Peak Prosperity - The Big Print: How to Survive the Coming Inflationary Times

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Printing money into existence cheats everybody who has to work for it. Nothing will change with the world until we fix the way that money functions.

Nothing in this program should be considered investment advice. It is for educational purposes only Please hit pause and read this disclaimer in full This wasn't going on when I was a kid it was just a more civil country and It's become uncivil because everybody's hurting and the reason they're hurting is because the monetary system is broken So if we fix the money we fix the world The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. Hello everyone and welcome to this episode of Finance U. I am your host Dr. Chris Martinson.

Today we're going to be talking with the author of this book, Larry Lepard, and this is The Big Print. And it's an incredible book, but let me cut to the chase because the title of this episode is this sucker is going down Larry Or Lawrence he saw at Lawrence Lippard on Twitter and There's titled his book their picture there and investment manager Equity Management Associates LLC their sound money advocates over there and Gold Stock Fund manager Austrian economist Anti-federalist,

love it, CrossFit athlete, and he's tagging Bitcoin here. Larry, welcome to the program. It's a long road that we've gone down since we got to know each other at the beginning of COVID. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, yeah, I have to confess, I'm a little surprised. I thought this sucker was going to go down earlier, but they've gone to more and more extreme measures and and now Larry I feel like I'm almost caught in like um a weird movie where it's the title should be nothing matters and anything goes It is kind of a Groundhog Day moment. I thought I was going down in 08 shows how wrong I was so yeah They're really good. They're good can kickers and that quote as you know is derived from or less than bright presidents George W. Bush and

Yeah, you know the math is unrelenting though and there's a chapter in the book called Stein's law and you know, I do believe in Stein's law and it's as others have you know compared to Newtonian physics where you know reaction and kind of reaction and you just can't add this much debt and You know run these bigger deficits without eventually trashing a currency and of course, that's what we're doing I'm gonna miss Paraphrase it bad, but it's Stein's lies anything that can't go on forever won't that's correct anything Yeah, if something cannot go on forever, it will end which is yes Which is a rather simplistic law and kind of obvious but you know as you've just pointed out I mean they can go on a lot longer than you think

You know there's a lot of momentum in the system And the people who are pulling the levers at the top of the system many of whom are quite evil Yeah, are good at that lever pulling job You know they know how to have kept us off off You know off balance for a long long time you've seeing it in medicine? I've seen it in finance We've all seen it. It's been horrible. Yeah Yeah, well you had this chart in your book And I want to have can you talk us through this because the red line on the bottom is our income national income such as it

Is GDP top line is total credit market debt outstanding TCMDO in the Fed series That's all debt state federal local all of it corporate doesn't include liabilities underfunded punch-ins social security none of that This is just straight that would add another hundred hundred fifty Yeah, that's just total system wide debt is over a hundred trillion now Since the books been published has gone up a bit and the red line is GDP And so GDP is the gross domestic product is the value added It's like the income statement is what we do every year in year in terms of things we buy and build and spend money on. And the GDP has to pay the interest on the blue line because debt comes well, and generally speaking, debt comes with interest,

although there have been periods where even that wasn't true when they had ZERP. And as the interest, if you can see, the slope of those two lines is quite different. And so if the debt line goes up at a faster rate than the underlying growth in the GDP, eventually this is Stein's Law, something's got to give. Either the debt has to fail, we will not be able to pay the interest, or we have to massively inflate the GDP in order to get it up to a more balanced way,

a balanced level like we kind of did after World War II. And so it's a conundrum, but it's mathematical and it's kind of rather certain, but as we just discussed, it's not easy to know the exact timing. It used to just be a couple of lonely guys like us, right, going, hey, this is a math problem, right? And I'll note now, Larry, that we got Ray Dalio chiming in Elon Musk Obviously making a big stink about this even Jamie Demon saying hey, whoa

Whoa, whoa those two the red line and the blue line can't diverge forever. Jay Powell's talked about it Like people are talking about it now. Yeah, do you feel like this? Does this mean we're actually making some progress or is they talked in their book? What's happening here? Yeah, that's a great question. I think we are making progress. I mean, it's becoming so obvious that these big luminaries can no longer ignore it, and it really is a fundamental problem. What's sadly lacking in most of those guys, although Dallio kind of gets it because he's a gold guy and he's becoming a Bitcoin guy, you know, what Elon sadly is kind of clueless on the whole Bitcoin thing from what I can tell and Jamie is anti-Bitcoin, is that there's nobody really talking about solutions and what do we do with it? I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story.

And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story.

And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. And I think it's a very interesting story. Because he's the, you know, the Fed is really the one, the people who made this possible with all the ZERP policies. Now, you know, the first round of ZERP was pre him and it was Bernanke and he actually pushed back a little on Bernanke. But anyway, long story short, yes, more people are becoming aware of it. And therefore, you know, the conversation of how to protect oneself is more important than ever. Some people seem to get it. I think Dalia was getting it.

I think, you know, Paul Tudor Jones big hedge fund man He completely gets it and says golden Bitcoin are the two fastest horses in the race But a lot of other people would prefer to cling to the system, and I don't know where Jay Powell is I mean he's citing Stein's law, and yet. He doesn't really have much of a solution for it, so There I mean technically. He's just a monetary guy, and he has a pine that the fiscal situation is out of control So he can opine on that but not really his deal However, that didn't stop our president from opining on Jay's job saying that he wants to fix both fiscal and monetary policy he's told he said I've instructed my people to stop issuing long-term paper and

I'll get Jay out and I'll set interest rates, right? So I thought, again, anything goes, nothing matters. Larry, I'm old enough to remember when a statement like that would have sent at least a ripple through the markets. Nothing happened. Bonds didn't. Nothing happened. Yeah, it's stunning, isn't it?

Well, you know, certainly nothing's going to happen in the stock market because I think we're trending towards what the canes or all strings would call a crack-up boom, which is to say just the price of everything is going up forever because they're going to happen in the stock market because I think we're trending towards what the canes or austrians would call a crack-up boom which is to say just the price of everything is you know going up forever because they're going to print the money to make it go up forever and uh that's more or less what happened here I mean watching the Trump administration evolve from you know we've got doge and we're going to cut two trillion and then we're going to cut one trillion and now it's down to 150 billion or something to um you you know And we're gonna balance the budget and do all these other things, you know The three three three plan of a set to you know, let her rip, you know, we're gonna make it up in growth I mean, that's a complete

180 pivot from where they were originally and I think it goes back to the underlying, you know Thesis that you and I spoke about pre show which is kind of given the system in the way it's constructed You know Lynn Alden is really right when she says nothing stops this train. They just they have to keep it going or else they're looking at a at a big collapse in everything. And, you know, obviously, inflation is bad, but a big collapse is even worse. I mean, we saw the prelude to that in 08 and therefore Paulson begs Pelosi for TARP, you know, and so they're learned a lesson. They're not gonna let that happen again as my sons. Back in the day Richard Russell had said of the Dow Theory letters,

yeah great guy. I only got to meet him once but it was such a trip trip of a lifetime, but he said he said it's inflate or die. Now that was back then and inflate or die means, again, nothing stops this train, in Lynn Alden's words, but the point is, is that whatever metaphor you want, a shark that has to keep swimming to not die, this system has to have more and more and more put into it, but as they do that, Larry, there are consequences to that, and there are really big, giant social consequences, one of which you talked about in your book.

