Welcome to The Wiggin Sessions. This is episode 64, it's hard to believe. Today, we have Mark Moss with us. He's going to help us understand how to survive and thrive in the post-pandemic economy for 2021 going into 2022, and also, we're going to talk about an event in Miami that's coming up on November 15th.

Mark is an interesting entrepreneur and business coach, right? ? You're helping other entrepreneurs get started too, and relate those experiences to investing. So, I'll let you riff on your own background. We've never met in person, but we have many colleagues in common. You come well recommended and you just told me before you started that you'd been reading our newsletters.

Yeah. I've been an entrepreneur investor for my whole career. The lines of the entrepreneur, business owner, investor get very blurred. Started out in real estate. I was fixing and flipping homes, over 150 homes. Was I an investor, business owner, right? It gets pretty blurred. Did really well with that. I started a couple businesses. I started an e-commerce business at the bottom of the dotcom crash. I had a high-tech medical equipment business and I learned how to make a lot of money and I was doing really well.

I sold those businesses. I had a Fortune 500 exit and I was just all-in on real estate. I was developing real estate from the ground up, eight figure projects. When 2008 came, I got pretty much wiped out. So that's kind of the story. My beautiful success story ended with tragedy. I had to kind of take a hard look at things, and I realized like, "Shoot, I'm pretty good at making money, but what is this whole financial casino thing going on that I don't really know about? There's something missing that I don't get."

While a lot of people never recovered from that, I just figured I had to figure this out, and so I just dug deep and started investing in my own education. Some of your newsletters were some of those things that really were working well for me. I think probably the majority of what I've learned has been through financial newsletters over the last dozen years or so. You get the play-by-play as it goes along. I had to figure out what this financial casino was about. I kind of started to learn about hard money and gold, kind of became a gold bug, and kind of went down that path.

As I kind of learned about that more, pulled myself out of the hole, was able to kind of rebuild my career, my assets, and so forth. For about the last seven years now, I've been kind of giving back and taking my own market analysis and kind of giving that back to the world and helping them kind of understand, make sense of what's going on in this world today, how to navigate it properly, how to protect themselves from it.

Well, that's one of the things that I find interesting about your story, is a lot of the ideas that you're bringing to the table, a lot of the discussions you're having with people are based on your experience, the experience of going through 2008, which, that's common for a lot of us, but you are able to kind of translate it into advice for people who are new in the markets or maybe they're trying to figure out the financial casino, like you say, or they're just trying to put pieces together for their own investment portfolio. Right now, yours is based on experience, and that's something that we always say at Agora, that's what's more important than anything else. You can read a lot of books, you can read a lot of newsletters, but experiences really are what drives things. I find your story interesting in that respect.

I want to talk about two things. One, the event down in Miami is called Market Disruptors. If you can talk about why that's important to you, that concept. That's something that we talk about a lot, especially in the technology sector. We talk about the disruption that goes on and it's all over the place because of social media. So, let’s discuss that a bit and then move on to what you see as an energy crisis that's already underway. I have some specific questions about Germany shutting off their nuclear power plants, Lake Mead being down to 30% of its capacity. There's a lot of people that consume energy, and the whole system is being taxed right now. But let's start with Market Disruptors, because I like that concept and you can talk about it a little bit, how it's going to apply, and then what the event's about, because it sounds really interesting to me.

Yeah. So, as I was trying to come back from the 2008 crash that crashed me personally, I, again dug deep into my own education and I learned a concept that I've really hung onto and it just kind of changed everything for me. That concept is that money is like energy. It doesn't disappear, it transfers. So I thought, "Shoot, that means that I lost my wealth and somebody else got it." I may not be the most competitive person in the world, but that didn't really sit really well with me. I figured, "Shoot, I need to figure this out," and so I vowed to myself and to my family that this would never happen again. I was going to figure this out, and I wanted to figure these wealth transfers out and I wanted to be on the receiving end. I wanted to be on the receiving end of the wealth transfer moving forward. For the last dozen years, I've kind of studied this phenomenon and the types of events, the type of market cycles that cause these wealth transfers to happen. As you just said, technology cycles are great for transferring wealth, especially what I call technological revolutions. So new technologies like iPhones, I mean that's cool, but a technological revolution is different. I'm talking about the industrial revolution, steam engines and steel, electricity, oil, automobiles, and so forth. Every time we have one of those, there's a new set of people getting rich. And so that's one of them. Obviously times of volatility, like we're dealing with right now, energy crisis, as you've talked about, those are dangerous for a lot of people but they also represent massive opportunities to have that wealth transfer to you if you're on the right side of it.

