Hey, hey, welcome back to the Bitcoin Matrix. I'm your host, Cedric Youngelman. The Bitcoin
Matrix podcast is proud to be powered by MicroSeed. Look, I've tried a bunch of different ways to
secure my seed phrase over the years. And this is hands down my favorite. You stamp your seed phrase
so tiny, it's practically invisible to the naked eye. It's genius. Effortless self custody with
maximum peace of mind. No stress, no worries. Grab your kit at microseed.io and use the code
matrix for a sweet discount. The Bitcoin matrix is proud to partner with CrowdHealth. My family
ditched traditional fiat health insurance and joined CrowdHealth last year. And it's been a
complete game changer for us. The whole system just makes more sense. Crowdfunding healthcare
with your community. No insurance company middlemen taking their cut. If you're ready
to make the switch like we did, head to joincrowdhealth.com and use the code matrix to get
your first three months at $99 each. We're also proud to partner with OnChained, River, and
Meanwhile. I use OnChained for their collaborative custody multi-sig vaults for secure Bitcoin
storage. Plus, they offer loans and IRAs. Get 10% off at onchain.com forward slash matrix with
code matrix10. If you're stacking sats, River makes it easy and secure. New users get up to $100
in free Bitcoin. Start stacking sats the right way at river.com forward slash matrix. If you're
into infinite banking, but don't want to sell your Bitcoin, Meanwhile offers Bitcoin-denominated
life insurance, the first of its kind. Store, borrow, and pass on BTC. Head to meanwhile.bm
and use the code YTPFYD to learn more.
All links are in the show notes.
Today, I'm sitting down with Tom Luongo for the sixth time.
And if you've followed any of our previous conversations,
you know this one's going to go places most podcasts won't.
Tom makes a bold case.
The chaos you're watching in Western politics,
the wars, the censorship, the financial pressure,
it doesn't trace back to China.
It doesn't trace back to Russia.
It traces back to Europe.
and specifically to a colonial power structure that never really let go.
We're diving into why Trump's second term is less about one man
and more about a battle over who actually controls American monetary and foreign policy.
Why the Epstein files are less of a scandal and more of a strategic weapon.
And why Bitcoin sits at the center of all of this as a direct repudiation of the British central bank model
that's been extracting wealth from the American people for over a century.
This one goes deep into geopolitics, monetary history, capital markets, and what it really means to opt out of a system that was never designed to work in your favor.
If the Bitcoin Matrix resonates with you, I'd really appreciate it if you'd subscribe on the Fountain app.
For just $5 a month, you can become a member and get early ad-free episodes plus other membership perks.
Please leave a five-star review wherever you listen or view your favorite podcasts.
Share the Bitcoin Matrix with someone who'd benefit.
Grab some merchandise or reach out at thebitcoinmatrix.com and say hi.
Just so you know, I only work with companies I personally use and believe in.
No exceptions.
When you check them out and buy and use their products, you're helping keep the Bitcoin Matrix independent.
And I'm really grateful for that.
And now, let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with my good friend Tom Luongo.
What is real? How do you define real? You can't jump into cash. Cash is trash. What do you do? You get out.
Tom Luongo, welcome back to the Bitcoin Matrix for the sixth time. How are you, sir?
I'm good. Really? We've done five previous ones of these?
Yeah, five previous and I think three steak dinners now.
I know, I know. And I'm, you know, ensconced up here in the wilds of Tennessee. So I won't be back in Florida, I think, until April for a few weeks. So maybe when we're on my daughter's birthday. So if we have some time, we should get together in April. It should be fun.
Let's do it. And I recommend people go back to those prior shows. They're about some of your writings and prior thoughts and ideas. But I kind of want to get into the world today. It's, you know, kind of hard to figure out where to start.
Maybe we could think about it in two ways, like maybe like a board game.
I know you like playing those.
And my son is starting to dip his toe into Dungeons and Dragons.
I get kind of roped into his world now, which is kind of exciting, but it takes me places I've never been or wouldn't go on my own.
Cool.
And, you know, I would say I'm blackpilled.
You know, I think you've said I'm blackpilled.
I wouldn't label myself at all.
And at the end of the day, I have optimism.
I'm optimistic about the long-term outcome, but I could get real cynical.
Sure.
I don't, well, I mean, you and I have had many a good conversation about that.
I wouldn't, you know, I've met some really bipolar people.
And at the very least, the fun part about every time you and I get together,
either, you know, for dinner or when we do one of these,
is that, you know, you've got an open mind about this stuff.
And, you know, I like the cynicism.
Don't get me wrong.
I think the cynicism is healthy.
I have plenty of it.
I have enough of it that it's actually very difficult for me to, like, remind myself that every once in a while, no, no, no, we're still winning.
It's just sometimes winning feels like losing, right?
Because as my friend Blaine Holt likes to say, you know, the enemy gets the vote.
So, you know, you can put all the little wins on the board that you want, but they're going to decide, they're going to, you know, come back at you.
And again, the other guy gets to turn, if you want to extend the board game reference, right?
That, you know, I got to the three wood spot before you did.
But he gets two wood when he goes to that spot over there.
So, you know, it's, you know, he might get the reeds if you're doing your Agricola thing, right?
For those of you who've played Agricola, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
I hit the three wood spots, you take the reed spot, and someone else takes the build fences spot.
And then, oh, God, grrr.
And then you do the thing.
But everything's a tradeoff.
And the thing about the board game reference, I think, is good, especially when you start thinking about it from that standpoint.
Like, in what order do I need to take my actions in order to outplay my opponent?
In a lot of these board games, it is very, very much about timing.
And so when you do that a lot, you can watch it happen in real time in politics or in capital markets.
Like, if things happen in the wrong order, ooh, that's going to be bad.
But if things happen in the right order, well, then it's a different story.
Then, you know.
And so I've been watching, you know, for me, everything comes down to whether or not the Trump administration can execute on a geopolitical level, at a domestic policy level, a political level, having to wrangle a recalcitrant, if not outright treasonous Congress.
And then we have openly insurrectionist governors.
We've got anti-ice protests and all of this stuff.
And it's all about the same.
It's all based on the same premise, and it all stems from the same enemy.
And don't ever, people like to confuse the game board,
it's China, it's the Russians, or it's the Iranians, or the Israelis.
No, no, no.
At the end of the day, it's always Europe.
It's always the old colonial powers of Europe,
with or without City of London, the remnants of the British Empire or not.
it's always about them because they're the ones that have the weakest position on the board.
They're the ones that have the oldest entrenched power structure that they want to hold on to.
So they're the ones with the most to lose. So therefore, they're going to be the ones that
make the biggest, they're going to be the ones that make the biggest moves. They're the ones
that have the deepest ties into our government. They are the ones that have the deepest ties into
our intelligence services, into our managerial state, into our, into Wall Street, the financial
markets. They're the ones we have the longest and deepest relationships with. And when you start to
really think through the history and the relationship between the United States, for example,
and Great Britain, you realize that it's a very complicated relationship and that we've lived in
the era of relative peace between Britain and the United States. But I would argue that that's not
relative peace at all. It's always been them sticking their hand up our ass and working our
political system like a fucking puppeteer. And the longer I go through this, the longer I analyze
these systems, I can't come to any other conclusion because they're the ones that have the deepest
relationships with, for example, the CIA, between MI6 and CIA and Five Eyes and all of that stuff.
They had a direct pipeline to the president to feed him malameless and disinformation for years,
for decades. We have their central bank model, which you as a Bitcoiner are fundamentally
opposed to as a human being, right? That's your whole, your whole raison d'etre is to get it to
be a part of Bitcoin is to repudiate the British central bank model of fiat currency and debt,
taxes, inflation, and all the rest of it, right? So, you know, trace all these things back. Don't,
don't overcomplicate it. It's just Europe over and over and over again. They're the ones that
are all communists.
Like, tell me
the EU isn't looking more and more like
the USSR every day. Censorship,
trampling of
individual sovereignty and what's supposed to be a trade
and customs union and a vague political
union. No. At the end of every day,
at the end of the day,
Europe every day acts more,
the European Commission acts more and more like
the unelected Politburo that they actually
are. Right? Look at what's
happening in the UK. Labor's
in power and they're literally
looking at 1984 going, yeah, that was a good handbook.
I mean, and every day, we've always been at war with East Asia.
I know we've always been at war with Eurasia.
It's the same black and white, up and down.
Ignorance is truth, and war is peace, right?
These are the people that want to continue the war in Ukraine,
even though no one else wants it.
These are the people that have been behind the Israeli-Iran conflict
on both sides of the equation.
And we finally, you know, they've been finally showing their hand on how much they, you know, have influence over Iranian policy.
And you realize that at the end of the day that, you know, there are no good guys in any of these fights.
It's just a bunch of bad guys, you know, mixing it up, trying to get us, the Americans, to go in there and fight their wars for them.
