Best of the Program ｜ Guest： Steve Forbes ｜ 4⧸20⧸22
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Summary
Join Marty and Matt as they talk about inflation, the dangers of central planning, and why Bitcoin is better than the alternatives. Recorded in Los Angeles, CA! Subscribe to my new show, "The Alt-Right's Guide to Bitcoin" wherever you get your shows, and get 10% off your first month with the promo code "ELISSA" at checkout.
Transcript
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Hey, welcome. We're talking a little bit about inflation today with Steve Forbes. He's fascinating
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and very, very clear on what inflation is and the warnings to our country. Also, we get ready
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for our big special tonight. I share some of the pieces that actually were on the cutting room
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floor. Some of the things that are now being taught in your kid's classroom. This is funded
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in part by the federal government. It is everywhere across the nation. If you thought CRT was bad,
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wait until you see tonight's episode at nine o'clock. And that's right after a brand new
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Stew Does America. Normally I don't watch that show, but you have a good guest on tonight,
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don't you? Yeah. Yeah. We booked somebody. Oh, Glenn Beck. Because we're doing a little
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bit on, uh, on this as well, kind of focusing on a little bit of a different part of it
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with, you know, the libs of tick tock thing that's going on with Taylor Lorenz. And we're
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going to get into that, uh, as well with you, hopefully, uh, on the program, if you decide
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to show up, we'll see. We'll see. You never know. You never, you never know. Blaze tv.com
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slash Glenn is the place to go. You can get your subscription, uh, for 10 bucks off. If you
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use the promo code Glenn. So I was reading an article, um, and I'm having our time editing
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it because I think it's so important. It comes from Alex, uh, Svetsky. He is the author of
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the Uncommunist Manifesto. And he says, modern society must make a decision. We as individuals
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in a modern society are becoming more technocratically dystopian by the day. We'll, uh, inevitably, we
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will inevitably be faced with a choice. Succumb to centralize digital money or rally around
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the freedom and sovereignty of Bitcoin. Now he points out in this, a big difference between
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cryptocurrency and Bitcoin. Hang on. He says, the West is no longer the West. I don't even
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know if it deserves to be capitalized. What made it great and successful, the enlightenment
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values and the sovereignty of the individual are all but dissolved in the morass of modern,
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uh, modernity's mindlessness. Gone are the days of excellence, greatness, and standing
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out in are the days of conformity, compliance, acceptance, participation awards, and just
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fitting in the values and virtues that made the West great have been replaced with the
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incessant cry for comfort and convenience in return for obedience. The crescendo of this
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horrific orchestra is nigh. Gaslighting is the norm. Like Orwell predicted, war is now peace.
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Freedom is now slavery. Ignorance is now strength. The West was not defeated by a single blow.
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It has been death by a thousand minute and meaningless cuts. From pronouns to equity, scientism,
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welfare, climate alarmism, political correctness, this incessant need to deconstruct objective
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reality into completely arbitrary subjective falsehoods. That has transformed the once great
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West into a cesspool of moral relativism. When everything matters, nothing matters.
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We are truly living in a clown world. We used to aspire to greatness and excellence. We were interested
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in the idea of quality, of worth, of value. But there is no more value. Like the money we conjure out of
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thin air and use to measure human action and all resources, everything has been supposedly made
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abundant. Because we have no anchor to real cost. And as a result, we're drowning in excess quantities of
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fake wealth, of junk that doesn't matter. Whether this be NFTs, moronic media, reality TV, fake celebrities,
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brainwashing at school, nursing home level politicians, or scandemics.
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And because we spend all of our time lying to ourselves and burning through real resources,
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we are simultaneously suffering from shortages and areas that do matter. Energy, food, responsibility,
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intelligence, and courage. We used to be pioneers. We used to envision our place in the stars.
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Now we bicker and worry about our place in the dirt. It's a sad time for humanity.
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And dare I say, only God knows when we come out on the other side, if we do it all.
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The empire of lies cannot last, and it will collapse either on top of all of us, or atop only some.
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I sincerely hope the latter, for the only meaningful and realistic goal we have left,
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as sovereign, intelligent individuals, is to limit the collateral damage.
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As we embark on this pursuit, and as the collapse of these false orders inevitably occur,
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it's my belief that Homo sapiens will bifurcate into two primary camps, and perhaps two different
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species. One, Homo lemmingus. And two, Homo bitcoinius.
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The first one is a classic midwit NPC status persona.
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Those who lack personal control and restraint, and as such, project that lack onto the rest
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of the world. The key characteristic of the yearning to reduce the diverse constituents
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of a complex organism into simple numbers, and transform these systems into mere spreadsheets.
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They are the doctors who believe health is the absence of disease.
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That disease is the absence of modern medicine, and that depression is the absence of Prozac.
