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 when the crisis unfolded and uh you found yourself broke did you lose any of your real estate I lost it all I lost my home I lost my cars I I lost every when I tell people how bad it was Mike people don't believe how bad it was I was this close from being homeless gold people do not understand real estate and the real estate people do not understand gold and when you put them those two together gold preserves your purchasing power and real estate helps you benefit from inflation driven by credit markets you

just need to make sure that when you're on the real estate side before the credit Market breaks you convert that Equity into something more resilient which is gold and that's the the part that people miss and if I would have done that if I would have done that in 200 2008 just taking a portion I mean a small portion 20% of the equity that I had on my real estate and just put it into gold to your point Mike when the real estate market crashed and it crashed because the credit markets broke

the gold would have accelerated against the real estate and I easily could have gone back and bought everything I lost and more and ended up with a lot more real assets on my balance sheet but I was wrong footed I didn't know how to play that game and so I was on the wrong end of that [Music] deal hi this is Mike Maloney and my guest today is Russ gray Russ how are you doing good Mike great to be here great uh you know Russ is one of the original real estate guys they started uh their uh radio channel

back in the uh late 90s 1997 1997 and he has a great personal story that is going to help you navigate this coming economic disaster that is headed right at us right now uh and he's got some great insights and he has learned through experience so Russ tell us your story with like the beginning of the real estate guys and everything and uh and you know up up through the pain that you went through the fire you went through to learn uh uh how you're you're going to navigate at this time yeah it's

it's a it's a long history and I'll just give you the nickel tour uh I saw that the baby boomer generation was moving into the asset allocation model where they were going to start making a move into Bond so I thought I was fairly sophisticated back then and I wasn't this was in the 90s and so I decided to get into the mortgage business at in 2000 and I got into the mortgage business it was a fantastic time to get into the mortgage business I started a mortgage company I everything I bought

real estate everywhere and I was riding a bubble I didn't know it thought I was a genius didn't understand really much past uh the treasuries what the bond market even was or how it worked and so I was generating a lot of income off of my mortg Mortgage business and I was deploying that with a lot of negative cash flow real estate that I was candidly in hindsight speculating on and what I didn't realize was that that Equity is fake and I think that what the tide went out as Warren Buffett said you

get a chance to see who's swimming naked I was one of those guys that was swimming naked and our mutual friend Robert kosaki and Kenny maroy they were telling me hey guys uh you know this is going to be a a problem and cash flow is really what you need to focus on and not capital gains and you know we were all Equity all the time and anyway long story short as it blew up and so when the credit markets broke and all the equity came out of the properties I went from on an assets minus liabilities net

worth being a multi-millionaire to being broke and what I didn't have was passive income because I made my living brokering credit when the credit markets broke I didn't have anything to sell and I didn't have any cash in the bank to go scoop up all the bargain that were everywhere because I didn't believe in having idle cash I put it out to work all the time and when the credit markets took away all my credit lines even though I hadn't defaulted on anything everybody was just shutting credit off

to mitigate their own uh risk in the in the in what they saw coming it was a sign I mean by the way when you start to see companies curtailing credit you know they're seeing weakness on the horizon I couldn't read those tea leaves back then so now I had no cash I had no cash flow I had negative equity I couldn't sell my properties uh I had lenders after me and it was just an absolute disaster and so that that's kind of the first part of the story and then on the back end of it I I started looking at

what was doing well and the irony was at the same time real estate values were crashing gold which I wasn't into didn't understand was spiking and I go I don't know that correlation is causation but there's something there worth investigating and that's where I really started looking into gold and trying to understand what gold was and in the postmortem of all that I also did a deep dive into understanding what the bond market was and its role in what happened and then I started realizing

that when you put all those things together there was really a better way to have approached that bubble and I said you know what if this ever happens again I'm I'm not going to be wrong-footed like I was I'm going to be right-footed I'm going to do it differently and and that's what I've done and I think now today as we stand here on the cusp of what could be another bubble implosion uh in all kinds of asset price values as fed as hiked interest rates and I'm sure we'll have

