TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #311: Surging commodities prices, de-dollarization and bitcoin with Lawrence Lepard

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

Join Marty as he sits back down with Lawrence Lepard and discuss surging commodities prices, de-dollarization and bitcoin. Follow Lawrence Lepard on Twitter Read more from Lawrence at Equity Management Associates Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Bitcoin 2022 - use the code TFTC for 10% off

freaks it's happening feels like it's happening right now downfall of the dollars accelerating the monetary transition is upon us I mean it has been upon us but now it's extremely apparent

just sat down Larry Lepard incredible human incredible sound money advocate incredible warrior in this journey to fix the money I think I meant to say it towards the end of the

conversation and to put forward a call to action since I forgot it during the conversation I'm going to put it the call of action in the pre-show dialogue that we have here. Share this far and wide. It is important to get

this message out there. I'm not trying to like growth hack downloads or anything. I think I truly believe that the message that Larry shares in this episode needs to be heard by as many people as possible. People need to understand what is going on, the gravity of the

situation and the options that individuals have laid before them right now. I highly recommend you share this with family, friends, whoever you think would be receptive to this episode. We need to educate as many people as possible about the importance of sound money

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If 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. Mr. Lepard, what is going on in the world? what's not going on in the world this is stunning stuff i mean kind of you know once every 20 or 30

years sort of stuff it's really shocking to me well it's it's for me it's like okay we expected uh trends to move in this direction trends being de-dollarization people fleeing to harder assets and a correction in the monetary balance of the world. Did you expect it to play out like this, how it has the last month particularly? I sure didn't. It just goes to show you can never figure out what the trigger is or what the snowflake is

that'll trigger the avalanche. But the two, you know, the drinking word for this podcast ought to be counterparty risk, right? And the, you know, it started with Trudeau, right? He says, you know, you send a donation to some guys who are protesting and I can grab your money. And then it got escalated to the sovereign level, you know, and obviously, you know, what Putin did was an illegal act. But in the U.S. says, you know, you invade a country without authority, you know, commit a war crime and we can grab all your foreign reserve assets. And, you know, so whose money is this anyway?

I mean, if you're, you know, these governments are basically saying, you know, your money is ours. And it's just shocking. I mean, it's like a walk, as I said, you know, just before we got started here, it's like a walking advertisement for non-state money, you know, Bitcoin and gold. It's just, it's stunning. Absolutely stunning. It is. And it's, again, it's sort of like an emperor wears those clothes situation, particularly for the US, because especially with the sanctions against Russia, I completely agree. what's going on in ukraine is is obviously an illegal act but the us gets put in this weird

situation where they look like a bunch of hypocrites it was like hey just like 20 years ago you went into iraq and afghanistan under false pretenses and similar things as you and i have discussed before i mean there's plenty of government misbehavior to go around on all sides i mean using the nuremberg war crime standards you know george Bush is a war criminal for starting the Iraq war. There's no doubt about that. And here, these guys are kind of doing the same thing. I mean, these governments are just playing by their own hard and fast rules that they can do whatever they want to do. And what it tells everybody else in the world, I mean, everybody's watching this, right? And your foreign reserves, if you're a

country, your foreign reserves or your accumulated surplus of things you've done and worked hard for and sold in and above, you know, what you purchased. And that's like your savings account. And, you know, to know that you have them in the Western financial system and the Western financial system says, hey, you know, we don't like what you're doing politically. We can grab your stuff. It's like, wow, that's an earthquake. And I mean, even China, which is obviously kind of aligned with Russia in this whole

thing, they got to be thinking hard about that as well. Right. I mean, they've got a lot of foreign reserves. So opens just an enormous Pandora's box. And I think is, you know, I mean, like I said, it's an advertisement for stateless money. I mean, you know, if this doesn't create huge demand for gold and Bitcoin, nothing ever will. Yeah, well, I think it's a very interesting situation. It is obvious that Russia and China, to a certain extent, have maybe been preparing for a bifurcation from the dollar system over the last couple of decades.

They've been accumulating a lot of gold. russia's been dumping treasuries and again you've been tweeting a lot the last few days about the commodities markets and that's why i'm very excited to speak with you particularly because i think what we're finding right now is that's where a lot of the signal of of what's actually happening is is located right now is in commodities markets whether it be energy prices grain prices metal prices the stock markets have fallen but i don't think they're quite right Well, it's a great question, and it's the right area to be looking at. The tricky part is that there are two things going on in there.

There's one, the debasement of currency, so the prices are going up as a result of that. The other is, of course, the supply disruptions. And if you're not going to get supply, of course, that can lead to panic buying. That's some of what we've seen. But related to that, and a point I think is important to make is that people say, and I credit Luke Groman for helping me a lot in the thinking through of this, although I could understand some of it without his help. People say, what did Putin do here? What was the whole point? Was this really about missiles on his border? Was it about all his other grievances

with the West? I mean, who knows? But to me, the signal that comes through in Putin's move is that Putin is very much here behaving the way Charles de Gaulle did in the 60s. I mean, so he's got a country that has a lot of natural resources, and they sell those natural resources for paper dollars that we can print. And I think he just called our bluff on these paper dollars. And he just said, you know what? We're tired of that. We're not going to play that game anymore. You know, we don't like how you treat us politically. You haven't treated us well. You know, you haven't listened to us. You don't allow us to be a partner at the table when we try to be a partner at the table. And there are times when they have tried. And we understand

that what keeps your system going is this paper gold fiat system. And as a result of that, But we call. We're calling you. And you need to now start to pay us with real money, not fake money. These guys, Putin and these guys, he sent representatives to the GATA conferences in the past that learned about the gold suppression scheme. And if you look at the gold suppression scheme in the petrodollar, and really the dollar standard that we're on as the world's reserve currency, that's what's allowed us to have

all our power. And he knows it. And I think he reached the point at which he saw us as being vulnerable and he got fed up and he said, okay, I call, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to go start a war and everything you need, I've got, I don't really need much from you. I mean, he exports, you know, hundreds of trillions, at least two or $300 trillion worth of real stuff. And he only imports, you know, between 40 and 80 trillion or billion, I'm sorry, billion dollars worth of machine tools and equipment, other things that we make. And he can get that probably and get around the sanctions. And so to me, what he just did is he shot the dollar in the head. He really did. He just came out and he just shot the dollar in the head. And

in my mind, it's almost a certainty now that the dollar reserve currency is going to collapse and we're going to have hyperinflation. I mean, I always kind of thought this was coming because of the way the math worked. But now I can see the path of how we get from where we are today to having that happen. Because what are we going to do? I mean, you know, we've got enormous inflation. What's Powell going to do? Come out and try and increase interest rates? I mean, to stop the inflation? I mean, one, it won't work. You know, two, the inflation is going to continue. And three, you know, Gresham's law is going to kick in here in a very big way. And as it does, more and more people are going to realize the only way to protect your wealth is to have