Because at the end of the day, if we're fighting their wars, then we're spending our blood and treasure and they aren't.
And, you know, so when I extend the board game metaphor, that's a classic, I'm in second place or I'm in first place and everybody in third, fourth and fifth place are ganging up on me to pull me down and bring them up, which is what I would do if I were them.
Right.
But that doesn't mean I have to like it as an American.
And it's really, and then when you back out from that even further, I really don't like it if I'm the Russians and I really don't like it if I'm the Chinese.
because if the Americans lose,
then they're stuck having to deal with the remnant of America,
plus Europe again, fighting them.
And China's too remote to actually fight them.
That means that the Russians are going to be on their own again.
And, you know, that's the game board.
That's why Ukraine exists.
That's why they still want that war in Ukraine.
They want to fight that war in Ukraine with or without us,
but they would prefer us to do it for them
because, of course, we'll be fighting a war
that we can't quote-unquote win.
They want to turn Ukraine into Vietnam again,
with us fighting it.
Or they want to turn Iran into Vietnam or in Afghanistan.
They're setting up Canada for this, for Christ's sake.
The way Mark Carney is acting,
it's clear that they want to set up Canada
as the next Ukraine for us to have to fight.
I got news for you.
Canada will take 20 minutes to deal with.
There's nothing the Canadians can muster in the next 20 years.
that could get them even close to being able to fight, you know, the American military that's in
Minnesota, no less the rest of the country. So I don't know, man. I mean, I don't know what you're
seeing, but what I see is Trump, as always, nothing has changed. Trump, you know, wasn't
lying when he said he wants to, you know, end all the freaking wars, fix the economy and move forward.
But he's, you know, he's up against these people that will do everything to extend and pretend and
just kind of wait him out and do exactly what they did in the first administration, which is,
You know, this time they don't have they can't saddle him with a bunch of neocons in his cabinet because he's got a good cabinet this time.
And he's spent most of 2025, I think, doing a good job of poking his opposition into defining, redefining, if not fully defining the art, his article to powers as president.
If you notice, every one of those, everything he tried to do, he did knowing full, I think knowing full well, I think Stephen Miller was the architect of this, knowing full well that they would cast in some traffic court judge in Maryland with cast an injunction against X.
I don't know.
The president isn't allowed to do foreign policy, for example.
And then that has to go up to the Supreme Court for the Supreme Court to slap it down and go, no, actually, the president does get to do foreign policy.
He gets to negotiate with foreign leaders.
That's kind of his job.
He also gets to do this and he also gets to do that and he also gets to do these other things Now of course on the opposite you know their counter move to that is to then scream no kings And you know we have a president and a king
Well, I got news for you.
In today's political environment, the United States president has an unbelievable amount
of power, far more than most kings have ever held in history.
And this is the part that's hilarious as people are crashing out left and right.
And Trump doesn't even like utilize half the power that he actually has because he hasn't
use the military domestically, even though he's had every right to. Like Minnesota, he had every
right to invoke the Insurrection Act and arrest Tim Walz and arrest Jacob Fry, the mayor of
Minneapolis. He had every right to do that. He could have easily done that. It's like, nope,
you guys are actively nullifying and knowingly nullifying enforcement of federal law. Sorry,
you get to go into federal prison. We're going to hold you for 21 days. Nope, sorry.
No, pending trial.
Done.
Remove them from power.
Didn't do it.
Why?
Because that's what they wanted him to do.
They wanted him to, because they had already prepared the ground that he's a tyrant.
Right?
It's like they prepared the ground for 15 years that Putin wants to reconstitute the USSR.
So then they force him to invade Ukraine so that they can then say, see, he wants to reconstitute
the USSR.
are. Like, no, dude, it's like, all you had to do is, as Marty Armstrong has to say all the time,
all you had to do is implement the Minsk agreement and Russia wouldn't have moved across the border.
But you didn't want to do that because the goal was to start a war between Russia and Ukraine.
But you want a virtue signal that you didn't. The Democrats are playing the same game. The
city of London is playing the same fucking game. They're all doing this shit. And it's nothing new.
And you don't see the Chinese playing that game. They're not playing that kind of game. The Russians
aren't playing that game. The only people who are playing that game are Europe, the Democrats,
and the British over and over and over again.
And we can get into the capital markets.
And you see the same thing in the capital markets.
So it's the same thing over and over again.
And it doesn't mean that he's done a great job of...
I'm not going to say that he's done a perfect job
of dealing with the problem, because he hasn't.
He's made mistakes, right?
His public handling of the Epstein files
has been, at best, problematic.
But then again, since he knew what was in those files,
and he knew that he had nothing to hide,
him personally
because he doesn't.
The only thing he had to hide
was that he was the guy
who helped turn Epstein in
the first time.
He was working with the FBI
to get Epstein arrested
back in 2009.
And then we get, you know,
and so he knew full well.
So then he asked himself
the question,
well, then why did he,
that doesn't make any sense, Tom,
because why did he say,
well, let's just get rid of it.
Let's just ignore it all.
Epstein's the corpse
that won't die
and let's just let it all,
let's let bygones be bygones
and move on.
Well, that's really obvious
because he was offering them terms of surrender.
He knew what was in there.
And they said no.
You have a treasure trove like Epstein.
You're not going to use it strategically
to try and sue for peace,
to win the war without firing a shot,
to minimize the number of casualties?
Why wouldn't you do that?
Oh, but we can't do that.
We can't think in those terms
because we have to think maximally cynically all the time
because we've been told to be maximally cynical
about everything because everybody's bad,
because everybody's terrible,
because they're all shitbags.
There are no good guys, right?
We're all morally gray.
Well, what if it's not as bad as we think it is?
When you, even if you don't believe it,
you should at least entertain that idea
and then try and fit some scenarios,
those are my hypotheses,
and then run them and go, maybe.
And then sit back and watch and go,
well, oh, yeah, that makes more sense
than the other argument makes sense.
so if that's the case
then you can continue to
say well it makes more sense that this is what
Trump was doing as opposed to
you know he was just trying to save his skin
like
it's clearly obvious
that that's not you know at this point
the big casualties so far
there's been two huge casualties in the latest Epstein
release Steve Bannon
and Peter Mandelson
the former ambassador to the United States
and the UK the Lord Peter Mandelson
the prince of darkness who's been
one of the leading
architects of all of this
horrific shit
he's done. That blows all back
on Keir Starmer. It's destroying
British politics. It's good. It's destroying the
British establishment. It's blowing
right back on them because they were involved in all
of it. Now everybody's looking at it.
But the big one is Steve Bannon.
He's been sitting there as a wolf in
sheep's clothing, you know, wrapping himself
in the American flag saying, I am the true
MAGA. I'm America's true voice.
and find out that that was all cooked up by,
that idea was cooked up by Epstein himself
to start the war room
so that he could then live under the imprimatur
of being a journalist.
Steve Bannon, journalist.
You know, go fuck yourself, dude.
Seriously.
Because he didn't have to register under Farah
as a foreign agent.
He literally had that conversation,
and there it is in black and white.
And all those assholes,
and how many times did I tell you
Thomas Massey is full of shit?
Marjorie Taylor Greene, didn't trust her either.
For five years, I've been calling her AOC for MAGA tarts.
Right?
Like, I told you, I know I told all of you all,
I know I said this,
I know I talked to you directly about this, right?
Like, all of them.
Like, everybody in Bannon's orbit.
And they're all compromised.
They're all now tainted by him.
I never trusted Jack Posobiec,
because I knew he was full of shit
and was a made man back in 2016,
because I was in that orbit back in 2016
during the first election cycle.
I was right there.
I was one degree of separation.
It was me and Adam Gingrich and Mike Cernovich.
I was part of that crowd.
I was adjacent to that crowd.
And I was actually being...
I could have been a part of that crowd if I wanted to.
All I had to do was go to the deplorable in Washington, D.C.
At that point, I didn't have a pot to piss in or window to throw it out of,
so I wasn't going to Washington, D.C.
to hang out with a bunch of fucking retards I'd met on the Internet.
Like, I'm not doing that.
But I watched Jack Posobiec right after that.
when he first got the job with OANN.
And that guy was watching me and Halsey English.
We were watching our live streams
that nobody else was watching.
And he was using our shit
and using our ideas.
And we called him.
Halsey, I was like, are you kidding me?
And we called him out on it
and he immediately blocked me.
I've been blocked by Jack Posobiec since 2017, by the way.
Because, you know, but he was a made man.
So, you know, and then I have,
so I have something for you, Cedar.
How did Steve Bannon become Steve Bannon, right?
I know little of his backstory.
I know Goldman Sachs, I think.
And then he made some money on Seinfeld when he went into TV production.
He was making weird, I don't remember what kind of slanted films on his own when he came out of Goldman.
He was a filmmaker.
Yeah.
It was Navy intelligence.
Yeah, so I know these smatterings.
That's about it.
I mean, I don't understand how that comes together or what the cohesive story is.
