TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #277: Slowly getting bitcoin, why gold is already demonetized, and the virtue of Bitcoin with Larry Lepard

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Join Marty as he sits down with Investment Manager Larry Lepard to discuss: - How the government and central banks have manipulated gold - Slowly coming to understand Bitcoin - Why fiat is bad for the environment - Why bitcoin is virtuous - What is the upside potential? - Sound money advocates are the Remnant - much more Follow Larry on Twitter Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app. Unchained Capital. Check out their white glove vault concierge service that will take you from zero to secure multisig setup in no time. Use the code TFTC and receive $50 off that package that includes 2 Trezor Model Ts and $1,000 in your vault. Braiins. Braiins are leaders in the mining industry; running Slush Pool, creating firmware to make miners more profitable (Braiins OS+), and building out Stratum V2 to help further decentralize mining and make Bitcoin more robust. Check out their mining profitability calculator. Compass Mining. Compass wants to democratize bitcoins hashrate and give everyone the ability to strengthen the network while mining bitcoin profitably. Thanks to Compass, it’s never been easier to mine bitcoin. Check them out at compassmining.io

what is up freaks it's your boy marty ben here to introduce this episode of tales from the crypt and the immense immense pleasure of sitting down of sitting down with larry lapard a man fighting the good fight a sound money fight i mean to embrace our our sound money advocates our allies in the gold community and larry's an incredible example of somebody who's very principled and is in sound money for the right reasons.

Yes, Bitcoin may go up by a lot. Yes, gold has gone up by a lot. May go up by a lot in the future. It's about more than that. It's about more than the gains, freaks. It's about fixing the money which will allow us to fix the world. This report was brought to you

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they got a lot of shit freaks go check it out brains.com b-r-a-i-i-n-s.com if you want to follow them on twitter they're at brains underscore systems doing long threads on the mining industry as well enjoy this episode with larry lapard i thoroughly enjoyed the conversation i think you guys will too we're gonna win we're gonna win we're gonna win we're gonna win are you ready to win let's be humble in our victory you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.

I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. You probably should be. what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here for another important conversation i will say we're sitting down with larry lapard from em2 what's going on sir oh not much marty it's really nice to be with you it's kind of an honor i

understand you're like one of the leading podcasts in this in this space and i haven't been as involved in bitcoin for as long so well uh the honor is all mine as we've been having a gosh we've been talking for almost 20 minutes now since before we hit record here uh i think it's going to be an incredible conversation i think we're going to learn a lot as bitcoiners there's i don't want to say there's goals of this conversation but i do want to say just having spoken with you over dm chat and the first 20 minutes of this conversation i think there are important lessons that you can provide the the bitcoin world coming from uh the gold world uh you you've seen a lot of uh to give some more context of the freaks out there listening

uh parker lewis and michael tanguma two bitcoiners uh have have been saying marty you got to talk to larry you got to talk to larry his story is uh incredible uh and i think it would resonate a lot with with the freaks and so you're a man that's seen some shit and and you you have yeah you want to you want me to go through a little bit of the background i'll just i'll skip on it quickly so I'm 64 years old. I've been a professional investor my whole life. I've always been a sound money advocate. I was a big Ron Paul supporter, ran a couple of ads for him in national newspapers.

You know, long before Bitcoin came along, sound money was gold and silver. And of course, I own a ton of it and was supporting that. I first heard about Bitcoin from the Free State Project up in New Hampshire. I have a friend up there who was a graphic designer. She bought a bunch of coins at $2, still has them. I mean, a lot of coins. That's really a fabulous story. I didn't know how to buy them back then.

This was pre-Mount Gox. You know, this is when you had to meet with cash and you got yourself a little code. I almost bought some Mount Gox. Mount Gox failed. Coming out of that, I bought my first coins coming out when Coinbase was running. So I've been in Bitcoin for a while and I bought fairly consistently. But my fear was always that technology was, you know, technology and my IBM computer would go blue screen every now and then. I thought, well, maybe that'll happen to Bitcoin.

Of course, over time, I got more and more comfortable with that issue. I sat next to a core developer at MIT once, and I asked him, what scares you? And he said, well, every time I make a change to the core, I'm a little afraid I'm going to go home and the whole thing's going to blow up. And that kind of concerned me. But anyway, eventually, I began to hodl very consistently. And I was hodling at 17,000, and I was hodling at 10,000, and I was hodling at 3,500. So I've been at it for a while, but frankly, gold has always been the core of my holdings. It still is.

I still own a ton of gold. But I think what I might bring to the party that people will find interesting is I've watched the government's moves against gold all these years. And there have been many, and they've been substantial. And the government, I mean, I think Bitcoin is a fabulous technology. I think it's going to win in the long run. I'm very much a believer. But I don't think it's going to be quite as straight line as some people think.

And I say that with the experience of having watched what they've done in the gold space. You know, they've obviously manipulated gold with paper gold. And, you know, I mean, these people are playing for keeps, right? And they're criminal and they use whatever they can to beat the other side. And they're very smart. I mean, there are all kinds of papers that have been written. um you know gibson's paradox by uh barsky and summers laid out the whole notion of how by suppressing the gold price they could create you know an economic boom and uh you know ruben

secretary ruben who was the treasury secretary at the time used it to manipulate the gold price and you know make make bill clinton's presidency look very fabulous but um you know when they get the chance they break the rules i mean they confiscated gold in the 30s they took us off gold in the 70s um you know they've um they've never reported the amount of gold that's in fort knox um they've created paper gold to great excess um i always get a kick people say well the monetary premium is going to come out of gold well there is no monetary premium in gold i mean gold should be trading if gold were trading the way it used to trade in relation to the money supply it would be ten thousand dollars right now so the monetary premium gold has been kicked you

know, the shit's been kicked out of it. It's maybe a little bit there and there's a little jewelry premium, but it costs a thousand bucks an ounce to mine it. So it's not like there's a big premium in it. And, you know, I think that on a go forward basis, you know, they're going to try some of these things with Bitcoin. You know, talking about this ETF that's coming out, as we were discussing it before, you know, I think people ask the question rightly and intelligently, can't they just do that with the gold? And I would say, I view that in two ways. One, yes, maybe. Well, I say one, no, because here's why. Bitcoin has gone up 500% in six months in the past. And anybody who shorts against that and doesn't have the coins on the

chain is going to get completely wrecked. So for that reason, because gold never went up 500% in six months, and they always knew that if they shorted gold, there'd come a time in the future when they may be able to cover it, they were very effective at manipulating gold. So in that sense, the volatility of Bitcoin is a positive because it makes it harder to manipulate it. But then let me give you the conspiracy case on the whole issue. And I've spoken to various people all throughout the gold industry over the years about this. And it's an interesting question. What if the government has an unlimited balance sheet? What if the government operates through offshore accounts? and what if the government doesn't care about the P&L and can create unlimited amounts of money to

cover losses well in that particular case they could sell short into the bitcoin market and just keep selling short and keep selling short and keep selling short and the losses could pile up and to the degree they had to settle the losses they would just print the money and deliver and so the losses would get settled but they would just never relent and so in the ultimate manipulation game you know think of manipulation as like a game of poker where you're you're playing table stakes and you know you don't have to necessarily show the cards if you're playing table stakes poker and the other player has an unlimited balance sheet and can just keep putting more and more stakes on the table but not caring about what those are because those are stakes they

print and that they can create in an unlimited fashion then they can conceivably go longer than you can because their balance sheet's bigger than your balance sheet. And to some degree, that's what's happened in gold, in my opinion. And I can't prove it, that they have this unlimited balance sheet, but I think there's a possibility of it. And I think for Bitcoiners not to consider it is a blind spot, that it is a possibility. And so I think, as we were discussing before, I strongly advise all my clients to have some Bitcoin because I think it will ultimately to monetize gold. The timeframe on that's debatable, but I also strongly believe that having gold is useful as well. And partly because, you know, other countries in the world have made

