Interview with Jeremy Cordon

0:07What's up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. As always, thank you for tuning in. We have a very special show for you guys tonight that I'm excited about. We have our special guest here tonight is from Goldback Incorporated, Jeremy Cordon. How are you, sir? Doing great. Thanks for having me here. Absolutely. Thanks for coming on. I wanted to talk to you specifically because I do feel that, as I've said several times on the show, I spend a lot of time talking about the news of the day and a lot of time on foreign policy. And I probably don't spend enough time talking about monetary policy and economics, which is a real passion of mine.

0:45So thank you very much, because I know this is the world you live in. So thanks for joining to talk about it. Awesome. super excited to be here well you know one of the reasons why i um i've really tried to um commit to talking more about this stuff particularly this year is that it it really is the case that monetary or monetary inflation central banking is in many ways really the worst problem that we have in America. It's really the issue of our time. And now you even notice all the Democratic candidates are running on unaffordability, but they're very vague with what exactly that means. And of course, the solution is a government program.

1:30The median first time homeowner in this country is now 40 years old. You got to be 40 before you can buy a house and then start thinking about having a family at that point, I guess. And now everybody's spending hundreds of thousands, you know, to even just try to have a baby and nobody can afford to get ahead in this world. And that just seems to be more and more kind of the experience of the average American. And I think one of the points that I've always been trying to make is that this is because of this model of central banking and fiat currency and the inflationary environment we live in, where we have a government that we can't afford.

2:07So we have to print the money to make it up. And everybody, all regular people end up putting the bill for that, essentially. Is that right? Yeah. No, it's exactly right. We pay for it with a lower standard of living. I think I was reading today that to have the equivalent of a six-figure salary from 1995, you'd have to be making about$350 ,000 a year today. Yeah, that's right. It's like literally it's right in front of you. And as you know, I was talking about this with my buddy Keith Knight the other day, that really, if you if you want to measure wealth or if you want to measure a standard of living, the only measurement that really makes sense is like how long you have to work for a given product or a given service.

2:55You know, like how many hours do you have to work for a chicken? And that's how you measure wealth. It's the only meaningful way to measure wealth. You look at the GDP or the stock market, but what difference does that make? If you don't have stock and you're not participating in the growing GDP. And yeah, I mean, as you put out, we pay for it in our standard of living lowering. And so my father-in-law tells me about this all the time when he bought his first house in like 1971 and he only made$13 ,000 a year, but the house was$13.5 ,000. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter if you're now making$150 ,000 a year, but the house cost$800 ,000, then you are poorer than you were making 13 ,000 a year.

3:39But they've got everybody telling themselves, oh, but I make 13 times the amount of money that I made 50 years ago. Right. Or, or, or that my grandparents made. And, you know, if I have a six figure salary now, that's making it because when I was growing up, that's what making it look like. And it's kind of this crazy world where we use the dollar as a measuring stick. And, you know, imagine, imagine we use, let's say we use the metric system. But every year, they recalibrated the meter to be a little bit shorter. Right. And then people started saying ludicrous things like, oh, my house grew 5 % this year.

4:20we're all getting taller. And like, they just, you know, it's so confusing. It's like, you almost don't, it distorts what's really happening when the dollar loses so much value so fast. And it tricks the average person. And that's why we have shrinkflation. You can buy less and less and the grocery companies are like, oh shoot, we got to raise our prices. But that makes us look like the bad guy. We're the bad guy because we can't, we can't keep up. And then you get your 2 % raise or your 3 % raise at work, or you get your little raise in social security. But, you know, real inflation, they think just since COVID with all the money printing has been at least 30%.

5:00And that was just trillions of dollars that went to what fraud? Yeah. Yep. That's right. And I mean, it's, it's, uh, it's one of these interesting things because I say this a lot of times on the show, but you know, inflation is one of those things that you kind of can't hide from people. You can attempt to, but everybody sees it. Everybody feels it. And so you can even attempt to tell people that Joe Biden isn't senile and keep them away from them as much as possible. You can tell people that we're winning a war over in Afghanistan when we're really losing it and they don't really see it. So maybe they'll believe you, but try telling people that their grocery bills aren't going up.

