TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #562: Bitcoin Has Entered The Geopolitical Game with Mel Mattison

Episode Date: December 6, 2024

Marty sits down to discuss how Trump may plan to wield bitcoin and an altered Federal Reserve to compete with BRICS. Mel on Twitter: https://x.com/MelMattison1 Mel's Website: https://www.melmattison.com/ 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Scott Bessent 7:42 - History of the Fed 12:59 - Unchained & Coinkite 15:18 - Trump indicates plans to change Fed 29:10 - Zaprite & SOTE 30:43 - Does BRICS need to play both bitcoin and gold? 39:35 - How gold and bitcoin could coexist 43:49 - How will the new policy be implemented? 53:18 - Sparking volatility and spinning the story 1:02:21 - We may be entering a new American Renaissance 1:14:49 - Preparing before the inauguration 1:16:41 - Plugs Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ 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/

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. When you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Mill, I apologize for sending you the wrong Riverside link.

We were both just waiting in separate Riverside rooms for 10 minutes. That's on me. No problem. Understood. As I was just saying, you were last on earlier this year, probably end of June. we published our conversation on july 2nd which was a little over a week before the first assassination attempt on donald trump's life a lot has happened between the end of june and today obviously trump won the presidency in resounding fashion he has a mandate won the popular vote electoral college republicans have the house and the senate and we're in this lame duck period

where trump is building his administration his committees putting people in places to effectuate that mandate which he seems to have and a lot of people have a lot of theories about where things are going including you and it seems like you may think uh that things are not going to go as many people think, uh, the plans, uh, are right now. So thanks for coming back on the show and really interested to catch up. Yeah, definitely. Um, appreciate you having me. There certainly has been a lot going on and yeah, like, like we talked briefly, uh, before hitting record there, I think there's a lot of things that both market participants, media, um, general population are kind of seeing as coming down the pike. And I think maybe some of it will happen.

I think some of it won't. And I think we will see a lot of things that are not going to be expected. I think big picture, we're going to see bigger changes and bigger fights and bigger stories than most people are anticipating. And that's a pretty high bar to cross because I think a lot of people are expecting big change. But what I'm talking about is substantial change to the monetary system, substantial changes to the interactions between the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, big changes with dollar, gold, Bitcoin, just geopolitical events that really we haven't seen these type of things since probably post-World War II time period. what's leading you to believe this you sent me an email yesterday i think topics that we should

probably cover that would dive into your thesis tariffs scott besent as secretary of the treasury and as you alluded to the potential for the feds the way the fed operates to change structurally under a Trump administration? Yeah. Well, I think starting with Scott Bessette is kind of a good place to start because he's a very interesting individual. I think there was a tweet when the decision was still being made, Elon put out seeing him as a business as usual pick. And after really researching him, reading about him, listening to almost every podcast I could find on him, where he speaks his views and gives his life story and all that stuff. I think he's a lot more imaginative and a lot more risk tolerant, more of a risk taker than people realize. And I

think he has some very clear views about central bank treasury interactions that you can trace back to his thesis on one of his biggest trades, which was really to go short the yen when Abe took over in Japan. You know, he was involved in some really historic trades. He was involved on kind of a peripheral level when Soros broke the pound and it moved outside of its established trading range. Back then, you know, the pound traded vis-a-vis other currencies in a very regulated fashion through something called the exchange rate mechanism, kind of a holdover from IMF currency manipulation days post Bretton Woods. And when Abe took over, who he I think really admired and has fashioned himself after a little bit, Abe famously had his three arrows. He had his

2-2-2 plan, which was 2% inflation, 2% growth in two years. Besson has come out with a 3-3-3 plan, 3% deficits, 3% growth, 3 million more barrels of oil or oil equivalents. And so one of the things in these many podcasts and interviews that Besson likes to talk about is what really got him over the edge to being willing to jump into this short yen trade was the way the appointment calendars were set up. He saw that Abe was going to have a chance to remake the board of the Bank of Japan. He was going to essentially be able to appoint a bunch of governors and a central bank chief that would carry out his policies. I think that the Treasury and some of these policies that the Trump administration wants to put in, on one level,

they seem kind of contradictory, right? So it's like, we want to really cut the government, but we want the economy to truly grow. And in the long term, cutting government spending definitely is a good thing for growth. But in the short term, it takes a while for the economy to change. If you just chop off, you know, half a trillion, a trillion dollars worth of government spending, that in many ways goes directly to GDP. And in some sense, there's even a multiplier to government spending. And Trump does not want the stock market to go down. He doesn't want a recession. He doesn't want unemployment levels to go up. And so to kind of square all of those circles, I think the only way that's really possible is by going back to

things that we haven't done since the 1940s 1950s things like yield curve control things where the treasury is much more involved with monetary policy than historically it has been and so we could get get into a little bit of that history because i think that kind of sheds light on it but i think then that also leads into different ramifications and it leads into what will eventually happen, which I think is going to be some sort of a, you know, volatile period for markets in in the first half, probably of next year, where people try to figure out where is all this stuff going to land? I think ultimately, it's going to land in a good place. But there's going to be a lot of feathers that get ruffled along the way.

Yeah, let's jump into the history lesson, because actually, it's funny that you bring up 1940s policy because that's something that i think lynn alden has been banging the drum about for a couple years as a lot of people have been anchoring this period of high inflation and using the parallel of 1970s inflation as the the parallel that we should be drawing conclusions from but lynn has been banging the drum saying no it's more like the 1940s and so really interested to hear your perspective on the lessons from that era, which many people seem to gloss over. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating time and it's a time that Scott Besson is very familiar with. So one of the interesting things about him, he's very much into

economic and financial history. When he took kind of a career break, he went as his job to go teach economic history at Yale. I think he still has been doing that even while he's been doing his company, I think, Key Square. So he's very much aware of this more so than, you know, just a normal kind of hedge fund guy might be. So basically in the 1940s, right, we had a similar situation where we had debt to GDP, 120 percent, something like that. World War II ends and, you demand for goods, services just kind of skyrockets. And you had massive inflation. You had double digit inflation in 46, 47. But you also had this desire by the government to keep interest rates low. And so you can kind of see a little bit of parallels already with what some economists are

talking about with Trump policies is that some of these have inflationary tendencies. But at the same time, we know Trump has also hinted he wants a weaker dollar. We know he's not going to want interest rates, you know, going up to have 10 percent mortgages, which people would be up in arms about. So the way you kind of, again, square that circle is you look back to parallels in history. How did we achieve that, say, in the 1940s? And we did it with yield curve control, which was basically controlling not just the short end. Obviously, the Federal Reserve can set short-term rates, but also controlling the long end and capping out Treasury bond yields at 2.5% for quite a number of years, actually. It started back in World War II and it continued post-World

War II, where Treasury and the Fed, through open market actions, were essentially buying Treasury bonds, keeping yields down at 2.5%, and they kept the short-term rate at 3.8%, so near zero. So you had this really nice sloping yield curve from three eighths on the short end to two and a half. It was very stable. Everybody knew that's what the rates were going to be. And obviously, you know, for long term bondholders, you know, that wasn't a great situation when you're having 10, 12, 15 percent inflation and you're getting two and a half on a bond.

