TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #505: Jerome Powell, Tether and Peak Oil with Tom Luongo

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Tom Luongo returns once again to discuss geopolitics. Tom on Twitter: https://twitter.com/TFL1728 Tom's Website: https://tomluongo.me/ 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - Larry Fink 6:18 - Sovereigntists vs Davos 14:00 - Sponsors 1 15:16 - Powell’s domestic concerns 18:39 - Bank of Japan 25:22 - Gold 30:00 - Tether 34:40 - Tom’s hivemind 36:31 - Sponsors 2 38:08 - KYC 44:31 - Yuval Harari clip 49:23 - The cracks are showing 58:32 - Sound money 1:06:30 - Oil 1:15:35 - Throw out the spreadsheet 1:21:42 - Israel parallels with Russia 1:29:26 - Recognizing manipulation Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

this rip of tftc was brought to you by river it's the best place to buy bitcoin go to river.com tftc and enjoy this episode you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free 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. Yeah, the attack is here. cool you thought this was coming instinct instinctually oh yeah i thought this was coming instinctually um the the situation with bitcoin and etfs and the approval and and uh gary gensler um finally having to relinquish i felt he was like king canute standing against the tide but the instinctual part here was that i really did i really do think and i talked with kate long about this about a year and a half ago and she's like recoiled at horror at the concept that i think the fed um has decided that bitcoin is part of the financial

system and there's a good collateralizable asset but they want to have control of how it's called how it collateralizes i think the sofa market um and it's just one aspect of of uh how to ensure that there's a um there's plenty of liquidity within the uh within the u.s treasury space as things change because the world is clearly changing and they need all the they need all the help they can get and so that's what i think no and i said this on a few podcasts and wrote a few newsletters about it but the haste with which the ets were approved and pushed through after a decade of really being stonewalled was a signal to me as well like it looks like they're trying to get the chessboard set up to have this compliant bitcoin ready to go so that they can

get larry fink in place and and others that can accumulate large it could be it could be like it's it's funny about the way this this is right it could it could be as you just suggested that it's all about giving larry fink access and then they're going to use it to control it and blah blah blah but it could also be that there are multiple factions up there like i don't know that think is running any i don't think think is running anything at this point i'll be honest with you i think think is running around trying to get back in the game and that powell has him by the short and curlies at five and a half percent and um you know if he's going to do anything he's going to do what the fed wants him to do not what you know think works for freaking davos and he has

from the get-go here, and I've always felt that. So there's a part of me that says, okay, maybe, you know, Larry, look, we can take you out because BlackRock is not all that. Like as a company, like the balance sheet, the size of BlackRock relative to its power is very – it's one of the – That's one of the biggest leverages, you know, in where they exist today. They control $9 trillion worth of assets, but there are assets. BlackRock only has, what, $34, $40 billion on its balance sheet?

It's a very small company when you think about it from that perspective, what it actually does or whatever. Actually, no, it's that amount of equity. It's only got, like, $30 billion worth of equity, right? It's not a lot of shareholder equity. So BlackRock can be taken out very easily. if they wanted to take it out the switching cost is relatively low for people putting their money in black rock to allocate it for them we saw this last year with was it the florida pensions

decided to to take all their money out of black rock and put it other places because of dei and esg yeah and same thing with texas and a couple other states have done the same thing right but my but that's i mean those numbers are are not those are more headline than they are actual real effects. I mean, $10 billion to BlackRock is not a lot of money. They're not losing sleep over the fees that they're not generating over that $10 billion when they generate their income over $9 trillion. So it's a rounding error, but it's an interesting rounding error because then it allows other people to go, oh, maybe I should draft off of this or change the way I set myself up as well i think the more interesting way to look at this is from the perspective of wall street

itself and who black rock works for ultimately who they're what they're pushing on at with their activist board members right because they vote our proxy for us on these all these boards so all of a sudden we don't want dei and esg but black rock is forcing for example say disney just as a bad example or could be you know in bev or anybody else that we've you know um been gaslit and into into hating this week um but that's far outside the the value of the size of the company that actually runs that actually you know operates those funds that company's very small so like at some point if you have a whole bunch of like american sovereigntists on wall street just turn around and go you know what hey larry um it's a nice book of business you got

there but we can take it from you yeah so you work for us now and this is what you're gonna do so yeah that's that that to me is as likely a scenario marty as any other scenario the you know the evil mustache twirling larry fink is one version of that reality and then you know the other side of it is that larry fink now is just another guy who had to bend the freaking knee and kiss the ring yeah well that brings up a good question in terms of the battle of the sovereigntist verse the davos class where where are we in the state of the world as it pertains to that thesis today well i still think that that that thesis is operating i think we lost a couple of major battles in recent weeks i'm not going to argue yeah i've the the ukraine aid the pushing forward

the giving biden the power to seize russia's foreign exchange reserves i wrote a big article about that a couple weeks you know last week um i think those are major losses they they they're very bad uh and they're clearly the kind of thing that we don't want to um see actually that bridge that we don't want that bridge crossed right um you know we're not going to win every battle and so far Powell's been able to hold out and keep rates of five and a half percent he's had to cut QT back to 30 billion dollars a month on the treasury side down from 95 but he did shrink the balance sheet by over a trillion dollars and he's been able to hold interest rates of five and a half percent now the numbers are beginning to show up in the economy now that he might have to

cut interest rates and i've been you know my base case at the beginning of the year that we would have around three and that the markets were terribly mispriced factory in seven that's turned out to be the i think it's going to wind up being correct at a month ago before this you know this this weekend of doom where you know donald trump and mike johnson both basically had to bend over and you know kiss the ring because they were clearly got the speech from somebody um now i'm you know i before that i was thinking hey we might even just get out of this year without any rate cuts at all and then go into 2025 with a rate hike or two um i'm not so convinced of that now i think we're i think we're we're down to we're going to see two or three rate

cuts this year and that's and i'll be honest with you i don't even think that that's that changes the thesis one one iota because the original argument that i was for i was arguing i was fighting against was that the federal raised to one or two percent and everything will break and then the fed's gonna have to go back to the zero bound and reinstitute qe and blah blah blah dogs and cats living together because the system is broken so that's nice i think you're underestimating the resilience of the american commercial banking system um and you can ask yourself you know when you look in the mirror why do you believe that to be the case um now we're here two and a half years into this or yeah over two and a half years into Powell raising interest

rates and he's gonna have to cut a little bit you know is going from zero to five and a half and then back to 4.75 over a three-year period is that really um would you call a pivot or you know a Bernanke-esque, you know, capitulation to the offshore dollar markets? I would say no. I would say, if anything, what Powell would be responding to finally is only domestic concerns, right? Where in the past, he would always have to, where someone would have to be at Bernanke or Yellen or Greenspan or Volcker,

or they would have to respond to the euro dollar markets. And I think the SOFR versus LIBOR thesis has been validated quite um quite well i mean it's a thesis or it's a theory i hate to even call it a thesis it's a theory and i think it's been you know back tested to the point now where it's pretty good i maybe stole i wind up wanting to wind up being wrong in the long run but you can't i think argue with the intention of what powell was attempting to do whether he will be ultimately successful is still up in the air why because well there are a lot of powerful forces arrayed against him he's just one he watched mike johnson hold down for four months against the ukraine aid

and eventually he caved right um is powell that you know that guy i don't know i don't know him that well i don't know him personally i didn't like hang out with the guy and i haven't drank i haven't drank beers with with jerome powell i don't know i'd like to it would be very that would be a fascinating conversation is just to sit down with drum hey how you doing what's going on here you must be under a lot of stress but mike johnson so to that point so what do you so what do you drink i drink rye what do you want double what do you drink whiskey are you a wine guy what are you let's do the thing right yeah i mean mike johnson came out and pretty much explicitly said he got the tap on the shoulder didn't he he's like yeah we were in this meeting we found out

information that i didn't have before and once you become privy to that information your mind changes and then lo and behold a month later and i i think i i think i don't know if it was mark walk or somebody else made the point somebody made the point i can't remember who it is now so please don't if i get the the reference wrong you know please forgive me um but it was that no it wasn't mark walk it was a friend it was one of my one of my patrons actually pinged me on linkedin one day and said hey i i think i have an i think i have an idea here which is that um that the reason the ukraine aid had to go through was because the information that johnson got was that we already sent we already stripped all of nato's assets air defense assets from like greece

