TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #559: Death Throes of the European Cabal with Tom Luongo

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

Marty sits down with Tom Luongo to discuss the next steps after Trump's victory in the election. Tom on Twitter: https://x.com/tfl1728 Tom's Blog: https://tomluongo.me/ 0:00 - Intro 1:30 - Trapping Trump in a war as a last resort 9:30 - Bond markets 14:21 - Unchained & Coinkite 16:40 - Treasury Secretary choice 21:06 - Tom’s thesis is playing out 26:20 - What do the next steps look like? 32:31 - Better ways to fund the govt 47:25 - Zaprite & SOTE 48:58 - Trump appointments and foreign policy 58:16 - Gaetz 1:05:02 - Zeitgeist shift 1:20:34 - Authenticity of the new guard 1:29:09- Podcasts are superior 1:35:09 - There’s plenty of work left to do Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Coinkite https://coinkite.com/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Salt of the Earth https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

Five asset classes not normally correlated are all going to go up together. Gold, Bitcoin, stocks, bonds, and the dollar. It's going to be a massive safe haven trade as Europe collapses. Tom Luongo, geopolitical analyst and markets expert, reveals what he thinks will happen as the euro continues to weaken due to political uncertainty and energy dependence. You know, threatening the world with nuclear war, that's kind of, I mean, once you go nuclear, you've got nothing else you can threaten people with, right? What you're watching now, I think, is the death throes of the people who

really thought that they had everything buttoned up and while europe struggles tom shares his reasoning for an unpopular opinion on american interest rates powell's gonna cut rates harder under trump than he would have under kamala harris i know that sounds backwards but it's true post-election analysis geopolitical updates and timely financial predictions this conversation will keep you fully in the loop at a time when you may need it most you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when you talk about a fed just gone nuts all 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 it's a brave new world maybe maybe how are we getting rugged that's what i want to know how are we getting rugged it feels too good to be true no we're not gonna get rug pulled down with this one this is what they're gonna what you're watching now i think is the death throes of the people who you know really thought that they had everything buttoned up i mean you know the last time last couple times we've talked marty it's been you know having to go through the scenarios where things could go wrong right and i think we did a lot of that and um you know

it's funny um i i saw the the the the the thing the tweet you put out the other day of the of the the excerpt you did of one of the the last conversations we did and i was like yeah that was definitely where i was thinking in i don't know july or september or wherever we were but you know um that was one scenario and part of that scenario was still on the table like we're here we're doing this what this is november 19th we're 12 14 16 hours since you know somebody shot something that was supposedly attack them into russia breaking red lines right with the russians but the russians haven't responded yet you know i was talking with dexter white this morning about all these things and he knows much

more about the capabilities of all these weapon systems than i will ever learn because he this is what he does with the spare time i play world of warcraft to decompress um and uh he reads about what u.s and russian weapon systems and the the reality is i think if i understood his point correctly is that the attackams that we sent ukraine that we know were in country only have a range of 100 miles and these things shot off an effective range of 100 miles and these things were pinpoint targeted at 140 so really or were these storm shadows or were these scalps because we know that the brits have sent those into ukraine We know that the operation and the incursion of the Kursk was designed and operated and

blessed by the British. The goal being, of course, that, you know, okay, let's take some Russian territory. Let's embarrass Putin, typical British position, a neocon position, British position on this. And then at the moment when our bond markets, their bond markets, the British and the German, start to break down, when the governments start to come under serious attack, we've got the German government has already fallen, lo and behold, we get this thing happen over a weekend where Joe Biden is reported, which I don't believe, to have blessed this. And then 48 hours later, the missiles fly. So two things. One, I don't believe that Biden authorized anything. And two, I'm not completely convinced that these were U.S. attackums. So now the question is, why would we allow, why would Russia and the United States both go through the process of the charade of saying they

were attackums and go along with the narrative? Well, this just literally just popped into my head as we were, as I'm going through this, I just hadn't framed it in that with that question of mine, right? Well, let's think back to the IL-20, the IL-76 shoot down over Syria in 2019. Supposedly the story is that the Israelis were in the area and the guys made the Syrian S-200 systems got confused between the Israeli plane that they wanted to shoot and the Russian plane. they hit the Russian plane by mistake. That was the story. That was the story that everybody was sold. My good friend, Joaquin Flores, at the time writing for either his own, he was writing, he wasn't writing for Strategic Culture at the time, he's writing for his own site. And now I

can't know the name of that site I'm blanking on, but he went through chapter and verse how that S-200 could never have hit that IL-20 plane, Eland plane, because it was like 260% out of its range. Couldn't shoot that far. Scrubbed from the internet were reports that there were missile launches fired from French and UK frigates in the area at the same time. So, the conclusion we all drew in the alternative geopolitical space was that Netanyahu, the Russians, and the Americans, and the Syrians all took one on the chin in order to cover up British and or French perfidy in an attempt to start World War III via a NATO attack.

Article 5, invocation of some form or another. And that's what happened. So is this a kind of same thing that's happening today? I'm not saying this is true. I am running a scenario for y'all to error check. That's what I'm doing. And nothing more, nothing less. But we have precedent for these things.

So it would make sense that the Russians would blame the Americans for this. And it would make sense for the Americans to take the blame, because if the British were the ones that actually gave the Ukrainians the green light and rogue elements of the American either military or the intelligence services gave help to this attack with the satellite service, then the deconfliction hotline is running really, really high right now and working overtime to stop all this. that's what i'm that that sadly makes the most sense to me and uh let's yeah so that's right there's an in lines with one of the theories we discussed the last time you were on a couple months ago lead up to the election i think you laid out two scenarios or maybe three make it too big to rig two scenarios make it too big to rig right um so there's no question which is exactly what happened and the two scenarios after that were were if it wasn't too big to rig the one scenario was time up in lawfare try to take it to the courts and have a constitution step in and be

like we're gonna make sure that he doesn't get in too big to rig that's not possible fallback plan is world war three it seems like fallback fallback fallback plan to the 14th amendment which jamie Raskin has been talking about this nonsense Trump's not an insurrectionist um the other one of course is and if you look through it I wrote I wrote a big tweet the other day about this it was popping into my head because then and the oh and we're not done with the with with the with the actual get here um start world war three okay leave Trump with a war that he can't get out of easily which has been my theory for two years now like they don't kill him and he wins the election then you just leave him with a bunch of poison pills that he can't you know he

can't fix quickly that everybody wants him to fix that's also you know that also rhymes with history with the very people who are involved in this particular thing when you when you mix that with the movements in the bond markets, which is what I was talking about for my clients at Newsmax this morning, it's pretty, and I was just looking at the charts. I'm like, well, how do you stop a meltdown in the long end of the meltup

in the long end of everybody's yield curve? Because now Trump's going to come to power. There's going to be a recession because he's going to take an ax to the government. There's going to be a lot of turmoil. And so the long end of the yield curve should rise in yield in order to offset the risk of some political infighting and all the rest of it. Fine. Okay. And the potential for a recession, fine. I want higher yields. And that has to be

fought because if the US yield curve sells off, then everybody else's yield curve has to sell off because there's trillions of dollars of currency and interest rate swaps that are out there and hedges and all of that that are tied to specific ranges of spreads between one sovereign debt and the other or one currency's exchange rate versus the other. This is just the practicality of living in this world, right? And that's not going to change, by the way, if Bitcoin takes over. The denominator in all of these things will be Bitcoin as opposed to the US dollar, All right. It's still going to be the same processes are going to be there just to remind everybody that, you know, we're not there, you know, that even the future world is still going to have some vestiges of this. So it's incumbent upon everybody to bone up on these skills and bone up on this type of analysis in order to be able to be better at trying to handicap what's going on next.

That's what I've been trying to do. I know that's what you've been trying to do and, you know, and all of it. So, what a shock to find out that, you know, with the Euro and the pound last week breaking down hard. The pound hit 126, the Euro hit a low below 105, just briefly below 105. Like, it was a big move down. Oil didn't move in price. Therefore, now, you know, energy prices, relatively speaking, are rising for the Europeans, even if oil prices stay flat because their currency buys fewer barrels of oil. And then that translates into the need for higher bond yields.

So if we have the US yield curve selling off, then the German yield curve should sell off and the UK yield curve should sell off and the French yield curve and the Italians and everybody else's. That's just the way these things are going to work. Well, we get to the red lines of the German tenure, around 2.4% currently is what Christine Lagarde has been defending. And about 4.5% on the UK guilt, 10-year guilt. And lo and behold, someone engineers a moment where money needs to go to ground and go to the deepest, most liquid markets in the world, i.e. the safe haven of safe haven assets in today's world

for many, many financial players. Maybe not the Bitcoiners in the audience, maybe not the gold bugs in the audience, but certainly for the pension funds and the two and 20 carrying interest trade guys and all of that, all of that world, which doesn't deal in those assets, and that's fine. Those guys are going to move into U.S. Treasuries. Like it or not, doesn't matter whether you like it, that's the reality. And so you can see that if you engineer a rally in the U.S. Treasury, well, what does that also engineer a rally in? Or at least arrests the sell-off in The UK gilt, the German bund, the French bonds. I don't remember the name of the French bonds.

You know, Italian BTPs and all the rest of it. Interestingly, Japanese debt kept selling off because Japanese aren't defending that anymore because they need higher yields. And they're not fighting higher yields. They're just allowing the long end of their yield curve to rise in stages. But they're not fighting a limit anymore. They're above their stated limit of 1% on the 10-year.

