TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #597: Insights From Inside The Gold Market with Josh Phair

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

Marty sits down with Josh Phair to discuss the state of the gold market. Josh on Twitter: https://x.com/joshphilipphair Scottsdale Mint: https://www.scottsdalemint.com/ 0:00 - Intro 0:36 - Josh’s background 6:13 - Overview of the bullion market 16:24 - Fold & Coinkite 18:02 - Is the gold really where they say it is? 30:31 - Unchained 31:02 - Price suppression 36:58 - Bessent’s reset 42:02 - Staying prepared for turmoil 50:49 - Tying in European conflict Shoutout to our sponsors: Fold https://tftc.io/fold Coinkite https://coinkite.com 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. Josh, welcome to the show.

As always happens, we record like a little pre-recording episode, so I figured we should hit record and jump into it. Let's do it. Well, I think you hopped on my radar probably one or two months ago now at this point. You were on a plane giving a first person recount of what you had just experienced on a road trip in Europe, particularly doing some diligence on what's happening on the gold markets. And obviously that has been a big topic in some of the more obscure areas of FinTwit and financial Twitter and people covering finance really not getting much tick in the mainstream. But there's something happening in the gold markets. And you're somebody who I've been following for a few months now. And it seems like you have a very good pulse on what is actually happening. A lot of people have theories, but you were, again, on the ground in Europe. So I think starting there with that road trip, what you observed, what you're comfortable disclosing about what you observed and how you would describe the mechanics of what's been happening with this flow of gold into the US. Yeah. So I've been involved in the metals space for 20 something years now. So I did corporate risk management for really huge gold and silver and copper mining companies. So worked at the C-suite level, just managing mega billion dollar companies and fell in love with the metal space and then started what's now Scottsdale Mint, let's see, 16 and a half years ago, roughly. So been in the space a lot of times.

So we now, my company manufactures and produces legal tender gold and silver coins for roughly 20 foreign governments, central banks. We do private bank work. So some of the private banks, you walk into a bank branch, let's say in Canada, and you want to buy a silver bar, it's actually made right here in Castro, Wyoming. So I do that and then supply hundreds of wholesalers all around the world. So I really see quite a bit of things. And then we also have a, I have a new vaulting operation that's at an institutional level grade here in Wyoming. And, and so I'm, I see a lot of stuff and we're actually, we're going to have a armed, one of the arm, the largest independent arm company is going to be leasing space for me in my building just to service my, my customers.

This is kind of like Casper, Wyoming is a little bit like kind of building a hotel in the middle of nowhere. And suddenly Avis wants to put in a rental car agency there, which is wonderful. So we are moving a lot of physical gold in and out of the U.S. We work with a lot of the refineries. We're doing the finished product. So we see it all. So I know the transport guys, and I think you're right. I was flying back.

I think it was February 2nd. I think I had my ex account for two weeks at that point. So even though I've been in the space a long time, never really vocalized much. And I actually had someone that was listening to me talk about what I was seeing in the market and they go, can you put that on camera? And so I was like, why don't I just share what I'm seeing? And I think, I don't know if I was the first person to talk about the insane amount of gold shipping over, but I think I might've been one of the first to break it at least

on a large level. And there was one of the weekends, I think it was more than, we had more than 5 million views between a number of channels. So yeah, I think it was quite an interesting time to see what was going on. And yeah, you're right. I was meeting with some governments and some big refineries, some banks, wholesalers. And unlike this amount of gold, no one on their own can move this amount. And it was mind boggling. As you heard about that process of material flying, you know and it was happening you know before christmas and so you know and i'm just listening and it's coming from multiple carriers and i'm like this is this is really big and so what what

is going on and i think it kind of goes back to a couple years ago um started with the ukraine war what the brics nations are doing and there's been a very very kind of covert uh movement of a physical metal really primarily china um is what's been happening for for a while and now to see it come to the United States, it was like, wait a minute, this is pretty big. This is pretty big. And at that level too, because it's disrupting the marketplace. So when you disrupt the commodity market, you disrupt the Bank of England, which is the settlement. That's where after World War II, a lot of the war debts were settled. A lot of people don't realize gold is still used. It's pledged for with the world bank um it's pledged for like when you're you know the world bank is

giving loans to countries that's all being done with gold backing and so all this gold was there and suddenly it's all moving around and you're disrupting their delays their their their feeling if you're a private investor as i just wrap my head around all this i'm like you can't do that so the hung brothers try to do it silver in 1980 and then george soros in the early 90s and then warren buffett in the late 90s and every time those guys got a knock on the door right and they had to liquidate and actually warren buffett's the last one turned in the silver etf and so when you do this at the level of gold who is who's who's allowed to do this and to me it feels truly like it's the u.s government and so to give everybody a perspective of how this physical

