TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #679: Why Central Banks Are Panic Buying Gold at Any Price with Gary Brode

Episode Date: November 3, 2025

Marty sits down with Gary Brode to discuss tariffs and manufacturing reshoring, dollar debasement and the BRICS coalition threat, New York's exodus of wealth, and why Bitcoin remains the ultimate hedge against government overspending. Gary on Twitter: https://x.com/Gary_Brode Use promo code TFTC21: https://deepknowledgeinvesting.com/ STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/TFTCBitkey20 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ Obscura https://obscura.net/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Newsletter tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ 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 if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Gary Broad, it's been too long, sir. Welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me back, Marty. Well, we were just discussing before we hit record, the last time you were on it, I believe, I remember it was in the midst of or right before the tariff tantrum. And

regardless of whether it was right before or right during i think your your call was pretty prescient is that this is going to take time to see the sort of ramifications of a shift in trade policy toward tariffs to play out and so we've had uh about eight or not eight my like six seven months now of the implementation of the tariffs what is your what are your thoughts on on how this has played out so far as it pertains to terror specifically so you know back when you know we had independence day roughly six months ago seven months ago something like that um you know what i said at the time was this is not going to be the disaster people think it is you had all these fiat economists screaming oh no you know

we're going to have horrible inflation it's going to crash the economy and none of that has happened And, you know, to their credit, some of them said, hey, you have to give it time. It takes a while for these things to work their way through the supply chains. But, you know, here we are and we're now a day away from November and we're just not seeing the kind of goods inflation that indicates any kind of disaster or, you know, any kind of massive slowdown. Regardless of that, I think, you know, there's a huge error in the academic models. You know, Porter's theory of competitive advantage. It makes sense in a classroom.

And I'm a free market guy myself. But the issue with this stuff is the United States has been outsourcing its manufacturing capacity to lower cost partners. You know, I use that word very guardedly. And that's been going on for about 40 years. And so what happens when we can no longer make our own pharmaceuticals, our own chips? You know, there are all sorts of aspects of our economy that we no longer have control over. And, you know, what happens when we get to the point where the only thing we export is dollars? So it's not a sustainable situation. And one of the things I really like about what President Trump is doing is he's bringing back manufacturing to the United States. We have trillions and trillions of dollars of companies saying we're going to build manufacturing capacity in the United States in order to avoid these tariffs.

That, to me, is a pretty good way around this. And touching on the point of it's going to take time to really see the full ramifications of this policy shift. When do you think we'll be in the clear? Do you think we're in the clear now in terms of understanding the effects of tariffs? Is it going to be a 12 to 18 month window where it's like, OK, we're in this this period where we're adjusting and we'll have clear information once we once we get a year, year and a half out? Or is it safe to say now that this is moving in the right direction? We should be leaning in harder. So I think we're leaning in the right direction.

It'll be interesting to me to see if the fiat economists who were screaming that this will be a disaster, but saying it's going to take a little time, you know, we'll get CPI data and we'll get like PMI manufacturing data over the next couple of months. And it'll be interesting to me to see if there is no gigantic spike in goods inflation, if they'll just admit we got it wrong. And if you take a look at the history on this stuff, one of the ways that the academic theories have gotten it wrong is people do substitute for different goods. But also when there are tariffs, you end up with an increase in domestic manufacturing. And that's exactly where we're heading.

The thing that I'd be watching for right now is all the companies have said we're going to build trillions of dollars of production capacity in the United States. I want to see them follow through on it, because that's that's the long term win is to put Americans back to work, building things, making things. And I get that I sound, you know, like in 1980s and 1990s, you know, Reagan commercials saying that. But there is something to it. And outsourcing all of that, you know, to Asia or to Mexico, that's, again, not sustainable. It's not something that I want to see happening long term. You know, we're in a situation right now where China has just basically exercised influence over U.S. trade policy by threatening to withhold, you know, certain things that we need. Do we really want to be at their at their behest?

You know, I think that's not a good place for us to be. Yeah, it's been a topic on the show for the last few weeks is the posturing between the U.S. and China, particularly around rare earth metals. obviously scott percent trump meeting with g in his cabinet this week are you optimistic that something good can come out of these meetings yes and no um i think short term at first well they've said you know we're going to come to an agreement and and the smart money was always on them coming to an agreement because it's in both sides interest to do that the thing that i think this particular White House understands, and I wish more Americans understood, is China's viewing this as temporary, right? The thing that they were using as leverage is access to rare

earths, which we need for things like technology, auto manufacturing. You want EVs? We're going to need those. And a lot of our weapons systems require that. Advanced weapons systems, you need these kinds of things. So China, by saying you can't have these things that, you know, they have an almost a near monopoly on, you can take entire U.S. industries offline. And that's that's where we are. It's not an accident that China has such a monopoly on this. And, you know, one of the things that will happen is if other places start to produce rare earths, you know, China can drop their price. They will lose money. They're willing to lose money in order to maintain market share or or basically monopoly market share. This is not an accident. And so, you know,