something to talk about that I feel like I'm in a lot better shape to weather that storm now yeah so um when the crisis unfolded and uh you found yourself broke broke did you lose any of your real estate I lost it all I lost my home I lost my cars I I lost every when I tell people how bad it was Mike people don't believe how bad it was I was this close from being homeless and we stayed on the radio and we plowed through it and we continued to work and I had an experience my father was a high-tech

entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and he lost everything in the 1987 stock market crash and I was actually selling securities at the time and I quit because I realized I was selling snake oil that I didn't understand and those markets were casinos and I was doing a disservice to Main Street so I quit and I went back into corporate sales and and started trying to understand and then you know what was going on and and and I wanted to be in financial services and financial education but I didn't want to

be in paper assets and so I learned though when my dad lost everything that you can have your net worth conflated with your selfworth or vice versa and uh I saw that happen to him and I said you know you know if I ever get wiped out I'm I'm not going to stop believing in myself I'm going to recognize it for what it is which is a fantastic lesson I'll tell you a quick story on that too by the way had a chance to interview Donald Trump before he was even president candid a presidential

candidate back in 2015 and I ended up in the Press room with him in Iowa and I asked him Mr Trump if you decide to run for president um you know you've had good times you've had bad times what did you learn in the good times what did you learn in the bad times and if you decide to run for president how how is that help you well he didn't answer the last question because he didn't want to tip his hand at that point he hadn't announced and he said to me well I didn't really learn anything in the good

times but in the bad times I learned it's always good to have a little cash and I've always told that story like the idea of having some cash on hand having some liquidity would be a good idea this is a guy who had negative net worth of almost a billion dollars a real estate guy with a negative net worth of a billion dollars so when he said it I mean my problem was a lot smaller uh but I understood what he was saying but the real wisdom minute was that he said he didn't learn anything in the good times

and so the inverse of that is that you learn everything in the bad times and I thought well I just went through a terrible time in 2008 I must be brilliant or at least there's a lot of Brilliance here to be learned if I will do the work so uh and I have I feel like I have and I I'm not saying I've got it all figured out but I I scaled up the people I hang out with you know I hang out with some pretty smart people no longer the smartest guy in the room and I dug deep into finding out what

happened and why you know you said uh that uh you thought you were a genius when this was all uh when when everything was on the way up the good times that's right so it's like the dummies come out of the woodwork in the good times and they're not learning anything right it's it's the tough times that really and it's it's a shame that so many people have to learn from a lot of pain I mean and what you went through sounds like the ultimate just uh uh you know it's being tested by fire and you learn

a maximum amount when you're when you go through something like that uh and you're much more cautious the next time around so um I've got so a couple of uh charts that I want to show you and the first one you know we were both at a uh a function recently called the collective that was a bunch of very high net worth real estate uh in investors and one of the things that I have noticed is I've been presenting how much real estate is currently overvalued but it's overvalued at the same time

that the stock market is overvalued and at the same time that bonds are overvalued so this is different than the crash in 2000 it's different than the crash in 2008 where uh it was real estate and the stock market this time it's real estate stocks and bonds and there is uh there are cracks in the foundation of the economy that are just enormous and so the instability this time around is uh I believe we're going we're headed for an economic disaster far greater than 2008 but here uh we have from the when gold

bottomed in 2001 at uh $256 an ounce I think it was uh the performance gold and the and Robert schillers uh 20 City composite home price index so gold and residential real estate here uh index to a value of 100 and you can see that they were both climbing up until 2006 real estate leveled off and then in 2007 starts to implode and uh but gold uh you know when you were talking with me at the um the collective you were saying how it was revers correlated and here gold did its job it protected people what's what's

your comments on this and what is your strategy today yeah such a great question and probably the Crux of the whole conversation uh I think the first thing you have to understand is that when you think of the world in terms of dollars and everything is dollar denominated you're automatically going to have a distorted view of value in other words if you have a $50,000 house a three-bedroom two bath house that you buy for $50,000 and it's 1,500 square ft on a postage samp lot in Main Street

