The Problem With Rich People

Pick up to the sound of the alarm on your iPhone, and annoyed that you couldn't get more sleep, you grudgingly unlock your phone to see what's going on in the world. There's an email from Amazon telling you that your package has been delivered. So, you force yourself out of bed to get the package, and it's some Johnson and Johnson medicine you ordered the night before—the wonders of overnight shipping, you think to yourself. You glance across the room to see the clock; it's 8:00 a.m., and you have to be at work by 9:00. Flustered, you open your Microsoft computer to answer some work emails before getting dressed. There's no time to cook breakfast, so you'll just grab something at McDonald's on your way to work.

What if I told you that every single company you just interacted with within the first hour of your day is heavily influenced, in large part, by one company: Black Rock? Now, I'm sure you've heard about Black Rock; there are dozens of videos here on YouTube that talk about how it's the company that controls the entire world. But the reality is far less glamorous. Here is why everything you've heard about Black Rock is wrong.

Before we talk about that, let's talk about data. Every time we browse on the internet, companies collect an insane amount of data from us—information which is then sold to data brokers who then sell it to the highest bidder or just lose that information in data breaches. According to a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center, there were 68% more breaches in 2021 than in 2020, and that number is only going up. Black Rock is an investment firm that controls a huge number of shares in some of the largest companies in the world. They have a total of 10 trillion dollars in assets across the globe—that's an amount equal to half of America's total GDP controlled just by one company.

It's easy to dismiss such a powerful company as all-out evil, but the truth is Black Rock doesn't own these companies or even own shares of these companies; their clients own the shares. Black Rock simply manages them. That's not to say that Black Rock doesn't have any influence on these companies—they definitely do because they control such an incredible amount of their stock. It's possible that companies want to keep in Black Rock's good graces so they don't pull their investments.

Now, while Black Rock might not be the evil company some people make them out to be, the truth is there's still something very shady about them: their hypocrisy. Black Rock was founded 34 years ago by Larry Fink, and he grew the company from 5 million in value to 8 billion in just 5 years—primarily by managing money invested by large institutions like pensions, university endowments, and substantial fortunes invested by the uber-rich. Today, Fink serves on the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum, commanding the attention of business tycoons and political leaders around the globe, and his company is on the cusp of consolidating so much power that it could essentially control the world.

Let's talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate. The worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987, the 2008 financial crash turned out to be an incredible opportunity for Black Rock. It secured an uncontested contract to control many of the banks that had collapsed. That gave Larry Fink, who was already incredibly wealthy, even more power and a direct line to the American government. The same thing happened in 2020 during the early days of the pandemic when the government called in Black Rock to protect the Federal Reserve from financial fallout. Periods of economic uncertainties like these were key to Black Rock's rise to power.

And as the famous saying goes, with great power comes great responsibility. And Black Rock would like you to think that they are being responsible. In the summer of 2020, while the world was angry about the murder of George Floyd, Black Rock came out with a statement saying that companies should serve a social purpose and that they would be giving every company an ESG, or environmental, social, and governance score. Companies that promised more diversity in hiring and leadership or offered environmentally friendly policies and technology received higher scores than companies that didn't. Although this concept had been around since 2004, Black Rock became the loudest proponent of ESG investing in 2020, and in all honesty, it worked. Before this statement, ESGs were mentioned in far fewer than 1% of earnings calls, but by May 2021, that number rose to around 20%, and in a sense, remained the fastest-growing segment in the asset management industry.

People are more concerned about the environmental and social impact of companies, and that's a good thing, right? Socially responsible companies get the upper hand in an ideal world? Yes. But we all know that the world we live in is far from ideal. While there's been some positive improvement, the main result of Black Rock's ESG statement has been a massive surge in companies participating in practices like greenwashing—pretending they're more sustainable, diverse, or responsible than they actually are. It's also exposed the hypocrisy of Black Rock itself because while it claims to champion ESG investing, the company remains the largest investor in fossil fuels and war profiteering and maintains a pretty friendly relationship with human rights violators.

And it's not just Black Rock; the second largest investment firm in the world, Vanguard, is guilty of the same technique—promoting ESG investing on one hand but on the other, unwilling to stop investing in oil and gas companies or pull out of companies with questionable human rights practices. We see this time and time again from Black Rock: they do something that seems like they're moving in the right direction in the eyes of the public, but behind the scenes, they're unwilling to tamper with their investments—even if it's for the greater good of society.

Take climate change, for instance. Black Rock says that climate risk is investment risk, meaning that investing in companies that aren't creating policies to help address climate change is a risky move. In 2021, Black Rock actually did do something about this by helping shake up the board of ExxonMobil and installing new members who promised to take action on climate change. Previously, the oil and gas behemoth was responsible for 2% of the world's emissions; now there are new self-imposed mandates to help reduce that over time. This is a great move by the company, no doubt, but the fact that it's still the world's single biggest investor in fossil fuels makes this feel more like virtue signaling than actually trying to make meaningful change.

And the hypocrisy doesn't end there; as mass shootings continue to end lives in the US, Black Rock has spoken out against gun violence and said that gun manufacturers should do more to protect the lives of the American people. But who's the largest investor in gun manufacturers? You guessed it—Black Rock. The investment firm holds a 16% stake in Sturm Ruger, 15% in Vista Outdoor, and significant percentages of other manufacturers just like them. Black Rock says it talks to these companies about improving safety, but so far, it's unclear whether or not there's actually been any policy change.

Outside of America, Black Rock's U.S. Aerospace and Defense Fund has billions of dollars invested in major weapons contractors worldwide, like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. They're supporting these companies that then get huge Pentagon contracts and use taxpayer money to engage in violence and war around the globe. Often these weapons are supplied to foreign governments in the name of peace, like Saudi Arabia, which received weapons from the U.S. government and used them to indiscriminately attack civilians in Yemen during years of civil war. Funding this spread of war and an increase in nuclear weapons shows that Black Rock constantly skirts its own commitment to human rights.

So does its engagement with authoritarian governments. Black Rock is officially the first global asset manager to have access to China's mutual fund, leaving critics wondering what did Fink promise Chinese President Xi Jinping to allow him to access the Chinese Communist Party's fund? To be fair, Black Rock isn't the only investment company out there looking to do business with China, but because of its widespread power, it's been the most successful in gaining a foothold in the controversial territory—which is surprising, especially for a U.S. company.

This power also made it a major player in the war in Ukraine, as we saw in China. Despite its emphasis on ESG investing, Black Rock has a tendency to overlook human rights in favor of monetary gain. It's been investing in Russia's most prominent companies for years. The British pensions that Black Rock controls alone have contributed $630 billion to Russia after Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, a precursor of what would become the more than a year-long war in Ukraine. Black Rock reconsidered some of its investments in Russia, but just one year later, it was back to being among the top shareholders in the country's biggest corporations.

Even when it became clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning an invasion last year, Black Rock didn't budge. Like most other Western firms, it did eventually pull assets out of Russia once the war started. But think about all the money it flooded into Russia over the years—money that the authoritarian government controlled and used in its expansion mission that led to this deadly war.

All of this begs the question: how did one company gain this much global power and influence? Well, it started with technology. Black Rock's business is built on ETFs or exchange-traded funds, and an ETF contains diversified investments to reduce an investor's risk. Rather than buying stock in a single company, you're investing in a fund that buys stocks, commodities, and other securities. This practice proved to be very lucrative for Black Rock and its investors, thanks to a portfolio management software created in 1998 called Aladdin.

