[00:00] You mentioned how in the last 50 years, incomes gone up 6x, but the cost of a car's gone up 8x, the cost of a house 12x, 20x, education, 20x.
[00:12] Doesn't that worry you? We're talking about the state of the US economy. How is the average person getting poorer and poorer? Is that concerning to you? It's more than concerning. It is going to destroy so many people.
[00:26] And I didn't tell you the worst part about that. So I told you how the median income has gone up 6x. But you know what else has changed between the 1970s and now? Today, the median household income is based off of two people working, the man and the woman work in 2026.
[00:40] In 1970s, the early 1970s, it was just a man. And so when we look at now how the economy has changed, it went from a one-income household in the early 1970s to now a two-income household.
[00:52] Despite the change in two-income households, incomes have not kept up with the price growth of things, and they have not even closely kept up with the price growth of assets. So now when you say does that concern me absolutely, it is going to be a very painful realization at some point
[01:07] for the United States. When, I don't know. But they're trying to... Let me say painful, painful realization. What do you mean exactly? Are you going down the path of right value that this could lead to instability?
[01:20] Or you're not that worried? It's a part of our economic system. It will happen. Nobody knows when. I mean, you can worry about dying every single day because one day we're all going to die.
[01:33] But instead, you choose to live healthy that we can extend your lifespan and enjoy the days that you're here. So, you know, downturns happen that are part of our economy.
[01:45] We saw a very bad downturn in 2020, which was really supplemented by the Fed. We saw another really bad downturn in 2008. We saw a bad downturn in 2000. We saw a bad downturn in the 1970s. We saw a bad downturn in the Great Depression era.
[01:59] We will get through it, but there will be a period of economic pain. And as we continue to print more money, as we continue to have a bigger divide between the rich and the poor, those two things go hand in hand.
[02:11] The money printing is what causes inflation. Inflation is the reason why there's such a smaller middle class. Inflation is the reason why the rich keep getting richer and everybody else keeps getting poorer.
[02:24] And as the reason why, when you have these market swings and downturns, they're going to continue to become more volatile and bigger downturns. So, what I'm worried about when I referenced Ray Daly
[02:37] is not the downturn that has every X number of years and it's part of the cycle. It's more that gap that is widening between the rich and the poor, that inequality. So, I'm looking at it more from a social aspect
[02:50] that if this is not addressed and it doesn't look like it's going to be addressed, then I worry it could lead to something more than just a downturn. That's what I meant by instability. Well, yes, I mean, we've seen it happen
[03:04] in countries around the world. You can take a look at what has happened in Venezuela and the past. You can take a look at what has happened in many countries, the Weimar Republic. And so, this is where if a country
[03:16] just continues printing money on a thin air, there's going to be ultimately a breaking point. When does that breaking point? Well, we don't know. Luckily, the United States is still the world's strongest economy, the world's largest economy, has the world's reserve currency.
[03:30] So, we have a lot of things going for it. We have the world's strongest military. We have a lot of natural resources. Again, there's always going to be worries about this Doomsday scenario.
[03:43] But there's a lot of things working in favor of the United States as well. And those are the things you want to understand. I mean, Doomsday is inevitable if you keep printing money. But again, even that will be something that people can get through.
[03:55] And this is where, you know, really, it's like, well, what do you do? And so, there's the political stuff and then there's your educating people through your channel. You're trying to meet people aware. Maybe something get scared and say,
[04:07] all right, let me give a money in order that way I can have assets. You know, and so it's like, everybody has their part. For me, I run a company, briefs, finance. We're publishing our free newsletter, market briefs. We have, you know, tools to help people start managing their money and start building their wealth.
[04:21] That's, you know, what we're trying to do is try to show people that through your financial education, through your financial knowledge, you can start to learn how to protect your assets, build your own wealth, because if you rely on the government to make you wealthy,
[04:36] that's not a very proven path to financial freedom. Are you diversifying away from the US in any way and has that accelerated recently?
[04:48] Yeah, there's a few places where I invest my money. Not biggest investment is my business, briefs, finance. But then I invest my money in physical real estate and invest my money in stocks actively and passively.
