I think this was the most enlightening pre-record conversation I've had.
We should record that shit for your premium people, right?
We should have.
You know, I do that when I'm with Tom Longo.
We hit the tape before we hit the tape.
I hit the tape on my phone.
I go, let's go.
Argue about something like music or some uber shit, you know.
Tom is one of my favorite crazy uncles, recurring crazy uncles on this show.
He's totally.
He's totally, yeah.
Yeah, we definitely we definitely riff off of each other from different angles.
I look at it from finances and I try to explain the world.
He tries to explain the world from ideology.
And together, it's like we're both right or we're both just lying to each other.
Who knows? All right. So I'm with you.
Do you do you pick up what he's putting down in terms that England still controls the world?
The crown still controls the world?
he needs a focal point
and that focal point
this is not going to be a negative statement
he seems to focus on a focal point
and then he sees the tentacles coming out
I don't see the focal point
it may not be the king of England
or the crown
two years ago it was Davos and WEF
and the Biden Junta
that was his expression
and now he's gravitated towards the crown
I'm like you know what
I mean, when you look at things through the lens that I study and analyze things, which is like him, and that is all you do is you find out who benefits and who suffers.
And you just keep eliminating people until you find out the one guy who's there.
And I don't know that it's the crown per se, but there's definitely a – one thing that he said that's really true is that Europe in general is a plantation.
Long time ago, he was talking about it this way.
Europe's a plantation.
They've, you know, feudalism.
And the people that are in power want to stay in power.
And the Europeans are still colonizing.
They're trying to protect their colonies.
And I guess if you want to put a focal point on it, you can call it the crown.
You can call it the people that operate the crown.
I think I know from a friend of mine who's a banking executive here that there's an ideological
split, and it's everywhere.
And the ideological split is the European old money.
I mean, they don't have anything there.
I mean, I'm not anti-Europe like he is.
But, you know, they're doubling down on, let's say, ideology or wokeness.
And Germany's got no manufacturing anymore.
No, no.
I agree with him.
It's probably not that.
In six months, you and I will talk about this again.
And he will say, well, I know who's pulling the strings of the crown now.
He just keeps going up the ladder, right?
He was like, I hate Biden because of this.
And I'm like, yeah, you're right.
He goes, and then I will look at Europe and England in terms of trade.
I'll say, well, this is what's going on here.
That doesn't make sense.
Italy's getting screwed, yada, yada, yada.
And then I'll say, well, that's because the ideology is driving all the policy.
I would say the ideology influences policy because I still believe that people can at least be semi-rational.
He – he's kind of dragging me that way, but he's like, no, no.
Ideology determines everything with these people, and it's sad and pathetic, but it's true.
I'm looking at things differently now.
For example, domestically, Kamala Harris, right?
I don't care about the politics.
I'm not a political person.
Well, I identify her as what you would call a third generation feminist.
So there's real feminists, then there's their children, and then there's the third generation.
Why are you a feminist?
Because my mom was.
Kamala's third generation.
I'm like, well, where did she get this training?
And I found that yesterday.
Kamala Harris, I'm listening to like the Dick Kennedys, which is like, they have a so-called...
Are you familiar with the band?
Yep.
So California Ubrows, right?
It's about Jerry Brown, you know, the hippie who wanted to run for president when Reagan won.
And I'm reading the lyrics.
I'm like, yes, it's pretty funny.
It's really cool.
And then, you know, where's Jerry Brown now?
Boom.
I did one of those things on ChatGPT.
And Kamala Harris's name came up in his bio.
She was attorney general for California for seven years on their head.
And I'm like, oh, that's where you got it.
And they just got off the deep end of those people.
anyway all right cool um so i agree with tom on a lot of things and when i disagree i let him know
and it's usually minor stuff uh or when i don't agree or disagree i just sit back and just watch
him froth and we have fun he brings on to kind of give him a sounding board to do his thing yeah
it's uh great we we typically we for some reason we always record on the late friday afternoon
whenever we do record.
And that's like him after a week of screaming at people
and dissecting things.
And I don't know if I get him at his most tired point
or when he's distilled his thoughts most clearly,
but they're always incredible conversations.
If they're not distilled clearly,
I see the picture of the guy from
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia with the map.
I'm like, whoa.
I'll say, okay, time out.
Could you pause this?
What the fuck are you talking about?
Tom Peppers.
And then other times I'm like, that sounds stupid, but it's not wrong.
That sounds, it's not wrong.
Oh shit, he might be right.
And I just, I just walk away going, all right, I guess I have to look at it that way now.
Yeah, I will say he definitely dragged me towards his viewpoint in terms of this, for lack of a better term, inter-cabal squabble, like changing the reference rate.
Inter-cabal squabble.
Yeah, that's right.
That's what it is.
Inter-cabal.
That's a good phrase.
You should get a .com on that or something like .io.
Inter-cabal squabble.
The only thing that I've identified that I think that, and I'm saying it to you and I'll say it to him, but I haven't said it to him yet, but I'm saying it to you.
He has become so patriotic.
I'm very patriotic.
But he has become so patriotic that everything Trump does is viewed as good for us.
And I have said that as well, meaning Trump's an accelerationist.
Whether he's good or bad, I don't care.
We're going to get to where we have to get faster because of him.
but I don't think he's the 3D chess people that some person that people do.
I think he's a people pleaser. He just wants to be liked.
Oh yeah. He's a, would you say people pleaser? Yeah.
That's right. He's got a personality disorder and that's,
and I'm not saying that lightly. He's got,
he's a narcissistic personality disorder.
I studied him when I was in New York city for years as,
as one of the things to look at and yeah.
And it becomes a people pleaser.
He's constantly pulling.
And thank God, because he doesn't get married to an idea and he can change gears if he's wrong.
On the other hand, it really kind of makes it look like he's out of his mind.
Yeah.
I was watching Scott Adams.
He did his daily show yesterday.
And he was highlighting like the Hamas Israel deal that was signed.
Who knows if it will stick?
But nobody thought he could do that.
Right.
I think he's catering to the people-pleasing nature of like –
Oh, you're right.
And that's something that Tom actually pointed out.
He goes – like, this is me and you versus Tom and his part, conversation.
Tom, do you know what Trump does on Thursday?
He dumps some ideas to get them distracted.
He does something else on Monday.
It's brilliant.
And I'll say, Tom, he tries stuff.
If it doesn't work, he moves on to something else because he wants to keep the press on him in positive light.
He's like, oh, no, he's got a plan.
But no, he doesn't, Tom.
So anyway, the point is the result is the same, but I agree with you.
That's true, right?
People pleaser.
Right now, he's not like the economy.
He's talking about – the funny thing is because he's screwing up on – let's say he's being perceived as screwing up on – I mean, look, he's not making – he's not getting more popular, right?
He's losing popularity.
So what's he doing?
And he goes, well, where can I pivot to next?
Oh, shit.
Let me work.
He's working on things all the time.
And, you know, and if Gaza works, his popularity goes up.
I mean, look, after the midterms, he's done in terms of influence.
And so he kind of recognizes that.
Yeah.
No, I mean, last point on this, but like he did have MSNBC, ABC, CBS, sort of giving him
flowers and obama while not explicitly mentioning him in the tweet did say that was a good thing
that this peace deal is coming so it seems like he is dragging people in his erection but one thing
that trump is famous for is being a big fan of gold uh this is your expertise and why i wanted
to bring you on obviously is gold i think it's still trading over four thousand dollars right now
Wow. Silver screaming.
I told you
we've had two people on.
I'm short silver right now. I'm a fucking idiot.
Don't
record that. Turn that mic off.
Let me see what I see here.
Yeah, Trump and gold. That's your Scott
Bessette thing. And that's where Bitcoin
comes in.
You don't announce you're going to create an
SPR for Bitcoin. You just buy.
Gold's 4019. Jesus
Christ.
What?
whenever I see gold up $40,
I go,
all right,
what did Trump do today?
You know,
like the Gaza deal just blow up or something.
Yeah.
He called out China.
He said,
China's not,
uh,
not over the table.
China's not cooperating with the rare earth metals deal that they want to do.
Right.
That's right.
He said,
right.
Stocks are down.
Gold is up.
What's the dollar doing in dollars down?
Yeah.
Oh,
but the market's acting recessionary.
I think I just saw something come across the tape
That he's threatening to do more tariffs
Yeah, Trump threatens China tariffs
There you go
Doesn't take much to get gold going right now
And by the way, with the context of Bitcoin
I do want to say something to your audience about that
Because having lived through the repression of gold price
All your people are smart enough to know how it's happening
But I just want to confirm it and give them details of how it's being done
because they're keeping the lid on it to accumulate it.
That's what they're doing.
They're trying to wash people out.
That's what they're doing.
And I'm not even paranoid.
Anyway, all right, I'm ready for you.
All right, we'll get to that later.
Let's focus on gold first.
Like I was saying, I've had two people on the last three months
caught my eye, actually probably the last two months,
caught my eye two months ago,
the chart of the Shanghai warrants going up.
We'll cover that.
parabolically. What is happening there?
I'm sorry, what?
What is happening there?
Are we starting now?
Yeah.
Okay.
We've been recording for 11 minutes.
Oh, nice. Cool.
All right. So, okay.
Shanghai warrants.
