they know the next time that they go to do this, exactly how the public will react. Shockwave testing. Okay, now it says that, um, if this process, uh, it is by this process that partial differential and in indifferent matrices are discovered that define the family household and make possible its evaluation as an economic industry. Which is dissipative consumer structure. Then the response of the household to future shocks can be predicted and manipulated. It says, in society becomes a reg, a well-regulated animal with its reigns under control of a sophisticated computer, regulated social energy bookkeeping system. Eventually, every individual element of the structure comes under computer control through a knowledge of personal preferences. Such knowledge guaranteed by computer Association of consumer preferences, right? U P C codes, zebra striped pricing codes on packages, right? They're talking about literal barcodes. Right. All that is tracking, all that is data set sets, right? Um, it says with identified cus to consumers right. Identify via association with the use of credit cards and later a permanent tattooed body number invisible under normal ambient illumination. Right? That's the, uh, that's the microchip in you that, that they're gonna talk about, right? That's the, that's the digital credit score, right? That's the digital, uh, digital currency. Right. So maybe it's a little bit different than what they expected in 1986, but very, very close. Right? Credit cards were literally designed just so they could get the data of your buying decisions, right? That's every c v s phone number that you put in. That's, uh, the, the barcodes on the back of it. All of it is data, not data for, I mean, yeah, target uses it for their data, but data for the, the company that owns Target. Why do you think BlackRock owns all of these companies? It wants the data, it wants to predict, it wants to throttle economies, it wants to prop one up while it goes to war with Ukraine. It wants to, uh, manipulate financial markets here so that you could have, uh, the downfall of a country over here. Right? So it says summary economics is. Only a social extension of a natural energy system. It also has its three passive components because of the distribution of wealth and the lack of communication and lack of data. This field has been the last energy field for which a knowledge of these three passive components has been developed. Since energy is the key to all activity on the face of the earth, it follows that in order to attain a monopoly of energy. Raw goods, materials and services. And to establish a world system of slave labor, it is necessary to have a first strike capability in the field of economics. In order to maintain our position, it is necessary that we have absolute first knowledge of the science of control over all economic factors in the first experience at engineering the world economy. In order to achieve such sovereignty, we must at least achieve this one end. That the public will not make either the logical or mathematical connection between economics and the other energy sciences, or to learn to apply such knowledge. Hmm. Right. Public first private utopia. They wanted to hone this technology and to keep it to themselves so they can meet at Berg, so they can meet in the Swiss Alps of the World Economic Forum meetings and talk about how they're gonna manipulate you. It is only a matter of time before the new breed of private programmer and economists will catch onto this far reaching implications of the work begun at Harvard in 1948. The speed of which they can communicate their warning to the public will largely depend upon how effective we have been at controlling the media, subverting education, and keeping the public distracted with matters of no real importance. All right, now here's the economic model. It says, the Harvard Economic Research Project in 1948 was an extension of the World War II operations research, right? We learned about that. It was felt that with sufficient mathematical foundation and data, it would be nearly as easy to predict and control the trend of an economy as to predict and control the trajectory of a projectile. Such has proven to be the case. Moreover, the economy has been transformed into a guided missile on target. To make sure history of it all. It was discovered that an economy obeyed the same laws of his electricity and that all of the mathematical theory and practical and computer know-how developed for the eco electronic field could be directly applied to the study of economics. I. The discovery was not openly declared, and its more subtle implications were in our kept closely guarded secrets. For example, that in an economic model, human life is measured in dollars and that the electric spark generated when opening a switch connected to an active inductor is mathematically analogous to the initiation of war, right? Turn on and off the amount. Of dollars, right? The human life, right? That's where you get into the depopulation agenda, right? If you can expand the, the, the expand the, the people that are on this earth and then immediately contract them down to a smaller amount, the amounts of goods still remains the same. It's already been produced, so now it goes into a smaller and smaller group of hands. So that's where the depopulation agenda comes into control. That's where war comes into control. It's, it's, it's a mechanism of, of inflating and deflating the amount of money owed that getting rid of debts that are owed to the government that the government owes to you. Right. The greatest hurdle it says, which theoretical economists faced was the accurate description of the household as an industry. This is a challenge because consumer purchases are a matter of choice, which in turns is influenced by income, price, and other economic factors. This hurdle was cleared in an indirect and stati a statistically approximate way by an application of shock testing to determine the current character characteristics called current technical coefficients of a household industry. Finally, because problems in theoretical electronics can be translated very easily into problems of theoretical electronics, and the solution translated back again. It follows that only a book of language translation and concept definition needed to be written for economics. The remainder could be gotten from standard works on mathematics and electronics. This makes the publication of books on advanced economics unnecessary and greatly simplifies project security. All right, so now it goes into a bunch of diagrams. Okay? Now again, this will be on the sub stack, so you can go read through those and look through them yourself. I don't find much value if you've comprehended a little bit more of what I've talked about here, but it basically talks about how the flow of economics and utilizing one industry for supply to demand, um, then results in what they want, right? So, so more control, more money, more power. Alright. It uses these, you know, kind of electronic models and, uh, to give you a, a better discussion surrounding what we talked about already. So it, it just lays it all out for you. But that's a pretty consistent, uh, or a pretty, uh, technical way of going about this. So let's go ahead and we'll scroll past that for now. All right. There is one part that I wanna point out though. It says the social welfare system. Okay, this is just a small piece of it. Uh, it says the problem with sub stabilizing the economic system is that there is too much demand on account of one, too much greed and two too much population, right? 'cause it goes into how other large are te alternatives to war, right? As economic inductors and economic flywheels are an open-ended social welfare program, or, An enormous but fruitful open-ended space program, right? Nasa, could you imagine that right? An enormous open-ended space program with no end in sight. Right there. There's nothing, there's no real end, there's no real goal. Uh, so you can have that as one balancing mechanism. You can have war, right? Too much demand on the count of too much greed. And too much population can be balanced with open-ended space programs, social, large, social, open-ended welfare programs and war. Okay? It says the problem with stabilizing economic systems is that there is too much demand on an account of too much greed and too much population. This creates excessive economic inductance, which can only be balanced with economic capacitance, right? So true resources or value in goods and services. The social welfare. The social welfare program is nothing more than an open-ended credit balance system, which creates a false capital industry to give non-productive people a roof over their heads and food in their stomachs. This can be useful, however, because the recipients become state property in return for the gift. A standing army for the elite for who he pays. The Piper picks the tune for who he pays. The piper picks the tune. Hmm. So this is why we see the Democrats, the liberal, the left, right, which this knows no left and right, but this does this, this is important, right? This is why when you have these soc, social and ec, this is why they say, right, I'll, I'll, uh, find me a young man who's a Republican. I'll show you somebody without a heart. Uh, find me an old man who's a liberal, and I'll show you somebody without a brain. Right? It's like when you can enslave somebody by giving them a stipend. Right. That's literally how they did this. This can be useful putting a roof over their heads and food in their stomach for people who are completely unproductive because the recipients become state property in return for the gift. A standing army for the elite, for he who pays the piper picks the tune, right? If they give you the money, you fall in line. You do what they say. You are now docile. So I found that to be interesting. All right, so the next part of this, right now that we've gone through the more technical aspect of the energy portions and how that's, that social energy relates to, right, the, the findings of scientific energy. Uh, let's go ahead and pull up this next part. If my computer will play nice with me and it doesn't want to, alright. But I found that to be interesting, right? Even the shockwave testing, when you start to think of things in this way, when you start to think of data, right? Everybody's been talking about data, data, data. What does Facebook, well, Facebook makes their money from data, right? Why is data so important? Well, when you have enough data, you can predict actions. Right. Where are people gonna spend their money? How are people gonna react physically? All right, so I. It goes on to say that those who get hooked on the economic drug must go to the elite for the fix. And this, the method of introducing large amounts of stabilizing capacitance is by borrowing on the future credit of the world. I. Okay, so those who get hooked, hooked on the economic drug must go to the elite for the fix. They own the banks, they own the printing machine to give out the credit. Like what gives you the right you, there's no, there's nothing there. It's all a facade. It says in this, the method of introducing large amounts of stabilizing money, right by printing stuff. Is borrowing on the future credit of the world inflation, right? What we print today affects our children tomorrow, right? Things cost more. This is the fourth law of motion onset, and consists of performing an action and leaving the system before the reflected reaction returns to the point of action. A delayed reaction, right? They don't have to deal with it. Your children, our great-grandchildren, deal with it. The means of surviving. The reaction is by changing the system before the reaction can return. By. This means politicians become more popular in their own time and the public pays later. In fact, the measure of me measure of such a politician is the delay time, right? How long does it take for everything to crumble after Joe Biden leaves? After so much money is poured into the system after it's printed to send to Ukraine. The same