America and 10 years later it's worth a 100 and then 10 years after that it's worth 200 uh whatever number it is at the end of the day it still only sleeps three people so in terms of real value it never changed what happened is either the dollar weakened against it or they dragged purchasing power from the future into the present to bid it up and every time anybody tries to make something more affordable by adding financing they make it more expensive and so when you understand those basic concepts you

realize that certain asset values are driven by healthy credit markets and when credit markets break for whatever reason and clearly that's what happened in 2008 the asset values that were dependent upon that healthy influx of credit collapse and you can see it right there in the chart uh and so but gold isn't in that Camp the other thing is when you denominate in gold and not dollars you're denominating in real money and I learned there's a difference between capital money and currency and

uh it took me a while to understand the differences and when people think they're saving money A lot of times they're really saving currency and then sometimes people think they're making money or they're capitalists but really they're financialist and they're just generating paper profits and they're collecting pieces of paper they haven't really produced anything of real value in the real world which is true capitalism so when I look at this chart all I do is see that that uh gold uh you

know measured in dollars well this is this is real estate right so so what I see blue is real estate and the Gold Line is gold yeah yeah yeah so so gold just continued to reflect and this is denominated in dollars right it's all denominated in dollars and then it's indexed to 100 so the performance okay so the credit is the credit yeah uh here's one that you're going to love because here this next one I've taken the real estate uh from its high just before the collapse and I've

priced it in Gold so this would be uh you know and it's indexed to a value of one and what you see here is that the value of the real estate measured in Gold not the price fell by about 85% so at 80% it means that if you had sold a home in 2005 and bought gold and then sold your gold in 2012 you could have bought five of the same exact home a five times increase in true true wealth um and so this was the value of real estate measured in gold at that time not measured in US Dollars yeah and the Nuance here is that you can see from

the leftand side of the chart is that credit markets were breaking which led to the 2008 financial collapse uh the prices were coming out of real estate gold wasn't subject to that because gold is not part of the credit system and so it was immune to it that's why you buy it it you know it ensures you some people think it ensures you from a currency collapse but it really ensures you from a credit collapse and what I've noticed is that when the credit markets break gold does well and so real estate

doesn't so you have to understand that that relationship and so the key is how do you use real estate to create equity and then convert it quickly into gold and to your point then once your Equity that you created in real estate using leverage and inflation to your benefit when it's there and then when the credit markets inevitably break because there's Cycles you have removed your equity and converted it into something more resilient more real which is gold and that's where the that's where debt real

estate and gold all work together and this is the thing that I found a lot of people in either Camp don't understand the gold people do not understand real estate and the real estate people do not understand gold and when you put them those two together gold preserves your purchasing power and real estate helps you benefit from inflation driven by credit markets you just need to make sure that when you're on the real estate side before the credit Market breaks you convert that Equity into something more

resilient which is gold and that's the the part that people miss and if I would have done that if I would have done that in 2008 just taken a portion I mean a small portion 20% of the equity that I had on my real estate and just put it into gold to your point Mike when the real estate market crashed and it crashed because the credit markets broke the gold would have accelerated against the real estate and I easily could have gone back and bought everything I lost and more and ended up with a lot more

real assets on my balance sheet but I was wrong footed I didn't know how to play that game and so I was on the wrong end of that deal well you probably wouldn't have lost your real estate so you're saying pull some Equity out of the house refinance uh take that and buy gold and what happens here is when the real estate crashed gold went up enough to where if if you know uh a certain percentage of your assets was gold the bank would look at your balance sheet and they wouldn't even take the real

estate or they may say okay we need you to cough up a certain amount because the value of your home is now way below the value of the loan so uh we need a you know basically more of a down payment they need you well I mean there's different there's different ways you can play it at the end of the day to be able to control real estate you got to be able to control it with the cash flow and the cash flow controls the mortgage and mortgage controls the property and overtime inflation is your friend it's

when you lose control of the cash flow you lose control of the mortgage now when you're upside down on a property you lose the motivation to deal with the cash flow especially if it's coming out of your paycheck you have a little bit of resiliency if it's a rental property because you just keep applying those rents uh and and but I was negative cash flow but what I would have had the opportunity to do in this scenario is I would have been able to retire that debt after negotiating it down uh because