So we put all of that together and that's where I think we are. And I think Putin understands this. I think, I hope Trump understands it. And now it's just a matter of everybody, you know, keeping the hotlines open, keeping the lines of communications open to let real information flow to both sides while those who are twisting in the wind, while those who are, you know, who are swimming naked as the tide goes out, let them twist in the wind. Like as I mix metaphors, like some linguistic concrete. But you say, you get what I'm saying. Sup freaks, this rip was brought to you by our good friends at

Unchained. We've got a special event for you, an online event. Bitcoin is hitting its stride with massive ETF inflows, major geopolitical changes, increasing corporate adoption and a proposed US strategic reserve. 2025 is shaping up to be a defining year. I think it's pretty safe to say that if you've been paying attention, you probably should be. Here's a real question you need to be asking yourself. Are you ready? Is your Bitcoin house in order? If you're not sure, you're in luck. On December 10th, Unchained is hosting the central session focused on helping you get positioned for what's ahead. You walk away with a clear path to your end of year moves, smarter strategies for bringing your family into Bitcoin, and the confidence of knowing

you're set up for the long haul. Join Unchained General Counsel Jeff Van Drew and Adamant Capital founder Ter Demeester, both have been on this podcast many times, to understand what makes this moment different and the key moves you need to consider from year-end planning to bring your family into Bitcoin the right way. With the bull run gaining momentum, this is your window to get ready for what's ahead, register at unchained.com slash TFTC, unchained.com slash TFTC. This rip is also brought to you by good friends at CoinKite. CoinKite builds the best Bitcoin hardware in the world. There is no second best when it comes to Bitcoin hardware. If you're looking to secure in self-custody your Bitcoin, you can get the MK4 or the Coldcard Q. Coldcard

Q has a full keyboard, a QR scanner, NFC enabled, has a battery pack with some AA batteries in there. Create private public keys off pair in an air gap fashion. Private keys never have to touch an online device. They have their sats card, which is the best way to give Bitcoin. If you're looking to gift Bitcoin for a wedding, a birthday party, a communion, a bar mitzvah, whatever it may be, tap the card on the back of your phone. You get a address to send to. You send it to that address. It lives on the sats card. Again, there is no second best when it comes to Bitcoin hardware. The Bitcoin price seems to be going up. You want to take care of your security before Bitcoin goes to six figures make sure you get your bitcoin off exchanges using coin kite hardware mk4 cold

card q go to coin kite.com use the code tftc we have a code now tftc for five percent off at checkout i think the signal to me that trump maybe not that he knows exactly what's going on but is cognizant that there is something going on and he should make a very strategic decision that could affect the outcome of all this is the lead up to the announcement of the treasury secretary it seems like that is a position that he's thinking very long and hard about and taking a lot of console around yeah he should he should it's the most important position in this in this administration because ultimately if i've been right about what i've been laying out about the fed and the treasuries and you know the fight between powell and yellen and all this stuff on

And again, y'all salt all that analysis to taste. I don't care. I happen to think I'm right, but I'm also willing to admit that I may be wrong, right? But if I'm right about all that, and that's our boundary condition for the thought experiment, then who's ever a treasury has to be a person willing to work with Powell hand in glove to deliver a monetary and fiscal policy that's aligned with the new and incoming administration. And we don't have any more infighting. We had infighting, globalist Yellen versus, my argument, Sovereigness Powell. But now we've got

Sovereigness in charge. So the Treasury Secretary can't be the globalist snake in the grass, which is what the GOP is arguing for. At every turn, they keep trying to throw these globalist snakes in the garden into the mix. And so far, Trump has, I think, done a very good job of resisting that. We can discuss Secretary of State, we can discuss some of those other people, but I don't think they're like, they're not germane to this phase of the conversation. We can have that conversation a little later if you want, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that. But for right here, right now, if he makes the right decision about Treasury Secretary, And I'll be honest with you, all of the people that have been floated don't seem to have a lot

of upside. Scott Besant has a lot, I think it's Besant, right? Has a lot of upside because he knows where Soros' bodies are buried. I look at him and I say, he could easily be Jim Rogers because Rogers used to run a fund with Soros. And when he figured out what Soros was, he left. yeah that's a lot of people are fear-mongering around scott percent due to his source connection i actually know a few people in my network who okay the source fund and they're completely diametrically opposed to his worldview as well so i think the idea of somebody worked at the source fund in the past who knows they may be aligned with him and his view of the world some extent but i just you mentioned jim rogers i know another and they do not share the same

worldview right and remember and just because you worked for somebody doesn't mean you agree with them it was not it was a job opportunity you took it and you worked with it and then you put it on your resume and then you went on to other things like you know that kind of analysis of the of he worked with this one worked with this one he connects to him that's a a world that doesn't allow for growth forgiveness nuance or anything else it's just tracing connections and it doesn't really mean anything, right? Unless you have, you know, unless you dig in and find real meat on those bones, it's analysis that doesn't, it's a fact that doesn't have any significance. There are lots of facts in the world that are not really all that interesting. There are lots of facts in

the world that aren't interesting. I have a fact for you. I have like 140 board games. Is that an interesting fact? No, it's not. No one gives a fuck, right? You know what I mean? And you shouldn't other than maybe that oh tom's like insane that he owns 140 board games well okay and maybe that colors your analysis of me okay maybe in that respect it's interesting but you know anything beyond that you really shouldn't you know because it is what it is like part of that i can you know whatever you know we can we can draw whatever conclusions from that fact you want but it doesn't necessarily isn't necessarily germane to the current conversation same thing with scott percent or um you know in the past jim rogers like i don't i i've never questioned jim rogers

i'm it's very obvious i've met jim rogers i've been in a room with the man it's very obvious that he's too much of a gentleman to say what he actually thinks is your service that's simple you see it on his face yeah no and when it comes to percent too i mean we were talking about this before we hit record but um appreciate what howard lutnick has done for bitcoin as an advocate but in terms of becoming treasury secretary i'm happy that he's uh in the commerce yeah head of commerce because i think treasury secretary needs somebody letnick comes off to me like a brute like just knows how to make money goes in i think we need somebody very strategic yeah when it comes to treasury secretary particularly if we're running

with your thesis which seems to be coming uh more true by the day more true by the day right and i'm happy to be i'm happy to have been right about it like not because it's my ego but because dude it gives us some hope that maybe all this is going to work out that's why i mean you know this is not about fuck this is about if it's about anybody associated with me it's about my daughter okay if you you know if you if you guys want to know what my freaking motivation is to try and find like a ray of hope in this world is because i'm trying to figure out how to navigate you know to leave my world, my daughter a world that doesn't suck. Okay.

And, you know, she's 18 and all the rest of it. So that's where we are. And so I can see that about Ludnick. I'll actually be, I'll actually further your point. I agree with you completely. We need somebody as secretary. Dave Collin made this point when I was on with him and Jim Consular and Tommy Kerrigan about a week and a half ago, right after the election.

And Dave said he loved the idea of Stan Druckenmiller. because Druckenmiller understands plumbing. He understands the markets. He's never lost money. I mean, relatively speaking, on an annual basis, man's never lost money. And he said, you know, this was very early in the conversation, the Friday after the election.

And Besant has got Druckenmiller's approval saying exactly what Collins said about Druckenmiller. So, you know, I'm okay with that. We are going to need a guy who understands the way money actually flows through these accounts and through all of these channels and then how the Fed helps to manage that. And if they're on the same page about how to change the flow of dollars around the world, such that more dollars that are produced circulate domestically as opposed to constantly being sent out overseas to colonize the world, which is what we've been doing. If they're both on the same page there, because it's clear that's what Powell's been doing, and it's clear that Yellen's been trying to do the opposite. if we have a treasury secretary who understands what Powell's doing, how he's doing it, and why it's significant, this could all change very quickly. And the dollar index is responding

to that. And the clearest chart for anybody to watch is the dollar index chart. We're threatening a November breakout of a two and a half year band below 106. Well, 106.5. We closed at 106.62 on the dollar index on the end of this month dude we're going to 120 on the dollar like me and francis hunter gonna be like you know deciding it's gonna decide you know who was more right like they're gonna be hilarious i'll be like no francis you can run with that you if you if you need to be right more right than i am if that's important to you you can go you can go ahead and do this i don't i'm just i'm picking on francis he's a friend i like i love francis a lot and i've been on a show many times um but you know um yeah i don't know like

That's what I see. And, you know, Martin Armstrong will eventually wind up being right as well. And $1.20 on the dollar index will be a bad scene, okay? But it'll be a necessary bad scene for us to get through in order to get to the other side of this. Transition states are always messy. But it's a dollar index at 120 and say by the end of 2025 is indicative of a transition state from one set of monetary parameters or one way of looking at the world to another state. And it's like a chemical reaction that has to go through a transition state. And this thing of the dollar index at 120 paying off Brent Johnson's milkshake theory is that necessary transition state.

you know and very broad kind of metaphoric terms for the layman to understand i mean with that in mind too if we're running with besant or i mean i've seen senator bill hagerty right floated as well and i i've personally met senator hagerty and not gonna be honest not sure about his knowledge in terms of the interworkings of the plumbing which you described earlier but i do know he's um he's he's like he was tapped during trump's last administration bill i need you in japan to go fix stuff he went and did that and i know he's on board to to make sure that if there is a mandate to change things and he's tasked to do that he will do um i believe he will do what is necessary to get the job done um with all that in mind when

you factor in i guess we're running with the assumption now because it hasn't been announced whether it's percent haggardy somebody like them that gets put in this position you factor in the tariffs the tax policy doge what do the mechanics look like if all that's in place to get us through that transitionary period what are the types what it looks like yeah that's a good question that's a good way of looking at it. What I'll say is this. You're going to have that weird moment that Martin Armstrong has been warning us about for a long, long time where five asset classes that are not normally correlated are all going to go up together. Gold, Bitcoin, stocks, bonds, and the dollar. It's going to be a massive safe haven trade as Europe collapses. The dollar could

go to 120 or even 130 because the euro is going to collapse to 50 cents. The pound collapses to 80 cents. The yen holds in the 150s while the Japanese divest themselves of a lot of their dollar holdings in order to defend the yen. We got another round of commodity cost plus inflation because you're going to see the following. Powell is going to cut rates harder under Trump than he would have under Kamala Harris. I know that sounds backwards, but it's not. But it's true, especially if the dollar goes higher. That means there's a massive demand for dollars.

And to blunt that rise, you cut credit more aggressively than you would have otherwise. It also would then support a massive cutting of domestic spending, which is going to be deflationary. There's going to be some tariffs. That's going to be deflationary. There's going to be a lot of things that are going to be deflationary. There's going to be deregulation at the same time, which will be inflationary because it's going to put an upward demand on raw goods as the markets unfuck themselves.

