How_to_Invest_in_Commodities_in_a_Radical

00:00:00.000 | Don't just dream about paradise, live it with Fiji Airways.

00:00:05.000 | Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale.

00:00:09.120 | Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

00:00:14.040 | Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value.

00:00:21.160 | Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com.

00:00:24.920 | That's FijiAirways.com.

00:00:26.640 | From here to happy.

00:00:28.160 | Flying direct with Fiji Airways.

00:00:29.960 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:35.640 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while

00:00:39.920 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:43.000 | My name is Josh Rochites.

00:00:44.000 | I am your host.

00:00:45.000 | Today, I'm pleased to welcome back to the show, Stephen Harris.

00:00:47.400 | Stephen, welcome to the show today.

00:00:48.800 | Hey, Josh.

00:00:49.800 | Great to be back.

00:00:52.200 | Always a fun time.

00:00:53.400 | I'm looking forward to this.

00:00:55.440 | And if you're listening to this, buckle up, hang on, and get ready for a fun ride.

00:01:01.240 | Absolutely.

00:01:02.240 | Today, we're going to be talking about commodities and the concept of investing in commodities,

00:01:09.200 | saving money in commodities.

00:01:10.800 | But we're going to do it in a little bit of a different way than many people are accustomed

00:01:14.800 | to.

00:01:15.800 | Steve, you're not known for holding back on your opinions, and so I think it's going to

00:01:19.680 | be fun because I'm also not known for that.

00:01:21.320 | We get along well in that regard.

00:01:23.040 | And I think we're going to have an interesting conversation on the subject of commodities

00:01:28.080 | in a way that's not usually done.

00:01:30.160 | And I want to lay about 60 seconds of groundwork by way of introduction, and then we'll discuss

00:01:35.780 | some of the specific details.

00:01:38.040 | Many people think, especially when it comes to thinking about hard times, hard financial

00:01:41.960 | times, many people think about the value of owning some form of commodity.

00:01:47.000 | But usually, that term is used to refer to precious metals, usually gold and silver coins,

00:01:52.520 | something like that, although there are people who extend things beyond there.

00:01:56.320 | And there are great benefits in owning things like gold and silver coins.

00:02:00.320 | But I like to think about the term a little bit more broadly.

00:02:04.080 | And this has been a common theme on Radical Personal Finance going all the way back to

00:02:07.080 | I mean probably within the first 50 episodes, the first 100 episodes, I talked about the

00:02:11.600 | old book by John—what's his name—The Alpha Strategy, John Pugsley called The Alpha Strategy,

00:02:18.160 | where he was facing what he thought was going to be impending inflation back in the 1970s.

00:02:23.040 | And he thought, "What can I do in order to prepare for inflation?"

00:02:26.900 | And the basic idea that he came to was, "Well, if I buy the things that I'll use in the future

00:02:32.080 | with current money, and then store those things and use them over time, then I'll have protected

00:02:37.880 | my money from the potential ravages of inflation."

00:02:41.720 | And that strategy is, in my opinion, one of the simplest strategies for people to incorporate

00:02:47.800 | to protect for inflation.

00:02:49.640 | It's very hard to predict what's going to happen with a financial portfolio, an investment

00:02:53.760 | portfolio during a period of inflation.

00:02:56.100 | There are different times where portfolios are affected differently.

00:02:59.720 | But it's not difficult to predict what's going to happen with the value of a stockpile of

00:03:05.000 | toilet paper that I have in my backyard or in my back shed.

00:03:08.600 | It's going to be there and it'll be used and it's still going to be just as good until

00:03:11.880 | we reach the end of its natural shelf life.

00:03:14.380 | And that's the problem, of course, with commodities, that there are certain items that you can

00:03:18.280 | store for longer than others.

00:03:19.760 | In the Alpha Strategy, John Pugsley talks about, for example, how long you can store

00:03:23.680 | a pair of shoes.

00:03:24.680 | Well, that'll depend on whether your shoes are made with needle and thread or whether

00:03:28.200 | your shoes are made with glue.

00:03:29.320 | The glue will eventually start to break down.

00:03:31.340 | He talks about how long you might be able to store canned food, of course, would be

00:03:35.320 | an obvious example, or how long you could store an extra set of tires for your car.

00:03:39.040 | And all of these kinds of things have certain shelf lives that can be extended to a certain

00:03:44.040 | degree, but there is a certain shelf life.

00:03:46.200 | And so you need to be thoughtful when you're approaching this subject as to how you're

00:03:50.200 | going to approach it so that you don't lose money.

00:03:54.480 | Because the two big risks that you face when you're dealing with stockpiling of a commodity

00:03:58.960 | is the risk of loss due to something like theft or the risk of loss due to something

00:04:04.640 | like a fire.

00:04:05.640 | A house fire can be catastrophic if you have tremendous stockpiles of stuff in your home,

00:04:10.640 | and especially if it's not properly insured.

00:04:12.800 | And then the second thing is the risk of obsolescence, either due to the product no longer functioning

00:04:18.520 | as you wanted to, maybe something better came along and this old version doesn't work anymore,

00:04:24.160 | or just simply the product has become obsolete due to falling apart, decaying, etc.

00:04:29.420 | And so Stephen is an extremely creative thinker, and he also has a great deal of experience

00:04:35.100 | in this field.

00:04:36.100 | And we're going to talk about stockpiling commodities in ways that a lot of people don't

00:04:40.600 | think about.

00:04:41.600 | We're not going to talk much at all, probably, about gold and silver coins.

00:04:45.440 | We're going to talk about other metals, other items as well.

00:04:48.680 | So Steve, there's my introduction.

00:04:50.360 | I'm looking forward to the conversation.

00:04:51.920 | Okay, right away, I want to obliterate something that you mentioned about three times in your

00:04:58.840 | intro.

00:04:59.840 | All right, go ahead.

00:05:00.840 | And it's something a lot of people use, and it's used to marginalize experts and those

00:05:08.760 | in the sciences, and it's just something that is way too widely used.

00:05:16.280 | I had someone use it on me the other day.

00:05:19.520 | And anyways, the word is opinion.

00:05:24.080 | I do not have an opinion.

00:05:26.320 | Joshua Sheets, you're not here listening to him on radical personal finance because you

00:05:32.120 | go, "Oh, Josh's opinion is so good."

00:05:36.560 | Josh does not have an opinion.

00:05:38.740 | He has experience, expertise, and wisdom.

00:05:44.500 | Now whether or not you like his experience, expertise, and wisdom, that's up to you.

00:05:50.560 | You can decide to dismiss it and everything else.

00:05:54.560 | The guy panhandling on the street corner with the sign that says, "Want money for beer?

00:05:59.920 | Why lie?"

00:06:00.920 | He's got an opinion.

00:06:01.920 | You can ask him if he likes an apple or he likes an orange, and he'll give you his opinion

00:06:08.120 | based upon what he likes.

00:06:11.120 | Opinions come from people who do not have judgment, experience, expertise, information,

00:06:19.360 | knowledge, wisdom, et cetera.

00:06:22.880 | It's used to marginalize the experts by those who do not have the ability.

00:06:29.200 | And it's like, you know, Josh can say something extremely intelligent based upon something

00:06:35.680 | that he's done and tested.

00:06:37.080 | It's like you went for an entire year on cash only, right?

00:06:40.280 | I did.

00:06:41.280 | You don't have an opinion on that.

00:06:42.960 | You got an entire year of expertise.

00:06:45.400 | You talk to someone and they go, "Well, that's just your opinion.

00:06:49.880 | That's just your opinion.

00:06:50.880 | Why don't we let what other people think talk?"

00:06:54.920 | It's like, "Because other people didn't do what I did."

00:06:59.800 | And so if you're listening to radical personal finance, you're coming here for severe advice,

00:07:06.960 | severe expertise, severe knowledge in a subject.

00:07:12.200 | And that's what I'm bringing to Josh's show.

00:07:15.080 | That's what Josh brings to the show every day.

00:07:19.640 | So when you're considering, I mean, when you want me to help you with your entire estate

00:07:29.160 | and backup system and food and water and power, do you want to come to me for my opinion or

00:07:35.680 | you want to come to me for what I've been doing for 35 years with thousands of people?

00:07:41.800 | Yeah, absolutely.

00:07:43.560 | And I'll give just a quick plug, Steve, and then we'll get into the details.

00:07:46.360 | I'll just give a quick plug for your work that over the years, the reason that I've

00:07:50.840 | consumed so much of your work, and I think I've probably consumed, I mean, I'm sure that

00:07:56.160 | you've done something I haven't consumed, but I've probably consumed almost everything

00:07:59.920 | you've put in publicly at least in the last seven or eight years.

00:08:04.280 | And I have found you to be one of the most accurate thinkers and creative thinkers with

00:08:09.240 | good practical solutions to the problems discussed.

00:08:12.400 | And it's been great because it's affected my life.

00:08:15.280 | And then I've been able to take many of your concepts, add some of my own spin, share them

00:08:19.480 | with others, share them with some of my listeners and students, and then point people back to

00:08:23.560 | some of your resources as well.

00:08:25.200 | But I admire some of the work that you've done.

00:08:27.720 | Tell me a little bit about some of your—

00:08:28.960 | That's what I want people to do is I want them to listen to what I say.

00:08:34.640 | Because look, you know, people are always asking me like, "Hey, I want a list of stuff

00:08:38.360 | to buy and I want to, you know, I got this whole pandemic shopping video."

00:08:43.160 | It's five hours of video broken up into 15 different videos between three minutes and

00:08:48.920 | 58 minutes each.

00:08:50.840 | It's me going out and doing shopping before the pandemic or disaster or whatever you want.

00:08:56.720 | And I say right there, "Look, my list is not your list.

00:08:59.240 | I'm not you.

00:09:00.240 | I can't tell you what to get because I don't have four kids.

00:09:03.520 | I don't, you know, I'm not 68 years old.

00:09:06.880 | I'm not 18 years old.

00:09:08.280 | I'm not you, but I can go through and I can show you what I got, why I got, what I didn't

00:09:13.960 | get, and why I didn't get it, and why you might get it.

00:09:16.880 | And then you can use the knowledge and the examples I'm giving you and you can form your

00:09:23.440 | own conclusions for you.

00:09:27.140 | And that's what I think is most – and that's what you did and that's what I think is most

00:09:31.000 | important, not following Stephen Harris doctrine.

00:09:34.440 | It's, you know, listening to what I am telling you I've done and why I did it and forming

00:09:40.860 | your own conclusions the same way people listen to you for the same thing on finance.

00:09:45.200 | Yeah.

00:09:46.200 | And I'll add to your teaching style in terms of one of the things that you say as a teacher

00:09:52.240 | that you want people to do.

00:09:53.800 | If you understand how to do something and you have experience, you can understand why

00:09:58.280 | something works, then you can be put into different situations and you know the concepts

00:10:04.520 | that will work.

00:10:05.520 | So, for example, Steve, you're probably most known, especially in the prepper world, you're

00:10:10.040 | most known for your skills and your knowledge in the area of energy preparedness, although

00:10:14.120 | of course your knowledge goes far beyond that.

00:10:17.240 | But when I absorbed your lessons and whatnot on energy preparedness, then I was able to

00:10:24.280 | take those lessons and bring them into my own life.

00:10:27.960 | And so I left the United States a year and a half, two years ago, and I left the United

00:10:32.320 | States with – I didn't take, you know, batteries and generators with me.

00:10:35.240 | I left with about eight or nine suitcases and my children in tow and my family and we

00:10:39.960 | left.

00:10:41.080 | And so I had to set up shop in a new country, in a third location that I don't talk a lot

00:10:45.840 | about.

00:10:46.840 | I don't have Amazon.

00:10:47.840 | I don't have the ability to say, "Oh, I've got to get this certain particular thing that

00:10:52.760 | I need.

00:10:53.760 | I don't have this certain part, this certain gadget."

00:10:56.960 | So what I had to do was when I was time to go ahead and start setting up my backups at

00:11:01.600 | my new location, I had to go to the store and start figuring out what's available where

00:11:05.840 | I am.

00:11:07.240 | And because I had the concepts understood of what was available, I was able to go and

00:11:12.760 | put together a pretty decent, robust personal preparedness system covering all of the various

00:11:18.400 | issues.

00:11:19.520 | But I did it without ever going and looking at a shopping list of, "I have to buy this

00:11:23.000 | certain item."

00:11:24.000 | I went by what was available.

00:11:25.600 | And I think that's the goal, that we want to absorb concepts at a deep enough level

00:11:29.720 | that you understand them so that you can go out and in almost any country and almost any

00:11:35.520 | place and almost any place that you find yourself, you can look around and see, "What resources

00:11:40.680 | do I have and then how can I adjust my use of those resources so that I can provide for

00:11:46.400 | my basic living needs?"

00:11:47.960 | Yeah, you sent me a picture the other day of a table outdoor in the beautiful weather

00:11:55.480 | and you said your power was out and you had a picture of two waffle makers and a Honda

00:11:59.720 | EU2200i generator.

00:12:02.960 | And it's like, "Well, what's that for?

00:12:04.960 | He's going to make breakfast."

00:12:05.960 | It's like, "No, a waffle maker is the fastest food production machine you're pretty much

00:12:11.180 | going to find."

00:12:13.760 | Josh could make two and a half pounds of food every three minutes with a waffle maker.

00:12:20.580 | And no, he doesn't have to use waffle mix and pancake mix.

00:12:23.440 | There's a whole variety of different things you can make in it.

00:12:27.480 | But he could make, let's see, well, two and a half pounds times 20.

00:12:34.660 | That's about 42 and a half pounds of food an hour, edible food, ready to go in a Ziploc

00:12:40.000 | bag in your pocket, ready to put jam or jelly or syrup or honey or eat plain.

00:12:47.520 | And he could have made that out of ground flour, ground corn, ground wheat, oats, rye,

00:12:56.560 | rice, you name it.

00:12:59.040 | It's a food production machine.

00:13:01.400 | It's not something you'll only get at your local restaurant in the morning.

00:13:05.200 | Agreed.

00:13:06.200 | All right, I want to focus us on the financial opportunities or the financial expressions

00:13:13.660 | of preparedness.

00:13:15.080 | And let's start with food because I think that what we're talking about is useful, that

00:13:21.020 | food itself can be a commodity.

00:13:23.280 | And in fact, it can be an extremely valuable commodity in many circumstances.

00:13:28.800 | Number one, benefits of storing food.

00:13:30.880 | Number one is that we all eat food.

00:13:32.840 | And so if you store food that you might eventually eat and you put yourself in a situation where,

00:13:38.120 | okay, I'm not going to eat this right now, but I'm going to buy several months worth

00:13:42.560 | of food, I'm going to buy a year's worth of food, you are protecting yourself on a guaranteed

00:13:48.760 | basis from changes in your financial assets.

00:13:53.080 | And that food...

00:13:54.080 | I did it.

00:13:55.080 | Yeah, go ahead.

00:13:56.080 | Tell us your story, Steve.

00:13:57.080 | I did it.

00:13:58.080 | I did it.

00:13:59.080 | I did it.

00:14:00.080 | So, I was a research and development engineer for Chrysler Corporation in scientific labs.

00:14:07.040 | And I worked on electric vehicles and I was knowledgeable in fuel cells and electrochemistry

00:14:12.680 | and the other stuff.

00:14:13.760 | And I was there from '90 to 2000 and I went independent in 2000 and left the corporation

00:14:21.060 | because dare damn Germans came in of Daimler Chrysler and started ruining everything.

00:14:29.680 | And I went independent and I was consulting to fuel cell car companies.

00:14:33.960 | Fuel cells were a big thing back then and still have become a big thing.

00:14:39.480 | But there were a lot of interests back then, especially with vehicles, and I had experience

00:14:44.240 | in both of those.

00:14:45.240 | And I was doing a bunch of consulting and flying to California and all that nice stuff.

00:14:49.960 | And 9/11 happened.

00:14:52.860 | And just like the pandemic, everything got put on hold for 9/11 only in business change,

00:14:59.240 | only it was a different change than what we experienced recently.

00:15:07.760 | So I had to make my mortgage payments still and everything else for my house.

00:15:13.880 | And I found out about DirecTV installing and I went out and became the most overqualified

00:15:20.840 | DirecTV installer you ever saw.

00:15:23.880 | But back in 2002, it was $100 per house I was doing the install on.

00:15:29.280 | I didn't have to do very many of those to make a payment on a $600 mortgage because

00:15:35.200 | I bought a $78,000 house rather than the $144,000 house technically that my salary told me I

00:15:43.640 | could afford.

00:15:44.640 | And keep in mind, this was the early '90s.

00:15:48.940 | So I was living below my means, which I think is something that you would recommend.

00:15:54.560 | So I didn't have to do a lot to make my payment and I could continue to do my own work on

00:16:01.360 | the side, which is how I developed my publishing company, Knowledge Publications, but I got

00:16:06.880 | really poor.

00:16:07.880 | I mean, if I was going out and installing DirecTVs to pay my mortgage, I wasn't making

00:16:12.520 | a whole lot of money.

00:16:14.960 | And I ended up eating my own food storage for about five, six months as a regular part

00:16:21.760 | of my staple.

00:16:22.760 | And I had part of my staple was white flour.

00:16:27.280 | And I have a whole lecture, which I won't get into on white flour, but I had white flour.

00:16:32.160 | And one of the things I like is biscuits.

00:16:34.460 | So I made biscuits every day.

00:16:37.120 | And I would take biscuits out with me in my pocket in a wrapper or a bag and munch on

00:16:45.720 | them.

00:16:46.720 | And I can make up dinner out of biscuits, biscuits and honey and butter and jam and

00:16:51.240 | jelly and peanut butter.

00:16:53.000 | And I would make my own bread, but I just preferred to make biscuits.

00:16:57.840 | Biscuits were nice and simple.

00:17:00.160 | And so, yeah, I mean, a fair amount of my caloric intake was I ate my own food storage.

00:17:07.320 | And at that time, my food storage would have been stored for a good eight years at least.

00:17:15.280 | And it's not called food storage, it's called food insurance.

00:17:20.320 | So there are things that you can buy.

00:17:22.520 | I mean, there's things you can buy that have a very infinite shelf life to them.

00:17:27.080 | And they're more valuable to you in the sense that you're feeding yourself or you're feeding

00:17:31.680 | your friends and your neighbors, because in a disaster, the people that come over, your

00:17:36.360 | friends and your neighbors are the resource in a disaster.

00:17:41.680 | And they're not a hindrance, because you always need extra hands, extra bodies, someone to

00:17:47.040 | stay awake at night and keep a lookout and wake you up if something happens, be on watch.

00:17:54.160 | So that food insurance is good for you and good for others.

00:17:58.560 | Now, remember, just because you might be eating some of the Mountain House freeze-dried really

00:18:04.480 | good stuff and the freeze-dried ice cream every day, that doesn't mean the people coming

00:18:09.000 | over and helping are eating the same thing you're eating.

00:18:13.040 | They can be eating the rice, the beans, and the other things that are cheaper that you

00:18:19.160 | stored and put away.

00:18:20.800 | And if they don't eat it on the first day they're there, I guarantee you they're going

00:18:25.560 | to eat it on the second day that they're there.

00:18:28.760 | And they'll be happy for it.

00:18:31.540 | But as far as the commodity, foods are generally first and foremost to provide you with calories,

00:18:41.880 | not nutrition.

00:18:42.880 | If you're worried about nutrition, what I say is shut up and take a multivitamin, and

00:18:47.560 | you'll have all the nutrition that you need.

00:18:54.000 | What you're after is calories to do daily work, existing, not being hungry, et cetera.

00:19:02.720 | But there's a few foods that you can put away that would be a 20-year or 30-year commodity.

00:19:09.760 | The only one I can think of that would be perfect-- well, there's two of them, actually.

00:19:14.840 | Well, three of them.

00:19:16.120 | Sugar, honey, and salt.

00:19:18.640 | Both last forever.