I pulled a different chart But it's this one which is that the more they do this printy thing the more the top 1% pulls away from everybody else And so you look the bottom half of the country is not part of the wealth game They're not they're not tapped into this whole thing all Pretty much a hundred percent of the gains are going to the very tippy top and that's because the Fed prints, the government spends, and these are the people who benefit the most. And it's very unequal and this is corrosive to any culture or society. Deeply corrosive. Absolutely and that's

why you see the election result in the New York City primary that you just had. I mean the young people are you know they're getting screwed and they're obviously choosing the terrible or the wrong solution, but they, you know, they're lashing out that this is wrong. They can see it, they know this is happening and I can see, we can all see it. I mean, we call them contillionaires. The people at the top who understand inflation

and understand the way the monetary system is constructed, they have set this thing up in a fashion where the more inflation they have, the more we grow this this machine The richer they'll get and it's at the expense of everybody else and that's all because we don't have sound micras as you know we don't have a monetary unit that doesn't inflate when you have a monetary unit that inflates like crazy and you have You know favored players

I mean Wall Street Street, hedge funds, people who can borrow at low interest rates. And then you and I have to borrow 25% on our credit cards. We're at a massive disadvantage. And that's how the constitution of this country was set up to be. It was meant to be, you know, they knew the outcomes wouldn't necessarily be fair

because everyone has different sets of talents, but they wanted the system to be fair. And this system is grossly unfair, just grossly. It's tragically unfair, and it's causing so many people in this country to suffer. And therefore, we've got to change. We've got to break this system, rip apart this system, create a new sound money system.

And that's why I wrote the book. I mean, I want, you know, and I wrote it, I tried to write it in a way that average people would get it because it's kind of a sophisticated fraud, you know, and I wrote it I tried to write it in a way that Average people would get it because it's kind of a sophisticated fraud, you know, and they make you feel like you're not rich Well, you're just not working hard enough. Well, no, that's not really the case, you know The game's stacked against you average guy and yeah, and they and they know it Yeah, well, the book is the big print. It's a great book. Why the title? well, so as we said, you know, basically, if you look at what's going on here, they have to continue growing credit and money and the money supply

in order to support the existing credit or else it all collapses. And why the title is actually because my my book agent had a great she pulled it out. I use that term in the book. And so this has got to be the title and she's right. We've had two big prints. We had one in 2008 where we grew the money supply, you know, $3 trillion. And we had another one in 2020 with COVID

where we grew the money supply 40% of $5 trillion. So, you know, and notice that those have gotten bigger. The first one was smaller than the second one and they're coming more rapidly in my view. And you know, we're gonna have to have another of all that over, you know, indebtedness that we have, they are going to have to go back to Zerb, go back to QE, etc. And the first thing is going to fail Chris is the bond market. I mean, and there was a piece I just tweeted out yesterday there, you know, the, the, uh, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't thing that's going to fail, Chris, is the bond market. I mean, and there was a case I just tweeted out yesterday, you know, the UK guilt market just took a real spike hiring interest rates indicating that people see it over there. And, you know, it's amazing to me that our bond market has held together as well as it has, but it has. But we've seen a couple of tests. I mean, in fall of 2023 It went through 5% and 12 Fed governors quickly came out and said oh, no, no, don't worry. We're done. We're done raising rates

so, you know basically they are going to be forced into printing again and You know, it's gonna be bigger still and then we're gonna have another devastating round of inflation I mean, I think the reason the book is timely I think the reason why more and more people are focused on including the luminaries that you spoke about earlier It's just it you just can't ignore it anymore Everybody goes to the supermarket to buy food and I mean to me every time I go it's a horrifying experience I just can't believe what a basket of food costs. I just can't believe it and yeah

Oh, it's going up more than two or three percent a year, you know, so Well, and and also there's home insurance and auto insurance home insurance which you have to have in order to have a mortgage in most cases and also auto insurance which you have to have in order to drive on the road you know because you can't your car registration will be yanked otherwise the both those they've those spiked extraordinarily no explanation Larry I think personal guess they're they're up to their eyeballs and commercial mortgage back Disasters and they're having to make it up by just gouging us on the on the revenue side But you're not positive one of the first people to say that I completely agree

I think all those insurance companies hold a bunch of commercial real estate that's that's good They're getting tanked on they also hold a lot of bonds and just you know Generally speaking long-term bonds and you know look at what's happened to the long long bond market in the last five years And so so they're losing money on all their investments and their only choice to And just, you know, generally speaking, long-term bonds. And, you know, look at what's happened to the long bond market in the last five years. And so, they're losing money on all their investments, and their only choice to cover those losses is to jack our rates. I mean, as you mentioned, pre-show,

you know, a young driver that you're familiar with, you know, what's she paying? $4,500 to enter the auto market? Yep, just to drive, one year, $4,500, little over little over forty five hundred and it has ticked all the boxes for safety You know drivers add this that no accidents all that right? So that that's the best rate you can get in Georgia right now And and by the way the insurance agent leaned over to my friend and said just be thankful. She's not a boy It would be even worse even worse Wow

Yeah, so, yeah, look, the problem's very obvious to a lot of people. What is not so obvious, again, the reason I wrote the book is that the monetary system's what's broken. I mean, you know, what inspired me to write the book is I was watching Team Blue and Team Red argue last year, and I just, I watched the debate between these two gates, and nobody, nobody was talking about the monetary system. Nobody was talking about the debt

nobody was talking about them to none of that, so it's just not even discussed and Yeah, I mean and then look I mean it's it's it's the same old same old I mean this big beautiful bill is coming down right now and I think it's close to getting passed and you know They they basically what happened the Freedom Caucus. I mean these guys caved on everything, you know You're Thomas Massey you try and stand up for it and from vilafaz. Yeah, I mean, these guys caved on everything. You know, you're Thomas Massie, you try and stand up for it from vilifage. I mean, it's just, they can't stop this train. Well, they can't, so I wanna put the chart up because you mentioned it.

This is M2. M2 is powering to an all-time new high again. So here we are for people looking at home, we're starting in 1998. It just sort of like keeps growing and growing, M2. This is why we have inflation, it keeps growing. But look at this, because COVID, right? It just sort of like keeps growing and growing M2. This is why we have inflation. It keeps growing. But look at this because COVID, right?

This enormous 40% increase in just about a year of the money supply. And that's driving why we're having the insurance and the grocery experiences we're having. I was surprised to pull this chart up and discover that it just hit an all time new high. So people like, oh, stock market's hitting a new high. Bitcoin, gold, these are all actually derivatives to me of this chart in essence, right? So Where's what's driving this though because the feds shrinking its balance sheet? I know that commercial loans commercial banks are reporting lower loans Larry. Where's the m2 coming from?

