TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #754: 15% Inflation Is Coming Back with Chris Martenson

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

Marty sits down with Chris Martenson to discuss rigged oil and futures markets, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve heading for tank bottom, the coming wave of inflation, and why hard assets are the only protection against a terminally broken financial system. Chris on X: https://x.com/CHMartenson Peak Prosperity: https://peakprosperity.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/

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. Chris Martinson, welcome. Welcome to the show, sir. Very, very excited for this conversation. Been a fan for years. Well, thank you. And thank you for developing the show and inviting me on. I'm thrilled to be here. Like I was saying, my audience and myself, we have to give you

a massive thank you for hosting our crazy Uncle Dave's year in review for many years now. And And it's it's one of my favorite times of the year is when Dave finally gets around to publishing his year in review and then having a conversation with him. Yeah, it's always always a little bit of a mad. Can you hear that? Unfortunately, it's a dog. OK, yeah. And every year it's such a fun thing with Dave because somewhere around November, he says, I'm not doing it. And then somewhere around mid early December, he's like, OK, I'm doing it.

And then the stuff flies in like last minute, hundreds of pages. And he's very, very meticulous. Like everything has to be referenced, footnoted, you know, everything. And it's always a mad scramble. But what a what a joy to host that thing. It's one of my favorite. I just love reading it every year. I do as well.

It's take a day or two over Christmas break if he gets it out by then and dive in. But yeah, we're we're here to speak with you, Chris. And I think it's a good time to speak with you considering everything that's going on in the Strait of Hormuz, I guess, flip-flopping, tacoing, ceasefire on, ceasefire off. What is going on? You wrote a piece, I believe, almost a month ago in May calling for oil above $200, possibly much higher. Are we on trajectory to hit that still? do you think how are you viewing everything that's going on in the middle east right now well you have to take one of two positions here right one is this is just rank incompetence right

and you get these terrible outcomes and the other is that this is part of a suite of things that that are being done to intentionally damage the united states um and uh i'm leaning kind of 80 towards this is intentional because if you flip a coin 50 times it comes up heads every time got to start thinking maybe it's not a fair coin you know um so what's been happening is you know what we saw early on like the straight of hummus gets closed within two or three days oil spikes to 120 a barrel and then all of a sudden all these traders out at trefagura and all these other big houses like somebody has stepped in in size and has started to sell these things right and so my my architecture for understanding the markets i was a i was a day trader for a while it was really

successful 2005 six seven and then my whole system fell apart in 2008 and i think that was kind of the rise of the machines at that point right where they're really elegant um algorithms with with obviously faster fingers than i had you know um and and i remember the moment to so i was trading gold futures at that point in time almost exclusively and i was sitting on 10 contracts and they had a really nice gain on them but i had this really distant trailing stop and i woke up the next morning and all 10 were gone. And somebody had come in and the price had gone just down. I personally got pickpocketed. My 10 contracts was the total volume in that tick. And it just just somebody reached in and took it. And I said, OK, this isn't a fair game anymore.

It's just it's, you know, your tuition is expensive in trading. But when I figured out just how fraudulent it was at that moment. Right. Because that's not price discovery. that's clearly thieving and price setting, I started understanding that that's what the future markets are really used for. And that started, obviously, in the precious metals. But then I started to see these same patterns. And it was about two years ago, that same pattern started to show up in oil, right? Where in a single one minute candle, it would be three, four, five, six million barrels

of oil sold all at once. It just crushes the bid stack. Every bid under that normal bid stack and ask stack that's sitting there just gets crushed, right? And it had the same flavor. It's like watching a 2 a.m. Silver Slam where the bid stack would get crushed, but then that's the new price. It's not like all this activity reassembled and brought it back up again. And so I observed, OK, price setting is a thing. And obviously, there's no regulatory oversight that's interested at the CFTC, SEC and, you know, curbing that behavior. And I think the explanation for that's easy, because when that behavior is reinforcing the official narrative, it's it's it's OK.

you know that that's it's just part of the game so i watched uh oil suddenly just start getting the same treatment really heavily actually starting in trump's first year in office right it just coasted down from about 75 all the way down into the high 50s almost almost ruler straight marty just like tick tick tick tick tick month after month it was just like going down and trump's out there saying oil should be 50 and chris wright the energy secretary is like oh oil should be 50 and he comes out of the biz you know ceo of a fracking company nobody's making money at 50 in the oil space in the shale space nobody they're all hemorrhaging capital ask me how i know right um and because i'm a direct investor in this space so watching oil just

mysteriously get clocked over and over and over again i said okay getting the silver treatment you want to call it that and then uh i watched it happen again here during the open part of the war And listen, I can even understand. We want to keep markets calm. We think this thing's just about to end. We wouldn't want a big price shock. But here's where we are. We are now, because oil is like, I think it's with 92 at the time we started recording on WTI features, right?

That's not enough to cause demand destruction. In fact, internal demand in the United States is here. Yeah, supply is here. And so how do you close the gap? Well, normally with price settings, the price goes up, kills demand, brings it to supply. uh-uh we are tapping the spr and commercial inventories and also distillate inventories and we're exporting those and consuming those uh to make to make up that supply demand gap prediction real easy um this all carries on until you get to tank bottom and then it's then it's

then it's a crisis then it's really bad then we get back to my original thing i opened with which is like if i wanted to intentionally harm the united states one of the things i would do is have it go full speed into tank bottom where you actually not a supply demand mismatch that can be corrected with price but an actual shortage now you're gonna have to triage who gets it who doesn't and that's just a hot mess every time it's dried and you can't even get to tank bottom right because i think we learned this during the biden administration that due to the physics of these petroleum reserves you need to have a certain amount of oil in the salt caverns or else they become defunct yeah for the spr it's there's a bunch of different salt caverns out

there and some of them probably two-thirds are holding this medium sour grade which is actually the stuff everybody wants and the other one-third is this light sweet and nobody's really buying that um there's tons of that floating around uh refineries don't need that so actually what i'm tracking mostly is just the medium sour caverns and i i'm guessing i'm guessing they about half left of of their current balance so at current rates i would give that another 80 to 100 days and then that's out right and and for people listening who don't know what that means the salt cavern is actually a physical hole in the ground it's a cavern right we mine salt out of it uh and then the way you get the the oil out of it is you put water in the bottom because oil floats

and you drive it with water pressure as it drives up for every barrel that gets taken out 15 barrels of salt are dissolved into this process and there's only those walls suddenly become unstable you know and they can start to collapse and they can cover up your injection pipes and there's things that can happen um so i think and nobody really knows i've dug around marty i can't find like you would think the doe would say we've studied it we know the number right here it is like matter of national security or they haven't studied it yet so i don't know that we actually know and i mean bringing this back to like futures markets i actually think it was on your site uh earlier this week and you were talking about overnight markets particularly

uh with silver and if you're trading overnight that's where you're going to experience most of the gains versus during the day so to your point of potential price manipulation while markets are open um and sort of tying that concept to oil markets i think you had scott percent and others in the administration come out a couple months ago and say that they would do everything in their capacity to um leverage futures markets to keep oil within a certain range yeah i was looking down because i want to i want to build on that point because to me this is just the most astonishing thing sort of sort of how did i come by my there's there's there's an invisible hand operating at night thesis i come by it honestly um so this is a chart showing that if you had

held silver from 1970 just during u.s open trading hours just during those few hours that were open uh silver is apparently worth uh 34 cents an ounce if conversely you just held it from the moment new york markets closed overnight the rest of the world is doing whatever it does with silver and then sold right before the open silver would have been worth three hundred and ninety six dollars an ounce so wow it's worth a lot more overnight than during open new york daylight hours right and then somebody was observing you know weird behavior for alphabet uh here overnight versus daytime okay um maybe we can make some allowance for that but this is the part um during wiki leaks if you see i'm sure you've seen this this is one of my

