Wealth and Ownership Amid A Shifting Global Financial Order

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0:54Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz, And my guest today is Carol Roth. She is a recovering investment banker, entrepreneur, speaker, economic, business, and financial commentator, content developer, and a New York Times bestselling author. And we're going to talk about her latest book, which is also a New York Times bestseller called You Will Own Nothing, Your War with a New Financial World Order. So Carol, welcome to the show. So, John, it's so great to be with you. And it's so fun to be in this seat because I feel like so many times over the years when we've chatted, the roles have been reversed and I've got to interview you.

1:37So like now I'm in the hot seat. Yeah, I think that's right. So let's just get it. This little tiny financial world order topic that you tackled. What what lit your fire? Sure. So I was in the media talking about lots of issues. And, you know, I've been an advocate for the underdog and for individual wealth for a long time. And I have people who are doing all the right things. You know, they're working hard, they're saving. They're just like, why can't I get ahead? Like, what's going on here? And certainly, you know, over the past several years, we've seen just this historic transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street.

2:16We're dealing with the debasement of the currency and all the impacts of that. And then all of these other wild topics are coming up, things like ESG and social credit and central bank digital currencies. And then Wall Street's coming in to compete with you for a home and kids are going to college but not getting returns. And so like all the people are like, what's going on? What's going on? And I'm like, I don't know. hold on a second. And it just kind of hit me one day that two things. One, that they all fell under this meme that had made its way around social media called You Will Own Nothing.

2:53And I felt like that was a crazy tie that set the stage. But in terms of You Will Own Nothing, there's something that goes on through history that I think that is really central to the book. And And that's the shifting of the global financial order. And we've been at the center of the global financial order here in the United States for about 80 years. So for us, we're like, well, it's never going to be any different because we've never known anything different. And we've had this immense prosperity. But we have to remember that, you know, 80 plus years ago, it was the British. And before the British, it was the Dutch.

3:30I would imagine that those citizens of those countries felt fairly invincible during that period of time. You've got the British Imperial Empire. Those people are going, this is going to go on forever. I don't know how things are going to change. But we've seen a lot of those signposts that say, yeah, we're getting long in the tooth. You know, we've got a crazy debt load as we're recording this. We just saw the second U.S. debt downgrade ever. We have a Fed who hasn't kept the currency stable for either the domestic or the world stage. We've seen the weaponization of the U.S. dollar, particularly against Russia as they invaded Ukraine and we froze their access to reserves.

4:15So we're getting all these signposts that say there are a lot of folks who aren't real happy with the U.S. being the leading superpower. power. And when that happens, and you are wealthy, and you are well connected, and you go, oh, things are shifting and changing. And I see this has happened throughout history. You go, well, I just hope this is going to work out for me. Or you go, oh, no, we better figure out a way so that we hold on to our wealth of power when this all shifts and, you know, let the chips fall where they may with everyone else. So I think that's kind of the underlying foundational thesis of of where the concepts of the book all kind of get tied together.

4:55And by the way, you know, it's not conspiratorial. I know everyone likes to say this is like a giant conspiracy theory. You go on the White House's website right now, find President Biden's speech to the Business Roundtable March 21st of 2022. And he talks about exactly this, the change, you know, every three or four generations. And he says there is going to be a new world order out there. That's very easy to Google. So my hope was to take these things that kind of get tinfoil headed, so to speak, and then bring them together with lots of resources and lots of citations in a way that help people make sense of what's been happening and then give them a plan to fight back.

5:37So you spend a lot of time in the book, you know, unpacking all these things that are happening. Is your intent in the book then that people create their own plan or is it just, hey, this guy's falling and you better duck? Well, I'm a planner and I'm a fighter. So, you know, that's in the subtitle. Your plan to fight back against this new financial world order is that I think that you can't come up with a relevant plan unless you know what's coming at you. And so you have to empower yourself with the knowledge because, you know, the stakes that might be changing for something like the levels of debt and internal promises of the U.S.

