John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you could have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Carol Roth. She is a recovering investment banker, entrepreneur, speaker, economic business, and financial commentator, content developer, and a New York Times best selling author. And we’re gonna talk about her latest book, which is also a New York Times bestseller called You Will Own Nothing: Your War With a New Financial World Order. So, Carol, welcome to the show.

Carol Roth (01:28): John, it’s so great to be with you and it’s so fun to be in this seat. ’cause I feel like so many times over the years when we’ve chatted, the roles have been reversed and I’ve gotta interview you. So like now I’m in the hot seat.

John Jantsch (01:38): Yeah, I think that’s right. So let’s just get it this little tiny financial world order topic that you tackled. what, what lit your fire?

Carol Roth (01:51): So I was in the media talking about lots of issues and you know, I’ve been an advocate for the underdog and for individual wealth for a long time. And I have people who are doing all the right things. You know, they’re working hard, they’re saving, they’re just like, why can’t I get ahead? Like, what’s going on here? And certainly, you know, over the past several years we’ve seen just this historic transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street. We’re dealing with the debasement of the currency and all the impacts of that. And then all of these other wild topics are coming up, things like E S G and Social Credit and Central Bank digital currencies. And then Wall Street’s coming in to compete with you for a home. And kids are going to college but not getting returns. And so like all the people are like, what’s going on?

(02:38): What’s going on? And I’m like, I I don’t know, , hold on a second. And it just kind of hit me one day that two things, one that they all fell under this meme that had made its way around social media called You’ll Own Nothing. And I felt like that was a, a crazy tie that set the, the, the stage. But in terms of you’ll own nothing, there’s something that goes on through history that I think that is really central to the book. And that’s the shifting of the global financial order. And we’ve been at the center of the global financial order here in the United States for about 80 years. So for us we’re like, well, it’s never gonna be any different ’cause we’ve never known anything different. Yeah. And we’ve had this immense prosperity. But we have to remember that, you know, 80 plus years ago it was the British and before the British it was the Dutch.

(03:31): I would imagine that, you know, those citizens of those countries felt fairly invincible during that period of time. You’ve got the British Imperial Empire. Those people are going, this is gonna go on forever. I don’t know how things are gonna change. But we’ve seen a lot of those signposts that say, yeah, we’re getting long in the tooth. You know, we’ve got a, a crazy debt load as we’re recording this. We just saw the, the second US debt downgrade ever. We have a, a fed who hasn’t kept the currency stable for either the domestic or the the world stage. We’ve seen the weaponization of the US dollar, particularly against Russia as, as we invaded Ukraine. Uh, they invaded Ukraine and we froze their access to reserves. So we’re getting all these signposts that say, yeah, there are a lot of folks weren’t real happy with the US being the the leading superpower.

(04:24): And when that happens and you are wealthy and you are well connected, and you go, oh, things are shifting and changing, and I see this has happened throughout history, you go, well, I just hope this is gonna work out for me. Or you go, oh no, we better figure out a way so that we hold onto our wealth of power when this all shifts and, you know, let the chips fall where they may with everyone else. So I think that’s kind of the, the, the underlying foundational thesis of, of where the concepts of the book all kind of tie get tied together. And by the way, uh, you know, it’s not conspiratorial. I know everyone likes to say this is like a, a giant conspiracy theory. You go on the White House’s website right now, find President Biden’s speech to the Business Roundtable March 21st, 2022. And he talks about exactly this, that the change, you know, every three or four generations. And he says There is going to be a new world order out there that’s very easy to Google. So my hope was to take these things that kind of get, um, tinfoil headed , so to speak, and then bring them together with lots of resources and lots of citations in a way that help people make sense of what’s been happening and then give them a plan to fight back.

John Jantsch (05:37): So, so you spend a lot of time in the book, you know, unpacking all these things that are happening. Yeah. Is your intent in the book then that people create their own plan? Or is it just, hey, this guy’s falling in, you better duck

Carol Roth (05:51): ? Well, I’m a planner and I’m a fighter. So I, you know, that, that’s in the subtitle. You know, your plan to fight against this new financial world order is that I think that you can’t come up with a relevant plan. Right. Unless you know what’s coming at you. And so you have to empower yourself with the knowledge because you know, the, the stakes that might be changing for something like the, the levels of debt and, and, you know, internal promises of the US government are gonna be very different than say if we go to a central bank digital currency. So I think it’s important for us to understand these things. There’s also a ton of misinformation out there mm-hmm. . And so a lot of times things get poo-pooed because people understand like half of it and that have made up another half of it that doesn’t exist. And so the entire scenario gets thrown out the window instead of focusing on that part that really is true and, and, and is at issue. So the intention is, you know, 10 chapters of telling you, here are all the different things that are coming. And then one chapter of you, here’s what you can do now that you know all of this.