favorite things. WikiLeaks dumps this thing. So we get this cable. It goes from New York to London. And this is in 1973. And of course, gold became legal for U.S. citizens to hold again in December of 73. It was illegal before that. And so they're very worried, like, what would happen if too many people bought gold and the price went up and then that price is rising and it makes the dollar look bad or U.S. treasuries look bad. So there was a lot of concern over how they were going to manage this and so here's the quote to the dealer's expectations will be the formation of a sizable gold futures market and the dealers these are all your primary dealers right the big one scotia jp etc and each of the dealers expressed the belief that the futures market would be a

significant proportion and physical trading would be minuscule by comparison so signal versus noise right the signal is now the futures market not the the actual gold physical gold itself and here it is black and white highlighted in yellow quote also expressed was the expectation that large volume futures dealing would create a highly volatile market in turn the volatile price movements would diminish the initial demand for physical holding and most likely negate long-term hoarding by u.s citizens end quote some manufactured volatility to scare people away from holding yeah and by the way volatility in there is code speak for sudden downward um price spikes right volatility is never upward you know

the vix doesn't measure upward volatility it only measures downward volatility yeah yeah i mean and i mean now i'm having flashbacks to last year when silver and gold were running you had the thanksgiving uh the day after thanksgiving sort of comex glitch where it seemed like Like if you had your tinfoil hat on that they were just hitting the circuit breakers. And I think the theory was that J.P. Morgan was trying to get on the right side of that trade. They were net short silver and they were going to get called out on their BS. And I mean, the end of the year with fireworks and precious metal markets. And that seems to have quelled for the first half of this year.

You think they're trying to suppress it after after we're running? Yeah, yeah, they are. And there's something else weird running here that I don't understand. Because as of this morning, I just checked again, China, Shanghai, silver markets running about nine bucks hotter per ounce than the U.S. market has been persistent for probably six months. that shouldn't exist like if if i had the capability if i was a big enough player i could just sidle up to come hex you know take a million ounces out put it on a plane and make nine million bucks right minus some trading fees and import costs and things like that but still it's free money arbitrage like that doesn't exist in an actual free market so something else is operating here that i don't quite understand yeah i'm just looking at silver gold now silver's at 75 down from 120 and gold at 4 500 obviously down from around like 5400

it feels like they're consolidating and i mean that's the big question with everything going on in the middle east i mean bringing this back to her moves i'm sure you saw it not only are people worried about whether or not the ceasefire actually happens and we get some sort of deal mou whatever it may be but i think and i don't know the extent of the validity of these claims but now people are talking about this barnacle barnacle apocalypse that could that could actually severely perturb the the ability for ships to move through through the straight because barnacles are just building up on on the propellers and you could have this sort of negative externality of sitting sitting in the straight for months that even if there is a a

peace agreement that you can't move the oil through the street because the ships can't move because of the barnacle build up and uh again bringing this all together just to highlight it seems like you know there's the potential that what we're witnessing in in markets not only commodities but potentially in stock markets just this this beach ball being held underwater the beach ball representing volatility and just waiting for uh a domino to fall to really signal to the market like oh there's gonna be massive supply chain disruptions beyond oil and gas because of this yeah and it's um i mean it's truly a bizarre time right because i've lived through multiple periods where you know 2008 oil went to 150 a barrel 148 right in july of 08

and it did so because it was this persistent one million barrel per day shortfall back then um and and that terrified everybody right now that took about a year to really develop but You know, just that little that little bit. So oil is a highly inelastic commodity, meaning a tiny, tiny move on one end and supplier demand can actually have outsized impacts on price. And it always has. It's not this time. And it's not just like, oh, you know, there was this Gulf Arab crisis of 73 to 74. There was the 2022 crisis where people thought maybe three million barrels a day were going to be missing due to Russian sanctions on the Ukraine war. This is bigger than all of those, Marty, combined. And then some, right? And it's the most mysterious thing.

So you hear like the chatter like, oh, the Strait could be open tomorrow. You know, everybody runs their analysis and Goldman Sachs or the head of, you know, Qatar's energy agency say the same thing. They're like, well, within six months, we think it'll be 70 to 80 percent recovered. OK, well, it used to be 25 million barrels a day. So 80 percent recovered is we're still missing five million barrels a day. six months from now there's nothing even remotely that scales to what we're talking about here at this point and yet really just total placidity and and you know complete reliquification of the u.s stock market well it's not just u.s if you can see this south korean stock market even germany

stock market just powered to all-time new highs last week you know and germany's just imploding at this point from a business standpoint so there is just something going on here that just doesn't make sense and i think you got it right that that beach ball is being held down i think that everybody who's a professional beach ball holder cut their teeth on all these things like i don't know the dot bomb crisis the great financial crisis you know long-term capital management these are all like human contrived issues and you can paper over them if you if need be and i think they think they can do that oil's different right oil's a molecule energy is the master resource you can't just paper this over it's just it's not possible so i think we're

getting set up for the biggest of all possible rug pulls sudden emergence of that beach ball and then we're going to be facing actual rates of inflation that are going to be i think really terrifying both for the market masters who are the beach ball holder downers but also for the rest of Plus, this could be a darker repeat of that double hump inflation of the 70s to 1980 era. I forget who surfaced the chart, but that echo inflation of the 70s resurfaced a couple of weeks ago. And we're tracking pretty tightly to it right now with the latest inflation prints. And that's the other thing. CPI is notoriously underreporting actual real inflation.

And when you get into the knock-on effects of the supply chain disruption, I mean, I had somebody who runs a fertilizer business on last week, and he's saying that John Deere, which will typically extend financing to farmers in the U.S., is not because they're looking at fertilizer prices, looking at corn prices and saying corn prices aren't high enough, fertilizer prices are too high. We can't finance your your your sort of your endeavor to go plant crops this season. And so talking about like lagging effects, that's what I worry about is this fall, particularly not only oil and gas, but moves into food. And then you get real tough conversations at the dinner table about what are we going to do? Well, this is this is such an important point, because, again, now corn, its price is also set in the futures market. And again, I believe that all the big giants, you know, conspire to keep the price of corn down because it serves their interests. Right. And and so the producers just get hammered all the time. I kind of hope that we get a producer rebellion.

You know, what if all the silver miners got together and said, sorry, you know, quit your or only make direct deals, you know, with Chinese solar manufacturers or something like that. But corn today is trading at exactly the same price it did in 2008. right can you imagine if like ford f-150s had a futures market and the market shrugged and said sorry ford you have to sell your f-150 trucks for 32 000 because that's what they were in 2008 like ford would go out of business and that's happening they are driving farmers out of business and that sounds like a bug it's kind of a feature of black rocks on the back end snapping up the farmland right so there's something going on here but it's very clearly not capitalism and it's not legitimate price discovery between willing consumers and producers there's there's

another you know what matt taibbi called that blood-sucking squid it's just like you know it's it's bad but you know then you're right you have that uncomfortable moment around the dinner table someday like wow who knew that if we kept copper prices this low for two decades we wouldn't have enough who knew that we need farmers in business not out of business so freaks this was brought to you by good friends at big key guys things happen things get lost you need to replace your phone life happens and bikki has been designed with this in mind uh so if you're looking for the easiest way to secure your bitcoin uh off the exchange go get a bit key it doesn't come with any seed phrases there's no single point of failure it's a two or three multi-sig you have