6:17government are going to be very different than, say, if we go to a central bank digital currency. So I think it's important for us to understand these things. There's also a ton of misinformation out there. And so a lot of times things get poo-pooed because people understand like half of it and that have made up another half of it that doesn't exist. And so the entire scenario gets thrown out the window instead of focusing on that part that really is true and is at issue. So the intention is, you know, 10 chapters of telling you, here are all the different things that are coming. And then one chapter of, you know, here's what you can do now that you know all of this.

6:58So let's unpack you throughout some buzzwords, some terminology. Let's unpack a few of those. Let's just start with social credit. What is it and how does it play into this? So social credit is sort of a spectrum from cancel culture to what I would call informal social credit to what you have in China, which is a very formalized social credit system. So maybe the easiest way to understand it is to start with China. There was a video making the rounds on social media over the past few weeks where, you know, all of a sudden someone got a call on their cell phone and a warning message started blaring.

7:35And it said, the person who's calling you owes lots of debt. And they have a bad social credit score. And we would like for you, if you answer this phone call, to please tell them to pay off their debt. That's one of many examples of what social credit is in China. It is a formalized system, although not quite as formalized as some people think. But you're kind of on a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction basis with letter grades or number grades that basically say, are you doing the things the government wants you to do and deems as appropriate? And or are you not doing those things? And if you do those things, you get good marks.

8:12And if you don't do those things, you get bad marks. And there are severe penalties. One of the stories I told in the book came from NPR, a gentleman by the name of Lao Duan, who was a coal intermediary. And the government in China changed its stance on coal and he went bankrupt. and they took away his ability to travel. And the most Orwellian thing was they put his picture up on a billboard and it said, here's this person, here's their unique name and number, and they are not a trustworthy person. So you take that and you go, okay, that's the CCP. And you kind of take what social credit is trying to do.

8:52And of course, my book is coming at this from an economic lens. So, you know, outside of other things like freedom of speech and censorship, it attacks your social standing. So those are your opportunities, ways that you get to make money and sort of participate in society. In some cases, it attacks your job and doesn't leave you with that source of income. In other cases, it goes after your assets. You go, OK, well, you know, how is that happening here in the U.S.? Well, it's happened very much in the U.S. If you think about around COVID, regardless of whether where you stand on COVID, I'm not here to try to change anybody's mind.

9:29I'm just telling you the reality of the situation that, you know, they were telling people not to show up for Thanksgiving and for Christmas. They were saying if you didn't have a vaccine that you couldn't go into a restaurant once those open by mandate and participate in society. If you weren't wearing a mask at Trader Joe's, someone took a picture of you and ridiculed you on social media. maybe called your boss. These were all things meant to go after your social standard. Then we had a mandate that came out that actually took people's jobs away. People who had been deemed heroes and who worked through the crux of the pandemic while their people stayed home, those people, whether they were nurses or military or policemen or firemen, they ended up losing their jobs by mandate and the mandates coerced big businesses.

10:20Even if they weren't by mandate, they didn't want to run afoul and get in trouble of making some people not be able to go to their job. And then we saw businesses actually shut down. So your assets were taken. If you are neighbors to the north and you were a trucker who participated in the Freedom Convoy, you had your bank accounts frozen. And so, you know, we see these kinds of things. We certainly saw during COVID, but we're seeing it happen on an ongoing basis. If you say the wrong thing on social media or you act out in public, people are going after your financial standing. We saw with the Twitter files and information coming out of Facebook that the government's actually coordinating on some of these cases.

11:02So you may not have that official number system yet, but you certainly do have the, if you're doing the right things or the wrong things, whoever gets to decide what those might be that you're finding, you know, what's happening with you and then your financial opportunities gone after. And, you know, you can go down the road, Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan didn't work for them because they were super powerful, but a whole bunch of people where it did work. Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting.

11:40All you have to do is license our three-step process that's going to allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale, perhaps without adding overhead. And here's the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create, and you can have them today. Check it out at dtm.world slash certification. That's dtm.world slash certification. So if I'm sitting here thinking, oh, my 401k is fine. My financial advisor says I got enough money to retire.

