TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #732: The Iran War Escalation with Mel Mattison

Episode Date: April 1, 2026

Marty sits down with Mel Mattison to discuss the escalating Iran-Israel conflict, the rising threat of nuclear war and global recession, and how investors should position themselves in cash, gold, and Bitcoin to navigate potential market crashes and stagflation. Mel on X: https://x.com/MelMattison1 Mel’s website: https://www.melmattison.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://bitkey.world/ Bitcoin 2026 - Las Vegas http://bit.ly/3NA9xQh OPNEXT https://tinyurl.com/tftc2026 Unchained https://unchained.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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Mel, here we are. Q1 2026 ends tomorrow.

And we're here for the quarterly update. Yeah, what a quarter. Longest first quarter in history, I think. Yeah, it's one of those quarters where years happen and weeks, I think. We'll get into it. We were just talking about it before we hit record, but I mean, you came out with a video that was pretty open and I think vulnerable on Friday talking about your, your battles with alcohol.

And I thought it was, I was telling you, I think it was really admirable of you to put that out and recognize it and get it out there in the public. Cause I think it's important to not fight those battles by yourself. And so I'm happy that you, you did go public with that. And, um, you're on up, it seems like on a path to, to getting cleaner. Yeah, I, I hope so. And, uh, I, I, I appreciate, you know, I, I know there's been people that have been supportive and, you know, that means a lot and it helps me, um, anybody that's known

me for any period of time, you know, has known that I have struggled with alcohol pretty much my entire life. It was, it was kind of one of these, uh, you know, love at first sight things with me where there was no like building into it. Like I've always struggled with it. And, and I've had periods of time where I'm sober for years, you know, um, spent time in, in AA. Um, I have a sponsor. Uh, so I, it's something that I've recognized as a, as a battle for me. And sometimes I do really well, uh, fighting the battle. And sometimes I get into weak situations and weak times and week periods in my life where, you know, I don't do the recovery work I should.

I start thinking things are, you know, all right. And that's when it, you know, slips into you, you know, as they say in the program, you know, it's cunning, baffling and powerful. And, you know, while you're not drinking, you know, alcohol's in the garage doing pushups, you know, waiting for you to come back. And so basically, you know, what happened to me really was I was in a really good place. i would say two three years ago when my book came out and you know i had really like spent a lot of time on kind of fitness and sobriety during the pandemic actually and i just kind of slowly

started slipping back into it and and thinking that i was all right and when you suffer from this you know that's that's a false sense of security it's just something that you know does happen to people. It's great when people like go into the program and, you know, they have this epiphany moment and some people do. The vast majority of people, you know, they struggle a little bit and they don't, you know, go to that first meeting and they're sober the rest of their life. It's more of an on and off battle. And people have slips, people have relapses, and people get into bad phases. And I got into one of those bad phases recently. And, um, you know, fortunately I, I have the opportunity to like check myself and pull myself back right now

before any, you know, real damage is done other than, you know, making some jerky, stupid posts or, um, embarrassing myself a little bit, um, you know, before any serious damage is done. And so I just wanted to say to people that have followed me and listen to me, you know, if you read a post or you see me, you know, after a few drinks, you know, on a podcast, you're like, what the hell is up with this guy? Like, you know, when I'm when I'm on the ball, I'm pretty good. And, you know, I've let some things slide. And so I would just, you know, apologize to people and say, look, you know, that stuff really wasn't me. It wasn't the person that I want to be. It was somebody who's, you know, kind of suffering and dealing with alcohol use disorder.

And, you know, I'm trying to get better and I'm working on it. And like I said, I'm fortunate that, you know, I'm not in this kind of rock bottom, lost it all position. You know, I have people that love me, support me and understand this. And so I'm going to, you know, get back to the work, get back to focusing on on that aspect of my life more than, you know, just the markets and things. But, you know, it's it's not easy. It's not easy. But, you know, I I've I've seen so many people that I respect and admire go through, you know, issues with addiction and alcohol. And I think it's something that just comes after people, you know. and, and you have it and, and, and, you know, the only thing you can do is, is work to get better

and, and acknowledge it and, um, you know, do the best you can, uh, because it, it really is something that, you know, it, it tears up families, tears up lives, um, all over the world. And, uh, it's, it, it's not fun. You know, it's not fun. It stopped being fun for me a long time ago um and uh so that's where i'm at with that no no like i said um we had we've never met in person but we've been developing this relationship doing these quarterly updates for two three years now and um not care by and i'm here for you and um i'm glad to see that again you were um wise enough to to basically go public and be vulnerable and make a public statement like hey i'm in a bad spot and i'm looking to get a better one and hopefully if anything this quarterly update

can serve as um as a step in that direction where we step back look at what's going on uh in in the markets in the world and try to provide people with some signal based off your analysis which throughout, um, throughout the years has been pretty, pretty spot on and some misses here and there, but I think that's why people really love these discussions because, uh, your perspective is, uh, certainly unique and oftentimes, uh, correct in retrospect. So, um, like we mentioned, it's been a crazy first three months of the year. Um, obviously the war popping off in the Middle east we have um severely hindered oil and gas infrastructure uh supply chain which i think many people particularly on x and i think in the circles that we we observe are saying it

feels like february 2020 pre-covered pre-lockdown uh where the people who are very online like ourselves are saying this is not going to be a quick and easy fix and people need to prepare And while most people who are not terminally online are a bit oblivious outside of what they're seeing at gas stations right now. Yeah, I mean, this is definitely, we've gotten ourselves into a pickle here, to say the least. And it's been a little shocking to me, to be honest with you, because I've been following this Iran situation closely. And, you know, I'm not calling myself some grand, you know, military strategist or expert, but I do follow a lot of people that I really respect that have spent their lives doing this type of stuff. I mean, whether it's like a Colonel Douglas McGregor or a John Mearsheimer or, you know, there's a couple of favorite shows that I like. One's called Daniel Davis Deep Dive by this former former lieutenant colonel.