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today. This episode has been sponsored by our good friends at BitKey. What's up, freaks? This rip is brought to you by our good friends at CrowdHealth. I've been a happy CrowdHealth member for almost five years now. My wife and I have had two children while we've been on CrowdHealth, and I actually just got the last bill for our third child funded. It was $6,157. CrowdHealth negotiated down to $2,309, and we only paid $500. The rest was crowdfunded by the crowd health network if you're sick of health insurance premiums and having to pay deductibles and getting ripped off at the hospital join crowd health it's an alternative way to pay for your health care it's not health insurance it's crowdfunded health care as you can tell

they negotiate prices for you you pay in cash it's much cheaper overall we're much happier they have incredible perks go to joincrowdhealth.com slash tftc to sign up five years on crowd health not looking back join crowdhealth.com slash tftc use the promo code tftc once you set up your account you're going to get 99 a month for your subscription for the first three months yeah i mean and then in parallel to all this you have the massive re-industrialization campaign obviously the ai data center build out and i think more and more people becoming quite aware that the the energy infrastructure particularly the grid infrastructure in this country is not as robust as it may need to be if you're going to supply all that demand

from the hyperscaler build-out. And it's very confounding to me because as somebody, like, I use the AI tools and I love them. I think they're extremely powerful. They've helped our business out. But there is, like, this sort of existential fervor behind the ai race that we're speeding towards it and particularly on the infrastructure side it seems like that industry is getting priority over all others at a time where attention may

need to be elsewhere or may need to be divided evenly elsewhere particularly when it comes to food and energy prices like things we cannot neglect if if you like to your point energy is the base of everything we do in the economy and even if these ai tools are incredibly productive or create efficiency gains for individuals and companies like it's all for not if you don't have the energy base there to actually support the the growth that will be necessary to make it more widespread yeah there's a whole larger story on pack around all that and um i'm i'm one of those people who tends to really um so let's just take natural gas this is how we're funding all of the energy requirements of the ai centers right so we're not building nuclear at this point we're

not really recommissioning coal-fired plants so it's gas right and that's great because you can drill wells and it's fairly dispatchable um kind of energy but i'm sitting on the back end of this going well wait a minute outside of the permian basin every single other source of natural gas out of the Bakken Basin, out of the Woodford, the Hainesville, the Marcellus, offshore, everywhere, they're all in decline. So then you say, OK, well, you know, these data centers are going to be consuming another eight to nine BCF, billion cubic feet per day by 2030. And when I say another eight to nine BCF per day, these things are on 24-7, 365.

There's no like slate loading. You know, these things are just on there. I call them toasters don't make toast. They just they make waste heat. I mean, it's crazy. Right. You take, like, say, a gigawatt of actual natural gas, burn that you create, you know, however much waste heat from that. Then you take the electricity, shove it into this thing, and then you have to burn more energy to cool it. So if you have a gigawatt data center, typically you're going to be burning about two gigawatts of power to both create the electricity and then to cool the resulting heat. it's massive okay and that's what we do with it and so now there's this second order effect which you hinted at i'm going to just call it out because it's important we're going to be spending

trillions on this build-up fine maybe it's really super productive it's the other side of the coin well that's capital that's not going to something else right by definition that capital went for that purpose not for new high-speed rails not for reshoring manufacturing you know not for anything else. I went to that. And I don't know about you, but when I drive around my country, I see we have some self-investments been a little bit neglected for a while, you know. And if you do go to China, which I do from time to time, it's astonishing. They're putting their capital into their infrastructure and it shows. Right. And so all capital going towards infrastructure is got a timer set on it. You build it, it's shiny, it's new, and then it degrades and you have to

maintain and replace it so we're not even we're barely maintaining our infrastructure at this point which is painfully obvious you go to new york city in a rainstorm like oh my god it rained what again you know and their subways are flooded and you know all this stuff is happening because it's just it's in that bad of a shape and so i think that's the other part we have to talk about is we're putting trillions into this and not that by definition and i think we need more of that um compared to the data stuff but i don't know what i'm still confused like you you said it's almost like a some mad dash like how do you understand like like what's the theory winner i mean the theory that the theory that we get in uh public is that it's a national security

issue and we need to beat china to the punch of getting to agi i'm skeptical of agi in and of itself like i think these things are calculators i'm not one of those guys who's like uh we're gonna get to the singularity we're gonna have some transhumanist uh utopia that we all live in i think that's actually very dystopian i think they're just very good at predicting the next word probabilistically and can help you get a lot of work done but i think what's being positioned as we need to beat china to the punch of basically having control the most powerful artificial intelligence systems um and then we'll make sure that the the uh the free and open democracy wins out against the the communist regime in the digital age um but really i think it's there's

also that the command and control aspect we need to win this just so that we can suck up all the data and um and basically try to get to a point where we have this orwellian surveillance state and i think it may sound a bit crazy like marty why are you uh like very bullish on this stuff using it because i i do think um if you're looking at the progression of the models particularly the open source models versus the frontier models from the hyperscalers, which are closed source, the open source models are not as cutting edge as the closed source models, but they're not too far behind. And so my hope is that recognizing that this is a useful technology that can bring a lot of productivity. Obviously, it's going to bring a lot of disruption as well. But I think Pandora's

box is open cat is out of the bag you can't really turn back the clock and make this technology not exist so with that in mind it's like okay how do we leverage it um so that that humans can can use it but in a way that's not um hyper controlled by the government the hyperscalers whoever it may be so that's why a lot of our coverage here particularly in our newsletter focuses on open source models and how they're progressing. And I think if you're looking at the trends of how those models are progressing and then how easy it is to get to host them locally,

I do have hope that we can leverage this technology in a way that individuals actually control the ultimate way in which we leverage these tools and not the hyperscalers and the governments. yeah we're currently taking 20 years of my content and cramming it into an llm you know and you know and and then i think well i'll finally have the search tool i've always wanted for my own content you know yeah i mean we've done that here then our we have an agent running and it's got every newsletter every podcast we've ever recorded and um maybe we can quick search like

hey what are we like we're talking about energy and ai today what have we talked about that over the last eight years and what have we said and within a minute it has everything i'm jealous i'm still waiting we're gonna get our soon i hope but yeah so that that's a good use and and i think for for most people you know maybe super advanced uses is different but deep seek is pretty robust model right quinn works pretty good like they're pretty darn good you know i think for average people and using them for average productivity you know tools i there must be something they have behind the scenes that that they've seen has scared them you know it's an idea i've had that they have different models that we haven't seen and so they're like oh they can see where this

is going like we're going to need data centers so fast that you know nobody need like they're just overwhelming communities with these things right now and there's i've never seen a build out like this this feels like a very public manhattan project at this point oh it certainly is and i mean i've been in the bitcoin mining industry for almost decades so i saw that build out when china banned bitcoin mining in 21 obviously a lot of that migrated here the united states and i had an up close and personal sort of experience and view of of that build out and i thought that was pretty awe-inspiring at the time when we were spinning up 100 megawatt facilities then 250 then 500 and then riot um announced their their gigawatt facility in texas it was like oh

my gosh like this is insane because when you think about it the largest data centers in the u.s weren't larger than like 25 megawatts a decade ago now we have gigawatt facilities but the ai wave of the last two years just far exceeds when even i witnessed in in bitcoin mining it's astonishing how how quickly they're they're trying to scale this up and as somebody who understands how these power purchase agreements and these interconnection deals and the demand response deals and what it takes to spin up new generation uh it does make you question like how how are we going to do this and two sides of that coin pessimistic side is like we're going to run into these supply constraints and it's just going to not happen and then the

optimist is like hey constraints breed creativity and efficiency or maybe this is good because we'll produce so much generation to your point about the over focus on natural gas i completely agree we should spin up all the coal plants we should rip the red tape off nuclear let's just have as much energy generation as possible because we've gone off the Henry Adams curve since the 70s and we need to get back on that curve. And you know who's on it? China, right? Yeah.

