MI Rewind: How to Beat Inflation w/ Joe Brown

24:16And that money then is able to be spent on other things. And so if they buy a treasury from a bank, then that bank is able to take those new dollars and turn around and do something else with it. Usually that's loan it to the government again, create a new treasury, and then they turn back around and sell it to the Fed. All of the money that the Federal Reserve is printing and using to buy assets, that money, then it goes and gets spent on other things. Well, in 2020, they needed to buy more things than just mortgage-backed securities and treasuries. They weren't allowed to. They're not legally allowed to.

24:47So they had the treasury department set up special accounts called special purpose vehicles. And inside these special purpose vehicles, the treasury purchased things like corporate debt, like ETFs that hold corporate bonds. And some of them were high yield bonds, which are junk bonds from companies that should be paying a very high interest rate on their debt because they're garbage. And the Federal Reserve funded all this. So they didn't hold it on their own balance sheet. They were holding them at the special purpose vehicles held at the treasury, which is basically like a 19-year-old who is not old enough to buy alcohol, has a 21-year-old buddy, gives his own money to his 21-year-old buddy and says, hey, go buy some alcohol for me.

25:27And he does. Same thing, same result. It's just getting around the letter of the law. You're not abiding by the spirit of the law. And so these are all the things that the Federal Reserve does when they print money. They basically buy assets and that injects money into the economy in exchange for whatever asset was just purchased. I'm curious. I know that the Federal Reserve is a separate entity from the US government. Is there ever a point where the Federal Reserve says that we're not going to lend to the US government anymore because the debt has just gone too far for them? That's a good question.

26:02I think the opposite is more likely. So the Federal Reserve is a quasi-public, quasi-private entity. And so when people say that it's independent politically, what they mean is that they're not controlled by a single party, but they exist at the sole discretion of Congress. The Federal Reserve Act is what allows them to exist and gives them their mandates of stable prices and full employment. And so they operate only under the allowance of Congress. And anytime they step outside their legal boundaries, because they know that Congress will forgive them, they don't ask permission, they ask forgiveness, and everything is okay, like the special purpose vehicles at the Treasury.

26:37So let's say they did find religion and they said, okay, we're going to take the short term consequences of doing the painful option right now that's healthier long term, that would cause so much economic pain that my guess is that Congress would fold the Federal reserve fully underneath the treasury department and take control. And they would have zero independence left. And they would do the opposite. Because when you have an entity that both has the power to make decisions to benefit somebody, and they have extreme incentives one way and against another, they're likely, and most times through history, going to take that.

27:11And so the government has more debt than they can handle, especially if deflation sets in. The only way to continue this game is to debase the dollar, get more dollars and use that to service the debt until basically the debt is meaningless. It's not getting paid back. We're just printing money to pay all the bills. If it got to the point where the Federal Reserve said, hey, we're independent, we're going to do the right thing, that would make the federal government insolvent. They would not be able to pay their bills. They would default on their national debt and they would not be able to tax near enough.

27:39You would have many problems. And so the federal government would have the power to just say, nope, you're not going to do that. We're going to fold you under the treasury and we're going to take over the printer and we're just going to monetize our own debt. We're going to print the money. So that's what I think is more likely. And that's what you see throughout history. When you get to this point of debt to GDP, this point of inflation, this point of problems financially, you tend to see a full nationalization of the banking system underneath central bank gets folded into the federal government.

28:05You have a merging there of monetary and fiscal policy. So I anticipate that at some point that will happen. Very interesting. Now that we know what inflation is, let's talk about what investors can do to protect themselves from inflation. What asset classes should investors look to or avoid when wanting to protect themselves from inflation? That's a great question. I'd say the first investment that has the highest ROI is going to be reading books, especially history books. For hundreds of years, people have been documenting what happens when there's financial crisis that they're living through at the start, at the end, when there's a rise and fall of great powers, when there's transition periods throughout history, people go back and study these.

28:47There's more documentation on every time this has happened throughout history than anybody will be able to read in their entire life. And so that's the first thing. And the book behind you, Principles by Ray Dalio, I recommend books by him all the time, especially his recent one, The Principles for Dealing with the Rise and Fall of Great Powers. It's a long title. I always forget the name of the book. But that's the first thing that I say is start reading books because you start pattern recognition. You start to be able to realize, hey, these things that you're talking about that happened 100 years ago, that sounds like what I'm reading in the news today.