they were going to take a haircut if they foreclose too either way right so if I can get them to take a haircut with me I mean it damages my credit score but I would have had a chance to hold on to the properties and if not then they could take the properties when you sign a mortgage the deal is pretty straightforward forward if it's non-recourse either you they get the payments or they get the property and they agreed to it at the beginning you know you walk away hand them the keys go hey take the property that's fine I'll

buy the one across the street using the profit in my gold and you know I still end up with a property it's just not the same one I had with the same Financial structure yeah I just want to show this last one for anybody that's interested there's uh from uh when gold from the beginning of the century uh so the year 2000 uh that's the performance of gold real estate and the S&P 500 uh all on one line all indexed to 100 uh so okay so I'm sort of done with these charts you read my book

recently I am devouring your book mike check it out I got every you know all this stuff highlighted I I love it you know you can tell you uh worked with kosaki because you've written in very simple language but the concepts are very sophisticated and I think the part that you get right is just understanding the plumbing of the financial system and their relationship with the real world I think a lot of people who geek out on the plumbing of the financial system forget to make the connection to the

real world a lot of people who run around in the real world especially Real Estate Investors this is how I was we don't think what goes on in the macro matters to us at all we ignore it the problem is it's like having your back to the uh to the ocean when the tsunami is forming out on the horizon if you're not watching the weather reports or don't know how to read them you don't know you got a problem until you're Swept Away that's what happened to me in 2008 so when a guy like you takes the time to

write a book like this you know I I just recommend everybody don't just read it reading it isn't good enough you got to really study it and and and so I learned a technique um my wife and I my late wife and I homeschooled our children and uh I I say that lightly because she really did the work but one of the things that we learned was this concept called for ring and um I'll share it with you because it's really served me well especially in the wake of recovering from a difficult time when

you really have to study and the first R is read and and then when you read you research you're going to have terms you're going to have things you don't understand don't just gloss over it but dig in and look it up and try to figure out what it means it's never been easier to do the third one so you read you research then you reason you think about it like what does this really mean and does it make sense do I agree do I disagree just because somebody wrote it just because somebody's an expert

doesn't mean they're right you know you have to ask yourself does this make sense and then you relate it back to your situation to how does this matter to me in the real world how does this matter to people and when you read books that way uh it opens up a world and you can take your education that you get from the book and convert it into actual action in the real world and uh so I recommend and all the people that we coach and talk with to study books that way that's what I'm doing right now with

your book okay thanks um so have you you know speaking about all of that have you read the great taking yet no um no I we just released a video on that recently and this author uh he's writing it for from a conspiracy theory perspective I'm right there I got my tin foil hat over here in the back in the cupboard so a little bit of it sounds you know a little bit nutty however take a look at the evidence that he's put together I remember do you remember when Cyprus did the bail-ins sure that was 20 yeah

2012 or something like that uh and right after that shortly after that laws were changed in the United States to allow the same thing in the next Crisis in the US where but they were passed like in 2 whenever but they didn't activate for like five years lat so the people who passed those laws in The Dodd Frank bill they left and then the thing I think it was 2014 that it actually activated deed so the government likes to do that they like to hide ticking time bombs in these in this legislation right well there

have been a whole bunch of other decisions and legislation and and uh rulings in in uh court cases and so on that have allowed the taking of assets and uh what this guy believes is that there's going to be a big deflation now in 2008 we did see a deflation in some asset prices the stock markets crashed uh real estate crashed and uh but gold took off and you didn't see in deflation in retail prices really in 2008 and we didn't see a contraction of the currency Supply we saw an expansion of the

currency Supply and he's thinking that there is going to be a real a genuine deflation Great Depression style uh that happens uh and it's it's um that this will be coupled with uh the Federal Reserve sort of uh manipulating this you know in my first book um back then everybody was thinking that there was going to be big inflation that that was the next step that there's all this currency printing it's going to lead to Big inflation or even hyperinflation and so all the an analysts were screaming hyperinflation

inflation and I'm going it doesn't work that way uh the big boys throughout history the big boys always win and if you go if if everybody is leveraged out on debt and you go into a hyperinflation with just a few minutes work you can pay off your mortgage uh so it doesn't go straight into hyperinflation when the public is all on one side of the boat the boat capsizes right it isn't like uh you know everybody gets rewarded for stupidity uh with you when everybody's out strung out on massive amounts of

