Jason Hartman hosts editor in chief of Forbes Media, Steve Forbes. The discussion centers around why the government continues to get bigger and bigger. Forbes gives us insight into the history that proves that free-market capitalism works best and that government simply functions to meet its own needs. He discusses his book, Freedom Manifesto, which he co-authored with Elizabeth Ames. Jason and Steve explain the benefits of economic freedom and also look at current economic issues including asset bubbles created by the Federal Reserve.
Announcer 0:00
Welcome to this week’s edition of flashback Friday, your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason is hand picked to help you today in the present, and propel you into the future. Enjoy.
Announcer 0:16
Welcome to creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven’t thought of before and a new slant on investing fresh new approaches to America’s best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multi millionaire who not only talks the talk but walks the walk. He’s been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason’s footsteps on the road to financial freedom, you really can do it. And now here’s your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.
Jason Hartman 1:07
Welcome to the creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. And this is episode number 302 number 302. And today we’ve got our interview with Steve Forbes, the great steve forbes. I really love his thinking. And it’s just so clear and concise. And I just I just think he’s really, really got it figured out. So we’re going to talk with him here in a few minutes. But first, one of our investment counselors is on with me, and I’ve been trying to get her on the last several episodes, but she’s just been too darn busy. And that is Sarah, how are you Sarah?
Steve Forbes 1:41
Hey, good, Jason. Thanks for having me.
Jason Hartman 1:43
Well, my pleasure. So a couple current events I’d like to talk about before we get into the interview with Steve Forbes, and one of them is the issue of the Socialist Republic of California. And how it is doing such a great job of losing high quality residents to other states. And you know, this is always the equalizing factor. One of the things that these taxing authorities, they must realize this. And if they don’t realize it, then I guess you just call it an unintended consequence. I don’t know, which is true, I guess it’s probably a little bit of both. But there’s an investor’s dot com, which is Investor’s Business Daily article, talking about how California moves to Texas, Arizona and Nevada. And it’s just talking about how people are just leaving the Golden State. And it is such a sad, sad commentary, really. But it’s interesting, Sarah, because you you posted this on your own Facebook and got some interesting comments about it. What are your thoughts?
Steve Forbes 2:44
I did? Well, it’s just mind boggling to see you know, this article says that, you know, had a net loss of 100,000 people just last year, and yeah, I posted this on my Facebook and instantly got a ton of response in my post was something to the effect of I’m moving. I’m moving out of California Who’s with me? And you know, it was interesting to see how many of you know my colleagues have already moved, and a lot of them to Arizona, Texas, Colorado. So yeah, and they love it.
Jason Hartman 3:14
It’s it’s really, it’s really amazing. When you start looking around the country, you realize California is definitely not the center of the universe. And you know that that number 100,000 people, the net loss of 100,000 people just last year, just last year in one year, that may not seem like that big a deal to a state with almost 40 million people. But folks, this is what you’ve got to realize. And it’s interesting because it comes on the heels of the news. Just yesterday, I read about Detroit, on the verge of filing for bankruptcy. Frankly, I’m surprised it hadn’t happened a long time ago with Detroit, but in a time where the general population of the United States is growing. You lose 100,000 people from its most populous state, have very, very bad commentary. Now, what’s interesting to Sarah is to look at where they went 59,000 people went to Texas. I mean, just just unbelievable. And this is this is making up more than 100,000. Well, no, this is the net loss number. So yeah, I guess it doesn’t have to add up to 100,000 in these other numbers, another 49,000 and change to Arizona. And what else do you show there?
Steve Forbes 4:30
40,000 to Nevada, 38,000, to Washington and another 34,000 to Oregon.