29:21And so that sets in. And one thing that you notice is that when you have periods of time where the debt is unmanageably high, and you start to have a monetization of the debt, you start to have inflation take over, things like gold, things like silver, things like real estate, things like land, things like real assets, real estate, mining stocks, energy commodities, all typically do very well. And then things like owning cash, especially the cash that is being debased, and things like owning debt and fixed income instruments do extremely poorly. And so you start to notice trends like that. And then I'd say increasingly today, Bitcoin might fall into that category extremely well.

29:59It's still very new, but Bitcoin might fall into that category very well. Now that you bring up gold and silver, I'm curious, why do you believe that these two assets haven't performed as well as maybe some might have anticipated in this era of high monetary expansion? Yeah, absolutely. It's kind of funny to me because they haven't performed nearly as badly as many people think they have. So gold and silver, they anticipate the results of monetary policy. So if you look at where gold was at the end of 2019, through the top of its peak in August of 2020, it ran up 40%. And since then, from the end of 2019 to now, it's up about 25%.

30:43And so what you saw was that initial run where it went up 40%, it was anticipating the inflation that had not happened yet as a result of the massive increase in the money supply. After that run-up, when it hit the top of that bubble in August of 2020, what were the fears then at that point? Everybody was talking about the possibility that the Fed would taper, that they'd start tightening, that at some point they're going to raise interest rates. So gold and silver then at that point have to start pricing in the fear of deflation because now they're saying, we've already run up, but now we're pricing in the fear that tapering will start, that tightening, that interest rates will rise.

31:19And so what are they going to do? They're going to fall. Well, right during that time, that's when the inflation actually starts to take off. So you see other commodities really respond because other commodities just respond to what prices are. So you're going to see a real-time corresponding to inflation. But gold and silver already had their run-up. They anticipated that inflation and now they're anticipating the deflation. Well, fast forward to November of 2021, just two months ago, gold bottomed. What day did it bottom on? It bottomed on the day that the Federal Reserve started the taper. And then briefly, a couple of weeks later on December 13th, I think, it briefly for like a couple hours dip below that bottom and closed higher when the Federal Reserve announced they were accelerating the taper.

32:01And gold bottomed and has been moving up since then in anticipation of this taper is going to end and they're going to have to reverse course. And so it's anticipating the future inflation, the future monetary policy. It's already priced in the deflation, the price is coming down as a result of the taper. So gold and silver are highly anticipatory. And this isn't just something that's happening right now. This happened before. Gold hit the bubble in 2011 on fears of massive inflation. And then fears of Fed tightening started to set in and gold entered a bear market. And when did gold bottom? 2015, on the day the Federal Reserve actually started to raise interest rates.

32:39Now at that point, it's already priced in. Gold only went up from there. Once the Federal Reserve kept on raising interest rates, raising interest rates and tightening, gold continued to make higher and higher highs. And so gold and silver are highly anticipatory. And it looks to me like the bottom is in and they're pricing in the next round of QE. One thing I can't help but ask is what your thoughts are on a so-called run on the bank in relation to gold and silver. I always hear that the gold and silver market is highly manipulated due to the amount of paper markets that are riding on top of the physical gold and physical silver.

33:12And a lot of these paper markets aren't actually backed by physical gold and silver because there's only so much to go around. What are your thoughts on a potential run on the bank, so to speak, in the gold market? Yes, 100%. Most gold ownership is actually gold ownership. And that is unallocated gold is the technical term of what this is. And when you own unallocated gold, you do not own it, you are owed it. And so anytime you can buy gold and pay spot, and it's in storage for you, and you're paying spot and you're not paying a premium on top of that, you have unallocated gold. That means that you don't own, there's no physical bar or coin in the world that you can point to and say, I own that legally.

33:57What it means is that at any time you can exercise your right with that company and say, give me gold, they will have to go out to the market and buy that gold and give it to you at whatever price gold is currently trading at. Most gold is owned that way. That means people are owed gold. They don't own gold. So it's paper. There's not enough gold. It's many times more gold ownership through unallocated gold than there actually exists, which means if you start to have a short squeeze happen, you start to have the price of gold. This is silver as well. I'm saying gold, but it's for both. You start to have the prices rise quickly.