stateless money, because the state can't make the money good. I mean, it's amazing how far out over their skis the state is on all this paper money we've printed. And you and I talked about this in our last meeting, you know, the, I mean, we can get into it in the future, but in this conversation, but you know, the amount of paper gold that's out there is just stunning. And the correct gold price is multiples of today's price, just multiples of it. Your wife won't believe it until it hits $3,000. No, my wife doesn't believe that. Yeah. Well, you know, she's been long suffering and I, to be honest with you, I've been long suffering and all us gold bulls have been long-suffering. And all the Bitcoin guys had a lot of laughing at our expense the last couple

of years because you guys got a five-bagger and we've been sitting flat. And these two assets are going to see-saw back and forth. And I've often said and I always said they're both great assets. And in some ways, Bitcoin's better. In many ways, Bitcoin's better. But in some ways, gold's better. And that's why I've never gone 100% one way or 100% the other way. Not that I criticize anybody who wants to. I mean, if you're young and you can take the risk and handle the volatility, Bitcoin's probably the better way to go. But, you know, my investors can't handle that volatility. And so I've balanced the two. And I think that's the intelligent approach. And one of the things I always had in the back of my mind was this East-West dynamic. I mean,

you know, the West is all based on fiat. The East is very much based on commodities, particularly Russia. And, you know, China and Russia have made an enormous, as you pointed out in the earlier part of the conversation, China and Russia have made an enormous bet on gold. enormous and and they're going to have a seat at the table i mean you know russia has the largest pile of natural resources china has the most you know productive manufacturing capacity and the rest of the world has a lot of good stuff too but all three of those groups are going to have a seat at the monetary table in my opinion when we reset yeah and as an american sitting here right now i feel very vulnerable right like because the factors that you just mentioned like russia and

china are producing commodities that the world needs the united states has hollowed out its manufacturing base and financialized its economy it's essentially a service economy economy built around the fiat monetary system and trying to gain that any way possible and now as it becomes pretty clear that that may be coming to an end like we need to begin reshuffling at home to to protect ourselves and become more secure yes and no i mean i you know look this is a great country and a lot of great people here and you know you really look at you listen to the russians carefully you listen to chinese carefully i mean a lot of things are wrong with those countries but a lot of times they want to be like us you know the only thing that's the thing that's messed up

america in my opinion is we've been just so hubristic we've been so arrogant i mean if you know these countries in the world i mean china has said repeatedly they don't want a war but they've also said repeatedly that we take advantage of our strong dollar system. Putin has said the same thing. He said he wanted to be a part of NATO way back when. I mean, these countries want to be like us. The problem we've got is we've got elites in our country that are sickos. I mean, we've got these neocons, and we've got this military-industrial complex who just live off of war, and they want to create conflicts. I mean, I don't think the average Russian wants to kill me. i don't want to kill the average russian i don't think the average chinese guy wants to kill me i

don't want to kill the average chinese guy but i'll tell you what there are people at the top of our government who basically you know live to have people fighting with one another because it puts them in power and you know as you would say bitcoin fixes this right yeah we got to fix it we really do and it's like do you so how does bitcoin play into this situation in the short to medium term right because i'm sure there's obviously been a lot of talk about russia turning the union pay which is one of china's payment rails and it seems like they may be dead set on creating their own gold-backed cbdcs or something like that as well do you see china and russia adopting bitcoin at all or doing more in-depth research i think china's less like we

all know they shoved out the miners which you know i think i think you know something distributed and and private like bitcoin is kind of anathema to a communist system but both of these countries have you know somewhat adopted capitalism and we're all kind of merging towards some common system um you know russia kind of shut it down but then the word i got was that gas prom went to Putin said, no, no, no, we're mining this stuff and making money off of mining it. Don't be so harsh. And I think as they both come to study it strategically, they'll realize that to the degree they don't embrace it, they've made an enormous error, as Jason Lowery has pointed

out. So I'm not sure how it all shakes out. I mean, yeah, look, everybody at the top would love to shove us all into CBDCs and control our spending and you know, live in, live in a Klaus Schwab world, you know, where we own nothing and we're happy, but, you know, the problem they've got is there aren't very many of them and there are a lot of us and, uh, you know, we're not going to put up with it. And, uh, um, so I, you know, I'm very optimistic that the continual, um, the weakness of these currencies is going to lead to alternatives and those alternatives are going to also solve our political problem. I agree. Cause I think

this is something that many people severely underlook right now which is the collapsing confidence in these institutions like to think those out there like no we're going to switch to a cbdc the the fed's gonna create this thing it's like people are losing confidence in mass in these political institutions and banking institutions to think that they're going to watch the systems that they built over the last decades collapse and then trust them to build a new one just seems a bit far-fetched to me completely i mean you know i think the biggest trend of the time is that the you know even even people who are you know not necessarily as plugged in or as bright about what's going on are just becoming incredibly disillusioned because of all

the lies that have been told continually you know and it's gotten worse and worse and and you know as people study the system they come to realize the system rewards people who lie and they get that's how they get to the top and you know but that will change it has to change because the system is going to reset itself and that we know is really kind of a mathematical certainty so yeah so what would you say the average joe out there listening right now or what or not the average listening but like how do you see this transition and this moment affecting the common man and you were tweeting about a hyperinflationary induced depression yeah i mean sadly sadly i think the transition period here is going to be hard very hard on a lot of people and i you know i guess

it's horrible but uh you know i didn't build this system i just live within it and all we can each do as individuals is fight to try and make it a better system and protect ourselves i mean i think that um you know people who are honest and work hard and will have productive capacity on other side are going to be just fine. I think I've said in the past, I would avoid leverage and I would keep my savings in sound money. And I think the two forms of sound money that most people should own are Bitcoin and gold. Obviously, we've talked about that a lot. Sadly, you see all these commodity prices shooting up, and that's a symptom of shortages and the currency failing. The flip of that, though, is that, you know, $200 oil or $150 oil and $8 gasoline, I mean, this is going

to lead to a recession, right? And then you're going to start having people laid off and then demand is going to fall. I mean, one of the great problems with this interconnected economic system that we've got is every input, you know, it's like the butterfly's wings that they flap and it gets felt around the world. And so, as I've said in the past in other podcasts, I mean, I think the Fed is kind of driving a clown car between, you know, one guardrail, which is extreme inflation, and another guardrail, which is deflation, because, you know, and so they, you know, until this whole thing happened, you know, Powell was talking about raising rates, and everyone was saying, oh, they're going to raise them nine times, and

think about, you know, they were clamped, right? And maybe they would have. I mean, certainly they had to. I mean, their credibility was fading fast. So I suspect they would have started to try. Maybe they still will. But the point is that, OK, so let's say they do that. Let's say they close off demand.

