TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #586: Will Bitcoin Skyrocket $GME? with Peruvian Bull

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

Marty sits down with Peruvian Bull to discuss Gamestop buying bitcoin, the state of gold markets, and the potential of incoming QE. Peruvian Bull on Twitter: https://x.com/peruvian_bull Peruvian Bull on Nostr: https://primal.net/peruvianbull 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Will bitcoin blow up Gamestonk? 1637 - Fold & Bitkey 18:19 - Bitcoin has completely outpaced crypto 25:22 - Lightning 27:32 - Unchained 28:32 - Gold markets 33:31 - East/west liquidity drain 37:14 - Bessent's reset 39:09 - What's gold's real price? 44:47- Tariffs and regulatory changes 48:33 - Bitcoin/gold lagging corelation 53:15 - QE is coming 58:51 - DOGE 1:02:07 - Debt paradox, price prediction 1:04:44 - If you're not paying attention, you probably should be Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Unchained https://unchained.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 probably should be proving bull is gamestop gonna buy bitcoin well that was the uh subject of three and a half hour spaces we had today that's why i saw i was uh

again apologize for being late but on the uber back to the studio i was looking at your your x page i saw you you held that spaces what uh what was the discussion in there like it was really heated um you know it's funny with the gamestop community it's like they because gamestop went down the web 3 rabbit hole and the with the nft marketplace and mutable and um basically like using eth layer twos and loop ring to to create like nfts and shit coins they all the all the gamestop investors are essentially like or not all a lot of them are shit corners and so fighting them and then at the same time bitcoin max is coming into space and saying you guys are all idiots why are you even buying gamestop why do you like who cares about this company just buy

bitcoin it was just like a two-front war and it's kind of hilarious but it was very uh a very good discussion i think we we orange pilled quite a few people so it was good oh yeah the i mean does because they made an announcement last night correct and before the announcement i think last week uh the ceo and michael saylor were pictured together um and what what is the latest on gamestop leading up to the picture and the announcement i think are people still very into the stock or are we still gonna crush the shorts yeah so i mean the story is very long obviously and complicated but um what the story has been for the last like let's say three years is really a turnaround story because when ryan cohen took took control of the board in august

or he first he bought in in august of 2020 with a 12 stake and then rose to chairman of the board in in january of 2021 which is part of the catalyst for the initial squeeze um his role mainly was to save the company because it was verifiably going under it was extremely levered they had like a 400 million dollar bond that was due in march of 2021 that they didn't have the cash to pay uh they were free cash flow negative they were losing money on essentially every single store except for the ones in in major cities in north america and so rc had to do this like turnaround story where he first started with layoffs of admin staff then he started to reduce sgna expenses and he was able to get them down by a significant amount i mean the sgna as a percent of revenue

it went from like 36% in 2020 to like 22% now. So he almost halved the, you know, SG&A expenses and he leaned the company so that they were able to pay off the debt and basically become EBITDA positive for the first time in like, you know, six years. But the problem now is that GameStop faces is, okay, so they've gotten rid of the debt issue that was threatening bankruptcy. and it seems like the short attacks are over because the bear case for the company is kind of gone, right? The company's not going to go bankrupt tomorrow. They have $4.5 billion of cash on hand, but what are they going to do with all this money that they raised this summer in these equity ATM dilutions? And what I've been proposing, and I've been a part of a group of

people that have been crafting shareholder proposals to the board, as well as public letters to to ryan cohen is that they buy bitcoin and follow essentially like a modified version of the sailor strategy of turning some of their you know net income into like 20 of that into bitcoin and potentially a third of their cash holdings into bitcoin if they don't have a major m a um you know purchase coming up which it seems it's still it's still up in the air because it's only been six or seven months since they raised all this cash but um given that they haven't haven't uh telegraphed anything um you know if they don't have a better idea of what to do with the cash i think buying bitcoin is an amazing answer yeah and that's what i'm trying to think of is who would be

an appropriate acquisition target for for gamestop and i guess what are people throwing out in regards to that people are thinking you know bed bath and beyond that which is already bankrupt that people are thinking um toys r us there's even blockbuster like bring back the 90s kind of a kind of a a theme there but the issue that i see with that is that none of these companies are really like they're all other brick and mortar retailers and they might you know if you revive them and restructure management and get rid of like excessive store footprint you could probably get the margins back up to a reasonable level but i don't see how that fundamentally changes like the game stop story right that's just seems like a bolt-on that

helps their business but doesn't it doesn't catalyze growth in the same way that like google acquiring youtube is and so that's why we've been writing for the last you know six seven months uh to the board saying like we need you have all this cash bitcoin is the hardest money ever ever invented you know sailor has done this strategy where he's been able to rocket the share price two thousand plus percent in a couple years gamestop is already notoriously you know shorted and you have a huge retail investor base and if you adopt bitcoin you would adopt you'd get immediate buy-in from a bunch of bitcoiners if if if you guys were able to accept bitcoin payments for gaming and for you know streaming services or for skins or or other modifications

within a within a gaming marketplace like i think bitcoiners would adopt them wholesale and you'd get a whole nother retail investor base so the you know the the argument there is i think very potent and i again i i haven't been able to find another company that would in my opinion rocket the share price much as much as just them buying bitcoin yeah it was funny seeing that picture with uh ryan and michael saylor because it seems like he's taking the the letters and the the recommendations to heart and i i completely agree if you have that much cash on the balance sheet you're not doing anything with it um you got to put it somewhere and it might as well be bitcoin at least a portion of it yeah i mean it's like what what are they doing right um

the funny thing with that picture is so you know ryan cohen has been tweeting he's he's an austrian which is funny enough and he's been tweeting misi's quotes if you follow his twitter since like 2022 and he you know so he kind of is already in this camp of people who understand economics understand gold um and but he got trapped on the shit coin rabbit hole following meme coins following immutable following the loop ring and pushing the company into that and they burned tens of millions of dollars with their with their experiment and it was like free cash feel positive for like a single quarter in 2021 at the height of the meme stock or meme coin mania and nft mania and ever since then the volume on the storage collapsed 97 and it's been burning