[05:01] Then I invest my United States, but I also have funds that are international. I invest my money into what I call speculative investments. My speculative investments are startups and crypto.
[05:14] And then I have a little bit of physical gold. Hey, you're playing with crypto. Nice, okay. What crypto just bit coin or you're a bit more risk of us?
[05:26] Yeah, I have some Bitcoin. I have a little bit of Ethereum and by causing many, many years ago, got me into XRP. Interesting. When I first started my business, money was going in and out and I had no way
[05:39] of knowing where the money was going, which meant I had no way of knowing how much money I could pay myself. The problem wasn't how much money I was making. The problem was I wasn't tracking where the money was going. And that's where using a specialized business bank
[05:53] and account like our sponsor Relay is so powerful because that's exactly what they specialize in. Relay is an online business banking platform that's built specifically for small business owners that want to organize their money.
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[06:18] one account for your profits, and one account to pay you. Plus, your team can get their own individual logins with different permission levels. That means your bookkeeper, your assistant and your business partner can have access to the things that they need to see. So what that means for you as a business owner
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[06:45] and you can automate that process. So if you want to learn more or open up a business bank account with a sponsor Relay, all you have to do is scan the QR code on the screen or I have the link for you down in the description. And your thoughts is one question on crypto.
[06:57] Crypto's obviously going through its 4-year cycle. How do you view crypto as a good hedge, a good store of value? If you look at Bitcoin alone, is it becoming more and more of a store of value or still too speculative and volatile?
[07:10] Speculative. It's part of my speculative investments. It's a very small piece of my portfolio. I'll tell you a little story about crypto in my experience with it. So I started buying Bitcoin. I started talking about it on YouTube,
[07:23] 2017 when it was about $3,000 of the coin. And so that was when I started buying it. Again, for me, it was a part of my speculative investments. No idea what's going to come of it.
[07:35] I understand the purpose, decentralized, store of value, global currency. And so I started buying it then. And I sold a big chunk of it during its highs in 2024.
[07:51] A little bit before it hit that $100,000 part. So I was selling it there because it had ballooned from this small piece of my entire portfolio. It's now being worth a lot more because I was buying it when it was very cheap.
[08:03] And the reason why I started selling it was because it was a speculative piece of my portfolio and had it run up significantly. Could Bitcoin go to a million? Sure, maybe could it go down to 2000? Yeah, absolutely.
[08:15] And so because I saw this huge run up, I said, well, this is a good opportunity for me to take this Bitcoin and go out and turn it into real estate that pays me with income every single month because that's how my portfolio is structured. So for me, it is a speculative investment.
[08:29] It's kind of like, it's a little bit of fun. And I've been able to have these speculative investments now because I have built my more established investments, my business, my real estate, my stocks. But for me, I look at it as something speculative.
[08:43] It could be what it is intended to be. President Trump is obviously trying to push for the United States being the crypto capital of the world. He's trying to push for stable coins
[08:55] has tried to add legitimacy to Bitcoin. But it's speculative. Still at the end of the day. You didn't buy any Trump coin just, Pete? I have not.
[09:09] Well, how about gold? What's your position on gold? It just seems everyone I speak to is extremely bullish and makes you really good argument on my gold. There's a really good hedge. The argument is really solid. All countries are printing money.
[09:21] A lot of countries are a massing gold. And gold has been a store of value for, I don't know how many years. Yeah, look, I started buying gold before it became popular. I started buying it before the pandemic.
[09:33] It's about 2% of my portfolio. Let me tell you my story with gold. I come, my family is from a state in India called Punjab. And in India, people buy, when they have extra money,
[09:45] rupees, they turn it into gold. The reason is in India inflation, although people don't necessarily understand the concept of inflation, they know how it works because India has seen very high inflation.
[09:57] So if you have X amount of rupees today, in a couple of years, it's gonna have way less buying power. People intuitively understand that because they've seen it in the daily lives and that inflation is so significant.
[10:10] So when people in India have money, they go out and turn that into gold as like a way to save money. And so that was just something that is something I've seen.