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They lack the capacity to think holistically, and they view all fractal, complex systems as
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linear and isolated from the whole. They have major control issues because they lack self-control,
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and therefore compensate by attempting to control others.
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They're willing to trade the diversity and complexity of life for sterility and linear control.
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On the other hand, Homo bitcoinius will be the kind of individual who continues to become more
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robust, sovereign, and self-reliant. They will be too busy practicing self-mastery and building
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something of value to bother with meddling in other people's lives. They will be more local.
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They will own the product of their labor. They will trade freely, and they will have no master.
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Of course, there will be diverse classes of people arranged into hierarchies of competence.
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They'll not be built on some arbitrary authority by decree, but the emergence of natural leaders
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and masters of their craft. This is what nobility means in the classical sense.
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To be noble is something to aspire toward, not something to sneer at. To be noble is the pursuit
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of excellence and greatness. It is my hope that the New West will both be built and populated
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by these kinds of people. We're going to have a high price to pay.
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He goes into the difference between crypto and Bitcoin. Have you ever thought of this, Stu?
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Sure. Yeah. I mean, every project is different in scope. And I was reading some of this earlier
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today. It seems like one of the big criticisms he has is the centralization aspect of many
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Which is a problem. I don't think that they're all worthless, but that is one of the strengths
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of Bitcoin. It was why it was the first one. It achieves those fundamentals much better than
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any of the others. So he talks about Bitcoin. He says, here are the reasons Bitcoin came up
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in the first place. It was the removal of rulers and issuers of money, the removal of monetary
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inflation, the demonopolization of money forever, the placement of money into the realm of physical
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and natural laws, and the fusion of energy, universal physical currency, to money in the metaphysical
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sense. The magnitude of this achievement is staggering. And the inability for people to
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comprehend it is both mind-numbingly frustrating, but also expected, considering the nihilistic pets
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humans have become. Perhaps the words on this page jolt you, or perhaps I'm just yelling at the clouds.
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I don't know. But I'll try my best to remind you that fiat is the enemy in every sense of the word
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and in every incarnation. Any kind of coin other than Bitcoin is just replicating the fiat we already
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have, but on a more digital standard. You don't want to give these people, no different than Bill Gates
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or Mark Zuckerberg, ultimate power over you. Do you? And he talks about how crypto
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has just become outright Ponzi schemes or machines used by the financial tech world and by governments.
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And he specifically goes into Ethereum. And I didn't know this about Ethereum. Ethereum apparently
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is, let me see if I can find it. Ethereum is the Ethereum foundation. Did you know that?
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Yeah. He writes, it's infused with World Economic Forum participants, but Ethereum co-founder
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owns Infura, which practically the entire Ethereum network runs on. He's part of the old guard,
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worked at Goldman Sachs, I believe in his bed with agencies attempting to reduce the world into a
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spreadsheet and humans into numbers to populate it. The WEF, BlackRock, et cetera.
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Look, Ethereum is a totally different project, right? And it's a totally different aim.
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But still, you know, look, the point I think is, is most pure here in the difference between Bitcoin
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and these centralized Fed coins, where, you know, this is where you're taking the positives
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of Bitcoin and implementing it into a system where the central government can monitor every one of your
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activities. Correct. And that is, I think, the biggest danger here. You know, you can obviously be
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involved in these other crypto projects or not, but it's really more about not just, you know,
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which cryptocurrency you're talking about, right? It's, it's, it's a bigger issue than this.
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Well, he says, you know, that centralization. Yeah. He's, he's talking about like Cordano is,
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is, uh, you know, using, uh, yeah. Cardano or cut Cardano. Yeah. Cardano. I mean, we're,
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we're super deep here. I think. No, I know that. I know that. But they're saying that it's
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blockchain for social good. Cause that explains what happened at the world economic forum. They were
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talking about blockchain and a lot of these things have their founders and, uh, you know,
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the people on their board who are WF members. And they're talking about, this is going to be,
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you know, um, you know, socially good for everybody that, that is leftist code language,
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you know, socially good. What, how are you going to make sure that things are balanced? That's the
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one thing that Bitcoin does not do. It doesn't balance and give, promise you equity. It promises
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that you can take your labor, turn it into money, put it in Bitcoin and it remains safe for you.
