The Tucker Carlson Show - Iran War Expected to Spark Global Energy Crisis. Here’s What Americans Can Expect at the Pump.

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

What happens when you remove more than a billion barrels of oil from the global energy supply? Both the government and futures markets assure us everything will be fine. That’s probably not true. Paid partnerships with: Black Rifle Coffee: Promo code "Tucker" for 30% off at https://www.blackriflecoffee.com American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Battalion Metals: Shop fair-priced gold and silver at https://battalionmetals.com/tucker Dr. Chris Martenson, PhD (Duke, Pathology) and MBA (Cornell), is an economic & energy researcher, a reality-based analyst, and founder of PeakProsperity.com (http://peakprosperity.com/), a vibrant online community that’s now 25 years in the making. By blending scientific rigor with profound skepticism of official narratives, Chris’s mission is to help people see the true drivers of economic growth and history so that they may become more resilient and build buffers against the shocks to come. He’s also a farmer, father, businessman, Christian, devoted husband, fly fisherman, a pistol and long-rifle shooter, and an author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first thing to know about the two wars now in progress in Ukraine and in Iran is that they're about energy because Iran and the countries around Iran produce about 20% of global oil supply. Russia, meanwhile, produces about 12% of global oil supply. So these are the biggest energy producing regions in the world. And the wars have gravely affected their ability to produce that energy and to ship it anywhere else and to refine it for that matter. So that's the first thing to know. The second thing to know is that energy is the same as prosperity. The more energy a country uses, the richer it is.

There is a one-to-one correlation between energy use and the size of your economy. GDP, roughly measured. I mean, look at the list of the countries that consume the most energy and put it side by side the richest countries, and they are directly connected. The country that uses the most energy per capita on the planet is Qatar, which is also by most. measures the richest country, tiny population, 350,000, massive natural gas supplies, huge per capita

wealth in that country and huge per capita energy use, about roughly 19,000 kilowatt hours per citizen. On the other end, the poorest country in the world, arguably South Sudan. Their energy use per capita, 51 kilowatt hours. The United States, by the way, about 12,000. kilowatt hours. Now for the past 15 or 20 years, maybe 25 years, elements of the American leadership class have been scolding this country and the West for using too much energy. We use too much energy. We're destroying the earth by using energy. By the way, bombing civilian population, somehow does not destroy the earth, but turning on the lights or having an MRI or driving a suburban, that destroys the earth. Say the people who put solar farms in the woods.

that propaganda, as absurd as it is, has effectively hidden from many Americans the direct correlation between the amount of energy they use and the lives they live. And that would include their life expectancy and the likelihood their children will survive infancy. And everything that is good or considered progress in our society, all of it derives from one simple fact. We consume an awful lot of energy. And to the extent we consume less energy, those facts will change. In other words, we will become poorer. Again, energy is the same as wealth. So when a country uses less energy or when energy prices become unaffordable for the majority of the population, that country by definition becomes poorer. There's no debate about this. This is the iron law of economics,

of reality of civilization. Energy equals prosperity. So if you take two steps back and you see one country, the United States, waging two simultaneous wars, one against Iran and the other against Russia, and make no mistake, the United States is at war with Russia. The Trump administration's intelligence from the CIA and other intel agencies is being used by the Ukrainian government to target drones and missiles. So the U.S. government, us, your tax dollars, is at war with the government of Russia, whether you're aware of that or not, whether you wanted it or not, and of course most Americans don't. And the effect of that is what? To destabilize the Russian regime, break up Russia into 15 separate republics? Well, no, not yet. The effect is to hike global

energy prices because once again, Russia is the producer of about 12% of global oil supply and about 5% of refined petroleum products. And the war the United States is waging against Russia at this stage, through its proxies in Western Europe and Ukraine, is a war against energy. About half of Russian refineries have been hit by missiles or drones targeted by the United States. So at some point, you have to ask, like, why would we do that? Why would the United States, under the previous president, blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, which was the source of cheap energy from Russia into Western Europe, our allies in Western Europe, countries that are occupied still by American troops 80 years later? our closest allies on the globe. Why would we deprive them of cheap energy? Who knows? There's a story here,

though, and someone should tell it. And then in this war, which began February 28th, of course, the central fact of Iran is not whether it has an active nuclear program or how many missiles it has or how many crowds in downtown Tehran chant mean things about Israel or the United States. I mean, those are interesting data points, but they're not really the core fact of Iran. The core fact of Iran is its geography and the fact that it sits on the northern side of the Strait of Hormuz, which is the opening, famously at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, through which 20% of global energy flows. And then if you look at a map, it curves around, into a thing called the Red Sea.

And the Red Sea is the waterway over which another big percentage of global energy flows, without getting too boring about it, Saudi Arabia, which is probably the world's still, the largest oil producer in the world, kind of thought ahead, what if they closed the Strait of Formuz at some point and built a pipeline on its territory into the Red Sea? So they wouldn't have to send ships through the Strait of Farmuz.

Well, unfortunately, across the water is a country called Yemen. And Yemen is effectively an enemy of Saudi Arabia and the Houthi militants, who we were briefly at war with, are of course proxies of Iran. And they are now. now bombing shipping, attacking shipping in the Red Sea. And the main thing to know about energy

shipping is it is very expensive. A super tanker full of petroleum of crude oil is worth about $350 million. So you don't have to sink too many of these, maybe any. You basically have to set a couple on fire or just threaten them. And there's no insurance underwriter in the world who's going to guarantee to pay back the owner of a very. that ship if it sinks. So you can't get insurance for your cargo and ship worth a total of $350 million. You're probably not going to set sale. So in other words, instability itself, even if no shots are fired or drones launched, is enough to end the flow of energy out of the straight through the Red Sea and to the rest of the world, primarily to Asia, but also to Europe,

especially to Europe, and to the United States. And so what you're looking at is the single largest disruption in energy markets since energy markets began. Nothing like this has ever happened. It began February 28th, the people who had thought about this ahead of time, very much including people around the president, his advisors, analysts at various intel agencies. They all knew this was going to happen.

and it did. This war, combined with the war that we are waging against Russia in Eastern Europe, have completely shut down probably a quarter of the world's energy. And what does that mean? Well, it means poverty and disaster and almost certainly famine in some places in Africa, because of course half of all global fertilizer is derived from natural gas, etc, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It means a readjustment downward of the standard of living of people, certainly in Europe,

almost certainly in the United States, and definitely in parts of Asia. So that is the main fact of these wars. That's the fact that will affect the most number of lives. That's the fact that will precipitate shifts in power, the fall of governments. that's the main thing to know about these wars. And yet it's the one thing that almost nobody ever mentions. And to the extent public officials, not just in this country, but in Europe, talk about this war.