thing is achieved by a government, by printing money beyond the limit of the gross national product and the economic process called inflation. This puts a large quantity of money into the hands of the public and maintains a balance against their greed, creates a false self-confidence in them, and for a while stays the wolf from the door. They must eventually resort to war to balance out the account because war ultimately is merely the act of destroying the creditor, right? The people killing off people, and the politicians are the publicly hired hitmen that justify the act to keep the responsibility and blood off the public conscience. So just by printing money eventually, it's literally taking life. If the people really cared about their fellow man, it says they would control their appetites, their greed, their procreation, so that they would not have to operate on a credit or welfare social system, which steals from the worker to satisfy the bum. Since most of the general public will not exercise restraint, there are only two alternatives to reduce the economic inductance of the system. One, let the populace bludgeon each other. To death and war, which will only result in the total destruction of the living earth. Number two, take control of the world by the use of economic silent weapons in the form of quiet warfare, and reduce the economic inductance of the world to a safe level by a process of benevolent slavery and genocide. Print, fight, print, fight, print, fight, the balancing act. Eventually somebody has to pay for that. Getting rid of the creditor, getting rid of the people that erode the money, eliminating the population. The latter option has been taken as the obviously better option. It says at this point it should be crystal clear to the reader why absolute secrecy about the silent weapons is necessary. The general public re refuses to improve its own mentality and its faith in the fellow man. It has become a herd of proliferating barbarians and so to speak, a blight upon the face of the earth. They do not care enough about economic science to learn why they have not been able to avoid war. Despite religious morality and their religious or self-gratifying refusal to deal with earthly problems renders the solution of the worldly problem unreachable to them. It is left to those few who are truly willing to think and survive as the fittest. To survive to solve the problem for themselves is the few who really care. Otherwise, exposure of the silent weapon would destroy our only hope of preserving the seed of the future True humanity. Hmm. So that's where you get the idea and this sociopathic idea that there should be a ruling class, that there should be slaves, that there should be peasants, that there should be bums because you don't know any better and you're too stupid and too lazy and not enough. You don't have enough self-awareness and you don't have enough intellect to, to actually grasp what's going on in these financial systems. And, and instead, we're just gonna send you off to war to die. So we can pay off the bets so that we, the debts that we owe, so that, You know, we can drive our Ferraris to Davos and meet once a year to talk about how we're going to further our enslavement of you through our children. All right? It goes on to show some more of those examples, uh, showing the diagrams of how these stages of s schematics simplification, right? Where is war play into this? So it it, it has mathematical equations, which are beyond my scope of understanding, uh, but. It talks about the final bill of goods, says the final bill of goods is called the final bill of goods or the bill of final demand, and is zero when the system can be closed by the evaluation of the technical coefficients of the non-productive industries, governments and households. Households may be regarded as a productive industry with labor as its output product. Interesting. So that's how they look at you, huh? Says the household industry, the household, the industries of finance, manufacturing, and government. Real counterparts of the pure industries of capital goods and services are easily defined because they're generally logically structured. Because of this, their processes can be described mathematically and their technical coefficients can be easily deduced. This however, is not the case with the service industry known as the household industry. Household models when their industry flow diagram is represented by a two block system of households on the right and all other industries. On the left, the following results, so there's another diagram. It says The arrows to the left. Yeah. You'll have to kind of read through this so you actually get an idea of what it's talking about. Let's see. This is applied to economics. This means that all of the households in one region or in the whole nation are studied as a group or class rather than individually. And the mass behavior, rather than the individual behavior, is used to discover useful estimates of the technical coefficients governing the economic structure of the hypothetical single household industry. Right? So taking a a general average allows them to say, you know, even if 30% of the country isn't gonna get vaccinated, we're betting on the 70%. Right. We know 70% compliance is enough to get us to where we need to go. The next time around that we do this, it says, one method of evaluating the technical coefficients of the household industry depends upon shocking the prices of a commodity and noting the changes in the sales of all, of all of the commodities, right? So when we get rid of toilet paper, how does that affect the general economy? Where do people start to put their money? Where do, where does that panic lead us? It's so easy to make us panic. Which is exactly all that was, was a shockwave test, getting rid of toilet paper to see how people would react. So the next time, how easily is it to predict your reactions and profit from it? Right? In the shock testing of an aircraft frame, the recoil impulse of a firing gun is mounted to the airframe causing shockwaves, right? We talked about this. It is as they tell the A aviation engineers, the conditions under which some parts of the airplane or the whole airplane or its wings will start to vibrate or flutter like a guitar string, a flute read, or a tuning fork and disintegrate or fall apart in flight. Economic engineers achieve the same result by studying the behavior of the economy and the consumer public by carefully selecting a staple commodity such as beef, coffee, gasoline, eggs, toilet paper, maybe, or sugar. And then causing a sudden change or shock in its price or availability, thus kicking everybody's budget and buying habits out of shape. They then observe the shockwaves, which result by monitoring the changes in the advertising prices, and sales of that and other commodities. The objective of such studies is to acquire the know-how to set the public economy into a predictable state of motion or change even a controlled self-destructive state. Of motion, which will convince the public that a certain expert of people should take care of the money system and reestablish security rather than liberty and justice for all. When the subject citizens are rendered unable to control their financial affairs, they of course become totally enslaved a source of cheap labor. Not only the prices of commodities, but also the availability of labor can be used as the means of shock testing. Labor strikes, deliver excellent test shock results to an economy, especially in the critical service areas as trucking or transportation. And you wanna talk about the transportation industry during c O D communication. Public utilities is energy, water, garbage collection, et cetera. We have seen this playbook play out, and it was written in the fifties. These, exactly the playbook that was used during covid By shock testing, it has found that there is a direct relationship between the availability of m
Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything. We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance. Desan's research explores money as a legal and political project. Her approach opens economic orthodoxy to question by widening the focus on money as an instrument, to examine the institutions and agreements through which resources are mobilized and tracked, by means of money. In doing so, she shows that particular forms of money, and the markets within which they circulate, are neither natural or inevitable. Christine Desan, “Making Money“ Ursula Le Guin The Earthsea Novels (money hard to come by, but kinda cute) Samuel Delany, the Neveryon series (money part of the evils of naming, slavery, labor appropriation) Jane Austen “Pride and Prejudice“ Richard Rhodes, “Energy“ John Plotz, “Is Realism Failing?” (on liberal guilt and patrimonial fiction) William Cobbett, “Rural Rides” (1830; London as wen) E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (notional “just price” of bread) Peter Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD” Chris Vanden Bossche, “Reform Acts“ “Sanditon” on PBS (and the original unfinished Austen novel) Still from “Sanditon” Margot Finn, “Character of Credit“ Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century“ L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900) Leo Tolstoy “The Forged Coupon” (orig.1904) Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp” (1891) Frank Norris, “The Octopus” (1901) D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909) Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
Our Recall this Buck series, back in 2020 and 2021, explored the history of money, ranging from the earliest forms of labor IOUs to the modern world of bitcoin and electronically distributed value. We began by focusing on the rise of capitalism, the Bank of England, and how an explosion of liquidity changed everything. We were lucky to do so, just before the Pandemic struck, with Christine Desan of Harvard Law School, who recently published Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). She is also managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance. Desan's research explores money as a legal and political project. Her approach opens economic orthodoxy to question by widening the focus on money as an instrument, to examine the institutions and agreements through which resources are mobilized and tracked, by means of money. In doing so, she shows that particular forms of money, and the markets within which they circulate, are neither natural or inevitable. Christine Desan, “Making Money“ Ursula Le Guin The Earthsea Novels (money hard to come by, but kinda cute) Samuel Delany, the Neveryon series (money part of the evils of naming, slavery, labor appropriation) Jane Austen “Pride and Prejudice“ Richard Rhodes, “Energy“ John Plotz, “Is Realism Failing?” (on liberal guilt and patrimonial fiction) William Cobbett, “Rural Rides” (1830; London as wen) E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” (notional “just price” of bread) Peter Brown, “Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD” Chris Vanden Bossche, “Reform Acts“ “Sanditon” on PBS (and the original unfinished Austen novel) Still from “Sanditon” Margot Finn, “Character of Credit“ Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the 21st Century“ L. Frank Baum, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” (1900) Leo Tolstoy “The Forged Coupon” (orig.1904) Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Bottle Imp” (1891) Frank Norris, “The Octopus” (1901) D. W. Griffith, “A Corner in Wheat” (1909) Read the episode here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One who purchases a field from his father, but then the Jubilee year complicated the issues of inheritance vs. purchase. Which leads to a dispute between Rabbi Meir and R. Yehudah with R. Shimon. Also, a new chapter: paying compensatory damages must be paid out of the best land, while loans and IOUs are paid from intermediate land, and the ketubah is paid from the worst quality of land -- established because of "tikkun olam" (but is that all the cases, or just the last one?).