But that was the price to be paid. And I think that's that's the price that's that's going to be paid in coming years is is long-term bondholders losing out. And, you know, I'm not the only one to say that a lot of people, Luke Groman, I'm sure Lynn Alden probably has talked about this a little bit. You know, Luke Groman likes to say, you know, they're the suckers at the card table. I tend to agree with that. And I think what's going to happen is, you know, again, you go back to those forties, fifties period, there was a lot more direct control that the treasury had and the federal reserve just did not like all this monkeying and there was something it was 1951 or 1952

there was a meeting where truman called in leaders from the federal reserve and the treasury and basically said you know you guys need to get together and it became known as the the treasury fed accord of uh of 1951 or 1952 i forget exactly but very early 50s because things were starting to to get a little bit out of hand with all the wars ending going on at that time with Korea. So basically, what happened was at that time, there was a little bit more of a delineation put in between the Fed to control monetary policy,

and the Treasury still got control of the dollar. The Fed has certain mechanisms. I mean, the Treasury has certain mechanisms that still allow it to manipulate the dollar. They have a special fund with special drawing rights. and US dollars in it that they pull out during financial crisis in 2008, they did in 2020 to stabilize currencies. But they've generally stayed out of monetary policy. And I think to truly affect the Trump policies in a way that doesn't tank the stock market, tank the real

economy, you're going to need some of these monetary controls, which eventually lead to weaker dollar, higher asset prices, stocks, and especially things like, you know, Bitcoin and possibly gold as well. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications

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Use the code TFTC. We have a code now. TFTC for 5% off at checkout. This would make sense considering Trump's posturing over the last year, because I think he's explicitly come out and said that he'd like to control the Fed's fund rate if possible. So it seems like he's put Scott percent in this position with the knowledge that he has and the experience that he has particularly around currency trades whether it's the yen or the speculative attack on the pound when he was at the soros fund so that is that is this confirmation of the signaling he's been doing for the better part of a year because if they are going to go out and attempt to execute this policy that there is a needle to thread, I would imagine.

Yes, I think there's a very small needle to thread. If anybody could do it, I think, you know, this team would have a chance. And I think it was not surprising to me that the Treasury pick was one that Trump seemed to agonize over, seemed to have some difficulty eventually coming to a final decision on. And I think that it's, of all the picks, it's the most important, you know, pick for his White House. I think there's also a chance, although I'm not sure if this would happen, where he could eventually want to slot Besson in to lead the Federal Reserve at the end of Powell's term, if not sooner, if not challenge the Supreme Court ruling that the chair cannot be removed by

the president. I think that's still unclear whether that's the case. But you're absolutely right. Trump has said, you know, maybe the president shouldn't be setting the Fed's funds rate, but essentially should have a voice at the table, a voice at the FOMC, the Fed Open Market Committee that sets rates. He's talked about greater involvement during his previous term. He jawboned a lot. He talked a lot more about Federal Reserve, openly criticizing Federal Reserve for keeping rates too high. And so you have this willingness. And this goes back to Besson some of those those podcasts he talks a lot he tells stories about his father having the largest science fiction library in the state of South Carolina and really being into kind of

imagination that one of Besson's favorite lines in these podcasts is to tell people he could find Alpha Centauri in the sky long before he could find Chicago on a map because he's always kind have been this dreamer, but in this kind of financial guy's, you know, body and life. And he's also, I believe, a patriotic guy. He was admitted to the Naval Academy, but he felt at the time, given the policy against homosexuals, that it wasn't right for him to go into the military, given he was gay. And he's often looked for ways to serve. And one of the most telling things i saw in these podcasts was a manhattan institute interview he did about five months ago where he literally for like a minute straight starts talking about the need for a new bretton

woods something along the lines of a monetary restructuring like we had after world war one like like happened as a result of the treaty versailles after after after world war one like like we had at Bretton Woods after World War II, excuse me, and that we needed a massive monetary reset. And he was very specific. We needed it in the next administration. He says in the next four years, we're going to need a massive monetary reset and I want to be a part of it. And so I think that pretty much he's telling you that he wants to be involved in remaking a new global monetary system. And this goes right back to my opening where I think the level of changes that people are bracing for is huge, but it's actually going to go even higher than that, that we're

going to have all kinds of discussions, rumors, massive changes to institutions in ways that a lot of people might have seen as kind of sacrosanct. You can't do that. You can't mess with Fed independence or you'll you'll royal the markets. And I think that Fed independence is going to be threatened. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I've been on podcasts in the past where I've talked about the Federal Reserve. You know, there's a place there's an argument to be made that it should be abolished. I think that's such a drastic move that you don't need to abolish it, but you need to realign the incentives of the Federal Reserve System with the needs of the American people. And I think right now the Federal Reserve System operates as kind of a proxy for the

large banks, which at the end of the day are the owners on the cap tables of the Federal Reserve branch banks. So if you look at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, there are shares of that entity that are owned by Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, Bank of America. And so basically we have this Federal Reserve system that parades around as if they're acting in the interests of the American people. And I'm not impugning Jerome Powell as a person, but I think the institution itself is not set up to serve the American people. And you have to understand why central banks were set up in the first place, because when money was gold, the government actually needed physical gold. And so the central bank was set up as a way to funnel gold from wealthy individuals,