They talk about the threat posed by Islamic radicalism because there's really no religious extremism in the United States. Just have pride flags everywhere. You can turn a person from a girl into a boy just by wishing it so. but we're not religious extremists. In any case, they tell you that this is really a war about ideology, but its net effect is on energy, which is to say GDP. So when asked about this, it's interesting how they respond.

So take a look at the Secretary of Defense. This is in June on a Network Sunday show, is asked about energy in the effect of this war on energy, and here's how the Secretary, I beg your pardon, of war, responds to the question. Watch. We have a totally different energy dynamic around the world. By the way, the way energy flows today, the straits will be nowhere near as relevant one to two years from now. Because of the foresight of President Trump, he's made us energy independent at home.

We're a net exporter. Now Venezuela through our partnerships. Now we're killing foreign terrorist leaders who have terrorized the American people, the amount of drugs and gangs that came to China. Energy prices are pretty high right now. It's a huge deal. So I don't know that the independence is helping people at the pump. They are. So there was a lot in that paragraph.

We started out with energy and then we got immediately to foreign terrorist leaders who are terrorizing Americans not clear who they are, not clear who the foreign terrorist leaders are, also not clear who the Americans who were terrorized

by those foreign terrorist leaders were. If you live in this country, it's probably a long time since anyone at the grocery store mentioned four terror leaders. But in any case, it sort of jumped around. But let's move to the beginning of that short speech.

And there was a very specific point in there. And it was, look, the straight-of-form moves is effectively closed. Like, that's measurable. Everybody knows that. It's been closed since April. You kind of can't lie about that. But it doesn't really matter because the straight-of-form moves is basically becoming irrelevant. Like, really, who cares about the straight-of-form moves?

It's just 20% of global energy. No one really cares because the energy dynamic is changing. Because we arrested Maduro and, his wife and put them in a cell in New York. And so the energy dynamic is changing. So of course, in real life, it doesn't mean anything because it was spoken by someone who doesn't know anything. But let's just take it seriously for one moment. So pre-war, which is to say on February 27th of this year, about 20 million barrels of oil, not even including LNG, but let's just stick to petroleum, oil. About 20 million barrels per day, we're moving through the strait of Horn.

removes. And that number is zero in that range right now and has been pretty much since April. So that's a huge amount of energy to make up for how are you going to do that. Well, of course, with Venezuela, which we know from listening to the president has the largest oil reserves in the world, like dwarfing Saudi Arabia, which is why Venezuela is just so darn rich and why most Venezuelans have their own private 747. Oh, wait, just kidding. But in any case, we've been told that Venezuela has the most oil of any country in the world. And I guess technically that may be true, but does it matter? Well, it doesn't matter if the oil is still under the ground. So how much oil is Venezuela exporting now? Well, the good news is the number is up,

up from what it was a year ago. More oil is leaving Venezuela. That is absolutely right. left a year ago, what's the number? Well, it's a little over a million barrels a day. A million barrels a day. Now, keep in mind, the Strait of Formuz allowed 20 million barrels a day to go through before the Trump administration decided to kill the elderly religious leader of Iran. So that leaves 19 million barrels of oil, not including natural gas, which is also kind of shut down in the Persian Gulf, mostly from Qatar, but not only. But let's just stick to oil. Where do we get the extra at 19 million barrels per day to make up for what we've lost in the Strait of Hormuz, which apparently no longer really matters?

No hint, because there's no answer. Because the real answer is we're not. As long as a straight stays closed, the rest of the world is going to have to readjust to a deficit of at least 19 million barrels per day. And that's just oil. Okay. So that was the Secretary of War's position. And again, we are often to killing foreign terrorist leaders who are terrorizing Americans,

the danger of Islamic jihad, or Hamas, Hezbollah. You know, America's greatest problems. Not the drug cartels that control New Mexico, but Hamas. So what's interesting is that three days later, that man's boss, who would be the president of the United States, was over in Europe with the G7, was asked about the Strait of Hormuz. this was, you may recall, this was last month, you may recall at that moment,

he was in the middle of explaining that we were going to sign a memorandum of understanding, perhaps we already had, but basically a framework that would get us to a peaceful, non-violent settlement of this war. And he, because he is Donald Trump, whatever you think of him,

he has these moments of kind of amazing candor, and it's refreshing candor. Again, whatever you think of the guy, he sort of says things that are obviously true from time to time. And he said this. Three days after Pete Hegs said that, Trump said this. If I went out and continued to bomb them for another four,

just bomb the hell out of them. I get bad press on that. No, there's nothing I can do. But what this does is it allows the ships to go. If we keep bombing, those ships won't be going. And you're talking about $500, $600, $700 million a day. It's a lot of money. A lot of money.

money. That's why the world is okay. It's liquid. It's fine. Also, we run out of reserves at about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world, and we would really run out, and there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it, and you want to see Bedlam? Wait a second. Three days after the Secretary of War, not defense, war, helpfully direct, war, three days after he told us on CBS, it actually does, you know, like, who cares with the straight of her news? There's the president of the United States saying, actually we got four weeks to go until we run out of oil. You can't get any. And then there's, quote,

Bedlam. People are just eating each other. It's out of like a medieval woodcut. People are just fighting in the street because they have no oil. Bedlam. Craziness. Now, probably both of these are an exaggeration, but the latter, the president's assessment, is, of course, obviously closer to the truth. And we know that because for the duration of this war, a war over a strait that apparently doesn't matter, well, then why are we fighting over it? The United States has been in the process of draining its strategic petroleum reserve. something like 172 million barrels taken out of the SPR since this war began.