bullion market typically works the the big players that have popped in to the scene or at least my observation of the scene you have three that people are mainly talking about on um the lbma the bank of england and then comex over here in the united states and there's sort of this interplay between the three that is sending off alarm bells and so how do they interact with each other or at all yeah so london has literally been you know since since world war ii the kind of the headquarters for for for gold throughout the world so when central banks are buying and selling gold a lot of it is settled and held in the bay at and at the bank of england and the london bullying market association is just kind of a standard um think of that that's

a little bit that's more institutional level right you're you're more banks refineries are delivering in and out. And then in the US market, it's the COMEX. And so oftentimes people don't realize this, but gold and silver is transported over continents to take tiny ARPs back and forth. So oftentimes banks will go short a futures contract in the US and if there's an arbitrage to be had, and then they buy the physical metal somewhere in the world, whether that's London, Korea, somewhere else. And that metal comes in, they deliver in and they take a small spread. Well, when those spreads suddenly went to what I call epic, all the bullion banks are making huge, huge money unless they're caught on the wrong side of another trade or something. But

on that EFP, that exchange for physical premium, you don't see that. I'd say the only time I've seen that in my 20 plus years was COVID. And that was when the refineries in Switzerland all shut down. Mines shut down in the world. So there was huge shortages of gold and silver. So the banks basically said, hey, if you want to exchange your paper contract for the real thing, you got to pay up. And instead of paying maybe pennies per ounce, and I think we've seen this EFP over the last three months has been averaging 30 cents to $1.15 on silver and gold has been averaging $15 to maybe as much as maybe $65 an ounce. So we're talking huge money. So all these banks have to do is find the metal. They short the market on the COMEX and they deliver it in.

And so that movement was originally being thought that it was just maybe a tariff risk, right? So is Trump going to tariff gold and silver? That was kind of what we were thinking back in December. And then when I'm literally getting back, it's February 2nd, I'm like, this can't be. This has got to be something bigger than this. And I think we're starting to see that. But, you know, we haven't really had, you know, tariffs haven't really fully come into play in terms of what's going to happen, right? You know, Mexico and Canada got essentially on most products got another 30, you know, multiple extensions. So we don't really know. But yeah, the EFP still exists.

It's moderated a little bit like in the last week, but it's still higher. You know, even today, you know, it's still above average. So something really is big. So all these institutions, are they moving metal? And oftentimes, most of the stuff sits there. So there's always been concern of like, has it been leased out? Has it been, because banks do like to utilize, and governments, they lease their gold out. And so why do they do that?

So at a very sophisticated level, you can lease it out with someone with large credit, and you can earn a small yield on it. So this is what the banks do. JP Morgan is the largest holder of silvers in the world. And then they have their own gold and silver vaults literally next door to the Fed in New York. So it's a very interesting business of how physical metal really kind of makes the world work. I feel like we've been slow walked into the idea that I don't think we're educated in the school system, that gold is still part of our society, even though we're not gold backed the way we used to be. And Richard Nixon, just over 50 years ago, cut us off. But it is still the underpinning of central banks. The only thing on their central bank balance sheets is gold outside of their own fiat currency. So I know people are talking about how Bitcoin is going to come into play. But as of right now, it's governments that are talking about it. And even Michael Saylor is really kind of focused on the US government.

Well, does the US government really control the Federal Reserve? And I think we kind of got our answer. Powell said Trump can't fire me, right? And so what does that mean? They're a private bank. And a lot of people don't realize the US Fed, they pretty much are, they manage all the other central banks or the majority of them around the world. So they're all – this is banked for international settlements. This is – and I'd say at a high level, if you watch Game of Thrones and you watch the kings and queens and who's running the show, but then they have to go to the Iron Bank. And when they walk into that room, right, you humble yourself. And then the Iron Bank is financing both sides of the war. And this has been going on and it's really based off of some famous names that you've heard about, right? The Rothschilds have financed, they going back to the Napoleon. So it's quite interesting to see it now kind of coming into the forefront. And then, you know, you had Elon Musk out of nowhere tweet or posted on X, hey, surely the U.S. gold at Fort Knox is audited every year, right? And that kind of kicked off a whole nother thing going, well, does the U.S. have its gold or not?

Is that maybe why the gold's coming into the U.S.? And, you know, are they because, you know, we're auditing everything, right? So USAID, right, everything within government's being audited. So is it possible that they already knew, maybe from Trump's first term, that maybe some of the gold had been re-hypothecated, leased out, sent somewhere else? And what do they say about property? Was it nine-tenths of the law is fiscal ownership? So if there is dual counting, they're repatriating. So they're saying, hey, I want all these assets in my jurisdiction. So we're starting to see. So China has been saying, I want it in my jurisdiction.