00:19:19.640 | And you go, oh, sugar?

00:19:21.920 | Sugar?

00:19:22.920 | Yeah, sugar stores forever, just like honey.

00:19:26.000 | It's basically almost the same thing except for a different form.

00:19:30.520 | Excuse me.

00:19:34.360 | Honey just has a lot higher dollar value associated, which is pretty good.

00:19:39.480 | I got 10 gallons of honey stored, and the story is I got it for really basically for

00:19:46.600 | free.

00:19:48.120 | But if you're going to put money into something that other people would want, five-gallon

00:19:53.680 | buckets of honey, they're like $200, $300, depending upon what type you get.

00:19:58.560 | And they'll still be worth $200, $300 in 10 years from now on an inflationary adjusted

00:20:04.680 | basis.

00:20:06.440 | Salt is always going to be salt.

00:20:08.280 | It'll never be anything else but salt.

00:20:10.080 | It'll never go bad.

00:20:11.640 | However, salt generally goes for like $50 a ton.

00:20:17.760 | So it's very, very bulky and heavy, and it's a widely available commodity.

00:20:24.160 | So I wouldn't recommend of it for financial storage, but it's good for-- I mean, there's

00:20:33.200 | only a certain amount of it you can store, like a five-gallon bucket will last you a

00:20:38.760 | lifetime.

00:20:39.760 | But if we were talking about storage of a commodity, what we're basically talking about

00:20:45.840 | is we're going to cover different places to park your money that actually allow you to

00:20:54.120 | keep pace with inflation and/or ways of getting these things so you actually have an economic

00:21:01.600 | gain at the end of a period of time, whether it's a preparedness item or not, that you

00:21:07.600 | might not have thought of.

00:21:09.000 | And thus, these things are going to be a little bit more fluffy.

00:21:12.680 | They're going to be a little bit-- you're going to need to have space for storage.

00:21:15.840 | You're going to need to have a place to put them.

00:21:19.240 | If you're living in a two-bedroom apartment, it's not really going to work for you.

00:21:24.920 | But it might be something you keep in your mind for when you finally get out of the apartment

00:21:30.320 | and/or you find a space location where you can put stuff of value.

00:21:36.040 | Steve, I want to ask you a question about salt.

00:21:40.000 | In what form factor-- so honey, I think the form factor that's obvious and works great

00:21:44.760 | is the five-gallon buckets.

00:21:46.480 | All my life growing up, we always had a friend of ours who was a beekeeper.

00:21:50.120 | And I don't remember how often it was, but on occasion, we would buy a five-gallon bucket

00:21:55.480 | or two of honey from him.

00:21:57.080 | And that was the way that my mom saved money, was just buying five gallons at a time.

00:22:00.480 | And it's great.

00:22:01.480 | It's just a five-gallon bucket.

00:22:02.480 | It comes directly, ready to go, and as you say, stores forever.

00:22:05.060 | What form factor would you use to stockpile salt if you were going to stockpile some?

00:22:10.120 | Oh, well, salt likes to absorb water and become hard.

00:22:15.920 | It's hydroscopic.

00:22:16.920 | In fact, depending upon the salt you get, it's also called deliasquin.

00:22:22.680 | But you're not generally eating that salt.

00:22:24.720 | We're talking about sodium chloride.

00:22:26.920 | So excuse me, something's got in my throat, and it's not the coronavirus.

00:22:34.280 | But no, something completely hermetically sealed, five-gallon bucket, two-and-a-half-gallon

00:22:40.560 | pail, one-gallon paint can.

00:22:46.360 | Definitely not the paper item that you buy the salt in the store, either the Morton salt

00:22:54.080 | tube or the bag of pickling salt.

00:22:57.480 | I buy my salt from Gordon Food Service, and it's 25 pounds of Morton-type of salt, I mean

00:23:06.240 | regular granular salt, that is ready to use.

00:23:10.880 | And it's $8.25 for 25 pounds.

00:23:14.040 | I just pour that into a five-gallon pail, fill up the five-gallon pail, and you got

00:23:20.960 | a darn heavy bucket of salt.

00:23:22.840 | I make sure it's hermetically sealed.

00:23:26.320 | And depending on how long I'm storing something, I knock down the lid with a rubber hammer,

00:23:32.200 | and sometimes I put a piece of silicone tape all the way around it.

00:23:38.600 | So that's just the best way to store it.

00:23:41.960 | - Okay, give a short, as we move through some of these food groups, 'cause I want you to

00:23:46.600 | cover sugar in a moment, but give a short lecture on how to, if you're gonna, let's

00:23:52.820 | say you're gonna get a bucket, right?

00:23:54.040 | You're gonna find a supply of buckets, and you're going to fill a few buckets with salt,

00:23:58.360 | knowing how valuable it is, and I'm gonna spend $50 on salt, I'm gonna fill five five-gallon

00:24:02.520 | buckets.

00:24:04.800 | How do you treat those buckets?

00:24:06.100 | Talk about oxygen absorbers and how to make sure that it's hermetically sealed for a long

00:24:10.280 | period, and what's necessary for these different foods, please.

00:24:15.160 | - Well, you know the word "salary" comes from the word "salt," don't you?

00:24:20.160 | - Yes.

00:24:21.160 | - At one time, Roman soldiers actually got paid partially in salt, and that's where the

00:24:27.720 | term "earning your salt" comes from.

00:24:29.960 | Salt was a very valuable commodity in the days of old.

00:24:34.000 | It was carried by camel and other beasts of burden thousands of miles from where it was

00:24:40.800 | harvested to the marketplace where it was sold.

00:24:46.360 | Salt is sodium chloride.

00:24:48.440 | It is over a billion years old.

00:24:51.840 | It is not gonna spoil, it is not gonna go bad.

00:24:55.400 | The oxygen of the air does not affect it.

00:24:58.840 | You take a clean five-gallon pail, not wet, clean and dry, just wipe it out with a towel

00:25:07.480 | or whatever, pour the salt in, put the lid on, smash it down with a rubber mallet so

00:25:14.080 | it's got a good seal on it, and you're done.

00:25:17.840 | There are no oxygen absorbers or nitrogen or CO2 flushes needed for salt or sugar or

00:25:26.400 | honey in the least.

00:25:28.880 | All three of them are preservatives.

00:25:32.040 | My ex-wife, I drive me crazy.

00:25:35.280 | Every time I turn around, I go, "Where's the jelly?"

00:25:37.960 | It was in the fricking refrigerator.

00:25:41.600 | And it's like, it doesn't need to go into the--.

00:25:45.920 | Well, it says refrigerate over opening, and it's like, that's for stupid people.

00:25:51.920 | It's all sugar.

00:25:53.080 | It's a preservative.

00:25:54.520 | It's not going bad.

00:25:57.240 | And people who put peanut butter, jelly, honey, and vanilla, and vanilla is mostly ethyl alcohol,

00:26:09.160 | into the refrigerator drives me crazy.

00:26:12.040 | I have a housekeeper that comes over, and she's Chinese.

00:26:18.360 | Yes, I have a Chinese housekeeper.

00:26:20.520 | And I say, and she comes and puts everything in, and I go, "Look."

00:26:25.240 | And I listed off all the stuff.

00:26:26.720 | None of this goes into the refrigerator.

00:26:29.400 | She goes, "Why not?

00:26:30.400 | It'll spoil."

00:26:31.400 | And I go, "No, it won't spoil.

00:26:33.800 | Don't fill up my refrigerator with things that don't need to be filled up."

00:26:39.200 | And plus, it's harder to get out of the container when it's cold.

00:26:44.200 | Right.

00:26:45.200 | How did you get 10 gallons of honey for free, in terms of saving actual money, but getting

00:26:50.520 | stuff for free?

00:26:51.520 | How did you do that?

00:26:52.520 | I became a recycler.

00:26:57.400 | And I forgot how we found it, but we found this--.

00:27:01.720 | Oh, I know.

00:27:02.720 | I got a guy I buy barrels and drums from.

00:27:06.280 | And he contacted me and said, "There's a bakery, and they got a bunch of barrels and

00:27:11.640 | drums of honey that's partially crystallized, and they can't get it out.

00:27:18.200 | And I want to know if you can get it out for me so I can have the barrels and the drums."

00:27:23.320 | And I go, "What do you got?"

00:27:24.320 | And he goes, "10 barrels, 55-gallon drums of honey."

00:27:28.400 | And I go, "Well, take it!"

00:27:33.200 | And he brought them all over, and we thought they were half full, but they weren't.

00:27:38.280 | They turned out to be an eighth to a quarter full, mostly more towards an eighth full,

00:27:43.680 | but still an eighth of 55 gallons is a lot.

00:27:46.820 | So I got a bunch of my friends together from a Facebook preparedness group, and we had

00:27:51.720 | a party at Harris House.

00:27:54.740 | And we had to buy a drum de-litter, which is like a big can opener for a drum that takes

00:28:00.760 | the lid off of a drum.

00:28:03.880 | And we opened it all up, looked at it, and it was crystallized.

00:28:10.440 | And what we did was we took a great big paint mixer on a heavy-duty drill, I mean the type

00:28:16.400 | of drill you have to hold with two hands, and we mixed it all up so it was homogenized

00:28:22.080 | and so it would flow.

00:28:24.360 | Because there was honey and there was crystals in there, and all we did was mix it.

00:28:28.280 | And then we would upend the one barrel upside down, leaning against the fence against a

00:28:34.440 | clean barrel, and we just let all the honey slowly drain out while we were working on

00:28:42.200 | the other barrels.

00:28:45.360 | And then we washed out that barrel, and we got the honey out, we scraped the rest out,

00:28:51.840 | and we washed it out with water, and so we had a mix of honey and water, and that went

00:28:56.480 | into another barrel.

00:29:00.440 | So we kept upending the barrels, and we ended up getting 60 gallons of honey, and we all

00:29:05.920 | split it up.

00:29:06.920 | So that's how I ended up with 10 gallons of honey.

00:29:09.640 | Now we had about another 25 gallons of honey and wash water, which we knew the concentration

00:29:16.920 | of because we weighed the barrels before and after, and we knew the weight of the barrel.

00:29:21.440 | So we knew the weight of the honey, and I actually measured the amount of water going

00:29:25.080 | in so I know the weight of the water.

00:29:27.640 | Well, now we know our honey and water mixture, and some of my buddies, they like making mead,

00:29:33.760 | which is basically honey wine or beer made from honey.

00:29:41.320 | All you do is pitch some yeast and keep it warm and let it ferment, and you got one of

00:29:46.880 | the oldest alcoholic drinks ever made.

00:29:50.240 | So they took that home, and they made the mead and left me with the 10 gallons of honey.

00:29:57.240 | So I found a valuable resource.

00:30:00.600 | Yeah, it's probably $400 in honey.

00:30:04.560 | Technically it's USDA organic.

00:30:08.760 | It was labeled such, and I know it came from India/Pakistan, but nevertheless, it's still

00:30:17.040 | good honey.

00:30:18.040 | It's a good story.

00:30:19.040 | I looked at the pictures and can prove it.

00:30:20.880 | We had a ball.

00:30:21.880 | Nice.

00:30:22.880 | Let's talk now about sugar.

00:30:24.480 | Your preparedness doesn't need to be miserable.

00:30:26.400 | Your preparedness needs to be fun.

00:30:28.920 | And we all re-crystallized it.

00:30:31.840 | The best way to re-crystallize honey is at about 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:30:36.560 | I got a Cabela's dehydrating oven, countertop appliance.

00:30:43.480 | It's kind of tall.

00:30:44.480 | It's like 18 inches tall.

00:30:45.680 | It can hold like 12 trays.

00:30:47.560 | I just took the trays out, and I put in the half gallons of honey in half-gallon mason

00:30:53.320 | jars.

00:30:54.320 | And I just ran it at 140 with two half-gallons in there overnight until I...

00:31:01.480 | Well, actually, I just re-crystallized two half-gallon mason jars.

00:31:06.240 | The rest is crystallized.

00:31:07.720 | And when I want to re-crystallize, un-crystallize it back into a raw, syrupy type of honey,

00:31:13.920 | people go, "Oh, that's freezer-burned.

00:31:17.760 | It's bad."

00:31:18.760 | It's like, there's no such thing as freezer-burned.

00:31:20.440 | Those are just ice crystals.

00:31:22.600 | Big deal.

00:31:23.600 | I mean, heat it, cook it, it's just fine.

00:31:27.000 | And they say, "Oh, your honey's gone bad."

00:31:29.480 | No, the sugar is just combined into crystalline forms as it wants to do.

00:31:34.920 | All you do is heat it up.

00:31:36.520 | And you can heat it up in a bath of warm water.

00:31:40.080 | You can heat it on the stove.

00:31:41.080 | You can heat it up in the oven.

00:31:43.080 | You can heat it up in a food dehydrator.

00:31:45.040 | You just want to get it above 140, and it'll all melt back down together.

00:31:50.360 | And there you go.

00:31:53.680 | Let's talk about sugar now.

00:31:54.760 | I think sugar is an interesting thing to store, because as you say, it stores forever.

00:31:58.440 | It's a preservative.

00:31:59.760 | You can use it to preserve fruits and make lovely jams and jellies.

00:32:03.480 | And even in terms of an overall food preparedness regimen, sugar on top of bread makes everything

00:32:10.880 | go down easier, and it's useful to have.

00:32:12.760 | The thing I like about sugar is that, especially if sugar is stored in quantity, and if you

00:32:16.760 | have some other equipment, sugar can be transformed into things that are quite valuable, especially

00:32:22.840 | during hard times.

00:32:24.200 | So talk about storing sugar, the methodology, and some of the things you could do with stored

00:32:28.200 | sugar.

00:32:29.200 | Okay, sugar, the big thing about it is, again, it's mildly hydroscopic.

00:32:35.480 | It wants to absorb moisture from the air and become solid.

00:32:39.440 | And it's not bad when it becomes solid.

00:32:41.640 | It just becomes a pain in the butt, because you got to break it up and regranulate it.

00:32:48.880 | And a blender works good for that.

00:32:50.760 | I mean, a hammer and a chisel, and then you throw the hunks of it into a blender, turn

00:32:55.040 | it back into powdered sugar that you then use.

00:32:58.840 | But sugar is really good for jams and jellies.

00:33:05.600 | It's needed for baking, because you need it for yeast to eat, to make carbon dioxide to

00:33:12.840 | make your bread rise.

00:33:15.560 | It adds sweetness and a taste to things that would generally be regularly not as palatable

00:33:23.080 | or not as pleasantly palatable.

00:33:25.520 | I believe you should be a spectator in disaster, like you're a spectator in a football game,

00:33:30.320 | sitting there and fans eating hot dogs and drinking beer and talking with your friends

00:33:35.680 | and watching the game on the gridiron, rather than being one of the idiots on the gridiron

00:33:41.000 | slamming into other idiots with helmets and shoulder pads.

00:33:45.560 | They're participants.

00:33:46.560 | You want to be spectators.

00:33:47.760 | So you want to be a spectator in the disaster, watching everyone.

00:33:51.520 | You watch a person floating down the river at high speed, barely keeping up above the

00:33:56.960 | water, and you go, "Oh, I bet that sucks."

00:34:00.400 | And then they're gone.

00:34:02.160 | Call 911.

00:34:03.560 | But so you were a spectator.

00:34:06.240 | That other person was a participant.

00:34:09.320 | Participants only become one of two things.

00:34:11.120 | They either become survivors or they become victims, decedents, dead.

00:34:17.840 | And just because, you know, the second you crawl out of the river naked and make it to

00:34:22.400 | the bank, it's like, "Oh, I finally made it out of the river."

00:34:25.680 | Well, you're still a long ways away from any help or civilization in the woods.

00:34:30.720 | You just crawled out of the river naked.

00:34:33.520 | So now, congratulations, you are a participant in another survival experience, making it

00:34:41.280 | to help, naked, after crawling out of a river.

00:34:45.240 | So thus, you want to be the spectator.

00:34:48.960 | Sugar, it does have a need, a trading commodity value.

00:34:54.880 | One of the things you can do with it, you can easily turn sugar into soft and hard candy,

00:35:00.400 | which is going to be small, compact, and dense.

00:35:04.040 | And it is going to have a trading value in a post-apocalyptic or disaster type of situation.

00:35:14.200 | I carry hard candies in a bug out bag and everything else just to share with other people.

00:35:18.480 | If I ever wind up in a shelter, I mean, a hard candy will definitely make people, you

00:35:23.640 | know, smile for five or ten minutes.

00:35:26.680 | The other thing you can do with sugar is you can make moonshine.

00:35:30.160 | And I have an entire instructional video on this.

00:35:33.320 | It's very easy.

00:35:34.600 | No, you don't need to have the pods in the still.

00:35:37.520 | I mean, the device I use is basically a simple, looks like a coffee maker.

00:35:43.880 | And you can distill alcohol directly from sugar after processed by yeast.

00:35:50.240 | No, you don't need corn.

00:35:51.920 | No, you don't need mash.

00:35:53.320 | No, you don't need wheat.

00:35:54.920 | No, you don't need to be out in the woods.

00:35:57.120 | No, you can do it on your kitchen table.

00:35:59.200 | In fact, all ethanol is come from, all organic ethanol made by a biological process comes

00:36:09.560 | from yeast eating a monosaccharide sugar.

00:36:14.040 | Starch is a polysaccharide.

00:36:15.040 | And you turn starch like corn into a monosaccharide by heating it and treating it with malted

00:36:21.800 | barley or alpha amylase and glucoamylase enzymes to break it down into a monosaccharide so

00:36:27.720 | the yeast can eat it.

00:36:28.880 | So all yeast comes from sugar, whether that's starch converted to sugar or whether that's

00:36:33.840 | sugar to start with.

00:36:35.000 | The easy button is just buy the damn sugar at Walmart or Costco.

00:36:38.400 | No one's going to look at you twice for buying 500 pounds or 1,000 pounds of sugar.

00:36:44.400 | Besides, just make up a little company, do a DBA and call it Joshua's Hard Candy and

00:36:51.320 | Sweets.

00:36:52.320 | It's like, buy underneath that name.

00:36:55.520 | You're buying sugar to make candy, even if you're making ethanol moonshine out of it.

00:37:01.800 | But really, the moonshine, since ethanol never, ever spoils, you are by far better buying

00:37:08.440 | sugar and making the moonshine and storing it.

00:37:12.000 | I advocate you store it in water bottles.

00:37:15.800 | Buy the little, and you want to do the eight-ounce bottles, not the 16-ounce bottles from Sam's

00:37:23.640 | Club or Costco or wherever you give them.

00:37:25.920 | Yeah, just pour the water into your mash and make your, actually it's called a wort, and

00:37:31.040 | make your wort out of it and distill it and then put the ethanol back into the bottles,

00:37:37.480 | only you put a little black dot on the cap so you know it's ethanol.

00:37:41.520 | You put it in there about 100 proof, and eight ounces is about three and a half, four and

00:37:49.560 | a half shots.

00:37:51.040 | So basically, eight ounces is one really good drunk.

00:37:56.080 | You can trade that away all day long, anywhere in the world.

00:38:02.920 | I'll tell you something really interesting.

00:38:07.360 | I'm a consultant to different elements of government and special forces, which people

00:38:12.320 | know.

00:38:13.320 | I got this one entire group and team to, they always carry a multi-fuel stove, a pressurized

00:38:23.120 | one, and it runs on diesel, kerosene, gasoline, you know, Avgas, Jet A. It runs on almost

00:38:34.160 | any liquid fuel, but it doesn't run on alcohol.

00:38:38.760 | And so there'll be like a 12-man ODA, and two or three of them will have the stove with

00:38:46.000 | them, but another two or three will have a simple, what you see online as the brass alcohol

00:38:53.360 | stove.

00:38:54.520 | All you do is pour in the denatured ethanol or marine fuel, which is denatured ethanol,

00:39:01.000 | and it's a simple little alcohol stove.

00:39:03.400 | Alcohol stoves are just simplicity, they're just so simple.