12:24I mean, how do I draw back and look at the macro picture? Like does the dollar, you know, destabilization, you know, how do I look at that macro picture. Do you see what I'm getting at? I mean, because I think most people just look at their, like, how's this impacting me? Right. So I think there are two things and they sort of stand at odds with each other. One is there is this anti-ownership movement that you'll owe nothing and you'll be happy. Wall Street's competing with you for a house and they want you to think it's for your convenience. You're getting these articles of, oh, you don't need to have a car, you know, let us just, you know, enhance your transportation or take Uber.

13:03We'll share things and that'll just work out for you. And I think that people need to understand that ownership is what drives wealth creation. That if you don't have assets that have the opportunity to appreciate and value, or at least retain their value, you don't have wealth. Or pass down generationally. passed down generationally. If something like the house is the biggest financial asset on households balance sheets from a dollar value basis. So this is how middle-class families retain wealth and pass them on. So if you go away from that ownership, you don't have that wealth creation opportunity.

13:43But then going back to what we just talked about with social credit, you also have all these other people that you're beholden to. If you own your own house, you can pretty much do what you want in your own house. And maybe there's an HOA or whatnot. But if there is a corporate owner who is now in tight with the government, they don't want you to have a firearm. They want, you know, gas stoves to be banned. They want, you know, whatever it is, they have control of that. And I'm really worried you say something bad on social media, you get kicked out of your home. So that sounds super, you know, convenient and YOLO and no, I'm going to go live my life carefree.

14:23But I think people are really forgetting about the implications of that. So that's one piece. The second is that we are on this insane trajectory. And that will have implications in terms of the US's global financial standing. What I don't know is duration and catalysts. If I knew this, if I could tell you exactly how long this was going to take and what the catalyst was going to be, John, I would be on a super yacht in the Mediterranean and not having this lovely discussion with you. So, you know, it's easy to look back in history and go, oh, over this, you know, 50 year period, this happened.

15:06And over thousands of years, 50 years is a pretty small little enclave. For us living through it 50 years is a huge chunk of our lifetimes, right? So we have a different perspective. So I think it's an awareness that there could be long term inflation that eats in to the purchasing power of what you have that tends to benefit, again, as we've seen over the last 15 years, asset holders. and it tends to hurt people who are savers and retirees and people who are just trying to get by. So in that case, it really lines up with the notion of ownership. But I think we also just have to have an awareness, too, that things could get crazier, and you just have to be prepared for that.

15:55I use in the book, I nod to Saturday Night Live, this wonderful skit that was done with Dan Aykroyd pretending to be Jimmy Carter. And he was like, wouldn't you like to have a$500 ,000 car and wear a$75 ,000 suit? Everybody could be a millionaire. You're joking that people don't understand the difference between a top line number of purchasing power. And I think that's just one of the things that people have to get their head wrapped around, because if certain things happen in terms of the global financial order, it could impact the dollar standing. And that could have implications on whether it's your 401k or whatever else, which is why I think it's important to diversify, which by the way, John, is financial advice I would give people under any circumstances.

16:45But I think looking at it through this lens, it gives it a sort of a different vibe and a different sense of urgency. All right. So we don't have time to cover all of this today. I'm not even going to throw climate change in at you, but let's talk about, and this is a topic that really, you know, I'm passive. My kids are all out of college. Fortunately, they didn't have to take on debt, but there are a heck of a lot of people that are coming out of college today going, I've got$300 ,000 worth of debt. And I'm not really even sure I want to do what I trained to do in college. How do we fix that one?

17:24All right. So I'm going to talk about how we fix it going forward before we even try to address the people who are currently in the situation. But the government is the largest predatory lender in the country. And what they have done is they have taken minors and, you know, 18 year olds and they've saddled them with five and six figures worth of debt at a time when they don't really have the financial wherewithal and the understanding to understand what they're signing up for to make those decisions about things like return on investment, which is unfortunate given the fact that we fund the education system, but it's just not a piece of that.