If we go back in time, Venezuela said, we want our gold back, Bank of England, and they said, nope, and it's being held there. I think it's somewhere in the World Courts. Germany took, I think, eight years to get their gold out of England. So this is one of those things like, you know, it feels better when it just is here on your own turf. And also, if you look at history, world conflicts, and I would say we're entering the zone. I realize Trump's trying to create some peace here, but maybe it doesn't.

oftentimes gold is always the over it's it's it moves in advance of war and if not like the french had to do you know if you want a fun story read about how the french moved the gold out in the middle of the night on the ships you know to get it out before before the germans were coming in so you know history i i don't like the i don't like to say history often it doesn't repeat it often rhymes but it it kind of does so we're most of us have never lived through anything like this um there's some sort of you know the system's broken um that that we're currently in this you know keynesian experiment is probably a good term right and this is i would say the rise of of both bitcoin um over the last number of years you know was was really rooted in a lot of

these these these structural problems in finance and the distrust of politicians that just distrust of government um and and and here we are kind of you know obviously and now you know bitcoin has morphed into a number of reasons of why to own it. Now it's digital gold. But you're still seeing physical gold. It's really not going away. And you and I were talking the other day, I'm not Peter Schiff. So Peter Schiff loves to hate on Bitcoin. And I am one that says, I will embrace things that do well. So yes, I'm very much a classical asset. That's what's in my business. But I've owned Bitcoin longer than Michael Saylor has. I've been holding it on some of the balance sheets of my private companies, like a treasury asset for longer

than Michael Saylor has. I just don't do the debt thing that he does. But I'm a big fan of have abundance. So obviously, the term maxi, you're either in the club or you're out of the club. I can embrace all those guys. And in fact, a lot of my, through the years, Scottsdale Mint, a lot of my larger customers have become friends, have been original OG Bitcoin guys from, I'm talking dollar up. I've got a lot of people that then rotated and they sacrificed for Ethereum Genesis day one. And these guys, they're mega billionaires. These guys are always clipping a little bit off the table and they go into physical gold and silver. So they may not tell the public that, but that's what I see. And this is at the highest levels.

This is what the family offices do. And I don't think we need the animosity between the, let's say, Bitcoin or gold. I mean, Michael Saylor's always trying to attack it. And I mean, I understand he's trying to attack the economic energy, but let's think for a minute how much capital is just in fiat, right? All the derivatives and it's just fluff. And the government could just print all the money at once and buy anything at once, right? That's how it works. Why do we have to sell gold to buy Bitcoin, right? You could own both, dominate both. And I realize the play is you're going to bankrupt everyone else that's buying gold.

And I kind of chuckle with this because it's like, it's not the government. The US government doesn't have their own choice in this, right? It's all the central banks. They're pretty much running it. And they're going to have to go to a new system. So whether it's the Chinese system or the US system, the World Economic Forum system, You know, will we own nothing and be happy? You know, there's so many different directions and they're all fighting for control.

So this is going to be a wild decade ahead for sure. 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.

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to secure your Bitcoin, get the most secure hardware wallet on the market, go get the cold card queue. It's a beautiful thing. And we love our gold bugs here at TFTC. I think we're ideologically, philosophically aligned and all marching towards a world that stands on sound money, ideally, and whether I think the philosophy behind gold is sound money and Bitcoin is very aligned. And I agree, there's so much fiat built up in this debt based system that it's going to to flow into both assets and likely will over time i think bitcoin has uh its advantages to gold but i think it would be naive to think that there there won't be a flow into an asset that has been hard money for for millennia but on this point like that's that's why i wanted to have

you on is like what are your thoughts and what exactly is happening you mentioned tariffs or There was a theory that people were repatriating gold in preparation for tariffs. I've seen you and many others talk about Basel III, gold being labeled as a tier one asset on bank balance sheets going live later this summer. Some people have been surmising that maybe it's being repatriated into the U.S. banking system to be used as that asset, to be recognized as that type of asset. And then the other one is there is a recognition that the U.S. dollar as the global reserves currency may be on its way out. And there's this huge reshuffling of the board and people preparing for a transition to whatever the next reserve system may be. maybe it's a reversion to a gold reserve system a a sort of transition to a bitcoin standard at some point in the future but like that the this i agree with what you said this amount of gold moving this quickly across the world is something that i haven't seen in my lifetime uh outside of

covid but covid was a very uh was obviously a very unique situation in terms of the you had this pandemic in quotes and the the global economy shut down and that was that was a very volatile system geopolitically socially this time around with all this gold moving is and there's not a very similar situation it's relatively calm it's not relatively calm relatively being the most important world word there but it's not a covid like situation so like the impetus for all this gold moving is um leaves a lot of questions like what is happening yeah so i'm not going to pretend that i know the exact answer i'm very much like what are the clues right and i i put it i pin everything on the board and i move it i move it around and if something proves false i take it

off that's that's me i'm not going to hold a losing position on something so i'm going to move it around i would say it possibly could be a little bit of everything i think you know the tariff play, EFP risk, banks are in the business of making money and not taking risk or taking as little risk as possible. So if they were in a short position and needing to bring in the physical and you got to put the silver on a boat or even moving gold isn't done in one day, you got to schedule the flights and all that. So it makes sense that they would try to reduce some of that position, move more material into the United States in the advance. So that completely makes sense and there's a lot of money to be made like these guys have been killing it the last number