So in the last 10 years, they've installed as much electricity generation, actual generation, not nameplate capacity, but actual electrons flowing out the pipes in 10 years as we currently have. right like they just doubled and so i think ai is fundamentally a story of energy i think all of economy is fundamentally a story of energy china's clearly dialed into that they wrote this big beautiful it's like two years ago they released it a a five-point strategic plan for how they're going to build out their energy infrastructure and i almost cried because i'm like that's what one looks like we don't have one here in this country like we don't have a

strategy right and they said yeah we're going to be people focus on look at all the solar china's putting in but they very clearly said they're going to only put one percent of total incremental capacity in alternative wind and solar per year and it's going to max out at 12 percent because they can't you can't afford more than that whether you get grid instability otherwise it's going to be nuclear you know they've got a two thorium pilot plants right now they did a hot refuel meaning it's running and they refueled it while it was running so they're way ahead of us on on the thorium fuel cycle they're slamming in uh uranium plants left right and center and so they have a policy that makes sense and it included a geopolitical component they said oh by the way

we're going to have to be very friendly with the countries that supply these sorts of things like oil and gas because that's going to be really important for us going forward so geopolitically there are forging alliances you know which i strategically i align with you know united states does this gunboat diplomacy where it's going to ride in and take out your leaders kind of a thing um it doesn't tend to win friends and influence people you know um and china gets that i kind of wish we got that too the commentary there but china has a plan and it's it's a pretty comprehensive energy build-up plan and we do not have one in this country if they if we do we're keeping it secret you know well if we were to make one if we don't have one what would your

plan b um first off i would just absolutely can all these lng terminals it makes zero thermodynamic sense to take a gas out of the ground turn it back into a liquid so that costs you x percent of the native energy in that just doing that one process right and then you lose x percent motoring it somewhere else in the world also you can what sell it for currency units dude we make those out of thin air like why i don't understand that so nope all of our all of our natural gas becomes just for americans and future americans too we rip it out of the rip oil out of the ground so fast that we still have to flare the gas into the air you know that's how excited we are to just get this stuff out of the ground two you create a strategy right

and a strategy for a business or for a country is the same thing always the same two components where are you going how are you going to get there what's the vision and what your resources visions are easy to come up with resources are always limited that's why you have to go through the process so if we said look our our fossil fuels are abundant but not infinite and we can clearly track out where they're going to be like they'll run out and we owe it to those people in the year 2100 to have been thoughtful about this and to have engineered where we're going to get there so we get there what's it look like well you paint the vision okay we still we think electricity is like this awesome thing it's a great way we think we're going to be able to

electrify transport we're going to be able to electrify all these different processes maybe the haber bosch process for making nitrogen fixed out of the atmosphere whatever the thing is you go through all of that to say what does that look like you're like wow we're going to need this many nuclear plants we're going to need this kind of nuclear recycling containment facility obviously we're going to need thorium as part of that mix maybe fusion comes along maybe you know but whatever that is you you have some allowance for that but you have to just basically say here's our bequeathment coal oil natural gas and here's what we're going to use it for and if there's something left over fine ship it to europe if you feel it's important but we do not have that

capability right now because we don't have that larger plan and you know what takes energy not just making more energy we have to use energy to replace that francis scott key bridge that got taken out from the baltimore harbor we're going to have to use energy to build trains that are electrified that go from a to b if that's part of our future right we're going to have to think all of that through and then we're probably going to have to onshore the development and the capability of building every one of those components ourselves right so we're critically short on i think 20 critical elements according to the usgs that like 100 dependent like or almost 100 dependent for rare earths titanium all kinds of stuff so part of that energy strategy is how do

we how do we rebuild all of these components that we've we've built out here at this magic future point okay that's what an honest to god strategy would look like we're slamming in lng terminals so fast right now as if that's the highest best use that we're going to double our lng exports probably by 2033 from 17 to about 34 35 billion cubic feet per day and we currently only produce about 108 billion cubic feet per day so the question is where's all that coming from and nobody can answer that right now it's just going to arise because it always does um it's a mystery and what's the justification for that just the geopolitical aspect of creating dependent trade partners and so it's just the cost of this strategy is yes we it may be better used here

on u.s soil but we need uh some geopolitical leverage via these these energy trades well i'm a little mystified because you know a big part of that is um sending it over to europe right last i checked europeans don't even like us all that much you know so not really clear what the geopolitical strategy there is um and and you know i could i could understand shipping it to asia to japan you know singapore maybe china i can understand that but um anyway it's not a it's not a we don't have that plan though that says how much of this stuff do we have left and what does it look like when it when it when it you know in the future like what are we using it for um and if we really want to like like you know re if we want to compete at

all with china so if anybody listening if you really want to know just how far ahead of us China is go to Timu dot com. Right. It's there, you know, Amazon and just buy something you're familiar with. Right. So, you know, I just buy like tools and building supplies and things like that. And Marty, I don't even know. I couldn't even source the raw materials for the price of this thing that's been manufactured halfway around the world and shipped to me at a profit. I don't know. Like you could just get a sense of how far ahead of us they have to be to produce all of these different things right like i just bought little charge controllers individual units that can run um just a small collection of solar panels because i've got extra solar panels

just in case people in the future might want to use them you know certain certain outcomes but you need a charge controller and a little output device so i buy these little devices and they can handle up to um 100 amps right it was just a ton that's like i don't know how many panels that is like awesome and they work they were five dollars and 63 cents each holy shit like how does that so anyway so you look at that and and then i then i heard about the byd plant where they're like okay we're going to start manufacturing cars they found a facility which was 50 square miles you know it's like the size of san francisco right yeah that's that was the quoted thing seven so seven miles on a side gets you to 49 so just think of like a seven mile by seven mile block and the point is

like raw materials come in one end of this thing and cars come out the other end of this thing so their entire supply chain is seven miles long and internally consistent ours because of nafta geopolitical considerations i think the transmissions are made in windsor canada but the truck bodies are made in mexico and they're assembled in detroit whatever we have like multi-thousand mile long supply chains we can't compete with them so you know what the answer to that is yeah we've just blocked import of byd cars all right freaks you know me you know i don't take sponsor money from products i wouldn't use myself so listen up the aven bitcoin visa card is one of the most interesting things i've seen in the bitcoin lending space in a long time here's the

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And it's coming in here to push the communist talking points. But objectively, I mean, looking at the energy generation and the BYD plant and all these other things, it's like, hey, this stuff is happening there. And God, I've seen what you've done for others. I'd love that for myself. Like, how do we like there's a chasm in my mind? Who knows? Maybe I'm incredibly naive idealist. it's like why can't we both go after that stuff and sort of work cooperatively together which

brings up the the trip to china which i thought was interesting um last month uh that signal to me that the trump administration and everybody or the mainstream media was saying look how strong we're we've got all our ceos and our complete cabinet over there drawing a strong strong force within china but to me that actually signal weakness it's like we need to bring up all these heavy hitters to to basically flex in a way they're another way to put it it didn't seem like we had a quiet confidence that we have leverage in negotiations with china is the way i read it could be wrong but um this whole superpower juxtaposition of china and the u.s I think a lot of what we're seeing today is a proxy war between that sort of struggle of China's rise and the U.S. trying to figure out what it wants to do as it turns 250 years old.

