TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #748: The Bond Market Says Tick Tock with Luke Gromen

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Marty sits down with Luke Gromen to discuss the unsolvable U.S. sovereign debt trap, why the Fed will be forced to print money to cap yields into a new inflation spike, and how AI-driven labor disrupt...ion and the Iran-Hormuz supply shock are accelerating the end of the dollar-centric world order. Luke on X: https://x.com/LukeGromen FFTT: https://fftt-llc.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/yHGkvYxdqT Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bitkey.world/ Aven https://www.aven.com/bitcoin CrowdHealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/tftc 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/

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 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. Mr. Groman, where do we even start? We have a big meeting in China last week. We have yield curves blowing out in Japan, in the UK, even here in the United States. And we have this backdrop of this re-industrialization and AI build out. And it's kind of hard to grasp
Starting point is 00:00:55 what's uh what's going on at the same time you have this supply chain disruption because of what's going on in iran and it's been harder than ever for me to figure out where the signal is because i've been playing with ai it's incredibly powerful made me way more productive uh we're looking at yield curves we got a new fed chairman transitioning in and you're looking at the yield curves it's like there's so much potential here but it feels like the the boogeyman of sovereign debt is going to throw a wrench in the plans of of this build-out yeah it's um if you ignore what's going on with sovereign debt everything looks pretty good which is sort of like other than that how was the play mrs lincoln um that really i think is the economic question of the moment
Starting point is 00:01:52 which is, when are they going to start printing money into an inflation spike to cap bond yields? They're going to. They're going to have to. I think there is zero chance that Warsh, et cetera, Trump, et al. are going to come in and go, you know what? 10-year yield and the bond market, they're Liz Trumping us, right? Liz trusting us.
Starting point is 00:02:19 And so we need to go. we said we're going to do a trillion and a half on defense and we're going to cut it to 800 billion and you know this year we're set to spend almost five trillion in interest and entitlements alone which is nearly all of receipts boomers sorry you lose we're going to cut it by 30 percent so that we can pay our interest to foreigners good luck that's never going to happen and so if that's never going to happen you know and by the way to do the correct math on it when you when you look at total receipts of the US, about $5.2 trillion, by the way, $200 billion plus of which probably going away if tariffs go away. You're looking at, yeah, about $3.8 trillion in
Starting point is 00:03:04 entitlements, health and human services plus social security annualized. And you're looking at about $1.4 trillion interest annualized. So you're over 100% of receipts. So defense is another call it 1.1 trillion annualized right now um to get down below you know if you look at you know just call it a three percent deficit you know from a gdp deficit from six percent um then you got to cut three percent of gdp right so you got to cut you got to cut three percent of i don't know what is that three percent of 28 trillions uh 8.4 840 billion excuse me so right so yeah i think that's 840 billion so you got to cut 840 billion out of the budget to get to a three percent deficit can't cut interest without
Starting point is 00:03:55 cutting rates which will make inflation worse so the only thing's big enough to cut are defense and entitlements so defense and entitlements together are about 4.9 trillion you got to cut 840 billion out of that so it's the just short of 20 percent 20 percent cuts defense 20 percent cut to entitlements and you can do it permanently and immediately and then you got to basically suffer through the pain of the recession slash depression that follows um and hope that it doesn't lead to the deficit going right back to six percent because your receipts are going to kind of decline because government spending is 25 plus of the people cut back on spending because they're not getting entitlements anymore defense lays people off etc so you're going to have a
Starting point is 00:04:39 recession and deficits blow out by 600 to 1,000 basis points, typically in a recession. So there's very possible you could, even if you went through all of the political pain of that, the math strongly, strongly, strongly suggests that if you even could do that politically, which you probably can't, you would end up cutting 3% to try to get the 3%, and you would end up 12 months later with your deficit it's somewhere between nine and thirteen percent thank you for playing game over so when you run through that mental exercise it leads you as played as okay they are going to cap yields and that's why i think this iran thing was such a bad idea is and why i don't think it was thought through from the stab from the point of the bond market in particular which is you were
Starting point is 00:05:28 going to have to do that at some point and prior to this you were able to you know forecasting rate cuts and inflation had fallen back down and now like you're going to have to cut rates so you're going to print money to cap yields into an inflation spike so uh look maybe this is what needed to happen i i could argue that it does but people need to be ready for double digit inflation And then the question is, is when do they do that, right? They're going to do it. When? And if I'm them, I probably do prefer doing it after a bit of a twist in the wind, right?
Starting point is 00:06:06 After you take the air out of some sails. So when you get to your 10%, 12%, 15% inflation, maybe it doesn't get there in two months' time because you've sort of let risk assets twist in the wind. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they'll do it faster than that. But that's the question of the day is, you know, this Iran war has brought forward this bond market problem now. I think that's a big question for me is how are they going to cap yields? Because as we saw in like September 24, they lowered rates, 10-year, 30-year jumped on that.
Starting point is 00:06:44 And that's what I worry about is their ability to cap yields limited, obviously, without going to yield curve control, which I think you've been saying for many years is what they're going to have to do. And then that begs the question, is it going to be viable? Is it actually going to work for people just calling BS on sovereign debt markets in general, looking at what's happening in Japan and playing out that process happening in other countries forward and pulling the pricing of that forward by calling BS on just sovereign debt in general? There's ways you can do it. I don't think they would ever want to do explicit yield curve control. They may not ultimately have a choice, but that's sort of the Hotel California.
Starting point is 00:07:30 Once you check in, you can't check out. But, you know, the one way that I think is being discussed and like Wall Street sort of loves because it's their guy doing it is, you know, Kevin Warsh. Warsh cuts rates. Warsh shrinks the balance sheet, which means he's selling bond. Right. So the long end will rise further. So you're going to get a steepening in the yield curve. And then Warsh changes the regulations for banks so banks can buy more treasuries without reducing lending to Main Street, right?