of months there's no doubt so but it just it keeps going and going and going you're like that's where the the head scratcher component says kind of where i think i'm at right now is you know if you put if you if we asked 100 people does us uh does four knocks have all of its gold right i i feel like a lot and i don't know what percentage but a lot is probably going to be like i don't think it's there my personal take is i think it's there now so it's quite possible that some of this you know especially if we start thinking about how it's looking like what elon is exposing is we've been looted like for for quite some time right he's looking at the fresh stuff right i think we go back uh the united states has probably been looted to some degree

through both sides of the aisle for quite some time so is it possible that some of this gold was sent out was it loaned out who who knows i mean especially if someone's like ah we don't need it no one's auditing it's not been audited in 50 years you know they did you know a quick show and tell into one room you know what and like 30 years ago or something it's just so it's quite possible that you know trump is back uh is it possible that you know under his you know called the new team the moment he won he started working with some of the banks to start positioning the material and so a lot of it's going into the comex but a lot of it's not but a lot of that's going to the comex is is it's someone is standing there for delivery and they haven't taken it out so

there's a big difference between like what's in there and what can actually be pulled out and so there's someone behind this and that's where i say it's got to me i feels like it has to be someone so big um so maybe all the gold you know some of it has either moved back into fort knox but obviously the u.s has other vaults i mean i i also like to play the odds trump does not like to look bad if he can and either does elon and elon comes off as so right that's that's his shtick it's like warren buffett drinking a coke and eating candy he makes you feel like he's just like one of us but these guys are on a whole nother plane right how they how they work so i think when trump says we're gonna go look at it why i better hope it's there like i feel like that

kind of uncertainty like you know if you knew you had something wrong in your house that you could fix before telling your wife before you got home like it's the bathroom was flooded if you could clean it up where she gets home honey and then you say honey there was a problem but don't worry i got it all mopped up it's cleaned our bathroom's good i suppose would you rather hear walk in and it's all flooded and the flooring's a mess no so it feels like to me that the perhaps there was a problem and they've already corrected it that and then and then that leads into the whole you know trump's talking about a golden age and then i know he's just he's talking he loves gold i think we can go back decades he's go stay at a trump hotel any of them right you the gold ordained gold

gilded it's everywhere right the artwork it's there that's what he loves so it's no shock i mean he even sat down at the uh you know the the crypto summit the other day right he's wearing a gold tie there's a gold trophy in the middle of the world cup i mean and then he says it's a golden age it feels like to me this might be a little bit of like he's slow playing us into um the the word gold like it's very memetic right it's it's it becomes a meme um and here we are and you know maybe we're not going to have a gold standard, but maybe they're going to, maybe they're going to do like a gold bond, you know, a gold issue bond. Maybe they're just going to put gold on the sovereign wealth fund, right? And then maybe Bitcoin's on there too. I mean, there's so many

scenarios here that I don't know what's happening, but it's clear. I mean, a lot of people did catch this, but if you go back and look at Trump's X account, he was warning shots on X to BRICS to not create a competing currency to the dollar and don't back it. I didn't say with what, but I'll let you figure out what it is. I mean, anyone that studied gold movement knows it's gold. And absolutely, the BRICS countries are raging. And we've seen, if I go back to the last couple of years, the Shanghai, the EFP for Shanghai has been higher,

which means they're incentivizing people to move metal over to China. So, you know, is it possible, you know, sometimes the best offense is a good defense and he's just trying to shore up a lot of things especially you know i'm in i'm in a in the camp we're gonna have some hard economic times ahead over the next number of years like this and then the elon even says if you go back in time right uh be pre-political right he was talking about universal basic income or maybe even universal basic needs so what does that world look like at some point and so he's you know probably you know I don't know. What do you think the percentage we're going to have in the federal government

between last year and maybe at the end of this term? 90% cut, perhaps? I mean, you could kind of see how the world is changing so rapidly. And then there's the AI movement. If you don't have energy, you can't run AI. If you don't have AI and energy, you can't run perhaps Bitcoin mining, you can't really. Energy is so critical. So you look at what they're doing with nuclear now, they're turning the coal plants back on uh let's go let's because if you don't have the energy and the power and you let someone else whether it's bitcoin or or it's gold right whoever owns the most of anything controls controls that market so that's kind of what what what i'm sensing here um is just there's a lot of changes up ahead they call it the great reset you know out of davos

right uh claude schwab that's not really the best world um and then you know they basically they kind of installed the next canadian guy you know it's the same it's the same deal i mean literally justin trudeau schwab was at a conference years ago and says he is uh one of ours we installed him you know so there's this there's a high level battle you know at the finance level you know the great reset level and look at the end does the little guy and little guy means just the common you know we neo-feudalism is is is rearing its head and you know what does this all look like i i don't know i just again it's it's kind of wild to watch it in and you know just even going back and watching what we dealt with already this decade so with with covid and