Let's say in doing that, the bond market tanks, the stock market tanks. And by the way, the stock market, the wealth effect of the stock market is a huge component of everybody's spending. I mean, you wipe out the stock market, and everyone's going to feel a lot poorer. And then we're going to suddenly be heading towards the Great Depression, because a system that's as indebted as our system is, that's the problem, right? I mean, we should have let the system reset in 2003. We should have let it reset in 2008.

You know, we're well beyond the point. We've been shoving coins in the fuse box for a long time. And so if we ever let it naturally reset, you know, it would look like the 1930s. And so, you know, we can't really do that or they can't really do that, in my opinion, because they can't take the political pain. So my, you know, in the inflation, deflation, balance and debate, I think eventually they'll break through the inflation guardrail. Because I think, you know, if things do start to slow down and it does start to get rough, which I think is going to happen, you know, one thing they will not

let happen is they will not let the markets fail. And, you know, I mean, what did it take? It took, you know, $3 trillion post-2008, but then spread out over three years. I mean, we printed $3 trillion in, what, eight, nine months of COVID. And this one, I mean, let's say this one really gets to be big. You know, I could easily see this being $9, $10, $15, $20 trillion. I mean, it's just each one gets bigger, right? And at what point does everyone say, hey, you know what? These guys can't stop. The system is designed to blow apart. And when that happens, that's really Gresham's law. I mean, if you study the history of hyperinflations, it happens when a majority of the people come to the conclusion that, oh, my God, there is absolutely no way

they can stop this printing or else it will collapse. Therefore, what I am holding is going down in value. I need to hold something else. And so everyone says, well, there's no monetary velocity. Therefore, you can't get inflation. Well, you watch monetary velocity. When everyone thinks the dollar is going to fail, which it is, there's going to be a lot of monetary velocity as everybody buys gold and buys Bitcoin. I mean, a lot. Or houses. I mean, we've already seen some Gresham's law on housing, in my view. I mean, part of the reason why houses are up 20% year on year versus the 2008 example is that, I mean, even in the 2008 housing boom, there was never a year they're up more than 14%. I mean, to me, everyone there, they're just putting on the Hugo Stennis

trade, which was, you know, lever yourself up and buy something real, right? I mean, the government will give you 30 year money at 3% to buy something you can live in. Well, guess what? People aren't fools. They're like, oh yeah, if I can afford it, I'm going to do that. Because you know, that, that thing I'm buying is going up 20% a year and it only costs me 3% to buy it. And I can use a lot of leverage. You know, that, that makes total sense, right? yeah i mean just sitting here in austin texas it's insane seeing how i mean austin has a interesting dynamic where many people are leaving in the northeast in california to to come to the new tech hub but um it's being compounded by everything as well yeah it is

and i'm not suggesting that's necessarily always a good trade because if you get too far out over your skis you buy more house than you need you know you lose your job and now you can't make the payments i mean you know to the degree we we veer towards the deep inflationary guardrail housing is going to fall a lot i mean in the depression my grandfather there's a house that was in birmingham michigan that sold for i don't know 30 000 40 000 dollars in in the 20s late 20s and he bought it for seven you know in 1932 so you know that's quite a drop right yeah Yeah, it's very interesting times. And it will be like, what does the Fed do?

When does that collapse in confidence happen? I think it's happening in real time, right? Because this is game on. I mean, it's happening, right? I mean, you had Jerome Powell come out and say what you're not allowed to say as the Fed governor last week, which is there could be more than one reserve currency. I mean, I think that's him signaling to the market. the best that he can like hey the gig may be up here well and i think i saw nick samaros the guy

from the wall street journal who's the fed guy you know asked him said are you know are you going to be judged if you're able to stop inflation are you know are you going to be able to stop inflation and he said you know kind of yeah i hope so i mean but but there was there was a condition i mean he used the word hope right i mean it's look i i think i think there's trembling going on all over the place in the halls of power i mean absolute trembling i mean you know they they they're not stupid they know how much trouble they're in yeah and um you know what what i'm watching for is to see you know how they react and what the next moves are and what the new narrative is i mean they're they're undoubtedly trying to craft that right now well you know

it's i mean the situation with russia and ukraine is definitely exacerbating the situation uh or the the the inflation situation but they're trying to throw it all on that like oh no it's the situation that's yeah I mean there's some who can say that we arguably pushed them right to that point you know and I mean this very conveniently it's like the Ukraine dog ate my homework here on an inflation right but but I mean it was inflation was roaring before the Ukraine this is making it worse I mean I think it's interesting that Putin chose this as the to do it i mean i think he realized we were vulnerable well yeah you're coming out of a global supply chain crunch and then you can compound that on the energy and commodity side

specifically it's just there's fuel in that fire to the point where you have joe biden going to nicholas maduro asking him like to sell us venezuelan oil to right and yeah i mean if If Putin wanted to be seen as more of a statesman and less of a thug, what he should do is he should pivot, he should declare peace, accept whatever they're going to give him out of the Ukraine, try and get a guarantee that he doesn't get missiles on his doorstep, and then say, look, guys, really, behind all this, what was really bugging me was that you guys have had the US reserve currency, and you've abused the world for 30 years, and we're tired of it.

We're going to a gold standard, period. and if you do that you know i'll sit here peacefully and we'll play our role i mean if if he did that you know he'd be a historical figure of some significance in a more positive light than he's being seen today i agree and and that if he does put the ball in in the west court like that and that puts the west in a very precarious situation then they'll look like a boogeyman in history because the alternative to beating at the table and doing that is world war three and they well that's right and that and that's and that's what's horrifying i mean that's what's absolutely horrifying that um you know that i mean you know if you've read a lot of history

and you read how world war one got going and everyone thought it would be short and quick and nothing serious and then you look at what happened and uh you know you kind of see some of the similar historical accidents being made here i mean everyone's you know oh it's just a little thing in the ukraine it's not that big a deal you know nobody could know it would never go nuclear it would never get serious we would never enter blah blah blah i hope all those things are true um because i've got kids you know and uh you know i mean world war ii we slaughtered you know 50 million people um historically you know most fourth turnings have had wars involved having said that you know we've now got the form of ultimate war which i've always hoped would be

the kind of thing that would prevent us from from blowing ourselves up um in other words the knowledge that we could actually kind of is the safety valve you know there's no such thing as a limited nuclear war right yeah let's hope it's limited to an information where obviously we have a hot war in ukraine right now but i think yeah we're in a battle for the minds of of the masses it's crazy um seeing the way normal people are being sort of ginned up to support like war efforts like we're seeing my wife was on instagram yesterday and she's like there's a bunch of people's stories or they're posting like hey inflation is is the price of uh punishing russia like it's temporary like higher prices at the pump and at the grocery store are worth it for