Do we have to talk about Elon's magic money machines now or well? I think I think it must be actually coming out of the some of us coming out of the credit card companies because you're seeing large credit card growth and that's just you know they can print money so to speak and they issue okay give you money to buy something that you don't have and so that's a good point supply I do think some of the banks are actually growing this happens to be the usm2 I believe global you'll see that there's a lot of growth in China, huge growth in China. And so that's pushing global M2 up very sharply, because they're trying to fight a downturn

in their property market. So yeah, I mean, it basically, it really is credit growth. I mean, Doug Nolan writes a credit bubble bulletin every Saturday morning, which I make a point to read. And he pointed out some of the growth and some of the credit statistics. And there are just a lot of them that are growing at 10%, 20%, 30%, 40% a year. I mean, you know, just credit leads to M2 growth. When you create a new loan and you issue money against that loan, well, that's more money

in the money supply. And obviously the loans in the money supply. And obviously, the loans on the balance sheet. But the other thing I think is going on, you know, Basant and Trump have been talking about the possibility of having a shadow Fed president, you know, appointing the next Fed president because they can't get Powell to resign. And of course, what that person would then say is, hey, just hang on until next May, and, you know, we'll have Zerp and QE everything else And of course markets are nothing if not forward-looking and so, you know these markets will say okay, you know, great All we got to do is hang on for you know, ten months and and it's party on Garth

Well, we can do that You know Let's let's borrow and lever up to do it because we know that everything's gonna go a lot higher when all that new money Comes into the system in that time frame So a lot of things going on but that's that's kind of my take. And I think, you know, what this implies to me, it's just incredibly bullish for the prices of things that can't be printed. And, you know, the top of that list are Bitcoin, gold and silver, and then a little further down is real estate. But real estate, I've always said it has a lot of problems because of the taxes and

hard to move it and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, hey, you might you might be interested. I just did a big interview with Mitch Vexler He's out of Texas and he talks about how the property taxes are a full-on scam They're a fraud how properties are appraised how they just ratchet hire Of course, it's a tax on an unrealized gain all of that But his point was that he had county after county after county in Texas, Oklahoma every state He's looked in where there's no Mathematical chance that they can pay those bonds back. So they just roll them

Yeah, they just roll them He says about a five point one trillion dollar time bomb and of course that will be the next big print, right? Because it'll have some cool like acronym like thing Yeah, they'll you know, I'll try and hide it and they'll say they're not I mean as you you know One point you made earlier said well the Fed is tightening. Well, yes and no, they're still tightening on the Morgan's bond side But as you'll recall a few months ago a 25, you know billion dollars per month of QT went down to five Yeah painting as much and you know, they're out talking. I mean you see cracks in the system, right? I mean, there's this thing called the supplementary leverage ratio of the SLR

It does it determines how much a bank can buy Treasury bonds. Well, they're amending that to let the banks buy more of the Treasury bonds. I mean, they've got a problem. They've got $9 trillion of short-term debt that they've got to roll over. And with rates in the 4% range, that's a lot of money. I mean, the interest costs and the government debt we have today is larger than the defense budget. And I think it's getting close to being larger than Social Security might already be a touch larger. So

You know, they they really need lower interest rates to try and get the budget even close to being you know Balanced or you know out of the situation. It's in right now Well, you know so the story has been in you're exactly right at first they came in and said we're gonna shave off You know expenses and then they said too tough we're gonna grow we're gonna grow revenue right this is all about you know three three three we're gonna get the GDP just like screaming higher so so in that first chart we we talked about for everybody listening what they're trying what the government is gonna do is instead of attacking the blue line they're gonna attack the red line

they're gonna try and make the red line go up faster rather than flatten out the blue line on top. Now that's not, this isn't just government debt, that's everything. Government's only 37 trillion of that. But at any rate, that's what they said they were going to be doing. And my concern with that is this.

So first up, this just came out on Zero Hedge the other day, but so May, May was the third worst May on record. So the story is, oh, we've got all these tariffs coming in more than we thought. We're containing this. We're going to control spending. But I looked at the big, beautiful bill. I agree with Thomas Massey. It just backloads the savings or the cost cuttings to somebody else. Correct. But in the near term, we're running the third worst deficit on record and that's, you know, and it has to compete with 2020 and 2021.

The depths of the COVID craziness. It's total craziness. And those are the COVID years, which were absolutely terrible. Yeah. So the bottom line is they, you know, they're stuck and You know, they really are stuck and you know, it's the implications It's gonna run its course in my opinion and eventually we're gonna have another crisis and they're gonna have to do another print another print so but then that brings me to

To this part, you know chapter 9 in your book you said sound money is a moral issue And what I loved was that you put a proverb under that because I think this really gets to the heart of it It's almost like we have a biblical warning against what we're about to be doing here. Like don't do that. Yeah That's that's the thing. I mean, it's yeah. Oh go ahead finish them Yeah, Proverbs 2010 unequal weights and unequal measures are both like an abomination to the Lord So so what does that mean to you? How do you interpret that? so this is obviously written thousands of years ago when human beings were trading with one another and they they traded using scales and they said okay, you know, how much wheat do you have I'll weigh it and

Obviously back then there were dishonest people just like they're dishonest people today and somebody probably created a weight And so, you know, the, and the authors of the Bible, you know, recognize that that was a form of cheating. And the authors of the Bible were, if nothing else, were, you know, believed in fairness, you know, fairness in human relations, fairness in human exchange. And so, this is a problem that's, you know, swept down to the bottom of the pyramid. And so, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the truth is that the And the authors of the Bible were, if nothing else, were believed in fairness, fairness in human relations,

fairness in human exchange. And so this is a problem that's swept down through the millennia. This isn't some recent problem where people try to jigger the money system and take advantage of others. I mean, some humans have been doing this for a long, long, long time. And of course, you can go from then to present

and coin clippings and the Roman denarius going from all silver to all steel and so on and so forth. And so, you know, the fact of the matter is that in monetary matters, the system should be fair. And if it's not fair, it's immoral. And so for the government to dilute, you know, if you work hard, you know, we all have one life. We all have a certain amount of time. That's the one thing that truly is finite for you. And so, you know, the fact of the, you know, we all have one life, we all have a certain amount of time. That's the one thing that truly is finite for each of us. And so when you work, when you spend your efforts and you earn something, it's not an unreasonable request to have what you earn maintain its value, if you choose to save.

And in fact, you know, the book also goes through a lot of examples of how savings are what really has driven human progress without savings. We don't get capital investment without capital investment. We don't get greater efficiency without greater efficiency. We don't get the ability to live the way we currently live. And what's really amazing to me, Chris, and the book talks about this, is that these government aparchics and and you know Keynesians kind of swiped a system that had worked for thousands of years which is the gold standard and declared it to be the enemy and said it's a it's a barbarous relic it doesn't do anything good it does not mean consider that you know we built the best country in the world between 1789 and 1946 on the gold

standard more or less I mean Roosevelt cheated a little so so did Lincoln and And so, you know, they've kind of thrown that all in the dust bucket and said, no, that's, that's not real. You know, we can't, we really need to have a government managed form of money to, you know, balance out these booms and busts and blah, blah, blah. And you need us, you know, you need us big PhD economists to tell you how to do it. Oh, and by the way, you know, if we're Jan and I, what's angered me so much is, and I watched it as a gold guy and now as a Bitcoin guy too, is that the world just accepted this lie like, oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're modern. We need to have Keynesian economics. And, you know, there's so much more to do. And so, you know, I think that's the biggest thing that we need to do. And I think that's the biggest thing that we need to do.