money and so they closed it down uh well over a year ago and so uh it's like you know what are you doing like why why did it take you this long it's kind of frustrating for some of us but i think we're um we're seeing the early stages of of um of ryan cohen's orange pilling because right after that meeting michael saylor started following ryan cohen uh on twitter and so it's a sign that things went well i think well he's i can understand and i agree with the consternation with the nft meme coin meddling but everybody's got to touch the stove game stop ryan they've touched the stove they've learned their lesson they experienced the ephemeral highs of a shit hype cycle and uh consequently the uh terrible lows the the bottomless pit of a shitcoin

ephemeral cycle ending uh the new one materializing so it was i mean we i was talking about it with somebody this morning it would be incredible if they adopted a bitcoin strategy um not only using some of the cash that they have to buy bitcoin but signaling like others like microstrategy meta planet similar scientific cathedra have signaled like bitcoin is our treasury reserve asset and our intent is to build that treasury by any means possible whether that's spinning positive cash flow and profits in the bitcoin or tapping capital markets in prudent ways to buy more bitcoin and the stock price because that would add like fuel because it's so heavily shorted right if you start squeezing the shorts and killing the shorts i gotta go buy more stock

and you have sort of uh an additional fuel source to some upwards stock appreciation yeah and this is what we were talking about in the spaces ironically right like right after that and that cnbc article came out saying like according to anonymous sources within gamestop the board is considering direct investments in in bitcoin um the stock price skyrocketed like 20 and after hours um went up to like 32 and changed from like 25 before at the height and then it retraced a bit and um we saw a universal like encouragement from the bitcoin community that this was a smart thing to do and i think especially for the um the gamestop you know meme stalkers it this could be extremely value accretive because as you mentioned the stock is shorted ex like to an

an absurd amount. And, you know, the current short interest is like 30%, but historically it was about a hundred percent. And we, we believe that not all those shorts have closed. They've just been hiding the short interest in other ways. And every time that there's been like a, a mini squeeze, or you could say like a momentum push in the market, it always ends up in this like parabolic move. So when DFV came back in March, in May of 2024, and then again, in June, we saw, you know, the price skyrocketed from like $10 a share to $80 a share within like a week and a half. And all of that is just driven on hedging, gamma hedging with options and then retail investor buying. And if, if they buy Bitcoin and in a real way, like just this rumor skyrocketed

like 20%, if they actually buy Bitcoin and the price goes up a hundred percent within two days, and then shorts actually start to cover, they can, they can dilute into that and then use those profits to buy more Bitcoin. And so you could see the same strategy that Saylor does, except maybe even in a safer way because instead of using um you know convertible debt which is you know arguably risky you're just using cash on hand and cash raised from equity dilution and so poses no risk to the company yeah and it would be poetic because as you were mentioning before or no after we hit recording like there was bitcoiners saying just buy bitcoin you meme stalkers are idiots but i mean i was one of those people in 2020 2021 screaming that as well like yeah i understand

the energy and the goals of the wall street bets and the people buying game stock but like bitcoin is the true way to get back at um the the financial system if you deem it to be the enemy um and a real way for the little guy to garner some power in this world financially at least and i think coming full circle five years later four years later um and sort of teaming up the meme stalkers uh coming to the conclusion that a bitcoin treasury um is is a good idea is is a bit poetic in my mind yeah it totally is it's funny because at the end of that space as we had with like you know two thousand people in it at a certain point we had this guy come up who was a bitcoiner who was just roasting us he's like guys this the meme stock is manipulated they're

shorting this you know they're clearly shorting it they're clearly buying mainstream media uh you know views to to push their narratives um bitcoin's immutable bitcoin can't be fucked with you know buy bitcoin and we're like wait so isn't that the perfect argument for why GameStop should buy Bitcoin. Like they're the most, you're right. They are extremely a manipulated company. They have, you know, they've seen short attacks. We've seen wash trades. We've seen, um, you know, Bloomberg on the Bloomberg terminal, we've seen options, uh, positions from major institutions appear and then disappear within 24 hours and then reappear. And they all blame it on glitches. Um, you know, like we've seen all this weird shit happening with institutional,

shores. And you're right that the system is rigged. And you're also right that Bitcoin is a solution. And so it's like, to me, that makes sense. That's the perfect acquisition for a company that's been as manipulated as this one has. And he finally acquiesced at the end of that talk. He's like, actually, you make a good point. I'm like, okay, so you see now why us GameStop holders who, you know, I don't hold like 90% of my portfolio in GameStop. It's much less than that but i'm i'm obviously mostly a bitcoin holder but i do own big gamestop and i want to see them win and buying bitcoin with all this extra cash that they're not doing anything with currently seems like a great way to win yeah and it's just fun to to play through these

scenarios and again it's a big focus of ours at 1031 on the private market side really encouraging and helping uh company founders approach a bitcoin accumulation strategy obviously get revenue get the profitability as quickly as possible then begin building that treasury um whether or not want to go public get acquired in the future um deal with that but like let's focus on the the treasury first and now applying just applying this mindset to public markets too especially considering the the pools of capital that you can tap into um it's fascinating so i think that trend as it continues to grow again micro strategy started we got similar we got meta planet obviously the bitcoin miners um tesla's got bitcoin on their balance sheet and just

block seeing this begin to really ingratiate but the bitcoin strategy itself in public markets and how people are going to utilize it and i think i mean and i can hear some of the hardcore listeners saying right now marty stop uh stop shilling game stop i'm not shilling game stop i'm just having an interesting intellectual uh discussion about bitcoin's effect on public equity markets and i think um the game stop getting into it again would be poetic and it would be hilarious if the stock ripped and all the shorts got blown out and the narratives that were massive in 2021 um come back And the GameStoppers are proven to be right, ultimately, with what has been going on with the stock. Yeah.

And you'd see, you know, if that happened, there's like 800,000 people in the SuperStonk Discord or SuperStonk Reddit page. You'd see most of them get orange-pilled. It's like, wait, GameStop bought Bitcoin and that caused this massive squeeze. We all made money. And then now we can own a bunch of Bitcoin. Like, wow, maybe, you know, this thing has real value, real fundamentals to it. So I think that that would be a major catalyst because, again, most of these people are still stuck in the shitcoin loop ring and Ethereum phase. And so it's difficult to get them to move out of it just because they think that Ryan Cohen is still in that camp.