Powell's going to cut interest rates, which means this credit's going to flow more freely, which is going to be a little inflationary. So what Powell's trying to do is, and what Powell and the Treasury have to manage here is how to balance the deflationary forces of cutting some spending. The Fed's still continuing to shrink its balance sheet. Very important. Powell's still doing QT, by the way, while this is going on. And cutting interest rates.

So we've got deflation, but then you're going to cut interest rates, and then you're going to have commodity, and that's going to unlock commodity demand as people start to try and invest and buy things and do things because the lack of regulation. I mean, if Vivek Ramaswamy is serious about what he's saying, he has a mandate to stop all of this unconstitutional regulatory miasma that was put into effect under the Chevron Doctrine. It's not, oh, now we get to sue the government to get these cases overturned. No, these cases have already been adjudicated as unconstitutional,

and all of this stuff is null and void. CAFE, RENZ, the Green Air Act, all this stuff, every bit of it. And if they're serious about that, dude, the disruption is – I can't even describe the disruption. I can't fathom it. I can't imagine it, okay? And I got a big imagination, right? So, yeah, like it could be big.

So, on the other side of that, Powell is going to have to accommodate this. And if he wants to have a non-adversarial relationship with the Treasury Department and with the president, well, the president is going to want lower interest rates because now he needs to fix the entitlement, to pay out the cost of the entitlement systems, right? And he needs to fund that debt and fund the rollover of the debt and everything else at lower interest rates. moreover um and powell will should be able to give him that um it doesn't mean he's going back

to zero bound it means he's gonna go back to three percent as opposed to four well on the rollover topic do you worry about that with the the last two cuts despite the cuts the the long end of the yield curve has gone up like do they have to get that under control i don't i don't worry about it too much because i don't think anybody's willing to give us duration yet Okay. What you're going to see is Powell cut the short end, cut to create an upwardly sloping yield curve at current long end prices. Because you're going to have to,

there's going to be sincere demand for the long end of the curve still. Because there's still going to be demand for the U.S. Treasuries as collateral. Okay. It's still going to be in the system. And if Europe melts down, money's going to flow into the long end of the yield curve because, well, you know, who's not buying a revamping United States of 4.5%, right?

Yeah. Okay. But if he cuts the short end of the yield curve, then you wind up with the end of the, quote-unquote, bear steepener trade. You don't get a long-end sell-off. What you get is a long-end hold between 4.5 and 5. It might rise another 50 basis points or so. But then the short end of the curve slopes down to 3, I think, by the end of 2025. I think, you know, we're in such flux that when I look at the way the demand curves for money,

the futures curves for money are pricing, I keep saying they're mispriced over and over and over again. I was right about this last year. I said, then pricing in seven rate cuts in 2025 was dumb. We're not going to get seven. We're not going to get seven. We're going to get three or four. I said three, we might get four. Okay. I was off by one. So it was not seven. We're not three and a half percent last I checked. But the idea that Powell is going to hold rates higher under a Trump administration cutting spending and cutting regulation, this is the other thing I want to pop into people's heads. There's a lot of hand-wringing out there about how we can't cut, there's so much of the budget can't be cut because it's all entitlement spending and defense spending

and whatever, and an interest rate, servicing the debt, interest payments. So you can't cut a dollar out of Medicare because costs have ballooned out of control in the healthcare industry because we're getting every dollar worth of value out of the money we put into Medicare. Correct? You really believe that? You don't think that there's not 50% waste i'm not talking about people actively defrauding medicare i'm talking about the administration of medicare and the administration of health care costs at the hospital level based on all the regulations that the hospitals have to deal with and the doctors have to deal with and the billing into this and that and all that crap that's what's causing the prices that

medicare has to pay out to the health care providers to keep them solvent and the beholden the insurance regulations well same thing cut the and same thing to the insurance companies cut the cost of that it it cut the amount of money it costs to take medicare provide a health care service cut that by 50 and all of a sudden medicare expenses are cut by 50 because the payouts are lower because you introduce i don't know something called the market back to health care providing no we can't have that obama nationalized it like everybody who says we don't have we have private health care is this is full of shit that's why literally it's why i stopped listening to certain people that in in my in you know 2018

2017 2018 2019 2020 there was a cadre of us that were you know in the in the alternative of geopolitical space it'd be like bernard at moon of alabama pep ascobar the saker those guys and i remember during covid bernard at moon of alabama who's by the way former german intelligence um going on this epic rant about how at the beginning of covid the united states was fucked because its private health care system would not be able to deal with the and he was and he was doing this with an ass load of schadenfreude as well by the way so the tone was unbelievably dismissive and obnoxious and so because the private health care system in the united states will not be able to deal with this kind of thing it won't be able

to coordinate it won't be able to like what the fuck are you talking about dude we have we have a more we have a more nationalized health care system than you do in germany or do you not know anything about how medical care actually is delivered at the insurance level in america The only people getting medical care in the United States are the people who are uninsured using concierge service. Everybody else is just feeding the billing machine. I'm on the same boat. I haven't bought, I refuse to buy an Obamacare policy.

I'm 56 years old. I don't have health insurance. Okay, I refuse. I have a concierge service down in Gainesville that takes care of me and my family. And are we doing a high wire act in case I wind up with cancer tomorrow? Yeah, I am. And at some point, will I get a catastrophic policy? Yeah.

But I'm going to wait until this blows over. There's going to be a moment in the next two years where all that shit's going to change. And then you're going to watch me plunk my dollars down on the table and buy them and buy the freaking policy. Yeah. But there's so much that can actually be cut if you just start to think about the mechanisms by which we spend the money. we spend the money badly it's like the defense it's like the the defense department badly is

underselling it it's yeah i mean i badly is underselling it i'm like i'm i'm new yorker i'm a new yorker i try to say it i try to sell i try to say sell badly with in with it with you know with emphasis right in order to like get it across to you it's horrific how's that is that a better word you know catastrophic more descriptive um gargantuan you know no and like to your point about the vague i mean elon was even signaling this i forget who he's being interviewed on or by but he said they said like you're going to go cut all the spending it's like yeah we're going to cut a bunch of programs maybe we'll find out that some programs were actually necessary we'll bring them back but it's going to be this trial and error where you just you know there's

a gargantuan problem and a lot needs to be cut you just start cutting and things that were actually valuable will prove to be valuable in retrospect and just bring them back i don't think that's a terrible strategy no i don't think it's a terrible strategy at all because the the idea that we should absolutely assume that everything again assume that everything that we're currently spending on is a net good right that by definition everything we're currently doing is good this is always the way it's framed we are doing x because x is good and that if you take 10 of x away then we're cutting 10 of good bullshit like we know that's a lie right so the same thing with the defense department like can we not think that we can't get the same level of service out of

the defense department for half the money literally half the money i think 10 of the money i'm again i'm just trying i'm actually trying to soft sell the 50 cut i know it's 90 marty i know all this is bullshit but what i'm saying is even when you go to present it to somebody who's unconvinced go in with 50 give them a number that they can wrap their brain around and then when you say oh what oh look we cut 50 of the defense budget we're getting we're getting better weapon systems than we did before. We're getting better value for our money. Maybe we can find another 50%. And we just keep doing the Pareto thing, 50% or 50% or 50% until we get down to a number that doesn't suck. And we can fund with tariffs and excise taxes, which is the way we should be

going. And oh, by the way, everybody talking about, let's get rid of the income tax. Yes, let's get rid of the income tax. It's expensive. The tax code is horrible, all of that stuff. but we don't replace it with a vat yeah explain i saw you tweeting about this this morning you were pretty passionate absolutely do not replace replace the shit with a vat fuck that that's freaking european communism on steroids even without an income tax even if you repeal the 16th amendment you'll never get through this congress anyway so it doesn't freaking matter um and there's and the last i checked there's more than 15 states without voter id and you need three three quarters of the states to sign off on this and you know that'll never happen

um so the vat is terrible just in conception we can like if the government provides a service that you know like i don't mind paying gasoline excise taxes to the state of florida and i pay a lot because they build roads with that they maintain the roads the roads are in good shape they constantly expand the infrastructure the infrastructure with it they do good things with that money i mean is there a better way of doing it maybe the hardcore libertarians are right there's a slightly better way of doing it, fine. But as of right now, I don't need a state income tax to do it. We run the whole state of Florida with a massive surplus and can send most kids and most A students in Florida coming out of high school on a three quarters or full ride to a state

institution. And we still have a surplus, billions of dollars from property taxes, excise taxes and sales tax. That's it. VAT is sold to you as a sales tax. It's not a sales tax because it hits every stage of the structure of production. This is a sales tax, by the way, which also bothers the crap out of me. It should only be excise taxes on the finished goods at the point of consumer demand and everything else is nonsense. We already have a 7% VAT, 6% to 8% VAT depending on where you live in the country. It's called a sales tax. Same thing. And by the way, it's enough. And it's more than enough. So, sorry, they don't need more than that. Excise taxes are the way to go. If we have to fund a government, we have to have a government.