And his persona is a little weird.
It's not hard.
Ready?
Once Navy intelligence, always Navy intelligence.
Same thing with Jack Posobiec, by the way.
So, you know, if you just take Steve Bannon's resume
and just strip his name off the top of it,
and you look at it and you go,
oh, God, that guy's an intelligence asset.
It's that hard.
Like, you know, like, oh, he went here,
he went to the school, he did this, he was there.
Right, seriously.
Okay, that's, I mean, anybody else,
you'd be like, oh, God, that guy's probably a spook.
But, you know, he goes out the slovenly prick
that he is in his everyman outfit, you know, every day,
makes himself look like the everyman.
He's unkempt.
He's ungroomed.
I mean, I'm wearing this shit, but this is who I am.
I'm doing this thing out of a fucking trailer, right?
You know what I mean?
I am that guy.
He's not.
So half of the guys in his background there,
I remember chatting with Lee Stranahan about this
when I used to do Fault Lines on Sputnik Radio
with Lee and Garland, and Lee had him pegged ages ago.
All those guys, Cernovich and the rest of them,
they were all getting money from guys like Jeff Giese
and the Mercers and all that, they're all in that, there's serious money behind a lot
of these guys.
And we're finding out about all of it now.
And so when you think about Bannon, when you think about the Bannon orbit, how many people
are backpilled today and who don't believe that Trump is doing the right thing because
of the intensity of the Steve Bannon orbit?
Right. So maybe, for example, you don't like Bannon, but you like Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Or you like Thomas Massey. You're a libertarian, so you like Thomas Massey.
Or you're a construction worker. You believe that Marjorie Taylor Greene is on the up and up.
You're not some cynical asshole like I am. This is where cynicism really works for you,
because you go, I've seen this shtick before. I don't believe this. I don't believe this
For example, I never believed Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Never bought the whole, never bought anything about her persona.
Don't know why, just for some reason I'm like, I just knew there was something off.
And then I realized that when you sit down and you listen to shitlib speak, right,
they all would talk about Marjorie Taylor Greene the same way we talk about AOC.
And I'm like, oh, right.
They're both assets.
They're just straight from central casting, except that, you know, the left got the hot Latina.
And we got the grouper-faced, guerrilla-armed construction company
owning cunt from North Georgia.
So, I mean, and that's how they think of us.
We don't get the hot one, right?
Right?
You know, they just decided that she works,
that that'll work reasonably well.
So, you know, and that's the way this works.
And you realize that they're playing both sides the entire time.
So what was Steve Bannon's role?
Steve Bannon's role was, hey, man, I have to be the guy who catches all the conservatives to figure out that the Russia, that Russiagate is was an operation, that the Russians aren't our enemies.
And we got to catch those people.
We got to we got to give them something else.
So let's give them China.
So that's Bannon was that was always Bannon's job.
Bannon's job was catch all the conservatives that were that were that were starting to believe, you know, oh, well, Russia's not our enemy.
Maybe Iran's got a point.
They're not fully evil either, yada, yada, yada.
But the minute that those people sort of wake up, they're still going to want to believe that America's under attack because they understand that there's something wrong.
So then you conveniently give them China, and that's Steve Bannon's job.
And you still get to feel intelligent because you moved from one state of ignorance to a new state of enlightenment.
But you're still just caught in the matrix.
The matrix is that, you know, from Europe's perspective, we don't give a shit whether Trump supporters hate Russia or hate China, as long as they hate one of them and or Iran, or even worse, Israel.
Any of those people, it doesn't matter.
You can use that to drive a wedge between them and Donald Trump.
That's the goal.
It's always the goal.
It's to drive the wedge.
Because if you drive the wedge, then you can splinter the base.
You can splinter the voters.
And you can use that strategically to then try and, you know, win elections or justify when you go to steal the election, why he lost.
It's what they're doing to Viktor Orban over in Hungary right now.
It's nothing new.
It's what they do in every one of these consequential elections as they come up.
So it's, you know, this is the way of the world, man.
Like I can, you know, this is the world we live in.
And it's all intelligence operations.
And if you're confused by what's going on in the world, the confusion's the strategy.
Because if you're confused and they've robbed you of your ability to think straight about who the real enemy is, they're winning.
That's what I would do.
If I wanted to stay in power, I would just set everybody against each other.
So they don't have time to look at me.
And I wouldn't put my face on television.
So if I were the British, I would put an evil fucker like Bibi Netanyahu in charge of Israel over and over and over again
to then commit freaking genocide in Gaza and throw the Israelis under the bus.
Like, it's not difficult.
The problem is for most people, we have a soul.
We still have like our toes.
As my friend Susan Gokinda likes to say, I got a toe left in humanity.
I'm still dipping my toe in the pool of humanity.
I would never do that.
But they would.
Because they really are that evil.
And they really are that terrible.
And so we have to figure out a way to beat these people.
And the way you beat them is, you know, don't listen to fuckers like Steve Bannon or anybody in his orbit.
because they hate, don't ever forget, they hate Donald Trump. And there's a reason why they hate
him. They hate him because he knows who they are, what they've done, and what it'll take for us to
win. And so they're going to do everything imaginable to stop it. I mean, they're parading
Mitch McConnell around the Senate saying he's not going to vote. He's a no against the safe act.
And Mitch McConnell doesn't even know where the jello is at this point. Mitch McConnell looks
worse than Joe Biden did. At least every once in a while, they could drug Biden up and make him
coherent for 20 minutes. I mean, I'm sorry, but the elder abuse needs to stop.
I would say the younger abuse, because the elders are abusing us by staying in office.
Well, I mean, yeah, I mean, there's that too. They are abusing us, right?
But I get what you're saying. So in 2016, I got really interested in what was going on,
and I was kind of diving into the Trump thing. I bought a couple books back then that I never
really got to. One was a compendium, I think, of Trump interviews by Wayne Barrett from,
I think the village voice.
And another one was about Robert Maxwell I about 100 pages into that And I have a lot of questions about the Epstein file and I still black on some of the stuff you said
but I don't want to get into it. I'm going to read these books.
But what I am seeing, but I do want, I don't know who Roger Stone is.
Maybe that's one name, but just we could bubble that for a second.
He's got the big Nixon tattoo on his back.
Kind of the reason I only bring up Roger Stone,
because he's a weird one like Steve Bannon,
but the Nixon tattoo, and we're learning a lot about Nixon
in this era, it seems like.
We are.
Roger Stone is a guy I never wanted to pay any mind to Roger Stone.
I always thought he was a little bit of a...
They all...
Honestly, to be honest with you, Stedrick,
after Banning got bounced from the administration,
I'm like, well, Trump probably had a good reason for it,
and it turns out that he did, obviously.
I just didn't pay him any mind.
I never watched The War Room.
I never watched any of the people that were in his orbit.
I just didn't care.
I just thought he was, okay, whatever.
He's Steve Bannon.
He's like doing that.
Yeah, I know he's out there doing some damn thing, and he's railing about China, whatever.
I didn't think he was important.
Turns out, you know, he was prepping this ground, right?
Roger Stone had a really interesting couple of tweets about Bannon in the last couple of days.
I hadn't given Roger Stone a second thought in, I don't know, seven years, right?
But Roger was making a very, very cogent case about how Bannon had outed himself in all of the, especially relative to his, Roger's testimony.
And when Roger went to jail and, you know, how Bannon basically stabbed him in the back.
And he's like, that was a tell, guys.
Everybody thought it was crazy, but that was a tell.
When Bannon went to jail for contempt of Congress for not wanting to talk to the J6 Select Committee,
Roger Stone pointed out, Trump was like, dude, I will hand them the information about you so you can go and testify.
They won't learn anything they don't already know.
And Bannon turned him down and decided to go to jail instead.
Now, why did he do that?
Cover for status, dude.
Ian Burlingame, cover for status.
He gets to cover himself and now have a martyr come and then have the martyr persona to say, I went to jail for Trump.
And all of his dudes are out there on Twitter all day long going, how can Bannon be the bad guy?
He went to jail for Trump.
No, he went to jail over not talking to the J6 committee.
That is fundamentally different.
You can retcon history all you want, but this is what he did.
He didn't go to jail for Trump at all.
Trump wasn't even speaking to that bastard at that point, but he was still willing to, as always, you know, the Trump was always much more magnanimous than he had any right to be.
You know, nine times out of ten, everything, all the terrible things they say about Donald Trump, it's really funny.
He turns out that he's always far more generous to even to his enemies than anybody ever gives him credit for.
They never say anything nice about him.
They just use him and then abuse him.
because they know they have the media in their back pocket.
They know they have celebrities.
They know they have social media and everybody else,
and we'll just pile on.
Because, again, if everybody hates you in politics,
you're probably the good guy.
You're not necessarily the good guy, but you probably are.
And, oh, by the way, bringing up Nixon.
Nixon was bounced out of power.