I think China views what's happening here. We'll have an agreement, but they view it as temporary while they continue to build strength in areas where we're going to need them. And if the United States doesn't understand that we need to build our own capacity again in rare earths and pharmaceuticals and semiconductors, you know, these kinds of of critical industries. Without that, we're going to be in trouble because what are we going to do when we don't have something to negotiate with? Yeah, and that's. China this year, particularly with the rare earths, the tariff saber out uh saber rattling between the us and china and then i'm sure you've noticed but the sort of shift towards this alternative settlement network by putting a lot of gold

registering a lot of gold on warren at the shanghai exchange and beginning to broker deals with with other countries to settle trade deals in yuan that can easily be reconverted into gold because they're putting all this gold up and so it seems like china is like moving their pieces on the chessboard to say hey us we have a strong economy number one number two we're not happy with the way you guys are weaponizing the dollar system and are beginning to set up alternative rails to sort of hedge that exposure yeah that i mean that brings me to something where i've had you know multi-year arguments with people you know if we go back to you know i think it was the first quarter of 2022, when the Biden administration basically stole hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian

dollar denominated assets. And I said, this is a bad idea. And, you know, people got angry at me. They said, oh, no, you know, you're supporting Russia, that you like Putin. No, that's not it. I'm an American. I want what's best for the United States. And what we've just done is we've communicated to the rest of the world that the dollar is something you can rely on only as long is you stay in the good graces of Washington, D.C., a place that switches leadership every two to six years. Right. I mean, we we just made the dollar unreliable by doing that. It didn't stop the Russian war machine. It didn't slow Putin down, but it did hurt the United States. On top of all of that, you know, I've had this multi-year debate with people where, you know, they're the

BRICS coalition, right? Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. Now that that group has grown to a couple dozen countries that encapsulate more than half the world's population. You know, they're saying we're going to come up with our own BRICS currency. And, you know, so we need to take this seriously. And people have, you know, they've argued with me on X, formerly Twitter, and said, you know, hey, they can't do it. Who will trust them that, you know, they don't really have the capacity they're not coherent okay fine but we should be concerned about the fact that more than half the world's population is looking for an exit for the dollar and you know i've i had never owned gold before 2020 but in 2020 i started buying it in size i've never sold any

and i've just held that position um because you have a situation where the dollar is being debased at an increasing rate you know the purchasing power of the dollar is declining but also you have central banks all over the world that are saying we want to sell dollars and buy gold and we're just going to hold it and they're they're not price sensitive right the central banks buying gold don't care if they're buying at three thousand dollars an ounce you know fifteen hundred dollars an ounce where i first bought it at four thousand dollars it doesn't matter they're just going to stick it in a vault. Yeah. Well, and that turns to domestic monetary policy here in the United States. And I think throughout the course of this year, it's been pretty clear that the Trump

administration, particularly Scott Besant, wants to sort of align the goals of the Federal Reserve with the goals of the treasury and begin to sort of erode the perceived demarcation between the fed and the treasury the fed's independence and there's been a number of things that happened this year but obviously we had a fed meeting this week and i believe it was last month's meeting or maybe in jackson hole jerome powell had to come and make an about face and acknowledge that tariffs weren't as inflationary as people thought they were but um in recent months it's this idea or this this theme that you have silver rates blowing out you have the standing repo facility being tapped and many people wondering if a liquidity crisis is on the horizon um in the back end of

the system and yesterday cut 25 bps and um it looks like inflation is not screaming like the Fed thought it would, at least as it pertains to CPI inflation. What what do you make of the Fed's decision this week? What's been happening in recent months and this sort of quarreling between the Treasury and the Fed? Yeah, so I have a lot of thoughts on that. But first, I actually want to address something that you said. One of the reasons I love talking to you already was the way you said the perceived independence of the Fed. And again, like this is a disagreement I've been having with people. You know, you have all these people saying, you know, the Trump administration is, you know, they're changing our norms. They're, you know, they're violating the independence of

the Fed. OK, Marty, you know as well as I do, the Fed has never been an independent institution for the first couple of decades. The chairman of the Fed and the Treasury secretary were by law the same person. FDR used the Fed to finance his whole new deal. Lyndon Johnson literally picked up Fed Chairman Arthur Burns and slammed him into a wall, literally strong arming the guy into lower rates. President Nixon, he did the same thing. He didn't slam anybody into a wall, but he pressed for lower rates, got it. And we had the inflation of the 70s. it's this has been a constant feature feature you know i'm on team and the fed but we have never had a politically independent fed and every president whether democratic or

republican has always wanted a federal reserve that would give them easy money policies so they can juice the economy every president wants to point to lots of economic growth even if it's meaningless nominal growth right it's it's why washington spends so much money right now they can all say you know look while they're stealing they can they can just say you know look uh we have gdp growth well you know is it really is it is it really product or are you just you know wasting our money um and counting it on your own scorecard right every one dollar snap benefits contributes $1.80 to GDP. I hope you knew that. Yeah, great. Yeah. I'm glad to know that. Yeah, the government multiplier. That is, you know, if you think about it, that is one of the most

incredible examples of a PSYOP I've ever seen, where the government, which even when it's effective is not efficient, is trying to convince us that every dollar they take from us, every dollar they take from the productive private economy and spend on their own prerogatives somehow leads to more benefit for us than we would have produced ourselves, right? Like literally the non-productive part of the economy is taking from the productive part of the economy and saying, we're producing $1.80 of benefit for every dollar we steal from you or $5 or, you know, like guys like Krugman, you know, would make a living talking about the multiplier effect.