Again, I'm leaving the hardcore libertarians in the dust here. The anarcho-libertarians in the dust here. I'm not talking philosophy. I'm talking pragmatism. We have to have a government. has to do something. We wanted to do things. We should pay court. We should, you know, the courts should charge fees for their services. Hey, you know, you go to court and you pay the fees for the judge's time and for the clerk's time and for the bailiff. And okay, fine. We pay some fees. Like you provide a service. You, you know, you want your, you want, you, you bought a piece of property and you want the government to be the record keeper of who owns what property and all of that. Fine. Great. What do the doc stamps cost? Every time I buy a piece

of property or sell a piece of property or something like that, I mean, I don't do a lot of this in my life, but I've bought a few in my life. This is the rarest occasion where I get angry or even when I buy a car, right? Doc stamps and all that stuff for the registration. What do I give a shit? It's 150 bucks. Here you go. To register my car, to know that there's a database and an infrastructure in place that if someone steals my car that i can prove that it's my car because i have the title to it that's worth 150 dollars to me and i don't give a shit that the free market can do it for 110 you know what i mean yeah i mean i i'd like to get to the point where our society is so efficient and so unregulated that we have that conversation

yeah let's cut another 40 bucks off of this we're not there right let's cut let's cut that out that's unnecessary. Wouldn't that be great to live in that world? Peter St. John's this afternoon was literally screaming about, oh, by the way, lovely, lovely man. I love Peter. I did a podcast with him a couple of months ago. I met him for the first time. He's a lovely man. And saying, we spend $546 billion a year preparing our taxes. And that's just the tax. That's just the cost of tax preparation. That's not the unseen cost, Harry Hazlitt, like economics in one lesson, Harry Hazlitt, like saying of all the unseen costs that go into preparing those returns. All of the people, the compliance officers, the tax officers, the accountants

at the companies, all the time you have to spend if you're a sole proprietor, having to get all your receipts together at the end of the year, organize them, put them in a spreadsheet, send them over to the accountant to bless. And all they do is they take your numbers anyway, by the way, you have to still do all the legwork. They just package it in such a way as to make sure that the forms are filled out properly and that they're willing to sign off on the numbers you gave them as being true and correct to the level that you gave them. If you didn't give them the right numbers, your accountant's not on the hook for that. I mean, that's just the way it is. and that's a that's a that's a terrible system that's all hours lost where i or you or anybody

else yeah i could rant into a microphone an extra two hours a week if i didn't have to you know spend 100 hours preparing my taxes every year right days lost i mean imagine running a company on a bitcoin standard it's uh or or how about the local tire guy right or the local restaurateur right? Having to manage all the receipts and the this and the that and all the accounting and the small books accounting and everything else, just to make sure that he's tracked all of his numbers so that he can pay the government the right amount of money on envelope day to make sure he's not light. And I'm now making a Sopranos reference. That's what this is. And I'll be honest with you, when you think about it, that means that that's time not spent serving food, fixing people's cars,

surveying their land whatever it is family spending time with your family any of those but i'm just talking about the rote economic just just the first order effect is that that's time not spent that i don't that i can't spend on my business and that then winds up being time i take away from my family and take away from my community and i don't have time on the weekends to go clean up the local park or you know or be this kid's soccer coach or or any of the or any of the other stuff we're all spending our extra time preparing our fucking taxes it's a big broken window fallacy writ large it's just that simple and it's disgusting and it's horrific and it's dumb and we should stop fucking doing it i completely agree and i mean i guess that's that's probably

unlock two trillion dollars with the gdp easily because all these people are not doing what they are have a comparative advantage in doing they are doing work i'm a bad tax preparer but i'm an excellent geopolitical analyst so i don't spend an extra two hours a week or whatever it is doing the shit that i'm really good at getting paid for it meanwhile i'm running around collecting receipts and having to be a bookkeeper i'm terrible at that so do you think i'm going to do that well no i'm it it could it could take a it could take a person with good skills in that 50 hours to prepare my taxes but it cost me 100 you're not and you know it's funny i i went on this rant and some guy came back to me well how do you measure that the the unseen stuff i'm like

you don't you moron you can't measure something that didn't happen yeah you figure out after you get all that out of the way and then it's like oh look at all this economic productivity that No, what happens is when you cut the taxes, you find out that when you cut the taxes, when you cut the IRS, when you cut the regulation, all of a sudden, all these projections, well, that's going to cost us 10% of GDP. And it turns out it's two or it's one or as opposed to a cutting GDP by 10%, GDP expanded by 3%. And all the economists and all the academics are shocked, shocked, I say, that this happened. I'm like, yeah, because you're an idiot and you don't understand secondary, tertiary, and quaternary effects. So as I said to this guy back, I'm like, if you're asking me to measure something that didn't happen, you're either A, an idiot, B, A, a shill for thieves, an enabler of thieves, or C, an academic, or D, all of the above. I happen to go with mostly idiot, but there you go.

This rip was also brought to you by good friends at Zaprite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that currency runs on are a risk as well. You need to begin accepting Bitcoin as soon as possible. Invest in the future of your business. Create a redundant rail by accepting Bitcoin as payment using ZapRate and reduce risk for your business. I've done this for my business Here at TFTC, we use ZapRite. It allows you to easily create invoices, payment 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 zap right.com slash tftc 40 off this rip was also brought to you by our good friends at salt of the earth you got to be hydrating freaks and while you're hydrating got to be getting your electrolytes this is the best electrolytes mix that i've ever come into contact with pink himalayan salt with calcium magnesium potassium sodium no sugar it tastes incredible my favorite is the orange and the pink lemonade go to drink

sote.com that's drink sote.com use the code tftc when you make your purchase and you'll get 15 off i'm telling you get on it freaks you're gonna love this stuff it seems again before we even hit record i was like how we get we're right when we hit record how are we getting rug but when you factor in everything that's happening right now letnick today commerce secretary right before we went live dr oz head of medicare medicaid um chris right i mean this is this one hits close to him because i've had chris on the podcast before years ago and when he did liberty energy like he's incredibly impressive ceo in the oil and gas sector and it seems like he's being put in that position to revamp the oil and gas sector treasury secretary unknown yet but

there's some good names in the mix obviously tulsi rfk jr vivek elon like this does seem like somewhat of a dream team to actually go out and affect this change and with that in mind we've talked a lot about the benefits this could have on the u.s economy like how is the european british side of the fence reacting to this like what badly they're trying to start world war three yeah but what like it doesn't like i don't think i don't think anybody's buying it i think everybody saw the announcement and the launches go off they're like yeah fuck you let's wait 60 days and get the adults in the room and blow over um and then it seems like trump's also positioning to the east china specifically like doesn't want to ban tiktok anymore has essentially come out and

signal taiwan figure it out yourself like we're not gonna we're not gonna lose american lives over taiwan right um and then you have this is a distinctly non-neocon foreign policy that he's setting up even though there are a lot of the people the first see trump was very smart in how he handled the overton window on this if you i don't know if you noticed the first thing he did was he announced all of the pro-israeli members of the cabinet and foreign policies to the base and everybody and then he allowed that all to percolate for about 48 hours then he can't then he hit us with gabbard dni gates for ag which is by far my favorite well let's take a look before when you finish i'm not gonna go off on a rant on mac gates we'll do

that later but the rfk and all these other ones right all these other very good appointments ben carson as a surgeon general right um so but he did that it's like first it's those guys the marco rubios and the and even hegseth like i look at some of these people those even those appointments those appointments all all in the foreign policy front outside of the pro-israel stuff is all about hegseth is is qualified his his resume is stocked to the gills with making the military strong again. It's completely anti-woke in that respect. That's what his job is going to be, a sec def, more than anything else. Tulsi at DNI, Ratcliffe at CIA, that's a powerful combination. Tulsi is going to oversee all of these people

and we're going to have somebody Trump trusts, who is conscientious and wise beyond her years in that position to coordinate and filter for the president and give the president and and so one of the things that's interesting about trump i i i want to um was it was it it wasn't let's listen to somebody talk about this and i don't know that it was gabbard maybe it was gabbard she was talking about this what tulsi said was that of the... No, it wasn't. It was somebody who's been in the room with three different presidents. And I've been in the room with Bush, in the room with Obama, in the room with Trump. And of the three of them, Trump was the only one to ask pointed questions, to be engaged,

to set the agenda back, to ask for more information. Everybody else knew how to try and... eventually figured out what Bush wanted and then gave him exactly what he wanted. Same thing with Obama, gave him what he wanted. Trump got information, assessed that information, thought about it, asked questions, drilled down, and then demanded more information. And that completely destroys the narrative that Trump is disinterested and he just sits around and watches Fox News and drinks Diet Coke all day and then tweets on his phone, which is bullcrap.

So you have, if that's the real Donald Trump in the White House, having Tulsi Gabbard on the other end of that conversation, that's a different world than what we've had. So Gabbard is going to, and the FBI director is also going to be a very, very interesting appointment, but we can't get there until after the inauguration for reasons. um yeah we chris ray doesn't get moved out until after the new administration comes in apparently for whatever reason i think it's um the way the appointment works

so she's going to lift the pressure off the junior analysts and all the and all the intelligence services and say oh no the president wants this information and the guys who have been toiling away in the bowels of quantico writing reports that they can't send up the chain of command because nobody above them in the chain of command wants to pass that information up because it's contrary to what the president wants to see or what the National Security Council wants to see. So they never get there. And all those guys all the way up the line all want to get their promotions.

So their promotions are dependent upon ensuring that the right information makes up the, you know, that's the way the bureaucracy works. Because there's top-down pressure saying, give us what we ask for, not what we need. What if that changes? and it's not, oh, no, no, no. We really want that information now. Now, all of a sudden, those voiceless guys at the bowels of Langley and Quantico

are going to have a voice, are going to have a conduit. This is something I've talked to Larry Johnson about because Larry's literally experienced this firsthand and had a couple of conversations with Larry about this. So I was on his show the other day and he was on my podcast six, eight months ago talking about this stuff.

So that's a very empowering, as a very empowering thing. And I think that that's what's important to understand in terms of the foreign policy thing. Trump is going to set the foreign policy here. Okay? I don't worry about Marco Rubio at this point. Because Marco Rubio is clearly a signal

that we're changing our focus from Asia and the Middle East and Europe to Latin America. That's why Rubio was picked. Why do you say that? Rubio has extensive... And I'm not saying that our policy in Latin America is going to be good. It's just going to be the focus. Cartels particularly?

Maybe. Maybe. He speaks the language. He's got a lot of respect within the community. He's got a lot of contacts. I mean, Marco Rubio has a resume. We all like to kind of cartoonify him up as like, I don't know, Cuban McCain, but he's not.

Okay. He's not good. I mean, but it's better. I would actually prefer him as Secretary of State because now he has to perform and he can be fired. Couldn't be fired as Senator. And now we get to filter somebody into the other Florida Senate seat who we can trust. That's not squishy.