for peace in the long term and these are obviously privileged upper middle class to upper class individuals who don't understand that that inflation is really going to affect the poor people uh pre like very hard and and then on top of that it's not a solution to your you're they don't even recognize that we're not going to like economically choke russia out in the way they think we are because they have all the commodities well and yet the other thing i think the west doesn't realize is you know the russian people have endured one hell of a lot over their history and i would i would bet on their their ability to take pain i would suspect is a lot a lot higher than the woke west's ability to take pain

you get a yeah they've had several they've had several hyperinflations the last 20 years i mean it's they've seen their currency be wiped out several times they've you know they lost multiples of what we lost in World War II. These are not lightweight people. Look, it's a very sad situation. I think the only hope, in my view, is that we can get enough people in the West educated to the fact that this is stupid and we can help those who are suffering through this thing in inflation. we can change the political structure to get back to sound money. I mean, that's, that's, because at the bottom of it all, I mean, you know, my, my Twitter handle is, you know, and I borrowed

it from somebody, I can't recall who now, but, you know, fix the money, fix the world. I mean, that's, that is the issue, right? At the bottom of all of these problems, you know, having unsound money is, is what's created this mess. And it's the, and it's, by the way, it's where the war is being fought. I mean, I really think what Putin did was he shot the petrodollar in the head, very much in the way that charles de gaulle did it in 1967 when he started asking for all his gold back that forced nixon to go off the gold standard i think that's what this is about what do you what do you think is necessary like again we're talking about like the hubris and the sociopathic tendencies of our leaders here in the west like how do we shake them and say

we're not going in the world war three you need to enact some extreme ownership recognize the precarious situation you put yourself in due to hubris and bullying on the world stage like it's time to eat some humble pie and then like people will say oh you're un-american like you're you're not a patriot whatever it's like no you need to be everybody needs to be realistic about the situation here's absolutely here's the landscape and we have two paths we can go down We can recognize that we messed up and we're very hubristic and put not only the U.S. but the world in a precarious situation via our bullying tactics and say, all right, we're done being bullies. Or we can double, triple, quadruple down and plunge into World War III. Yeah, well, again, that's the challenge for you, me, and all the people who feel the way we do.

And that is to try and do the best job we possibly can of educating the largest number of people that we possibly can. I mean, I'm encouraged because, you know, I'm encouraged about this country. I don't think this country is stupid and I don't think this country is a warmongering country as a general rule. I think there are parts of it which, you know, allow themselves to get sucked up into that thought pattern. but I don't think they're the majority, um, based on what I've seen in the voting history of the country. So, um, you know, as long as we don't allow ourselves to get fooled, and as long as there's a good alternative press and media and, and so forth, sorry about that. It's good. Matt, Matt's dogs bark all the time in the back of our,

yeah, you know, then, then I think, uh, I think, I think our odds are pretty good at getting out this without it being World War III. I really do. Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I think what's going to happen is we're going to have runaway inflation. It's going to be really bad. Some people at the top are going to get smart enough to understand that we need to do a sound money currency reset. I'm hoping that guys like Jason Lowery and people in the Pentagon, people in the army, think tank people, etc. There's been a lot written about this. It's not as if this isn't been studied i mean triffin's dilemma and the you know the whole reserve currency issue has been well known by many people for a long time and and so what's really going on is you've got

these old powerful elites who benefit from it who are trying to hang on to it unnecessarily and you know i mean i've i've been reading that we're going to have seven or eight dollar gasoline at labor day well you know what that means i mean that's going to be that's going to be an unmitigated disaster right i mean for this country yeah parker parker lewis texted me last night yeah i think he filled up his gas tank he was like four dollar gas in texas very spooky that's cheap i mean i you know i i just talked to somebody in connecticut who paid 550 for premium yeah but we're talking about texas texas is usually significantly cheaper than the rest rest of the country like four dollar gas here is like it's crazy yeah fair point so so you know

look the the price signals are gonna tell people there's a serious problem here and you know that's gonna that's gonna ring that's gonna come around politically i mean it's which got to speaking of timing maybe this is a timing actually works out for us and due to the fact that we're in um we've got midterms this year so maybe there's there's uh politicians who really want to get a seat at the table and this is what they can campaign on like hey recognizing that we messed up and if i get in there i haven't seen much of that i mean the last politician i ever really liked was ron paul but um i haven't seen a lot of that but but we have seen some support for bitcoin and that's encouraging, right? Um, you know, and that's, that's a sound money asset. So, uh,

you know, look, it's, it will become clear is, is my sense. Uh, at least, you know, I don't know, perhaps I'm just, I'm wildly overly optimistic and that we're going to just devolve into, you know, a complete mess and a shooting war. I mean, you know, I, I sure hope not. I really hope not. I do as well. And I, I think I share your optimism. There's too much at stake. There's so much potential yeah right as a society look at us we're video streaming from across the country right now we're sending us out to millions of people around the world and uh we've gotten this far as a society it would be an incredible shame if we were to ruin because world war three in a nuclear in a world with nuclear proliferation it doesn't work it doesn't make any sense i mean who

wants to start that nobody it just it doesn't make any sense you know which isn't to say it couldn't happen but it i think it's a low probability event to happen i think i think you know more likely we're gonna have a lot of these proxy wars like we're having now there's gonna be a lot of kind of skirmishing around at the edges you know i mean china will probably start being a little more aggressive with respect to taiwan i mean you know and look all of these great powers have interests that they're trying to protect and defend and they're trying to take care of their people. And in my view, the solution to this is decentralization, which is what the internet has brought and which is what Bitcoin brings in the monetary sphere,

right? I mean, we need to get more decentralized because it's these big centralized organizations that decide to take these, if controlled by small groups of elites that see a way to make those organizations benefit themselves, they try to take these policy paths that hurt the rest of right i mean that's really what's going on yeah and that's what again silver lining america great country and good foundation like states asserting their autonomy i mean you even had ron desantis when biden asked him to send some of the florida uh coast guard or national guard up for the state of the union he was like no thanks they're going to stay here and so that like just that one small gesture of hey we have some autonomy you can't boss me around i want to see more of that i think

we're going to see more of that. I think Bitcoin will be a part of that. Uh, that completely, completely agree. Completely agree. I mean, it's, you know, um, the, you know, people say it's un-American, you know, the thought patterns we're having here on America. I mean, there's nothing really more American if you go back to the founding documents. I mean, you know, the issue is that, you know, we've, we've gotten way, way, way far away from the founding documents, right? I mean, the founding document said only silver and gold could be money, right? I mean, how's that working out, right? Right.