No, I agree. And I often get people sort of yelling at me about China like they just copy stuff, which is such a 1980s talking point. You know, I'm usually talking to somebody older than myself when you get that sort of refrain, because I'm like, well, who did they copy the circulating quantum satellite from? Because we don't have one of those. Nobody does. Who did they copy like their manufacturing process efficiencies from? Because I saw this this other instructive video and it could be Chinese propaganda, but it looked kind of real where they showed a plant that was making missiles. And they said this plant can turn out a thousand missiles a month. Right. It was just fully automated. It's just running all on its own, right? And then we had the CEO of Ford go over and come back terrified and said, you know, I

went into this factory and they had to turn the lights on so I could see what was happening because there weren't any humans on the floor. It was all robots manufacturing stuff, turning out a new chassis like every 20 seconds, right? You couldn't even conceive of the efficiencies in that model. So if you dare to believe your own lying eyes, it's clear that China can out manufacture us amazingly so and then skip over and look at what just happened between the ukraine war and then the iran war we ran out of our fancy pants missiles you know the thads the sm2s the sm3s like we're like just ran out like it's gonna take years to replace our patriots and all this stuff right

um so i will tell people right now without flinching that we've already lost the next war with china because wars are fundamentally logistics and manufacturing we can't compete on that front and i hope we never try right because we'll just lose a lot of people yeah our fancy missiles will knock down the first wave but not the second the third or the hundredth wave and china can out manufacture us that that's how we won world war ii our manufacturing centers did not get bombed we were able to out manufacture our adversaries and that's pretty much what every military person will tell me it's like oh yeah you know you don't go up against a foe who can out manufacture you not just two to one but probably 100 to one or even a thousand to one

in some uh select areas plus we get a lot of our missile components from china so that might be awkward hey yeah i know we're shooting at each other but can you send us another another load of titanium nose cones that would be awesome yeah we need the chips too can you send those no then you factor in you layer in the fact that uh we are i think fully in the age of asymmetric drone warfare and um i'm sure you've seen the videos of the the drone light shows in china over the years that's always been a sort of light-handed military military flex in my mind it's like hey we have all these drones over here uh be ashamed if we use them in other capacities And a 23-year-old kid's running them off a laptop, all 10,000 of them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's – are you hopeful that sanity will prevail here in the U.S.? Because, I mean, I guess we can bring this back to precious metals and monetary matters too. I think if inflation rips again, you're looking at the 30-year, 10-year yield. Here in the United States, I mean, that's – I mean, look, this is a Bitcoin podcast. a lot of what we've discussed over the last nine years of running the show is hey looking at the national debt looking at entitlements looking at the trajectory and it's becoming clear that

we are on this runaway debt train driven by fiscal insanity that doesn't seem like it'll ever get fixed and uh what does that mean moving forward with i think post 2022 i think that was like the the massive inflection point with the freezing of the treasury assets of russia we're four years beyond that and now we are in another war uh the yields are going up the debt is going up the interest expense on that debt is going up inflation's about to rear its head again um and then you have a ai wave that's coming and many of the builders of this technology are saying hey it's going to wipe out a ton of jobs, too. So prepare for that. How does the dollar system survive that? That's it. It doesn't. I mean, listen, it's got a lot of inertia. It's going

to take time to play out, but we're already seeing it play out. I was asked in an interview yesterday, somebody said, well, you know, the dollar isn't doing that bad. Well, that's because you look at the USD index and you're comparing it to other fiat currencies. But let's compare the dollar to gold oh it's lost half its value in about four years um you know and uh so on and and so that's really going to be the ultimate arbiter here is what is the dollar against real things and that's what's about to get exposed because of the closing of the straighter for moose which marty you know this but everybody needs to keep this in mind because every day it's like oh oil oil oil well it's also oil products oh it's also helium it's aluminum too and fertilizer

and sulfur, right? It's just, it is actually a poly crisis. Each one of those is an individual full conversation with all kinds of stuff that's just now rearing its head. And it's going to be with us for a few years. So we have that. And sometimes inflation is a monetary phenomenon because we mischaracterize it in the United States. We call inflation rising prices. Does milk cost more this year than last year? That's inflation. True to a point. So we have inflationary pressures because the ultimate source of inflation always is government deficit spending. Right. That's that's the real headwaters of the Nile on this whole thing. And there were spending as if I know there's a war going on. But even

before the war, we were spending as if it was World War Two. We were spending nearly seven percent of GDP in deficit. You know, we just sort of ramped it up in 2020 because covid and never found out how to dial that back. Right. And so we just kept that going. Six, seven percent of GDP deficit spends that's highly inflationary um and that inflation is coming you know we just caught a ppi print last month or the last month came out a week ago at six percent ppi leads the cpi it's almost a guarantee that we're going to get six percent cpi prints in just a few months right because it's usually a three to four month lag between those two and so if that happens well do you want to be holding a 30-year bond even at five percent if inflation six percent

no sir um and and so that's a lot of the selling pressure but it's not just u.s right japanese bond long bonds are selling off uk gilts are getting murdered they're all on the rise in europe as well and the u.s so 10 20 30s all like heading upwards in yield so that's that's pretty much baked in the cake at this point my personal prediction is that we're going to sort of get to tank bottoms and then oil's going to go to whatever it's going to go to much much higher numbers we're going to call that inflation and it's a little bit driven by the fact that we have tons of money circulating the system explosive m2 growth worldwide tons of margin debt tons of bank lending mostly for these ai centers so there's cash everywhere that is going to provide some some inflationary

pressure but it's really it's going to be a supply shock too and so sometimes you get cost push inflation which just happens because you don't have enough stuff and prices rise as a consequence those two things together i would not be surprised if i could just pull this chart up again because this is the one we talked about i got this one from um james lavish the informationist but first came out that's the one i was using yeah i first saw the first iteration of this uh from torsten slock at apollo but let's use this one and for everybody watching the blue line is the 70s and up into 1980 peak right green seems to just be like almost perfectly echoing and here we have the april cpi reading at 3.78 it's going to go to six percent on the next couple of readings

out right it just probably unless something's broken with the ppi model uh and i actually think my model that you know i think we're going to see 15 to 20 inflation in about a year and a half to two years if we follow this and it's going to be a lot of money right out there chasing too few goods and also too few goods in some critical areas it's those two things combining together and at that point we have to ask the question like okay we had paul volker right six foot five texans cigar chomping pushed people in the chest backed him into the walls when he didn't like what they were saying kind of guy uh who was capable of ramming he had to run short-term interest rates at this peak 21 they block that can you even what what happens to our interest expense

if the long bond goes to 14 like it did back then and short term goes to 21 it's game over like it's not possible well that that would make uh at 39 trillion yeah that would make the interest expense what like six six trillion a year or not not six but uh or like five four and a half five a year it's at what one seven one eight right now yeah that's the past social security yeah yep thankfully we had janet yellen the gnome genius the garden gnome genius um putting all of our our treasuries into short duration so we have these massive eight nine ten trillion dollar rolls every year now because we're all on the short end of the curve as if that would always remain subdued um we should have should have as a nation when when 10 years

we're at 0.75 we should have just slapped everything we could gone argentinian style austrian style made hundred year bonds i mean just like push like that would have been smart uh i again it just keeps coming up heads like was she really that that dumb you know well that that's the another sort of confusing thing is because coming into the trump administration uh scott percent and others were saying this was a terrible mistake she shouldn't have been doing this to your point i think trump explicitly said we should have been issuing 10 years bonds when the yield was that low i think he mentioned 100 year bond too maybe even a 50 and then besant got in and kept hammering the front end too and there's something structurally behind the scenes i don't know

exactly what it seems to make it so they they feel forced to do this um and obviously as long-term yields go up they're probably going to favor it um the front end just to avoid locking in higher interest rates of long-term debt but no it feels like a a problem that uh isn't easily solvable unless you figure out the fiscal side and that's another confusing thing it's like hey this has been the year of unearthing the last 12 months of unearthing all this incredible waste and grift within the um for the federal government whether it's social security um having dead people get paid social security till they're 115 obviously the medicaid medicare fraud that's been laid bare with um all the learning centers and hospice centers across minneapolis and la and other

parts of the country um from many different it seems predominantly immigrant groups uh and it's just laid bare right in front of us and um the public myself included makes enough for like hey they're obviously just overtly stealing our tax dollars let's do something about it and you'll get like headlines in a week of uh a week of um just pandering to to that sentiment and then nothing happens people come out and say well we actually can't fix this because uh reasons yeah yeah i i confess i had some optimism in january of 2025 particularly when elon rode in with the 20 something crowd and ai'd their way right through the bureaucracy of dc just like those all those people had those little like fiefdoms with their like mysql databases of spending that