then more importantly the reaction of what governments did yeah and completely i said this on another show two weeks ago to think that they're going to go into fort knox open the doors there's not going to be gold there they're going to open it they're going to be blinded by the light shimmering off off the bullion bars and trump's gonna be like oh we actually have more than we thought to think they would ever um publicly uh publicly signal to the global market particularly today that the u.s is in a position of weakness is completely naive like if they're if they do who knows maybe they don't but if they do go into fort knox i'm pretty certain that the gold's gonna be there and that yeah back to but it's kind of the bathroom analogy they might tell

us that there was maybe some missing but we got it all back i mean that that that kind of i could see something like that because obviously the date of the bars are are are going to be there and and And one of the guys on my team a number of years ago, it was more than a decade ago, quoted the U.S. government to refine the gold in Fort Knox. And at the time, because the grade is a little lower. So the industry standard, you know, in theory today is closer to a 4.9 period. There's some stuff that's like, you know, below that. And so it's not necessarily so all these exchanges around the world, they have different specs. And so sometimes that gold's not interchangeable with each other.

But that doesn't mean at the end of the day, even if you're a percent lower, the gold is still there. So you just melt it down, you purify it to whatever spec, you pour it into the size, whatever you want. So that's why I kind of feel like it's been there. And to your point, he's an art of war guy. This is how he negotiates everything, right? And even Art of War is like, you don't trap your opponent, you give them a bridge to go across that you want them to go across, right? And that's what he's trying to do with tariffs, he's trying to do this with the Ukraine situation, and I still think, yeah, why would he want to look weak on this? why bring this up literally what a few weeks into his his term like i don't know the gold's there oops that's just maybe not not the mode uh how someone would go about it so freaks bitcoin is the ultimate scarce asset join bitcoin macro expert nick batia at a live online event on march 17th for death taxes and 21 million learn how to shield your wealth leverage tax advantaged accounts and secure your bitcoin for future generations your financial advisor accountant

or attorney might not be up to speed on bitcoin so invite them join too register now at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc march 17th be there and i i think you alluded to it earlier but there's been this long-running theory in many gold circles that the price of gold has been suppressed by paper markets and to usually unleash the true uh the true price of gold you need to call call it physically and really call bullshit on the people running these paper markets you see do you have you subscribed to that theory number one and number two if so does a situation like this potentially lead to a situation where we get a reprice of gold to where these people would argue it should be so i'm gonna go with facts um just a couple years ago jp morgan

was fined i believe was 900 million for suppressing the precious metals market right so were they just spoofing it for their own book right um perhaps so so big big banks have been involved in manipulating the markets and they've been they've been fined by the government so if we go back even further and i i i'm trying to remember when it was some of these same groups were also sued and they went to court and the judge ruled that because they were acting on behalf of a sovereign nation that you cannot sue they dismissed the court case so i think i i take i take the facts and i think this was back when um i'm trying to think the company You know what? I'm not going to name it. But some of these companies were taking the opposite side

of hedges. So if I go back in time when gold was like two, 300, very often the gold mining companies would hedge because they didn't want to see it drop closer to 200 if we were at 250. So they would hedge their production. Well, some of these trading houses were the ones taking the other side, right? And so they were taking the other side. And basically when that price went down, right? Guess what happened to the asset? It was repoed. And so that bank took over those gold mines, right? And they now get the gold. And so I think this is what kind of concerns me, like a micro strategy. I realize he says he could go down on anything and I'm fine, but you know what, man? If you do believe Bitcoin's going to go somewhere, wouldn't you like to try to control

one of the biggest players that there is so this is where like banks often manipulate governments maybe that's the thing there's people bigger than than than the private banks right this is the governments can do whatever they really want to do right there's there's court of law and all these things but i you know just history proves this stuff so yeah i would say it's real i'm not one to say like like you can't you can manipulate on a short term you can kind of cap it um you know But long-term, price is going to find its zone, especially if now people are competing for it. I think that's what we're seeing with gold. When you have other nations that might not be playing the cap game, they're acquiring the real metal.

So gold, it's really gone up and this has not been retail at all. And so my company works with a lot of retail and it's been quiet for the last 16 months or so. And it's just now starting to activate again. So this is pretty much a central bank move. So, yeah, this is kind of an interesting time to watch between what's going on with the cap. And you could also say that the ETFs, and I would say this is a paper product, right? Is that a diversion from the physical?

And I'm going to allude to what I think could even be happening with Bitcoin, right? Is can you short the futures market? Yep, you sure can. And so gold, the moment we had ETFs and all these other things involved, right? It seemed like gold and silver had a hard time getting out of the gate. It kind of feels like we're seeing this almost like, who in the heck is selling Bitcoin? If Saylor is buying all this nonstop, why is it going down to the way it is? So I think the tough thing is with the futures market, I would say the possibility of entities doing, let's say, capping games or manipulation games.

And we see this in the crypto market where the leverage gets really high and they just cut the legs out, right? And you have these flash crashes and they gobble it all back up, right? And then the price goes right back up. So, you know, is that manipulation? Probably, but that's the game we're in. So, you know, I would say to me, if Bitcoin was back where only people held the physical, the physical, meaning self-custody, it's not on someone else's balance sheet, right? It's on the blockchain. I think, firstly, I think Bitcoin would be higher.