Aladdin predicts the possible outcome of every investment and collects information and personal data on everyone who has ever knowingly or unknowingly given Black Rock money. This allows the software to predict how likely it is that a specific investment will fail. Eventually, this technology put Fink and Black Rock on top, making the company the go-to firm for ETF investing, which keeps getting more and more popular. Global ETF assets could explode to $25 trillion by 2025, meaning trillions more for Black Rock.

But we don't need to wait until 2025 to see the effects of the power Black Rock has right now. Black Rock oversees assets worth 10% of the entire world economy. Companies like Fox, Comcast, and Disney have to consult with Black Rock before they make major moves since it has such a large share of their ownership. Black Rock and other large firms like Vanguard are the biggest investors in global giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. This level of ownership creates an anti-competitive environment.

You feel this in the prices of airline tickets. Black Rock and Vanguard are among the five largest shareholders of the three biggest airline operators, which means that there's very little incentive to lower prices in order to compete with each other. This level of ownership consolidation reduces consumer choice and raises prices, and it also means that eventually, a handful of powerful people at these investment firms could wield more power than the executives at the companies they own shares in.

Even Jack Bogle, who founded Vanguard, says that this kind of ownership concentration is bad. Too much money in the hands of too few will not work out well for the global economy. There are solutions that governments could put in place to stop these companies from gathering too much influence—things like not allowing funds and ETFs to vote as shareholders in companies or creating ownership caps that would dictate how much of a company can be owned by a single entity. The laws can be passed limiting how much influence an investment firm can have in the companies it is invested in, even if that influence is intended to be benevolent, like with the ESG.

But how soon could any of this happen? Because Black Rock and Vanguard are less than a decade away from managing $20 trillion in assets, that would upend the asset management industry and intensify the already staggering ownership consolidation of the world's largest companies—sending prices through the roof. One of the biggest problems with the system of business is that the more money Black Rock manages, the lower its fees for investors. So, we end up in the cycle where the best way to invest our money today creates a potentially catastrophic environment for our money and our society tomorrow.

Unfortunately, most people don't have the luxury of looking that far ahead. What looks good in the short term is all that matters, and that is how Black Rock thrives. It hopes you will overlook its hypocrisy around the environment, diversity, and human rights because it puts out statements about being a responsible company, as its future hinges on its investors not caring about these things. The problem is that many of its investors don't even know their investors; they're simply part of a pension fund or an endowment that Black Rock manages.

There are smaller funds that do support ESG investing without conflicts of interest, and there are options like managing our own shares that help us avoid the moral pitfalls of large companies like Black Rock. But much like how most of us couldn't live without Amazon's next-day delivery for our last-minute essentials, using these large companies is just easier. Over the past decade, the public has become more and more critical of what massive companies do and say. As that magnifying glass emerged, Black Rock made sure that its messaging about making the world a better place was heard and publicized.

Black Rock's hypocrisy won't end; its public image versus private actions will most likely always conflict with one another. But as consumers and investors, it's our responsibility to know what's happening. Taking them at their word is the easier option, but that's exactly what Black Rock is betting you'll do. That's how they've gotten this far. This is the same ignorance that allowed banks and governments to drown us in debt.

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Thanks for watching. Do you own the music that you listen to? If you collect vinyl records or just happen to still have CDs laying around, then you do. But the majority of us in 2023 rely on subscription services like Spotify or Apple Music to borrow the music we enjoy. What about the movies you watch? Well, thanks to the access we have to streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, very few of us feel the need to own DVDs or VHS tapes anymore, and have instead become borrowers of the movies we watch.

But you think these are just subscription models. What about the games you buy from Steam, the PlayStation Store, or Xbox Store? Do you own those games, or do you just own access to those games? If you own it, shouldn't you be able to resell, lease, or even borrow it to someone else? These are just a few examples of how big tech has created a business model that has almost entirely erased personal ownership, and entertainment is just the beginning.

In 2016, a member of the Global Future Councils wrote, "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better." This satirical article talks about something called the sharing economy and how society is moving towards the point where only a few people own everything and the rest of us simply borrow to live in it. Ida Alin proposes that as digitalization and subscription services continue to grow, people will own fewer personal possessions and instead become more accustomed to renting from and sharing with others—essentially trading ownership for convenience.

In the future, people will rent my living room for meetings while I go to work, she writes. The invention of a rideshare service like Uber, Lyft, and Zipcar has made it easier than ever to not own a car. As a result, it's becoming increasingly more common for people to rely on the flexibility and convenience of these services rather than taking on the responsibility of becoming a vehicle owner themselves. For those who do go ahead to purchase their own vehicle, we've started to see car companies turn features that are supposed to come with a vehicle into subscription services.

BMW recently received a lot of backlash when they quietly announced that they'll be blocking off features such as heated seats, heated steering wheels, automatic high beams, and adaptive cruise control—charging car owners a monthly fee to access features that should come with the car. Microtransactions like these are greedy and exploitative and keep the consumers tied to the companies even after a supposed transfer of ownership of a property. If I own the car, why do I still have to pay for some of its features—features that should ideally come included with my purchase?

Sadly, this is just the beginning of a slippery slope that will continue to chip away at the value of ownership. Some of you may be surprised to hear that we own fewer things now than we did decades ago. I know it sounds contradictory when news articles, TV shows, and YouTube videos tell us that we are at the pinnacle of a consumerism crisis. However, there has been some emerging research which suggests that actually, the peak of consumerism may have already passed. The Office of National Statistics ran a test in 2013, which showed that the average adult in the U.S. owned 10.3 tons of personal possessions—a number which had dropped pretty significantly compared to the average 15.1 that was measured in 2001.

But what exactly is so dangerous about living in a world that is slowly moving away from personal ownership and towards a sharing economy? Being an owner of a possession, whether it be something as large as a piece of property or as small as a DVD, provides us with a sense of personal and financial autonomy. Purchasing a home, for instance, is an investment, meaning that the money you pay towards the down payment and the mortgage of that home has the potential to come back to you in the future if you decide you want to sell the property.

Even if you own a home that you have no intention of selling, the fact that it's yours still provides you with a personal sense of freedom, security, and sovereignty. Just knowing that if you run into any financial emergency, you can sell your house to solve that crisis gives you peace of mind. This example is most obvious when we talk about buying a home, but it extends all the way down to the ownership of every single material possession.

The beauty of owning something, whether it's a property or a stainless-steel pan, is that you can trade or sell it to recoup the money that it's worth. Looking back at the pieces of media we talked about in the beginning, when you bought a vinyl record, you could share it with a friend or sell it after you're done listening to it. Today, you can't even listen to your music without using a specific company's app, or buy a game from the PlayStation Store and sell it to your friend once you're done playing. Right now, it might seem like trivial things, but imagine the world Ida Alin paints in her article, where the average person doesn't even own their everyday household appliances because of how easy and accessible it is to rent and share them.

If that futuristic world were to become our reality, wouldn't we all be a lot less in control of ourselves and the environment we live in? Wouldn't we all be simply floating through life, renting and borrowing things to get by? It's a scary thing to think about. Another concern that comes with the sharing economy, subscription services, and digitalization is the loss of personal privacy. Think about it: Streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify have all your data. To use these platforms, you kind of have to grant them permission to learn everything about you, from your favorite kind of music to the movies you watch in the middle of the night when you're alone.