00:39:09.880 | It's a little bit more expensive of fuel, but they just work so beautiful.

00:39:15.080 | So they'll carry that, and they were carrying denatured ethanol that you get at Home Depot

00:39:20.400 | as a backup fuel, about a pint of it or two pints of it.

00:39:25.600 | And what it is, it's 98% ethanol and 2% methanol.

00:39:30.960 | It's called denatured, so it's not natural, so you can't drink it because it will literally

00:39:38.040 | make you sick or blind or poison you if you drink denatured alcohol.

00:39:42.080 | And I told the guys, "No, no, stop doing that."

00:39:46.080 | They go, "Why?

00:39:47.080 | What?"

00:39:48.080 | I go, "Go get Everclear."

00:39:49.760 | In the United States and most states, not all states, you can buy 190 or 195 proof ethanol.

00:39:56.900 | And so that is basically 95% ethanol, and the rest is water.

00:40:02.860 | In some states, it's 150 proof, and it won't work, but if you can get 190 proof ethanol,

00:40:09.540 | Everclear, I said, "Carry that as your stove fuel."

00:40:13.460 | I said, "And it's actually cheaper than the marine alcohol."

00:40:17.260 | Wait, no, the marine alcohol is cheaper.

00:40:20.900 | But anyways, I told them to carry this, and they go, "Why?"

00:40:25.900 | I go, "Well, one, you can medically use it to disinfect things, needles, sutures, wounds,

00:40:32.980 | et cetera.

00:40:33.980 | Two, you can use it as a stove fuel just beautifully.

00:40:37.540 | Three, you can use it as a trading or barter item.

00:40:42.620 | And four, you can use it as a trading or barter item because you can drink it."

00:40:49.220 | And I said, "Let's say you get into a bad situation.

00:40:55.260 | You get a bullet through the leg.

00:40:59.140 | Your buddies do T-Trips-C on you.

00:41:02.460 | They put a tourniquet on you, bandage you up, and you guys now have to do a three-legged

00:41:09.780 | race for the helicopter.

00:41:11.300 | That's three and a half kilometers away, and you are in, oh my God, horrible pain, and

00:41:18.100 | your medic's not there.

00:41:19.100 | There's usually two medics and an ODA."

00:41:23.700 | And I said, "Now you got something that has been historically a proven anesthetic for

00:41:29.820 | severe pain.

00:41:31.300 | And it's like you can drink that alcohol, and you can get yourself a little bit drunk

00:41:35.540 | or a lot drunk depending upon your medical situation, and it might allow you to overcome

00:41:40.580 | the amount of pain that you have to get through to make it to your ex fill.

00:41:45.380 | Otherwise, you're going to become a prisoner or dead."

00:41:49.860 | And these are people operating in hostile areas.

00:41:54.860 | It's not big army or the big Marine Corps.

00:41:59.220 | So there's an example of what you can do with ethanol as a commodity or as a storage device.

00:42:08.420 | You can use it as dope fuel.

00:42:09.880 | You can use it trading and bartering.

00:42:11.980 | You can use it as a medical disinfectant.

00:42:14.020 | You can use it as an internal analgesic.

00:42:16.740 | - Right.

00:42:17.740 | That's what I like about the idea of thinking about things that you could store.

00:42:24.700 | So I don't buy much into the idea that the world, there's this idea that some people

00:42:31.900 | have that, "Well, everything after the zombie apocalypse, then we go back to 1800s technology."

00:42:37.300 | I don't buy into that idea, but I do know that there can be times when society as normal,

00:42:43.980 | it doesn't exist for quite a while.

00:42:46.820 | And if you want to find one of the historically most valuable things to have, alcohol has

00:42:51.540 | always been at the top of that list.

00:42:53.900 | And so if you think about the value and you say, "Well, maybe I could store some sugar."

00:42:57.140 | In a moment, we'll talk about putting money into alcohol itself, like alcohol that other

00:43:02.900 | people have made, but the cheapest way to do it is, as you say, you store the sugar,

00:43:07.720 | you possibly go ahead and distill the alcohol yourself and store it, and that can have significant

00:43:13.580 | value, and is really worth considering as one reason to store significant amounts of

00:43:17.980 | sugar and also to accumulate the appropriate equipment that would allow you to properly

00:43:27.980 | distill it safely.

00:43:28.980 | >>Ted: I would not do it post-event.

00:43:33.580 | I would not make alcohol post-event.

00:43:37.580 | The type of alcohol I would make post-event is what they do up in Alaska, because a lot

00:43:44.220 | of the Inuit city areas up there are dry, is you can take yeast and sugar and water,

00:43:56.900 | and you can make a wine.

00:43:59.580 | You just ferment it, and it makes a wine/a beer, whatever you want to call it, and you

00:44:06.220 | can drink it straight.

00:44:08.260 | It's going to be about 11% to 16% ethanol, depending upon the yeast.

00:44:14.740 | If you use Red Star Baking Yeast, it's going to be about 11% alcohol, and you can drink

00:44:20.220 | that directly.

00:44:21.420 | I would not use my valuable energy for distillation of that post-apocalyptic, because your energy

00:44:30.620 | is by far too valuable, and don't go, "Well, what if I got a solar panel?"

00:44:37.420 | It takes a fair amount of energy to distill.

00:44:40.020 | It takes a fair amount of energy to distill ethanol.

00:44:44.940 | I would not use solar power, solar energy, gasoline.

00:44:49.700 | If you had an abundance of hydroelectric, sure, but other than that, no.

00:44:55.340 | It takes a lot more energy than energy you have in your battery bank to distill even

00:45:02.500 | one gallon of ethanol.

00:45:04.860 | So, on the same theme of things that store forever, most distilled spirits will basically

00:45:10.700 | store forever, and some distilled spirits can actually grow in value.

00:45:15.060 | I noticed an interesting headline a couple weeks ago, beginning of September.

00:45:18.940 | The headline is, "Son sells birthday whiskey collection worth over $53,000 to buy his first

00:45:24.900 | house."

00:45:26.380 | His father, basically every year, spent about $6,000 total over 28 years, and he would give

00:45:32.140 | his son a bottle of McCollin single malt whiskey as a birthday gift.

00:45:37.260 | He did this from the very beginning, and at this point in time, he now has a collection

00:45:41.520 | worth about $53,000, which he's planning to sell through a broker, through an auction

00:45:45.860 | of some kind, and be able to use that money for paying a down payment on his first house.

00:45:54.860 | So, Steve, what thoughts do you have around storing distilled spirits as a way of having

00:46:02.460 | inflation-proof assets?

00:46:06.420 | Sounds pretty bad to me.

00:46:08.060 | Six thousand times 20 is 120,000, and he's selling it for 50,000.

00:46:13.220 | Sounds like a bad investment to me.

00:46:14.220 | No, no, no, no, no.

00:46:15.220 | It was $6,000 total.

00:46:17.300 | All of the bottles have cost about $6,000, so the $6,000 spent, because of the time that

00:46:22.660 | they had sat on the shelf, the $6,000 had grown to be worth about $53,000 in today's

00:46:29.260 | dollars.

00:46:30.260 | No, I wouldn't do that.

00:46:34.180 | The only thing I would buy is, if you want to buy a bunch of Costco vodka really cheap

00:46:40.100 | and have it as something, you can't put enough money.

00:46:44.980 | It builds up too much space in terms of volume versus dollars, which is what's nice about

00:46:51.580 | gold is that one ounce is small and you've got a lot of monetary value into it.

00:46:56.860 | The problem with it is it's small and you've got a lot of monetary value into it.

00:47:01.820 | You can't make change with a bar of gold, but you're really not going to make money

00:47:08.500 | on gold or silver.

00:47:09.900 | It's just an inflationary-proof place to park your money for 10, 20, 30 years or more or

00:47:16.220 | to pass it on to another generation.

00:47:22.220 | If you happen to make money on it, great.

00:47:23.980 | I know a lot of people have lost a lot of money on gold and silver.

00:47:26.940 | People are losing money on gold and silver right now and people are making money on gold

00:47:30.100 | and silver right now.

00:47:33.060 | The whole idea of, "Oh, well, in a disaster, I'm going to go take my gold and silver and

00:47:39.140 | trade it for a loaf of bread."

00:47:40.340 | No, you're not.

00:47:44.780 | Stop listening to the idiots on the net.

00:47:46.660 | I know people that have gone through the entire inflationary period and the collapse of Venezuela

00:47:53.180 | and people who have escaped Venezuela and gone to other countries.

00:47:57.540 | I dealt with people working for me doing web work and other type of work.

00:48:02.540 | He was an MD.

00:48:03.540 | He was a doctor.

00:48:06.580 | He was making more money working for me for pennies than he could make in Venezuela.

00:48:11.860 | You can't buy a loaf of bread with an ounce of gold if there's no loaves of bread.

00:48:24.340 | Don't think there's anyone that's going to trade you a loaf of bread for an ounce of

00:48:28.180 | gold because they won't because they're hungry.

00:48:31.700 | Hungry is one of the most powerful motivators.

00:48:35.580 | After thirst and breathing, hunger is one of the most powerful motivators of human beings.

00:48:44.700 | When he left and his parents were still there trying to get entry visas into other countries,

00:48:51.660 | she would have about one meal a day.

00:48:53.740 | She'd get two gallons of gasoline every three days.

00:48:56.660 | That was allotted to her.

00:48:58.540 | She would wait four to six hours each time for that two to three gallons of gasoline.

00:49:04.540 | There was nothing in the stores.

00:49:06.460 | There was no currency because the currency was devalued beyond description.

00:49:13.380 | There was no one buying trading with gold or silver.

00:49:18.300 | None.

00:49:19.300 | Zero.

00:49:20.300 | If you don't have it before a disaster, you're not going to get it during or after.

00:49:26.260 | That includes your food, your water, and your other needed supplies.

00:49:32.220 | I paid him electronically through a system called Payoneer.

00:49:37.260 | It's like a worldwide version of PayPal.

00:49:41.100 | I paid him through Payoneer.

00:49:43.220 | He went to a black market person.

00:49:46.100 | He transferred the money to him in Payoneer.

00:49:50.980 | Then the black market guy transferred his money to his bank account in Venezuela.

00:49:58.220 | Everything was purchased on debit cards.

00:50:01.260 | Everyone used debit cards.

00:50:02.700 | Everything was purchased with debit cards because the inflationary index was already

00:50:07.220 | accommodated for that day in the bank transfer.

00:50:13.260 | He actually used his debit card so much over a period of two and a half years that wore

00:50:18.860 | out.

00:50:19.860 | I said, "Go get a new debit card."

00:50:22.060 | He goes, "Yeah, well, I'll have to be in the bank waiting all day."

00:50:26.140 | I go, "Take a good look.

00:50:29.460 | You need to have a working debit card."

00:50:31.300 | He only had one.

00:50:33.820 | You can't buy food or anything.

00:50:36.380 | You can't buy anything without your debit card in Venezuela at the time, which became

00:50:42.380 | really bad when they had the countrywide power failure.

00:50:46.740 | Then they couldn't even use their debit card.

00:50:51.980 | Everything was done by debit card.

00:50:53.300 | I asked him, "What would you do if you had gold or silver?"

00:50:55.900 | He said, "I'd have to take it to the black market guy to get it transferred and put into

00:51:00.620 | my bank account as monetary units in my bank account to use my debit card to go buy something."

00:51:07.500 | He says, "He would charge me more than half."

00:51:10.460 | If you had $1,000 US dollars in gold, he would only give you $500 for it because it was such

00:51:18.660 | a pain in the rear end for him to try to turn that back into something that was useful to

00:51:24.140 | him as a black market person, some type of fiat.

00:51:29.460 | This myth of, "I'm going to go buy my bread and my stuff with my gold and silver is in

00:51:35.180 | I'm buying these little pieces I can break off into one gram slices and I'm buying one

00:51:42.140 | tenth ounce gold pieces."

00:51:43.860 | Bull crap, bull crap, bull crap, bull crap, bull crap.

00:51:47.820 | It's not going to get you nothing.

00:51:49.340 | In fact, during the pandemic in the United States, you couldn't buy stuff.

00:51:56.060 | It just wasn't there.

00:51:57.060 | You went to the grocery store and there just was no bread.

00:52:01.140 | There just was no meat.

00:52:02.740 | There was no milk.

00:52:03.980 | There was no eggs.

00:52:06.300 | Depending upon where you were and what time during the pandemic, there was none.

00:52:10.500 | We are fortunate as hell that we had power and that we had electricity.

00:52:16.580 | We had gasoline.

00:52:17.580 | We had electricity.

00:52:18.580 | Imagine the pandemic without gasoline and without electricity.

00:52:22.220 | It would have been a lot more and not being able to go to the store, not being able to

00:52:28.260 | go to the pharmacy.

00:52:30.340 | One of the things we were going to talk about, Josh, was other forms of commodities that

00:52:34.820 | you could store dollars in.

00:52:39.340 | You're looking for places to park your money.

00:52:42.940 | It's like a slow drizzle that fills up your rain bucket.

00:52:47.180 | We're not looking at a thunderstorm.

00:52:49.300 | We're not looking at trying to move your life savings of $600,000 into gold or into silver,

00:52:55.260 | which is absolutely kind of impossible to do at the moment, even if you wanted to, which

00:53:00.700 | is why you talk about how to survive the upcoming financial problems by using foreign banks

00:53:06.900 | and different banks.

00:53:07.900 | You got a whole beautiful strategy worked out for it.

00:53:12.820 | But there are things that you can get.

00:53:15.260 | If you got space, there are things that you can get that are reasonably dense that you

00:53:19.780 | can park your money in and you can get them for a bargain.

00:53:25.700 | You actually might make money on them in 10 or 20 years when you go to cash them in.

00:53:34.900 | You're not going to be just like cashing these things in on the street.

00:53:40.780 | It's not like you're going to be able to go to liquid instantly, but you're going to be

00:53:45.380 | able to go to liquid and go to profit.

00:53:49.580 | But it's not like, "Hey man, I got some silver.

00:53:51.660 | You want to buy it?"

00:53:54.760 | You might be going to a company or to a market or to a scrapyard or something and turning

00:54:02.500 | it in.

00:54:04.660 | Some of it might take you a month to convert it.

00:54:07.060 | Some of it might take you a day to convert it.

00:54:11.060 | But this started, I do a lot of work in the industrial world and I was on Facebook Marketplace,

00:54:18.860 | which is a great place to buy stuff.

00:54:20.580 | It's basically taken over Craigslist.

00:54:23.660 | And this guy had billets of a special stainless steel that's used on a CNC or a lathe or a

00:54:33.020 | mill to make stuff.

00:54:35.740 | And they were about six inches long by four inches by four inches.

00:54:43.820 | And they were a specific type of labeled stainless steel.

00:54:49.180 | And anyways, he said they were $144 brand new.

00:54:56.980 | And Detroit is a fairly industrial area where I live.

00:55:01.540 | And he says he wanted $70 for each of them each.

00:55:07.300 | And obviously he was selling them to people who wanted them for their own CNC or mill

00:55:13.860 | work.

00:55:15.720 | And I was looking at it and I was like, "Gee, I bet you if I bought them all, I could get

00:55:20.820 | them for 50 bucks each."

00:55:23.100 | So brand new, 144 in year 2020, selling them at basically half price.

00:55:29.020 | I could probably get them even cheaper.

00:55:32.420 | And what you need...

00:55:33.740 | And there was like $10,000 of them.

00:55:36.100 | He had 200 of them.

00:55:38.100 | And so $10,000 of them at $50 each.

00:55:41.580 | Well, if I had a spare $10,000, that was like a small fraction of my income that I wanted

00:55:48.740 | to park.

00:55:49.740 | And we're talking what, what would you say, Josh, 1% or 2% of your income, 1% of your

00:55:53.580 | income that you wanted to park.

00:55:55.820 | So whether that was $1,000 or $10,000 or $150,000, that's up to you.

00:56:03.380 | I could have bought these billets of steel.

00:56:05.140 | Now you want the certs with them.

00:56:06.920 | You want the sheet that comes with them that says what they are.

00:56:09.780 | And usually they're going to be marked with a paint pen that says 3003 on them or whatever

00:56:15.340 | the type of steel or metal that they are made out of and what their formulation is.

00:56:21.140 | And you want the certs or the XRFs that come with them.

00:56:24.180 | But that's fine.

00:56:25.180 | You can take those and you can just put a coating of WD-40 on them and you can put them

00:56:32.220 | into a plastic tote that you hermetically seal with tape.

00:56:37.740 | So no moisture gets in there and corrodes them past their WD-40 coating.

00:56:44.100 | And if you got a barn or a place to store them, bury them, whatever you want, in 10

00:56:50.460 | or 20 years from now, those things are still going to be worth $144 times the inflationary

00:56:58.660 | adjustment for when you go to sell them.

00:57:04.740 | So they might be worth $215 or $250 each in 10 or 20 years.

00:57:11.140 | But it is a commodity.

00:57:13.180 | It is steel.

00:57:14.180 | And it is a specific flavor of steel that has a higher value to it because it's used

00:57:20.100 | in the machining business for the manufacture and making of parts from custom machining

00:57:26.180 | shops or something.

00:57:27.180 | Now, can you just go down the street and say, "Hey, dude, I'll trade you this hunk of stainless

00:57:31.820 | steel for bread."

00:57:34.380 | It's like, "No."

00:57:36.500 | But we're not talking about that.

00:57:37.500 | We're talking about parking money for an inflationary proof storage and/or an inflationary proof

00:57:44.500 | storage plus profit method.

00:57:47.300 | Now it's a roll of the dice whether or not you're going to make your money beyond inflationary

00:57:51.780 | adjustment on gold or silver, right?

00:57:53.660 | Correct.

00:57:54.660 | It all has to do with demand.

00:57:57.100 | Right.

00:57:58.100 | No, I mean, this is a regular commodity that is always going to be in demand even 20 years

00:58:03.020 | from now.

00:58:05.020 | And if you got the room, you can buy it and you can store it.

00:58:09.740 | And it's a place to park some money other than gold and silver.

00:58:15.100 | And this, like I said, this will probably have return on it.

00:58:18.180 | One of the other good things is I deal with scrappers and they go and scrap things and

00:58:24.180 | they take it to the recycle yard and get money for it.

00:58:26.980 | Well, I tell the scrappers that I want bar stock copper, like the copper that comes out

00:58:37.260 | of the back of a big industrial circuit breaker panel.

00:58:42.380 | Not the thin stuff, not copper wire.

00:58:44.620 | I want stock bar stock copper and I'll pay them 10% over what Great Lakes Recycling will

00:58:52.380 | give them.

00:58:53.380 | And to be honest, I don't want fluffy copper.

00:58:56.540 | I want dense copper.

00:58:57.860 | I want copper that's easy to store.

00:59:00.740 | So I'm buying it at recycle price, which is well below commodity price.

00:59:07.740 | And it's in a stocky method and I already have an industrial shop and a storage unit.

00:59:15.220 | So I got a place to put my copper.

00:59:20.220 | And if you took a priority mail mailer box and filled it full of copper, and I have,

00:59:31.180 | you can barely lift it.

00:59:32.380 | It's like 80 pounds.

00:59:33.940 | Copper is a dense metal.

00:59:36.960 | Now that copper I can take to any scrap yard in the country and they will give me cash

00:59:43.500 | for it.

00:59:44.500 | And there's scrap yards in every city, everywhere that you go.

00:59:47.880 | So I can turn my copper back into cash and I can have an inflationary proof method of

00:59:57.060 | storage for my money.

00:59:59.300 | That is not gold.

01:00:00.540 | That is not silver.

01:00:02.340 | That has what we call a completely different signature to it.

01:00:05.900 | I mean, gold or silver, you're only going to sell it to a private person or you're going

01:00:09.860 | to sell it to a dealer.

01:00:10.860 | And you're going to have to find a dealer or a private party.