from banks to the government when the government needed gold to finance wars and different things. And so the bank was set up to serve these interests of the banks because it was their gold that was being lent to the government. We now have a situation in this fiat world where that whole apparatus is no longer necessary. The federal government has no need to go to J.P. Morgan in order to issue treasury bonds. They're still using J.P. Morgan and J.P. Morgan's balance sheet to hold Treasury bonds, but it's a bit of a facade rather than an actual case of where physical gold needed to be transferred from J.P. Morgan's balance sheet to the Federal Reserve, to the Federal Reserve, to the Treasury. And so we've got all of these

things going on, and there are good reasons why now is the time to make these changes, not the least of which is what's going on with BRICS, which we know is also on Trump's radar. Well, that perfect setup, Ali, to the next question I had is, is Scott Besant being in the position that he is, it seems like Trump recognizing that we need structural change. Is it just that, like a recognition that we are operating in this late stage of the fiat monetary system set up over a hundred years ago when the fed was put in the place and it's a recognition that it's sort of gotten out of hand it's frankenstein that is out of control and we need to rein it in and people have been throwing around the word soft landing in the context of fed policy

in recent years but this truly seems like the way you're describing it like scott besent the trump administration trying to manufacture this soft landing to a new monetary order or is it simply interested parties saying this isn't working in the interest of the American people? We need to bring in a new system. If left alone, that system could persist, but we don't like it nonetheless, and we want to create this new one. Yeah, I actually don't know if left alone the system could persist. I think that it's actually much more of a dire situation than anybody's going to tell you on from the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, or even on mass media, you know, that you're not going to hear, you know, CNBC, which is backed by Morgan Stanley and JP

Morgan and BlackRock, you know, you're none of these, none of these people have in their interest to be honest with the American people about the real situation. And, you know, the the the spike in deficits and deficits to GDP that we've experienced is huge. And, you know, it's also happened or come to be that at these levels, there's really a massive threat to financial stability if there's even the slightest hint of a significant pullback in the real economy or a recession. So, for example, in 2022, we did not have massive unemployment, but we did have a stock market sell-off. And that sell-off alone cost the Treasury over half a trillion dollars in receipts in 2023 because of lack of capital gains taxes coming into the government. And so the government

has gotten itself pretty much in a Ponzi scheme type situation, like a la Bernie Madoff, where Bernie Madoff, everything is great as long as the stock market's going up. He can pull money from one client and give it to another. But when the stock market crashed in 08, you know, and people wanted their money, all of a sudden it comes crashing down. And we've gotten ourselves into that type of a situation where we don't have 60 or 70% of debt to GDP anymore. We have 120% debt to GDP. We have 6% deficits. We spent $1 trillion on interest last year. And the projection is for that to be, you know, closer to $1.5 trillion or higher next year, given that in 2025, there's something like $6 or $7 trillion in treasury notes and bonds that are rolling over that need to be

refinanced. So not only the issuance to fund the deficit, which will probably be around $2 trillion again, but also, you know, you've got to refinance $6 or $7 trillion. And most of that is at much lower rates than what the market's at right now. So I went through the latest fiscal year report from the Treasury. Fiscal year ended September 30th for 2024. And I just added up defense spending, interest, Social Security, Medicare, and I included veterans benefits in that as well. And you get to 86%, 87% of federal spending. If you cut out the entire rest of the government it's less than a trillion dollars so you know like some of these things with with doge talking about oh we could probably cut two trillion even if you completely got rid of every

single government department and office department of justice you know agriculture interior educate you get rid of them all you don't even cut off a trillion dollars from the deficit um that's that's how much of our spending is in interest entitlements defense and va benefits and so the the only way that you can you know cut some spending i think um is there is waste fraud and abuse in the system there are government uh departments that are overfunded over employed i think it's realistic to think two 300 billion could possibly be be chopped off of the uh federal spending, but nowhere in any world can I see the magnitude of cuts that some people are expecting to eventually come. And so what that means is that we're still going to operate at

a deficit. Even Besset says his goal is to get to a 3% deficit by 2028. So he's basically telling you he expects the government to operate at 4%, 5%, 6% deficits for the entire Trump administration, And then by 2028, we'll be we'll be we'll be at three. And that's if his plan goes according if everything goes according to plan. And so we have this situation where the amount of and then I could add on other things on top of that, like the amount of treasury issuance that Yellen funded with T-bills. And this leads into stable coins. This leads into the bigger picture replacement of the monetary system. There's other people, again, who have talked about this, where you need something to inflate to back the debt of the United States. And in the 70s, we did oil. And now we could do Bitcoin. We could do gold. I think that's an idea, you know, Luke Groman has put forward. I think you could almost even take that idea one step further and see how it could be possible to essentially attack the BRICS system, which is currently being based on gold, by inflating Bitcoin, buying Bitcoin in a strategic reserve and funding those purchases with the sale of U.S. gold stockpiles. I'm not necessarily in favor of that. In fact, I'm a longtime precious metal holder.

But you can see kind of the game theory involved of let the BRICS build up their system, Russia, China spending all this money on gold, and then the largest known holder of gold at over 8,000 metric tons, over 260 million ounces, starts to sell it into the market, how that collapses the gold price to buy Bitcoin, inflates the Bitcoin, which then has, you know, the beginnings of becoming a monetary base. Now, whether or not that's going to happen, I don't know. But it's one scenario that I think you can lay out there that, again, is a bigger change than what people are imagining right now. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at ZapRite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a

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you're going to love this stuff yeah i mean from what i'm hearing it seems like the trump administration is very gung-ho about this bitcoin strategic reserve and i'm headed over to abu dhabi next week for the bitcoin mana conference uh and the rumors behind the sammy people are talking about this publicly on twitter so i feel comfortable saying it here in this conversation but people are pretty confident that there will be some announcements about middle eastern sovereign wealth funds that are they're allocating to bitcoin too and it does seem like with the trump victory and his upcoming second term that bitcoin is going to play a role which is insane to me if you were to tell me this only a year ago i would have thought you were crazy however it seems like

we're here and when you put it that way in terms of using bitcoin as a strategic asset not only to bolster the treasury but to use it as a tool to weaken uh a bricks coalition that seems pretty dead set on competing with the dollar reserve system it makes a lot of sense and i guess the question is as it pertains to bitcoin do you think russia china and it seems obvious that the middle east who seems to be playing both sides of the fence at all times due to um the way the international Oil and gas markets operate simply just where they sit in the stratosphere of the game theory that they could be seeing what's happening here in the United States and saying, crap, do we have to hedge our bets and get exposure to Bitcoin as well? Yeah, I think you could. I mean, you you can see and envision a path where there's these two systems, one backed with the monetary base being Bitcoin and one with gold.