Starting point is 00:08:04 And so that is like the grand – that's the macro Fed. These are not the droids you're looking for. It's the Jedi mind trick, right? Like, hey, look, we're shrinking the balance sheet. Well, not really because you're the regulator of the banks. You're cutting rates. you're shrinking your balance sheet but then you're just moving it over to their balance sheet taking the regulations off so they can still lend to the fed or lend to the federal
Starting point is 00:08:30 government by treasuries and lend to main street at the same time that's inflationary that's basically just qe through the banks uh with better marketing and and that's fine like that's probably what needs to happen that's one way you could do it because the banks ultimately don't care about real returns they just care about spread at least until inflation really gets extreme at that point they might start to care but you know if if the government tells the fed it tells the u.s banks that you know listen inflation is four percent right when it's actually 12 as long as they can make their 200 basis points 250 basis points front to back they don't care you know now if inflation is friggin 20 or 25 not that i think that's what it's going
Starting point is 00:09:11 to get that's where you get into questions of you know listen guys we're we're not going to make a a 30 year mortgage at, you know, with inflation at 20% because it's gone in frigging five years, six years, uh, on a real basis. Um, so there's ways you can do it that aren't explicit yield curve control. Markets won't care. And that's, you know, at the end of the day, you know, an inflation won't care like that will show up as, as what it is. So, you know, and in the meantime, like you said we've got this you know emergent re-industrialization happening this build out of ai which is both very aggressive but also i think fragile um you know look you know china could come out tomorrow and have a really attractive offering that blows up the economics
Starting point is 00:10:04 of that and now a lot of this stuff is debt financed and that could be problematic you And if these – with valuations of it trading where they are, not necessarily individual stocks, but look, tech is like record high percentage of the equity market. U.S. equity market is record high percentage of the world market. U.S. equity market is record high percentage of the GDP. So on sort of these big picture valuations, like we're in frigging la-la land, picturing and like no bad news. Nothing's ever going to go wrong. And the economics of the model is going to make sense no matter what. Maybe. I don't know. But for the moment, it looks pretty good. Well, it does. Well, I wonder if the wrench is being thrown in the reindustrialization cog as we speak, again, because of Iran.
Starting point is 00:10:52 If you look at the supply chain disruption for things like helium, specialty gases, chemicals, motor oil. I mean, I think you were tweeting about it. We covered it as well. And they have warnings going out that there's going to be a 40 percent supply reduction in motor oil by the middle of the summer. We have sulfur shortages, which is big for fertilizer production. Freight brokers are having a liability shock with the insurance or the ambiguity of how to actually navigate the Strait of Hormuz. And then on top of that, it looks like we have Mother Nature beginning to step in with a massive El Nino, the likes of which hasn't been seen in a century and a half, which will just exacerbate the supply side. So no matter or not if the will to do this build-out exists, the supply side may temporarily at least, or maybe it's more medium term, slow that down as well. What does that do for all of this as well?
Starting point is 00:11:54 Yeah, and I think there's a real key question around that, I think, are sort of two things. Like, the longer it lasts, the more these second derivatives happen, right? Where you, you know, random idiots on the internet are like, oh, who cares about a 40% shortfall of motor oil? And you're like, dude, you understand, like, 70% of the dollar value of goods in this country move via truck? You just start randomly taking out sort of the ability of the reliability of of internal combustion engines, be they. And I'm no expert on, you know, what, you know, diesel uses this motor oil.
Starting point is 00:12:33 So just broadly speaking, though, I didn't realize it was as narrowly sourced motor oil. It is from one part of the world, but apparently it is. And that is there. um so there's that sort of second derivative dynamics where there's a you know something called liebig's law of the minimum which is if you're short one part you know it's it's it's a matter of scarcity it's not a matter of oh this screws europe before it screws america or this screws southeast asia before it screws america it doesn't matter like one part it goes down and then things start going on here so that's sort of one of the questions around that
Starting point is 00:13:07 the other thing that i think is one of the most epic i don't know whether it's denial or propaganda about this all like part of the reason hormuz isn't open still is because iran has more fire control over the gulf than anyone wants to friggin admit and you know when i first started saying this two months ago people think you're crazy and like here we are it's going to still be closed on June 1st. I had a conference call with an institutional investor prospect back March 6th. And I said, listen, based on what I'm hearing, if I'm you, I would start stress testing your portfolio for Hormuz to still be closed on July 4th. And it looked like I pissed in their Cheerios. It was like, wait, what? You understand you're saying hundreds of millions of
Starting point is 00:13:54 people around the world would starve to death later in the year. I said, yeah, I understand exactly what I'm saying. But I'm telling you, based on what I'm hearing, there's a very good likelihood that's the case and you know at the time no nothing but there's still this sort of denial around well it's just insurance well yeah it's insurance because insurance companies don't like their boats going kaboom um and we you know so i think they're that's kind of the to me as i look at is it going to reopen is it not going to reopen i still see a lot at least here in the western media and certainly on x that gets our decision like liberation day right like hey when's things gonna flow again when's trump gonna change his mind and he snapped his fingers after the
Starting point is 00:14:37 chinese did the rare earth thing and and and you know the several big retailers went to the white house in april or early may of last year and said dude you're gonna have friggin empty shelves by christmas knock it off and he changed his mind uh he started a fight he and the israelis started a fight and and like they don't get to walk away from the street fight by going okay we're good now like new york times report 90 of the missile locations along hormuz are still active and you've got the russians resupplying them via the caspian sea and you get the chinese are probably resupplying them on some level if only humanitarian but probably some other mixed use or dual use goods you know through these rail lines and it's not enough to sort of replace what they haven't
Starting point is 00:15:24 taken out but it's enough to buy time at a time where we don't have time you know the bond market saying hey you know as the samuel jackson meme right tick tock mfr right like here here we are so that to me is the wild card is i think in the next month there's a moment that's coming where western markets and go oh iran actually does have a say in this these are marty the hormuz is still closed in part because Iran still does have a very notable measure of fire control over Strait of Hormuz. And then people, I think, you know, that's going to be an interesting moment, right? And, you know, you've seen us by time, right? We're talking about taking Russian oil sanctions off again today. There was a story that we were maybe going to take Iranian oil
Starting point is 00:16:15 sanctions back off, you know, reported in Iran, denied here, who knows? It's fascinating. Maybe taking iranian oil sanctions off on monday and then we'll we're talking about maybe bombing them over memorial day weekend so we can you know we can do it with with a three-day so the three-day weekend so the markets are closed and you know the tenure doesn't sell off any worse than it already has but anyway i'm rambling a bit but i i really think this important within that hey the supply chain the supply side there's a day coming where markets are going to go oh iran actually has saying this and it's not it's it's it's a not significant say and the iranians know from here on out every day that follows like they've taken all their pain up front their pain is going to be