01:00:15.180 | And depending upon the dealer, if it's a coin deal or something, you're going to lose a

01:00:20.100 | certain amount of money above spot to get it.

01:00:24.300 | And he's going to pay you a certain amount of money below spot for it.

01:00:29.440 | And depending upon the amount of money, there may or may not be a paper trail behind that

01:00:35.680 | that you may or may not want, depending upon how you were doing your business and your

01:00:41.060 | personal finances.

01:00:43.080 | So copper is good for that.

01:00:46.980 | In the world of copper, there's bright copper, number one copper, number two copper.

01:00:51.380 | Bright copper is stripped copper wire.

01:00:53.300 | Number one copper is copper from copper wire.

01:00:58.020 | And number two copper is like copper pipe.

01:01:02.440 | And any other type of copper, enameled copper, et cetera.

01:01:08.080 | And wire is fluffy.

01:01:09.260 | There's a lot of airspace in wire.

01:01:11.460 | And that's why I wanted the bar stock, because it's already as densified as I'm going to

01:01:18.460 | get it unless I melt it and cast it.

01:01:21.420 | Melting and casting copper is a world of difference from melting and casting aluminum, because

01:01:26.340 | it's melt and pour temperatures up around 2,000, whereas aluminum is between 1,200 and

01:01:32.420 | 1,400.

01:01:33.420 | Speaking of aluminum, I would not recommend the storage of aluminum, because it becomes

01:01:38.700 | what we call too fluffy.

01:01:40.020 | It is too cheap and it takes up too much space.

01:01:42.780 | Right now, aluminum is about 30 cents a pound at the scrap yard.

01:01:46.920 | And that is an awful lot of volume of aluminum to be able to store and turn back into the

01:01:53.780 | scrap yard in the future.

01:01:56.340 | One of the ones that I do have a lot of experience with is lead.

01:02:01.760 | Lead right now is between 85 cents and $1 a pound, depending.

01:02:06.100 | It depends upon the antimony content of it.

01:02:09.100 | You can get lead in all sorts of forms, from tire weights to range lead to lead sheet scrap.

01:02:19.220 | You can get lead in all sorts of forms.

01:02:21.220 | But the neat thing about lead is it's really easy to melt.

01:02:23.900 | It's melt temperature is 620 Fahrenheit.

01:02:26.700 | And generally, you pour it around 700.

01:02:28.940 | And you can pour it into ingots.

01:02:33.020 | And actually, for some professional work I've done, I got some 80-pound ingots of lead.

01:02:40.100 | They're not that big, and darn, are they heavy.

01:02:43.780 | But actually, the funny thing is when you get above the 80-pound ingot, you get into

01:02:48.420 | 1,000-pound blocks of lead.

01:02:51.060 | They're called sows, like the pig.

01:02:56.460 | So it's easy to melt and pour.

01:02:57.820 | And the thing about lead is it's impervious to about everything.

01:03:01.380 | It just does not want to react.

01:03:04.060 | There are lead roofs on churches in Europe and in the UK that are over 1,000 years old.

01:03:11.980 | Lead was the first metal that man ever started to work with.

01:03:15.980 | And over time, it forms a layer of lead oxide and eventually lead carbonate on the surface.

01:03:24.540 | And it's basically like a scab on a wound.

01:03:26.700 | It protects itself.

01:03:27.700 | And the layer doesn't go very deep.

01:03:31.220 | And we've actually talked about-- we got one of the people who works for the lead company

01:03:35.820 | has a big farm someplace.

01:03:37.820 | And he's got like 200 acres.

01:03:41.660 | We literally talked about the idea of just putting a million pounds of lead-- that's

01:03:50.060 | a million dollars in money-- out in the farm field, just in a pile.

01:03:57.060 | That's the storage method for it.

01:03:59.900 | And it's like, it's not going to go bad.

01:04:02.260 | It's not going to get bad.

01:04:03.620 | It's not going to change.

01:04:06.260 | And it is going to be very, very, very hard for someone to, one, recognize what it is,

01:04:14.860 | where it is, and then to get it out of there.

01:04:19.540 | How are you going to move a million pounds of lead?

01:04:22.540 | A semi-truck carries 40,000 pounds.

01:04:27.300 | So you're looking at 25 semi-trailer loads of lead just to move it.

01:04:36.060 | But again, we were hypothesizing that as an inflationary proof storage method of lead.

01:04:44.020 | Now we think over the next 10 to 20 years, lead is going to become more invaluable than

01:04:48.820 | valuable because of the rise of the lithium ion battery and the less use of the lead acid

01:04:57.540 | battery.

01:04:58.540 | And we think lead use is going to actually go down rather than go up.

01:05:02.820 | Incidentally, lead is, on a percentage basis, lead is the most recycled metal in the world.

01:05:08.260 | The most recycled metal in the world by volume is steel.

01:05:11.180 | The most recycled by percentage is lead.

01:05:15.260 | So we talked about actually doing that with lead.

01:05:17.540 | You can take lead down to your scrap dealer and they will buy it all day long.

01:05:24.220 | You're better off, scrap dealer might give you 30, 35 cents for it.

01:05:29.500 | And an industry person, and I found a couple in Detroit, they're small lead foundries.

01:05:35.620 | They melt and pour lead.

01:05:37.620 | They will give you 70 to 85 cents for the same amount of metal.

01:05:44.340 | And they're going to zap it with their XRF because they want to know what the antimony

01:05:49.060 | content is of the lead, which determines its hardness.

01:05:55.260 | Or if it's pure lead, or what we call 3% or 6% with the antimony in there.

01:06:01.500 | And then they're going to buy it from you.

01:06:03.460 | Again, not as easy to dispose of as gold and silver, yet it is another method that is an

01:06:10.540 | option for you to consider based upon what you have, where you're at, what your priorities

01:06:17.180 | are and what your availabilities are.

01:06:19.660 | I mean, if you've got a front end loader, you can load, put bars of lead into your field

01:06:24.340 | all day long and get them in and out easy enough.

01:06:27.700 | If you don't, it's a pain in the rear end to do it by hand.

01:06:32.340 | So again, this is information from Josh and me that you can utilize for what you have

01:06:39.380 | and what's available to you.

01:06:40.580 | If you're in a two bedroom apartment, you're not storing ingots of lead in the closet.

01:06:46.420 | You're going to do something that is available to you.

01:06:50.500 | So lead, it was an interesting commodity.

01:06:53.380 | Aluminum, we said it was too fluffy.

01:06:57.860 | What else is there that you're thinking of, Josh, that we can talk about?

01:07:01.540 | Oh, I have, I got kerosene.

01:07:04.900 | I got in the 1990s.

01:07:08.220 | I got it for $1.35 a gallon from the gas station and I stored it because I decided kerosene

01:07:15.180 | in the 1990s was going to be my amount of fuel.

01:07:18.580 | I wanted one fuel that would do the most.

01:07:20.940 | I can heat with kerosene.

01:07:22.380 | I can cook with kerosene.

01:07:23.740 | I can illuminate with kerosene.

01:07:25.900 | I can even do some transportation, a vehicle on kerosene, which is a longer story.

01:07:31.620 | So I bought kerosene.

01:07:32.620 | Well, that kerosene is now $4.50 a gallon.

01:07:35.660 | So from 1995 to 2020, did I have an inflationary balance or gain?

01:07:42.820 | Yeah, probably.

01:07:44.100 | Yes.

01:07:45.100 | But really it was meant for my own usage rather than for trading.

01:07:50.620 | Yet it could be a good trading item.

01:07:54.700 | But I have a saying from my 35 years in the energy field, never go long on energy, ever.

01:08:04.060 | Decade by decade, average basis, energy is always cheaper.

01:08:07.420 | So what do you mean, Steve?

01:08:10.300 | Gasoline used to be $0.32 when I was a kid.

01:08:14.860 | That was 50 years ago.

01:08:16.260 | Okay.

01:08:17.260 | Josh, you want to do the inflationary adjustment from $0.32 on a gallon of gasoline to...

01:08:23.420 | I'll look it up, but I'm tempted.

01:08:25.260 | I was like, "Oh, we could bring in some peak oil conversation."

01:08:28.940 | I bet Steve would have some quite salacious words to say considering what you're saying

01:08:33.740 | right now on that topic.

01:08:36.140 | There is no such thing as peak oil.

01:08:37.940 | Peak oil is bullshit made up by people who want to motivate you.

01:08:43.580 | They want to motivate you by fear.

01:08:48.780 | It's always the sky is falling.

01:08:50.540 | I mean, literally I have books from 1910 that talk about when are we going to run out of

01:08:55.740 | coal.

01:08:56.740 | I kid you not, 1910, 1920, we're going to run out of coal.

01:09:02.180 | It's always the same thing.

01:09:03.540 | We're always going to run out of something.

01:09:05.540 | We're going to run out of air.

01:09:06.540 | We're going to run out of water.

01:09:07.860 | We're going to run out of oil.

01:09:09.220 | We're going to run out of whiskey.

01:09:11.660 | We're going to run out of something.

01:09:15.580 | It's like Ron White was doing a comedy routine and he's talking about going back to his doctor

01:09:20.260 | in California to renew his marijuana card.

01:09:23.300 | The doctor goes, "What are you taking marijuana for?"

01:09:26.980 | He goes, "Anxiety."

01:09:28.380 | He goes, "What do you get anxiety about?"

01:09:30.620 | He goes, "Not having any pot to smoke."

01:09:34.740 | I ran the numbers.

01:09:35.740 | I mean, it's just a continual always thing of someone trying to motivate you by fear

01:09:43.340 | that has no experience in the field.

01:09:45.660 | Right.

01:09:46.660 | I ran the numbers for you.

01:09:48.140 | In 1950, if I purchased an item for 35 cents, then in 2020, that same item would cost $3.77.

01:09:58.100 | I mean, that's almost an exact analog for gasoline.

01:10:01.140 | You can't store gasoline that long.

01:10:03.140 | That's a long conversation.

01:10:05.460 | You can diesel and kerosene, but that's an exact analog for almost what we got.

01:10:10.540 | In fact, right now, diesel fuel is $2.15.

01:10:18.340 | I got a bunch of diesel fuel stored because actually I got it for free.

01:10:23.580 | I had to have a big generator moved and it had 450 gallons of diesel fuel in it.

01:10:29.780 | It's like, "We got to get rid of the diesel fuel."

01:10:32.060 | It's like, "I know how you can do that.

01:10:33.700 | How's that?

01:10:34.700 | We got to pay the guy to show up with the truck and pump it and everything else."

01:10:40.940 | It's like, "I'll take it for free."

01:10:43.420 | I mean, so there you go.

01:10:49.140 | I remember gasoline being 85 cents in the early '90s when I was working at Chrysler

01:10:53.900 | and I had a Geo Metro that got 55 miles to the gallon.

01:10:59.660 | Now we're talking about gas being $1.75 a gallon to $2 a gallon.

01:11:06.580 | You do an inflationary adjustment between, "Oh, it was 89 cents when I was working at

01:11:10.820 | Chrysler in 1992."

01:11:13.620 | Do an inflationary adjustment between 85 cents and $1.73 in 2020.

01:11:17.940 | I bet you that 89-cent gasoline was not so cheap as you think it is.

01:11:23.300 | It's cheaper now than it was then.

01:11:26.540 | Natural gas crashed in price.

01:11:30.740 | Oil crashed in price.

01:11:32.260 | I mean, there's always going to be spikes, but I'm talking on a decade-by-decade average

01:11:36.740 | basis or a decade-moving basis, energy is always cheaper.

01:11:44.420 | There's always that oil spike to $150 a gallon.

01:11:48.260 | Well, that was artificially induced reasons, et cetera, and a bunch of other things.

01:11:52.980 | And you notice the price of gold went up because the price of gold is directly tied to the

01:11:57.980 | price of diesel fuel because it takes their remote mining and everything and all their

01:12:03.860 | equipment runs on diesel fuel.

01:12:06.500 | So the more they pay in diesel fuel, the more the price of gold is going to be because the

01:12:10.940 | cost of mining has gone up.

01:12:14.300 | But you can talk about that later.

01:12:15.900 | That's a whole other paradigm of the way things work.

01:12:20.660 | So don't ever go long energy in any form economically.

01:12:26.900 | Now, there's something intelligent you can do with energy.

01:12:30.180 | I have a friend, and he had trouble with a propane company, and he said, "Screw it."

01:12:36.100 | He went out and he bought four 1,000-gallon tanks, and he bought them used reconditioned

01:12:42.540 | from a reconditioned place, so basically as good as new.

01:12:46.500 | And he has the propane company come and fill them up every year in the summer at 95 cents,

01:12:52.100 | and he uses it all through the winter when propane is above $2.

01:12:58.060 | And he's made his money back on the price of the tanks in like four years.

01:13:03.820 | So there's a short-term thing you can do with energy.

01:13:06.100 | It's like I tell everyone, "Look, you're on Facebook Marketplace.

01:13:10.380 | Buy your air conditioners in the wintertime, and buy your heaters and your wood stoves

01:13:14.260 | in the summertime.

01:13:15.580 | You will buy them all for bargains at each time, and so what?

01:13:19.300 | You got to wait six months, but that six months will happen.

01:13:22.460 | That six months will occur."

01:13:23.860 | And there was a great wood stove, beautiful $1,500 wood stove with the glass in the front

01:13:31.180 | and the legs and everything.

01:13:33.500 | And it's just premium stove like you'd get a tractor supply store for $150 on Facebook

01:13:39.180 | Marketplace from someone who just said, "I just want to get rid of this thing."

01:13:44.260 | They spent the $1,500, you spent the $150 and got it for a bargain.

01:13:51.340 | But yeah, so you can be smart with energy and you can like your propane because propane

01:13:55.380 | never goes bad.

01:13:56.380 | So now he's got two years, literally, more than two years of propane on his property,

01:14:01.860 | which in his generator runs off of propane, his stove runs off of propane, his furnace

01:14:07.300 | runs off of propane, his water heater runs off of propane.

01:14:11.380 | They all run off of propane.

01:14:13.620 | So he went monofuel with propane and he buys it cheap in the summer.

01:14:19.500 | He got the tanks reconditioned used.

01:14:21.980 | And so he's making money all day long on that aspect of propane.

01:14:28.300 | I think these are good examples.

01:14:32.300 | And I want to talk for a minute from the financial perspective about what you will, if you think

01:14:39.140 | about people often have significant opinions around things like gold and silver.

01:14:46.540 | And it's…

01:14:47.540 | There's the old word again.

01:14:50.880 | People have hot feelings around gold and silver.

01:14:54.340 | Some people say, "I believe in gold."

01:14:57.060 | Some people say, "I don't believe in gold."

01:14:58.860 | And I remember the first time I went to go and buy…

01:15:02.300 | I was trained as a professional financial advisor in a fairly mainstream viewpoint.

01:15:07.020 | And I remember the first time I went and decided I was going to buy a gold coin, I felt like

01:15:11.140 | I was committing some heinous crime.

01:15:13.060 | I felt I was looking over my shoulder going into the coin shop and I just felt like, "Wow,

01:15:17.900 | I don't know what am I doing here."

01:15:19.900 | And it was all a totally opaque world to me.

01:15:22.620 | I didn't understand.

01:15:24.020 | And when I left, I looked at this little coin and I thought, "I spent $300.

01:15:28.300 | I think I bought a 10-ounce gold eagle.

01:15:30.500 | I spent $350 on that."

01:15:33.980 | And then in time, I became more comfortable with the topic of investing.

01:15:37.340 | But what I've often identified and seen is that if you understand a marketplace, you'll

01:15:42.860 | see that that marketplace has distinct advantages and distinct disadvantages.

01:15:47.580 | So as a way of example, gold and silver being commodities really should perform just about

01:15:54.260 | like copper and lead being commodities, which means that they should in time keep pace with

01:16:01.300 | inflation generally speaking.

01:16:03.540 | Now because of the emotions that are charged with it, because of the market, so for example,

01:16:08.300 | you have arguments, you know, Stephen's talking about the lead marketplace, people using lead.

01:16:12.740 | Well, there's all these arguments about the silver and the silver, you know, people using

01:16:16.060 | up silver in the industrial system.

01:16:18.060 | There's arguments about gold.

01:16:19.660 | Gold is extremely-

01:16:21.180 | I hate that on TV.

01:16:24.540 | It's like, "Silver, we can't make silver.

01:16:27.060 | We can't make solar panels without silver.

01:16:29.700 | Silver is going to go up.

01:16:31.140 | Alternative energy, your cell phone uses silver.

01:16:34.260 | Now silver is advertised as being antiviral and antimicrobial and we're in a pandemic

01:16:40.820 | and buy silver and I'm screaming at the TV, 'Shut the F up!'"

01:16:49.660 | I hope that your blood pressure is okay, Stephen.

01:16:52.780 | Either that or you're going to turn off the TV.

01:16:55.420 | Oh, no.

01:16:56.420 | No, no, no.

01:16:57.420 | You know, Jack Spierker always said that, you know, Harris should go on medical marijuana.

01:17:03.900 | No, no, no.

01:17:06.140 | No, no.

01:17:07.140 | It's just, you know, I have passion and enthusiasm for what I talk about and I speak about it

01:17:14.580 | in a passion-enthusiastic method because a lot of the stuff I'm dealing with is life

01:17:19.780 | and death, okay?

01:17:21.540 | When I'm teaching different elements of the military, special forces, I'm teaching different

01:17:26.980 | things about batteries.

01:17:27.980 | Look, if their battery dies and they can't make that call and they can't get their evac,

01:17:32.700 | they're captured or they're dead.

01:17:35.100 | When I'm talking to you about preparedness and about food storage and food making and

01:17:39.420 | different tools and everything else, you know, if you go, "Oh, Steve, I thought you said

01:17:45.260 | blah, blah, blah."

01:17:46.420 | No one ever says, "Steve, what did you really—what do you really think?

01:17:50.460 | What did you really mean?"

01:17:51.740 | No one ever says that.

01:17:52.820 | I come across clear as a bell because your life depends upon it.

01:17:57.580 | It's like, "Oh, I thought you—I got, you know, you wanted me to buy bleach.

01:18:03.020 | Oh, well, I bought ammonia.

01:18:05.580 | Won't that purify my water?"

01:18:07.380 | No.

01:18:08.380 | You know, I'm talking about life and death subjects here, that, you know, literally your

01:18:13.980 | life could be dependent upon what I say based upon a situation that gets thrust upon you

01:18:22.620 | in the future.

01:18:23.620 | There's an old saying that says, "Leadership has never found one or acquired.

01:18:28.620 | It is always suddenly and violently thrust upon you throughout history."

01:18:33.780 | George Bush, 9/11, good story.

01:18:36.300 | He was elected president.

01:18:37.300 | He was the president of the United States.

01:18:39.220 | You think of him as a leader.

01:18:40.580 | No, he was never a leader until 9/11 happened and leadership was suddenly and violently

01:18:45.420 | thrust upon him.

01:18:47.100 | No matter what your feelings or stories are about 9/11, I'm using that as an example of

01:18:52.860 | how leadership is suddenly and violently thrust upon you.

01:18:55.820 | Well, you can be in a situation—it could be the pandemic, it could be a hurricane,

01:18:59.620 | it could be an earthquake, it could be a blizzard, you weren't monitoring the weather, and all

01:19:04.020 | of a sudden it's suddenly and violently thrust upon you, and you're going to fall back on

01:19:08.580 | your lowest level of training, and your lowest level of training is Harris yelling at you

01:19:14.180 | because you don't forget it.

01:19:18.020 | And that's why I am extremely verbose, communicative, boisterous, loud, straightforward, blunt,

01:19:26.780 | you know, and to the point on things when it comes to preparedness because, you know,

01:19:32.100 | this is a life and death subject.

01:19:34.660 | I mean, you're talking about stuff with—in radical personal finance that dramatically

01:19:39.700 | affects the quality of a person's life now and in the future, okay?

01:19:45.180 | It's not really life and death.