were all like squirreled away that you could never you know forensically audit and ai just ripped it apart. Right. You know, they smashed through USAID and we were starting to get the data Republicans showing all the connections. And it was just this big sea of graft. I'm like, finally. And then next thing I know, Trump unceremoniously dumps Elon, proves that he will betray even somebody who is highly responsible for being a key supporter financially and otherwise in a critical moment to help him get elected and just spit him out and said nope we're all done we're all done doge just went nowhere like that to me was the dc power structure saying that was a little too frightening we saw the light the end of the tunnel you know

and they just put a rip on it and and stopped it um and since then absolutely nothing of substance has happened nothing yeah even after nick shirley and you know the sort of man on the street investigative journalists um one of the things yep billions and billions of dollars worth of fraud in one state alone and yeah nothing i mean yeah well that's like if again trying to i try to wear many different lenses and one of the lenses talk to tom luongo a lot and he's um i think he's big on like hey this isn't going to happen overnight it's going to take time like you brought up usa like we got usa out um that doesn't seem to have come back we're not going to get everything all at once and um holding on hope that like maybe that's the case where it's

okay we can only do a little bit at a time but it is hard to see it right in your face and then i mean the the medicaid fraud the somali daycare fraud is like that should be cut overnight instant stop feeding the money yeah instant i i think um something like one in six um hospice kid was it in-home care specialist works in la county it's an impossibility right you know for medicaid you know and that was i forget who i think dr oz went and did that one and that was like a russian immigrant fraud like we're not we're not racist here we're not uh against somali specifically or whoever it may be um it just seems like there's the very clear loopholes are being exploited and that's the weird thing you brought up the deep state there is

there seems to be some sort of organized effort to make make it the somalian and russian immigrants aware like hey these loopholes are here here's how you can claim to be a hospice care nurse and just take millions of dollars from the u.s government yeah hey if i could marty i'd love to get your take on this because this is to me the most astonishing thing ever that came out of this was late january early february 2025 right before elon got shit canned um and i'm sure you're familiar with it but you've heard this right this is the most astonishing thing i've ever heard so he's uh elon is on a um interview on ted cruz's show with this other guy i don't know um one of the things you told me about

Yeah. Okay. Right here. I mean, they're not totally wrong, but they're probably off by 5% or 10% in some cases. So I call it magic money computer, any computer which can just make money out of thin air. Best magic money. So how does that work? It just issues payments. And you said something like 11 of these computers at Treasury that are sending out trillions in payments? They're mostly a treasury. Some are, but there's some at HHS, some at, there's one or two at State, there's some at DoD. I think we found now 14 magic money computers. 14, okay. They just send money out of nothing.

So this is the guy who presumably knows something about payment systems, you know, having cut his teeth at PayPal, right? And he's very three times, he says, these are magic money machines because they just emit credits. Now, in my limited understanding of the world, that feature only exists at the Federal Reserve. And he's saying that's now metastasized. And you have them at HHS, DOD. Of course, that makes sense. Like they can't pass an audit to save their lives. Right.

You know, but they're just these machines emitting credits. And then that just it violates everything we know about money. Right. just means we're just manufacturing just one side of of the debit credit balance sheet and we're just emitting credits i don't understand how that reconciles inside the banking system i mean and right after that they were like okay you're out yeah and you're left with the black eye too yeah and uh oh no well that's that's like the the crate like i think i mean we're getting the pure wizard of oz territory and think about just how fake reality is if they're able to do that the

misallocation of money via the printing of it ex nihilo towards all these things that are i think against what most american citizens what humans want at the end of the day and so like that i'd really be interested to get your perspective on i mean deep stake deep state is a very broad topic it has many meanings for many different people but i do think there is something here to this sort of entrenched sort of supra like unelected layer of the federal government that exists and historically has sort of just abused the system and done it through monetary means too i mean one of the favorite books i've read in the last couple years is gold warriors which highlights how the cia basically plundered the the gold that was in southeast asia after world war ii and just used

it as a black box slush fund for for decades until these investigative journalists figured it out and i mean back then you actually had to find the gold to run the the the slush fund now you can just use the magic money machine to print it out of nothing yes well very important that we don't audit fort knox if that story is right you know somehow that's too hard i don't know counting bars well difficult um well so two things right so remember during the iraq war like there were all these pictures like tankers filled with gold bars and smiling servicemen kind of holding up bars i'm like where'd it go right nobody can answer that question like was it returned to the iraqi treasury nobody will say like just went missing and then i'm skipping a jump it was just

last week we heard about this fake cia agent he was real cia agent but he had faked his resume and they found 40 million dollars in gold bars in his in his apartment or house and and he said oh he had those were for um he was paid in gold like those were for he's i think he said uh pay remittances or something like basically for hours work the cia pays people in gold and you're making 40 million dollars out of government jobs yeah we took that story that'll get buried trust me right well we talked about this last week on the weekly show that i do like how did how did the cia not flag that this guy was lying about as military like is there no sort of inter department information sharing between the

the the military and the the cia like i find that hard to like the fact the whole story stinks uh he submitted 40 million dollars of time payment stubs like what it's a lot of overtime you know i'm just like no something really stinks in that story but but a gold is is central to it you know So so here's here's my here's my wackadoodle, you know, hypothesis. So I track positive and negative space stuff. So negative space in the story is that in 2003, the Federal Reserve stopped reporting MZM, its largest money measure, right? Money of zero maturity, because it was not cost effective to track it anymore.

Like you guys print money out of thin air. What's cost effective? I'm losing the plot. Second, 2006, we lost M3. Now, M3 tracks all the money in the United States plus offshore money. And now we're not tracking offshore money. So the question is, where would these magic money machines be emitting credits? And my guess is a lot of it's going offshore to do things, right?

You've got to pay contractors. You've got to, you know, whatever, buy off dictators. You know, there's things that have to be done. But that could be where all of this is going. And so my hypothesis here, Marty, is that whatever you think our money supply is, it's larger than that. I don't know how much larger. I hope it's not twice as large because you could imagine like Panama Papers showed us there were 275,000 shell companies offshore where people have money stashed, maybe CIA officers with $40 million. Right.

And imagine they're all just parked there thinking they have all this U.S. cash and it's good as gold and all that stuff. And then one day they wake up and the rumors have gotten started and the dollar is starting to tank and all that money suddenly says, I'd rather be in something different. You know. That could be another sort of beach ball moment where you're like, oh, there was a little bit more pressure in the system than we thought, you know, out there. But I'm I'm convinced at this point we do not have good insight into how much actual money has been created. money is power money is privilege money is an extraordinary substance and there's not a chance in the world that people who are unauditable who are unaccountable haven't abused that system oh yeah I mean it was I think it was I mean and it's almost like it's in your face now because what was it like last year for some reason or another like the Cayman Islands like was forced to report

their treasury holdings and i mean it's not the government to the cayman islands holding the second amount of you i think i forget if it's larger than japan or just below it but in the same ballpark as japan which is the largest holder of u.s treasuries and obviously these are all sort of cayman funds that have exposure to treasuries and many people are believing that's sort of the a lot of that is hedge fund fronts for the cia to to run slush funds down there Well, this was an astonishing thing to me because I just I just tracked this down the other day. So the Board of Governors, Federal Reserve System, they have some paper. Paper comes out by Barth, Beltran, Kahn, Pirazek comes out in October of 2025.