5:42Try telling them that like anybody who goes to the supermarket and has been for the last five, six years knows how much poorer you're getting every week. And I guess I just think that in a weird way, you watch people, particularly progressives who are trying to seize on this moment, you watch them spin it in different ways. You know, the problem is that corporate greed spiked. So they'd kind of go along with that perception that, yeah, the problem is the supermarket or the supermarket chain is raising their prices. And I do think it's really important for some of us to come along and go, yeah, but you know how, like, since George W.

6:19Bush, they've printed 80 % of the money that ever existed. I think that might have something to do with that. Like, just maybe your dollars being less valuable might have something to do with the injection of tens of trillions of dollars of new money, which you would think would be kind of intuitive for people to understand. You know, I'm old enough where I remember where people used to talk about the national debt, but people would take turns talking about it. It was kind of this political football. When your guy was in office, you didn't talk about it. The other party talked about it. And when your guy was out of office, you talked about it again.

6:54And I remember, you know, during Bush, during Obama, there's kind of this back and forth of whose fault the national debt was and who's made it worse. And, you know, really, it's just the dollars is going down and down and down and down. And now there's new threats. They're trying to push through central bank digital currencies now. And they've already done that in parts of the world, like in China, where you have a social credit score and you cannot bank or use your money if your score falls below a certain threshold. Right. Yeah. And there was just recently a bill about this, right? There was a bill in the Senate, and I think it got defeated, but it is worth pointing out that they are still trying to push this central bank digital currency.

7:46Yeah. And the threat is if cash is gone completely, like physical cash, then you can only use central bank digital tokens. So everybody's in the system. There's no privacy. There's nowhere to run. If, you know, the government doesn't like your show, they don't like, you know, they did this even without central bank digital currencies to like the canadian trucker protesters for that yep they'd be banked them for for their protest yeah and i think it's um the one of the things that's very concerning and i think perhaps that um because this was more of a democratic party idea and i guess donald trump had there was enough noise from the grassroots that donald trump had said in his campaign, one of his promises was, I guarantee we'll never have a central bank digital currency.

8:38Then again, he also said no new wars. But, you know, so Donald Trump at least brought this up and that that maybe then creates the illusion for people where it's like, all right, at least that concern is kind of tabled for now. But of course, you know, even if Donald Trump doesn't break that promise, him breaking the promise on the war has been enough to make him very unpopular and almost guarantee that the Democrats are going to come back into power now. And so that whole threat comes right back to the forefront. I got to say, that's one that I'm particularly concerned about because first of all, well, there's a couple of things.

9:14Number one, clearly our monetary policy is unsustainable. And so we're coming up to kind of like a turning of a chapter here where this can't keep going forever. And so they're going to try to supplement it with something new. And the regime is well aware that they have this major problem right now, which is free speech on the internet. And the fact that the tech censorship has kind of not worked and rolled back and that now all of the most popular voices are challenging government propaganda. They've got a real issue with this on their hand. And this is one where you go, shoot, how are you going to rein that in?

9:51I mean, trying to do tech censorship again is going to be very tough. There are these, you know, websites like Rumble and places where people can go at this point. And also, even if you shut me up or you shut Tucker Carlson up or you shut whoever up, is their audience really going back to Jake Tapper? No, probably not. They're going to find other voices in this space. But you know what really does solve that problem for the regime very nicely is a central bank digital currency where all of a sudden they can monitor. Well, what have you been saying online what have you been doing you know wherever and if they have that they don't even need to pass an amendment to abolish the first amendment they can just say no you have the right to say whatever you want to but we have the right to shut off your bank account it won't even be the government doing it it'll be there it'll be their partners it'll be the banks and they already kind of happens like you know you had operation choke point uh under obama where precious metals dealers and firearms dealers they were getting debanked and had to run from bank to bank to bank to try to figure it out.