That doesn't have what I like to call a manila envelope quotient, an MEQ that's off the charts because little Marco has a big manila envelope pile on his desk of who owns him. So remove him from the Senate where his vote can be, you know, manipulated and put him in secretary of state under a direct chain of command from Trump to, you know, from Trump to him and with getting information from Gabbard and Gabbard working against anything he tries to insert into the process that, you know what I mean? Like he can, she can now temper Foggy Bottom. and do you think average simply going to be a conduit filter for information or you think structural change will come oh i think the structural change dni is not really not really a structural position it's really a traffic cop amongst all the intelligence agencies it's also only a 20 year old position i mean we only created that position after 9-11

to coordinate all the different it's not like it's one of these things like the department of education like oh we we've never we've always had a department of education no we didn't it was created there in the carter administration like like fuck off the same thing with the homeland security it's another one of these agencies that does nothing and costs us a lot of money or does very little for the amount of money for the the cost benefit analysis at best what i'll say is the cost benefit analysis on dhs um is very poor well let's just put it that way Well, this gets back to the DSA, obviously. When it comes to structural reform, particularly the intelligence and the DOJ,

I guess that comes back to Gates, which is where you let the pit bull out. Yeah, you want the pit bull there. Like, you know, Matt Gates, Elon Musk came out with a brilliant tweet about Matt Gates. I don't know if you saw it or not. I don't think I did. He said, Matt Gates has three qualities that make him the most qualified person for being Attorney General. i don't remember what those three things are so basically he's you know he's not corrupt he's he's a bull he he he's an absolute bulldog and he won't you know he won't let anything go and you know and

he's tenacious as hell and and and uh you know and he's uncompromising now for there was something else elon had three points it's a famous tweet it's got four it's a it's typically on tweet it's like you know it's got six eight million views already um he said it makes him supremely qualified to be attorney general. Now, Matt Gaetz becomes a very interesting political football because, again, we're now deep into the bowels of Florida politics. Dexter White and I did an episode of my podcast last week going over a lot of this in detail because we're two Floridians

and Dexter has a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of Florida politics going back for most of our lives because he's a native Floridian and, you know, was always politically much more astute when we were younger than when I had hair. So, you know, he's always known this, this stuff. So this for him is, this is where his, you know, his specific knowledge is really good. His argument is, okay, if the Senate stands their ground on Gates

and doesn't allow him to be AG, um then with rubio and at state then desantis turns around and appoints gates as rubio's replacement in the senate that's still a win because now we replaced marco rubio with matt gates one less squishy republican one rabid republican or trumper on in the senate representing one of the most important states in the union the third most important state in the union um and then the ag position dexter's argument would be then he turns around and says okay not ron desantis because there's too much bad blood between them anyway and desantis's job here in the in florida isn't finished it's um ashley moody the current florida attorney general

under desantis and she's a bulldog as well and you put her in and uh then maybe there's a quid pro quo in 26 or 27 you know the at the midterms where you do a mid you do a mid-term reshuffling of the cabinet and maybe by then desantis and trump have you know buried the hajit or whatever and desantis could slot in his ag and that would be excellent You know, I mean, you need these people to come in and just rattle everyone's cages. Because in total, if you look at this cabinet, this cabinet is really designed to take on the domestic corruption and root it out and start reversing the process. it's really not about setting up fights with the legislature which are going to fight trump trump tooth and claw anyway because the democrats are still cheating to create a less durable advantage

in both houses of the legislature so the thing to do is to not worry about that just say pass a goddamn budget and leave me alone and fight amongst yourselves i don't care um and then this cabinet gets all the wins that the people want which then paves the way for a midterm sweep right mcconnell retires lindsey graham is either primaried out or removed right because he's he's up in 27 as well so um and a variety of others murkowski i don't have to check to see if murkowski is up in 27 and i don't know murkowski collins the typical ones murkowski collins Graham and you know that crew

you get rid of all that McConnell you get rid of them and then Thune right a Senate majority leader I think they're all up in 27 those are that's a lot of seats a lot of changeover and you could get you could force a lot of retirements to

force a lot of people to just be given the option of the gold watch and not jail and I think a lot of people are going to be doing that calculus once the cabinet is set. And Trump can use recess appointments if he wants. McConnell's not going to want to give it to him. Tough shit. I'm going to read you something about the vacancy clause. Again, this is why I love my friend Dexter White. He is so good. Let me find this real quick. We've been going back and forth about, I have to really

scroll back through my text because it's been that it's been that heavy a day but let's talk about yeah because this is something that came up within the last week and it's been used once before is that correct yeah the vacancies clause yes did i miss it was it already in here from last night oh god so many texts today oh if you read article 2 section 3 carefully it is clear that the president has the power to adjourn congress to such time as he shall think proper which ultimately means yeah that he can appoint then he goes and then there's the federal vacancies reform act of 1998 so they can use and this is going to factor into not only the gates appointment where i will be

likely now that he is appointed but it's going to be how trump puts people where he wants by using the the vacancies act of 1998. it's their rules and would this have to happen after the inauguration you can't do no this would happen during the recess he can just adjourn congress and then use the vacancies act to push people into position and and then he can not re-adjourn congress until such time as he's as he's comfortable with what he wants he does not have to read your congress yeah i can only imagine the uh the screeching from the mainstream corporate press about the dictatorship oh my god the the i'm now calling them the undead press by the way um not even the legacy press or the or

the no they're the undead press they really are being sold off for parts i was wondering the other day whether or not if i found a spare tenner under the couch i can make a bid for msnbc when they put it up for sale well i mean that's chatting with what's that i mean with rfk getting in like if he's if we do the one thing that 98 of other countries do which is not allow the pharma companies to advertise that's a big hit it's a big hit big hit you know i love the fact that now we got democrats out there like making a big stink on tiktok by that they're going to drink seed oils because they're so healthy i'm like great you know shit yourself to death i'm i just make sure you film that one too okay where are where are the landmines here where does this get

held up like obviously talked about world war three is that the last card in the hand that they can pull i think that i mean you know threatening the world with nuclear war that's kind of i mean once you go nuclear you've got nothing else you can go you can back you can you can threaten people with right so i don't know i mean there are landmines here but um again as i as you and i've talked about over the last two years wall street and the the side there's a sovereignty swing obviously at the dod i mean everybody sees it now right i mean everybody sees it um they're clearly in charge they're clearly setting the agenda because if not we would have already gone off half cocked like rambo without a jockstrap

like we would have but we didn't we haven't and so and and the russians haven't gone off half cocked you know and this just feels like it's one of those things where you know we are right to distrust the calm and the quiet i i saw john brennan up on msnbc the other day so he poked his head out thinking that he's got something to play the landmines here i think are going to be they're going to try and they're going to try for civil war still as well like they're still counting ballots in all these swing states they're trying to you know run with the meme that trump didn't get 50 of the vote and therefore he's a minority president and he's not a legitimate this is to give the shit lips the the dopamine hit that there's still a chance that they're

going to become the resistance and all of that gavin newsom started floating the idea of california seceding and he quickly backed down on that like they keep playing these cards and they keep landing like a led zeppelin you know what i mean and uh which is where how zeppelin got its name yeah do you know that's you know that story yeah yeah so um hey man not everybody does it's a great story. So, they keep landing badly. Like, no one's listening to it. No one cares. Everybody's like, Trump's the president. Live with it and move on. It's like you told us to live with it and move on last year, four years ago. But what he's doing here, what he's setting up now, and what is incredibly important is that we get some kind of national election reform for national elections.

But if you look, and I'll tell you, Trump and company are being very smart about what stories they are planting into the zeitgeist. The fact that we can't recall senators. Everybody's like, why can't we recall these shitbag senators? Well, there's this thing called the 17th Amendment, where we took the power away from the state legislatures to appoint senators and gave it to the people to make it yet another big frigging house of the people. Now, that was a very unbalancing thing to our government.

Our government was designed around a different structure. The states had representatives in the Senate. The people had their representatives in the House of Representatives. The executive branch, so they had the bicameral legislature with two different groups being represented. We don't have that. We have the senators running in statewide elections who now represent corporate lobbyists. And foreign actors. because they're the ones that pay as opposed to the state legislatures so the state legislatures

which would look at this stuff and go you're not working in our best interest you're going home and uh you get to manage a dairy queen you know and destined sorry you're not senator anymore yeah that's it it's over that seems way more efficient i never knew that about the 17th amendment yeah 17th amendment killed the 17th amendment is part of that what i call the so if we had the original american revolution then the second one was the failed second american revolution well i would argue it could actually depending on whether you think the union should have won or the south was right depending on it's still the second american revolution the third was 1913 income tax direct election of senators federal reserve act

and then the fourth one was was it two weeks ago or was it 2016 when trump 2017 when trump nominated powell and we started the monetary um independence of the united states which we'd never had before yeah yeah their bullshit is falling on deaf ears i mean just look at i don't know if you watch the ufc fights on friday but it wasn't only john jones is the one getting all all the clicks on twitter but every fighter every american fighter even if they lost went up to him shook his hand oh yeah no i didn't i didn't watch it i didn't watch the fights uh i was i i uh one of the one of my patrons who i play i play uh world of warcraft with he spent the evening watching the fights

with his young his young son and uh and he came back in later on i didn't i don't i don't generally watch the fights anymore and i and i wasn't going to watch anything on netflix anyway because i won't give them money i i have more of a hate on netflix that's that's i didn't watch that fight i'm talking about the ufc fights that was uh oh yeah i don't watch ufc on a regular basis anymore actually i don't even watch any sports to be honest anywhere i don't even watch hockey i don't even watch the stanley cup anymore like i don't have time yeah it's really i mean when i wanted that when i want downtime like i i guess especially when i watch hockey like i get so emotionally invested in it like i do geopolitics and markets and everything else i mean i'm just

as freaking rabid watching the fucking nhl than i am when i do this shit and i i need i when i jack out of this world marty i i you know i don't smoke these like with a death grip i'm like thank god like let's just i'm just gonna sit and relax for a little while and now that we and because and before then i would say it was even worse i would sit down to relax and watch television and of course i would watch only shit that was like filling my brain with with stories that i could use to work i was still working like when i play world of warcraft i am not working i am killing pixels for love and money and that's that's all i'm doing i'm hanging out with my daughter and a couple of my patrons and a couple of her friends and we're running five mans and