debt that's when you go into deflation and they can't sell an asset to pay off that debt all of the assets are down they're underwater on everything that's what happened that's yeah and that's when the banks well yeah we had asset price deflation and he's thinking it's going to be real deflation with not just asset prices but uh the uh the currency Supply and retail prices everywhere uh and um uh right now what we've seen I said in the book that no you're going to

have uh and and in episode six of hidden secrets of money we're going to have uh uh we had this dip in asset prices deflation in asset prices in 2008 we had a reflation uh we we need to have uh an inflation and uh people going out on debt and leverage again and then a big deflation and the banks get to take everything the big boys win and then uh to go into be able to go into big inflation or hyperinflation the FED has to be so scared of deflation that they print and print and print until finally deflation

gives way finally people feel good enough to go out and buy stuff again and that's in episode uh so what I'm seeing is that you know if this guy is right that this is the what I wrote back in 200 uh five six7 and and early 2008 because my book came out just before the last Financial you know the global financial crisis of 2008 and it pretty much predicted that and it became a bestseller because of that but I think that uh that what this guy when when he lines up all of the evidence even if you

think from uh the way it's written that it might be conspiracy theory stuff uh and and not you know maybe it doesn't play out this way but he sure provides a lot of evidence that the game has been set up and the people that usually win are the people that are running the game it's the it's the house in Las Vegas that wins not the individual Gambler and uh by with with the lockdowns we've had and then the big inflation afterwards uh but it was an inflation where wages did not keep up so everybody has been

squeezed and all of that currency that was sent out to people directly that uh helped to cause the inflation that's been used up I think uh um the all of the uh uh mortgage forbearance is ending the student loan forbearance even though they forgave a lot of student loans the rest of them people are expected to make payments on now along with payments on their mortgages uh why in a time where their wages didn't go up or uh they went on to part-time work uh and that hasn't kept up with all of the prices so all

their savings have gotten used up so now they have no savings uh they've they've uh got mortgages and and they're uh they've got a lot of credit card debt student loan debt and then you collapse everything the banks end up with everything and he calls it the great taking and they have uh put uh laws and and regulations in place that allow the brokerage houses to the all of the stocks if you've got stocks in a brokerage account or and bonds assets in a brokerage account those assets aren't

even there in that brokerage account they have been uh hypo reh hypothecated they are in a Clearing House an international clearing house uh and they are not U allocated and segregated uh they there it's just pulled and so those your stock certificates you you you think you've got stocks like a stock certificate with your name on it what you've got is a brokerage account with an IOU for that amount of stock or bonds or whatever and that your stocks have been taken and rehypothecation and

they're in this Clearing House and uh in a crisis that the Clearing House all of those stocks can be used to they are the collateral for all of the derivatives market and the derivatives keep on getting rehypothecation and rehypothecation and that's bigger than world GDP I mean there is no bailout that they can possibly do to you know the risk just gets transferred from direct risk to derivatives risk but it's not gone you may have somebody may think they're smart because they've taken

Insurance out uh you know a brokerage house they've taken Insurance out on interest rate changes so they're hedged on interest rate TR changes but it just transfers the risk to somebody else that's taken the bet in the derivatives market and it's all backed by the collateral of the stock exchange and your home if you've got a loan with the bank and especially if that loan ended up inside of a mortgage back security uh it's everything is at risk and the rules have been changed so that you think you

may own your house and own your stocks but they've been changed so that uh the ultimate uh collateral holder the one that's at uh at the very front of the line when it comes to bankruptcy proceedings that can collect on everything is the big boys and they're called the protected class that's actually what they call them and uh uh companies like JP Morgan Chase are that protected class it's all the big it's it's all the primary dealers that deal with the Federal Reserve they're all

protected and they're the ones that end up with all the cookies if we go into a big deflation and so what I wrote back in 200 five six seven and eight really does seem to be playing out uh there's little twists and stuff and and little a few more little bumps in the roller coaster uh before we get there and it's taking a decade longer to play out than I thought it would but uh here we are I suggest reading the great taking if you go to the great tak.com uh it's available for free on a download you actually Mike now