And he has a lot of great guests like, you know, a Ted Postal guy who's worked at MIT his whole life studying like missiles and interceptors and like people that really know this stuff. And these aren't the type of people that get time on Fox News or CNN because what they're saying doesn't fit the narrative that, you know, the powers that be want out there. But these are the guys that really know what's going on. And these guys like not that much that's happened is really that surprising, other that we actually did what we did, because they were saying when the troop buildup was going on in Iran, like there's not a military solution here. yes, we have the most powerful military on the planet, but sometimes there are solutions for which the military isn't the answer, right? And you think that, hey, I could tie it into my own situation. Like, it's like, hey, you know, I've got great willpower. I can work hard and do this and do that. And it's like, you come up against something that willpower is not the solution for,

you need to find a different solution. And, you know, this thought process that the U.S. military, we're just going to drop some bombs and we're going to achieve all these objectives, was kind of foolhardy from the beginning. So I was not actually too worried about it. As recently as when Trump did his State of the Union address, which was just a few days before the attacks began, you had guys like Mearsheim around there saying, hey, Trump's saying like if Iran says the magic words, no nukes, you know, this doesn't have to happen. And then you had good signals coming out of Oman, like there's negotiations. And so the fact that there's no military solution, that Israel's been trying to talk the U.S. into this for decades, and every

president in the Pentagon has basically come to the conclusion this is a bad mission. Yeah, we'd like to get rid of the Iranian regime, but the military solution just isn't there. I just didn't think it was going to happen. And when it did happen, I thought, well, they must have like a rabbit up their sleeve, like a Delce Rodriguez or something. They're not going to actually do this, are they? And by like the fifth or sixth day, and it became clear, like, no, this is just, they're going down this route. I, for the first time since in December, one of our first quarterly meetings in December of 2024, when I was saying, hey, you know, buy puts, raise cash, for the first time i did that and unfortunately this market actually gave you a chance to do this like

we were still trading like 6800 6850 on the spy seven eight days after this thing started i mean we even went positive on the nasdaq and the s&p you know the monday after the attacks so the market i think was kind of in the same kind of general agreement with me like that we're not really going to do this are we and and once it became clear which for me was like five six days after the attack started, I think the market generally started to get this maybe the second or third week and then definitely last week. You know, people are realizing like there's no easy exit here. And every day that goes by, Iran is just getting in the driver's seat more and more. And and what's to stop them from truly demanding their goals being met of us getting out of the

Gulf, abandoning our bases. You know, oil starts trading in Yuan. They start collecting a toll on the Strait of Hormuz. Because we don't have leverage with them. To use Trump terms, we don't have any cards. What are we going to do? He sent out a post this morning that makes me wonder if he's lost touch with reality, where he's just saying we're going to hit their energy plants and maybe their desalinization plants. And it's like, don't you realize that these guys have missiles that can do that exact same thing to the entire you know gcc where like they're obviously like 80 90 dependent on desalinization or you know talk about like in the beginning like this bs about oh well the reason the straits not open is because people won't give insurance um but it's

safe it's like if it was safe the u.s navy would be in there and it would the oil would be flowing So there's just been this massive, massive propaganda to convince people that there are some really good options on the table for the United States. And right now, everyone that I know doesn't see them. And I think the best case situation is that somehow we actually do sacrifice a lot, like get a bad deal, but at least get out of it. But what I'm worried about is the probability that we don't and that, you know, this escalates and continues. And it has the potential, I believe, to spiral all the way to the possibility of a nuclear exchange, specifically between Israel and Iran. And I think we didn't know Iran had had missiles that could reach Diego Garcia. And for all we know, since last June, they took that 60 percent uranium, ramped it up to 90 percent, and they could very well have a nuclear weapon for all we know.

And so I think that's a big fat, you know, a big tail on the end of the spectrum. But the fact that that's even something that I think is a serious scenario people need to consider is a pretty ridiculous place for us to be, given I thought we had a lot of tailwinds, you know, heading into this year. yeah and actually i was um reflecting on our past two conversations and i forget it was the last one of the one before that but it was right after we went in and exfiltrated uh maduro from venezuela and i asked you like what are and that was one of those operations where it was six hours in and out in pretty clear that it seemed like we wanted ground forces in venezuela wasn't be some prolonged conflict and i and i asked you well like and i think you were pretty bullish on the execution of of what happened in venezuela specifically and i asked you what are

you worried about moving forward is that something like this boost his confidence to the point where he goes oh now we go get cuba now we go to iran and it seems like that now that scenario is playing out uh because he's saber rattling at cuba uh in parallel as well yeah i do i remember saying that i remember saying what's worrying me is that he's he's he's on a hot streak and i've been on a hot streak as a trader where it seems like every single thing i touch turns to gold and you start to start believing your own hype and and and you you put down a big bet on something and then that big bet is wrong and it it makes those past gains not look that great and i think he had a lot he was he was rolling up like kind of a string of pretty good victories like he kind of extricated

the u.s and israel out of the 12-day war with that strike on fordow and the other nuclear facilities in iran no american casualties midnight hammer looked brilliant then you had you know the maduro raid. I mean, things were looking like, hey, he's being able to surgically use military force to achieve kind of a tactical objective with very little cost in lives, frankly, not only to us, but also to our enemies. People might die on either side, but in the grand chess game of geopolitics, relatively small casualties or zero on on our side in Midnight Hammer and the Maduro raid case. And, you know, it's like, hey, if I think he I think he really believed that he could do the same thing. And there's a lot of talk about, you know, Mossad, you know, seven in-face

meetings between Bibi Netanyahu and Trump since he became president, kind of convincing him away from U.S. intelligence, like kind of bringing him on board to, we can go in and hit them, they're weak, they're ready to collapse. And this is really a concern of mine, is just this influence that the Israel lobby and that certain contributors to Trump have. And I think a lot of people, you know, they kind of know it exists, but they don't, I don't think they really understand how pervasive it seems to be in this case with this president in particular. I mean, I think you have people that he's putting in key roles like Jared Kushner and Witkoff, and you have to question are they totally allegiant to the united states and you know an example that i would give

is like an or an analogy is i'd imagine like let's say you work for a company for like 20 years or i don't know let's say you still have friends you have maybe some family members that work at this company let's say it's apple then you go to work for microsoft and you see an opportunity to do something while you're working at Microsoft, that's going to cost Microsoft, you know, 20, 30 cents per share off their earnings. But you know that if you do that, it's going to cost Microsoft 20 or 30 cents, but it's going to save $5 a share off of the earnings of Apple. And you think, wow, I've got all these friends, I've got these family, maybe I still got stock options there. It's going to be a little bit negative for Microsoft, but it's really going

to help out Apple. So, you know, I'm going to do it like if an employee did that, a boss would come in and say, hey, man, you're fired. You're making decisions against us because you want to. And and I think there are very powerful people in the United States government who somewhat or absolutely do feel that way about Israel, where they see it as almost an extension of the United States or they feel that it's legitimate to take Israeli national interest into concern when it comes to United States strategic decisions. And this is a very serious issue, in my opinion. I mean, this is this is to me, Israel is the greatest danger to the United States from a nation state perspective. And I think the evidence is in what's been happening the last month with us