Starting point is 00:17:02 sort of linear especially getting supplied through the back door by a couple of allies western markets we're on the clock well that's what i mean i think it's becoming clear because just observing it it was like whenever the 30 year was getting around five percent you'd have a true social post like hey cease fire it's all going to be over don't worry and that's happened like two or three times and now we're well over at a 5.127 on the 30 year and there has been any announcements i think it'd be interesting to get your thoughts on the big meeting in china last week i think many people were thinking that that maybe the u.s would go and talk to president g and say hey convince them to open up the straight we'll make some concessions on our
Starting point is 00:17:48 end and i think my read on it is like not much was accomplished there maybe maybe some chip deals maybe um some more clarity on taiwan whether or not we like that clarity i think is a is another question but i think it's pretty clear that taiwan is a red line the fact that that's the first thing they talked about um but yeah what are your thoughts on china as it relates to not only the straighter her muse but this time that we find ourselves in this this geopolitical frame uh the multipolar world expanding yeah i i i my understanding is that the meeting was a much bigger deal spun as a much bigger deal uh in the american press by the administration than it was to the chinese um you know the chinese you know trump i didn't realize this till over the weekend
Starting point is 00:18:42 but trump was just the latest leader of a parade that's gone through there you've had starmer you've had macron you've had merits um trump you've got uh literally apparently trump was like wheels up barely and it was announced that putin's coming either this week or next week and my understanding is is that meetings in china don't get scheduled like you know it wasn't like she got off the phone with trump and called putin like that was already on the books um pakistan is going there uh as well in the next couple weeks and that i think is noteworthy even that pakistan is said to be the mediator to this whole thing so um i i'm sure they probably discussed the iranian situation i don't think it's as desperate a situation for china as it has been made out here by some people
Starting point is 00:19:32 in the u.s um not least of which which is i think everyone and their mother is going okay we're done with this whole you know the u.s has been dicking around in the middle east for 25 years like i don't know what their infatuation is with it but this is nonsense we're moving we're moving away from it and we're going to move to more ev or uh you know ev solar battery like get away from fossil fuels. And who's that benefit? China. Plays right into China's hands. Nobody has the supply chain in EV, batteries, solar that China does. So when Europe's like, fine, you want to try to choke us out? Great. They pick up the phone, they call China. And I wouldn't be surprised to see some massive trade deals around solar, EV, battery stuff into Europe. They can figure out
Starting point is 00:20:25 the latency issues and the intermittency issues, not latency, but intermittency issues around solar and battery storage and balancing out grids. That's just an engineering problem. And that engineering problem is getting much, much easier, to your point earlier about AI. You plug those problems into AI and let it run, and it'll figure it out much faster than it used to. Then it's just a matter of pick up the phone, call China, say, we need this many solar panels, we need this many batteries we even need this many you know transformers you know and here you know we'll sell you a bunch of airbrush jets or whatever the hell's on the other side of it whatever um and i think you can see that around the world i think you know india india's got a
Starting point is 00:21:11 fossil fuel problem okay so much so that they're talking about cutting fuel you know a modi right got on the got got on the on the wires last week and said hey please stop buying so much fuel and and please stop buying gold, which are their two biggest import issues, putting them into a trade deficit. Well, you can fix the oil thing really quickly. Ring, ring, hey, China, we want to buy a bunch of solar and battery stuff from you, and we're going to mandate that India go 80% EV or something, like now. Okay, great. Where are they going to buy the EVs from? I'll give you two guesses. The first one doesn't count. They're going to call China. No one else has a manufacturing capacity you know by the way you know the byd etcs of the world are so dirt cheap no one else
Starting point is 00:21:56 can make them that cheap so i'm coming around to the view that contrary to this you know the initial view in the west at all we've choked off china's oil i think all we've done is like push the world into china's arms as it relates to the entire ev slash solar slash uh you know battery um grid dynamic and so i'm not sure china's in a great hurry to open this thing number one um and i think that might have been a bit of a miscalculation in the west now china is not the economy is like just treading water so this just you know this just sort of keeps them afloat but again it keeps them afloat so you know let's see what's up freaks this was brought to you by our good friends at bitkey they've got the new hardware well i got it in my hands got a full
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Starting point is 00:24:33 trying to show a strong hand with a lot of their their cabinet heads and uh obviously ceos of many of the largest businesses in the u.s showing up but i'm reading that i'm like you're trying to to flex hard going all the way across the world and it doesn't seem like you have the leverage here is the way i read that it's like you feel compelled to put on a big horse and pony show on on chinese soil to to try to project strength it's not i don't know if you caught if you read it that way too but everybody in the media was rah-rah-ing it but i'm like if we have all the leverage why do we need to do this that's kind of where i'm at like i i've got a good relationship who made the point to me this is years ago that i guess back in the original gulf war
Starting point is 00:25:23 The U.S. had the Saudis fly all the way here to basically sort of press the flesh to sort of thank and help pay for the war, right? So contrast that, right? You know, they couldn't just wire the money. They wanted them to fly here for the optics with this, which is, oh, by the way, the second straight time we've gone there, right? We went to Seoul, South Korea in October, if I recall correctly, nine months ago, eight months ago. And now we're going there again. And that's not an easy flight, right? So if we've got all the cards, my view of it is in agreement with you.
Starting point is 00:26:03 If we have all the cards, why are we going there? No. And everyone, by the way, everyone's going there. UK. France. Russia. Germany, Pakistan. Wow.
Starting point is 00:26:25 I think the last time we talked, I think AI was becoming much clearer than it was the six months prior when we last caught up then. That this is real. It's happening. It's going to lead to a ton of reinvestment. On American soil, it's deemed existential. And one way that people are positioning it six months ago, and I think still today, is if you're looking at the sovereign debt crisis
Starting point is 00:26:59 and you're looking at all of our spending that we're doing, I think that the one potential positive externality special variable is basically the ability to grow our way out of it with AI. And I think over the last three months specifically, or actually since the turn of the year when agents really took off, it's becoming clear that, yes, there's a real there there. But as we just mentioned, like the supply side could could throw a wrench in the growth and the build out of the infrastructure.
Starting point is 00:27:30 But then on top of that, like the effect on the jobs market, I think, is becoming clearer to the point where you had Ken Griffin on stage last week, who was a bear on AI in January, saying that they're doing work that would take months on the research side at Citadel in a couple of days. And he was actually a little depressed learning about this, thinking about how many people are going to be necessary to run his business in the future.