And, you know, to put some numbers around this, I put out, you know, Federal Reserve numbers of U.S. gold holdings, took a look at what that total supply is. And it's not as big as you think. I think it's 261 million ounces at twenty six hundred dollars an ounce. it's somewhere in the 600 billion dollar range so if you start doing the math and you take a look at the um bitcoin act by senator loomis she talks about in that act uh buying 200 000 bitcoin a year for five years uh if you want to try to finance that you know that's what 20 billion dollars a year it's pretty easy to sell a little bit of gold into that and buy bitcoin at say 100 thousand a coin but if you announce that you're going to start selling u.s gold into the gold

market what's that going to do to the gold price when the biggest holder announces they're they're liquidating a large portion of their assets it's going to drive down the gold price and when you at the same time say they're going to buy bitcoin it's going to raise the bitcoin price and so you very quickly get to a point where the bitcoin price skyrockets gold price plummets and it's not actually that easy to finance the strategic reserve simply by selling off a small portion of the gold holdings. You almost have to liquidate the entire U.S. gold holdings in order to fund the Bitcoin holdings. And so I actually don't think that that's the end result or that will be the end result. But even whispers of something like that in the system, again, it starts playing

into people saying, huh, like a Saudi Arabia is a perfect example. We want to have relationships with China. We want to do trade. We're going to do Juan and Saudi realities with them. But at the same time, we are going to need net settle in gold. So we want the gold price to be stable. But if the US starts unloading gold and just buying up on Bitcoin, we better get our hands on a little bit of Bitcoin. And you start off these things that from the outside, like you said, two, three years ago sound crazy, but you start saying, oh, wow, Western central banks that want to align with the United States system are going to also now need to start buying Bitcoin. And all of a sudden, you know, it just starts off this spiral. And then the same thing on the gold side,

you know, the biggest holders of gold are still a lot of these Western central banks like France, Germany, Italy has a huge amount, obviously Switzerland, you know. And so I think getting all those people on board of dumping gold to buy bitcoin is not going to happen but that doesn't mean in the same way that trump might use tariffs you know big tariffs as negotiating tactics that doesn't mean that um trump claiming he's going to finance a bitcoin strategic reserve by selling gold that can have effects even if the gold doesn't eventually get sold and so i think you You have all of these geopolitical moves in the air that would just, you know, completely upend the system and ultimately cause volatility.

And that's why I do think, you know, there's going to be a lot more volatility in financial assets, in the stock market, in the treasury market in the first six months of the Trump administration, because all of these this whole stew of all of these ideas is going to come out in one way or another whether it's leaks or whether it's truths on true social or tweets or whatever way these these these massive changes are going to start floating out into wall street journal reports and financial uh markets are going to start reacting to them and i think it's it's actually you know bullish for gold and bitcoin because i think gold gold will be that asset that's not financial assets. And Bitcoin obviously has its things. And I know that sounds

a little contradictory, Mel, you're saying it's going to be good for gold. Because I think at a certain point, while it could cause gold sell-offs, people will start to realize, well, wait a minute, if the BRICS really institute this system, it needs to be a lot more than $2,500 an ounce, even if the US isn't playing along. And so if gold's going to truly become a monetary metal again, which is the basis of a monetary system for half of the world's population, half of the world's GDP, it needs to be a lot higher than $2,000. It needs to be closer to $20,000, $30,000. It doesn't mean that the U.S. selling gold in the short term doesn't cause a gold drop. But once people realize where gold is going to need to end up, if it's truly going to become

the monetary base, and if Bitcoin is truly going to become the monetary base for the Western world, Well, I mean, that's where you start getting into, you know, I did some some calculations somewhere around the twenty five million dollar mark. Now, that sounds crazy, but it's based on an assumption of around one one thousand trillion in global wealth. And if you wanted to back that half of that with twenty one million Bitcoin, you're at about that twenty three, twenty four million dollar coin mark. And so do I think that's going to happen overnight or we're going to these these sort of levels in any in the next four years? No. But if you if people start saying, wow, there is a really, truly significant adoption of Western central banks of Bitcoin as a reserve asset. it starts us on that path where in 20, 30, 40 years, if it truly becomes the monetary base, this is where we're going to end up with it. And the same thing goes for gold. If gold is going

to represent the other half of the world's wealth, my calculation is it needs to get to somewhere in the $50,000 to $60,000 an ounce category. So the bottom line is that creating a new global monetary system, not based on fiat, not based on the unlimited potential for governments to spend money so fruitlessly that you eventually get massive inflation, negative returns on investment, losses in buying power. If you want to avoid all of that and you say, okay, we had this experiment from 1971 to 2024, where we were on a pure fiat world, we saw it wound up with $330 trillion in global debt. It wound up with massive inflation. It wound up with bloated socialist-like governments. And the way to avoid that is to have a neutral reserve asset that can't be printed.

And you go with gold or you go with Bitcoin or a combination. I see no way that these assets don't settle significantly higher do you see a scenario in which instead of splitting into two different reserve assets serving two different parts of the world where you have a coal coalescence around one like bitcoin i'm just thinking i mean that's one of the ideas that's talked a lot about in bitcoin or one of the theories is that the gold standard failed due to the physical nature forcing the physical centralization of the asset as the economy grows, as the population grows, and you have so much wealth that needs to be represented

in this very scarce physical asset. And gold just becomes very, very hard to scale. Whereas with Bitcoin, since it's digital, extremely divisible, you can send it over the internet. It's much better suited to facilitate the amount of economic activity that's simply happening on the planet today? Is there a scenario in which both sides, the western part of the world and the eastern part of the world,

wake up to this fact and coalesce around Bitcoin as opposed to gold? Well, I think that problem with gold about easy to send around and so on, it might be a little overstated, right? I mean, the central banks would hold the gold at the Federal Reserve or they'd hold it in Switzerland, or they'd hold it at the Bank of England. And the BIS would monitor this, the Bank for International Settlements, the Central Bank for Central Banks based in Basel, Switzerland. And they would do the accounting to transfer gold from India to the United States or vice versa. And then the actual transaction mechanism of these currencies,