an enormous bet on gold. I think in their, you know, I think it's a mistake, but China's obviously betting on gold, Russia's betting on gold. And so, you know, my view as a money manager and one who runs a fund, my view is that the intelligent approach to this is to have some balance between the two. And I view gold as being more like a sound money bond that doesn't grow nearly as fast as Bitcoin, but never suffers a drawdown, a yearly drawdown of more than 20% or 30%. And I think of Bitcoin as being a sound money animal, growth stock that is eating everything in its sight and growing at 200% a year compounded. So we all love that. But the negative, the thing that I think is people who are recommending other people where to put their money, they need to do

is they need to make sure that the people who are doing it fully understand what it looks like and what the issues are. Because I know many instances, I think it's sad, where people who believed in it went home at Thanksgiving in 2017 and pounded the table and got all their friends and neighbors to chase it and buy it at $17,000. And then, of course, it went up and over the cliff and came back to 10 and then a year later to 3500 and damn near all those people blew it out which of course was the wrong thing to do so you know if if you don't if you're selling it and the buyer doesn't understand the importance of hodling then you're not doing the buyer a favor you know and uh i think i think that's an important point that needs to be made when people are promoting bitcoin i

I would agree. 26-year-old Marty made that Thanksgiving mistake in 2017 and had learned. It isn't easy because internally you're like, I've had this feeling since 2013 when I first got in, this is going to happen. This is going to be massive. You want your family and friends to participate, but you do have to realize they have to have a first principles understanding of why sound money, number one, should win out and probably will win out in the long run. I mean, the government obviously is bankrupt and it can't keep printing forever.

Things will hit ahead. Sound money will prevail at some point. It's a matter of if, not when. But as we were discussing before we hit recorded, the pleasure of getting breakfast with Josh Crum last week, and he is behind gold money and Bitgold and Mene, and um that was one of the things he said him and roy sabag when they were going out and pitching bit gold specifically is that they wanted to change the narrative around sound money uh

sound money goods particularly gold and silver uh particularly gold i don't know if they dealt too much with silver but a lot of gold bugs and gold heads at the time are saying gold's going to go to ten thousand ten thousand and they really wanted to shift the narrative of yes it may go to 10 000 but it'll go to 10 000 because it is a sound money and like why will sound money be be that valuable in the future i think that's something that bitcoiners um and gold gold bugs like i hate saying gold bugs gold uh gold supporters i don't mind gold bugs i don't view it as an insult anymore i mean it's yeah i mean sound money i mean the you know i'm giving a speech in new orleans this week which will be up on the web and shown around it and to me sound

money is the most important moral issue of our time. I mean, I'm right where Jack Maulers is. I'm willing to die on this hill. I mean, I think, you know, I look at the world, what it was like when I was a kid, and I look at the world today, and the biggest difference is the money's unsound. And that's the bad news. The good news is that, you know, this is a system that's designed to fail, and it's going to blow up spectacularly. And then we will go back to sound money in a variety of forms. And really, when I say sound money, what I really mean is non-state money. I mean, that's, if you think about it, you know, fiat money is a statist, you know, thing that's created to control people. I mean, look at the $600 they want us to report now. You know, it's

insane, right? And so, you know, gold, silver, you know, and Bitcoin are forms of money that the state cannot control. And that's a beautiful thing. Now, you know, I say that and then recognizing that they're probably going to try, we were talking about this, they're probably going to try to make us report our Bitcoin. And of course, you know, we'll have to make decisions on how much we want to play along with that. But I don't think they can kill it. But, you know, I do think that there will be ups and downs. I mean, they certainly could go after Tether. And if and when they do that, I mean, I think that'd be a net positive. If and when they do that, it could certainly create a dip in the Bitcoin price. So my view is it's a volatile asset, but it's probably the best asset

on the planet right now in terms of optionality and asymmetry, but it's also volatile. And the way you deal with that is you allocate the right amount to handle that volatility so that you won't get blown out at the bottom and your dollar cost average on the way in. I have new clients walk in the door, they have zero of it. And I say, you got to get some, pick a number, pick a percent, And, but understand that if it dips 30% or 50%, I mean, recently it dipped from 60 to 30, I was a buyer, you know, I'm a buyer at 60, by the way, but at 30, I stepped it up a little bit and, and, you know, and so, I mean, I, that's, and that's what I say to clients, you know, you just, this is, this is the classic buy the dip asset, you know,

and not necessarily sell the rip, you know, just, just buy, you know, be, go at it in a steady way. it's the other thing about it that i find fascinating it's just all the leverage in some of these you know block five i mean all these people who are using leverage with this asset are absolutely insane in my opinion just insane that's a sure way to lose your money you know that you you gotta you gotta buy this stuff unlevered and just be prepared to hold on we've seen an untold number of people get wrecked by this like leveraging leverage trading bitcoin and it's very attractive there the nature of bitcoin and the fact that it can evade uh state sanctions

and it is a completely separate network uh distributed network there's services out there they'll give you 100x leverage and people oh i know i mean those services ought to be shut down because there's no way the house wins all the time i mean there's no way you can win playing that game even five to one leverage there's no way you can win they're they're sure to you know they're going to liquidate you on a drawdown that's it you're out of the game yeah it's uh it's theft it's really tough yeah we've seen uh we've seen a lot of these margin trading platforms pop up through throughout the years the uh the okc wood chipper was uh was a fun order book to watch back in the day like 2013 2014. yeah i i didn't follow a lot of that as carefully as closely as you guys

have. I mean, I've just been stacking. I mean, I like your statement of stacking sats and getting people to stack sats. I think that's right. I mean, that will do extremely well. I was very satisfied this morning. I got an email from a woman I counseled about five or six years ago. She didn't have a lot of money. And I convinced her to put $20,000 into Bitcoin. And she came back. She said, holy shit, I hadn't looked at this account for a while. It's worth $250,000 now. and i was like yeah that felt really good you know what i mean i mean i just i mean it's it's fun to watch people you know do the right thing saving a sound currency and it goes up you know it goes up over time well that's i think the beauty of stacking sats particularly in dollar

cost averaging and having a plan sticking with it really highlights the importance of low time preference um so it's like a compounding effect of the bitcoin price going up but also So the societal lesson of low time preference, which I think many would argue the fiat system has degraded pretty significantly. Oh, absolutely. I mean, yeah, and it relates to everything. I mean, Jeff Booth has great stuff on this. I mean, we should live in a deflationary world.

A deflationary world is a much better and fairer world where things get cheaper and savers get rewarded. And Keynesianism and the notion that growth is good at all costs, I mean, how do you do that in a fixed resource planet we're going to destroy the planet if all we do is is figure out how to grow eventually we're going to overwhelm the planet and we're going to be like you know the deer on the island up in you know the licking eating deer up on the island off of alaska i mean where you just hit a level and then bam the whole damn thing collapses i mean what we need is much greater efficiency productivity and efficiency we need to figure out how to get more for less

and that's deflation by definition. How do you get more for less? And so when we take this whole Keynesian paradigm and blow it up, which it's in the process of doing and put it on its head, we're gonna be in a deflationary world. And that's gonna be an absolute thing of beauty. I mean, you're gonna be able to save

and know your money is good. In fact, you're gonna know that with savings, your money is gonna get better in the future and you'll have hope. I mean, one of the things that really distresses me because I know a lot of people at this age, i know people my age who have reasonable assets and they're trying to retire they don't feel like they can and the reason they don't feel like they can is they don't know if they're going to outrun

their money you know they might have a you know a number that a young person would say well that's a lot of money you know you got a million bucks well you know you're 70 years old you got a million bucks is is that really a lot of money i mean you know if gasoline's a hundred dollars it's not a lot of money and that could be where we're going you know and and so you know this whole Keynesian, you know, grow at any cost, inflate as necessary to keep the growth going, you know, it eliminates people's freedom to save and their freedom to retire safely. And it's just, it's criminal. It's absolutely criminal. And, you know, and then, of course, it rewards those who figured out how to play the system, you know, and then they changed the rules, you know, I mean,