and spain and other places and this money is actually just going to replace what we've already sent and has been blown up in ukraine and if that was the case that's a very compelling argument as to why they had to do this and then if you take it one step further and realize that it's that trump was holding out against this he held out against david cameron david cameron went to to to mar-a-lago to dress trump down and he had that big you know striding through the quarters of nato like he's like like he's actually a man with a with a penis um at moment and then he goes to trump and trump just looks at him and says get you know get the fuck out and and then two days later the guy who's always able to get trump's um they get trump to move is andre duda andre's

duda the president of poland um he shows up at mar-a-lago and 24 hours later trump's like okay so you know trump's russian foreign policy was very rational up until the day he went to visit poland if you go all the way back to like 2017 right he's like right after his first meeting with putin that we all like watch body language videos over did did they get along did they not get along what's going on here and then like a month later trump goes to the three c's summit you know for all the visit grads and you know immediately turns into rabid mr neocon you know on eastern european policy and i'm like yeah something's going on here so however the polls have been able to convince him of what's happening here and i of course look at duda as a

a british asset i always have um it you know it tracks yeah you know it just tracks to me so nothing has really changed the people that trump trusts can move can move him very easily because he's doesn't really believe in anything no so no he's uh he's very easily manipulated yeah which is a shame this episode was presented by river river is the best most secure place to buy bitcoin in the united states go to river.com slash tftc set up an account today you'll be able to DCA into Bitcoin without paying any fees. You'll be able to give people Bitcoin via river links. You'll be able to send and receive Bitcoin over the lightning network. And you'll be able to set limit orders. If you want to buy Bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now,

you can set orders to buy Bitcoin when it hits that price. Go to river.com slash TFTC and set up your account today. This rep was also brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Unchained is building a financial services platform for a Bitcoin standard. They have over 7,000 clients that are securing over 90,000 Bitcoin with 12,000 keys on their platform. Their platform leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties. Their cornerstone product is their Volt product, a two or three multi-sig Volt, which allows you to hold two of three keys in a multi-sig quorum. That gives you full control over your Bitcoin. They also have an IRA product, a lending desk, and they're rolling out a bunch of other products, including an inheritance protocol

and sound advisory so go to unchained.com set up a call with our concierge onboarding team today tell them that tftc sent you and use the promo code tftc at checkout unchained.com bringing this back to pal and him taking the position that i'm only going to react to domestic concerns what do you think would be the catalyst for him to what what domestic concerns would be the catalyst we had the michigan consumer confidence survey coming this morning 10 points below expectations uh year ahead inflation expectations were above where they're they expected is it purely the job market inflation is he looking at commercial real estate what do you think job market is uh is is softening right the uh the jobs report the initial jobless claims the other day came in hot

right and uh i i mean this is the kind of thing that you know i don't follow it as closely as i probably should um i tend to trust certain people and certain commentators on this and daniel dimartino booth has been banging her shoe on the table saying that you know the the economy is weakening faster than um you know the headline numbers are telling us and uh and i don't you know i don't doubt daniel's uh motives at all right i've spoken with daniel i like daniel i I think she's I think she's an honest, you know, straight shooter. And so, you know, she calls it as she sees it. And yeah, I think Powell's in a really rough situation.

I think the the economy is beginning to weaken in a structural way. But at the same time, we still have inflation coming back, roaring back because oil prices refuse to back down. And now we're getting a bounce in industrial metals and which is going to have commodity cost push inflationary effects throughout the entire economy. So we're in a stagflationary environment, which I think I called for originally, and I still think that's what we're going to wind up with. Hopefully the rain doesn't get too loud that it overwhelms the microphone. FYI, we're having a storm here in Florida this afternoon. We need the rain badly, so I really can't complain.

But, you know, you're hoping that it doesn't hit too early in the cycles, that Powell can hold on to interest rates for as long as possible. But at the same time, if the economy really starts to go into the tank, Joe Biden's not going to get reelected under no matter how many ways they try to prop up the idea that there's a you know, that Biden's on the right side of important issues like Palestine, Israel or whatever. you know it's that's not going to fly so i don't think biden wins this election if the economy really falls off a cliff in the next you know a couple of months yeah he was blindsided by aaron burnett of all people on cnn cnn yeah yeah i mean and that's you know that's that's empty-headed aaron burnett you know trying to make joe biden understand just how bad things are and she had to have walked out of that interview going oh my god he's gone like he

has no idea what's going on i honestly think biden believes that the economy is doing well because that's what they tell him i mean does he believe anything does he know is he does he have the mental capacity to even understand even if it was one way or the other i don't think so i don't i don't either right i don't so yeah so he just goes with what what does people tell him many moves on yeah and so there's a bunch of variables in this whole equation and one of which it's been popping up more recently in recent weeks is japan their inability to control yield curve there and their lackluster interventions last week uh announcements of a swap line opening up between the u.s and japan dropped yesterday yep obviously no surprise

holder largest holder of u.s treasuries in the world how does this variable either throw a wrench in the plan or or help hell out um i think the the i think the announcement of the swap lines tells us everything we should have already always known which is that at the end of the day the boj is still the fed's wingman right and that the battle lines are pretty clearly drawn that's the Fed and the BOJ on one side, and the ECB and everybody in the ECB's orbit on the other side. So you've got the Swiss National Bank. I think the more interesting story is the Swiss National Bank last month cutting interest rates to radically weaken the Swiss franc that propped the euro up as oil prices were breaking out. And then we had the Riksbank of Sweden cut interest rates

yesterday. We had the Bank of England hold interest rates stable, but the pound is clearly rolling over it tried to hit a high of 128 which is insanely high and now it's pushed back down below 124 um everybody wants to focus on japan's problems but i read something really interesting this morning on twitter just to remind everybody that japan can accept if they're buying their oil and they're in the in the yen right say from russia do they really care about a weekend like it's all domestic you know it's not gonna it's not gonna blow back on them in that respect right so japan will continue to intervene as they will i was surprised actually with the price action in the end this week i fully expected a bigger

correction to the upside that i'd see the end we see the end drop into the high 140s or even maybe even 145 that because we had a four-day weekend in japan a lot of people could have been caught on the wrong side of the trade and a lot of margin calls filtered through um didn't happen so we're probably going to see another push towards 160 and once it possibly even 165 but you know at some point um the boj has got a lot of money to defend the end with that they they need to and i just as you started to bring this talking point up i i immediately ran over to check what the japanese tenure is doing this morning and it's at 90 basis points and it's creeping higher and which it should be and it should creep above it's going to creep above one

percent um but the the the japanese because there's an insular market in that respect that once you once the carry trade goes away they'll be able to handle a weaker yen as long as they allow yields to rise so which is what they're doing this is going to do it slowly and yeah the weather is actually picking up kind of interestingly so we'll see how we'll see how long this this conversation lasts i may lose power so um well the it's not messing up the audio at all so at least we have that yeah because japan has a pretty large basket of f fx reserves if they can yes that they can uh put their hand into if they need to yeah they have a huge um fx reserves that they can they can dip into and then of course they have the you know 1.1 trillion

dollars in treasuries and they have like four or five hundred billion dollars in just dollars like they're just sitting around like they've got a lot of dollars and they can deploy them if they need to the ministry of finance has a lot of dollars the bank of japan has a lot of dollars in the form of treasuries they have a lot of they have a lot and they can spend and they accumulated those in order to spend them at the right moment when they decided to change policy and i think that that's you know this you know we have it i i don't want to be i'm not trying to be cruel or mean or anything else here i really am really not i'm just a little frustrated with um the state of commentary everybody wants a massive dramatic thing to happen right japan

is doing this is clearly means that we're at the edge of a of a cliff and blah blah and everything is a cliff everything is in the end of the world right it's all it's all in our everything is an rem song at this point right and i'm like maybe it's not maybe it's just indicative of a change and that you just don't realize that it's going to be a lot less interesting than you think it is, and Japan's going to spend a trillion dollars and push themselves out of a lot of this mess. Are they going to get out of this without getting their hair must? Of course not.