which was backed by gold, was divisible into dollars and pennies and dimes. And you could do ledger accounting and do things so that, you know, money was being moved more or less instantaneously without physically trucking the gold from one place to another. That had its issues, but, you know, it seemed to suffice at least. I think a lot of people were really upset with the gold standard during the depression because they couldn't increase the money supply, right? They couldn't take that gold and say, you know, we have a lot of money because gold, in the U.S. was pegged at $20 an ounce. And that was why, you know, FDR confiscated gold in 1933. That was why he immediately revalued it to $35 an ounce and therefore, you know, increased the

money supply, you know, $15 out of on a $20 base. That's a 75% increase in the money supply overnight with the gold revaluation. And so I think if you have Bitcoin or you have gold as that monetary base, there's always that potential to revalue it, right? There's always that way where we just had a global pandemic and we need to increase the money supply. And the way that that happens is you're actually benefiting from having a difference between the reserve asset and the transactional asset. So the transactional asset, what people get paid in, what they buy stuff with can be devalued and increase the money supply in a time of global financial emergency. But at the same time, savers that own the gold or own the Bitcoin

don't get devalued away, which is what happened in 2020. So we had a global pandemic. We basically needed to print trillions and trillions of dollars around the world. No government wanted to tax people trillions and trillions of dollars and say, we're going to take 15% of everybody's net worth. Instead, what they did was they just printed the money and through inflation took 20, 25 percent of everybody's net worth in order to pay for the COVID response. And so you hurt the savers, but you did get the money supply increase. If you have a neutral reserve asset that can't be counterfeited, printed, and you need to expand the money supply, it's beneficial to have a transaction asset and a reserve asset separated so that you can essentially revalue that transaction

asset um and not be hurting savers um that want to maintain their purchasing power interesting so how how do you see this playing out come inauguration end of january trump gets in hopefully it seems very likely since we have the republicans have the house and the senate that his or at least a lot of his appointments get confirmed into their positions what do you think the the order of operations particularly from the treasury is to begin enacting this policy to thread this needle well i think we're gonna have doge come up with cuts and in in some of the exuberance and enthusiasm for those. I think, you know, Elon might find out it's harder to make big cuts in Washington than put rocket ships on Mars. But basically,

we're going to have, I think, Besant as the puppet master of all of this behind the scenes, whether it's a new financial system, managing, cutting the deficit at least somewhat without tanking the economy and the stock market. And then, you know, starting to essentially put together the frameworks and the channels for this global reordering. I think at some point, it is going to require a summit, something G20, maybe bigger. Maybe some members will refuse to go because they want to, you know, be in a BRICS summit. But I think there's a good chance for an actual formal monetary summit, the likes of which we haven't seen since Bretton Woods, which was exactly 80 years ago this past July in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, where people got

together specifically to create the new monetary system post-World War II. And so where does this all end up? So I've tried to lay out different scenarios, things that I think are within the realm of possibility. But of course, I don't know. I wish I did know exactly. This is the path that I see has to happen. I think there's so many moving parts in it. But I do think, going back to the beginning, that the monetary situation is more acute and more dangerous and more fragile and more precarious than any of the big parties want you to know. It's the same type of a situation in 2007 when you had Federal Reserve governors coming out and saying the mortgage crisis is contained. Don't worry. This isn't going to spill over into the real economy. We've got it under

control. And lo and behold, what happened? And so I think you've got people saying, look, you know, Powell says the debt levels are the debt levels, not unsustainable, but our trajectory is unsustainable. That's his that's his go to statement for it. I think that we're getting close to a level, a point where even the debt levels are getting unsustainable. And I think especially if interest rates continue to rise, you know, given the interest expense. And so we're at that crisis point. And so what I do see definitely coming within the next one to two years is a major crisis point, a crisis point that creates a lot of volatility, that creates a lot of some of the ideas I've been talking about getting out there into the ether and really

scaring different financial players, participants, markets, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, insurance companies, people getting scared. And then coming out of that, some sort of a pragmatic solution that i think actually besant has been training his whole life to kind of orchestrate like you know cometh the hour cometh the man type situation where you know the world is at a point where it i mean it's becoming household knowledge now things that you know i used to research and study and talk about you know years ago uncontrollable debts entitlements are going bankrupt um you know we're turning into a banana republic with our spending uh you can't trust the purchasing power of the dollar. All these things that Bitcoiners and other people

have known for years and years are starting to enter the household vernacular. And we're coming to this point. And I think that's what's going to happen. And exactly how that turns out, I don't know. But I do think Bitcoin and gold will be a part of it. It could be that people start to realize, hey, you know, U.S. is still going to do some trading with China and BRICS nations, And they're going to need and want to hold gold as a reserve asset for that. But that Bitcoin is also going to come in and serve as a reserve asset for those countries that want to buy, start buying into that kind of mechanism. Who knows? Central banks could say, you know what, we like the idea of Bitcoin. we're going to create a blockchain, triple ledger, you know, hard cap digital asset that's going to

be a central bank digital asset, like a special drawing right that the IMF created. You know, I think there are problems with that. But I do think there's just so many of these big unknowns that there's no way that once these things start getting talked about in the open and in the Wall Street Journal and on CNBC and Fox Business that they're going to royal markets. And so I think that Trump's inclination to keep the stock market going, keep the economy at full employment is going to lead him to do things that heretofore have been thought unthinkable, like significantly change the mandate and interactions of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, break that 1951 Treasury-Fed Accord and have government much more involved in monetary policy and

yield curve controls, these types of situations, maybe even capital controls on dollar exports. And so all of these things, I think, are kind of on their way. And it's really going to be a pivotal time, probably, like I said, the greatest monetary shakeup since, you know, 1944 is coming in the next 12 to 36 months. In terms of breaking the Fed-Treasury accord, what do you see being the potential mechanism to make that happen? Executive order, a bill that President Trump sort of puts into the ether and somebody from the House puts forward?

What does that look like? Yeah, so it could be done in a number of ways. So you could amend, you know, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. You could also amend it in ways that, you know, are a little bit more subtle, increasing members like like the Democrats have talked about increasing members of the Supreme Court. You can increase members of the Federal Open Market Committee. Currently, you have, I think, seven governors and six bank presidents that serve on that board if you expand it and allow Trump to appoint new governors. And then obviously, in spring of 2026, he has the right to appoint a new Federal Reserve chair.