Then, also, like you said, technology is that and there's kind of that creative destruction. Something new kills the old way. That's that Market Disruptors event. All of these things are disruptions in the market. If you read them properly, if you position yourself properly, I believe they can be massive opportunities for you instead of wiping you out like what happened to me. This, right now what we're going through, is kind of all of those wrapped into one. We kind of have this perfect storm that's been brewing. On an 80-year timeframe we can see right now the financial system's ready to be reset. On a 50-year cycle, we can see technological revolutions happen. And so, we're there right now. So we have this new technology, it's disrupting markets. The financial markets are being disrupted. At the same time, we have all these political things, which we can talk about, that then lead into more financial things like energy. And so it's dangerous, but there's also opportunity.

So, I wanted to have an event. I put together about 15 speakers who focus on different parts of the market and basically have them answer two questions. One, what do they think is going to happen over the next couple years? And two, what are they doing about it, or what should you be doing about it? I thought that was just really important because we're at this really, really dangerous time, but a tremendous opportunity. I'm not a doom and gloom guy. I do think the next couple years are probably going to get worse, but I see massive hope and prosperity on the other side. If we can use this time to get ahead, we can have a tremendous life in front of us, and so that's why I put the event together.

This goes beyond just money and finance, although it is all together. I believe that we should be looking at freedom as an asset. I believe we should be looking at health as an asset, and especially in today's day and age, our freedom's under attack, our health is under attack, and so I think it's important to look at that a little bit more holistically. We have people that are kind of leading the world, the World Economic Forum, guys like Mark Carney who have massive influence and they've written books, then told us what they think the world is going to be like, what their goal is. And so I think it's important to understand that and look at that holistically.

We're going to have people talking about everything from what they see happening politically and financially, of course. How to build your wealth, and so different strategies, what's going on in the bond market, the stock market, cryptocurrencies, but also how to protect your wealth. Asset protection strategies, how to build cash flow, things like that. And then even into health and freedom. I have Dr. Joe Mercola coming to talk about health and censorship in today's day and age of this pandemic kind of world, and then into plan B stuff, so passports, offshore destinations, onshore plan Bs and stuff like that. Really everything that you need from A to Z, from understanding what's going on, how to build your wealth, how to protect your wealth and then how to protect your health and your freedom, all of that together in one event.

Yeah. Well, I think it doesn't hold weight at all. And if you have a basic understanding of what money is, then you can understand that they can't just create that from thin air. Anytime you have a group of people who have to work for wages and another group of people that have a money printer, it leads to slavery every single time. We've seen this happen over and over throughout history. So this Modern Monetary Theory, it can't really work. And like I said, I think it's really caused these distortions that we have today. You talked about the Fed with their six and a half trillion dollars in 2020, it's whatever, somewhere in that range.

You dump that into the market. And then what do you think is going to happen? Typically high prices are the cure for high prices. So prices go up, two things happen. One, people buy less of those things. Two, manufacturers would rise to make more of those things but when you dump in the money, the people don't care about high prices, they keep buying more things. Also inflation has run so high that the manufacturers can't really produce more of those things. And then because of that money printer, because of all that money, it's most of that money, you reference the three and a half trillion or maybe the two trillion dollars, most of that goes to government bloat, right? Pork, if you would call it that. And so it allows that government to get bigger and bigger and then what do they do? Well, they start passing more policies like, oh, people in this certain class of people shouldn't be allowed to work anymore, things like that. And that just only makes the problem even worse.