01:19:47.580 | It could be when it comes to, like, using money for, like, medical treatment and everything

01:19:51.820 | else and stuff like that.

01:19:53.420 | It could be life and death, but you're talking about stuff that affects more of a lifestyle,

01:19:58.780 | and I'm talking more of things that go along with what you're teaching.

01:20:04.900 | You know, we're being smart financially.

01:20:09.100 | You should be smart with food and water and power and self-reliance and independence.

01:20:15.140 | You know, financial independence, food independence, water independence, energy independence, those

01:20:19.780 | are all just different types of independence.

01:20:22.300 | But when that event happens, when it is thrust upon you and you go, "Holy crap!

01:20:28.100 | How did that happen?"

01:20:31.020 | I'm talking about something that, you know, very well might mean life or death to you.

01:20:37.820 | Literally, if you don't take my advice or you didn't have my counsel, you might end

01:20:44.300 | up being dead.

01:20:46.180 | This could be everything.

01:20:47.180 | It's like I carry a tourniquet.

01:20:49.140 | I carry a RATS tourniquet everywhere I go.

01:20:51.300 | I have for, like, the last six years, ever since I had a T-TRIP-C class, which stands

01:20:57.060 | for Tactical Combat Casualty Care, which teaches you how to use tourniquets, and they use live

01:21:03.340 | animals.

01:21:04.340 | They're anesthetized.

01:21:05.340 | There's a vet there and everything else.

01:21:06.820 | And sometimes it's called the goat lab.

01:21:09.220 | Sometimes they're pigs.

01:21:10.260 | Sometimes they're different things.

01:21:11.460 | But they're given in certain places around the world, and you learn a lot very quickly.

01:21:17.300 | I mean, I have stopped three pumping arteries from a six-inch long, four-inch deep wound

01:21:24.100 | into the flesh of an animal.

01:21:25.500 | I have stopped the bleeding within 20 seconds.

01:21:28.700 | That is a very, very, very powerful thing to learn, especially when you go out on the

01:21:34.260 | battlefield as a warfighter, which I have never had.

01:21:37.940 | But the people I was working for, they're all SEAL Team guys, and they're all about

01:21:43.420 | cross-training.

01:21:44.420 | And I came into the environment of teaching battery and power and energy because you used

01:21:50.780 | to only have to have bullets and water to complete your mission.

01:21:54.580 | Now you need bullets, water, and batteries to complete your mission because you got to

01:21:58.700 | take a soft lamp, put a laser marker on the top of the hill, call up to the orbital cafe

01:22:04.620 | above you, and have them pickle a 2,000-pound JDAM that goes right onto that spot that you're

01:22:10.660 | looking at.

01:22:11.660 | Well, that requires batteries, both for the Special Operations Forces laser acquisition

01:22:18.860 | marking device, the soft lamp, and for your radio to talk to the satellite, to the bird

01:22:24.340 | or to the bombers of whatever type, from F-18 to B-1 to B-52s, the B-2s above you, to drop

01:22:33.580 | that bomb and hit it onto the target.

01:22:36.140 | If you don't have batteries, you can't complete your mission.

01:22:38.780 | So the military got serious about batteries and power, and all the next thing I knew,

01:22:42.380 | I was roped in.

01:22:44.180 | And the team guys are going, "Hey, you been in the military?"

01:22:47.820 | "Nope."

01:22:48.820 | "You ever done this?"

01:22:49.820 | "Nope."

01:22:50.820 | "Ever done that?"

01:22:51.820 | "Nope."

01:22:52.820 | "Nope."

01:22:53.820 | And he's yelling, "Hey, Gunny, throw the frickin' engineer in the class with the guys."

01:22:57.580 | It's like, "Where am I going?"

01:22:59.780 | He's like, "You're going to the machine gun class."

01:23:02.340 | I go, "What?"

01:23:03.340 | He's like, "Yeah, there's a five-day machine gun course on the .50 cal and on the M60."

01:23:13.020 | And I was with a bunch of Marines and other people, and I got to take a part and put it

01:23:22.780 | together and shoot thousands and thousands of rounds of .50 cal and .30 cal out of a

01:23:29.900 | M60 machine gun.

01:23:30.900 | And it's like, I like this cross-training.

01:23:34.740 | They just did it so I would have more familiarity with what my students had to do.

01:23:41.660 | And so that's how I got into the T-Trip-C class.

01:23:46.060 | We were teaching a government law enforcement group, and they were deploying to Iraq.

01:23:54.380 | And it looked at me, it's like, "You got three days?"

01:23:57.420 | I go, "Yep."

01:23:58.420 | I got thrown into the T-Trip-C class.

01:24:01.540 | But anyways, so I forgot.

01:24:04.100 | Ever since then, I carry a tourniquet because, one, if you're a concealed carry holder, you're

01:24:09.540 | more likely to use your tourniquet on someone else than you are to use your firearm.

01:24:14.420 | You're more likely to be near a shooting, around a shooting, not there at the time of

01:24:20.900 | the shooting to engage the bad guy with your firearm.

01:24:25.260 | You might be there at the aftermath.

01:24:27.340 | Then I was in law enforcement for five years, and I always carried a tourniquet because

01:24:31.820 | I can get shot.

01:24:33.820 | My vest only covers a certain area.

01:24:37.620 | And so I actually might have to self-administer a tourniquet to myself.

01:24:42.800 | We just had two cops shot, sheriff deputies shot in San Diego.

01:24:46.980 | And she actually, the guy had a head wound.

01:24:50.260 | It was a strike across the forehead, not into the cranium.

01:24:54.780 | And she was shot in the jaw, and she could barely call in Officer Down, which was a 998

01:25:01.460 | code in Los Angeles.

01:25:04.620 | She could barely say 998 into the radio to get the calvary coming to her.

01:25:09.100 | But she actually used her tourniquet as a pressure dressing to stop the bleeding on

01:25:14.660 | the guy's head wound.

01:25:15.660 | There's a joke about using a tourniquet around someone's neck to stop the bleeding, and it

01:25:19.660 | solves the problem.

01:25:21.020 | You don't use tourniquets around the neck.

01:25:22.900 | Use tourniquets on extremities.

01:25:24.980 | But in this case, it's actually a perfect use for a tourniquet.

01:25:29.640 | She had something to stop the bleeding, which could be a T-shirt, a rag, a paper towel,

01:25:36.140 | a Curlax, sanitary gauze, could be anything.

01:25:41.220 | She put that onto his head laceration, and head lacs bleed like sons of bitches.

01:25:47.340 | Smalls head wound looks like it's a bullet strike, blood falling in your eyes and everything.

01:25:53.220 | So anyways, he had a bad head wound, and she put a compress on it, and then she used her

01:25:59.780 | tourniquet, which you can pull tight on it.

01:26:03.960 | She just pulled it tight around the top of his head to put pressure on the bandage to

01:26:08.260 | hold it against his head because she may have been using her pistol, the radio, or applying

01:26:17.020 | first aid to herself.

01:26:20.660 | So if those people who taught me, and they're very distinctive in the way they teach as

01:26:28.900 | well, it's a little bit less than a drill sergeant, but a lot more than your college

01:26:34.160 | professor in terms of intensity.

01:26:37.080 | Because if they failed to teach me how to use that tourniquet, and it was not permanently

01:26:42.240 | in my mind, in my muscle memory, the lowest level of training that I'm going to fall back

01:26:47.320 | into when I'm shot, when I'm bleeding, when I'm in pain, when I'm cold, and I'm hurting.

01:26:55.480 | In moments of stress like that, you will forget your mother's own name, literally, let alone

01:27:01.360 | their phone number.

01:27:02.680 | If you cannot repeat that exercise under stress, then you may very well die because you have

01:27:11.000 | failed to put that tourniquet onto your leg, and your femoral artery was hit, and you'll

01:27:16.000 | bleed out and die within three minutes.

01:27:19.300 | So that's the level of seriousness, life and death seriousness that I've been taught with

01:27:27.120 | since 2004.

01:27:30.500 | And so by reputation and nature, and by stealing the best practices that I've been taught with

01:27:37.460 | in teaching, I have naturally adopted that into my preparedness teaching, because I believe

01:27:44.620 | it's a life and death subject.

01:27:46.180 | I believe it's deadly serious.

01:27:48.100 | I get myself in trouble.

01:27:49.420 | 10% of the people out there hate me.

01:27:51.620 | Oh, they loathe me.

01:27:52.620 | They'd walk a mile to piss on me if I fell down.

01:27:55.300 | The other 90% are rabid followers of Harris.

01:28:00.620 | They want to hear what I have to say.

01:28:02.380 | They want to hear what I'm talking about.

01:28:04.220 | They want to ask me questions.

01:28:05.980 | And they take what I'm telling them as dead ass serious that they then utilize.

01:28:11.460 | And like I said, take what I say and apply it to yourself.

01:28:16.900 | Maybe you only have-- maybe you're missing an arm.

01:28:19.460 | It might be a little hard for you to use a tourniquet.

01:28:22.340 | You might have to do one arm.

01:28:25.380 | I don't know.

01:28:26.380 | That's a poor example.

01:28:29.700 | When people actually try-- when someone's trying to do preparedness, and they say, oh,

01:28:34.180 | that's stupid.

01:28:35.180 | You shouldn't do that.

01:28:36.180 | Oh, why do you want to do that?

01:28:37.180 | You're a survivalist.

01:28:38.180 | That's crazy.

01:28:39.180 | Why would you ever-- someone's trying to protect their family with preparedness-- food, water,

01:28:44.660 | energy, medical, everything else.

01:28:47.020 | And someone else is trying to talk them out of it.

01:28:49.900 | I am rabidly aggressive against that idiot trying to talk him out of it.

01:28:54.580 | In fact, I personally consider it attempted involuntary manslaughter.

01:29:04.100 | There's no question that it definitely matters.

01:29:07.860 | And I agree with you.

01:29:08.860 | It's funny that it-- I-- Beat me up, Josh.

01:29:15.500 | Come on.

01:29:16.500 | No, no, no.

01:29:17.500 | I don't disagree with you.

01:29:18.500 | I just-- obviously, it's sobering words when you just say that.

01:29:21.700 | Obviously, it's why it takes a moment to think about whether that's true.

01:29:24.860 | But certainly, I think that preparing for-- protecting and providing for yourself and

01:29:31.780 | for those that you love is a primary responsibility that we all have.

01:29:36.300 | And anything that we do that diminishes that can have very significant and dire consequences,

01:29:41.740 | as you say.

01:29:43.420 | And I never want to be in the situation where I look back on the other side of a tragedy

01:29:47.440 | and say, "Well, I could have done more and I was just too dumb or too lazy to do more."

01:29:53.820 | Rather, if I look back from the other side of a tragedy and say, "I did everything I

01:29:57.420 | could," fine.

01:29:58.420 | We'll deal with the results.

01:30:01.420 | But we owe it to ourselves and to those we love to do everything that we can.

01:30:07.300 | Let me talk for a moment-- big picture-- about comparing these commodities.

01:30:11.780 | And we'll close with a few final examples.

01:30:14.580 | But what you see when we talk about these commodities is-- I was thinking about the

01:30:19.340 | tourniquet.

01:30:20.340 | A tourniquet is an extraordinarily valuable thing at a certain time.

01:30:24.820 | And it shows how-- it's cheap and easy to find a tourniquet.

01:30:29.280 | It's not that hard-- 20 bucks for a decent one and it's probably shipped to your door.

01:30:32.780 | It's not that hard to come across a tourniquet.

01:30:35.300 | But when you need one, its value is inestimable.

01:30:38.500 | When you're actually in a situation where there's blood pumping out of an extremity

01:30:43.780 | and you need to apply a tourniquet, it's invaluable.

01:30:47.900 | And I think that that's often how it is with many physical items.

01:30:51.660 | That physical items, for the most part, are generally in abundant supply for most of us.

01:30:58.020 | Most of us don't worry about is there going to be food at the grocery store.

01:31:00.660 | Most of us don't worry about is there water going to come out of my tap.

01:31:04.940 | Most of us don't worry about these things.

01:31:08.260 | But what happens is markets change.

01:31:11.400 | And when markets change, then all of a sudden those things can dry up.

01:31:15.940 | The power can go out to your house for--

01:31:17.900 | Oh, I'm sorry.

01:31:18.900 | I got one more for you, Josh.

01:31:20.980 | We got to cover this one more item I forgot.

01:31:23.100 | You just triggered me onto it.

01:31:24.620 | Hang on.

01:31:25.620 | Hang on.

01:31:26.620 | Bullets.

01:31:27.620 | I'm sorry.

01:31:28.620 | I'm sorry.

01:31:29.620 | That was going to be on my list because that was going to be a shortage I was going to

01:31:30.620 | talk about.

01:31:31.620 | So hang on.

01:31:32.620 | Let me finish my commentary and then we'll go to things like that.

01:31:35.260 | So when you look at things that are-- so all of a sudden what you're used to having can

01:31:40.980 | disappear.

01:31:42.060 | And when it disappears, its value increases enormously.

01:31:46.220 | And so the question is, are you prepared to provide for somebody when they're in that

01:31:51.620 | time of need?

01:31:54.300 | In general, a six pack of beer costs six bucks-ish.

01:31:58.380 | But when there's a hurricane and you're trying to get somebody who's a crew working across

01:32:02.500 | the street at the end of the day, you've got one tree that's down in your yard and you've

01:32:06.900 | got a crew across the street that's working.

01:32:08.940 | If you can walk over and you can say, "Hey guys, listen, I got a cold six pack or a cold

01:32:13.620 | 12 pack of beer.

01:32:14.620 | Would you be willing to come over and just real quick cut down this one tree for me?"

01:32:18.380 | That's something that you would be charged a couple hundred dollars for.

01:32:21.060 | But in the right set of circumstances, that cold six pack of beer buys you the world.

01:32:26.360 | And almost all of these items that we talk about have those characteristics.

01:32:30.240 | Now when we put this into financial planning, that's where things become difficult because

01:32:34.160 | I like that we talked about gasoline and how the gasoline hasn't really grown that much.

01:32:39.860 | And when we talked about if you store a million dollars worth of lead in a field, we're not

01:32:44.420 | saying, "Oh, it's going to become worth $10 billion."

01:32:47.200 | It's just going to be a million dollars plus whatever generally the rate of inflation is.

01:32:51.400 | And so that shows the downsides and the upsides of stockpiling things.

01:32:57.040 | When you stockpile physical goods, you have certain inherent benefits.

01:33:01.780 | You have big benefits such as, "Hey, this is available.

01:33:04.600 | Hey, this can't be manipulated by currency fluctuations.

01:33:07.560 | Hey, I'll have this if the whole financial system falls apart.

01:33:11.160 | I'll have this if a corrupt dictator goes into power and destroys the economy or there's

01:33:16.040 | a global pandemic.

01:33:17.040 | I'll have this."

01:33:18.560 | But there is a downside.

01:33:19.720 | The downside is, "I'll have this, but it's probably not going to be worth all that much

01:33:24.920 | more except by the rate of inflation probably."

01:33:28.520 | And so we accept that.

01:33:29.920 | So when you think about gold investing, and people talk about how Warren Buffett says,

01:33:35.000 | "All the gold in the world wouldn't fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool and I'm not investing

01:33:38.600 | in gold."

01:33:39.600 | Well, he's right because if you compare investing in gold, which can't really grow by all that

01:33:44.480 | much because it's just sitting there, and you compare that to investing in something

01:33:48.600 | that may be able to grow at 6%, 8%, 10%, 20%, 200% per year, well, you'd be a fool to put

01:33:55.120 | all your money in gold.

01:33:56.580 | On the other hand, the fact that gold just sits there has a huge value to a lot of people

01:34:03.520 | in a lot of circumstances.

01:34:05.080 | And so when financial markets collapse, when companies go bankrupt, when you need the ability

01:34:10.720 | to get money and transport money to other places, then all of a sudden that gold is

01:34:15.280 | really valuable.

01:34:16.280 | And what I love talking about some of these commodities is it even helps you to see why

01:34:20.440 | are things like precious metals, which we're not discussing in today's show, why are they

01:34:24.360 | so valuable?

01:34:25.360 | So let's talk about, you know, Stephen's million pounds of lead example.

01:34:29.320 | Right.

01:34:30.320 | Go ahead.

01:34:31.320 | Let me back you up for a second.

01:34:35.080 | But if you live in a two-bedroom condo, okay, and you have no space and you have nothing

01:34:40.120 | else you can do, and you need to park some of your money for inflationary purposes, you

01:34:45.360 | can put a quarter million dollars worth of gold into a safety deposit box and be reasonably

01:34:51.320 | assured that it's safe.

01:34:53.400 | It's not going to be stolen.

01:34:55.920 | The cost of the box versus the cost of the gold is very low and that you have an inflationary

01:35:01.720 | proof head.

01:35:02.720 | Now, if you ever bought $40,000 in gold and $40,000 in silver, you find yourself saying,

01:35:08.920 | "Oh my God, where am I going to put all this damn silver?"

01:35:12.560 | Right.

01:35:13.560 | You know, so the density of gold is the good thing and I'll let you go on to the lead,

01:35:17.280 | but when has anyone other than Josh Sheets and Radical Personal Finance ever talked to

01:35:22.320 | you about a commodity you could put in a field for 20 years?

01:35:27.120 | Exactly.

01:35:28.120 | So let's, like, the lead is a good example.

01:35:30.440 | So if you think about, if I'm going to buy $800,000 worth of lead, I'm going to put 800-

01:35:34.920 | And guess what?

01:35:35.920 | Guess what?

01:35:36.920 | I can actually, right now, Josh, I can actually have you call a place.

01:35:42.600 | And one of the places is called Dole Run.

01:35:45.080 | I can actually have you call Dole Run.

01:35:47.360 | You can wire them $800,000.

01:35:50.000 | They will send you 20 semi-trucks full of lead.

01:35:53.100 | No joke.

01:35:54.100 | Right.

01:35:55.100 | This week.

01:35:56.100 | Right.

01:35:57.100 | I mean, that's actually, I mean, can you do that with gold?

01:35:58.400 | Can you do that with silver?

01:36:00.400 | Not at your local pawn shop.

01:36:03.800 | Delivered on a truck.

01:36:04.800 | Right.

01:36:05.800 | So, delivered on a truck this week.

01:36:07.640 | It's like, fine, guys, pull it.

01:36:09.680 | I got the forklift.

01:36:10.680 | Pull it up to the barn.

01:36:11.680 | We're going to put the lead in the barn.

01:36:13.480 | Go ahead.

01:36:14.480 | Right.

01:36:15.480 | So, to finish this example out, if you compare lead to gold, you want to invest $800,000

01:36:23.040 | in lead.

01:36:24.040 | You can wire $800,000 to the company.

01:36:25.480 | They'll send 20 semi-trucks.

01:36:27.320 | You can dump the lead in the corner of the barn.

01:36:29.360 | You can dump the lead in the field.

01:36:30.680 | On the other hand, you can, if you can get your hands on one, you can purchase one, the

01:36:35.920 | standard good delivery bar, the 400-ounce bar of gold that you see pictured in a movie

01:36:41.080 | when you see a stack of gold.

01:36:42.820 | That's the basic commodity of gold.

01:36:44.800 | There's no seniorage expenses.

01:36:47.120 | It's just gold.

01:36:48.120 | It's a bar of gold.

01:36:49.120 | Well, in today's world, that has a market value of something like $800,000.

01:36:54.420 | But that 400-ounce bar is about 27 pounds.

01:36:57.360 | Right.

01:36:58.360 | So, you could take that 27-pound bar.

01:37:00.340 | You can stick that into a backpack on your back, and you will walk around with $800,000

01:37:05.480 | of physical money or something that can be turned into money in any corner of the country

01:37:10.440 | or the world.

01:37:12.640 | On the one hand, it's untold more valuable than the lead because of its portability.