And they said, oh, we're kind of trying to square it up because, you know, the U.S. TIC report out of Treasury says the Cayman Islands have four hundred twenty seven billion at the end of 2025. But when we looked at their 9F, their PF forms, it turned out they had one point eight trillion. it's like we missed 1.4 trillion what's 1.4 trillion among friends and i'm like i'm reasonably certain that that either the the treasury has to send you a coupon payment or upon remittance right because it's a you know it's a t-bill so it was sold at 98 but you par out at 100 when it rolls um they have to send that money somewhere they didn't know where it was going impossible i mean it's just implausible like you said it's in your face now that you have to accept these like oh we just didn't know 1.4 trillion extra and it's like oh the pentagon failed

another audit can literally cannot audit what we're doing with all your tax dollars or the money that's just being printed that's i mean do you i mean you mentioned like the the beach ball in regards to people basically calling BS on the fiat system and going towards harder currencies. That's why I got into Bitcoin. That's why I'm passionate about Bitcoin. I think there is not only a pressing need to transition back to a sound money economy,

but I think there's a moral obligation. I think the ethics of money production by Holtzman was very influential on my thinking on just the morality of money printing. And I do think there's an ethical dilemma that the whole world finds itself in now where we're living in immoral monetary systems. And getting back to sound money is an imperative if we want to have a true society. Because, again, going back to the point with all this magic money machines, these slush funds in the Cayman Islands, whatever it may be, it's all fake, manufactured out of nothing. And what has that done to push the trajectory of humanity into the direction that we're on now versus what otherwise would have happened if those forces weren't there? This is such an important point. And it's kind of this is the genesis of where I got started.

But I got started in all this, you know, way before Bitcoin was around. And so I kind of dialed in on on gold or anything. I didn't even care. Like it could have been sheepskins, just anything that humans couldn't print out of thin air. Because if I if I reach into your bank account and I steal three percent of that, you know, I've stolen. It's it's it's it's that's immoral. Right. It's unethical.

But that's what the Fed does. Right. They print all this money and they steal from everybody who's got existing hard money supposed to be that store of value. Hey, I work hard. I overproduce. I have some excess. I save that. Right. And they're saying, now we're going to steal that from you on an ongoing basis. So by definition, we have a fraudulent system of money because it's fraud if I can steal from you without you knowing. Right. It's just that's all. It's impossible to build a non-corrupt system on top of fraudulent money.

It's like to me, that's just sort of a philosophical like truism. Right. oh we're gonna put these rules in place and we'll have this great system but underneath it the sill plate of this house is termite shot you know it's like we're gonna build this beautiful house on top right good laws rules regulations you can't you just can't so i think if we want to have a just society you have to have sound money and i'm agnostic i don't think we should have a sound money system they sold us on it like you have only the dollar i'm like let's have bitcoin let's have gold let's have sheepskins i don't care and let them compete because it's competition that keeps things refreshing and also honest over time right you know if i want if i want to save my

wealth in airline miles fine you know but then i find out the airlines give me less and less and less for each mile over time like nope you know i'm gonna save it in pokemon cards nope that was a bad idea okay whatever you know but you get i think that having choices would be great you know i completely agree and now now i'm starting to get uh not angry but just thinking about it like they print i mean it's become a meme i think uh shout out to president naiba cate lee for coming what was it the c-pack a couple of years ago or and basically explaining like taxation is a humiliation ritual because that's the other that's what it is that's the other immoral thing is well hey you guys can print all this money you are printing all this money but then you're turning

around and slapping 30 to 50 percent tax rates on people um and you're taxing them on the way in on the way out every which way possible and you're compounding that immorality of debasement by basically stealing uh stealing the hard-earned wage even more via taxation yeah yeah no indeed um and you know again early 2025 there were these little glimmers of hope right where trump actually said magic words to me which is you know maybe we should explore getting rid of property taxes which to me is the ultimate insult right so every so often somebody says we should tax unrealized gains on stock portfolios and the whole world erupts in fervor right like oh my god worst thing ever what a terrible idea and objectively it is a terrible

idea but that's what happens with houses right you know you get taxed on the unrealized gains the assessor comes around every so often says oh your house is worth more you owe more you know it's the craziest thing why do i owe more on this thing that i have a house it's a depreciating asset trust me you know and i bought it it should be mine why are you uh why are you taxing me in And I mean, this is another reason for the sound money economy, too, I believe, is, I mean, people are using their houses as piggy banks. And that is, I think, part of the reason we're seeing this sort of intergenerational struggle and resentment from the younger generations towards the olders. because they've been a combination of PSYOPT enforced via the financial, just the natural financial pressures of the system to use their houses as piggy banks

that people who are coming up are finding it harder to buy a house because they don't have the cash to purchase that piggy bank, for lack of a better term. Well, I'm either a very late boomer or an early Xer, depending on who's setting the starting date. Ideologically, I align more with Gen X because, you know, just how I grew up and all of that. But every time I say, hey, the boomers as a class are leaving behind a much worse world than the one that they were granted, right? Every single time, Marty, I get all these angry boomers. and it's this it's it's the same argument every time they go no i'm not that way or no my mom and dad weren't like that and it's like i said the average height of people in la is five foot eight

and somebody comes along goes no i know a guy who's six two you're wrong i'm like since they can't do the generalization they have to destroy it with a specific which is so classic for that generation right it's all about me me it's the it's the the boomers are leaving behind a ruined world for their offspring full stop there's no way to debate this at this point in time right you can't get by on minimum wage you can't get by on two minimum wages people can't even get by on you know you saw professor plum michael green saying you know let me make an argument poverty if you live in a city is 140 000 now right oh the opprobrium he got for that point of view but the point is that the poverty line is not 32 300 like whether the government's on

it's way up there and it's going higher every year that's the world we've left behind and objectively i mean what can you see levels of happiness like way down household formation way down having kids way down those are all markers forming a household having kids are signs that you're positive about life in the future and the opposite of that means you're not positive that's the world that's been left behind and it's because i think boomers were asleep at the switch and they just didn't do what needed to be done it's hard work kicking out raccoons who've taken over and infested your political structure it's it's hard work pushing back against this and we just didn't get any pushback so i think it carries on till it breaks

right so when you ask for you know where does this go in my mind i'm in my studio but right outside i've got six cows and 30 chickens and all that because i'm a little bit worried that this could this will go to the breaking point at some stage but this it's it's sooner or later you maybe you either get sort of that violent uprising which can happen but there's another form of violence too which would be in china there was this little movement i don't know how long it is but people were overworked and so they called it lying flat meaning you just you just don't you just don't work anymore you know you just check out of the system so we're seeing people check out of the system right you know the the male participation rate and employment just plunging

right there's guys who are just like i'm out i'm just i'm not doing this and and when the males the typical traditional providers and protectors are saying i don't even want to play the game right well you've got a bad game and it's a rigged game and we know this now right so i have i totally support the younger generations are like the olders are leaving a mess and i'm sick of this i don't want to play the game i think that's rational and supportable as a point of view because if the game is rigged against you don't play the game totally makes sense yeah require quitting trend growing i mean you can say i mean i'm a i'm smack dab in the middle of the millennial generation got a younger sister straddles millennial and gen z and then

cousins that are gen z and it is i mean i think it's objectively true this there's a lot of hopelessness um within the younger generations that's one thing i try to do with this platform though my audience my demo is a bit older we do have younger people listening but not as many as uh as gen x and boomers funnily enough that listen to this show but anytime i get to talk to uh to a young person it is what you just said it's like opt out but opt out in the right way that's like bitcoin like i think um adopting a sound money standard on my personal balance sheet in my early 20s has worked out well for me as i get into my mid-30s i'm married i have three children and i don't think i would have been able to do that as

uh as um with as much peace of mind if i if i wasn't on a personal sound money standard so that's one way you opt out is don't use their broken money um and then as somebody again with three young children trying to think of what the world will look like in 12 years when they begin to, to get out of our house and on their own. It's like, what, what's that going to look like? And what can we do to make sure that it is, uh, a world of opportunity and relatively safe? And I think, um, the big question that many people have right now is where Gen Z and Gen Alpha going to do because they're going to be forced to pick up the pieces um i think not only what are they going to do but how quickly are they going to be able to do it if they figure it out yeah