10:53We've dealt with this problem at Goldback, where the bank just says, gee, the regulators are putting a lot of pressure on us. We don't know if we can continue this banking relationship. And I know it happens to influencers too. But at least we have a bunch of different banks. But if you centralize that control and you make it uniform. Like in China, you can just bankrupt all of your opponents and make it so scary. China, they don't even talk about politics. It's too dangerous to talk about politics. It's just it's not safe. You're looking at being homeless and not being able to feed your family and on and on and on.

11:36So there's the central bank digital currency threat. But even if we don't go there. Like even if that doesn't happen and we can stave that off, if you were to measure the value of the dollar in gold, so 100 years ago, an ounce of gold was about$20. And it was a$20 gold piece. It wasn't exactly an ounce, but it was about that. It was the double eagle. And that was just the money. And today, I want to say gold's like 4 ,500 bucks. Yep. So just measuring the dollar in gold, it's lost like what, 99.6 % of its value. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Fast Growing Trees.

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13:32Now is the perfect time to plant. Let's grow together. Fastgrowingtrees.com, promo code PROBLEM. Offer is only valid for a limited time. Terms and conditions may apply. All right, let's get back into the show. And just to give people some perspective on that, no, that's exactly right. And also just if you could just measure like, so you're going 100 years ago, you're putting it at about$30 an ounce. and then by the Bretton Woods agreement, right? So this is like, what, 1944. So 20 years, it's at$35 an ounce. Then by the year 2000, it's at like$300 an ounce. So like, oh, wow, it's 10 times less.

14:13But you could see how, and then how rapidly the dollar has been destroyed recently that we're now between four and$5 ,000 for an ounce. And I don't know, this is going back a while that I had read this, but there's these interesting things. The reason why measuring it in gold is not just like an arbitrary measure is that gold is very unique in the fact that it preserves its purchasing power. Like there's, it's, I know what people would say like, you know, like an ounce of gold, they say in ancient Rome would get you like a toga and a headpiece and a pair of shoes. Like it would essentially get you like a suit for that time.

14:47And in 1948,$35 would like get you a nice suit and a hat and a pair of shoes. And in the year 2026, an ounce of gold will get you like a suit and a hat and a pair of shoes. It's like it is almost like representing almost the same amount of purchasing power. And so, man, is it creepy to look at that and then go, yeah, that's literally what this policy has done. They've robbed 99 percent of the wealth of your dollar that you're holding. Yeah, they robbed 99 percent and then another 60 percent after that. so if you had a if you had a hundred dollar if you had a one dollar if you have a hundred dollar bill today it would be like less than a dollar a hundred years ago in purchasing power or another way to look at that like the penny the wheat penny that guy had about two dollars and fifty cents worth of purchasing power and that was the smallest amount of money they even bothered with If it was less than 250, like forget it.

15:48And in that context, all of our change is obsolete. Quarters are obsolete, half dollars obsolete, dimes, nickels, all of it's obsolete. I mean, when was the last time you, you know, cared to count up and add up your change? No, it's like a thing that my kids put in their piggy bank as like a game, but it's not really like, you know what I mean? It's just like, oh, that's what I do anytime I have a coin, which is rare that I have them. And it's, you know, it's also worth pointing out that, you know, when when you have this inflationary economy, right, so like when you start from that point and you keep diluting the currency until we get to where we are today, this, of course, is essentially in effect a giant welfare program for the rich.

16:32You just transfer money upward and upward and upward because if the value of the dollar is going down, well, then people who own things are benefiting from that. Or at least you're keeping up if you own something because the thing you own is worth a lot more than it previously was. So that's okay for people who own a lot of stuff. It's great for people who are in huge amounts of debt. And when I say debt, I don't mean like you have a little bit of credit card debt. I mean, debt like you have borrowed billions of dollars from the bank, but to start some new enterprise. And now you only really, in effect, got to pay back millions.