getting dragged into a war that's completely not for our national security interests, has a very low likelihood of success, and is only hurting the American people, putting our troops at risk, possibly driving the global economy into a recession. And I think the clock is ticking for getting us out of this without extreme damage, extreme damage. And I think there's still time left to do it and the economy can recover. And that would still actually be my base case. Like after all this, I still think we can end up with a pretty good year in financial markets. But I think some hard decisions need to be made in the next two, three weeks, next month top. And if they're not, we could start going down a path that just has like 35, 40% possible

declines in, say, the broader markets written all over it. And that's probably not even the worst case scenario. So freaks, guess what? Just booked my tickets to Vegas, headed for Bitcoin 2026. it's that time of the year, April 27th to 29th in Las Vegas. I'm going to be there. A ton of people are going to be there. You better get your ass there. You know what? People are calling it bear market. These are the best conferences. I've been going since 2019 when it was in a parking garage in San Francisco. If you want to get the best possible ticket prices, make sure you use our link and the code TFTC. You go to 2026.b.tc. Use the code TFTC. You'll get 10% off. You can bundle with a hotel room to stay big and make the most of your experience staying on site at

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party up next is where builders meet capital founders find funding and companies source top talent plus meet institutional investors and developers from blackrock hc wainwright and bitcoin infrastructure corp if you're at a venture fund or another finance firm this is the event to learn more about the quantum computing leading edge bitcoin tech and topics that will define Bitcoin's futures. Go to opnext.dev for tickets and use the code TFTC to get 25% off a general admission or VIP ticket to the event. Again, that's opnext.dev, go TFTC for 25% off a ticket. I'll see you there. No, I mean, I think, and it's funny because you mentioned you're worried he got in a hot streak last year. And then I went back and read the tape. I think it was this

quarterly update last year. I threw out there, my biggest worry was Israel convincing the Trump administration to go troops on the ground in iran and when the 12-day war happened in june i was worried and happy to to learn or happy that was only a 12-day war and they got out but this time around i was in florida when the bomb started dropping that friday and saturday uh friday night and saturday morning it was just like oh god here we go because i i don't like once you get into this stuff and again i think the the scariest thing of the last month is just how the sort of etiquette of war has been thrown to the wayside particularly with the targeting of energy infrastructure uh refinery infrastructure and the rhetoric around bombing desalination

plants like once you cross those lines it's very hard to come back from that i really hope we can pull back from the edge uh as it pertains to that stuff yeah i mean it's it's it's been a total disregard it's not just like crossing over the line a little bit and i mean you look at you look there's things in the un charter and article two and different stuff about um you know uh uh you know nations should you know adopt should should go through every single diplomatic effort available before engaging in hostility and only then like in self-defense and you know the only way that it's possible to kind of wage like a first strike is if there is like an imminent threat and that's why this word imminent is always brought up because it's actually in you know

international law and it's it's it's basically you know defined and and and it's pretty clearly defined and it needs to when they're saying imminent they're talking about like nuclear bombs are in the air and can't be called back like they're not saying like well in you know it's possible because i mean obviously i mean any country at any point could say it's possible somebody is going to attack us in the future. You know, it's very possible that one day China might attack us. It's very possible that one day Pakistan might attack India. It's very possible one day North Korea might strike South Korea. All these things are possible threats. And so they define imminent pretty clearly. And, you know, I understand that international law is not

anything that can reign in, you know, nation states. I mean, this is like at the end of the day nation states are live in an anarchical world like there is no like true higher power the u.n doesn't have you know they they can the the war courts can put out arrest warrants but if you can't enforce it i mean what is it but but there's a reason why these why that that framework was put in place after world war ii uh in the language of the documents to avoid the scourge of war is why they did it. And the idea was, let's put these things in place to try to avoid war at all costs. And it just seems like after that hot streak, like it began to start to forget about what war can actually become. And it can just be like a video game. And they've even put out, you know,

videos from the White House, like kind of comparing our strikes to video games, which is really kind of depressing to see and then you saw a post this morning from yeah talking about taking out desalinization plants and i mean these are all things that are clearly war crimes i mean like i mean you pete hegseth no quarter like they've they've gone beyond the pale of like tough talk to achieve a goal it's now like they're starting to do some of these things and we've seen israel do some of these things and the the thing that people need to realize people might say well it's war you got to do what you got to do but in this situation as i mentioned at the top like iran has cards to play i mean they have very good missiles and a lot of missiles and they have these missiles

in underground bunkers that even you know moab and bunker buster bombs can't get um you know there's no way to destroy them without like sending in boots on the ground like they're going to have these missiles. We can bomb their power plants. We can bomb their desalinization. They're still going to have these accurate missiles. They're still going to have targeting information. They probably already have targeting information from the Russians and Chinese on all of these vulnerable assets in the region. And you take out like the desalinization capacity for Riyadh and you're talking about a humanitarian crisis with hundreds of thousands possibly dead. And I mean, the Gulf Coast countries are like 50 percent of the people

there are dual nationals. They're not even citizens of the country. I mean, that that entire area could become like a ghost town. I mean, everything that's been built up in these places like Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Riyadh over the decades to try to create something for themselves post-oil world is being threatened right now. I mean, everything is being threatened. And with no good military solution on the table that anybody with any brain in their head can see, you start to get worried that is this, you know, something that could drive Israel to say, look, we need to do what we need to do. And that means a tactical nuke, or they're said to probably have around 200 warheads, maybe a mass bombing of Iran. I mean, that actually starts to become

a possibility, which is absolute madness. And as I said earlier, I think there is a chance that Iran has a nuclear weapon as we're speaking. And some of these guys that know, it's become a joke that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon for the last 15 years. But that's been part of their thought out strategy is we're not going to have a nuclear weapon. We're going to have all the pieces for a nuclear weapon, and we're going to keep it ready in case we need one on short notice. We're going to have an uranium up to 60% enrichment. We're going to have probably bomb designs, warhead designs. They have missiles that can get fitted with nuclear warheads so that at any point in time, it's like you have a big jigsaw puzzle on your table and you get it 90%

complete. And then you just forget about it for five years. Yeah. For the last five years, you've been two more hours of working on it away from completing the jigsaw puzzle. It is possible to be two weeks away from a nuclear weapon for the last 10 years. And I think they have been anywhere from what i've seen from the experts some say that it's as little as two to three weeks and i've seen some people say tops like six months and so if they started working on this in extra secret you know circumstances you know after june um after that first attack uh on the nuclear facilities it's very possible they have one and obviously our intelligence is not perfect because we've seen that they launched a missile at Diego Garcia and we had no knowledge that they