Most of us are aware of these algorithms but hardly ever consider them to be a compromise of our privacy because they're used in a way that helps make our experience on the platforms more enjoyable. But that's not all; the data is being used for. Our information is constantly being sold to advertising companies to handcraft and deliver targeted ads to us, causing us to spend money we don't have on stuff we don't need. Furthermore, because you have provided these services with your name, phone number, email, home address, and credit card number, they have an enormous amount of access to your personal and financial information.

With all that data being stored and tracked, it's no wonder that digital hacking is at an all-time high right now. The cost of being hacked rose nearly 15% in 2020, the highest year-over-year increase in IBM's data set history. This increase was partly due to hackers and cyber gangs capitalizing on the chaos of the pandemic, but part of the reason why they were so successful was also due to how much personal data is readily available on the internet and how much of our personal information we give out to these big tech companies.

At some point, we need to ask ourselves: should we really be paying for comfort and ease of use with our privacy? The biggest offense for subscription models is that they help us save on costs. Where you would have had to pay around $10 for one album, for the same price every month, you can have almost every song in existence. And yes, we can't deny the fact that subscription models give us access to way more things at a reduced cost.

But the reality, as with most things, isn't that straightforward. Because these subscriptions are automatic, over time, costs can sneakily add up without the consumer being fully aware of how much they're actually spending. Let's use Netflix as an example. When you first sign up for Netflix, you're mystified by the possibility of having unlimited access to approximately 50,000 shows and movies for only $15 a month—a fee that adds up to $179 a year. However, in reality, no singular person will likely have the time or ability to watch all 50,000 of those movies and shows.

Let's say instead, during that first year of being a Netflix subscriber, you end up watching 50 movies and shows. Although many would argue that paying $179 to enjoy 50 pieces of entertainment is still a great deal, as the cost of buying the physical copies of those 50 movies would have been far greater, there's still an underlying flaw in that equation. If you own physical copies of those 15 movies or shows for the one-time fees you pay to buy them, you would have unlimited access to them for the rest of your life. Whereas within the confines of the subscription model, the second you stop paying the recurring monthly fee, your access is cut off completely.

So, in reality, the cost isn't $179 a year but $179 a year for the rest of your life—including every single price increase—because again, you're locked into that one company if they're the only ones who have the movie or show you want to enjoy. There are also several situations where a person has the desire to watch just one specific show or movie, but the only way they can do so is to sign up for an entire streaming service, meaning that they'll pay roughly the same price to borrow that piece of entertainment as they could have to just own it outright and have unlimited access to it forever.

And that is if they managed to sign up for and then cancel that subscription within the first month of their membership. It's been statistically proven that people chronically underestimate how much they're paying for streaming and subscription services. A survey commissioned by market research firm C+R Research eliminated that 54% of people underestimated the amount that they spend monthly on subscriptions by at least $100, and 24% underestimated it by over $200. On average, consumers spend $133 a month and about $1,600 a year—more than they estimated they did on streaming services.

All of this goes to show that subscription fees can become a slippery slope for people as they recur passively, which allows them to easily fly under a customer's radar and build up over time. This problem of ownership is not only caused by subscription services; the rise of digital assets, as opposed to physical ones, are also reducing what it means to own something. The best example of this is software. When you buy software, what you're buying is digital access to it.

This is why you can buy something but you still don't have the right to resell or even lend it to someone else. The danger with this is that we leave all the control in the hands of the companies. If you buy something and you decide it wasn't right for you, your only option is to hold out hope that the company you got it from has a return policy. If not, you'll be stuck with something that you can't get rid of and money you can't regain.

Furthermore, streaming services and online websites that sell pieces of intellectual property, such as movies or video games, to consumers, always have the option to discontinue their ownership of that property, thus making the consumer's ownership of it obsolete as well. Imagine paying Netflix a subscription for years just to watch your favorite comfort show, and then one day they just announced that they'll be removing it from the platform, and you can do nothing about it.

For most of us, this isn't something we have to imagine; it's something that has happened time and time again. And this is the final and most painful thing about the digitization of everything: if these things only exist in digital form, when licenses expire or these companies simply don't see the need to host the content on their platforms anymore, they'll be gone forever—lost forever.

If big tech completely destroys ownership, and all we have is borrowed and all we own is digital, what would be in the museums of the future? You've just graduated college and worked your first month at your new job. You've worked extremely hard to get this position, and getting that first paycheck feels like such a triumphant moment. The possibilities of what you can do with your income are exciting. This is the first time you've had a sense of freedom over the money you've earned.

But the sad truth is, you don't have any freedom, and that reality becomes clear when you open a letter you receive in the mail a few days later. It's from a student loan program informing you of your repayment schedule. This paycheck never really was yours; you owe money. You're in debt, and will be in debt for a very long time. Once the realization sets in, every coffee purchased or drink with a friend suddenly starts to feel like you're splurging with someone else's money. It makes you feel guilty and sometimes even depressed. This is the story of around one in five American adults who have student loan debt.

But in reality, this isn't your fault; it's just one of the ways that government and banks might be keeping you poor. The truth is debt can lead you down a pretty dark road, especially if you're not concerned about falling deeper into it. Household debt in the U.S. just hit a record high of $16.9 trillion—that's 16 with 15 zeros behind it. Even making six figures, you're more likely to be living paycheck to paycheck than thriving.

Before continuing, I should clarify that not all debt is bad. It can give people opportunities that they might not have had otherwise. It allows startups to get off the ground without using personal capital, and it allows people to make big purchases that can be paid off in smaller chunks, spread over a long period of time. But too much debt and lousy interest rates can cause severe problems. Studies suggest that being in debt can make you more anxious, depressed, and cause many people to experience suicidal thoughts.

You might feel okay with how much you owe right now, but these mental health issues can grow bigger as your debt gets higher. Debt also makes your future feel limited. Your ability to travel, make big purchases, and move on to another phase of life is greatly challenged by the amount of money you owe. For instance, you can't get a mortgage if you have too much student debt. Debt can impact your relationships and health, and there are studies linking bad debt ratios to high blood pressure and higher rates of divorce.

It goes back to that feeling of splurging on something using someone else's money. This feeling puts a spotlight on spending habits within a relationship, causing stress, arguments, and separation. You don't need to be a gambling addict to have fights over money. You might think it's okay to incur debt because when you die, it dies with you, but this isn't always the truth. A lot of different debts can be inherited by your loved ones—especially debts you've taken on with another person, like a mortgage.

Being in debt isn't great, but don't be too hard on yourself because it's not necessarily your fault. We live in a society that has institutionalized debt, and has made borrowing a living commonplace. Think about it: We're encouraging young kids, barely old enough to vote, to take on thousands—sometimes hundreds of thousands—of dollars in loans just to get an education. We all know how terrible these loans can be, but one effect we don't really talk about is how they tend to normalize the idea of taking on debt to people who are just entering adulthood.

This creates a mindset about money that takes a very long time to shake—even if it's possible to shake at all. A student who has a lot of loans to repay may also experience debt fatalism—a state where being in debt seems inescapable. If you're accustomed to existing in debt, it's difficult to picture what it's like to exist without it, and as a result, you're more likely to continue drowning in it.