And I think that's the biggest thing that we need to do. And I think that's the biggest thing that we need to do. And I think that's the biggest thing that we need to do. And I think that's the biggest thing that we need to do. And I think that's the biggest guy and I was a bitcoin guy too Is that the world just accepted this lie like oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're modern We need to have kane's economics and you know, there's certain things in in life and in the human condition There's certain timeless principles that go back thousands of years. I mean thou shalt not kill you can't murder your neighbor I mean, it's not like oh, you know what we kind of say we're not really modern and there's some people who just Aren't really doing it the way we want to do it. We ought to be able to kill them and you know, I mean it's like no

No, you know that doesn't work, you know, and you know, and maybe we do with drugs, right? Which I know you've got what and so it's dark Larry. That's a dark story It's a very dark story But the point is it we left this timeless moral principle of not jiggering with or fiddling with the monetary standard, to have a monetary standard that's run by the governments and that gives enormous power to the people who are sitting in those seats, where they can control the interest rate. And it's just as simple.

I mean, I like to use the example that Judy Shelton points out a lot of how you know Price fixing doesn't work Russia proved that you know you even at the price of grain you're gonna get too little or too much prices, you know the the invisible hand of economics works really well when you have a free market for prices well Money is something that has a price You know things today are worth more than things in the future and the difference in the two is the price of the interest To carry it between that time frame that interest price should be set by balancing savings against investment demand full stop You don't need a 12-board Federal Reserve to sit there and say oh we're gonna have interest rates at 20% which almost bankrupted my father or

And interest rates at 0% which allows contillionaires to get filthy rich at the expense of the rest of us I mean, it's just it's absurd. It's just completely absurd I mean the Fed and frankly these these huge swings and the price of money The Fed would have been much better off if they just said you know what we're gonna set interest rates at 4% I'll leave them there forever or 3% or you know, just some I mean and there would have been ups and downs But it wouldn't you know, the extremes that we've got are just nuts they're absolutely nuts and this is why we you know it's so funny because they were formed in theory to stop the booms and busts you know the crash of 1907 or JP Morgan kind of saved the New

York banking industry that led to the formation of the Fed I said well we're gonna stop that with this federal reserve it's made it worse it's just made it worse so yeah but back to this. So the moral issue, this enormous 40% increase, this is everybody working and slaving away and starting businesses and taking risks and hiring and firing people and making widgets and doing all kinds of stuff. And then somebody, like you said, sat down and said, Hey, you know what we need? We need 40% more dollars in circulation right away And basically that stole forty that like if you want to know why people are on fentanyl Quiet lives of despair and death if you want to know why people are experiencing forty six hundred dollar

You know yearly insurance bills now why people can't get insurance in other is if you want to know why groceries are so expensive If you want to know all you have to do is look at this chart. That is a moral abomination Absolutely what they did I mean imagine you're 60 years old and you know, they stole 40% of your working life in two years You work you work for all those years from say when you were 20 to when you were 60 So you spent 40 years of working and you saved up whatever you saved up and then bingo 40% of it Just got taken away from you. So a moral abomination absolutely and the thing that makes it really hard because you know I have a registered investment advisory and we work with a gentleman

who's very good at helping people plan for retirement and the number one thing that people can't get their heads around is if you're trying to plan for a world of three and a half percent inflation it's very different than if you're trying to plan for five percent, let alone seven percent. Those become almost unworkable numbers, right? It just gets away from you. So can we talk about inflation is not like we, it's always talked about Larry in the press. It drives me nuts. They act like it's a comet. We don't know where it came from. It's from the Oort cloud. It just is coming through. We don't know. It's a human thing, right? And so what I think most people are not aware of

is that for hundreds of years of our country's history, we did not have any inflation. Sure, sure, sure. We had a little inflation in the context of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War, but it went back down again so that at the beginning and the end of that 200-year period, it was kind of the same, same prices.

And it's not as though we didn't make a lot of progress as a country. I mean, we went from a nation of farmers to an industrialized nation and living standards went up 10X. I mean, electricity, I mean, just name all the developments that took place. And it was, yes, with very, very modest inflation.

And yeah, and this is, the Keynesiansnesians grab hold I mean they started in 1913 I mean Keynes was just kind of getting going at that time. They really kicked in in 71 I make the the most interesting part of that chart is you know, if you look at you know, right exactly The elbow the inflection point the elbow of the chart, right? I mean, it's just yeah, absolutely, you know crazy and since that it's just been a very persistent problem Yeah, you say problem They say feature this they like it this way Yesterday with a really brilliant guy and he said, you know, Larry the system is working exactly as it was designed to work

Mm-hmm And he's and I said, oh you've got a point. I mean, for a certain group of people, it works great. They're wealthy. And they're doing well. The problem is the bottom half of the country is getting kicked in the teeth on a regular basis. And they're not doing well. And as you say, Fennel, I mean, just, it's just it's horrible. When I think about all the things I saw just on a mini scale, what it did to my family, my family has

been very lucky. My you know, we were we were always middle class. So you know, it's fine.phlet that basically generated the American Revolution. And, you know, even though I was a little bit of a little bit of a Book Becoming Common Sense and you know what common sense was right? I mean it was the pamphlet that basically generated the American Revolution and You know if every I mean Jeff Booth has said to me once he said Larry if we could get everybody in this country to wake Up and understand how important sound money is we could crash this system overnight, and he's right But but you know as you and I both know you know it's it's taken some time And it was we were very lonely voices five years, 10 years, you know, when we were listening to Richard Russell.

We're getting to be less lonely. In fact, I heard a statistic this morning I thought was really encouraging. A guy went out and he did a big survey, so he has data to support it. 14 percent of the country now owns Bitcoin. 14 percent of Americans own Bitcoin. That's a big positive, in my view. You know, the tipping point, according to Gladwell, is about 10 percent. When something gets beyond the 10 percent level, you get on the steep part of the adoption curve.

So, you know, there's there's signs that people are waking up. The markets are unraveling and the stakes could not be higher if you're relying on passive strategies or so-called diversification or perhaps using an advisor who was, I don't know, maybe in elementary school during the great financial crisis, you could be on a collision course with staggering portfolio losses. Peak financial investing is your lifeline. We handpick wealth managers who will actively manage your portfolio with proven, market-savvy strategies.

Not the tired, modern portfolio theory that could crumble under pressure. The unprepared will not just lose this time, but lose big. The future that I see consists of both winners and losers, but many more losers this time than last time. Go to peakfinancialinvesting investing comm today and schedule your free consultation This is your chance to protect your wealth again. That's peak financial investing comm And I'm dr. Chris Martinson urging you please don't wait another day. I Started with this suckers going down Larry is there any possible way for this system to survive

given how it's being operated and who's operating it I think it's a very low probability I don't think it has to devolve into complete collapse or hyperinflation though I've often said I run an investment fund and I've often said to my investment fund, you know, to my partners in that fund, if the government were ever to get responsible, this monetary debasement thesis would not be so strong. Now, you know, and they, and most people, when I tell them that, they chuckle

because they know the government will never get responsible, but they could. I mean, you know, you've got to, you've got to think about every possibility, and yes, they could, but I, I think as a practical matter Chris, I mean my prediction of where we go is it gets much worse The outcry gets much larger and then I pray pray that we have people at the top who were smart enough to do a structured

Monetary reset before we get into complete, you know hyper inflation collapse, you know, Mad Max kind of shit You know, I mean the man yes, I I don't want to go there. I don't think we have to go there nobody nobody wants to go there of course. I do have a farm just in case You got to hedge your bets right Not a bad thing to have on any day. You know the farms are nice Head to head your way so all right, but but as we look forward to so I always say collapses Process not an event right a lot of people think oh collapse is a process, not an event. Right? A lot of people think, oh, collapse is going to happen on Tuesday at 938. No, no, no, no, no, no.