had ballistic missiles that could be sent that far away from Iran. So we're literally dealing with a situation where we might have two nuclear powers in Israel and Iran who are seriously considering using those. And I mean, the question is, is why? Why have we gotten ourselves into the situation. Iran has been basically at the same posture for the last 15 or 20 years. And there has been this shift in the United States of recognizing that a lot of U.S. foreign policy towards Israel is not necessarily in U.S. self-interest. And it's been growing, and you can see it in the demographics. And you get this sense that Netanyahu and super hawks, even in the U.S. State Department, like the neocon type people, they might have seen this

period as the last chance. Like this is this is it. It's now or never. If we're going to do something about Iran, we do it now. And I mean, it could have been a big Mossad operation to manipulate Trump, defeat him, false intelligence coming from Bibi Netanyahu. So and then some of the things that Trump says, I mean, he seems to be losing touch with reality at this point where he's talking about we've achieved regime change. We've won the war. And, you know, the only thing about Trump is, you know, he did go to a church growing up in New York City. It was kind of like a positive thinking manifestation type message from this particular congregation. like you say things and and they they become reality and so he does have a tendency to just say what he wants to happen um but you almost start worrying like is is he surrounded by so

many yes men has he been given so much false intelligence uh fed through uh bb that that he actually doesn't really understand the gravity of the situation and even the way that somebody like a Mearsheimer or a Colonel McGregor or one of these guys understands. And if he doesn't understand that, he could believe that, oh, we can send boots on the ground and we can do this. We can take these islands. And I mean, it's just it's just ridiculous. It's like Lindsey Graham talking about like, oh, Iwo Jima. I mean, Iwo Jima, it's like there were 20,000 Japanese on Iwo Jima and there were 25 plus thousand Marine casualties to take that Island. Okay. Iran has a million man army. All right. Use those same percentages. So what do we need? You know, 1.3 million, you know,

US casualties. Yeah. Oh, we could suffer that. I mean, the US could do it. We could carpet bomb them with nukes. We could, we could raise 200,000 troops and we could mobilize forces and spend the next three years you know losing hundreds of thousands of people um for what i mean nobody wants that the cost is way too high nobody wants it wants that obviously it's it's ridiculous to even consider that but that's like kind of what it would take to take iran and so we've got this situation um and and just on iwo jima like i mean yeah it was like six seven thousand killed like 20,000 casualties. There were like 20,000 Japanese on the island. And by the end of it, there were only a few hundred Japanese alive. So over 90% KIAs for the Japanese force,

like that's what Iwo Jima was. So we don't want to be bringing up Iwo Jima as some sort of a model for future action. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and Block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair,

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going in the right direction. No, he's horrible. I don't know. I mean, some of these people, I mean, it's like, I don't know. It's like General Jack Keane on Fox. I mean, he works now for something called the Institute of War, which is completely funded by like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, because, you know, it's one thing when Lindsey Graham says something or even Pete Hegseth, but then you see like a four-star general, like General Jack Keane or a three-star general, this guy, Keith Kellogg, who actually was the division commander for the 82nd Airborne, start talking about how, oh, we'll take casualties, but these young kids, they know what they're signing up for. You know, we'll put them in. Like, what are these people thinking? Are they

are they really insane? I mean, you start to think like these are. These people have some sort of psychopathy, like there's something wrong with these people that they're almost giddy about some of these strikes or talking about it, some of the commentary that's come out of Trump, like doing it for fun. Or I told Pete we were going to wind up the war and he said, oh, that's too bad. Or I mean, some of some of this language, it's almost unreal that this is coming from the top people in the United States. It makes me. I'm not going to say embarrassed, but it definitely makes me regret voting for Donald Trump. Now, I wouldn't have voted for Kamala Harris either. I shouldn't voted for anybody after seeing the behavior from this administration in the last month.

And I've said this on X, like, I got to admit it, like I was wrong. I think a lot of people that voted for Trump feel the same way. And that's the other confounding thing about it. He's destroying the coalition he spent the last 10 years building up. And he's going back to people like Condoleezza Rice, or he's pointing out quotes by like this guy, I think his name is Scott Yates, who was the national security advisor for Dick Cheney, as like people you need to start listening to again, Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney's national security advisor. I mean, and this was something that was always a concern of mine. I always would say, you know, I'm not a Trump sycophant.

There are issues I have with him, particularly with his policies and his stance toward Israel. I didn't understand why he didn't take the same stance toward Israel that he took towards the Ukraine, which was like, look, this isn't our war. Yeah, we want them to do do well, but it's not that important to us. And I'm like, yeah, because they're a foreign country. And that's the way we should think about Israel. This is in George Washington's farewell address where he says a nation should neither be friend nor foe. I think he uses the term an excess of fondness or hatred for another nation for to do so makes that nation to some degree a slave. And he's basically nailing it on the head in the farewell address that nation states should not have friends.

what he called an excess of fondness, and there continues to be this display of an excess of fondness towards Israel and an excess of hatred towards Iran, which does indeed make the United States to some degree a slave. And it's not pretty. It's not a good situation to be in. What Washington was thinking about was Jefferson being too fond of the French and too hatred towards the English and John Adams being too fond towards the British and too much hatred towards the French. And that was what prompted him to say that. But in this situation, we have, you know, kind of the same dynamics playing out where

there seem to be powerful people in the government, including the president, that seem to think that israeli national interest should be taken into account um and into the calculus for united states national interest and that's just not the way it's supposed to be at least if you agree with george washington yeah i do agree as uh somebody millennial mid-30s now it's hard to admit um i grew up with 9-11 the iraq afghanistan war snowden leaks the wiki leaks i part of the reason why i'm bitcoin is staunch anti-interventionist think the money printer the bankers are funding the wars and enabling it and that's part of like a very strong reason why i'm in bitcoin you know do what i can to focus on something that takes some of that that power away from these governments and and gets us

away from all these conflicts which have proven that's the other thing it's just like we pulled out of afghanistan what two three years ago now at this point it was complete clusterfuck but it was like all right we were there for 20 however many years and now we're out and it's like oh we're going back to the middle east uh and to your point if things don't de-escalate or we don't find a way out of this in the near term i think similar to you i'm convinced this is going to be a prolonged conflict that costs a lot of lives a lot of money and disrupts the economy which is probably something we should get to is like markets i guess now for the audience like painting the different scenarios and maybe starting with what's the extent of the damage that exists today

and its effect on markets and what are the the different paths we can go on from here considering different uh reactions from the trump administration yeah yeah let's let's tie it into the markets and finance. I mean, the one last little point I'd add before I do that is it was it was fascinating to like listen to Joe Kent on on Tucker talking about what he called sinister forces, possibly forcing Trump's hand and talking. I've seen other people talking about like possible Mossad threats against like killing Trump's grandchildren and Epstein file things. And, you know, what do they have on his head? And I think the fact that you have somebody like Joe Kent, who is the head for the Center for Counterterrorism, like the number two guy in the intelligence structure, talking about he's worried that sinister forces might have forced the president of the United States hand. And like, this is pretty scary stuff that we're in.

