The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - Financial Crisis or Huge Opportunity with John Rubino | The CBP (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What To Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004 and sold it in 2022. John has written for Fidelity Magazine and CFA Magazine, and his blog can be found on Substack at rubino.substack.com. Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com ⁠Discord:   / discord   A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠www.easydns.com⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

Preston Pyshko, Jr.: Friends and enemies. Welcome back, Tuesday night. Good to see you, sort of. You can see me. I can't see you. I'll only see you in the chat, your eyeballs and your slanderous messages. You know my name. Tonight, we're talking to John Rubino. John is a former finance guy, gold bug, author of the Rubino Substack, which we will talk about tonight. And basically one of us in terms of the Bitcoin maximalist ethos. We know that fiat currencies are going the way of the dodo faster every day. What does it look like when a currency collapses? What are the signposts? Like I always say, John has been talking about this, writing about this, and thinking about this for a lot longer than any

of us have. And so it's our pleasure to have him tonight. But first, as always, the sponsors, EasyDNS. You guys know Mark. You love Mark. Mark's been a great friend to the show, a great friend of mine, and a partner of the podcast now for several years. He is the Friendly Neighborhood Registrar. Why does he call himself that?

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Mark takes care of all that. Undefeated in the realm of DNS and domain work. CBP Media is the code if you go there, or just tell him we sent you, or just talk to him in the chat. He's here in the chat all the time. So you can talk to him then too. And you get 50% off your first round of buys. Cannot beat it. Second sponsor, Bull Bitcoin. What's the price? Unknown. 1,022 sats per dollar.

So probably like 96,000, something like that. Great day to buy, just like it is every day. Head over to Bull Bitcoin, deposit some money, see how the service treats you. Non-custodial. Never worry about getting rugged. We just saw a certain Canadian exchange start to change their rules about login bonuses and shaking sats. Don't worry about that on BoldBitcoin. They don't need you to go there all the time. They don't need daily active users. They care about quality, not quantity.

So they're non-custodial. Every bit of Bitcoin you buy there has privacy features baked in on withdrawal. Coin joined gives you a solid estimate. Everything is very, very fast, very easy. E-transfers, you want to still go to Canada Post, got to show ID now, but you can do cash too. Then on top of that, if you're trying to live on the Bitcoin standard, man, the bills system, pay any kind of bill you want, mortgages, cell phone bills, probably not your bar tab at the peelers from last weekend, but they may end up there too. At some point, you never know. The code is in the description. I don't know what our code is, but you guys are all using it. If you're not using it yet, why

go there, give them some information, $20 to $21, in the name of Satoshi, of course, write into your account, start using Bull Bitcoin. A team of people that cares about Bitcoin, cares about the mission, and isn't worried about going public and all this other nonsense. Let's bring in John. Here he is, John Rubino. John, it's great to have you here. I've been subscribed to your substock.

I'll admit I'm not a paying subscriber. Hold your tomatoes for some time. And I read your stuff. And now thanks to Substack's audio feature, I listen to it once in a while. I got to say I'm a big fan of yours. So I'm very happy for a free Substack subscription as soon as we get off. So you're officially a free paying subscriber from now on. Incredible. So you are a guy with a lot of history. You started Dollar Collapse as part of a book effort. We just talked about that beforehand. We can touch on that if you'd like. But what I'm really interested in is your thoughts on what's going on and what's gone on, to be honest, John, probably since 2020, 2016. I'm thinking of those years because those were the years where Bitcoin especially gained a lot of traction. And when Bitcoin gains traction, the ideas that you and I have in common and believe in

also gain traction. Things like sound money, things like understanding inflation, things like understanding how governments fail, how currencies fail, things of this nature. So I think maybe the best place to start is what happened in the last 10 years, in your opinion, that's really accelerated these processes for modern governments. They seem to have lost control, at least in some regard, in terms of currency valuations, in terms of faith in institutions. There's some obvious ones, but I'm sure you have some not so obvious ones as well. Well, to understand the last 10 years, you got to go a little further back to 1971 when

we broke the last link between the major fiat currencies and gold. And at that point, all the big governments had unlimited credit cards, basically. They had monetary printing presses that let them make as much money out of thin air as they wanted to. And from that moment on, we were doomed. You know, the governments of the world were just going to spend as much as they wanted, borrow as much as they wanted, and face no political repercussions for it. And their currencies were going to be destroyed. And that has gradually and now quickly happened over the last 10 years is that the boom and bust magnitude, the amplitude of the wave where the boom got bigger and the bust got bigger, had been growing ever since the 1970s.