it's if you just think about it for a second of course that doesn't make sense but it's an incredible psyop that you know the newspapers reported and like how stupid do we have to be to accept that as the truth i i think people are waking up to it though i mean that was the uh i mean that was it seems like one of the rote scripts that was handed to uh democratic politicians last week at tim waltz keen referees i believe tweeting it out like hey we need to turn snap back on because it's actually stimulative for for the economy and it's like this doesn't really make sense you know one of the things i think is really interesting um you know look marty i know one of the things that you pay attention to is the overton window right what what are we really

allowed to talk about and i have seen an incredible change in the last couple of weeks as we've come up on like, you know, the snap cliff. And previously, if we go back, you know, five or 10 or 15 years, it would have been unseemly to say, hey, I don't care about this program because we always said, oh, no, you want people to be hungry. You want people to starve. And we couldn't have talked about it. My thread on X, my feed is full of people saying, wait, how many people are getting fed by the government? How many people are on benefits? Like there there is this visceral anger from people who are working saying, wait, how many people am I feeding who aren't in my household? And it did this. This situation has actually ended up opening the Overton window

wider where that's not what I would have expected to see. You know, people are openly saying we've got too many people who are on benefits. Yeah. Forty million. Fifteen percent of the country and and yeah to not come off as a sort of soulless non-empathetic individual there's certainly people who may need some assistance but if you look into the details it's like you're supposed to be looking for a job uh what you're allowed to spend the benefits on like you can buy any crap you want it's becoming clear if you hop on tiktok and you find people talking about what people actually do with the benefits there's a lot of people just selling them and um just using as a loophole to to not have to work and i think that's whether it's the snap benefits or the

broader immigration conversation that's happening in the country right now i think a lot of people are getting back to first principles wait a second there should be rules there is a rule of law and if we don't um if we don't enforce the rules whether it pertains to what you have to do to get these SNAP benefits or the rule of law of what you have to do to be here legally as somebody who came from outside the country. You were saying, wait a second, like we're not following any of these rules and that can't happen anymore. You don't have a society. Why does the government exist if they're not enforcing any of these rules? That is the contract that we engage in as citizens with them is to enforce these pretty basic rules. Yeah. And in fact, you know, one of

the things people you know the conversation has to take place in this you know humane you know we want what's best for people we want to be kind but i have more concern for my fellow americans than i do for people who came here illegally and one of the ways our government is harming our fellow countrymen is by taking people who came here illegally giving them free housing giving them these SNAP benefits, giving them food, and basically covering their expenses. And what that means is that these people can work for below market rates, right? I mean, basically, imagine, you know, you're a blue collar worker and your job gets taken by somebody who's supported by the government, right? Who's like, yeah, I can work for lower rates. I can work for a lower wage

because the government's covering my grocery bills and my rent. And that's, you know, why is it somehow wrong to express sympathy for our own people? Sup freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device, and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device

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They accept Bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.com slash TFTC to get 15% off anything or simply just use the code tftc when shopping at slnt.com patented technology special operations approved it has free shipping as well so go check it out to your point i think the over to window is shifting and that's what i what i wonder is is there enough time between when these policies start getting implemented earlier this year and the midterms to really see immaterial effects that sort of gets regular americans like you and i were more maybe not like you and i blue collar americans specifically waking up and saying oh this actually did help me i can get a job now and when you think about immigration specifically as it pertains to rent

and housing and all that um like pushing up the cost of real estate and exacerbating the housing affordability crisis like if they're successfully able to cut the benefits of illegal immigrants and get them out of the housing, bring housing costs down, bring jobs back to market, bring consumer good costs down, then I think there's a good chance that people can say, oh, wow, this is actually working. We should lean into this harder. Yeah. So I, you know, one thing I think was lost in the data that we got earlier this year was you had a decrease in the number of jobs available, but you didn't have a decrease in the number of Americans working and wages went up. And you think, wait, how how is that possible? This shouldn't these things shouldn't have

existed together. And the obvious answer was you had people leaving. So you had fewer jobs available, but you had fewer people looking for those jobs, enabling Americans to hold on to their jobs and get wage increases. Right. They were no longer competing with illegal labor. And, you know, so what you had and Powell was he was careful the way you said it, but he talked about a labor market that was surprisingly imbalanced. So this is a few months ago and some people may not remember. But I think people were surprised that you had so many things shifting all at once, but remaining in balance. Now, you know, one thing you and I should talk about is he had some other interesting comments in this week's press conference,

But, you know, this is as long as we're talking about policy, it makes sense to reference what happened earlier. I think it was in the summer. Yeah. What what comments this week stuck out to you? Well, you saw the market, you know, tank when Powell said that, you know, a December rate hike wasn't, you know, baked in. And then I think, you know, people, anybody with a brain would have said, well, there's no universe where Powell would have actually said, yeah, we're planning a rate cut for December as well. He was never going to say that. But I think it was the part where he said far from it. Right. It was like this hawkish message, like telling Wall Street, don't don't count on this.

