Most people believe they own their stocks, retirement accounts, and even their cash. In reality, the modern economy operates through centralized financial control, legal structures, and institutions most Americans never see.

In this Thursday Deep Dive, Keith Malinak is joined by Justin Haskins to examine how financial ownership quietly shifted away from individuals and toward centralized systems designed to survive crisis. From the Depository Trust Company and property rights to digital currency, CBDCs, and programmable money, this conversation explores how power moves when markets fail and who is protected when stability breaks.

As debt rises, asset inflation accelerates, and digital currencies reshape the financial landscape, the discussion turns to preparation, diversification, and what ownership actually means in an economy built on contracts instead of control.

Episode Chapters

1. 00:00 — The Ownership Assumption
2. 10:01 — How the System Quietly Changed
3. 20:04 — Centralization and the Trade Nobody Noticed
4. 27:35 — When Your Assets Become Collateral
5. 30:39 — The Market Beneath the Market
6. 34:07 — Emergency Powers and Crisis Rules
7. 35:36 — The Man Chosen to Run It All
8. 43:05 — Intelligence, Influence, and Finance
9. 47:07 — Life After the Gold Standard
10. 52:04 — Can Crypto Actually Protect You?
11. 01:00:40 — The Promise and Threat of Digital Money
12. 01:15:11 — Stablecoins, Trust, and Control
13. 01:22:37 — Regulation That Changes Everything
14. 01:30:20 — When the System Finally Breaks
15. 01:38:14 — A Warning From Abroad
16. 01:46:13 — Who Benefits From the Wealth Gap
17. 01:56:48 — Preparing Without Panicking

If the rules of ownership change during a crisis, do you actually control your money, or are you trusting the system to let you keep it?

Much like your financial future, don’t leave your information sources to chance. Follow At The Mic for weekly Thursday Deep Dives.

Guest

Justin T. Haskins

1. Follow on X: https://x.com/JustinTHaskins
2. Book: The Next Big Crash (Available on Amazon)

Connect With At The Mic

1. Website: https://atmshow.com
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Produced by Wes — 2nd Floor Studios

1. https://secondfloorstudios.co

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Hey, hey, welcome to this edition of At the Mic. I am your host, Keith Malinak. Today, we are talking about the economy. What shape is it really in? What lies ahead on the horizon? What's the worst case scenario? As we look ahead, you'll definitely want to hear from my guest coming up here just a moment. He has a lot to say on this subject, and he has a fascinating new book that we're going to get into. All right.

But before we do that, could you please do me one small favor? I'm going to call this the one person project. That's good alliteration, right? So here's what I'm asking. Could you just please share this show, any episode will do, but please share this show with one person in your life. Again, it could be a friend, an enemy, someone in your family. But whether you're watching it now live on X, live on YouTube, later on Rumble,

Spotify, iTunes, you name it. If you could just share this with one another person, I would be so grateful. It would mean a lot. and you know, it helps the show grow as does a five-star rating and a kind review. So keep that in mind as well. I do of course want to thank the awesome folks that get this thing to you. Like Wes, huh? At second floor Dallas on X. And then Gabby at Jeffy Apologist.

That's, I'm sorry, that's Hero West and the great Gabby. Wes, of course, responsible for all the great artwork associated with the program. He makes sure it gets distributed everywhere and Gabby is always putting out those hot clips over on Instagram at The Mike Show where you can follow over there. Tomorrow we will do the Friday live stream, by the way. So I don't think the gang is all going to be here, but I think we're going to get three. We're going to have Hall of Fame numbers. Three out of four, I believe.

will be a part of the live stream 24 hours from now. And then that Wednesday live thing, that's going to start up next week. So wish me luck. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 3 PM Eastern live on X at Keith Malinak. OK, a guy who understands the economy and what the future could very well look like. is Justin Haskins. He is the vice president at the Heartland Institute, senior fellow

for our republic you can follow him on X at Justin T. Haskins he just wrote this awesome book the next big crack I don't know Justin I just said it's an awesome book which it is an awesome read but I'm a little concerned by some of the things that you have in here how you doing man thanks for making time I appreciate it

I'm so excited. I'm so excited to be here with you because honestly, this topic is one of these things where it's really hard to explain and it takes a little bit of time to get it right. And most of the media that I do is, you know, I get five minutes, 10 minutes, 50, you know, so it's tough. It's tough to get into it. So today we're going to do something I think

This is the way it should be done. I'm gonna do it the way it should be done.

Yes, and that's what I told you. said, look, you take all the time you need. This is a deep dive. It's called the Thursday deep dive, not the Thursday cursory glance. And so I want you to take your time. one of the things, and maybe I'll wait on this. want to get to the opening chapter. I'm not sure how much of this I want to read, but it's terrifying as hell.

Yeah, I'm going to read an excerpt here in a second. First, I want you to set it up the way you want to. And whether that's to talk to us and educate us about the Depository Trust Company, take us back to the 70s, wherever you want to begin, Justin. But at some point, don't let me forget, I need to read some of this, at least the opening chapter here to kind of set the stage on what could be on the horizon for us in reality.

Yeah. OK, so I think the best place to start is with the fundamental issue here. Everything kind of flows out of this one fundamental problem. that fundamental problem is that contrary to what the vast majority of people believe, they do not own. No one owns for the most part. Very few people own their investments. So we're talking about securities investments, so stocks.

Bonds, when you think of Wall Street investments, the stuff in your retirement account, 401ks, IRAs, that's what we're talking about. People think that they are the owner of the investment. So when you go and you buy a stock or you buy a bond or whatever, you think that's your stock. You have that share in the company.

I know when I cash those stocks in, I'm the owner because I have to pay capital gains tax on them.

on it. It's very true. But the reality is you don't own them. That's the crazy thing.

That has been the biggest jaw dropper that I've learned from you over the course of not only looking at this book here, but watching your interviews and reading your op-ed at FoxNews.com. mean, that has been, I'm so glad you emphasized that because that's a stunner, man.

Yeah. Yeah. It's absolutely incredible. And when I first heard about this several years ago, I honestly just thought it was nonsense. thought there's no way this is true. So, you know, in my line of work, I think you probably get a little, a little bit, maybe get a lot of this too. I don't know. I get a ton of it probably because I'm associated with that crazy Glenn Beck guy, but I get lots of conspiracy theory type stuff sent to me.

Yes, I used to be Glenn's call screener. know what you're talking about,

So you know. Yeah. And it's like this never ending street. And I'm a lot more accessible than say Glenn is right. So I get all kinds of crazy stuff and most of it is garbage. Right. But so when I first started hearing this, it was from more reputable than average sources, but it still seemed too crazy to be true. But the reality is that over several decades, what I

the only way of really accurately describing it is it's a conspiracy occurred to take away people's right, their property rights, their direct ownership of their securities investments. All of those investments ended up being owned by one singular institution called the Depository Trust Company, which is still the owner, the direct registered owner, sort of, we can get into the details of that, but they're sort of the direct registered owner of

basically all stock and bonds and other securities investments. And this was done by major institutions and perhaps other shadowy figures working with them in order to make lots of money and create a system where it would be easy to do things sort of riskier kinds of investments like stock lending and shorting and options trading and all this other stuff.

All of that stuff is made possible at the scale it's at today because they centralize the ownership of securities in one institution. And so people think they own these things. They have account statements with their name tied to securities investments and retirement funds and all that. But the reality is what you, the average person owns is not the actual stock. What you own is a contract.

that's related to the stock so that when the stock goes up or down, you're able to make money. You have rights as it relates to the contract. You can obviously sell basically the contract in essence, the rights that you have to the underlying investments. You can do a lot of things and there's all sorts of regulations tied to it. And there's, know, the state government regulates it, the federal government regulates it, the Fed regulates it. There's all kinds of

people who are trying to make sure that you know, don't get totally screwed by these big financial institutions because of this arrangement. But as I point out in the book, there are some really serious flaws built into the system that puts everybody at risk as a result of the fact that you are not the direct registered owner of these investments.

Honestly, as you write about the DTC, the Depository Trust Company, I kept thinking to myself, this sounds like one of these entities buried in our government that Ayn Rand would have written about in a fiction sense, an Atlas shrugged. Almost like, hey, it could be this bad, guys.

Hell it is. I mean, as I'm reading that, just didn't even seem real, man. They outsmarted us.

So, yeah, so I'll tell you, this has been, so it took me years to put the work together for this book. I've been working on it variety of different ways. My concerns have sort of ebbed and flowed as I've gone along in the process. And for a while there, I really wasn't entirely sure how bad things were. I knew there might be, I knew it was bad, but I didn't know how bad. the place that I've sort of settled in,

is this really disturbing area of just feeling like the system is so complicated and so full of stuff like this, probably, my guess is, that we've never heard of and we never will hear of it. And that really, can we even unwind all of this? And it's been kind of a depressing sort of thing.

That's one of the things I wanted to ask you. I wanted to ask you, was there ever a moment in doing the research for this book or when you were in middle of writing it, or maybe this occurred before you put pen to paper, but was there ever a moment where maybe you're laying in bed at night and going, my gosh, man, this is actually this insane. It's actually this bad. Was there ever that?

Aha moment that clicked where you said, holy crap, it's real.

Yeah, and there were moments just like the one that you're describing. There were other moments too where I remember, know, money talks, right? You know you believe something when you are spending money, you know, it affects the way you spend money, right? And I can tell you, one of the moments I realized, okay, I really do, I really am.

genuinely concerned about this. And this isn't just something that I'm coming up with because it's an interesting idea was when I have, I've made very concerted efforts to say, you know what, we're not putting all of our money in the stock market. We're not putting even most of our money in the stock market. Right. And why is that? Because I know that when I buy stock and when I put money in my 401k, it isn't really my property that I'm getting at the end of that.