In Episode 4 of the Market MakeHer Podcast, Jess Inskip teaches us what mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) are and how they work - and whew - we learned a lot! If you couldn't take notes while you listened, don't worry - Jess wrote an article to help explain it in the Episode Equity for the Episode 4 page of the site and Jessie took notes, which can be found in the Dividends section of the site. Here are some things we learned in Episode 04:The differences between mutual funds and ETFsActive vs PassiveYou can't just buy the whole S&P 500, but you can buy a mirror of itAllll the types of funds that are out there (including Target Date Funds - yes, we will do a retirement episode!)Stocks are securities, but securities are so much more than stock (i.e. Stocks, Bonds, Funds, Money Markets - oh my!)Portfolios are like an easter egg basket analogyMutual Funds are like a group gift analogy (Bonds are “IOUs” - duh)Mutual Fund ticker symbols always has 5 letters and ends in "X"Jessie's light bulb moment about Primary vs Secondary MarketsFees Fees Fees! (we also need to do an entire episode about taxes)How Mutual Funds and ETFs could make you money“The Greeks” and what Beta means - definitely marinating on this oneHow often Jessie says "like" - all the time apparently Bonus Tip: Don't leave your money sitting in a Money Market in your Brokerage Account! You have to take that money and then invest it in stocks, ETFs, Mutual Funds, etc. There was also a surprise pop-in visit from Darling Lady Darla, which you can enjoy on our YouTube channel. As always, you can send us any questions you have about Mutual Funds, ETFs, or anything about the Stock Market at www.marketmakeherpodcast.com/contact-us or on any of our social channels. We are keeping them all organized to be answered in the appropriate episode. And PRETTY PLEASE, if you're learning something from these episodes - share with your friends, leave us a review, subscribe - you know the deal.
This week we welcome back author and podcast regular Alex Rodriguez! Listen in as we discuss the Babylon Bee visiting Twitter headquarters, the What is a Woman documentary, the Streisand Effect, censorship, Disney's tough times, Alex's recent trip to New Zealand, and much more! Keep up with Alex on Instagram and Twitter. Host: Cale Matthews Audio Engineer: Art Pipok Visit us at solid7podcast.com to snag some merch, rate the show, buy us a Jocko Go, see upcoming events, follow us on social media, support worthy causes, and become a Patreon supporter. © Copyright 2023 Solid Seven Podcast. All Rights Reserved.
In this episode, Emily Morris of startup Emrgy discusses the promise of small-scale hydropower and the opportunities it could provide for both power infrastructure and water management.(PDF transcript)(Active transcript)Text transcript:David RobertsHello Volts listeners! I thought I would start this episode with what I suppose is a disclaimer of sorts. I suspect most of you already understand what I'm about to say, but I think it's worthwhile being clear.Every so often on this show, like today, I interview a representative from a particular company, often a startup operating in a dynamic, emerging market. It should go without saying that my choice of an interviewee does not amount to an endorsement of their company, a prediction of its future success, or, God forbid, investment advice. If you are coming to me for investment advice, you have serious problems. I make no predictions, provide no warranties.The fact is, in dynamic emerging markets, failure is the norm, not the exception. My entire career is littered with the corpses of startups that I thought had clever, promising products — many of whom I interviewed and enthused about! Business is hard. In most of these markets, a few big winners will emerge, but it will take time, and in the process most promising startups will die. Such is the creative destruction of capitalism. I'm not dumb enough to try to predict any of it.More broadly, I am not a business reporter. I do not have much interest in funding rounds, the new VP, or the latest earnings report. (Please, PR people, quit pitching me business stories.) I do not know or particularly care exactly which companies will end up on top. I am interested in clever ideas and innovations and the smart, driven individuals trying to drag them into the real world. I am interested in people trying to solve problems, not business as such.Anyway, enough about that.Today I bring you one of those clever ideas, in the form of a company called Emrgy, which plops small hydropower generators down into canals.Now I can hear you saying, Dave, plopping generators into canals does not seem all that clever or exciting, but there's a lot more to the idea than appears at first blush. For one thing, there are lots more canals than you probably think there are, and they are a lot closer to electrical loads than you think.So I'm geeked to talk to Emily Morris, founder and CEO of Emrgy, about the promise of small-scale hydropower, the economics of distributed energy, the ways that small-scale hydro can replicate the modularity and scalability of solar PV, and ways that smart power infrastructure can help enable smarter water management.Alright, then, with no further ado, Emily Morris of Emrgy. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.Emily MorrisThank you for having me. It's exciting to be here.David RobertsYou know, I did a pod a couple of weeks ago about hydro and sort of the state of hydro in the world these days. And one of the things we sort of touched on briefly in that pod is kind of small-scale, distributed hydro, but we didn't have time to really get into it. And I'm really fascinated by that subject in general. So it was fortuitous a mere week or two later to sort of run across you and your company and what you're doing. Your sort of model answers a lot of the questions I had about small-scale hydro.Some of the problems I saw in small-scale hydro, just because it just seems to me so at once small, but also kind of bespoke and fiddly. And your model sort of squarely gets at that. So anyway, all of which is just to say I'm excited to talk to you about a model of small-scale hydro that makes sense to me and some of the ins and outs of it.Emily MorrisYeah, absolutely. And I'm thrilled to be here. I'm thrilled to tell you more about our model. And I love that you called small-scale hydro bespoke because I was talking with one of the larger IOUs a few weeks back and they referred to hydro as artisanal energy. And I got such a kick out of that because it is in so many ways, hydro can often be a homeowner's pet project that has a ranch or something like that. And bringing hydro into a world in which solar panels are taking over distributed generation and utility scale, and doing it in such a standardized, modular, repeatable format, bringing that architecture into water, is something that hasn't yet really been done successfully. And what we're trying to do here at Emrgy.David Robertsit is kind of like a lot of this echoes solar. It's sort of an attempt to sort of replicate a lot of what's going on with solar. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's start the business model is, to put it as simply as possible, is you make generators and you plop them down into canals. So let's start then with canals, because I suspect I am not alone in saying that I've gone almost all my life without thinking twice about canals. I know almost nothing about them. Like, what are they? Where are they? How many are there?This water infrastructure kind of surrounds us is almost invisible. So just talk about canals a little bit. What are they used for and where are they and how many are there? What's the sort of potential out there?Emily MorrisYes, canals are almost invisible, but my goal is that after this podcast, you'll never look at a canal the same way you'll look at it, as a source of energy. That, man, we should be tapping that energy and using it. Canals are our main target market. They're really our only target market right now. We get asked all the time, well, couldn't you do this in a river? And couldn't you do this in tides? And the answer is yes. If you're focused on the engineering but as a commercial founder at Emrgy, I'm focused on the market and where can we install projects today that can be immediately delivering economic benefit and environmental benefit.And so canals are that market. A canal is an open channel of water conveyance that's moving water from one place to another for a specific purpose. That purpose might be because it's raw water that's being delivered into the city to be treated for drinking water. It could be that it's an agricultural channel taking water from a river out to farmland. It could be an industrial flow of water that's coming from a large brewery or a large factory and delivering that into either a river or another piece of water conveyance. But canals are seemingly invisible. I'll be honest, when I started Emrgy, I thought that the technology would first thrive in a water treatment environment.There's 30,000 water treatment plants in the US. And many tens of thousands all around the world. And that water is running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365. And man, the ability to take something modular that looks and feels like solar in terms of its ability to seamlessly integrate into the surrounding infrastructure, but deliver power in a baseload format was something that immediately, I thought, water treatment. Yet when I was really early in my entrepreneurial journey, we did our first pilot at the city of atlanta's largest water treatment plant. And I went out to Los Angeles and gave a white paper on it at LADWP.And when I was there, the city of Denver had two representatives there. And they came up to me after my presentation, and they said, we think you're thinking about this all wrong. You got to come to denver and see what we've got in terms of water infrastructure. And when I went out to Denver that next couple of weeks, I spent three days touring probably 500 or 600 miles all around the Denver metro area of canals that are transporting water. You may not know that the water you drink in denver actually comes from the other side of the continental divide, and they bring it into the city of denver through a series of canals and storage reservoirs that allow for the appropriate amount of treated and stored water for the city.And so when I was there, I thought about, okay, as a business model, being able to deliver one to ten of these modules at 30,000 water treatment plants sounds like I need a big sales force. And then looking at the Denver infrastructure and seeing hundreds of miles of uniform canal that's transporting water where thousands or tens of thousands of these generators could be deployed with one partner just made a ton of sense. And so then I started peeling back the curtain on that.David RobertsYou say one partner. So are most of these two of the sort of features of canals? That came as somewhat of a surprise to me, and I'm sure you're familiar with this response is, first, when I thought of canals, the first thing I thought of was agriculture. I assumed they were mostly out in farmland. But what you have discovered is that they are laced throughout urban infrastructure, they are in cities.Emily MorrisOh, absolutely. It's