Jason Hartman 4:37
Amazing, really, really incredible. So this this is what happens when you overtax people and it’s happening on a national basis as well, where we’re seeing more and more people leave the country. And this is what happens when you increase tax. When you increase government intrusion. When you increase regulation, you get the fact, of lessened economic activity, because people find a way to get around it. They spend all their time trying to game the system and beat the system, or they just finally give up and leave. And they just say, Look, I’m not going to put up with it anymore. It’ll be interesting to hear after this. I’m interviewing Jim Rogers. He’s going to be on the show for the second time. And it’s not on this episode. We’ve got steve forbes this time, but I’m recording the interview with him just in about an hour here. And it’ll be interesting to hear his his commentary on all of this, but but any other thoughts on the California out migration issue? Well, I mean,
Steve Forbes 5:37
it’s just really sad that you know, as Californians were disincentivized to work harder, I mean, it’s, it’s just, it’s just mind boggling how much money you know, we’re giving away each year. I remember you know, about a year or so ago being in the middle of a, you know, an audit and it was for such a small amount. And I just remember how time consuming that was and thinking gosh, you know, for such A small amount and how much they’re paying these, you know, IRS people to audit me and all the amount the energy that it sucked out of my life I thought, Gosh, I could be working harder and creating more revenue for for us and it just, it just is so backwards to me it is totally backwards when you put people in a position where they have to spend so much of their mental energy and their time defending themselves against their own government, you have a recipe for disaster. Now, all of this being said, you know, we pick
Jason Hartman 6:34
on on the United States quite a bit on this show. And you know, rightfully so there are a lot of a lot of problems, a lot of issues, a lot of things to pick on. However, all things considered when you look around the globe, America still pretty darn good place. Okay, so, you know, and what one of the great things about it is that we can criticize it without too much fear of retribution. Although there are some stories about some retribution, but by and large, it’s still pretty good. But yeah, definitely sad about California. Now another thing that’s interesting and maybe before we jump into this next event, I want to talk a little bit about a recent real estate scam. One of the things we always say and you know, Sarah, I know that your clients are constantly talking to you about my commandment number three in my 10 commandments of successful investing, which as of our last meet the Masters event at the Hyatt Regency in Irvine, California, we introduced the next 10 commandments. So now we actually have 20 commandments of successful investing. But number three in the original 10 is thou shalt maintain control. So you don’t leave yourself susceptible to investing with a crook. You’re not pooling your money. You’re a direct investor, you’re in control of your own money. And number two is you might be investing with an idiot. So you don’t want to invest with a crook. You don’t want to invest with an idiot. Number three, assuming they’re honest, assuming they’re competent. They take a huge management fee off The top for managing the deal. And that’s what happens to people who go into pooled money, paper asset type investments. This is why we don’t like the stock market. This is why we don’t like anything other you know, if you’re going to be in metals, which I think gold and silver have huge flaws, the precious metals have giant flaws that we’ve talked about many times. But certainly, the only way you invest in those things, if you’re going to do it is by physical possession. Not taking a piece of paper not having a paper asset. We like hard assets. And Sarah, isn’t this a great example of why
Steve Forbes 8:39
Yeah, absolutely. You know, and in reading this article, it’s just, you know, really sad when people think they’re getting in on a good deal and promised these high returns, you know, I think they were promised like 10 to 15%. And they probably didn’t even know what they were getting into. I mean, they had an idea of this great development, but you know, never came to be and Now the guys behind bars and they’re out a bunch of money.
Jason Hartman 9:02
Yeah. So what happened here in this deal is this is a guy named Russell Daniel. Okay. And Russell Daniel basically got people to invest in his real estate company. And his real estate company was in the business of buying fixing and flipping homes. And you know, rehabbing these properties. And and guess what? The properties were fictitious. And then he created notes on the properties. And I think although the article doesn’t say this, I think he sold the notes to people. And the notes were fake, the mortgages were fake. So it was like a double whammy. And he’s got to go to federal prison for three years and and pay nearly $3 million in restitution. But what happens with most of these scam artists, is they spend all the money they go live some lavish lifestyle, they figure out a way to hide it, move it offshore, so they never really pay the restitution. And that’s usually what happens. So it’s really, really a sad story, be a direct investor. commandment number three, thou shalt maintain control. Good advice, right?