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Yeah. Relatively. It's, it's not, there's no, there's no overseer, right? That's the, that's the,
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the promise of it. And, you know, I will say there's a really good argument that
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a lot of the cryptocurrency stuff has gone away from that. You know, they've tried to solve some
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of the, you know, perceived problems with, with no centralization by putting a few people who aren't
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the government in a position of centralization, which is not, it's not any good. That's what we did
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with the fed. It's not, it's not great. Right. It's exact. You are setting up a new federal reserve,
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but like you, as you see, you know, we've been talking about this type of stuff for a while,
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when you talk about content being removed from the internet and, and social media accounts going
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down, you know, banned and speech being not only banned, but banned in advance, you know,
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people censoring their speech before they even say these things. That's the promise of this type
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of technology where it's so far outside. You know, we keep talking about, uh, you know,
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how are we going to change the law so that YouTube is nicer to us? Like, I mean, I'm not saying there's
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nothing to do down those roads, but like those are, that's, those are not solutions to these
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problems. Like YouTube is never going to do what you want it to do. Twitter is never, even with Elon
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Musk in there, you're just going to start disliking Elon Musk more if he takes this thing over
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because they're never going to do, they're never going to do this right. But that is the reason
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why Bitcoin is so good is it sets the rules up and the rules can't be changed, right? The rules are
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the rules just exist. Yeah. Nobody, nobody can change those rules. I would have no problem. That's
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what the internet used to be. I'd have no problem if you had YouTube, Facebook, whatever, and the rules
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were the rules and you don't change them along the way to, for your own, you know, board members or
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whoever you just, that's it. Um, and everything was fair. You don't like that one. Good. Go create
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another one. And they didn't have the ability to stop you from creating another one. That's the world
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that America always was. America was based on that idea. The streets were lined with gold,
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not literally. They were lined with gold because if you want to build something, this was the place
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where you could build it. And remember Disneyland was built in under a year, about seven months.
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You wouldn't be able to get an environmental study for Disneyland today. Um, that's who we used to,
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that's who we were in 1955. So are we going to be free or are we going to be under somebody
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thumb? That is the main choice that we all have to make. This is the best of the Glenn Beck
00:16:31.960
program. And don't forget, rate us on iTunes. If you don't, um, use Tik TOK. Good for you. I mean,
00:16:46.660
I mean that sincerely all hail you. Um, Tik TOK is a, is a, um, is a Chinese tool. I think just to
00:16:59.840
just dumb us down. Um, but I digress there, there is, um, there isn't, there's not the censorship
00:17:10.800
on Tik TOK that there is elsewhere. And somebody has really done a great job at exposing the craziness
00:17:22.220
that is the fringe of the liberal part. I can't say that, you know, what was fringe we're now living.
00:17:29.400
So I don't know what fringe is in the, in the, on the left anymore. I have no idea what fringe is.
00:17:37.660
Um, but the creator has now come under attack and I want to play just a little bit of something she
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said, uh, yesterday as she is being doxxed and exposed and her address is given out online.
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How has this affected your life? This Jeff Bezos piece?
00:17:57.780
Well, it's the past two days have been very chaotic and overwhelming. Um, I have to make
00:18:04.280
some travel plans, you know, really fast, but I was not planning on earlier. So there was a little
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bit of coordination that had to happen. Um, and I'm now in a location where I don't think anyone would
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find me, um, not in any of the locations that Taylor Moran leaked or that anyone can find.
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Um, but I, it's, it's been a little bit tough, but I'm not going to let this get me down.
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So her friends and people who know her say she's not going to stop. This is not going to,
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it will frighten her. It will scare her. Um, cause they're coming after her and these people
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will be violent. You know, they always say the right is so violent. Show it to us, show it to us.
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The left, I could show you boatloads of evidence that you're violent.
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So all she's doing on this tick tock, it's the libs of tick tock. All she does is take things that
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are on tick tock. She doesn't edit them out of context or anything else. She just takes the post
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and she reposts it in one place. And now conservatives go to libs of tick tock and
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they see what they're saying. Let me give you two of the videos she posted. Here's video.
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Number one. This is a tool I use to teach students about gender and sexuality. First up,
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we have sex assigned at birth. This is what the doctor says you are. When you come out of the womb,
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it should be based on chromosomes, hormones, and genitals. But most times doctors just look at
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genitals. Next up, we have gender identity, which is totally different from sex assigned at birth.
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This is what you feel you are inside. And no one can see this from the outside.
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There are three different sliders that you can move up and down to describe your gender identity.
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Then we have gender expression, which is how you show your gender to the world.
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It's usually based in a sort of binary system, which isn't perfect. Again, you can slide these
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up and down to show the different gendered ways you express yourself. Then we jump down to
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attraction. We have physical attraction and emotional attraction. These are different.
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Again, there are sliders that a person can use to best describe their sexuality.
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All right. So this is done with a big cartoon unicorn. This is for our kids. That's a teacher
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explaining, showing the curriculum what's happening. Instead of teaching addition, we are teaching
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Now, this is a first grade classroom. This is a from a teacher in a charter school in Boston.