Are we going to get out of this without getting our hair must? Of course not. But the question is who's going to get hit harder? And one of the ways I've tried to look at a lot of the things happening is it's like the Russian foreign exchange reserves thing. It's all a big central bank game of, no, you go first. No, you go first. No, you drink. No, you drink.

Right? I've been saying this. I've been making this joke now for about two weeks. And I'm like, I really think it's the thing. Like, every time the EU thinks that they finally got the Americans, you know, backed into a corner that we're going to seize Russia's foreign exchange reserves, then the very next day they come out and say well you know we're really not going to do that because the risks are too high and then the americans don't do the deal don't do the deed and then they're like no we really need to to seize russia's foreign exchange reserves and they

keep pushing the ball closer to the line it's like the zero it's like xeno's paradox about who's going to seize their you know we keep inching our way closer to the event horizon but we never actually get there right but this shit and like they all know that whoever goes first loses and so none of them want to go first but everybody is trying to get the other guy to go first and i think that's really the best way to help yeah it's kind of yeah we're approaching it asymptotically it's one of my favorite words in the english language right it's uh so you know you can tell how how wet it is outside i can't keep my cigar lit it's really annoying how's gold factoring into this too because i saw some i think luke roman was sharing charts

the diversions between central banks loading up with gold versus u.s treasuries is that a move in the background of people moving first oh yeah the the big the big move is that you know gold is now the gold is sorry central banks make up what 15 to 20 percent on an annualized basis depending on the year of annual gold demand when 20 years ago they were net sellers you know we had the washington agreement about how we're going to sell gold to suppress the price now we're now they're all buying gold as quickly as they can and as surreptitiously as they can to not move price to get as much gold as they can um the chinese are clearly trying to be price setters in the gold market and they're using i think um their bid underneath the price of gold

as a geostrategic weapon against, at the same time that Janet Yellen's trying to continue to use sanctions and tariffs and all the rest of it. The world is bifurcating. It's moving into spheres of influence. It's everything that Zoltan Pozar wrote about a couple of years ago. It's everything that Vince Lonci and I have been talking about on my podcast when I asked to actually publish another episode of it. I have a couple coming out next week that i'm actually going to record next week um but it's this we have to realize that the gold

is going to stop moving around the world right and if it does move around the world it's going to be under very strict controls circumstances where the governments will decide yep that 50 tons or that 100 tons can you know go and you know can go to india or wherever but you know only through trusted intermediaries and all the rest of it. Gold is clearly also the only asset that the central banks are willing to use to fix their balance sheets. They're not willing to use Bitcoin yet. Maybe they will the next cycle around, but they're not using it this time.

Like I said, to open the show, I think the win here for Bitcoiners is effectively realizing that Tether and Bitcoin together represent a really nice marginal demand for U.S. treasuries that the Fed can utilize to help collateralize the repo markets. And I think we should explore that as commentators and as forensic analysts on this, forensic accountants on this. And I have a couple of patrons that have been doing this work for a while and they seem to be convinced of it.

I'm willing to throw it out there into the public I can just get people chewing on the ideas. I'm not married to these ideas. My goal here is to seed interesting and novel ideas into the zeitgeist and then see what people come up with. But clearly, from a central bank perspective, they absolutely want to utilize gold as a means by which to fix their national finances. And the way you do that, of course, is you allow the price of gold to rise,

but in a controlled manner. So $200 up and $100 down, $200 up and $100 down, $300 up and $150 down. You know what I mean? What they want is a nice controlled rise where the loss of confidence in the existing system is arrived at organically and not all at once. Because all at once is bad. all at once has trillions of dollars in derivatives going blowing up overnight and margin calls and dogs and cats living together and mad max and all the rest of it and no one really wants that so it's kind of a it's kind of a game of not chicken but of uh i guess the best way of

describing it is to say it's like that line from full metal jacket it's all a big shit sandwich and all we all have to take a bite and we're going to do so a little bit at a time yeah and eventually we'll get rid of it all and that's financially i think that's what everybody's hoping for there are certain people who just want to crash the whole system and that's why we see the geopolitical events that we see and i think those people are mostly centered in europe because they have no hope out of this they have no way out of it they don't have any they don't have enough collateral they don't have enough freaking natural resources or productive economies or productive economy exactly yeah now i'm bringing back to tether i'm wholly bought in on that these

If you just look at what they've done over the last year alone, onboarded the FBI and the secret service, they just announced earlier this week that they have an official partnership with chain analysis to make sure that sanctioned individuals aren't sending and receiving tether. You had Cantor Fitzgerald on CNBC a few months ago, maybe three or four months ago, basically saying that he loves that tethers his client.

And it seems like the U S interest to try to position tether as this okay product that that they're they're comfortable with which is very interesting considering how tether started it's essentially no no argument there i'm not i'm not immune to the tether fud and the story surrounding it of course but actually if you really think about it who better to get on to flip onto your side than the most corrupt of all the quote-unquote stable coins because you've got them by the short and curlies and you can flip them easily and turn and turn them from a quote unquote enemy into an asset. I mean, this is the way I would I mean,

you know, I put on my Emperor Palpatine hat when I do this kind of analysis, right? And I'm like, yeah, I would do that. Like, oh, no, you you work for me now. Yeah, you're not the bad boys of finance. You work for me and we're going to and, you know, we're going to do for you. We're going to execute all the other crappy stable coins that are out there. They're competing with you

and we're going to take them off the board and you're going to be the only one left. Yeah, but you work for us now. Yeah, for all those treasury yields into Bitcoin, they're buying more than 8,000 Bitcoin a quarter over the last three quarters at least. So if the U.S. interest wanted a Bitcoin accumulation strategy, it seems like they were able to co-opt Tether.

It seems like it's working pretty efficiently right now. And it also creates, it also offloads all of the Bitcoin trading demand onto a proxy for the dollar but not the dollar itself which is very important for you know having a another subtle control mechanism for working you know for dealing with you know fx risks with the dollar right that frees up actual dollars to deploy because now bitcoin is not trading against actual dollars where people are buying bitcoin with actual dollars or you know what they or they you know they're they can trade amongst themselves they don't have to settle in dollars they're settling in tether at the end of the day right and so you leave that you leave most

of the bitcoin trading settled against tether to keep it out of the dollar sphere so that you can't use it as a run on dollars and in the real world you leave it where it belongs in this kind of offshoot market and so but you also have the ability to you know take tether out whenever you want to if they decide to get uppity because all you got to do is you know withdraw their um withdraw their collateral so yeah because their collateral is mostly u.s treasuries a little bit of gold a little bit of bitcoin right and i like dude it's a it's a great way to to i mean what's tether's market cap now has it breached 100 billion dollars yeah it's over 100 i think it's probably closer 120 now yeah oh wow because i haven't looked at it in weeks i haven't looked

at it in months a couple of months now i remember when it when it was cresting 90 earlier in the year and i'm like if it's up to 120 billion then this thesis is even more are more uh uh validated than it was when i was arguing when it was like moving up a billion dollars every couple of weeks last and q4 from like 85 to 86 to 88 billion or 90 billion or whatever now if it's 120 billion forget it it's clearly what's going on let's fact check that logan let's see 110 fair enough 110 110 still that's all that's a lot it means that tether's putting on about five billion dollars a month regularly since last since the end of last year um yeah but it's may right yeah so tether was trading had tether's market cap was between 85 and 90 billion at the end of last year they

were in the may so it's putting five billion dollars a month it's literally five billion dollars a month and in treasury demand yeah and what is what is that like that's not that's not nothing it's is it above one percent yet of overall like auction demand ongoing auction demand i'm not sure i don't know that's i don't know but it would be anybody if that's a that's a really good point i hadn't thought of so i have to i have to look into that but yeah i mean or reconsider it but that's a really good point marty i like doing interviews with you you're like of all the people in the bitcoin space you you understand all of this all of these subtleties as well as all the subtleties of bitcoin i really appreciate what i just as an aside i really

appreciate what you do from that perspective every time i sit down to have a chat with you i'm like i'm consistently surprised well and in a very good way so the feeling is mutual i love our conversation if anything just to check my priors um i think the the theses that you put out there incredibly compelling interesting you can see the it seems like a lot of them are playing out now it is interesting isn't it and i look and again i and i'm and i'm not and this is i i make this point all the time i just want to make sure everybody's clear on this i don't exist as a as an individual at this point i'm the figurehead of a hive mind of that i've accumulated around me and these people who i just are so jazzed to talk about this stuff all day long that we just sit

there and i have the skunk works of of a discussion private discussion forum that is just i mean dude it's immense and i go in every day and i learn shit that i would never learn otherwise and they bring the world to me and then ask me for my opinion on it i'm like uh hold on let me think about that for 20 minutes you know what i mean before i can even answer so yeah and your particular hive mind does a really good job of getting outside of your universe and educate i think uh at least twice or three times a week i have people in my mention saying hey you gotta see what tom said about this particular thing um happened yesterday yeah well it's funny that we are having this conversation today because somebody pinged us yesterday and say hey when

are you guys going to talk again and you reached out to me what an hour later and say how about tomorrow. I'm like, uh, yeah. Okay. I've got time tomorrow. Let's do it. Quick break here. Freaks. This rip is brought to you by gradually. Then suddenly a framework for understanding Bitcoin is money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the forward to the book. I'm honored to have done so because it's the best zero to one primer. If you're looking for a logical explanation of why Bitcoin obsoletes all other money, buy one for yourself and maybe a few for your friends. Go to the safe house.com slash gradually. That's the safe house.com safe spelled s-a-i-f the safehouse.com slash gradually use the promo code tftc for five