Steve Forbes 10:09
Yeah, absolutely mean it, you know, maintain control of your investments. And I mean, there is there is an amount of, you know, risk that’s involved with these, you know, even buying your own, you know, single family properties, but you can really take out a lot of that risk by being that direct investor doing your own due diligence, you know, asking the right questions, and not just turning your cash over to to someone else that you think you can trust. So
Jason Hartman 10:36
remember, you’re listening to flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and Wednesday. This is exactly what happens, folks. Right now. We’re in a time where a lot of money has been sitting on the sidelines for the last several years throughout the financial crisis. And that money is really beginning to move off the sidelines, and people are feeling the wealth effect. I think that’s largely fake. After Obama’s first election, they blew up the stock market again, by printing a bunch of fake fiat money creating money out of thin air. And so the stock market came back at least a nominal dollars, maybe not real dollars, probably not real dollars. But it but in nominal terms, you know, it sort of came back to where it was announced doing even a little better than that. And now they’re blowing up the real estate bubble again, and here we go. So people start to get this feeling that things are better than they really are. It’s called the wealth effect. And what happens when the wealth effect is created, and these bubbles are created, is you get people that just sort of start to get really stupid with their money, and they just throw it around. They don’t pay a lot of attention. They don’t pay attention to details. They think, gosh, I’ve got a half million or 2 million bucks sitting in the bank on the sidelines. I got to put that money to work. That’s a great philosophy, that’s a great thing to think. But that doesn’t mean you should get reckless. One of the things we said since since we really started doing the real estate investment business, mostly with a lot of my prior clients for many, many years ago in the traditional real estate business in Southern California, that that’s where sort of the genesis of this business model was. And I always said to people, don’t take your California mind and start investing in these other markets across the country, because everything looks like it’s dirt cheap or free. And that is a recipe for disaster just because it cost at the time $500,000 to buy the same house in California, and it only cost 120,000 to buy that property in Dallas, Texas, doesn’t mean you should stop thinking.
Steve Forbes 12:53
Well, and and you know, just to magnify that imagine, you know, we deal with some foreign investors too, and you You know, I think that our real estate looks even cheaper to them, you know, and so I was just in touch with a foreign investor the other day. And, you know, we discovered that, you know, he was working with a group who was marking up prices, I mean, just flat out, not even taking possession of the property, but just marketing us properties and marking them up five to $10,000. And just taking that some off the top. So
Jason Hartman 13:27
that’s, that’s the South African group. And you know, that is so scary, folks, when people just, they just get in this position, where they just get dumb, they just get built, and we just see it all the time, where people are just overpaying for things. They’re they’re investing in things with ridiculous projections and performance that don’t make any sense. Yeah, I mean, speak to that a little more, if you would, Sarah, any more examples are great.
Steve Forbes 13:54
I would love to get my hands on one of their performance to find out if they’re putting in a vacancy or they put maintenance, taxes, insurance, you know, all the fees that are associated with, you know, make, I want to know what their cash flow numbers look like next to, you know our numbers, because what I find as I’m subscribed to a lot of different property providers articles and things like that, and, and what I find is that they’re missing a lot of the meat. And it’s very hard to see what the bottom line is, which is why I love how we use a third party software to, you know, make sure that all the assumptions are in there, and then our clients get those apples to apples projections. I think that is so important.
Jason Hartman 14:32
Yeah, it really is, and they’re nice and conservative. And again, as we mentioned on a prior episode, we’re going to do a comparison of the typical scenario that we project comparison of a competitor scenario which looks better than ours, frankly, because they’re not as conservative as we are. And a worst case scenario that you know, when things go bad surprisingly, people when it comes to income property investing because it’s a multi dimensional asset. class, people don’t know how to keep score very well. And they’ve got to learn how to keep score better. And that will help them make decisions in a much more prudent manner. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. I
Steve Forbes 15:12
mean, it wasn’t. It’s interesting, you bring that up, because I had a great call with an investor yesterday who, you know, was asking me about doing a 1031 exchange. And we started to get into the detail of his property, and I’m thinking, why do you want to exchange that property? It was a it was a great property. And, you know, we started talking about just that about keeping score. And, you know, turns out it probably would be better for him to, you know, refinance that property, maybe stretch out the term of the loan and lower the interest rate a little bit. The numbers worked. So you know, you’re right people. They don’t they often don’t keep score.