But in 2007, 2008, we had a monster boom followed by a terrifying bust. And then that led the governments of the world to, instead of cleaning up their financial houses, they just rolled the dice and they just borrowed insane amounts of money starting in 2008 or so. And we're living in the consequences of that now. Sooner or later, there was going to be a bust that was so big that governments just couldn't do anything about it. The fiat currency system would die and we would have to replace that system with some version of sound money. So what happened in, well, the pandemic really kind of got in there and changed the process

to an extent by giving us a big crisis that wasn't necessarily a financial crisis. But we spent insane amounts of money trying to cover over the problems with the pandemic response around the world. And all that money slammed into the economy and gave us double-digit inflation in 2022. And that's really the big deal for a lot of people because most people had lived their entire lifetimes without noticeable inflation. In other words, prices went up a couple percent a year or whatever, but that's beneath the notice of most people. But then when their cost of living went up by a third or so in the space of a couple of years because of that big burst of inflation in 2022, all of a sudden that became a real thing for hundreds of millions of people or billions of people around

the world. And we now know, people now know that it's possible to have inflation again. And that's leading them to think about, well, okay, what is inflation? And therefore, what is money? So we're having to get back to these foundational concepts that we didn't have to understand for all these years of fiat currency because the government just printed whatever they needed to and life was basically good. You know, the 1990s were the best time to grow up in, or 1990s US were the best time, best place to grow up in human history. It was an amazing time because inflation was moderate. There were jobs everywhere you look. Technology was, you know, the internet was just being born. And that was the formative experience for most people until 2022. And then we found out that it's possible for the currency to just fall off the table. And that kind of opens the door.

I mean, there were Bitcoin people before that. There were, of course, gold bugs before that. But we were minorities, small minorities in the world. But now a huge number of people are starting to wake up to the nature of money and they're asking the important questions that lead to Bitcoin maximalism or hardcore silver stacking or whatever. So we are experiencing a huge cultural change right now. And it was always inevitable. It was always going to happen because that burst of inflation was always coming. But it actually came finally. I wrote a book, a co-wrote a book in the early 2000s called The Coming Collapse of the Dollar and How to Profit From It. And my co-author, James Turks, and I, our big fear as we were writing it in 2003 was that the

system would collapse, the financial system would collapse before we could get the book out. And so it seemed that imminent to us at the time, but it turned out to be much, much further in the future, which means I've been saying this stuff since I had black hair. You can go back and find videos of me looking like you and saying very similar things, except that this time around, I get to say that, okay, it's happening. We're in the death spiral now. I happen to think that you wrote that, John, that we are in the death spiral. I happen to think that you put that john that we are in the death spiral i maybe before i gotta be honest with you i hardly ever write things down when i'm getting ready to interview a guest but i i've been thinking about what i want to ask you about here because i know we have like a limited time and i i gotta pick your brain a little bit before

we do though do you subscribe to the theory that there was a repo rattle in late 2019 that maybe would have caused a complete disaster in the global financial system. And we just so happened to get a lab leak three months later. Are you on board with this? Do you know of it? I'm sure you know of it. Are you on board with it? Well, people forget that we were in a kind of a financial crisis in 2019. And it was the whole repo thing. You know, things were breaking in the financial markets and governments were stepping in with, you know, kind of backdoor free cash for everybody. And that could have screwed things up in myriad ways. Yeah, but you're right. Then the pandemic came. And okay, I'm going to put my tin

foil hat on here. I'm go for it yeah you know because anytime somebody says well what do you think about this conspiracy theory um it used to be that i would be like oh well you know it's one in a hundred of those things turn out to be true so it's possible that it's true but now it's the opposite for me i think well 99 and 100 of the conspiracy theories turn out to be true so it's probably opposite for me. I think, well, 99 and 100 of the conspiracy theories turn out to be true. So it's probably true what you're saying, you know, because really the conspiracy theories of the past decade sounded basically crazy when they were brought up and they have by and large turned out to be true. So what you're saying about, I guess I assume you're