2008, they completely, you know, raided the system. And, you know, it was socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for everybody else so they lost their houses to foreclosure i mean it's just it's absolutely so upside down backwards wrong and yet the the number of people that understand it in society today it's it's a small group it's it's gold people sound money people and bitcoin people the good news is that that group is growing you know over time i mean it's and i think we are getting closer to a tipping point i mean inflation problem has become really obvious and it's only going to get worse and you know the solutions are becoming more widely known you know i mean i i can't tell you how happy i was when safe's book came out and i saw the effect on the millennial

i mean my kids are all in their 20s and they're all huge bitcoiners and not just because dad's a sound money guy but because they read the book and you know suddenly we had this whole young cadre of of austrians you know i mean i was like this old guy austrian and people were like oh you know oh you're a fossil you know don't talk about gold and and suddenly i got we got all these converts who get the sound money story because of safe book it was fabulous it was absolutely fabulous it was like it was like we you know the reinforcements have come to help us out here you know we've been fighting this battle for 30 years with with with no new blood new blood so it's great I mean you think it was Facebook alone do you think there's like a sort

of timing aspect of it too like I'm a millennium 30. yeah yeah I I was a senior in high school in 2008. uh presciently not presciently uh serendipitously is probably the better word taking an elective economics class my dad was like yeah take an economics class you're gonna go to college take that so that was fall 2008 world's falling apart my teachers like boys this what's an all-guy school this is not good like you should go to college and try to understand this so i did yeah um for me personally i won't speak for my whole generation but like they were 9 11 when i was 10 08 when i was 17 um like you said the government tends to fuck things up and oh wait particularly i read the tarp bill as a 17 year old senior in

high school was like this is corrupt this is evil you said criminal i would say evil i would think takes it a step further it's truly evil and nefarious do you think there was uh a generation of people around my age is looking for a solution and sound money um maybe so i mean maybe i'm giving safe too much credit but i do know safe's book moved the needle for a lot of people certainly certainly i agree one of the biggest advocates for the bitcoin standard and saves work yeah i mean no i i think that's right i mean you guys could see how broken it was and it was kind of like man this is messed up. I mean, I've heard plenty of stories from people who said, you know, this is really personal for me. My parents lost their house. You know, my dad lost his job. I

mean, we were in economic, you know, tough straits. I mean, my, you know, my sister lost her house. I mean, you know, this is, I mean, these people have done a lot of damage to a lot of people in this country, you know, and, you know, I mean, it's tragic. I mean, look at what's happened in the midwest look at you know what i call the you know the the economic despair that has led to you know the drug overdoses and the fentanyl and i mean there's just so much you know the suicides and mental health issues i mean it's just so many bad things that have happened and you know and then we go get in these overseas wars and so you know honorable hard-working honest guys who and girls who get involved in these things and they're getting limbs blown

off in places where they shouldn't be and it's just it's tragic it's so tragic i mean that That part reminds me of Vietnam, which was in my youth. I mean, it just, you know, and, you know, I mean, like Ron Paul has one of the greatest lines where he said, you know, it's no coincidence that, you know, the century of war or the, yeah, the century with the greatest wars coincides with a century of central banking. I mean, you know, the Fed was formed in 1913. Three years later, they broke their charter and they went out and they started printing money so they could fund the war. you know i mean which wouldn't have been able to the war would have been unfundable if it hadn't been for fiat money and you know so it's just it's a very evil set of circumstances as you say and and there are some very evil people i mean look the defense contractors have done really

well for the past 30 years you know i mean afghanistan was a complete you know boondoggle for them they made tons and tons of money but maybe not so good for the afghans and certainly not so good for our people who got shot up you know the one of the one of the workouts that i do in crossfit is called murph and it's named after a really heroic and honorable guy you know michael murphy who was the guy you know um in the movie in the story it was kind of the last guy out and it was uh you know it's just uh terrible stuff really terrible stuff so i mean i hit the dive too deep in the war here where you think too like the return zone where they're negative right because you just piss people off and far off lands that then want to attack you again and then you

just create this negative feedback loop that oh yeah edwin star had it right i don't know if you if you they probably don't play it much anymore but there was a really great song in the 70s you know edwin star's war the title was just war and said what is it good for absolutely nothing yeah i mean and that's right i mean that's absolutely right and and the funny thing is you know human beings alone don't necessarily want to go to war with each other although i suppose criminals go to war with society because they want to kill people and steal stuff but in general you know the average american guy you know living out in the woods you know in america somewhere he doesn't want to go over to vietnam and kill a bunch of guys in vietnam and the average

rice farmer in vietnam doesn't necessarily want to kill a bunch of americans but if americans are walking around in his country that's not going to make him happy and you know it's it's you know it's these governments that are doing it and that speaks to the broader trend of decentralization i mean i think we hit peak centralization in this century you know and i think we we you know world war ii was you know the just it was a killing orgy you know 40 50 million people you know killed in that war and you know fortunately i think you know we kind of have learned something from it because at least since then the wars have been more proxy wars at a smaller scale but um you know i'd like to see a situation where you know these nascent states kind of dissolve i mean it's not entirely

clear we need them you know we can't go back to much smaller decentralized local governments i i've been pushing that that line of thinking for quite some time i think we're going to see balkanization i think uh we've seen a trend towards that in the last year and a half with states asserting their their autonomy more and more uh yeah well you live in one I mean I look at I just I just I bought a small place in one I mean I you know I think Florida and Texas should just say bye-bye you know I mean we'll pay our we'll pay our share of the national defense all that other stuff leave us alone please please just leave us alone you make things worse yeah that's it this is the other thing right I think I think and so that was another part of the pre-discussion

having is like so you you think that this could be a much longer battle than many bitcoiners tend to believe i believe i'm one of those bitcoiners maybe i'm naive like i said maybe i'm not um but i think it's becoming too blatantly obvious that the emperor wears no clothes and that people are going to be begging for a sound money solution or a yeah a rose government's power? I don't think you're naive. And I think the emperor is very naked. I think more people are seeing that. I don't know how it's going to get resolved. You know, I don't necessarily think it's going to get down to shooting in a civil war. I tend to, I tend to think that what will happen is that things will continue to get much worse first in terms of inflation, and then in

terms of confidence in money. And these markets will be able to function in a way that puts the fear of God into the government, and they'll have to either start behaving better, and they may do a little bit of that, but more likely, or get overturned. And so, you know, I think this Francis Suarez in Miami is probably going to be, you know, President of the United States someday, and he's a Bitcoiner. And, you know, I say this, because I think, you know, there was a, I mean, Ron Paul was ahead of his time, right? There was a small core of us who all believed in him, supported him, worked for him. And he kind of timed out, you know, he's too old to be President now. But, you know, you're generation i mean and and this fits into the fourth turning and i'm sure you're familiar with

that whole model and so forth i mean these turning fourth turnings tend to take 20 to 30 years and you can either argue this one started in 2000 or 2008 so you know if it's 10 years i mean we're already past that i mean probably 20 years i think it's going to get resolved in the next 10 or 15 years i think your generation is going to be the hero generation that's going to fix it and i think that, you know, the fixing it is going to come at a political level. And, you know, you're going to see, you know, people like Gabby, or people like, you know, Suarez, or other libertarian minded, freedom oriented, sound money oriented people step into the breach. And when the country has been ravaged by inflation, and is feeling very much poor, and society is really in tough shape,

you know kind of 1930s of shape in a way people's you know this message will get out and i think people will be smart enough to know that it was the money that did it to them and they're gonna say yeah i'm voting for that sound money person you know i i want to go there well let's let's dive into this a little bit more because bitcoiners a lot of bitcoiners i would say myself included but i have um there have been some people that have put strong arguments in front of me which is beginning to persuade me back towards the other direction but bitcoiners a lot of us will say don't even engage in politics like bitcoin is so strong we can build this parallel system and essentially bead excuse me bleed the political system dry and essentially just leave these

people do like a galt gulch and just leave let them mess up the world and we'll be fine over here it's possible i mean i think certainly in terms of your own monetary sovereignty and wealth that's possible but you know if they decide they want you to report how much bitcoin you have and they want you to pay a tax on it maybe 90 and you know that i mean i've seen you know articles that have talked about and some of the people in the community have talked about this how you know look the other side are a bunch of really bad people and we know they will break the rules And they are going to try to change the narrative to these Bitcoin and gold people ruined a system that we had that was perfectly good and they ruined it, you know, and you know what? Therefore, they need to either go to jail or pay a huge tax on their winnings.