It's already happening. And the way I think about this, Larry, is that so Alan Greenspan did this big bailout in 1987, right? Young guy cutting his teeth. Okay. So that was a, but that was child's play compared to what he had to do in 1994. And they did the sweeps account, big bailout. Most people don't know about it,

but gave us the stock bubble boom, internet boom. Then we had a long-term capital management. That was a five, $6 billion bailout, but then we had 2000. And then that was a bigger bailout. And then 2007, eight was a bigger bailout. And then COVID was an even bigger one. So I'm just gonna spot the trend here and say,

I think this next bailout, each one of those is either doubled or tripled the feds balance sheet on average. So a two X or a three X or so. I think the fed balance sheet goes from say seven to 15 trillion or 20 on this next one. I have it marked between 15 and 30. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. I mean, you know, here's, here's a, here's a thought experiment. Let's say they had to go to yield curve control to keep, to prevent the bond market from falling apart and say, they said, you know, here's a thought experiment Let's say they had to go to yield curve control to keep to prevent the bond market from falling apart And say they said, you know, okay, you don't want to you don't want these bonds at 3% They're we're taking the bonds. We're gonna cap the bond you'll at 3% If you don't want them sell them to us, I think the bond market might go to them sold

You know turn around say okay Fed sold to you. Well, there's a 37 trillion dollar bond market So, you know add 37 to the existing It's a little below seven right now eight six point something but round numbers add seven So that's that's a 44 trillion dollar Fed balance sheet, you know, and that's just that's a massive inflation at that point in time We're not into hyper inflation, but we're kind of looking like of South American country or or Turkey I mean we have very very high rates of inflation Yeah country or Turkey. I mean we have very very high rates of inflation. Yeah well and in this process not an event the process is underway gold started to fall

so I've been following gold for 25 years okay and I have my favorite charts and some of them are gold inverted against the 10-year yield right or against negative real interest rates etc. Lock solid you can just take those to the bank. 2022, they broke, right? And so that's part, this is ongoing. And then we read about like, you know, central banks buying and of course, China's doing all this buying of gold. And then we read about somebody stepped up to the plate and bought nearly $11 billion worth back in April of this year, right? And all of that. So, when we add it all up, when we look at year to date, and I also have a year, one year one, but this is off of FinViz, just here's year to date performance.

Top of the, the big green thing at the top is platinum. That was a surprise, surprise horse coming out of 47%. Gold at 23, silver at 22, Bitcoin at 12 and a half. Swiss franc right under that, but you get, you know, what do I see down there? The bonds are way down at the bottom. But this starting to smell to me, Larry, like sound money's winning.

It is, and this is only the first six months of this year. I mean, gold, I think in the last 12 months is up over 50 or 60%, which it very, very rarely does. And as you've pointed out, the divergence between real interest rates and the price of the metal, think in the last 12 months is up over 50 or 60 percent, which it very, very rarely does. And as you've pointed out, the divergence between real interest rates and the price of the metal, you know, it's been stunning since 2022. And of course, what triggered that was when we grabbed the Russian reserves. Yeah.

And yeah, I mean, so my operating thesis, Chris, and I talk about it in the book, and I think you and I have discussed it before, is that we are in a sovereign debt crisis and The evidence of that is that gold is a record price highs Bitcoin is a record price highs. The only piece of it's still missing the puzzle is silver still not although I think those are coming Yeah, we can talk about that in just a second. This is this is over the this is over the this is this is one year performance But one year good. Yeah one year good one year Bitcoin Clocking out at sixty four point eight percent gold at thirty two platinum twenty eight silver just twelve laggard, but look at bonds They're sucking wind down there. Yeah, and this this you know because what's going on as you pointed out earlier

More and more people are waking up to the fact that they can't stop printing They will have to stop stop printing these bonds. You know, you'll be paid back in nominal terms, for sure. They'll give you the money. The problem is that the money won't buy as much, and it's quite straightforward. And so, you know, what it suggests to investors, as I say in my book, you know, and I know I have a lot of friends who are boomers who've done extremely well, and they have big stock portfolios, and some of them have bond portfol bond portfolios to although they're moving away from those But and I say to him I said guys, you know If you don't have some sound money assets you're you're you're gonna get this gonna be rough for you Because this this decade in my view is gonna look kind of like the decade of the 70s perhaps even worse and

In the 70s Fox went nowhere And go and and oil, you oil performed extraordinarily well because there were things that couldn't be printed. Well, as well, I'm a big believer, more people, I used to be lonely on this too. So I used to trade very, very aggressively. I was a day trader. I was highly familiar with everything.

2007, eight, my models, my methods broke, sorry. And then I realized a couple years after that that I was up against algorithms and they were remorseless and their fingers were fat faster than my fat little finger right and and um I have the proud I have I still have it printed out in a file somewhere where I had two gold contracts it just got tagged I had a trailing stop on them but it was way below and somebody came down and reached and picked my two lonely little contracts off at two in the morning. Right.

You know, long enough. They don't want to write back up the old price. Yeah. Yep. Yep. They just sniped it and took it out. Right. There's some money down there.

Right. Anyway, so it was I learned that it's it's a little bit manipulated. And of course, I think more people are understanding the degree to which it's manipulated, meaning there's players in there who set prices who are setting prices. It's not price discovery. I don't think there's anything more egregious than what's been happening in the silver market, to be honest. We agree.

But from a long-term standpoint, from a chartist standpoint, that's the most beautiful cup and handle you could hope for. It looks to me like it's getting ready to rip but the fundamentals under silver we're gonna enter our seventh year of a structural silver deficit less mind than is being consumed How do you have something seven years in a row and it's basically gone nowhere really in pricing. It's trending up You know, there's a lot of paper silver out there as we know and and there is there is a fair amount of junk silver I might my coin store I go there regularly because I'm always buying coins and stuff and he's got more tea sets sitting around you know and you know it's sad

too because what you what you find is an elderly couple and they're you know they're running out of money but they have a beautiful tea service that they were given at their wedding or something something like that and you know he'll build he's happy to buy it for the melt value or some fraction of the melt value and so there is silver that comes back in but in general you're right most silver gets used and you know it's hand to mouth and there are all kinds of new developed you know new technologies are developing need more silver I mean and you know cars need more silver, batteries need more silver, solar needs more silver. In fact, this new Toshiba

solid-state battery that they think might really revolutionize carpool. Very exciting. Yeah, that needs a ton of silver. So, you know, you can hold a beach ball underwater for a while. And in this case, they've obviously done it for several years, but it's going to break free. And, you know, my target kind of falling off a log silver prize 100 bucks an ounce You know the old high of 50 that on brothers established in 2011 Echoed um, we're here to go through that. I mean, how is it that this is an absolutely necessary essential commodity that everyone needs and uses And yet we're not at an all-time high when when literally every other commodity in the world has put in all-time highs

I mean, it's just it's it's stunning to me that they've been able to suppress it so much, but they have You know and this I mean as you point out the system is not fair, and there's a lot of rigging going on If anybody was accidentally making the price go higher. I think are you know by the same mechanisms I trust the SEC would be all over them by you know daybreak you know But so we have very unsound money And I found something that I thought I would be able to do with the SEC be all over them by, you know, daybreak, you know. So we have very unsound money and I found something that I thought for sure Larry's gonna appreciate this and maybe one other person in the whole world, but this is fun for me, is this, which is you go to the H-4-1, which is the Federal Reserve has to put out these financial statements and this is table seven, it's collateral held the Federal Reserve, has to put out these financial statements. And this is Table 7. It's collateral held against Federal Reserve notes.