saying that the pandemic was something that was released as a kind of false flag to distract us from this other horrible thing that was happening. And yeah, okay. I mean, we know now that we created the virus. We funded the research that led to that virus in the Wuhan lab in Wuhan, China. Then it got released, and it caused a lot of changes in the world. Yes, maybe it distracted us from a looming financial crisis, but it also gave governments around the world a trial run trial run for next generation dystopia, you know? And because they had to find out how easy it would be to fool people into compliance. And they found out that for half the population, it's pretty damn easy, you know? So in that sense, I think it was

a success from their point of view. In another sense, it was a monstrous failure because the 50% of the population that did not buy it is now a political bloc that's capable of winning elections. And we're not going to listen. Let them try the whole bird flu thing this time around or something like that. And so now you've got this populist, of course, populism goes deeper than just the pandemic, but it fed into what was always coming. But now you've got a populist revolution going on around the world. And it just happened in the US, obviously, the whole Trump, Elon Musk, the fake Ramaswamy-Tolsi Gabbard thing, that is a

populist revolution happening here. And what you're seeing in Europe right now might even be, well, I don't think it'll be bigger than the Trumpian revolution in the U.S., but it's liable to be pretty huge because Europe is a bigger economic entity than the U is. Yeah. And it's incredibly badly managed. The euro is collapsing. That's the fiat currency that might be the first domino that knocks over the other fiat currencies. And you've got far-right political parties winning in European elections. And the Europeans are starting to think they just need to ban all the dissent that's out there. And so,

you know, again, if they try that and they succeed, then Europe deserves what it gets. But if they try it and they fail, then they guarantee the revolution they were trying to prevent. So we'll see. I mean, that's a very interesting story for the year ahead because with big German elections coming up, it might be literally a next year story or later this year story. I think it's definitely possible they win. It's funny. I know I'm not going to accuse you of using the term far right in the same

sensationalist way that the press does, but it is funny to hear the press continue to call anyone who wants to vote for, it seems like their own interests maybe is the best way to put those voters or describe those voters as far right. I don't know what it's far from. It's certainly not far from the median anymore. It's certainly not far from what the expectation is going to be going forward. It may just be far from the current government. That's about it, though. Well, European far right is like a moderate Democrat or a moderate Republican in Texas or something like that. Basically, they want the borders to be under some kind of control. They would like government spending to be, you know, grow, but grow modestly. And they would like to avoid crazy wars out there that are going to suck their kids in and kill them for no reason.

That is far right in terms of Europe. And of course, you know, to today's Democrats, it's also far right in the US. But you're right, they've rebranded common sense conservatism to be some kind of quasi-fascist thing. And again, people aren't that stupid anymore. You can get away with that for very short periods of time while you control the media. But once you lose control of the media, you know, once Joe Rogan isn't buying your shtick, then you can't get away with it anymore. And that's happening in Europe. I mean, Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, between them, with X and The Joe Rogan Show, probably have a bigger audience

than any national news outlet in Europe. Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So it's basically, you know, it's over for the guys who just want to get away with lying and controlling people. Now they have to fight for it. And I don't think they have the stomach for it. You know, I think that we get a tidal wave of Trumpian kinds of things happening in Europe.

And then it's completely possible. See, they're so far gone in terms of out-of-control immigration that it might end up being a civil war over there. It's not clear how you bring things back into balance after what Angela Merkel and the quasi-conservatives in France and the UK have done with their borders. So, you know, I don't know. I'm kind of getting way off the reservation here. But it looks like we've just begun a kind of populist wave that is going to sweep over a lot of places.