All right. So the fact is, and I know you know this and your people know this as well,
but the fact of the matter is Shanghai has been adding warrants, which are claims on gold,
in the exchange. Now, generally speaking, the Shanghai warrant float is, I'm going to make a
number up, but it's going to be giving an idea of the scale. If you have the chart for your people,
that'll help them as well. About four, like four on a scale of one to 104, you know, 4,000 warrants
or 400 warrants, but it's a small number and it's very regular. And it goes like this. If you're
looking at a chart, if you have chartists out there, it'll go sideways. And what that is,
is that those warrants in general are tied to people arbitraging the physical to the futures
in China. That's all it is, right? There's not a lot going on there. But a couple months ago,
it starts to ramp. And there you go. That's it. Yeah, it starts to ramp. So
it starts to ramp before 2025. It starts to ramp, frankly, when Trump started doing the tariff thing.
And it's getting aggressive now.
Now, I've been watching this for a couple months with interest, but no conclusion.
And just to stay with the facts of that for a second there, what they're doing is they're
locking up gold.
That gold is being locked up.
And China has been importing gold hand over fist.
And they advertise that now because they're broadcasting to their BRICS partners.
They're junior partners that say, we've got the gold.
We've got the gold.
We're telling you we've got the asset that allows us to get off of treasuries, which
allows us to get off of dollars.
And they're doing that.
But what are they using the gold for is really what I think there's probably only three people
who have a clue, at least publicly, that are talking about it.
One of them, I hope, is me.
Another is Eric Young.
He and I are friends.
We've come to the same conclusion from different points of view.
And there's someone else out there I'm not going to mention because I don't know.
So, but here's the situation.
And it has to do with gold and the yuan, the Chinese currency, and it has to do with trust.
So, in the West, we recently changed gold to a tier one asset per Basel III.
And that means, right, so everyone knows that terminology here.
All right, good.
So we changed it to tier one, Basel III, and we did that because what it does is it allows the piggy bank of your gold to be recognized on your balance sheet.
So my balance sheet now recognizes the asset at its full value.
It used to be tier three.
Tier three, only 50% of its value is recognized.
So if I needed 100%, you sold it.
The structure was made for you to sell gold.
They make it tier one.
You don't have to liquidate it.
So you hold it and you get the full benefit on your balance sheet. And when you do that,
if you're, let's say you're a central bank, I don't know if it applies to central banks yet,
but it offsets your losses. You have a bigger piggyback. You have a bigger savings account,
but you can't touch it. You can't monetize it. You can't loan it. You can't leverage it. It's just
a pet rock, which is what they want. Because if you let the pet rock out,
it becomes a potential replacement for the dollar and for treasuries. So that's Basel,
that Basel III in tier one The next level above this is where China comes in the next level above Basel III in Tier 1 is what called HQLA That a high liquid asset If they not familiar with that I explain it very quickly
HQLA means not only is it Tier 1, but it's so liquid and so robust and so continuous that we trust it to be used as collateral in financing.
HQLA, so essentially, what is HQLA?
Treasuries, the biggest bond market in the world, right? And the argument was made in Europe
that gold is not HQLA for various reasons. And, you know, depending on how you slice and dice the
technicals of it, maybe it's not. But if you slice and dice the technicals another way, it is. The
World Gold Council put out a report. And I read that report. And that report said, gold is not HQLA.
And I went, oh, shit.
So it's just a pet rock still.
It's just all a pet rock.
And I moved on.
And then I went back to this chart that you showed.
And I went, what the hell are they doing with that?
And then I talked to a couple of friends and I said, oh, shit.
And I did, then I did some, what I did then was I did some, I did deep dive research on
the BRICS behavior at their summit this year in May.
And that summit, which did not get a lot of press this year, there wasn't a lot of hype.
for various reasons, but I wrote five articles on it. And one of the articles was I identified
from piecing together articles everywhere, I'm talking to two sources of mainland China,
from talking to someone in Hong Kong, that China, to assuage fears of the other BRICS people,
had said, look, we want you to use the yuan for currency. And let's say you're a Saudi Arabian.
You're like, OK, I'll use it.
I'll use it.
But you know what?
I may not trust the US, but the US dollar is better than the yuan.
What are you backing it with?
Well, we're backing it with our economy.
We're not going to back it with gold.
But I'll tell you what we will do.
We'll do something the US doesn't do.
We'll let you convert it into gold freely.
No problem.
And the Saudi Arabians said, everyone, just for instance, they said, that's great.
Where will the gold stay?
This is like five years ago.
Where will the gold stay?
well, it'll stay in China. They're like, nah, that's not going to work. We just ended this
problem with the US. Everyone's pulled their gold back. And so China comes up with a plan.
And the SGE, which is the Shanghai Gold Exchange, that's their physical exchange,
they create an international division, SGEI. And the SGEI starts partnering with vaults in
various BRICS countries, and they create a network. So I'm Saudi Arabia. I give them my oil.
They give me yuan. And I say, you know what? I want to convert this into gold. Will you make me
a market? And they do, China. And the yuan gets converted to gold. Where's the gold go?
It goes into their vault. So in a sense, in a crypto way, they've decentralized the or in non-crypto, you'd say they diversify the geographic risk of ownership of the physical metal, but they're still accounting for it.
in a, you know, it's like old school blockchain.
It's like, you know, red flimstone chain.
But, and so that made the Saudis
and the other countries in the BRICS
more comfortable holding yuan.
I could convert it to gold.
I could have, I could see the gold.
I don't have to worry about it going anywhere.
I don't have to worry about it.
You know, I don't have to worry about an accountant
going in and auditing them, you know, to an extent.
and they gradually got more comfortable with it.
At the same time, they got less comfortable with the U.S. Treasuries.
And so at the BRICS summit, the Chinese had homework,
and their homework was to internationalize the yuan
and to internationalize gold ownership.
And this is what they announced.
Hong Kong, Singapore, the Golden Card,
or I'm not sure if I named that or they named that,
but there's like a Golden Card or Singapore, Macau,
all along this area, the Shanghai Cooperative Organization.
And they're saying all these vaults are now connected,
which means you could arbitrage back and forth,
which means every country can have their gold close enough to see, to visit.
And I went, this is great.
I see what they're doing.
They're making sure people are trustworthy in gold.
And I said, well, what are they doing about the volatility in gold?
Right?
Well, because the U.S. can spoof it lower.
Anyone can spoof it lower.
It's not that deep.
Well, it turns out they solved that too.
I don't know if it's going to work, but they solved that.
Their solve was the gold will be carried on everyone's balance sheet according to a moving
average, not according to the price at the end of the day.
So 200-day moving average.
And let's face it, over the long run, gold holds value because it's gold, right?
I mean, there's no synthetic gold yet, at least not in large size yet.
Okay, so they create the network of vaults.
And I go, all right, this is for the BRICS Summit.
They address the concept of price volatility.
I go, all right, that's good.
And then I read something, I wrote on it, and I went, oh, shit, this is what they're going to do next.
And this is what they're going to do.
They announced that they're going to be partnering with vaults in countries that need to build infrastructure.
So you're thinking about the African BRICS countries.
right? Why? Well, I'm a country in Africa, Ghana, and I've got a shit ton of gold.
And it's just sitting there. And if I want to use it, I have to give it to the IMF,
and they give me treasuries, and I borrow money, and I build a road, right?
But I want to do business with China. China is building roads and airports and cutting deals
because they're just colonizing economically. We know that. China says, you can use your gold.
So I'm an African country that needs an airport built to simplify it.
And I've got gold.
I put it in the vault, which is in the system of the Shanghai Exchange setup.
And then China loans me the money on the gold directly, not through treasuries, not through
some swap deal.
The gold is there.
China trusts them.
and then I take the yuan and I go back to China and I say, build me an airport.
And so what they've done is they created project financing. Now, I had gotten that far with this.
I'm like, okay, this is really good. They're unlocking the buying potential of gold. You
own stocks, I own stocks. Can you borrow money against it and do stuff? Yeah. And if you use
your leverage smartly, you're fine. I went, all right. So they're going to unlock gold and that
makes it high quality collateral asset. I went high quality collateral asset, HQCA.
And then I read this report, high quality liquid asset. Oh, shit. And then I went back to my bond
days and I went, what is an HQLA used for? Now I'll use a word that everyone knows, repo.
If you want to get something done in the world, you pledge your treasuries into repo, which is
theoretically you're selling them and you buy them back as collateral and they give you money.
That's what the repo market is.
I have an asset that's high-quality asset.
It's a treasury.
Here, loan me the money.
I'm going to build the road, and I'll pay you back on the back end.
I mean, that's what we do with treasuries.
And the HQLA pool is, I think it's more, but I'm going to throw you a lower number, $17 trillion, $20 trillion.
And of that pool, depending on how you measure, between 50% and 70% is US treasuries.
and none of it is gold.
It's treasuries or sovereign bonds
that we deem are high quality enough.
Chinese bonds aren't high quality enough.
The BRICs won't even buy the Chinese bonds.
But anyway, I'm going to pause for a second here
because I'm talking a lot.
Is there anything you wanted to,
you know, I don't want to,
should I just keep going?
Yeah, because this is,
we've been covering this,
not this specifically,
but this idea of this diversification
away from the dollar treasury
system and one of the mechanics that's one thing i've been saying for years as a bitcoiner it's
like all these countries should just skip to bitcoin instead of some bricks back currency
because they're not going to be able to trust each other which is like what you're getting into now
like who wants to buy chinese bonds who wants to buy russian bonds who wants to buy saudi bonds
they're working around it right they're working around it and i think china's end game to that
point is eventually they'll get everyone to buy chinese bonds whether it be whether it be stable
coin Chinese bonds. But that's the point is they want everyone to own Chinese bonds. But
they're just replicating what the US did probably a little bit better, using it in a more
decentralized way. Yeah, but I agree. That's what they're doing. So here I'm going high quality
collateral asset. I went, oh, yeah. And I went, oh, shit, now you're competing. Gold's going to
compete with treasuries. Then I went back to my European analysis and I went, wait a minute,
but it's not hqla so it can't be repo then i call the friend of mine on the mainland i go
are you guys going to use this as a repo asset so you can allot the financing of that poor country
in africa that wants to do this or wants to do that or so saudi arabians can load money to the
country in africa in gold you know using gold as collateral because they have a ton of money
and uh he basically said yeah i said well how do you do that this is where i was a little bit
not wonkish enough. He goes, well, you get it. You turn it into a high quality liquid asset.