When people think of debt, there's often the stigma that it's the individual's fault. You hear finance gurus tell you about wasteful people who splurge on the latest iPhone and buy Starbucks every day instead of making coffee at home. And while there are certainly people who are responsible with credit, the reality is that most people who are in debt are there out of necessity. For one, people with children are far more likely to incur debt from the cost of taking care of a child. The same goes for people who have to take care of a parent. These two factors introduce a variety of necessary expenses that no amount of penny-pinching will mitigate.

Most people's financial literacy is also very poor; it's a subject that's seldom taught in schools, so we're often at the mercy of the lenders and the fine print that we don't bother to read. Even if we did take the time to read the terms and conditions while applying for a new credit card, would we even understand them? All of this without even talking about the system whose entire existence depends on debt: banks.

Let's take a moment to look at how banks work. You give them money; 90% of that money is lent to someone else. The person taking the loan puts it in their account, and 90% of that amount is lent to someone else, and so on. The bank charges interest on all those loans that were made possible thanks to your money. Debt is how they make money—it's the core of their business model.

To make matters worse, banks are profit-driven and often use predatory practices to try and get you to incur more debt because their favorite clients aren't the ones who pay off their debt as quickly as possible, but the ones they refer to as revolvers—people who are perpetually in debt. Banks know your income, and they know what you can't afford, but that doesn't seem to stop them from issuing you multiple credit cards or locking you into a high-interest loan.

These are companies that pursue profits over the well-being of their clients. Imagine having several maxed-out credit cards and then piling on multiple high-interest loans until you can no longer afford the minimum payment on any of them. Where else can you go? Remember that dark road we talked about earlier? Well, that road can lead to someone taking their own life. This is what's known as debt suicide. People find themselves drowning in debt and feel like there's no other way to escape it. People in debt are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts, and similarly, people who die from suicide are eight times more likely to be in debt.

Sure, you can say that ultimately the individual is responsible, but what about the corporations that nudge, push, and deceive these people into making poor financial decisions? What responsibility should they bear in all of this? Credit card companies, for example, will often use deceitful tactics like charging 0% interest for the first six months to try and get people accustomed to not paying off their credit cards. Then, when the high-interest kicks in, there's a good chance the cardholder has already accumulated a ton of debt. Strategies like this are designed to nudge more and more people down the dark path, keeping them poor.

It's how banks and credit card companies make more money. In the pursuit of bigger profits, they knowingly neglect the welfare of their clients. This can sometimes mean that the parents can afford to give their kids a decent start in life, or that the kids can afford to give their parents a decent end to life. These are the consequences: we're destroying the lives of the common people to fill the pockets of the few at the top.

These shady companies are on one side of the institutional debt equation. On the other side is what we need all that loan money for in the first place. The two biggest expenses in life for the average person in the U.S. are an education and a home. And in the last 50 years, the cost of both has skyrocketed, far outpacing inflation to what many would consider a good life—with a home they own and a good education. Most people either have to come from wealth or incur enormous debt.

But why has college and university tuition risen so much? The culprit in the U.S. is the reduction of state funding for these schools. For the last 30 years, colleges have been a primary target for governments to cut costs, especially during recessions. This reduction has caused colleges to operate more like businesses to earn the money they need to stay afloat. The unintended consequences of schools operating like businesses are that they are now more focused on competing aggressively with each other and trying to make the most profits instead of focusing on the welfare of the students.

This means that pursuing star professors and researchers with higher wages, keeping class sizes lower to be more attractive to potential applicants, and introducing a lot more extracurriculars to attract students—even though they might be an unnecessary expense that only increases tuition further. There's no central mechanism in the United States to control the cost of higher education. The country does give students a fair amount of financial aid, but much of the country's college tuition is paid for through loan programs.

In neighboring Canada, tuition has also risen a lot in the same period even though it's more significantly subsidized for citizens. The problem remains that students across North America are paying a lot more for post-secondary education than they were before, and it's happening on the government's watch. But there's a much bigger cause of debt that has also exploded in costs in the last 30 years: housing.

The reason why housing is so expensive now is complicated. I'd love to write it off as greed, but that wouldn't be telling the full story. One of the main causes of housing's high cost is government regulation, but it's not quite what you think. Regulations are important; there's environmental impact analysis, soil sampling, and numerous other approvals that need to be acquired before a developer can break new ground. These are necessary but expensive steps that need to be taken today that wouldn't have been done 30 or more years ago.

It's great that we're doing them now, but there are other unnecessary regulations that aren't driven by human and environmental needs. These are housing density regulations, and they have a big impact on house prices. Housing exists in a system of supply and demand—more supply typically results in lower cost. A great way to increase the housing supply is to build higher density housing, like apartment buildings. But in many cities and towns across North America, regulations are preventing higher-density housing from being built, and these regulations are often influenced by current homeowners who want their homes to remain at sky-high value.

When high-density condominium buildings do get built in great numbers, there are still some other factors that can prevent home prices from falling. In Toronto, for example, developers build large luxury condos—ones that sell at a premium price. These condos wouldn't sell very well at those prices if not for a second factor that's keeping prices high: investment homes. These are homes that wealthy people buy up as investments, reducing the local supply, and therefore increasing the value of these homes.

Many luxury condos are purchased as investments, only leaving many of them sitting empty even during a housing crisis. Governments have done little to intervene in investment housing and have instead prohibited solutions like higher-density housing. Blame is often passed between levels of government, with local, state, provincial, and federal bodies blaming each other and kicking the can further down the road. The result is that homeownership becomes an enormous source of debt for some people and not even a remote possibility for others.

And there's no escape from this problem by simply renting, either. The cost of rent has also skyrocketed as a consequence of higher housing prices, further leading to even more debt. Another problem for renters is when companies buy existing buildings, give them a luxury renovation, and then jack up the price of rent. No new homes are built in this scenario, and the average price of a home and rent still goes up. The question of personal responsibility for debt doesn't seem so significant when you see how banks and governments are making increasingly larger debt loads inescapable.

Debt is painful, and it seems like our largest institutions are too invested and profiting from it to make it easier on the average person. For now, we can make sure to not take on unnecessary debts and be sure to read the fine print when we do need to take out a loan. The truth is that governments can do a whole lot more to help their poorest citizens. The video on the screen right now will show you how the richest man who ever lived did exactly that for his citizens.

Picture all the gold you could possibly imagine. Now double it—that's how much wealth the richest man who ever lived controlled. Yet most people will go their entire lives without ever learning his name. When asked who the richest man who ever lived is, given the rise of wealth inequality and the creation of money out of the form of cryptocurrency, it might be tempting to mention some modern billionaires—people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or maybe the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto—but all of these answers would be wrong.

To find out who the richest person who ever lived was, you'd have to go back to West Africa in the 1300s during the Mali Empire. If you're not familiar with the greatness of the Mali Empire during that time period, don't feel bad; it's not your fault. Western history tends to ignore the achievements of African nations prior to colonialism. History books often focus on the progress made by great thinkers in the West, even when there's plenty of evidence to suggest that a lot of those discoveries had already been found somewhere else in the world. This is especially true in terms of mathematics and astronomy, but that's a subject better suited for its own video.

The Mali Empire was an exceedingly wealthy one, with three large gold mines that accounted for half the world's gold reserves at the time. The region was thriving. Add to this the fact that they were also blessed with salt and copper, and you start to see just how wealthy this African nation was. In 1312 CE, Muhammad ibn K, the reigning emperor of Mali, set sail across the Atlantic to look for new land. Sadly, he was never heard from again. In his absence, Mansa Musa took over as emperor and would go on to make one of the wealthiest empires in the history of humanity and make himself the wealthiest man who ever lived.