Starting point is 00:28:00 And so then you have that factor as well, the labor side of things come into the picture. You can paint a really grim picture in the next two years with all these things coalescing together. yeah i found the this i i saw that clip i thought it was a hugely important clip i don't know if you saw dan lobe third point basically echoed the clip he quote to it and he's like oh yeah we've been doing it too right so um
Starting point is 00:28:26 there seems you know there's there's there's ai doomers and there's ai sort of uh champions i guess if you will you know that you we've seen out there. And one I saw recently, and it was actually Mark Andreessen, who's a brilliant guy and obviously a champion of it. And he's been pounding the table that it's not going to disrupt the labor market. And I think he's a brilliant guy. And I think he's talking his book and wrong. Somebody made the point, and he quote tweeted it, showing new slide rules. 1952, you know ibm engineers advertisement look each one of these is like increases the number of engineers by like 50 because they can work so much faster with the new slide rule and people like
Starting point is 00:29:19 it didn't destroy you know engineering it didn't this and it was kind of like yes and let's put this in its appropriate context 1952 was just seven years after the end of a 30-year period where literally 10 to 15 percent of the people alive in Eurasia in 1913 were dead. So you killed 10 to 15 percent of population in Eurasia from 1914 to 1945. Two world wars, a variety of political revolutions, famines, etc. And you completely destroyed the industrial base of anybody who was competing with the Americans across Eurasia. And oh, by the way, much of those 10 to 15% that were killed were working age men. So yes, you introduced a slide rule in 1952. And it was all after you killed 10 to 15% of working age men or of overall population is probably closer to 20%
Starting point is 00:30:19 of working age men across Eurasia, Eurasia, excuse me, and destroyed all the factories and industrial base except for in america now tell me how relevant that comparison is now versus then like and this isn't like doomers and this is just realism and so now you're going to introduce something way more productive you know productivity driving than a slide rule and to everybody by the way and like yet everyone has the industrial base china's got too much industrial we're trying to build industrial base europe has an industrial base that's being hollowed out as we speak you know i look at this and go like yes on you are going to drive massive productivity but the amount of unemployment you're going to drive right same argument you can be mad
Starting point is 00:31:13 like well you know gosh we you know the industrial revolution drove people off farms in the 18 you know from 1850 to 1900 and they were fine like yeah because 10 to ultimately 10 to 15 percent were killed in wars because they were trying to like adjust the the the economics of that world you had it was so technology was so disruptive it blew up four empires right there were four empires in 1913 by 1918 three of them were gone they were dead one was mortally wounded that we took over for the uk and so like i look at this and go i think ai is ultimately it i think it is massively productivity traffic i think it is massively changing and living in the rust belt i think mark andreessen and these others are are smoothing over and i you know
Starting point is 00:32:03 i think they're smoothing it over and i i i don't think i think they're being cynical in the way they're smoothing it over they're way too smart not to understand this and so if they come out and tell the truth about what's about to happen guess what's going to happen the politicians are going to get involved they're going to actually have to pay some sort of you know tax into some sort of sovereign wealth fund or you know fund and they don't want to do that they want to put all the money in their pocket and like i look i i suppose i get it you know if i was them i actually wouldn't support that i would support putting the money in a fund because i don't want a bunch of white collar workers outside my you know gated house
Starting point is 00:32:44 with pitchforks and guns in two or three years which you know has already started with sam altman open ai out in san francisco by the way um but like they're way too smart not to know that that's the case and so i think they're cynically talking about hey there's not going to be a big job apocalypse and because you know they don't want the politicians about there's gonna be like come on like and well people will just retrain no they won't no they won't million americans kill themselves with opiates that's what they do like like and i don't want to get like too like doomer like depressing because it really is but like look that's it was one thing when luke groman says oh luke's just a doomer well is ken griffin a doomer too because guess what he sounds a lot like luke
Starting point is 00:33:29 groman four months ago and now he's like sort of catching up to what this is gonna do you know i don't i don't know the right answer but that to me again i always take it back to the sovereign debt side if we were an equity-based system no debt not debt-based and if debt was really low who cares like you know it's it's a issue to be dealt with but it's not systemic but with debt levels where they are sovereign debt levels where they are 50 of receipts coming from employment heavily in the services type stuff that this is going to disintermediate this being ai it's absolutely a systemic threat and like to continue pretending it's not gonna it isn't doing anybody any good no i think it's already manifesting in
Starting point is 00:34:21 many ways the k-shaped economy meme that people have talked about to your point about some like mark andreason sort of glossing over it you do have elon out there saying we need universal high income which is an oxymoron but we don't want to get it yeah i haven't figured out what he means by that but at least he gets the problem like i actually think he really does care or tries to care i really do um yeah what is that universal high income right i take it to me all i need to know about universal high income is you go back to the show the incredibles i know if your kids have watched the incredible jet right where the guy's like if everybody's a super then nobody is right so if everybody's high ultra high income great why not just do that now
Starting point is 00:35:04 if that's the solution just do it now and the answer is it ain't the solution no that's what i think they're nobody really has one right now but again like the exacerbation of the inflation re-emergence is i think it's going to force people to figure this out rather quickly we're going to head into memorial day weekend with the highest price per gallon uh in recorded history uh again I think you've covered it well, but the food inflation is beginning to creep up, but the brunt of that will not be felt until the fall of this year when you have a full crop cycle come and go and the sort of effects that it has on spending. And then you look at the financialized side of it, like the market, you look at where margin trading is, how much leverage is in the system, where things are trading. It looks like we're not at dot-com bubble levels yet in terms of multiples. But if you look at some ratios, something like the Shiller ratio is pretty inflated.
Starting point is 00:36:13 And obviously, there is some dislocation between the whole of the S&P 500 and the few stocks that are actually tied to AI in the infrastructure build-out. There's a dislocation there. And it makes you wonder. And again, then you have Kevin Warsh coming in saying, I want to lower rates, but not expand the balance sheet. And it's just finding it really hard to see how he's not forced to do that. And if inflation is creeping up and you have all these job market disruptions hitting at the same time, what does that scenario look like? Is it the 1970s eco-inflation with a different flavor and put on crack because of the speed of AI?
Starting point is 00:37:03 I think it's Brazil 2000. That's what I think it is. Or maybe UK, you know, 1956, you know, Suez moment, where, you know, inflation for the UK from 56 to 76, Hager was almost 7% a year. that's what I think, right? Because, you know, the other crazy thing about AI is, look, this is no longer just an American tool, right? This isn't the 1990s where America's got all this technology and then like everyone else is just trying to like survive in Eastern Europe and in the former
Starting point is 00:37:38 Soviet Union. And, you know, China's still, you know, coming out of being a backwater and, you know, Southeast Asia is just starting to really rip and grow with the tigers and what like japan was on its keister still like south america was still you know you know third world fully third world you know ai is like everyone can use it it's distributed right so now you're competing around the world for the first time so this isn't just going to be like well you know and so what does this mean well you know i think the deep seek moment of january 2025 is a perfect example is like what happens if you know any day you could wake up and be like oh china just rolled this out it's
Starting point is 00:38:29 way better and it's cheaper and it blows up the economics of sort of everything they're doing over on this side of the world with ai there's nothing no reason that can't happen you know um now the people in that world are will know much better how close they are to that assuming none of it's been classified by china right like we're you know and and who knows we may have stuff that's way better we have classified i strongly suspect that's the case um but that's like the that's that's when you look at the valuations of tech today versus tech 2000 i agree with people like yeah hey these things are generating cash they're not that expensive the margins are enormous you can justify the multiples for that i agree
Starting point is 00:39:14 If you look at it in isolation. But take a look at employment in the 90s versus employment now. Which is to say, in the 90s, these were truly productivity drivers. You were seeing productivity grow and employment grow. You're not seeing that now. You're not. And so it's accruing to the K-shape. And so essentially, like the difference this time or the bubble this time, a U.S. federal debt to GDP in the in the 90s was maybe 40 percent, 50 percent.