We designate it for our half of the world as HQLA. And then we put it into repo.
And then I went, oh, I went back to the chart. And then I talked to a friend of mine, Eric,
Eric Young, and he's popular on Twitter, King Kong. And I went, Eric, HQLA, you need to be to
become a repo. And I think they're doing that for all this mine stuff and this project stuff. I go,
where's the goal? He went, that's what the warrants are for. They're locking the goal down.
And at some point, again, this is theory. We're not sure yet. It's conjecture. At some point,
we believe they're either, reasonably speaking, they're either testing the system out. They've
tested things before and I've seen them tested. They're either testing the system out, stress
testing it for wards or whatever, or they're accumulating it to put it in the Hong Kong vault,
which just opened. You put that in the Hong Kong vault and what do you have? Hong Kong is the
buffer zone between China and the rest of the world. And you have your Switzerland for gold.
and that's where your first repose will be, he and I concluded separately, coming from different
points of view. So China is going to, I believe, has a very good chance or intensive, they have to,
otherwise the gold just is still a pet rock. They need to unlock its leverage and buying power
now that everyone trusts it, now that everyone's in the process of trusting yuan,
in the process over there.
They want to say, okay, now you can borrow your wine against your gold,
and you can see the gold, and you can build an airport.
And it's like, great, let's do it.
And they drop the Neokinesian concepts, and they do this,
which is a hard money concept, and they're going to start doing it.
That's what I think is going to happen.
And I wrote almost like a short academic-style paper on it,
a St. Joe's Prep-style paper, right?
and I had to drop that in
since we figured that out
like it's the Jesuits
so
I look at all that and I go
why the hell else would the warrants be going up
a lot of people are saying oh they're doing this
they want to do the 3D testing
no the warrants are rarely used because they're about arbitrage
they're just like SHFE
which is the futures exchange
kind of like COMEX versus LBMA
Go back to London, go back to London.
It's going back and forth.
But then it just starts ballooning and it's not going anywhere.
I mean, ultimately, it just makes the price go up.
But I think they're getting ready to do that.
Now, I want to add one anecdotal piece.
It started happening before the end of the year, right, in that chart you have.
And it's since ramped up even more.
What else happened at the end of the year?
The U.S. started repatriating gold.
U.S. started repatriating silver to the counter, right?
Okay.
U.S. started repatriating gold.
Now, did we buy the gold or were we just bringing gold back that was ours?
I don't know.
I mean, I actually do know, but it's not important.
What's important is that the U.S. is now emptying London of its gold.
Again, it's collateral.
You have to, like Zoltan and Pozar, it's a crisis of collateral.
You need to have the collateral there.
You need to say, this is my gold.
If you're going to borrow it, it needs to be there.
If you're going to borrow against it, it needs to be there.
So the U.S. starts calling the gold back.
And I also noticed that when the U.S. is calling the gold back, gold's not being bought by China.
I have a chart.
When the U.S. buys, China doesn't.
When China buys, the U.S. doesn't.
So there's your – what's the word you use?
Cabal?
Inter-cabal squabble.
That's exactly it.
It's the war of the roses.
But it's a divorce.
But again, I'll give you that chart.
it's visually interesting. But I talked to someone in the political side, and I think he's well
connected. But what he said to me is, that makes sense. I said, why do we start bringing gold back?
And my theory was we started bringing gold back because we figured out we needed it for something.
I didn't know what for, right? If you talk to one person, it's, we're going to have gold bonds.
We're going to have a gold standard. Talk to all the bums, right? No, we're not going to have gold
bonds. That's my opinion. I'd like it to happen. Judy Shelton, I respect her, and I think she's
right. At one time, I agree with her, but I think gold bonds would undermine the regular treasury
market. Oh, I'll get the gold bond. Why would we sell people bonds with gold and we could just
sell them paper? The second one is gold standard. No, we can't go back to gold standard. It's the
end of the world if we do that. You can't do it, in my opinion. A use for gold. Well, yeah,
the commercial banks can start throwing it to blockchain and stable coins and
they say,
create a new ETF type of product,
the new product Like all right that good But there was more bought that should have been bought or more delivered Some of it was going on to Comex some of it wasn It was going to the Treasury
And so I talked to my friend.
I said, do you think that's related?
He goes, oh, yeah.
He goes, I think the US finally paid attention
to what they were doing and said,
well, if they're getting theirs
and there's a chance that gold becomes a competitor to the US.
If I want to finance a project in Africa, I may need gold too.
So let's get our gold back.
And so we ramped the gold back.
You saw Trump flip-flop.
We're going to tariff gold and silver.
We're not going to – those are just – sorry, like him or don't,
those are idiotic things to do.
But they work because when he does them, the market tells him
if he's right or wrong immediately.
You know, he's instant feedback.
Well, that's what I was going to ask, because when it comes to repatriation of gold at the end, gold at the end of last year, like one of the main narratives is like people are flooding it into U.S. vaults because of the pending tariffs.
So were tariffs just used as a mechanism to flood it back?
Or was it just some narrative control?
Yeah.
Excuse.
I mean, I knew.
Let's just start with the tariffs on gold.
Silver's a different story, but tariffs on gold.
You cannot tariff gold.
because gold is the intent bitcoin's going to be as well but gold is the intentional unintentional
loophole to avoid sanctions everyone does it so this is gold well is it money no it's gold it's
a good i'm buying a good from you right it's a good it's it's it's barter you're giving me a jet
and i'm giving you gold it's barter and so that avoids the monetary that avoids the sanctions
but because gold is used for nothing and it's a brick it's gold so it's money it may as well be
money it's not good for anything else and so that's a loophole that exists in the world
russia uses it we use it i'll give you an example as a martin arms for an example
when japan looks at the u.s and says it's not hypothetical it is in the 90s when japan has it
you know there's supposed to be like a trade relationship you have to buy this much from us
We have to buy that much from you.
Well, what Japan does is Japan used to go like this.
All right, we're not buying enough stuff from the US.
What are we going to buy?
Cars?
No.
Let's buy some gold.
You buy American gold.
It's a money laundering operation.
You know, you buy American gold.
You take it.
It counts as an import.
It counts against your trade deficit.
And then you take the gold and you put it back in London and you get out of it.
It's a laundromat.
So gold is used that way.
Gold is used to satisfy the legal fine print on trade deficits.
And that's where that went.
So they're not going to tax or tariff gold.
To put it simply, one of the words that I use a lot is mercantilist, but I don't want it to be like a catchphrase.
But the bottom line is if you look at the concept of mercantilism, you tax imports of what you make, and you don't tax imports of what you need.
And we need gold.
We need silver.
We need lithium.
You don't threaten the tariff of lithium.
And so gold is that loophole item that allows us to circumvent tariffs.
And we don't close it because it's kind of like an honor among thieves.
We all do it.
So the tariffs being a reason to bring gold to them, that's complete horseshit.
It was complete horseshit then.
I saw it then.
And it's complete horseshit now.
In fact, like a month or two ago, didn't Trump do that?
Trump said we might tax the gold and gold went crazy.
I mean, I know he did that, right?
He said, we're going to tax bullion.
And the bullion banks were like, whoa, you can't do that.
Because all they do is take gold, put it in a safe, short it against it, take the money
and go out and buy Aussie bonds or something and buy, you know, NVIDIA.
So he changed that right away.
That was rule 282.
Changed that right away for gold.
And there will be no tariffs on monetary gold.
Your gold chain, they might tariff that.
But once it's melted down, they can't tariff it anymore.
And that's it.
So gold will not be tariffed.
Gold's money for them anyway.
Yeah.
I mean, in tying this all together too, I mean, before we hit record,
So we got to touch on the Russian war because that really ties into this, too.
Is that the catalyst for this big movement?
And sort of we've been prepping for this for over three years.
But that was really the Treasury freezing in 22 was the last straw.
It was. It was. It was.
And last straw is a good way to look at it because because our biggest trade partner, China, raised concerns with us after the financial crisis.
They're like, okay, we own a lot of treasuries
And you're printing all this money
And they were convinced that everything would be alright
And during that time, around 2014
With the whole Ukrainian thing
Because this is the geopolitics of it, right?
Russia said, you know what?
The US is meddling
We don't want to deal with this anymore
We don't want our treasuries
And they started de-dollarizing
And they tried to bring
This is from someone who was involved in the conversations
that they Russia approached China and said and said we're de-dollarizing are you going to be
dollarized and China's like no way you out of your mind we can't do that we're not going to do that
we we're still too tied closely together and then so China little by little is selling treasuries
but nothing crazy and but they're buying gold and it's not public they're not really saying we're
buying gold they're just buying it and then they get into the World Trade Organization a little
more time goes by in 2022, the US sanctions and Europe sanctions them for invading Ukraine.