both. It's certainly both. Our project we have a project with the city of Denver that overlooks the Denver skyline right there near the city. And if you overlay a map of Phoenix roadways with map of Phoenix waterways, you can see two highly sophisticated transport systems all throughout the metropolitan area. Not just Phoenix, think of Houston 22 canals and bayou's flow all throughout the urban metro area that are both a source of water or even an attraction for the city, but also have an inherent energy, sometimes too much energy during hurricane season and whatnot to be able to harvest and hopefully deliver value from as well.David RobertsYeah, and so the other feature is they're not privately owned for the most part. Most of these canals are operated by a city municipal water district.Is that sort of the standard?Emily MorrisYeah, that's correct. Typically there is an organization that manages the water infrastructure, the canal infrastructure. It is often public. It can be a political subdivision, like a municipality or a local not for profit organization or co-op. It also can be a private canal company, although those typically remain nonprofits. They're typically a public service for the good of the recipients of the water.David RobertsBut the point is, you are not having to track down a bunch of individual owners of individual canals. You can get at a bunch of canals through one partner.Emily MorrisThat's absolutely the case. And it's all public record the managers of water infrastructure and their contact information. You're not going and knocking on someone's home asking if you can put something in the backyard or something like that. This is an operated and often, from their contractual perspective, they're typically buying water from an entity and selling water to a series of entities, buying water from the US Government and selling it to farmers, something like that. And so the reporting aspects about that water that flows through, they tend to be detailed. They tend to be long running. And so as you think about developing a resource assessment of how much energy is inherent in that water that you can produce electricity from, it's not necessarily like needing to go build a MET station and understand exactly what resources there.They're typically well organized, well operated, and well documented.David RobertsA well characterized resource.Emily MorrisAbsolutely.David RobertsOkay, so you go to these canals. You make a deal with the owners of these canals, and then you go plop down energy generators into the canals. Let's talk about the generators, try to give the listeners kind of a sense of how big one of these things is and kind of what it looks like. What are you plopping down into the canal?Emily MorrisIn terms of physical size. Our generators are an eight foot cube, and they have their own precast concrete structure that holds them together. So you can think of sort of half of a precast concrete culvert, if you are familiar with the construction world, that is an eight foot cube. We do that strategically, they are easy to lift and handle.They're easy to transport by trucking or other means. You can even containerize them if you need to. And we place those into the channels without doing any construction, any modification, any impounding of the channels, which is a really important part of the canals, because, as I mentioned before, that water is going to a destination for a purpose. And so going in and saying, yeah, we're just going to build a dam right here in the middle of your canal doesn't seem to resonate so well. And so being able to bring something in that's fully self supported can be placed into the channel and held there by its own weight.And it only weighs about seven tons, so it's not a super heavy lift, but it's hydrostatically, designed to not shift or slide or overturn once the water hits it. And inside of that culvert or the concrete structure, there is a vertical axis turbine that looks probably very similar to vertical axis wind turbines that many of the listeners will be familiar with. And so they take advantage of the kinetic energy in the flow using the swept area of the turbine and the speed of the water, and generate torque and speed around the shaft up to the power takeoff and the generator. And so physically, they're eight foot cubes.But from a power perspective, our smallest turbine that we sell is a 5 kilowatt turbine. And it's the same physical footprint that the 8 by 8 cube, but it can generate mechanically and electrically up to 25 kilowatts per turbine based on the depth and the speed of the water.David RobertsI was going to ask whether the sizes vary. So the generator, the eight foot cube is standard. All the generators come in these eight foot cubes, but the generators themselves vary in size based on the water flow.Emily MorrisYeah, that's exactly right. We do have a deeper water platform that goes up to about 18ft of water, and then we're working on an even deeper platform in conjunction with the DOE. But right now, our main platform is the eight foot cube. And the beauty of water is that the power is exponential by the speed of the water. And so we can place a turbine in and it can generate 5 kilowatts at say a shallower, slower speed. Or that very same equipment can put out five times the power output if placed in a different location. And so as we think about coming down the cost curve, growing to scale, we can immediately find higher density resources that make sense today, even as a young company that hasn't quite gotten fully to the quantities that other adjacent industries like solar and wind have.David RobertsRight. So I have a bunch of questions about that. But just this question about size brings up the question about canal size. If you have a standard sized module, I'm assuming that canals themselves are relatively standardized in size. With this eight foot cube, can you confidently say, we can go to more or less any canal and it'll work? Or do canals also vary?Emily MorrisCanals vary, but not substantially. There are standard sizes, and our eight foot cube does cover a wide envelope of canals in the US. And abroad. We do see, though, that this is the array planning and array specification, which is how we deploy these. We never deploy them as single turbines, but really as arrays, just like solar and wind, that with the arrays. It's a very similar planning method to solar is you look at your total square footage across the canal, you look at the gradient of fall along the canal, and you plan out the optimized number of turbine modules that make sense for that canal.So sometimes if you have a canal that's 18 feet wide, rather than build two 9 foot cubes, all of a sudden, you do two 8 foot cubes, right. And you standardize and you optimize for cost even if you're not squeezing every single ounce of power out of that flow. And I think that's one big thing that differentiates energy and distributed hydro from traditional sort of small-scale hydro is we're optimizing for cost and scale rather than for utmost efficiency, which is typically where hydro really focuses.David RobertsRight. And Volts listeners are very well educated on the fact that the modularity, the small-scale and modularity of solar panels are a huge piece of why they have proven so adaptable and grown so fast. Like the advantages you get from standardization and modularity vastly outweigh whatever sort of marginal gains you could get on either side in a particular canal.Emily MorrisAbsolutely. We're big believers in that, our smallest module is an order of magnitude larger than a solar module. But you should think of it absolutely in that same way. We do have people, especially the folks that are really focused in hydro, they say to us, "Oh, your modules are so small, 5 kilowatts or 25 kilowatts, that's so small." And I say to them, "No one ever goes to the solar field and say, 'Hey, your panels are so small.'" It's a totally different mindset that you have to be thinking of the module as the panel, as the individual generator that ultimately goes into the array. And yes, our arrays will likely continue to be on the distribution scale rather than on the utility scale or the large transmission scale. But no question the aggregation of modules is how power grows, this generation of renewables.David RobertsWell, let's try to get a sense of just how big they are power wise. So, 5 kilowatts to 25 kilowatts, what's a typical array, and then what's the output of a typical array, and then maybe just to help the listeners kind of get their head around it, how does that sort of compare to an array of solar panels? Like, if I'm the owner of a canal or a network of canals, and I'm trying to decide, do I want to put a bunch of these in there or do I want to say cover the canals with solar panels? What's the scale comparison there?Emily MorrisWell, if you're asking me which one you should do, I would absolutely say both. The answer is both. One does not preclude the other, because this is a great real estate segment to be able to convert to renewables of all types. But when you think about our systems at 25 module, let's say that's 40 turbines to be a megawatt. And some canals are on the smaller side that we look at maybe enough for two or three modules across, some of them maybe ten modules across, just depending on the width of the canal. And so you could place 40 modules as close as, say, half a mile away across those four rows of ten, or it could be spread a much longer distance, it could be a mile or 2 miles for that.And really we're optimizing for spacing. Obviously, you don't want to run cable to the point of interconnect any further than you have to. We're optimizing for hydraulics. You want the energy to recover after being taken out by our turbines as it flows downhill. And then ultimately, we want to co-locate these with the offtake and whether that's directly into the grid or behind the meter with a particular industrial or municipal client. Those are typically how we think about this. But when you think about covering a canal in solar panels, I don't have the specific statistics on how many linear feet equates to a megawatt or things like that, necessarily, but you're going to see, most importantly, that you need three times the power output or potentially more to overcome the differences in capacity factors. So with our system, they're typically operating 24 hours a day.David RobertsSo in these canals that water flows through, water is constantly going through there 24 hours a day. I would think some of it at least would be sort of like scheduled or go in one direction and then another direction. Are they all steady 24 hours flows?Emily MorrisNot everything is consistent, of course, but I would say that in the water space, the capacity factor is determined by seasonality and or maintenance schedules, but less by intermittency. It's actually pretty bad for a canal to be turned on, turned off, turned on, turned off, because you end up having other maintenance challenges, things that break issues in the canal.David RobertsSo they want to run them?Emily MorrisThey want to run them continuously. Yes. And so depending on what the water is being used for, whether it's a certain area of cropland and therefore there's a seasonality to the flow that's fairly common, or if it's municipal, it may be a year round