When he took over as emperor, Musa quickly discovered that simply processing half the world's gold isn't enough to put you on the map, so he looked to expand the trading network of his empire in a bid to bring more business to the nation. At the time, Mali wasn't well known to Europe or the Middle East, where most of the large trading cities and city-states were. Mansa Musa was a devout Muslim who knew how to speak and write Arabic. This allowed him to expand his trading network to the Middle East.

You see, at least once in their lives, every Muslim is supposed to make a Hajj or pilgrimage to the sacred sites in Mecca—a city in today's Saudi Arabia. Mecca is the birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad, and this Hajj is believed to be the most intense spiritual experience for Muslims. In 1324 CE, Mansa Musa set forth on a 4,000-mile Hajj to Mecca—a journey that would literally put him and Mali on the Catalin Atlas, a medieval world map.

On his Hajj, Mansa Musa traveled with his entire royal court—his officials, soldiers, griots, merchants, camel drivers, and 12,000 enslaved people—all of whom were dressed in gold brocade and the finest Persian silks. Everyone on the pilgrimage carried large amounts of gold through the Saharan Desert, with their camels taking the majority of the burden. Along the way, Mansa Musa and his entourage stopped at different cities, including Cairo in Egypt. They gave away gold to the poor, funded the construction of mosques, and contributed to a variety of public projects, like public housing.

By doing these things, he hoped to make the Hajj easier and less hectic for other Muslims—a show of empathy that was rare for leaders of his day. Mansa Musa gave away so much gold that he decreased its value, creating an economic crisis in the Middle East. In total, his generosity caused roughly $1.5 billion in economic losses. Once he realized what he had done, he tried to buy back as much gold as he could to fix the crisis, as he hadn't intended to cause financial distress to the cities he had visited. His generosity was spoken highly of wherever he went.

He gave away so much to strangers that his griots, who were singing historical storytellers, did not like to praise him with their songs. They believed he was wasting resources outside of the kingdom. But in reality, the emperor had so much wealth that he could give the entire world and still have more than enough to advance this empire. And so did he.

Upon his return from Mecca, he annexed the region of Gao, the trading city of Timbuktu, and many other cities. In total, he annexed 24 cities. He then transformed Timbuktu into an enormous commercial hub. It had so much gold that it was considered a real-life El Dorado—the lost city of gold. Emperor Musa continued to grow his wealth by expanding his business outside of his empire. He helped establish this trans-Saharan trade route, which connected the Mali Empire to the Mediterranean and most of the world.

He contracted great architects to build enormous mosques and universities that still stand today. He had the Sankore Madrasah Mosque converted into a university that hosted 25,000 students—1/5 of the population of Timbuktu at the time. At its peak, Sankore University hosted the largest collection of books and scrolls in the world, roughly 1 million in total. Thanks to the university, the average citizen of Timbuktu learned how to read and write in Arabic, which was an astonishing literacy rate at the time.

Mansa Musa invited scholars from all over the world to teach at the university on subjects like astronomy, mathematics, Quran studies, and legal affairs. Over time, the university produced its own leading scholars who astounded even the most knowledgeable men of Islam; many would go on to become professors at universities in Morocco and Egypt. It was a citadel of knowledge. Although the school hasn't been an active university for hundreds of years, the structures stand as a testament to the rich intellectualism of Western Africa before the age of colonialism.

Mansa Musa's projects had a tremendous impact on the socioeconomic well-being of the people of the Mali Empire; they helped shape and transform the values and quality of life of the Mali people in a way that astonished visitors. During his visit in 1354 CE, the great world traveler Ibn Battuta observed that the people of Mali were very timely in all their endeavors, including their daily prayers and business dealings. They also competed with each other to give generously to charity; poetry and culture flourished, and the people followed strong rules of cleanliness. The women of Mali enjoyed freedoms not seen in most other places in the medieval world.

So, Mansa Musa was able to provide a decent life for his subjects, but how much wealth did he really control? All historical accounts resist putting a figure on it. They want you to imagine the most amounts of gold you can possibly think of and double it. One of the only estimates of Mansa Musa's wealth is from the website Celebrity Net Worth, which wasn't even around in the 1300s. They estimate his wealth was around $400 billion in today's dollars; that would make him richer than any existing billionaire.

But we can assume his net worth would have been far greater than that. It's also possible that Mansa Musa wasn't really the wealthiest man who ever lived. His successors technically had the same resources he did, and the gold mines and the empire existed before he became the ruler of Mali. But what separates his wealth from the rest is how he used it. He gave away so much of it, and what he kept, he invested in his homeland and his people.

Mansa Musa's notoriety came from spending and giving away his wealth, not hoarding it because at the end of the day, what good is a person's wealth if it doesn't touch people's lives? Many of us admire the billionaires of today, but for the most part, their wealth just sits idle or is used for vanity projects, like buying a social media platform or the world's largest yacht. Yes, it's their money, and only they get to decide how they use it. The reality is if we didn't have media sources constantly reporting on their personal wealth, it would largely be meaningless to us.

Yes, some billionaires do have large philanthropic ambitions, like Bill Gates's efforts to eradicate smallpox and his fight against malaria. Then there's Jeff Bezos's plan to give away the majority of his wealth before he dies. But on the whole, most billionaires aren't exactly handing out gold bars to the poor, are they? Or in modern terms, sending Bitcoin to their crypto wallets.

Though it's fun to imagine Elon Musk driving around in his Tesla, transferring Bitcoin or Dogecoin to people on the street, the reality is that Mansa Musa isn't some progressive hero by today's standards. He ran a slave-owning state, albeit with a notable emphasis on standardizing the quality for the enslaved people. He was also an accomplished military leader; in his lifetime, he managed to annex 24 cities, growing his empire even more. And that's another quality that isn't exactly beloved by modern people.

Details of how he annexed these cities are also not well recorded. All I'm trying to say is he wasn't a saint; he was still an emperor in the 14th century. But it is possible to admire the way he used his good fortune. He spent his wealth changing people's lives. He embraced the values of Islam in a way that lifted the average Mali person. Religious fundamentalist leaders today typically use the religion to control and harm the welfare of their people.

Mansa Musa is a great example if you're ever searching for one of a religious leader who used his values earnestly to help his people instead of harming them. After he died, his sons took over the empire, letting it dissolve over time. It was strange; they had similar resources but seemed to lack something their father had. Musa had a good strategy and a desire to better his empire for his people. That, combined with his wealth, is what put him on the world map. Otherwise, I doubt we'd remember him as the wealthiest person who ever lived and he'd just be another forgotten king, bound for the faded records of history.

What would you do if you were the richest person on Earth? Watch this video next to find out according to science exactly how to spend your money if your ultimate goal is to be happy. This video is sponsored by Aura. If a family member calls you from jail, panicking, and says that they need you to wire them some money for legal fees, would you second guess them and potentially make the situation worse, or would you send the money immediately?

In March 2023, a Canadian couple were faced with this exact situation. They received a frantic phone call from their son, Benjamin, claiming he was in jail and needed money. The voice on the phone was unmistakably his and insisted that they send him $21,000 immediately. And so they did, because they loved their son. But it wasn't their son on the phone; it was an audio clone of his voice created by cybercriminals using AI-powered tools.