Jason Hartman 15:48
Yeah, they just don’t know how to keep score and when in not doing that. They tend to make very bad decisions. So it’s very important to know how to keep score, isn’t it? Absolutely. Well, hey, let’s Go to our interview here with Steve Forbes. And we will be back with that in just a moment. But be sure to visit Jason Hartman calm and get involved in our upcoming property tour. The tours we have coming up are Memphis, and then probably a while after that, we’ll probably go to Houston or Dallas. keep those in mind and you can learn about them at Jason Hartman calm and the blog there I really want to recommend our blog to people. If you’re only listening to the show, and you’re only taking our content in on an audio basis. Remember, there’s a text a whole whole bunch of text on our website, and a great Google search bar. That’s a fantastic resources. We have thousands and thousands of pages of investor content on our website that you can look at. So check that all out it almost all of it is free at Jason Hartman calm and we will be back with Steve Forbes in just a moment.
Steve Forbes 16:57
What’s great about the shows you’ll find on Jason hartman.com Is that if you want to learn about investing in and managing income properties for college students, there’s a show for that. If you want to learn how to get noticed online and in social media, there’s a show for that. If you want to know how to save on life’s largest expense, there’s a show for that. And if you’d like to know about America’s crime of the century, there’s even a show for that. Yep, there’s a show for just about anything, only from Jason hartman.com or type in Jason Hartman
Jason Hartman 17:33
in the iTunes Store. It’s my pleasure to welcome a name that you are all very familiar with. And it is Mr. Steve Forbes, who doesn’t really need an introduction, but his body of work is so comprehensive as a presidential candidate, the author of numerous books, and of course, Forbes magazine. Steve, welcome. How are you?
Steve Forbes 18:01
Good to be with you again. Thank you.
Jason Hartman 18:03
Well, likewise, I’d like to talk to you about your latest work first, maybe the freedom Manifesto, why free markets are moral? And I completely agree. The first chapter Steve starts out with the FedEx versus the post office. And of course, we all just heard that the post office is cutting Saturday delivery, what a mismanaged disaster it is. But tell us about the book.
Steve Forbes 18:26
Well, the book was written because of a perplexing question, confusing question as to why government gets bigger and bigger when we know it doesn’t work very well. Since the 1980s. With Milton Friedman and others we know that is highly inefficient outside of a certain area, and yet it gets bigger and one of the reasons we discovered why it gets bigger is because it occupies the high moral ground. People acknowledge government may be inefficient, but it’s hard. It’s in the right place. It takes care of people in need, takes care of the kids helps deal with free markets when they go off the rails and the like. And So it just gets bigger. And when this book which I co authored with Elizabeth Ames, we found out that contrary to myth, free markets are actually moral because they meet the needs and wants of people, while big government is not moral because it meets its own needs. And you saw that in that Chicago School strike a few months ago, one of the worst school systems in the country was all about pay and benefits, not about the kids. You saw it in the GM bankruptcy where the government to force a settlement that favored the union’s political supporters of theirs, tore up the contract law did things you expect in the third world. So free markets, encourage all the things that we want and encourages creativity, innovation, meritocracy, just compare apples, Solyndra and big government is about meeting its own needs. And that’s what people have got to realize.
Jason Hartman 19:56
People do have to realize that government always looks out for itself. First, and looks for ways to expand its power and to keep its entrenched alliances and motivations. And, you know, it’s just an issue of pandering. I mean, it’s a constant pandering. Is that why government occupies the high moral ground in most people’s minds? Of course, it’s misleading but maybe talk a little bit around so government always
Steve Forbes 20:21
takes a crisis and if you oppose a government program, you always get hit with What do you have against helping children? What What do you have against the elderly? And so you always get are portrayed if you oppose a government program is being heartless being cold calculating accountant. And free markets actually are the ones that enable people to get ahead and enable people to earn more, have more, and this government that holds us back but government gets bigger by taking our resources and then pretending to help us
Jason Hartman 20:56
or in anybody listening to this has to do is just ask themselves I mean, what is their personal experience with government versus free enterprise? I mean, would you rather walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles or the Apple store? The post office or FedEx? Who’s more helpful? It’s obvious,
Steve Forbes 21:12
yes, because government answers to its own political constituencies, its own bureaucracy. Whereas in the free markets, if you do that, you don’t stay in business very long. You must be attentive to your customers, you must be on the cutting edge, or the world will pass you by unless you get bailed out by government, they will. One of the interesting things we recount in this book is the story of a British historian, fellow named Parkinson’s. In the 1950s. He was doing a history of the British Navy. And notice after world war one when Britain had the largest Navy in the world by far, they’d won the war so they downsized the Navy mothballed ships discharged sailors laid off dock workers. And yet the government agency running the Navy got bigger as the Navy got smaller, and he postulated That organizations, unless it’s in a free market organizations inevitably get bigger just because they want to get bigger and that the work they have to do has nothing to do with the size of the bureaucracy.