Yeah. No, this is, it's almost like the American populace has been psyoped and thinking that being a good American is being a little longer and being a bottom. Not almost like, it absolutely is the case. I mean, it's, you know, they, they just, it was, it's been a long slippery slope. You know, the, the Fed got established in 1913. It was the money cartel. you know i mean it's it and the good news is though that there's you know these these technical

developments have changed the playing field i mean you know the internet really was the gutenberg press of our day right and if you consider the nation state to be you know the catholic church of the you know 14th century you know the internet is is the press and and you know they're alternative sources of information now and everyone's figuring that out and you know the new york times does not tell everybody what to think anymore. You know, people get to decide for themselves and they get together information any way they want to. And so that's a powerful change. And, and it's going to be in the long run, it's going to work out great, but in the short run, we're going to go through a real rocky monetary period, in my opinion, because I don't think the world, the world has not

experienced a sovereign debt crisis like this since the 1930s. And so there's nobody alive today who's lived through one including me well yeah well even that like this this crisis is probably going to be in order of magnitude larger in terms of the amount of debt that we've accrued well there's that yeah there there is that i mean it's it's certainly going to be larger than 08 i mean 08 was a warm-up to this or it was you know at the housing level in one country this is at the sovereign level and it's worldwide you know and more importantly it's at the sovereign level with the world's reserve currency which is the dollar yeah and so that's actually another thing i wanted to talk to you about like so obviously you are very closely

aligned and you you understand the gold market probably better than most people on the planet And there's very strong arguments to be made. I've been convinced that gold markets have been manipulated via paper for some time. What does gold break through that manipulation during this crisis? If so, what happens exactly? That's a great question and something, obviously, I spent a lot of time thinking about. I mean, so they've created a lot of paper. First of all, let's just quantify the numbers.

I think it's helpful for people to understand. And so in 1980, well, in 71, around a gold standard, you could more or less take the US gold reserves, 83,000, 8,300 tons. That's roughly 266 million ounces. You could take that divided into M1, you got the 35 bucks, which is what the set price was coming out of Brentwoods. Obviously, in the 60s, what happened is, you know, guns and butter, we started spending money.

Actually, we did a little bit before that with the Korean War, but it was just a blip. And more or less from World War II to the mid-early 60s, we ran kind of balanced budgets. We were fairly monetarily responsible. So, you know, the gold standard worked for us at that time. Then we started spending a lot of money and other countries noticed that. And so, you know, they got to the point where they said, hey, hang on a second. You're running deficits. You want us to pay for it because, you know, we're having to hold your dollars and, you

know, you're diluting your dollars. So you're more or less stealing from us. And the firm or the country that figured it out the most and the quickest was France. And that's because they had a brilliant economist there, a guy named Jacques Ruff. And he advised De Gaulle. And so they started asking for their gold back. And the U.S. had huge reserves coming out of World War II. And they started to be depleted very rapidly.

In fact, in my next quarterly, I'm going to show the chart of that, how they went from, I think it was roughly 20,000 tons down to 8,300 tons. And that whole process kind of showed that you can't spend too much without having your currency weaken. And so what happened then is in 71, Nixon broke the gold standard, as we know, and it was $35. And the market quickly picked up on the fact that we weren't getting any more fiscally responsible and drove gold from $35 to $800. Well, when it got to $800, it's interesting that at that point in time, if you did the

same math, remember in the early 60s, you could look at the money supply outstanding in ounces of gold, and we more or less were on a gold standard. By the late 70s, at the $35 an ounce, we had gone way off the gold standard because we were spending too much. By the late 70s, if you did the same math, what you find is that we were on about a 55% coverage. This is the number of ounces divided into the M1 money supply. And historically in Britain, they were able to determine that if you had 30% to 60% gold

coverage, in other words, you had that amount of gold as compared to your M1, that was good enough, because 100% of the M1 wasn't going to come ask for the gold all at one time. So anyway, the point I'm making is that in the 80s, we actually had it reasonably well covered, 55% covered. If gold had gone to $1,500 in 1980, we would have had it 100% covered. OK, fine. Volcker came in, put rates up, reassured them that they weren't going to print any more money, got money supply growth under control, and we entered a deflationary period.

Technology took off. Later on, China came in to provide low-price labor, et cetera. And so we had a very long deflationary period. Throughout that, we kept eventually, slowly but surely, running more deficits and printing more money, but nobody picked up on it, and the gold market didn't pick up on it. The reason the gold market didn't pick up on it is that we got pretty good at manipulating the gold market. And that grew out of a paper that was written by Larry Summers and Barsky called Gibson's

Paradox, which you can find on the web. And then they influenced Robert Rubin, who was an advisor to Clinton. And he was Treasury Secretary at the time. He also had been a gold trader at Goldman Sachs. And he said, look, what you need to do is grow the money supply, but you need to grow it without having inflation show up because inflation, it's a free lunch. If we can grow the money supply without having inflation show up, you're going to get great economic growth and it's not going to cost you anything. It's not going to visibly cost you

anything. What it does cost you is there's really underlying inflation in the money supply, but you can hide that. And they figured out how to hide it was they could go into the commodities paper gold markets and sell gold that they didn't have. And that's what they did. And so now you've got this enormous unallocated paper gold market. We don't know how big it is. Luke Roman's done a lot of work on it. Other guys have done work on it. Roman has done work on it. Others have done it as well. But there's clearly between $220 and $500 or perhaps as much as 1,000 ounces of paper gold for every ounce of real gold in the world. So you're running a big fractional reserve gold market that if anybody came and said, hey, please give me my gold, if everyone came at the same

time, it wouldn't be enough gold. The gold price would explode. So you've effectively created a fake market. And this is the vulnerability that Putin saw because he went to the GATA conference and learned about it, or he had a representative go to the GATA conference and learn about it. And as a result of that, that's the underlying weakness, the unallocated gold market. And there's no other commodity future which has a similar sort of structure where there's that much unallocated paper as against what's underneath it. Well, the math on, just so you know, the math on that market today, if you were to go and you look at the gold that the US holds or theoretically holds, because I think we've

probably let some of it go, but let's assume for the sake of argument that we have 8,300 tons. If you did the math on that today as compared to M1, gold would need to be $78,000 an ounce today to give 100% coverage on the gold standard. And it would need to be $25,000 an ounce today to provide 25% coverage, or 25% to 30% coverage. It's kind of the minimum necessary. As you know, $25,000 and $78,000 are a lot bigger than $2,000 or $1,800. And that shows you how far off the sound money trail that the gold and how much the gold price has been suppressed. And Bitcoiners are right. Gold is broken. Gold has not worked. Gold has