And we'll see what happens then, you know, because populism is not an actual political philosophy. Populists can do anything once they get into power. It's just a sales pitch for an election when you say, okay, you're being screwed over by a tiny handful of super rich criminals. And put me in office and I'll go get back for you what you've lost. So that can mean anything. That can be Bernie Sanders' socialism or Donald Trump's, whatever it is we call his stuff now. It could be any of those things. But something is coming to your country everywhere right now and it's going to be named populism do you so okay a

couple of things i want to pull on there when you say that this whole um you know i i would call it a failing if not failed experiment in europe here in Canada, for fucking sure. It's like a failing experiment. I hate to say it, but it is. And when you say it's about media control and information control, I agree with you in part, but the other part of me doesn't agree with you, and I'll tell you why. For these counter movements to really gain exit velocity, escape velocity. In a lot of cases, it takes capital. And capital is in the highest earning, most bougie, in a lot of cases, oldest neighborhoods, communities, cities in these countries. I think about Toronto and Ottawa here in Canada. I'm sure there's kin cities in the United States and in

Europe, all over the place. And these people oftentimes, John, to be frank with you, are enjoying cushy pensions. They're enjoying houses that are 3,000 square feet and living there alone or with their partner. They are going to play racquetball every day. Not only do they not listen to Joe Rogan they also don't listen to the news and none of the problems that are torching cities all over the world are affecting them

and it sort of brings me to one of the things I want to talk with you about tonight is it fair to say that for this whole rebellion for lack of a better term to really gain escape velocity do Do we need

to see some damage, some rattling, some shaking in the entitlements and pensions programs in these huge countries? Canada, for example, just constantly, our finance minister, former finance minister at this point, Freeland, discussing every time she had a chance over the last two years, how great the pension system was, how Alberta leaving the pension system would be detrimental for Albertans. I don't know if you know this or not, but during the NBA All-Star Game here last year, the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board was airing advertisements talking about how well-funded and liquid their assets are and Canadians need not be worried. Never a surer thing than to worry after seeing that, but I digress. Do you have a view on the likelihood?

I think a lot of people understand that people my age are not going to get a pension, even if they're promised one. But the likelihood that people in their 60s and 70s now are five or 10 years away from seeing significant pension clawbacks or significant pension damage. That will really turn the tide in terms of that demographic leaning left and starting to lean right instead. Well, I mean, the people you're describing are obviously my generation, the baby boomers. You can make the case that we basically, as the biggest political group, designed the world to work for us. We shut down the government to get out of the Vietnam War back in the day. And from that moment on, the U.S., at least least worked for baby boomers. You know, we had these financial booms

where we could all go to Wall Street and make fortune trading junk bonds. I actually was a junk bond analyst in the 1980s. So I've been a direct beneficiary of the whole boomer thing. And, you know, we bought our houses in the 1990s and then we had this steady inflation in financial asset prices

that made that $70,000 house that we bought in 1992 worth $750,000 today. And so that's all we had to do to get rich was buy a house, especially if we were in California. So it has always worked in favor of boomers. Now, what is coming is the breakdown of the financial system that we basically designed and presided over. And that means you're right, there's going to be massive clawbacks. Or we might not count it as clawbacks. What will happen is the government will try to debase the dollar.

In other words, inflation will be, let's say, 5% or 6%. But they'll lie about it and only give us a 2% increase in our social security as a way of clawing back what they can't afford to give us anymore, but hiding it while they do it. And so basically, there's going to be a generational battle between the boomers and between everybody else who we want to pay for our cushy retirements. And it's going to be hilarious because, you know, there's some symmetry here, though, because we basically emerged as a generation in the streets protesting the Vietnam War, right? And we're going to go out in the streets protesting Social Security cuts and Medicare cuts and things like that. You'll see us with our walkers, you walkers and our wheelchairs out there.

Big hip that I paid for. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And that $70,000 hip that we can now walk on. But we'll be storming the Capitol with our canes and stuff. It's going to be hilarious. But it's also inevitable because we are out of money. We're out of wealth.

This idea that America is the richest country in the world, and it's a scandal that we can't afford to invade all these other countries or give everybody everything that they want. You know, that is the illusion of paper wealth talking right there. And we're basically close to the end of that. So at some point, all these countries that have fiat currencies now have to live within their means, which means life or living standards have to decline by a third or a half. And that means your pension is only going to cover half of what you thought it was. Social security is going to

be cut somehow, some way. Medicare is not going to cover what you thought it was going to. And it goes on and on and on. Or the financial system just collapses and we have this massive drop in wealth all at once. And it could happen in either way, like a drawn out, grinding decrease in living standards or a massive crash. And I think it's more likely that we had the massive crash just because the system is so fragile now. There's so much debt out there that there are a dozen catalysts that can fill the role of subprime mortgages. That's what blew up the fictitious economy in 08. There's lots of other things that could do that now. And it only needs one.