Now, why would we do that? If we didn't need the energy, if it didn't matter, if energy flows were changing in the world and the Strait of Hormuz was becoming irrelevant, probably wouldn't be drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve. In fact, we probably wouldn't be fighting this war in the first place. We probably wouldn't even be talking about a humiliating MOU with Iran in which we admit were powerless, why would we go through any of this if we didn't very desperately need to keep that straight open? Well, of course, the answer is we wouldn't. So if you ignore what people say,

as always, and watch what they do, a very clear picture emerges. And of course, it's the picture of desperation. It's the picture of a group of people who went into a war with certain expectations, hopes, anyway, delusions, they told themselves certain things were going to happen, those things didn't happen, and they're desperate. That's all very obvious. Again, you probably wouldn't drain your strategic petroleum reserve and get 18 million Americans killed and go through the whole drama of all of this if you didn't have to, all of which leads to maybe the most interesting fact of this entire exercise, which is oil markets. Now, if you grew up in the United States, you have learned the hard way that a lot of the things you were taught as a child were not true.

Diversity is not our strength, actually. The government is not necessarily on your side, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But one thing you likely still believe is that markets are real. And you have every reason to believe that because markets as conceived or as sold to the American public are completely transparent. We can watch them on a ticker. We know exactly what the price of shares in any publicly traded company is doing at any moment and in commodities, whether it's oil or gas or soybeans or wheat, doesn't matter. We can watch it. And we know that fluctuations in price are driven, maybe not exclusively, but in the end, primarily by the supply of whatever's being traded. The principle of supply and demand governs markets.

If something is scarce and much sought after, it's expensive, diamonds. If something is abundant and has limited use, sand on your beach, it's cheap. Supply and demand govern price. Very few people from Keynesians to Austrians, it doesn't matter what kind of economic theory you buy into. It doesn't matter if you're a DSA member or a neo-con or a Newt Gingrich Republican. you can understand how markets work because it's very, very simple. And you see that principle reflected in daily life from the minute you wake up to the minute you go to bed. So it hasn't

dawned on most people to suspect that commodities markets are rigged. How could you rig a commodity market? An international commodities market. It's not controlled by any one person. You don't think. So how could that happen? Well, it's time to start thinking deeply about this. And by the way, for those who are interested in exploring this, we recommend so. strongly a piece by Ron Unz. Came out a couple of days ago in the Unz review. You can find it online. Last name is UNZ, one of the deepest and most interesting thinkers in the United States, wrote a piece about what is happening in oil markets. And again, it's worth the read, but to summarize it in four sentences. So the price of oil that the consumer understands,

mostly, if you're a CNBC watcher, you judge it by something called the price of Brent Crude. Brent crude, there's a Brent oil field in the Shetland Islands in the North Sea. It's actually, I don't think operating anymore, but Brent crude is the name that oil traders use for sweet light crude. That means less viscous, lower sulfur content, easier to refine into gasoline and diesel. It's the majority of oil traded in the West is light sweet crude. We call it Brent crude. So if you want to know what oil prices are, you look up something called the price of Brent crude. And it's kind of a commonly agreed upon measure in the West for what oil costs.

And you can look it up on your phone. It's like the price of gold or silver or any other commodity. And so when this war started, the price was maybe 70 bucks, something like that. I think it was about 70 bucks, $72 or something like that. That would be the end of February. So again, the war is taking place at the center. of the global oil trade, which is the Persian Gulf. And so naturally, the price went up.

And then in April, the straight is closed. And oil predictably shoots up to maybe get the number wrong, but maybe $1.18, $118 a barrel for Brent Crude. And that seemed honestly a little bit low, considering that 20% of global oil just got taken off the market, just wasn't flowing out of the Gulf. And there was also extensive damage to oil extraction. facilities to oil refineries to petrochemical plants. I mean, there's a lot of damage, you know, not just to the oil wells, but to all the downstream machine machinery involved in

refining oil. So anyway, it seemed a little bit low, but at the end of April, it reached what turned out to be its highest point. And then it did something quite amazing. It went down. There was a time this month with a straight basically still closed. when oil as priced on the Brent crude market, oil was cheaper by a few cents per barrel than it was before the war started, even though the strait was closed. Now, you don't have to be Larry Summers or a Harvard trained economist to wonder like, what the hell is that? How could that possibly be? You take 20% of the supply offline and the price goes down? And you hear people say, well, China stopped importing a lot of oil. True. But this is a market and the people investing are basically making a bet

on what's going to happen in the future. These are futures. So China can't stop buying Gulf oil forever. And there aren't an extra 20 million barrels a day of oil anywhere on the planet that we can just like, okay, we'll just replace oil with this. So there's a global of this commodity and the price goes down. So the run-ons piece has all kinds of different potential explanations for this that are very interesting. And, you know, it's not clear that we can settle on any one of them, but we can say unequivocally at this point that oil markets, at least the Brent crude market, do not reflect reality,

which is to say they're fake. and they're either being manipulated by people. And as Ronans points out in his piece, that's not a crazy idea. I mean, GameStop, famously, publicly traded company that was tanking, became an incredibly valuable company because a bunch of guys in their boxer shorts and their rec rooms decided to spike the price by buying shares.

Same with Hertz during COVID. So we have precedent for determining, small, determined groups of people manipulating public markets. Like, that happens. Could it happen in a market this big and this closely watched? Who knows? Another possible explanation is AI. So it turns out one of the many facts that you learn in watching this war that the majority of oil futures trading, I think about 70%, is done by machines. It's done by AI. There's no people, done automatically in the way that we target drones and missiles. now. We just let the machine decide who to kill. So apparently in futures markets, oil futures

markets, the machine decides when and how much to buy. How does the machine make that decision? Well, of course, the same way that AI makes all decisions with use of language. And so one theory is that by making public statements that the Strait of Hormuz is irrelevant and the U.S. government, President Trump have this completely under control and that energy prices are not actually rising. In fact, they're going down. When you look around, they are rising. And by the way, if you try to buy a barrel of oil, let's say on the internet, it tells you they're priced at 72 bucks or 84. I think it's 84 today.

Can you actually buy a barrel of oil for 84 bucks? If I want to buy a barrel of sweet light crude for $84, where would I find that? And no news organization has bothered to actually, like, you know, call the biggest retailers around the world. Ask, like, what are you actually selling a barrel of oil for? No one's decided to do that for some reason, probably because they all support this war. But if you were to do that, you probably wouldn't find anybody who would sell you a barrel at the price listed on the internet. So the internet price is not the real price, right? By definition.