Now, for anyone who's not familiar, and I know that you are, just briefly,
Russia had most countries that use dollars, and every country does use dollars,
has dollars in this global network called SWIFT. And SWIFT is essentially a big network of ATMs.
and that money's in there and your assets are there and it's basically all treasuries and you
borrow against the treasuries and you do what you have to do. Throughout most, I'm not a historian,
throughout most wars, nobody seizes anybody's money. They don't do that. So Russia invades
Ukraine and the U.S. and Europe just decide to freeze all their assets, essentially confiscating
their assets. Now, right or wrong, justified or not, every other country out there that has money
in it says on the BRICS side, it's like, you know what? These guys have been keeping the price of
gold down. They've been keeping the price of oil down. We can't make any money. We live off
natural resources. We're poor. And they just took all the wealth from Russia on nuclear power.
They can do that to us anytime they want. And they started knocking on China's door and saying,
okay, we're ready. Let's do it. And it started to accelerate. And China started buying gold very
publicly to show them they meant business. And in 2022, the rest of the world outside the G7 said
the only reason to own treasuries was because of the guarantee that the US would never
take it from them as a counterparty. And that made it more beneficial than gold with the interest
trades. And after this, that's no longer worth it. How can we work another type of collateral
like treasuries into our system to substitute for treasuries? And everyone's awareness had
been raised up because of crypto and Bitcoin. And all of a sudden, we also have the inflation in the
US. People become aware of it and trying to start selling bonds and buying gold. And they all start
doing it. Even just to bring it to present day, the last time Brazil bought gold was in 2021.
And now Brazil just bought, I forget how much, 15 and a half tons this month. They haven't bought
gold in four years. And so now they're buying. So countries are de-dollarizing even more.
Even the countries that are our friends are repatriating their gold from us.
Serbia, whether they're friends or not, it's hard to say.
But yeah, that's a great chart.
That's a great chart.
Yeah.
I pulled this up because the inflection of 22, particularly on the gold part of the chart
is pronounced.
So we'll see.
Is that share reserves?
Yeah, that's actually an important point.
So a lot of people will look at that.
So that's what's that showing.
Gold is in the process of eclipsing US Treasuries as a share of the Central Bank reserves, right?
OK.
I have something to add to that.
It's not me.
Bank of America did a study about six months ago.
And what they were trying to figure out, at least publicly, they probably already knew.
If central banks are buying gold, the word they use is diversify out of the dollar,
how much gold should they buy to have an optimal diversification of their portfolio?
Bank of America did the analysis, and they said it's not efficient frontier, but it's similar to it.
They said the optimal amount of their reserves in gold for all the central banks that report to the IMF is 30%.
and it's currently at 20%.
So as a percentage, you should have 30% gold,
maybe $50, and 20% other currencies.
And so they optimize, and they're basically doing a trade way.
How much trade do I do that I need gold for?
That's going to go up.
And I had that report, and I broke it down.
I shared it with subscribers.
Then you go into chat to EPT, and you say,
how much money is that?
and it was like $1.9 trillion in gold.
Now, are they going to buy it overnight?
No, they're going to buy it over time.
And then Goldman Sachs comes out with a report that says,
we're not going to say what we think the optimal amount is,
what we think they're going to be buying from three to five years.
And I went, okay, they're going to buy $2 trillion worth of gold
over three to five years.
What does that do to the market?
It drives the price to potentially $10,000.
It just does if they do it,
depending on how patient they are.
And every time, to your point before we started, every time Trump says, I'm not putting up with China, what does gold do?
It rallies because a central bank somewhere says, oh, shit, let's buy a little bit more.
So, yeah, I mean, that's it.
The dollarization started with the Russian war, and it accelerated something that was already on the table to happen.
And it's not going to go away.
We're talking about a decade of this probably.
Yeah. And two things I wonder. First, like bringing it back to geopolitics with a U.S. perspective, like did Trump and Bessent more specifically come in understanding this dynamic at play and really try to reorient things with this incoming administration rather quickly to sort of combat or rearrange their side of the chessboard to be in a better position?
or were they caught off foot?
And then two, with the gold price running like it is,
Bitcoin was at an all-time high last week.
Do animal spirits get engaged?
Is there like a FOMO trade where a number of countries
or individuals, institutions, whatever it may be,
realize they're offside, underexposed, and rush in?
To Bitcoin?
Gold, Bitcoin.
I know this. Oh, yeah. I think part of this debasement trade.
OK, so so the first the first what was the first question again?
Because that was interesting. That was an interesting political side where.
Right, right. Yeah. Or the percent, because obviously you had that famous percent interview at the Manhattan Institute,
where he's talking about the global monetary reordering that he wants to be a part of.
Like in my mind, it's like, OK, he seems to know that something's going on.
He wants to be in that position.
But you look at the volatility of Trump's positioning, throwing things out there, backing away, pivoting somewhere else.
Like, do they actually know what's happening?
Are they flat footed?
Yeah, I think we'd have to have like a, you know, sit down and have a beer or pizza or something and say, all right, what are they doing in the room together?
And, you know, some people are like, you know, it's a master plan.
And some people are like, he doesn't know what he's doing.
And I personally think from the study that I've done of him over the years in the 90s
and always when I was in New York on Wall Street, I personally think that Trump will
find someone that he likes to listen to, that he will, who knows how to not be alpha, but
be like a consigliere.
And this time it's Besant.
And I think Besant said, this is where we're going.
This is where they're going.
We want to get there.
Let's take care of this or that first.
And so eventually, Trump's like, I want to make America great again.
I understand that we need to do manufacturing.
I'm going to do that.
Tell me the plumbing of this.
And so Bessette does that.
And he basically says, eventually, we're going to have to have more gold.
We're going to have to have something.
We're going to have to solidify the dollar.
It's all about the debt that we have.
We're going to have to monetize the debt.
And this is where I think it's a combination of prepared and flat-footed.
This is where I come down.
It sounds like a compromise, but it's really not.
Prepared in the sense that I think there are smart people like Scott percent who know what's
going on and know the end game, right?
Flat-footed in the sense that because we are the global reserve currency and because we've
been able to screw up for decades and get away with it, that incumbency, you're the
champ, you always get the extra vote.
So I think that has made us complacent. And so even someone as sharp as Scott Bessett, I would think he's I think he's sharp, might say, yeah, this is going to be a problem, but we can come back to that. We can always buy time later on.
And the reason I'm not just making that up is because I had a conversation with the CEO of Scottsdale Mint.
And so he's very heavily involved in the industrial side of metals, copper and silver.
And we were talking back and forth And we were talking like you and I are talking now And it like you know what Why do we not care about copper For example China has been taking scrap
copper out of the US for years. And we both concluded we don't care about it because we
have copper or because we've just got bigger fish to fry right now. Right? Same thing with silver.
China has been going into Latin America and buying silver in raw form before it gets to the exchange
so the supply never hits.
So it's like pre-mining silver.
And he's like, yeah, they're doing that.
I go, it's called silver concentrate.
I go, why do we not care?
We're like, well, because silver really isn't that important.
It's important to us.
We're in a little bit of a bubble.
So Josh said, he goes, but copper is important.
Everyone's talking about copper, right?
Even if the price isn't doing the crazy stuff.
and sure enough he comes back from an event right a month before they list silver as a critical
mineral and he says for some reason the federal government has mobilized to protect our copper
supply now is what he shared with me what i can share that he told me we have a big processing
plant for scrap in atlanta i forget the name he goes they're locking it down they're not letting
any silver any he's talking about copper not letting any copper leave anymore they're making
sure all the roads lead to this plant. They're centralizing. That's what the government's doing,
they centralize. He goes, we're serious about copper now. And then the tariffs came out.
I went, oh. So to my point, as half-cocked as it is, I think we are smart enough to know what's
going on. I think we do know what's going on. And we think we have all the time in the world.
and somebody sounds an alarm and they go, let's lock that plant down.
So I think when that happened, you also saw a start of repatriating gold and silver.
And therefore, I believe that we're playing catch up,
but we always can play catch up because of our positioning.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
No, as it pertains to copper, it makes a ton of sense
considering the sort of expansion of the energy grid that's necessary.
Yeah.
It has been deemed necessary. I think it's critically necessary, but mothers may have another opinion, but it seems abundantly clear that even before the AI boom, the data center boom, it was clear to me.
I've been talking about it since 2018. It was very anti-ESG. Energy is good. Cheap abundant energy equates to human flourishing.
like we should be expanding our grids, our grids are unstable.
And I think luckily for us, this administration recognizes that now
and has made it a point to really lean into the energy sector specifically.
And copper is a huge part of that.
You need copper throughout that whole supply chain.
That's right.
You know, the copper story is interesting because in there you could see how Trump screwed up,
but reaffirmed it.
he initially said about right where,
right when he,
remember how copper had that spike.
He made an announcement that we're going to tariff all copper imports.
And I immediately called Joshua.
I go,
why,
how would we tariff copper imports?
He goes,
well,
we don't really need to buy copper because we have our own raw copper.
What we don't have is we don't have a fabrication facilities.
We don't have the manufacturing.
I went,
okay,
fine.
I go,
but it still doesn't make sense.
And sure enough, a couple of days later, he said, you know, this is this is it's probably didn't hit the press this way.
But this is the fact. We tariffed finished goods in copper.
So you and I, we go buy a copper weather vane over in, you know, Africa.
We bring it back. It gets tariffed. Right. But then they made a carve out.
And this is to your point about energy. The carve out was semi finished copper goods.
we're not going to tire. And so a semi-finished copper good is an electric cathode. Because we
don't make them and we need them, to your point about energy. So we were like, nope, you can't
bring that weather vane in here. You can't bring in that copper kettle here. Cathodes, oh yeah,
you can bring them all in. We want them all. And so copper is that important. And I think
it's become obvious that we need it.