So this is what backs the Federal Reserve notes. This is how you know that the dollars you hold, Larry, are backed by something. What's the collateral? And they say the collateral is, well, they have a gold certificate account. By the way, it's funny because they say, well, the gold certificates are their asset. The Treasury also claims them as an asset. I'll let them duke that out in the courts. Can't be both.

But notice what they're saying is collateral is US Treasury agency debt, which is backed by dollars. So they're using dollars to back dollars, and they actually print this table and say, we're good, right? Yeah, it's pretty ballsy with making that. I mean, there's so much legion to man. I mean, how about the fact that the Federal Reserve

is running enormous losses because they've got this low interest rate paying bond portfolio and they're paying out more in interest on excess reserves. And they're calling that a deferred asset. I'm like, no, it's not, that's a loss. That's a loss, it's not a deferred asset. You are subsidizing the banks

to the tune of several hundred billion dollars a year and you're calling it a deferred asset? What? I mean, you know, I mean, obviously the saying that because it's deferred because it holds the system together. But yeah, you look, it's you can't make the shit up, Chris. I mean, you literally just can't make the shit up. Yeah. And when I watch Jay Powell get on his press conferences and say, we're doing things in

the best interest of the American people. And I just scream at the TV, liar, liar, liar. I mean, he knows better. He's not stupid. You know, they they they are they are screwing us left, right and center. The markets are a ticking time bomb. Volatility is spiking. trade wars have broken out, and most investors are sleepwalking into disaster. Many portfolio strategies perform poorly

during times like these. At Peak Financial Investing, however, we don't gamble with your future. Our Registered Investment Advisory connects you with battle-tested wealth managers who reject outdated models and embrace active management, strategies proven to navigate chaos, and who aren't afraid to discuss things like the great taking or maybe the importance of protecting your wealth with gold. Without the right approach and with the wrong

advisor you're risking, well, everything. Don't wait for the crash to act. Visit peakfinancialinvesting.com right now to schedule a free consultation and discuss your particular situation. Take control of your wealth before the markets take it from you. Again, that's peakfinancialinvesting.com, and I'm Dr. Chris Martenson urging you to act now.

And I'm Dr. Chris Martenson urging you to act now. So let's talk about, you know, what people can do to get out of this because, you know, obviously, real estate taxes are crushing people, insurance costs, inflation, etc. It's very hard to stay in front of inflation. I think you would probably agree that inflation, as bad as it is, is understated officially by the official numbers. Totally. By some whole number, like two or three. I mean, I think the situation as bad as it is is understated officially by the official numbers. Totally.

By some whole number, like two or three. I mean, and Shepwood index and John Williams, shadow government stats, and you know, and it goes from different areas. I mean, sure, one area might be deflating. I mean, you know, eggs came down a lot in price when the chicken thing got sold, but as you point out, you know, your insurance bill is going crazy

because all the insurance companies losing money. So yeah, it's like inflation, it's hard to measure inflation, but the best long term measure of inflation is the under underline growth in M2. I mean, that really, that's kind of what I use as the base level. And there are years when reported inflation is lower than that, but that doesn't, you know, that that's only a lag. It's going to catch up at some point, right? There's all of that, by the way, very surprisingly to me, because I've been a peak oil guy for

a long time, I'm an oil investor at the individual oil level. Listen, you put the hole in the ground, it flows well for a while, and then it dwindles away. It's a thing. This is just geology. But what was surprising was finally in March of this year, the EIA, the Energy Information Agency out of the DOE said, oh, shale, well, US oil production peaks in 2027, they said. They've now dialed that back to 2026.

It doesn't matter. This should be sending shockwaves, right, through the system because it's not running out of course, you know, for anybody listening, it it's not that but it's the days of us being a swing producer and producing whatever it wants are over and it's gonna start going the other direction it is such an extraordinary thing we need to have an energy policy that's like written by adults and we just don't yet at this point you know we're gonna drill baby drill and we're gonna export it that's like and drill baby drills a good thing and I mean don we're going to drill baby drill and we're going to export it. That's a drill baby drill is a good thing.

I mean, don't get me wrong. You know, a lot of things, you know, Trump's got it. Trump would tell the shitty hand and he's trying to do the right things. I mean, deregulating, you know, the additional drilling. I mean, the Doge, I mean, even the fact that Doge kind of failed at a macro, big macro level. I mean, they did a lot of fraud in that USAID thing and they chop back a lot. So give them their due.

They're at least trying to push things in the right direction. I mean, reshoring industry here, I mean, a valid thing to do, great idea, things we should do. But the problem is you've got 40 years of rot and you can't solve 40 years of rot in four years, much less than six months that he's been in there. So it's been hard And I'm not at all. I think the world's going to be a much better place in 10, 15, 20 years. But I, we first got to make our way through this monetary transition because this system's been in there for a long time. And I think that's the only way to do it. And I think that's the only way to do it. And I think that's the only way to do it. And I think that's the only way to do it. And I think that's the only way to do it. And I think

that's the only way to do it. And I think that's the only way to do it all. I think the world's gonna be a much better place in 10 15 20 years, but I We first got to make our way through this monetary transition because This system's broken. I Don't think I mean, how can you look at the system and not say this is broken when we got kids in New York City voting for an aphod Socialist Marxist. I mean, it's like huh, you know, do you guys have any sense how bad that would be? You know, you want to turn in the Venezuela? You know do you guys have any sense how bad that would be you know you want to turn in the Venezuela?

So you know we'll see but I mean we've got a we've got to fix this monetary system Chris. That's the solution well, I Confess I think on this all the time I can't find a way to solve this current the dollar system right right because you really only have two options right one is You pay the debt down, so that's austerity, politically very unpopular, you know, you have to tell this generation that they have to tighten their belts because the prior generation did some stupid things, overspent, and spent it on things that didn't really add to prosperity so much. So oops, right?

But, you know, so that's unpopular. Or you have to try and inflate it at just a fast enough rate that you don't just blow your whole society up You don't get into the hyperinflation. You know, it doesn't get away from you in some important way Those are the only options for that but alternatively, you know now we see I'm a little worried wonder what I'm worried about I'm worried about watching the stable coin acts going through because to me Larry those smell like CBDCs by any other name. Yeah me, Larry, those smell like CBDCs by any other name. Yeah. And that they're going to just try and do the impossible,

which is our plane is flying and both wings fell off and they're gonna staple some stable coin wings on and, you know, get this right, I think. But I don't, garring that, I don't know, I don't think there's a solution to this that doesn't have a lot of pain for people. No, there really isn't. And as my book argues, I think that the honest and correct way

to deal with that pain would be a complete expose of what we've done wrong, how we got here, what we need to do on a go-forward basis, and kind of what I would call a massive global reset at a lot of levels, almost like a constitutional convention where we say, OK, the founders had these great ideas And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point.