I was chatting with Susan Gokinda about this the other day,
and she was there in the 70s.
She testified for Nixon, right?
She said, no, Nixon was thrown out of power for closing the gold window, for stopping the looting of the American Treasury.
And so he protected what was left of the U.S. gold reserves by cutting off gold convertibility and handing the gold to the Federal Reserve.
That's how they fixed it.
And that's a compelling argument.
And it's a hard argument for libertarians and hard money guys to accept that.
And it's funny, I was chatting with Peter St. Andrew about this yesterday.
I'll put the podcast out probably tomorrow.
And I brought this up to him, and I could see it on his face.
It's an audio.
You know, my podcast is audio only, but I could see it on his face.
He's like, I'm having a really hard time believing this.
I'm like, you don't have to believe it, Peter.
All you got to do is consider it.
Come back to me in a few months after you've thought about it a little bit.
I'm putting it out there as an idea for you to think about.
And, you know, but I've gotten to the point now where I think that Nixon, that was the last act of defense to stop the looting of the American Treasury.
I wrote about it last month in the newsletter, and I was able to find a good chart of, an accurate chart of U.S. gold reserves from 1940 to the present, right?
And the important period, of course, is from 1940 to 1971, because after 1971, they don't move very much.
A little bit of gold has flowed out to, you know, mint coins and stuff like that.
But for the most part, you know, we've had 8,133.5 tons of gold on the balance sheet since then.
And, you know, we lost over two-thirds or just about two-thirds of our gold reserves from their peak between the year of 1950 to 1971.
United States had 23,000 tons of gold in its reserves in 1950.
I didn't even think about how much silver we had.
Because remember, at that point, silver was still money.
A coinage in 1950 was still 90% silver.
So think about that.
Think about it.
The U.S. Treasury getting rid of its silver was one of the greatest dishoarding operations in human history.
So you think about that and you're like, wow.
Bretton Woods was designed to watch the gold flow out of the Treasury.
And while everybody now likes to retcon history and say,
well, the United States was given the exorbitant privilege of being the global reserve currency,
which we were not until after 1971,
really when we were the global reserve currency until the 1980s.
I mean, the U.S. dollar reserve standard didn't really start until after Paul Volcker
raised interest rates to 20%,
and gold rectified the balance sheet,
the debt to the reserves.
It wasn't until that point
that we actually had a dollar reserve.
And then, that was 1980, what?
That was like 1980.
By the time the recession was over, 1983,
1984, LIBOR becomes the debt indexing rate of the world.
Positive accord, the G5 gets together
at the positive accord in 1985
to start breaking exchange rates.
I want to ask the audience a very simple question.
So when you look at it that way, do you really think the United States was ever really in control of its own monetary policy?
Do you really think we were ever really in control then of our own fiscal policy?
And then if that were the case and all the money was flowing overseas, why wouldn't you think that that money would then go to buy our politicians while we start adopting all of this European regulation about, you know, clean air?
equal rights, all the voting rights stuff, all this Civil Rights Act, all this crap.
And then, don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't think that black people should vote.
Of course I do.
That's not what I'm getting at.
But so many of these acts are far beyond these pieces of legislation, the Clean Air Act and
all of this, all far beyond its reach than how it was sold to us and how we want to describe
its original intention.
The intention of these things was to destroy the rule of law, the construction of the Constitution, the balance of powers and everything else.
It was to hand power to the legislature or hand power to the president that it shouldn't have and hand executive power to the legislature that it shouldn't have or to the judiciary that it shouldn't have and destroy the separation of powers.
Because if you're going to destroy the country, you have to destroy the political system on which the country is based, which is the founding document.
So you have to then have a party, one of the two major parties, be unconscionably hostile to a constructive read of the Constitution.
That means making sure that you put shitbag communists on the Supreme Court and at an end, right?
So understand that it's like, I don't know, man.
The fucking British have been trying to overtake Russia for 300 years.
Why wouldn't they be having tried to take over the United States for the last 110, 120, when they finally stopped fighting us?
I mean, that would be after Reconstruction, right?
They finally just stopped fighting us.
No, then they just started buying our politicians, and then they got Woodrow Wilson elected in 1912.
And then miraculously, we got, you know, direct election of senators, the Federal Reserve, and the 16th Amendment, and the income tax the very next year.
and somehow we wound up fighting two world wars
to bail the British and the French
out of their friggin' bullshit
and after both of those world wars
the price of gold was reset to the pre-war value
both times creating a massive deflationary waves
and gold flowed toward the old country
and away from everywhere else
the more I study this stuff, Cedric
the more I see it all as one big goddamn British plot
and just bothers me to no end.
Like, it does.
It bothers me.
It, it, it, oh.
Like, I, if, you know,
you know, the whole fight club thing, right?
For years I used to say,
well, if you could fight one person,
who would you fight?
I used to say Milton Friedman
because, you know,
he was the libertarian in wolf's clothing.
He was, because he wasn't a libertarian.
Like, no, he just, you know,
he's the free marketeer in wolf's clothing.
No, no, no.
If I could fight one dude,
I'd fight Churchill.
I'd beat Churchill until he,
I'd beat Churchill until I shoved that cigar
right down his fucking throat.
Because that cocksucker needs a revaluing in history.
That cocksucker is one of the biggest fucking mass murderers.
He's a bigger mass murderer because of him, we got Stalin.
Because of him, we got Hitler.
Because of British ambitions to take over Russia,
we fought two world wars for that.
We watched Eastern Europe be under Stalin's thumb
for 70 years in the goddamn Cold War.
Fuck Churchill.
And fuck all this limey history.
I'm just so fucking over it.
So it's time for everybody to just lay their cards on the table and go,
you know what?
Yeah, I'm no longer, I am, I'm not a libertarian anymore.
Fuck you, it's war.
There are no libertarians and there are no goddamn atheists and foxholes.
Let's go kill these motherfuckers and be done with it.
Metaphorically speaking, of course, because we're on YouTube.
Like, and I mean this, you know, and how do you beat them?
You beat them financially.
You beat them politically.
You don't go to war with them.
You don't need to kill them.
Like, you killed them by taking away their money, by taking away their power.
by taking away their ability and their access to it in the future.
That's how you do it.
And that's a very, very difficult task.
And that's what Scott Bessent is for.
Because Scott Bessent used to work for them.
And Scott Bessent knows how to do it.
And so I choose to live in a world, maybe I'm Pollyanna,
but I choose to live in a world where bad men can become,
can have a third act in their life.
Like I don't think, for example,
I don't think Donald Trump was a good guy when he was younger.
I don't think Scott Bissett was a good guy when he was younger.
I think they were, you know, they were assholes.
They did whatever they, they did what they wanted and then they did bad things.
And I can also, you know, I, when I started getting into all of this stuff, this, all
this politics stuff, I remember reading Jim Sinclair, that jazz mindset, right?
Mr. Gold, Jim Sinclair.
I remember reading that blog every day.
When I got up in the morning, the first thing I read every, the first thing I did every day
was check to see if Jim had written a new post.
I mean, years I did this.
Lou Rockwell, J.S. Mindset,
and eventually when Zero Hedge hit the scene,
I started reading Zero Hedge.
And when I read of Jim, it was very clear to me.
Jim was a, you know, he was an amoral trader.
He was a, you know, he was one of those guys
who in his third act of his life went,
I'm going to spill the beans on how
the whole rotten system operates.
I'm going to teach everybody how this stuff works,
how the financing works.
For example, in the gold industry and all of this stuff.
And he did.
And, you know, it doesn't matter whether you were a good man or a bad man when you were younger.
You know, ask yourself that age-old question.
You know, if you believe that you're a Christian, well, then you believe in forgiveness.
You believe in atonement.
You believe in redemption.
I'm not saying I am or I'm not because my spirituality is incredibly confused, right?
but I'm at least willing to entertain the idea.
And I like a good redemption story like anybody else.
So, hey, why don't we have that conversation?
So if I can believe it about Jim Sinclair,
I can certainly believe it about Donald Trump.
I can certainly believe it about Scott Besson.
I can believe it about other people as well.
I can even believe that the intersection
of their personal arcs with other people
wanting to just survive what is a terrible environment
you get some of the things that we've seen.
Like, for example, I don't like the New York Money Center
banks any more than anybody else does, right?
Like, do you think I like Jamie Dimon, J.P. Morgan?
Do you think I think he's a good guy?
But if Dimon is CEO of J.P. Morgan,
his job is to run J Morgan Therefore if there an existential threat to J Morgan then I should expect Jamie Diamond to go out there and defend JP Morgan right Well central bank digital currencies are
an existential threat to all commercial banks. So I don't have to ascribe noble intentions
to Jamie Diamond, JP Morgan, or John Solomon and Goldman Sachs or anybody else, right?
Even Larry Fink over at BlackRock.
As a matter of fact,
what did we see at Davos this year?