Starting point is 00:39:50 And the tech boom into the bubble was driving a productivity gain and an employment gain and supporting the tax receipts of the United States government. This is a bubble where the participants are not expensive. expensive right like we just said i mean slightly but not like nearly as like stupid expensive as as some of the you know cisco's and sun microsystems of the world so i'll call it from you know 96 to 2000 uh levels but these tech companies are actively borrowing money on net right some of them are still cash flowing but more and more and more they're all getting close having to borrow the money to spend on this stuff hyperscalers um and they're borrowing money to undermine the tax base of the united states government and doing that at a time where
Starting point is 00:40:43 debt to gdp is 120 where true interest expense is 100 of receipts that's where the bubble is this time and the strains when when that bubble starts to strain what are you going to see first are you going to see crashing stocks first are you going to see spiking sovereign yields across the west i would argue you're going to see the latter you're going to see spiking sovereign yields now what do you do take us back to our first discussion you're going to cap yields print money to cap yields a new inflation spike are you going to let yields rip because i don't know what the number is on the 10-year in the u.s but there's a 10-year number on the u.s where everyone in tech is going to be like i'm out why take all this risk when i can you know that china's going to
Starting point is 00:41:27 disintermediate me or that, you know, these guys can't refinance at 7% because, you know, the 10 years up to five and a half, I'm out. I'll just buy the 10 year at five and a half. And so to me, that's where the risk is in this. And that's where people, you know, people that are having this debate, well, it's not like the bubble last time. Well, yeah, I know it's not. And it doesn't mean it's not a bubble. It just means to me, it's almost like a second derivative bubble, right? Like if we saw job growth, if we saw tax receipts benefiting from this, it'd be one thing. You're talking about taking jobs that are paying multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and replacing them with something that you can
Starting point is 00:42:07 subscribe to for 20 bucks a month. Like you're undermining the tax base of the United States At a time when the United States can not afford to have its tax base eroded at all. And that, to me, is like the, that's where the bubble's going to break. That's where we're seeing the strains already, in my opinion. Do you think Bessent has a grasp on all this? I would guess he's an extremely frustrated man right now. Because they were, you know, he laid out very clearly what he wanted to do as Treasury Secretary, both from sort of like three arrows, right, 3% real growth, 3% deficit, 3 million barrels a day of more oil production, bring oil prices down. uh he said judge me by the 10 year right february last year i just put a tweet up earlier today
Starting point is 00:43:08 about that february 25 judge us by judge our economic policies by the 10-year yield not by the front end of the curve not by anything else well the three arrows is now the o for three arrows and they're going to be the o for three arrows uh inflation's ripping 10-year yield is to what five-year highs or near it um fail fail fail fail and this iran war has completely taken the initiative out of his hands for a lot of different things number one he talked about the possibility of a grand currency deal with the chinese and others and now we're not in the driver's seat anymore on that uh we've given away the initiative on a currency deal to pursue this nonsense and so i suspect he's extremely frustrated um he's a brilliant man there's no
Starting point is 00:44:07 question about that he's also shown a tendency to get hyper focused on a single thing to the detriment of all others and then being wrong because he was so focused on that one thing whether that be you know china i mean he's been a china bear for a long time um whether that be some of the things we just discussed whether that be energy some of these other things like so i i think he knows this but i also think he's probably frustrated because a of of you know i think the iran war throws a spanner in the works of all of what he was hoping to do but i also think he's come to realize like washington is not wall street you know you make a decision as a hedge fund manager boom you put it on you take the position
Starting point is 00:44:57 it's just you know it chews up everybody right it chewed up elon right how often did we hear well it's it's gonna get fixed because elon's going there he's our best guy you know and elon's freaking brilliant like nothing stops that dude and washington chewed him up and spit him out in what two months three months four months maybe that's so like i suspect besant knows a lot of this and i suspect there's not a darn thing he can do about most of it he's you know they're getting overtaken by events as a result of the ill ill-fated decision to go into iran so freaks this rip is brought to you by good friends at crowd health i've been a happy crowd health member for almost five years now my wife and i have had two children while we've been on
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Starting point is 00:47:01 out there or go interest only for up to five years. Rates start at 7.99% APR. For a product that lets you keep your stack and still access liquidity, it's hard to beat. I mean, the duration in the rates is the best I've seen in the market to date. You also get 2% unlimited cash back every time you use the card, spend fiat, keep your Bitcoin, the whole game. If you've been stacking for years and need liquidity without triggering a taxable event, this is worth a serious look. go to aven.com slash bitcoin that's a-v-e-n dot com slash bitcoin check it out no i think that's one of the uh one of the things that many people are hoping for with wash getting into position at the fed is that oh it's uh drunken miller's good old boys are back together they're gonna be able
Starting point is 00:47:48 to work together to to navigate these tumultuous times and uh i don't know it's just uh to your point i think iran was a was a massive misstep but then there's others of a point at like oh look at all the oil that's the oil deals that we're making and reinvigorating the the american oil industry and we're setting up all these these deals that are making the middle east less systemically important than it was in the past you have what was it the uae leaving opec um a few weeks ago um basically signaling that they they want to let people drill more to help bring down oil prices which should be good for the u.s but it seems like there's a lot of balls in the air and trying to juggle them perfectly is getting harder and harder as each day passes yeah and
Starting point is 00:48:37 for me it again you always take it back to the bond market like if we try to do this 30 years ago low debt we have the leeway you know are we gonna you know are we gonna give swap lines to everybody like i thought that was a huge moment uae coming out and saying look either you give us swap lines or we're gonna move over to china we're gonna we're gonna start pricing oil and gas and yuan and boy did you know that's something and the team jumped right to that right hey swap lines. Which I thought was an interesting read on leverage. I think it's also an interesting read on the sensitive US asset markets. Look, the UAE is rich. They could sell dollar assets for a long time to finance their income shortfalls. Where do you think the tenure would be if UAE and others
Starting point is 00:49:25 started really dumping treasuries? I mean, already, people are like, look at the dominance. Everyone flocked to treasuries. I don't know if you saw the chart. Japan sold more treasuries in the first quarter then they've sold in like four years which oh by the way was the last time oil spiked because of the ukraine war right so i think we're about to get what's today the 18th it probably come out today um at the end of the market at the close of the market the uh foreign holdings of treasuries for march that's gonna be a real interesting number i would bet you a couple of my cars you know my wife's car my car that it's gonna show foreigners sold a lot of treasuries uh being forced to they have to they have to right it's it's people say well we'll sell