And I just hope I just hope that we come out of this. But I just wanted to say, like, because it's just so confounding to me. Like, why would you do this? This was so obviously a military disaster waiting to happen. It's not in the interest. It's breaking apart the MAGA coalition. It's like it's destroying the economy, which it's it's breaking every promise you made. No foreign wars, a great economy, lower prices like.

And and let's let's segue it there with lower prices, because one thing I've always been a proponent of in the last year or two is like putting up a chart just showing like CPI overlaid with WTI oil and saying that a lot of people, I thought, gave way too much credit to like all the money printing for the massive inflation we had after the pandemic. And I said, there was also a massive, massive oil spike there. There was literally like one hundred and fifty dollar spike in oil from the low to the high between 2020 and 2022. We had like negative 20, negative 30 dollar a barrel oil. And at the peak after Ukraine, we were at one twenty one thirty. That spread like one hundred and fifty dollar spread. That's a massive oil spike. One hundred and fifty dollars.

The equivalent would be we were at like fifty five. it'd be like oil going to 205 that was the type of jump we had and oil spiking oil is the key driver of inflation in my opinion it it starts off in the in the headline and if it stays some high long it moves into core and it because it's it's involved in so much of the economy it's the transportation it's the moving goods it's in the plastics it's in the fertilizers it's in the gases It's in everything. And the thing that I was always saying to people, don't be worried about inflation coming back. Look, oil's $55 a barrel. Like, you don't have to worry about it. And yeah, there you go. There's WTI. And, you know, I wasn't worried about it because oil, it looked like it could possibly even head to the 40s. And when you inflation adjust that, I mean, that's about as cheap as we've ever seen oil in the last 30 years.

So I was like, there's nothing to worry about with inflation. And so I think what we've seen markets doing is worrying about that. Then what does that mean? It means possibly rate hikes. What does that mean? It means higher two year yields. You know, now we've got higher bond yields. Now we have to lower the PEs that like all these things start flowing from this higher oil price, higher for longer. And one of the things I said at the beginning of this war was it would almost be better to have like a spike to 150 and like a quick end to this war come then like something that can be drawn out. And we're we're we are in a situation where one of the possible situations is like this drawn out conflict, like maybe some boots on the ground, but it's a lot more of this missiles back and forth. And the economy doesn't completely shut down or go to two hundred dollars a barrel because, you know, Iran does is letting like China tankers go through and stuff like this.

And so instead of having some sort of a resolution anytime soon, we get this long drawn out conflict where oil just hovers between, say, 90 and 150. And like you do that and you are going to start getting six, seven percent inflation down the road. And then you add on to that, you know, the already slowing labor picture and all of these AI concerns that people have had. And you do actually wind up getting into that 1970s stagflation situation, which I thought would be impossible for us to get into because oil was so well behaved and we were oversupplied and the United States is the world's biggest producer and all of this stuff. So we've got so many risks on the table for the market. And I think even the best case scenario, which is this thing wraps up in the next few weeks somehow magically, there's going to be this new premium on oil. And that's going to be a big headwind that's going to stop Warsh from being able to lower rates as much as I thought at the beginning of the year he was probably going to be able to. I still think he's going to lower rates because I think the economy eventually, if the prices are that high for that long, it will start to drive, you know, recessionary and create demand destruction and all that stuff eventually.

But by that point, I mean, man, that economy is already going to be wrecked. And like I said, we're going to be 25, 30 percent off the highs in the broad indices. So I think the marketplace, like the next two to four weeks are extremely critical. Because if this thing doesn't have a clean off off ramp in sight, I think that the markets are just going to inevitably have to really start pricing this in and not just a 10 or 15 percent decline, which is kind of what I'm hoping for. Something that takes us down to the pre-tariff highs, which is around, say, 610, 615 on the SPY, something around 6100. You know, and if there is no clear off ramp or if there's continued escalation, then I think we're going to have to go down a whole nother level, maybe all the way to the tariff lows. So, I mean, this set of scenarios, you know, going forward is just not good. And so from my perspective, what I'm trying to do is hold a lot of cash, hold puts.

um i think gold is the one thing that i've added to strategically when it touched the 200 day and got down to 4100 last week um because i think whenever this wraps up what is going to have to happen is going to be federal reserve intervention because um we've got the private credit concerns I mean, there's so much to unpack in all of this, but I think the main point is, is that when the dust settles, in order to pick up the pieces without a massive recession that collapses tax receipts, that essentially leads to three, four trillion dollar deficits, which then collapses the sovereign bond market across the developed world. The only way out of that is going to be massive coordinated global central bank intervention. And this is going to be the golden opportunity for gold. And for Bitcoin, it needs to break away from that tight, tight, tight software correlation and really move into its own as a store of value liquidity asset, which it always has been. But the liquidity is being drawn out of the system right now, especially with higher oil prices. Once we get into that situation where the liquidity is being pumped in again, that's when the gold and Bitcoin, I think, are really going to shine. And I think they're going to have a great year when all this is said and done. but the path there can either be a hard path or it can be a really really hard horrible path and i hope we just have to take the the semi-hard path and not the uh the disaster path yeah i mean

it's uh it's hard not to be a doomer these days never doom i'm totally weak especially for me I'm always Mr. Optimistic. Like, hey, man, it's going to like that's my default unless I see something structurally changing in like the global dynamics of the economy, like some little attack or, you know, a little thing like like the markets can work through it. The Fed can open up a facility. This can be handled with, yeah, maybe a five, 10 percent correction, but that's going to blow by. It's going to be V shaped. This is not what we're heading into right now. We're not heading into that. We're heading into the possibility of something we haven't seen, you know, really since the financial crisis, which it's eerily reminiscent. I mean, I remember it well. I remember oil was one hundred and fifty dollars a barrel back then, you know, after the market peaked and. And there is no war going on, you know, it was, you know, supply demand, it was overheating, it was other things happening. Um, and you know, what you saw happen during the financial crisis was eventually you saw