01:37:17.720 | On the other hand, you can look at that portability, and you could say, "Anybody in the world can

01:37:21.480 | put a gun in my ribs and can say, 'Give me your backpack,' and now I've lost that,"

01:37:25.640 | whereas somebody is going to have to work really hard for them to come and get the million

01:37:30.140 | dollars, the $800,000 of lead that's stacked out in the back 40.

01:37:34.360 | So any—

01:37:35.360 | And that's why I want people to take what you and I are saying and make it their own

01:37:42.400 | and utilize it for their own personal situations.

01:37:46.560 | I'm not telling you what to do.

01:37:48.040 | We're just giving you examples.

01:37:50.240 | Modify as you so desire.

01:37:51.720 | Right.

01:37:52.720 | So, any physical item has certain benefits, certain characteristics, and those—sorry—any

01:37:59.160 | physical item has certain characteristics, inherent attributes.

01:38:03.080 | And in one circumstance, they can be benefits.

01:38:06.240 | In another circumstance, they can be drawbacks.

01:38:08.960 | And so portability is an inherent attribute, but it's either a benefit or a disadvantage

01:38:15.200 | based upon your perspective.

01:38:17.360 | And that's the mindset that many people have—that do not have about all kinds of investments,

01:38:24.480 | be it gold bars, gold coins, boxes of ammunition, boxes of stock certificates, mutual funds,

01:38:31.880 | insurance policies.

01:38:32.880 | These things have attributes, and it's these attributes that when you understand them,

01:38:37.400 | you can see how in some circumstances, these attributes are positive and they're benefits

01:38:42.680 | for you.

01:38:43.680 | In other circumstances, these inherent attributes are negative and they're drawbacks.

01:38:48.400 | So what I want to do is list out a few more things.

01:38:51.520 | We talked about some interesting things.

01:38:52.880 | We started with salt and sugar and honey.

01:38:57.080 | These are valuable—

01:38:58.080 | And ethanol.

01:38:59.080 | And ethanol.

01:39:00.080 | These are valuable for you and your family, but you're not going to put a million dollars

01:39:02.880 | in salt, right?

01:39:03.880 | You're never going to do that.

01:39:04.880 | You're not going to put a thousand dollars in salt.

01:39:07.600 | But yet, these things are very valuable.

01:39:09.200 | And so you can see that these attributes are useful, but they have a limit.

01:39:14.660 | Now you move on to something like—

01:39:16.120 | But—

01:39:17.120 | Go ahead.

01:39:18.120 | But you could put $5,000 in honey.

01:39:20.400 | Right.

01:39:21.400 | You could, certainly.

01:39:22.400 | Maybe not $10,000, but if you had a barn and stuff, you could put $5,000 in.

01:39:26.960 | That's a pretty powerful statement.

01:39:29.160 | Sure.

01:39:30.160 | Sure.

01:39:31.160 | And if you think about it right, what I hope to do in today's show is to get people to

01:39:37.440 | appreciate physical assets.

01:39:39.560 | Now I'm a globe-trotting, suitcase-towing person, and so physical attributes, physical

01:39:46.400 | things for me are very difficult because I'm moving around and I'm changing things all

01:39:50.600 | around.

01:39:51.600 | So physicality, which is an attribute, is now for me something that's difficult.

01:39:55.200 | I still have physical assets, but I have to engage—I have to think more creatively about

01:39:59.440 | the storage and the maintenance, and they become difficult.

01:40:03.080 | But for somebody who has physical space, somebody has a house, somebody has a garage out back,

01:40:07.920 | somebody has a barn, all of a sudden now these physical assets are important.

01:40:11.280 | And physical assets have the attribute of being less affected and/or unaffected by the

01:40:17.440 | vagaries of the stuff that happens on TV.

01:40:20.400 | So if you've got a pallet of honey out in your back shop, when you walk out there you're

01:40:25.240 | going to see the pallet of honey.

01:40:27.400 | And something like that, it would be an unusual thief who comes and says, "I'm going to take

01:40:30.840 | this pallet of honey."

01:40:32.240 | And so physical things are very, very useful.

01:40:36.160 | And so then you could take it.

01:40:38.320 | And so, you know, you were talking about bullets.

01:40:40.480 | Almost any physical thing has benefits—or sorry, has attributes that can be advantageous.

01:40:45.720 | So in the past when I've talked about commodities, certainly—we haven't talked about salt and

01:40:49.680 | sugar and honey—but those are genuine commodities that are useful.

01:40:53.640 | But usually you think of metals.

01:40:55.640 | We've talked about different approaches of metals.

01:40:59.140 | But then things like bullets, it's a commodity.

01:41:02.480 | I've talked about storing commodities such as AR-15 lowers.

01:41:05.680 | Well, if you had done that when I talked about it three or four years ago and you'd bought

01:41:08.800 | a box of 10 or 20 lowers, and then maybe you were cooped up in your home during the lockdowns

01:41:14.740 | for the pandemic, and you went ahead and built 10 lowers into genuine rifles and sold those,

01:41:22.240 | now you've got genuinely a high profit return with a basic commodity, an AR-15 lower.

01:41:29.400 | Bullets have their own markets.

01:41:30.620 | My experience, guns around the world are not that difficult to find, even in places and

01:41:35.600 | in countries where they are not legal.

01:41:39.000 | So people are always worried about laws.

01:41:40.680 | My experience traveling is that I think I could come up with a gun in just about any

01:41:44.420 | country in the world if you give me at least a few days.

01:41:47.700 | But what's hard to come up with is bullets.

01:41:50.140 | Bullets on the other hand can be very, very difficult.

01:41:53.340 | And so stockpiling those can be very useful.

01:41:57.620 | Right now, if you had just, a couple years ago, you just systematically gone to the gun

01:42:02.740 | shop once a week and purchased 1,000 rounds of 9mm, you could easily flip those boxes

01:42:08.460 | of 1,000 rounds of 9mm ball ammo on Craigslist for a significant healthy profit if you had

01:42:14.500 | stocked up when they were a bargain.

01:42:16.900 | Actually, ammo is not allowed on Craigslist, but people do do ammo.

01:42:21.260 | I mean, there's ways around it, but 9mm right now is going for 80 cents to a dollar a round

01:42:29.860 | in the United States right now.

01:42:31.260 | That is stunning.

01:42:32.260 | If you can find it.

01:42:33.260 | Yeah, that's stunning.

01:42:34.260 | And you can't find it in any decent quality, in any decent quantities at this point in

01:42:37.260 | time in retail gun shops anyway, right?

01:42:40.540 | That's right.

01:42:41.540 | Now, I actually have a friend of mine who is a weapons professional and he has, through

01:42:46.700 | his career, he has made money through a lot of hard work and a lot of talent and perseverance.

01:42:54.660 | And he has a large space and he actually has a semi-trailer sitting on his property and

01:43:02.460 | it's innocuous, secured in more ways than you would imagine.

01:43:07.620 | And he will literally spend half a million, three quarters of a million dollars on ammunition

01:43:14.360 | over a short period of time.

01:43:16.400 | It's like two years ago, you know, after Trump was in office, we're going ammunition is just

01:43:22.980 | way too cheap.

01:43:23.980 | Everything is just way, guns are cheap, ammo is cheap.

01:43:26.740 | And he did this pre-Obama, post-Obama, pre-Trump, post-Trump.

01:43:34.220 | And he literally had like 30 million rounds of 22 and 223 and nine millimeter, all in

01:43:42.900 | multiple, one or two semi-trailers.

01:43:46.340 | And when Obama ran the prices up, and Obama was the best gun salesman in the entire world.

01:43:56.140 | So when the prices went up during Obama, he sold all of his, most of his ammunition that

01:44:02.020 | he had for sale, he's got his own, he's got his ammo for sale.

01:44:06.340 | He sold it at two to four times what he paid for it.

01:44:11.020 | And then he took that money and he waited and Trump was elected and everything got so

01:44:16.700 | cheap.

01:44:17.700 | I mean, we're talking like, you know, 12 cents a round for nine millimeter or something like

01:44:22.060 | that.

01:44:23.060 | And he bought another couple of semi-trailer loads full of ammunition and he's been selling

01:44:28.980 | it all during pandemic, the riots, and now the upcoming elections.

01:44:33.780 | And so, you know, he's making 50%, a hundred percent, 200%, 300% on his money.

01:44:42.820 | And yeah, it takes five, six, eight years to do it, but you know what, where can you

01:44:47.940 | get bank interest like that?

01:44:50.260 | - Right, and sometimes those kinds of markets are clearer to people, especially someone

01:44:57.900 | like that who's involved in the business, your knowledge of the market.

01:45:01.660 | - He's an industry professional, most definitely.

01:45:04.300 | - And so what I think many people should do, I mean, I used to know electricians, right?

01:45:07.780 | Electricians, they keep wire and they know the market and they just stockpile it in the

01:45:11.100 | back of their shed or whatever copper scrap they come across.

01:45:13.460 | And then when the price gets high, they go and sell it because they understand, hey,

01:45:16.500 | the price is back up now.

01:45:17.900 | This is common.

01:45:19.080 | And so what I think we should do when it comes to physical items, there's lots of things

01:45:24.020 | that have their benefits and sorry, have their attributes.

01:45:27.300 | And again, those attributes can be an advantage or a disadvantage.

01:45:30.740 | So that the attributes, if you have a decent pistol or if you have a decent AR-15, that's

01:45:38.740 | a very, very compact form of wealth.

01:45:41.500 | That's always going to be very, very desirable and will never lose its desirability.

01:45:47.420 | And just like a gold coin, it can be put someplace and it doesn't talk, it doesn't have any registration

01:45:52.660 | associated with it, it doesn't send out digital signals that the IRS collects, it just sits

01:45:57.980 | there, right?

01:45:58.980 | It doesn't have that.

01:45:59.980 | But on the other hand, it's very hard to take that thing across the border.

01:46:02.780 | It's very hard to put it in your back pocket and walk onto an airplane, very, very difficult.

01:46:07.020 | And so on the other hand-

01:46:08.020 | - The gold, gold coins.

01:46:09.020 | - No, I'm talking about the gun.

01:46:10.780 | The gun doesn't work very well.

01:46:11.780 | On the other hand-

01:46:12.780 | - Oh yeah, the gun, yeah.

01:46:13.780 | - The gold coin can.

01:46:15.180 | And so now if you'll capture this way of thinking and you'll say, "I see the benefits of these

01:46:21.780 | things that I may not previously have seen," you can now come back to your life and you

01:46:26.620 | can say, "What makes sense for me?"

01:46:28.340 | And for somebody it makes sense that for the first time in your life you buy a five gallon

01:46:31.620 | bucket of honey and you'll never sell it, right?

01:46:33.980 | What you'll do is over the next three or four or five years, you'll use it, you'll put it

01:46:37.180 | in your bread, you'll put it on your pancakes or whatever you do and you're like, "Hey,

01:46:41.300 | I saved some money."

01:46:42.420 | And that's the thing about physical things is that you can buy them when they're on sale.

01:46:46.700 | And so when you move into bulk buying, which is often what you do when you move into when

01:46:50.580 | you're stockpiling things, you'll save money.

01:46:53.820 | And if you buy things for your use and you develop a diversified portfolio of physical

01:46:58.020 | items, then at any point in time you can go and you can say, "Okay, this thing I'm gonna

01:47:03.940 | sell over here and I can access this market over there.

01:47:06.900 | So I need to make a mortgage payment.

01:47:08.660 | I need a thousand bucks.

01:47:09.980 | What I'll go ahead and do is I've got a thousand bucks worth of stainless steel.

01:47:13.180 | I'll go ahead and flip this on Craigslist or on Facebook marketplace right now or I'll

01:47:17.020 | take it to the machine shop and I'll see if they'll buy a thousand dollars worth of my

01:47:19.780 | steel."

01:47:20.820 | And you go and you liquidate something and you move it and you solve your problem.

01:47:24.620 | The last thing I wanna point out, which is something that I'm intensely conscious of

01:47:29.540 | is how advantageous physical items are from a financial planning perspective because they're

01:47:35.900 | unusual.

01:47:37.400 | And so imagine a guy who's just a general trades guy and he's purchased some physical

01:47:43.180 | items.

01:47:44.180 | He's got some cash saved.

01:47:45.180 | He's got some money in his 401k, but for whatever reason, something went wrong and now he's

01:47:50.260 | headed for bankruptcy court.

01:47:52.160 | Do you really think that the bankruptcy judge is gonna come out to his house and say, "Hey

01:47:57.020 | buddy, listen, I see those five things of stainless steel over there.

01:48:00.660 | Those are worth $600.

01:48:03.140 | Those need to be on your statement.

01:48:04.600 | And over here I see you've got two buckets of honey.

01:48:07.140 | And that's worth $400 and that's gotta be written down.

01:48:10.100 | And I see over here that you bought a chest of tools, of machinist's tools on Craigslist

01:48:15.260 | when some guy just had to move or mechanics tools, he had to move.

01:48:18.860 | And so you stocked up on these tools and by the way, those gotta be there."

01:48:21.820 | That's just not the world we live in.

01:48:23.500 | And so even in a financial situation, having physical assets that can be bought and sold

01:48:29.540 | easily without paper trails, that can be stored easily, that can be strewn around can allow

01:48:35.540 | you to generate significant levels of wealth that protect you.

01:48:40.940 | And you can walk into bankruptcy court and come out the other side with your buckets

01:48:43.700 | of honey.

01:48:44.700 | And you've still covered your honey supply.

01:48:47.180 | And so that's one area where these physical items have a tremendous value.

01:48:53.680 | And now when you mingle that with a mixture of a knowledge of financial planning laws

01:48:58.580 | and the value of having money in a 401k and the value of cryptocurrency and the value

01:49:02.980 | of this and that and the other, now you can build a very, very robust financial life that

01:49:08.500 | sees you through almost any kind of imaginable situation.

01:49:12.300 | And I want to comment on that because I think the financial, I'll back up a couple of things.

01:49:21.420 | One, there's an old saying that is the counterpoint to what you just said.

01:49:25.620 | And again, I'm not criticizing what you said.

01:49:27.740 | I'm just putting the counterpoint for other people out there to consider as they're listening

01:49:32.540 | to you and I and developing their own personal strategy is there's a saying that's very true.

01:49:38.060 | You don't own your things.

01:49:39.300 | Your things own you.

01:49:41.780 | And so having a lot of things can be a detriment and it can be an asset to just what you said.

01:49:47.780 | And in some of the cases, what you're talking about with the buckets of honey, it's a metaphor

01:49:51.740 | for whatever that item or that vehicle is that you want, which is a very good one if

01:49:59.700 | you're facing bankruptcy.

01:50:00.860 | But the amount of personal, I think the wealth, the sound financial strategy you're teaching

01:50:07.940 | some people, there's some teenagers listening to you, you know that.

01:50:10.980 | And there's some people who are like 80 years old going, "Damn, I wish I knew that when

01:50:14.700 | I was 18."

01:50:16.300 | And there's people in their 20s and 30s and me in my 50s and you're helping us build our

01:50:23.180 | platform for our railroad.

01:50:25.900 | I mean, you're helping people cut down, map out, cut down the trees, then you got to build

01:50:32.380 | up the railroad bed, then you got to put gravel down, then you put down the ties, then you

01:50:37.060 | put down the rails and now your train can run on it.

01:50:40.780 | And the financial basis and the financial education you are giving people is what is

01:50:45.860 | enabling them for their train to go down the tracks.

01:50:49.500 | And if you don't have that, you can't drive your car down the road, your train can't go

01:50:53.220 | down the tracks, you can't walk down the trail, you're immovable.

01:50:58.860 | And the financial freedom and security you are teaching people is letting them walk down

01:51:03.860 | that trail, drive the car down the road and their train down the tracks and fly their

01:51:08.340 | airplane through the air, all of which are metaphors.

01:51:12.620 | And that allows people to have the freedoms, like the old saying, you know, what's the

01:51:17.460 | hardest thing to make in your financial future?

01:51:20.820 | And the answer is the first million dollars, the rest comes easy.

01:51:25.980 | And I got a good story for you of where your personal teachings have personally benefited

01:51:32.020 | a really good friend of mine.

01:51:35.220 | He's what I call a classically repressed genius.

01:51:39.780 | He didn't go to college, he didn't get PhDs and everything else, you know, but society,

01:51:44.700 | there's a war against smart people out there by the normies and by society to repress genius

01:51:50.380 | and to repress intelligence, which is a whole nother lecture.

01:51:54.740 | So anyways, he's a part owner of a company, it's mostly a blue collar job.

01:52:00.460 | The guy can basically fix anything, understands anything, learns anything quickly.

01:52:05.100 | And I saw this and when the pandemic started, I said, "Hey, Sean, there's a shortage of

01:52:12.940 | freezers out there.

01:52:13.940 | You can't buy freezers, they're gone in the United States.

01:52:16.540 | You can't get them in the store, you can't buy them online.

01:52:19.420 | When they are used online, they're very expensive.

01:52:21.780 | I mean, your $170 freezer is $350 to $600."

01:52:28.460 | Well people would just put freezers up for sale on Facebook and it's like, "Oh, $100

01:52:34.620 | freezer, don't need it, come get it."

01:52:35.780 | Well, he'd come get it, turn around and sell it for $300 to $400.

01:52:39.940 | And then he taught himself appliance HVAC, how to fix freezers and refrigerators.

01:52:45.900 | He went online to a YouTube HVAC university, taught himself HVAC.

01:52:51.660 | He bought all of his tools used, the really good ones off of Facebook and Craigslist.

01:52:57.620 | So he didn't pay the high dollar for them.

01:53:00.100 | He recovers his refrigerant from people down the street that need to have the refrigerant

01:53:04.620 | recovered out of the appliances that they have to scrap before they can scrap them.

01:53:09.260 | So he's picking up the refrigerant for basically free.

01:53:13.100 | Now he's going out and he's getting freezers, chest freezers and upright freezers, not refrigerators,

01:53:21.460 | freezers.

01:53:22.860 | And he's fixing them.

01:53:24.500 | Sometimes it's a starting capacitor.

01:53:26.580 | Sometimes it's a starter.

01:53:28.040 | Sometimes it's a new compressor, rarely is a new compressor.

01:53:31.340 | Sometimes it's find a leak and suck down and recharge the thing.

01:53:34.660 | So he's paying people 50 bucks to haul it away.

01:53:38.580 | Or they're saying haul the way doesn't work and he has a tall van and he's got, he bought

01:53:44.540 | a really nice appliance dolly so he can move anything himself upstairs as one person, even

01:53:51.620 | a heavy freezer.

01:53:54.860 | And he takes them home, fixes them sometimes in five minutes, sometimes in like five hours,

01:54:01.260 | lets them run for two weeks, puts them up on Facebook and sells them for 300 to a thousand

01:54:08.060 | dollars each depending.

01:54:10.420 | And he says, Oh three, you know, 90 day warranty guaranteed to work and you know, delivery

01:54:16.580 | available and people love that delivery available.

01:54:19.940 | So anyways, he calls me up and he goes, Steve, I averaged out everything I was doing.

01:54:24.580 | And I go, yeah.

01:54:25.580 | He goes, I'm making $750 a week on the side above his job of, you know, he's a part business

01:54:33.620 | owner above his job and his salary.

01:54:36.380 | And he goes, this is stupid money.

01:54:38.260 | I go, yeah, it's only going to last so long.

01:54:40.820 | You need to reinvest it.

01:54:42.980 | And we got other things for you to do.

01:54:45.340 | And we do, but that's another story.

01:54:47.720 | So anyways, you're going to love this.

01:54:49.740 | I taught him about the coin inflation website, which I'm sure you know.

01:54:55.500 | And I taught him about gold and silver and buying silver on Craig's list and what he

01:55:00.420 | wants in silver, which is, you know, basically, I mean, starting out, you want junk silver

01:55:04.900 | or silver Eagles, and those are two most recognized forms of silver in the United States.

01:55:10.580 | And but silver Eagles are going for $10 over spot.