John Jantsch (06:58): Okay. So let’s unpack you through out some buzzwords, some terminology. Let’s unpack a few of those. Let’s just start with social credit. What is it and how does it play into this?

Carol Roth (07:07): So social credit is sort of a spectrum from cancel culture to what I would call informal social credit to what, what you have in China, which is a very formalized social credit system. So maybe the easiest way to understand it, just to start with China, there was a video making the rounds on social media over the past few weeks where, you know, all of a sudden someone got a call on their cell phone and a warning message started blaring. And it said the person who’s calling you owes lots of debt and they’re, you know, they, they have a bad social credit score and we would like for you, if you answer this phone call to please tell them to pay off their debts. , that’s one of many examples of what social credit is in China. It is a formalized system, although not quite as formalized as some people think.

(07:57): But you kind of on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis with letter grades or number grades that basically say, are you doing the things the government wants you to do and deems as appropriate and or are you not doing those things? And if you do those things, you get good marks. And if you don’t do those things, you get bad marks and there are severe penalties. You know, one of the stories I I told in the book came from N P R a gentleman by the name of LA Juan, who was a colon intermediary and the government in China changed its stance on coal and he went bankrupt. And, you know, they took away his ability to travel and the most Orwellian thing was they put his picture up on a billboard and it said, you know, here’s this person, here’s their unique name and number and they’re not a trustworthy person.

(08:44): So you take that and you go, okay, well that’s, you know, it’s the c C P and you kind of take what social credit is trying to do. And of course my book is coming at this from an economic lens. So, you know, outside of other things like freedom of speech and censorship, it attacks your social standing. Mm-hmm. . So those are your opportunities, ways that you get to make money and sort of participate in, in society. In some cases it attacks your job and doesn’t leave you with that source of income. In other cases it goes after your assets. You go, okay, well, you know, how is that happening here in the us? Well it, it’s happening very much in the us If you think about around Covid, regardless of whether you, where you stand on Covid, I’m not here to try to change anybody’s mind.

(09:29): I’m just telling you the reality of the situation that, you know, they were telling people not to show up for Thanksgiving and for Christmas they were saying if you didn’t have a vaccine that you couldn’t, you know, go into a restaurant, you know, once those opened by mandate and uh, participate in society, if you weren’t wearing a mask at Trader Joe’s, someone took a picture of you and ridiculed you on social media, maybe called your boss. These were all things meant to, to go after your social standing. Then we had a mandate that came out that actually took people’s jobs away. People who had been deemed heroes and who worked through crux of the pandemic while their people stayed home. Those people, whether they were nurses or uh, military or policemen or firemen, they ended up losing their jobs by mandate. And the mandates coerced big businesses, even if they weren’t by mandate, they didn’t wanna run a foul and get in trouble of making, you know, some people not, you know, be able to go to their job.

(10:29): And then we saw businesses actually shut down . So your assets were taken if you are a neighbors to the north and you were a trucker who participated in the freedom convoy, you had your bank accounts frozen. And so, you know, we see these kinds of things we certainly thought during covid, but we’re seeing it happen on an ongoing basis. If you say the wrong thing on social media or you act out in public, people are going after your financial standing. We saw with the Twitter files and, and information coming out of Facebook that the government’s actually coordinating on some of these cases. So you may not have that official number system yet, but you certainly do have the, if you’re doing the right things or the wrong things, whoever gets to decide what those might be that you’re finding, you know, what’s happening with you and then your financial opportunities gone after. And you know, you can go down the road. Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan didn’t work for them ’cause they were super powerful, but a whole bunch of people where it did work.