Yeah, for sure. Over a year ago I made a video. When I was in California, there were rolling blackouts happening. At the time, this was September 2020, I was down in Mexico in a town with one paved road. The rest is all dirt roads. And in California, there were rolling blackouts, in Mexico there was no problem with power blackouts. And so I made this video and I said, what's happening in California is coming for the rest of the country and it's coming for the world. Now that was somewhat prophetic. But I said, the reason why I know this is because it's being caused by policies. So in California, trying to be kind of the leader, the example, they said, let's shut down all the fossil fuels. They shut down natural gas, they shut down nuclear. And let's move to renewables, wind and solar. But they didn't build the wind and solar, didn't replace it. And so then we found ourselves with shortages. And so I knew that because it was policy. It was a government policy that caused that problem.

And as those policies continue to be put in place throughout Europe, throughout the whole world, we're continuing to see more and more of that problem. And so it's both, it's a money problem and it's a policy problem. I think the money problem causes the policy problem.

Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a man-made crisis. So we've known how to make energy and we've known how to make electricity for a long time. It's easy to do. The only reason that anybody would ever be short of it today is because of policies that were put in place. So it's definitely manmade. And I think it's unfortunate, if you look at the way things are going today, most of the people that are driving these policies, I think there's two things, but I think first off their aim is not human flourishment. Their aim is to try to turn the world back to its original state, which of course is not habitable. People freeze to death or die of heat stroke, famines, floods, etc. And it's only through our management of the world that we've made it a good place to live.

And so I think they're not focused on human flourishment because if they were, they would realize that access to cheap, abundant energy is what creates human flourishment. And as you bring people out of poverty, they consume less. Instead of burning wood for fuel, which is the worst you could do, they would move to clean natural gas. And so really it's the ability of people to move up that really affects that. It's what allowed the United States to lower its carbon emissions by 30% over the last decade. And then of course we can discuss science if that even matters.

But all the things that they're looking at, I think it really comes down to somehow they think we need to turn the world back to its original place. Now I say that's also due in part to the money. And that's partly because what happens is if you look at like the eight stages of the decline of an empire, like a 250 year empire, you'll see that after affluence, you kind of go to the age of enlightenment, and people go to full-time academia, they go to full-time politics. And those people don't really live in the real world. And so they start making policies that have no real grounding in what the world needs. And so they're making decisions without understanding what that is. And so they start to control how the power companies work, the energy companies work, and that causes even more problems.

Yeah. So that's really a question of the stakeholders. If you're a full-time politician, what do you gain? I ask one of my colleagues this all the time, because he listens to a podcast and he comes up with different theories on how things work and I'm perpetually perplexed by what it is. What's the incentive for politicians to make dumb decisions. But what's their incentive? What do they get out of it? There's an academic theory on that, called public choice where you advance a certain policy like this climate change agenda so that you can continue to get votes because it becomes a popular thing.

And then that gives you more power. There's a whole school of thought there. But I still don't get it. I don't get what the motive of wanting ... the way you phrased it is to return the world to its natural state or something like that. It's funny, just this last week we were writing about Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And he wrote in one of his seminal works called The Solitary Traveler and his idea was that society itself was broken and the only way to return to a virtuous life was to live in the wilderness and get out of society entirely. And I remember reading that and thinking, well, yeah, that's good for one person at a time. Like if you want to go live as a hermit, you could go do that. But that's not how society functions.

Yeah. And I'm kind of far removed, but not that far removed. My dad grew up on a farm in Iowa. My grandfather obviously grew up on a farm. And that was a little bit far removed, but anybody who's actually seen or actually tried to experience living off the land, it's not an easy life. Good luck. You'll spend all your time trying to provide food and shelter for yourself. And so we've ... as humankind, we've evolved past that where we don't have to spend all of our time trying to stay alive anymore. And now we can focus on higher level things like creating medicine and creating computers and things like that. And so for anybody that thinks the goal would be to go back to live off the land, I just think they're just so far detached from the real world. They've never really understood what that means to live off the land. And then how backward ... that's where we came from. We would have no progress. If all we had to do was figure out how to stay alive on a daily basis.