So if he gets to put in his chair, put in governors that are sympathetic to his viewpoint, I think he could do that. I think if Congress was behind this, you could amend it by law. I think that there's also certain things that the Treasury Department has at its disposal, which it has not used. It has this, as I mentioned, this special fund. It currently has, I think, it's called ESF. I forget exactly what it stands for. It's got 200 some billion in it currently. You know, these these types of funds could be expanded by pulling cash from the Treasury general account. What Senator Loomis talked about in her Bitcoin Act was essentially extracting money from the Federal Reserve by demanding that the Federal Reserve revalue the Treasury gold

certificates. So back when gold was around $42 an ounce, I think, the Federal Reserve took custody of the United States gold and gave the Treasury certificates that were valued at $42 an ounce. Loomis says in the bill that to pay for the Bitcoin Act, she's going to demand that the Treasury submit those certificates to the Federal Reserve banks. Federal Reserve banks need to issue new certificates at a market price of gold and then deliver the difference between that $42 an ounce in the market price in cash funds to the Treasury. And so I think there are ways without having Congress do it that you have the Treasury use extraordinary powers with which constitutionally it has but has not used that don't require an amendment of the Federal Reserve Act. But I think

that could be on the table as well, especially if financial markets get to a point of crisis because of some of these, you know, volatile, you know, these incidents that I think are going to spark this volatility. What do you think it's sparked a volatility, like a liquidity crisis behind behind the scenes liquidity crisis um yields getting out of control dollar getting out of control um you know in 2022 we had the dollar index at 114 and we had uh 10-year treasuries getting close to five percent and obviously when when that happened it triggered a lot of things uh it triggered you know a lot of banks um because they hold all these long-term treasuries that want like their balance sheets are insolvent. You had Silicon Valley. So financial

system instability. So, OK, like let's say that you had government, you know, within the president's power, he's he's cutting spending. And then at the same time, you have, you know, tariffs which are causing, you know, different inflationary aspects, for example, or even supply shocks or goods that are tough to come by. You have all of these things that start happening that can also lead to dollar illiquidity. So, you know, you could have these countries that have been doing a lot of exports

to the United States, not doing as many exports. They still need dollars because they're still working within the dollar system by and large. So how do they get those dollars? They start selling treasuries. This starts, you know, jacking up the dollar again, jacking up treasury yields.

And again, these things start to become a spiral. And so there's a dozen ways, more than a dozen ways that this financial instability can start to be sparked by some of these actions that the president is able to take simply by executive order. He has this broad tariff ability. He has the broad ability to cut government spending in different ways. So all of these things can start that chain reaction that then leads to the moment of crisis, that then leads to legislative will to make some of these dramatic changes, including possibly amending the Federal Reserve Act. So in that scenario, is the Trump admin sort of wishing for this crisis to make these changes? is does the do the changes necessitate a crisis to justify the tectonic shifts that could potentially manifest i think if besant understands and i think he does that there is a part of the global economic financial order that literally has gangrene and it is a matter of do we act now and put that tourniquet on and amputate, which is going to be bloody and painful and a horrible experience? Or do we let the whole thing collapse and perhaps devolve into a real

World War III? We're kind of in the middle of an economic World War III right now. Do we go into a hot World War III? Do we let the entire banking financial system collapse? If the system is really as fragile as i think it is and that's the threat then all of a sudden cutting off that leg even though it's painful and causes this economic disorder and volatility and i think i mean you look at it you look at these morgan stanley strategists and everybody you know a year ago i was out saying look we're we've got so much fiscal spending we're going to have you know 6 000 on the s&p by the end of this this year probably 7 000 by the end of 2025 and all these you know big strategists were saying oh well the economy's slowing and you know the fed needs to

cut and all this stuff and now they're all saying oh you know all these policies it's just going to be amazing year for the stock market you know 7 000 people are trying to up it somebody just came out today 7 007 as a s&p prediction for the end of next year when you start getting all of this mass bullishness and everybody's thinking that everything is going up into the right I mean, that's really when you have to start being afraid. And so I've been very bullish on the stock market for a long time. And I'm now thinking about cutting back some exposure, buying puts, doing some things that I haven't really been doing for a while at the end of this year, early in January. Because I think once Trump gets into office, he needs to move quickly, and some of these moving parts are going to be a little jumbled before we get to the other end of this, and that's where the volatility is going to be. But they're going to be willing to pay that price because they understand if they don't do something about it, it's just going to get worse, and there's no easy solution in sight. how much of threading the needle do you think narrative is going to play into it like is there

a situation which you can imagine in which the trump admin i would imagine percent at on the tip of the spear here saying hey we're about to take some harsh medicine there's going to be some economic volatility and turmoil but it is very necessary do you think that is needed to to get through the other side because that's one thing that i'm sure the other side of the aisle will jump on immediately if it's not articulated and messaged appropriately by the trump administration is look what happened you voted in trump he put in these tariffs he's making cuts and it's destroying the economy haha this is this is what you voted for um and unless there's some articulate motivated messaging that is sort of choreographing hey we're making these moves

there's going to be some turmoil but promise us or we promise you on the other end it's going to allow us to really set set things back to to a proper level a sounder base and then move forward with more um with with structural growth that is actually healthy yeah i i mean i I think it's probably the toughest leadership challenge, you know, since World War II is to lead the American people through something like this, through a jarring monetary reset that's going to have, you know, potential significant negative consequences. And it's going to require reeducation and it's going to require politicking, right? I mean, I think ultimately what the Trump administration will wind up doing is saying,