And I think with him changing, that'll move a lot of the mean stalkers fully into the Bitcoin camp. What's up, freaks? Do you have a credit card? Are you getting cash back or airline points or points for some other service? guess what those are shit coins you want to be stacking bitcoin i have some groundbreaking news for you the team at fold has finally released the bitcoin rewards credit card they have a wait list i'm going to be distributing the cards later this year so you want to get on the wait list fold plus members are going to get unlimited two percent bitcoin back on this credit card if you

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haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up a passphrase. Again, BitKey makes it easy to use, hard to lose. It's the easiest zero to one step, your first step to self-custody. If you have friends and family on the exchanges who haven't moved it off tell them to pick up a big key go to big key dot world use the key tftc 20 at checkout for 20 off your order that's big key dot world code tftc 20 i'm not sure if you've been paying attention to this but the dislocation between bitcoin and the rest of broader crypto has never been as wide as it is today um i think james check from check on chain he posted a bar chart

the other day that blew my mind which is if you took the rest of the bitcoin that hasn't been mined yet and you basically spun it out as its own asset uh with its own market cap based off today's bitcoin price it would be the fifth largest cryptocurrency so you have like the bitcoin that's already been mined i think ethereum ripple solana and then bitcoin again just the bitcoin that needs to be mined um and i think uh whether it's ryan cohen or whoever i think it's becoming clear that bitcoin is a completely unique beast in this um very confused world of broader crypto and i think even um long-term eath bag holders and even the solana bulls are beginning to concede yeah yeah it's different and they're trying to create narratives of how

differentiated and don't compete with bitcoin yeah absolutely i mean eth is down 17 year today and bitcoin is up 5.3 percent so it's already this year we're seeing that divergence and if you look back on the cycles eth hit the eth bitcoin ratio is an all-time high in 2021 and it's just been grinding down ever earlier than that it was 2017. oh actually you're right yeah july 2017 it hit like 0.14 per btc 0.14 btc that's fallen since then it gave it tried to get back there in 2021 but didn't quite make it i think it got like 0.1 okay yeah i was looking at the five-year chart but actually i do remember you're right it is 2017 but that that's the problem with all these alts is that they all get ground down to zero against bitcoin just because

they don't have the fundamental characteristics that that bitcoin has and you know we covered that in the discussion is like 50% of the block, over 50% of the blocks of ETH are OFAC compliant. So if you're going for immutable money or whatever, Bitcoin is the clear choice here because Ethereum is already captured. I mean, so much of it has already been pre-mined, but we also have the issue of the sound money fallacy, which is essentially they say, oh we're ultrasound money because we have deflation well you are able to change issuance and that's the definition of sound money it doesn't matter if it's deflationary right now it's the fact that you guys can change it from inflationary to deflationary whenever you want

and so defeating that those misconceptions was like so important for for getting more of the game stop retail investors to truly understand the you know the massive sea change that bitcoin represents yeah and even i mean ethereum is actually inflationary again now because they've ah it's so beautiful and and this is predicted by many bitcoiners uh humble brag including myself for years is like they ethereum is the perfect representation of a second system problem like when they did the merge and the transition to proof of stake they were like oh we're gonna make it perfect this time and they completely made a complicated rube goldberg machine and could not foresee the unintended consequences of the changes they were making

and part of that was the architecture of the base layer of ethereum as such that it's like gets really expensive to transact and that pushes everything up to l2s which is big meme and those are very centralized and so you have all the activity pushed up to the l2s and the whole meme around super sound money or whatever they're calling it what were they calling it a super summit no what were they called ultra ultrasound money there we go yeah different pokeball um the uh the ultrasound money like they were like all right like as fees go up we're gonna burn a lot of the ethereum but they the dynamics of the system pushed all the activity up to the second layers and so there's no activity on the main chain so now it's inflationary and it's

It's just been beautiful to see. You know, Vitalik Buterin himself wrote a paper in like 2015 or 2016, and he created this concept of the blockchain trilemma where, you know, any blockchain has to optimize between two of the three corners of a triangle, and the corners are scalability, decentralization, and security. And so if you optimize for scalability, which is transaction throughput, and let's say security, you lose decentralization because that's just a SQL ledger. like that's what the fed has right now with their master accounts like they just have a giant sql ledger they probably have very very advanced encryption but because there's only one node they can just do everything instantly and the scalability is extremely high and the problem that you like he understood at the time part of the issue but he didn't fully connect the dots in that any money or any like true currency needs to be the you know the bottom and the

the bottom half of the triangle so it needs to be decentralized and secure it does not need to optimize for scalability because by optimizing for scalability you will lose either the security the decentralization and you want the base layer of the monetary system to be decentralized and secure and you can build scaling solutions on top of that and so what ethereum did and what all these other altcoins keep doing is they keep moving towards this scalability issue and they say well we want the base layer to be able to transact 10 000 times per second well great guys you can't coordinate that many nodes at once you need to have miners with an insane um you know internet connection to be able to process you know that many transactions and then be able to do blocks

like every you know 30 seconds or whatever you need for that to happen so you're you're not essentially creating a real you know money that's based on uh sound characteristics sound uh sound austrian principles you're you're basically creating another sql coin and so that's what i just keep calling them is like whenever they keep coming at me they're like dude look at solana like look at the tps i'm like great guess what you can only run it you can only run nodes in an in a in an amazon um data warehouse you can't run this thing in in africa like you can on bitcoin like this is this is more centralized than anything you could even bring out to me like this is it's hilarious that they keep dragging the bitcoin quote unquote uh

the decentralization failure because BlackRock owns some, and because some of the ETFs own some and Saylor owns, you know, 400,000 or whatever. And then they don't point out the same, you know, or even worse, um, issue with, with Solana and with all these other, other meme coins that just need like basically to sit in an Amazon warehouse to even run. Yeah. I feel like every three months they need to pull the Solana cartridge out of the, uh, the gaming system, blow on it and put back in it goes down and then they essentially coordinate to turn it back on it's uh it's laughable in the uh and i just released an episode this morning and recorded last week with uh lisa niget who's a long-time uh lightning developer and that's it's fascinating too because like l2