we're face rolling a whole bunch of shitty dungeons and we're having a blast yeah and that's it well the point like sports is a good lens into where the zeitgeist is and i think the zeitgeist a combination of what you're seeing out of like the sports world but just the athletes feeling emboldened to publicly support trump um and i i tweeted this out last week but the fact that he put tulsi and rfk and i think that's going to go a long way going back to your point about like civil war like there were those whether you want to call them right-wing hippies or essentially anti-war health conscious liberals who came over to the trump ticket because of tulsi and rfk specifically like they're going to go to bat for him i can yeah they are and i'll tell you something else

is happening um i've said i've told the story before but i have a friend um uh down in gainesville um and uh and one of the things that he does to make make ends meet is he substitute teaches in the natural county school system he's like dude all the kids are coming to school wearing mega hats after the election like it's like the veil was lifted and you know into alachua county school system which is as fucking blue as a county as you have in florida like it gets bluer every year every election we're 62 38 now and this last was 62 63 30 37 or whatever it's almost as blue as broward broward is a percentage wise i think only tallahassee only leon county is worse right but populationally obviously the biggest concentration of uh of of libs and in uh in

florida still broward county by population it's like 1.8 million people versus a couple hundred grand for alachua county but um but yeah i mean but the kids are walking around the alachua county schools wearing aga hats it it feels i mean again go back to the zeitgeist like it feels like a weight has been lifted off of all the sensible people in the country and they see a path forward towards relative freedom the ability to yeah interact like there's a true optimism like holy shit we can have another yeah we did it renaissance yeah we have a we have an opportunity here this is the boat where does the boat herd around the world i mean it caused the collapse of the german government dude it's it's it's gonna have the the world was asking us to lead

I really believe that. It was asking the American people to lead. Like, we can't do this without your help. You know, the Russians have led on their corner of the world to, you know, geopolitically to push back against the hegemon, which was the right thing for them to do, to start breaking apart all these old narratives and all these old relationships

and force them into the open for people to have to defend, right? And that's really what Putin's done. You know, Brexit, you know, was the first state of it, was the first sign of it. Then Trump's election in 2016, obviously the empire struck, you know, struck back. I mean, you know, I'm a cute Star Wars guy, but I'm not crazy about this whole, you know, Star Wars, the empire strikes back, return of the Jedi, right? I'm not a big fan of that, but it's cute. Or the return of the king, even if you want to use the two towers reference,

the Tolkien reference, right? But the point being is that, you know, things had progressed to the point where they were really untenable for a lot of people. And for us to give, to deliver this result to the world and say, look, we're going to fix our house. And by us fixing our house and by us pulling back on the pressure that we're exerting on the rest of the world, that's going to give you an opportunity to rise up and do the things put your put pressure from the top from the bottom up where you are and you know the i love the

reactions that i'm seeing out of the german government we're gonna have to go for snap elections we're gonna ban afd you know and and not a lot and you know for what you know for a couple of trumped up for some trumped up bullshit about three guys from saxony who were separatists like we're all feds anyway like are you kidding me it's like the 12 it's like the 12 neo-nazi spooks that were they're marching through some um columbus ohio the other day i'm like really you think those guys are real you think okay i mean give me a break like it's this it's so pathetic at this point it doesn't play you see it in the uk too with those those farmer wealth tax that they just tried to live where they're trying to let me and people are standing up it

feels like from afar and just from the english people that i follow on twitter like they're fed up and they seem emboldened by what's happened here they're like look what they're doing in the u.s and for the first time right and the same way that we were emboldened when brexit went through i mean you know i i gotta tell you i i think brexit had a huge effect on uh on on the uh on the election in 2016 i think you know i i think nigel farage was a you know was a force for was a force for trump like people you know people on on the non-communist side of the aisle well looked at brexit and went yeah the u sucks like and that's that and you know and the idea that we um you know that all the uneducated you know mouth breathers voted for trump and all the

wise and insouciant you know college graduates voted for kamala harris that shit does not play like the way you turn that around the way and the way people are turning around is going oh really well you know if if only college graduates voted the country would have went blue yeah what that's telling me is that we definitely need to get rid of the department of education afuera get it out of here oh really okay that's all that's telling me i don't know what i don't know what it tells you but that's what it tells me um and again it's a green amplify at a certain level this is what you have to do with people and you know and and i'm okay with you know obviously i'm okay with that that's my whole shtick is like you know figure out the way

to you know in my own way you know i'm not i'm not a particularly great meme lord but when i see a great meme you know i come up with some every once in a while but the but the the true meme lords out there are just i mean they're next level dude i mean they really are and they are and they have done such great work to and to as dave collin put it the other day to us to keep our spirits up during the dark times they were the they were the guys in the foxhole saying nope we're gonna get through this nope keep laughing at them nope we're okay we're gonna get through this the bombs are gonna stop falling at some point and we're gonna be okay like they kept morale up they were the chaplains or whatever you you know you know whatever they you know

whatever you know role you want to put them in in the metaphor doesn't matter i think that it was a valuable service that they performed along with the people like Scott Pressler going out and just doing good old-fashioned grassroots, signing people up and getting them to the ballot box.

That shit wins. it's awesome to see. It's awesome to see people of high conscientiousness. These meme wars are are driven by conscientiousness you know a big five pillars of personality like they yeah they may all be anti-social but they're also conscientious and that's how they operate they operate that's how it that's how those two those two pillars like you know and i mean express

themselves shout out to the 4chan meme lord priest i mean they got trump in 2016 and this is another thing to do in bolden i'm sure there's people on the fence that intuitively feel that this is a good outcome for the country and then going back to the meme words and while we're having this discussion it's just kamala's already out of discussion i haven't heard anybody say her name in in two weeks now they're going back to joe at press conferences like kamala will be forgotten by new year's eve and what does that say to you trump won 2016 lost 2020 and is more popular than ever now like what do the people actually want and like do you think could you foresee uh a resurgent in fervor around kamala happening at any point in the future no no not at all i mean she's i mean

dude she's you know she's not even young and hot anymore right i mean she's not you know i mean that'd be the only people who would be who would be excited to see her at this point i i'll be honest with you somebody said it to me the other day they said you know dude she looked relieved and then you get the picture of her with her sister whatever and her nieces with the fat glass of white wine i was honestly happy for it's like you look like you did not want to go through like this is over now i can i can go i can yeah this is over and you know look and maybe just maybe you know this was the the thing but again it's like everything else when you you know you find out who people really are when they um you know when they're given the opportunity

to utilize power. When you look at Kamala Harris, I hate to tell you, but she wanted the brass ring or the gold ring. She wanted it. She can get it and now she can move on with her life.

People like Tulsi Gabbard, on the other hand, were offered all the power in the world. Unearned. She just ticked all the boxes and she walked away from power multiple times. and that's powerful and that story's powerful and the level of authenticity um on display there

you know if you're not if you still think that there's something you know something to that picture of her on the you know wef young leaders website you know sorry dudes you're missing it that's a cope like the woman is who she is and that's the face of the future she jd vance who goes out there with an unbelievable amount of self-effacement. This is one thing that has really impressed me about Vance. I'm not sure I'm sold on Vance's in every way. I'm going to be frank and honest. But the one thing I really like about Vance is that he's self-effacing. He looks at himself and goes, yeah, I got a lot of faults. Yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. Yeah, I'm not this, I'm not that. These people are not going out there

him, RFK, Kelsey, other people, Trump, not going out there with the typical political operative training, media training, the typical media training. And I've gotten a little of this as a newsletter editor at Newsmax. One of the first things I learned, I was told to do, and this is the way you write a newsletter. You lead and you never show weakness. And when you make a mistake, you just say, I made a mistake, we're moving on. like you and it's the way you know politicians are trained to act they're trained to act like never show weakness you're in charge you're you're competent you know blah blah blah you lead you know even if you're not even if you're in a um in a state of flux

it's in that respect it's almost kind of a fake it till you make it kind of thing it's not that's not really what they were saying but it it was this is the way you have to present yourself if you want to retain yours. This is how this thing is done. I'm like, yeah, I don't buy that. I'm going to hedge my position. I'm going to throw out thought. I'm going to throw out thought experiments.

And I ran into a lot of trouble with my first editor of Newsmax over this because she didn't like the tone. And I'm like, oh, well, I like her personally. And she did a fine job of editing the newsletter. And we're still friends, but I couldn't work with her because she had a conception of what I was supposed to do or how this was supposed to be written

and what my image was supposed to be to manage. And all of our politicians do this and all of our CEOs do this and the media presenters and everybody, they do this and they don't come across as human because they never show weakness. And that's a playground and a recipe for people who hate to show weakness to feed their narcissism and then use it strategically

and what we're seeing with this group of people that's coming in they're like no we're all flawed terminally flawed we're going to do our best but you know give us a chance we're going to do the right we're going to try and do the right thing as vivek was saying like we're going to cut i think it was yeah you just said we're going to cut a whole bunch of stuff and if it turns out that that thing that we cut was turns out to be vital we'll put it back in like you know no blame no shame like this is you know we're all flying by the seat of our pants here nobody's perfect so don't you know and as long as you you know as long as you don't present yourself as perfect then you know people will give you a lot of leeway yeah and this comes

across as real and authentic yeah and this is shining through in layers like not only the individuals but the way in which they won the election like on the podcast route and embracing the long format medium and being vulnerable and having conversations with people outside the mainstream media who approach conversations very differently and will take you to areas that you're not used to but you're forced to act with yeah you're forced to act authentically and that's what is connecting with people's authenticity we live in an age of authenticity because we're swimming in information and we have we we live in an age screaming for authenticity and an absolute sea of smarm. This is literally what I wrote in one of the first

blogs I ever posted on my website. It's called The Authenticity Gap. And I refer back to it over and over and over again because it's how I knew. And it was a crib of an editorial I wrote for my newsletter at Newsmax at the time in 2016. So I wrote this thing in the middle of 2017. So uh 2016 i mean during the election campaign i said trump is going to win the election because he's appealing to the millennial crowd that is dying for authenticity you know even though they don't know what authenticity may be but their their addiction to craft cocktails and farm to farm to table food choices and manscaping and all of this stuff and you know and and flannel shirts and all the rest of it all that lumberjack