that you mention it um but this morning uh a friend of mine sent me a text and said hey have you seen this documentary and now I remember that's what it was and uh you know I agree I mean obviously creature from jaal Island Ed Griffin g Edward Griffin mutual friend of ours uh he he he wrote this amazing book that just explained the Federal Reserve System I think if people are listening to this they really want to understand what's going on yes set the conspiracy theory thing aside because it

doesn't matter doesn't matter if you're locked in a room with an elephant and the Elephant hates you the elephant loves you or the elephant doesn't even know you're there if the elephant steps on you you're dead it doesn't make any difference so motives are interesting but what you have to do is really watch that elephant's movements to get some indication of whether you're in danger or not or where to position yourself to avoid the problem and so I think reading

the creature from Jackal Island very helpful we didn't have an income tax we didn't have an IRS we didn't have a Federal Reserve until 1913 so United States got along pretty good up until 1913 and when you understand how the world changed we've been through a number of great recet 1913 was one of them 1933 is a year we all know real well that's when Franklin Bano Roosevelt signed the executive order 6102 took everybody's gold uh and changed the system introduced a new deal and took a

lot of power and Consolidated to the federal government and I think that if you understand that people who are in power of whatever stripe want to have more power consolidate power secure power then if you look at what goes on in the world through that lens everything they do makes sense they might not be Thieves they might think that if they can control everything they can make the world better even for you uh benevolent jailers if you will you may not like it because you want to be free and I think I'm I'm obviously from

that stripe you look behind me I'm having a love there Lady Liberty I mean that's what I'm all about the Bill of Rights I think our Founding Fathers did better than anybody in the history of Earth incred I am going to use that quote benevolent jailers just to let you know you credit so yeah well you know the if you really understand there's an old scripture that says the borrower is servant to the lender and if you understand that basic principle and you understand our entire system is credit

and you are more often than not either the borrower or the collateral you say well I Russ I don't go into debt I understand you don't go into debt but your government goes into debt for you and then through the power to tax you so they issue bonds which is their ability to go into debt and then they they you're the collateral is you and your future earnings that's the game and so when you understand that the system is credit and that you are the collateral and the one thing you will never hear

anybody talk about on financial TV is counterparty risk nobody will ever talk about it so if you listen to Wall Street news and pay attention to all the mainstream guys and all the people that are paying being supported by the advertising for the Wall Street uh businesses and brokerage houses you're going to understand they will never ever ever ever ever talk about counterparty risk Mike which you were talking about where uh the asset you think you're holding is simultaneously somebody else's liability and there's a reason

why the ultimate insiders in currency which are the central banks have been loading up on gold at a faster rate than they ever did since Nixon broke the gold standard back in the 70s there's a reason for that and it's a clue and I think Main Street is starting to figure it out did you see the article uh that came out the other day saying Costco selling something like $100 million a quarter in gold bars I you must have seen that yeah uh but they uh and they do that and a lot of people bought and they ran out well we didn't

run out as a dealer over at goldsilver.com and we will buy it back from you and we can open up storage Accounts at Brinks for you and we can put it in your IRA so uh Costco has it a lot of people have have taken advantage of that and it's good if you want an ounce or two at home they were capped at uh you couldn't buy more than it was two ounces per customer and they sold out immediately yeah kind of like when you have a shortage you know when there's a the pandemic and everybody's trying to

buy toilet paper and think about that for a minute my point about that Mike is not that Costco's the best place to BU gold I'd argue that it isn't and I'd even argue maybe they're not selling the best kind of gold you would want to hold but that's a different just that you make it that easy for the public you put it in front of their face and people that hadn't even thought about it before feel that there is something wrong with the economy right now and they bought that's the point that's the point and

culturally there's a shift right there's people coming in from outside this country that have a different relationship to Gold than Americans and I think there's a lesson there one of the things that I've learned is that everybody around the world thinks about money to different ways or currency two different ways they think about their local currency and they think about the US dollar because the dollar is a World's Reserve currency Americans don't think that way Americans only think