is one of the big memes of this cycle and lightning is technically i hate the term l2 but a layer two um on bitcoin and when you compare lightning to all the other l2s are being spun up whether it's zk roll ups or uh whatever base is that queen base is spun up like even once you scale via second layers on bitcoin what we're finding is like relative to all the other l2s lightning is extremely decentralized and then on top of that it's ex it's a double-edged sword it's hard to know exactly what's going on which is a privacy benefit for people as well you can't audit lightning without going to each individual node operator and getting them to download the json files of all the traffic through their nodes to understand what's going on so you have this

incredibly robust decentralized l2 building on bitcoin as well that people would just completely ignore yeah exactly and that's what we were you know that's what i've been pushing for um for the board to do is to realize the use case of lightning especially for you know if we're talking about game top or even any other company right if you want to do micro transactions in a storefront if you want to do even like pos uh sales right like at the store you can do all this on lightning like they act as if it's impossible and they act as if oh well i'll have to wait 30 minutes at the store for the transaction to settle on the base layer it's like no you don't if you're just buying a video game for 20 bucks and you got a discount code from a friend like you can go in pay with

your lightning you know open up a lightning channel pay it pay the invoice walk out and you'll be good like yeah you don't have to over complicate things guys i bought a hat with lightning two days ago it took me two seconds i was like and let's put in my credit card information and let's put in my address or any of that obviously for the shipping i did but for the financial information the billing information just like a point click send me the hat this was brought to you by our great friends at Unchained. As Bitcoin's role in the global financial landscape evolves, understanding its potential impact on your wealth becomes increasingly crucial. Whether we see measured adoption or accelerated hyper-Bitcoinization,

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the potential futures at unchained.com slash TFTC. Bitcoin is going up. Make sure you're protecting it the right way. Make sure you have a good partner that is Unchained. Go to unchained.com slash tftc thank you for indulging uh indulging my game stop questions because when i reached out to you initially that's not what it was to talk about let's talk about gold markets and what's going on there because that's that's another big thing that's going on right now that i think people really need to be paying attention to is this i don't want to call chaos but you have very material things happening in the gold market particularly the draining of vaults in london where this bank of england or the l lbma um and the insane amount of physical gold coming to vaults

in the united states yeah yeah there's and so i wrote um i wrote a piece last sunday called um you know gold breaks the lbma and i was detailing in that piece the process by which you know there's essentially a run on the gold markets in in london specifically but also in the u.s so in the month of january we saw on comex a record 19 000 more than 19 000 deliveries of of contracts and physical deliveries and that equates to 1.9 million ounces which is 5.2 billion dollars and this is record oh do you want to well i was going to say just clarify so comex it interacts with the cme contracts right is the people calling cme futures contracts in kind yeah exactly yeah yeah and the comex i mean the comex is the north american uh commodities

exchange that is used to to settle basically all commodities that you think of trading as like copper um you know wheat soybeans and then obviously gold and silver as well um and comex the the thing about it is that in north america and in london by the way all the futures markets are primarily cash settled so it's this giant game of um you know paper shorting where a bank a bullion bank can take a hundred ounces of physical gold they have in the vaults and they and sell forward 1000 ounces in the futures markets. And because 97% of participants are not taking physical delivery, they take cash delivery, they're able to just continue this game and roll the futures forward continuously. And so it's a mechanism by which the bullion banks

and just the structure of the exchanges can essentially suppress the price of gold in real time. And we've known about this for decades, by the way, I mean, this has been written about by, uh there's a couple bloggers called another and friend of another or foa who are writing about this in the late 90s on the gold trail blogs um there are people you know like obviously peter schiff has been talking about this mike maloney like this has been well known in the gold space for years but the question is when will the gold market break when will the when will all the paper shorts or paper futures owners come to the door and say hey man i have announced for or have a i have a contract for 100 ounces of gold give me the gold right now and then the vaults are all

empty and the market goes haywire and the market is completely breaks down and i believe that this you know this could be a stress test for that exact scenario because what's been happening is we've seen this huge surge in um in current contracts on the comex being delivered and like i said month of january was the highest january month in uh probably like five years of deliveries and if you look at the chart it eclipses every other month by more than double they had to deliver 1.9 million ounces to uh people who were redeeming their their their futures for comex and comex responded by buying 11 million ounces of gold and filling their coffers basically front running this surge of deliveries because I think they're realizing that their inventories are

getting too low because especially since COVID, they've been being drawn down, especially by deliveries into the West or East, sorry, into Shanghai. And so COMEX has been loading up on this gold and about half of it's been coming from producers, from gold miners, and then the other half has been coming from mainly the LBMA. And so with this strain on the New York and US-based gold markets we've seen a draw of gold uh in you know west to to the u.s but we've seen the same simultaneous drain in in the uk and that's caused this chaos because the uk market is thin and all the all the bullion banks and participants are trying to work on getting physical um liquidity right so they're trying to get the actual gold in hand to be able to make these deliveries and the

problems they they've been running out of physical gold on hand and so they've been moving to the bank of england to get a source of of gold liquidity so that's been the the trend here for the last month or so and it's been increasingly playing out especially in the price yeah the because i and it's a product correct me if i'm wrong but comex physical delivery is almost at or surpass the point of covid when this happened in 2020 because that that i remember this popped up in 2020 too like when you had covid come lockdowns and everybody freak out you had a similar similar situation arise um and it seems to be about to or already have surpassed what happened in march and april of 2020 which is perplexing because the comparatively like

doesn't seem like the global economy is as uncertain yes it is somewhat uncertain right now but compared to how uncertain it was in march april 2020 it seems to be in a much better position today which just brings up the question like why is this happening now so there's a couple different theories um the the first one is the trade war on the tariffs it seems that there's fear that the current administration will submit significant tariffs to gold. And that has caused these bullion bank traders, especially in New York, to rush to take physical delivery of their holdings in London. Because the problem is a lot of these institutions actually hold their physical gold with London-based custodians. So for example, the GLD ETF, which holds well over a million

ounces of gold has all their holdings in hsbc all their gold holdings custodied custodied by hsbc and all those are in london and so if they want to take if they want to front run right some sort of tariff threat of moving gold from one country to the next we'll have 20 percent uh like fee attached to it then they have to move the gold uh right now i think that that's part of it i also think we're seeing massive gold demand from institutions. I mean, 2024 was another record year for central bank gold buying, especially Q1 was the highest gold buying Q1 in history that we have, you know, recorded for central banks. So there's been this pull of liquidity in general from the exchanges to the central banks. And that's especially true for, you know, Asian