You know, we it may not be coming. And, you know, people got really worried about a hawkish Fed. My take on it was very different. And I know you read the piece I put out on it, but my take on it was very different. You had the Fed cutting for the sixth time, you know, in this cycle with the CPI, which is understated, you know, at three percent, 50 percent above the two percent target, which itself is two percent too high. You know, what what the Fed is basically doing and, you know, they can talk about the employment

market all they want. But Americans would rather have 5% unemployment, which is 1% above that baseline and 0% inflation because inflation affects 99% of the country, whereas 1% of the country would be losing their jobs. And that's something that I think a lot of people are missing. But basically, what the Fed has done is they've made it clear the 2% target is gone. We now have a 3% or 4% target. And when you figure that the CPI is understated, most obviously in the difference between Case-Shiller and OER, the owner's equivalent rent, which makes the housing prices that people are seeing in CPI not reflect the reality, which is much more challenging unless you're selling a home. you know, what we really have now is a five or six percent inflation target. Right. And and they just did that at the same time that they're saying, yeah, we're going to end quantitative tightening. Everybody was focused on Powell saying far from it, meaning we haven't

decided on a December rate cut and got upset about it. But the reality is this was very dovish action by the federal reserve right you you had the cpi going up the cpi understated a fed cut and the end of quantitative tightening how much more dovish is this fed supposed to get right now i mean and to jerome powell's credit i guess uh to your and to your point like what do people expect like him to come out in november and basically tell you exactly what he's going to do in december but you wrote it in your piece like the stock market um is focused solely on expectations now like forward-looking expectations yeah and by the way that's something that i find really really strange right so the like you know last week the market was looking for a 3.1 cpi

print we got a three percent print and so like let's talk about a three percent print means right You got a 2% target, which is just a made up number. It's literally, it was made up by a European. Yeah, like a guy from New Zealand is on a TV show. Somebody asked him a question. He's like, ah, you know, 1%. Like you just made it up on the spot. But the Fed's mandate, as you know, is stable prices.

That's a 0% inflation target that we should have. Okay, so they're going for the 2% target, which is not right. It's just made up, but fine. Um, but we've been above that since the beginning of, it's been five years, right? Since early 2021, it's been five years, right? And, and they cut, but you saw people the week before when we get this CPI print, it's below expectations, right? So instead of 3.1%, we got 3%.

It's below expectations. Powell has to cut. Why? Why? The absolute number is still too high, right? I mean, it's people are using buy now, pay later for their groceries because inflation is too high, because the cost of groceries is not up one or two percent like the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us it is right. People aren't financing burritos because, you know, they're doing it because a burrito and a Coke is twenty dollars or eighteen dollars, you know, whatever it is. like people are suffering from inflation and the fed just reduced rates right and and wall street

is saying they have to reduce because our expectations were 3.1 percent uh you know i follow the logic but i don't agree with that yeah and um excuse me coughing number one but number two looking for um i forget it was the head of one um one of the banks i thought it was city bank but i can't find the clip but essentially he was we're getting to the point where the bankers are admitting that like because you have this sort of dislocation between the stock market um hovering around all-time highs and the real economy if you will if you will and it was the first time i've ever heard a bank executive explicitly say um i think people are flowing into equities to escape or outpace inflation i think it's equities are explicitly being used

is an inflation hedge or not um people aren't going into index funds because i think the um the financials of the companies within that index are producing uh value and they're being productive companies making a profit and that may spit off dividends it's like no we need to escape this inflation so we're just going to push all of our money into the stock market yeah so the stock market gold silver bitcoin energy right i mean basically what this federal reserve has done is they are taking money from the 99 of people who are harmed by inflation and blowing up another asset bubble so you know like what are you going to do i i have a no black pill policy um which i put into writing this week like i don't like it but i'm not going to

complain about it or whine about it or be upset about it i'm just going to own the things that are going to benefit from more long-term inflation yeah well and that and we're at this weird crossroads too where you have people escaping into equities to escape inflation but then you You have this sort of AI theme in the background, too. And there is this idea that we need stimulus to be able to invest in the infrastructure that can manifest what many believe to be the holy grail productivity gains. And not only that, but an arms race against China to be the dominant AI player in the world. And so you have that sort of external force implicitly begging for more liquidity so that they can go build out this infrastructure. And then not only that, but then you obviously have the effects of the productivity gains from artificial intelligence if they're real, which I think they are to an extent right now and could grow stronger moving forward.