failed. But Bitcoiners are wrong about one thing. They're wrong when they say gold has an enormous monetary premium in it, because it doesn't. It's been manipulated out of it. I mean, it costs about $1,200 on average to pull an ounce of gold out of the ground. you sell it for $1,800 until just recently, $600 of profit. Well, that $600 has to, one, pay the capital to build the mine and keep the mine going, which is generally quite high. And it also has to find more gold because once you've mined gold, you've got to replace what you've mined. So it's not as if the gold business is just swimming in profits right now. I mean, it is relative to a lot of other industries. But the point I'm trying to make is that if we were

to properly try to set the price of gold relative to the money supply, it would be in a completely different zip code, as Luke likes to say. It's not going to 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000. It's going to a much higher number. And this is why other people have pointed this out. I'm not the first to do this. I mean, James Rickards has the same numbers. Dan Oliver has the same numbers. Luke has the same numbers. Roman Manley has the same numbers. I mean, there are many people who observe this. But the gold market is not at all attached to the monetary market today. And people say, well, you can't go to a gold standard. You don't have enough gold. That's bullshit. It's like saying you can't go to a Bitcoin standard. There's not enough Bitcoin. Oh, yeah, you can. You can go

to any of those standards. All you got to do is have higher prices in today's terms. That's the issue. And so what forces that issue is a run on the volts, essentially. So you'll have countries. Yeah. So there was a gold pool that happened in the 60s, the London gold pool. So when things started to come unglued in the 60s, the US started to spend too much, central banks realized that if they let the gold price get above $35, that was going to mean that there was inflation and the whole system was coming unglued. So they all pulled together and they created the London gold pool. And they did everything that people did today. They sold it at strange times. They dumped large amounts on the market. They spread rumors about how much gold was available, et cetera,

et cetera. And the whole goal was to hold gold at a $35 price, right? And they were able to do it throughout most of the 60s. And by 67, though, they just didn't have enough gold. And people, the weakness of a suppression scheme like this is that, yes, you can say, you can issue a paper claim, here's your gold, okay? But what you can't do is when somebody says, please give me the ounce, please give me the gold ounce. I want to see it. I want to hold it. I want it in my hand. Well, you can't give them a paper claim for that, right? You either have the gold ounce or you don't. And if there are 100 claims for every ounce that exists and enough people ask for the

ounce, this is musical chairs where there's only one chair and there are a lot of people circling it, right? So that's going to be the underbelly that gets, you know, it's going to bust this thing wide open. More and more people, as Gresham's Law kicks in, more and more people, I mean, what happens, This is Rickert's ICE-9 thesis, which I hadn't read until recently, but I came up with the same thesis on my own, which is what happens when gold goes up? We wake up some morning and gold is up $1,000. Then the next day, it's up another $1,000.

Then after that, would gold holders sell into it? Most probably wouldn't. I'm not sure I would. Then it goes no offer. You see where I'm going with this? I mean, you know, you this is this is a run on the bank. Right. This is this is the equivalent of, you know, I mean, if you're running a fractional reserve bank, I mean, this is you know, this is it's a wonderful life. Right. I mean, you know, there's a bank run. Oh, my God. Let's go get our money out of the bank now while we can. Right. Let's be you know, I mean, you've got to be first or there's not going to be any left for me. Well, that's that's what we're talking about. That's that's the thing that we're talking about here. I mean, there's only so much gold in the world. Gold has been money for 5,000 years.

And every human being on the planet more or less understands that there's value in gold because it's a token for the energy that it took to mine it, very much in the same way that, you know, and it's an analog token, right? Very much in the same way that Bitcoin is a digital token for the energy it took to mine it. And in many ways, that's superior because you can move it more easily, you can store it more securely. You know, you can't re-hypothecate it.

you can't create paper bit well that's not entirely true actually you can create paper bitcoin but but there isn't as much paper bitcoin today as there is paper gold and so forth so yeah if you have your your if you have your bitcoin on an exchange you have paper bit well that's right that's that's the other thing i mean it's you can own gld but you know i mean read the prospectus carefully i mean they can force measure settle you out at you know yesterday's closing price and the fact that gold's now trading at ten thousand dollar an ounce and yesterday it close to 2000 well i'm sorry i should have read the perspectives right yeah so so in your mind who actually has the gold i think that obviously there's a there's a lot of speculation about fort

knox and whether or not that's uh that's actually supplied does russia russia holds their own gold right they've been smart yeah i think i think china has a lot more than they say they have russia holds a lot you know indian indian women hold a lot yeah um sadly americans don't own nearly as much as we should um and frankly there's a lot in the ground i mean it's not as though all the gold in the world is is has been surfaced yet i mean you know we've got minds that are economic to mine at two thousand dollar gold i mean at ten thousand dollar gold you know you'd be surprised at how deep and how far and wide we can go to find more of it you know um so there's still a lot of gold in the earth's crust i mean the big fat deposits have been found i mean this is very

much very much like the oil market you know there aren't any saudi oil fields laying around in the gold business anymore you know we're down to thinner pickings but you know spending up money and you can get gold i mean there's gold in the ocean i mean you can you know i mean there are gold's in lots of places but um yeah so that's that's kind of that's kind of the background there yeah canada shouldn't have sold all your gold yeah well britain they shouldn't have sold all their gold and i mean this this actually brings up an issue that i should talk touch on because a few people asked me before this about it you know and luke uh tweeted about or uh had a podcast about this recently i mean i do get concerned that you know as we move towards gold

and Bitcoin being money, these sovereign states are going to try and do everything they can to get their arms around these two assets, because they know and understand how important they are. I mean, and so seizing gold mines, requiring people to report Bitcoin addresses, you name it. I mean, look, we're playing for all the marbles here. I mean, we're playing for all the monetary marbles. And so, you know, I mean, and so, you know, OK, it's not a kinetic war where it's going

to be a nuclear war. But, you know, an all monetary marbles war, you know, you're going to see, you know, elites and governments doing stuff that I think is going to shock you. I mean, I know I was shocked when I saw Trudeau, you know, say he could seize somebody's bank account. Now, they apparently got him to back off that a bit. But, you know, really, is that where I think they're going? And then I was further shocked when I saw the United States saying, yeah, all these Russian reserves, they're ours. I mean, really? Yeah. I mean, that's really an act of war. i mean there's just no other way to to look at it right yeah and well this is harpens back to something we're talking about earlier this is why these these media and information sources so

important to get out to the public like hey the government's done this number one executive order 6102 in in the 30s they've already confiscated people's gold which you could argue led to us being able to completely detach ourselves from any type of gold standard of brent woods like we're gonna do it we're gonna at least try to do it again with gold and bitcoin just like how do we articulate to the public like don't let this happen and bitcoin that's why i like bitcoin so much it's significantly harder to do this because you can just hold it 12 words in your head and it's it's how is it even possible to get public perception to a point where you have a mass movement to just basically put your hands out and say no we're not allowing

you to do this when they eventually and inevitably do try to do it yeah um i think it is i mean i again you know millennials will grow up you know millennials get it um you know we've already got a couple of congress people we got a couple we got to say at least one senator maybe two arguably and several congress people who get it um you know 10 plus of the population owns it in three or four years that's going to be 30 or 40 percent uh you know the word is spreading fast and you know people people you know a lot of people they shit on the american public they shit on the average american person but i i think people are just a lot smarter than people give them credit for when it comes to matters of you know their own security their own money a lot of other things

I mean, you know, the bailouts, let's take an example of the bailouts, right? The 2008 financial bailouts, right? I mean, that was an evil act. That was a criminal act. That was wrong. That was unfair. And you know what? 98% of Americans knew it.