countries like China, where you've seen not only the central bank continue to buy all throughout 2022, 2023, and 2024, but you've seen huge retail demand. And that retail demand has been in mainly physical because the differentiator between the COMEX and the LBMA and the SGEI, which is the Shanghai Exchange, is that the Shanghai Exchange is physically settled only. So if you buy a contract, you are taking delivery no matter what it's like it's not really an option and that means that if there's a price differential between shanghai and uh the comex or the lbma you can go to the lbma and buy gold and then take to physical delivery and then ship it to shanghai and sell it for a higher price and ever since around late 2022 i and i covered this in another subsect piece but

since late 2022 we've seen uh 30 to 50 price divergence between physical gold prices spot gold in shanghai and spot gold in the comex and then lbma and so that's caused this drain of this institutional and retail drain of gold from west to east um as china enters this i think kind of deflationary crisis that they've kind of sleep walked into yeah and what are your thoughts on the other theory hanging out there about scott percent how he's been talking particularly over the last 18 months about this need for uh like a brenton woods or plaza accords excuse me uh soon which would necessitate like a repricing of the gold the treasury holds at the federal reserve from 42 an ounce to maybe spot price there some people even saying just

mark it up even higher than that well i think of that that could be part of the catalyst i mean it word brent johnson says it's best right like words are easy action is what counts so same thing with bricks with their prognostications that they're going to be starting a currency block and basing it on gold and silver and all the mike maloney's and the peter shifts of the world you know uh have an aneurysm and and go on twitter to celebrate you know every time there's a headline like that to do it in practice is much more difficult and as you know like gold especially if it's pegged to a certain dollar amount per per ounce is it's you know it provides structure to the monetary system but it also limits the amount of money at least ostensibly that they can print

And as we're going to a cycle where federal debt to GDP is 132%, the Fed funds rate is still above 4%, inflation is rising again, I think the practical ability of them to convince enough stakeholders to actually restart the gold standard is very low. I mean, I think it's more speculation and hopium on their part. Yeah, that's a good point. great quote much easier to talk than it is to act yeah where do you think this goes you think this is the the big event that everybody's been talking about because you mentioned the gold bugs have been um screaming from the rooftops about the these paper trades suppressing the price for for decades and i think it's safe to say they've been cast aside i think somewhat wrongly as just nut job conspiracy theorist um is like what maybe the other way to phrase is like how long does this

have to continue before something truly breaks any of like true price discovery and gold well the from the lbma's own data records we know that there's about a billion physical ounces of gold in london and around 800 million of that is already claimed and so the stresses we've seen in the markets have been indicative that we're starting to near you know a breaking point right and a breaking point doesn't mean necessarily like oh okay all the banks collapse and the end of the world it just means gold getting repriced upwards like dramatically like a several hundred or even a thousand dollar move uh in in spot gold markets within a week or something like that um the the indicators have been numerous and i'll go through a couple of them first off like we said around 80

percent of the gold in London is claimed. And the bullion banks are kind of panicking because they've been trading this paper credit version of gold, basically unallocated paper ounces between each other. And it looks like the markets that facilitate that are starting to freeze up. The bullion banks and the dealers are not wanting to make those trades or to even try to redeem the paper unallocated gold. And they've been going to the BOE because they themselves are running out of physical gold. So they've been trying to find other sources. And the Bank of england has you know a sizable amount of of uh of physical gold i think you know over 40 tons and so they want to have you know some sort of liquidity and the boe has a leasing program where they can

lend you gold at different rates obviously for different maturities and you just have to give it back to them so to get this liquidity because it's mainly a liquidity issue all these bullion banks have been going to the boe the problem is that the boe is not set up currently to manage this kind of demand and this kind of um you know logistical constraint or or uh or or pressure and so that's meant that the uh the weights at the boe have extended to like four to eight weeks for even authorized participants to get physical redemptions of of gold and the the boe also sells these like paper unallocated um gold certificates basically promises to get gold and the the delta between those uh paper you know paper promises for gold and and the real spot market is now

widened to you know several hundred times larger than what it normally was and for reference it's only like a five dollar price differential but normally the boes gold they're they're at least their paper promises their ious their gold certs trade within a few cents of spot and they've blown out to five dollars so this is a a massive massive dislocation in the price for for the boes paper gold and it's showing that you know the market essentially doesn't doesn't believe that they have all the gold that they've they've claimed yeah i i think the weight like this is essentially you have a a bank run the beginning stages of bank run like the wait times persist and god forbid they get longer you sort of have the social element that creeps in where it

just feeds on itself yeah no totally and we've seen like we've seen the contagion spread in um So late January, we saw that's when basically the first warning signs of the BOE's logistical constraints started to show up, where they started putting delays on physical deliveries of gold, where their paper search started trading below market value. Then we saw, obviously, refusal of redemptions for retail investors and for non-authorized participants, which are authorized participants are just the large institutions and banks that own gold. And then we saw this move to even the ETFs. So GLD ETF, like I mentioned earlier, they custody well over a million ounces in HSBC in London. And the GLD ETF restricted short selling on their stock or on their ETF shares at the end of January. And then they also saw a, like a 6% rise in the borrow rate of their shares, because what authorized participants were doing was they would take GLD shares and you could redeem them for the physical gold, but only redeem them in London. And you, you had to be obviously a bank or a broker dealer, and then they were taking

physical delivery. So they're using the ETF shares, they're borrowing them, they're redeeming them. And then they're taking physical delivery of the ETFs gold that's stored in London itself. And so like the pressure you can see is building and it's substantial because, again, we – I don't think we've seen this kind of stress in the markets since COVID or even before. So it is significant for sure. Where are we trading right now? For gold? Yeah.