And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. And I think that's a very important point. We are going to return to a sound money standard returning to a sound money standard Of course, you're right would be very painful because particularly for people who own bonds and certain assets But my view is it's painful now, you know, this is a rip the band-aid off situation

It's like we'll let's rip the band-aid off go through a very high one-time inflation But at least know that then going forward things would be sound You know and because I've studied a lot of hyperinflations throughout history and you know, they're terrible And so, when you return to sound money, you can do that, and they heal. I mean, take Ecuador in 2000, it's a really good example of that. I mean, they were torn apart, but they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it.

And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it.

And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so, they were able to do it. And so when you return to sound money, you can do that and they heal. I mean, I, you know, take Ecuador in 2000 is a really good example of that. I mean, they were torn apart by hyperinflation and they, they reset to a dollar standard, which is not a great currency, but better than the currency they had. And three years later they're booming. So, you know, you, you can do it. I mean, we, you know, I'm here to say we can get from here to where we need to be But it's gonna take you know visionary leadership. That's gonna take Voters that say this is what we need and want and demand because we're tired of this inflation. It's just it's making life unlivable

And the way to get those voters to say that is to have them read my goddamn book Yep, obviously I'm trying to sell books here But you know as you know because I think you've written some books you don't make a lot of my books. I mean, obviously I'm trying to sell books here, but you know, as you know, cause I think you've written some books, you don't make a lot of money on books. You really don't. Most expensive business card I ever wrote. Yeah. Right. The notion, we just got to get this knowledge out to a broader group of people so that, you know, if, if people say you can't vote your way out, I kind of disagree.

I mean, I kind of think that if, if we have a big enough catastrophe and enough people are educated in the right solution, we will come out of this. Maybe some people call me Pollyanna, some others say I'm Don Quixote tilting at windmills, but whatever. I mean, I got to do it. And I do think there's a way through this, Chris. I really do. But not the way we are right now. I mean, not with the level of knowledge that most people have right now.

No, most, you know, because if I mean, but sense has said he wants to sit at the next Bratton Woods. But if he were to go out and say, hey, guess what? We're going to back the dollar with gold and Bitcoin. You know, people would go nuts. I mean, there's no way that anyone would understand why he's doing it. Well, I love to get your take on this because I know you structured your fund around Bitcoin, gold, but really

anti-dollar if I was going to sort of put it under one umbrella and this is the dollar since the beginning of the year it's down it's going to be 11% now I guess ish here through this period here this is the beginning of the year 2025 dollars down now this is the beginning of the year 2025 dollars down now This is the dollar against other currencies right, so this is a basket So this is the USD mostly against the euro the yen stuff like that obviously against gold and Bitcoin This is a really bad-looking chart But are you tracking this and is this are are you getting concerned?

Well, tell me about what you see in the dollar chart. Yeah, so I am and I follow it very carefully. Keep in mind though that it's really the dollar against other fiat currencies. So these are all paper currencies and they're all destined to fail. Two of them are the yen and the euro are the two biggest ones. And so it's a problem that, you know, right now, we're weaker than them, and that someday the yuan will be in there as a bigger currency as well. So, you know, my view is, it's, you know, the dollar is important, but it's going to fade against these other currencies. And, you know, but they're going to fade, too.

And so the real cross that I'm always looking at is kind of dollar gold and dollar bitcoin and dollar silver you know you know there it's just you know there will come a time in my view when the dollar will will not be a relevant currency it'll be a much smaller piece of all transactions and there'll be you know multi-currencies I mean what we need is a neutral reserve asset and gold fills that role very well and Bitcoin can grow to fill that role in my opinion. I want to go back to your earlier CBDC comment and stable coins lurking. And I think there's some risk of that. I think that's somewhat probable.

My sense now is that there's a, so all this stuff is so far outside of the barn that it's going to be very hard for them to come back and try and do the Elizabeth Warren thing. I do worry though that in four years, you know, team blue might win. And they might say, hey, all you sound money people are ruining our beautiful Keynesian system and we're going to 6102 you, you know, and we're going to tax the hell out of gold or tax a lot of silver or tax a lot of Bitcoin. I mean, I worry about that. And you know, the the Bernie's and the AOCs and the hell out of gold or tax the hell out of silver or tax the hell out of Bitcoin. I mean, I worry about that. And you know, the, the Bernies and the AOCs and the socialist part of this country will claim that all the billionaires got their money unfairly. And you know, there's, I mean, in the sense that they're contillionaires, a few of them did, you know what I mean?

But it's not capitalism that's broken because we don't really have capitalism. This is crony capitalism. So, you know, and, and so, you so, you know the again back to first principles if we could get to sound money life will get to Be much better all the way around. So that's the issue Agreed agreed and and you know our best and brightest got siphoned off to Wall Street financialization Which is defined as making money with money, right? and which is defined as making money with money, right? Right. And all of that. So, you know, if I could wave my magic policy wand, I would just tell Trump, you know,

tell every regulatory agency top to bottom, down to the municipal area, you have to lose half your rules. I don't care which half, but you got to take half away, right now now and by the way you know I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger you know you show me the incentive I'll show you the outcome I think if I could wave my magic policy one like if the Department of Agriculture says oh Chris you're gonna have to burn your your beehives because we think there's a risk that there's a mite in there I'd say great you have to pay me for it it has to come out of their budget and if they really think it's important they'll find the money and we're good right but instead they just dictate that I have to like you know lose all this money It has to come out of their budget and if they really think it's important, they'll find the money and we're good, right?

But instead they just dictate that I have to like, you know lose all this money because they said so and the incentives are all wrong So I think we got to get sound money gives us the chance to connect Consequences incentives and outcomes back again, you know Absolutely, it'll fix so many things and that's I think that's what people are missing It's just how much has gone wrong as a result Of the money being unsound. I mean, you know the book my book also talks about in great detail I'm sure you're very familiar with and I thought it through and you know the the wars that we conduct You know the eight trillion dollars that we pissed away in the Middle East

I mean if something under the American public and said guys we want to go fight these wars in the Middle East and by The way your taxes are gonna go up 30% in order to do so. There would have been a revolution the next day. And what the hell? No, I don't give a shit about Iraq. I don't care about Afghanistan. But no, that's not what they did. They went and conducted the wars, and then they inflated the money away.

And so they paid for them by making our grocery bill higher, right? And it's subtle, right?'s it's it's sinky but you know again then proper incentives and you know maybe they can't conduct the war right right right well you know at the end you know sort of like problem definition but by the end you're like look here's what we need to do can you summarize that like what should what should the average person be doing here well yeah so what the average person needs to do, and I say it in the book, and I'm not,

I'm a RIA, Registered Investment Advisor, but I'm not legally permitted to make recommendations. So this is just a general blanket recommendation. Everyone's circumstance is different. You decide, do whatever you want. My personal opinion, it's not an investment recommendation, is that if one does not own sound money, if one's savings are not

Somewhat allocated to sound money by somewhat. I mean at least 20% That one is going to experience regret in the next 10 years Because I think we're in for a decade of very significant Inflation as they continue to debase the currency through money printing because of the Stein's law debt The GDP issue that you and I discussed a moment ago. So, you know, what that means is you start with gold, you know, it's the mama sound money, it's analog sound money, it's been around for 5,000 years, it's less volatile

than Bitcoin, you can hold on to it, etc. It's the long-term superior form of sound money. However, it has less alpha than Bitcoin because it's not undergoing an adoption curve because everyone wants it, has it. If you want to be a little more aggressive on the monetary metals, then silver, which is kind of the whip end of the sound money spectrum, it goes up and down faster because it's a smaller market.