You know, now, look, we all know with 12 words, we can decide we're not Americans anymore and go somewhere else and we've still got our wealth. But the point is, you know, I'd like to stay in America. I think it's a beautiful place and I've got a lot of ties and relatives and everything else here. So, you know, I'm more inclined to stay and fight. And I think, you know, as I look at the country, I think a lot of the country, when they get more educated on this issue, I tend to believe this is a pretty good country with a lot of great people in it. And I think we'll do the right thing. And so, yeah, I mean, look, you can do a gulch gulch and go somewhere else. I mean, I get that. And that may be necessary for short periods of time if this thing gets really, goes in the wrong direction really hard and really fast. but I think as a practical matter, we've got to think about, we can't ignore politics. We've got to think about how politics can fix it. Having said that, it's generally the case that in all countries, to the degree we're going to have a national state, that in all countries, the richest

people end up kind of in politics. And what if the Bitcoin people and the gold people have all the marbles? I mean, what if we were the richest people? I mean, I'd certainly rather live in a country that was you know that the politicians were bitcoiners and gold people than the politicians we have today right because i think we'd embrace libertarian values and low taxes and so on and so forth so you know i it's very hard to tell how it's going to unfold no doubt but um interesting questions for sure no i agree i mean and again even as a bit corner we had examples of playing the political game somewhat working in our favor obviously even steven mnuchin was on his way out out tried to try to sneak some aggressive legislation across uh people fought back

that's gonna get passed um you know senators like Cynthia lummis and um representatives like Warren Davidson and um many others beginning to advocate for Bitcoin it seems like that's having a positive effect on I agree I think there's another thing that we've really got going for us Luke Roman has pointed this out I really do believe it's true and there's a fellow whose name I can't remember right now up in MIT, who's done a lot of work on it with this SpaceX space project. But I think the Pentagon knows. Jason Lowry. Yeah, Jason, right. I think the Pentagon knows that it's strategically in our interest to move in this direction. I mean, I think they've seen how we've been weakened by offshoring, by all the theft of all the technology from China and

offshoring everything to China and letting the country slide and gutting the middle class in the middle of the country. And I think they're very much aware that we've got to solve this problem, or we're going to just completely go down the shitter. And so, you know, they've got to be thinking about the sound money, you know, equation, I'm pretty sure Luke has some really good contacts in the defense community, because of the information that, you know, discuss. And as a result of that, you know, I'm pretty sure the Pentagon understands that we've got to get back to sound money. And I in turn, I also think they're going to understand as a result of Jason's work and others that probably the better choice of sound money is gold, or I mean, is Bitcoin over

gold and silver. And the reason for that is that if we go back to a gold standard, you know, Russia, China, and India, three fairly corrupt countries have a big lead over us. I mean, you know, Ron Paul told me once, he's pretty sure that we don't have the gold we say we have in Fort Knox. And I believe that. I mean, I think that's probably been rated and sold if you read, you know, things. And I think there's a reason why it hasn't been audited. So, you know, assuming they've got all the gold that they have, we don't have the gold that we say that we have. And we need to go to a neutral reserve currency to settle accounts between countries, which you clearly do, or else Triffin's dilemma blows this whole thing up, you know, and go forward. You know, Bitcoin's the

right choice, because we've got the technical people to do it. And, you know, we're in the right position. So I think, I think Bitcoin's got a lot going for it. It really, really does. But it's going to take time. I mean, I, you know, gold, gold had a lot going, gold's always had a lot going for it. And I got to tell you, they're, you know, they know how to play this game. I mean the other side there's you know they're some of them are very stupid okay some of them but some of them are very smart and um the smart ones are gonna you know they're gonna fight back yeah yeah they are i mean you've seen this firsthand too you've personally been screwed i've personally seen it i mean i was you know look i was short all the financials in fall of 2008 that was up

you know 50 in my fund on that year and in september they outlawed you know they banned short selling of financial stocks. You know, I lost that 50% in 10 days. They just changed the rules. I mean, I had it right. I was Michael Burry, except I wasn't playing with CDS. I was playing with publicly traded financial stocks. Go look it up. The SEC banned short selling financial stocks, you know, on national security basis. And when they did that, all my shit got called in and I lost millions of dollars for myself, my clients, everything. They just changed the fucking rules on me, you know, right in the middle of the game, right? I mean, that's what did the gamestop guys right i mean those guys were going to bankrupt those firms and they were they

had them they totally had them and they just changed the rules right so that that the gamestop thing particularly uh had tinfoil had uncle marty come out because if you remember back in september 2019 when you had the first repo spasm and the fed had to allow the fcc to become a primary dealer so they could essentially by proxy bail out like citadel millennium 72. exactly that's exactly what happened right i think there was the same firms involved with gamestop right and yeah that's exactly what happened the fed view systemic risk yeah there's there's a reason why bernacki sits on the sit you know on the citadel board and you know the inside scoop from this is second hand and just gossip but i you know there's sometimes some truth to some gossip is that you know ken

griffin pays him 20 million bucks a year and and and related gossip is that he's using it to buy gold right yeah yeah yeah oh my gosh these guys aren't stupid they're not stupid and you know know, you might ask, how can he justify it? And I'm sure the way he justifies it in his mind is, look, I did what I had to do when I was in the political system and in the political arena. I mean, Alan Greenspan used to be an Ayn Rand follower and wrote all kinds of treatises on how great gold was and prevented, you know, confiscate or prevented, you know, the state from taking your money away from you through inflation. And then he got in there and he wanted to be famous and he just forgot all that shit and just totally played the game.

And I mean, look, the power and the money that these people have, it makes it very hard for them to do what's right. I mean, Janet Yellen getting paid seven million dollars for speech. That's just a blatant bribe. Just blatant. You know, I mean, getting paid 250 grand an hour. It's normal. Yeah, it's totally normal. Right. When you're an economics professor. Right. Yeah. It's nuts. It's nuts. And, you know, they just they don't even hide it anymore. I mean, it's, you know, they recently, I mean, there's clearly this campaign to, you know, to change the Fed.

Right. So they've got two of them to resign. They're both hawks. They're about to probably get Powell to resign. And who knows, they'll probably put Stephanie Kelton and some doves in there. And when they're, you know, they're greasing the runway to have another print-a-thon, which is at that point, that's going to give the next, you know, up leg to gold and silver and probably to Bitcoin as well. So, you know, it's just it's it's the same old, same old. And it's because of the math. I mean, you can't taper a Ponzi. And, you know, again, in the in the speech I'm going to publish in my quarterly report, which is on my Web site, you can see there's a great chart that just shows the accelerating growth of the money supply. And, you know, you've got to keep that accelerating. I mean, they grew the Fed balance sheet $3 trillion in three-year period after 08. Well, they did that in a couple of months. And this time around, the next time the market turns down severely, they're going to have to do 10.