Gold hit like 2880. Yes, or at least I guess that'd be Wednesday. It was an all-time high. And then now I think it's like in the low 2800s. but it's been hitting all-time highs for the last three weeks or so yeah that's uh i don't even say like because again in 2020 i remember i recorded with roy sabag while this was going on he's a long time um gold trader i think he's very good knowledge in the bullion markets and at that time it was like ah things could really get out of hand here

and obviously um things settled down now it's bubbling up again only five years later it's like all right what uh is this just another sort of temporary bubble up like it was in 2020 or do things get more serious this time around and you have a different confluence of variables contributing to this whether it's the tariffs um or just uh people calling more physical because they don't trust that the uh the paper is representative of all the gold that that exists in these vaults yeah yeah and you know there's also been regulatory changes right we saw adopt you know change to the nsfr which is the net staple funding ratio with basel 3 in 2021 that allowed gold but only physically physically held and unallocated gold holdings to be counted

as zero percent haircut assets under basel so basically allowing them to be treated as like reserve a reserve asset like just like treasuries or you know mbs or whatever whatever other high quality bond so um those changes have happened and have there's been also a categorical shift with institutions view of gold obviously so we we've talked about with central bank buying and with retail institutions buying retail and institutions buying especially in china um there's been a demand for gold but i think you know we're both in agreement that gold is the uh the old boomer bitcoin it's just buyer better to buy bitcoin because you don't have this settlement issue in the trust me bro iou problem that the physical gold market has and it's it's

it's systemic it's it's structural to the to the market itself right this is something else that the some of the gold bugs i think they misunderstand is they apply their austrian economics on how the world should work right the gold should be the money that everyone uses and everyone should walk around with flakes of gold in their pocket and gold bars and be shaving off a little bit for a coffee and shave off a little bit for your groceries and get a bigger chunk for your car repair the problem with that again is that gold has a settlement and centralization issue where it's impossible obviously for microtransactions to be conducted in gold so it gets centralized and stored and it's just like a physical this is just a mechanistic like

physical law that is impeding gold. And then once you do that, once you centralize the gold and issue paper promises to transact in it, you get this issue of, okay, well, do they really have the gold? Can we trust the auditor, even if they are audited? And then some banks, obviously like the BOE, has been refusing audits. And the Fed has famously refused audits. So no one really knows if they actually have the gold or if they're just holding gold credit with other institutions that also say they have the gold so the this issue is systemic to the market and it's structural and even if we reset the system today back to 100 gold reserves it would eventually start to to perpetuate itself again it would eventually start to see more paper gold trading than physical

we start to see more and more promises well taking delivery is difficult right at the comex it's 100 ounce bars and so if you're a retail investor that's 280 000 or whatever like you're not going to take that physical a hundred ounce barn delivery so you just settle it for cash and you would just see the system perpetuate itself again and explode to the current you know 10 to 1 paper to gold uh leverage ratio and it would just it would just happen again yeah yeah gold's physical nature really cucks it in some regards that's what it's been fascinating to to watch as a when i'm very and what you just described is uh would be chaotic for our gold bugs i'm very sympathetic to our our gold bug brethren in the sound money community here the broader sound money

community and that's i mean that's what bitcoiners have been beating the drum on for the last few weeks as gold has been consistently hitting new all-time highs and bitcoin's been range bound between like 95 000 and 103 000 is gold's going to lead the way bitcoin's going to follow but it's going to outperform by multiples in terms of how much it appreciates comparatively and i i do i think there is a lot of credence and and i do and i think at least in a short-term history post 2020 it's traded that way um that sort of correlation that lagging correlation and outperformance that bitcoin has with gold but you can you can feel it like in the bitcoin world today you had abu dhabi announced that they have a 430 or maybe not announced it was

disclosed that they have a 430 million dollar position and bitcoin etfs um and obviously the trump administration is very pro bitcoin at the very least from a regulatory perspective to let it flourish and potentially at a strategic reserve level um and it feels like the tailwinds are building and then bitcoin is just range bound and the range is getting tighter and tighter and something's going to happen at some point i think in the relatively near future where it breaks one way or the other and my um and my belief is going to be up granted anybody listening new to the show my bias is a bitcoin up always so take that with a grain of salt but it feels like things are are coiling for a big move oh for sure and generally again i'm not a chartist i'm not a

technical day day-to-day trader but i you know i've had i have read those books and i have traded before um generally if you see you know a narrowing range and increasing volume within that range it's it's coiling up for a big move either way and i agree i think that the move is going to be eventually to the upside because gold has historically and again i wrote another subsect piece about this called printer is coming back in october of last year but gold has historically front run waves of qe by about 12 to 18 months so if you go back to uh the first gold bull market or maybe not the first but the first major one in this century in you know 2005 to 2011 gold front ran the first major waves of qe first in in 2008 and then the next qe2 that started in

2011 2012 and even qe3 and then once you know qe was seen to not be like the balance sheet was stabilized gold started to get ground down again and and fall to its you know all-time lows of like 1050 announced or whatever, or I guess, you know, 10 year lows. And then we saw it front run even before COVID we saw in December, 2018, gold start to enter a bull market, uh, rally and, uh, basically, you know, front run the QE, uh, and run all the way up to $2,000 and seven to 2,070 announced in August of 2020. Um, while the fed was just starting QE and then obviously it started to retrace as the fed was doing more qe but what it was doing was it was foretelling of a of the next of the taper cycle which you follow it you know august 2020 18 months later is roughly when

the fed started to do um you know their taper and so which is march 2022 so this cycle has been seen again and again and obviously like you said gold has much less uh sensitivity to you know changes in global liquidity than than bitcoin does like we're talking orders of mag orders magnitude but multiples less you know if if net liquidity grows by a dollar gold might go up by a dollar fifty and bitcoin might go up by five dollars like it's that severe but gold has historically been this front runner of of global liquidity and so if you take the gold chart and you um you know i guess you you push it forward or push it back to the price of bitcoin it also foretells of a massive rise in the bitcoin price in the next you know six months or so and so if if the gold price is

correct right now which it's i i think it is and signaling that there's essentially another wave of qe coming and that wave is going to be pretty substantial and that will result in obviously higher bitcoin prices yeah and that's the many people are surmising that qe is coming something's gonna break in terms of liquidity in the system where it's exactly unclear i guess i throw that to you like we're looking at the markets right now reverse repo um is is draining i believe it's under 80 billion right now available in the reverse repo markets falling all the way from 2 trillion in 2022 i believe so that is a significant uh alarm bell i think that's going off and then on top of that obviously you have a bunch of debt rolling over right now here