And that effect on the jobs market and the economy overall, it seems like an interesting variable that's been added to the mix in the last two years. Yeah, look, first of all, I do think AI is going to be real. I do think there will be gains. I do think there's there's a value to it. We're not there yet. You know, like my my version of chat GPT actually tried to send me to a place that was closed when, you know, I had a time sensitive situation. And I said, why? Why are you doing? I said, verified information only. Why are you sending me to a place that was closed three years ago? And it responded. I was just trying to maintain the momentum of the of the conversation. Like what? I'm not asking like I'm not looking to chat. I'm looking for information. Right. That said, I'm not buying the argument that we need lower rates that we have to, you know, debase our currency in order to end up with AI leadership. And the reason for that is I'm going

to give you two reasons. One is the idea here is that if we lower the Fed funds rate, we'll have like a lower five year, a lower 10 year. But that's not what happened. Right. The Fed cut. And what happened that same day, the 10-year yield was up eight basis points. The next day was up five or six basis points. So you had increases. And the reason is the market is correctly baking in higher long-term inflation. So we're getting higher bond rates. People have this weird idea that the Federal Reserve controls interest rates.

They don't. The Federal Reserve controls the overnight rate. The bond market controls the rest of the yield curve, right? So Federal Reserve overnight, the bond market, everything from one day to 30 years. So the Fed doesn't have that much control. But the other thing, yeah, you got it right there. That was on a rate cut. So, you know, I don't know about that.

The other thing is AI spending is not being done by the general economy. You have half a dozen companies that are doing that. And those that have those half dozen companies have fortress like balance sheets. They're doing this with like the cash on the balance sheet. Right. Google, Facebook, Meta, whatever, Alphabet, you know, Apple, Nvidia. These aren't companies that are going into the market to borrow and needing lower rates. If anything, higher rates bring them more income.

Those companies have billions and billions of dollars on their balance sheets, right? So the idea that if like lower rates just means their interest income is lower. So I'm not I'm just not buying that answer. It sounds good, you know, at a cocktail party. But if you sort of look at anybody's balance sheet, it doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Sup freaks. Have you noticed that governments have become more despotic? They want to surveil more.

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the same old pattern parabolic spikes brutal crashes this time is measurably different the bitcoin check from unchained and check on chain shows how the 2023 to 2025 cycle has permanently reshaped bitcoin's market structure inside you'll find why volatility has collapsed why etfs have anchored new five and six figure price floors and why long-term hodlers remain firmly in control download now you'll also get access to the online event featuring james check bitcoin has crossed the rubicon get the report at unchained.com slash tftc that's unchained.com slash tftc and so with all this in mind how do you think people should be positioning themselves never do Do you think the ramifications of the Trump admin's policies, basically being able to get a track record and really get some teeth in terms of being deployed and having long-term ramifications come to fruition, coupled with the AI narrative, whether you believe it's stimulative or not?

like if we're going to go after that it could be really good for the economy but tied to that ai narrative is energy which we've been talking about for years and if that is just a an externality a positive externality of the ai boom and that's all we get that's i'd be happy with that is increased energy capacity expansion in the united states and with that talking about overton window shifts it seems like the over to windows it pertains to nuclear power specifically it's completely been blown open and it looks like we're going to go after it yeah that's that's definitely where we're heading i've been doing a lot of calls in that area and and that's the way i'm playing the whole ai thing um you know and look congratulations to the people who've owned

nvidia for the last few years they've done incredibly well but we're you know we're also at the point in the show where they're creating their own revenue, right? They're sending money to their customers that has to be used to buy their products, right? And this is the kind of thing that, you know, you saw with Cisco 25 years ago. So, you know, that's something that we're seeing right now. And, you know, I think that's a potential issue. You know, there's certainly huge demand for their products, but they're financing their own customers. And that's a gigantic potential problem. The way I've been playing it is on the energy side, because some of these individual contracts actually require, some of them require like, you know, eight gigawatts

of power or 10 gigawatts of power. And if that's the case, that's multiple Hoover dams worth of power, where the energy, where is that going to come from? Because we don't have it. And so the way I've been playing this is, is on the energy side, I own huge amounts of uranium. And that's, you know, because I'm a believer in nuclear, I own, you know, an SMR company, small modular reactors, like, I think that's the direction all of this has to go. And, you know, it takes 10 to 20 years to build a Gen 3 big nuclear reactor like, you know, Homer Simpson works at on the Simpsons. But, you know, these SMRs can be built in factories and rolled out and, you know, located very close to populations. There's no meltdown, you know, there's no kind of like

Chernobyl or Three Mile Island possibility with these. You know, a core can be replaced when that It has to be refueled, but there's no there's no dangers, no radiation issue. So I think that's where all of this has to come from. Yeah. And it's been interesting. I'm not sure if you've been following the announcements coming out of the Department of Energy, particularly as it pertains to FERC and demand response. But somebody has been paying attention to the U.S. electricity grid and capacity expansion since 2018 when I got into Bitcoin mining. It seems like with Chris Wright at the Department of Energy, who really understands this stuff, they're beginning to understand the problems and find unique solutions to expand capacity. came out and wants to fast track large load interconnection um and basically use bitcoin

miners or uh ai data centers to basically be like a buyer first resort for energy um and wait for interconnect built be built out and i think that's another thing that's a good positive is people actually understanding the true problem as it pertains to energy we've had massive capacity expansion expansion in the u.s particularly in eric up and other parts of the country as well but we've been lacking on transmission and interconnects and i think the administration and the market more broadly is beginning to realize like okay we are beginning to get our legs under us and remember how to build out an energy system and prioritize into your point about small modular reactors i've literally been beating the drum for like five years now which is like