The co-chair of the WEF,
the CEO of BlackRock,
Mr. Larry Fink,
Mr. Darkside himself,
Mr. Sheev Palpatine
of the 21st century himself,
knuckled under and sued for peace
with the Trump administration.
Said, yep, globalism's failed.
We've got to change our ways.
Why?
Because BlackRock,
at the end of the day,
is what I always said.
It's a $65 billion company
in terms of shareholder equity
or $80 billion, whatever the hell it is.
It's less than $100 billion in shareholder equity.
So it's not a very big company.
It means it's very, very vulnerable to somebody going,
you know what?
Yeah, you don't exist anymore, right?
And I'm sure that got that talk from either Scott Besson
or Lutnick or someone on the Trump team.
Like, look, dude, nope.
I remember for a long time when I first started talking
about this idea that Powell was stealth tightening
and SOFR versus LIBOR and all that.
So very early on, I remember a couple of guys
just coming after me day in and day out on Twitter going,
then why did Larry Fink go to see Jay Powell seven fucking times
if not to tell Powell what to do?
I'm like, really?
You believe that Larry Fink can tell the Fed chairman what to do?
Don't think that might have been Fink going hat in hand to Powell going,
how do I not die here?
No, it had to be the other way around.
That's what black pilling really is.
If you're not willing to at least put the script and ask a question
and give both sides the do.
You say one guy is the master of the universe.
Well, but one guy has real power
and the other guy has the pretense of power.
I'm going with the guy who has real power.
Right?
When it comes to Bitcoin,
the rules are simple.
Run your own node,
hold your own keys,
and protect your seed phrase.
That's where MicroSeed comes in.
Unlike bulky backups,
MicroSeed is stamped onto a tiny steel washer.
Fireproof, waterproof, and so small you can carry it anywhere or hide it in plain sight.
Go to microc.io and use the code MATRIX for a discount on your order.
Well, Powell's an interesting name.
So, or, you know, sort of player on the board.
So, you know, in my lifetime, there's been, you know, only a few kind of mega events.
A lot of the events you talked about were prior to my life.
sort of Brenton Woods, the Nixon shock.
So, you know, and it seems like we're coming,
it seems like we're on the cusp of a lot of change
across a lot of sectors where one of these sectors
would be radical change in and of itself.
So AI, you know, I'm not saying that the equities are great,
are properly represented in the markets
and nothing's overvalued, but I think it can be rapid change
like the way the internet was rapid change.
by the way i think bitcoin is rapid change and so these technological developments are built on top
of other tech so it's like it gets faster and faster maybe the way they're coming more often
but ai seems to be big uh it seems like the radical change in money right now gold silver
skyrocketing tremendous volatility for sort of your stable assets or things that are sort of
known as inflation hedges, Bitcoin going through rapid sort of overhaul transformation in terms of
the eyes of institutions and governments, stable coins, CBDCs, you know, the Federal Reserve,
and then also geopolitics. It feels like there could be a color revolution percolating here in
the States or sort of like they want to try. They certainly want to try. Seems like that could be
on the edge of things. And then
for me, it's not even
you know, it's not even to Trump, but Trump
did the Venezuela thing
and just that was sort of
I didn't feel that way since
maybe like Kuwait, you know,
in terms of, yeah, it didn't, it felt
bigger or like, wow.
I didn't see that at all.
I mean, I think
Venezuela is important, but I don't think it's
as, I don't think it's as
earth shattering as Kuwait.
I mean, in the same, okay,
on the same way only not on the same way for sure uh and it wasn't as sort of a wide of a of a
military or a big military conflict but i mean in terms of uh combined with the rhetoric around
greenland and uh different things happening and sort of the the way that mission went down and
was sort of portrayed in the news i i would i don't know how any any other country feels they
sovereignty okay let's let's let's unpack this real quick this is not hard okay
then as well I did a great podcast with Blaine Holt about this one and it's like
you know and I've created a meme for it it's like a bit of the globe with a big
post-it note on it and Venezuela means a B C D E or all of the above it's all of
the above so Venezuela wasn't about oil necessarily wasn't about voter fraud
necessarily. It wasn't about drugs necessarily. It wasn't about the axis of resistance necessarily.
It wasn't about China. It wasn't about Russia. It was about all of them. Okay. Maduro, what Trump
did was quite actually savvy because Venezuela represents a kind of nodal point on the organized
crime network around the world. And that organized crime network is, again, goes back to the city of
London. And if you think I'm crazy about that, you should have Matt Arad on the show for two
hours and let Matt talk for two hours straight and explain to you how deep the city of London
and the crown are embedded in global organized crime, along with the Canadian banks and a variety
of other people. We had Matt on the podcast a year and a half ago. Myself, he and Dexter White
sat down for a 90-minute conversation, which was illuminating. And I will just say that I haven't
spoken to Matty very often since then, not for any other reason that we're both busy. And I keep
meaning to ask him back on the podcast and have another chat with him. I'm going to see him up
in Cornerstone when we do that up in Calgary. He'll be there. But that's a very big subplot
in Venezuela. Venezuela was not a sovereign nation. Venezuela with Maduro at the top.
Yeah, he was in charge of the civilian government,
but he wasn't running anything.
The organized crime layer underneath him,
the intelligence services, the organized crime,
and everything else, that's what actually ran the country.
And Maduro was the guy sitting at the top of that,
managing all of that.
And also, in many ways, a puppet.
I would argue the same exists for, to a lesser extent,
the mullahs in Iran.
Same thing.
A lot of cash flows through organized crime, be it the drugs or the women or the kids or the oil or whatever.
And that funds terror networks around the world.
Because in order to fund ISIS or the Axis of Resistance or the militant wing of Hezbollah, not the civilian governorship.
Remember, there's Hamas and then there's the Hamas fighters and there's Hezbollah and there's the Hezbollah fighters.
Those organizations themselves are not monoliths.
though everybody would like to turn them into monoliths.
They're not.
Hezbollah, as a civilian organization,
is reasonable.
And it's not nearly as bad as the military armament.
The access and resistance strategy coming out of Iran
goes all the way back to City of London.
Don't kid yourself.
So what Venezuela was about
was about knocking out Maduro
and knocking out a lot of those that were there.
And there were people killed in Venezuela,
and they were knocked out.
And to actually allow the civilian government
to start operating again.
We didn't go in and do a regime change operation in there.
We didn't.
We walked in, we nabbed Maduro,
we killed a bunch of his cronies,
keeping the country under wraps,
And we're allowing Delce Rodriguez to now to help Delce Rodriguez actually get control of the country.
Everybody in Venezuela apparently is a lot happier.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's going to get better.
Cuba's next.
Why?
Because in order to knock down the regime in Cuba, they were getting all their oil from Venezuela.
That's not coming in anymore.
Cuba should fall soon.
And that's another node on this network.
OK?
Vancouver is another node on this network.
OK?
Vancouver
Vancouver where all the Chinese
you know the Chinese tribes and everything
over there so I call it Vancouver
I can't call it Vancouver anymore sorry
you know and if you have
outposts like this all around the world right
as Matt
said to us you know when we were chatting on the podcast
about this like why are the Russian mobs
why are Russian mobsters living in London
and Chinese triad
guys living in
Vancouver well it's because if
they went back to beijing or mosca they'd be killed because they're not actually russian nationals or
chinese nationals they're just or they're just shitbag it's just like why would the mob go back
to italy because they'd be killed no that's why they're in jersey you know it's like you know i
mean like in some respects that's why the sopranos is kind of bullshit that they actually went back to
the to the homeland because they probably would have been killed if they went back to the homeland
that's why they're injured that's why they're in jersey in the first place right so understand that
That's, you know, that's part of what was going on there.
So then there's the entire argument of what oil, why was China in there?
Okay, remember, China's getting, there's only a few places where you can get really good heavy sour crude.
Oil is not oil.
It's not a monolith.
It's not, you know, no, there's 100 different grades of oil out there, right?
Because you pull it out of the ground and it's got every, you know, what we call oil is certainly different compositions, right?
of different mixes of hydrocarbons.
This is where I get the, you know,
I get the flex as a chemist, right?
So there's light, sweet, crude,
which is, you know, sweet means that it's pH,
it's got a relatively high pH, it's relatively basic,
and sour means it's particularly acidic.
It's got more sulfur in it.
It's really sweet versus sour is the amount of sulfur
that's in the sulfur content, it's in the oil.
Heavy versus light, meaning does it have a lot of,
you know, does it have a lot of the light ends
that you can make JP4, jet fuel, gasoline, diesel fuel with,
or is it heavy oil that you make number five?
You make fuel oil, ship oil, and all the rest of it.
Pull the waxes off, make candles from it, yada, yada, yada.
Venezuela is heavy, sour crude.
What do you run a blue water navy on?
Heavy, sour crude.
And they were getting it for pennies on the dollar.
They were getting it for half price.
Same thing with Iran's heavy, sour blends.
The Chinese were getting that,
are still getting that out of Iran at pennies on the dollar.