17:07But for people on a fixed income, for working class people, for middle class people, as everybody around them can see, it's just absolute death. The guy who was making 70 grand a year was doing great 10 years ago, and now he's struggling to get by. It's just ruined. And oftentimes it's hard to even diagnose the problem. It's just like, man, like costs have gone up. I don't know why, you know, everyone's so greedy on their houses. If you were to measure housing in gold, if you looked at the U.S. stock market measured in gold, the U.S. stock market has been down since like year 2000. Right. If you measure it in gold, it's just the value is not there.

17:46The prices are overinflated because everyone's pushing their IRA money into it. And, you know, in terms of real value, it's just it really changes what the economics landscape looks like. We're not hitting all time records in the stock market if you measure it in something that isn't constantly losing value. And, you know, we talk about this and maybe the reason why you don't talk about it more is because there's not there's not like really a whole lot to be done about it. So like you come from a similar background. You know, I came into this whole thing as a Ron Paul guy. I was 21 years old when he ran for president the second time.

18:28And I went and got elected to be a Ron Paul delegate. And one of the things that he talked about a lot was just this issue. He had the book and the Fed. You know, central banking is the biggest issue.

18:47and there's a problem because you can't really return to the gold standard. This is something I've been super obsessed with and I've researched it a lot. There's a few problems. Even if we, you know, libertarians won, Congress is full of, you know, Massey's, we got Ron Paul into the Fed or some Ron Paul type guy into the Fed. He's a little old now. Maybe Ron Paul doesn't want that job. Give him a break. Let him relax. But yeah, someone like him. Yeah, let him relax. But, you know, you figure you win. Going back to the gold standard that we had 100 years ago, it used up all of the nation's copper.

19:23It used up 90 % of the nation's silver. And now 80 % of silver is tied up in industrial demand. 99 % of copper is tied up in industrial demand. um and even then like bricks countries that are like looking to go to the gold standard they can't figure out how to do it because the gold standard essentially failed because its main central point of failure was does is it in the vault does fort knox even have the gold is the gold even there they couldn't figure out how to divide an ounce of gold so what you had to divide it with was copper tokens, which were sold for like 4 ,000 % above their melt value, silver tokens that were bigger.

20:10And I call them tokens because you take two cents worth of silver and mint it into a coin that said 10 cents on it. That's essentially what constitutional silver was. So there was a huge markup and a profit to be had in making coinage. And you'd think if anything should be profitable, it should be literally making money, right? Yeah, right. And then a lot of those$20 gold coins out there that were to kind of back up the whole system, there just weren't a lot of them. The banks didn't have a lot of them. You had a lot of bills, $100 bills. There's$10 ,000 bills,$50 ,000. There's a$100 ,000 bill.

20:48You know how valuable that is considering that gold was$20 an ounce? And they would use these for like interbank transfers in the US. Yeah, they didn't have the gold. I mean, like if you were to measure all the gold that the gold standard actually had, it might be like five to 10 % of the gold standard was backed by actual gold at the melt value. Like that was it. So you can't really go back to that because the trust isn't there. Right, right. Like, so, you know, the bridge is burned. So then what do you do? You just stay in, you know, central bank inflationary hell. uh you know like there's not there's not a great solution so it's not it's almost like something that's not really people talk about because it's like what do you do you know like what do we what do we do how do we fix it right right all right so where does where does your company where does goldback come in on that okay so what we do is we go out and the thousand two thousand year old problem with gold so this isn't just a problem 100 years ago or 50 years ago in Roman times, it was a problem is you can't really fractionalize gold down that small.

21:59You have to use bronze. You have to use silver. You have to do something else because the gold is just so valuable. What Goldback has done, what we've done with Goldback is we've taken that one ounce and we've split it with microchip technology into 4 000 pieces and in a way that has never been counterfeited and wouldn't you know wouldn't be easy to counterfeit so it's you know this is a which is as much as you can say for any paper currency it's not you know like not easy anything i guess is theoretically possible to counterfeit you make it you make it very hard to do so yeah We raised the bar really, really high.