So that's like the point of the spear. Whatever copper does, other things will do.
And I agree with you.
Yeah. It's very interesting times. Are you optimistic about our ability
to navigate this reshuffling of the board politically on the monetary
side?
I'm violently neutral. Meaning I will wake up and say, yes, this can happen. And then I'll wake up
and say, this doesn't make sense. And right now I'm one that this doesn't make sense side. So
the yes, this can happen side goes like this. It's pretty simple. It goes, all right, we need time.
We're going to have 5% inflation for the next five years, give or take. I'm just making a number up.
that inflation is going to be used to retool the economy
we'll build manufacturing
and then we'll export our deficit by buying things
because we can't get anyone to finance our deficit
we have to sell things
I'm with you
this is best said
we need cheap energy
we need a weak dollar
and we need to build stuff
I'm like we can do that
that's me right
that's me
and I see the energy getting cheaper
I know Trump's cutting deals with Saudis
he's saying look
keep pumping the oil
you know at the right level
I'll keep the shale people out of your
noses. I'll take care of Canada's, you know, sans oil. We'll keep that out of the market.
And you can just get all the market share at the lower price. And you and Russia,
we will be happy. All right. So because we can do more, to your point, we can do more with cheap
energy than most anyone else can. If you're a patriot and you believe in the American spirit,
That's right.
And then the data centers.
And then I see the data centers and I go, all right, we need to build data centers.
We need to build data centers.
And I go, well, aren't we just building data centers?
Where's the demand coming from?
And I'm not even getting into the fact that the energy grid's not going to be able to handle it,
all the stuff that I think that you're focusing on. I'm not even getting into that. I go, well,
wait a minute. Didn't we just alienate everyone in the world? They're not going to buy our
treasuries. They don't want to use gold. Every good that's made these days is a commodity.
What are we going to sell them? Like Uber Eats? Our delivery system is the premium?
and so I get depressed
and then
of course it's Zero Hedge right
Zero Hedge posts something
and it shows
in posting something like this every other day
for about a month
but the thing they post when they talk about fundamentals
they're right and they say okay
this ties it with
Nvidia ties it with you know everyone's talking
about the circle jerk now
that's been going around for years but now they're
talking about it
So my concern is, based on my pessimistic side and based on the data that Zero Hedge is showing, is that companies are now extrapolating out, we're not going to do 2027 earnings.
We're going to do 2035 earnings.
And you're seeing these lines for data centers going out, projecting forever.
and I go, and this is me positively going,
that's crazy, but maybe it can happen.
And then I read a line that makes me think,
it's not going to happen.
And the line is, and the line is,
this is why I'm worried about 10% inflation.
And the line is, I'm not a doomer.
The line is, everything's coming along.
We're creating an asset bubble
by spending money to build data centers
and our stocks are getting driven up.
because of the projected future potential earnings.
And that's fine.
And we can do that in a world where everyone's on our side,
but they're not.
So are you telling me this is like the Tyler thing,
the zero action, the line's going up like that.
Are you telling me we're not going to have a recession
for the next 15 years?
Because that's what you're projecting.
And I went, oh shit, we're going to have a recession.
We have to have a recession.
Because the rest of the world
is going to have a recession at some point.
And it's going to affect us.
And we can't raise rates.
We're going to lower rates.
So my conclusion is we're not going to – I mean, this is like today.
Call me tomorrow.
Maybe I'll be in a good mood, right?
We're not going to get there.
Even if Trump executed everything perfectly, there's no successor to Trump who's going to be like him.
There's no – I don't know.
Maybe J.D. Vance is.
I don't know.
But the bureaucratic deep state is still entrenched like a tick at a deer.
They're not going to go anywhere.
They're going to wait it out.
And I think the first recession we get, because we're running a 1970s-style bubble, first recession we get, we can't afford to cut.
We're going to have to – we can't afford to raise.
We're going to have to cut.
We're cutting in a bubble right now.
We're cutting in an economic borderline boom right now, depending on how you look at it.
And the last time we did that materially was in 1973, 1974.
The US was on this mind.
This is where we are now.
1973, 1974, the US was monetizing its debt.
We're doing that again right now, by the way.
We're not doing that at the Fed, but we're monetizing our debt.
It's really ugly what we're doing.
Another conversation.
But in the 70s, we were paying for all the Vietnam veterans coming home.
We were trying to fend off communism, civil rights, a lot of social safety net and welfare
money is being spent, spent, spent.
We're financing Vietnam.
We're still paying for Korea.
And so we're cutting rates in the 70s, 72, 73, 74.
And 73 and 74, the stock market does very poorly.
But the gold market is at the highs.
But then they cut rates.
in 75 and 76 the stock market explodes everything is great again 76 is the bicentennial i was like
you know eight years old and uh every there was everyone was so happy the bicentennial everyone
wasn't yet and then 77 all goes in the shitter they stopped lowering rates to paint the turd
as the expression goes. Inflation came back, and between 77 and 79, 77 and 80, it was nothing but
inflation. So that's where we are now. Either we're in 1974, and we're cutting rates to get
the economy going, or if Trump doesn't succeed, it's 1977, and we're going to have asset commodity
prices high, and data centers that no one's using. They'll become skateboard parks. So right now,
pretty pessimistic.
But thank you for letting me go off on that.
It's
important because, I mean,
one thing I'd bring up is like, have we been
in a recession in real terms
for a while? Because if you look at inflation data,
you're using CPI. It's not tracking
real inflation.
Right.
And then
how bad does it get?
I posted yesterday a passage from
When Money Dies and the
corollaries to
why more Republic vibes
are very high right now.
Behaviorally,
they are very high. Behaviorally,
sure.
Everybody's on Robinhood.
Every Zoomer thinks they're the best stock,
but not every Zoomer. It's definitely
a growing trend of Zoomer
stock traders giving advice.
We saw that with Wall Street Bets, obviously.
Yeah.
But back then, we tolerated
because it was stimulus. There's no stimulus now.
They're still doing it.
No.
And to your point about the debt and the rates,
I worry like lowering rates right now.
We just cut 25 bps.
The 10-year is still above 4.
And I think that's one thing people had collective amnesia
after the initial rate cuts from last year.
Right.
Where they just assume like, oh, the Fed funds rate goes down
and bond yields will follow.
That doesn't seem to be really materializing at all.
That's right.
I'd like to speak to that for a second, if you don't mind.
During the QE era, we all got addicted to Fed lowers rates, bond yields drop, and therefore we have to buy stocks because nothing gives us any interest anymore.
Money market rates down, bond yields down, just help buy stocks, right?
But we're not in the QE era anymore, at least not from the Fed side.
And so when you're not in the QE era, you're what I call the anti-Goldilocks era.
So the Goldilocks era was QE from the 90s.
Well, QE started in the O's.
But from the 90s through the mid-O's, we had deflationary tailwinds, disinflationary tailwinds pushing us up.
Goods were getting cheaper.
Technology was being implemented.
Everything at Walmart was the prices are dropping at Walmart every day, like low prices every day.
You don't hear that anymore.
Because now we've gone from disinflationary tailwinds from technology from developing supply chains to inflationary headwinds.
And when you have inflationary headwinds, meaning other people are buying commodities that we need or restricting our access to them, like oil in the 70s, when you have that happen, you have inflationary headwinds hitting the economy.
And with inflationary headwinds, you can't lower rates without causing a bubble.
Actually, I just lost my train of thought on that.
The Fed can't, oh, the deficit and the debt.
Yeah, oh, this is a bond market, right?
When you have an anti-Goldilocks situation and you have the inflationary headwinds,
When you lower the Fed funds rate, the bond market vigilantes, and they're back, they say,
wait a minute, you're not done fighting inflation.
If you're lowering rates too soon, we're going to make the inflation come out the other end.
And so that's really what's happening though.
You're going about 4%.
There's two ways to, again, another Zoltan Pozar statement.
There are two ways to fight inflation at the monetary level.
One is by raising inflation.
using short-term rates, which we've stopped doing. And two is by letting long-term rates rise.
So like you said, Powell cut September 17th last year, and the bond market dumped yields,
climbed. The bond market did a seesaw. The bond market did that. That's yields. Drop, raise. I'm
like, that's bad. That means that inflation is not out of the market yet. And sure enough,
he cut again and the bond market didn't do it as badly but the bond market's not happy
and that's the rest of the world going oh look another reason to not own american bonds
and they're selling them and i think if he cuts again we're going to have one of these it's kind
of like a mini version of what went on in the uk uh people start selling dollars bonds and stocks
and taking their money back it's that's the real risk if you want to watch anything as a reason to
buy gold or as a reason to buy, you know, a crypto or Bitcoin.
If you want to if you want to watch anything, you want to watch how the market reacts to
when the Fed cuts.
And it has not been approving of the Fed cuts.
I don't think like I don't think he's going to I think I think it'll be a mistake if he
cuts again.
I do.
But does he have the political will to not cut?
That's the question, right?
Is that's where you have Trump coming in?
as well as being a bull in a china shop.
But he's a short timer, too.
Maybe he can hide and wait it out for six months.
Yeah.
Right?
I mean, what is it?
He cuts 25 basis points recently, right?
He talks extremely dovish.
And then like two weeks later, you know, gold rallies $100.
I'm like, oh, this is bad.
Like, he's going to cut again.
And stocks are up.
And stocks start to tail off.
Then he starts talking, oh, well, I was just readjusting the rates.
He's doing that whole Fed speak thing.