And then they talk about the earth temperature going up by one degree or some say 2.4 or something like that. I mean, shoot, I'm from California. That's a desert. Like in Arizona next door, it's 125 degrees in the summer. And people move there in droves. They have air conditioning. And I think one or two degrees is not going to hurt them at all. They've already moved there when it's 125 degrees. So with enough technology, we can manage things to make them better. And I think that's an important thing to understand.

And like I said, also by bringing people up, like we've increased our food supply, we've brought people into the cities, and they live cleaner. There's less attacks on the earth. As a matter of fact, we're getting more green spaces in the world as people leave the pastures and the farmlands and move to the cities. And so we've seen a positive impact. But some people, I think, are still left on this old way of thinking and I think it's partly to do with what you were talking about with the politicians, what's in it for them. I think there's two parts to that. I think some people nowadays start teaching kids this in school. It's really this fear-based system where one, you're a bad person; two, you live in a bad world; and three, everything we do is bad for the earth. We're teaching them this as a kid and so a lot of people have been raised to just think that and they believe that to be true. But I think then there's also people, maybe the Klaus Schwab or in the World Economic Forum, and the Mark Carneys of the world who probably just want to use this tool of fear to get more control.

I think that goes back to more control. So if you really want to control a nation, I mean, control their energy. The money, the energy, the food, those are the three attack vectors. And so, if you can't control the energy directly, then you could at least tax it. I think what we're seeing in this culture across the world is that there's this virtue signaling. People pretending to be this virtuous, this good person without really doing anything. And a lot of the carbon credits we see are what they call greenwashing. Companies will still continue to just do everything that they were doing before, but now they go by these carbon credits and they feel so much better about themselves. And all this money is now going to these carbon credits when they could have probably just used some of that money to clean up the processes that they were doing, for example.

Warren Buffet's partner, Charlie Munger says that, "You show me the incentives, I show you the outcome." And so this is kind of like this cobra effect, if you know that story. That India had too many cobras. They said, "Hey, we'll pay you if you go pick up the cobras." People did. Then, people wanted more money so they started raising cobras. Then India is like, "Dude, what the heck? You're raising all these cobras. This is stupid. We're ending the program." Then, all those people that were raising the cobras just let them all go. Then, the problem was worse than when it started.

And so, these unintended consequences. You do this thing like carbon credits, what they thought is like cigarettes. If we put this huge tax on cigarettes, people will smoke less. And so they thought, "Hey, if we put a tax on emitting carbon, people we'll emit carbon less." But really what we've seen is companies have just bought these carbon credits. What it's done is it's increased their cost to everything, compliance and manufacturing, et cetera, which of course, gets passed down to you and I as consumers. So all they've done is they've just bought these carbon credits. They're virtue signaling that they're doing something good. And it's created this market, to your point. I saw this article a few weeks ago, I was going to dig into a story on this. I haven't gotten into it yet. But basically, these giant funds like BlackRock are now starting a new asset category. I think it's called the natural asset category, where basically they're going to start financializing the earth, and literally, the air that's coming off of it so these can then be sold into these carbon markets. I just think it's a way to make things expensive. It's a way for people to virtue signal that they're doing something good. It's a way for them to control the companies. I referenced Mark Carney a few times. For people that don't know, he's the previous head of Bank of England, Bank of Canada, UN Special Envoy for Climate and Finance, advisor to the UN, advisor to the World Economic Forum, advisor to Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau. He's a pretty connected guy. He wrote a book called Value(s): Building A Better World For All. In the book, he tells you what he expects the world to be. He said that companies that don't get in line with this will be what he calls "economic roadkill." And so, basically, if you don't fall online, then you get no money.