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links, or connect e-commerce stores, connect your wallets or custodial accounts, and be set up in minutes. We can also connect our bank accounts, our Stripe accounts, our Square accounts to accept fiat as well. The time is now, freaks. The fiat system is fragile. Invest in the infrastructure that de-risks the future. Invest in yourself. Bitcoin payments with ZapRite. Go to zaprite.com slash TFTC to get $40 off their annual subscription. Zaprite.com slash TFTC, $40 off. And so how do you think all this tether, what do you think it means for like sovereign Bitcoin use? Like, do you think they're successfully able to co-opt Tether, embed it into the banking system? Maybe it's not even Tether.

Maybe it's just using Bitcoin. Do you think there's any possibility that they try to just completely KYC AML, throw out self-custody, and make it illegal? Oh, they're going to try. I think they're going to try. I don't know if they're going to be able to. I don't know if they're going to be able to. yeah i mean just to make sure that we're not cross cross wires i think they can i don't know if they will um i think davos is trying to like turn this into minority report with more germans

i'm not sure that they're going to be able to like it's like all this stuff is up in the air so yeah i'd like to hear what you think about this actually i think they're certainly going to try i don't think they can successfully um i do think they can deploy a chilling effect across the industry which they've done to a certain extent over the last few weeks but as the dust has settled after the doj's actions and the response to some motion to dismiss letters as it pertains to self-custody and trying to use bitcoin privately it doesn't seem like it has much teeth behind it from what i can tell particularly with the tornado cash um uh case that's going on right now they're literally trying to change the definition

of what money transmission is on the go um conversations i've had at least with people that are connected in dc i think it's going to be very hard to actually win a case on on those merits so that's promising and then i do want to actually do me a favor go into a little bit more detail on that i actually want to because i'm not following this at all i've got my head in the geopolitical clouds so this is something i haven't been following at all other than what i see in the headlines to be honest with you so if you want to like i don't even know what the hell tornado cash is to be honest so tornado cash was a smart contract on ethereum that allowed people to put ethereum into the smart contract and get tornado cash out and basically the way i understand

it i'm not too well versed on ethereum stuff but the way i understand it was ability to attain privacy while using ethereum you would put your ethereum into the smart contract and you'd be able to get money out the other end without a direct connection um and it was a smart contract that's the most important um aspect of this particular case is that nobody actually controlled the funds it was not company the company created this smart contract but once it went live nobody actually controlled who was sending money to it and sending money out of it the contract itself did and the doj shut down and arrested the two co-founders of tornado cash and they're in the process of getting to a case the tornado cash team sent a motion to dismiss the case on the

grounds that tornado the two founders actually didn't control or custody of the funds it was in the smart contract they couldn't determine who was able to send money in or send money out the smart contract handled that autonomous code and the doj is arguing that um so that technically the way it's set up they weren't transferring money the smart contract was they didn't have control of the smart contract once it went live anybody can interact with it the doj wrote a letter back to their motion to dismiss and basically said no um Um, uh, anybody that creates these contracts is, uh, basically, or wasn't even anybody who creates these contracts, these contracts are money service services, business, uh,

businesses, because they are facilitating the transfer of funds. And they said they use the analogy literally of a frying pan sitting on a stove and it transfers heat to the food that you're cooking. And historically, it's been very clear, and FinCEN has actually written guidance letters in the past, I believe 2018 and 2019. They wrote a few that clearly define that a money service transmission business is an entity that actually custodies and controls the flow of funds out. And they have to hit a button to send the funds out. And it seems like the DOJ is trying to basically change that definition. um and broaden that definition yeah this is any any kind of movement of money whatsoever

exactly and so for like bitcoin open source uh wallets that individuals can download and create private public keys and then they control the transfer of money they're trying to say that anybody that creates code that enables that is um participating in money service businesses but that's nonsense yeah and to my point everybody it was very scary when initially happened a few weeks ago but conversations over the last few weeks is like this really doesn't have a lot of legs to stand on well the funny part about it is that you know this is the this is exactly the kind of thing that you would expect out of the biden administration um because Because, you know, when you map them to who they actually, I think, who they actually work for, clearly, they work for the group in Europe that wants to, they want to control all of that.

They want to have full control of the full control over money and the full ability to decide where it went and then decide where it can stop. And a smart contract like that gets around that completely. every time i think about this i just think back to you know christine lagarde saying that you know if we have any escape valves away from the outside of the financial system people will use it and she said so with a look of horror on her face i'm like no christine that's exactly the world we are so we want and you don't want us to have and you know that's a that's a you know so i'm not surprised that you see this attempted overreach from the biden administration and it makes perfect sense to me yeah and it seems like it's a desperate attempt to rush things through as the writing

seems pretty clear on the wall they may be on the way out um but to the point that they're operating for the davis class the propaganda tactics that the davis class is deploying right now very interesting there actually was a video of uh uval harari that came out this morning logan you pull that up it's 54 second video and i think you need to hear this because the uh yes the hypocrisy or the propaganda that they're trying to deploy right now from davos is laughable when i look at bitcoin as an ex as as a historian i don't like it because this is a money built on distrust the central idea of bitcoin is basically electronic gold that we don't trust the banks the governments so we don't want to give them the ability to create as much money as they like

so we create this bitcoin it's a currency of distrust i do think that the future belongs to electronic money but what we've seen over the last centuries is that it's actually a good idea to give banks and governments the ability to create more and more money in order to build more trust within society. So I'm not sure what money would look like in 20 years or 30 years, but I hope it will be a currency of greater trust and not a currency of distrust. myself on mute talk about a classic redefinition of what bitcoin actually is like what do i say all the time commies are really good at inversion of words because that's their

entire that's their entire thing and that's exactly what he just did bitcoin is the ultimate trusted money because it's money that's trusted because of what it is and because of it's you know it's it's bearer ass it's it's it's as a bearer asset there's like gold like he's putting the cart before the horse he's saying yeah we don't trust governments anymore yeah duh that's the point like holy he's such he's i every time i watch that guy speak it just makes me angry well i don't know why they put him up as a front man it gets anytime he speaks he's nihilistic and malthusian and i don't see how they could say ab test that or run like a hey uh you would think they would ab test that with somebody else

but they don't because they live in an echo chamber yeah what's the problem you get a group of people together in a room to be like do for like commercials like would you actually buy this product if you listen to it uh what is it called focus group focus group yeah they should run a focus group on uval harari and people would be like and they'd find out well no that they would never do that they just keep pushing those same people in front of us because i you know these people live in a very small echo chamber um you know i the joke i've run with for years is that it's so small it would rent for 400 a month on the upper east side right but you know it's it's it's a good line i like using it um but this is the thing like they they they

don't they don't realize how out of phase and how out of touch they are with with humanity like like he if he claims to be a historian then he should understand that times of political unrest have all come because people because governments abuse their people and the people decided to have their money go to ground it's when governments respect the rights and the rights of people that society can flourish and government is there to keep things from going off the rails if if government has a role to play and i'm arguing i'm not i'm not arguing my personal beliefs here that government's able ever able to really do this i'm not a conservative i still am a libertarian in this respect um i just understand that at the end of the day our goal