Trump doesn't want the Chinese who are building a big blue water navy to have easy access to build a huge strategic patrolling reserve of heavy sour crude to run their navy with.
Just that simple.
And if they're going to do that, they're going to pay full price for it.
So that's part of, that's the subplot with China within the Venezuela thing.
So you can understand why he immediately started pressuring Iran the same way.
Because the Chinese are in there getting cheap oil out of Iran.
because in many ways, Trump created this by putting sanctions on Iran in the first place
over the JCPOA, but he made the calculus that Iran with a nuclear weapon is not acceptable.
So I have to take in the short term, I have to deal with this problem, order of operations.
We stop them from developing a nuclear weapon. We bomb fucking Ford out. We give the Iranians
and the Israelis the war they think they want, let them blow the crap out of each other,
which is what happened. At the end of the day, Iran smacked Israel upside the head,
and the Israelis smacked the Iranians upside the head
and then Trump bombed the frigging, bombed Fordow
and took the nuclear program offline.
Dude, that was the best outcome of that war
because the Israeli people finally realized,
oh my God, we're not invincible.
And the Iranians, all their propaganda
about how potent they are went bye-bye.
So everybody got taken down a peg.
Everybody got showed what it would look like
if the big powers stepped away.
Because all the United States did
was defend Israel during the initial attacks.
The Russians stepped away
and didn't defend the Iranians.
And all of a sudden,
nobody wants to go to war anymore.
Unless the big boys want to come in and help them.
Right?
So that was a great outcome,
geopolitically speaking.
Because you know what it also did?
It made Donald Trump
the most popular politician in Israel.
You know what that does?
It means that whatever he says goes.
So, while Netanyahu might still be Prime Minister, Trump is more popular than Netanyahu is.
So when Trump says we're going to have peace, after that, you bet there's going to be peace.
The guy who doesn't want peace is Netanyahu.
Who does Netanyahu work for?
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, city of London.
He always has.
Those Zionists that everybody wants to bitch and whine and fucking moan about?
Who do you think created Zionism?
homework assignment for the evening, folks. Because it was fucking London. They created
Zionism. First, they created Christian Zionism and stuffed them into the Midwest and the United
States. And then they grafted it onto frigging Judaism. Why? Geopolitics, folks. The British
Empire never wanted to end. And it's not the full version of the story here. It's just one angle on
it. But understand, this is part of the problem that Trump is trying to solve. And so if we can
get an Iran where the IRGC is destroyed. I had a great chat with Joaquin Flores on the podcast
about Iran. He made the very salient point that the theocracy in Iran is kind of the icing on top
of the technocratic cake, right? And that you have all your verticals within Iran. You have the army,
the IRGC, the civilian government, this, that, the civil service, how to get the other. Those
are all institutions. And that technocracy, that bureaucracy doesn't really interact much with the
theocracy. Theocracy can be removed and that those institutions would still operate just fine.
Kind of like Venezuela, except Venezuela is in far worse shape in that respect.
So Iran, you can get rid of the theocracy. 90% of the civilian government would still operate
normally. And then the Iranian people can choose what a new government for themselves,
if they so choose. And that's been Trump's M.O. If the Venezuelan people didn't want
Delce Rodriguez and the remnants of the existing government to stay in power, they would have
thrown it. And I think the same thing is on the table for Iran. And at the end of the day,
in order for us to get out of the Middle East, which is what everybody wants, we want out of
the Middle East, you want out of the Middle East, I want out, Trump wants out, how are you going to
get out without this whole thing exploding? Well, you got to get rid of the funding networks that
created all this shit in the first place. Now we go back to, okay, let's knock out Maduro. Let's
get rid of that node on the organized crime network. That takes the cash away from the IRGC,
from Hezbollah, from ISIS in Syria, from this group and that group and everybody else.
Let's try and cut a deal with the Chinese to stop bringing fentanyl precursors into the
Western Hemisphere, either in through Venezuela or in through Vancouver or whatever. Let's start
cutting those deals. Let's get this stuff cleaned up and get these people and get that layer of the
money off the board. So the first thing Trump did last year was get rid of the public money,
where they were raiding the public till through the NGOs, right? So by cutting out like USAID
and all the rest of it, get rid of the public money. Then you got to get rid of the private
money. That's the organized crime money that I'm talking about. Then after that, all you got left
is their savings, right? The castles and the piles of gold that they've got squirreled away here and
there and the land holdings and, you know, their positions on their silver short positions
on the Comax and all this crap.
You got to get there.
You got to get them to put their money on the table to fund their little color revolution
attempts.
Because if you take away their other funding networks and notice how you do away with USAID
and all of a sudden, like all these color revolutions are going tits up.
They're not materializing.
Even the one here in the United States, Minnesota is clearly a color revolution attempt.
So it was everything that's been going on in California, Chicago, right?
Portland, Seattle, right? Zora Mandami, you know, blackmailing the people of New York this week,
this morning with, we're going to cut 5,000 NYPD. We're going to go not hire 5,000 NYPD
because we can't afford it unless you, you know, give me a big property tax increase. Why? Because
he just wants to get rid of all, he wants all the shitbag shit libs in Brooklyn to move to Florida
to turn it purple. And they want to destroy New York City. Why do they want to destroy New York
city. Chris Trump's from New York city. Chris wall street's in New York city. They just fucking hate
us. Cedric. They just fucking hate us. They're still butthurt that we won the revolution. Okay.
Same families still in charge and fucking break creeper. And the crown is a, is a, is at, as at
best a captured pawn and at worst completely complicit in all of this. I'm up in the air as
to what I believe about that. I've argued with, you know, I have a friend, Ian Burlingame and I
go back and forth about this all the time. I'm not really sure. You know, he thinks it's a
captured pawn scenario. I think it's something less, uh, less salutary, but Hey, I'm, I've,
I've, and I've told him this both publicly and privately. I mean, dude, I hope you're right.
If, if, if so, I'll, I'll gladly buy a bottle of Scott. I'll, you know, fly out to, I'll fly
out for the weekend. I'll buy you a bottle of whatever Scott you want and we'll get blasted,
you know, toasting your, your wisdom. But if I'm right, then you're buying me my favorite rye and
we're doing the same damn thing.
And cigars, by the way, because rice is cheaper than scotches.
So you've got to make up the difference.
Well, it seems like the themes we're talking about,
you brought up in the beginning of the show, are blood and treasure.
Yeah.
And we talked a lot about the blood.
I only have maybe one and a half questions left for you.
The last part of the blood is, if you're looking at the board like Risk,
Greenland would be a really key piece.
It is.
and it's a key piece for for breaking up any idea that europe is going to have any
outposts on the north american continent this is that simple greenland is symbolic it's it's both
i was talking to martin or i'm sorry the other day and we brought up i brought up greenland
marty was of the opinion that it's just like a symbol to them of how they still have their
outposts here in North America. And so it's a symbol of their former colonial status that they
get to control this piece of the territory. I'm like, that's a fair assessment. I think it's
deeper than that. It's just our way of saying you're not going to have outposts on a final say
on this strategic piece of land. If we have to go to war with the Russians or with the Chinese,
and they decide to attack us through the Arctic Circle, we're putting listening outposts and radar
stations on Northern Greenland. And you're not going to stop us. And it makes no sense as your
NATO partner to be crashing out and screaming that you're going to like, you know, lob,
that France is going to lob nuclear weapons at the United States for daring to think that
we have a claim to Greenland.
And then there's Canada.
The last outpost of Europe in North America is Canada.
And Marconi was brought in.
Now he wants to like, you know, become part of the EU and rearm and all of this.
I'm like, really?
like you don't think we can't take
we can't take Canada over
by pulling a half dozen
A-10 warthogs out of you know
out of mothballs
and a couple of tanks and you know
some deer hunters from Michigan
not take the whole fucking country over
in an hour I mean
whatever you're smoking up there
in Ottawa dude like
I want some you know
but whatever like but Mark Carney
honestly believes that
he's got a plan and the people
behind him over in Brussels think they have a plan. And I just look at it going, sorry, but we're
going to take Alberta. We're not going to take Alberta. Alberta is going to like beg us to become
part of the country. And I've had, you know, I was on with Sean Newman, who's from Northern Alberta
and, um, great, you know, Sean's a great guy and a great podcaster. And, and, you know, he had me
and Alex Cranor on and he asked us, he's like, oh, I, you know, it's like, I've asked a dozen
different people, you know, question about what does Alberta independence mean or look
like or this, that or anything else.
And they all kind of like duck the question because they're all Canadian.
They don't want to actually say what they think is going on.
Like, I'm going to ask Alex and Tom because they're going to give it to me straight.
I'm like, oh, yeah.
So remember Brexit Remember what they did to the Brits over Brexit Five times worse than that They going to throw everything at you because Alberta is far more valuable than even the UK is
Third largest oil reserves in the world.