And I go, you're cutting into a boom.
Like we're creating a boom.
And, you know, related to what we're trying to do here is China, every step of the way now, saying things like, oh, you're spending $500 billion on Stargate?
Oh, we did it for $5 billion.
Now, whether they're lying or not, it's not the point.
The point is they're putting propaganda out saying that we're paying too much.
They're saying our assets are overvalued.
And that's petrifying to me.
They never did that before.
I think the bond market is telling us we should not be lowering rates.
I agree.
Yeah.
Well, staying on this topic of government debt and inflation before we hit record.
Right.
Inflation is not geopolitical.
There are these inflationary headwinds across the world for different purposes.
You said here in the U.S., manufacturing, Japan, defense, Europe, defense, and social safety nets, China.
Right.
Social safety nets.
So the inflation trade is not isolated to the United States.
No, it's not.
It's and it's actually.
Like, we're we're the last we're probably going to be the last to really debase or cut.
But yeah, you're right.
It's not isolated to the United States.
And if you go around the world, Trump's policies, which would have happened anyway.
Right.
Start under by we pulled out of Afghanistan.
If you look at Pax Americana of us being a cop on every corner of the world, we can't pay for that anymore.
And some places don't even want us.
So we're kind of like the tide of American military is receding.
We're retrenching.
Call it Monroe Doctrine.
Call it whatever you want to call it.
Call it America first.
Whatever the reasons are.
So we pull out of Afghanistan, butchered by Biden.
And then war starts. Gaza war starts. Ukraine war starts. And I see us not doing what we normally do, meaning in Gaza, we really let the Israelis off the leash. And I know it's another whole can of worms to talk about. But we really just said, you know what, we'll let them fight it out and make it a hockey fight.
and then we go into Jim Edgewood and then we say, what's Trump say? We're not going to spend
money on NATO anymore. And the math is very simple. Speaking as a Tom Luongo person,
but from my expertise or lack of a better word, one of the things that Europe is very proud of
is over the last 50 years, they're proud of their social safety net. They're proud of their
welfare state. They're proud of free college. They're proud of no homelessness. And to Trump's
point, that's because they have a defense budget of zero or 1%. And we have a defense budget of 5%,
probably more. And so we have been, since communism, even, you know, we have been the,
it's like a few good men like the you would eat me on that wall type of thing you know and we have
been there saying okay you can you can we're subsidizing their welfare state and so Trump
says we want to spend less and now you do the math and they're like everyone's going from maybe
it's one to three percent of GDP now it's five to six percent so call it five call it two to five
That's a lot of money.
And you're doing it right after you just let millions of people in your country to be attached to your social safety net.
What do you think you're driving down labor?
You're not driving down labor.
You're driving down welfare.
So Europe's got to spend more money.
They can't even spend on their manufacturing.
Germany's done.
Italy's probably going to be the next leading country in Europe, if you can call it that.
then you go over to japan and we're they're like hey listen taiwan like like we don't have a good
history with china we don't want to have that blow up on our face well and u.s say well we're
we said we're pulling out there's a there's a pact like a pack like asiana i forget what it's called
but japan's ramping up their their military spending all the things that we didn't want
europe to do because we're worried about the nazis coming back or about imperial japan coming back
Well, now we have to let them do it, right?
So Japan's spending on that, right?
And everyone's got big debt for buying flat screen TVs with money they didn't have, right?
So Japan's spending on military.
Europe's spending on military and a safety net.
In the US, we're not spending, I mean, we are, but we're not spending on military.
We're not spending on a safety net.
Well, we are a little bit.
We're spending to become a producer of goods again to compete with China.
So we're spending, Europe's spending, everyone's spending.
It's a race to the bottom one way or another.
And China, which has had to spend to begin with to get their economy out of their own kind of like recession.
And this isn't me talking, but I've read the work.
I forget his name.
Eric Green, I think, T.S.
Lombard analyst.
I had a conversation with him about a report that he put out.
And I'm like, completely naive American, right?
I'm like, they're communists, even though they're not communists.
They're communists.
What do you mean they don't spend enough money helping people?
He goes, oh, no.
Oh, no, no. When they went capitalist, they went full capitalist. They're like, you live in the country. We're not giving you a dime. You better move to the city and get a job. That was part of their urbanization plan, I guess. So what does that mean? He goes, well, it's not working anymore. People aren't moving anymore. And there's a higher level of poverty, right?
There's also they have like 50% college graduates or students or young men are unemployed.
It's bigger than ours for sure.
And I said, so what does that mean?
He goes, well, he goes, they're actually working up the plans to add welfare for the rural areas.
He goes, they're going to be spending a lot.
They're creating a welfare program.
They have no social safety net.
And so I went, so China's going to spend on social safety net?
He goes, yeah.
I go, so now every country is spending for different reasons.
And every country is going to monetize their debt.
And it's a race to the bottom.
It's like Santa Claus.
You know, you've got a 16-year-old kid.
He knows there's no Santa Claus.
You know there's no Santa Claus.
But as long as you don't acknowledge, you keep giving him gifts.
And that's where we are right now.
I happen to know, now that I've studied it, that we're monetizing our debt already,
which means we can't pay off our debt, so we're printing money.
We're printing.
not at the Fed level, at the Treasury level.
And in doing that, we're weakening the dollar intentionally.
So that's it.
Yeah, everyone's spending.
Everyone's spending.
No one can be austere yet.
That comes after the crash, possibly.
That's it.
When do you think the crash will be, if there is one?
Yeah, I get it.
Stuff like that.
I don't know.
I'm very, I see the fork in the road.
and it's like I don't know when it will be
but I'll know what will cause it
so it'll be
it'll be
you'll see
information like let's look at the
current events right you'll see information accumulating
that oh people are
Goldman Sachs which has been
AI stocks all the way is now saying
circle jerk you know
client finance and everyone
say oh it's just like 2000 I'll say well
it's not yet because people still believe
I'll start to say crash if I see a day where stocks are down and gold is up.
Not because gold's better, but because people are going to put their money into gold because
stocks are down They not going to buy more stocks So when I see things like that I be concerned I tell you what the warning shot across the bow was that I looking for to happen again to make me think there be a crash
The warning shot across the bow was, I think it was, I don't know, in April or May when Europe, to defend itself, said the U.S. is no longer American exceptionalism.
exceptionalism, the US is weak. And therefore, because of its debt, we're going to sell our
stocks. And instead of putting it in bonds, we're going to repatriate our currency. And that's where
your crash comes from. So for example, Japan is a huge investor overseas, huge. And they've got
problems now. They've always had problems. But the solution to their problems now is to repatriate
currency. It's to sell your investments in Europe and bring your money back for yourself. That's
what they need to do to shore up the currency. Imagine if they did that with U.S. Treasury. I
think they're the largest holder, maybe number two. But they financed the world. So as countries,
I'm Europe. I need to rebuild my infrastructure. You can't use dollars to build a road.
You need euros. And so it's sell my U.S. stocks. Don't put it in bonds this time. Don't put it in
dollars. Put it in euros. Bring it home. And so when the dollar, gold, so when the dollar,
bonds and stocks drop at the same time, I get petrified.
And we had, I think, a shot across the bow in, I think it was April or May.
And when I see that happen, I pay attention. So when that happens, then I'll say,
Marty, we should get short. And of course, we get our asses handed to us, but we get how it works.
Yeah, that's it.
No, it is. In the last six months, I've
described the period that we're living in as equally exhilarating and unnerving
because it's just impossible to tell.
Yeah, yeah.
What's the expression?
The guy with one foot in a bucket of coal,
the other foot in a bucket of ice,
and you say, how are you doing?
He says, on average, I'm okay.
That's where we are.
That's where I feel like.
Yeah.
And so let's talk about Bitcoin.
I mean, you talked about it earlier,
about a lot of the moves that have been made
in the last couple of years with the ETFs,
I think the options on the ETFs, futures going 24-7 soon, I believe, if not already.
You think these markets and particularly the derivatives are being used to hold the price down so the government can accumulate?
Yeah, I do.
And I'm not a paranoid to fill out where I'm a person who never believed that.
But I understand how it works now.
There's only two things a nation does that it doesn't let its people do.
One, kill you. You can't kill yourself. They can put you to death. And two, make money.
Nations, anyone who's a hardcore, I'm not a hardcore Bitcoin person, but a nation needs to have sovereign money.
That's sovereign wealth. And that's very like the charterless concept.
You print the money, you give it to them, you take it back at tax, you create that circle, right?
And then you skim off the top and you run it.
Bitcoin was becoming a threat, whether it's made by someone or not, I don't care.
It has a life of its own now.
It is a Trojan horse in many ways.
And what the US does, not all governments, what the US does is it will,
if it catches it early enough, it'll kill it, the threat to the dollar.
If it doesn't catch it early enough, it'll just use rhetoric and propaganda and fun it.
And if it survives that, then it won't actively attack it.
Maybe like a CIA assassin goes out to kill Bitcoin.
I mean, you get my point, like a regime change.
And then if it can't do that, and this is where the US is really smart, it co-ops.
So when you create the ETFs, I think I know that people do not value the liquidity network that the US has big enough.
And so I'm going to exaggerate, but I'll make a point.
70% of all the Bitcoin transactions were outside of the US.
The liquidity was not in the US.
You create, finally, the spot Bitcoin ETF.
and without doing anything intentional, without funding it, without manipulating it,
you make the liquidity pool the US. And so the US may not own the Bitcoin, but the US
controls the Bitcoin. You raise margins, you change T2, all these things, and you create,
you control the liquidity pool. So if you can't kill it, you demonize it. If you can't demonize
or vice versa. You co-opt it. So what the US does is it takes everything it cannot control.