And I think it's a lock just about that something like commercial real estate or some other aspects of derivatives or something like that will crash and pull everything else down. And then we have this really interesting conversation at the bottom where we have to decide what to rebuild from the rubble. And I think that's when the whole what is money and what is money's role in a society and where does it come from? And that becomes a conversation that regular people have while we're trying to figure out how to design a new monetary system. And I think that's going to be fascinating. And I think the work that we're doing now to educate ourselves in the gold bug community and in the crypto community is going to create a lot of really coherent voices for this debate when the time comes.

And while all that's going on, of course, capital is going to be pouring into sound monies of various kinds. And that becomes very interesting too, because do we go back to a gold standard? Because that's understandable. We were on a gold standard for 200 years and it worked brilliantly for most of that time. Or does capital just kind of spontaneously flow into some aspect of the crypto world? And do we just have money as an emergent property or official money as an emergent property, all that capital flowing into Bitcoin or wherever?

We'll see. I think it's going to be fascinating. I don't think it can be predicted at this time exactly what the details of the revolution will be, but I think it's basically guaranteed that this system breaks in the very not too distant future. And we have to figure out what to do after that.

So maybe the, I'll mention here that my chat absolutely loves you. I have a lot of people on the show and this is often a very adversarial chat, as I've said in the past, but not tonight, including your buddy, Mark, who says to say hello. So I guess the rational next question is like, what about Trump? What role does a guy like Trump or any American president have to play in either accelerating or decelerating this seemingly inevitable end. I think about a lot of the stuff he's said and done, especially over the last two weeks.

Some of it I really like. Some of it I like. Discouraging, again, very lightly phrased here to protect my YouTube monetization. Discouraging illegal immigrants from entering the country and showing up at grocery stores and doctor's offices, things of this nature. Great. Love that. It sounds like he's going to eliminate the Department of Education and give that back

to the states. Love that too. Other things I don't love that much, like a sovereign wealth fund where his, I guess, basically his CIO, right? Bessent or whoever that guy was talking about how, hey, maybe if we're all going to buy a 200 million doses of vaccine, we want to have some equity in Pfizer. Like, I don't know that I love that. You know, that doesn't really float my boat.

I think about the strategic Bitcoin reserve. Now it's a strategic, you know, crypto reserve. Our mutual friend, Kerry Lutz would call them kleptocurrencies, right? And so, you know, I have some concerns there too. Is this a guy who people should be looking at and saying, this guy is going to slow down this train. He's like Spider-Man holding the train back on the tracks. Or does it just not matter? And this is just all theater and mental masturbation here on the way to what's an inevitable end for fiat currencies. And ultimately, I think too,

the American empire, where do you come down on that? Well, there's a lot in what you just said. So let me start with Trump. When you elect a populist, you get a random group of policies from him because populism, like I said, it's not a coherent political philosophy. There's all kinds of stuff that can be lumped under the rubric of populism. Now Now Trump, okay. Before Trump came along, we were in the

process of destroying two generations. One was the, um, you know, the 40 year old high school educated guys who work with their hands when via, um, globalization, we sent all their jobs to China. So those guys no longer had a middle-class income. They're working at Walmart or someplace now. Their wife has left. Their kids don't want to be seen with them and stuff. So they were ripe for the picking as a political bloc. Now, the other political bloc that was more or less ripe

was the young kids who were just coming into the world where all the aspects of adult life they thought they were going to get had been inflated away from them. They thought they'd get houses like their mom and dad, and they can't afford a house. They thought their job would let them support a family, and no way. And that's all because of inflation. So Trump, who is a real estate guy, which means he's opportunistic, he has spent his life looking around for undervalued buildings and buying them. Well, he just saw these two undervalued or unloved political blocs. And he just stepped right up with a total populist pitch. Hey, you're being ripped off by these globalists. I'll get it back for you. Put me

in office. I'll build that wall so you don't have any competition from foreigners. And I will force China to bring back all the factories. So you'll be making serious money again. And we'll drill, baby, drill. So inflation will go away. So houses will be cheaper. He just said all this stuff, and it worked. He put together a coalition of people who basically want to turn back the clock, close down globalism, close the borders, bring back factories. And so he's the president now. So should we expect good stuff from him across the board? No, no. But some of it, like you said, some of the stuff he's doing is awesome. And so it's going to be one of those mixed bags where, you know, if you're a Trump fan, you have to accept that some of the stuff he does is going to be really cringey or scary or whatever, you know? And so do you want to go public with your fandom and then be responsible in front of your friends and family for all the crazy stuff he does? And so, you know, I like a lot of what he's doing too. And I don't know how predictable it's going to be. Like, is he going to be the second coming of Hitler, like the Democrats said?