Every frigging critical metal you could ever ask for other than maybe uranium.
But that's just over the border into Saskatchewan and the Azkabazka Basin.
And if Alberta leaves, Saskatchewan will probably go with them.
like Alberta could become, you know, tomorrow they could become the, you know, one of the
richest countries in the world. The problem is that they're landlocked and that they don't have
a population large enough to defend themselves against, you know, a foreign invader. So they
would need someone to give them a hand. And Alex, and again, Alex did a great job in that podcast
talking about his personal experience being Croatian
during the breakdown of Yugoslavia
and the war they fought for independence from Serbia.
And he said, you know, it's funny,
because I was making the argument,
and I still will make the argument,
and I have made the argument
to some of the Albertan leadership that I've talked to.
I said, you guys, if you want to become part of the United States,
you should want to come in as a territory first
before you become a state,
because territory, you get all the benefits
of being part of the United States.
Our legal system, our corporate law,
our tax rates, our military,
all of those things are protection.
But you're no one's political football
while we have a very tenuous situation here
politically up on Capitol Hill.
Because we've got one party
in complete fucking revolt.
We've got like 10, what, 15 states
that would leave tomorrow
if they thought they could get away with it, right?
I mean, your point earlier, Cedric,
about the color revolution is absolutely correct.
I have been in civil war mode for over a year,
like, up here.
To me, I've been fighting a civil war
since before Trump was elected, okay?
I mean, to be honest with you,
I can almost go back two years at this point
to the primary season in 2024,
when it was very clear that they just wanted
to put Donald Trump in jail and give us Nikki Haley,
all right, and then set up Nikki Haley
versus Kamala Harris and really rub it in
that they were going to just give us two shitty brown women
to choose from for president?
Thank you, City of London.
Yeah, why don't you drive that salt a little deeper into the fucking wound?
Assholes.
But that's what they were doing.
They were laughing at us.
And every American listening to my voice right now
should be outraged at that idea.
But that's what they had on the table for us.
You want to get angry about something?
Don't get angry about friggin' Trump knocking out Maduro in Venezuela.
No, that was a good thing for the world.
Be angry about the fact that these fucking ass,
these fucking arrogant European colonial cocksuckers wanted to hand us either Nimrata
or drunken fucking Kamala Harris as president so they can go run the table and start World War
fucking three because that was your choice okay that would have been your choice and you would
have been you want to talk about being demoralized yeah the country would already split apart
so we're dealing with that problem so going back to Alberta better to be a territory than a state
because we're not a country right now politically.
So you want to enter into statehood
when you're nobody's political football.
Because if you look at the history,
as Canadians, you probably don't know much
about the history of how territories
were turned into states and how they became states.
You should probably look into the horse trading
that's gone on over the last 250 years
about which states got to enter with other ones
and which ones became slave states
versus non-slave states
and there was always a political football.
If you want to have the smoothest transition
from being a stepped-on Canadian province
and the blood host of the vampire class in Ottawa
to an independent nation,
the path to that is as a territory of the United States first,
and then come in when the United States has settled down
and we have a relatively stable picture
of how the country is going to operate,
I expect that state borders are going to be redrawn before this is all over.
I can see West Virginia becoming a lot bigger
and Virginia becoming a lot smaller.
Maybe, maybe not.
We'll see what happens.
I can see the Greater Idaho Project coming to fruition
and shitbag states like Oregon and Washington losing a lot of territory,
California losing territory.
The Greater Idaho Project is a real thing.
and in an environment where we're not sure
what things are going to look like.
If Trump doesn't run the table on these Davos fuckers,
it can get very dicey for the next four to 10 years.
And so as Alberta,
you want to be able to come into that environment
where you get to be able to walk on your own
without having to worry about
what's going on south of the 49th parallel.
Just work on your own stuff.
We'll protect you from the Chinese
coming in through British Columbia
or, you know, they're ravening hordes of Doug and Bob McKenzie fans coming out of Ottawa
and, you know, trying to, you know, call you traitors and throw, you know,
and throw Molson cans at you or whatever.
I don't know, however they fight fucking wars in Canada, you know,
come at you with their hockey sticks.
But, you know, that's what you should do.
And you get plenty of time to just, you know, integrate your legal sticks.
I think crown law is completely different than ours.
Like, there's a whole bunch of shit that needs to be done in order to get done.
So to me, it's like that's the best path for them.
It's the least painful path.
And then when we're like settled down, then we can come in and welcome them in with open arms and be nobody's political football.
And maybe bring British Columbia, maybe bring Saskatchewan and Manitoba across.
I think you'll take the whole thing.
I think, I mean, to be honest with you, I think the whole freaking country is going to wind up being ours.
Just because Canada is, I mean, I think I agree.
The more I think about it, the more I agree with Trump.
I'm like, I just don't understand why Canada is even a separate country.
It was always set up to be the Pakistan or India.
The history of Canada is very much a bunch of British loyalists
who went to Toronto and Ottawa and were going to fight the power.
I mean, that's the history of all of that.
It's very important.
We as Americans don't have any idea about any of this shit.
I'd have to talk to Canadians to find this stuff out.
and um just like canadians don't understand anything about america we don't understand
them either it's like oh really this is canada right they're just like they're just like snow
mexico right you know i mean i kid i and this is the funny part about it is i have a i have a lot
of i have a lot of love for canada like i'm the world's biggest rush fan i'm a huge goddamn hockey
fan like you know i want to i would like to go and genuflect at the at the at the mecca of hockey
the Hockey Hall of Fame up in Toronto,
but I wouldn't be caught dead in Toronto right now,
just on general principle.
I wouldn't go to New York either, by the way.
So why the fuck would I go to Toronto?
So I'd be worried I wouldn't be allowed out.
I'm a little worried about going to Calgary in six weeks.
I don't know.
Am I going to let me out of the country?
I don't know.
They're going to let me in,
but it's going to be a fucking Roach Motel?
I don't know.
You never know.
I'm not going to England.
I've had so many people
Invite me to come to Europe
I'm like fuck that
Me? Europe?
Gulag, right?
Come on
I can't do that
I'm not independent
Contrary to popular opinion
The Israelis don pay me enough money To go spend the rest of my years In a European gulag and my wife still have enough money to live on Sorry it just not the truth
Maybe South America.
Maybe.
I have to sell everything and she could move to Mexico or some shit.
I don't know.
But I'm not just so I can go see London.
Wow.
I can skip London.
I still haven't seen Utah yet.
But last I checked, Utah is a lot prettier than London is.
Well, Utah is spectacular.
London's history.
But, yeah, the nature in Utah, especially southwest Utah.
We're going to Moab, actually, for vacation later in the year.
So it's going to be fun.
I'm going to drive my floor out to Moab.
It's going to be fun.
Okay, before you jet off into the sunset, I mean, I got to ask you,
What is best case scenario for America with the monetary financial system transition that we're going through right now?
Oh, easy.
The best case scenario?
The best case scenario is that we win, dude, and it's awesome.
What does winning look like?
Is that gold?
What does winning look like?
Winning looks like we rebuild the middle class using, you know, Trump is clearly doing the whole Hamiltonian thing of a political economy that's going to annoy the shit out of every libertarian in the world.
But I hate to break it to folks, but it's the same playbook that Putin's done a run in Russia, and it worked relatively well to get a country on the brink of dissolution with a failing middle class back to something stable.
So he's going to do this.
The tariffs are here to stay.
We're going to have a domestic dollar that circulates separately from the international dollar.
The Fed is going to be repurposed to look like, to be the gatekeeper between the two.
The Treasury is going to take a more central role in monetary issuance.
There's going to be more hard asset-backed dollars flowing through the system, either by proxy, since Tether is issuing stablecoins back with Treasuries, but they're also issuing stablecoins back by gold, and they bought Treasuries.
You know what I mean?
There's going to be a means by which all of that is going to be in the mix to have a much more grounded monetary system.
Everybody is buying gold in order to be able to issue assets and issue currencies that the world will trust.
Because you know I've been a – we had dinner with Martin.
And you know that I agree with Martin Armstrong about the fact that debt is going to become the sovereign debt is going to become the, no metaphor here, the four-letter word of the world.
And debt that does not have enough collateral asset behind it, over-leveraged debt, is going to be devalued terribly.
And that's what we're pushing towards.
So that plus deregulation of the economy, which is happening, the desire to get much lower taxes and much lower government spending, which is being fought tooth and claw by Congress.
Okay.
And so all of that to change the process so that we no longer have a vanishing middle class, but we have a rapidly burgeoning middle class.
and but you'll note what the democrats and davos are doing they are absolutely setting up again as
always the false diet of communism or capitalism but no third way between them right so the lower
classes you know scream for communism are told communism is the only way to beat the capitalists
and the capitalists like oh my god you can't can't let these commies win it's all bullshit
and then they're layering another you know christianity versus muslim versus islam on top
of everything. They're trying everything to split us apart. But what winning looks like is Trump gets
the Save Act passed, gets a bunch of his guys through the primaries, primaries out, a bunch of
the shitbags. Some of them, a lot of members of Congress are retiring. I don't know if anybody has
noticed, but it's like 47 members of Congress are not running for reelection and are retiring.