And then of course, I'm a big proponent of Bitcoin because I do believe it is turning into digital gold and that it will ultimately you know, ultimately, in terms of raw price performance against the dollar, it will outperform gold pretty significantly. And the reason for that is that it's undergoing an adoption curve and that, you know, right now, 14% of the country knows about it and holds it. I believe that, you know, Gladwell's tipping point issue, you know, in 10 years, another 15 years, a large percentage of the country will hold it.

And as you and I both know, there's only a fixed supply of 21 million. I mean, one thing that differentiates Bitcoin and gold is that we do mine gold every year. Not a lot, 1.7% of the outstanding supply. But in 40 years, the world will have twice as much gold above ground as it has today. In 40 years, there'll still only be 21 million Bitcoin. So, you know, that fact, in my opinion, makes Bitcoin more attractive in terms of generating alpha than gold. But the price of that alpha is that we've seen multiple 70% drawdowns,

and people cannot forget that. And so when I see Bitcoiners telling people, oh, yeah, just put all your money in Bitcoin, no problem. Borrow money, go to Bitcoin, et cetera. I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. You got to explain to people what they're buying and what can happen so that they don't make the terrible mistake that I know some people made of buying it at 60 before Sam Bankman Free. And then, you know, Sam Bankman Free blows up and crypto blows up and Paul Jack's rates. And it goes from 50 down to 15.

And they think, oh, I made a mistake and they blow it out, which is the wrong thing to do. If they'd hung on to it, they'd have to pay for it. And they'd have to pay for it. And they'd have to pay for it. blows out and Paul Jack's rates and it goes from 50 down to 15 and they think oh I made a mistake and they blow it out which is the wrong thing to do if they'd hung on to it they bought it at 50 and now it'd be a 109 but you know obviously that roller coaster was tough for some people to ride so I think it's important people understand what they're buying when they do buy bitcoin and I always when I'm looking at people's allocation to bitcoin I always try to say to them think about what as I say to my clients many of them are gold people many of them are very resistant to it

I've said to them look the only wrong allocation is zero. You know, I don't care if you buy 2% I think this thing can go up 10x and then go up 30% and then go up 30% I think it's important for people to understand that volatility in Bitcoin, but I you know, as I say to my clients many of them are gold people Many of them are very resistant to it. I've said to them, look, the only wrong allocation is zero You know, I don't care if you buy 2% I think this thing can go up 10x and then go up 10x again And if you have zero in 10 or 15 years, you might experience regret But if you have 2% it goes up 10x so that becomes 20% of your portfolio and then it goes up 10x again

That gives you 200% of your portfolio. So, you know, maybe you want to buy 2% most people can afford to lose 2% of their savings if they're wrong so that's that's kind of how I view Bitcoin. I love that and by the way, I had a Fabulous moment this year were a good longtime friend of mine. I finally got him and he started going into gold and silver then he really went in and But you know gold would go up silver would go down he'd be calling and then eventually I got the call and he said hey so my house went up 40% over the last five years in Phoenix but when I measured how many ounces of gold it would have talking took in 2017

versus today it's the same number so now we're just talking we don't do the dollar stuff anymore just like how many ounces do you have? How many sats do you got right? It's just like like that's the decoupling like you no longer measure in dollars, right? Because it looks like his house went up 40% in value. It didn't it's the exact it was literally within a tenth of an ounce The same number across those two timeframes entered into Bitcoin terms. It probably got cheaper in Bitcoin. It did. Yeah. Yeah, so Yeah, I mean some people say well Bitcoin's too volatile to be money and I flipped that on its head I said no the dollar is too volatile to read money. Bitcoin one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin

that damn dollar price keeps going up and down a lot. Well I mean it's fundamentally impossible to have a stable sound on a system on a fraudulent system of money. It's the frauds. The fraud is right in its very construction. Some people get to decide and print it and hand it to their friends and The rest of us have to work for it and take risks with it. Yeah, I mean Jack Mahler said it right It's it's it's wrong for any man to be able to print money You know in exchange for me to labor for money that some man can print, you know, it's just Fundamentally wrong and so indeed. Yeah

And some of us have known this for a long, long time, Chris. I mean, I know you're one of them. I'm one of them. We were reading Russell in the seventies. I mean, you know, I mean, my grandfather was outraged in 71 when we went off the gold standard. I mean, some of us have known this for a long time and it's taken a lot of years for these chickens to come home to roost. But, you know, here we are 50 plus years later, and boy, they appear to be coming in big time because we're, it's, what is this, Hemingway's suddenly, gradually and then suddenly, it appears like we're entering the suddenly phase. Yeah, I have a model for that.

It's about how exponential functions work, but yes, we are in the suddenly phase. So buckle up, people. You will have regrets if you're not in sound money. Lots of ways to skin that cat is as Larry's been telling us. The book is the big print. Larry LePard. You are at at Lawrence LePard on on Twitter. Where else? Anywhere else? That's it. I have a website EMA to calm which my fund, Edward Mark Alpha, the number two com. We do a free quarterly newsletter, we'll never spam you.

At the bottom of that site, you can input your email address, it'll just automatically get added to the list. So every quarter, I kind of reflect on what's going on in the macro world and how it affects gold and silver and Bitcoin. So that's for free. And yeah, I make a lot of noise on Twitter. I'm not very friendly to the central banks.

I think the central banks are a plague on humanity. I really do. But I think we need to get more people to understand that. Ron Paul had it right all those years ago when he said we got to end the Fed. We really do. Having them as a cartel to set the price of money is just fundamentally wrong. It just does not work. And that's what's caused all this pain And you look at all this political dysfunction. I mean even within families you see families

You know team ruin team blue and team red are fighting I mean none of this this wasn't going on when I was a kid or when you were a kid, you know it was just more civil country and It's become uncivil because everybody's hurting and the reason they're hurting is because the monetary system is broken So if we go back, I mean I my tagline on Twitter is if we fix the money we fix the world And I really sincerely believe that Yeah, let's end the Fed. Let's get this done Yeah, a huge respect for all that you've done and with your pods and your your newsletter and everything else

I've been a longtime fan and follower and I mean you, you're covering of the whole medical side of this fraud has just been outstanding and I really Huge props to you for all the work you've done on that. So thank you for having me on your show Well, thank you. I appreciate that too. All right, Larry. We'll do this again sometime Until next time. All right, everybody. This has been a finance you episode and thank you very much for listening again Remember if you want to find out more you can follow us at We'll do this again sometime. Absolutely. Until next time. All right, everybody, this has been a Finance U episode and thank you very much for listening again. Remember, if you want to find out more, you can follow us at peakfinancialinvesting.com and or come back over to Peak Prosperity.

Those are my two operations. All right, until next time. Bye everyone. you