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Again, from the libs of tick tock. Listen to this and something, something cool about me,
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Miss Hammond. All right. All right. So something that's really cool and unique about who I am
00:20:56.100
is that I am transgender. So we touched a little bit about that at the beginning of this week in
00:21:02.500
the book that Miss Hammond read. But I'm going to give you my explanation about what it means to be
00:21:07.220
transgender as well. So when babies are born, the doctor looks at them and they make a guess about
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whether the baby is a boy or a girl based on what they look like. And most of the time, that guess is
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100% correct. There are no issues whatsoever. But sometimes the doctor is wrong. The doctor makes
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an incorrect guess. When the doctor makes a correct guess, that's when a person is called
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cisgender. When a doctor's guess is wrong, that's when they are transgender. So I'm a man. But when I
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was a baby, the doctors told my parents I was a girl. And so my parents gave me a name that girls
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typically have and bought me clothes that girls typically wear. And until I was 18 years old,
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everyone thought I was a girl. And this was super, super uncomfortable for me because I knew that
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wasn't right. I didn't know the doctor's guess. Did you know that? No, I kind of thought they had
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some information based on science that they were making. Yeah, they were recording. But no,
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I guess it's just a spin of a wheel. I guess we don't follow the science. No, no, it's just a
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guess. So the reason why we're bringing this up is this is all this woman does. She's not taking
00:22:19.560
people out of context. She's just playing that on one channel of, you know, her channel lives of
00:22:24.940
TikTok. And many of them are these are those are two more of the more serious examples. A lot of them
00:22:29.760
are funny. I mean, it's just, you know, laughing at the oddities in our world, right? We all have
00:22:35.960
them. Some people have more than others. But nobody's on candid camera. They posted these
00:22:40.940
right to TikTok. That's really important. She's not as far as I know. And correct me if I'm wrong
00:22:45.860
on this, Glenn, but she's not going into someone who has their account set as private. No. And
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lifting their their account. She's just going through and and and being a human algorithm.
00:23:00.140
Yeah. Hey, these are the things I find interesting. Look at what look at what liberals are really
00:23:04.440
saying to each other in this world. And they admit quite a bit when they're bragging to their
00:23:10.860
friends about how much typically they are owning conservatives. Correct. They're doing this to brag.
00:23:18.580
So here's the thing. The Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, the Washington Post through Taylor
00:23:26.300
Lorenz has doxed the woman that has the libs of of tick tock doxter. She's a regular person. She's only
00:23:38.560
all she's doing is being a human aggregator. That's it. But apparently Taylor Lorenz, who I think is
00:23:48.220
psychotic, she is had a psychotic break because she has been crying on NBC, complaining about threats
00:23:59.100
and online bullying that she claims has targeted her. And she said it is so destructive and has
00:24:08.160
destroyed my life and made me feel unsafe. If there's just one piece of information that comes
00:24:14.840
out about me. Well, she then goes to the Washington Post and exposes the woman behind libs of tick tock
00:24:24.100
address and everything. Now, they're saying they didn't do that. But yes, they did. They posted a
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real estate license with the woman's address on it. Oh, he didn't see the address. Bull crap. You didn't
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see the address. And the only reason why this is happening is because libs of tick tock is successful.
00:24:47.360
People actually watch it and laugh. And that cannot be tolerated in an authoritarian state.
00:24:57.300
You do not make fun of the authoritarians. You don't.
00:25:02.720
That's the only reason why this is happening. This is intimidation, period.
00:25:13.780
They wanted us to extract consequence. They wanted pain. They wanted a price. If you're going to
00:25:20.760
make our movement look bad, then you're going to pay personally in fear, in harm to your career,
00:25:31.600
anger, in intimidation, in whatever form it is, you will have to pay a price for being successful
00:25:41.320
against liberals, against progressives, against the far left, against the Great Reset. They have
00:25:49.000
to extract a price for it. There's no other reason to do this. BS. They didn't know the address was
00:25:54.240
there. In fact, they're not even saying that. They're not saying we missed the address. They're
00:25:59.220
saying they didn't do it at all. They're just memory holding the entire experience when everyone
00:26:04.140
saw the link to the real estate license with the address on the page. They're just acting as if it
00:26:09.900
didn't occur. That's their plan right now, the Washington Post. And it's completely, it's
00:26:15.640
embarrassing. This is, this is not 1997 where Taylor Lorenz was crying about a piece of information
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out about her who is a public figure, a reporter, and everyone knows her name. Now she's actually
00:26:30.440
trying to justify outing someone who isn't a public figure, who doesn't have their name public.
00:26:37.480
What does that do to her life? She knows exactly what it does. She was just crying and sobbing about
00:26:42.660
it on MSNBC a couple of weeks ago. And to have this disconnect shows real struggles dealing with
00:26:50.000
reality. Oh, a psychotic break, a true psychotic break. She is, I don't know if she, she is a danger
00:26:58.920
possibly to her own self. She is to others. She's now demonstrated that she is not living in reality
00:27:07.000
and she is a danger to others. Uh, that's a reason that, you know, they keep you at the hospital.