You know, and then the next time, I mean, the Fed's going to have $100 trillion balance sheet, you know, in five years at the rate they're going or everything's going to implode. And, you know, I mean, they're both bad outcomes. But my gut is that push comes to shove. they'll always pick the inflation because kick the can and, you know, at least, you know, they think they can kind of stay alive and outrun it in some way. And, you know, that's what Von Havenstein thought in Weimar, too, in 1921. And, you know, eventually it just gets out of hand. I mean, the tipping point for both Bitcoin and gold will come when the bond market really starts to sell off.

I mean, the thing I watch like a hawk is the 10-year. The 10-year yield really starts to roll. And the other thing I watched, well, related to that, a really interesting thing happened in March. Remember March of 2020 when the COVID thing came down? There was a time when the 10-year went no bid and the rates started to go up. That was frigging huge. That had to scare the living crap out of the Fed. And if the 10-year starts to go no bid and interest rates start to go up aggressively,

now they probably got all the Band-Aids in place through this reverse repo and other things, having the bank buying bonds. But the point is, eventually, they're going to have to monetize the entire bond market. And at that point, when you're running a deficit that's equal to 50%, when you're spending 50% more than or 100% more than you collect in taxes, i.e., you collect $3 trillion in taxes, you spend $6, that just can't last. And then you can't get foreigners to buy the other three. You've got to print it yourself. I mean, that's just the definition of monopoly money.

And so it's only a matter of time. I mean, you know, we call this CSIP, you know, it's, it's, you know, substitution inflation. I mean, as people begin to see that the money is losing value, they're going to, they're going to gravitate towards Bitcoin. They already have. And that's why it's seen such a lift. And it's the one fire alarm that's working. And they're also going to gravitate towards gold and silver. And, you know, I mean, it's, it's going to be one of these, it's the most asymmetric trade I've ever seen. And sound money people are going to end up with all the marbles in my opinion. and and and that's a beautiful thing and and i'm not really in it to win all the marbles i mean if i get marbles i'm going to use them to try and push for sound money because i i really care a lot more about sound money than i do about making a profit but um you know it's it's just going to happen because it's human psychology i mean when you're when when you know that what you have in savings is melting you look to go someplace where it won't melt because it's just self-preservation You know, you've worked, especially if you're older, you've worked your whole life to earn a certain amount of savings.

You know, you need you're going to realize you need to protect it. And that's why I say to all of my clients, you know, how much of your assets are allocated in sound money bets? And to me, the most obvious, the three most obvious sound money bets are gold, silver and Bitcoin and gold and silver stocks. And then and then after that real estate, I mean, you're actually already starting to see some of this, Marty, in real estate. I mean, people say, well, why is real estate going up so much? Well, they're just doing the Hugo Stennis trade, right? I mean, real estate's up 23%. You know, okay, so you got an asset you know is real, and you know you can use it, and it's going to grow in value.

Last year, it grew 23%, and you can borrow money, 30-year money at 3% to buy it? That's a frigging no-brainer. I mean, you just, right? I got an asset that's going up at some number that's north of 9, and I can borrow at 3? hell give me more of that right yeah you know so so that's i mean that's what's going on there and that's that's what i'm describing is austrians know that's the beginning of a crack-up boom everyone says the money's bad i gotta get stuff you know well you mentioned rudy van havenstein yeah shout out to the uh the uh parody account on twitter oh isn't he the fab he is so fabulous

i've interacted with him a lot he is great i've been following since i think following him since like 2012 he's actually in my early years of getting into the austrian school was very formative but yeah transitioning to the actual havenstein that's something i've been saying on this podcast for the last year and i wrote about it last april i was like whoa people people like what we're doing right now the fed printing all this money at the same time that they're locking down the economy and preventing people going from work is not exactly what the weimar republic did but it's very similar they told factory workers to stay home printed money and dumped it on them and very close yeah when it comes to like calling an end to like I want to be like especially when you

consider the supply chain crunch that we're under right now and you have uh commodities energies particularly going up parabolic like I think this winter if it's a cold winter could be very interesting um in terms of the things appear to be moving pretty quickly now I mean I I mean you And I look at a lot of touch points. I mean, Igor Van Graer does some good work on this and Alistair McLeod. I mean, you know, there are a lot of good folks on Twitter who've done the analysis here. And, you know, it would appear to me that we're, you know, we're reaching the inflection point in the curve where, you know, it's not going to take much. I mean, they know they need to hold gold under 2000.

They're working like hell to do it. But it's going to break through. And when it does, it's going to run like a scalded dog. I mean, the same way that I think they're probably working hard to keep Bitcoin under 60, you know, around 60 and if it breaks it and starts to run, you know, look, I mean, there had to be some very, very scared people. When Bitcoin went on the run from 10 to 60, you know, whenever it was last year, I mean, there had to be some people who were just like, holy shit, this is a serious problem. Yeah. I mean, it's basically saying, guys, your money's failing. right because in bitcoin terms i mean the dollar is getting destroyed absolutely decimated yeah

dollar sat parity not too far away but uh right a few more years but it's coming yeah yeah i don't know that's the other thing so like i i'm a very strong believer like these hyperinflationary events are part uh due to the expansion of the monetary supply then they're part social right and the social aspect is when people lose lose faith that's when things really get weird and i think we're beginning to see that too i mean last week you had tucker carlson go on with a whether you love him or hate him he did a 10 and a half minute segment on inflation and the effects of qe and it was just very cogeny speaking to an audience of millions of people saying hey it's not your politician well your politicians are certainly part of the blame but you should

be looking at the central bank and how much money they're printing and then my wife um who's a bitcoiner and she gets the whole thing but she's still very much involved with pop culture she's sharing articles with me from the daily mail in the uk which essentially like a like a uh tabloid and a rag if you will and they're warning their readers about inflation they're saying hey the fed and the bank of uh bank of england are telling you that that inflation is this but they're just showing like grocery store uh prices going up exponentially they're lying to you like the the on the social side of things things are starting to get out that were previously not talked about by by certain right talking heads or publishers if you will right and and again

all it takes is for everybody at the margin to go buy sound assets and for those sound you know once once these sound assets really start to break upward then it's really going to get interesting because the bond market, the stock market, all these people are going to, I mean, I like to say to my clients, I mean, it's like the housing thing. It's a Michael Burry trade. It's very asymmetric. And so once this happens, there's not going to be a do-over. I mean, imagine tomorrow Bitcoin were at 250. I mean, it could happen. I mean, in six months, Bitcoin could go to 250,000 bucks. And by the way, I mean, if that happens, I would imagine gold would go to $3,000. Okay. And, you know, all the companies in my portfolio that are trading at three times cash flow,

you know, they'd all be four baggers. And, you know, that would wake people up when people would say, hang on a second, something is really going on here. You know, and some would say, oh, I'll sell into that. It's a bubble. Well, and others would go, no, no, no, no. This is currency failure. This is what it looks like. I mean, I've had actually on Twitter, I've had a lot of people from foreign countries come to me argentinians especially come to me with dms and saying things like oh yeah i know exactly where you are you know you're it's like within the next two years man it's happening really yeah oh yeah kind of like you know oh yeah we saw this exact same thing i you know you're you're about two years away from you know the end game i mean it's happening now

it really is yeah the second interview on this podcast back in the fall of 2017 was with a man named santiago siri from argentina and he he the first story he told about his experience of hyperinflation was running to the grocery store with his mother to go buy things as fast as possible on payday so that they could they could get as much food as possible before the prices change and again my wife going to the grocery store she comes back she's like it was this much this week it was 25 more this week like you're starting to see it here people don't want to believe it can happen here we're america yeah country to ever live it could never happen here yeah well i mean it's yeah look at the you know it's it is happening and it and it's funny it