in you know systems creation should always be to minimize uh tyranny and minimize uh overreach uh from one you know of one person versus another and not maximize it and governments are really good at maximizing the amount of damage that they do to people and um harari is clearly in that camp that you know government that humanity can't govern itself without a very strong hand having complete control over everything and that's where he is and that's to him that's what trust looks like to him that's his definition of trust that's for me the white pill the silver lining of all this whether it's the actions against non-custodial bitcoin in recent weeks or them rolling out harari to put something like so outrageous like that out to project strength from the government it feels

like they're in a deep position of weakness and then you couple that with the growing disdain for the immigration policies that are happening both here in the united states and in europe like what's going on in ireland the irish standing up for themselves um and uh i think in sweden people are finally like yo what the fuck's going on here um you see it in new york as well they're really losing control of the narrative because everything's so bluntly in your face where it's right it's no longer like don't believe your lying eyes it's like it's impossible not to see what's happening you know i agree it was funny i was i chatted with uh michael leahy of the irish freedom party the other day i was on a podcast with him explaining to him what

i think is going on in europe right my friend crypto rich had us had put us together on a podcast and that's the episode that so many taxes i watched like 20 minutes of that yeah yeah it was good it was good it was just me it was me trying to to you know go back to the primitives and try and explain a lot of what i'm seeing to a man who doesn't really on who gets it but doesn't have the any of the plumbing right so i did my best there to to get it into you know put it in in good context for that kind of audience um i'm not sure if i succeeded but you know you know post comments and let me know what how well how well i did right um but it's very interesting to see the massive protest against sinn fein in dublin um as fake you know fake populists like that's a good

It's a good sign, really, to the Irish. And I don't know. It's happening all across the board, all across the West. And to your point, really are kind of holding on by the skin of their teeth. Excuse me. And because of that, they're clearly accelerating their program as much as possible to try and get as much of it passed as possible in order to hope that if they get enough of it done

before all their agents are removed from power, i.e. in Europe and the United States. For example, how paranoid are they about the European parliamentary elections next month? I didn't really have this on my radar because I just don't see the EU parliament as being even interesting. But there is a real potential that they would have a, I wouldn't say a populist overthrow, but it could be in such a way that the president of the European Parliament isn't a committed globalist in one of their crowd.

And they'll have to actually fight to, you know, they'll have to get rid of Charles Michel or whoever's in that role right now. And that would be odd for them. they this would not be a good sign for them they understand that their system is so brittle that it can't have any um overt win that the the opposite the populace can't have any any overt wins in any of any uh lasting effect so even if you know victor orban for example in hungary survives uh the election cycle then they have to destroy orban at every level when he's um when he's when he goes up against them but interestingly enough hungary is going to be in charge of uh the european council starting or the european presidency starting in july

right hungary takes over the european presidency in july right after the election so i think there's something there i'm gonna have to really like dig dig deep into this and really think this one through but there's something going on here they're more worried in europe than i've ever seen them um even after even post-brexit because i think they always said they always thought that even brexit they had that ring fence because they had their people in charge in britain at the time so hey they very well should be and yeah you're seeing signs where the scottish prime minister stepped down and rishi sunak beginning to change his rhetoric we've had some consentions on the energy side of things with macrom um promising to spin back up nuclear power plants they're

obviously buying russian gas and oil despite sanctions well and then and then to find out like like the report that the green party the the the green the member of the green party that was in charge of the report about why we needed why germany needed to spin down the nuclear power plants that all the data was faked did you see that report yep yep yeah yeah so it was really you know when i see things like that happen like i ask myself who let that out of the bag who let that cat you know walk around and let everybody you know how did that glitch in the matrix occur right and um you gotta go you have to always look at that as kind of inferentially as you know evidence that there are countervailing forces pushing information into the zeitgeist

based knowing it will get picked up by a very or now very organized you know counter media that would be i and i would consider both of us as part of that counter media to then disseminate it to as many people as possible like you if i know about this and you know about this and we honestly operate in two almost completely different domains right you're yours is a bitcoin podcast mine is a mine is a really geopolitics and financial plumbing or oil and gold service that's what i do right i mean bitcoin is part of it but it's not but i'm bitcoin adjacent i'm not right so we operate in two different areas of the the political and financial commentary space and yet we both know about this very very small little point

and everybody goes what does that mean yeah so somebody clearly knows so i think somebody clearly understands that if we put that if they let that out into the world we'll take it run with it and amplify it well beyond what anybody wanted right well and to that point it seems like they're trying to really prevent people from speaking i mean hate speech laws in canada uk that anti-semitism bill passed here in the united states a couple weeks ago where it's going through the house i'm not sure if it was officially approved but um and i don't think it's made and yes and the point and the point of that was not really the anti-semitism it was the it was all the attended secondary effects of the more general per point of the thing that was the that

was the the the what was the important point there right yeah tick tock ban um since we last spoke i was thrown on the list uh by the center for countering digital hate um for for speaking bad about climate change and saying i'm not as worried about it as the mainstream would have us to be how am i not on that list you're not trying hard enough on youtube it was youtube channels only okay because yeah what's really funny is that i mean dave dave collin and i the first time day i ever had dave on the podcast and that was the like literally the first time dave and i ever met other than like hey dave would you like to be on the podcast right was like the only direct conversation he and i ever have which was in twitter dm where we organized the chat and he's

like well what do you want to talk about i said well we're two old crotchety chemists let's talk about how climate change is dumb and he's like excellent sounds great and then we went on we went for an hour and a half just going over the data like how bad the data is just doing a data quality analysis and how you know just dominant the whole thing is i'm like how are we not on these you know how are we not on every list there is right it's just funny like well shout out to Tony Heller is doing one hell of a job to really highlight the corruption of the data over time. He was on the list with me. Oh, excellent.

It's a good company to keep, Marty. Yeah. No, it is hilarious. I mean, just the Center for Countering Digital Hate is laughable how weak they are. They have to spin up this NGO that is like, what the hell is digital hate? And you're going to give a list to YouTube and say that you should censor these people because they have opinions about climate change. Well, what's really funny is that I actually look at that as a very good thing because I look at how much money they have to spend to spin up the NGO,

and then they have to staff it, and it's all money wasted, right? It's all really wasted money. And so they're spending – it's like the argument – when I think about something like that, it reminds me of my arguments about the myth of policing, that policing as a tool is an intimidation tool where you arrest one person to cow a thousand people and that but once you get to a point where you have to have more cops than there are people then the whole system collapses right because you

can't if you have too many enforcers then you don't have enough money you don't have a productive economy to support all the enforcers and then the whole the checks stop and the whole thing just and then the whole thing really collapses and so if they keep spinning up all these ngos i'm like Oh, good. Keep spending George Soros's money. Keep spending all these euro dollars that that Jerome Powell is drying up at five and a half percent around the world. Like spend your money. Go ahead. You're going to run out because there aren't because we ain't making more of them. That's the key to understanding why what Powell has done has been so monumental is that he really has dried up so many of the of the nefarious funding channels. There's still plenty of them out there, and the British crown still has unbelievable amounts of money in offshore tax havens and all the rest of it.

But they're now spending seed corn. They're not spending leveraged up crappy, shitty euro dollars. They're not spending the interest on their crappy euro dollars and the CLOs and all this other crap. They're not doing that anymore. They're not having to actually spend M0, not M3. You know what I mean? Yeah. To maintain this, and that's a good sign.