00:27:13.220
She said she was dealing with massive PTSD. Yeah. She said she was, uh, mentally just exhausted.
00:27:23.140
This is two weeks ago and she understands the consequences of all this. Then she goes to work
00:27:31.240
with Jeff Bezos and she does exactly what she said caused her breakdown. That's somebody who needs help.
00:27:41.340
I mean that I, I don't want to, uh, get into the world of, uh, diagnosing people and committing
00:27:49.480
people to insane asylums, but she is a danger to others and she is not making any sense. She is
00:28:00.380
doing what she just said should never be done. And it's a much worse version than what happened to
00:28:07.460
her. She, I mean, the fact that she's taking someone whose identity is not known and making
00:28:12.180
it known is a really big line and taking someone who is not a public figure and making them into a
00:28:17.020
public figure is a big difference. Taylor Lorenz, look, she, she, of course she's dealt with criticism
00:28:22.500
online. She's an online reporter for all of the major papers in our country. Basically she was at the
00:28:29.060
New York, New York, the top two New York times and Washington post, right? She's been, you know,
00:28:32.920
she's been in the center of this debate for a while. And of course, yes, she has received
00:28:37.960
criticism, much of it fair, some of it unfair. I'm sure some of it was terrible. I know that we
00:28:43.640
receive terrible, abusive things said to us all the time. It's part of being a public figure in
00:28:49.440
the United States. It's not a good thing. No one, no one should do that to her. However, what she's
00:28:55.060
talking about here is now she's trying to say, well, this is just what reporters do. So of course,
00:29:00.260
people who are antagonistic towards her and who are a little more aggressive are going to go to
00:29:05.460
all of her friends and all of her family and do these things, show up at their door. And we've
00:29:10.940
seen some of it already. She's already complaining about some of it happening already. Well, you're
00:29:15.100
the one normalizing this behavior. This is insanity. It should not happen. And, you know, her, she
00:29:20.780
tweeted yesterday, she said, rather than debate doxing, I hope people can read the story and see the
00:29:26.380
striking escalation of attacks against gay and trans people in the crucial role this account
00:29:30.580
has played in the right-wing media ecosystem. Well, look, I read the story. That would have
00:29:36.380
been the debate if you didn't name the person to give out their address, right? That would have been
00:29:40.240
the debate. People would have been saying, well, is this account highlighting people who are going
00:29:44.480
through difficult times and maybe shouldn't be highlighted? I don't know. You could have that
00:29:49.020
conversation. And you know what's so crazy is I'm not debating that that guy felt, you know,
00:29:55.700
he was a girl and felt like he's now a he or whatever. I wasn't even debating that. What I'm
00:30:02.740
debating on that TikTok video, the last one we played, is you're saying that doctors are guessing.
00:30:10.700
That's the thing. And you're saying that to first graders. Right. That's the controversial part
00:30:16.260
for me. I mean, I'm so past the, oh, he's a dude. He was a girl. Huh? I mean, I don't really care.
00:30:27.080
When I'm on TikTok, I don't really care what you say you are. And it's such a strange thing where
00:30:34.020
they separate this when it comes to gender and sex. You know, this has been their defense,
00:30:39.660
right? When you say, wait a minute, we know what sex is. Everyone knows like, whoa, this is a
00:30:43.160
different thing. It's the feeling you have inside. Look, maybe it is the feeling you have inside, but
00:30:48.780
your feelings about what you have inside are completely unimportant to me. I don't care what
00:30:55.480
your feelings are. Your feelings make no difference to society. You can have all the feelings. You can
00:31:01.380
be, you can cry at Hallmark movies or not. I don't care what your feelings are. Your feelings might be
00:31:07.040
important to you. They might be important to your family. They might even be important to the first
00:31:11.800
graders' families who you are teaching, but they are unimportant to society in general.
00:31:17.820
You can feel like a boy or a girl, however you want, whenever you want. But what you are is
00:31:25.420
important to society. What you feel like you are isn't. That's important to you in your personal
00:31:30.780
life. You deal with that all you want. But what is actually important to society and to doctors
00:31:36.400
who need to know whether you might be pregnant or not is what you are. That's the important thing.
00:32:05.500
So I am I'm really interested in hearing your take on what we are headed for with inflation.
00:32:13.820
So let's let's start here. Explain what inflation is, because some people, you know, you're so used
00:32:21.820
to hearing we're going to have two percent inflation. Oh, that's good. No, it's not. Is it, Steve?
00:32:28.140
No, just as you don't say we're going to reduce the size of a gallon of gasoline two percent.