Almost certainly not. But is he going to, you know, be willing to do some authoritarian stuff if it comes down to it? Maybe, you know, and so we'll see. But I don't think that, I mean, they're doing good stuff. They're going to scale back the size and scope of government and they're going to change the behavior of and scope of government. And they're going to change the

behavior of a lot of countries that took advantage of the old globalist system. And that's going to benefit us. But there's nothing you can really do if you're president right now and you have 120% of GDP in treasury bonds out there, outstanding treasuries, you're borrowing $2 to $3 trillion a year. And the interest on your debt is $1.6 trillion a year, which has to be borrowed, which makes next year's interest even, you can't fix that. So the financial crisis that was always coming, still coming. It'll be way more entertaining with Trump in charge. And it could be that, you know, here's the dream for somebody like Trump, because he's got some kind of gold buggy

people around him. And what if, you know, things start getting out of control and some of his people say, listen, on Sunday night, let's just declare that we're back on the gold standard. We'll just say the dollar is now a name for one ten thousandth of an ounce of gold. And Trump says, OK, let's do it. That sounds cool. And so that would be the least painful way to get from here, which is a broken financial system, to a financial system that can work going forward and create wealth. But of course, that impoverishes. Devaluing the dollar by 80% devalues the nest eggs of everybody who trusted the government. And so the crypto guys, or at least the guys lies because that might be just insane

civil unrest if we try to go immediately back to a gold standard. I think you're right. Do you think that people may not know this but the US doesn't actually mark to market its gold holdings every year or every month or whatever. So the Central Bank of India for example marks to market their gold

every month or every year, every quarter whatever the frequency is. But the US does not. Is it more likely they take the scenario you just outlined and go with that? By the way, gold bugs listening, if it lasts for more than four hours, call your doctor. Or is it more likely that they just mark to market the gold that they have in the treasury or in Fort Knox or whatever and say, look, we're going to use some of this to pay down debts or whatever? I've heard both floated. Where do you come down? What is more likely in your view? See, not only don't we mark to market our gold, we also don't audit our gold. We have no idea how much gold we have. There might literally be nothing. I wasn't going to say it, John. I wasn't

going to say it. Yeah. So's another um gold standard hurdle that we would have to get over like we would actually have to have enough gold that we could demonstrable you know demonstrably prove that we have um in order for a gold standard to be trustworthy and i don't know i don't know i don't know how much we have um there's a decent chance we would just steal other countries gold yeah see you see what's happening now with all this gold flowing out of London and into other places and everything? A part of that is people repatriating their gold because they don't want to have to depend on NATO to give them back their gold if they ask for it. And so that could be one strategy that dovetails with the whole return to a gold standard thing is that we steal a bunch of other countries' gold.

And I wouldn't put it past the guys in charge right now. I mean, I think the guys in charge right now are honestly less psychopathic than the ones who have been in charge for a long time. Like we don't have as many crazy neocons as we used to. But I still think that under certain circumstances, they would definitely just tell Germany, no, you can't have your gold back. Or India or whoever it is that's storing gold with us in New York or in London. If I was them, I would get that gold back as soon as possible. I think it's a big part of what's happening now with the