But how did they get to that fake price in the first place? And it may be that the A. AI traders read news stories about the price of oil, and prominent in those news stories are statements from American officials saying, actually, prices are down. They're never going to go up. The Straded for Moose is irrelevant. And they calculate their decisions about the future price of oil based on those statements, which of course are not only lies, but probably made in the first place, in an effort to influence AI trading. in oil futures, if that makes sense.

In other words, you can speak the truth into existence because AI, far from being smarter than people, is actually dumber even than Kamala Harris. Like, that's possible, though it sounds kind of shocking. So if you were going to do that, what would you say? Well, here's the Secretary of Interior, Doug Bergman. By the way, in the executive branch, Secretary of Interior has more day-to-day authority over oil questions. The Secretary of Energy,

who's most Americans think the Secretary of Energy is about energy. It's really about nukes. But the Secretary of Interior has jurisdiction over a lot of federal lands that produce oil and gas. And so he's, and we have a Secretary of Interior who's pretty knowledgeable on energy questions. Again, Doug Bergam of North Dakota. And with that in mind, the idea that it's possible that Trump and those around him are trying to influence computer-driven futures trading by making false statements about energy. Watch this. Every barrel that goes out now gets replaced by 1.2. So think of if 10 barrels go out, 12 barrels are going to come back in for the same price.

We've already saving Americans billions of dollars because we've got business leaders like President Trump driving our energy policy. Right. Okay. So energy prices have gone way down. You may have noticed that, oh, wait, no. the price of gasoline and diesel fuel and jet fuel, and by the way, electricity have all gone up a lot in the last year, a lot, not a little bit, a lot, way outpacing inflation. And of course, in the end, driving inflation.

So energy prices have not gone down. And for every barrel that goes out, we get two back or whatever. What does that even mean? Well, not explained. And it probably doesn't need to be explained because it may be read by these machine future traders as good news that they fact. factor into their calculation with the future price of oil, thereby keeping the present price down,

at least on paper, and thereby creating a feedback loop where the people making decisions keep the price artificially low, not the actual price at which you can buy or sell the product, but the price reflected in markets, which we thought were real but aren't. And then those same decision makers read the markets, which they've manipulated and believe them. Oh yeah, and believe them. So if you're Trump, last month, you were saying, we're about to run out of oil. The SPR is almost dry. These are salt caverns and we're getting to the salt part of the oil. Like we can't even refine it. It's too salty. That was last month. But subsequent to that, oil prices have gone up and down like they always do, but they've gone

pretty low because the markets have been manipulated. And it's entirely possible. And it's entirely that Trump and those around them are looking at this and being like, wow, I thought this war was going to cause massive spikes in the price of energy. And because they're not calling around and asking people, hey, are gas prices up? Like, what are you paying per kilowatt hour at home? Have you noticed a change in the price of everything? All of which is affected by the price of energy? Instead of doing any of that, they're just looking at this one number, Brent crude, pulling it up on their iPhone and being like, everything's fine. It's possible that's what's happening.

the dumbest and most dangerous feedback loop of all time. And then in effect is to get us back into not just a war, but a ground war with Iran. It looks like that is happening. It's so crazy. It's so crazy that even the Israelis who are world famous for reckless, bloodthirsty behavior, and there are partners in this venture,

keep in mind, are now saying, I don't know. I'm out. And if you don't believe it, watch this. This is the secretary, the finance secretary of Israel. He's in the Netanyahu cabinet, very famous man. Mr. Smotrich, basically saying it looks like America's going back in this war, but we're out because, you know what, even I don't want to die for Israel.

Watch this. It's right to have been interest to to have taken to the matter of which has a matter between Iran to the U.S.

is the right and the good to us. We need to the U. and it's not the fact with the U.S.

It's toer to unleash at the plet the military. We don't know to assim of the state of Israel.

It takes a lot of well, Hutzpah to say something like that. in public, if you were a cabinet minister in the government that the U.S. military is partnering with in this war, because you just saw what he said. And if you don't speak Hebrew, you could read the subtitles. He said, yeah, what the U.S. is doing is helpful to us. We have no interest in a, like, a liberal government or a pro-Western government in Iran. We don't care about the

protesters. We were weeping about, you know, oh, they're killing protesters. We never cared about that. We want the country in a bloody generational civil war, so we don't have to deal with it so we can take southern Lebanon and parts of Egypt and kill the rest of the people in Gaza or whatever. We don't want to be constrained by this country on the other side of the Persian Gulf, so we want the United States to take them out. And we're happy about that. It serves our interest. He just said it.

But the one thing we're not going to do is die for it. Yes, this is for Israel. This war is for Israel. But I'm not dying for Israel. Amazing. You could say something like this. It's unclear that there's a single American leader. leader this honest, hopefully not this evil, but leaving moral judgments aside, this honest,

this direct. What was the last time, American leader said anything that's straightforward in public ever? It never happens. And this laser focused on his own country's interest. Now, that's a criminal country that's committing genocide. You don't want to be that country, obviously. But you would like leaders who are willing to say unapologetically, I'm in this for my team. Meanwhile, the entire House of Representatives, every Republican but seven today, minutes ago,

just voted to merge, merge the U.S. military, the $1.5 trillion a year U.S. military with the tiny reserve force IDF. Does that help us? No, of course, helps them. Merge American intelligence, the 19 intel agencies with Mossad. What? Of course. Basically a humiliation ritual. Whatever you want, Israel. If it hurts us, that's fine. Actually, it feels good to sacrifice for you. It's like everyone in the entire government is Mike Huckabee now. Craven, self-hating. So there is something sort of nice about seeing a government minister say, yeah, my people are not dying for this. But as Mosheist just said, happy to see Americans die for it, and of course, they are. And more will, apparently,

because the president appears to have convinced himself completely that because he arrested Maduro in January, we don't need, well, what's the real number? If you combine Persian Gulf and the Saudi pipeline into the Red Sea, both of which could be closed, 25% of all global energy offline? We don't need it. Here's Trump today. In fact, if you combine us and Venezuela, we have about 62% of the world's oil market. So we don't need straits. We don't need anything. There's no measurement by which I mean not to like it.