00:32:34.200
That's good for you. No, it isn't. Keep it the same. So inflation with this is why we did this
00:32:40.460
reader friendly book. No jargon. Straightforward. There are really two kinds of inflation. One,
00:32:46.180
the non-money kind, non-monetary kind is when, say, you have bad weather. So commodity prices go up,
00:32:53.520
wheat prices go up, or you get the kind of shutdowns we had with the pandemic, which disrupts
00:32:58.880
supply chains all over the world. We're still suffering from that. That sends prices up.
00:33:03.760
And then you have the money kind, where the government reduces the value, in this case,
00:33:09.580
of the dollar by creating too many of them. And we know the government has been spending on a spree.
00:33:16.320
How has that been financed? A large part of it is the Federal Reserve buys those bonds. How does it
00:33:21.740
get the money to buy those bonds? It creates that of thin air, the ultimate ATM. Now, unfortunately,
00:33:27.440
Glenn, on the non-monetary inflation, normally, if you just leave the economy alone,
00:33:32.160
those things will heal themselves. We did it after World War II, and we converted from a wartime
00:33:38.200
economy to a peacetime economy. Disruptions, but we did it. But unfortunately, the Biden administration
00:33:43.780
is putting obstacles in the way, starting with the war on fossil fuels and a lot of other crazy
00:33:49.500
things they've done. 77 executive orders, $200 billion of new regulations. So they're making the
00:33:55.800
problem worse instead of letting the economy heal. And the Federal Reserve, they've been printing a lot of
00:34:01.500
money. They've been using gimmicks to try to keep that money from flooding the economy, but that's
00:34:06.160
going to run out. So if they don't get their act together, we're in for a rough time. And let me
00:34:11.880
just conclude on this. Unfortunately, and this is where we have a real danger now, the Fed believes
00:34:17.780
the way you cure inflation is not by stopping the printing press and making the dollar whole again,
00:34:24.640
making it stable again. They believe you do it by slowing the economy down, throwing people out of
00:34:31.340
work. And that's what they're up to now. So Steve, first of all, the the idea of inflation,
00:34:39.440
we say it's now at 8.5. That's just because we measure it differently. If you look at shadow stats
00:34:45.880
that measure it the way we did under Reagan, it's at 17.1. Is that fair to do or not?
00:34:55.320
Well, this gets to the whole thing of how do you measure prices? The whole labor department has a
00:35:02.520
whole bureau devoted to it. What do you put in the index? And one of the crazy things is, is when
00:35:08.320
people's buying patterns change, let's say meat prices go up, which they have. So instead of having
00:35:13.940
a steak, you might go for some cheap hamburger. Well, they don't they they don't count that as a
00:35:20.900
inflation. They just say the patterns have changed. So yes, you can manipulate these things six ways
00:35:26.540
to Sunday. But the bottom line is prices are going up. The cost of living is going up. Part of it is
00:35:32.940
the pandemic and the Biden administration making things worse. We can cure that hopefully with a new
00:35:38.960
Congress. But the Federal Reserve, they got to get over this notion that when we do work, when we are
00:35:44.800
trying to be prosperous, they got to slow us down. I really bad stuff. I don't know that anybody really
00:35:50.860
understands the Fed balance sheet and what they've done and the money that they have loaned out trillions
00:35:58.720
of dollars that they have bailed banks out all around the world. If you can't, you know, they're trying
00:36:06.220
to sell off the stuff they have on their balance sheet. But every time they try that and raise
00:36:12.120
interest rates, the economy stops. And so not sure they're going to be able to do either of those.
00:36:19.680
How do you pull this money back in to be destroyed?
00:36:24.880
Well, what you do, first of all, which they won't do this part, is you leave interest rates alone.
00:36:31.960
Let the market set interest rates. Controlling interest rates is like rent control, which,
00:36:38.160
as we know, hurts new construction. This is trying to control the price of money and affect the price
00:36:43.760
you pay for renting the money, so to speak. So they should just leave that alone and let the market
00:36:49.040
do it. The market can sort it out very quickly. On your point about the balance sheet, when you say
00:36:55.060
balance sheet, people's eyes start to glaze. This thing of it, Fed is sitting on a pile of bonds,
00:37:00.000
and too many of them. And so what they should be doing is letting those bonds mature, not buying
00:37:08.040
new bonds. Let the money supply go down. And if they do that in a responsible way, we'll avoid a
00:37:14.580
huge slowdown. But let me give you something. This is a gimmick that they've been employing in the past
00:37:20.520
year when they create or are creating $120 billion a month, pulling money out of thin air. Let me just
00:37:27.680
walk your listeners through on this. The Federal Reserve creates money. They call up a dealer,
00:37:34.220
a bond dealer like Goldman Sachs, and say, we want to buy a billion dollars of bonds.