I realize there's a lot of capital that has come in through the ETS, have come in through MicroStrategy due to regulation and whatnot. But I think it's almost, it's the same thing with precious metals. So much has gone into the physical, but it's a paper product. And if you read it, they could have derivatives, right? It could be, I'm not here to poke holes in anyone's product. but these are some of the banks that have been involved in various activities in the past so i think it does lead you to believe it's impossible yeah totally in the area anybody out there

listening get your bitcoin off the exchange make sure you do it right make sure you understand how to properly secure your bitcoin maybe you get maybe get a cold card or something like that a hardware wallet uh to do it but uh i completely agree i think that's one thing that does play to bitcoin's benefit is still to this date like the way that satoshi launched the protocol like he distributed a bunch of the supply in the early years at a point in time where you were essentially forced to self-custody so as it stands today i believe more than 50 of bitcoin that is on the market is held in self-custody but that number can always go up um but we don't have to belabor that point i think another interesting sort of detail to point out here as it relates to what's

happening in the gold markets and if we are repatriating a lot of this gold is trust treasury secretary percent who historically has been uh really into gold and has gold as a core part of his portfolio or at least before he was when he was managing a portfolio before he he became treasury secretary and he's spoken openly over the last 18 months about this need for a monetary reset a bretton woods 2.0 or a plaza accords type situation where everybody gets to the table and we agree that the fiat system has gotten out of control and we need to sort of come to a restructuring agreement of how the global monetary order operates which is interesting yeah no i that's that's a that's a really really good point um about that so and when you assemble

a team right of like-minded people that are all trying to to achieve the same the same goal yeah i think that the hint the hint is there yeah yeah and what is it you mentioned there could be economic turmoil on the horizon you think that's that's a likelihood do you think it's necessary short-term pain for a resetting that gets the the global economy the u.s economy specifically back on more stable footing to to move forward or so good yeah so the us government's got to renegotiate it's dead right trump has been and percent had been very vocal to the point where i think the cent finally said okay i'll stop talking about it but he they made as their point, right? I want rates lower. Well, why? Stimulate the economy, right? I feel like what

they're actually doing with, let's say, axing capital flow within the government, the federal government is such a big part of our GDP, our economy, the movement, right? It's a little bit deflationary. Totally. It really is. And now tariff, I'd say the uncertainty, companies don't know if they need to hire or fire, right? It may impact your business in an amazing way. It may cripple it so i think right now you know you're in we're in a situation where companies don't know what's going on they're not spending money they're not doing projects and and they're not hiring a lot and so it definitely feels like to me that if if you're trump would you rather this thing just crash out a little bit in the beginning and then build it build it back i'd say it's

possible the other thing that's happening is is china's exiting the nasdaq so you know other other governments are invested in in stock market right so the swiss are invested china's invested and i think it's been pretty vocal that china i think we've been telling them to get your money out of our system. I feel like companies at a very high level are also being told to deleverage from China. Meaning this is not just tariffs, right? We haven't said that China's our enemy, right? It's been Russia. And Trump's kind of changing the board right now, but we're so integrated with China. It does feel like they are pulling out capital themselves out of the US. And so, you know, our multiples, like you just look at the S&P, all the price earning ratios are at historic highs.

It doesn't even make sense. It makes no sense. So this is where I say there's so much fluffy money in this. This isn't you and I and families with their 401ks just putting money in. This is so much money was printed and put in. And so our global world, like we've been in globalism for quite a while. We're now deleveraging all that. And so this thing could just poof and just let it get chaotic and you rebuild from there. And frankly, that's Trump's MO. He walks into a room and you don't negotiate when everyone's sitting at their table and feeling happy. He makes everyone feel really uncomfortable and just disrupts the entire room and everyone doesn't know what chair they're supposed to sit in.

And he's like, you know, you're going to sit there, you're going to sit there and you're going to take that rate. And this is what we're going to do in trade. And in the end, it's funny. People even talk about already, you know, Trump's capitulated on tariffs and such. This is just this is this is how he negotiates. This is. And they have said they've been saying that we might have to go through a period of detox. What does that mean?

Detox. So I would say we could be facing some some pre-day headwinds and it may not be comfortable. for a lot of us um and yeah i think it could be at moments tragic even what what could happen well this is something that is this is what got me into bitcoin i'm a child of a great financial crisis of a senior at high school in 2008 when everything went to shit studied economics in college and really went to college with like a know your enemy mindset like how could he get this messed up and i think tarp and the bailouts really rubbed me the wrong way i think you make the argument this is a detox it's and uh some harsh medicine that it seems