gold get hit and you saw gold go down a lot. And, but then coming out of it, that was when you had that massive precious metal run and you had gold get over 2000 and you had silver hit 50 in like 2011, I believe it was. so you had gold go from or like silver go from like i think at the low in 2007 it was might have been in the single digits and you know a couple years later it was 50 so it had one of these massive like 400 you know percent moves in like 48 months and so because of the amount of liquidity that needed to be provided to the system now obviously Bitcoin wasn't around back then. But my guess is that Bitcoin would have behaved similarly,

which is that at the peak of the kind of liquidity squeeze, everything gets sold. Everything needs to be delivered. All the margin calls come in. And it doesn't matter if it's the world's store of value like gold was, it's going to get hit. But then coming out of it, that's when the central bank reaction comes in and it winds up, you know, kicking ass and taking names. And I think that's where we're heading. And I hope we're heading there in a much less severe manner than happened during the financial crisis. And I still think that's my base case. But I don't think we're there yet. I don't think we're bottomed yet. And I think that as far as gold and bitcoin they have given you opportunities to begin to add here i don't think equities have

but i think when gold hit the 200 day uh that was your chance and i think uh bitcoin which has been holding in there um hasn't made a new low for almost two months now um in the 60s uh with the six handle on it, let's say, is a chance to begin to accumulate, even though it could have further declines if this works out poorly. And I believe the same thing with gold. And when we got down to that 200 day, I wasn't able to pick it up right at the 200 day, but I was able to the next day add to some of my longer term holdings of gold with the acknowledgement that I might not be getting the bottom there. There might be one more big leg to drop. And so I think it's very possible there's one more leg to drop in Bitcoin and gold, but there might not be. I think almost certainly

there's at least one more leg to drop in equities. And we're starting to see that today. Like the market's starting to roll over today. And it's kind of like giving you that clear signal where we like open up in the morning and a lot of stuff that's been oversold was doing well. But the big winners, the generals, the microns of the world were getting killed, you know, after they open. And when they start like dumping the microns because they know that they just need to get liquidity and they need to de-lever, it's a pretty easy foreshadow that this is just a small little bear market bounce. And sure enough, you know, S&P is down 11 right now. I think at one point we're up 50 or 60. So we've dropped 70 handles from the open or something. And it's

just like that day after day after day. And what I'm waiting for is that big capitulation moment, right? The 90% plus declines on the NYSE advanced decline line. I'm not talking about a down 3% week. I'm talking about a down 3%, 4% day in the S&P. And if Trump moves in boots on the ground or something like that, I mean, it could happen this week. So I think people need to be ready to deploy some capital because the best times to buy are when the VIX is in the 40s or 50s and you just have to hold your nose and say, there's something here. But in this case, because this could be structural um i will not be i have a lot of cash i will not be deploying at all even if we get there i'll just you know say okay it's time for me to deploy some into equities right

here and and see and see where we go yeah well i mean you mentioned private credit you mentioned ai and that's one thing too i'm trying to view what's happening in the middle east through through different lenses and private credit and private equities doesn't really fit into it but like ai and uh this idea that many people are um putting out there which is like what's happening in iran in the middle east is sort of a proxy to choke china off from um from running away with the ai race and in a way to sort of curb the speed at which they're they're executing on the ai side and to sort of send a message to them like really that being the um the most important or superpower power struggle of the day is China versus the U.S., just like a signal to China from

the U.S. Like we have some leverage here. Obviously, what we're doing in the Middle East is affecting your accessibility to oil and gas to a certain extent. And then the byproducts, which are heavily integral to the chip process that you need to win this AI race. And I could see that. And then you roll in private credit here in the U.S. and it's like you're getting two different stories, one of which is it's a systemic risk that is going to have knock on contagion effects similar to the housing crisis in 2008.

And you have others who are saying, well, it's really confined to the the BDC retail oriented private equity funds that have more finicky investors due to the fact that they're retail that don't understand long duration private equity funds. And so it's just an anomaly with this particular product that doesn't have a good product, a client match in terms of the duration profile necessary. um all this is being being said like going back to like there's talks of rates actually going up the probability of rates going up at the end of the year is beginning to increase dramatically as people are looking out there and looking at the potential inflation on the horizon but i actually just recorded with um john arnold partner um one of my partners at 10 31 this morning about the subject it's like i don't see them raising rates at all because you either have this mass industrialization that's going to need to support the war effort or if the people who

are right about private credit potentially being a contagion event like they're going to need a bailout and you could see the scenario going back to your stagflationary comments from earlier where we get to the fall of this year and inflation's ripping private credits completely disintegrating which is creating these knock on effects and the Fed is forced to drop rates to zero again and inject a bunch of liquidity. Oh, and by the way, AI is advancing at a similar pace and eating out the labor market at the same time. Yeah.

And do you occur control and do do whatever is necessary? Because, you know, in the seventies, you know, Volcker had that option to to raise rates to to crush the inflation. if we get a situation where we have this big problem in the economy, but we do still have inflation creeping in, because look, the AI build is going on, right? I mean, there's a lot of demand for commodities, demand for electricity, then you add in the higher oil prices. So I think we can have a situation where we have these inflation rates going up, but the Fed just doesn't have in its toolkit, like raising rates into that type of a situation the way that Volcker was able to.

It will kill, you know, the fiscal receipts of the government. We saw what happened to the deficit in 2022 because the market went down that whole year and capital gains were not what was expected. And it hurts states, you know, like California, who get a lot of their income from people exercising options and things like that from you know working at meta or apple or whatever and they got nice gains on those options they got to fill the state coffers um you know all these tax receipts kind of collapse and i think that you know today um i'm not sure exactly what the the the tenure is doing here um right now but it you know earlier today yeah we had yields coming down there, there's still yields are still down on the day. Because I think what the market

is trying to realize is like, yeah, like raising rates isn't going to be an option. There's not going to be the potential to say, oh, well, we know inflation is up, we know there's probably going to be more coming. So let's raise rates into it. Because if they do into a weak economy, it's going to collapse the economy so much that it's going to hurt housing, which is a huge, Like everything's just – to raise rates, it's kind of a weird circular thing where they're like, okay, we need to raise rates to calm inflation. But if we raise rates, we're going to destroy so much of the economy, we won't actually manifest that inflation. And it's this situation where the central bank is just ill-equipped to handle the economic challenges that it's presented with by using that simple tool of either raising or lowering rates. And they're going to have to get into tools that haven't really been used since World War II, you know, when we did do explicit yield curve control and the 10-year was capped back then at 2.5%.

And I think we're already seeing foreign holders of treasuries at the lowest levels since 1997. You know, so what are you going to do with all this government debt? I mean, think about all the government debt we're going to have to print. This is going to be the biggest deficit we've ever seen. I mean, the tariffs are being taken away. A lot of that money is going to have to be refunded. They've got a $200 billion bill in the works for more military spending. We've got huge refunds coming from the one big, beautiful bill.