you know remember those a whole thing if you look at and and it gave me a lot of hope i said those guys are going to break for trump because that's what they want because they've been living in the sea of smarm of these fucking mendacious liars for so long like no we just want somebody real we don't even give a shit if he's competent we just want to know that this is who you actually are and um i'm telling you paying forward here it's so very obvious and that's why i you know i mean dude i i do podcasts with people i know are authentic or i go back on their show when i after i've had a long conversation with them that i know are authentic so i love hanging out with you i know you're authentic and this is the real deal and that's why the conversations are good

you know and uh and that's why podcasting is the future of media it's why the undead media hasn't gotten yet it's why chris wallace will never you know put out a good podcast he may put out a successful podcast because of his name for a brief period of time but it won't be an authentic podcast notice how megan kelly went from megan kelly of nbc news with that persona go back and watch megan kelly at the first debate with trump when she was the moderator go watch those clips now watch megan kelly today completely that's the real megan kelly that we see today that one was a construction of media that's funny that was an actress there was a quote or not a quote a clip of uh morning joe from msnbc and they literally had a panel of

uh i think micah and joe scarborough might have been the youngest people on the panel talking about the problem of social media and podcasting well all the millennials are doing these 20 second clips and they're not seeing our stuff and it's like we are seeing your stuff it's just coming in on clips on twitter and we're making fun of you and like even they don't even understand like they're mischaracterizing it they think we're consuming our information in 20 second clips it certainly happened to an extent but most of the deep information um sort of filtering that people my age are doing is via podcast and yeah yeah i mean people have a lot of time in their car it's why it's why rush on it's it's again let's go back to am radio why was rush limbaugh

so successful why did he carve out why was he such a pioneer let's let's let's give it up del Rushbow. I mean, I wasn't Rush's biggest fan as a, you know, what he talked about on a regular basis, but what Rush represented was immense. He understood that there was an immense gap to be filled. There's a unique selling proposition in AM radio and he revitalized the entire industry himself and provided a counterpoint to all the droning on that we saw everywhere else and got news for you folks you know it's it's it's continue to pay dividends and as the as the technology you know change that so that we can do effectively what used to be am radio and now we can do it in whatever format we want. And well, necessarily not any format we want, but we can do

it now with our own personal takes. And people have the time where they're stuck in their cars for an hour and a half because of this terrible city planning that leaves people stranded on these hour and a half commutes or wherever. They got big blocks of time to zone out, not talk to the person next to them on the train, or they're stuck in their car by themselves. They stick on a podcast and they get a an hour or an hour and a half of really good information when i was when i was i have my own version of that pre quote unquote podcasting days but when i was working in south florida away from home and i had to commute back and forth to my life up here in north florida on the weekends it was a three and a half hour trip what did i do i loaded up my phone

with all the gold, early gold, now we would call them podcasts, but all the old shows like Jim Papava's show and this one's show and that one, Al Corlin and all those guys. And hours upon hours upon hours of lectures from the Mises Institute. I mean, hundreds of hours, including listening to Human Action and Man Economy Estate and all of that stuff, right? I'll listen to them all. i'm in a car for three and a half hours you know when i wasn't talking to my friend on the phone

about what raid we were going to run in world of warcraft when i got back to when i got back to stewart on sunday afternoon like i was listening to these things i was doing this five seven hours a week for five years and then in my office and then in my lab while i was working and running experiments this shit was on the shit was on autoplay all day long i literally was doing this stuff back into you know at the at the beginning of youtube you know i remember when stephon molyneux first started his youtube channel because he stopped writing for lrc lou rockwell and he started doing youtube i remember when he started it was there i've heard it yeah and as you're describing i mean it makes that we've had the going back to am radio rush limbaugh very early

days like ipod rss like we're like a generation into this format and yeah maybe this election is a signal that like the time dilation between the introduction of the format and the overall effect it could have on society is being played out right now we had flashes of it in 2016 and now i mean this is the first election where i mean podcasts were a medium that that politicians actually realized that they had to to leverage and guess who i guess it was the first one to leverage it as a campaign strategy rfk yeah he literally went out and said i'm going to do every podcast i can yeah and i'm going to tell the people who i am and the you know warts and all and and others have you know and other people like gabard was very smart and you know between

2020 and 2024 she embraced it you know she made herself available she didn't have anything else I mean, what was, you know, what was she really doing, right? She was no longer a congresswoman. She got the commentator gig here and there on Fox News. But, you know, what did she do? She went on Joe Rogan a half a dozen times or three or four times, whatever it was. Built up a relationship with him. Built up a relationship with this one.

To the point where when Barry Weiss tries to smear Tulsi Gabbard as a Russian asset, Joe just like stops her dead cold. Very kindly, I might add. but it was the it was the kindest gentlest body slam ufc style that i've ever seen and uh it was it was gorgeous is what it was and it's funny barry weiss couldn't get herself out of the new york times mindset of oh i'm just gonna believe what everybody says he's like no right you may want to look into that yeah maybe you should uh yeah maybe you should i'm gonna push back on that but there's and she thought she was in a safe place going on joe rogan

because rogan's not a really he's not really a confrontational guy that she hears jamie pulled up and she's like oh shit i'm fucked jamie fact checker yeah i'm very optimistic right now i came into this conversation expecting uh expecting to hear where we're going to get rubbed potentially but i think i i on i well not now i mean i i i can see where the pitfalls are but i've been watching this play out and you know for the last two weeks it's been really weird feeling um i hoped it would be it would happen the way it's happened right you had to go into it with an immense amount of skepticism i won't lie to you i put at least five pounds on stress eating leading up to this thing um and uh i've already in two weeks taken it mostly back

I was going to say, you look great. Yeah, well, I do now, but like two, three weeks ago, I looked like shit. Like, but I, you know, I just immediately went on a freaking carnivore diet for a week and cut everything out. And I'm not stress eating it. I'm not running out to the, I'm not running out to the convenience store and buying a box, a bag of pretzels and a diet Coke at two o'clock in the morning. Okay.

Which is what I was doing. And then not going to bed until 4.30 and getting up at seven. I was, this is what my life was like for like the month up until the election. I couldn't function. I would go through, I get one sleep cycle and my sleep cycle is about two hours and 45 minutes. So if I do two and a half, so if I do two sleep cycles, about five and a half hours,

I'm usually good, right? Dude, it was terrible. And I knew I was doing it to myself. And you know what? I was like, if she fucking wins, it's not going to matter. I'm now going to have to make really, really significant changes to my lifestyle Because let's not kid ourselves, what was being set up for us was, hey, everybody, we've

now made it okay for you to complain about the Jews and Israel and the this and the that. Here's the pressure release valve. You got a year to get it out of your system while we catalog all of you people because you're all going to get deplatformed. You're all going to get unpersoned. You're all going to get sent to digital Guantanamo and your lives are going to be over. They were planning this. The threats were all right there in front of us and we could all see it.

And no matter how much you try and say, well, maybe, you know, maybe the angel of death will pass over my door to really extend that metaphor. You didn't know. And I had this, you know, I've had a lot of brushes with success in my life up until this point. and every time i've gotten close to it something's taking it away either my own self-sabotage or not reading the tea leaves right and running in the coffin corner metaphorically speaking or whatever and this was setting up to feel exactly the same way so part of what you probably were

getting off of me and you know in the the things we did over the summer was was part of that i know that's what was going on with me i don't know about you but that's clearly what was happening the last two times you're on you were you were tired very tired yeah yeah i really was and um today i feel just i i you know it the weight was lifted on that evening we were doing a twitter spaces live blogging the the late night from like we were on from like 11 till or from 10 to like 12 30 or whatever and it felt an awful lot like the live stream i did on 20 the night of 2020 and we were all I was you know hanging out with my my my patrons then and you know we were there and we were high-fiving this thing it looks like it's in the bag I'm getting drunk everything's

good and then I kick off about 11 30 and I go to watch the election results in about 2 a.m. I see the steal happen and I went and I texted Dexter White and I said they're going to steal this thing this is how they're going to do it at best he's going to get 269 he's going to lose 271 to 269 and his reply to me at 2 30 in the morning was civil war it is then yeah that's where we've been for the last four years so strategically you know we've had to manage that stress level and that mindset for the last four years and um and yeah it's been it's been a lot but you know i don't know maybe the you know and that and i'll tell you coming into june of 2021 and that that faithful fomc meeting that

for me really does mark the change of you know the the beginning of this counter-revolution that we've kind of been chronicling um that was the first ray of hope i'd had in nine months. And even the midterm elections weren't much of a kick in the teeth, to be honest with you, because by that point, it became pretty obvious to me that there was something else running. It was a countercurrent running that was powerful enough with the right people having the right amount of power, counterbalancing, countervailing power to the ones that we were fighting. And then I watched like Omicron fail and I watched this fail. And you know, I made the call at some point in 2020 when Omicron happened and they couldn't like turn

that into a big, they couldn't turn it into a second round of lockdowns. We are at peak Davos, we're done. It's now, they're just fighting rear guard actions and now I can, okay, let's see how they're going to destroy us. Let's see how they're going to move, counter move us down to the point were when they threatened us with nuclear war. And when Trump lived, everything changed. And then it was just a matter of, you know, okay, are they going to take this thing to AIDA? And are the grownups actually in charge or not?