I mean, they just, they totally got it, you know, or certainly 90% of them got it. I mean, I don't know many people who said, oh, yeah, no, that was right to bail all those people, you know, those guys out. and so you know i think if the u.s government starts coming around and saying hey you know um you know your bitcoin is our bitcoin you know we have a right to know this we have a right to know that you've got to turn you know if if if governments go draconian i think there's going to be big pushback i think there's going to be a really big push especially in america yeah i can't see i can't see americans putting up with it i just can't see it

no i can't see millennials or zoomers looking at anything you just i don't want to be mean or anything just look at the state of our leaders whether it be joe biden nancy pelosi is there all people that we want to let drive cars because they're so old they can't like but i mean i i think i think there's no doubt that you know anyone with their eyes open can see the corruption and just how deep and embedded it is all the way through. It's not specific to one party. It's specific to the system, which is sadly very, very broken. But once again, Bitcoin fixes this, it will.

Look, I think what we're looking at is going to be extremely messy, don't get me wrong. i'm extremely optimistic and um i'm actually quite excited that things are taking the pace they're taking because you know if you look at all this stuff i mean it's like you know i got a fixed time window here i mean i can't you know i can't wait 30 years for this to happen i mean you can but i can't i can but i don't want to no exactly and i think if you know if the system i mean it's like tearing a band-aid off right i mean if the system's broken which it is and we want to have a better system which you know needs to be fixed which we do all right fine let's you know let's get on with it you know let's let's rip the band-aid off fix this you know have it be bad

for a while if need be and get on it and and build the correct build a better system right i mean it's you know that's the jeff booth argument i totally agree with that yeah that's the beauty of bitcoin too the system is already being built parallel well that's right that's exactly right and i you know i i'll tell you actually one way i orange pill people these days is um i take them through the strike app and i just try and show them and i'm like you know look at this wouldn't you like to be able to pay this way and not have to pay mastercard visa you know 300 basis points you know i mean this is this is just a it's a it's it's it's going to change the world right and everybody's going to be doing it it's going to seem obvious looking backwards but looking

forward right now you know most people aren't even and when i when i start talking about strike i mean everybody's eyes blaze over nobody i know knows what strike nobody unless you're a big where you wouldn't know, right? I mean, no, they shouldn't change their name. I mean, it's going to become a household word. No, I said they're changing the game. Oh, they're changing the game. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, speaking of orange pilling, the last time we spoke, it was right before you were about to go to a gold conference in Louisiana to give a rally cry for Bitcoin to an audience of gold enthusiasts.

How was that? And how have your conversations with other gold investors been? regards to bitcoin yeah i'm glad you asked and i that speech is out there and i'm proud of it took a lot of time working on it and writing it i i've said this before in podcast i think everyone should know it i thought it was pretty interesting so first of all you go to a gold conference and there are a lot of i mean the age tends to be kind of on the older side there aren't a lot of millennials there and and probably not even you know zoomers and and and so forth and

gen z um you know or gen x i mean and so you know we've got a big audience call it a thousand people and one of the speakers had the intelligent idea to kind of ask, hey, everybody here, we know you all own gold, that's obvious. Everybody here owns Bitcoin, raise your hand. I think half the hands went up. And so I was impressed and happy about that. I mean, I think the two investment theses

align perfectly in terms of sound money, Austrian economics, what's been going wrong. And I had a few people come and argue with me and they couldn't get past the physicality argument and all the standard Peter Schiff kind of stuff. But I would say in general, I think I probably orange-pilled a few people in the sense that they thought, you know what?

I mean, I'm not selling all my gold, but maybe it does make sense to have a little bit of an allocation into this area. And so I think a gold bug is your easiest orange-pilled target because they get the monetary piece. I mean, some people don't even get that, right? Yeah, that's what... I mean, we did this the first time we spoke.

gold investors and Bitcoiners are on the same team. We're all on the same team. Just stop infighting with each other. I think it's actually slowed down and calmed down. I do as well. Yeah.

I mean, I know that I try not to dump on Bitcoiners because Bitcoin's been flat. And I try to even defend Bitcoiners because Bitcoin's been soft recently. I know some people are kind of like, geez, this is no fun. And gold's been doing okay.

And I mean, neither one should be doing victory dances when the other one doesn't work and i i i've always i've long maintained bitcoin's going to crush gold's performance in the longer run but gold is going to be more stable throughout the entire run so if if you can't handle the volatility you know then maybe gold is the right choice for you yeah you can hear bitcoin or screeching in the background guys stop screeching okay it's okay to say these things it's probably it definitely is true too there is going to be less well i mean look we you know we've really got a common i mean everyone says well you know that has there must be one i've heard all that you know blah blah blah

i know sailor's argument i get it but you know we've really got a common enemy which is which is you know a statist run currency that you know that is just you know they're living off of their privilege right i mean they're printing money and and doing what they want to do and every day we pay for it at the gas pump or at the food at the food store and you know no i'm tired of that you know i'm tired of having my savings be debased and ripped off by people who you know want to benefit from doing that it's an it's an inherently evil system it's weird that it absolutely is yeah all of society yeah it's criminal i mean you and i can't print money you know but people who can are revered as federal reserve governors you know and listen to and you know people put credibility

in what they say some people not not all yeah yeah so how do we prevent ourselves from doing this again if the reset does happen we do transition to a sound money that's a thought that always lingers in my head is it inevitable to to stray away that's our grand that's our grandkids problems i mean i mean humans are humans we'll we'll figure out some other way to you know mess it up, no doubt. But I think the issue of inflation and monetary abuse, that'll be taken out of the hands of large governments and solved, I think, when we're on one of these standards or some combination. To me, money really is a representation of energy. So you could do a gold standard, you could do a Bitcoin standard, you could do an oil standard, you could do a

hybrid of the above. You could do a commodity standard like the Bancor, which was proposed by Keynes at Bretton Woods. We need a standard that reflects sound money principles such that it doesn't give somebody signorage, privilege, and power over the money supply. I mean, it was Rothschild who said back in the 1800s, let me control the money supply. I don't care who makes the laws and that really is true i mean you know if you control the money supply you you know you can get rich at the expense of everybody else i mean you know that is the cotillion effect and you know those who are in power have used it to their advantage massively at the expense of the common man it's and it's tragic absolutely tragic yeah i'm very bullish on what's a shame what's