You can write a paper on this. Everything it cannot control, that's an outside force,
and it co-ops it. And that's what it did with Bitcoin. Now, I'm not even into the manipulation
part. In 1974, there's a WikiLeaks email out there that essentially says what I'm about to say.
in 1974 after the u.s went off the gold standard and the price of gold started to move higher
the u.s and the uk london were trying to keep the price of gold down why because they were cheating
they were printing more dollars than they had of the gold and they had this thing called the london
gold pool scheme etc etc but then they came up with an idea simple idea and it's in the email
We're going to create a futures exchange for gold.
Why?
Because if you get, it's in the email.
If you can create a futures exchange, then you can reduce the demand for physical.
Because over time, people will take convenience over authenticity, right?
I'll take the knockoff.
And when you get them with electronic bank accounts, it grows more and more.
And a generation goes by and your grandparents are dead.
And they're like, I don't need it all.
Just it's the next best thing that's gold.
And you do that.
And over time, you set up the market structure because you don't want gold to go up.
You make it a tier three asset.
You make the margins higher.
And then you have these banks called bullion banks.
Those are the custodians of Bitcoin now.
The bullion banks say, all right, the government wants gold to go down.
They're happy when it goes down.
they're lending us money at zero, we'll rehypothecate. And so rehypothecation,
which was invented for gold bulls, not for bears, is used by bears to sell five, 10 times as much
gold as out there. And the reason it works, Marty, the reason it works is because the US liquidity
pool is so big that the trading, you look at the US price, you trade on the US hours. You don't
trade in the off hours, we become the market. And in becoming the market,
and the futures price becomes more important than the spot price, the derivative price becomes more
important than the spot price, then you can influence the market lower by just selling paper.
You don't need the gold. You don't need the gold. Just need the paper. And that goes on for years.
And then they come up with other schemes. And I don't mean, these are just traders who want to
make money. I would have done it if I was in that seat. It's like, wait a minute. You want it to go
down? Fine. I would approach the Fed in 1993, just like the boy in Bankston had said, you guys have
gold sitting in Fort Knox doing nothing? Give it to us. We'll give you 50 basis points for it. We'll
take the money. We'll take the gold. We'll short it. We'll take the money and we'll go buy something
else. Greenspan was like, great idea. It happened. Great idea. Clinton, who was the president at the
time, was like, great idea. It'll keep the bond players from freaking out because bond players
would buy gold as a substancy. And so they did it successfully for 30 years. And a generation goes
by like an elephant tied to a stake with a thread. He doesn't know he can pull the stake out of the
ground. And it goes on and on. And that's why Bitcoin is gold 2.0. They're doing the same thing.
Are they doing it to buy it? Yeah, they're doing it to buy it. Are they doing it to make it the
dollar? No, they're not going to do that. Then you lose sovereign money. And little by little,
there's no liquidity in the world anywhere for Bitcoin except here now. I mean, you know,
and other nations like China, although they should have it, and they probably do have it,
they've shied away from it because the US has a monopoly on it now. And so the rehypothecation
has gone from bullion banks selling futures and taking the money and borrowing to custodian banks
like JP Morgan or BlackRock or however they do it, go, I have your Bitcoin, I'll give it to you
five days, you basically take five orders for Bitcoin and you sell. It's rehypothecation all
over again. So every time someone buys a Bitcoin at the BlackRock level, they're slamming a future.
And you know why that works? It works for the same reason JP Morgan makes money when silver goes up.
JP Morgan has all the silver in the world, hypothetically, in their vault. They have
the Hunt Brothers silver. It's been passed down to them. But they're not long silver.
there's short futures against it.
And if the shit hits the Fed,
they just won honor the contract Isn that what Bitcoin places are doing That what they did We don have the Bitcoin so we not going to honor the contract So it happening all over again And they got Bitcoin
under control, and it'll go up in price, but there's no one who's going to challenge the US
on it right now, at least not yet. So I hope that makes sense. Yeah, I will say anecdotal observation.
and I didn't really think about this
until you started walking through that explanation
is probably been a few years,
but there was a point I've been in Bitcoin for 12 years
and it was like a meme
and something that you came to expect
is that when Asia woke up, the price would move.
Yeah.
In my early days creating it, I was like, oh, Asia's up.
Yeah.
And that doesn't happen anymore.
Right.
It's not as prominent as a meme as it was five, seven, 10 years ago.
I used to trade the Japanese US hours for gold.
And I used to trade the ARB.
And it was a very, very low profit margin, high transaction thing.
You know, it did OK.
But during that time frame, when China was stimulating, when China was stimulating, all
the base metals would go off, iron, copper, aluminum, and then eventually silver and gold.
would go up. And I would be able to like kind of front run it, right? So when China said,
we're going to print money, and then Bitcoin comes on the scene, it's like iron, Bitcoin,
aluminum. I'm like, why is Bitcoin going up? I called a buddy of mine, he goes, well, that's
because every time they print money, the banks want to make sure they don't have too many yuan
in their pocket, so they buy something that can go up. So Bitcoin was a, what do you call it,
like a safety valve for these guys. And they're not doing it anymore. I mean,
Yeah. Well, to your point, not even pushback, but just a different perspective in terms of the ability to combat this manipulation, which I think whether you call them, I think you can define anything as manipulation.
buyer sellers exist right right uh it's just the market dynamics the way they exist with
the large custodians like blackrock which really they're custodying with coinbase and
you layer on futures and options on top of that you can easily manipulate the price using those
tools but i think where bitcoin has the opportunity i think this week we have a great example of
how to combat it is it's so much easier to take delivery and actually use it and custody it and
i think if we see more things like square announced this week where they're enabling
four million merchants to shuffle to immediately sweep a percentage of their their cash flows in
the bitcoin that they can then draw from uh their square terminals or business portals um that's
what needs to happen if you want to combat this manipulation so that's why here at this show and
i advise anybody getting into bitcoin i think etfs are good if you want exposure you don't have
self-custody and you don't need to use the bitcoin right but highly encourage people to
take bitcoin in self-custody get it off the exchange yeah to prevent this manipulation
so you're talking about jack when you say square right yeah okay he has been on a on
a thread for about maybe three to six months.
It's not enough that it's a store of value. It has to be a currency.
Am I paraphrasing that right? Yes.
He's so right, Marty.
Meaning, what I just said to you about how the U.S.
co-ops something, what they do is they rim-fence the liquidity
so the liquidity is all there and they don't let it out.
And so you take, I mean, look, Bitcoin's about network, right?
You take the network and you make it a walled garden.
And if it's not a currency, if it's not out there, it doesn't build its network.
And if it doesn't build its network, it becomes an asset.
It becomes the pet rock.
That's what it does.
I'm not saying gold was ever something you couldn't do that, but you could do it with
silver at one time.
But you take this thing that is indestructible, right, unless there's no energy for like, you know, no power for like 50 years.
That's indestructible.
That's as easy to use.
You know, you talk about whether it's fast enough or not.
I don't care.
The point is if it doesn't proliferate, it doesn't get used.
It gets used as a store of value, but it doesn't get used.
The analogy that I've used with my people is the Joe DiMaggio baseball card.
OK, so the Joe DiMaggio baseball card, let's say there's only 10 of them in the world.
Right. And there's only 10 in the world and nobody cares about it.
Well, it's a store of value, but you can't do anything with it because it's locked into the SEC.
They they they securitized money. They made money, a piece of art.
They made money, an asset. They made it a humble.
I don't know if anyone's old enough in your group. You know what a humble is?
You know those little stupid glass figurines that your grandparents have in a China cabinet?
Well, they all have serial numbers on the bottom.
They're all one of a kind.
They're all special, and they're all worth money.
And if you have to sell them, you'll get some decent money for them.
But you can't go around with a humble.
They stay in the China closet.
The ETF is a China closet for Bitcoin, and it's going to go there, and it's going to fall out of existence.
It's like the landline.
The first landline was built.
Who needed it?
But when the network gets built, the last person in the world who doesn't have access to a phone would pay a million dollars to use it because he wants to be connected.
The first person wouldn't pay anything.
And I think Bitcoin, you know, if you want to make the case that the government's involved, it's like, you know what?
How about this?
The government's involved in Ethereum because they want to make sure that Bitcoin doesn't proliferate.
I mean, I'm just taking the side of a maxi in that point of view.
No, the idea is to own it, lock it down.
The idea is to, instead of, and I know the Maxis are like, oh, but it's a Trojan horse.
You know what?
Maybe it's a Trojan horse.
But it's going to take 100 years for that Trojan horse.
The state's not going to let it survive until the state itself is dead.
The state does two things.
It kills people and it prints money.
And it will not give up either of those two things.
And if it does give up either of those two things, that's because it's not a state anymore.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Focusing on Dorsey,
when you think of the prominent billionaire CEOs
or executives pushing Bitcoin,
I think you have him,
and then Saylor, juxtapose Saylor,
it's digital capital.
Why would you ever sell it?
And you have Dorsey who's like,
no, this is cypherpunk digital cash
that we need to be pushing in the economy.
I respect the hell.
I'm friends with both of them,
And I agree more with Jack in the sense that like this is supposed to be used as money.
It was in the white paper.
I'm not getting full Roger Moore here, but I think it is a better money at the end of the day.
And this whole focus on treasury companies and using it as digital capital is catering to those like to co-opt it.
And it's like, no, we shouldn't.
Look, Steller, who is brilliant in his own right, he knows what he's doing.