Look, it's the same thing with immigration. You know, there's probably going to be a video at some point of something horrible happening with mass deportations. I don't know what it God forbid, you know, migrants start deciding, well, if I get arrested in Texas, they're going to turn me over to ICE. I might as well start evading police. And a bunch of car chases happen and a six-year-old girl gets run over. You know, the left is going to jump on that and say, see what happens when you have Tom Holman and mass deportations. But why is that happening? Because they opened up the border and let in 20 million people and we needed to do something in order to get these people out, right? And FDR did, you know, per capita, you know, it would have been 20, 30 million deportations uh barack obama did millions of deportations so but these bad things happen you know when you're trying to to fix things that are broken and so you know i think he's going to

have to say look there these bad things are not happening because i'm fixing this these bad things are happening because this thing is so messed up that in order to fix it you know in order to fix your toilet we had to turn off your water supply for for a few hours in order in order to fix the financial plumbing. You know, we're having to disrupt things. And don't blame me. Don't blame the Republican Party. Don't blame the MAGA people or America First, because we're doing the hard thing to make this country better and put us on a firm footing. You know, blame the money changers, blame the easy fed policy, blame the over Democrat spending, blame the bloated social programs. This is what got us into this situation. And now we're having to fix it. And so, you know,

if you can do that effectively i think the american people in some sense for a while have been looking for a purpose you know there's a there's a little bit of a strength and struggle that sometimes occurs in people where you know kind of like after a pearl harbor event whether you think it was kind of allowed to happen or not whatever it kind of galvanizes a population that really didn't want to have anything to do with world war ii but it's like okay now we need now we need to do this. Right. And I think there could be a moment like that where the American population realizes, hey, this really has gotten so out of hand. The only way to fix it is with pain. And Trump is the only person that can fix it. And we need to give him a little bit of leeway

here, even if in the short term, it's not the most pleasant of experiences. Yeah. And that's why i actually think the bitcoin strategic reserve is top of mind for trump because you have to imagine maybe it's not him individually but people surrounding him in his administration have to recognize that americans on a per capita basis own the most bitcoin and most of the bitcoin wealth in the world i believe not most but um indexing for every country i think the u.s is number one in terms of who owns the most bitcoin on an individual basis and so in terms of manufacturing a soft landing and using the bitcoin strategic reserve as a variable and a tool on the way to that soft landing i think that that is a good calculated risk to take to

to basically ensure that you have a material percentage of americans being protected because the price of bitcoin is going up um and if that's happening those individuals are going to be able to go out and reinvest in the economy and help rebuild things here domestically um i do and it's not hand up i'm a bitcoiner uh this show's about bitcoin i run a venture fund focused on investing in in bitcoin infrastructure talking my bag here but uh outside of that like outside of my bag and my personal incentives to push bitcoin forward i mean i think removing myself from that point of view and just looking at this objectively like it is a wise decision to lean into bitcoin at this particular time considering the strategic advantage that america has just due to the

fact that so many americans own a material amount of bitcoin yeah and i think at the end of the day what we're talking about, too, is these monetary instruments are about kind of securing resources, securing jobs, securing prosperity for people, and that we will get through this volatile period. And I don't think it's necessarily a super long volatile period. I think it could be a sharp period, kind of a shock to some people who think everything is going to be rosy for the next 12 months, but that I'm talking about a matter of months. And once the, just like the COVID drop was like a 40, 50% drop in the market, and then it was back, that when we come out of this and the new Bretton Woods occurs or the new systems in place, that it's going to also be matched with

real industrial policy. It's going, like imagine there's yield curve control and interest rates are capped. And we've got, you know, massive onshoring going on because of tariffs. And, you know, everybody, everybody needs everybody that wants a job can have a job and wages are going up. Maybe they're like there's a there's a dollar revaluation here in terms of Bitcoin and gold, which is inflationary. But that dollar, but that wages are going up more than inflation. Maybe inflation runs at seven, eight percent, but wages are going up 10, 12 percent. You know, that benefits paycheck to paycheck Americans. And that's a big part of the Trump base. It doesn't necessarily benefit pension funds or insurance companies. But if you literally have two hundred

dollars in your bank account and you're living paycheck to paycheck, if all of a sudden you get a 12 percent rise, but even though there's seven percent inflation, but you got a 12 percent wage gain in the past 12 months, you know, you're doing better. And so there are ways to paint inflationary policies resets all these types of things where people start to understand hey this might not be great for corporate profit margins it might not be great for treasury bond holders but this is the right thing for america so that we can rebuild our manufacturing we can regain our sovereignty we can you know have a a happy thriving middle class where you don't need you know the mom and the dad working three jobs total and they're still barely

able to make ends meet and going into credit card debt at 23%. If we can get a country that looks more like, you know, a affluent middle class as the base instead of a super wealthy elite as, you know, spending, you know, trillions of dollars on, you know, Louis Vuitton bags, if we can move more back into that manufacturing base of a country, you know, I mean, this is going to be a great thing and ultimately great for the stock market. I mean, I could see the stock market going down to four something, five something on the S&P next year, but then winding up by the time, you know, 28 comes around at, you know, 15,000, you know, which might sound absolutely nuts, but in a devalued currency, you know, let's say we got a real doubling in the stock market.

So it went from 6,000 to 12,000. And then because of inflation and, you know, earnings are priced in nominal terms, you add, you know, we could get some really crazy situations here with, you know multi-thousand dollar advances in gold bitcoin you know who knows how many hundreds of thousands um and the stock market at 15 000 and you know a job for every person who wants it in a in a in an economy that is leveraging the natural wealth resources innovation that america has instead of having it being drained off in the financialization um of america which has happened for decades yeah i really like the idea of it being short too and i think that could be messaged appropriately too it's like hey we're going to make these stark changes it's going to

be some short-term turmoil maybe the next six to eight months are going to be a bit shaky but at the end of that period we'll be reset we'll be able to reset the great reset is here um we'll be back at a structural uh a sounder base from which we can grow and i think terrorists i mean trump joked about it uh on his campaign trail terrorist is my favorite word it'll become your favorite word too and i think it's hilarious because it is becoming i think people are becoming reacclimated with the way terrorists can be used you have this overt um tax on on imported goods and american citizens do pay but it creates this incentive to build the manufacturing base but i think one thing about tariffs that many people underappreciate is just just pure leveraging

um the pure leverage that they provide the united states and we saw an example of this yesterday i mean reports from fox news that trump met with justin trudeau and basically threatened him with tariffs and asking Justin to justify why we're sending them $100 billion year in and year out with that exchange not being reciprocal in terms of the value that we receive as a nation. I think the negotiating leverage that just threatening tariffs provides the United States is something that people need to better understand as well. Yeah, we're still the biggest boy on the block. um and and i mean that's really what he's doing right he's moving away from these multilateral international intergovernmental organizations and he's going at people kind of bilaterally