And because of all of these rules and regulations that base that could, that could don't necessarily have to, but could someday be used to undermine my property and even potentially take it away from me. Even if I do nothing wrong personally, I I'm, you know, we'll get into the, how that all works in a second, but that that's the moment where I said, I can't, I can't put my family at risk by doing that. And then what kind of person am I?

If I'm doing that and then I'm not telling people about it, right? You know, so that moment absolutely happened for me. like I said, it's been a wild, wild ride. And once I started learning about who the characters were involved in the creation of this whole system too, that was the other thing that just, something really bad happened here.

Yeah, and I think that's very important to explain and I want you to take us back to the beginning because it's one thing to just say, hey, it sucks and here's why. I really like to get to the heart of it. Let's go back decades, man. I want you to take us to the very beginning and I'm looking for the guy's name, the one guy in particular. Thank you, Denser. Yeah, I mean,

William Densers.

And he lived a long time, right? mean, he was.

You died during COVID, actually. I remember right, yeah.

This guy has seen this evil genius. Tell us about this guy. Why is he important to this story?

Yeah, so the whole thing begins back. The whole story of William Denser. William Denser was the very first head of the depository trust company. He was the guy that all these big financial institutions, when they decided they wanted to centralize direct ownership of investments, they went to, they picked this guy to lead the new institution they were building, the DTC, to house all of these things.

And what year are we talking about?

This is in the early 1970s. 1973 is when it officially launched and they approached.

So basically, just gathering all of us under one umbrella.

Yes. So prior to that period in time, and there were all sorts of pilot projects and things that they did before they launched DTC that were very similar. But prior to that period of time, the vast majority of people directly owned their stocks and bonds and other securities investments. So if you bought a stock, there might be people who are watching the show right now who remember this. If you bought a stock, you would often get a paper certificate with your name on it.

And the corporation or someone else intermediary would actually have a registry with how of how many shares specific people owned. So they knew how many shares each individual person owned. You would have the paper certificates. You would lock them away and safety deposit boxes or in safes or things like that, because if they were stolen, then that would create all kinds of problems. And that was that was the way it worked. You actually owned that.

investment when you bought it. The problem with that system is it was really heavy on paperwork.

And there's always an excuse that people can go, that makes sense why we wouldn't want all this paper out there. But there's always this insidious underbelly that's the real motivation in all of this kind of.

became really time intensive and expensive. And the transfer time was really crazy because think about it, you got to buy and sell stuff that involves paperwork, you know, and that involves, and we're talking about in the seventies, we don't have the internet, you know, we don't have any of that stuff. So cell phones, all that. So this was a really complicated time to do this. So it was expensive and they were having problems and they had a couple of crises where the markets I think may have even temporarily shut down and stuff like that. Cause they just couldn't handle the volume.

So they were having issues. So what they decided to do was there's a lot of ways that you could have dealt with this problem. But what they decided to do was deal with the problem in a way that benefited them to the maximum amount, right? And that was to centralize the ownership of all the investments into one place. That way, when you buy and sell or do other kinds of activities on Wall Street, all you're really doing is moving things around on paper because one institution owns it.

So now you're just moving things around on paper to determine who has a share in what. And it called a book ledger system. And that is a really simple way of solving that problem. But the issues that come with it is if one institution is the owner of all of these securities investments, then you as the individual no longer have your property rights to the extent that you do with.

other things in your life, like your car or your house or, you know, the cash in your wallet or whatever. So they made that trade off very deliberately knowing that they would benefit immensely from that, not only because volume would go up, but also because then they could start doing things much easier, scaling up activities like stock lending and options trading derivatives, futures markets.

shorting and alonging and all of that stuff margins, margin accounts, like all of that kind of stuff that is a huge part of Wall Street now was not really possible at a high level in that period of time. And now it is because all of that activity is happening basically on paper in one institution. So

So who made this possible? Surely there was a law that passed that our elected representatives made sure to hand over our sovereignty basically to our own property, right?

Yeah. So big institutions decided this is what the move they wanted to make. And they, we'll get, we'll circle back to William denser. I promise. He's a part of the story, but no, no, it's me. That's, that's doing that. But the, but basically a big institutions decided that they were going to do this. But the problem that they had legally was they're all the whole legal system at the state level and the federal level was built around the idea that when you buy securities investments,

Taking you off the path.

you are really the owner of it and paper is the thing that needs to be traded around it. So they had to go to the states, they had lobbyists and so quote unquote legal experts working with the lobbyists for banks and for Wall Street firms go to all 50 states and change something called the uniform commercial code. The uniform commercial code is a state law governing commercial activity. It is super, super boring and difficult to read and massive.

That's all they

That's how they do it. They went to all 50 states and they basically told the lawmakers, look, we need to solve this crisis. We have a solution. Trust the experts just passed this law. And the state lawmakers who are for the most part, and this is true today as well, just as much as it was back then, a lot of state lawmakers are sort of regular people. They don't have gigantic staffs and things like that. And a lot of states, they don't have any staff.

And so when the experts come to them and say, you got to do this or else the people in your state are not going to be able to invest in the stock market in the same way other people can in other states. Most of the lawmakers just said, okay, well, the experts are telling us to do this. I don't understand how this stuff works. So sure, let's do it. And that's pretty much how it happened. It took, took several years for them to get all the States to agree to do it, but

Once they reached, once they got the really big ones, they fully launched the project and that kind of forced the smaller states to go along with it. And states have been basically amending that code for decades ever since, changing the rules little by little by little, often in ways to benefit these big institutions for the same exact reasons. They just don't know what they're doing.

And they're told by the quote unquote experts, if you don't do this, it'll break some part of the stock market. And so you got to listen to us. And that's all the way up to the current era. That that kind of thing has been going on.

Yeah, that guy who was named for whatever reason escapes me constantly here. Private property rights. mean, that is a tenant of the United States of America. But now here's what I'm doing right now. Right now, I'm going to check this. am down to just two companies that I own stock in. OK, let me just check. As soon as they hit a profit, I'm out because this is terrifying, man. I keep digging that hole. I'm a bad gambler, bro.

I hate this!

Anyway, so is there any property rights? We talk about paying property taxes in all 50 states, so we never really own that property. Obviously, if you don't, I mean, we could get in the hole, everything is going to apply to cars, everything. But but

Please, Justin.

We don't even own our stocks. That's not even our private property.

No, no, you, you. So, you know, I was very involved in the anti great reset movement and the big one of the more terrifying elements of that was the whole you'll own nothing in the future, you'll own nothing and you'll be happy. Right. And that was that the truth is you already almost own nothing.

And you'll be happy.

It's a lie. It's factual and it's terrifying and it's depressing. Sorry.

I mean, a lie.

Yeah, no, that's 100 % right. And all of this stuff was happening kind of around the same. So cash is another thing. I mean, this has nothing to do with DTC or anything like that. Most people don't understand this. When you put your cash in the bank, you don't own that cash anymore. Bro.

Bro, I seriously, I was gonna bring this up specifically. I didn't have a chance to talk to you ahead of time about this, but I listened to the Tucker Carlson podcast with Yannick Schrade last week, and he got into this as well, just like you have the knowledge. And it's just when you hear that said and reinforced by multiple places, you're like, holy crap, that's real.

Yes, it is. And it's crazy. And so what happens is they build these systems where they take away your ownership rights. And then what they do is they say, yeah, but don't worry about it. Everything's fine because we've built in all these regulations and rules and safety precautions and

We've built these giant bureaucracies that are regulating the heck out of all these financial institutions. And so you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, you don't own your cash. Yeah, you don't own your stocks. Yeah, that's most of the wealth that exists in the world, but that's okay because we've got all these regulations that say the things you do own, which are these contracts that are related to all this stuff, you know, that's going to protect you from really losing access to your wealth. So we get the best of both worlds. get the benefits of having

centralized ownership and we also get all these protections for individuals. And the reason why we haven't had like some cat, the reason most people have never heard of any of this is because for the most part, we haven't had widespread catastrophic events that caused people to lose their assets, lose their securities investments. And as long as the system hums along, most people in most situations will be totally fine.

And so it really is all about, yeah, but why do they do it this way? Then it's in addition to profiting off of it. They do it. They do it this way because they know they're preparing for an event that may never happen. But if it does happen, then the big institutions will be protected and everybody else will just have to suffer through whatever the consequences of that.

big to fail. And just to clarify on the Yannick trade thing, he was talking about how all your cash is tracked. So even people like me that pay cash wherever they can, those serial numbers, man, they go through the bank every night and it's everything, everything is logged. that is not even with a central bank digital currency, which is something else we have to talk about today. Okay. So

Yes.

I'm going to let you talk, because I swear, I've got 20 questions still.

Okay, so let's let's go back to a couple a couple of things that we need to hit. So the first the first thing is

So why am I so worried about not having the ownership? There are a few reasons why it's so important with just the laws that are already on the books right now. It's not some wild hypothetical situation that I'm concerned about necessarily.

and they built in these special protections for big institutions so that they would, under certain circumstances, have priority, be favored over individual investors. So one of the worst laws that we have on the books right now related to this, this is part of the Uniform Commercial Code already, is if your investment management firm

be off right there.

that you are your broker dealer, the people who are holding, you have your account for your retirement accounts, your stocks, bonds, et cetera, brokerage account. If they, whether they're supposed to or not, because in a lot of situations, they're not supposed to do this, but they've been caught doing it before. they take your securities in a crisis, they would probably only do this in a crisis. They take your securities and they say, I'm going to we need to get a loan. We need financing because we're about to crash.