We're already starting to see this. We saw the Exxon was taken over by activist investors, for example. Now, Exxon is going to start producing less oil. And so, there's no funding and we've seen this continued talk about companies that don't fall in line, don't get funding. And so, I don't know, it's a dangerous form of control that's only going to create more climate emergencies, or I should say, energy emergencies.

I'd always thought and commented a lot in regards to Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, that people say, "Oh, the governments will make it illegal." I'm like, "You think the whole world's ever going to agree on anything. That's never going to happen." Then, the pandemic came and then the whole world locked down at the flip of a switch. That was pretty interesting. And as you just pointed out, 135 countries have this GMT, which is scary as well.

I think one thing though is we are starting to see this globalist agenda break up a bit. I mean, we're starting to see Russia really push back. I don't think there's any world where China goes along with the rest of the world that they don't control and deals with Russia. We're seeing Turkey now, which is I think the second largest contributor to NATO starting to pull out. And so, a lot of this, it's also cracking apart. It's going to be interesting to see how it plays out if they're going to get their wish.

I believe that's just humankind. If you go back as far back in history as you can find, it's just a repeating story of man's drive for freedom, but then some guy's greed for power and then oppression. Then, oppression's too bad. Revolution. Freedom. Oppression, revolution, freedom, and it just kind of repeats over and over and over.

I've studied it and it seems like there's a 250 year cycle. About every 250 years, we see this revolution happen, which we can see 250 years ago was the American and French revolution. Two hundred and fifty years before that was the Protestant Reformation. And those represent rejecting that centralization, that globalization, and pushing back and moving to decentralization. The American Revolution rejected the centralization of the monarchy and set up a Republic, a decentralized government. Here we are 250 years later in that cycle and we can see that we're at/or very near peak centralization or peak globalization. At the same time, the whole world is erupting. I mean, if you're not watching mainstream media but you're on social media, you see that almost every country in the world has people in the streets, marching, pushing back against this agenda. That drive for freedom, that drive to be free, it's not just an American thing. I think it's a human thing and I think ultimately it wins.

Well, I like that and I agree. I mean, the Constitution is the greatest document ever written. The guys that wrote that were so smart. We'll never have smart people like that again, I don't think. But the problem is that it's just a piece of paper and unless you defend it, unless people actively are willing to use that and defend it, it's kind of worthless. And so, we're seeing an all out assault on that Constitution today and just nobody's really picking it up and defending themselves with it. It's being dismantled. We were told by a certain president about a decade ago that there was going to be a “fundamental transformation” of the country. That's when the constitution started being dismantled. I see that. I think that's a big problem. I think the problem that we have, and again, the pandemic has accelerated this is, that we used to have a rule of law, so the Constitution was that rule of law, and that rule of law is supposed to be pretty easy to understand so both you and I can understand it.

It's also supposed to be set in stone so I can plan my life based off of that and you can plan your life based off that. But today we're ruled by men who are constantly changing the rules all the time. So for example, I'm from California ruled by Gavin Newsom, and I don't know what the laws will be next month. I don't even know. You can't operate like that. You can't plan a business, you can't plan a family, you can't plan a life in that ever-changing system ruled by men. We have to have a rule of law. I think that's one place that this revolution is going to fix.

I think the first thing, and I'm not ready to jump into this debate or discussion right now, but I think there is a debate that should be done about the science of the whole clean energy thing, period. So, that's a whole discussion that can be had. There is no consensus on that. Let's not get into the science of it, but just from a perspective, if the goal is to get clean energy, what we've seen is that, yeah, nuclear is the only option to produce clean energy.

It's weird that when you have that opportunity, you have all these people saying we have to shut down fossil fuels because they're dirty, there's too much emission, and then we have nuclear, why wouldn't they recommend it? So, that's a question that I asked myself, and I think it really goes back to the seventies, or probably more of the eighties, when the whole world that had this threat of nuclear war, the height of the Cold War and mutually assured destruction, maybe the seventies when they were protesting against. I think a lot of people looked at nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors, nuclear energy, kind of the same, and I think as the world was pushing back against nuclear weapons, they also pushed back against nuclear energy.