Jason Hartman 22:13
Well, it reminds me very well looking at bill Bennett’s book decks of leading cultural indicators where he had this very telling graph. And it compared teaching staff and public schools versus administrative staff back into I think, the 60s or 70s, up to the 90s. And the equation Steve has completely flipped, where the they’re so top heavy with administrators and all the money. I mean, it’s just they constantly complain, oh, we need more funding. We need more funding,
Steve Forbes 22:41
when they keep getting more funding and they keep misusing that funding. Well, if you don’t stop them, they will get bigger and bigger and more bloated and as you pointed out in terms of higher education, thanks to government subsidies, for tuitions, ostensibly to help the kids what happens Is that you get more administrative bloat, you look at the number of administrators versus professors and the numbers become completely skewed. And the kids instead of getting something that catapults them ahead in the world come out of higher ed with a burden with debt sort of a mortgage without a house, right?
Jason Hartman 23:19
Yeah, yeah. And that debt, by the way, is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So they they literally indentured servants for life to that student loan debt. And and that is very scary. But what what it seems to be when you look at the left and the right in the political debate, is that the left always appeals to instant gratification. Oh, we’re going to have more government, you know, loan guarantees for college. And all they do is create the Basic Law of inflation as you have, you know, a large supply of dollars chasing a limited supply of goods and services. And so of course, tuition prices go up. And you see these colleges abusing the system. My mother went to oddly it’s kind of odd. My mother Went to Berkeley in the 60s and got a degree in social welfare yet Steve has never voted for a Democrat.
Steve Forbes 24:08
markable woman
Jason Hartman 24:09
Yeah, yeah, exactly. But but as a social worker out of out of college for a couple of years, he just saw that government didn’t work, you know, at all. And you know, she worked her way through school back then you could do it. But nowadays, I don’t think it’s possible for a kid to go to a decent college and pay their way through. She didn’t get a student loan, she didn’t have her parents paid for it.
Steve Forbes 24:31
Well, you had scholarships, and you took jobs to help pay your way through. And colleges knew there wasn’t an open a faucet or an ATM for more and more cash. So they watched expenses a little more carefully. And you could get a good education. And by the way, you didn’t have these things where you have today where you get six years before we get a degree and I think you’re going to see a huge change. thanks to technology. Thanks. To the web, you can get if it’s just knowledge you’re interested in. You can get a virtual university education for $1,000 a year. going online.
Jason Hartman 25:11
Yeah, it’s it’s amazing. And you can actually get it for free at the Khan Academy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. But
Steve Forbes 25:17
yeah, we we’ve written on this. And so it’s a huge possibilities out there. But if government was in charge, you believed we know cell phones, if government been in charge of cell phones, you know, the first 130 years ago as big as a shoe box and close $3,995 if government had been charged, saying everyone wants to have a cell phone, I guarantee you they’d be just as big as a brick today, and cost $9,995 and government would be railing against greedy cell phone makers.
Jason Hartman 25:48
You are so right. Well, I don’t want to spend all the time on the freedom Manifesto, which is a fantastic work. But the last chapter Yeah, I love the title of it, by the way is entitled The spirit of Reagan or Obama. To address that for a moment, if you would,
Steve Forbes 26:02
well, free markets are about optimism. You don’t invest in the future, or you’re the last one to be paid off, if you didn’t have faith in the future didn’t have faith that you could put together a team to achieve great things. And both Reagan and Obama came in times of crisis came into office in times of crisis. And Reagan, while acknowledging the severity of the crisis had a basic optimism that the American people would pull through as they’ve always done before. Whereas Obama was sort of a pessimistic we must put childish things aside, did not convey the faith and the basic the uniqueness of America and the American people. And you see it in the way he governs. It’s about conflict 1% versus the 99% elderly versus the young labor versus management all about conflict class conflict and the like to generate government power, whereas Reagan was a more optimistic and A benign view of the future because he had faith for all the flaws of human nature and free markets with sensible rules of the road. People do great things.