[10:24] So I started buying a little bit of gold as I started to grow my portfolio. And I said, okay, I'm gonna have a little bit of this physical gold. But I also like to study history. And so now what we saw, this 2020, the money printer
[10:36] gets turned on by the Federal Reserve Bank. Interest grades are cut and gold starts to skyrocket. Why? Because people are wanting a hedge against the dollar. Well, then inflation starts to become a bigger problem.
[10:48] D dollarization becomes a bigger concern of countries trying to leave the dollar. And China says, okay, we're gonna try to compete against the United States. We're gonna work to build the BRICS alliance,
[11:01] Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, which has now expanded to about 20 countries as a way to compete against the United States dollar. These BRICS countries said, we're gonna try to compete against the dollar by acquiring more gold to strengthen our currencies.
[11:15] All that's happening now, but it's happening, especially because of the money printing in 2020. Gold goes up when there's concerns about inflation. Gold goes up when there's concerns about the dollar.
[11:27] Gold goes up when there's concerns about the economy. If those concerns go away, we've seen gold prices fall pretty hard. If you take a look at the 2008 crash, the great recession hit and quantitative easing happens.
[11:42] Ben Bernacchi at the Federal Reserve Bank announces quantitative easing. We're gonna print a historic amount of money, stimulate the economy, cut interest rates, and people said, oh, what's gonna happen to the dollar?
[11:55] Gold prices skyrocketed between 2008 to 2009 to 2010 to 2011. To 2012, gold was just booming. It was the best asset out there at the time.
[12:07] But then 2012 came and what happened in 2012? The economy started to really turn around. We listed prices had bottomed out. They're starting to go up again in 2012. The stock market is now back up. The economy is moving again.
[12:20] Jobs are coming back and people said, oh, okay, it looks like the economy is not gonna collapse and it looks like the dollar is not gonna collapse. You know what happened to gold? Gold prices crashed. They crashed in 2012. They stayed down for 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017,
[12:34] 2018, 2019 until 2020. What happened in 2020? The money printer was turned back on. The concerns came back. Gold prices boomed again. Now gold is having its field day because money printing
[12:48] and inflation have been the talk of the town since the pandemic. But if that gets under control, if I can just say, if we don't know what's gonna happen, but if that gets under control,
[13:01] gold prices might come back to Earth too. I'm telling you this has somebody who owns gold. 2% of the portfolio. 2% of the portfolio. Yeah, there's 2% of the portfolio.
[13:15] But I look at gold as a way to save hard money rather than an investment because it doesn't actually produce any value. You mentioned the breaks. What's your perception of them? Are there an actual threat to US hegemony
[13:27] and the hegemony of the US dollar? Well, anything can be a threat to the dollar. But I think people are... It has also become sensationalized.
[13:39] There is concern. 100% there's concern. But I think it's become sensationalized to the idea that people think that it's going to collapse the dollar in 2026 or 2027 or 2028.
[13:51] But we are not that close to it happening. I agree. That's a very, very, very long process.
[14:03] I mean, if you really want to quantify it, you can take a look at how the world stores their wealth. And the United States is the world's observer currency
[14:15] and currently we've seen over the last 25 years. The world keep less reserves of the United States dollars, about 25 years ago and around 2000,
[14:27] about 75, 78% of the world reserves were kept in dollars. Today, it's in the 55, 56%. So it's fallen, but 25 years ago,
[14:39] 0% of the world reserves were kept in the Chinese yuan. Today it's about 2%. So there's still a huge gap between where China's yuan dominance is
[14:53] and where the United States dollar is. And people are point to get, hey, the Chinese yuan is gaining traction, but yes, sure, it is. But for this idea that the United States dollar is going to collapse,
[15:07] not happening today. Will it happen? Could it happen? Sure. But if you try to attach a timeline to it, it's hard to say that that's going to happen around the corner. It gets people clicks though,
[15:20] saying the US is about to collapse or US dollar is about to collapse. Kind of bringing it back to what we started with, and that's where the markets are at now. What's your overview of where the markets are at today
[15:34] and how they're reacted to the world? I know you made the point very clearly at the beginning. That doesn't really matter when it comes to the strategy of always be buying. But for those that are curious away from an investment perspective, just understand the markets.