Okay, so we got to get financing quick. So they go to the bank and they say, give us financing, please. And the bank says, well, things are not looking very good for you. So what are you pledging as collateral in case you can't pay us back for the loan we're giving you? If they were to take your investments and pledge it as collateral in order to get the loan, which again, in a lot of situations, unless you have a margin account, which is like a special

It's sort of a very risky account to have in a lot of ways. People use it for longing and shorting and stuff like that. But if you just have your stocks in a retirement account or you have your stocks in a brokerage account and you're not doing anything like risky on Wall Street, they're not supposed to take your investments and pledge them as collateral. But if they were to do it anyway, then they fail to pay back the loan that they owe the bank.

the bank can take your investments as the collateral in the, part of the bankruptcy and whatever they get priority over your investments, even though they're your investments. That's on the books right now. And the drafters who came up with this and the uniform law commission, these are the people that put together these uniform commercial code laws that they then try to convince lawmakers to adopt. They, one of the drafters, one of the chief people said,

that this was to prepare for quote Armageddon. That's what he said. So they're saying if there's an Armageddon situation and we've got all kinds of chaos happening on Wall Street and we've got institutions failing and they owe money to other institutions and all this stuff, how do we, how do we make sure that these other institutions don't get dragged down with those institutions that are failing the too big to fail institutions? How do we do that? Let's give them priority so that

They'll be the first one made whole.

Our entire economy is built on a pyramid scheme.

Yeah, kinda,

I mean, right. And I guess you could twist it in a way. but it's like you said earlier, you said the state lawmakers in particular are passing these laws. don't understand they have now created this machine. And it feels like it works both ways, because now it's such an entrenched behemoth that that these same lawmakers, essentially, at least the same ilk.

You can't expect them to be able to write the laws to pull us out of this kind of mess.

That's right. It would be, it would destroy the system if they were to just overnight write laws that give you your property rights back. As crazy it is to say that it literally destroy Wall Street if they did that. It couldn't happen. whole derivatives people, know, derivatives are a complicated thing, but the derivatives market, these are, this is like options and futures and, and stuff like that. Though that market.

credit default swaps, all that. That market is gargantuan. It is by one estimate says one quadrillion dollars. That market. One quadrillion dollars. Now how can you have one quadrillion dollars, which is a number so big that people can't even really conceptualize it. We're talking about once we get beyond hundreds of trillions, we get into quadrillions. How can it even be that? Yeah, I don't even know. I can't count that high. But that's, but that.

Crap.

That is the number so big. How could it be so big? The reason it's so big is because of this ownership model that we've been talking about with DTC, this derivatives market has been able to expand rapidly. And basically the way derivatives work, if you think about like a football game, you have a football game, you have two teams, they're playing the game. Then you have people who come and they bet on the game. The bets are kind of like derivatives. They're not the game itself.

they're a bet related to the game, right? So you're gonna bet whether the stock goes up or down, basically, okay? But then you have people betting on the bettors, and then you have people betting on the bettors who are betting on the bettors, and then you have the game. And this gets so complicated and so big, and there's so many different iterations of it going on, you end up with a quote, because it's essentially an infinite number of bets that you can make on one thing, right?

Right?

So the value of what is going on has swelled so much that we've reached a quadrillion dollars. Now, some of that, lot of that quadrillion dollars is stuff that isn't necessarily risky, but a lot of it is risky. And we don't even really know how much of it there is. And all of it's made possible by this system. And then on top of that, to make matters even worse,

Yeah, go ahead.

There's all these emergency powers laws and in the book, the next big crash, we outline all of this. There's all these emergency powers laws that could easily be used to tell these financial institutions, hey, please do to protect yourselves, use other people's investments to bail yourselves out. We're going to take that rule away. We're not going to stop you from doing it anymore. There's emergency powers laws that could do that right now on the books.

And you know, there's, so when the next big crash happens, that's kind of the whole point. We really don't know what they're going to do, but because you don't have direct ownership of the investments, you're at the mercy of whatever the government and these private institutions decide. And that is really the fundamental issue. You don't, you don't have the protection. It's not like your house or like the property you have in your house or anything like that. It's,

It's you don't have that level of property rights. And so they can manipulate the system in all sorts of different ways. And because courts have really not decided a lot of these things, we have no idea what the limits are to it. It could be literally that they just start taking people's assets away in order to prop up other institutions. That could happen. I have no idea. But because it's possible.

That's why I wanted to write the book and get people aware of it. Because I think most people just think, no, that could never happen. That's my property. They could just take it from me.

I mean, there's really nowhere to hide and and and I decided I'm not gonna read an excerpt from the front of this book Here's what I'm gonna challenge everyone to do the next time you're Barnes and Noble or actually she just buy it you shouldn't even go But you should just order it online at Amazon right now, but if you find yourself Looking at this book. I just want you to read just the first few pages Just to kind of get the mindset of what the world could look like If the next big crash happens

because that really sets the stage. if you are intrigued, dear reader, just after reading the first four or five pages, this is the book for you. Justin, okay. Good Lord, man. I don't even know where to go now. I'm terrified. I'm terrified. And I've got some serious questions here as well. Did you want to go into more detail on the DTC?

and any of that other stuff there before I get into my crazy questions for you.

Let's make sure we hit William Denser. So that, yeah, that that guy. So the thing that's so important to me, the reason that I've mentioned it several times before, the reason this was such an important part of this story for me is who you put in charge of an institution tells you a lot about what your motivations are. And in this particular case, this was one of the most the biggest red flags in any research project I've ever been involved in.

that guy. That guy I can't remember.

William Denser is a guy who is a super smart guy, very successful, but he's put in charge of this DTC project in the early 1970s by big financial institutions, Wall Street firms. And the guy was totally and completely unqualified for the job. Yes, always are. And you would think

They always are, man.

with all these big financial institutions, they're building this new thing that really hasn't existed at this scale before. It's gonna transform how Wall Street works. You would think they would put like one of their own in charge of it, but instead they chose this guy who had no experience on Wall Street, no experience working for a clearing house, no experience doing any of this stuff at all. And they put him in charge of this institution. So I started looking into this guy.

And you go back to the job that he had before that job, he was the chief bank regulator of New York, of the whole state of New York, which was a very important job at the time because state regulatory agents were the way a lot of banks were regulated. wasn't primarily from the federal government for a lot of them. And New York has a lot of big banks. So this was a very important regulatory job.

problem with that is, cause you could say, well, all right, well, maybe that's why he's qualified. He was the chief bank regulator. The problem is he was totally unqualified for that position too. He didn't have it for very long and he was totally unqualified for it. And he basically admits that he was just put, he was put into the position even though he had no qualifications for it. Okay. So then what did he do before that? Well, before he was the bank regulator before that, he was on a New York domestic policy commission set up by the governor of New York.

He had no experience doing that either. He had no domestic policy experience. He had never lived in New York before. He had nothing to do with any of that stuff. all of this kept happening very short period of time. We're talking about within a few years, he got all of these promotions until finally he was in charge of one of the most important financial institutions ever as it's being launched. All right. So I looked at this guy and said, there's gotta be more to this. There has to be more to this. So

This goes.

You go all the way back to the beginning of William Denser's time at the very beginning of his career and you work your way forward. And this is how the story roughly looks. All of it's laid out in chapter three of the book. People are interested in the details of it. It's an incredible story. Absolutely incredible. But William Denser starts out as a student activist. He's a progressive guy in the early 1950s we're talking about. He's a progressive, but he's kind of like a Roosevelt progressive. He doesn't like communists, but he, he,

still wants the elites to be in charge of everything. So it's sort of an anti-communist, anti-Soviet union, but progressive student organization, one of the largest in the country. becomes president of this.

That's the only way to get us to for the good of the game. Unless you want to be a commie, then you better support our plan. I'm serious.

So he's the head of this student organization. He's elected president of it. And while he's president, or right around that time, and the story of exactly who set this whole arrangement up, we don't know. But while he's president, he begins getting this infusion of funding from an unnamed source. later on, like two decades later, we find out

I'm just waiting for you to drop this bomb on

No, it's gonna- yeah, before- you know it's coming! Okay, my gosh.

Bro.

Every effing show that talks about the dark corners of America always begins with a single kernel. Drop the bomb, please.

Yes, so the mysterious funder was the CIA. What? Yes. Who couldn't have?

If anybody's watched this show for any amount of time, they knew this is where we were gonna land. Crap!

Now this is not some crazy like conspiracy this is well documented anybody can look this up it's called the National Student Association is the name of the group just so happens to be the acronym NSA that's a coincidence. So this National Student Group National Student Association was receiving funding secretly from the CIA in the late 1960s this story broke with the public and it was a big scandal at the time but nobody knew about it all the way until the late 60s.

Now, this is illegal. This is an illegal arrangement. The CIA is not supposed to be giving money for domestic operations of any kind, never mind domestic propaganda organizations with students. That's not supposed to be happening. And yet that's what was going on. So what ends up happening is he's the head of this student organization. And then he goes and does this. He goes to Europe for a little while and he's involved in more student activism, but in Europe, anti-communist student activism in Europe.

Nope, we're going to speed you up. You're going to come with us instead.

It's like they didn't have their systems weren't talking to each other back then. They're like, oh, not this guy.

Yep. And so he ends up in the CIA. So now he's a CIA officer. And while he's a CIA officer, it's as I explained in the book, there's all kinds of mysterious things going on. He never talks about what he did as a CIA officer, but we have secondhand accounts from other people talking about how he was still involved with this student organization. And he became part of this whole

secret operation to fund this student organization and make sure that they were doing the things that the CIA wanted them to do. So he probably was still doing that. That was probably his main job. We know that he was helping recruit at the time. A lot of other people who he knew in the National Student Association also joined the CIA. It became a recruiting ground for the CIA.

They were grabbing people and pulling them in. A lot of them ended up becoming very, very high level CIA people in the future, like number two to the CIA type of people. So really crazy how they use this as a recruiting pool.