London Metals Exchange and gold going up at the rate that it's going up lately. Do you want to talk about the London Metals Exchange thing? I think there was a story. I can't remember if it was London or somewhere else, but the delay basically went from 72 to 96 hours

to get your physical out to something like two or three weeks. You would know better than me on that, but I can't remember where I saw that over the last few days. And that was an alarm bell for me. Like, holy shit, man. Like that's, that's not another day. That's a quarter, almost a quarter. You gotta wait now for your goal. It is eight weeks now. And, and you're right. I mean, normally, the point of a metals exchange is that you've got inventory on hand. So somebody wants it. It's like you're at Costco or something like that. You just grab one of those chickens or something off the rotisserie rack and you take it because they have it there waiting for you when you want it. And if the gold's not there and it's eight weeks, that's a form of default. If you've got a futures contract and the exchange is obligated to give you metal in return for that contract, if you call for physical delivery and they tell you eight weeks is what you've got to wait, they've defaulted. And so that's kind of happening right now. And excuse me, part of it is because everybody's worried about the Trump tariffs. Yeah. You know, because nobody wants to be in a situation where there are all these, you know, capital controls and trade barriers and stuff like that with anything they think is really important and valuable to them. So everybody's trying to repatriate gold. And what I just heard was that

one of the big bottlenecks is that New York and London use different size gold bars. So to move gold from London, you've got to ship it to Switzerland where it's melded down and recast in a form that New York... This is crazy. See, that is either an absolute selling point for physical assets or an absolute no way for physical assets. I'm not sure which it is. It's either a really good thing or a really bad thing for physical gold. But that's where we are. And the chaos that flows from that might be signaling, especially the BRICS countries do something bad if they try to bring out a gold-backed currency. But they still need the ability to do it. They got to have it all set up just in case because you just don't know what's going to happen going forward if you're Saudi Arabia or India or somebody like that. The world could get very crazy

very fast and you need your protections in place. I think holding physical gold, you feel good about that story you just told. The shipping, the melting, the remolding, the reship. You want the gold under your bed and you're safe, whatever. Great for you if you got that. If you don't have that, it's not so great. And this, you know, maybe, you know, in order to, we'll start winding down here. The Bitcoin thing, John. Okay. Now, I have not heard you speak extensively about Bitcoin. You haven't written extensively about it.

I've tried to listen to some of your away games in the last couple of days. I don't hear too much about it. I have to ask, give me the thoughts on Bitcoin. Where do you think Bitcoin is good or as good as gold? Where is it worse than gold? What are the insurmountable hurdles for most of the gold bugs when it comes to Bitcoin? I'll just preface this with, as an Italian, I say this on my show all the time, I love gold. I love gold. If you show me a gold chain, I like to look at it.

If you show me a wheelbarrow of cement, I will mix it. These things are ingrained in me, John. And so I understand as a young man as well, though, that Bitcoin has so much potential in terms of its fungibility, transportability, as you just mentioned. And one of the sort of shortcomings may be with some gold reserves, among other things. So tell the listeners here, already a fan favorite. So I don't think you can do too much harm to your reputation here, but tell you know what do you think let me start with electricity okay um i have tried multiple times in my life to understand electricity you know it's the ohms and the watts and the volts and everything i i literally you know read brochures and websites and things. I still don't understand electricity.

I cannot figure out what it does. And I'm kind of like that with Bitcoin because I love the concept of private sector technology-based money that just bypasses government regulations. That's a libertarian's wet dream right there. But I cannot figure out how something that doesn't exist can be money or can really be anything in the world. I mean, yes, it exists as code, but it doesn't have a physical existence. And I'm not saying I don't think there could be a Bitcoin standard. I don't think, or I see a lot of signs that capital is flowing into cryptos and we're just going to see state level money as an emergent property of something like Bitcoin at some point in the future. I see all this happening.

I cannot figure it out in a way that makes me comfortable with owning a lot of Bitcoin or anything. And I think it's just possible that there's an age thing, obviously. But it could just be that I'm like the guy with a horse-drawn carriage looking at the very first car in 1990 going, no, there are just too many reasons why that'll never work. And so you should never use me as a source of information about cryptos. You know, I'm just somebody who has not been able to figure them out to the point where, oh, by the way, I just did a post in Substack on peak complexity and how the financial world

was getting even more complex than it was back in the 2000s when it almost blew up and destroyed the whole financial world. And tokenization was one of the things that I cited there where they have a subcategory called real-world assets that are being tokenized. And so now things that actually exist are a subcategory of the financial world. That's just astounding to me. And so yeah, I would be very happy with a global Bitcoin standard if it could be made to work. Because the good points of Bitcoin