Which acutely highlights why we need sound money back in the world. It's what enables them to do all this terrible shit. It's this easy money. Right, and I don't care what that sound money looks like. I'm agnostic. I'm agnostic whether it's going to be gold or Bitcoin or some version thereof. Like, I'm not, you know, I get a lot of hate from the Bitcoin evangelicals. I guess it's better than calling them the Bitcoin maxis

because maybe there's a fundamental difference between those two sets of people. But my critiques of Bitcoin are not kind of IQ 105 midwit arguments about Bitcoin. They're very, very nuanced, specific, intellectually rigorous arguments about Bitcoin that are based on the fundamental truth that no technology is the end all and be all of a particular thing. because human beings are still in their knees are always evolving bitcoin may be the thing the next thing but it won't be it may or may not even be the last thing it could be i sincerely doubt it but it could be and even if it doesn't even if it isn't that if it is the thing that drives a you know helps drive a massive reorganization of global uh capital handling and back towards decentralization and property rights then it doesn't have to do any more than that it can

just be one of the things the tools in our toolbox to regain our sovereignty as people and that's good and isn't that good enough that's a massive success exactly i mean that was one of the core points at the end of the bitcoin standard by safe um was if the only thing that bitcoin does is force central banks to bring sound money back to the world is a massive success massive success let me put it this way one of the things i mean for example martin armstrong has made the argument for a long long time and again i'm not endorsing martin's argument here but i am gonna i'm gonna riff off of it okay which is the following he said look you know martin's opinion is all the original conception of the federal reserve wasn't wrong it was there as a thing to provide elastic

money in times of illiquidity for the banking system so that we didn't have a massive deflationary collapse, that the Fed was there as the lender of last resort on a regional basis, the 12-member banks, on a regional basis to keep the banking system solvent during crisis periods because of the natural vagaries of the boom-bust cycle. From that perspective alone, it's hard to argue with marty okay if we take the fed as it exists today and we go from where we are today to back to that that would be a massive win it wouldn't be the win right but it would be a a great win in the battle i'm not you know again this is not an endorsement of the federal reserve but let's just play that out wouldn't you it's like thinking to yourself

Okay, if you are a hardcore Austrian sound money kind of guy, and you were running the Federal Reserve right now, how would you operate monetary policy? Would you just be like the guys who run for dog catcher in BFE Texas and say, I'm running as dog catcher in BFE Texas to abdicate the job and take it off the books? no that would that would be unbelievably disruptive disruptive and destructive of to the entire world because the world sadly you can argue sadly is you know operates within this paradigm in this framework of central banks so like i'm not saying that the the central banks are reformable but if they need if they want to survive they may have to go back to a much more humble role in the economy, and wouldn't that be a good thing? And if I were Fed chair, for example,

I'm having a hard time believing that I wouldn't be running the Federal Reserve right now the way Powell is, setting up a domestic debt indexing rate and setting up a domestic banking system that pushes us back towards regional banking and net interest banking and classical, you know,

what classically what banks are supposed to do as opposed to the casino that they've been turned into. You know, that's what I would do. That would be my step one along in the way of getting rid of the Fed, for example, right? But I have to, like,

order of operations matters. I've always been, I've been said this for years. So that's, this is just, again, it's not an endorsement of the fed as an institution it's just like how do we go from where we are to where we want to go and what steps do we take along that path and i thought about this a lot and i you know i thought about this a tremendous amount and i'm like yeah um that whole libertarian hippocratic oath thing is very important like do as little harm as possible

while you're on where you're you know unfucking the world basically yeah and that's i mean that path is a harrowing path with a bunch of needle threading that's i think that's the the scary part is of course it's a virtuous goal and path to try to take but has the frankenstein that's been erected so fucked up that it's it's yeah i'm not i don't have an answer for that i'm saying i just knew what i would try to do with the imperfect knowledge that i have in front of me and with the imperfect tools that i have that if i were fed chairman looking at with my tools that were my toolbox. I'm going, I don't know if I can pull this off, right? But I'm damn well going to try, and I'm damn well going to fix what I can fix. And then hopefully, if I can get enough buy-in

from the rest of the world to work through the process constructively, we can get there if we make that decision. If the people, however, who erected that system for their own benefit refuse to give up that power which you have to expect that they won't willingly then you have then does the world not kind of look like what we have today right now yeah and aren't in the middle of it i could i can make that argument very very very compellingly and you know you can choose to say that i'm full of shit that's fine like i'm not i'm okay with that but i happen to think that that's where we are and um there's a lot of compelling evidence to to to think it in those terms and maybe i'm not maybe i don't have the whole picture in my head maybe there is

a different way of looking at it that i haven't considered yet i'm happy to have somebody put that on the table for me but i know damn well it ain't peak oil as the i saw you go who are you going who are you fighting back i was going off with steve san angelo he he he he poked a fight he should never get into with me he's done this two or three times and he shouldn't do it so peak oils they've been fear-mongering about peak oil since the 70s yeah well my my issue with with the with the er oei guys i know i know i'll make this very and this and this is analogous to bitcoin because bitcoin is an energy-based money right just like gold is an energy-based money no gold is just you know congealed diesel

fuel right i mean at the end of the day or you know or you know human labor or you know shovels and picks and shovels or whatever you want to call it i i'm getting past from satellite to satellite on starlink so if it's a little fuzzy right now it's the audio is fine the video is a little fuzzy but the video is terrible it's terrible on my end so um but one of the things to discuss and i know i've just i think i discussed this with dave column as well at one point we talked about peak oil i was like look they're focusing on the enthalpy version of the of part of the problem you put mechanical work in to get mechanical work out hold on for a second holding okay like one of my dogs is you know letting me know that there are new people here

working on my property um and um so but the gibbs free energy equation has both an enthalpy and an entropy component to it. And what that means is that just because we burn a lot of oil, Goober, that's enough. Just because we burn a lot of oil, Goober's a great dog, by the way, just because we burn a lot of oil to run our economy doesn't mean that's all we use oil for.

There's a lot of oil is used in a lot of value-added products up the chain that drive a lot more profit than just taking the oil out of the ground cleaning it up turning it you know fractionating it and then turning it to diesel fuel jp4 gasoline and all the rest of it there's all sorts of things we do with oil and that generates a tremendous amount of profit and that's on the entropy side of the equation part of the equation and they ignore that because they want to ignore it it's it's it's a willful suspension of it's it's a univariate analysis about what oil is and what it does as opposed to and it's the same thing i have a problem with again with the bitcoin fundamentalists who have the same argument about what bitcoin can it has

to do right it's the same kind of thing they're saying they don't have we don't have the ability to respond to incentives as people come up with better technology either to extract oil that's currently non-economic or come up with competing technologies energy technologies thorium molten salt for example or gen 3 uranium or whatever all these other things for generating electricity and and mechanical advantage there's all sorts of other options here right and you can't just look at one aspect of a market you have to look at the entire thing because if that were the, and that's where the price of oil in inflation-adjusted terms destroys the whole EROEI argument. You go back to the 1970s and you go and look at the price of oil

and you use the CPI and you go back to the early 1970s and you calculate what the price of oil was in inflation-adjusted dollars versus today. And it's like a 15% increase, maybe 20%, you know, at 85 or whatever it is it's not enough for me to get upset about even if our er oei has dropped from 100 to 1 to 5 to 1 or whatever the hell it is it's dumb there's so many other avenues here and if anything that's stopping us from shifting more of oil demand away from burning oil to using it as a materials precursor it's only because governments are in the way stopping us from doing so yep and we're not allowing the natural investment cycle of those barrels of oil into new technologies to give us new options as people be it you know natural gas and um

you know hydrogen fuel cells or thorium molten salt or you know gen 3 gen 4 uranium 238 reactors or whatever like there's all sorts of of other technologies that are out there for for energy And I just I'm like, you really think that it's this is the end of this is the end all and be all of of of energy and that we're tomorrow we're going to like go over a cliff and we're all going to go back to the Stone Age. Like, really? Like, dude, we got four X class CMCMEs just like popped off the sun. And this might be the last interview you and I ever do. Right. That's a cliff you should be worried about.

Speaking of which, I don't know the cigar. They should be hitting the earth like today and tomorrow, right? Yeah, no, it's a big deal. So part of the other thing is to remind everybody, hey, at the end of the day, let's have a nice, calm conversation about all these things because we're all on edge and we're all anxious and on edge because we can feel them trying to meme us into World War III and there's all these things that are happening. And then we're getting bombarded with X-rays and high energy particles from the sun in ways that we've never been bombarded by before. All these things have changed. And we have to realize that, you know, we're not nearly as rational as we think we are. We're just not.