You used to need a lot of audio to clone someone's voice, but now all you need is a TikTok. There are entirely legal and barely regulated programs like 11 Labs that use short vocal samples to create AI voices with the potential to scam people like Benjamin's parents. Whether it's audio, text, or even video deep fakes, AI-powered scams are becoming far more dangerous than we could have ever imagined.

To understand how these AI scams work and what we can do about them, I spoke with cybersecurity expert Zakari Ramon, chief scientist at Aura—the company that's trying to make the digital world as safe as it can for its customers. "What we're dealing with now is a national crisis," I think in 2022. "I believe $10.3 billion was lost in cyber crime. Now, what's interesting is that the amount of money lost in physical theft was only $1.6 billion. So home burglaries accounted for $1.6 billion of cost, and so we're seeing a situation where online crime is now like six, seven times bigger than physical crime. And I don't think most people even get that at a fundamental point and why we need to focus on this problem so critically."

In 2019, criminals used an AI-generated audio recording to trick the head of a UK energy firm into transferring £220,000 to a fraudulent account. This is considered one of the first criminals blatantly drawing on AI technology to execute a scam. Across the world, in China, someone used AI face-swapping technology to impersonate someone on a video call. The victim believed he was transferring 4.3 million yuan or $662,000 to a friend who needed to make a deposit during a bidding process. When the actual friend was later confused by the situation, the victim realized he'd been duped.

Deep fakes have been around for a while, but generative AI like ChatGPT has taken their powers to the next level. Recently, a series of videos appeared on WhatsApp featuring fake AI-generated people with American accents supporting voice support for a military-backed coup in Burkina Faso. But what these people said had poor grammar, immediately outing the videos as fraudulent. If the scripts had been written by ChatGPT in fluent, somewhat eloquent English, it might not have been easy to tell that they were fake.

There are already companies like Hour 1, based out of Tel Aviv, that allow users to pick an avatar, type a prompt into ChatGPT, and get a lifelike talking head—a completely AI-generated personality. The goal is to use these AI personalities to create personalized online ads, tutorials, and presentations. But they're also a signal of how this advanced technology can be used to trick people like you and me if someone uses it for harm. It doesn't have to be audio or video; phishing scams via text have been available for decades, and AI is making them even easier to deploy convincingly.

If that isn't bad enough, scammers might not even need to convince you of anything to steal your information. Pascal is a password cracking program reported to crack any 7-digit password in less than 6 minutes. The software enters combinations of letters, numbers, and symbols and pulls common words like sports teams and company names to get past what we might think of as an unguessable password. The common CAPTCHA prompts to prove you're not a robot might be useless. GPT-4 tricked a TaskRabbit employee into solving a CAPTCHA test during its testing phase. It lied to the worker, stating that it was a visually impaired human to get them to complete the test. Although guardrails have been put into place to prevent GPT-4 from doing something like this in the real world, scammers are unfortunately finding ways around these guardrails.

One of the many uses of ChatGPT is writing code. I use it almost every day, and this can be helpful to the average user who just needs simple code for a website or as a tool to help coders be more efficient. But the problem with AI writing code is that often the difference between malware and regular software isn't the code itself but the intent behind it.

Imagine I said, "Please generate the following code: can you generate code that can hook the Windows keyboard API that can collect keystrokes that are being typed in, take the output of those keystrokes, and send them to a remote server using a protocol that is non-standard?" You might say, "Well, that seems like something really nefarious! If somebody's collecting my keystrokes and sending it to a third party, that's what every keystroke logging piece of software does." And every keystroke logging malware follows those steps.

But you know what else follows those same steps? Every instant messaging application that runs on your desktop. AI can't figure out your intent, so there's no way to know when you're trying to create malware and when you want to create something legitimate. Following its release, Checkpoint Software Technologies reported that while ChatGPT can't create something too sophisticated yet, it could easily improve the efficiency of dangerous code that's been written.

The good news is that AI creating malware isn't something we need to worry about. The bad news is that this doesn't mean we're safe from malware; it just means that hackers have had refined tools for creating malware for decades, which is why Aura provides you with an antivirus product to protect yourself and your family from malware.

With these glaring digital safety concerns, why are companies not doing more to protect the average person from harm? Historically, a lot of the tech firms that tried to solve this problem were really focused on the technical buyer, number one, and number two, many of the incumbents in the space were focused on a set of point problems that were then aggregated into a more comprehensive solution. So, it started off with antivirus; there may be personal firewalls. Then eventually we got things like online fraud, and so on and so forth. Many of these companies kind of got built by just creating a patchwork of individual solutions with no holistic way to tie them together to provide a suite of capabilities for the average user.

And that's really where Aura is unique. Our real focus has been on creating essentially an all-in-one suite for consumers and their families that's designed for the consumer in mind from day one, that is designed with a common platform in mind because security is not just a monolith; it's a mosaic. These scams will continue to grow thanks to AI, so we must protect ourselves. You might think you're impervious to these scams, and you might be right now, but the more advanced they get, the more difficult it'll be to spot—especially because many of these scammers already have tons of information thanks to data brokers.

Everything you do leaves a bit of a footprint. There's a set of maybe digital breadcrumbs, a digital trail that you leave in every interaction. What data brokers try to do is collect data about you and coalesce that data into one place. Now, you might think, "Hey, I left a bit of data here and a bit of data there," and in isolation those two pieces of data may not be that valuable. But when you put them together, along with other pieces of data about yourself, all of a sudden you can build essentially a digital dossier that describes a person in a lot of detail— including things like their phone number, their email address, how to contact them, maybe the preferred way to contact them, etc.

Now it turns out that data brokers are required to give you the ability to opt out. So you can go to every one of these data brokers and say you don't want them to collect your data; they've got to essentially comply with your request. That's the good news. The challenge and the complication is that trying to do that at scale is very difficult because, number one, there are many data brokers out there. So trying to find every single one and opt out is not easy. Secondly, if you think about it for a moment, data brokers don't really want you to opt out because their whole goal is to make money off of you. And therefore, when you look at the instructions they provide you with to opt out of their services, they're often highly inscrutable, difficult to understand—they're sometimes written in three-point font. There's a footnote somewhere that you've got to dig up and find to be able to actually opt out of a data broker directly.

So one thing that Aura does in particular is we have a service called Data Broker Opt Out, where we actually have automated that process. So you have to just give us your email address and any other information about you. We will scan every data broker to find your information, and we'll automatically opt you out of that data broker because we know how they work, how to opt out, and we can automate that mechanism for you.

Governments around the globe are looking to regulate AI and educate citizens. China is the only nation that has enacted hardline rules to grapple with AI. Europol, the European policing body, has also started engaging stakeholders and holding workshops on how criminals might employ programs like ChatGPT for nefarious purposes. Still, we can't wait for our government or employer to save us. Protecting ourselves from these AI-driven cybercrimes is our own responsibility, which can be scary.

Our founder, Har, was a victim of identity theft many years ago, and when he tried to navigate the sea of solutions to deal with identity, he realized that this is a mess. He was someone who'd done very well, successful on his own. He had the resources to go do the research himself and have people do research on his behalf, and they came back with a 35-page plan that he had to go implement. He was like, "What is the average person going to do? How can they solve this problem?"