like trump and the team that he's assembled um are um willing to take and this should have happened 16 17 years ago arguably you can go all the way back to the 70s um and it's necessary it is going to be uh very tumultuous if if we are going through a detox period here however um in the long run will be massively beneficial particularly for the common man because if you look at the markets that this detox is most likely going to affect it is equities and assets like real estate A lot of the wealth is held in, but that wealth is controlled by a minority of individuals in the United States. And so it's going to suck for them. If you own debt, if you own these assets, your wealth is going to come down considerably. But for the flyover states, the Rust Belt, Main Street, whatever you want to call it, it's a it's a necessary resetting. And if it is deflationary, makes things more affordable. And I think Trump, at least from my observation, it seems like he's trying to choreograph and really be somewhat communicative about about this, which I think is completely necessary. is you're going to hear and see headlines about the mainstream media and a lot of um a lot of

people in high finance kvetching about about markets falling um and trump being a terrible president but i think really getting out there and communicating hey this is necessary medicine to get to a more stable foundation to build from is important yeah i think um so my company's name is scottsdale mint so it has the word scottsdale in it but i started just over four years ago to move it to wyoming so i'm i'm now in wyoming um we moved our old staff up over the last number of years kind of preparing for this event um our facility is even in a foreign trade zone and so we're essentially our vaulting and manufacturing operation. We're within a free port. And a lot of people were like, well, what does that mean?

Because we're a free trade society. Well, if you look back, the Great Depression was the Smoot-Hawley Act. And that's when the US had 25 to 50% tariffs. A lot of people can look back, critics of it would say, even though they put it on to reshore jobs and to create economic activity with factories and everything, it kind of delayed their economic recovery and it extended that depression. But there's other critics that say, was it done on purpose? And then was it done on purpose to allow a monetary financial transition? So if you got to think that time of the world, we were also moving, kind of the system was moving from European control into the United States. So they kind of put everything on ice. I'm not saying I thought

this was going to happen this quick, but here we are. And so we're talking about the same things that we did during the Great Depression, which is again, for those fourth turning book guys out there, every 80 years. So here we are with tariffs. And so I do think we're going to be faced with some really, really interesting hard times. And so building a company that is able to hold assets like artwork, if there's tariff on art, we can bring it in, it could be showcased, held here or other assets if it gets tariffed. And so this is, yeah, it's kind of, and Wyoming's a little bit of a, it's a rugged place to live. Not a lot of people live in Wyoming, but a lot of blockchain companies are here, right? It's got some of the best property rights. That's where

almost every crypto custody company out there is now based in Wyoming. Obviously Cynthia Lummis is pushing it. And so I think through the destruction, to your point, that there's going to be hard times, but there's also going to be some potential good times too that come out of it. And I think for those that are positioned for it, maybe have deleveraged in, let's say the old school finance stuff, and there may be more position for what's coming. And I'm a big fan of like, that's where maxi on anything, I feel like is especially, I get like, you're a young kid, you got 10 bucks to your name, you walk into a casino, you

put it all in black, right? There you go. And you hit it, you lose it, no big deal. But as you get older in life, you've got a family, you have assets. So at some point, and I have a lot of friends with, they have so much Bitcoin and Ethereum, a lot of them both, that they can never really sell it without moving the market. and yet they still diversify, right? And they still hold it. They diversify along the way in their reposition. So I think that's kind of the world we're in. I'm not a doom and gloom guy.

I'm optimistic, but let's be frank, the public's not going to find out on anything until it's kind of too late. Like, did they tell you, hey, buy Amazon stock? It wasn't very easy. Buy Apple? i mean how many people bought it and held i mean that's even even when you look at bitcoin it's up so much but how many people have held the whole way through right what not a lot and you know i

even look at guys like so people that got me into it i won't name a few names but like a roger vare right he's he was you know bitcoin jesus right and kind of got defamed because he was very concerned about bitcoin he did and you know bitcoin he didn't fork it himself but bitcoin cash he was a big proponent of that, but I don't know if he ever sold his Bitcoin. So in theory, he might be the largest holder of Bitcoin in the world. And you watch what just happened to him a few months ago. He wrote the book, How Bitcoin Got Hijacked, and he was arrested by Interpol a few days later. I actually think he might be still one of the largest holders of Bitcoin. I wouldn't be surprised a lot either.

It's possible. It's possible. So man, and he was an Austrian economics guy. So I maybe wasn't as billion is him he was in gold and silver so was i i i think i was on a website to buy bitcoin when it was a dollar 40 and you know what i said to myself i said this feels like world of warcraft people it feels like magic the gathering this way it's like and and it was at that point that's what it was and i said you know what this isn't for me so i wasn't that smart i didn't get into it till a number of years later but uh yeah it's just it's an interesting time but i think this is It's also an opportunity. This is probably the greatest opportunity for people of all ages to say, hey, I'm going to strike out for whatever's coming ahead. It's a wonderful time. There's so much change, right? Volatility. When things are stagnant, you can't really move. So things are going to be really, really volatile, be breathtaking. So I think for those that are paying attention and positioning and trying to work on things, hopefully you can come out the other side and take care of your family, your friends, and other people.