We're kind of irrational ultimately as people. So we should really just, you know, take a step back, be a little, be a lot less hubristic about what it is we think we know. And just keep playing ideas out as best as we can. and uh you know and don't pick fights with people that you know know more than you because it's never never it's never a good idea especially the uh yeah imagine what would happen if the government wasn't subsidizing all this other energy exploration corrupting the the pricing mechanism for exploration and and like all this oil that's out there that we could go grab you know in canada or all the like this is there's so much oil out there there's so much natural gas

i think this morning i think on twitter somebody posted up a a list of the major oil discoveries in africa over the last three years in response to this twitter thread that we got into that i got into yesterday with the peak oil guys and i'm like exactly yeah well it's not high enough recovery yeah it is if we need it to be it will be or we will figure something else out and we'll We'll fire up the nuclear reactors, and we'll make new ones, and we can do this. We can remove all the permitting stuff that's in the – like 10 years to build a new nuclear reactor in the United States is a function of regulation and permitting and bureaucracy. It's not a measure – it's not a mechanism of – it's not because we don't know how to build nuclear reactors. That's just dumb.

We can do this if we want to. if we're if we're if if if it's that acute if the need is that acute we will we as people can do it yeah and we've proven in the past that we've done it we've built this society to this point we can continue going and if you don't believe in the law of diminishing marginal utility well then you're a malthusian and ultimately you're a communist yep you've all harari at the end of the day yes yeah yeah factor in like guyana low-hanging fruit just go in and get the communists out of venezuela and clean up their extraction process like there's i'm not worried about there's so many like the russians are pulling oil out of the ground and you know and yeah even

steve this morning came up and said well if russia was you know why isn't aren't they drilling deep wells anymore when they're drilling now like 48 of shallow wells because the shallow wells are cheap and they finally got access to the technology because we kept it from them for for 40 years like we we we hoarded our fracking technology as a strategic asset from the dod and wouldn't export it for years decades and some of it leaked out you know and you know with the joint ventures that uh the russian oil companies you know formed with like shell and gas prom and exxon and others they taught the russians how to do this stuff and now they're doing it why because these wells are cheap to spin up not because they're

their only option they're desperate like yeah i don't believe in false dichotomies marty you know that to me everything is a multi-variant uh problem to be solved and you know it's you know and anybody who tries to reduce everything to a single variable invariably you know they you get what you you know you get what you measure if you only measure one variable and then slot and as as my partner dexter white likes to say you build a model in excel and then you take it and you slide the model the slider on the model all the way to the right and boom you know the world blows up well yeah but that's not the way we operate we respond at every step along the way and we alter our behavior as a measure of incentives of just our incentives

change at every price point yeah that's one thing uh i've learned working in the bitcoin mining industry for six years is uh throw the excel models out nothing will ever map to them no they don't they don't work like you have to like it this is where someone like martin armstrong whether you believe in socrates or you don't is irrelevant martin's overall thesis his his not thesis his contribution to society and it's a profound one is that everything is cyclic it is what marty's talking about when he says things like that is literally the law of diminishing marginal utility writ large and what he's trying to do is you know build models that predict how we're going to respond to changing environments by looking at all these different variables at the

same time and then solving a whole bunch of differential equations it's an ambitious project on his part i don't know if he's cracked the code or not i don't even care i just know that what he's taught people elementally in this in this zeitgeist of everything is either you're either we live in an if not a then b environment if you're not a gold bug then you love bitcoin if you're if you love bitcoin then you hate gold or you know all these if you you know if you're if you don't side with israel you love the arabs if you're against if you're against government education you hate children like all this bullshit right what marty's saying is nah it doesn't work that way everything responds to everything else and everything you know and we respond to a complex

system of incentives and and feedback mechanisms and yes all within perfect knowledge but that's the nature of the universe and you know you should you should always be humble in the face of your own ignorance that's a beautiful thing too yeah of course it is it's uh yeah completely coastline that'd be humble just ride the wave somebody surfs a lot that's one thing you learn surfing there's the ocean's not very predictable but you get i can only imagine i've never been on a surfboard in my life uh fun uh i'm sure it is i the only time i ever really worked my legs hard was when i was doing uh martial arts and uh yeah yeah spar with people and surfing is all shoulders it's all shoulders is it and then yeah i guess so yeah neither of which i have ever had

strong shoulders or strong core so yeah i would get on a surfboard and then i would drown and and the board would be in the bahamas and i it would be bad i'll just stand on the shore and watch you watch you surf and like and and and kick the and and walk through the edge of the walk along the beach and and work my work my calves out as i walk through the the wet sand that that'd be enough for me smoking a cigar the entire time that's not it's not a bad way to spend your day on the beach i'm not gonna lie no really yeah i know you just said we shouldn't focus on individual variables but before we wrap up that's one there is one variable i'd like to touch on it is jerome powell um what is his future at the federal reserve um what are his potential

futures at the federal reserve you think they keep him around you know i think powell is i don't think he's going to go for another term. I think he's about 71 years old now. I think Daniel has intimated quite explicitly that he signed up for the second term, even though he didn't need to. He's, I think, a man on a particular mission to reform the Fed in a particular way to make it a domestically focused institution, knowing that the age of the dollar global reserve currency is over. And he's trying to set it up in such a way that the impact of that change on the united states is as minimal as possible and he's fighting a political class and that would include donald trump by the way who don't believe in that who don't agree with

him and are fighting him all lock stock and uh two smoking barrels didn't trump come out and say he wants to control interest rates yeah of course he does is that a rumor trump is a trump is a mercantilist he believes in strong protection tariffs and a weak currency he's a marty i've been saying it for years i like trump but he's just a shitbag property developer from queens yeah like you know that's who he is at at his core and he was trained by mob bosses roy cone and others to know how to negotiate and how to do do the thing and he would and what what what scares me about trump is that the wrong people will be he will be surrounded by the wrong people that will allow him again to um to force the unwinding of everything that powell has

done that is my biggest worry at this point and the rumor that i saw the other day that he was going to choose marco rubio as his running mate should be the most chilling piece of news of the week because what that's saying is oh we're going to have our reagan george herbert walker bush moment where if trump steps out of line they'll just kill him and install little marco who they fully control and that's not a good sign i don't know how true that is i just know it's a rumor um i'm still hoping against all hope that he does the right thing and chooses tulsi gabbard because she fixes every one of his deficiencies as a per as a human being and bridges the gap between the left and right on israel i think in a way that is reasonable minus the histrionics of

all the libertarians who are screaming that you know she's bought into the ridiculous you know islamist evil islamist caliphate argument i don't i don't see gabbard as that person i think she's right in that respect that there's a sect of islam that even muslims are horrified by and like the seko away and i think hamas represents that and i don't see her as you know pro israel in this respect either i think she looks at the entire thing and says it's all bad we've created it and it needs to be dealt with um so the other day i would i i i think i i think if you really were to press gabbard on these points and i i may have to sit down and read her book just to find out what she's actually saying on this on this point um maybe i actually will do that um but

you know the other day i was doing a um my um my twice weekly podcast for my subscribers and we've been talking about this a lot i just literally posted an article the first half of an article that about all of the stuff about israel the protests and you know title six of the civil rights act i published the first part of it today i wrote a proto version of that article last week from my subscribers so we've been discussing this in very controversial terms now for a little over a week i was on tom with tommy kerrigan the other day trying to explain some of the stuff and i'm working through these things but the other day i was thinking about it and i said you know in midst of all of this stuff that's going on benjamin netanyahu puts together

publishes his plan for what to do in gaza post israel's wiping out of hamas whether you believe that they can wipe out Hamas or not is that's not what this is about. I'm not endorsing this plan. I'm just saying Netanyahu has a plan for the future. And that plan for the future is to wipe out Hamas, get the Palestinians to submit and then bring them into the fold in within a greater Israel so that everybody can coexist. Okay. I don't, I think it's a little weird. Even my Israeli friends who are like, you know, who are not pro, not pro Netanyahu in any way, or like this feels odd and then i thought about it for a minute and it reminded me of what putin did in chechnya when he leveled grozny

and again i'm drawing a parallel here i'm not in any way matter shape or form condoning anything that's going on okay i am drawing a parallel in 2008 during the second chechen war when putin went in and leveled grozny and got the the the separatists under the elder kadirov to submit the terms of the surrender were that you surrender you submit you pledge loyalty to russia and we will rebuild grozny better than it was before and we will allow you to self-govern and as long as you don't ever take up arms against moscow ever again we're cool govern yourselves however you want to this and today chechnya is in a much stronger position than it was before the wars um putin has been as good as his word