Starting point is 00:50:10 them the oil well yeah but still it's a double entry bookkeeping reality great they need oil we sell them oil what do they buy it with dollars okay great well they're giving us the dollars for the oil where are they getting the dollars well they have to sell something they sell treasuries they sell dollar assets it's just a double entry bookkeeping reality so that has a policy trade-off to your prior point is yes we will send a lot more oil to other places and foreigners who you know foreigners oil importing creditors of the united states will sell treasuries to buy oil and that's fine but it also means there's gonna be nine trillion dollars worldwide of foreign-held treasuries bidding for american oil and what happens when that happens
Starting point is 00:50:55 It's simple. You pay $7 a gallon for gasoline, maybe eight. And not in California. California, we might be double digits. Now, is that the right thing to do? It's good for energy. It's good for stimulus of, look, more EVs, more solar panels, all that good stuff. Sure. Where's that going to come from? America ain't making that stuff. Come on. Tesla just got out of the frigging EV business. All but the little one, right? they're moving on to robots where most of the components are made in china but we'll set that
Starting point is 00:51:28 aside china's gonna do all that business how's that hurting china i don't know but it sounds good right it's it's you know it's not true but it's but it sounds good so i i you know it's just such a i i think there are less chaotic ways it could have been done but that's why i sit in the seed i said yeah well i mean this begs the point like what um what do these nation states do for for reserve assets moving forward obviously we had gold spike into the end of last year go above 5 000 i think it's sitting at 455 right now um it looks like it's it's sort of consolidating after after coming off all-time highs obviously silver ran bitcoin ran at the in the last year, it's down, I think, anywhere between 35% and 40% right now from its all-time
Starting point is 00:52:25 high. Do you think there is going to be a recognition that sovereign debt as reserve assets is, I mean, there already has been if you look at, to your point, foreign nations selling U.S. treasuries, what that bets out to on an ongoing basis, but is the mindshare around alternative reserve assets going to going to get stronger moving forward and if so what does that mean for for gold bitcoin silver even moving forward i i think um i think i think it's going to start at gold um you know silver because it's needed uh ultimately it's counterproductive if you really bid up silver i mean i think silver's going higher get me wrong uh but half of it half of its use being industrial use um it starts to be
Starting point is 00:53:17 counterproductive if silver is usually a reserve asset so i don't think silver is going to be a reserve asset in any real way i think you start with gold um and i think it's i think it's started i think it's accelerating obviously gold's higher than treasuries and global fx reserves as we speak uh that surpassed that last year i think it's going to continue um simply because there's just trust is breaking down um and if you don't hold it you don't own it and the repeated weaponization of the dollar and treasuries and fx reserves etc so i i think it'll start with gold uh and i think you'll see you know trade net settle in gold i think you'll you know China has that framework completely set up.
Starting point is 00:54:06 It continues to boggle my mind. It's like hiding in plain sight. There's an offshore yuan clearing bank in every single major gold hub. London, Switzerland, Singapore, UAE, Hong Kong, and of course in Shanghai. Why? Well, because if China's paying more with yuan, particularly in commodities, there's going to be commodity producers ending up with some excess yuan, and they're going to need to do something with it other than buy Chinese goods with it, solar panels, batteries,
Starting point is 00:54:43 and ID, et cetera. And they're recycling it into gold. You can see it clear as day. If you look at Switzerland's gold exports to Saudi Arabia, it's an astonishing chart. right so there's an offshore yuan clearing bank in switzerland and swiss gold exports to china they are like this over the last four years since since we sanctioned russian fx reserves which is interesting because i had two different people that don't know each other that are longtime veterans in the oil market say to me and i quote the saudis were horrified quote horrified
Starting point is 00:55:16 by the u.s sanctions of russian fx reserve um and so now it looks like you've got saudi net settling some portion of their oil sales in gold that's just a fact you know if you look at the trade flows if saudi purchases of gold from so you'll say swiss exports of gold from switzerland to saudi are like that some portion of saudi's gold oil exports are getting settled in gold why Well, they're either converting dollars or yuan. It doesn't really matter. You know, it's which Chuck E. Cheese token you use to buy the gold. Doesn't really matter.
Starting point is 00:55:50 But my point is the Chinese have facilitated to make it very easy to do that. And so that to me is the roadmap. I think that's going to continue. I think the Chinese are going to continue to do that. I think others in Asia will do that. And I think what we're seeing in, you know, if you call up a chart of, you know, the two-year Japanese, you know, government bond yield against gold over five years, like they're the same chart.
Starting point is 00:56:13 you know, Japanese people are very monetarily sophisticated. They're smart people. Like they know where this is going. They, you know, they did the same math Kyle Bass did on Japan 15 years ago. Like once it gets to a certain number, they're screwed there. There's no way out. So what do you buy when you buy gold? So, um, now Bitcoin, I think is ultimately, i think going to serve that role as starting with sort of the people if you will rather than sort of the official dumb uh but in the short run it trades as as sort of high beta tech and if rates are going up on high beta tech not good rates are going up on high you know on on bitcoin is not good for now now ultimately really really good because there's nothing more bullish for a neutral
Starting point is 00:57:03 reserve asset than sovereign insolvency but between here and there is the 64 000 question yeah right and to the point about weaponization of treasury assets uh against your geopolitical adversaries i mean we're seeing the headline over the weekend out of iran is that they're they're going to use bitcoin to settle this hermuse safe insurance i didn't see that yeah i'm pretty sure it's legit and this is two weeks after uh ofac coordinated with tether to freeze 344 million dollars of of tether that was believed to be the irgcs and i think the point it's like a double whammy of uh in own goal because i think the genius act and this leaning into stablecoin infrastructure by the current administration and the U.S. banking system
Starting point is 00:58:03 is with the hope of like, hey, we need to drive demand for these treasuries, at least on the front end of the yield curve. And they're already weaponizing their ability to freeze these assets. And you're like pushing people outside of the U.S. border away from it almost immediately. It reminds me of the scene in Naked Gun, right, where they slap their heads. And everyone face palms like in the audience, right, with Leslie Nielsen and O.J. Simpson, what have you. Yeah, and there's another sort of contradiction in there that people aren't talking about yet, right, which is on one hand, stable coins are going to save us because we're going to be able to get all this demand. And on the other hand, Warsh is going to save us because he's going to cut rates at the front end and he's going to sell off the balance sheets to drive up the long end.
