I hope I'm wrong, but I think we're heading for a global depression,
I mean, people are depressed.
The economy stays down, it's hard to come back up.
And now the good news is, that for those who are prepared for it,
like you, you'll do better, because the best time to start a business
is right after a crash.
I made more money after 2008 than ever in my whole entire life.
All the bargains are going to be on the street, you know what I mean.
It's going to be bargains everywhere, but everyone else is, “oh, you’re pessimistic”.
No, I'm actually optimistic.
Guys who start right after our crash do very well, most of the time.
So let me ask you, the average person who is watching this right
now, “ok, Robert, I'm not like you,
I don't run a company, I don't have a brand,
I haven’t sold forty one million copies, I don't have oil,
I don't have rental properties, what do I do to be prepared for a time like
this?
Well, first of all, everybody can do something, but they won't,
and that's the problem.
And I think the problem with many Americans is they’re complacent,
they expect, it'll heal itself again.
So the thing everybody can do is, you know, like,
as I covered in “Fake”, my first investment was a gold coin
in Hong Kong about a krugerrand.
I was flying off an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, and I went to Hong Kong and I bought a gold
kruggerand.
The date was 1972, the reason the dates are important,
is because in 1972 it was illegal for Americans to own gold.
So I had to smuggle that little puppy into America,
I put it in my pocket, came off the ship and nobody checked,
but I felt like a criminal as I smuggled this gold coin,
because it was illegal for Americans to own gold
after 1933 under Roosevelt.
But that gold coin today is worth almost two thousand dollars.
Because I understand money, quantitative counterfeiting,
and zero interest rates, I don't trust the dollar.
So for most of my life I've saved gold and silver,
so I have millions in gold coins and silver coins,
I just kept saving it because, I don't trust the dollar.
So everybody can buy a silver coin today for 20 bucks,
a silver eagle is 20 bucks, but how many people will go to a coin shop
and buy it?
Probably none.
Less than one tenth of one percent of Americans own precious metals,
and silver today is 50 percent below its all time high,
so silver is the biggest bargain sitting in the market as we speak today.
It's about 20 bucks, it should go to 50, so at 20 bucks,
and I tell my friends, they go, ”oh, I’ll think about it”,
that's the problem.
So everybody can afford 20 bucks, you know kids can afford 20 bucks,
the thing is people won’t do it, and you know that too,
when you deal with people.
Most people are pretty sedentary, they want to do the same all day,
“I’m happy, nothing's gonna happen, they just trying to scare me”.
But I was talking to my doctor last night, you know what he says,
“you've been saying this stuff for 25 years, I never listen to you”.
You should have gold and you should have silver, you should have
museum quality artwork and real estate,
income producing real estate.
I have a friend in Panama, he has an avocado farm,
so he’s sitting in Panama growing avocados,
that's because people have to eat, another guy is,
friend of mine is growing blueberries.
But another friend of mine, he is from Seattle,
he had a big house, his kids all moved out,
so he converted the kids bedrooms into one bedroom apartments.
So he put a kitchen and he put a toilet inside his little bedrooms,
and so he now rents out four bedrooms, he's making more money today than ever before
because a lot of workers commute to Seattle,
so they come in, they check in, they come in on Sunday night,
the check out Friday afternoon.
That little house is making more money.
And there's something you should know about, the technology, all these cameras,
okay, it's called the Lindy effect, Nassim Taleb wrote about it,
he says, “Anything that's been new in the last 20
years, will be gone in 20 years,
what's going to survive is old”.
So everybody thinks, “well technology is going to make it”,
what survives is old, the reason gold and silver will survive
is cause it's old.
Bitcoin may not survive, cause it’s new.
So I'm not saying, I'm not telling you what to buy,
I am just telling you how to think.
So Nassim Taleb, has a book called “Antifragile” which
is good, and he is a smart guy,
but he writes about how we in school
are raising snowflakes, you have to have safe rooms,
and can’t trigger, can’t say anything, so we're raising a bunch of snowflakes.
And he says, “the guy that's going to survive is
somebody who is not fragile, antifragile”.
So what he says is this, “whatever doesn't kill you,
will make you stronger”.
So he says when you go to the gym and you pump weights,
you push 100 pounds, that means the next time you're pushing 105.
So bad times will make the strong stronger.
There is something everybody can do, like I said, everybody can buy
a $20 silver piece, everybody can afford 20 bucks,
but will they do it?
No, they’ll be at starbucks sucking it down instead.
So the point is everybody can do something, but you've got to figure out what you can
do.