It's crazy. If you combine America and Venezuela, you have 62% of the world energy market. It's not even clear what that means. But in no sense is that true. Venezuela and the United States don't produce 62% of the world's oil. they don't buy 62% of the world's oil. Nothing, I mean, nothing about that is real. Once again, Venezuela exports, as if right now,

a little over one million barrels a day. 20 million barrels a day went through the Strait of Form moves out of the Persian Gulf. That no longer happens. We're 19 million barrels of oil short just in the Persian Gulf. That does not include what's happening in Eastern Europe. That does not include, apparently,

then now the closure of the Red Sea. So this is a crisis and every American will feel it. Europe will be crushed. When winter comes and there's not enough natural gas to heat London, which is exactly where we're moving, thanks to the Trump administration and the Biden administration before it, it's going to be impossible even to care what the AI-generated Brent crude futures say.

No one will care. because reality itself will intervene. And in the end, always, that's what matters. Just because the battle stopped doesn't mean war stops hurting the people who fight them. No, for many veterans, the effects of what they've been asked to do continue long after the return home. They're injured physically and psychologically, and those injuries can last a lifetime. Groups like the Hunter 7 Foundation are here to help them.

1007 Foundation works to identify, to study, and to address the long-term health effects of toxic exposure during military service. They help veterans get care, get answers, and advocate for their health and their future. It's a non-profit. Hunter 7 relies on the support from other proud American companies, and Black Rifle is one of those. Black Rifle Coffee proudly supports organizations that stand up for soldiers who risk their lives because no veteran should have to fight for their health by themselves. They should have the entire country's support. To learn more about this good cause, find resources for yourself or a loved one or help support

the mission. Visit hunter7.org today. That's hunter seven.org. Chris Martinson deals in reality full time. He is a reality-based energy researcher, one of the most respected in this country, one of the most honest. And we are grateful to have him join us now to give us an overview of where exactly we are. Chris, thanks so much for doing this.

I got a little excited there, and I wonder if you think I overstated the case. You've much more knowledge on the subject than I ever will. Well, Tucker, thanks so much for the opportunity to come here. And yeah, this is my passion, it's my mission, because if anything, you understated it. Energy is life. Energy is our economy. The path we're on is headed for complete disaster at this point in time. And the people who are driving us there, as you hinted at, not my first rodeo.

I've seen these people in operation, what they did to Libya, what they done to the Middle East generally. They don't do consequences. And unfortunately, this is reality we're talking about. And you've been talking about the markets and there's these narratives that they push. And if they can just pretend for a little bit longer, it'll all sort of sort itself out. But this is different. These are molecules. This is physics.

This is very simple stuff. Exactly. Exactly. But it's all, you know, physical reality is so unfashionable. Well, it's so unfashionable you got transgenderism. But it's, I think since the invention of the internet, people just imagine that things happen. Electricities created, dams are built. You know, the world just sort of move supply chains organically organized themselves or whatever.

Like they have no sense of how things actually work. So you do. What does this mean for the life of Americans and Europeans? Well, it's unfortunately, it means the same thing. It kind of always means they're going to have these people who are going to accidentally wreck some stuff and energy costs will go through the roof. And then it's going to be the poor people, the poor countries are going to, you know, have the worst run of that as they start out. But we're looking at something here that could very easily upend our economy in a big, big way. So you mentioned in your intro, there's a sort of straight line relationship between how much energy and economy uses and how big it ends up being.

You know, it's like a straight line on this chart. Yes. And that's a really powerful chart because we've all grown up in an age of amazing energy abundance. I'm absolutely thrilled with it. I'm a conservative. I would love for us to keep this prosperity we have. But I fear that the people who are making decisions, they've lost that grounding. They don't understand that.

I don't know. They're like three generations from anybody who had dirt under their fingernails, right? It's been too long. So once we get grounded back in that, though, here's a simple thing. The world was consuming just oil, just crude oil. That's the tasty stuff. We turn that into jet fuel, diesel kerosene, and deck gasoline. And so that we were burning about 80, consuming burning, 86 million barrels a day before the war started.

And now we're missing for sure about 12 that's just missing, missing, because they did some workarounds here and there. Well, the question is, when was the last time the world globe was burning 12 million barrels a day less? That brings us to 74. So we go on our little chart and we look back. We find out that number is 2011. the world was burning 74 million barrels a day. Problem. The world's economy was 36% smaller back then.

And so this is what I work really hard at is because I do what I call put on my energy goggles. And it means when I go out, I don't just see a maddening and furiating traffic jam. I just see energy. I see people burning oil, I had gasoline. I see cars that took oil and diesel to manufacture them.

I see jets flying. I see bridges that need be repaired. And all of this is just energy, right? And it just sort of makes sense, right? So the economy requires people to do things. Like we all have to do some work, even if we have a service job. We're still doing work. Well, work requires energy.

And so therefore, the economy requires energy. We can just put those pieces together. And so when you have less energy flowing through an economy, by definition, it starts to skinny down. It gets simpler, which is a euphemism for it craters. And so we're actually risking the crater. of the world economy. Trump's saying, oh, we're insulated.

I know we broke that stuff over there, but we'll be fine over here. How's that going to play in, you know, diplomatic circles as it goes on? I mean, we're about to unleash, we, the United States with Israel, we're about to unleash the worst catastrophe on economies,

financial markets, and potentially because of the impact on fertilizers and other stuff, maybe even food, maybe even famines, things like that. This is what's at risk. And I wish we were having serious conversations, It's not Heggseth jokingly saying we don't even need a straight.

It's so cartoonish. I don't even know how to form words sometimes. So let's just assess specifically what that would mean for the U.S. Like you often hear the president, but not just the president, politicians going back at least 10 years, say this country is energy independent. It's a net exporter of oil. So if the country's a net exporter of oil, is that true? I don't think it is true, but I'll defer to you.

And what does that mean? Does it mean we can set the price of oil? Like, why is that relevant? Will you explain the system for people who might be confused? Yeah, this detail's important. So when I was growing up, petroleum and oil were synonyms. You could use them interchangeably and nobody would get confused. And they're just like, remember under COVID, suddenly the CDC lost the threat on what's hurt immunity or a vaccine.