John Jantsch (11:31): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So if I’m sitting here thinking, oh my 401K’s fine, my financial advisor says I got enough money to retire. I mean, how do I draw back and look at the macro picture? Like, does the dollar, you know, destabilization, you know, how do I look at that macro picture? Do you see what I’m getting at? Yeah. So I, ’cause I think most people just look at their like, how’s this impacting me?

Carol Roth (12:41): Right? So I think there are two things and they sort of stand at odds with each other. One is, there is this anti ownership movement that you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy Wall Street’s competing with you for a house and they want you to think it’s for your convenience. You’re getting these articles of, oh you don’t need to have a car. You know, let us just, you know, enhance your transportation or take Uber we’ll share things and that’ll just work out for you. And I think that people need to understand that ownership is what drives wealth creation. That if you don’t have assets that have the opportunity to appreciate and value or at least retain their value, you don’t have

John Jantsch (13:22): Wealth or passed down generationally.

Carol Roth (13:23): Yeah. Passed down generationally. If something like the house is the biggest financial asset on households, balance sheets from a dollar value basis. So this is how middle class families sure retain wealth and pass them on. So if you go away from that ownership, you don’t have that wealth creation opportunity. But then going back to the, we just talked about with social credit, you also have all these other people that you’re beholden to. If you own your own house, you can pretty much do what you want in your own house, and maybe there’s an H O A or whatnot, but if there is a corporate owner who is now in tight with the government, they don’t want you to have a firearm. They want, you know, gas stoves to be banned. They want, you know, whatever it is, they have control of that. And I’m really worried you say something bad on social media, you get kicked out of your home .

(14:16): So that sounds super, you know, convenient and yolo and no, I’m gonna go live my life carefree. But I think people are really forgetting about the implications of that. So that’s one piece. The second is that , we are on this insane trajectory and that will have implications in terms of the US’ global financial standing. What I don’t know is duration in catalysts. If I knew this, if I could tell you exactly how long this was gonna take and what the catalyst was gonna be, John, I would be on a super yacht in the Mediterranean and not having this lovely discussion with you. So, you know, it’s easy to look back in history and go, oh, over this, you know, 50 year period this happened and over thousands of years, 50 years is a, a pretty small little, you know, enclave. For us living through it 50 years is, is a huge chunk of our lifetimes, right?

(15:15): So we have a different perspective. So I think it’s an awareness that there could be long-term inflation that eats in to the purchasing power of what you have. That tends to benefit again as we’ve seen over the last 15 years asset holders. And it tends to hurt people who are savers and retirees and people who are just trying to get by. So in that case it really lines up with the notion of ownership. But I think we also just have to have an awareness too that things could get crazier and you just have to be prepared for that. I use in the book, I, I nod to Saturday Night Live this wonderful skit that was done with Dan Akroyd pretend to be Gen Jimmy Carter. And he was like, wouldn’t you like to have a $500,000 car and we’re a $75,000 suit, everybody could be a millionaire.

(16:13): You’re joking that, you know, people don’t understand the difference between a top line number of purchasing power. And I think that’s just one of the things that people have to get their head wrapped around because if certain things happen in terms of the global financial order, it could impact the dollar standing and that could have implications on, you know, whether it’s your 401K or whatever else. Which is why I think it’s important to diversify, which by the way, John is financial advice. I would give people advice under any circumstances, but I think that looking at it through this lens, you know, gives it a sort of a different vibe and a different sense of urgency.

John Jantsch (16:53): Alright, so we don’t have time to cover all of this today. I’m not even gonna throw climate change in at you. Okay. But let’s talk about, and this is a topic that really, you know, I’m passing, my kids are all outta college. Fortunately they didn’t have to take on debt, but there are a heck of a lot of people that are coming outta college today going, I’ve got $300,000 worth of debt and I’m not really even sure I wanna do what I trained , you know Yeah. To do in college. How do we fix that one?