are that it exists in limited quantity. You get zero inflation. You would actually have deflation in a Bitcoin-centric world. And that's the sign of a healthy economy. A healthy economy should have 1% or 2% deflation per year because that accounts for productivity we get better at doing stuff so stuff gets a little cheaper and in a in a bitcoin standard monetary system you would have that so i you know i i welcome it if it happens but i'll be damned if i can understand exactly what the you know the technical aspects of it would be when it does happen i i appreciate that you know even though don't understand electricity, you still use it. And I think that we could probably get you on the same page for Bitcoin. Yeah, I think we can probably

get you there. Okay. Last question. You've been very generous with your time. Apart from Bitcoin, apart from gold, give people my age and younger something that if they're not thinking about investing in hard assets, a lot of people are throwing money at zero day expiration options on Wealthsimple or whatever stock platform you use. A lot of people are going on Wall Street bets and buying leaps on some shit coins, some shit co and hoping to get rich because there's this financial nihilism now, like, who cares? I'm not going to make it anyway. Maybe this is my lottery ticket.

Make the case for kids who are thinking about starting this and having a hard time. What should they be looking at as indicators that hard assets are the thing to own in the future? We talked about a few of them, deb know, debasing currency, failing government institutions, forth-turning type stuff. What else would you point to for people who are just saying, I'd rather buy out of the money calls and see what happens? Well, there are two answers for that.

One is that life is going to teach those guys the lesson that we all learn, right? When we call a couple of things right, think we're a genius, put everything we own on something and find out that we have no idea what we're doing, we lose all that money, that's tuition. You got to pay that. And I have paid it with a number I can't even say because that would make it real. But it's just something that you can't tell somebody not to be doing stuff like that, to be playing with options on Robinhood and everything. People are going to do that until they learn a painful enough lesson that they stop doing

it. The reason that a lot of those people might come around to actual real assets is, besides the philosophical difference and everything, we're ready for a big pendulum swing. We've had basically 50 years of financial assets like government bonds and bank equities and things like that that depend for their value on the value of the currency that it pays you via dividends or coupons or whatever. And we've really devalued in a lot of ways real stuff that you can actually use like farmland and oil and gold and silver. Now, the pendulum is getting ready to swing back the other way where the currencies that give value to financial assets

start to fail. And that just blows up, for instance, the government bond market, stuff like that. Those are supposed to be the safest assets. Well, they're going to be the least safe assets when the currencies on which they depend for their value collapse. So you want to be as far away from financial assets as possible when that happens. And you want to be as big into real things like a really well-chosen rental house, gold and silver coins, ExxonMobil stock, things like that. Things that at least represent ownership stakes in real stuff that governments can't create out of thin air. Those are the things that get more valuable in this kind of a pendulum swing. Now, as for where cryptos fall on that spectrum, there are aspects of Bitcoin, for instance,

it's limited supply that make it seem like a real asset. And so in that sense, it could be hard money. And so maybe it ends up in the same category as gold and silver in this pendulum swing. Capital flows into it and out of treasury bonds. But again, I don't pretend to understand how that would work. So I'm not going to tell people go out and buy Bitcoin, but I'm not going to say don't either. It's just one of those things where I'm not going to take a position on something I don't understand well enough to do it myself. But the whole hard asset thing, I mean, that's the story of the next 10 or 15 or 20 years of investing is real stuff. So instead of a zero-day option, maybe go buy a silver coin or something like that.

I think that would be a much better use of limited capital. I think there's something to that. John, you've been a great first-time guest on the CBP. Tell people before we go where they can find your writing, interviews. The floor is all yours, my friend. Okay, I've got a Substack newsletter that is aimed at actionable advice for all the stuff we just talked about. All this crazy stuff is coming, but what exactly do you do about it?

What skills should you acquire? What kind of investments should you try to own as much of as possible? And so far, so good. It's a two-year-old newsletter that has a nice community built up around it of people who are trying for that actionable advice stuff. And most of what I publish is free.

So you can come sign up for a free account and get a large amount of what I put out. And then the stuff that is really actionable, especially the investment advice, is behind a paywall, but it's just $5 a month. So it's pretty cheap. So, you know, come do the free thing

and see what you think. Take them up on it, everybody. John Rubino. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next time. Thanks, Joey.