So, I think from that perspective, it had that. I think also we really saw... You talked about Germany reducing their nuclear reactors, that really started happening a decade ago after Japan's Fukushima accident. So, after that disaster, the world really turned on it, started removing nuclear power. Then I think it goes also back to the point I said, which is a lot of these people that are really fighting for this climate alarmism, their goal isn't really human flourishment, because nuclear is a perfect solution to give them what they want, which is that clean energy, and they don't want to accept it.

So I'd say it's those three things, but I would say, again, leaving the science on the side for now, because that doesn't seem to matter, the world is pretty much on a mission to have net zero emission energy. The only option is nuclear, right? The only option is nuclear energy. So, I think we're starting to see the tide turn on that. You mentioned again Germany getting rid of their nuclear reactors. So over the last decade, they've been shutting down all their nuclear reactors, and then we've seen their energy prices go up like crazy. Their energy prices have skyrocketed since then.

Meanwhile, France, next door, has 73% of their power from nuclear, and their energy prices have remained stable and cheap. As a matter of fact, they're over-supplying energy, so the Uk is trying to depend on France to get excess energy, and now just in the last couple of weeks, we've seen France starting to get nuclear energy classified as a green energy. I think if that happens, things really take off. The sentiment shifts, and I think we could see an explosion of that type of energy.

So the answers, I think, are going to be a little bit bigger. First off, anytime there's inflation or supply chain constraints or energy prices go crazy, it hurts the poor the most, right? The poor are always the ones that are hurt the most. For example, I'm in Puerto Rico right now. Puerto Rico has serious problems with keeping the power on. On my side of the island, the power was out for almost a week. About 800,000 people didn't have power, and it's hot. They have no fans, their food's rotting and it's a bad situation. The water pumps stop working. Well, I was able to pick up and leave. I went to the city. I have money, right? The poor, unfortunately, can't do that.

So the first thing is protecting your purchasing power. Energy prices are going up in Europe, 800% on natural gas, 400% on electricity. The poor are adversely affected. The rich, they can afford that. They can absorb those cost increases. So one, how do you navigate this challenging time by increasing your purchasing power. So, thinking about ways to grow your money through your investments, I think, is step one. Then two, by growing your money, by having more money, not only can you offset those increased costs, but you can also have options. So for example, in Germany, the power's too expensive. I can go to France where it's much cheaper.

I would say those are probably the two ways to do that, and then also, as we talked about in the beginning, through these volatile times, it creates these wealth transfers, and so when the prices of natural gas go up 800%, that's bad for you as you're paying for your energy, especially if you can afford it, but that's also tremendous investment opportunities. When something goes up 800%, we have a way to profit from that.

I would say look for the opportunity to benefit from that, so obviously, in Uranium right now, you're crushing it. We've been doing really, really good in Uranium. So I'm making more money and that money helps me offset those higher expenses and move if I need to.

Yeah. We're going to have it both live in person and a virtual option. About half my audience is international, and unfortunately, a lot of international people aren't able to travel to the United States anymore, which is unfortunate, so we are going to have that virtual option.

But I think it's super important to get there in person, because one of the other things that you need to survive these troubling times is you need to have a good community around you, and so getting out and meeting people and making friends that are on the same playing field that are looking at the same things I think is super important. If you can, obviously get there in person, if not the virtual option is good.

You'll learn about how to think about things differently, how to think about things in terms of purchasing power. If you're thinking about things, everything denominated in U.S. dollars, for example, and then they dump in $6 or $8 trillion, it distorts the price signal, and so now, is real estate cheap or expensive today? Well, in U.S. dollars, it's never been more expensive, but in oil or gold or rice, it's never been cheaper, right? So you have to learn to think about things, learn to increase your purchasing power, learn strategies to increase that wealth. Those are the things that you'll learn, and go while you still can, because who knows what next year is going to hold?