Carol Roth (17:24): All right, so I’m gonna talk about how we fix it going forward before we even try to address the people who are currently, you know, in the situation. Right? But you know, the government is the largest predatory lender in the country. And what they have done is they have taken minors and, you know, 18 year olds and they’ve saddled them with five and six figures worth of debt at a time when they don’t really have the financial, you know, wherewithal and the, the understanding to understand what they’re signing up for to make those decisions about things like return on investment, which is unfortunate given the fact that we fund the education system, but it’s just not a piece of that . And they really have transferred this wealth from young people to colleges and their administrators. I mean, the cost of college has exceeded the G D P and wage growth by a factor of five and eight times. And I always forget which one is which. But one of ’em, it’s five times one of, they’re

John Jantsch (18:20): Big, they’re both big. Yeah. It’s

Carol Roth (18:23): Exponential. It’s horrendous. So the more money going into colleges isn’t producing these amazing outcomes in terms of growing the economy or your individual opportunity. It’s just making the college administrators wealthier and letting them put more on the payroll. And it’s really despicable. So we need to go to a system where we get the government out of student lending and stop this free for all that’s going to the colleges. We need to have an underwriting process. Mm-hmm. , I mean, we value in the market an engineering degree different than a underwater basket weaving degree. You can sit and argue about it. And that’s not my case. To make my case is just the reality of that’s just how it works.

John Jantsch (19:05): So to pay except underwater basket weaving has got to be harder than being an engineer . I’m, I’m just gonna say it

Carol Roth (19:11): May take some engineering skills to be able to do that, Mike, but it probably doesn’t. Ward water warrants an $80,000 a year education to do that. Yep. So we need to get up to a point where there’s a bankruptcy process, there’s an underwriting process, and the colleges have some skin in the games to realign these forces so that it, the college is serving the purpose that everybody seems to think that it is, but that it actually isn’t. So that entire thing, and I just don’t understand from, you know, any party why we don’t have more people standing up and saying, you know, , your young people are getting ripped off and we’re transferring money and making colleges wealthy. We have to stop that. Like, that seems to me like a universal winning stance and it’s just, it’s despicable. And so what’s happening is that even though young people are coming out of school and they’re making more than the Gen Xes or, you know, boomers before them, even on an in place to adjust basis, they’re balance sheets are so wrecked by this debt that they just can’t get ahead of themselves. And so, you know, on top of all of the assets being inflated, they just, you know, can barely get themselves out of debt to be able to, to go through their lives on a, a normal basis. So that’s something that really everybody should be focused on because we want young people to be able to participate in the American dream. And if we have this highly educated population that has degrees that don’t have the value that they’re supposed to derive, something really needs to change. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:50): We didn’t even touch on so many of the items that are tied together to, so you’re gonna have to get the book if you wanna find, hopefully Carol scared the crap out of everybody and now you have to buy the book so that you can get the solution as well. Carol, you wanna invite people to connect with you. Obviously the book is available anywhere books are sold.

Carol Roth (21:09): Yes, books are available anywhere. Books are sold by a hard copy. You know, start walking the walk here and own physical things connecting with me. I am mostly on Twitter @Caroljsroth, but you can find me, you know, hanging out on LinkedIn from time to time or that Instagram place or whatnot. And yeah, I can’t believe John thought so quickly

John Jantsch (21:31): As I, I knew it would, you know, I do a lot of these interviews and obviously some o authors, uh, posed suggested questions. You, you had, I think it came at, at about eight pages of suggested questions. So, you know, clearly we touched on the surface of, of what’s, uh, involved in this. Can I, can

Carol Roth (21:47): I leave you guys with a marketing thing since this is a marketing podcast?

John Jantsch (21:51): Yes, do it.

Carol Roth (21:52): Okay. So I had somebody who was quoted in the book, his name was Andrew a Egan and he’s an estate planning attorney. And they did the best leveraging of pr. And this is what people need to do, is they put together a graphic and they say, congratulations Andrew Egan for being in the best New York Times bestselling book, you’ll own nothing. And put a whole thing about it. And they put this thing up on LinkedIn, which meant that not only is he getting the exposure in the book, but now everybody else knows that he’s an authority that’s in the book. And then of course I picked it up and re-shared it again, . And it’s a great reminder to people that if you’re going to do PR things, leverage them because you will get so much more mileage out of that than just, you know, hoping that somebody reads the book and calls.

John Jantsch (22:39): Yeah, no, no question. I’ve said all along that, you know, being a guest on podcasts is one of the best gigs going because the podcaster is very incentivized to make sure lots of people listen to your episode. So a absolutely 100%. Well, Carol was great, uh, catching up with you. I appreciate you taking a few moments to join us and, uh, hopefully we’ll run into you again, uh, soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Carol Roth (23:01): Always a pleasure.

John Jantsch (23:02): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.