We're going to have tax receipts down because the stock market is down. We are going to have blowout deficits. We're going to have so much debt to rent. And the foreign buyers are saying, why do I want to buy U.S. treasuries? They're trash. And how do you handle that without collapsing the global economy? Because it's not just the U.S. It's going to be the U.K.

It's going to be the ECB. It's going to be Japan. And so the only solution is either to allow there to just be a complete collapse and, you know, head into Great Depression 2.0 or take extraordinary measures. And I think that's going to be QE. It might not happen this year. This might not happen until 2027. But I think at some point, the only way to handle this amount of debt is going to be with money printing, artificially low rates, manipulated, perhaps the need to put in special facilities where the Fed will take in the paper that they need. They lent to these private credit firms because the way it gets into the banking system, private credit, is you might say, oh, well, it's private credit. It was companies like Aries and Blue Owl, and they just found rich investors or institutions or pension funds, and they took money. No, a lot of these firms borrowed money from the banks at like 4% to then go invest it with private credit at 5%. And so it's in the banking system.

And I can see them doing what they did with treasuries. So with treasuries, they said, we got a facility. You give us your treasuries. We give you, you know, dollar for dollar. We treat it at par because we know those treasuries are eventually going to get paid back. The problem with private credit is a lot of this isn't going to get paid back. And so that's just going to be straight up, you know, money printing, you know, facilitated by the central bank. And so all of this is heading at us.

And like I said, it's going to be a wild ride. It's going to be a bumpy ride or it's going to be a completely horrible, disastrous ride. But at the end of it, when the nuclear dust, as Trump likes to call it, settles, we are going to literally, I think, have the mother of all liquidity injections. And Bitcoin and gold are what you're going to want to own heading into that. yeah is this the final gasp of the fiat system it could be it could be where we have 10 trillion to roll over the next 12 to 18 months or something like that yeah i mean we always have that much because so much of it is bills now so i mean we're just always rolling over bills constantly Every like it's it's. It's just unbelievable. And in the amount of debt that's going to need to come in the in the next 12 to 24 months, it's I think we're going to see the largest deficit ever, probably for fiscal year 2026.

Now, we're already halfway through because it starts October 1st, so tomorrow is the midway point of the fiscal year. But definitely, if not this fiscal year, then fiscal year 2027, which starts in six months, probably setting up for a possibility of a $3 trillion deficit for the first time ever, if not more. yeah i mean outside of i mean obviously you want to position in gold and bitcoin in preparation for the big print right now you're in cash inputs um looking for a material for correction before beginning to tip your toes what else what other advice again going back to this ai thing too because he did this whole productivity and um boom that's really eating into the labor market like how how else do you think people should position with all this in mind yeah and and along with like cash inputs i'm also in uh too many absolutely worthless call

options as well um you know because uh just to be fair like when this thing started i'm like i don't know how this is going to end it's going to end either really bad or it's going to be over really soon and i was like get out of anything like sell raise cash but to give yourself some exposure one way or the other buy some nice calls like 725 spy calls for april but also buy some nice puts like 650 spy puts for april um and by getting a combination of those you were kind of prepared for for either outcome and thank god i bought those puts because um you know this thing is just getting, it's getting nasty and it's just not looking pretty. And it's spreading into the areas of the market that you are going to want to own when this ends. The hardware names, the things

that the AI build out will benefit from, some of the stuff in chips, you know, looking at things like materials um so i'm still a believer in emerging markets so you know these are the types of things like when we hit that bottom i'm not going to be putting my money into you know spy or whatever on the equity side it's going to be what are going to be the real big winners coming out of this i think you know we you and i have talked before about um our mutual admiration or respect for geordie visser's commentary and and you know that his whole thing of you want to own scarcity. Forget about abundance right now. And I think, you know, those those things that you might have said, oh, I wish I had bought SanDisk or I wish I had bought material sector or I wish

I had bought, you know, Lind, a big chemical company or something, which is the biggest weightings in in XLB and materials or some of these things that just basically had parabolic moves, silver, gold, Bitcoin, all these things that, you know, you've might have looked at in the last 12 months and said, oh, I wish I had more of that. Market's giving you a chance, you know, and I don't think we're there yet to jump in with both hands. I don't even think we're there yet to jump in with one hand. I think we're getting close to where you jump in with one hand and might be another leg down, maybe not. But to me, I'm really paying attention to the 610, 615 level on the spy because that was the pre-tariff high um and and after that you know

there's another leg down if you go to the 2022 low and you do a volume weighted average profile like um basically a vwap going there you know you're you go down another 35 40 handles on the uh, SPY, um, you know, something around the 570, 575 range. There's these opportunity points that I think, you know, could be presenting themselves, um, as soon as this week or this, or, or, or April, um, where you're going to get a good opportunity. Um, but I don't think what you want to do now is think that a bottom is in and think that, you know, this is the time, this is a great price. You're better off waiting until you get at least that capitulatory move, and maybe you're not there to grab it that very first day. I mean, let's go back to the tariffs. What happened? Trump

capitulated. You had that capitulatory move down. You didn't need to buy that. You also didn't need to buy it the day he capitulated, and we had that 10% up day because the very next day, the market gave back half of that because so much of that was just short-term short covering all that like the market came back and dipped back down and you were able to pick stuff up four or five percent off the lows and then see the market go up you know forty percent or whatever it did in the next you know uh six months or in the cases of certain companies like nvidia which got down into like the 80s you were you might have missed it when it was 89 a share but you were able to buy it easily later that week for 96, right. And see it go to 200. So, so, you know, I, this, I think this

isn't a time to try to be a hero or kind of perfect bottom or, or I think it's just time to, to sit back and wait. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing. And hopefully, you know, you've got out of a lot of short-term or risky positions. I mean, I didn't like sell everything or anything. Like I, I have certain long-term things that are in retirement accounts and things that, you know, I, I'm not going to go, I never go to zero. Um, but in my short-term account, like I did pretty much go to zero, uh, long exposure, uh, you know, is like tons and tons of cash. And that's, that's what I'm waiting for. And, um, you know, I think that the hardest thing when people try to time markets a little bit is they say, yeah, you might've gotten out,