Jason Hartman 27:09
There’s no question about that. And history has borne that out so many times. There’s just no example in the world or at any time when a larger government has created more freedom, you know, and of course, I say that there’s a lot of detail to that. We don’t want to live in Somalia. I remember when I saw you speak at the Nixon library several years ago for a young entrepreneurs organization event. You You said, I think you said something to the effect of look, we need government because we’re not all angels. Okay. You know, we need we need some rule of law. Of course, anarchy is no fun, but we’re on that continuum and that billion Shades of Grey, does one come down.
Steve Forbes 27:50
Well, I think then Madison, more than 200 years ago, made that famous observation he said if we were angels, we would not need law. We’d not need governments, but manifestly we are not angels. So we do need laws, we do need government. But he also pointed out that this is why the founders put in divided government checks and balances, because they feared that a government that was strong enough to provide law and order and protect us from invaders could also end up suppressing people inside the country. And so they wanted divided powers. So government has certain functions are safety dealing with immediate disasters and basic things like that enforcing contracts. But when it goes beyond that, and trying to run an economy, like what the government’s trying to do with healthcare, the financial industry, the energy industry, we should learn from your opponent, not to mention the Soviet Union. Those things will lead to less freedom, less opportunity, tyranny, and more miserable life. No question about that.
Jason Hartman 28:51
Just a reminder, you’re listening to flashback Friday. Our new episodes are published every Monday and every Wednesday. On your Twitter feed, there were two interesting tweets just yesterday that I wanted to ask you about one of them, since most of our listeners, by the way are real estate investors or certainly investors, to say the least. But what about asset inflation, how it leads to quote the wealth illusion, unquote. And how the government is just blowing along with the Fed, of course, is blowing up bubble after bubble, whether it be the stock market, the housing market, and it seems like here we go again on both counts. And then also there was another tweet about explaining the housing boom in the last 30 years. I just wanted to get your perspective on those.
Steve Forbes 29:38
Well, when government undermines the value of the dollar, you get misdirected investment. And we saw this in the 70s oil went from $3 to $40. a barrel Reagan comes in the inflation stops or crashes to $10 and then averages a little over $20 a barrel from the mid 1980s to the early part of the last decade. So when the The dollar is undermined, people go for hard assets to protect what they have, instead of investing for the future farmland has doubled in recent years. There’s another bubble the Fed has created now and get another bubble in the bond market. And so it’s like changing the minutes in an hour. Imagine what life would be like if you didn’t have 60 minutes an hour, but it changed each day. He would be would be a lot more confusing and a lot less opportunity to get a higher standard of living. So when government undermines money, bad things happen. And we’re seeing that today government gets all the money in wants deficit without tears, while small businesses, unincorporated businesses, their credit lines are drying up. They’re getting less credit today than they did two years ago and on housing. Government always does these programs extensively to help us in housing. The Community Reinvestment Act saying put the standards aside for lower income people and Fannie and Freddie bigger and bigger and bigger FHA Federal Housing Administration getting more bloated is going to need a bailout soon, and then just blowing up the housing market. And we have less homeownership percentage of the population, then do a dozen other countries. So in government says it’s here to help Watch out
Jason Hartman 31:20
very well. But as far as Reagan used to often say, so your prediction of the future, I mean, we’ve got $16 trillion hanging over our head, plus another entitlement time bomb of anywhere between 60 and $20 trillion. inflationary for the future.
Steve Forbes 31:37
It means trouble. And when when government undermines currency, you can’t predict what kind of disaster you’re going to get. But, you know, on toward bad things are going to happen. And we had that in 2008 2009. We never would have had that economic crisis. We never would have had the housing bubble. The Federal Reserve hadn’t printed so much money in the government made such a catastrophic errors in regulation. So in the future it is, you know, you know, the pain, the government debt. Right now it is deficit without tears, but you start to get real interest rates again, that’s going to cost the government hundreds of billions of dollars and where’s that money going to come from? So I can’t tell you exactly the bad thing that’s going to happen but the patient had better watch out or so they stay on the airplane, tighten the seatbelts turbulence ahead,
Jason Hartman 32:31
no question about it. So what are your other thoughts on if we didn’t cover them on the economy and you know, any tips for investors that you might have?