01:55:12.940 | And he found people on Craig's list that were selling, you like war, nickels, Kennedy, half

01:55:19.420 | dollars and a regular junk silver.

01:55:22.980 | And they were just wanting spots or very close to spot.

01:55:27.260 | And he started buying silver at 17.

01:55:29.700 | Now it's 27.

01:55:30.700 | But I mean, that's not the point.

01:55:32.380 | The point is that I want you to put 20, 25% of the cash that you're making into an inflationary

01:55:38.900 | proof method of storage, either for when you go to go buy land or your son has to go to

01:55:44.780 | college, whatever, an inflationary proof method, he goes, okay.

01:55:49.420 | And so he goes off on Craig's list.

01:55:53.060 | He starts buying, you know, silver that people are selling that, you know, basically at spot.

01:55:58.740 | And he goes, Steve, well, what should I do with the rest of my money?

01:56:02.340 | It's like, well, we got to do something better than bank interest.

01:56:05.700 | We need to find something that we can buy cheap now that will sell, sell for a lot more

01:56:11.020 | soon and that's relatively dense.

01:56:14.420 | It's not big and fluffy.

01:56:16.400 | So we came up with propane and kerosene torpedo heaters, especially the really nice ones like

01:56:23.540 | you use on construction sites or in your garage, because they're, you know, they're, they're,

01:56:28.220 | they're fairly compact, you know, compared to a furnace and he's buying them for 40 to

01:56:35.060 | $50 each right now.

01:56:36.780 | I mean, he's only, he's cherry picking the nice ones off of Facebook marketplace and

01:56:41.500 | he's stacking them up in his garage on shelves and everything else.

01:56:45.220 | And he cleans them, makes them look nice, checks them all out.

01:56:48.860 | They all work or he fixes a few of them.

01:56:51.340 | No big deal.

01:56:52.340 | Some of the ones he's got for 40 bucks are worth $400 brand new.

01:56:57.180 | Some of the ones he's got for 50 bucks are worth 150 on the use market in the winter.

01:57:03.980 | But the point is he is going to double and triple and quadruple his money that he's paying

01:57:13.580 | for now.

01:57:15.020 | And we started this in July, August, in January, February, when it's frigid cold in Michigan

01:57:22.820 | and everyone wants a heater for whatever reason, he is going to be getting way better than

01:57:28.620 | bank interest on that six month turnaround.

01:57:33.180 | And that's all because of the teachings that you teach people on radical personal finance

01:57:40.260 | that we took and modified for our own purposes.

01:57:44.500 | So thank you, Josh.

01:57:45.500 | My pleasure.

01:57:46.500 | I love it.

01:57:47.500 | I would say to any listener listening that don't, so first, awesome for him.

01:57:55.020 | He's going to do great.

01:57:56.420 | And what will happen is let's talk about the life cycle that he will go through in his

01:57:59.940 | life.

01:58:01.000 | Right now, $750 a week is life-changing money for him.

01:58:06.360 | And his ability to do this with heaters will grow and he'll be able to grow it.

01:58:11.140 | If he continues doing that, he will run out of heaters to buy.

01:58:16.180 | He'll saturate the market, the numbers will get too big.

01:58:19.060 | And so you'll take then now the same method of thinking and you'll apply it to something

01:58:23.920 | else, to a bigger market.

01:58:25.940 | But if you are already in the bigger market, let's say that you already have an income

01:58:31.540 | higher, et cetera, make sure that you recognize how easily you could teach a 15-year-old,

01:58:37.540 | a thoughtful, intelligent 15-year-old how to do what that man is doing.

01:58:43.300 | And if you teach that 15-year-old how to do it, just think from now on when they're offered

01:58:50.040 | a job and someone says, "Hey, listen, come over here and I'll pay you $12 an hour," and

01:58:53.660 | they look and realize, "Well, I can make $100 to $300 profit per freezer that I flip," all

01:59:00.700 | of a sudden you've dramatically transformed the ability of a 15-year-old to generate income

01:59:05.500 | for themselves.

01:59:06.500 | And that sets someone free for life when they know how to buy and trade and sell.

01:59:10.420 | So do it yourself and teach your children to do it.

01:59:14.220 | And Sean went and learned HVAC for appliances online on YouTube, bought the stuff, second-hand

01:59:22.100 | surplus used online.

01:59:23.900 | But I mean, it was the quality stuff.

01:59:26.100 | It wasn't the Harbor Freight stuff.

01:59:27.380 | It was like the really good stuff.

01:59:28.900 | So he bought it for $0.30 on the dollar and then he tested it, played with it, and taught

01:59:34.060 | himself further just on a unit that he got.

01:59:37.580 | And it's like, "Okay, I'm going to suck this thing down and recharge it.

01:59:40.500 | Okay, I did that.

01:59:41.500 | I'm going to find the leak and repair it."

01:59:43.340 | This is all stuff you can teach yourself.

01:59:45.100 | You don't need to go to a trade school or a university to do this.

01:59:48.620 | This is stuff that you can do that is under your own control.

01:59:53.540 | And that is the important lesson.

01:59:58.100 | And when I went to an abbreviated law enforcement academy because I was in the sheriff reserve,

02:00:04.780 | not a full-time sheriff deputy, I was law enforcement.

02:00:08.340 | I was uniformed and badged and had a gun and arrest powers.

02:00:12.140 | But I was only a sheriff deputy when I was on duty versus a regular LEO, law enforcement

02:00:17.660 | officer, as a law enforcement officer all the time.

02:00:21.300 | So I went through an abbreviated academy because we don't have to do traffic stops and everything.

02:00:26.060 | We're doing crowd control and other civic engagements and stuff like that.

02:00:32.460 | So anyways, I had really, really great instructors.

02:00:35.340 | Some of the best instructors always took their time to come and teach the reservists because

02:00:41.300 | they wanted us to have the best training because we were backing up and helping the regular

02:00:45.300 | police officers.

02:00:47.740 | And you're never going to forget this, Josh, and no one ever here listening is going to

02:00:51.820 | forget this short story.

02:00:53.820 | There is a lecture that he called "Turning the Wheel of the Boat."

02:00:58.100 | And the premise is, what if the guy behind the rudder wheel of the Titanic moved it just

02:01:06.060 | a smidgen to the left three days before they hit the iceberg?

02:01:11.740 | They would have never hit the iceberg.

02:01:13.680 | They would have gone south out of the iceberg area, a little bit more southern route to

02:01:17.780 | New York, and they would have never entered the iceberg field just because they turned

02:01:22.860 | the rudder a little bit three days previous.

02:01:27.020 | Well, the same concept applies to people.

02:01:29.820 | And this is done in law enforcement.

02:01:31.740 | It's like, what if I take an extra 30 seconds with this young man and talk to him?

02:01:37.300 | What if there's a kid in trouble, did something bad?

02:01:40.220 | Well, I'm going to take the extra 30 minutes and I'm going to handcuff him.

02:01:44.580 | And he's going to be cited and released.

02:01:49.380 | But I take the long way and I walk him through the worst portions of the jail or the prison

02:01:56.340 | where the people are hooting and hollering and yelling at the young kid and saying awfully

02:02:01.980 | mean sexual things to him and letting him feel like the piece of meat he's going to

02:02:08.220 | be as a fresh fish going into the incarceration field of a prison or a jail.

02:02:15.940 | And it scares the living crap out of him.

02:02:18.600 | What if I did that in an effort to change the wheel a little bit for that young person's

02:02:26.000 | future?

02:02:27.000 | Will I ever know what he avoided because I did that?

02:02:30.760 | No, I never will.

02:02:32.600 | And hopefully he avoids a life of crime and goes into something that's not a life of crime

02:02:39.600 | and has a wonderful, prosperous life.

02:02:42.720 | So that's the analogy in spending an extra three minutes with a woman who's being abused

02:02:49.840 | who does not want help.

02:02:52.480 | I mean, what can I do with an extra three minutes to change her life and her children?

02:02:58.340 | What if I get a shelter on my cell phone and it's called Marjorie, I got a lady you need

02:03:04.360 | to talk to, hand her my cell phone, they talk to her.

02:03:07.600 | And so she talks to her woman, the woman for three minutes, and she goes, okay, I'm going

02:03:11.800 | to come on down.

02:03:13.640 | That's what we call steering the wheel.

02:03:15.160 | You're doing the same thing with us financially by teaching a 15-year-old how to buy something

02:03:20.720 | cheap or learn a new skill or do something that they've never thought of before.

02:03:27.720 | A lot of people don't do things in this world because people don't tell them, you can do

02:03:31.480 | that.

02:03:32.480 | I was told that all my life, you can do anything you want.

02:03:35.040 | Just go learn and go do it.

02:03:37.760 | And that's what you and I and in your regular class and in my preparedness classes, I'm

02:03:44.080 | telling people, you can do this.

02:03:46.200 | It's under your own control.

02:03:47.840 | Go do it.

02:03:48.840 | You have nothing to lose.

02:03:51.360 | Even if you fail, you're going to learn.

02:03:54.000 | Steer your own wheel.

02:03:55.800 | Change the direction of the boat for your children, for your grandchildren, for your

02:04:01.360 | 20 and 30-year-old kids.

02:04:03.400 | The guy I'm talking about is 32 years old.

02:04:05.560 | I'm 52.

02:04:06.560 | He's a kid.

02:04:08.000 | I'm changing his life dramatically with what he's doing because I'm actually turning his

02:04:12.960 | wheel pretty radically.

02:04:14.840 | He's putting sails up and everything.

02:04:16.680 | He's going full speed ahead, which is a rarity in people.

02:04:22.440 | I think that is one of the great values of what you are giving to your people and I'm

02:04:29.480 | giving to my people is we're getting them to turn their wheel a little bit so they never

02:04:35.000 | have to deal with the Titanic hitting the iceberg, sinking and lifeboats and flares

02:04:41.040 | and radio calls and everything else.

02:04:44.040 | That bad thing never happened because they steered the wheel 10 years, 3 years, 1 year

02:04:50.360 | before they would have hit it.

02:04:52.520 | Now that you got that financial security, you got the freedom to actually do more things.

02:05:00.280 | Your son wants to learn HVAC.

02:05:04.200 | He needs $450 worth of equipment.

02:05:08.360 | He needs a used set of gauges.

02:05:10.800 | He needs a vacuum pump.

02:05:12.120 | He needs a refrigerant recovery bottle.

02:05:14.640 | He needs a bottle of refrigerant and everything else.

02:05:18.760 | It's like, "Oh, grandson?

02:05:21.240 | Yeah, go find it on Facebook.

02:05:24.320 | I'll buy it."

02:05:27.440 | You don't care about $450.

02:05:28.920 | You just throw him the $450 and say, "Go have fun.

02:05:32.040 | That's your education."

02:05:33.520 | I used to tell people in the 1990s and early 2000s, they go, "Steve, what's the best

02:05:38.120 | thing I can do for my child's education?"

02:05:40.400 | I go, "Buy any book they want."

02:05:44.000 | At the time, the website was called Half.com.

02:05:47.040 | It was used books.

02:05:48.040 | They're gone.

02:05:49.040 | But there's still Libris and Abooks and Amazon.

02:05:54.400 | We didn't have as much digital media.

02:05:57.440 | Now YouTube didn't exist then either.

02:06:00.840 | It was like, "Buy your child all the books that they want."

02:06:03.720 | It's like, "Well, just let them loose on the used bookstores."

02:06:09.000 | "Well, there's a library."

02:06:10.000 | "Yeah, the library's not on your shelf at 2 a.m. that you can go look at and read."

02:06:15.680 | I have a saying for a long time.

02:06:17.520 | A person's wealth is not measured by the numbers in their bank account.

02:06:21.760 | The person's wealth is measured by the size of their personal library.

02:06:27.840 | But that was something I used to tell people back then.

02:06:31.120 | "Buy your children books."

02:06:32.560 | Whatever, $100 a month, $50 a month, $30 a month, whatever they want, buy them the books.

02:06:36.600 | It's the best thing you're going to do for them.

02:06:39.680 | The other thing I got into was someone they were talking about.

02:06:42.520 | They wrote to me.

02:06:43.520 | It's like, "Oh, I lost my job."

02:06:44.840 | I go, "You didn't lose your job.

02:06:46.240 | You just got set free."

02:06:49.040 | He made the excuse that, "Well, it's my Christmas present to buy my USB drive," which we'll

02:06:54.320 | talk about in a second, "full of preparedness knowledge."

02:06:57.720 | I go, "What do you mean?

02:06:58.720 | You can take what's in there and you can start making battery banks and inverter kits and

02:07:02.600 | everything else.

02:07:03.600 | You can sell them to people using the California wildfires.

02:07:07.800 | It's an investment in your future.

02:07:09.160 | Why are you making an excuse?"

02:07:14.880 | In this world, you don't make money by pursuing money.

02:07:19.340 | You make money by pursuing knowledge and ability.

02:07:23.820 | If you pursue knowledge, information, knowledge, ability, experience, and eventually wisdom,

02:07:32.560 | which you only get when you're into your 50s, if you pursue those rather than trying to

02:07:38.800 | pursue money, as in the slave to the wage, the money will follow you.

02:07:44.300 | If you have the knowledge and the ability, people will try to throw you money to get

02:07:49.840 | you to do things for them, and good amounts of money.

02:07:53.960 | Okay, I'm done lecturing.

02:07:56.600 | It's true.

02:07:57.600 | I was earlier going to mention, and I think we'd be remiss in talking about commodities

02:08:03.580 | and investing in storing stuff if we didn't.

02:08:06.760 | What are your thoughts on storing nickels?

02:08:13.500 | I think it's an internet thing.

02:08:15.520 | I mean, technically, it's illegal for you to melt them down and to turn them into a

02:08:23.720 | commodity, and they actually watch and look for that.

02:08:27.000 | The same thing with copper pennies.

02:08:30.400 | You can't convert them into a commodity because they're already in a different form that's

02:08:36.280 | illegal to convert into a commodity.

02:08:41.840 | The famous Pawn Stars on the History Channel, the old man who died of Parkinson's recently,

02:08:50.600 | he had 55-gallon drums full of pre-83, pre-82 pennies that were all copper.

02:09:00.960 | You're just waiting for the time when he could melt those down and turn them in because copper

02:09:06.840 | was four or something, or $5 a pound on the commodities market.

02:09:13.400 | He died before he ever could do it, and he did it for decades and decades and decades.

02:09:22.080 | I think it's worth talking about.

02:09:27.640 | Let me make the positive argument for investing in nickels.

02:09:33.560 | The basic idea is, when Steve talks about going on Facebook and buying junk silver,

02:09:39.040 | what he means is buying pre-1965 US dimes, quarters, and half dollars.

02:09:46.080 | Prior to 1965, those coins were made of 90% silver.

02:09:50.320 | They've since been adulterated, so they don't have any silver content, right?

02:09:54.120 | I don't think they have any silver content now.

02:09:55.920 | None.

02:09:56.920 | None.

02:09:57.920 | None.

02:09:58.920 | Zero.

02:09:59.920 | In fact, pennies are mostly zinc.

02:10:00.920 | Right.

02:10:01.920 | Agreed.

02:10:02.920 | So, very quickly, people started to recognize when they changed what was in the coins, and

02:10:06.920 | they debased the metal value that was in the coins.

02:10:09.880 | Very quickly, people recognized the value, and they pulled those coins out of circulation.

02:10:15.280 | So now, if you want to buy silver coins, one of the simplest ways to do it is just to purchase

02:10:20.500 | that US currency.

02:10:22.400 | It has some advantages, some significant advantages.

02:10:25.800 | The first advantage is that it's very recognizable as currency.

02:10:30.600 | If you can just simply look, you know what a quarter looks like, you know what a dime

02:10:33.240 | looks like, and you look at the date, and it says before 1965, you know, okay, this

02:10:37.560 | is 90% silver.

02:10:39.200 | But they trade in value based upon their silver content.

02:10:42.200 | However, because they are so small in both size and in value, it's really not worth anybody's

02:10:50.240 | time and hassle to try to counterfeit it.

02:10:52.960 | People will try to pass off a counterfeit one-ounce Krugerrand, but I've never heard

02:10:56.560 | of anybody trying to pass off a counterfeit US dime.

02:11:00.200 | And so you get basically a counterfeit proof, although it's not necessarily proof, but you've

02:11:04.680 | got a very hard to counterfeit coin that has a certain metal value in it because of it.

02:11:10.680 | So that's US dimes, quarters, and half dollars.

02:11:14.080 | And I think that that's worth it.

02:11:15.760 | I think it's a good argument.

02:11:18.280 | It's an easy way for someone to purchase some silver at a low cost where they can recognize

02:11:23.080 | it, etc.

02:11:24.480 | The problem is, of course, the denominations are rather small.

02:11:27.800 | And so if you're going to have $1,000 of this stuff, I mean, it's not that big, but when

02:11:32.800 | you get into the tens of thousands of dollars, it becomes really, really significant in terms

02:11:37.160 | of the storage space.

02:11:38.280 | That's just the case with silver.

02:11:40.040 | Now if we fast forward, you have still two other things.

02:11:44.360 | So first you have old pennies, which is what Steve just mentioned, that had high copper

02:11:48.440 | content.

02:11:49.440 | That is no longer the case.

02:11:51.380 | But the one thing that you do still have, the one single US coin that does still have

02:11:56.400 | its base metal being very high, is the US nickel, which has a high percentage of nickel

02:12:00.880 | in it.

02:12:01.880 | And so you can calculate the melt value, which is something like 80-ish percent of the coin

02:12:08.160 | is made of nickel.

02:12:09.560 | And so right now, a current melt value, if you took a US nickel that you can buy for

02:12:15.320 | five cents and you melted it down, in theory it would have just over four cents worth of

02:12:20.960 | melt value of nickel in it.

02:12:23.120 | And so the argument is that if you purchase nickels, and by purchase I just mean you take

02:12:28.440 | a dollar and they give you 20 nickels, you can store nickels and those nickels will have

02:12:34.000 | the face amount of the currency.

02:12:36.400 | So you're not going to lose anything with your investment amount because it's always

02:12:41.520 | going to have the face amount of the currency.

02:12:43.520 | Five dollar roll of nickels is worth five dollars, whether that's today or five years

02:12:48.640 | in the future.

02:12:49.640 | It's worth five dollars.

02:12:50.640 | It's never worth less than five dollars.

02:12:52.760 | But if you move into an inflationary period, and if that inflation adjusts the value of

02:12:58.680 | nickel, then in theory the nickels would start to trade.

02:13:04.760 | You would guess that the mint would change the composition of nickels, and then the nickels

02:13:08.520 | would start to trade based upon their metal value, not based exclusively on their face

02:13:14.880 | value.

02:13:15.880 | So that's the positive argument.

02:13:16.880 | Well, they're not made out of pure nickel.

02:13:19.480 | They're 75% copper and 25% nickel as of right now.

02:13:24.880 | Okay, so but they still do have the melt value of the nickel is still four cents.

02:13:30.960 | So I was reading the melt percentage of the nomination figure from coinflation.

02:13:37.080 | So whatever the actual formula is, they do have the nickel value.

02:13:41.000 | And so the argument is that it's a basically a can't lose proposition because either you

02:13:47.760 | always have the face value of the coin, which is a totally fungible coin, or you have the

02:13:55.400 | melt value of the nickel.

02:13:57.120 | That's the argument.

02:13:58.120 | Now there are a number of downsides, right?

02:14:00.000 | So the point you made, Steve, is that it's illegal to melt them down.

02:14:04.240 | So and nickel is not nearly as valuable in terms of cost per weight as something like

02:14:09.600 | silver is.

02:14:10.600 | And so you wouldn't really expect someone to melt them down, try to purify it, etc.

02:14:14.880 | They're also extremely bulky.

02:14:16.440 | You know, if it's hard to store silver dimes and quarters, it's even harder to store nickels.

02:14:23.960 | But it's an interesting thing to think about when it comes to commodities, and I think

02:14:28.280 | an interesting argument.