flow. Or depending on your region in the arid Southwest, you'll see perennial flows a lot more frequently than you will, let's say in Montana or Idaho, where there's obviously quite harsh winters.And so in our case, we target canals that can be the most predictable in their flow and the most continuous. Yet if you have a site that is only running six months out of the year, getting to that 40% to 50% capacity factor because let's say it runs constantly through that six months of the year can still lead to an incredibly exciting impactful project overall with good returns, even though it's not on every day. Right? It's a different mindset.David RobertsRight.Emily MorrisI have definitely had water districts say. "Well, what do I do in November, December, January if we're not flowing water?" And I said, "You may not think about it, but every night when you go to sleep, your solar panels also aren't working." It's just a different mindset of something not working every day for 90 days rather than not producing every night. And so doing that educational piece to where projects in terms of their output and their economic value can be highly competitive even at the shorter seasons with canals.David RobertsRight. So the basic point here is that while these generators may not crank out as much power as a solar panel while they're generating, they are generating much more often. They're generating around the clock. And so you have to have kind of three times the power output from a solar panel to end up matching the total power output.Emily MorrisThat's right.David RobertsThey have the advantage of being base-loady, basically.Emily MorrisExactly. That's typically what we see is that for canals that are running the majority of the time, you'll ultimately need if you want the equivalent amount of annual energy, you'll need a power capacity on your solar that would be about three times larger than what you would need on the hydro side.David RobertsInteresting. Okay, so you go to a water district, you say, "Hey, we want to generate some power from your canals." You do an analysis of the sort of optimal kind of spacing and placing and then what, a truck comes in or a crane comes in and just sort of like drops these things one by one in the canal. It sounds like installation would be pretty straightforward and pretty low footprint, is that true?Emily MorrisThat's absolutely true. It sounds too simple to say in some ways, but yet simply lifting the turbines and placing them into the channel, making sure that they're level, making sure they're not sitting on top of debris, or boulders or something like that, that may have fallen in the canal is important. But placing them in the canal correctly is the most important aspect of the installation. That's unique to Emrgy.David RobertsSo they're not connected in any way it's just the weight of the thing holding it in place. It's not literally not connected to anything. There's no screwing or attaching or bracketing.Emily MorrisThat's correct. There is nothing that is physically attaching it to the canal.David RobertsSo easy to take out.Emily MorrisOwners love this. Yes. Because they can take it out if they needed to ...David RobertsOr move itEmily Morris... often. Because these are operated channels they often will, once every five years or on some periodic schedule, drive up and down the canal or drive a bulldozer down and make sure that all the debris is out or something like that. So they love the flexibility. We tend to see that canal owners like the flexibility of being able to take them out. Now onshore each turbine, or each cross section, I should say, has a power conversion system that has both the control system as well as the power conditioning. And that is something we deliver as well. And it sits on a concrete pad on the side of the channel. But then as you connect those together electrically and then connect them to the grid, there's no innovation from Emrgy there. It's just optimization based on the appropriate electrical balance of system design.And so as we think about partnerships with other types of developers, other renewable developers, there isn't a special skill set that installers would need to have to be able to install our system. The balance of system is essentially exactly the same as distributed solar. And all you would need to do is be able to place the turbines in the canals correctly.David RobertsInteresting. Yeah, I like simple and dumb. That's resilient and that's what can spread fast.Emily MorrisAnd maybe I'll just mention that when I first started this business, I thought it was too simple. I assumed that somebody had already done this before, that it seemed pretty obvious. And as I looked deeper into it, I learned really the two things that I believe have held this space back that now are no longer barriers. One of them is regulatory. And that gets a little bit back to why we focus on canals in general, is that up until 2015, I believe it was all water in the US was permitted for power in the same way. So to place our system in a canal would have been permitted and regulated the same way it would in a river. And in 2015, FERC enacted the qualifying conduit exemption which stated that electric projects within water conduits or conveyance systems were exempt from FERC licensing up to 40 megawatts per project.David RobertsInteresting.Emily MorrisAnd so now our projects are fully exempt from FERC licensing. And it's a 30-day notice of intent to FERC requesting that exemption, which is lightning fast compared to other projects.David RobertsYes. So you're not dealing with permitting issues, NIMBY issues, all the sort of like land issues, all the stuff that's bedevilling wind and solar right now you're sort of doing an end run around that stuff.Emily MorrisWe'd like to think so. I mean, projects are always controversial to some extent, and every neighbor may have an idea of what they'd like to see in the canals. But in terms of general regulatory approvals and project buy in, we tend to see this being much lower barriers than many of the other types of land based systems. The other thing that was a major barrier that has since been lifted is the growing ability to use solar designed or solar inspired smart inverters for technologies and generators other than solar.David RobertsLet's talk about that first. Maybe, I don't want to assume first, maybe just tell listeners what does an inverter do and what does it mean for it to be smart? And maybe tell us about how those were developed in solar.Emily MorrisSure. So the generation of the power from the water or from the sun typically has been done over many decades and even centuries in terms of hydro, very successfully. The physics of getting energy out of a resource is something that is fairly straightforward. Now, the modern scalability of being able to replicate that in thousands of locations all around the world, conveniently into our modern electricity grid, is something that I would say has been hugely influenced through the development, industrialization and scalability of the smart inverter. And what I mean by that is actually readying the power, conditioning the power, making it grid compliant and ready for delivery into the grid, has received billions of dollars of industrial development in the solar industry to take it down in size and form factor as well as in efficiency.And if that was not available to us, and Emrgy had to build out an industry much like solar to drive industrial development of power conversion and power delivery, to be able to install it globally, we would be on a 20- to 30-year timeline. We would need billions of dollars and or it would just be really slow. If we had to do all custom power equipment, then every utility would have to come in and do a full engineering review of what we were building, whether it would cause problems to the grid. And what we have been able to take amazing advantage of is the ability to utilize a smart inverter that was originally designed for solar and largely used in solar, and be able to use that to control our hydro-generator without invalidating its utility certifications.You have to know quite a bit about power systems, perhaps, to know that controlling the power curve in a hydro-turbine and controlling the power curve in a solar panel is very different, a lot trickier than one might think. And being able to manage the torque and speed, to be able to manage and optimize a power point along the curve is tricky when you're trying to use a device that was made for a different industry. And so one of the biggest areas of Emrgy's technology, development and innovation is not necessarily in the. Physics in the water of how we're getting energy out of the water.It's really how are we delivering that electricity now to the grid in the most cost effective, high efficiency and streamlined way. And being able to use the same inverters that the solar industry is using helps put us on a much closer playing field to be able to deploy these projects in an apples to apples way. And even, as you mentioned, do you do solar or hydro and canals? It's great to do both and potentially even put them right into the same inverter. And that's the beauty of where distributed generation, I believe, is going, is to a flexible environment where you can have that base load, have your peaking load, have your energy storage and share as much of the cost along the system as you can.David RobertsSo you can just use smart inverters that are designed for solar off the shelf. There's no engineering or tweaking or fiddling you have to do.Emily MorrisSo we're prohibited from doing a ton of tweaking inside the inverter because obviously they go through quite a level of utility compliance and we can't necessarily change that. However, what we have is a power controls unit. It's a NEMA panel that looks like a standard electrical panel that sits right next to the inverter and that contains all of our fairly sophisticated controls and mechanisms to allow us to control our system and have it communicate with the solar inverter in a language that the solar inverter understands most of our innovation. And IP in that area sits in that power controls unit rather than in the inverter itself.David RobertsGot it. And so what do we mean when we say smart inverter? I've always kind of wondered, do people just say that because it's like sophisticated? Or is there a clear distinction between a dumb inverter and a smart inverter?Emily MorrisI'm probably not best equipped to handle that question, but I can say that from our perspective, using the inverters that we do use enables us to have both the smart capabilities as it relates to grid following, ensuring the grid islanding or other types of issues are matched. But also for us, having the data aspect of what's collected in that inverter and the amount of information that we can pull off of it is very helpful for us. I mean, we collect data in a number of ways and using the solar inverter or the smart inverter helps us to triangulate and calibrate that data to ensure its accuracy. So, for example, the inverter will give us power output, real time data in that regard, while we also have sensors off board the system in the water that reads flow information, speed information.And so we know if there's a change in power, is that related to a change in flow and we can calibrate