34:34You have a bunch of shorts start closing out. You have some people ask to take delivery. You can get into a point very quickly where nobody can source the physical metal because nobody has it. You ask from me, but I don't have it. So I have to turn around and ask for it from somebody else. They don't have it. They have to turn around and ask for it from somebody else. It's all been rehypothecated this way. And there's no way to track how deep this goes. There are estimates, but it's a very opaque market. And so if you don't have it in your hand, there's counterparty risk. There are certain storage services where it's allocated, they're insured, it's audited independently.

35:07There's actual coins on a shelf and it's costly. You have to pay for that. That's the safest way to own it outside of holding it in your hand. Most people don't own gold that way or silver. And there's a very real possibility that we get a squeeze and you see a big bubble occur because nobody can source the physical. For investors that are more of these sound money advocates that are huge fans of gold and silver, How do they go about owning it? You mentioned how they're able to own the gold and have people own it and store it for them and their fees associated with that. How can investors go about doing that?

35:41Yeah, absolutely. There are plenty of services available. There's a checklist of things that I always say that if you're going to... Well, number one, buy it and physically hold it. That's the number one way to do it because you eliminate counterparty risk. You can't eliminate all risk because somebody could... If they know about it, they could break into your house and they could steal it, right? you could lose it, you could bury it in your backyard and forget where you buried it, right? So you don't eliminate risk by holding it, but you eliminate counterparty risk. So the way to reduce counterparty risk as much as possible is number one, look for allocated.

36:11That means that there's a actual physical bar that you legally own or coin that you legally own. It's not that you're owed. The second thing to look for is segregated. Segregated means that instead of there just being a bar and they say, okay, well, based on how much you own, you own like one-tenth of this bar. Segregated means that you own a whole piece of something that's actually there on a shelf that's moved into a little pile that's just yours. So you've got a stack of 10 coins on a shelf in a vault somewhere. So that's segregated. The next thing is independently audited. So companies, many times they'll hire independent auditors to come in and make sure that everything they say is there is actually there.

36:49The fourth thing is insured and pretty much everybody is insured. The fifth thing is that I usually prefer is private vault instead of a government vault, because there are governments around the world who have a history of just saying, no, we're confiscating this. And private vault storage has another layer of protection against that. The last thing I look for is in a country with zero history of confiscation of gold. So Bank of England, whether you agree or disagree with it, recently confiscated Venezuela's gold, or at least said, we're not going to give it back to you because they disagree with the politics.

37:22And you can say that's good or bad because Venezuela, dictator, whatever your views are on that, I'm not making a political statement here. I'm saying Bank of England has retained and shown and demonstrated the power to say, we're not going to give you your gold. And other countries have been repatriating their gold from the Bank of England because of this, or maybe not because of it, but they've been taking their gold back. America confiscated every single American's gold, FDR did. And then 30 years later in 1971, One, America confiscated all of the world's gold and said, no, we're not giving any of you your gold.

37:53That was what closing the gold window was. If I'm looking for storage, I'm going to use a private vault in a country with no history of doing that. So that's my checklist. There are plenty of services that meet all of those requirements. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows.

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41:29All right, back to the show. You also mentioned Bitcoin potentially being a good inflation hedge. And it's kind of funny to think about all of the labels that people put on Bitcoin. Do you see Bitcoin more as an inflation hedge or a risk on asset? Because it seems to perform well with low interest rates and high levels of monetary easing and money printing as well? Yeah, that's a great question. When a new asset, when a new technology, when something new comes onto the scene, the story about it has to change. And the story about Bitcoin has changed so many times. Medium of exchange, store of value, uncorrelated asset, inflation hedge, whatever you want to call it, it's changed because the way that it reacts has changed because it's new.

42:12And so the world is trying to figure out what this new thing is. Mathematically speaking, Bitcoin is not a hedge. It doesn't perform inversely to any asset that people are trying to hedge. Now, that doesn't mean you can't make money from it. It doesn't mean it's not the best performing asset in the world since inception, or maybe even over the last couple of years, but it is not a hedge. A hedge is something that performs inversely correlated to the asset you're trying to protect. A hedge is something like fire insurance. Fire insurance goes up to the exact same amount that your house went down in a fire.

42:43That's a hedge. And so Bitcoin is not a hedge against inflation, Bitcoin is a bet that the world will opt out of an inflationary system in the future. And if the world does opt out of an inflationary system in the future and chooses Bitcoin instead, the returns for anybody who buys Bitcoin ahead of time are going to be astronomical because for Bitcoin to serve as base money, the market cap must be many times larger than it is right now. And so that makes Bitcoin into a very attractive asymmetric bet for even a portion of a portfolio so that if it goes down, it can only go to zero, but it can go up many times higher than its current price, current market cap.