[15:47] Well, I'm going to put it this way. Our economy runs on spending. The stock market is a reflection of people's belief
[15:59] of where the economy is going to go. And the biggest spender, remember our economy runs on spending. The biggest spender on our economy is not you or me. It's not in video or SpaceX.
[16:11] It's the United States government. Well, the president has an agenda to see a booming stock market. Because he really wants to see a successful presidency in his eyes,
[16:28] a successful presidency in one way would be measured through a booming stock market. So we know that that's what he wants. The threat to the stock market is going to be the Federal Reserve Bank.
[16:42] Because now, Kevin Worsh, the new chairman at the Federal Reserve Bank has to figure out how he's going to deal with inflation with President Trump also wanting lower interest rates.
[16:55] So if the Fed were to come in and just are jacking up interest rates because inflation becomes a problem, then that's going to put downward pressure on the stock market. But at the same time, what the president wants to see a booming stock market.
[17:07] And again, people are going to call it market manipulation, which sure it absolutely is. But I'm just telling you what's happening. Last year, 2025, President Trump took billions of tax dollars
[17:20] by the Intel stock, not President Trump directly, but we're talking about the government, the United States government. The United States government went out and bought stock in the MP material stock. The United States government has bought,
[17:33] I think it's we're at five different publicly traded companies now. And the Treasury Secretary, Scott Percent, has talked about how there could be more of this happening.
[17:47] So when we talk about where is the stock market going to go, the logical person is going to say, we're going to take a look at price to earnings ratios.
[17:59] We're going to take a look at the profitability of companies. We're going to look at how corporate earnings are growing. And if you look at that, if you take a look at a snapshot, you'll say you'll see that, hey, corporate earnings are actually doing really good.
[18:12] But if you take a little bit deeper, you'll see, oh, corporate earnings are really good for the magnificent seven, like the NVIDIAs and the Alphabets and those companies. But for the other companies, they're not so good.
[18:27] So the AI companies have been seeing a big growth of AI spending, which might be slowing down because of higher interest rates. That's the concern. The other companies in the economy are not booming
[18:39] the way that the rest of the tech part of the economy is. So you could take a look at that. And now you can start to come up with your own analysis. And now you, as a logical person, can say,
[18:51] there are concerns in the economy. But the market can be illogical longer than you can be liquid. And what that means is the market can do things that make no sense.
[19:05] And if you are playing your money based off of logic, just logic, well, you can lose because guess what? The Federal Reserve Bank has a money printer that you cannot compete against.
[19:17] The government has the ability to spend money in a way that you can't compete against. And I call it that the X-Factor. And that X-Factor makes a lot of illogical things happen. Now, that doesn't mean that markets are immune from going down and the market crashes can't happen.
[19:30] But what that means is, as an investor, you have to be able to understand the full scope of things, which is why, again, trying to time the market is such a difficult game, trading is such a difficult game.
[19:43] Because now you're trying to use logic with how the market can be illogical. But what we do know is that over the long term, the market does situate itself and figure it out.
[19:58] Which means, over the long term, we do see markets grow. And so the goal isn't trying to time what's going to happen tomorrow or next month, but just keep buying.
[20:10] Well, explain, well, just pray it's, again, pleasure like last time. Thank you so much for giving us your time. And what was the YouTube channel, again, called? Yeah, well, thank you again, Mario. It was a lot of fun. You asked really good questions.
[20:22] That's why I enjoy talking to you. So I appreciate time. I'm a YouTube channel is minority mindset. And we have a free newsletter for investors called market briefs. I appreciate your time, Jaspreet.
[20:35] Thank you so much. Thank you. President Trump's new Fed chair just gave his first speech and he went against President Trump. And he said, not only are we not going to cut interest rates right now,
[20:47] but we're probably not going to cut interest rates at all in 2026. And we might even have to raise interest rates before the year ends. That news came as a shock to the Fed.