22:44You're not looking at$100 ,000 worth of equipment. You're looking at$20 million worth of equipment and 10 years of dicking around to try to make it look the same. So you want to raise that bar all the time to just make it more obnoxious for counterfeiters. So the quarter gold back has the same value as a wheat penny did 100 years ago. So it's like a$2.50 gold product. It's the cheapest gold product in the entire world. We mass produce it. we've got the one gold back and the idea here the the drive with gold back is we're trying to kind of reimagine and restore the gold standard in the private sector and invite people to participate and and so far it's gone it's gone really well we there are more places in the United States that take payment in gold, you know, a la gold back, then there are locations that take Walmart gift cards.

23:44And so the idea, so the idea is here to essentially create a gold standard for a private currency. And so that there's, you know, like you, at least in a sense, it's like an opt out option from the dollar, but potentially ultimately. Yeah. Cause if you, There are people today that do 70, 80 % of their financial life in gold. There are cities today that have dozens of industries that participate, grocery stores, gas stations, entertainment, healthcare, insurance, contractors, dollar stores, you name it. people that do your yard, landscaping people, they all take payment and goldbacks and they're all driving distance.

24:35So it's becoming more and more possible the more and more we grow the network. And you imagine you get debanked and it's like, hey, you're kind of screwed if there's no cash alternative and there's nothing you can do. And you don't really want to come up with a solution on that day. You don't want to say, okay, we have a big problem. We're all bankrupt. But we have things that we can trade. You want to start building up solutions well in advance. I think the reason why gold bullion and silver bullion haven't really taken off, that was the first thing I tried to do. The reason why they haven't really taken off is because they're not really a system of money.

25:23So if you buy an ounce of gold, that doesn't have an equal value to 10, 10-ounce coins. Right. They have different premiums. They have different values. A lot of gold coins are fake. You have to have an$800 Sigma machine to really know for sure if it's real. And it's not an easy enough system where people actually do that. So we wanted to make something that looked and felt like cash that people could intuitively understand and get on board with where, you know, it wasn't, it wasn't like some high friction transaction. Yeah. Well, it's, it's a really interesting idea because I, you know, and part of the reason why I'm interested in this stuff is that, yeah, like you said, we really do, we have to begin to look for solutions to this kind of coming problem.

26:14And as I'm sure you also being an old school Ron Paul guy, I came in in 08, I'm a little older than you um but or a lot older than you but it makes older people sound good right a little bit older than you um but uh you know we can't look to government to be the ones who are going to create this type of stuff because that'll that you that's a game that you'll die waiting if you're waiting for you're not going to vote yourself out of the central bank problem yeah no that's right if it's a system that primarily benefits people with massive amounts of debt and assets, who do you think the donor class is?

26:49Why would they ever change the game? Because it's the donor class getting richer and richer and richer and richer, and the average person getting more and more and more poor. And if there's a labor shortage, let's just import tens of millions of people. Let's just be poor. Suck it up. That seems to be the message. No, you're absolutely right. And look, as we're recording this, it's the day after Thomas Massey lost his primary. And it does kind of show you something about like you get out this guy who's an enormously popular congressman in his district who gets in trouble for taking enormously popular stances on big issues like opposing the war in Iran or being for the Epstein files being declassified.

27:33I mean, these are like 80 percent of the American people are with him on this. But the money isn't. And so they pump thirty two million dollars into his district and they get him out. So again, to your point, when there's a system that benefits those who hold tremendous debt and those who hold tremendous assets, if you want to go one-on-one versus Goldman Sachs, they're going to come out having more debt and assets than you. And they're going to come out having a whole lot more political influence than you. And so these, like, I'm not against government solutions, but I think sometimes there is this, this almost like a bias people have, where they go, if you try to come up with some private solution to the problem, they go, oh, that's a little pie in the sky.

28:17You know, what are the odds that we're actually going to get people all trading in these goldbacks? But then you go, as opposed to what? As opposed to thinking that the democratic process is going to yield some type of results where you have to directly take on all these big money interests that are always going to have more influence than you. I mean, seems to me like going, trying to come up with some type of private solution is the only viable. So we're not we're not the first company to do this. There has been, according to Wikipedia, as much as you can trust that, over 2000 local currency projects in the United States.