43:27And so that's the way that I view Bitcoin. It's a bet that the world will opt out of an inflationary monetary system in the future. And if that pays off, it pays off extremely well. That makes sense. I wanted to mention the stock market as well. I think many listeners are very much interested in the stock market, especially listeners of this show, because that's what they know and understand. And it's what's done well for them over the years. Do you believe that owning mostly stocks in a portfolio is a sensible strategy in this environment? Or would you rather have some exposure to other asset classes as well?

44:05So part of it is personal preference. There's a lot of wisdom in investing in what you know. And so there are some people that are extremely proficient at picking stocks, timing them. They're very disciplined in getting in, getting out, being able to analyze. There are other people where it's like, hey, a little bit of diversification goes a long way, especially if you're diversifying into assets that are uncorrelated. And so it depends on your area of expertise and your preference. There are many stocks that will perform extremely well over the coming decades, regardless of inflation, regardless of deflation, potentially, regardless of changes in monetary systems, collapses of fiat currencies, because let's say, hypothetically, the dollar fails tomorrow.

44:48Apple will still exist. Apple will be priced in whatever currency replaces the dollar. You can price Apple today in euros. You can price Apple today in yen. So that's all that would be going on there if a currency fails and it's repriced in a new currency. It's just, what's the exchange rate from the old currency to the new one? And that's what the price is. So there's nothing magical or mysterious or terrifying going on there. And when you look at how stocks perform in high inflationary periods, like look at Venezuela's stock market over the last five years. It looks like up and to the right, just a penny stock, parabolic, it's a hockey stick.

45:22And so anybody who looked at stocks in Venezuela and said, hey, stocks are overvalued right now. Multiples are at all-time highs. Prices are crazy. I'm going to sell my stocks and hold cash and wait for the stock market to crash. Well, guess what? They lost big time because the cash crashed and the stocks were just responding to that. And so it depends on what you're going to hold other than the stocks, because a lot of people are selling assets right now, going into cash, not realizing that the assets are simply responding to the inflation, the debasement of the currency, and they're going up not because they're worth more in purchasing power, but they are worth more than the dollar or the currency that they're trying to sell it for.

46:00Stocks are maybe not the best hedge against inflation, but they are a hedge against inflation. And even in a collapse of a currency, the companies stick around. And so if you know how to analyze and pick good companies that will stick around and do well, especially ones that do well during inflation, like miners and commodities and energy and real estate and others, they're going to at least do better than dollars. That makes sense. I'd like to talk about what is potentially next for inflation going forward, which I know might feel like a total shot in the dark for many. What is the Federal Reserve's next move to try and bring inflation down to normal levels, say the 2 % to 3 % range for CPI?

46:40If we look back at history, even just the last 20 years or so, we can see a very repeatable pattern. Economic pain, intervention to soften the blow of the pain, a little bit of a lull, and then a rebound resulting in a larger amount of economic pain than happened last time with a larger amount of intervention, and you repeat the cycle over and over and over again. This is an exponential process. And that's why a trillion dollars as a bailout for the financial crisis was preposterous. Nobody could believe that the word trillion was being tossed around. And now, if it's not a trillion, it's not even worth talking about.

47:18And so it is a very predictable pattern. And right now, the part we are at in the cycle is where they are trying to back off from the intervention. And so they're very verbal about the fact that they're committed to stopping purchasing their assets, more assets by March. By the end of March, they want to not be buying any assets anymore, the Fed. They also then want to start raising interest rates after that and potentially even start selling assets. The problem is, this is classic business cycle. This is what happens, the boom-bust cycle, the debt booms and busts. When you have growth that is founded, the foundation is debt caused by easy money, artificially low interest rates, credit expansion.

47:59When you start to pull the rug out from underneath that by raising interest rates and contracting the money supply, things crash very quickly and very severely. And so what they are doing is seeing the final stages of this blow off top from all of the monetary expansion. Meanwhile, they're pulling the rug out from underneath it by stopping their asset purchases, maybe selling assets and raising interest rates. That's going to cause a bubble forming underneath a gap of air, I should say, and it's going to start crashing very quickly. Somebody is going to become insolvent. Somebody is not going to be able to handle this.