Starting point is 00:58:53 And then he's going to remove regulations on banks and banks are going to buy a bunch of treasuries. OK. But now with clarity, we're trying to also undermine the United States banking system by being able to pay interest on stable coins, which I had a very veteran banking analyst last week. Be like, dude, if they do this, you could see bank runs in places like this is, you know, as people take their money out of banks and put them in stable coins to get paid because it's backed by the guard. Like, you don't know what you're creating. So, like, what do you want? Do you want stable coins? to buy treasuries and t-bills and or do you want banks to buy treasuries and t-bills because right now you're two different hands in the same administration are sort of working at cross purposes to do that and i don't know the right answer and and oh by the way let me layer another one on there all of the you know emerging market people are going to buy stable coins on their
Starting point is 00:59:46 phones right and you know those are gonna be back no they're not because you want to know what because in four months they're not gonna be able to afford friggin food because you invaded iran you moron and so now you attack iran so now food costs are up energy costs are up so you're you're undermining the emerging market people that are supposed to be like stockpiling dollars to buy t-bills they don't have any savings it's going to go to buying them wheat it's going to go to be buying them soybeans across the developing world that these were going to be the people buying hundreds of billions of treasuries through stable coin because they want the american dollar yeah they want the american dollar you know what they want
Starting point is 01:00:24 more than the american dollar friggin bread friggin gasoline friggin diesel like there's i'm getting worked up because i just watched the commentary relative to the actions of the government and they're not equating to like like okay see how these things interact with each other so like the trump administration says they want this and then yeah you sanction tether and then you invade it or you attack iran you hurt your buyers of t-bills throughout the emerging world because they can't afford food thanks nice job guys heck of a job brownie and then you know you've got you're trying to undermine the banks with clarity on one hand while also getting the banks to buy more treasuries with what warsh is doing what like what's the plan here
Starting point is 01:01:09 right is that we're we love modern family right what's the plan phil what's the plan what what what are we doing because it looks to me like you're just effing it up as you're going along and just making it up and flying to sound what's the strategy i don't know doesn't make sense to me i can't and in the meantime what's the chinese plan trade whatever you want settling in gold here take the gold home because to me like all right i'll just do the gold for now you know america call me when you're sober well to that point how do we get sober in your mind what needs to be done um what can we do to dry out here here too it's cross purposes right like people are like look at how much china's producing
Starting point is 01:02:03 yeah what did china do to do that well they crushed their housing market to drive speculative housing capital into manufacturing more they crush the consumer stock market's done crap like well great so all we have to do is crush housing and crush the stock market and then we can actually have non-inflationary reshoring of the american industrial base and you're like stock market backs the treasury market wrong next answer yeah well we can crush housing thanks blow up now what wrong answer next and like so i i i think the answer is ultimately we
Starting point is 01:02:54 effectively cap yields like we we just like just keep going like okay like if you're going through hell keep going you know all right fine the beautiful that's all right so you're you have worse come in have worse cut rates here's what's probably going to happen here's this will piss off everybody warsh is going to come in he's going to cut rates inflation's going to soar but they're going to lie about it inflation will be running 12 to 15 percent easy but they're going to tell you it's four four and a half um warsh is going to sell bonds into that so the long end will rise banks will step in and buy those he'll pull the try he'll pull the regulations
Starting point is 01:03:42 on. Besant, et cetera, will try to cap gold and Bitcoin, despite them being pro-Bitcoin administration. We're the most pro-Bitcoin administration in history, and they are, except they won't be, because they'll be capping it in price, because they're going to want the funds to flow into the tech bubble to keep that going, to try to drive that. Unemployment is, you know, we will go from a no hire, no fire market to a no hire and fire market in the job market. Um, gold will be capped where it is. The Chinese will just keep waving it in. Bitcoin will actually not rise despite the inflation. It will, you know, we'll have, we'll have, and remember we had the, the 58 K crowd, uh, whatever it was for like two years, we'll have the, whatever the,
Starting point is 01:04:33 58 to 72k crowd for the next 2 to 3 years while they do this how will they cap bitcoin prices I have no idea but they will um and gold will trade 45 to
Starting point is 01:04:53 47 42 to 5 whatever trying to drive the capital all in there meanwhile industrial production will hum in this country inflation will rip in this country the 10-year will trade no higher than 4.7 percent 4.75 percent maybe um now that's that's i could see something like that happening my base case is that what we're going to get is stocks up huge in dollars and stocks down in bitcoin and stocks down in gold i don't think they'll be able to control bitcoin or gold ultimately i i think
Starting point is 01:05:42 there's been some version of what i just described already sort of been happening slash underway can they continue to do that forever no because they don't control the supply chains china does yeah and it's uh out of all your years of analysis and following markets how would you describe this environment unique um there are elements that rhyme with with the first quarter of 2000 absolutely around some of the tech stuff and the breadth and what have you uh but remember we were very low debt we were at peace like i i've told my boys mold you know my boys are 20 25 23 and 21 this year 20 this year um that that was peak america like 95 to like 01 it was like that was peak
Starting point is 01:06:43 america um not to say we'll never get back there but like that was you know just one darn thing after another since then right 9-11 bond crisis stock crisis and the war and the great financial crisis syria and like just one darn thing after another uh and so this is happening this this bubble-esque type environment is happening into very different geopolitical we are no longer the only game in town we were the only game in town in 2000 like russia was on its ass china was still nothing uh you know still coming back europe was like right they just formed the euro they were figuring out what they wanted to do when they grew up or what they wanted to be when they grew up um you know the boomers hadn't sort of you know the the
Starting point is 01:07:43 entitlements hadn't sort of blown up the fiscal side you know the the serial we still had free markets like the markets aren't free like come on we still have democracy right like like people like well we have we're democratic so you know we're gonna win this great power competition like are we are we really democratic like do democracies have foreign powers dropping tens of millions of dollars into a house vote in kentucky it's we're a democracy asterisk that's what i would say you know we're democracy-esque um all these things are different that's why it's so unique we've never had this transformational technology which is both exciting and horrifying at the same time
Starting point is 01:08:31 we've never had the geopolitical sort of balance we haven't had a great power competition a real great power competition like and don't tell me about japan like we were militarily occupying japan china and japan are apples and oranges soviet union in some ways yes but here too the chinese against the soviets it's not even close the soviet economy was never on a purchasing power parity basis close to the size of ours chinese have already vastly surpassed ours on a ppp basis um you've got the you know the sort of the entitlement side where you know which is leading the generational warfare right we've got the the biggest richest generation in human history is getting 80 of federal government spending to them even though they're already