i mean it's it's very difficult to have give advice all my three kids are basically mid struggle with all of this right um and and just tapping into what what they and all their friends are saying they're like well what what even is the point like you know so there's no company loyalty anymore none of them believe that that social security which dips into their paychecks when they get paychecks you know none of that's going to be there for them they just they feel totally betrayed and abandoned by the system right which which is not conducive to things and so you know my warning to boomers is um do not even remotely assume that when push comes to shove that you're going to have a lot of sympathy in the younger generations going wow well let's yeah

that's kind of a shame you know you paid in to that system we'll work extra hard to preserve it so you can have your retirement try and act surprised when they just like up and walk away and say it's kind of on you good luck with that and um i'm sure you saw this too but i can't believe that that even the how are we not at like uh revolution at this point when you get larry fink who was born to steal from people right that's who he is he's just born to steal from everybody and this a ceo blackrock and he says ordinary people's savings accounts and pension funds worth trillions of dollars will be used to build data centers and power grids for ai much of this he says will come from savings accounts and pension accounts

yeah cue the the famous um uh you know scene scene from south park and it's gone yeah so So what's he talking about, like a bail in to fund the infrastructure? Well, so right now, you know, the free cash flows of all the companies like negative now because they're just like taking every ounce of earnings. And now they're also starting to issue debt. So who's on the other side of that debt? I think last figure I saw was one hundred eighty billion that's issued. Somebody is on the backside of that. You know, who's on the backside of that? Probably the bond funds. Right. Which all these 401ks are rolling into as part of a 60 40 strategy. And now they're also starting to issue stock. So they're pushing both, you know, equity and debt to get this build out.

So it's going to be the people on the other side of that who are funding that. And of course, as you know, there's no business model that shows that you're going to be able to earn that amount of money back before these chips depreciate out, which is three to five years, depending on the chip set. right um so like it's just and this is just we're watching a money evaporating machine in process right now and larry fink just comes right out and says and you're gonna pay for it how is that how do people just sort of shrug and move on from that i don't get it yeah it'll be interesting to see i mean that larry fink i think as somebody who uh i mean you mentioned flare gas earlier That's how I got into Bitcoin mining. We would go and take gas that was being otherwise flared, run it through a generator, produce electricity, mine Bitcoin with it.

But at that era in 2018, 2019, my biggest enemy was ESG, which Larry Fink was the main spokesperson for. And I think that was a massive capital misallocation mishap, a narrative mishap. and i think thank god we've we've gone beyond that that nonsensical sort of view of the world and how corporations should be run and what they should be allocating capital and um and hiring people but yeah it is funny how these people just get a pass larry fink especially and that and again it's the ai point of the pushback on like the profitability i think whether i think anthropic may be starting to free cash flow i think elon's colossus running that out to anthrop that's the other thing i'm trying to wrap my head around is like

seeing the stories of the circular deals i don't i don't know if it's exactly enron like and i always fall back to like using these tools they work and they are helping us and so um but for larry fink to go out there and be like oh no we're going to use your your pensions to fund all this it's like well i think uh i think it's a bit brash and then going back to sound money it's like why do we need all these uh exotic investment vehicles and you think of the amount i think the amount of etfs has surpassed the amount of um actual stocks yeah yeah actual stocks yeah and so we've just gotten this hyper hyper financialized economy i know i'm rambling here but i'm getting to a point which is like we should be on a hard money standard where you're

like forced away the the the money system forces you to weigh the opportunity cost of capital allocation and the market basically figures out like okay is this productive if so you'll be able to produce it and make a profit and reinvest those profits expand operations the whole point of this rambles like we can't even make these decisions because the money is completely broken. I agree. I agree. It's a huge stumbling block because it becomes about the money. And so financialization is making money with money. Right. And almost every company is out there figured out that it's in an expansive monetary environment. It's just easier to make money with money than to do hard things like hire people and train them and manage inventories and take risks

and all that stuff. That's terrible. But if you can just make money with money, you know, that's easy and you know i've got these this whole giant set of books by will durant you know inarguably the most complete and best historian ever and there's this one little chapter thing that um was brought to my attention um by uh simon black uh and he did this brilliant presentation around it where he just read this paragraph out of i think it was athens like 50 bc or something and they went through this whole monetary debasement but will durant describes exactly our society today people under a debasing regime suddenly wanted to gamble wanted to speculate wanted to make money with money anything but actually being productive because that's hard

work you know we're humans so if you give us an opportunity to like make money with money that's so much easier than do an actual hard work but you need the hard work you know and so uh i think we're just sort of at the tail end of this whole thing monetary debasement has been pretty much the surest way to completely ruin a society through all of history. I don't think now is going to be any different just because we've got some better tools, you know, got better computers. I think it's the same story as ever. You have to understand where value comes from. It starts with energy. It starts with people working hard, taking real risks and transforming that into higher value add products, right? And that's the true source of prosperity. Financialization is

always, always not a path to prosperity, except for the individual playing in the game who wins. right it's just nibbling at the actual prosperity that's out there it has to by definition right and all these all these private equity dudes out there they don't make anything right they make great spreadsheets you've seen the spreadsheets yeah incredible spreadsheets you should see the vlookups in those spreadsheets they're pretty beautiful formatting it's amazing you talk to some excel nerds they'll say hey this is this is actually pretty beautiful and productive what we've built here with this vlookup um chris i want to be respectful of your time i feel like we could go for hours um and i have it on the calendar for 90 minutes and we're brushing

up on that but this was incredible is there any parting thoughts for the audience based off of what we just discussed anything we missed anything you think people should be aware of before we wrap touch here. Yeah, absolutely. So first, I can't give specific investment advice ever because I have a registered investment advisory. And that service at Peak Financial Investing just helps people get connected with portfolio managers who actually see the world this way. And it's a really important service. But what I want to just direct people to, however you get there, I think the era of passive investing which is really dominated it's over right just just throw money into an etf you know and and just wait and magic happens i think we're entering an age of of severe

turbulence here i think there's supply shocks i think there's inflation there's all kinds of things coming along where i think everybody would be well suited to have a very nimble very targeted focus again it's just the pendulum doth swing right there's times when it's fine to just sit back and just sort of be patient. I think we're entering a period now where we're going to have to be nimble rather than patient. And the second thing is, if all of that seems confusing and hard, and it kind of is, hard assets, right? For me, that's anything that can't be just sort of willy-nilly expanded on a spreadsheet by somebody, right? And so really important. So for me, hard assets, it's land, it's trees, it's cows, it's gold, it's

silver it's equipment it's skills right all these these are the things to get back sort of into i think and and these two will come back in vogue at some point and like you i sort of share this idea that we're only looking at the shiny side of the ai coin and if we do that too long it's going to be much to our detriment because if i had a magic if all i have to do is press a button and a machine makes itself you know i press the magic you know claude coding thing and it recodes itself right that's fine you just carry that forward 10 years nobody remembers how the original code was developed if the machine blinks out for some reason nobody knows how to rebuild it we're all dependent on it right that's a huge risk here so i think that for anybody younger people skills

right actual human interaction knowing where real value actually comes from you know don't pay it money isn't, money isn't, isn't wealth. It's a marker for wealth. Know where the value actually comes from and how you provide value in the story. And you'll do fine. You might have to scramble and dodge and weave a bit in life, but, but you know, the old era that your schools are still trying to train you for, it doesn't exist. It already went poof. It's gone. I don't think it's coming back. So it's a whole new era. And that era is all about knowing where real value comes from and how to add to that. And there. That's the best advice I have for people right now. That's great advice. Have will, agency, sound money. You can opt out. Chris, this has

been a pleasure. Hopefully we can do this again at some point in the future. Absolutely. Pleasure's been mine, Marty. 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 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

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