hops it does it in unusual places i mean you know copper just went nuts and uh you know just zinc has gone nuts now some of this some of this is supply chain it is kind of a perfect storm of inflationary stuff you know you got the ports all backed up and you know you got supply and demand i mean i was talking to a fellow this morning about stuff and he was telling me a story and he was in canada and he said there was some high-end toyota truck that he was trying to buy and the sticker was 50 but they wanted they had a 30 000 what they called you know supply premium on it so if he if he wanted to buy the new one off the lot he was going to have to pay 80 for it right i mean yeah right i mean it's you know i mean and that's what happens right i mean it's

economics 101 you take the supply and you restrict it you leave the demand the same and guess what you know your prices are going up so 40 years of deflation from 1981 to present 40 years of deflation if this isn't turning the corner then i'm you know i don't know then i'm just crazy i mean, I'm blind, deaf, and dumb. And this has got to be turning the corner. I mean, inflation is raging everywhere. Now, can they get it back down from raging to just high? Sure, maybe they can. But then we're not going back to deflation. And yet the stock market and the bond market are still kind of thinking, well, you know, maybe we'll get back, this is transitory, maybe we'll get back to a deflationary world. And I just don't see it. I don't see it. And I think as they wake up to that

fact the assets that sound money people hold i think the sound we are going to be stunned with what happens to us in the next couple years that's my opinion just stunned and it's going to be it's going to be kind of like pinch yourself and you know let's okay let's try to remember to be humble let's try to remember to help the people that are hurting because they're going to be a lot of people hurting and and and more importantly let's advocate let's take whatever wealth we've got and and let's advocate to fix this broken system so the whole country doesn't go down the shitter you know the system's a mess right up thing about the situation it's not only our country like everybody the the nature of the world economy is so intertwined with the United States well

absolutely and China's China's just as levered as we are if not more as this Evergrande and other stuff that pointed out to us but but they're able to put it back in the can pretty easily I mean you know having a command and control economy is is you know it's a nice thing for them yeah well let's talk about the remnant right because I think that's yeah and uh I don't want to give up too much about your paper that you're going to drop and I had a um I had some visibility into uh last week uh because I think that's important we were discussing before we had recorded it is a bit Nauseating when Bitcoiners attack gold advocates, when we should probably be hand in hand together as sound money advocates. Well, true. But to be fair, there have been some gold advocates who've been real a-holes to Bitcoiners, too.

And we all know who they are. So, you know, and I'm part of what I've tried to do throughout all my workings. I believe in sound money above and beyond everything else. I think sound money is a moral issue. And I think the remnant is what I refer to as the group of people who believe in the rules that we were established in the Constitution in 1789. You know, gold and silver were money. We should live in a sound money environment. The government should be minimal. It should be controlled. You know, you should have all these branches that balance one another, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, all of that has over time gotten degraded and thrown in a dust heap of history, you know, and it's, it was just one chip at a time, you know, I mean, Roosevelt takes away the gold. I mean, the Supreme Court rules this way and that way. I mean, it's, but the remnant knows, I mean, we live by what I consider to be libertarian natural law, which is, you know, don't do harm to anyone else and take care of your own. and that's what the remnant is to me and uh you know we'll rebuild when if and when the system

collapses and i think sadly it's very likely to collapse you know i want to be part of that i think your generation will be part of that many people will be part of that trying to rebuild it and the the bright side is from my studying of history you know countries that do have collapse it can be it's obviously going to be terrible and brutal and many will be hurt but but when you you know if we don't get into a shooting war and we don't exchange nuclear arms and we don't start killing people um you know all the factories and people and intelligence are still there and if we go back to sound money we might actually be able to kind of get things going in the right direction fairly quickly now you know who's rich and who's poor will have changed

a fair amount and some of that frankly would be good i think some of the rich today aren't exactly the most admirable people. And, but, but that's okay. And, you know, and then we can put it back on a sound basis and, you know, have a deflationary world where we're not just trying to grow and consume all the resources in the planet all the time. We're all looking at longtime preference, things that we really enjoy, you know, staying healthy and living with friends and living well and, and getting, getting more for less, you know, that's, to me, that's what deflation, and that's what Bitcoin is all about, is getting more for less, being more productive because you have a long time preference. If you have a long time preference, you can invest in

productivity. If you're a Keynesian, you think, no, no, no, screw productivity. We need more demand and growth right now, no matter what it takes. Let's borrow from tomorrow and saddle our kids with these debts. That's just wrong. That's just blatantly wrong. You talk about ESG, you talk about the structure of the environment you talk i mean how do we continue to grow the way we're growing in a resource constrained planet i mean this you know i think it's i'm not sure if i got it right i think it's saint matthews island but google you know deer lichen and alaska and and it's a perfect example of how the carrying capacity of a of a certain area can be totally overwhelmed and then you just get literally you get a collapse you know this is a an island off

alaska where they introduced deer and they were able to live off the lichen they introduced the deer so that they could have food for the soldiers who were there during world war ii eventually the deer grew too too you know they got up to like a large deer population and then there was not enough lichen for the deer population literally went from like 12 000 deer to zero you know because they overwhelmed the resources right and that's the nightmare scenario here in the world you know if we just keep trying to grow without thinking about that growth it's not a good thing well all we need is to build back better yeah that's right where they they're gonna get 305 3.5 trillion dollars excuse me it's zero cost zero

we're gonna we're gonna get that that somehow make that cost zero dollars and then we're gonna go spend it and we're gonna fix the economy that way by pumping more resources and misallocating more resources and that's the frustrating thing for me as somebody who is in the bitcoin mining industry which is obviously much maligned for its energy usage and it's hilarious because if you actually understand what's going on which i'm sure you do but anybody out out there listening like i think that's actually what had a conversation with luke roman last year i think that may have been like an aha moment for him when i made it clear like bitcoin is going to usher in in energy renaissance because it makes us as energy efficient as possible at scale over time

because the cheapest energy resources are those that are being wasted completely agree yeah completely agree yeah no it's i mean look the u.s military consumes like one percent of the world's oil every day you know i mean i mean you know and bitcoin is what is it half a percent of the world's electricity i mean it's that's a small price to pay for sound money i mean sound money is worth that price in my view well again like you said low time preference capital allocation people don't think about the second and third order effects right yeah the fiat monetary system allows you to print money x nihilo and then go misallocate it yeah that's exactly right energy to be to be accomplished yeah it's it's right it's um it's it's a it's a broken system and very

much so. But, you know, there are a lot of good indications. And as I'm sure a lot of people and a lot of your listeners say, I mean, many times I've said to myself, you know, thank God for Bitcoin. I mean, it really does. Bitcoin fixes this. And I think it really will. And that's a beautiful thing. Having said that, you know, I again, going back to kind of the Bitcoin gold debate i mean i you know i hear this kind of you know there can only be one from time to time and and you know perhaps in the longer term that's a that's a possibility but i think in the shorter term um you know there can be more than one and it really does take i mean the enemy here is is fiat money in the state you know the enemy of bitcoiners is not gold gold's not drawing away from bitcoin

as much as you know um as much as people think and uh and then you know frankly i'm part of my view is is that i'm trying to do what i can to help gold people understand bitcoin and recognize that you know to protect themselves and to help improve the planet they should they should support bitcoin as well as gold they both have a place in a portfolio no i agree and i think the point you made about gold's monetary premia already being demolished by the fed was one that had never been brought up to me it was actually pretty illuminating it was like oh shit like you're at the point like bitcoin is always like oh we're going to demonetize gold you're like it's already been demonetized like yeah gold should be 10 000 bucks right now i mean if it were if it

were trading like the way it used to trade like when we were on the gold standard it'd be ten thousand dollars easily maybe more i mean at 800 at 800 gold in 1980 it covered the entire u.s money supply and egon did some numbers went back and back tested it and they found you know if you take the real inflation numbers from shadow government stats that 1980 number would be 22,000 today. So, you know, and it's at 1800. So it's, it's been demonetized, not fully. I mean, it could probably go lower. But, you know, it's, it's pretty damn demonetized. And, and, you know, there's a chance and, you know, there's a chance of a reset, there's either a chance of the paper market fails, or there's a chance that, you know, a couple of really big and important countries,