in the u.s and i believe tomorrow the 2015 there's a block of 66 billion dollars worth of 2015 10 year treasury set to roll over they were issued at two percent and they'll roll over tomorrow like four and a half percent and so that that represents i believe like a uh 130 billion dollars of additional interest expense on the debt annually just for this one block of 10-year treasuries we have six trillion of of treasury notes bonds and um bills to roll over and i believe the first half of this year and so whether it's an overt liquidity crisis caused by something like reverse repo draining and banks not being able to trade reserves or um somebody looking at treasury issuance and the rollover and saying hey we need to um figure out a way to lower rates to

bring these yields down so that we're not rolling over and adding 500 billion dollars annually to our interest expense yeah exactly i mean you said it right there's yeah six trillion in the first six months. I think the total number for 2024 is around $10 trillion of debt to be rolled over, right? Almost a third of the entire federal debt load. This is an extremely debt-heavy year. And that's part of the reason why I've been arguing why the Fed is actually easing, right? Despite the fact that we're not in a recession, we're not fighting a direct war, even though we're funding two wars, obviously, indirectly. We're not fighting a direct war. There's no major banking panic, at least on the surface. So why is the Fed cutting, right? If everything's so great and

the economy's so strong. Inflation's not solved. Yeah, yeah, you're right. CPI inflation has been rising since September of last year. It's been going up for each consecutive month. And then this month, obviously, January, we saw CPI rise to 3% and PPI rise to 3.5%. And that's a major warning bell that things are going wrong, that inflation's moving in the wrong direction. And yet the Fed, all they've done is to say, okay, we'll still cut, but we'll just cut a little less. And historically, the problem with that is that obviously, first of all, the Fed has never done a cutting cycle without doing QE ever since 2008. So if we're going to be doing this cutting cycle and not doing QE, it would be a break from the historical norm. And also, I think operationally,

it'd be next to impossible because if you're going to cut rates, especially to zero on the Fed funds, right, you have to have the entire yield curve kind of follow you there. And without Fed buying, it's going to be impossible to move the yield curve to be, you know, especially the front, the short end, or the front end to be to be on on par with, you know, around where Fed funds is at. So if you're operationally thinking and you're a Fed, a Fed governor, you know, how do you do this? How do you how do you pull this magic rabbit out of the hat? How do you lower rates without causing more inflation and without doing QE, I think you can't do it.

And if you have to choose between treasury market solvency and more QE and just getting yelled at on TV, I think you're going to choose the latter. Yeah. I figured it was earlier this week or last week, but Jerome Powell's comments post-FOMC meeting were pretty interesting where he explicitly said, we can't do QE until interest rates are by the zero bound.

so i think i think that's what my memory serves me correctly it was something of that like sort of choreographing like yeah and historically yeah historically he's right but he's also here's the other thing thing that people should notice is that we haven't had a slow steady cutting cycle since the 1980s so every cutting cycle since you know mid-80s post vocal volker shock has been basically like very quickly down within 12 to 18 months, the rate goes down 5%, right? You saw that in the nineties, you saw that in the two thousands with the tech bubble burst, where a Fed funds rate fell all the way to 2% from like, you know, five and a half or 6% before you saw it again in 2008, obviously we went from five and a quarter all the way to zero post 2008. And then again, we saw this

in, in 2020 with COVID, we saw the Fed funds rate dropped to zero within very, very short, short amount of time so with them talking about this slow and steady cutting cycle again i think it is going to be slow and steady until there's an issue or until just the funding needs of the government are too much and once that that funding need becomes too much they just don't have a choice they're just like okay we have to lower race to zero we have to do qe we have to grow our balance sheet again and they'll create another reason why they'll talk about this is transitory it's a temporary government program etc etc etc but the end result will be more liquidity more bond buying and more monetization of the debt yeah that's what i think

obviously the trump admin has to be aware of what's going on particularly in treasury markets and all the debt that needs to be ruled over where yields are and i guess is that and i think people are hoping for a saving grace and doge and all this cutting like all and publicly is being positioned as and rightfully so to a certain degree as a way to root out corruption and wasteful spending that that washington has engaged in um in recent years and decades uh for being honest um it is had it has been interesting like since trump's gotten to office like without cuts the yields have been coming down and i think that's because bond buyer saying it looks like at least on the fiscal side the u.s is putting an honest foot forward to try to get things under

control start with us aid um medicare medicaid uh the irs is getting audited and um there are hopes that eventually they'll get to defense um which is a large part of our spending and maybe i don't the probability i would put on this is very low but is there a way that the trump admin could thread the needle with all this cost savings on the fiscal side by essentially like sending elon and his crack team of autists in to figure out where the money's being wasted and cut it out as quickly as possible to signal to potential bond buyers like hey we're getting our act in order you should be buying our bonds well i think editing you know auditing the defense department is a very quick way to get yourself uh suicided on you know in your car on a sunday um but i'm

Look, I'm hopeful. Doge has done much more than I initially thought with finding corruption and waste, obviously. But I also know as a pragmatist and as someone who has studied the federal budget, the real monster in the room, elephant in the room is the non-discretionary spending, Social Security, it's the Medicare, Medicaid, it's defense, it's those things. And those things are extremely hard to cut. And like, let's say, let's say 10% or even 20% of that spending is fraud, and we can just cut it out completely without having an adverse effect politically. The rest of it is not. And if the lion's share is, you know, fundamental spending that's going to voters, they're not going to vote for their own paychecks to be turned off, their own social security checks or their Medicaid, Medicare assistance to be halted.

And so what that means is that politically it's next to impossible for them to cut that spending. And I think, you know, unless Trump is able to get a coalition of Republicans together that have enough willpower to become essentially like Tea Party participants and Ron Pauls and just slash the budget and ax all their political careers and be out of politics forever, I think that the budget problem is not going to be solved just by Doge. you know they they might cut a few percent but him talking that he's going to cut you know two trillion of spending a year i mean you've got to go after social security and defense for that there's no other way around it yeah and even if we're being generous and saying uh maybe yeah maybe all this will happen you can do that like they're still the clock's still ticking in the sense that we need to roll over this debt yields are where they're at and the market reaction to the spending cuts may not happen until after his first year

in office after which point like all that that's already been rolled over at higher rates and you're stuck with that interest expense um so yeah it's a shit show yeah it is a shit show and you know that's so that's the irony is that um i called this the peruvian bull debt paradox i had a tweet about it in like october 2022 that went kind of viral where i was basically saying like here's the irony is that the higher they hike the further they move behind the curve because with this debt load you're raising rates into an environment where your interest expense will blow out and then you know your borrowing rate obviously will blow out because you have to finance that that additional interest expense cost and then that means that the curve is