Yes. They started changing definitions. So sometime about 10, 12 years ago, our DOE energy information administration decided, you know what? We're just going to change the definition here a little bit. We're going to call petroleum anything that comes out of the ground that you can set on fire, right? So oil is the thing we really care about. Now, because we're doing all this shale oil drilling, very exciting, and doing all this shale gas extraction,

we have a lot of this stuff called natural gas liquids. Okay, that's propane, works great in my grill. I love it. Butane, it's good in a lighter. ethane turns into plastics all that, but they lumped all that together and said, oh, when you put all of this stuff in one pile on a net basis, we're an exporter. Problem, these aren't fungible. You don't decide one day I'm going to put gasoline in my car or maybe I'll put butane in my car, right? They're just not, they don't have very different purposes.

Those natural gas liquids, they're industrial. We use them. They're fantastic. They're industrial. We have way too many of them. We export a ton of them because we can't use them. Fine. We're still a net importer of.

of crude oil. And even more to the point, we get all this stuff out of the shale basins, right? You got the Permian, you know, you got places like that, the Bakken in North Dakota. So that stuff that comes out is really light and it's really sweet and it doesn't go into our refinery. So we package that up in ships and we send a good chunk of that away. And then we import heavier stuff from Canada, from Venezuela, but also the world. And so to your point, this idea that we'll just insulate ourselves from the world is untrue. Whatever we're paying for jet fuel here, has a big relationship to what they're paying for jet fuel in Europe because it's open to the highest bidder. And if it's worth it to put it on a ship and sell it to Europe, that's exactly what's going to happen unless we do something really catastrophic, which is closed down our borders to exports.

That would be a bad idea for a country with a $100 billion last month trade deficit. Because we're like, nah, we're going to keep all our good stuff. We're going to send you our treasuries. You know, we're good? You know, it's going to be a terrible idea. What would happen if we did that? I mean, at some point there will be pressure because the public has been told for a generation that we have an abundance of petroleum, as you said.

The definition is not what they thought it was, but we're an export. So people are going to say, well, it's $8 for a gallon of unleaded. Why are we selling this abroad? Why can't we just keep it here? So if politicians decided, okay, we're going to do that, we're going to stop petroleum exports, what would that mean? Well, first off, you have a heck of a legal battle on your hands because that would sort of break the fundamental contract that we have with how business operates. Second, we have legitimate contracts for LNG, for other petroleum products, things like that that would have to get broken.

But more of the point it would isolate us really badly in a time when we need this, at least the appearance, if not the reality of free trade happening where things go freely across our borders. to take one portion of that and shut it down. I think it would be as a damaging as when in, uh, was a February 2020, when the United States treasury under Biden decided to freeze Russia's sovereign assets, reserves, they're neither sovereign nor reserves under that scenario.

Um, and that kicked off a whole lot of things where people started walking away from the dollar. We started to see the treasuries weren't getting bid. Gold started to spike. There are real consequences to actions like that. Um, and so I just think that would be, it would be very,

destabilizing would be the kindest term I could put here. So that's not likely to happen, you think? Hope not. Homeownership has always been at the center of the American dream. It is an actual asset, a place people work their entire lives to build, a place of stability and security and real value. Right now, though, too many homeowners are stuck swiping credit cards to cover groceries. There's basically a survival tax of 20% interest or more.

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If you want out, call 800-685-56-96-985-6-85-6-85-6-85-56, or visit Americanfinancing. Dot net slash Tucker. How high could gas get? You know, I could ask this a lot. So there's a little thought experiment. So imagine, like, you know, I've got a lot. I've got a Nissan Pathfinder. It's totally dry.

I put a gallon of gas in there and then I drive it until it runs out. And then I have to turn around and push it home. Question, how much is that worth? Because I'm about 22 miles away from home. Probably take me, I don't know, three weeks to do that. So people will pay a lot for gasoline. People will pay a lot for diesel. It could easily get to $3,400 a barrel.

And people who are riding little scooters, you know, all over Bangkok. They're still going to be paying that because they're using it so efficiently. in their in their markets but it's worth every penny of that i have a farm i have a tractor you know i'm hay baling i would really rather not go back to hand hay baling i would pay a lot personally for a gallon so the question is what's it worth it's severely underpriced at this point in time in terms of its actual worth that's okay we've had a lot of it got a little lazy with the whole thing but um you know could we would people pay 200 easy a barrel 300 easy 400 yes absolutely what would that mean for gasoline and diesel prices? Like, how would that be reflected at the pump? The fableed

pump? Well, you know, this is interesting because we have the quoted price of oil, the futures price, right, right-ish now for WTI, maybe 95 for Brent. But on the other end of that, I don't put oil in my car. I put gasoline in my car. So the question is, after it goes to the refiner, how much of those products worth right now? Okay, so if you in Rotterdam this morning wanted to buy a barrel of jet fuel, you had to pay $158. If you want to buy a barrel of diesel, same market, about $148. So that's what it's actually selling for. Well, what's the point of having a Brent market, WTI, West Texas, what's the point of those numbers if they don't correspond to reality?

It's narrative control. It's really, I think that's what we're down to at this point in time. So I've been watching markets for a long time. and I used to trade futures and my specialty was gold also silver and I didn't dabble in oil all that much but they all operate kind of the same and so the futures market were this

awesome invention that allows speculators to really be very dominant in setting the price for things not discovering the price I'm using this terminology careful they set the prices for things so right now on a daily basis in the oil market you're a producer I'm a consumer

you're an oil company I'm a refinery right that would be the actual price discovery mechanism. We come to some agreement. That would be a one-to-one relationship. However, on top of that, we've allowed, because our regulators fell asleep at the wheel, we've allowed the speculators in that story

to become 50 times larger on a signal basis than the actual deal that happens at the bottom. So when you have a 50-to-one margin, it's the paper that's setting the price up there right now. And we've watched this for years, 1.30 in the morning, and this is happening with oil now constantly. 1.30, 2 o'clock in the morning when there's almost no trading happening. Everybody's asleep.

And all of a sudden, somebody will come in, and I've seen this several times now, and suddenly sell a million and a half barrels of oil in a single one-minute window, and it just crushes the price. And they do this over and over again. And then, of course, you have all these algos. And they're mostly momentum. A lot of them are momentum algos. And so they're like, oh, look, prices are falling. So they pile on. And you get the whole sort of herd moving in a direction. And it's just completely fake. It's been this way for a while. And I think it's because, I mean, you've probably seen the same clips, right? Trump comes out.