And I couldn't answer that question until after the election. And once the election happened, I'm like, nope, we're good. And I can, and I'm like, and I've been, I didn't walk around, interestingly enough, like when trump won in 2016 i walked around the house for two weeks i shit you not for two weeks randomly cackling in glee with glee i would just i'd be walking i'd get up my computer i start to walk over to the kitchen to go get a cup of coffee and halfway there i just start cackling like maniacally like the fucking joker right this time

it was just it was just okay then we have work to do and i told my patrons the the morning after i do the i do a market report on wednesdays that morning i said this is great um i played them a gaelic storm song to to start the to start the day another day above the roses which you haven't listened to that song with the lyric sheet it's brilliant it's a perfect way to go about all of this stuff and then did the market report and i got done went that was fun tomorrow we get back to work i mean that's honestly the most maybe we have different contexts of getting back to work but for like us in the bitcoin space like it feels like we've got room to breathe and like yeah i'm infinitely excited at the prospect of just being able to work and get shit done where

if it went the other way similar thoughts like we've got to reshuffle the deck and figure out what we're doing how we're gonna how we're gonna make this work because i'll be honest with you in my part of my part of the space i would really seriously have to think about being unperson debanked and all the rest of it right um and uh okay if that that's the case that's the case my wife and i looked at each other like that that's what happens that's what happens we've weathered worse in the past and they can take everything away from us they can't take each other they can't take we can't they can't take each other from us so okay and uh we'll figure it out and if we have to go out of our car we'll go out of our car like you know whatever you know

whatever happens happens like do your worst you can't take your last it's it's that scene from v for vendetta right where he's torturing her and she's like reading the the screen reading the beautiful story about about the actress valerie on you know on toilet paper and it's about that last inch if they're never going to take that last inch from you they don't have you they can take your body they can they can corrupt your mind but if they can't take your fucking soul fuck you you don't have me and they never had me and they're gonna and those are the guys they were going to take out so you know and maybe that's egotistical or so obsessive on my part Maybe it's paranoid.

I don't know. But it's the way you have to feel and have to make your peace with that if you're going to continue to do what you do. Because if not, then you're not capable of leading. And you're not capable of being a resource for everybody else. Like one of the things I find really interesting, we brought up the farmer's thing earlier. This is one of those moments. jeremy clarkson whether he whether he intended to or not has become a spokesperson for the farmers

worldwide clarkson's farm if you have not watched it shut up don't stop listening to me go fucking watch clarkson's farm because it's brilliant and but jeremy was like well they're gonna have this big um this big thing he's like i can't go i'm not a real farmer and they're like jeremy you are the spokesperson for all of us we need you there you it's time for you to stand up and be a man and not a nine-year-old boy you've made an entire trade and built millions of dollars in being a nine-year-old boy and championing these causes and the internal combustion engine motoring the you know and now farming great but now it's this is your moment where you got to get in that fucking lamborghini and lead that that big old lamborghini um tractor that he bought which is

terrible and drive that fucking thing down to london pot belly and all and do the thing and you know i'll bet you dollars to dollars if you've watched carson's farm his significant other his girlfriend lisa who's irish by the way if you have not watched the show she's she's great i'm like you know damn well that she read him the goddamn riot act and so clarkson manned up did the thing that's what you need yeah doesn't matter you don't you can be a bad man your entire life you can be you know a guy grifting off the off the zeitgeist and everything else but if this matters to you now if you truly love what you do now then that's the moment where you have to stand up and go you know what

shoot me what are you gonna do shoot me fuck you you can't have me we talked about this um in the episode right after the assassination attempt too but it's like i get i think there's some divine intervention in all these things and sometimes god picks uh conduits who are rough around the edges and you wouldn't expect trump clarkson you know archetypes you know one of the one of the most powerful stories you know one of the most powerful biblical stories is that god speaks through the worst of us right yeah capital god lowercase god doesn't matter metaphorically speaking you know this is the this is the story of you know saint christopher you know shepherding this is the story of saint christopher this is thomas covenant stephen donaldson uh great

fantasy story this is literally the worst of human being you can imagine having to be having to man up and and and and stand up against evil for something he doesn't even he doesn't even want to believe in, right? That story is very powerful and it's very important. And it's why that archetype of that story is very, very powerful. And Batman is also built off of that archetype, right? So the gargoyle that stands outside the cathedral to guard it, but can never enter it. It's very powerful. And maybe we all have a little bit of that in us. And that's what we have to reconcile within ourselves. I'm all in, dudes. This is about making the world a better fucking place. This is about leaving this fucking place better off for my daughter and for yours

and everybody else doesn't say anything else the rest of it does not fucking matter and this we have to pay this forward the kids went along with this did you see the demographic breakdown of the vote yep they know i mean when i finally looked at it i nearly cried because i realized that the 18 to 29 year olds nearly broke for trump like a lot was made that this is the gen x that Gen X finally came up and made themselves the Gen X election and everything else and I've been trying to meme we're the greatest generation kind of thing just to like

stick it you know just to stick it to the to the mythology of World War II but this is that moment but we wouldn't have done it without them and so we owe it to them to tear down this rotten edifice

replace parts of it with nothing reform what's usable and move forward. And is it going to be perfect? No. Is it going to be better? Yes. But it's not going to be up to us to make it that, you know, it's, it's Pareto guys. We're going to get 80% of the good stuff done. The next, next 80, the next, that 20% we'll leave that for the next cycle of humanity. And then the next cycle and the next cycle and the next cycle. And that's the way we have to approach this. I could have said it better myself. I'm again, extremely optimistic.

i think we're gonna do it i think uh if don't get complacent we got like no tom said we got work to do we got to get out there and do it fuck load of work to do and i'm excited to actually watch it happen and chronicle the good the bad and the ugly of it and um you know and by the grace of my patrons i will be given that opportunity yeah or not depending on how i handle it that's the way we all have to look at it so it doesn't matter if you're building a business or you're doing what i'm doing or you know everybody's got well obviously what i'm doing is a business but you know but with the point and you know this is this is what we have to do but it's doable all these things that they tell us are not fixable that we should just look

at the ground and worry about the worry about the abyss at our feet as opposed to looking up and seeing elon musk throw a fucking rocket in space and then catch it like fuck you dudes we can do anything we can fix the budget if he can do that we can fix the budget if we can do he can do that we can fire the hr nannies we can figure out how to balance the budget we can figure out how to get to fund the unfunded liabilities lots of talent out there that wants to do it i mean the amount of people volunteering for doge not to be paid to volunteer it's off the charts yeah and not only do we have this political will in these examples internally but externally like the argument against all this is falling flat because oh

let's point at el salvador they went from the most dangerous country in the world to the safest in three years argentina came in gutted their administrative state and they're back on their feet pretty quickly like why can't we do that like that's where i'm excited for the american spirits kick in where you get that competitive nature it's like oh these guys can do it like what human nature it's not even american it's not uniquely american i mean we have our own we have our own you know spin on it but it's just people people are awesome dude are you kidding like this is what i i you know this was the day i i really i really the day i realized that how incredibly persistent

and phenomenal people really are when I finally was able to internalize just how much they accomplished despite all of the shit that's thrown in front of them. And that happened very early, you know, after, you know, it happened within a few months of me

hanging out over at LRC and reading something to me. So that was my spiritual awakening to this. That's when I literally just stood back and went, holy shit, people are awesome. how in the when you really stop to think about it I'm like oh yeah

no no no I'm not going to being cynical doesn't doesn't cut it and the team that believes that people are awesome and can do these things just won and the team that thinks or tries to make you believe that people are terrible

just lost and they're going to lose and they're going to continue losing i mean as a millennial 33 talked about this before 9 11 08 wiki leaks snowed in covid first time in my life early 90s don't remember too well but first time in my life like oh shit this is actually exciting um yeah it really is i mean i i am i am just i it's funny the the longer this goes on the more i i willingly see whatever the burden is that needs to be born to get this done i bear it willingly whatever small part of it i can be a

part of i can i can affect to get to keep the ball rolling and to give people the information they need to decomplicate the world for them and demystify it so that they can go in their space, go, that's what I have to do. If I can help five people make a better goddamn decision about how to run their business tomorrow based on something I said in a podcast, are you kidding? We would all kill to have that kind of... This is what we have... How could you walk away from that? and how could you like you couldn't walk away through you have to like double down and work harder yeah period before we hit record i said they should create a position the czar of deconstructing the uh the european communists you know european communism you know because

yeah yeah because it's funny like those couple here and there a couple of people on twitter have been like dude you should make tom treasury secretary i'm like i'm not qualified for that I will take the position of czar of European destruction, of destroying communists. We'll get me, James Lindsay, Dexter White, a few other people, and we'll have a good old time with that. And we'll empower all the meme lords over at Fort Chan, and we'll just do the thing. That'll be great. So much talent out there, guys.

There's so much talent that's been repressed, suppressed, offered to tune in, turn out, and drop out. like no they're all like no no we're gonna make this work i we can make this work we have so much we can do like the old systems are brittle and fragile and they've built systems that are complex and and and unknowable and therefore they're you know they're it's the it's the i mean this is where you know talib before he went you know crazy over covid it was right you build systems that are anti-fragile they build systems that are maximally fragile and so they're actually easy to take down if you understand where the breakpoints are yeah it's the signal right here bitcoin going up all

times today that's one gold kind of pushing gold pushing past 3 000 will be another one like there's other there are so many of them out there but if let me put it this way marty The last thing to say, if Matt Gaetz winds up being AG, they have no power. They will put for every erg of political capital they can to stop Matt Gaetz from being AG. Trump put him out there for that purpose. Gaetz probably took one look at the – this is the conversation. Matt, I want to make AG. You're going to have to like fight tooth and cloth for it.

You may not get it. They're probably going to like destroy you and they're trying to destroy you in the process. in cases like game on motherfucker yeah don't let your memes be dreams freaks you can do it we're doing it that's right all right man it sounds like this sounds like a show what do you think this was a great show i mean this is the least stressful show we've had in a while um i'm happy happy for you happy for all of us again let's go build it's like you have that weight off our shoulders yeah let's go do let's go do something great like let you know elon musk is like a 10 year old boy he wants to flip cars into space and go to mars like let's let's enjoy

that and let's not and and let's keep our eyes on open for the next boss wanting to be the same as the old boss and all that stuff let's continue to distrust but verify and all of those things that need to go need to happen but you know at the same time don't sabotage yourself either you know like recognize when good things are happening right just recognize the good things are happening not everything is going to be good and you know and if you make

the perfect the enemy of the good well you're doomed to failure we'll end it there thank you Tom we'll do it again at some point peace and love freaks Thank you.