But when are you going to get back in? And that's why you kind of have to be prepared when those bottoms do come, even if it's not perfectly clear that we're out of the woods to start adding back. So going back to that tariff day, the day after the Trump tariffs, you see a 10 percent up move. And then the next day you see it start going down 5 percent. And you're like, oh, wait a minute. Maybe we're not done. You know, maybe maybe we're going even lower. But at that point, that's the hold your nose point where you say, I got to start adding here. I could be wrong. We could be going to new lows. but you know if i sold when spy was 690 and now it's at 615 i could be wrong we could be going to 575 but i've got to start putting some of that money back in because if i wait until it's perfect

and the all clear is happening it's going to be 690 again yeah and that's like um it's sort of like a different uh different train of thought here but like talking about like the i think the ai trade is on top of everybody's mind and the sort of picks and shovels around it and bringing it back to the war with iran like i actually that's like one thing i'm holding out hope is that the disruption that we're seeing in oil and gas supply chains and all the byproducts particularly their effect on chip production and sort of forces the ai players to be like we we got to stop this because it's slowing us down from doing what we need to do to win this race like if you were thinking this is going to slow down china yes you may have been successful

to a certain extent but now we're getting collateral damage it's slowing us down too and i think we did have a sign of that three weeks ago when david sachs was on the all-in podcast saying like hey we should we should get out of this asap like we should be in this war i was actually surprised that somebody who's in the administration was saying that publicly but i think uh sax being as close as he is to the ai industry to see look forward and see how this could really throw a wrench in that build out and and winning that race for us here even if you're trying to slow down china um if you believe that that line of thinking um and i i would not be shocked if that's ultimately what leads to a a sort of um us dropping out of this war the ai

paper scalers and the players and that and she's saying if you if you continue with this like we're not going to be able to win this race yeah it's it's it's hurting it's hurting us on so many fronts and you know if there is like a wish list that i could have and i i don't think there's really any chance of this happening i i actually think it would be for the u.s to give in to iran's demands and leave the Gulf. Like, we don't need to be in the Gulf. We don't need to be having all these bases there and guarding the Strait of Hormuz. Like, we can be, you know, an energy independent country. We're not energy independent. A lot of people like to say that because we technically produce more oil and gas than we need. But the thing is, we don't produce

all the refined products we need. So we do still need to import. California gets almost all of its gas imported from Asia, right? I mean, that's why gas is so expensive there, because we don't have the refinery capacity to satisfy our needs. So we are dependent on foreign refiners to meet our refined product needs. We export, yes, but we're not truly energy independent, because just because you have enough barrels of crude doesn't mean you're energy independent if you can't put it in the gas tank because you can't refine it so you know if if we basically went through something where we said look we are going to dial ourselves back from all this middle east bs and on top of that we're going to dial us back from europe and nato and we're going to start spending all this

money on adding refinery capacity adding to the electric grid you know for the ai build out in the future um you know we could be in a really good situation and you know i i it would be like amazing if somehow like trump or china and uh iran all came ukraine all came together and just actually had a moment of sanity it's it's not going to happen but like if i had a dream it'd be it'd be like they just say look this is enough is enough uh ukraine we're not going to support you anymore. You need to come to a deal. You need to give up, you know, the eastern one-third of your country to Russia. Russia, you need to stop at it there. We're not going to put them in NATO. Let's get a deal there. Iran, we're going to pull out of this trade at Hormuz. And yeah, people

would say, oh, we're leaving Israel out to dry. Look, Israel does have 200 nuclear warheads. And frankly, it's embarrassing the support that we give to that regime. I mean, it's just embarrassing. I mean, what they're doing in Lebanon, the actions, I don't even want to get into it. It's so sickening. So, you know, we need to move away from that. And that's what's the most scary, depressing thing about this whole situation is this nagging sense that the United States is essentially, as George Washington said, to some degree, a slave at this point, and we need to break free. And I think the American people are moving to that. I think the big loser at the end of all of this is likely going to be Israel, because I think by the time the 2028 election

comes around, that power of the Israeli lobby is not going to be what it once was. And it's never going to get back to that glory, because I think the American people's eyes are getting open to the situation and you know having people like mike huckabee who you know literally you know and not only that but it's this horrible reading of the bible and a lot of these evangelicals it's a fake bible the scotia bible i mean it's not it's it's not even if you read the chapter and you read what what's promised it it's basically said yeah you get this land if you keep my covenants if you follow my commandments. Otherwise, I believe the word used is vomit. Otherwise, God says he's going to vomit up the Jews from Israel because, you know, they're not doing what they're supposed to

do. So, you know, they're doing things that are probably making God vomit right now. I don't want to speak for God, but this is what's happening. And so that's really who is in an existential crisis, because without U.S. support, Israel's in a lot of trouble. And, you know, it's just that's the scary part, because desperate people do desperate things. And that's why I said in the beginning, I think there's actually a chance that they get to such a desperate point that they seriously consider using nuclear weapons. And, you know, God help us all if they do that but um i am optimistic that we're not going to do that's not my base case my base case is that eventually saner heads will prevail um and as crazy as that sounds it does sometimes happen

happen in the cuban missile crisis um you know trump pulled back from the brink on the tariffs um i'm hoping that um some sense of sanity returns and and we avoid that worst case scenario but i think you have to at least have that in your kind of tail scenario type situations of of what could be possible and and just hope that we help and pray we don't we don't end up there i'm certainly praying and hoping that we don't end up there um yeah i mean i i agree i don't think we should be there i think the pressure is put on via the israel israeli lobby are i mean to come in clear and just look at the polling data particularly younger generations are saying i i don't like this i i mean we talked about it last fall after the national security

strategy when i was talking about we were very excited let's pull out the middle east let's focus on the western hemisphere now we talked about it because those are the things we were hearing that's the things we were being told was going to happen we're gonna we're gonna pivot from the middle east and we're gonna pivot from nato and we're gonna focus on the western hemisphere and we're gonna work on ai and we're gonna build out our grid and we're we're gonna get the deficit spending under control and i i mean it's it's confounding it's confounding it's it's it's what makes me wonder if there's something to you know joe kent's discussion of sinister forces forcing the hand i mean it it just makes no sense makes no sense it doesn't well we'll see if q2 is uh

as eventful and long as Q1 was. And we'll meet here in the summer. Hopefully in three months, this has passed us. And we're still going to have higher oil prices and we're going to have a tough road to hoe. But hopefully there's like a path forward and there's this market, especially the Bitcoin and gold market,

starts seeing, look, there is going to need to be a liquidity injection. We are going to need to do certain things that are going to, uh, make it where this is what you want to own. And, and, and we're looking back and saying, Hey, we got that opportunity. And now, now we can start to see the fruits of the fruits of the risk. Agreed. Well, until then stay frosty and, uh, thank you again for, for being vulnerable, opening

up. And, um, I love this check-in. It was a great one. Yeah. Thank you, Mario. I appreciate it. All right. Peace and love, freaks.

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