00:37:39.380
So Goldman says, fine. They give the Fed the bonds. And how does the Fed pay for those bonds?
00:37:45.360
They credit Goldman's bank account. Where does that money come from? No place. The Fed just says,
00:37:51.300
voila, you have it. And that's how they create the money out of thin air. So they're doing that last
00:37:57.520
year at a rate of $120 billion a month to help finance the government's debt. And so what they did
00:38:04.300
to try to keep from an even worse inflation than we've been experiencing is they then create the
00:38:10.620
money and then borrow it back from the banks and money market funds overnight. If you want to get
00:38:16.260
technical, if people want to look at this stuff, they go to the Fed balance sheet, they'll find a
00:38:21.480
thing called reverse repurchase agreements. In effect, the Fed is pouring money, pouring a bucket
00:38:26.520
of water in one end of a pool and then taking it out at the other end of the pool. Now that gimmick
00:38:32.120
can't go on forever. And you know, a year ago, a little over a year ago, they had zero of these
00:38:36.860
reverse repos. Now they have $1.7 trillion. That's the game they've been playing. Huge dam of money ready
00:38:45.820
to flood the economy. So we are now also by turning the taking the money and saying, Oh, no,
00:38:57.100
your central bank that your dollars are no good to Russia. A lot of countries around the world are
00:39:02.400
going, geez, if I get on the wrong side of America, all of a sudden, what I have as gold
00:39:07.240
is no good. That's not safe for me. We are destroying the dollar at the same time we're
00:39:15.580
inflating the dollar. How's this going to end, Steve? Well, ultimately, and this will sound very
00:39:22.420
strange, and you shouldn't say it in polite company. Ultimately, in a few years, we're going
00:39:27.660
to do again what we did for the first 180 years of this country's existence. And that is tie the dollar
00:39:34.860
to gold. What it means is, is gold for a variety of reasons keeps its intrinsic value. And all it
00:39:41.860
means, it's like a measuring rod, not perfect, but it keeps the dollar stable in value. If we had
00:39:48.500
maintained the growth rates we did for that 180 years, which was the greatest in human history,
00:39:55.040
and then we went off the gold standard in the early 70s. And since then, the average growth rate
00:40:01.260
of the United States economy has gone down by at least one-third, from about four and a quarter
00:40:06.960
percent to two and three quarters. That doesn't sound like much, but you do that over 50 years,
00:40:12.600
let me just give you a number. The average, the median household income today is about $68,000.
00:40:20.180
If we'd maintained our historic rates of growth, which we did for 180 years through depressions,
00:40:26.280
wars, war, civil war, you name it, if we'd maintain that average rate of growth, you know what the
00:40:31.680
median income would be? $110,000. That's what we've lost for a half century of funny money. It's bad stuff.
00:40:44.240
Can you explain, you just said that the Fed is going to destroy jobs, or they're, you know...
00:40:51.240
Yes. How are they doing that? They have this thing, they have this theory
00:40:55.920
called the Phillips curve. It's not a baseball pitch. It's named after an economist who said that
00:41:02.480
if you want low unemployment, you have to have high inflation, higher inflation. If you want lower
00:41:09.020
inflation, you have to have higher unemployment. They believe prosperity causes inflation. They don't
00:41:16.180
realize devaluing the dollar causes inflation, but they can't grasp that. So as a result, when you hear
00:41:23.560
this talk about soft landing, what they mean is, can we slow the economy down enough without going into
00:41:30.700
a full-fledged recession? Usually their attempts at soft landings is a crash landing. They are trying
00:41:38.180
to slow the economy down, create unemployment because they think the economy is too prosperous. That's why
00:41:44.660
they think we have this inflation. So they won't say that explicitly, but you press them on it. Yes,
00:41:52.040
they want a slowdown, and they just hope they can avoid a recession. It's bogus thinking.
00:41:59.220
Experience disproves it, but at the Fed, the Phillips curve is wholly writ.
00:42:04.880
Steve, when you look at... By the way, we're talking to Steve Forbes. He's got a new book out called
00:42:10.600
Inflation, what it is, why it's bad, and how to fix it. Steve, when you look at the money printing that
00:42:18.980
we have done, you immediately think of Weimar Republic. I mean, idiots know that, hey, you can't
00:42:29.180
keep doing this for very long, and at huge sums of money, okay? Everybody learned that. Weimar Republic,
00:42:36.280
Zimbabwe, et cetera, et cetera. Venezuela, today. Venezuela. So do we know or have a guess on how
00:42:48.140
close we are to that? I mean, is there a possibility we go into hyperinflation?