He's like, oh, people told me oil is going to be 300. It's only 70. And the stock market's up. Those are really important narrative moments for him to be able to say, look, I did this thing. And markets approve of it. If they didn't, stocks wouldn't be so high and oil wouldn't be so low, right? I think that's the point of this stuff. It's political narrative shaping right now.

So it's lying because the price of something is the point in which the transaction occurs. What's it worth? What will you pay for it? I mean, that's what a market. I mean, correct me, I'm not the economist here. You are, but, like, right? So if, if I say the price of something is $5, but nobody would buy it for $5, it's not worth $5. This is so nuts.

It's just not real at all. It's a lie. So why isn't there an effort among policymakers or even the media to discover and publicize the price of oil? The price of oil is what people are buying it for. I yeah it's a big big mystery so here here's the thing you mentioned the most important thing there's like if you get take economics there's one chart they call it the pq chart price supply demand right there's a curve you can point to it that's how it's supposed to work um right now

we're holding the price lower than actual supplies right so what's happening is demand is too high and so we're burning through our stockpiles right now and if you want to see something alarming just look at the actual amount of crude oil we have stored in the United States. That would be the SPR plus commercial inventories. Or we could look at how much diesel do we have in tanks kicking around. Hey, or how much gasoline do we have in tanks? And all of these are just powering low. Now, why is that?

Because the price is too low. The only way you can get price, you know, supply and demand matched again is you have to use prices. So prices rise enough. People decide, I'm not going to drive my car today. We'll take a lesser vacation, whatever. That's how this thing sorts itself out. alternatively, and I'm really worried about this in a post-COVID, C-SA telling us who's essential and not environment, that we're just going to run this down, Tucker, until we get to scary minimums, and then we're going to have

government rationing attempts. They're going to try and decide who gets it. You're not important. You are. Imagine that amongst California Democrats. That'll be amazing. But I think this is where this is going is we're actually just going to sail into absolute minimum, and then the crisis comes out. And I'm starting to wonder if that hasn't been the point all long. Flesh that out. So the point of this destroying global energy supplies and capacity, including refining, the point of that, I mean, clearly there's a point. The United States is fighting a war against Russia aimed at Russia's energy sector. And the United States is doing that.

The Trump administration is fighting a war against Russia against Russia's energy sector. and knowing what it's doing. And then it started this word knowing what would happen that the LNG ports in Qatar would be hit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So like, you think the U.S. government, the Trump administration, wants rationing? Maybe that. I'm not sure if that's the ultimate end goal. But so February 28th, we conduct this, you know, decapitation strike, right? Kill Iran's version of the Pope.

And that's how I was going to work out, right? So we do that. On the second of March is when Ukraine, with some help, obviously, started really dialing in on Russian refineries and oil depots. And this is very poorly reported, I feel, in our country, but, you know, it's all over Twitter and other places. But you can see, and they were very effective. They were blown up all kinds of refineries and big black smoky things. They had even, like, struck right downtown in Moscow and took out their main refinery. And as of three days ago, every single major refinery in Russia had been attacked at least once.

None had been missed. And this is very effective. And some of them were 1,500 miles all the way inland. And that's not something Ukraine could do all its own because Russia has mobile air defense units. And so you have to thread all these needles to get your little buzzy drones all the way over there. But they, you know, they're getting that targeting information. And so all that's going on. And then also poorly reported, probably the single greatest loss of merchant marine vessels in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea because of drone attacks by Ukraine on Russian shipping.

any kind of ships, ferries, little merchant barges, you know, oil tankers, whatever. If it's a ship, it's getting hit. And then of late, we've really stepped it up because Russia has their version of Amazon's called wildberries. And they have these huge distribution warehouses. And they have six massive distribution warehouses. Oops. Now they have four. Because four of them have been completely attacked.

This is an economic attack. And of course, the scary part with us is that Russia just, I don't know, what was it, a few months ago? they they revamped their nuclear doctrine to say you know it used to be a we would only respond if attacked with nukes but we're widening that to say we can use them if we're facing an existential threat and the thing that drives me nuts is as we're poking the bear nobody's bothered to come out and explain to me what's the upside here what do we get out of this what's the point of what's why are we do why is the trump administration doing this they told us they were going to end the war they told me they were going to end the war and the CIA is providing an

NSA are providing targeting to warehouses and refineries? Like, I don't know. Like, what is the point? I don't know the answer. Do you know? It seems to be to provoke a reaction. I'm just having to, you know,

I just got to speculate like anybody, but I know it's dangerous. I know that if those things are happening to us, we would respond pretty vigorously, muscularly, I bet. So it feels, that feels dangerous, but it's just the timing of it that,

A, the straight gets closed down, straight of removes. B, Russia really starts to get dialed up. Now, see, we've pushed it all the way to the point that the Bobblemand Deb straight and there on the Red Sea is now closed. And so you said it before, I don't, I no longer trust a thing anybody says. What are they doing? So they've said, oh, we've tried to get this memorandum of understanding, which is an understanding about how you're going to get to an understanding.

It's not even a thing. But, you know, and we couldn't even abide by that, right? And so what are we doing? Everything we've been doing is to further inflame this war, get caught in a little bit deeper. Trump has been talking about, you know, escalating constantly at this point in time. Oh, if you strike a ship, we'll blow up a plant, right? And so the actions are they're trying to keep it closed. And here's the part that I'm worried about is I don't think they know not what they do.

I don't think they understand the relationship between how an economy is undergirded by energy. I think they just think it's all intangible. It's all narratives, right? I truly feel like there's people who live in a world of reality. Oh, yes. And then there are these abstractionists, and they live in an abstract world. Twitter worlds. Yeah.

Yeah. And so what happens if we push down that abstract world? Well, you know, as Anne Rand said, you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And, you know, I almost have to have a little chuckle because it's really dark. Like, like what they're doing, if I could communicate to people clearly, is they are risking everything. Everything that we hold dear about our way of life. about the ease of our lives, about the jobs we do, where the future is going, what we tell our children.