plop down the reactor, mine Bitcoin with it, build out transmission, connect it to the grid, and then rinse and repeat. It seems like that is the express intent of this administration and organizations like FERC right now. Yeah, I completely agree with you. And one of the things that's really interesting, at least as it relates to Bitcoin mining and AI data centers, is we actually don't need to build transmission, right? I think what we're going to see is one of two things. Either individual companies like Google will literally buy their own SMR and build a data center next to it,

and they don't need to hook it up to the grid, right? Just go from there. The other thing that we're seeing, like in Pennsylvania right now, is some of these big tech companies are buying power from the independent power producers and they're hooking in, you know, basically behind the meter. And so some of that is going to stop because it's getting expensive for Americans who just want to run an air conditioner. And, you know, they're saying, wait a minute, I'm competing with Facebook or, you know, Google for my power and they can outbid me and I don't like this and

it's going to lead to problems. But, you know, what can be done is because a lot of these places are already zoned for energy and in some cases nuclear, you put an SMR on or near the site and just hook in, you know, behind the meter and you can go from there. The thing that I really like about what the Trump administration is doing here is they've correctly realized that the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, basically, as soon as they took over in the mid-1970s, the United States stopped approving and building nuclear reactors. Over the last 50 years, we have closed more nuclear reactors than we've built, right? And I think in the last, what have we permitted and built to in the last 40 years? So the NRC, whether intentionally or

not. It serves to prevent any kind of actual building, right? It just, they require companies to submit millions of pages of paperwork and regulatory filings. And so what the Trump administration has done is they've started an accelerated program. They've got 10 companies enrolled in it where they can get accelerated review by the Department of Energy. And that, I think is phenomenal. And, you know, there, by the way, there is a, um, an SMR company that's part of a terrestrial energy, uh, that just had their, they, you know, went, uh, through a de-SPACing. The ticker was HOND. Now it's IMSR, um, for integral molten salt reactor. But, you know, you've got these companies that are saying, wait a minute, let's do the accelerated DOE

review um and not get stuck for another 40 years not building power plants how profound is that in your mind like how if we get a few of these smr companies going through the accelerated reviews successfully they begin plopping these down like how transformational transformational do you think that could be for the energy sector in the u.s i think it's enormous uh i mean look before the nrc we built more nuclear plants than anybody in the world and if you were somebody who wanted to stop the use of nuclear power in you know 1976 you couldn't have done better than to have a regulatory agency that somehow manages to never approve anything right that just somehow manages to never make it work now the people there you know are are they dishonest are they

you know not playing but i don't know you know maybe they're just all worried that if they approve something without getting two million pages of documents and it goes wrong you know you don't want to be the person to approve the next three mile island so maybe maybe they're not dishonest um maybe they're just you know ridiculously cautious because from their point of view, you can turn everything down and say, I'm just being careful. The thing that I really love about the DOE review is if you can get this accelerated process done, that what can happen is that that process will then produce data that can be given to the NRC. And they can then be in a position where they're approving something that's up and running and working. And that may

get things moving again. I also spoke with an expert in this area yesterday who said something really interesting. He said, look, the people at the NRC, you know, they're in their mid-60s. They've been there forever. You know, all they know is how to reject things. He said that, you know, the younger generation of engineers coming up actually are in favor of nuclear power and want to see these things done. And so there may be kind of a changing of the guard along with more and better data that could allow some of this stuff to proceed. The unfortunate part of this is it's not going to happen in the next three years. And so I'm hoping, you know, whatever administration follows the Trump administration is in favor, like there, I want them to be pro-energy as well,

you know, and pro-nuclear energy, because Gen 4 is safe, you know, and it's something that we should be taking advantage of. Especially when you consider this chart. I think you just got to get this chart in front of anybody in the u.s government particularly the nrc and say we need to fix this problem we need to bring down these prices energy is the base layer of our economy and we should be exploring any option that allows us to expand capacity generation and drive down these prices because i mean at scale and that's the one thing that people will knock on a nuclear specifically it's like oh it's not economical it's too much of an upfront cost but we haven't had the ability to really experiment with a wider implementation of of this technology which

arguably over time should drive down costs marty i completely agree with you and would simply add that you know for the people who don't know it there is a near 100 correlation between the energy a society uses and a good material quality of life and if people want to say hey you know but you've got your health, your spiritual, you know, practice your, um, you know, your connection to other people. Yeah. Those, those things will all determine whether you live a good life or not. But if we're looking at material quality of life, the R squared between that and energy usage is one. Yeah. And that's why, I mean, a lot, there's a lot of dooming out there right now, but I'm extremely optimistic i'm not sure if you've been following the sort of industrial startup

community it's it's forming in el segundo there's a lot of companies in austin there was just a metal fabrication startup that launched in michigan like the young people specifically the zoomers are fascinated by this trend of re-industrialization and really going out and starting companies and i think that's interesting just watching the sort of psychological and sociological side of things where i think people particularly millennials gen x boomers have been conditioned to think it can never be re-industrialized like this is just the way it is but it's been extremely refreshing to observe younger generations particularly in the startup community really lean into starting art industrial companies over b2b sas products in recent years