William Dinser, mean that is shame on me for his name constantly slipping my mind because that's one of those way way under the radar Names in American history that you bring forth very vividly in the book the next big crash in in surprise if it sounds like USAID it's because he was involved in that too. Yeah, there's so much information in

Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. So he leaves the CIA and he goes and works for the Kennedy administration. When Kennedy becomes president, leaves the CIA, goes and works for him. And his first, one of his first jobs there is to help set up USAID, which was at a Kennedy project. And so he goes into the state department, he sets up USAID. He's one of his primary jobs there. He's not the head of it, but he's

responsible for hiring the top 20 positions. This is according to him, the top 20 positions at USAID. So he was a top guy. Now think about that. That in and of itself is pretty amazing because basically this guy had no experience doing like domestic or a foreign, you know, development or international aid. He, but he's in charge of hiring all the people for it. And he was from the CIA. Well, why would they, why would they pick a CIA guy to do that job? Right. So,

He ends up working in the State Department and while he's in the State Department, I've got all the documents in the book, chapter three of the book.

Yeah, that's by the way, a lot of cross references here. I mean, you do a great job of that. Thank you. And I mean, you're excellent at that in all your writings. But here's my question. At what point in writing this book in when William Densers USAID connection, when that revealed itself, where was the news cycle? Like, want to know, where did it, the, see what I'm saying? Like, when we started talking about USAID and Doge,

Where were you in the writing of the book and unveiling that information?

Yeah. So when I learned about USAID, that was right around the same time as that becoming a huge topic. knew about the CIA stuff, but I didn't know about the USAID thing. That happened later on. And it was just amazing how it lined up perfectly. Because most people don't talk about USAID prior to Trump being president. Right. So it was incredible that the timing worked out. And so he ends up in the State Department.

And after he's kind of, he moves in and out of USAID, he's doing other things in the State Department. A lot of it is in South America, where he's helping basically prop up foreign regimes and get certain candidates elected and all sorts of other things and using aid as a tool to manipulate politics in South America.

Welcome to the CIA. CIA 101, South American Bride.

Yep. And we've got all the, I've got all the documents in the books. People can see, you know, with their own eyes, the kinds of stuff he was involved in. Obviously we don't know all of it. We just know we have little snapshots of it, but it all ends up leading to this incredible moment where he's put in charge of USAID in Peru. He moves his whole family to Peru. He's got kids and a wife and all this stuff. He moves them to Peru, to Lima, and they're living in Peru and he's the main guy there, I think for several years.

So he's in Peru and at the time they've got a guy who's fairly pro-American anti-communist. But the main thing they're worried about the Americans is they've got this really profitable oil field in Peru at the time. And it's controlled by an American company called the International Petroleum Company. And this is a big political scandal in Peru. A lot of regular people don't like this.

There's a lot of people in politics who are using this to get ahead. The sort of socialist communist anti-American types are getting a lot of getting a lot of political points for being in opposition to this because they're saying the Americans are over here raping our lands and taking our oil and we don't get enough money in return for it. And they're all mad about it. Right. And so it's a big scandal. And one of the goals.

And William Denser's mission here is a failure for the most part. The Americans do not protect the oil field. It ends up getting taken away. His very next big job that he has, he had like a very small stop in Washington, but he ends up in New York very quickly after that to this New York Economic Domestic Policy Commission that I was mentioning earlier. The reason this is all kind of related and important is that commission is set up by the governor of New York and

the oil company was a sub in Peru that he was trying to protect was a subsidiary of another larger oil company called Standard Oil. Standard Oil was the big Rockefeller family oil company. When he goes to New York, who is the person that sets up the economic commission and then makes William Denser the chief bank regulator of New York? And then he ends up being from that

the head of DTC, the biggest financial institution, one of the biggest ever created, it was Nelson Rockefeller, a Rockefeller. So I don't think that that's a coincidence. I think that it seems like the Rockefeller family, for whatever reason, or people tied to it, wanted him in New York running this project and they used this

And they knew they could trust him. They knew they could like, they liked him because what was he doing? He spent years trying to help this Rockefeller oil company. Now, again, this is speculation, right? I'm guessing some of this, but that seems to be at least at face value, something like that was going on. And that's how we ended up with the job, I think.

It's almost like the conspiracy theorists have been right yet again.

Yeah. And, and, just as an aside, cause this is also really important. At the same time that this DTC project is launching, William Densers in New York now, they're, they're creating this centralized ownership of, of stock and other securities investments, bonds, et cetera. Something else really important is also happening that the Rockefellers are one of the chief people pushing and they're the people who are tied to them.

David was the head of Chase Manhattan Bank in New York at the time that all of this was going on. So you had the governor of New York, the most important bank, which was the wealthiest bank, I believe, in America at the time. So the most important banker, the governor of New York, they bring this guy in, they set this whole system up, they get America off of the gold standard. They're allied closely with Richard Nixon, who's president at the time, convincing him to do all of this stuff.

And the entire financial system is completely transformed in a very short period of time. And it's the same people doing it. And you got to believe that whoever this was around the Rockefellers or the Rockefellers themselves or whatever, that this was all part of one plan to transform the system, centralize ownership and control of wealth. And they picked a CIA guy either because

They trusted him. They knew he could keep a secret. He helped them and sell them out. Or maybe because the CIA was also involved in all of it. And we don't know for sure, but there are reasons to think maybe that is the case.

Aha!

And I've never really taken a lot of time at all, quite frankly, if I'm going to be completely honest, to explore this theory. And I wonder if there's someone out there who has and maybe has hard numbers. But part of my thinking has always been, yes, Jimmy Carter was inept in the presidency. Yes, Jimmy Carter should have stayed on a peanut farm in Georgia and didn't know what he was doing. It was an inept four years in the presidency.

But one of the things I've always thought in the back of my mind is I wonder how getting off the gold standard in that maybe there was a shock to the system that really caused that inflation to get out of hand so quickly there during his presidency. Again, I've never taken time to explore it. Maybe there's a book about it or a guest somebody could lead me to at themikeshow.com. Sounds like my dogs are busy emailing me right now if you can hear them. But I just.

There are no coincidences, Justin, and you know this better than anyone.

Yeah, there aren't. And especially not at this level with the kinds of people who were involved. We also know that another guy named Eugene Black, who was the former head of the World Bank, was involved in a lot of these things at the same time. New William Denzer really well worked in the same commission. So, you know, there's no question that these people were all making a lot of these decisions and they were doing it for a reason and it benefited them personally. There's no question that that was going on.

And that happened with the gold standard being eliminated effectively. And so I've got this one statistic in the book that's just absolutely incredible. I walk through the increase in debt that's occurred in American history. And one of the things you see is when we get rid of the gold standard, that's when things go absolutely bonkers crazy.

And we've never looked back. It's just gotten exponentially worse and worse and worse and worse and worse, whether it's a Republican or Democrat, doesn't matter. It just keeps getting worse. So this statistic is in the book. It's this is mind blowing statistic. So in the in the United States, first 150 years, 150 years of America, the federal government added twenty point six billion dollars in debt in the century since then, it has added thirty seven trillion dollars in debt.

when that sounds really bad, but then this is the key point. That means the U S government now adds more debt every four days than it added in the first 150 years. Okay. So we spend, this isn't spending, this is debt. So we add more debt than the government amassed every four days than the government amassed in 150 years. That's where we're at. That's how out of control this whole thing has come. And it's,

And then on top of it, have a quill, a quadrillion dollar, you know, derivatives complex and gigantic bubbles in the stock market and things that make no sense. Housing prices skyrocketing. All of that is from these problems that we're talking about here. Yeah.

Yeah, and again, man, I thought two hours is gonna be plenty, but I got so many questions. mean, for example, okay, you and I both are very familiar with Glenn Beck and so most of the audience here, if not all. And one of the things he's always preached is get out of the system, right? Get out of the system, get out of the What's that look like? And I think that the most...

Obviously isn't the word, but maybe what appeared to maybe be the answer to that in recent years was Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Like, oh my gosh, hey, that's, mean, that is outside of the system. Here we are. But Justin, it seems like there's a little bit of problem here lately with Bitcoin in particular.

And there are multiple theories out there as to why it has crashed so hard in recent weeks. But do you have any thoughts on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? And is that going to be our way out of this mess? Because so far, looks like... I don't want to... If I say this, this is going to blow up in my face. It looks like the government's kind of out of that realm, but not really, is it? No.

Anyway, help me out here. Is Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, are they the answer to survive the next big crash?

So I think that, you know, in chapter five of the book, I talk about the things that I've done to try to deal with all of these things that I've learned. And one of the big things that I talk about in the book is you want extreme levels of diversification way beyond what most people typically do.

And so what I like to do is I like to have investments in all kinds of different things, including crypto currencies and not just Bitcoin, like some of the so-called alt coins and Ethereum and stuff like that. I like to have investments in that. I like to have investments in physical metals and stuff. I like to have investments in some investments in securities. I like to have cash. like to have, you know, all kinds. I invest in

like kind of like a Glenn Beck thing. I've got old books signed by presidents, you know, because that's the kind of thing that I think maximum diversification is the best protection for some of the problems we're talking about here. The worst thing you can do is just put all your eggs in one basket. Okay. So with that said, I think there are a lot of promising things about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. And although it's been

crashing really hard lately. Bitcoin and crypto is very cyclical. And if you look at sort of the long term, you zoom out, you look at the long term trend, it's still way, way, way, way, way up. mean, you know, so, and it has continued to go up pretty consistently with gigantic dips, but continuing to rise. And that's been something that's gone on for a long time. And the reason for that is precisely because there are a lot of people who do not trust the currency.

system that we have know that it's on the road to destruction in one form or another. And that as we continue to spend more money, alternative places to invest and alternative places to markets and methods for transacting are going to become more popular. So I think cryptocurrency is part of that puzzle. And I think that the more recent trouble that it's had is

somewhat part of the cyclical nature of these cryptocurrencies. There are reasons to be worried about it long term that have to do with like quantum computers and AI and yeah.