So it's not all about just, hey, I'm going to be the next king, right? There's a component there of, I would say, if you've been blessed with knowledge and you are then blessed, you're a steward of that asset to take care of people. That's kind of some of my mindset. Create jobs for new people, create things, do things. And that's where I think you look at a lot of things. There's going to be so many new opportunities. While AI might exit a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be in existence anymore, there's going to be new opportunities, hopefully, for people that have the skill set to kind of go forth. I completely agree. And I think this fiat debate, this fake fiat world that we've lived in has really paralyzed people from going out and doing these productive things. And so while there may be some volatility on the horizon, hopefully it rejolts individuals into like, oh, maybe I should go start a company, create jobs, be productive. And once you reintroduce opportunity costs to the market like that actually becomes incentivized. And so, I mean, on that note, last question, considering everything that we've discussed, it seems like people are wholly convinced that what Trump and Bessette are doing right now, they're letting the stock market go. they're trying to get the 10-year yield down so they can refinance and by letting the stock market go hopefully incite the fed to lower interest rates begin qe again do you think that is a

foregone conclusion you think that is a strategy do you think that will happen or is this this sort of repay trading of gold that we're seeing a signal that there's another option on the table that they may be going for and maybe uh the market consensus of the fed stepping in at some point this year driving rates to zero and blasting qe again doing the same old thing that we've done since 2008 um is misguided yeah i'm probably gonna differ for a lot of people that are following the gold camp i don't think anything's gonna happen tomorrow a lot of people are like this is it I view this as I think it's a journey. So we may not get an audit of U.S. gold.

It might be six weeks. It might be six months. It might be never, right? And so it actually could go quiet in theory. So I do think he is, I think, on the table right this minute is probably the interest rate component, right? Trying to shake around what we just saw today. Inflation number is down, right? So the table's now being set so that Powell could, in theory, justify some downward revisions.

And so if you started to create a little bit of volatility, and we've already seen it in the NASDAQ and the S&P, money's kind of being liquidated. And normally it all runs to dollar, and it's kind of been interesting. Gold's held really strong, which a lot of times, and it still could get, it'll have moments it gets whacked like everything else. But it's actually held very strong, even despite this volatility just in the last week. So I'm kind of in the camp of somewhere in between here. It's probably a journey, not an overnight thing. It's just he's still fighting things. I'm guessing internally the government is probably a beast to work with.

And he's probably trying to figure out who his partners are. So it's possible that he's just kicking Mexico and Canada in the nuts. And basically like get, get your house in orders. Cause these guys are, I mean, Mexico's fairly narco run, right? I mean, how many, how many people ran for office and were knocked off before the one that's in office? And so the question is, is where does her ally alliance? And I think Canada feels like it's, it's. uh yes indeed i think this like no one voted for this guy he holds three passports he's from the bank of england by the way i believe so yeah uh yeah very davosy so i think we're that that scenario here is yeah i don't know like the axis allies of whether that's a kinetic war or it's an economic thing like the the table could change a little bit here um and europe's kind of going alone for the moment like they want to take on the army of europe and let's go after

russia well i don't know i'm down to cup eight with europe they don't really look like they're aligned with our values these days in terms it's well that's been for i think that's been for a long time right and and you know look not not that putin's putin's an amazing amazing guy but to say that it was all him and not i mean the whole thing's been fabricated and created And it's been a proxy war for a number of years now. So the moment someone puts boots on the ground, and I'm going to go with this as another factor. In the moment, let's say the UK, Starmer's been saying, it's time, we may need to send troops in. Well, the moment that is, you're now a target risk for a bomb, right?

And so some of that asset that's flying out of London, it's a risk factor. And so does the UK really have the ability? uh no so yeah we're i mean the u.s doesn't want that war either so it's uh but some groups do within the united states they want war that's just you know i'm on both sides of the aisle a lot of people don't want peace there's so much money to be made through through a lot of this activity so yeah it's um sorry i got off tangent a little here it's just there's so much happening that the news is i love it i'm not an economist i'm just i'm kind of in it in a weird way i'm not any any special guru i've just been around a long time in in this space i i see i see things and

i talked to i talked to smart people like like yourself that just we're all putting pieces of puzzles together and talking and trying to have good conversation yeah well thank you for um hopping on x and giving your perspective i find it extremely fascinating and gold obviously i'm a bitcoin guy i've been in bitcoin for 12 years and i've have had many uh people who are in gold on for years uh throughout the years but the last time we really talked about this physical gold movement was in 2020 so i'm really happy that you came on to to give a big deal about thank you yeah don't don't let peter schiff give that the whole gold community i i'm probably kind a little bit of an oddity here i've just been in the space i i um i own digital art some has done

amazing like ridiculously amazing some of it went to nothing i like to i like to just be part of like what's going on in culture what's what's happening out there but i also i love the physical art so i feel like you could you could do the digital things and you can own the physical things and in you can have fun with both so yeah it's gonna be an awesome ride ahead yeah it'll be fun stay frosty out there freaks josh thank you for coming on hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future absolutely yeah thanks marty all right peace and love freaks