00:42:54.960
You can't rule anything out with these people, but I think the answer is no. I think even some
00:43:00.840
people at the Fed are realizing they're in the danger zone, and so they're trying to figure out
00:43:07.820
they got themselves into this mess, and they were doing this, by the way, undermining the value of
00:43:12.800
the dollar before the COVID crisis. This was starting in 2018, so they can't say, oh, we did it because
00:43:18.820
of COVID. No, they're doing it before COVID. So I think they're trying to figure out now, how do we get
00:43:24.900
ourselves out of this without getting a disaster? So I think they're going to slow down the money
00:43:30.080
creation, but what they should be doing now is, instead of trying to manipulate interest rates,
00:43:37.200
just let their balance, just let the bonds mature, and their size that they hold of those bonds go down.
00:43:45.560
Nature will take care of it. Keep the dollar stable, and then let the bonds mature.
00:43:54.520
Run off. And we'll get through this. But the other side of the coin is, even if the Fed starts
00:44:02.360
to behave itself, then you have a government that is doing everything it can to slow the productive
00:44:08.500
part of the economy. You know, the genius of Ronald Reagan was, when he cured the inflation,
00:44:12.820
at the same time, he had cut taxes, deregulation, and that's why we roared in the 80s after those tax
00:44:19.800
cuts went into effect. We're doing the exact opposite. So we're going to have to wait for 2024
00:44:23.820
to get that done. But in 2022, hopefully with the November elections, at least we can put barriers in
00:44:31.140
the way of the Biden administration from putting new burdens on the economy. And also start questioning
00:44:37.380
the Fed. What in the world are you guys doing? Why do you think prosperity is bad for us?
00:44:43.560
Steve, I know this is off the inflation path a bit. We're talking to Steve Forbes, the book,
00:44:48.680
Inflation, What It Is, Why It's Bad, and How to Fix It. But I'm really concerned about these ESG
00:44:55.500
programs, you know, going and switching our economy to a stakeholder capitalism, which is
00:45:02.280
just bullcrap, in my opinion. And the way we are letting BlackRock and others come in and just
00:45:13.660
buy us all up. They're buying one in every seven homes for sale, going to BlackRock.
00:45:22.200
Well, this, and the nice, the good thing about a free economy, free country, and free speech
00:45:29.180
is when these things start to happen, you can arouse the public. They won't say it publicly,
00:45:36.060
but Coca-Cola and Delta really reverse course after they did what they did last year when they
00:45:43.780
booted the All-Star game out of Atlanta because they didn't understand what Georgia did with the
00:45:49.220
voting laws, which are more liberal than they were in New York City. Hello? And they got burned on that.
00:45:57.380
They got real pushback on that. Disney's getting pushback on it. So the way you answer this stuff
00:46:03.760
is you push back. And one of the things I think you're going to see happen after the November
00:46:08.280
elections is looking at ideas on how, if you're a shareholder in a fund or a group, an ETF or something,
00:46:18.360
how can you have a voice on how your share of the shares, so to speak, are voted at these annual
00:46:25.220
meetings. It's complicated, but I think you're going to see real, real thinking on that. So it's not
00:46:32.340
just a group of people. You know, decades ago, there was a great business guru called Peter Drucker.
00:46:39.540
And he still, some schools still read his books, business schools, but he warned of what he called
00:46:46.060
pension fund socialism. He noted the rise of pension funds owned by the state and by endowment funds.
00:46:54.160
And he said, they could end up buying the economy. Government doesn't have to do it. They're doing
00:46:58.820
it for them. So I think you're seeing real pushback on that. But this gets to what you might call modern
00:47:04.940
socialism. The modern socialists recognize you don't have to take over a company or an industry.
00:47:11.100
You just have to regulate it. So its survival depends on your whims. And that's what the Biden
00:47:16.760
administration is doing, practicing modern socialism and pressuring the BlackRock and others or having
00:47:23.500
BlackRock and others go along with pushing that kind of agenda. That has to be resisted. But modern
00:47:30.100
socialism, different from Marx had in mind, you get the regulators to do it. You don't have to take
00:47:35.640
them over. Would you, would you say that we are now doing modern monetary theory in Washington?
00:47:41.980
We have one. They're doing a form of it. Modern monetary theory is simply modern garb on the old
00:47:49.540
idea of devaluing money by creating too much of it. You know, in Roman times, they did it by reducing
00:47:56.180
the precious metals in a coin and putting the tin and junk in it. Modern times, we do it by printing up
00:48:02.520
a lot of paper money or now ellipses on your handhelds. And it's the same thing. And what you see
00:48:09.300
unfolding now, and we discussed this in the book, inflation, is the old response of government,
00:48:14.720
they scapegoat. You know, in Roman times, they blamed Christians. In evil times, witches. Now,
00:48:19.960
today, we blame company executives with the same old movie. Steve Forbes, his new book is out today.
00:48:26.880
You want to pick it up. Inflation, what it is, why it's bad, and how to fix it.