I want you to, that was very interesting. I want you to address that. But first I want to just throw this out there. One of the things that I was reading that made me maybe a little bit uneasy about my own cryptocurrency investments was that the thing that we really were rooting for, kind of mainstreaming it and making sure that businesses adopted Bitcoin and brought it into their ETFs and really made it kind of a legitimized form of investment.

It's almost like the thing that I was reading. It's actually become its Achilles because now people can, I guess, bet against it. Kind of what you were saying earlier. Now people can, I don't know if the word was short, Bitcoin, but it was, I forgot how, what they were talking about. So I mean, that's like, oh my gosh, we got it mainstream the way we wanted to, and that's actually ended up biting us. But speak to us about the AI aspect because I think that's fascinating.

Because that's something that five, even three, two years ago, nobody was even thinking too much about AI as far as what it might do to our economies, really.

Right. So the value of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is largely built on this unblocked. It's built. It's because of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology is a decentralized system for basically transacting, sometimes creating new tokens or currency and other things.

But the idea behind it is no one singular institution or entity or person controls any of these different cryptocurrencies because it's built on blockchain. the blockchain, yes, blockchain technology is great because it allows for transact, no other kind of system allows for transactions and financial arrangements and things to occur without having some institution.

usually just one or whatever, verify everything that's going on. The system is built so that all that it's verified. Everything that's going on is verified using a decentralized network of lots of people that only have like one little piece of the process. And that piece is often really tiny. And because of that, no one can manipulate or control it. And you can't really hack it because of cryptography, because of the math behind it. It's just really hard to do that.

So the whole thing is built on that. The problem long-term is as computing power gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and quantum computers are currently thought to be sort of the most powerful computers that have been built and they're building even more complex ones in the future, but as computing power increases and then artificial intelligence uses increasingly more computing power,

Will you get to a point where AI can basically hack crypto and make it so that it really isn't a good investment anymore? The whole system would fall apart if people lost trust in it, if someone could hack into it. You'd have to have really powerful computers to do that, but like governments would probably have the ability to do that if they could. So it's also possible though that you could use this computing power to build

decentralized networks that are so powerful that you maybe can't hack it. But the point is we just don't know. So you don't want to put all your eggs in that basket because we don't know what's going to happen with it, I think is part of the problem.

I'm into Bitcoin. I'm into cryptocurrencies and I saw that. Maybe I shouldn't say that as past tense. I see that as a way out, a way away from the system. But one digital aspect that is absolutely terrifying that we've talked about multiple times on this program is the central bank digital currency, the CBDC. And I brought a little bit of a

a teacher's aid to this discussion. And it is an executive order that was signed on January 23rd, 2025 by President Trump. I read through it, and it makes it seem like, OK, I think we're good. But really, we're only good until possibly January 2029. You've got to get this stuff codified, man. Stop with the executive orders. But I read through this.

I mean, and it looks like, OK, well, we're safe for a couple of more years at least. But I don't like living election to election. What's your take on the CBDCs? And that's the thing. Not only does your book terrify me with the possibility of how they're going to take the next crash and then what would come after that in this realm, but you do also

talk about how to prepare. thank you for giving us both aspects of that as you read through the book, a worst case scenario, take us through what a CBDC is and, and what could be coming down the pike if we're not careful.

Right. So CBECs are kind of the short to medium term, I think the greatest threat to people's liberty that there is.

So then that system that you just described for half an hour plus, as terrifying as that was, the central bank digital currency is infinitesimally worse.

Yes. And the reason for that is because a central bank digital currency is not a digital version of your existing currency. It's a new currency. They'll probably, if they ever get it in the United States, they'll probably call it a dollar, but it's not the same currency at all. It's a different currency. And the thing that makes it really terrifying is programmability. And what I mean by that is if

You have a central bank digital currency. could theoretically build it on blockchain and make it decentralized and all of that, but they're not going to do that. No, every, every central bank there. So let's just start by saying the vast majority of central banks in the world today are working on a central bank digital currency system. Okay. Of some kind. Some of them are further along than others, but the European central bank, bank of China, they already have one.

Government would never allow that.

the United States Federal Reserve Bank, all of these banks have pilot projects, they have designs, they have conferences, they have experts working on it. So this is something that they're preparing to do in the future. And some countries have already started rolling these out. So what I mean by programmability is a central bank digital currency is a digital currency that can be programmed in such a way that it could be controlled. You could control how people spend it.

You could control how much could be spent in a given day by a specific person. You could control, I mean, really the possibilities are endless, right? You could tie specific interest rates for saving it, or you could penalize people for saving too much of it. You could create as much as you want of it with a push of a button. You could destroy it with a push of a button. You could do almost anything you want with it.

And what the Chinese have done in their pilot projects is they've taken central bank digital currencies and things related to that. And they've tied it to social credit scores, which is kind of like an individualized ESG score where good citizens get high scores, bad citizens get low scores. You you caught breaking the law or whatever, you get a lower score and that's all tied to your use of money. And that that's something that's

that's been talked about in China for a long time. They haven't totally rolled out that whole system, but it's the ultimate control of what people can do. and we know that they, even in the United States and Europe, we know that there's at least some of that being discussed because we've got them on record, including the Biden administration. He had an executive order Biden did related to central bank, digital currencies and digital assets. And in it, they talk about how

control.

in the order and in the documents accompanying it and interviews they did related to it, how it's going to be inclusive and how they've been working with stakeholders, including all these different labor unions and environmental groups. It's going to be an environmentally friendly currency and it's going to be sustainable and help improve diversity, equity and inclusion. Like that's the kind of stuff they talk about.

Well, how does it do that unless you're building rules into it that only allow you to do it, use it in certain ways, right?

They were, think, very clearly they had planned to, before Biden was done, fully implement a CBDC. And I think what ended up happening was... Yeah, this is a really interesting story. We're following it really closely at the time because I was working with, I wrote a book called Dark Future with Glenn Beck, we talk a lot about CBDCs in the book, Dark Future. It's all about...

emerging technologies and how they could be manipulated and used by powerful figures to control people. That was what the book was about. And in the book, so we were following this stuff really closely. So at one point Biden issues this executive order and says, I want every bunch of the agencies, the federal agencies to produce reports talking about,

what a CBDC should look like, the good things about it, the bad things about it. What, how do you want it designed? Like all of this stuff. And he ordered them to do it in a fairly short period of time. It was like six months or something like that. Don't quote me on that, but something like that. And so he had all these different requirements for these agencies. They produced all these agencies produced reports. Well, one of the people who was in charge of producing a report, one of the agencies,

I want to say it was the Department of Justice, but it could have been a different one, but I'm pretty sure it was Department of Justice. And one of the things they were supposed to do was produce a report that said whether it was legal for the Biden administration to launch or the Fed to launch a CBDC without an act from Congress. So they were trying to find out, do we have the right to just create this thing or do we have to get a law passed?

And of course they wanted to just create it. They don't want to have to pass a law because they would never have been able to pull that off in Congress at the time. they have the, again, I think it was the attorney general was responsible for producing this, an official sort of recommendation saying whether they could do this or not. All of the reports are created and released to the public, but curiously the person in charge of determining whether it was legal or not.

never publicly releases the report, even though they make it. And we even have records from people in Congress saying, hey, you were supposed to release this report. I can't remember which senators and congressmen did it, but they sent letters saying, we want to see it, show us the report. Because they highly suspected that the report's conclusion was, you can't do it. But they didn't want to say that out loud because then they could never do it, right?

So they just never released it. They ignored the congressional requirement for it, Congress's demands to see the report, and they just never released it. And the whole project kind of fizzled away as a result of this. So I think they were shelving it until a second term came along, and then the plan was to release it then. But of course, the second term never came, and then Trump comes in and kills the whole thing. Now, all of that is good, but...

The Trump administration has done some stuff on this, which we can get to in a minute, that I think is really bad, not related to CBDCs specifically, but other versions of it. And I think that is really a big, big problem, sort of no matter who becomes president after this current term.

Well, hit us with it if you want to. I'd like to hear what some bad things in the CBDC realm from Trump.

Okay, so you mentioned earlier that Trump puts out this executive order, basically saying, CBDCs are dead, don't even try to do it. Congress has basically come out and said, CBDCs are never gonna happen, we'll never pass it. The Fed doesn't have the right to produce a CBDC. Even Jerome Powell, if I remember right, said, yeah, we can't do a CBDC without Congress. So even he has said that. so CBDCs don't, they're not looking good right now. Until we get lots of Democrats in office,

That's not going to happen, right? And they would probably need a lot in order to make that happen. So what Trump did instead, because they didn't want to say, okay, well, let's just keep everything the way it is now. What they decided to do was promote heavily something called stable coins. Now a stable coin is a kind of cryptocurrency, it's so it's built on blockchain technology. It's not controlled by the government.

It's not controlled by a central bank, although it could be, but it's not in America. A stable coin is a blockchain based digital currency that is pegged to a stable asset or a stable currency. And in this case, what I'm talking about are dollars. So if you want to buy and sell in dollars without actually using physical dollars or even

dollars in from your bank account, you can do that through these stable coins. these, so these stable coins act like a digital currency, but they're not controlled by the fed or by the government. All right. So the two biggest ones in America right now are something called tether and USDC. These are the two big stable coins right now. And a lot of people who, who are heavily invested in crypto, they like to use these things on exchanges because you don't have to convert into cash.

in order to do transactions, you can just sell your Bitcoin and get it in USDC coin and then use USDC coin to buy other cryptos and you never go into cash in the process. And there's reasons why that's advantageous tax wise and other things. The other thing that's good about it is because it's a cryptocurrency, it doesn't operate in the banking system the way currencies do. So you can sell it, you can transfer it to people.