i i completely agree with that um and in fact like one of the things about the zoomers is they have figured out that you're better off right now being a 22 year old without a college education and with four years of experience as an electrician than you are being somebody who spent the last four years on a college campus if you want to get a job and get paid yeah and it'll be really and it'll be really interesting to see if this is allowed to flourish i really i'm optimistic that it will be but you have this political class particularly in dc that seems to be, um, filled with a bunch of Luddites, particularly on the left. I mean, everybody says don't get political, but I think it's objectively clear that the left has gone

completely insane. We're seeing it with the, the shutdown, um, their inability to bargain over this, the spending bill. Um, and I think they're falling on, uh, tactics that were tried and true in the past they were successfully able to um point at government shutdowns blame it on trump uh during its first term but this term it's you just look at the polls um people are basically figuring out like oh you're holding the u.s economy hostage because you want to get your your jibs passed and included in the spending bill yeah it's i there's no question that's been going on i you know i also think democratic messaging has been bad here um i like i've seen them they get on these shows and people ask them you know

direct questions about it and instead of answering the question you can tell they go to the talking points of the trump administration who this this and this and you know we're they're responsible for it. But anybody who's followed it has realized that there have been more than a dozen votes and Republicans are voting to reopen the government and Democrats are voting to keep it closed. And that's fine. As far as I'm concerned, go ahead and keep it closed. I actually like the government closed for one key reason. It's because it is a phenomenal message to Americans that we don't need them to manage our lives. Right. So I'm I'm pro shutdown. Like if the Democrats listen, You know, you made the great point. Let's not get partisan. Let's not get political. I am strongly in favor of the Democrats keeping the government closed. Right. Great job, Team Blue. Keep it up. Right. I'm on your side on this one. Right.

And the reason is, like, think about it. The government is in every aspect of our lives. We've now had a month without the government open. And there have got to be 300 million Americans saying, what do we need them for? Yeah. What what is it they do? How do they help us? I'm sending tax money for what? Right. And great, because we've just had a one month experiment in them not running our lives. and somehow we're managing let's let's give it you know six months or a few years and see how it goes and check in and you know figure out if we need to reopen things i tweeted that out four days ago on the 27th i was like the government's been closed down for 27 days and i have not noticed any material degradation in the quality of my life let's keep this going and yeah that's how did i miss that that's the funny thing too is the democrats it was made manifest their own them eyes because i was watching something that peter sainaj put out earlier this week and apparently mechanically if this goes on for long enough like you literally have to start

firing the furloughed workers completely so you could see at least one-third of the federal government workforce um get fired if this goes on i believe past january and and the thing i want to emphasize is those aren't temporary layoffs. That's not temporary. Those are those are permanent workforce reductions. And the amazing thing about this is, you know, a year ago, I was saying, I really hope Doge is successful, but I'm skeptical. I don't think anybody can shut down government spending. I just don't think it's possible. And, you know, and, you know, Peter Thiel is right. Never bet against Elon Musk. And I was really hopeful, but it didn't surprise me when that didn't really cut a whole lot of spending. But this could be the thing that

does it, right? This could be the doge moment when we get a real reduction in government spending. And by the way, that's something that's really necessary. You and I were understandably and reasonably critical of Federal Reserve Chairman Powell in this conversation. And I've been critical of him for the last however many years. But let's also be honest here. There's nothing he can do. Inflation is being created by overspending out of Congress. And that is a bipartisan problem. Whether Washington has been controlled by Team Blue or Team Red or some combination of White House and Congress, no matter what the combination is, we only have increased spending. And that's a thing that's really causing inflation. It's something that I've talked about as counterintuitive

inflation. Lynn Alden talks about it as fiscal dominance. But there's nothing Powell can do to stop that. There's nothing he can do to stop inflation. And so, you know, we should we should throw him a bone on that. But this is really the fault of Congress. So if they're out of session, at least they can spend more. Yeah, it's cautiously optimistic because. Right. Because I think, I mean, unless you're marching in a no-kings protest, I think most your average American is looking at this and saying what you said earlier. Like, yeah, do we really need this? What are we paying for? So, Marty, you and I agree that it's the Democrats keeping the government closed.