I mean, you can't just write off China and Russia, that they say, okay, you know, we get it, the money's messed up, we're going to back our currency with gold. And that would be meaningful. That would be very meaningful. So there's room for both of these assets. There's plenty of room for both of these assets. I think, I don't know if we did it in the discussion beforehand, but I often say there's $450 trillion of financial stuff out there, cash, stock, bonds. There's about 1.1 or 1.2 trillion of Bitcoin. There's 10 trillion of gold, but really a lot of it doesn't trade. A lot of it's in the antiquities and the central banks. There's about 5 trillion of tradable gold. There's about 1 trillion of gold stocks. So you take 5 trillion of tradable gold,

you add 1 trillion of gold stocks, and you add a little over a trillion of Bitcoin. So you call it 7 trillion of what I consider to be hard money investments. You got 450 trillion of financial assets you got seven trillion of hard money investments what happens when that 450 realizes they're in a burning house and says themselves holy this thing's losing value every day i gotta get me some of that gold or that bitcoin i mean if we went to just the rate we were at in the 1980 period gold was seven percent of total financial assets so seven percent of 450 today is 32 trillion okay so that would take the seven to the 32 so we'd almost have a five pack okay in, you know, if we just reset to the 1980 level, and I think we're going to reset to much higher

than the 1980 level. I mean, that was, you know, that was jacks for openers in terms of inflation. I mean, you know, this inflation we've got coming, it's going to make the 70s look like child's play. So, you know, if the total sound money assets go up 5x, you know, and how's that going to get split between Bitcoin and gold? Probably Bitcoin is going to do better because it's emerging and it's got a technological advantage. And, you know, I don't disagree that it's in many ways, it's superior to gold but you know it's not superior in every single way and you know and by the way i mean there's six billion people that know that gold is money you know i mean do to the you know to the poor people in lots of areas know that bitcoin is money probably not you know and

it's going to take time until six billion people accept bitcoin as money so yeah you can also make the argument may piss off some bitcoiners but it shouldn't like maybe the network itself like could it take on 6 billion people right now from a tech perspective oh i think it could i mean probably not at the base labor layer i mean you know as you know once the mining reward goes down enough i mean i met with safe once and he said to me look you know this is i mean so the mining reward will be too small even at whatever it is even a high bitcoin price you know this is the bitcoin the base layer network it's going to be like moving money it's going to be it's going to be like moving a super tanker i mean everything's going to be so damn valuable and you've got the

block size can only be so large, you got one every 10 minutes, that, you know, I mean, it may transaction may cost $50,000, or something, but, but who cares, because you're going to be moving a trillion dollars. And as a percentage, it's going to seem very slow. And but that's why you've got these other layers, right? That's why you've got the lightning network. And, you know, and those will scale to handle billions, right. And so, you know, it's, it's a beautiful thing, the way they've kind of layered it up. And so I can see where it's going to work. I mean, i believe over time solutions will be found yeah to let all six billion people in yeah no yeah i agree too in terms of like if hyperinflation happens the next year or two they won't all

be trading at the base layer though i mean you know and and and having one coin is going to be just like holy shit you own an entire coin are you kidding me you know i mean i mean seriously i think that's you know i think that's what our grandkids will say you're a whole you're a whole coiner yeah right are you on a whole coin yeah actually more than one it's uh that's fascinating time yeah sometimes i mean that's why i really like your piece because you that's the other thing too there's been so many warnings throughout history about money don't fuck up the money again like you said the founding fathers yeah put it in the constitution we've seen aristotle talk about it jesus oh yeah throughout the money changers and that's one thing you reference is the uh

the impure measures in your in your speech yeah honest weights and measures i mean it's right in the freaking bible i mean look this has been going on for hundreds of years there's been a hundred hyperinflations in the last 200 years you know how much misery that's caused do you know you know i mean how many i mean seriously think of the families the lives wrecked i mean just it's horrible right i mean it's it's really bad and i mean this is and this is basic stuff and yet the krugmans and the keynesians of the world they just don't get they won't even acknowledge it they won't even acknowledge it they make fun of it and then they talk about trillion dollar coins you know it's just i mean and they get nobel prizes right i mean it's like

well they're they're number one now because they're like the gold standard led to the depression right i mean that's just a complete lie i mean once again it just it just shows you that you know you can control the narrative for so long but unfortunately i mean but but but natural law wins out, right? I mean, humans aren't entirely stupid. Some are, but many aren't. And natural law wins out. And so, you know, people will slowly but surely, this change is taking place. I mean, you know, all of human history, all 6,000 years of recorded human history is, you know, crime and folly, but we have been making advances over time. And, you know, the big advance of this next century and this fourth turning will be sound money. I mean, I read this, it's in my speech,

I talk about our grandkids are going to sit around and say, can you believe that these idiots let some central bankers control the money and control the interest rates and control the money? What the hell were they thinking? They had to be out of their mind. Of course, the whole thing collapsed. You can't have that kind of a system. I get it's evil, right? Because it was thrust on people. Well, yeah, I agree with you.

It is evil. But, you know, the people who were in it, they actually, I mean, evil is pretty banal. I mean, you know, you I mean, you know, I mean, the entire German population was evil. No, I mean, some are just doing their job. You know what I mean? I mean, I know people who work at the Federal Reserve and I have a hard time like they're in the middle somewhere. I have a hard time pointing to that's an evil guy.

I mean, I think the Fed is an evil organization. You know, I think Jerome Powell is evil when he says that the Fed isn't leading to wealth inequality. He knows better, you know what I mean? but you know the average guy who's working at the fed is he an evil person i don't know i mean he's probably just misguided and he you know he's looking for a paycheck to go home with at night you know the fed gave him a job he's looking for that prestige on the resume right well that's right that's right i mean there's some of that i mean you know look i i don't think he's as

righteous as as bitcoiners or sound money people or people who you know work an honest day for their for their income i mean i you know um but i'm and i'm not sure i mean you know who was it said i mean it's um it's hard to convince a man of you know something that's true if his income depends on him not believe i think it was upton sinclair who said that you know his income depends on him not believing it right yeah there's a lot of that going on for sure a ton of it yeah i guess i'll end it on this question do you think bitcoin breaks the wheel how if bitcoin succeeds oh yeah oh yeah oh this is this in my opinion i mean i god i pray and hope it does i mean and i and i actually believe it does too i mean i think i think it's it's almost god-given that that we

were able to invent this thing that that solves the biggest problem of our time and that it's getting widely and widely adopted and i think human beings as messed up as we are you know over time, we're slowly but surely bouncing off the guardrails to going in the right direction. And I'm very convinced we will be on a sound money standard. We will be on a Bitcoin standard. Gold will be a piece of it too. And that will happen, in my opinion, within the 10 to 15-year time window with some rough ups and downs. I mean, one thing people should do is you should go and Google, get on Twitter or just Google the Myrmican, M-Y-R-M-I-K-A-N, Weimar volatility chart, because it shows you the ups and downs and the gold price as measured in marks during

the Weimar hyperinflation. And this is why earlier, remember, we were talking about leverage. You know, this is going to be volatile, right? This is going to be really volatile. And, you know, my big caution I would have, having been at this for 30 some odd years, almost 40 years of investing would be um don't get leveraged you know know what you own know why you own it be you know be ready for the down draw down maybe keep some cash to buy the dip i mean and that's let me let me make this other point this is important too and people say well you

should be 100 bitcoin well okay if i had been 100 bitcoin in 2018 or 19 i wouldn't have been able to So I was buying Bitcoin at $17,000, 2017, Christmas time. You know, I was with everybody else. I'm thinking that's going to $50,000 or $100,000, right? Of course, it falls to $10,000. I double down. It falls to $35,500 and a half. I double.