going on from an energy policy perspective here in the united states i hope it is funny seeing everybody come out of the woodwork whether it be mark andreessen elon musk like we need a drill we need nuclear after suddenly suddenly gretta's not looking like such a genius anymore right now no no yeah nor are any of the thought leaders in the energy policy space over the last two decades in the west it's and and again a bitcoin is driving a lot of this too i mean we're seeing in the oil and gas industry at cathedra like people are waking up in the energy sector to begin integrating bitcoin mining operations into their operational stack uh it's it's happening and that's like you said a currency backed by energy to a certain degree like i this is what

tell the energy companies and that are thinking about becoming miners like you are going to be replacing the federal reserve you're not going to be uh you're not going to be controlling the amount of bitcoin that exists or an interest rate associated with it but you're replacing like the fed window essentially at the mining pool level where you that's right you are no longer is the creation and distribution of money confined to a small window that only primary dealers have access to anybody in the world can have access to it if they're so willing to buy these and that that concept in and of itself is massively revolutionary for humanity like this absolutely the window is constricted to this and we're going

to open it up so we can't even you don't even know the the edges of it the democratic nature of it all is just stunning i mean it's it's really a thing of beauty i mean it uh and i you know that's obviously you've got to go for, you know, quite a ways down the rabbit hole to fully understand those implications. But once you, once you start to, and you just think, wow, this is really great. We may be able to get peace on earth. Certainly, certainly in that direction. I mean, you know,

there'll always be humans that want to fight with other humans, I suspect. Yeah, I do as well. But maybe not at industrial scale in nation state form, you know, and that would be a big positive. It would be, it would be, we just got to hopefully we can get through these next weeks, these next months without, uh, getting into world war three. Yeah. I, I, like I said, I'm pretty optimistic that that won't happen.

I think, I think, you know, it's a prisoner's dilemma, right? It's mutually, mutually sure destruction is actually really a pretty big anti-war thing. I mean, it, um, you know, there's, there's no, there's no sense, there's no sense in going there. No. So, um, having said that, you know, the, the, the monetary war is going to rage. Oh yeah. It's, it's going to rage and it's for all the marbles and, you know, there's going to

be a lot of volatility and, um, you know, it's going to be very tough. And as I said, you know, like I said earlier in this broadcast, my, my, probably my number one thing is you know focus on not being if you're monetary wise focus on saving sound money terms and not being leveraged and then you know beyond that i tweeted the other day i just said you know i'd focus on physical fitness and community because in a you know if we're going through tough times which i think we might be going through you know being physically fit and healthy is always better than not and then you know community is what you know has your back so that if to the degree things start going in the wrong direction you know none of us work too

well alone we all work well in groups so yeah you're uh all you millennials out there you have to pull your head up from your phone myself included and uh go shake your neighbor's hand yeah because uh phones are great though they are they're double-edged swords in some some regards people can get lost in them and uh it's get very anti-social that's why that's what we've been pushing here go shake your rancher's hand make sure you know your neighbors uh decentralize support your local economy yeah ah larry this is um been a pleasure as always thank you for thank you for taking some time out of your monday to speak with me it's crazy times in the world uh it's stuff that you've been predicting for many years is it seems like it's it's

it's coming to fruition right right in front of my eyes in some ways i wish it wasn't but you know i i've often said my you know i'm cursed with the skill of analysis i like to figure stuff out not always good but you know systems work in a certain way and if you can understand a system you can kind of see where it's going yeah you either recognize and accept it or put your head in the sand and hope that it isn't true that's that's never a good strategy in the long run Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, Bitcoiners have already recognized and accepted. So it's a unique thing. I think probably the best thing everyone can do is just try and spread the word. I mean, we need to get further up that adoption curve. Agreed. you know, more orange-filled people, more knowledgeable people, you know, I mean,

Bitcoiners should be friendly, positive, outgoing. I mean, I will say that, I mean, I went to that gold show, and boy, the gold guys are just, you know, tired and beaten down. We've been fighting this battle for 30 years, you know, and we are, I had it up earlier on Twitter, we are Lucy in the football, right? I mean, Charlie Brown and Lucy in the football. I mean, we've had that football yank so many times, it's ridiculous. And, you know, and that's where the Bitcoiners are so much more fun to be with because, you know, it's just you guys are winning, you know, and now maybe you're getting a football moment in this correction. But the point is that in general, Bitcoiners are much more optimistic and positive than gold people. So, you know,

we're all sound money advocates. You know, I'm so glad you guys came along and are on the team and are, you know, another weapon in the effort to destroy this money cartel that these evil guys have set up you know that we have to live under yeah if anything we're just good at memeing they just get it ridiculing the uh i think it's better than that you're wicked smart i mean it's uh you know look at guys like jack and you and parker and you know matt all the other men odell all the other guys i'm just like i'm blown away with how you know what a good group of young people we've got in this community so it's awesome stuff really is it's a privilege and an honor to be here with you and the others you mentioned and it is yeah i think it is i feel very fortunate

i'm just the old guy that provides context i've been at this for a while i wouldn't i wouldn't relegate yourself to the old guy who just provides context i think you do more than that uh it's uh again crazy times scary times exciting times hopefully we get out on the other it's all good it's all good i mean what what just happened was an earthquake i mean that's the summary of our discussion here. What just happened was an earthquake. Putin just shot the dollar in the head and it accelerated our cause. It actually accelerated our cause. It's going to be, it's good. Things are really moving now. You know, and I, I, I was once worried that this was going to take into the 2030s to unfold. No, I don't think so. This is going to unfold

faster. Yeah. We may look back at 2025 and be like, Oh, well, I was going to say, I mean, the ball is really rolling now so you know it's it's going to get very interesting it is interesting but it's going to get more interesting and sooner i think you know um i look at the gap from 2008 to 2020 it was quite a gap you know 2020 to now not not such a gap you know we got a crisis going on now i mean they're coming fast and furious right so yeah yeah yeah like you said And then confidence is key and confidence is, is waning pretty quickly. Oh yeah.

Yeah. Well, thank you again for joining. Yeah. Thank you. I know I didn't let you wrap up last time. No, it's fine.

I can keep going for hours. I want to respect your time. I could too. And I, but I think we've covered everything we need to cover and I'm happy to come back any other time. You want to talk some more? No,

we'll definitely be talking some more on this show in the future. Um, there's, uh, we'll be talking about Bitcoin and gold succeeding in this case. Are you going to Miami? I am. I am.

Oh, great. I'll see you there. See you in Miami. I look forward to meeting you. Thank you. Alright. Peace and love, freaks. Okay.