Starting point is 01:09:17 the richest generation um you know we've got the first american generation where the kids are less going to be less well off than their parents um there's all of these things that are that are different and unique in into this high debt situation america's never had 120 debt to gdp after world war ii we're 110 and we got it down to 55 in five years um so it is it is historically unique yeah well to your point i know you're discussing uh your oldest son uh before we hit record and you don't have to expand on what we're talking about specifically but i'm just curious because it's something i think about a lot with gen z like what what are their their views on this life coming out of college being in college how are they viewing things they've i mean i'm
Starting point is 01:10:07 sure because they're your sons they're they're a bit more optimistic because i i trust that you raise them the right way to think the right way to approach stuff but do they have commentary on their generation and what the uh what the vibe is yeah um you know and it's hard to tell right because a 25 year old there's always some element of nihilism right and you know at that age no matter what so it's hard to tell like how much of it is that age versus this generation um they're acutely aware of you know sort of the relative the generational stuff um you know their grandparents are rich and they're poor to be blunt um
Starting point is 01:11:00 they and and the internet is so powerful and that they can sort of like look up and say like okay where where how are you doing when i was this age and what have you and yeah every every generation has its as its has its challenges for sure um i i will tell you i think there is a growing understanding and and fear of ai they understand that it's there they understand it's coming uh it's almost like you know like jaws where you haven't seen the shark yet but you've starting to see the bodies wash up on the beaches and like you know that ain't a motor boating accident um yeah i mean it's it's
Starting point is 01:11:51 i don't want to put words in their mouth you know we talk about you know a lot of these serious things right like you know three draft age boys they've been concerned all year like you really You know, do you think they could possibly do a draft like, you know, that kind of thing? I don't think they would. It's it's just, I think, a pretty weird time for them because there's just it's a period of for that generation. It's just such rapid change. You got a lot of kids that went to college and are coming out. Like we know somebody, they got a economics degree at Yale and then they got an advanced degree in Yale.
Starting point is 01:12:29 They speak three or four different languages. They can't find a job. That has never happened in the history of America. I would be willing to bet good money that somebody with two advanced degrees from Yale University, multilingual, three or four different languages, and they can't find a job. And there's a lot of them, of their friends, can't find jobs. Why? There's a whole bunch of what the American economy is. AI does better.
Starting point is 01:12:59 Administration. math science you know it does a lot of it better a lot of it cheaper and so like yeah eventually it's gonna be great for everybody's gonna grow but like between here and there you know it's it's like lord farquhar right some of you may have to die and that's a sacrifice i'm willing to make no that's why i that's why i love talking to you especially about the kids because i'm i'm gonna be close to the beginning of my journey with raising children my oldest is six now youngest is eight months so i've got some time to figure it out but it's something i think about constantly it's like okay like what should you even be learning to
Starting point is 01:13:36 be prepared for this this world when uh when you when you go out on your own 12 years from now i think it's all about just maintaining lines of communication with them you know when it was funny because right like when my when my oldest was seven we moved into this house and this was our pine box house and i signed the mortgage the week lehman went under and i didn't know i was gonna have a job in six months and so like they're running around loving the house yeah second one was so seven five and two and they look back and they're like god the world was insane dad how did you like we didn't know that i said i know your mom and i you know we didn't talk about it around you i wasn't sure i thought i just signed a mortgage i wasn't able to pay back i was not
Starting point is 01:14:20 going to have a job who knows world's crazy but but they never knew so like there are things that kids need to know and things that kids don't need to know so like that was one thing we did and then as they got older we started having more of these conversations hey do you remember this that that vacation we went to in you know when i was getting ready to start fftt we went to this vacation up in niagara falls which for us is like a three-hour drive and we rented this house on and it was like 92 a night and it was like that's what fit in the budget because we were saving money because i was not going to take outside money from investors i wanted to be able to write what i wanted to write and i said remember that vacation we did that because we were literally like scraping money
Starting point is 01:15:03 together putting it all away to get ready for me to leave my job have my salary go to zero without taking you boys out of school without taking money out of your college fund and they're like we didn't know that's why you did that we just thought the arcade was awesome and then there's like this shitty little arcade in this house with like two video games and they thought it was like the greatest vacation history so that's another thing i would tell parents is like what you view as like good or bad is not what they do like what they they just want to feel loved they want to be with you they want to enjoy an experience and it doesn't have to cost a gazillion dollars so and then as they continue to get older i just tell them like look like
Starting point is 01:15:43 the only thing i ask of you just keep getting up like you're gonna get knocked down but now we're just brutally honest about like listen ai this at the other and and like and honest like i don't know this could i could be totally wrong and this is all gonna be awesome and and but i'm gonna tell you what i think and all i'm asking is just get up you're gonna get knocked down get up you'll be fine and if you can't get up you call me and i'll help you get up like that's that's about it so But I think just tell them what they need to know and then start telling them things and then openly share. You develop that relationship. You support it.
Starting point is 01:16:24 You show it. You model it with your wife and your spouse, whoever that might be, and what communication looks like, what a good relationship looks like with your parents, with them. And you teach them to empathize. You teach them to be flexible. well you teach him to critically think and then like you hope for the best and it's scary as hell it's scary it is fun there's a lot of fun i think that's a good oh my god it's it's amazing it's the best thing like it is it's the best thing i will have ever done it's the greatest honor my life and it's just like you're like well when they're older then i won't worry like people ask someone
Starting point is 01:17:06 i ask one time when do you stop worrying about you because i had we had kids relatively young when do you stop worrying about them i said you'll stop worrying about them when you're in your grave that's it maybe that's it the worries change that's all you know yeah no i think this is good uh a good grounding topic to end the conversation on because uh that's really what matters at the end of the day uh i'm trying to just keep keep your sanity and anchor back to the family make sure that you're being good present father or mother and doing your best to make sure that you steward steward them in the right direction as we go through for sure these crazy changes in the world the world's going to change it always has changed it will always change but um i think
Starting point is 01:17:48 uh understanding how it's changing is important that's why i love uh catching up with you well as soon as you figure it out you let me know i'm just like trying to hang on oh well oh well this was great um thank you again for your time i always appreciate it luke thanks for having me on it's great great chat with you as always all right peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the
Starting point is 01:18:31 podcasting platforms that goes a long way last but not least if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free make sure you download the fountain podcasting app and go to fountain.fm to find that five dollars a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps the show gives you incredible value so please consider subscribing via fountain as well thank you for your time and until next time Thank you.

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