He knows that the path is, I want the price to go up. And if I have to work with the government,
I'll do that, provided I play well in the sandbox. Whereas Jack, in my opinion,
it's probably pretty obvious, he's an idealist. And so he wants to, he's not an anarchist person,
maybe he is, I don't know. But he wants a more fair distribution based on merit and not based
on incumbency. And so, you know, these are the, this is the bucket of calls and the hot and the
ice, right? It's true. I mean, that really is true. And I think at the end of the day,
at the end of the day, I've seen what they did with gold for 30 years.
Can they do that with Bitcoin? I think they can. At least I think they can, unfortunately,
it's because maybe you can't destroy it, but our liquidity pool is so big and so important,
even if it is on the way down,
that all you have to do is critically limit the on-ramps and off-ramps
or structures that you're controlling them,
and then half the world is going to be like,
nah, I'm not going to use it.
I mean, I'm an optimist, but I'm also a realist.
Yeah.
But would you agree with what I said earlier in terms that
the ability to combat net suppression is much easier with Bitcoin
due to the fact that it's digital?
Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
You know, I think this is like a monetary philosophy point here.
I think the main difference in terms of gold and Bitcoin, I mean, there's many differences,
but the main difference is that people look at gold as a store of value that's money because
it's a thing.
And if you really understand Bitcoin, I'm not saying that I do, but I understand monetary
theory.
If you understand money from a chartless theory, then you understand that money should be nothing.
It basically just an accounting ledger And gold is nothing It just that there is an obsession with it because it I guess it like a Marxist comment
Capitalism itself makes it that.
But what's his name?
Richard – was it Richard Spencer?
The guy who was on Tucker Carlson.
Richard Warner.
Richard Warner, right?
Richard Spencer is a completely different tip.
He's probably like a rock and roll guy, right?
Like an old singer or something.
He's like a white nationalist out of –
Oh, is he really?
He was some deep state
PSYOP white nationalist here in the US.
Listen, I'm not Elon Musk, all right?
I'm just kidding.
I'm just kidding, Elon. Don't ban me.
Yeah, so Richard Werner
talks about QE,
talks about all these other things, and one of the
things he said is that banks at the commercial
level can create money.
And I digged
into some things after that. And what I digged
into was there's a paper by the Bank of
England out there. And the Bank of England
was written in
I don't know, 2014, I think maybe.
And that paper, the Bank of England said, yes, because Werner was right.
Yes, it was at Spencer again.
Yes, money is created from nothing.
And we don't want you to know that.
It's not just created from nothing from central banks.
It's created from nothing at the commercial bank level.
And what they have is they have essentially what's called the chartless asset.
The chartless of that, there was a big fight between the Keynesians and these other guys,
maybe German guys, I don't know. But the Toronto Stat set was like, no, no,
money is just a ledger account of you owe me a favor. And so basically, it's kind of like,
it dovetails into MMT as well. And then the other side, the Keynesian side, not Neo Keynesian,
was like, well, money needs to be tethered to something real so that we can make sure we don't
overprint or debase. And so the Keynesian side won, which became Neo-Keynesian, but the chartless
side is what Werner's talking about. And you know what? That's what Bitcoin is. That's really what
it is. It's like Bitcoin is like, you know what? Let's take the Bitcoin ledger of nano,
and let's put it in a gold casing like an iPhone, and let's put it in an ETF, and let's make everyone
worship it. Let's make it shiny.
No, no, it's a workhorse.
Get it out there because that's what
money is. Money is a workhorse. Now, I'm not
a proponent of MFT, but I
am saying that
there are aspects of Bitcoin that make it
that make it.
I'm a gold book. There are aspects of Bitcoin
that when the world is ready for,
it will, whether
it's Bitcoin or a successor,
when the world is ready for it,
it'll be ready for it.
It's, you know, you can't get away from the physicality of it all yet.
Yeah.
Obviously, I'm full on in it, been in it for 12 years, completely incorporated into my business.
But we have, like, I think it's going to be ultimately successful just because particularly for cross-border payments.
Like, I have some contractors that work outside the United States and they demand to get paid in Bitcoin.
And like it was unprompted.
I think they know.
We're a company focused on Bitcoin specifically, but I was surprised a couple of months ago, this new contractor started and he was like, all right, send me the invoice.
I was thinking it was going to be an international wire transfer.
It was a Bitcoin invoice.
I was like, yeah, sweet.
I think, you know, we were talking about this before as well.
I think Bitcoin's going to find a niche that can't be crushed, cross-border.
Europe is scared to death of it, right?
Black market, I'm not trying to demonize, but you know, things that you got to get around
stuff like you use with gold.
And I think it's going to thrive in that niche.
And then there'll be an opportunity, like a calamitous event or a nation.
And it'll become the surrogate currency.
And then it'll never go.
There's your Trojan horse.
Assuming that you can't kill it, if you can't kill this, it will survive.
And it will survive, in a good way, a virus.
It won't go away.
It'll be there.
And then a good product that's indestructible, all it needs is time and an opportunity.
And something will happen.
And they'll go from your contractors to a small country going, you know what?
Oh, Jesus, we train with our partners across the border here all the time, and they're sanctioned, and I'm sanctioned.
Let's create a zone between my country and your country or the border, and let's just use Bitcoin.
Just do that.
And then after a while, it organically spreads.
That's the home run.
The home run is time.
And time usually means one or two generations.
I have to be dead, and you have to be old.
I think.
uh many bitcoiners myself included recognize that as well it's a it's a multi-generation
thing and that's it's a funny when i hear people deride and besmirch bitcoins like oh it's not used
as day-to-day currency where can i spend it's like what other monetary asset uh has launched
and been completely ubiquitous within 17 years like it's not survived yeah i mean just that's
That's the whole point of a network.
If you can create a network, even if it's not being used,
even if it's not being used but it exists,
all it needs is an opportunity.
Using gold, for example, Shanghai has had gold for 15 years,
and it survived.
And then it's all an opportunity, and boom, it took market share.
This is what it's all about, surviving and taking market share.
And Bitcoin is a survivor, and that's why it eventually wins.
Yeah.
I think the other thing we have in the Bitcoin or camp in our favor is we're very good at memeing.
We're very good at getting messages.
Would you admit, would the gold bugs admit, that we've helped the sound money cause materially in the last 15 years?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, look, I tried to reach out to you early on, not you specifically, but your group.
And I was like, listen, would you stop shitting on gold?
It's the same thing.
I mean, yours might be gold 2.0.
I would like create memes of like the old guy memes, right?
Black and white cookie, you know, a Seinfeld joke,
look to the cookie type of shit.
Shut up, you old man.
And then, and this is where I started to hate sell
because I knew that that fucker, excuse my French,
was just trying to say, hey, go because he just wanted it to go up.
And he was going after the demographic.
It was a smart move, but he was like, people like I'm Gen X, right?
So Gen X up to boomers are like Bitcoin.
No way.
I'm just lucky, you know.
But yeah, it's like it's like we're just like it's it's new tech.
We're not familiar with it.
Give us it.
Give us a break.
You know, I've been very consistent throughout the years on this show.
I love our gold bugs.
We're ideologically and philosophically aligned.
We need to work together.
Right.
Well, I mean, that's it.
You know, it's like the speaking of memes, it's like the what is it?
The Splinter and Ninja Turtles meme.
you know we raised you and now you're and then you're going to use your ear it's usually ron paul
a lot it's like yeah yeah exactly it's a ron paul beat it's exactly ron paul that's exactly it yeah
yeah yeah since this has been uh it's been great thank you for doing this i can't believe it's
this long i appreciate you having me i appreciate you having me on uh uh this is fun i know that i
i know you by reputation i know you from we're mutuals on uh on x but uh yeah this was fun um
very pleasantly uh surprised that wasn't negative but i'm pleasantly surprised i hope you are as
well yeah the fact that we went to the same high school if you're ever back uh in philly let me
know we'll have to get a beer and a pizza somewhere yeah yeah have you have you have you uh
have you been to the at the jay zoo in a while have you been to the prep in a while
not uh not in a few years i need to get fabulous it looks fabulous unbelievable what they've done
Unbelievable.
Anyway.
All right.
Memories.
Yeah.
Well, hopefully this is the first of many.
I'm sure there'll be plenty to talk about as things evolve moving forward.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Thank you for having me on, Marty.
And oh, if I just want to just drop.
Is that OK?
Yeah.
So I have a newsletter on Substack and it's VBL Gold Fix, Victor Boy Larry Gold Fix at Substack.com.
And it is, as you would guess, it's predominantly monetary, and it's predominantly gold and silver because, well, that's what's been moving lately.
But when those markets are not at the front of everyone's mind, I'll talk about geopolitics, which I do all the time.
Look, if you understand gold, you understand geopolitics, you understand inflation, and you understand economies.
And my background is in the bond market and fundamental analysis.
And so, therefore, I will talk about Bitcoin.
But I do get some good research on Bitcoin as well.
And I cover it.
I cover it as well.
But that's not a sales pitch.
I guess what I'm saying is I'm a gold guy who hedges his gold with Bitcoin.
Not a Bitcoin guy.
So that's it.
You can find me on Twitter as well.
Just VBL Ghost.
Like I said, we love our gold bugs here at TFTC.
So thank you for adding to the list of gold bugs that have come on the show.
And we'll link to all that in the show notes.
So you guys are interested.
Check out the show notes.
You can check out Substack.
And great follow on X as well.
Thanks, buddy.
Thank you.
That's all we got today, freaks.
Peace and love.
Okay.