that via the sensors, or is it related to an issue in the system? And using both the data off the inverter as well as off of our other data collection systems, helps us to diagnose and monitor device health as well as to especially as we continue to innovate, predict and alert water infrastructure owners of decisions they may need to make.David RobertsThe obvious service you're providing to a water district is we're going to give you some power, some economical power. But I'm wondering about, if you're collecting so much information about water flow, is that information helpful to the canal owners? In other words, are you able to improve the actual operation of the water infrastructure itself?Emily MorrisWe are, and I believe that this will continue to evolve as the industry continues to evolve as well. But right now the water management, especially out in the field, is managed by an aging population. I think the last figure I saw that the average what they call a ditch tender or ditch rider, someone that is monitoring the health of the water conveyance system, the average age of that title is 56 years old.David RobertsA familiar story in so many of these areas.Emily MorrisYeah. So recruiting young talent, recruiting the right type of personnel is tough and so being able to provide data that can integrate back into a SCADA system or otherwise be able to inform those that are not in the field things that may be happening in the canal is definitely valuable. Now over time as well. The canals have been operated for mainly one purpose for many decades now, which is to deliver water and earn revenues off of delivering that water. They're selling the water now as they will be running water and earning revenues from generating power along the way.Working with water districts to optimize their irrigation schedules or their deliveries, to be able to take advantage ...David RobertsSo they could change the way they do things to optimize power delivery too?Emily MorrisYes, I mean, this is one of the very few generation types, particularly on the distribution grid, that is a controllable feedstock. And so to the extent that a water district can generate double the revenue by flowing water during specific times, there are incentives to do so.David RobertsInteresting.Emily MorrisAnd we can provide those. And so aligning incentives between the water district Emrgy and the farmers that they serve to be able to really bring a powerful force of renewable energy onto the grid at the right times of day or the right times of year is something that we believe distributed hydro has a unique ability to do.David RobertsSo I'm guessing that this is in early days, this idea of a water district sort of co-optimizing water usage and power output. I would guess that there's a lot of running room there to find efficiencies and find better ways of doing things.Emily MorrisThat's right there is it's early days. I mean, we are working one of our municipal clients, the canal that we're installed within, its only job is to manage water levels between two reservoirs. So there is a ton of operational flexibility within that section and being able to work with them on optimization of the water flows to drive power is something very straightforward. Now, there are other districts that have been doing things the same way for 50 years. And perhaps they're going to be more of the districts where you have to put the incentive out there first, let them start to see how it changes their income with a change in flow and guide them on that, and we'll see it over time.But this is one thing that we talk about a lot at Emrgy, is how to adequately predict future behaviors with water as a function of how this partnership can work together and provide them both the data, the revenues and other services that are helpful.David RobertsYou could even imagine water districts with an array of these turbines installed maybe playing a role in demand response type things. In other words, they might have the ability to sort of turn it up and down on demand as a source of value.Emily MorrisAbsolutely, and they can do it both on the water side as well as somewhat on the power side as well. If you're familiar with the energy water nexus, the concept that it takes quite a bit of electricity to move water, move and treat water, a lot of these water districts are huge electricity consumers. And so one thing we often talk about with districts is what are their highest consumers of electricity? Is it a particular groundwater well? Is it a particular pumping plant? Is it a particular water treatment facility? How can we both utilize the water to drive demand response and to drive smart operation of water and therefore power?As well as should we cluster these systems around some of those highest consumers even in some ways behind the meter or along with energy storage to where they're able to keep that demand down into a whole different echelon from what they've been operating at?David RobertsRight. Well, this raises the question of in your installations so far, who's buying this power? Who's the modal kind of consumer? Is it the water districts themselves? I mean, they're big electricity consumers. You can see this as kind of a self contained loop kind of thing where they're sort of generating the power that they're using or are you selling it into the grid? Are you selling it to particular off takers or is there a standard model yet?Emily MorrisThere's not a standard model yet. I would say the most common models are power purchase agreements directly with the water district so buying power from us rather than from the grid. And in many cases, if we're in states that have advantageous net metering, which I know are becoming fewer and fewer each year, but able to use that type of arrangement where essentially they're receiving a bill credit and then remitting those savings onto EmrgyDavid RobertsAnd net metering works the same here as it does for solar panels?Emily MorrisYeah, exactly the same. Exactly the same. Down to the same form you fill out from the utility, all the same. And then there are certain states that have advantageous hydro avoided cost contracts where we can just pull directly on a standard offer from the IOU in the area that can allow for a bit of a streamlined contract negotiation. Then when you're meeting with the district, you're only talking about how much we're going to be paying the district to host the system and share those revenues with the IOU rather than contracting with them on power purchase directly.David RobertsRight. A little easier for them. And that sort of raised my next question, which is, is the business model that you go to a water district and sell it these turbines and then it operates these turbines, or is this a power as a service type of arrangement where you own the turbines and operate them and just sell the power to the districts?Emily MorrisYeah, Emrgy has always been organized with a goal toward power as a service. We're currently doing that, although in our first reference projects, we needed to sell the turbines just to get equipment out there, get people familiar with it, which we were successful in doing. Now we're focused primarily on a power as a service model. Although water does tend to be an industry with a high value on ownership. And so many of the districts we work with, they're either interested in being a part owner, they're interested in a future buyout option or transfer of ownership option, just because it's quite common that the manager of the water district grew up at the water district, had maybe a father or grandfather that worked there.And so they focus on generational outcomes. They want to see long lasting systems. They don't want to see us come in, plop something in and then blaze off. They want to know that we're going to be there for the long haul, which with water power that is one of the other benefits is that this is an electromechanical system that if properly maintained, will last for many decades. It doesn't have that inherent chemical degradation.David RobertsRight, solar panels are I think the official is 20 years, or in practice they last a little longer than but I think they're like generally certified for 20 years of operation. What's one of your turbines? Is there a specific fixed time period that you guarantee or how long will these last?Emily MorrisYeah, well, we market 30 years. We seek out 30-year contracting arrangements on both site hosting and power production and sales. But truly there's nothing that drives that 30 years aside from that's what our clients are used to seeing from solar or wind or other types. For us, if these systems continue to be maintained, well, we do do an overhaul every 15 years and make sure that all the equipment is well maintained. But ultimately I was just in Idaho, a few weeks ago and there was a hydro-plant there that had similar materials, similar bearings, similar turbine blades, generators.It was 113 years old. And I won't live long enough to know if one of our turbines can last that long, but there isn't anything inherent of the system that just breaks down and ultimately causes it not to function.David RobertsRight. So another question is which these days I find myself asking every guest, which is what is IRA doing for you? Is the Inflation Reduction Act helping you in some specific way either in manufacturing these things and by the way, they're manufactured here in the US?Emily MorrisThey are.David RobertsSo that's domestic content, what's your relationship with the IRA?Emily MorrisWhile we are still early in how the IRA is being implemented and transacted against within our projects, the understanding of how the IRA will provide advantage to the projects is massive for us. You're spot on. Our systems qualify for both the production tax credit and the investment tax credit. And by both, I mean either we can use either one. We meet the requirements for the domestic content requirement, and many of our projects that we're seeking are in energy communities as well.David RobertsOh, right.Emily MorrisAnd so the opportunity for quite a substantial tax benefit as a function of these projects. And I'll say, in addition, some of the other major IRA programs or BIL programs that funded both the Department of Energy's Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, OCED, or the USDA's Rural Energy for America program, the REAP program, are also incredibly advantageous to our projects. A substantial amount of our project pipeline right now is in USDA REAP eligible census tracts, which means that they qualify for either loan guarantees, which provides for commercial lenders to be able to offer lower interest lending to the project, or grant programs for renewable energy systems up to a million dollars each. And so these can provide, especially given that these are not exclusive, so we can bring in both REAP loan guarantees as well as the IRA tax benefits into the same project, making them incredibly attractive even in an earlier stage of a company where we haven't yet optimized cost and whatnot.David RobertsInteresting, so you're already in a position where you can go to a water district and offer them a pretty sweet deal, very low upfront costs, a new revenue stream, fairly minimal maintenance. A couple of final questions. First off, you talk about sort of scale and reducing costs. These