24 hours a day, seven days a week, instantaneously. So if I want to give you Keith, I want to give you a hundred dollars, I can send you a hundred dollars in USDC coin right now. You'll get it right now. Like almost instantaneously. We don't have to go through some kind of banking system in order to do that. All right. So there's all sorts of advantages to having stable coins. The disadvantage to stable coins, cause they've been around for a long time is that they don't, they're not, they're not really regulated and they're not really, so you know, it's a little risky.

there's companies that sort of control the stable coins and you're just kind of trusting that the company that says, okay, Keith's got a hundred USDC coin that they've got a hundred dollars somewhere backing up that 100 USDC coin one to one. You're kind of just trusting them. And so there's always been that kind of a market force that says, I don't know if I trust that it's not as safe as banking. Right? So

what the Trump administration did was they came in and they said, okay, we're not going to have a CBDC that's dead in the water, but the world is moving towards digital currencies and the existing system that we have now is going to be outdated and everybody knows it. So how do we get the best of both worlds? How do we get digital currencies that you can send to people across the world 24 hours a day, seven days a week for almost no fees at all without having to go through the banking system and all of that. but

also not have it controlled by the government and it's programmable and they can see everything you're doing and control what you're doing. How about we just promote this stable coin thing? Maybe stable coins is the answer. So they passed this thing called the genius act and the genius act. What it did was put the government stamp of approval on certain stable coins by regulating them and telling these stable coin companies issuers

we're going to, we're going to make sure that you have one to one for every one of your USDC coin or whatever. You've got $1 somewhere sitting in reserve that way. We know for sure we we're, we're, we're telling the consumer, we're making sure that they're, that they're doing the right things. So by all means buy USDC coin, because if you buy USDC coin, we it's good for a dollar. We know they've got the dollar. We're regulating it.

and so what it has in essence done is made USDC coin to institutions and, other, similar kinds of stable coins much more attractive because now if you're a big institution, you're saying to yourself, I can actually trust this thing because the government is regulating it and they're making sure that nothing crazy is going on. Now,

What's wrong with that? It sounds like a pretty good thing. Like this is the free market and like there's all these advantages to this new technology. And if the government's going to make sure that people aren't going to get screwed, then that's, guess what the government should be doing. Everything looks pretty good. The problem with it is twofold. One is there's a corrupt element to all of this, I'll get to in a second. And the other thing is that the companies that are the people behind the most popular stable coins,

Right?

are not at all trustworthy. And it's a lot of the same great reset people, ESG people, BlackRock is heavily invested in this. I think they do realize this and I think that they're doing it anyway. And because the benefits I think from their view outweigh the risks. And I think they've made a lot of decisions economically with that same sort of mindset.

administration not realize this?

This is good for the economy. It's good for economic development. It's the future of currency. And in, and if this thing really takes off, then we don't need a CBDC because we already have all these digital currencies floating around. But do I want BlackRock? Do I feel more comfortable with BlackRock in charge of it? No, no, I don't. And when, when the next Democrat president comes in and they're the ones talking to BlackRock behind the scenes saying,

Here's how you need to make sure you design the rules so that stable coins are good. What are they going to tell them? They're not going to tell them what the Trump administration is telling them. So there's that's, that's a huge part of the problem. I'm really worried about that.

Yeah, well, that's a great point, man. I hadn't even realized that.

And the corrupt element of it, I'll just get to that real quick too. There's a corrupt element to it. The corrupt element is this. So remember what I said before, one of the main things that the Genius Act did was say, if you're a stable coin company, you've got to have one to one. You issue a stable coin, you got to have a dollar backing it up, right? Well, you don't have to necessarily have a dollar. There's another thing you could have instead of a dollar that will count as a dollar.

And that thing that they said you can have instead of a dollar is a U S treasury note. So if you're a stable coin issuer, you have a choice. You issue a stable coin. You could either have a dollar sitting in reserve or you could have a treasury note sitting in reserve. Which one do you want? A lot of them want a treasury note. And the reason why they want the treasury note is a treasury note pays interest. So if you buy a treasury from the treasury department,

what you're doing is you're giving money to the government and the government is saying, okay, we'll pay you back with interest off into the future. So this stable coin system is now helping fund the government because they now have a reason to buy all these U S treasuries and hold the U S treasuries because they'll make money from it in the future. And then the treasury, the government says, this is great because now

we've been having trouble getting people buying treasuries. Nobody wants to invest in us. Now we have this in all these big institutions that have to invest in us, or at least it makes a lot of financial sense for them to do it in order for the stable coin market to work. So this is a win-win from the government's perspective. You get this new non CBDC digital currency floating around in the world. And yeah, sure. Blackrock is like one of the big owners of it, but we'll worry about that later. And we get

people buying treasuries. So we get to go deeper into debt without having to raise interest rates. And so that was why I really, those two things, I'm really opposed to that law. think it's a huge mistake, but I see why they did it. And Republicans and Democrats, by the way, supported the genius act. widespread support. It wasn't just a Trump administration thing or something. It was a law passed by Congress with bipartisan support.

I in preparation for today's conversation. I did print up this article from this is about Robert Kiyosaki, right? The rich dad poor dad guy and in back. I don't know a year or so ago. He said that the biggest crash in history is coming. Does that sound familiar? But he also said and he was talking about the debt and and back then when he when he was writing that article or what have you I think the debt was only

a mere 34 or 35 trillion. Now, what do we have to do? Are we pushing 40 yet? We're somewhere. It's incredible. But he also did say that Bitcoin would hit 350,000 for what that's worth. I'm just telling you, that's Robert Kiyosaki. But you may not need any kind of retirement savings or anything like that, because what is the date on this one here? I don't even see it. I it was just last week. Elon Musk just said that

saving for retirement is pointless in about 10 to 30 years because a squirreling away, there's a quote, don't worry about squirreling money away for retirement in like 10 or 20 years. It won't matter in quote, because we're all going to be, you know, he's, he's got the AI and everything's going to take care of everything for us. We got AI butlers and all that, you know, but the, the CBD, people don't realize if, if, if you say,

I think still to this point, even though it's been on the radar for years now, I think when you say CBDC or central bank digital currency and Croft is the comments, I've been seeing your comments there. And I totally understand that sentiment that you do not trust digital currencies. And I don't blame what you're saying. I'm sorry, cryptocurrencies. But one of the things I want to point out, because he made the point, CBDC sounds like a new recreational drug.

I don't think that people still realize, even if you spell it out for them and say central bank digital currency, what you need to be saying to people is cashless society. No more cash. A grandma's not going to be able to put five bucks in a birthday card anymore. going to be, that transaction is going to be known by the federal authorities and probably international at some point.

But just understand, if you have friends that are just like, ah, look, I do everything digitally anyway, that's fine. But do you want it all to be going through the government's watchful eye? And like you were saying earlier, Justin, governments are already allotting who gets what and how much they can spend and when. And then that clock starts anew. It reminds me that Justin Timberlake, I don't even remember the name of the movie he was in, where I think you had a social credit score, and it was like your life clock.

Remember that? was that?

I don't remember if I know that you're talking about I know

Like you had the number on your wrist or something and like you I think if you did something good for people Like you would get more time on earth or whatever and the worst you were I don't know I forgot is so long ago, but it's like that is

literally what we are on the press. Yes. Yes. And it is very terrifying. And and the reason I put I dedicated a whole chapter of it in this book is because I believe that when the next big crash happens, this will likely be one of the first things they try to do.

Supiso!

people be begging for it man

people be begging for it because, the promise will be if you sign up for this, you get stimulus right away and we don't have to worry about all this other crap. Like it's, it's really more complicated. It's, it's hard for us to give people stimulus through the existing system. That's all cash based and everything. We got to people checks in the mail and we there's fraud and all kinds of problems. If you just sign up for this account, you'll get this digital account and we'll just drop you money into it.

tomorrow, you'll have it tomorrow. Just sign up. And then all of a sudden you'll have this whole new system, this whole new currency system. And people, like you said, will be begging for this system. Crisis is an opportunity. And that's, that's what this is going to be. I really, think it's inevitable. And the fact that, that everybody, all these big central banks all over the world are building out the infrastructure and design for it. And they're contracting with

like MIT and people like that to try to help design it for them. Why are they spending so much time and energy and money on something that hasn't even been passed into law? Hasn't even come close to being passed into law because they know that they got to be ready for the moment that the opportunity strikes. And I think it's a crisis moment. you, you pump this into the system and then all of a sudden the, the, then, then what you do is you tie, this is a Glenn Beck theory I've stolen, but Glenn has told me this many times.

that his theory is you get a CBDC out there in the world. Everybody wants to have it. And then what they do is they say, and by the way, if you want to trade in your dollars for CBDC coin or whatever, we'll give you an extra say 10%. So you give us a dollar, we'll give you a dollar 10 in CBDC coin and everyone will want to do it. They'll be wanting to do it.

And then the inflation will eat that up in five minutes. All right. Okay, so I want to go through some current things that I'm seeing in the economy and get your take on them. But first, I want to ask you, what do think the percentage chance is that we're going to get a... Well, I don't know. I guess I have two questions. What do you think the percentage chance we're going to get a CBDC is?

That's exactly right. Exactly right.

Ever?

100 probably 100 % if ever right but how about in our lifetimes you and I we're such young men

I think it's 100%. I think it's 100%. I was gonna say maybe you could say 99 or 95 or something like that.

lifetimes 100 % if you say sorry

is a possibility that the stable coin could become that and that they may not be able to do it because that's so popular. There's no demand for it, but I don't think so. I think it's probably 95 to a hundred percent somewhere in that range. And if it's not that it'll be the stable coin is the other 5%, you know, as the main thing, heavily regulated stable.

So as the book eloquently lays out there, a big crash would definitely lead to this cashless society. my question to you is, God, I keep having these two questions waiting for you. That's going to happen, you think, regardless of if there's a big crash, correct? OK. So then my question is,

Eventually it will happen.