02:14:30.720 | The 1946 to 2014 nickel, the five cent nickel is worth right now as of September 17, 2020,

02:14:41.320 | it's worth 4.1 cents.

02:14:44.440 | Right.

02:14:45.440 | And I can't even, I can't find the value of the 2015 to 2020 nickel on coin inflation

02:14:53.240 | right now.

02:14:54.240 | Right, right.

02:14:55.240 | Yeah, so the argument is that it's never going to be worth less than five cents.

02:15:00.000 | And you have a 20% range between the face value of the coin and the melt value of the

02:15:05.440 | nickel.

02:15:06.440 | So, you know, if you have a 20% increase in values, then now you're in depositive territory

02:15:11.480 | with the nickel.

02:15:12.480 | So anyway, we don't have to spend too much time on it.

02:15:14.840 | It's an interesting thing.

02:15:16.840 | The biggest problem with it, as with any commodity, is that it's hard to store the things.

02:15:23.480 | And the nice thing is it's easy, it's not so easy to spend nickels, I guess though in

02:15:27.360 | the current coin shortage, maybe it's easier than it once was, but you can spend nickels.

02:15:32.400 | It's hard to spend ingots of lead at a store, but still at the end of the day, you know,

02:15:37.400 | you're filling ammo cans or something with nickels, and it's pretty, pretty heavy stuff.

02:15:42.240 | Yeah, yeah.

02:15:44.120 | I think the best thing we've talked about is the inflationary proof methods of storage

02:15:50.440 | of money other than gold and silver.

02:15:54.200 | And the actually the ways you can buy things on the used market surplus and actually have

02:16:02.360 | something that is going to be worth more money.

02:16:05.540 | It's worth more money right now.

02:16:06.600 | If I bought all those pieces of tool steel at $50, I could go someplace else and sell

02:16:11.840 | them for probably a hundred dollars.

02:16:14.320 | But I mean, you're starting off to the positive.

02:16:16.640 | And the other thing about, you know, being a world traveler like you are, you got a Honda

02:16:22.240 | EU 2200i generator.

02:16:24.560 | Now those are about $1,100 to $1,200 brand new here in the United States.

02:16:30.160 | You actually couldn't get them for a while because of the stupidity of Honda and recall.

02:16:34.760 | But let's say you went to a Latin American company country and you bought one of those

02:16:41.200 | very good condition used and you paid $700 for it.

02:16:47.600 | Well now let's say you're going to move down to Peru for whatever reason, and you can't

02:16:55.960 | take your stuff with you because you don't own your stuff.

02:16:58.840 | Your stuff owns you.

02:17:00.300 | You can't really take it and drive that distance with it through those countries to get there.

02:17:06.120 | So you go and it's like you go on to your, you go to the, what's it called?

02:17:15.520 | The bazaar or the flea market or whatever you have, or whatever your equivalent of Facebook

02:17:21.000 | marketplace or Craigslist is down there.

02:17:23.920 | And you sell your $700 generator.

02:17:26.800 | Well you will, you'll sell it for $650 or $700.

02:17:31.120 | So you got your money out of it.

02:17:32.720 | And at worst you lost 50 bucks on it because that Honda generator is always going to have

02:17:37.960 | a value for it.

02:17:39.400 | That Honda generator is sought after around the world.

02:17:43.320 | You know, if, if, if anyone is going anywhere out into the wilderness and Alaska and they're

02:17:48.480 | all using the Honda generators, it's recognized around the world as being pretty much the

02:17:54.720 | most reliable generator there is.

02:17:57.040 | That's a gasoline or propane or natural gas based generator.

02:18:01.880 | So if you buy it used and it's like, yeah, now you've got that bulk.

02:18:05.840 | I mean, you got that thing that you need at your location that you're in and you know,

02:18:11.400 | it's there for when you need it and you needed it at the other day.

02:18:14.640 | But yet when you go to move or travel again, you can reconvert it back into a Fiat, travel

02:18:27.160 | to your new place and buy another one on the use market and very, very good condition.

02:18:33.360 | And now you, now you got your generator back and it was by far cheaper than all the expenses

02:18:38.200 | you would have gone through of shipping or hauling it, you know, to the other location.

02:18:43.520 | Yeah, absolutely.

02:18:44.960 | And I think that's the value of physical items and where if you get comfortable, I mean,

02:18:50.200 | I think a basic skill that we should help everyone to develop, whether they always use

02:18:54.920 | it or not, that's up to them.

02:18:56.440 | But a basic skill that we should help everybody to develop is the skill of buying and selling

02:19:01.480 | things in the local markets.

02:19:03.480 | And this has become so much easier with Facebook Marketplace, Craigslist and whatever other

02:19:07.520 | versions there are.

02:19:09.280 | I mean, my little quip that I've used for years is simply store your stuff on Craigslist.

02:19:14.880 | That if you just simply store your stuff on Craigslist, you can always go back and get

02:19:17.760 | it up, but get it back if you need it.

02:19:19.840 | And I have several times given advice to people.

02:19:23.520 | Recently I was talking to somebody who was trying to move.

02:19:27.480 | They were trying to move from Florida to North Carolina and they were trying to figure out

02:19:30.400 | how they could split a moving truck with somebody.

02:19:32.880 | And I just said, "Look at the stuff that you have, okay?

02:19:35.440 | None of this stuff is worth moving.

02:19:37.560 | Just simply sell all of it and move in your car, right?

02:19:41.680 | Load up your small valuable items that you can move with in your small car, sell all

02:19:45.960 | of this stuff, move in your car, and then when you get to North Carolina, replace it

02:19:49.960 | little by little."

02:19:50.960 | And you're not dealing with sales tax.

02:19:54.400 | You're not dealing with...

02:19:55.400 | I mean, you can do it very easily.

02:19:57.880 | And even if you lose a few hundred bucks, you still are better off than paying a lot

02:20:01.680 | of money for a moving truck.

02:20:03.360 | And so...

02:20:04.360 | Seventy-nine cents a mile.

02:20:06.400 | It can be done.

02:20:07.400 | And it's cheaper to take your car and pay a little bit extra.

02:20:10.760 | And what you'll do the next time through...

02:20:13.840 | Some people often think, "Man, what a relief it would be if my house burned down because

02:20:16.880 | then I could start again."

02:20:17.880 | Well, a move can be that chance that you can start again.

02:20:21.120 | And the next time around, you buy better, you buy smarter, you buy more patiently, and

02:20:25.520 | you get better deals.

02:20:26.520 | It's a skill that you can build and develop.

02:20:28.960 | So I think that's...

02:20:29.960 | And you get the newest version of whatever you had.

02:20:32.120 | Yeah, it's true.

02:20:33.120 | All right, Steve.

02:20:34.120 | I think that's two hours and 21 minutes.

02:20:36.120 | It's a pretty mammoth show, and I think we got some good stuff.

02:20:38.940 | Anything that we missed or anything that you'd like to cover before we close?

02:20:42.200 | Yes.

02:20:43.560 | Steven Harris Preparedness is available through a link that helps support Josh.

02:20:52.000 | And I got a couple of things up there, and I'm changing everything around with the way

02:20:58.680 | I sell things and deliver things.

02:21:01.000 | But if you want to go see the best of what I have, and you go to RFP for Radical Personal

02:21:09.800 | Finance, you go to RPF1234.com.

02:21:17.760 | That will automatically drop you onto the right page on my site via what Josh is doing.

02:21:38.480 | And you can take a look at all the stuff that I have and decide what part of my educational

02:21:44.480 | system you want to go into.

02:21:47.600 | There's plenty of stuff up there for free.

02:21:49.600 | Basically, you can listen to almost everything for free if you want to see the videos, and

02:21:55.120 | then you end up purchasing the videos from me.

02:21:59.080 | But I mean, some of my videos, stuff you're going to learn from me, I'm very detailed

02:22:04.320 | on my videos.

02:22:05.320 | And do you think, how does three bucks an hour sound, Josh?

02:22:08.680 | Is that like too expensive for a quality education?

02:22:11.120 | Josh Cote I guess what I should say that will be a louder

02:22:14.560 | testimonial of your stuff than anything else is very simple.

02:22:18.320 | I think I have bought previously, like I told you, I think I've bought every product you've

02:22:23.320 | ever sold.

02:22:24.960 | And I think I've consumed, at least of everything I've ever found on your websites and stuff

02:22:28.880 | that you've found, I think I've consumed all of the public stuff that you've said.

02:22:32.680 | And so if we were to total that up, let's see, I bought all your earlier videos, your

02:22:37.480 | bug out bag video, your battery backup video.

02:22:41.160 | And then when you launched a membership site, I joined that as I was one of your founding

02:22:45.880 | people with your initial membership site.

02:22:48.040 | And then I lost my credentials and we got mixed up with all of that.

02:22:53.760 | And so then when the pandemic came around, I saw that you were doing more stuff and I

02:22:57.000 | went up and bought another, I don't know what I paid for.

02:22:59.880 | Anyway, I think I've sent you at least probably four, I don't know, five, $600 over the years.

02:23:04.080 | So the point is that I have never regretted any of the money that I have spent with you.

02:23:09.440 | And I consider you to be a very thoughtful, intelligent teacher who is able to focus on

02:23:15.480 | systems that work rather than specific solutions.

02:23:19.080 | And to me, that's a powerful way of thinking.

02:23:22.540 | When you understand systems and you understand that knowledge can be applied in many circumstances,

02:23:28.760 | it has basically allowed me with other stuff, right?

02:23:31.400 | I spend lots of money on education.

02:23:33.520 | I take a certain percentage of my income and I always spend it on education.

02:23:36.400 | So I'm in some ways an easier sell than some other people.

02:23:39.240 | But what it's helped me to do is it's helped me to feel incredibly confident in almost

02:23:44.980 | any circumstance.

02:23:45.980 | I mean, you did stuff on food preparation, right?

02:23:49.800 | And a while ago, you did a thing about making corn into food and you did this whole big

02:23:54.240 | video about it.

02:23:55.240 | And so what that gives me the knowledge of is as a father of four children, I know that

02:23:59.400 | if I'm in the United States and I am running low on money, I can take my car, I'll go find

02:24:05.880 | a grain elevator somewhere where I can buy sacks of corn and I'll buy sacks of corn and

02:24:11.480 | my children will never go hungry because I know how to take it and how to make it into

02:24:15.480 | food that they can eat and that they'll enjoy eating.

02:24:18.160 | And so that knowledge, if for no other reason, having the confidence of knowing how to do

02:24:23.000 | stuff is extremely valuable and well worth paying for.

02:24:26.880 | So I've never regretted any of the money that I've spent with you.

02:24:29.080 | Yep.

02:24:30.080 | I bought in the pandemic shopping video, I went to Tractor Supply Store, which is a little

02:24:37.400 | bit more money than buying from the grain elevator.

02:24:40.000 | But I bought 800 pounds of corn.

02:24:44.300 | They even loaded it into my truck for me and I bought it for $105.

02:24:50.960 | That is awfully, awfully cheap food.

02:24:53.800 | And the number of things you can make out of corn is extensive.

02:24:59.600 | I mean, it's huge.

02:25:01.280 | I mean, the food that fed the slaves and the poor in the 17 and 18 and 1900s was corn.

02:25:12.280 | That's what they ate on a daily basis.

02:25:14.520 | From hoe cakes to Johnny cakes to polenta to cornbread.

02:25:22.240 | It was the grain.

02:25:24.580 | People would raise and they would raise and grow wheat and they would sell their wheat

02:25:30.560 | because it was three times more expensive than corn.

02:25:35.160 | And then they would go buy corn for their family from a different person.

02:25:40.600 | And that was their food for the rest of the year.

02:25:45.040 | But even when they grew the wheat, they sold the wheat and bought the corn.

02:25:49.440 | And I'll tell you why that kind of stuff is so important to me.

02:25:53.200 | Just like you, I don't want to eat corn every day.

02:25:55.880 | Although I could and I could make it good.

02:25:57.320 | I don't want to.

02:25:58.320 | I eat a lot of meat and my freezer is packed full of meat.

02:26:02.560 | That's my primary food method, preparedness plan is a freezer full of meat.

02:26:07.000 | But what I use the corn for is of course to know and I would eat it if I were hungry.

02:26:12.720 | But what I use it for is an inexpensive way of me supporting people that I care about

02:26:17.920 | that I can't get to take care of themselves.

02:26:20.420 | And so I have a very, very large network of people that I care about that I would never

02:26:25.720 | turn away from my door hungry.

02:26:27.820 | But how on earth do I afford to provide for dozens of people if there are shortages, if

02:26:35.520 | there are needs for food?

02:26:36.760 | I can't afford to have fancy food for them, but I can afford giant piles of corn.

02:26:43.720 | It's not hard for me.

02:26:44.720 | Okay, I spent 500 bucks on corn, but I could feed 100 people for weeks and weeks on that.

02:26:49.200 | Okay, I'm sold.

02:26:50.500 | And so to me, that's one of the reasons why things like that are so valuable is it allows

02:26:54.280 | me to be prepared to care for people in my network that I need to care for who are not

02:26:58.880 | going to, either they're not going to or they're not going to be able to care for themselves.

02:27:02.680 | And I can do it by mastering these methods.

02:27:05.160 | Yep, yep.

02:27:06.160 | And like I said, people are the resources.

02:27:08.680 | Well, you and your wife are sleeping peaceably all night.

02:27:12.480 | You know, you're the people that are helping you that you are feeding and everything you

02:27:16.240 | go.

02:27:17.240 | Dave, John, Steve and Joe, you're on watch all night, you know, two hour shifts, you

02:27:24.680 | know, 12 to 2, 2 to 4, 4 to 6, 6 to 8.

02:27:29.560 | You got the night vision goggles on and you're sitting out there on the porch with a shotgun

02:27:35.140 | just being quiet, keeping an eye out.

02:27:37.920 | You know, if any if anything happens, you push the button on the bow thing and you go,

02:27:42.360 | wake up, wake up, wake up.

02:27:44.520 | And you know, I'll wake up and we'll wake everyone up and get armed up and you know,

02:27:49.520 | watch what's going on or it could be the same thing if you're on a farm.

02:27:55.720 | Now you're out there watching the cows like someone's coming in to steal your beef.

02:28:02.040 | You know, someone needs to be on overwatch all night.

02:28:05.420 | You're dealing with harder methods of food and water and labor and you need strong backs

02:28:13.180 | and skilled minds and everything for all of that.

02:28:17.620 | And it's a lot easier with a lot of people and all you had to do was buy $100 worth of

02:28:22.100 | corn and you got help for all the help you need for months with it.

02:28:28.340 | So that's a pretty powerful currency.

02:28:32.020 | I mean, that's a very cheap way of hiring labor when you need it the most is with food

02:28:40.380 | like that.

02:28:41.380 | Because I guarantee you, what did I tell you?

02:28:43.600 | Your first priority is breathing.

02:28:45.640 | Your second priority is hydrate.

02:28:48.160 | Actually your first priority is breathing.

02:28:50.440 | Your second priority is temperature, either staying cool or staying warm.

02:28:55.860 | Your next priority is thirst and your next priority is hunger.

02:29:01.960 | And for most people as base needs in human beings.

02:29:09.060 | And so all those things will happen to people.

02:29:11.740 | They're going to, you know, if they're cold, tired, thirsty and hungry, they'll be showing

02:29:17.020 | up at your door.

02:29:18.020 | And if you can satisfy any part of cold, thirsty and hungry, you got people who will be very

02:29:25.420 | happy to you because they don't want to go back into those states.

02:29:28.780 | It's like, "Hey, can you help me with this?

02:29:32.420 | Oh yeah, you bet.

02:29:33.420 | You name it.

02:29:34.420 | I'll help you all day long."

02:29:35.420 | Right.

02:29:36.420 | And people are the biggest resource that we have.

02:29:38.620 | All of your and my problems are always going to be solved by people and all of humanity's

02:29:43.660 | problems are always going to be solved by people.

02:29:46.260 | And so the more people you can have on your team, the better.

02:29:49.740 | And so sometimes stockpiling those basic supplies, if they go short, those can make all the

02:29:55.180 | difference in the world.

02:29:56.220 | And when you have the intelligence of a group of people and you can meet a few basic needs,

02:30:01.900 | you're well set up.

02:30:03.300 | So RPF1234 is an affiliate link.

02:30:06.900 | So if you'd like to do that, I would highly encourage you to go to rpf1234.com.

02:30:11.700 | Check out all of Steve's products.

02:30:13.940 | Again, I think I own everything you do.

02:30:15.580 | If I don't, I'll buy it.

02:30:17.180 | And I have benefited immensely from it.

02:30:20.100 | I've tried to get Steven to get more stuff.

02:30:22.020 | Recently we were talking and I tried to get him to start creating more stuff because he's

02:30:25.900 | got more, as is my problem, you know, both of us have more knowledge in our head that

02:30:31.620 | we had struggled to get out because of the difficulty of getting it out in a form that

02:30:35.860 | it can be consumed.

02:30:37.220 | And so it's really, we've got to keep on streamlining that and getting more stuff out so you can

02:30:41.660 | get the knowledge out into a form that it can be gained by other people.

02:30:44.860 | Yeah, I'm going to die with 20 lifetimes.

02:30:48.260 | 20 lifetimes of inventions never, never done.

02:30:52.220 | Well, at least get a few of them out.

02:30:56.220 | Well, Steve, thank you for coming on.

02:30:58.700 | RPF1234.com.

02:30:59.700 | Any closing thoughts as I wrap this up?

02:31:02.820 | No, no.

02:31:04.260 | Again, take what we have taught you and make it your own.

02:31:08.420 | Modify it for your own purposes and by all means do it.

02:31:12.540 | Okay.

02:31:13.540 | I don't care if you just do one step today.

02:31:16.100 | As long as you take a step forward every day or every week that you can.

02:31:21.580 | And don't say you don't have time for it because you do have time for it.

02:31:27.180 | You can make time for it.

02:31:29.340 | And even if it's 10 minutes this week, that 10 minutes of taking what we've advised you

02:31:35.620 | on making it your own and doing it.

02:31:39.220 | I have become so belligerent in the pandemic, literally berating people.

02:31:47.900 | We're dealing with a life and death situation.

02:31:50.780 | They ask me a question and then they immediately find a reason to not do it.

02:31:55.940 | They immediately talk themselves out of doing the advice that I'm giving them.

02:32:01.660 | And they find it, I call it, they find a reason not to do it.

02:32:05.780 | Start finding reasons to not do it and start finding reasons to do it.

02:32:11.100 | Agreed.

02:32:12.100 | Totally agree.

02:32:13.380 | And if you capture the knowledge, then if you are behind, if you're behind, I mean,

02:32:19.900 | you sell at the, you know, rpf1234.com, you're selling the USB stick, right?

02:32:25.820 | That is available with all the stuff.

02:32:28.300 | The nice thing is that even if you find yourself caught behind the curve and you promote a

02:32:34.860 | lot, Steve, when there's a hurricane coming, the hurricane has several days of lead time.

02:32:40.860 | And if you know what you would need to do if a hurricane were coming, even if you have

02:32:44.180 | a few days, you can take action.

02:32:46.260 | But even so, you don't want to do that.

02:32:47.540 | You want to take action quickly.

02:32:48.540 | So, all right, we've preached enough.

02:32:50.060 | Steve, thank you for coming on and rpf1234.com, rpf1234.com and I'll be back with you very

02:32:55.660 | soon.

02:32:57.820 | Don't just dream about paradise.

02:33:00.340 | Live it with Fiji Airways.

02:33:02.580 | Meet the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale.

02:33:06.140 | Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

02:33:11.140 | Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value.

02:33:18.300 | Discover your tropical dreams at FijiAirways.com.

02:33:22.100 | That's FijiAirways.com, from here to happy.

02:33:25.340 | Flying direct with Fiji Airways.

02:33:26.820 | (upbeat drum music)

How_to_Invest_in_Commodities_in_a_Radical_Way