Where did I get the money to double down? I sold gold. I had gold to sell, right? So, you know, you got a volatile asset. There's an argument for having another asset that's less volatile. You know, the volatile asset goes on a great run and it goes to 250. Maybe you sell a little bit. Maybe you buy a little gold.

The 250 collapses back to 125. Huh, okay, on a relative basis, that sounds cheap again. Maybe I'll buy, you know, take that gold and sell it and buy some Bitcoin. You know, in my opinion, there's wisdom to, you know, in asset allocation and dollar cost averaging. You know, I've seen that as an investor over the years. And that's my biggest argument to Bitcoin people. I mean, fine, you believe in it. You want to be super heavy Bitcoin, great.

Hold 10% gold on the side. You know what I mean? Just hold it. Because if you get a big dip, you're going to want to be able to sell the gold to buy the dip, right? And to gold people, don't go all gold. That's ridiculous. You've got this super sound, super rapidly growing money that's adopting, that's doing

two things. One, it's reflecting the dilution of the money, the debasement. But two, you've got an adoption curve, and you're at 10%, and it's about to get widely adopted. It's a no frigging brainer. If you don't have some Bitcoin allocation and you're a sound money person, you've got to be shot. I mean, seriously. I mean, you just don't get it. I mean, I don't know what Peter Schiff is thinking.

I just don't know. And I know a lot of other cool guys who have the same kind of view. Now, and so if we define the brackets as 90-10 one way or 90-10 the other way, and then I think everybody's got to make a choice. okay where do i feel where do i fall in that spectrum what am i comfortable with i mean just to give you some data my fund is 80 gold because i have the history of that it's 20 bitcoin but that that's growing fast you know personally i'm more like 60 bitcoin 40 gold you know because yeah so because i mean you know i'm talking about my pa you know which more or less including my allocation of my fund and so forth so yeah um because i believe very strongly in bitcoin

well i do as well thank you for i mean i know it well i'm not i would imagine you don't give a shit but i know i know it is a bit controversial to be um in the gold space and to be espousing bitcoin yeah it is i mean i look like it's the thing that sucks about where i am is i get shits from both sides you know the toxic say you know i'm talking about gold and i'm you know they're like some guy said uh you know why would you bring a horse when the car is available yeah okay Well, they both beat walking. And on the other side, I got, you know, I got the gold guy saying, you know, are you going to believe this magic fairy dust Ponzi scheme, you know, bullshit, you know, blah,

blah, blah. And I'm like, no, you don't really understand it. You know, it's immutable. Money is just a record. It doesn't have to be physical, you know, and this is an immutable record and it's been adopted and it's growing. It's got a huge network effect going on. I mean, as I told you, I was a big investor in the internet in 93 and it worked out great.

this feels just like the internet to me just the same thing this this thing is going to eat the world it is just going to eat the world but but vol in a volatile way in a volatile way so don't don't forget that piece don't use leverage freaks yeah don't use leverage yeah well one last thing i just curious myself is we've been having this conversation you've been saying i've learned i've learned like how long as an investor i think this would be productive and um good perspective for the audience here like how long did it take you to be comfortable as a quote-unquote investor how many years decades you have a lot of i'm still not but you know what you know what is great about investing marty is that it's one of you know like some you'll see in your age and a lot of things

in your life as you age it sucks kind of things go the wrong way right investing is actually an intellectual exercise where seeing cycles it does get better and it gets easier because you can see this pattern recognition and so I mean I must say for the first 10 years I kind of felt like I was groping around really didn't know what the hell I was doing fortunately I was with some older guys who were showing me and they prevented me from making what would have been some really stupid and fatal errors so I spent 10 years kind of apprenticing and had guys who were 20 or 30 years older than me, keeping me out of danger. Then I learned enough to be, you know, okay. I think I would say five to 10 years in, I felt pretty comfortable. I didn't feel like I had it

all nailed, but it was kind of like, okay, I get the drill here. I can do this, you know? And so for that next 10 or 20 years, you know, I could do it and, you know, ups and downs, made mistakes, but it was all good. It was all generally good. And then, so now I'm 30 years in and it starts to feel easy. You know, it really starts to feel easy because it's kind of like, oh yeah, I've seen this before i know exactly what this is you know oh yeah arc oh i get it you know this is munder net net i mean you know the the stock market today the triple q's i mean this is the internet in 2000 you know i mean it's you just the pattern recognition piece of it becomes very very ingrained and you you know i mean did you see the video that was on the the web this reason

the guy who was talking about a stock he didn't even know what they did yeah right i'm having technical difficulties i can't quite hear you right i mean that was so classic right i mean if that's not march of 2000 then i've never seen it i mean i was investing in march of 2000 i remember the mood perfectly it's the exact same thing right i mean i strongly feel this just my gut your your your listeners may totally disagree i'm pretty sure the top is in for the stock market stock market's done put a fork in it yeah we're not the triple q's they're not going higher tesla i mean all all the sexy stocks they've seen their top i mean i'm not i'm not a short seller but you know if i were um and and i could be wrong there's one there's one

possible exception to that statement and that is if we have a crack-up boom then everything's going higher right if we haven't you know because the venezuelan stock market and hyperinflation took off yeah right and the weimar stock market took off so if we have a total collapse crack-up boom then it's going higher but absent that if we kind of continue tripping along with the system i think the top's in yeah crack up and everything's worthless essentially so well that's right that's right yeah yeah well thank you for well thank you i really enjoyed it um and i i hope i've added some value and helped your listeners a bit um well you know i know you've added value to my life in the last few weeks we've been interacting uh and to me personally so i i assume that'll be

felt by some of the freaks out there at least i'm sure you will get the annoying bitcoiners i'm sorry guys uh that will be attacking you but i i i can live with it you know my my skin's gotten thicker i mean look it's everybody's entitled to their opinion and and uh you know i mean some people have to learn stuff the hard way too i mean i do see i do some see some people particularly the stock market bulls who are really all bulled up on the market boy i gotta tell you i feel like they got a hard lesson coming they really do it this market could this market could fall 50 percent no problem absolutely no problem higher inflation you know it's going to squeeze i mean we're at peak profit margins of peak multiples that just can't continue with higher inflation just can't

you know i mean it's it's it's over it's just over so all the uh the gold and macro guys i've been talking to in the last month they they see deflation um and financial asset prices coming up especially i mean just look at the commodities market you look at supply chains too like yeah right these economies aren't uh light switches like the supply chain issue is not going to be resolved anytime soon which is a shame and scary and then the energy just compounds that and it's part of it uh yeah yeah it's uh yeah yeah it'll be fun it'll be interesting to watch and i'm i'm i'm glad to have met you and hope that uh we can continue the correspondence because it's been fun and it's been a lot of fun good luck in new orleans this week freaks yeah thanks when uh

when larry's piece is finally published which should be any day now um go read it if you haven't already um this will probably be posted on the day it is published or yeah it's thursday thursday morning i'll i'll publish it and thursday i deliver the speech so it'll be out there i'll put it on twitter all right this will be the day before so you'll you'll have uh this will come out the day before i get it unless you want me to send no no that's great whenever you no please put it out before yeah okay there will be some anticipation you guys will have to wait some some amount of hours before you're able to read it but i highly recommend you do read it when it does become available larry thank you for coming on oh thanks marty i really enjoyed it i'm definitely

about to do this again i can't wait to meet in person to have a steak with you uh absolutely i'd like to do that yeah keep fighting the good fight we are the remnant this is uh that's a fact that's a fact we'll win we'll win we've got you know we've got a tailwind with the stuff's on our side i mean it's just be ready for some ready for some zigs and zags i've been doing this a long time i can tell you we've got you know they're going to be curveballs coming at us you know but but we'll be fine. Prepare, freaks. Prepare.

Yeah, no leverage. Keep the leverage manageable. That's my big piece of advice. Yes. All right. Peace and love, freaks. Thanks.