18:01And they really have transferred this wealth from young people to colleges and their administrators. I mean, the cost of college has exceeded the GDP and wage growth by a factor of five and eight times. And I always forget which one is which, but one of them is five times, one of them is eight times. They're both big. They're both big. It's exponential. It's horrendous. So the more money going into colleges isn't producing these amazing outcomes in terms of growing the economy or your individual opportunity. It's just making the college administrators wealthier and letting them put more on the payroll.

18:39And it's really despicable. So we need to go to a system where we get the government out of student lending and stop this free for all that's going to the colleges. we need to have an underwriting process. I mean, we value in the market an engineering degree different than an underwater basket weaving degree. You can sit and argue about it. And that's not my case to make. My case is just the reality of that's just how it works. Except underwater basket weaving has got to be harder than being an engineer. I'm just going to say. It may take some engineering skills to be able to do that. It might, But it probably doesn't warrant an$80 ,000 a year education to do that.

19:20So we need to get up to a point where there's a bankruptcy process. There's an underwriting process. And the colleges have some skin in the games to realign these forces so that the college is serving the purpose that everybody seems to think that it is, but that it actually isn't. So that entire thing, and I just don't understand from any party why we don't have more people standing up and saying, you know, young people are getting ripped off and we're transferring money and making colleges wealthy. We have to stop that. Like that seems to me like a universal winning stance. And it's just it's despicable.

20:00And so what's happening is that even though young people are coming out of school and they're making more than the Gen X's or boomers before them, even on an emplaced and adjusted basis, their balance sheets are so wrecked by this debt that they just can't get ahead of themselves. And so, you know, on top of all the assets being inflated, they just can barely get themselves out of debt to be able to to go through their lives on a normal basis. So that's something that really everybody should be focused on because we want young people to be able to participate in the American dream. And if we have this highly educated population that has degrees that don't have the value that they're supposed to derive, something really needs to change.

20:50We didn't even touch on so many of the items that are tied together. So you're going to have to get the book if you want to find. Hopefully, Carol scared the crap out of everybody. And now you have to buy the book so that you can get the solution as well. Carol, you want to invite people to connect with you? Obviously, the book is available anywhere books are sold. Yes, books are available anywhere books are sold. Buy a hard copy. You know, start walking the walk here and own physical things. Connecting with me. I am mostly on Twitter at Carol J.S. Roth, but you can find me, you know, hanging out on LinkedIn from time to time or that Instagram place or whatnot.

21:26And yeah, I can't believe John so quickly. As I knew it would. You know, I do a lot of these interviews and obviously some authors pose suggested questions. You had, I think it came out at about eight pages of suggested questions. So, you know, clearly we touched on the surface of what's involved in this. Can I leave you guys with a marketing thing since this is a marketing podcast? Yes, do it. Okay. So I had somebody who was quoted in the book. His name was Andrew Egan, and he's an eight state planning attorney. And they did the best leveraging of PR. And this is what people need to do is they put together a graphic and they say, congratulations, Andrew Egan, for being in the best New York Times bestselling book.

22:12You will owe nothing. It put a whole thing about it. And they put this thing up on LinkedIn, which meant that not only is he getting the exposure in the book, but now everybody else knows that he is an authority that's in the book. And then, of course, I picked it up and reshared it again. And it's a great reminder to people that if you're going to do PR things, leverage that because you will get so much more mileage out of that than just, you know, hoping that somebody reads the book and calls. Yeah, no question. I've said all along that, you know, being a guest on podcasts is one of the best gigs going because the podcaster is very incentivized to make sure lots of people listen to your episode.

22:50So absolutely. 100 percent. Well, Carol, it was great catching up with you. I appreciate you taking a few moments to join us and hopefully we'll run into you again soon one of these days out there on the road. Always a pleasure. Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics. Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It's called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it at marketingassessment.co, not.com,.co.

23:27Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That's just marketingassessment.co. I'd love to chat with you about the results that you get.