and in bilaterally it's like there's no comparison right you know what percent does the u.s economy rely on mexico and what percent does the mexican economy rely on the united states and it's it's it's it's he's got the leverage he knows how to negotiate he has instincts that you know are off the charts you know and i think he just knows he knows how to push people's buttons and get things done and you know nobody's perfect i mean sometimes things backfire i have some questions about some of his picks i'm not somebody that thinks trump is a saint in the the next messiah you know he's not a perfect person he you know i'm willing to let him make mistakes i'm willing to let him you know do whatever before i start you know turning on him and saying oh my god he's putting

in deep state guys or whatever you know i'm willing to see how he's playing this because he's got a lot of balls in the air you know if he just didn't play any ball with the establishment i mean you start to create such a wall against yourself you know if you don't have a marco rubio in there if you just have all kash patels i mean you you're not going to get anything done and so he's got to play the field right and and so i think he's doing that um and i'm willing to give him that benefit of the doubt that he understands all these dynamics consciously or instinctually. And that's what he's putting in place. So, I mean, I'm positive about things. I'm more positive than I have been because traditionally I've been thinking that there's

no way that we were going to do the gangrene amputation and the whole system was going to blow up and collapse. I thought it was going to happen sometime in 2027 or 2028 around the time the Social Security Trust Fund starts to go bankrupt and, you know, that we're just going to continue on these massive deficits and that we're basically going to head for a financial total collapse. And I think we might have this, like you said, a short period of volatility with some pain, but a very quick V-shaped recovery that leads to kind of a brave new world that, you know a lot of americans get behind and could even turn into you know a longer period you know i think we could easily be looking at a 12-year period of of maga type leadership in the white

house and similar to um you know fdr um being elected four times being followed by truman until finally eisenhower a republican got in there a new american renaissance would be great i'm optimistic as well and i and i completely agree i think the harsh medicine needs to be taken and that that's what i'm most interested to see and i think scott percent was a good pick and at the period of time when it was rumored to be percent versus lutnik um howard lutnik uh big in the bitcoin space canterford sherrod holds all the treasuries for tether he's publicly gone on podcast says he owns hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin believes it'll be billions of dollars at some point in the future and so many people are thinking like that's who

you want as treasury secretary but when it comes to tact and um posturing letnick seems more like a bull in a china shop to me compared to percent who seems not gonna act like um some scott percent uh historical uh experts and everything he's done but from the research i've done and the things i've read about him he seems very calculated cool calm collected and methodical in terms of how he goes about effectuating the the trades he's made historically or i think it's been very public that he's been in trump's ear for the better part of two years in terms of fashioning his economic policy on the campaign trail yeah definitely and he talked in one of those podcasts his largest position gold i think i think he'll need to come around a little bit on the bitcoin idea um i think

that's not his you know kind of starting place of of seeing bitcoin as a realistic um monetary uh reserve asset for the united states but i just think bitcoin and this is almost hard for me to say because i've traditionally you know been more of a precious metal guy actually i do own bitcoin I own gold. I own both. But like Bitcoin just checks so many of these boxes, not the least of which is that negotiating tool with BRICS, who have spent billions and billions of dollars buying gold in the last few years and just threatening to sell U.S. gold to buy Bitcoin. What that does to the Bitcoin price and does to the gold price, at least in the short term, as I said earlier, I think it would be a short term dip in gold that this type of rhetoric would cause. But that,

you know these types of things are almost irresistible to a guy like trump i think to throw out there as you know outrageous things that just you know can really get under the skin of some of these bricks countries which he's obviously not happy with yeah so how do you think people should prepare heading into inauguration well i mean look nobody has a crystal ball i i could be totally wrong what what i'm personally going to do and i'm starting to do is i want to lighten up on my risk um not gold not bitcoin because i don't know this gold sharp sell-off thing is going to happen but my equity risk in particular and have cash um i think traditionally the end of the year uh people don't want to sell because of tax

reasons there's a whole bunch of reasons why we're probably going to go up into year end here the last few weeks of the year but i think that early in january especially if i start seeing confirmations like markets start struggling in january to make new highs um you know certain sectors that tend to lead uh heading into economic volatility start start performing well you know i'm going to be de-risking building cash and then i'm going to be looking for like i said uh that that moment to pounce blood on the streets i mean who knows if warren buffett's seeing any of this i don't know i mean obviously he's got an oil tanker that if he wants to build cash he's got to do it you know years or months in advance maybe maybe he sees something like this coming i don't

know but but i'm gonna actually start raising cash which i've been pretty much 100 fully invested you know for a long time um and and trying to get myself ready so i think that's that's a good thing for people to do especially if they have a large amount of equity exposure um and if they don't want to sell at least maybe you know buy some puts because right now i mean volatility is low protection is cheap uh you don't want to start start buying those things if the vix starts spiking to 25 or 30 yeah no this is great we got to do this more often july 2nd let's come out december say third fifth it's too long we'll have to catch up uh maybe at the end of the first quarter next year perfect that'll give a chance to see if any of this is uh coming to fruition

or if i'm going way off the deep end and if i am going off the deep end i'll be the first to admit it and say hey you know we're not seeing any of this and the first quarter i think we'll start seeing the ripplings of this by the end of second quarter i think we'll we'll really be getting into the thick of it awesome mel appreciate you it's been great where uh where can people find out more about quads about your theories because you joined twitter after the last podcast or you became more active on twitter after the last podcast yeah exactly i had never been a twitter social media guy i've i've worked 20 plus years in financial services uh ceo of three different broker dealers, venture capital funded startups type things. And I wrote a book called Quaz.

It's a financial thriller. It's about corrupt central bankers. It's about AI. It's about the blockchain. It's about Brazil and India and Russia conspiring to take down the dollar's reserve status. It's got a bunch of stuff in there that relates to what we talked about. So people can search Quaz financial thriller or go to my website, melmadison.com or follow me on Twitter at Mel Madison one. Uh, and, uh, yeah, I've been posting a little bit more. I'm not super active, but I'd never really posted anything until about 10, 12 months ago. And now I'm trying to do some more regular insights. Um, recently posted a piece on tariffs, why they can actually be free markets, um, orientated, um, and, and how Adam Smith looked at it. So there's, there's stuff

up there. If people are interested, go check it out. Freaks. So we got today. Peace and love. Thank you.