Okay. This is a big deal. Now, some of them are doing that because they know they can't win. So
they're hoping that, you know, there's all these little political games that are being played.
But what's important is that what's stopping the United States from, or certainly from Trump,
from remaking the United States at this point is the makeup of our Congress.
And I've known this since the day, since they finally figured out how many seats they could steal after the 2024 election.
And I saw that we have a five-seat majority and three seats in the House.
Well, they stole five Senate seats and 40 House seats.
So, yeah, we're going to be gridlock for the next.
We've got two fake majorities in the legislature.
and it's going to be gridlock and it's going to be a knife fight to get anything done.
And the fact that Trump's got anything passed at all is, you know, honestly, in this environment,
is a fucking miracle.
And it tells you just how strong his hand actually is.
And this is why Steve Bannon crashing out here via the Epstein files is so very fucking
important because now it just takes all those guys, it takes all that pressure, that political
pressure that's pushed your social media and the podcast space, the media space, it's all
gone.
The only people left pushing the narrative that Trump is a tyrant are the very people that we hate anyway, the regular media, who have a lower approval rating than Congress does.
So we've got the Democrats and some of the Republicans are going to stand against voter ID, which is dumb.
It's a losing proposition.
Trump's going to win on that.
And, you know, the other part of that, the other thing that's happening is I saw something, again, from my friend Peter St. Allen this afternoon.
I saw a great tweet. He said he showed self-deportations are continuing to accelerate
month over month, meaning we're watching a lot of people go home. The incentives are being removed.
There are fewer people, fewer shitbag immigrants trying to get on the dole, various doles,
right? It's ending. So that marginal demand for services is going away. That should bring prices
down for professional services. It should at least get rid of wait times for dentists and,
you know, seeing your doctor and all this other shit, right? Minimum, it should be that at the,
at the very least we should start to see, you know, you know, that we should start to see that,
which will take a lot of the actual costs. Like, you know, it's one thing to pay $500 to go to the
dentist to do a hundred dollars worth of dental work and be pissed off about it, which is, you
Let's just call spade a spade.
But it's even worse when you have to wait three months for it to then overpay for substandard
service.
So if you can get in there and see your dentist for the same price, but you can get in there
next week, it makes the poison go down a little easier because at least you didn't lose both
the money and the time.
And we have so much time loss in our economy because of all this interstitial bullshit.
Get rid of that and everything starts to...
And everybody's mood improves.
everybody's not so goddamn stressed out trying to like manage all this rotten crap and we can
actually get back to like working and hanging out with our kids and and spending a lot less time
managing the bullshit managing all the red tape and actually getting stuff done it's amazing how
people how much better people feel when they're actually getting shit done because when they feel
like they're getting shit done.
They not as apt to go out and nitpick the shit that their government not getting done because the government got out of the fucking way so that they can go get shit done and you know everybody and everybody becomes a lot more generous when you not just like you know pissed off all the time like so that is you
asked me what it looks like it looks like things get better like psychologically better at every
level. And then let Trump and Besson and the rest of them work out how to improve the housing market
and how to get Fannie and Freddie back on board to help first-time homebuyers find a way to get
into mortgages and start families and all of that. But it starts with wages out, what we're
starting to see. Productivity is up, real productivity is up over inflation in ways that
we haven't seen during normal times, not coming out of a COVID lockdown or a big financial crisis.
We did 5% real growth and productivity, not GDP, but productivity in Q4.
5%.
That's versus the CPI, which is a fuckload higher than truflation.
And truflation is probably a better metric.
And there are some states that are in outright deflation.
So you can imagine what that productivity, if you drill into those productivity numbers
in places like Texas and the Southwest is in active price inflation right now overall.
Wages are growing at 7%, 8%.
It's improving.
Now it's improving from a shitty starting point, but it's improving.
And all it takes is a little bit of improvement.
And people will, you know, if the pressure, if the boot is being lifted off people's necks a little bit,
and it continues to lift, then it's smooth sailing to get rid of these shitbag communists
and these sons of bitches in fucking Congress and the Senate.
They get rid of the Elizabeth Warrens.
They get rid of the AFCs.
They get rid of all these fucking people.
Put Gavin Grusom in this fucking place in California.
That guy should be in fucking irons anyway.
All right.
What any of them were doing over in Munich, negotiating, lobbying with foreign governments,
shitting on the United States to foreign leaders in a foreign country, and your governor, excuse me?
Why do we stand for this?
That's not acceptable.
And yet somehow we do.
Oh, because there are no rules.
They can do whatever the fuck they want.
Bullshit.
Don't ever forget that,
while I'm not Mike Flynn's biggest fan,
at the end of the day,
getting rid of him over the fucking Logan Act
was unbelievable,
given what Grusom and company just did.
It's one thing for a private citizen
like Hillary Clinton to do it,
because she's a private citizen.
Gavin Grusom is the fucking governor of California,
and doing diplomacy with foreign governments
at the Munich Security Conference.
Yeah. Okay.
My final question is, it seems like the boot is on the neck of the Bitcoin price
for the last year.
Is there a political fight over the Bitcoin price?
I think so.
I think this is where we're watching.
I mean, it's interesting that Bitcoin and gold seem to be,
on a day-to-day basis, it's almost like one-to-one, right?
Whenever gold is up, Bitcoin seems to get slacked.
I don't know what to make of that.
I'm not saying that there's something there.
I don't know what it is, but there's something there.
Yeah, if the United States,
for years, I sat there and I had to talk
a lot of gold bugs off the cliff.
Why won't gold rise?
It's like, oh my God, inflation, I got this.
Yeah, you're right.
But guess what?
The Chinese are still accumulating.
Russians are still accumulating.
Americans are still accumulating.
When large players are accumulating,
does the price go up? No, they want to pay as little money for it as humanly possible.
Same thing with Bitcoin. That's the way I look at it. So I don't know. I never thought I would
get a chance to buy Bitcoin in the 60,000s ever again. I'm kind of happy to. So that's what I've
been doing. I don't buy a lot, but I buy some programmatically every month and I'm happy to
get more Bitcoin for my money. The same thing with gold when it's down. Right now, it sucks to have
to buy gold and silver. But, you know, I don't usually buy gold and silver programmatically. I
buy them. I have a preternatural, I don't know, after playing both those markets for so many
years, I have almost an intuitive gift for picking bottoms on pullbacks, on emotional pullbacks.
And I'm not, again, I rarely tie markets well, but it seems that whenever I want to, I'm ready
to buy physical gold and silver, I almost always pick a bottom. When you do it right,
every once in a while, you have so few opportunities to say, yeah, I did something right in the
markets because the markets always kick your ass, right? I can tell you a hundred stories about all
the things I did wrong, but I get to tell you three or four times in my life I've done it right.
It's about the only thing I ever get right. So I certainly didn't get Bitcoin right. I made a big
buy in the 80s not a big buy but i bet you know an oversized buy for me in the 80s and i don't you
know i don't really feel too bad about it but you know kind of feel trapped in that position too so
oh well it'll come back i'm not worried about it and when it does we won't care whether we bought
in the 80s or the 60s because it'll be 300 and will it really freaking matter you know what i
mean like that's what's going to happen next but it's going to be a slog between now and then
bitcoin now has everybody's attention so therefore it's going to be all harder slog than it's been
in the past. The first move
up to $100,000 was the easy part.
Because intelligence services
could use it to move illicit money
around and this and that and everything else.
Building out the infrastructure, not
enough coins, too many people.
Hey, man, let it go up because we're making
money on both sides of the trade.
Now, we want to use
it for real. We want to use it to free people
from
the drudgery? Oh, no, now we're going to
demoralize the shit out of you. What else
is new. They're going to do it to
silver now for the next three months.
It'll be a good time
if you're willing to wait and
be patient. Buy silver at StinkBits.
Thank you so much, Tom. It's been
so dope as always. I'll leave it to you
for any parting words and let people know where they can find you
in your work. Sure. Thanks, Cedric.
I know you never really get to speak
much when we do one of these. I just go on a rant
for half an hour.
I usually stop once my
voice starts to go. As always, you can follow
Y'all can follow me on Twitter at TFL1728.
I don't know that a worse version of me will show up on Twitter than what showed up tonight.
But because Cedric always gets the best out of me late in the afternoon.
And then, of course, Patreon slash Gold Goats and Guns, where you guys can sign up and support us on a regular basis.
And if you need to get more of this, well, then that's how you do it.
And we'll call it that.
And as always, man, it was good catching up with you.
And we'll definitely have to do it again in the real world and meet space.
For sure.
Always a pleasure, Tom.
Take care.
And I'll catch you in the next one.