about the dollar and for a long time that was a great Advantage but today I would say it's a disadvantage and the reason is is because it makes us blind to the fact that the dollar is having issues and the rest of the world sees it there's alliances of major countries all working together I don't need to tell you this to get away from the dollar and this is a movement that's been going on for a dozen years since the GFC and they saw how we handled that and how much the fed's balance sheet grew and so the

world is trying to get away from the dollar I'm not saying they're going to succeed or they're going to succeed anytime soon but they're trying and if they were to succeed and I think you need to be prepared for that as a possibility you better have a plan because if your whole life is denominated in dollars if you earn dollars you borrow dollars you invest in dollars you think about value in terms of dollars and the dollar changes you know what are you going to do if you don't understand counterparty risk and

you don't understand currency risk and you're an investor out there like I was this is how it was in 2008 and I didn't understand credit markets those are three things that you really need to understand and when you understand them then you can look at what the big boys are doing Mike to your point and begin to recognize where the threats and where the opportunities are going to be and get repositioned so it's an exciting time now because there's so much chaos and I feel better educated but even more

than being educated I'm excited because I'm connected to people like you people like George gamon Kenny mroy these people I get to hang out with that really play the game at a high level that understand things and we can have these types of conversations so I'm delighted that you decided to have this conversation with me and that we get a chance to talk with your audience so thank you for having me yeah you know you just mentioned uh the big boys and the biggest of the big boys are the

central banks and you were saying that you know people that aren't Americans think about their currency and they think about the US dollar the the other central banks around the world though think about the US dollar and gold they do think about gold they're accumulating gold and the reason is no counterparty risk the dollars have an enormous counterparty risk for all of the world's central banks and that is the reason they're accumulating uh gold is that lack of counterparty risk it's it's

there it doesn't vanish uh dollars spring into existence and vanish every day uh that's the reason I call them currency uh is because you know According to Aristotle and every legitimate Eon Economist since then uh the key functions are medium of exchange a unit of account and a store of value how can it be a store of value if it comes into existence like repurchase agreements that the Federal Reserve does they uh uh type dollars into existence and buy a billion dollars worth of treasuries from a a bank and so those

dollars sprung into existence and it's a billion dollars worth and then the next day the the agreement says that the bank is going to buy back those the the US Treasury for a billion dollars plus a little bit of interest and those dollars vanish when they hit the fed's balance sheet they're gone and so they only stored value for one day and then they're gone and so it's currency it's gold doesn't vanish uh and so uh I you know I really got to thank you Russ this was a tremendous interview

and your insights from going through this yourself you learned from the bad times just like Donald Trump said uh that's when you really learn uh do you have anything else to add about your personal experience and andh what this adds up to and what you look forward to in the future well I I I think that if if I could talk with people out there is just you know preach into the choir a little bit your audience is already kind of sold on gold but I think one of the mistakes a lot of gold investors make is

they think of it as an investment number one and I don't it's money savings and you make investments which generate cash flow something I learned from Robert kosaki the the the second thing is is they they they they they use gold as a trading vehicle and if you really think about the ill logic of that I hate paper currency therefore I'm gonna buy gold cheap and sell it high and end up with what a whole bunch of paper currency right so that's not a good game so you you know you have to really test and say

what am I really thinking and if you denominate your wealth in ounces then you get excited when the price goes down in dollars because it means it's on sale and you can collect more and it changes your whole Paradigm so I think that continue to uh accumulate gold for sure and understand though what it is and what the dollar is and isn't and the other thing uh that I think that many people don't put enough emphasis on is not just their education but their what I call Advisory board so I have uh a 6B

thing that I that I do I have six BS that I evaluate myself on every week and uh the first B is my my brain did I put good ideas in my brain number two my body did I put good food did I take care of my body number three my brand did I behave in a way that people think better of me or Worse number four is my board my Advisory Board who are the smart people that I've added who are the smart people I've spent time with who are the smart people that I'm allowing to speak into my life and to give me new ideas

that I'm willing to be humble in front of and take my problems to if you don't have those people in your life then one of the best goals you could make for 2024 as we approach this new year is to make a strategic plan to get in relationships with the highest caliber people you can possibly spend time with and then budget time and money to spend time with them study books listen to podcast go to seminars socialize with them and just chitchat about what's going on in the world but make a