essentially steepened more and more because you have to you know borrow more and more and pay more and more interest expense and so the debt spiral accelerates and that means that with the next wave of QE, when you have to do the next round of easing, you're going to have to be buying more bonds than you would if you hadn't hiked, ironically. And so there's truly no way out of this conundrum. They're trapped in this black hole of their own design. There's no magic button they can press that will get them out of this. They either die via inflation by cutting rates to zero and doing qe or they die eventually by inflation by raising rates to five percent and incurring a bunch of interest expense and accelerating the national debt spiral and

then lowering rates and buying a bunch of that debt that they you know caused in the first place and so there's there's no easy solution for the fed or for really any central bank that's facing you know above 120 debt to gdp i mean qe is is really the only answer here it's going to be infinite liquidity soon how high does bitcoin go i mean hard to put a a price target right as uh max kaiser says you know bitcoin has no top because fiat has no bottom uh but i would say i mean this cycle obviously uh targeting 250k you know hopefully up to 300 350 potentially but i mean the end game obviously within the next 10 20 years i mean we're talking millions dollars per bitcoin easily yeah yeah and i think uh i think things could get weird this year in the

bitcoin market it's because of all these factors we've been discussing over the last hour um and and it it is with this trump administration with doge it does seem like again there's an honest effort to cut out the waste and spending but as you said this conundrum that exists with the debt that already exists like there's it's i don't want to say it's a it's a worthless effort because i do think it's earnest and worthwhile and virtuous to cut out all this waste and highlight the corruption and kick these parasites out of the sea but i think the end state of the debt situation was predetermined once we passed a specific threshold 120 debt to gdp is Because what many people like to reference as once you pass that, you don't come back.

Who knows whether it was there. But I think wherever that line is, we crossed it a long time ago. And there's nothing anybody can do to fix it. To go back on the other side of the line. Yeah, we crossed, as I term it, the monetary event horizon, right? And so once you cross that 120% debt to GDP, you have this issue of any increase in GDP gets financed by additional debt and the ROI on that debt becomes negative. You have to go into more debt with each marginal dollar to produce diminishing returns of growth of real GDP. And so that means with diminishing growth of real GDP, you have diminishing, obviously, real tax dollars coming in.

And so that's why your ability to finance that debt is collapsing and you have to pay it by borrowing, right? So your ability to fund it by real tax receipts falls off a cliff and you have to borrow the difference. And that increasingly means more and more money has to be borrowed. The reason why the 120% is the figure that everyone thinks of is because Hindenburg Research released a report, I think this was in 2017, where they analyzed every country since 1850 that's gone above 120% debt-to-GDP. And they found that 54 out of 55 countries had defaulted by either a straight-out demonetization of the currency, a hyperinflation, inflation, or a depression. And the only exception out of those 55 countries was Japan. And Japan is obviously currently in its own like yen crisis, slow motion currency meltdown. And so there's really been no exceptions to this hard and fast rule.

And the U.S., even though it's a reserve currency, which grants it additional borrowing capacity and additional demand for its currency outside of its own borders, the U.S. is not immune to math either. And so because of that, we're running up on this increasing inflation, lowering rates conundrum. And I think the price for Bitcoin in that environment is whatever it needs to be in an infinitely debased world. It needs to be way higher in an infinitely debased world. I think that's easy to say. Thank you for doing this. I know Friday afternoon, we sort of put this together last minute, but I saw you put out your piece on Sunday and I think it's very important if you're listening, pay attention

to the gold markets. I know this is a Bitcoin podcast and many people are like, oh, Bitcoin, gold's a shit coin, right? Beating indicator, very important. And I think seeing the flows of physical gold that have materialized in the last few weeks has been very fascinating to watch play out. This is exactly what was happening in the beginning of 2020 before there was a ton of market volatility.

And I think that alone is a canary in the coal mine that we've seen before. It's happening again. You should be paying attention to it. Exactly. Like I said, gold is front-running liquidity like it has done in the last three cycles. If that's true, that means Bitcoin is being primed for another huge move higher. And if you're a Bitcoiner and you're thinking, yeah, who cares about the gold market? This thing doesn't really matter.

It's anachronistic. It's a pet rock. I think that that's completely wrong because, again, you have to remind yourself that these institutions function on this older standard of how things are, you know, how things are valued. And for them, Bitcoin is extremely speculative and they're just starting to get their toes in. But gold is something they understand. And gold is, for them, the hedge against inflation and debasement. They literally don't have the infrastructure to have Bitcoin as a reserve asset, particularly like the banking sector specifically. like like you mentioned basil 3 like has made gold physical gold like a an asset they can hold

as a reserve without taking a haircut on it um like here in the united states at least like europe's completely fucked but here in the united states we just had hester pierce at the sec repeal sab 121 and issue sab 122 which allows the banks to to custody um bitcoin but they haven't build on any of that infrastructure if they wanted to um they couldn't even do it yet there was announcement i believe state street and city um have signal that they're going to get into it but you literally need to adopt technology set up processes compliance all that to do it first to bring on bitcoin as an asset whether you hold it on behalf of your customers or the the bank itself and that infrastructure exists for gold and it's being leveraged and used right

now that's something we should be paying attention to yeah and this is a massive opportunity obviously for bitcoin companies right go go start a custody service and get a bunch of bitcoiners together and teach institutions how to how to safely custody their bitcoin and you know help this adoption curve along because you know getting institutions in the door obviously increases the flywheel effect of bitcoin and their ownership of individual coins doesn't affect you know the nodes or the miners and so that's you know that's bullish for the price and bullish overall for the ecosystem yeah and a few bankers out there listening to this and you're thinking like we need Bitcoin infrastructure a magic partner 1031 we

have a lot of portfolio companies that could help you out hit me up okay you can help you peruvian bull it's always a pleasure we had this more often I think I said come on this is fun I love talking macro with you Marty here you're very knowledgeable and you always ask really good questions that make me kind of squirm in my seat to give you good answer so maybe we should do a quarterly peruvian bull update we'll uh we'll try to mix that in let's do that all right you go enjoy your weekend happy valentine's day hope you have a good one thank you all right peace and love freaks