48:32When that takes place, which I think will happen within the next year, could be wrong. I think it'll happen within the next year, a crash starting from this, they'll have to reverse course. They'll have to start blowing up their balance sheet again. They'll drop interest rates to zero, but they're only going to have maybe three interest hikes in, which are a quarter of a percent each time. So they're not going to be able to drop short-term interest rates enough to have any meaningful impact. And remember, every time they intervene, they have to intervene more than they did before. Otherwise, it does nothing to stop the crash.

49:00And so they're going to have to do other things that they've never done before. Outright yield curve control. They're going to have to buy 30-year treasuries enough to keep interest rates low. They're going to have to peg mortgage rates to 2 % or 1%. They're going to have to do all sorts of other things, universal basic income, things that they've tested and tried out a little bit and gotten close to. It's all going to come in full force to deal with this next crash because the seeds that they've sown from the unprecedented intervention are going to cause a crash like we haven't seen before if they let it go.

49:30So they're going to step in and it could potentially be the last time they say, how far can you kick the can down the road? This might be the one that causes the economy to overdose on stimulus. As you know, there's a lot of talk that the Federal Reserve can't afford to materially raise rates. It makes me look back to the 70s and early 80s where the 10-year treasury rose all the way to 15%, which is pretty insane to think about. Is it just the high debt levels that we have today that prevent them from raising rates materially? Or what makes this period so much different than that time period? Yeah.

50:07And it's not even just the total debt amount in terms of dollars. It's the total debt amount in terms of percent, however you want to measure it compared to anything else. And so whether you're looking at total corporate debt, whether you're looking at debt to GDP, whether you're looking at the total national debt, whether you're looking at the cost of the federal government servicing its debt load as a percent of what it brings in from tax income. We are nowhere near where we were in the 70s. It is not even close. When you look at the fact that the federal funds rate got up to 19 % in 79 or 80, we probably couldn't even get the federal funds rate up to 4 or 5 % before the government is insolvent.

50:47That would be if the average interest rate of government debt got up to like four or 5%, it would cost more to service that debt than the government brings in in taxes. That's insolvent. Now, far before we get to that point, I think there will be other problems that will cause them to reverse course. But the fact of the matter is we have no capability to fix this through austerity or raising interest rates. The crash is baked into the cake already. I wanted to talk about another potential consequence of high inflation. It might not be in the US, it might potentially be in other developed nations around the world, and that's price controls.

51:26This means that the government essentially sets a limit on the prices of goods and services to ensure that people can afford them. Could you talk about the negative effects that this could potentially have? Yeah, 100%. Price controls always make the problem worse. And the reason why is because prices are just information about the relative scarcity of a good or service compared to everything else that people want. So say, for example, this year, they make half the bread that they made last year. Bread is not something that goes into storage. And so all the bread that is consumed this year is also produced this year.

52:00So if half the bread is produced by necessity, half the bread will be consumed. So information has to be sent out to economic actors about consuming less bread. You can do that a number of ways. You could have a central committee that says, hey, we're going to fairly and in a very just way, we're going to tell everybody who can consume more bread, less bread, the same amount of bread, and there would be no corruption and no bribery, and it would be done in a very fair and equitable way. Now, the other way you could do it is what the free market solution is, which is just prices. Because the reality is prices are information about scarcity.

52:37And so when half the bread is produced, prices will respond by going up. And those higher prices are information signals that are sent out to economic actors to consume less bread. And there will be some people that if the price of bread doubles, they'll say, I'm going to consume zero bread. There'll be some people, let's say bakeries that say, I'm going to consume the same amount of bread because I need it no matter what. It doesn't matter if the price doubles, I'm going to buy the same amount of bread. But overall, the prices will respond accordingly to give economic actors the right information they need without knowing anything about why there's a bread shortage, why there's less bread being produced.

53:13You don't have to know anything about that. It's just one simple thing, price, which is your way of measuring how much you want that versus everything else that you might be able to buy. Further, let's say it's something more important than bread. Let's say it's water during a disaster. This is something that's probably highly controversial because even people opposed to price controls say that price controls during a disaster are necessary. So let's say water, there's a disaster and water bottles go from$1 to$15, right? So that's, let's say what the free market would have priced them at. That would be looked at as extortionary and taking advantage of people who are in desperate need of water.