Should I post on X, Marty, Ben has just endorsed Democratic policies? Yes. as long as not new york democratic policies and if it's federal democratic well that i mean and it's interesting like we've got wins there but then you have this sort of emerging sort of socialist populace um particularly in new york city with mamdani um coming to it seems inevitable that it will become to power uh in a couple of weeks here uh and it's this weird sort of manifestation of this overt democratic socialism in the financial hub of the world and it is scary to be honest that there are a number of lemmings out there who

will take this guy's sort of campaign speeches hook line and sinker and think that they can actually um impose socialism on the united states's largest city and have good outcomes but um i think that's something we need to keep an eye on moving forward and that's what i've been thinking of like how do you really cut through that narrative like this it never works throughout history wherever it's tried to be implemented um we should not be doing that anywhere in the United States, particularly the financial hub of the world. Well, you know, we've seen the same party in the same policies in every major city in the United States and living conditions in those cities continually gets worse. But the people there keep voting for the same policies. So,

you know, the truth is anybody who knows any history knows that socialism or communism or redistribution. It doesn't work. And, and, you know, everybody says, Oh, you know, we just did, it wasn't real communism. Yes, it was. It's, it doesn't work. It's not going to work. Unfortunately, you know, every generation needs to learn that lesson through hard experience. It's available in books, but that requires, you know, reading something longer than a TikTok video. And, you know, people don't want to do that. Okay. You know, fine. Then they're going to learn. And the thing that is really amazing to me as somebody who lived in New York City, who lived in Manhattan and worked in finance for 25 years, you know, all these people who say, you know, the rich aren't

paying their fair share. Well, you know, one, nobody ever defines fair share. The beauty of fair share is everybody's in favor of fair, but it's never specific. But more importantly, the the tax base of New York is a very, very small number of people. The top one or two percent of taxpayers there are highly mobile. They they run finance firms. They can pick up and leave. Right. They all they and by the way, they don't have to move to Florida. They can. They don't have to. They can move to Connecticut. They can go to Greenwich. They can go to Westchester and they can go to Long Island or New Jersey like they don't have to pick up and have all of their employees move. They literally just need to go one county over in any direction. And and New York

has just lost its entire tax base. So, you know, none of this is going to work. You know, I own a home in Connecticut. We're expecting a flood of refugees and much higher property prices. And it looks like there's a good chance that New Jersey could get a Republican governor uh in a couple weeks how incredible that is right right virginia new jersey like people are they're getting tired of of seeing these policies they're willing to try something different the thing that worries me marty is you know so we've been very critical of the left in this conversation and reasonably so rightfully so right i i endorse everything i i said everything i said i stand behind it. But one of the things that does worry me is Republicans run for office saying we're the

party of fiscal sanity. We're going to get things under control. You know, we're, you know, not going to be the party of tax and spend. And we're going to do things that make more sense. Right. We're the adults in the room. But they don't actually do it. They're lying. Republican team read when they're in charge of Washington, they don't cut spending. They talk about it, but they don't actually do it. And so, you know, we correctly criticize Democrats as being horrible communists, but we should also criticize Republicans as being liars because they spend like Democrats. It's a bipartisan problem. Yeah, it really is. And hopefully the government shut down and doesn't give either of them the ability to lie. I think I think it's incredible that if we

could get you elected to the Senate, you'd be voting with the Democrats right now. uh this is fascinating yeah i'm very optimistic right now and i guess to wrap this up uh you have a deal for the listeners of the show for deep knowledge investing if you uh i'll let you explain it yeah yeah the so if you go to deep knowledge investing.com there's a subscribe now button in the top right if you're interested so you know what we're doing there. I talk about macro stuff like this all the time. But, you know, I also have my own portfolio up there. And, you know, whenever I have a new idea, I write it up for subscribers and explain how I'm investing and why. And because the important thing is, you know, you and I, we've

just complained about a lot of stuff, but I'm investing in a way to take advantage of all these things that you and I don't like. And so for people who want to take advantage of that, just click you know the subscribe now button and we have a coupon code for you for your people it's tftc21 and that gets you guys 21 off of a paid subscription whether you do monthly or yearly well i appreciate you offering that to our audience i mean i i think you're one of uh this audience's favorite recurring guest over the last couple years the youtube comments are always clamoring for me to bring you back on more consistently. So I'm sorry it took us six months to catch up, but I'm glad we did. And not only that, it's on Bitcoin white paper day.

It's the 17th anniversary of Satoshi Nakamoto releasing the Bitcoin white paper. So, Marty, I'm going to tell you, Bitcoin is my largest position because I bought a medium sized position and then didn't sell. it just became it just became huge and and you know the one change the one change i made so i bought in 2021 20 no 2020 when i was 15 000 runs up to 64 000 comes back down to 15 000 i didn't get upset i didn't lose sleep i didn't worry i just bought more i think we're sitting pretty now hovering at 110 uh yeah so i you know i saw somebody you know saying do you think it hits a hundred thousand

first or 150 first or you know is the next 10 000 or 20 000 up or down and i don't know the answer to that but somebody asked me the other day do i think it'll hit a million and i said yeah absolutely and a friend of mine said you know i want to buy bitcoin but i think i missed didn't i see you didn't miss it he said how do you know and i said well do you think congress is going to stop overspending no you think they're going to stop debasing the dollar no then you're not too late we're all going to be billionaires one day in dollar terms uh well yes it's that old incendiary live jimmy carter thing you know like wouldn't you like to have a six thousand dollar suit you know wouldn't you like to have a hundred dollar cigar right like not really

no Gary this has been a pleasure thank you for joining me on this Friday morning and I hope you have a great night in Tel Aviv

yeah Marty thank you so much really appreciate you having me always great talking with you I enjoy these conversations looking forward to the next one I am as well peace and love freaks

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