And what's remarkable is that before you couldn't scale solutions to work for the average consumer, but now we can leverage the power of AI for good. We can leverage the power of AI to automate—to create almost like a personal digital Sherpa that can guide you on this complex digital terrain and help you navigate the risks, storms, and different types of treacherous grounds you'll face along the way. I think there's an incredible promise show of AI being used for good and to solve a problem that will be at the heart of every consumer right now. If they don't realize it, they should realize it at some point, because you can't navigate the digital world safely without solutions like Aura being in place.

If I asked you the question, "What is man's greatest invention?" what would your answer be? There's a lot of options. Would it be fire? Because it gives us warmth, protection, and the ability to cook our meals. Or perhaps you would pick the wheel, because it's the driving force behind the beginnings of trade, commerce, and travel. While both of these are excellent choices, most of the time, when we think about the greatest inventions of mankind, we tend to forget one of the most important ones of all: money.

But unlike man's other great inventions, money is immaterial. Maybe that's why we don't often think of it in the same breath as some of the other great inventions. Things like fire and the wheel are tangible, but not money. Money is merely an idea, an illusion whose value is non-existent—only determined by the importance we place on it, or at least money as we know it today. However, the fact that money is an illusion does not in any way undermine its importance.

Before we created money, we were forced to trade goods and services directly in what we refer to as the barter system: people exchanging goods and services for other goods and services in return. Because there was no arbitrary value placed on these items, every single trade was determined by what each party was willing to give up for something that they wanted. It was kind of like a game. If I wanted some of your vegetables for dinner but I only reared cattle, I would have to give you one of my animals in exchange for a bag of vegetables. If I wanted shoes to wear but I only made tents, I would have had to give you an entire tent in exchange for a pair of shoes.

Immediately, you can already see one of the major problems with this system of trade: it's the asymmetry. As a tent maker, there's no way I wouldn't feel cheated having to exchange an entire living space for simple footwear. Because there was no standardized medium of exchange, it was very difficult to get two people who needed things from each other to come to an agreement. Having to wait until a double coincidence of wants—where two people need the exact opposite thing at the same time—was also very difficult and inefficient.

And that wasn't all. You see, our money is not only a medium of exchange; it's also considered a store of value. And before the invention of money, some people could never store their wealth for no fault of their own. Think about the farmer who sells tomatoes and the man who makes tents. The man who makes tents can create an entire village of real estate and barter it out with anyone who needs a place to rest their head all year long—and he would probably cash out on that.

But the farmer who sells tomatoes can only barter when tomatoes are in season, and because tomatoes are perishable goods, he cannot keep them for a long period of time. So although he would be putting in the same effort into his business as the tent maker, there's absolutely no way for him to remain wealthy all year long.

There's also the problem of having something that only very few people want. Nowadays, when starting a business, you're often told to find a niche—a small group of people who are very interested in what you have to offer. Before money was a thing, that advice would have left you with nothing worth bartering. The people who had the most were those who owned things that everyone wanted—things like weapons, animal skin, and salt.

But then, since everyone knew that everyone wanted these things, they started buying them even if they didn't need them at the time, just so they could trade with them later. And so, commodity money became a thing. People would exchange goods and services for the most common items, like salt or weapons, and just use that to trade for what they want from someone else.

From salt and weapons to tiny collectibles like shells and beads, humanity had found a better way to trade and transact. Instead of exchanging goods and services for goods and services you may not need at the time, you can exchange your goods and services for arbitrary objects to act as placeholders of value—an IOU or two. After that, you can use these placeholders to get goods and services you actually want from someone else. The idea was brilliant—so brilliant that the entire world slowly moved away from the barter system to the money trading system.

But there was still one problem with this medium of exchange: you see, for money to be worth anything, it needs to be scarce. The more available something is, the lesser its implied value—that's basic economics. If everyone can get their hands on something, it can't be worth that much, right? So things like sand or shells that you could easily pick up on any beach weren't really a good measure of value.

As a result, around the year 770 BC, the first metal coins were created in China as a sort of homage. The Chinese made miniature versions of the tools that were once regarded as currency. They made the coin circular so that it was easy to reach into your pocket and take them out without hurting your fingers. Then they cast the coins in bronze. This was it! Money was finally worth something! You couldn't just go to a beach somewhere and pick up bronze; it was scarce—it had value.

At this time, money wasn't yet an illusion; the value of a coin was determined by the value of the metal the coin was made out of. If you had a coin that was made from 1 g of gold, it was worth 1 g of gold. You could easily measure it and see for yourself that it is in fact 1 g of gold. However, kings and rulers quickly discovered the power of money. They realized that the more of these tiny precious metals you had, the more power you could control.

And so when, in 600 BC, Alyattes, king of Lydia, created the first official money mint, he created the coins using a mix of silver and gold and stamped an image on the coin to act as denominations. Now people could easily tell the value of the piece of metal they were holding simply by looking at the picture on its face. But the kings of the world wanted more money, and precious metals were too expensive to produce more money. They started slimming down the coins, then mixing the more expensive metals with cheaper metals.

Soon, all the coins in circulation were worth less than what the image on their face said they were worth, and so the illusion of money was born. The value of the coin was no longer determined by the value of the metal; the value of the coin was now simply what the rulers in the bank said it was, and enforced it as legal tender. The illusion of money is one that we never really think about, but just like the kings of old, the governments of today understand the power of money.

They want more of it. So what do they do? Well, they can simply create more pieces of paper out of thin air. Yes, if for example the United States government wanted $340 million for I don't know, maybe another F-22 jet, they can simply print the money to do so. But there's one problem with this: inflation. The thing about money is that primarily it needs to be a means of exchange to be considered valuable. So the amount of money in circulation needs to reflect the output of the goods and services that are being produced.

When more money is printed than there are goods and services, all other things being equal, the prices of these goods and services increase, and the value of the money itself drops. This is why many economists and even everyday people like you and me are worried about the current global reserve currency: the United States dollar. 2020 was a terrible year for the entire world. In the wake of the pandemic, most economies had to be shut down. The goods and services available in the general output of the economy were reduced to mere trickles, and the world kind of came to a halt for a while, because there wasn't as much money flowing around to keep the economy from going under and basically our world falling apart.

The U.S. government started printing money at a rate faster than has ever been printed before in its entire existence. Right now, 40% of the U.S. dollars in existence today were printed in the last 18 months alone. That's outrageous! And because the output of the country hasn't really increased by that much, eventually the prices of the goods and services might start to skyrocket. You can see this taking place in the price of commodities such as lumber, which had as much as tripled in price from just a year ago.

If you haven't noticed, some of the prices of the things at your favorite restaurants are now slightly higher than they were last year. It's an ever so small increase; maybe the guac at Chipotle is 20 cents higher, but it's happening right there under your nose. On the surface, it seems like a good thing that governments decided to send out stimulus and unemployment checks to their citizens. But the reality is it's a double-edged sword.

Of course, it helps those most in need, and that's a good thing. We're at the point where because of inflation and a slowed economy, people really aren't able to get the right jobs at the right times. Sometimes it's not even because they don't want them, but because it's simply worse than the alternative. For example, in the United States at least, if you're a waiter or a waitress, you're not required by law to be paid even minimum wage. Some are literally paid $2 to $3 an hour, with the rest of their income coming from tips.

But with a lot of restrictions and rules in place around the country and not as many people going out, there's less customers. Less customers with less money means less tips. If your employees aren't making enough money, they're going to quit—it's simple as that. If your business doesn't have employees to help you run it, you're going to go under. It's a domino effect.