What do you think is a percentage chance, I'm going to put you on the record here, that we're going to have that big crash, I don't know, in the next five to 10 years, zero to 10 years.

okay. Five to ten years.

Whichever, whichever. I was actually going to say in the next 10 years. Let's just say the next 10 years. This big crash where it just grinds to a halt and then all hell breaks loose.

Okay, so I think that within the next 10 years, I would put it at a really big crash, think 75 % chance. I would say that the only reason I don't say 100 % is because there is this scenario that I've been toying with for a long time, going all the way back to great reset days when I was looking heavily into that.

that I don't know how familiar you are with Japan and sort of what's been happening in Japan over the last 10 to 20 years.

Or more. Population drop off?

Well, population drop off, also just debt, debt in Japan and the currency in Japan and stuff like that is really interesting. Japan has adopted this model that a lot of the pro money printing people here in the United States love. It's a so I don't know if you ever heard of modern monetary theory. Do know anything about modern monetary? Hmm.

Yes I do.

So modern monetary theory is kind of the fancy academic way of saying that we think that if you have a central bank currency, not a digital currency, but just any currency, you have a central bank currency that you control yourself. So like the U S has that, but not all countries do. You can effectively print as much of that money as you want with never, without ever having an inflation problem or a gigantic economic crisis. So long as you,

very carefully control how the money is being spent and where it goes and things like that. Okay. So this is the theory. The one of the masterminds behind this is a woman named Stephanie Kelton. She was the chief economist for the for the Senate Democrats for a while. She was a chief economist, one of the head advisors for Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. So she's she's a huge advocate for this. And I'm I believe that

A big reason why the Biden administration spent so much money right off the bat was because the Democrat party had been totally infected with this idea of modern monetary theory at the time. They were all being told behind the scenes, it's okay. You can really print as much money as you want. It won't cause a problem. Just make sure you can, do it the right way. What's really interesting is the right way, according to Stephanie Kelton and the academics behind this theory is,

one of the golden rules is you don't just take the money and give it to everybody. You don't do that. And that is exactly what the Democrats did when they started printing money. They printed money and they gave everybody stimulus checks. And that was what that happened under during COVID under Trump and the Democrats. That was one of the things they did. They sent everybody stimulus checks, not everybody, but most people, even if they hadn't lost their jobs, they were sending them money. Now that's, you don't do that in their modern monetary theory because

That's how you get inflation, according to their theory. It's not just printing money. It's where does the money go? Right? So, the reason I'm, I'm bringing all of this up is because in Japan, they, one of the big cases that Stephanie Kelton and people like that would present, in their literature that says you can get away with this is Japan. Japan has their own currency and they have been printing money and going into debt at

rates that make the Fed look fiscally responsible. They've been doing this for decades and decades and decades, massive, massive, massive amounts of money printing, and yet they have not had a gigantic economic crash or a gigantic inflation crisis. They've had neither of those things. And even though they've been doing huge amounts of money printing way more than the US has ever done.

They've even gone so far in Japan as at times they've had negative interest rates. So what a negative interest rate means is they're actually paying you money to go into debt. Okay. That's what they have done in Japan. So instead of paying like 1 % interest on a loan, they actually have negative interest. So, so you get paid money. You get, you get like a rebate almost for going into debt. So,

What has happened in Japan though is, so you might say, okay, well, does that mean that all this is fine? As long as we do it the right way, we really can print infinite amounts of money. No, the problem with the Japanese system is what they've done is they printed lots of money and then they've used it to avoid a big economic downturns. They've used it to prop up their companies. They've made sure that the employment rate doesn't go too low, big massive things to prevent crashes.

But the cost of that has been there's no economic growth. So in Japan, they have literally had basically zero GDP growth over like 20 or 30 years. Okay. It's hard for Americans to really relate to no economic growth for decades. And it's because of this, in my opinion, it's also related to their population problem, but it's their population has been declining. It's getting older.

but also they print huge amounts of money. And so the wealth, the quote unquote wealth that they're that's happening in Japan, it isn't real. There's no real wealth growth.

So is that bubble in Japan getting so much bigger that when it does eventually pop, it's going to bring down the entire world?

Well, no, because in Japan, and this is a big disadvantage for the US dollar that the Stephanie Kelton's of the world that I think don't take into account, because Japan isn't a world reserve currency, meaning other countries around the world don't really use the Japanese currency to transact like they do with the dollar. They can kind of get away with it and insulate it in their one country without it causing all these other ripple effects around the world. America can't do that.

So that's one of the reasons why it's really bad for us to do it. If we ever lost our status as being the world reserve currency, which is going to happen, by the way, that could trigger a gigantic depression like scenario in and of itself. So, but what the Japanese have done is it's not really a bubble. What they've done is they, whenever they get into trouble, they print massive amounts of money, they bail everything out, they prevent anything from being bad, from getting too bad.

because they'll just print as much money as they need to to stop that from happening. But the cost of that is all of their quote unquote growth is basically fake. It's all being driven by money printing and not really supply and demand and real wealth. And so they've been able to keep things stable in a sense, but really what's happening is they're declining. It's just happening very slowly in a way that you don't feel the pain of it.

The balloon is losing air slowly.

Exactly. so they're getting poorer and poorer and poorer relative to everyone around them. But it doesn't look like it on paper because they're printing the money to make it looks like things are actually moving along. Okay. But in reality, everyone's getting poor.

Well, I'm going to get to some graphs and stats here I want to pick your brain with and see if you think we're getting poorer here in the United States as well. But first, let me ask you this. It feels like our economy in the US is a house of cards. It feels like, I mean, you laid it out and you lay it out in your book perfectly of how all of this is just this cog on cog in this ridiculous system that we now have set up under our feet.

So I guess my question to you is if we're this, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, so stop me if this doesn't sound accurate. If we're constantly living on the edge of the knife and we're this close to a complete and total disaster, what is preventing us from, why didn't we crash today or yesterday or last week? In other words, is it MacGyver's...

duct tape and bubble gum that's keeping this thing from exploding in our faces for the time being or what's the magic tool here that is keeping this thing afloat.

Yeah. So this is a really good segue from the from from the discussion about Japan. So there is by every metric that you could possibly look at to determine whether a crash is about to happen. We've already passed the sort of warning point in that. OK, you can look at all sorts of different things. You could look at price to earnings ratios and the stock market. You could look at the cost of real estate and how quickly that is.

skyrocketed, you know, basically every measure that you can look at shows we should be about to have a gigantic crash, but that's been the case now for a few years. And so the crash hasn't happened. And the question is, why hasn't there been a crash? Well, there is a theory that maybe we don't get the crash because maybe the

Right!

the signs, the signals that we're seeing that would indicate that things are overheated and are about to crash are really just the, the, like in Japan, lots of money printing that happened. And there was a lot of money printing trillions and trillions of dollars of money printing happened during COVID and immediately after that, that was pumped into the economy, had nowhere to go. It ended up in assets and it's inflated the prices of all these assets. But,

It hasn't created a true bubble. It's just increased the price of everything across the economy in such a way that it's not like a bubble from overheated economic activity. suddenly you're going to have people pulling everything out because they're afraid. It's just everything has gotten more expensive because of the money printing. it's, it isn't going to lead to a crash similar to how Japan really hasn't had.

big crashes, they've just had this agonizing decline in their economic growth relative to their competitors over time. There is a theory that that could be happening in the United States and that we're not going to see that gigantic collapse. We're just going to see this slow decline. Now, under Biden, I think that was a real possibility. But under Trump, we actually have seen GDP growth and some other things.

Maybe that isn't gonna happen and maybe there is a crash headed our way at some point in the future, but at least we're seeing real economic growth while there's growth. So it's a question.

Okay, I don't know West Coast, Northeast looking rough as usual. They're 2.8 to 3.2%. New York City 2.9%. I'll get ready. Get ready for the mom Donnie effect up there. Look at that deflation in the New England states as well. Any thoughts on this map? Is this accurate? Do you think? And is that good? And is it even good news? Just looking at that and inflation, I don't know what the hell I'm looking at there.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think that there are different reasons for why you're seeing inflation and deflation and all these different in these different areas. And some in some of those cases, it's good. And in other cases, it's bad. It depends. It always depends. So, for example, some of the inflation that you see on that map in the Mountain West, in certain parts of the Midwest and certain parts of the South.

is probably being driven by lots of people moving to those areas. And that economic activity is increasing prices. And a lot of people who move to those areas, like say Florida or Georgia, North Carolina, those are people coming from areas where you have really high prices, much higher prices. so they move in. Yeah, exactly. They move into Texas and they say, my God, everything's so cheap in Texas. And it's like, well,

mean, people in Northern here.

that's relative to what you're used to. So they're willing to pay more and that drives up prices in some of these areas. So in like in Florida and in Georgia and North Carolina, I think some of that has, what's has been going on in the places where you showed inflation, like in the West coast, like you have California that's, that's really bad because you have inflation prices going up while you have lots of people fleeing.

It's just bad governance.

that shouldn't be happening. They're fleeing because the prices are going up, not the prices are going up because people are moving there and there's lots of economic growth. The reason they're doing it is because of bad policies. So when they do things to increase the price of energy, for example, that drives up the price of everything, high regulations drive up the price of everything. So that's the cause of inflation there. So it all depends is what I'm saying, I guess, in some areas, like in Texas, you have deflation. It's probably,

Alright.

because of good economic policies is a big part of that. But in New England, the deflation that's happening there is probably in part because of people leaving and that's not a good thing. So it all depends. It all depends is the point.