the younger kadirov ramsay kadirov as absolute goober damn it sorry um the elder kadirov is now one of putin's strongest allies within russian politics he was there at the you know at putin's inauguration and at the um uh the the the may 9th celebration for the victory their victory in world war ii and talk glowingly about how they're going to you know bring ukraine under the fault into back into the fold and how putin is going to you know i mean he has putin has disarmed Chechnya in that way and it's

working and now he has some of the most staunchly loyal people on his side Chechnya voted like 99% for Putin the other 1% didn't show up and remember it was Kadyrov's Chechens who were the ones

chomping at the bit to go into Mariupol and do the bug hunt to wipe out the Azov battalion that was holed up in the steel plant in 2022. Those guys couldn't wait to prove their loyalty to Putin. Now, I'm not saying that Netanyahu is going to create that same situation in Gaza with the Palestinians. That is not what I'm saying. But it certainly seems like that's the plan he's putting forward here, that there will be no two-state solution. He's always been against

that. I don't trust Netanyahu as far as I can throw in. But I throw these ideas out there for you to chew on, not because I endorse them, okay? These are, you know, at some point, something has to be done to deal with the animals and the crazies that we've created for cynical geopolitical reasons. And they need to be dealt with, just like ISIS, just like Al-Qaeda, and all of it. and um you know i i you know i don't have a i don't have a good answer for this but that may be one of them like history is pretty clear that conflicts like this always end bloody and but they end but if they're going to be bloody then they need to be definitive they can't be allowed to fester and the the people who we're all fighting against want these conflicts

to never be resolved because then they can be spun up at a moment's notice to gaslight people divide them get them screaming at each other while they you know erect another part of their big technocratic um you know awful system that they're that they have a plan for that they want to put in place and i think we need to remind ourselves that that there's always a bigger that everybody's a pawn everybody's engaging in propaganda and everybody's a victim yeah and that you know and that's the thing that just you know and i find myself now caught in the middle between these two sides i don't endorse israel i don't endorse hamas i don't endorse any of these freaking people but i look at it and i say oh well we got jews to the left of me arabs

to the right here i am stuck in the middle with you or in europe i've got frogs to the left of me limey's to the right here i am stuck in the middle with you i got i you know what i mean i i've got i've got i've got nazis to the left of me ruski's to the right here i am stuck in the middle with you like it's it's the same this is what this is what narcissistic abusers do they triangulate between people and they get them again they set them against each other while they get off on it and they use it to their advantage and we have hundreds of years of history showing us who those people are and they're really good well this makes me think like how much of a generational aspect comes into this i'm 32 child of 9-11 wars in the middle east

great financial crisis obviously um 2020 covid now you pair all that with the economic stress that everybody in my generation and the generation cups coming up is feeling like how much of all this is and now that we live in the information age we have shows like this and yours again white pill i'm trying to focus on the white pills silver linings recently like i think there's a generational aspect where like people my age are like we're done with all of this like you know that you're trying to manipulate us and divide us not all of us obviously but i think a strong enough intolerant minority at the very least is being able to identify that everybody's being manipulated and again it seems like their game's just overplayed

like you can sort of piece together the um their way of operating their modus operandi and identify it as it's happening we see it it's they couldn't even wait four years election year it's like protest that's throughout bird flu and everybody's like we're not falling for this again you know you mentioned that you're 32 years old i i which i which by the way is is phenomenal by the way that you're in this uh you're in this state of awareness at that age i didn't even start to become politically aware or even like try to dial in until i was 32 okay like i was like nope this is all just shit and i and they all suck and is that and i was at 32 is when i took the world's smallest political quiz for the first

time i went oh i know what my problem is i'm a libertarian i literally was like overnight like oh that's what my problem was i literally went home i said honey i know what our problem is with politics we're libertarians and she went oh okay that makes more sense now and we were just completely out of phase with the world because we we looked at it and we said we can't change any of this and um but then it's been a long slow hard grind over i'm 56 now so it's 24 years of me piecing these things together and getting better at it over time and you know um my instincts were that was all bullshit but i didn't have any good context for it i didn't study history i studied chemistry and literature right um and so over time i just had

to become you know i just pieced it all together slowly but surely you know through monetary theory and you know politics and this and then eventually that's where we are where we are and if i i wouldn't even be where i am right now if i didn't become i didn't move into the public sphere to be able to sit down and have conversations like this with the world right you know i i just remember being the guy shouting at my own shouting at the walls of my house everybody looking at me like i had four heads they were probably right you know no and that's that's the thing i think people really underestimate is the power of these conversations and not only this conversation with tens of thousands millions of conversations happening whether it's in a closed patreon discord

server slack group um broader shows like this get released publicly these conversations are happening everybody has that deep down intuition like something's fucked up they're fucking with us and think about what to think about the huge effect that joe rogan has had on the ability for people to just sit around and shoot the shit for two hours and have everybody go be in rapt attention about anything and it's amazing yeah it really does break through the whole tightly controlled soundbite driven you know what i like to call the old british media model of of of of uh of of what's the word i'm looking for um well propaganda is obvious but it's it's that you know it's a sensationalist nonsense and then spin the narrative and their their narratives

don't last 24 hours anymore no so and that's a go make like martin armstrong's cyclical thesis like it feels like we are at the end of a cycle entering into a new one and yep if you believe neil howell's uh what's he called um the fourth turning turning fourth turning yeah we're in the fourth turning yeah it was like neil how strauss and how the chondriti f martin armstrong armstrong says we're in the cycle of cycles that the end of a cycle of six cycles right he has a whole thing that way when you look at what's happening within the sun you realize that there's also we're coming to the end of a whole bunch of different major solar cycles as well and what the earth is doing in relation to it and blah blah blah these all these things are coming together and

i don't again i don't like the older i get the more i'm like yeah you know maybe astrology isn't woo-woo you know maybe this isn't you know like this like as people i and i say this all the time and you know i know i know we have to go soon because i've got another show in a couple minutes and i i need to to to recharge but all stories are metaphorically true and all stories are false right all stories are not true they're all just they're all things that happen that are then filtered through our consciousness and then we communicate to somebody else and that's what the story is and the story is your version of the truth but at the same time all those and that the stories may be you know may not be literally true like the story of homer and you know of the

odyssey or the iliad or the stories in the bible or star wars or this or that or any of these big freaking stories but what they all are metaphorically true in order to try and tell us what happened in the last crisis period and how we dealt with the last crisis in order to inform the next generation to how they're going to better be informed to handle the next crisis. That's what these stories are for. And we have

to, you know, and the stories we're telling right now are the ones that we're working through the real issues that we're feeling, be it intuitively or intellectually, or a mixture, hopefully a mixture of both. That's the

real important part. so and i i and i'll be i'm on the side of e.m mcgillicrist um if you've not if you don't know who he is the the left brain right guy right brain guy it'd be mcgillicrist is brilliant and he's firmly convinced that what we have now is a fight between models and reality between the left brain and the right brain and we are a left brain dominated society that has lost its ability to to interface with you know reality that the left brain builds models the right brain sees reality and you know the problem with the left brain is that it can the model can over can overcome the reality and shout it down and then keep it suppressed and in the world we've we've built for

ourselves we're reinforcing left brain model making on a daily basis social media you know to a lesser extent some even conversations like this are contributed to this and it's why it's important that we be aware of those things so that we can try as best as possible to remain balanced between you know our intuition and our reason it's very important it's also described as the hyper real i forget by who but yeah um just as mcgilchrist says like the map is not the world it's a model of the world it's not the world if you think that the map is the world you're you're doing it wrong like they're i got ducks walking around the backyard that's the world yeah that's the map doesn't show that it doesn't you know doesn't doesn't do the doesn't do the

the world justice yeah that's why uh everybody out there go have some kids play with your kids that's real it's the most real thing to me at least yep so tom it's always a pleasure thank you for doing this on such short notice i needed this conversation to end the week i'm i'm i'm happy to have done it and i'm glad to reached out and we'll do it again and i'm and i did and if it helped good great that's all i can that's all i can hope for because i had a great time marty thank you for having me on it was uh i learned a lot as always i got a chance to go through a lot of stuff so it's great well the pleasure was all mine as always thank you for doing this and yeah we'll do it again soon absolutely whenever you want okay thank you

sir peace peace and love freaks Thank you.