are pretty simple, as I said before, as one of the benefits. Sort of simple. You have a concrete bracket, there's a vertical turbine, there's some wires and some power control stuff. Where is the room here for technological advancement or is there room for a lot of tech advancement or are you going to get more cost reductions out of scale?Or are you, do you think, pretty close already to this being as cheap as it can get?Emily MorrisYeah, I mean, in terms of tech advancement. I often describe our systems as sort of like when you drive past a wind farm and you can just tell that it was built in wind 1.0 all the turbines are sort of facing the same direction and they're sort of spaced in a finite manner. And then you drive by a newer wind facility and you can tell they're taking advantage of all of the wake of all the different turbines and they're all oriented differently and they're spaced differently. I call our system still a bit of like that 1.0 feel right?We're designing systems and optimizing them for the canals, but there's things that we just can't simulate in any fluid dynamic software until we've got hundreds or thousands of these turbines out there operating.David RobertsSo learning some learning by doing here.Emily MorrisOh, absolutely. I mean, there are times we've seen in practice where the turbines are all generating and then let's say the water district starts to they lower their flow and the turbines are no longer fully submerged in the water. And we found that if you ease off of one of the turbines in terms of its electrical loading and it starts to spin faster in freewheel, then it can ultimately push water levels up and the turbines upstream push into their optimal generating capacity. And that gets a little technical. Maybe folks listening want to call me a nerd out about that sometime, I'd love to ...David RobertsAbout hydraulics.Emily MorrisBut nonetheless, we are definitely at the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding all the different wake effects and how to create an array that is more than the sum of its parts. So I'd say that's a big area for tech advancement. We are currently funded by ARPA-E in advancing that what we call the term we use is called dynamic tuning, tuning the systems as things dynamically change around them. Another area for advancement is certainly around hybrids and micro grids. So you made the comment earlier about solar or this and we really believe that to really become carbon free at the distribution level, it's going to be many different technologies, not one silver bullet.And so there's no reason why you shouldn't combine either floating solar or ground mounted or spanning solar together with our system, share as much of the balance of system as possible, drive LCOE down and have a hybrid. Adding in energy storage or even adding in renewable fuels production is absolutely something that you could use our system with. And we're actually, we're funded with DOE on another one of these projects looking at micro-grids for resiliency, because a lot of times that resiliency piece in a micro-grid is diesel, right? When all else fails, you have your diesel.And so how can we create something where hydro can be that resiliency piece as something that we're currently working on as well for tech advancement?David RobertsInteresting.Emily MorrisAnd I think you'll see a lot of we see Emrgy as sort of the base platform, the distributed hydro as the base platform. But ultimately we're interested in pursuing how water infrastructure, which spans, as we already talked about, both rural and urban environments, can ultimately become a key facilitator of the energy transition, not just something that's invisible.David RobertsWould you Emrgy get into designing and installing hybrid systems or would this be like a partnership with a solar company? Or is it too early to know?Emily MorrisWe already are into designing and specifying hybrid systems and really more so on creating, for lack of a better term, sort of the universal plug right, where you could plug our system and solar and other things into our overall power architecture. And so we're not necessarily out there innovating on the solar side or on the energy storage side, but creating a way that whether it's with a codevelopment partnership or whether it's something that we can source from a manufacturer, the same way that other developers do, with a very flexible and universal application for combining generation and storage types.David RobertsYeah, because if there are efficiencies available in optimizing one of your systems, I can just imagine once you get into optimizing systems that are small hydro turbines and solar panels and batteries, the more pieces you have, the more sort of room for optimization and efficiency you have, and the more sort of runway there is to bring down costs for the total system.Emily MorrisAnd the more controllability you can add, then the more ultimately this becomes meaningful. At the distribution scale, I think we need more controllability and dispatchability at the distributed scale and providing that baseload resource is one of the key pieces to getting there. And so we don't claim to be experts in microgrid controls or anything like that and definitely seek partnerships in that regard. But I definitely see this as an important piece to the puzzle in how we get to be a more resilient set of carbon-free communities.David RobertsMaybe just say a word or two about why you think, because there's a long running argument in the clean energy world where you see this, especially in solar, where people say, well, the industrial size, utility scale solar, you get cheaper per kilowatt hour output, which I don't think is controversial. Like if you're just measuring on a per kilowatt hour basis, you're going to get cheaper power out of giant fields of solar than by scattered multiple installations. So what do you see as kind of the advantage of doing all this work in a distributed way rather than just say, like adding some big new dam or some big turbine to some big river somewhere? What do you see as sort of the advantages of power generation being distributed through urban and rural areas in water infrastructure like this?Emily MorrisI wouldn't call myself an expert on the math, but while I think you're right that at the field the cost per kilowatt hour of a large solar farm is less. Although I don't know that that math holds. If it's the cost of that kilowatt hour to your home, and if you calculated the per kilowatt hour cost to your home for utility or transmission level solar versus local distributed energy, whether that's solar or Emrgy or anything else, I think the number is probably a lot closer and maybe surprising. I'm sure people have done the math. I personally don't know it, but I believe that as we start looking and staring down the barrel, truly, of what it's going to cost our grid, our transmission grid, to maintain modernization and resiliency, if all we do is keep building large utility scale solar farms, the price of delivery to the house is no question going to become higher and higher.And if we can successfully generate local energy, then it should be lower cost because you're not going to have those massive grid upgrades. It should be more resilient so that if there's a wildfire halfway across the state, it doesn't affect you.David RobertsThe micro-gridding and ability to island is huge, especially if you imagine it sort of multiplied out to every place with a series of canals, which is more or less every city of any size.Emily MorrisNo question. And so we're big believers in the distributed scale, but again, large hydro and large solar provides such a huge benefit. I think we often take strong stances without realizing all the benefits we enjoy from all the various types of assets that are on the grid. And so I think there's a need for all of it. But I absolutely think that there is a better way to becoming net zero than just covering all of our remote fields in solar and all the batteries that are needed to get there. So being able to bring that more locally in a more continuous format is one solution of, I think, all the many that we'll need to truly become net zero.David RobertsSo, final question is a question that, as you say, you get asked a lot. Do you have an eye on other kinds of distributed water infrastructure or is this like a canal play more or less exclusively? Or are there other like, I didn't even really know about canals, so are there other hidden water infrastructure that I don't know about hiding around? Or can you imagine something this simple and modular and low footprint working in natural water features, streams or rivers or something? What's the sort of next step beyond this?Emily MorrisYeah, I mean, we get asked for all sorts of applications that would probably not be on your radar. Whether we can hang these off of oil rigs out in the Gulf, or can we take advantage of the intercoastal waterways on the barrier islands in Florida, or could we use these in tidal environments in Australia or in LNG plants in Singapore? I mean, you name it, we definitely get asked about anytime someone either is driving in their car, looks out the window and sees a flow of water, and they think, "Oh, we should be able to tap into that energy."David RobertsRight, there's energy in all of it.Emily MorrisThey're absolutely right from a physics perspective, but Emrgy is super focused on what we can do and bring value today. Because for me, a clean kilowatt hour generated today is far more valuable than a clean kilowatt hour that I have to plan for and engineer for and design for that can be generated in 2028. And so we're focused on what are near real term opportunities. I would say that we're coming full circle back around to some of the water treatment applications.David RobertsYeah, I was going to ask, what if there's stuff in the water? I meant to ask this much earlier. Are most of these canals carrying clean water? And if it's not clean, if there's stuff in it, does that muck with your turbines?Emily MorrisCertainly. If there's undesirables in the water, it's going right through our turbines. We design the turbines to avoid as much as that as possible with some fluid mechanic designs, but we have an operating mode that essentially will flush the turbines if needed. If they're stuck, if there's debris or algae or something on there, that's a very similar mechanism to what you find in a pump to flush it and get rid of any alien items. But nonetheless, I would say that in terms of water treatment, we'd be focused on effluent channels of already treated water that's returning out to a different water source.As I mentioned before, we are doing some R&D work related to riverine and tidal resources. When I started Emrgy, I said, "Hey, we're going to pick a market that we can really master. And if we can master the product and master the base platform that can scale, amending it for a specific environment is much easier than trying to create a product in lots of different environments at the same time." So over time, perhaps you'll see us in rivers or you'll see us in tides. I don't think it'll be anytime soon. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that there's 2 million linear miles of surface water infrastructure in the world over the globe.And so we'll be pretty busy in the canal market for a long time. And I think building a really impactful technology for this space along the way. But certainly we'd be open to collaborations or exploring other markets as those become, I believe, more accessible and developable.David RobertsIt's exciting to me because this is sort of, as we said, modular and repeatable in the way that solar was, but at the very, very beginning of that journey that we've seen solar go through, which is scale expands, it gets cheaper. You find your ways into new niches. You find your way into applications you didn't even know you were going to get near. Just sort of like it's a self reinforcing cycle of sort of scale and cheapness and then spreading to new applications. That's been fascinating to watch in solar, and it's sort of just at the outset here in small-hydro.Emily MorrisAbsolutely. We hope we can leapfrog some of that, having learned from all the things that they've done and being able to actually adopt many of their innovations like the inverters and whatnot. But no question, this is an emerging asset class. There's still tons to learn. And as we scale, I'll like to look back on this podcast a few years from now and see how many of my predictions help.David RobertsYeah, we'll have to have you back on. Alright, Emily Morris of Emrgy, thanks so much for coming on this really intriguing and exciting new area here, so I appreciate you sharing with us.Emily MorrisThis was great, thanks for having me.David RobertsThank you for listening to the Volts podcast. It is ad-free, powered entirely by listeners like you. If you value conversations like this, please consider becoming a paid Volts subscriber at volts.wtf. Yes, that's volts.wtf, so that I can continue doing this work. Thank you so much, and I'll see you next time. Get full access to Volts at www.volts.wtf/subscribe
The US debt ceiling is all anyone in Washington (and increasingly elsewhere) can talk about these days. For months, politicians have been in a stalemate triggered by Republican demands for spending cuts as the price for paying America's debts. With next week seen as the point at which the Treasury may have to start issuing IOUs, any deal to avert a catastrophic default is going to come down to the wire. Recent sticking points are tied to potential spending caps, the GOP's insistence on slashing domestic spending for several years and the Biden administration's desire for more limited cuts. On this episode of Stephanomics, Senior Editor Chris Anstey and reporter Josh Wingrove give us the state of play, from explaining what exactly the debt ceiling is to laying out some scenarios of how things progress from here. Stephanie then sits down with economist Stephen King to talk about government debt levels more broadly, and if we should be worried given how high interest rates have climbed.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Top Chef does a movie tie in episode and it turns into the FASTest elimination challenge in HISTORY! There's a lot of moving and running and winning and losing and one very large Vin Diesel lady boner from Victoire. This week's premium bonus is a #RHOC trailer breakdown. For bonus episodes and video recaps, join Patreon at patreon.com/watchwhatcrappens Tour Dates: https://www.watchwhatcrappens.com/2023-cheater-brand-tour/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
The Steak for Breakfast Podcast is ending the week with a HUGE Friday edition of the show! Rain checks and IOUs snowballed into a packed podcast that's bringing you a little Kash, a trio of U.S. House Representatives and the best tech analysis that the Heritage Foundation has to offer. Former Chief of Staff to the DOD and Special Assistant to President Trump, Kash Patel joins us to open the show. We discuss Chinese Spy Balloons, a recent Truth Social post and get behind enemy lines regarding the Russia and Ukraine conflict. Today's Cold Open is examines the fallout from the House vote that removed Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Intelligence Committee. Florida Congressman, Matt Gaetz (FL-1) makes his Steak for Breakfast debut today. Rep. Gaetz takes through the first month of business in the House, the start of committee work, and his journey to becoming the Firebrand that we have come to appreciate on the show. California Congressman, Kevin Kiley (CA-3) was back on the podcast today discussing the launch of Committee Season. Rep. Kiley talks about about resolutions passed this week that ban socialism and end the covid emergency and how he is best utilizing his new position in Congress to expose CA Governor, Gavin Newsom's America Last agenda. News Block One provides coverage to the most recent developments in the Russia and Ukraine conflict from around the globe. Tech Policy Expert for the Heritage Foundation, Jake Denton was studio today to talk about recent developments with Congress trying to slow the spread and influence of TikTok and we get into the new ChatGTP app that's writing term papers now, but may be replacing journalists in the future. Georgia Congressman, Mike Collins is finally back on Steak for Breakfast. Rep. Collins discusses his committee appointments, the vote to remove Rep. Omar from Foreign Intelligence and the upcoming battle over the debt ceiling. News Block Two kicks off Committee Season, where the Judiciary couldn't begin opening their session on the Border Crisis before getting into it over the Pledge of Allegiance. Subscribe to the show, rate it and leave a review on iTunes and Spotify before you download, listen, like follow and SHARE Steak for Breakfast content! Steak for Breakfast: website: https://steakforbreakfastpodcast.com Steak for Substack: https://steakforbreakfastpodcast.substack.com linktree: https://linktr.ee/steakforbreakfastpodcast MyPillow: Promo Code: STEAK at checkout Website: https://mystore.com/steak Website: https://www.mypillow.com/steak Via the Phone: 800-658-8045 My Patriot Cigar Co. Enter Promo Code: STEAK http://mypatriotcigars.com/usa/steak Kash Patel (Former Christ of Staff to the DOD) Truth Social: @Kash Website: https://fightwithkash.com Matt Gaetz (U.S. House Rep., FL-1) Twitter: @mattgaetz Website: https://linktr.ee/repmattgaetz Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/firebrand-with-matt-gaetz/id1512848110 Mike Collins (U.S. House Rep., GA-10) Twitter: @MikeCollinsGA Website: https://mikecollinsga.com/ Kevin Kiley (U.S. House Rep., CA-3) Twitter: @RepKiley Website: https://kiley.house.gov/ Jake Denton (Tech Policy, Heritage Foundation ) Twitter: @RealJDenton Website: https://www.heritage.org/staff/jake-denton
Ron Magill joins us and shares how happy our audience makes him when they reach out to him about animal questions. Then, we dive into how the Manningcast and Amazon NFL broadcasts have started their seasons, get to Stugotz fine IOUs, and discuss our Grid of Death punishments. Plus, after Dana White tries a DNA and blood test to see how long he'll live, we discuss whether or not we'd even want to know. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Startuprad.io - The Authority on German, Swiss and Austrian Startups and Venture Capital
We want digital debt to be registered, issued, transferred and eventually traded on our infrastructure. Benedikt Schuppli, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of FQX Executive Summary FQX is a Zürich, Switzerland-based fintech with great aspirations. They want to digitize company debt and this digital debt to be registered, issued, transferred, and eventually traded on their infrastructure. Promissory notes are known around the financial world. These instruments are fairly standardized. So, if you put this on a blockchain, you have an extremely powerful financing tool. Benedikt Schuppli, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of FQX The Founder This time we interview Benedikt Schuppli (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benedikt-schuppli/), a founder from Switzerland. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of FQX (https://fqx.ch/), a fintech startup from Switzerland offering electronic IOUs. Benedikt is a lawyer by training but took his first job after graduating with a Swiss fintech pioneer named Lykke as Chief Legal Officer. He there realized he wanted to be an entrepreneur and co-founded a smart contract startup called Lexon. The Startup FQX (https://fqx.ch/) is based in Zürich, Switzerland. Promissory notes, a version of IOUs is a stable of company funding in the German speaking area. Now with digitalization they get the ability to become much more widely used and listed on capital markets globally. A single issuance of promissory notes by one issuer is normally between 50-150 million Euros each. According to a recent statistic Q2 2021 alone saw the issuance of promissory notes worth 2,5 bn Euros in Germany, compared to 3,2 bn Euros in Q2 2020. Right now, they have a premium for not being tradable, but this is about to change with FQX. Learn more here: We want digital debt to be registered, issued, transferred and eventually traded on our infrastructure. Benedikt Schuppli, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of FQX Executive Summary FQX is a Zürich, Switzerland-based fintech with great aspirations. They want to digitize company debt and this digital debt to be registered, issued, transferred, and eventually traded on their infrastructure. Promissory notes are known around the financial world. These instruments are fairly standardized. So, if you put this on a blockchain, you have an extremely powerful financing tool. Benedikt Schuppli, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of FQX The Founder This time we interview Benedikt Schuppli (https://www.linkedin.com/in/benedikt-schuppli/), a founder from Switzerland. He is the co-founder and co-CEO of FQX (https://fqx.ch/), a fintech startup from Switzerland offering electronic IOUs. Benedikt is a lawyer by training but took his first job after graduating with a Swiss fintech pioneer named Lykke as Chief Legal Officer. He there realized he wanted to be an entrepreneur and co-founded a smart contract startup called Lexon. The Startup FQX (https://fqx.ch/) is based in Zürich, Switzerland. Promissory notes, a version of IOUs is a stable of company funding in the German speaking area. Now with digitalization they get the ability to become much more widely used and listed on capital markets globally. A single issuance of promissory notes by one issuer is normally between 50-150 million Euros each. According to a recent statistic Q2 2021 alone saw the issuance of promissory notes worth 2,5 bn Euros in Germany, compared to 3,2 bn Euros in Q2 2020. Right now, they have a premium for not being tradable, but this is about to change with FQX. Learn more here: https://medium.com/startuprad-io/fqx-brings-companies-debt-funding-to-the-blockchain-83c8528515a3
Photo: #SriLanka: Disorder with IOUs in the Indo-Pacific. Cleo Paskal @FDD https://www.ft.com/content/297276f6-5f21-4f65-9c8e-33154d00e785 Cleo Paskal FDD, associate Fellow at Chatham House; Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Geopolitics, Manipal University, India; adjunct professor of Global Change, School of Communication and Management Studies, Kochi, India. Non-resident senior Fellow, Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
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