53:49What's going on that drove the prices up? Well, the first thing is that demand for water increased above everything else because everybody wants and needs water more than anything. So they're willing to divert a lot more resources than they used to be. And they're doing that above and beyond diverting resources to things like Netflix, let's say, or consuming food. So the reality is that that water is not scarce everywhere. Let's say the disasters in Texas, Florida has plenty of bottled water. Now, maybe Florida doesn't have the capability to deliver water to Texas if the price of water is$1. Maybe Florida would lose money on that.

54:26But maybe if the price of water is$15 a bottle, suddenly the people with water in Florida look at that and say, now I can deliver water to Texas. There's enough of a profit incentive to make it worth my resources to do everything I can to get as much water as possible to Texas because the profit opportunity is there. That means everybody with the capability devotes all their resources for the small window of opportunity to go make those massive profits. The incentive is there. And guess what? Enough water then gets delivered to the people who need it until there's so much water being delivered that it floods the demand, overwhelms the demand.

55:01And now people don't need as much water. Those prices come back down. So high prices are the cure for high prices if there's a free market and no price controls allows the free market incentives to work to deliver the resources where they are needed the most. And if you input price controls on that, what you do is you increase demand because suddenly if somebody needs water and it's$1 when it should be$15, they're far more likely to store and buy more of it than they need. Whereas if prices go up, that means they're only going to buy what they need, or maybe they'll buy less than they would before.

55:37So there's a lot less hoarding when prices go up. So price controls incentivize over demand. And then what they also do is they disincentivize increasing the supply because now nobody with the resources will come in and deliver what it's needed. And so price controls always make things worse by increasing demand and decreasing supply. It almost feels like the Federal Reserve has hit the end of the road with interest rates having hit 0%. How do you believe that this will all end? I sense that something big is coming at some point in our lives since we're fairly young. After learning about the macroeconomy from people like yourself, but I really don't know what's going to happen exactly.

56:20How do you see this all potentially playing out? Yeah, absolutely. I go back to studying history a lot because a lot of the things that we see happening right now have happened before, especially when you look at the rise and fall of powers on earth and financial systems and the age and reserve currencies and debt loads and things like that, you see a lot of patterns repeat themselves, maybe not exactly, but you see a lot of similarities. And so right now, the way that it looks is that this financial system is near the end of its road. You have the debasement of currency, you have inflation start to take over as the predominant method to funding the government whose expenses have become a burden on the economy rather than a help to it.

57:03And that's the reason why you have to resort to money printing because you can't tax the economy any more than you can, any more than you already are because it's taxed to its max. Any additional taxes have decreasing or diminishing returns because it's imposing a larger burden on the economy so it can't grow as much and you are increasing rates and changing behaviors. And so tax-wise, you're almost tapped out. Borrowing-wise, you're almost tapped out. And so you're borrowing from the Federal Reserve, which is just printing money. And so when countries resort, when they get to this place where they have to resort to the money printer to fund their expenses, you have pretty quickly historically, although it takes a long time when you're living through it, you have an eventual collapse of the currency and people start using different currencies.

57:50And so that's long-term what it looks like is happening right now. And that corresponds and happens at the same time as powers shifting around the world. and you have allegiances changing around the world. And you have a swing from ultra centralization to more decentralization. So you've got more small businesses coming up now. You've got less people wanting to work for a couple giant corporations. You have smaller nation states rather than superpowers. And so at financial systems, you'll have competing monetary systems instead of one dominant one like the dollar today. And so it does look like we're going through a transition period, ultimately, I think even though there's some short-term pain, there is a lot more upside and improvement and growth to look forward to.

58:38I 100 % agree. And I think it's just so important to get a good understanding of what's going on in the world to ensure that you are protected as an investor. And I looked up Ray Dalio's book that Joe mentioned earlier. It's The Changing World Order. William Green on We Study Billionaires show. I recently had Ray on to talk about his new book, and I recommend listeners check out that episode. Now, Joe, thank you so much for coming on to the Millennial Investing Podcast. I learned a lot from your insights and really enjoy listening to your YouTube channel, Heresy Financial. Joe, where can the audience go to get connected with you before we close out the episode?

59:15Yeah, absolutely. The main place would be my YouTube channel, Heresy Financial, And then my Twitter account is also at Heresy Financial. So those two places if you want more. Awesome. Thank you again for coming on, Joe. I really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app so you can get these episodes delivered automatically. And if you haven't already done so, be sure to check out our website, theinvestorspodcast.com. There you'll find all of our episodes, some educational resources we have, as well as some tools you can use as an investor.

59:52And with that, we'll see you again next time.

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