Steve Forbes 32:40
Well, the investors are in a tough place right now. Because you know, the Fed is mucking around with the dollar. So you do need some hard assets like gold as an insurance policy, but you don’t want to go too far into it. Because these things burst. We saw it with housing a sure thing. And then exploded. We saw in the 70s oil crashes of 70% when the the the inflation ended, so you got to be just very careful and for your retirement fund, unless you’re about to do it. The advice there is don’t let emotions be your enemy. If you’re contribute, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, weekly, whatever you do small amount do it consistently, because even though the markets are turbulent today’s in real terms is still lower than they were 14 years ago. 12 years ago. The thing to keep in mind as America always comes back, and if you keep putting in steadily you’ll do just fine trying to time the market, you will get killed and early 2009 when things look especially bleak. A lot of people pulled out of the market and since then the market has doubled. So stay in it. Ride the storms. Don’t let your emotions get in the way. And you’ll do just fine.
Jason Hartman 34:03
What do you say to someone who thinks this recovery is real? I think it’s fake. I think it’s just an inflation induced recovery. So it’s maybe a, maybe you’d call it a nominal dollar recovery, rather than a real dollar recovery. The problem is with this stuff, is there always time lags, the government creates a bunch of money out of thin air, and everybody feels prosperous for a little while, and then suddenly, they realize, oh, everything just got more expensive. So maybe I’m not as prosperous as I thought. And it’s these constant cycles of catch up. And I mean, I mean, certainly you don’t think this is a real recovery?
Steve Forbes 34:37
Well, it’s a very weak recovery. And what is astonishing is after every sharp downturn in the past, we’ve always had a sharp upturn. And then the question became, could you sustain it, but you always got that sharp snap back. We didn’t get that sharp snap back this time. So we’re like the car on the superhighway. We should be going 7075 miles hour today. Now we’ve gotten it From 20 to 30, but we’re going to go back to a 10 or 15 miles an hour. So yeah, this is not NASCAR time. Sadly,
Jason Hartman 35:09
yeah, it’s just a slow plodding recovery is a recovery at all. Maybe right now, Steve, what’s going on at Forbes magazine?
Steve Forbes 35:17
Well, Forbes magazine, actually for the first part of this year is doing rather well in advertising, circulation paid is holding up. real excitement is on forbes.com. In January, we had over 45 million unique visitors. So we’re adjusting to the new age and knock on wood. So far, so good.
Jason Hartman 35:38
And you’ve been adjusting to the new age for a long time. I mean, I think you were one of the first big publishers to really recognize the power of the internet. While everybody was trying to figure out what to do. I mean, I remember when I met you, you know, about 12 years ago and the investor crews in Russia and Scandinavia. I was talking with some of your people at the dinner table about how Forbes publishing for the web. And so it’s a different business, isn’t it?
Steve Forbes 36:03
It very much is both on the content creation side, we now have almost 1000 contracted contributors for forbes.com. Making one or two submissions every week, every month or so. And on the marketing side, we’re doing things very differently than we were doing five or 10 years ago. So, yeah, the world is changing. What you have to keep in mind is what Peter Drucker, the great management guru, once said, he said, businesses should remind themselves what is their what is their purpose? What are they trying to do? And if you do that, then you don’t get quite as hung up on the means to achieve what you’re trying to do. And you’re better able to adjust to changing times and circumstances.
Jason Hartman 36:50
Yeah, fantastic advice. I think he also said the one constant is change. I may not be attributing that correctly, but I think it was Drucker. Yeah. And when we need to get used to it A lot of change especially in the future. So, as you said, fasten your seat belts. Well, anything else you’d like people to know in closing
Steve Forbes 37:06
just even though we’re in for some very stormy weather, don’t lose faith in the future ronald reagan never did. We will find a way out of this. We always do. Don’t despair.
Jason Hartman 37:18
Fantastic. Well, Steve Forbes, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you.
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