But what can you even do when you can earn more money from unemployment and stimulus checks than you would from being employed? Why even look for a job in the first place? You see, the Federal Reserve of the United States has a very sneaky way for the government to essentially create money out of thin air and pump it into the economy without people thinking too much about it. Before 2020, the United States was $29 trillion in debt—that's an unbelievable and inconceivable amount of money to even begin with.

This debt is obtained in the form of bonds and treasury notes, which are basically just pieces of paper that say the government will pay you so and so amount plus interest. Right now, a 10-year U.S. treasury bond will return you about 1.23% on your investment at expiry. So if you put in $1,000 today, you'll have made $12.30 by 2031. That sounds terrible already! But to add icing onto the cake, it doesn't even keep up with inflation, which is targeted to stay around 2% a year. It's a lot higher than that, but that's for another time.

By investing in government notes of your own country, which issues the currency you use every single day, you actually lose buying power over a decade. It is weakened by the day! But regardless, banks, businesses, and individuals around the world buy these bonds and treasury notes, and the government uses all that money it gets back how it sees fit. However, when it's time for the government to pay its debt, all the money they made has already been spent. So they buy back all the treasuries and bonds, but only from the big financial institutions and then pay them back with new money created out of thin air.

Since March 2020, the Federal Reserve has bought back over $1 trillion in bonds and is planning to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. With all the new money pumped into them by the government, banks can now give out more loans to people, earn more interest, and help grow the economy. But this increases the total amount of money in circulation, reducing the value of each dollar. With multi-trillion dollar stimulus payments and infrastructure packages, it makes you wonder how long this stuff can go on for.

New money steals value from old money. The amount in your bank account doesn't change, but because of the new money the government has just printed out of thin air, your money is no longer valuable as it once was. Basically, every second you store your wealth in any fiat currency—such as the U.S. dollar—it is being devalued. You could stare at your bank balance, and day by day, you'll be able to buy less and less things with whatever you have left.

The reality that money is nothing but an illusion is one that we must all embrace because only then will the path to financial freedom become clear. It's all a game—a game that never truly ends. Understanding that money does not have any intrinsic value in itself but instead only inherits the value we give to it will prevent you from trying to store up your wealth in currency. Instead, using that money to acquire assets that will appreciate faster than inflation is the only way to win the game. And it's not really winning; it's avoiding total loss.

As more and more money is printed each and every day, the value of each dollar in your pocket will continue to decrease. But the dollar value of the assets around the globe will continue to appreciate in value. But it's all a mirage—it's smoke and mirrors. A stock market that is literally in "up only" mode may make it seem like it's all okay, but it isn't. It's all denominated in the same currency that is slowly dying each and every day.

For example, if you were to denominate the Dow Jones, which is just a performance measurement of 30 large United States companies, in terms of gold instead of USD, you'll see that we're basically at the same place we were in 1997—smoke and mirrors. But what's the end goal of all of this? With fiat and an unlimited supply of money, will the value of each currency just continue to decrease until the end of time? Will the gap between the rich and poor just continue to grow wider and wider, or are we finally going to fix a problem as old as man itself and stop placing our financial success in the hands of those who are destroying it day by day? Only time will tell.

But just know there is a way out. The Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, Citizen Kane—some of the greatest movies ever made were made during the famed studio system era of Hollywood. We, as audiences, look back on this era with nostalgia. What an exciting time it must have been to be alive! From the 1920s through the late 40s, eight companies controlled almost every single film made in the United States. Each of these companies contracted writers, directors, actors, and crew to be full-time employees. Sometimes a studio would loan an actor or a director to another studio, but ultimately the heads of these studios were in total control of the artists who worked for them.

The lack of competition and the concentration of power eventually caught the attention of the federal government, and the studios were broken up. No longer could they own their talent, nor could they both be the company that made the movie and the company that owned the movie theater it would be shown in. The studio system came to an end by 1950, and the entertainment industry was forever transformed.

With the days of a handful of companies controlling what we consume, we're far from over. Seventy-five years later, 90% of all the media in the United States is controlled by just six monstrous conglomerates: the Walt Disney Company, Comcast, 21st Century Fox, Time Warner, Sony Corporation, and Viacom. These companies own everything from CNN to ESPN to Hulu to National Geographic to DC Comics and Nickelodeon. In 2021, they earned $478 billion in revenue—more than the combined GDP of Finland and Ukraine combined.

Nowadays, not trusting the media has become mainstream. But even if you attempt to avoid cable news or sitting on your couch for hours on end watching television, there's no way to truly escape the influence that media has on all of our lives. Media molds us. It tells us which world events deserve our attention, or which movies and TV are worth seeing. It can affect what we buy, and it can shape our opinions on every significant topic—from immigration to healthcare—and of course, it has more than a significant sway when it comes to elections.

Modern media companies want to make us feel like we have options across the political and cultural spectrum, but it's simply an illusion—an illusion of choice fabricated by the people in control. The small group that runs these companies infiltrates your life day in and day out. They present us with what seems like endless options, when in fact every network, channel, company, or platform is answering to the larger entity that owns it.

And we certainly didn't hear by accident. Back in the 1940s, the Federal Communication Commission, which regulates the media, had rules limiting ownership of multiple media outlets like radio and TV stations. In 1983, media in the United States was owned by 50 different companies. That all changed in the 80s and 90s. The 80s roared into the picture, and soon, a newly elected President Reagan embraced deregulation and an exceedingly free market economy. By the 1990s, only nine companies remained in charge. The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton, was the cherry on top of Reagan's deregulation. The act declared that large companies in media could further expand their control. At the time, only 3% of Congress voted against this bill.

Suddenly small TV and radio stations were either bought up by big companies or failed because they couldn't compete. It was reported at the time that a consumer group tried to buy ad space on CNN to criticize the Telecommunications Bill—CNN, which was owned by one of these megacorporations, wouldn't sell the group the airtime. By 2020, the number had shrunk from 9 to six ultra-powerful companies.

As the years have gone on, power has gotten more condensed, and any regulation that has passed or lifted has done so without much publicity. This makes it very hard for citizens to get the facts straight and for voters to push back on any policy decision. But what does this kind of concentrated ownership really mean? Well, it means that fewer individuals and organizations control shares of the mass media. When controlling entities like the government decide that a free market is more beneficial than imposed regulations on businesses, companies act quickly, because after all, it's in their interest to consolidate.

Merging and consolidating power can increase profit margins, reduce risk, and get rid of the dreaded competitive edge they're all fighting for. So, it's no wonder that these megacorporations spend millions of dollars every year lobbying to sway legislation in their favor. But a concerning control over our political system is far from the only problem with ownership concentration. As anyone who has taken an introductory economics class can tell you, deregulation can lead to consolidation of power, like we saw back in the studio system and like we're seeing now in media as a whole.

The monopolies born out of that consolidation would be great for providers but bad for customers. Not only is this model riddled with conflicts of interest, as billionaires like Jeff Bezos own the very publications like the Washington Post that are supposed to be reporting on them, but when six companies control all the information that we consume, it threatens diversity of expression and reduces diversity of viewpoints and content and news coverage. This narrowing of perspective then forces us as audiences to silo ourselves. Are you an MSNBC person or a Fox person?

Our identity becomes wrapped up in what media we consume and therefore what ideas and facts we prescribe. Ownership concentration