commitment to do it we are going to need each other more than ever before the pace of change the radical shifts that are going to occur as this you know financial car is fishtailing across the ice it's a slippery slope to mix a whole bunch of metam fores uh I think we're going to really need each other so I encourage people to do that invest in your education invest in your time change your Paradigm uh about gold and then I think that don't get too hung up in the motives of the big guys they

they're going to do what they're going to do they're not calling Mike they're not calling me they don't care maybe our vote counts maybe it doesn't I don't know you know you should still vote but at the end of the day you vote with your pocketbook and you can opt out of their system by getting out of the banking system by getting out of the credit system by having no counterparty risk on a major chunk of your uh wealth storage which would be gold and so don't worry

about the price just collect ounces and the more you have the happier you're going to be in my opinion not giving you Financial advice I'm just telling you if I could go back in time if I would have done this be a lot different I'm also keeping a lot of cash uh you know the paper Federal Reserve notes so Gold Silver and cash because the cash can't vanish and in a deflation it's gaining in value it's gaining in purchasing value and bullets and bullets right I'm telling

you if the world goes to you know you're going to be you know hey I'll trade you I'll trade you you know a box of 9 millimeter for a steak I'm going to buy more bullets than Robert teaches the 5gs that what you really want is ground grub gas guns and gold if you've got the 5gs you're doing well so Russ what was the best thing that you learned in the Bahamas when we were there for the collective I would say that smart people can look at the same situations or a different set of eyes you know Brent

Johnson was there brilliant guy and George gamman who I just think is amazing and uh Brent has his dollar milkshake Theory and he's not really concerned about dollar weakness in fact makes the argument that the dollar is strong and I have respect for both those guys and from their perspective uh they're right it is strong when you compare it to the dxy right the other six currencies or whatever it is in that in that index C in the way I explained it in the Bahamas was that if you got a A bunch of people that all jump out of a

airplane together and they're pegged they're holding hands they're going to fall equally but if one person pulls their shoot first in this case raises interest rates first their currency goes way up and they look like they're going up relative to everybody else who's falling faster but the barometer of movement isn't each other because you're all falling it's the ground and the ground is solid it does not move and so when you look at the dollar against the barometer of gold which does not move

you realize that the go dollar is weak the dollar is weak against gold it's weak against Real Estate it's against weak against the things that that are real and so it doesn't make Brent and George wrong they're right because they're in the game of investing for dollars in paper asset markets maybe maybe not George so much but Brent but I can see both sides of it and so I think what I learned is that it's okay for me to disagree or have a different perspective than um than than even

really really smart people and so I encourage people when you're out there and you're having the conversations don't just assume because somebody has a podcast or wrote a book that they're smarter than you are you're probably smarter than you realize so just trust your own judgment so for me that that was a fun takeaway and I think somebody told me that George actually quoted that that explanation of jumping out of the airplane on one of his podcasts and gave me a shout so that was that was pretty

cool yeah um you know uh gold has lost nine the dollar has lost 99% of its value against gold since uh Roosevelt took us off of you know gold used to be uh the dollar used to be worth one 12th of an ounce of gold now it is worth one 12,000th of an ounce of gold so Russ uh where can people find you what what's your website and well I appreciate that Mike you know you've inspired me I've been been reading your book I'm gonna I'm gonna promote it one more time folks if you've not read this book read it and

like I said study it uh and so I decided I wanted to write a book and I am going to title it gold wealth uh my working title is gold real estate and real wealth and to to share the things that I've learned about putting the two together and what I wish I would have known in 2008 so folks want to get on the advanced notice list and maybe even be part of my guinea pig group that I float ideas to just send an email to Gold Russell gray.com gold russell.com I'll put you on the list and when the

book's out I'll let you know thanks Russ it's been great having you is there any last thing you want to say guys just keep listening to the great Mike Maloney Mike thank you so much for your work you have changed so many lives you've inspired so many people including me now I get to go write a book you this you know I hope I don't have to work as hard on it as you did but I I hope it's popular and when it's done I'll send you an advanced copy maybe if you like it you can give me a a

little endorsement okay thanks a lot and we'll see you next time thank you