All right, I got a little bit of good news in my hand here, but mostly bad. When it comes to the economy, let me just read this headline here. This is from seven days ago. So last week, income needed to buy a home in the US falls 4%. So it just says Americans needed to earn $111,000 per year to afford the average home for sale in December, down 4 % from $115,000 a year ago, and down

8.8 % from a peak of 122,000 back in June. I don't know. That's good news there, but less money needed as far as your income goes to buy a house in the US. Now seems like maybe some Trump policies are working. But however, I do want to put this on the screen here. And again, this isn't cut and dry. But let me just show you this.

What are you?

25 only 12 percent fall into both categories again. This isn't just an income thing and a home ownership thing It's also marriage but holy crap I just wanted to point out the difference in what's happening in america between 1960 and 2025 over right americans down to 12 now, I just thought that was interesting I just wanted to toss that grenade into the discussion

Yeah, it's actually incredible. And politically, it's, and that's going to get much worse, by the way, much, much worse, because artificial intelligence is going to take a lot of entry level jobs, it's already started happening, and younger people are going to have increasingly harder time finding well, good paying jobs before the age of 30. And their ability to own assets is going to be harder and harder and harder. Unless there is a significant

supply side increase in the number of available homes that drives the price of homes down, which a lot of people don't necessarily want to do because voters who vote Republican, a lot of them own homes and they don't want the price of their home going down. the thing that people have to understand is, and it's so ironic because the number one person who has made

experiment!

the most political gains off of this quote unquote wealth gap is Bernie Sanders. AOC is a close second. They've made careers off of this. The rich are getting richer and everybody else is being left behind and things like this indicate that. a lot of this is people are waiting longer to get married. That's true. But it's also true that a lot of young people who are married can't afford to buy a home anyway, even when they get married. And

There's no question that there's been a wealth gap that's been dramatically increasing over time. But if you look at the data, the most obvious connection to the reason for why we have the wealth gap growing and why asset prices keep going up and up and up and up and up and people who are just starting out can't afford it. And the people who make out the best of the people who already own assets because the value of them keep go skyrocketing while they hold them. The number one thing correlated to that is money printing.

is if you print trillions of dollars and dump it into the financial system and create this crazy thing that's not going to happen in a normal market-based economy. And that is exactly what they did. They trillions into the system, asset prices skyrocketed, and the gap between the wealthy and regular people grew substantially just in that short period of time. And money printing was a big cause.

And interest rates also being rock bottom helped a lot of that as well. Okay, you talked about the electoral benefits for people like Bernie Sanders and AOC. I would argue Zoran Mamdani. In fact, that's one of the last interviews that Charlie Kirk gave. He talked about the rise of Zoran Mamdani in this class warfare struggle. It's just interesting. mean, Reagan said it best. I the government...

They're not the solution, they're the problem. And it's just ironic that they create the solution or the problem and then act like they have the solution. They're really only making the problem worse. I mean, we can go back to the CIA and where we started the conversation two hours ago. It's just fascinating. But that pendulum, yeah, it swings one way.

But it always swings back the other way. And holy crap, we're only six weeks into the Zoran Mamdani experience in New York City. And the natives are already restless there with his policies. So that's going to be fascinating to watch unfold during his term. And it might be just micro observations that we have around the country, whether it's a blue state or a blue city like this, to see how this all washes out.

Absolutely fact I want to I want to throw a couple of stats here at you More things in the news here, and then I want to get your final thoughts on everything This came out. Why the hell aren't the dates printing up anymore. Let's see. Okay, so this was from Saturday the 14th The 60-day delinquency rate on US subprime auto loans is up to a record six point nine percent So people have missed two payments on their vehicles

0 % I know a lot of a lot of numbers and it's hard to visualize when I'm just babbling away but this is the worst that it's been on missing car payments in America and I don't like it that's a little terrifying

Yeah, yeah, and in the in the book, in the next big crash book, I talk about how what some of the signs in chapter one, I talk about some of the signs that we could be heading towards a crisis.

Chapter one may be the scariest chapter in anything about the economy.

Yeah, and in it, one of the things I talk about is personal debt and how much personal personal debt, not national debt, the national debt skyrocketed, the personal debt has skyrocketed. The asset prices have skyrocketed. Affordability crisis is skyrocketing. All of these problems do create the possibility, the conditions for a crash. If they don't cause a crash, it's just going to be people slowly becoming miserable.

which is the alternative scenario, but either way, this is unquestionably a crisis. the statistic that you just mentioned, there are all kinds of other statistics about commercial real estate that show that that's a problem there. There are people missing their mortgage payments. That's been an issue at times. The cost of rent skyrocketing. mean, regular people, the reason they voted for Donald Trump, a lot of people voted for Donald Trump was because

things under Biden for regular people were becoming crisis level bad. And it was driven by inflation and high prices, not just for everyday goods and services and things like that, but for everything. The big picture like housing and college and all of that, it's just gotten totally out of control. And under Trump, there has been

tiny little gains made, for the most part, the problems persist. And the reason the problems persist is because unless Trump's going to go in and pull all this money out of the economy, which of course you don't really want to do, you're not going to see prices come down. You're not going to see deflation. You're not going back to what they were before. And things are still really bad for people. All we can do is stop the bleeding and then grow our way with real economic growth out of the problem.

And that requires controlling government spending, controlling money printing, being fiscally responsible. And unfortunately, nobody in Washington wants to do that.

One guy does. One guy does and he's called a grandstander.

That's very true. There are a few principled people in Washington, but not many.

Let me just point this out there. You mentioned things that are going through the roof. mean, these are things that government touches. Housing, you talked about. You talked about the cost of school. If the government touches it, then that screws up. can't just let the market deal with this stuff. And it's madness to constantly see the tinkering and the overhauling. And then next thing you know, the costs are through the roof. And I would also like to say, we talked about Jimmy Carter earlier.

that the nineteen eighty two American was much more patient than the twenty twenty six American so God only knows what's gonna happen in the terms here one last story here for you and then I'm gonna let you. Have the last word as they say- this is a story from last week- retail sales were unexpectedly flat the crucial holiday month of December- let's see.

well below the 0.4 % gain economists predicted. Blah, blah. My comparison retail sales rose in November by 0.6%. Anyway, here we go. Also in the fourth quarter, American, this is I wanted to read. Why did I highlight all this? Because I suck. Also in the fourth quarter, Americans' wages grew at the weakest pace in more than four years, and a greater share of households fell further behind on their debt. We just touched on it with the car payments.

the debt's becoming a problem and my gosh are the conditions ripe for a hell I don't know where that sentence ends but it doesn't end well from my perspective but I will let you who know the most about the economy of the two of us for sure haha I want you to have the last word on this Justin Haskins and by the way this book is incredible and please have it so you can prepare because it's not all just

Negative negative. It's you know what it is. I'll tell you it's a three-parter It's it's actually it's a horror book about what could happen It's a history book about how we got to where we are and then it actually has a positive note that tells you how to prepare for what could be headed our way, but Justin Haskins, please Have the last word here,

Yeah, yeah, I think that the main thing is people need to start being, they need to be prepared. They need to be prepared for what I think is inevitable. And that's not to say that everything that I talk about in the book is inevitable. It's not. It's entirely possible that we have a hundred years go by and

And none of the, I think the digital currency thing is going to happen for sure. But the, all the DTC stuff and all that may never happen. But the problem that I think most Americans have is that they are not prepared for those things, even though there are real risks tied to it. And a lot of the re the biggest reason they're not prepared is because they just don't know about any of it. And I think that's the main thing. I just want people to be aware of what the potential risks are.

and then to build those into the way that they live their lives. And so people need to be prepared for an economic crisis. That doesn't mean running away and hiding in the woods necessarily, although you could do that. That is an option. think what I thought

That's all I'm thinking of as you're saying this. I'm thinking, yeah, you won't be using a digital currency where I'm going.

Right. But it does, it does mean making sure that you get rid of as much of your debt as possible. It means having diversified a portfolio of the way that you manage your wealth. means not putting all of your money into your 401k or into IRAs or into brokerage accounts. It means not putting all of your money into any one thing, be as diversified as possible. and in it means

just understand what your rights are, what the risks are, and hopefully put some pressure on lawmakers to change things so that there are more protections for individuals, because that can be done. It can even be done at the state level, a lot of it, for some of the things I talked about in this book, but it requires people knowing that there's a problem and putting pressure on lawmakers to change things. It doesn't have to be a crisis for you watching this right now.

It could be a crisis for everybody else, perhaps, but it doesn't have to be for you if you're just prepared. And so I think that's the biggest takeaway is know what the risks are and know how to position yourself so that, you know, you may be hurt. Everyone's going to be hurt if there's a big crash and big crashes are inevitable in any kind of economy. But you don't have to be at maximum risk. You can be better situated than other people.

And that's the reason why I wanted to write this book. And just to throw this in there, I probably should have done this a long time ago, not in hour three here, but I'm not making any money on the book. All of the money from the book goes to nonprofit organizations that are trying to get laws changed to fix some of the stuff that we're talking about in

That is incredible, Justin.

Yeah, so I'm not trying to make money. A lot of people have, there's been some people have accused me of doing this fear mongering to make, I'm not making any money on this. It's just something that I want people to be aware of and I want people to care about it and be prepared.

Okay, Justin Haskins, The Next Big Crash, Conspiracy Collapse in the Men Behind History's Biggest Heist. That's an excellent title from start to finish and there's so much in here, so much in here. And I hope that people will check out your book. Follow you on X at Justin T Haskins, correct? Correct. Awesome. You're just a wealth of knowledge and I appreciate you being on top of this stuff and thanks for spending time with us today.

we'll have you on again sometime and who knows what we'll talk about. I bet your next book will be about the sunshine and lollipops.

I'm due. think I really need a positive book the next time around.

I it, man. I get it. Thanks all of you for joining us. Please share this episode. We'll be here 22 hours from now for the Friday live stream. And Justin Haskins, thanks for making time, sir. The next big crash. Y'all go get that book. Thank you, sir.