And we're not having really any serious conversations outside of, say, this podcast and others like it. So is the world getting more stable or less stable? That's a rhetorical question. We're not in charge of the world, unfortunately, but you are in charge of, in fact, responsible for your own family and your savings. So the dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power since 20, 2020. That's crazy. The dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power in six years. You know what hasn't? Gold. Gold has been a trusted store of value for thousands of years,

and that's one reason you should think about gold right now. It's about 25% below its high from earlier this year, which is amazing. Some of the world's biggest financial institutions are making the move, because gold relative to its power and endurance as a medium of exchange is pretty cheap right now. central banks are reducing their reliance on treasuries and increasing their holdings of, yes, gold. They're not alone. Individual investors are doing the same. Ray Dalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund and a friend of ours, recommends holding up to 15% of your portfolio in gold.

We've long believed in gold. We've been vindicated. We started battalion medals to give Americans an honest, fair-priced way to buy metals, gold and silver, because a lot of these companies are scams. Ours is not. you know, we have like three points over spot. We'll ship it to your house. Battalion Metals.com slash Tucker is the place to go to learn more about buying metals, gold and silver.

Precious metals, IRAs, secure storage, all of it. Battalion Metals.com slash Tucker. I don't think there are any. I don't think there are any. And people throw this stuff out unchallenged. No, actually, we're going to, we have Venezuelan oil now. so we have more than enough oil. And by the way, if you wouldn't mind explaining why that probably isn't true,

what does that mean when they tell us that we now have all of Venezuela's oil so we don't need oil from the Persian Gulf? Yeah, so oil is, oil's not saying like water. Water's kind of water, maybe salt water and fresh waters. We understand those are different. Well, oil has like 900 different flavors, right? Yes. And the Venezuela has a lot of oil, but it's, you're going to use the little quotation marks in the air.

oil. And the reason for that is that they have two fields. They have the merry field, which we're currently drawing from. It's nice. It's very heavy. It's sour, which means it has sulfur in it. Actually, sulfur sounds bad, because we call it sour, but it's actually tasty in the sense that we use it for all kinds of things, right? So that's actually high value oil. The rest of it is in this stuff called the Orinoco belt. It's a big belt, but it's not oil. Like, you couldn't, like, the easiest way to get out of the ground is with a spatula, right? It just doesn't flow. It's like, it's really tar. It's like a, it's basically imagine a real, you know, it's basically, imagine a hot road. It's August day.

It's a little soft. Yeah. It's pretty much asphalt. It is packed with asphaltines, a component of that. So it's hideously expensive to get that stuff out of the ground. You have to do all kinds of very fun things. You have to either use steam, which means you have to create steam. So you have to build a power plant on site, inject it down there.

Or you have to put a diluent down, some kind of solvent that you just inject in the ground and suck it back out again. It's tricky. So remember Trump goes down there and he brings in all the Exxon and all these people. gets mad at them because he said, go down there and get that oil boys. And they said, it's, it's uninvestable because there is probably $100, $150 billion that would have to be invested down

there. And defending an oil infrastructure in Iraq is relatively easy because it's all flat desert. Defending oil infrastructure in the jungle is a whole different beast if things go south on you. So they said you can't do that unless you give a security guarantees. And that's that way, that's awkward. How do we do that? So they couldn't come to any agreement and Trump just got mad at Exxon. But it's not trivial and it's very expensive. And if we started today with complete security guarantees and also contract guarantees in a socialist regime, they took Maduro out, but the whole rest of the structure remained intact. So I'm not real clear what happened there. It would still take five to 10 years to get that flowing.

And we don't have five to 10 years. We've got like two or three more months here. Would if it was flowing at full force, would it compensate for the 19 million? missing barrels of oil a day through the straight? Hard to imagine. Here's as closest comparable is the Batum and the tar sands. Canada, like they've rebranded at oil sands. But all that beautiful stuff up in Alberta, a very capital intensive over, you know,

the past 15 years, they've managed to bring that up to a very respectable 4.67 million barrels a day of flow. But it took tens, if not hundreds of billions of capital. It takes a long time. You don't just turn a tap on and it kind of comes out. You have to, each chunk of the field has to have pipes put in it and infrastructure and steam and all kinds of stuff. It's just, listen, if that's comparable, I would say, if you could be as stable as Canada, I would imagine in the next 15 years, you could probably get that up to four or five million barrels a day if they're comparable. And listen, I'm simplifying a lot. I'll have some oil people calling me up and yelling at me, but just to keep it sort of roughly comparable.

four or five million barrels a day under best case circumstances with political stability, security and massive $100 billion infrastructure investments. You get it to five million barrels a day. We're 20 million barrels a day offline. So like there's kind of no way around, I don't care what Doug Bergham or the Secretary of War says, there's no way around the reality that like we are. short, awful lot of oil in the global markets. So what, so I mean, that's just like, is that, are I misreading this?

That's, that's the fact, right? Yeah, that's the fact. And I guess, again, the administration officials I've seen, they kind of keep going shrugging and going, well, we'll be relatively okay. But what that really, what they're really saying is the person, you know, the country that we're going to hit the most is the largest importer of oil is China. And China may decide it has to say something about. this at some point in time. They've been very quiet so far, pretty suspicious, but it was May 13th,

Trump goes over, brings over Tim Cook and all these other Elon Musk CEO types. And it was shortly after that that they really dialed back their imports. So I'm pretty sure there's a quid pro quo. The quid was, we'll stop importing for a while. I don't know what the pro quo was. You know, it was Taiwan? We don't know. We'll have to figure that out later. But China can't do that forever. They've been, I think, a little fairly gracious so far. But they are starting to to re-import and bring their imports back up. And they can't have this area shut down for the next year. It just, they're going to have to intervene in some meaningful way, I would imagine,

because again, energy is everything. And they know that. They've got these beautiful five-year sets of five-year plans. And their energy policy, actually, when I read it, I weep because I wish my country had one. It was so comprehensive. It's very thoughtful. It only brings on alternative energy slowly up to a certain percentage. and they're pursuing nukes and alternative nukes and thorium reactors and a plank of their energy policy is have good relations with the people we get our oil from.

Germany could take a lesson from that book, right? You know, and so they're obviously dialed in on energy. They know it's importance. And eventually they're going to have to intervene here, I think, if we continue to mess this up. How long till American consumers are shocked by what they see because of rising oil? energy prices. Well, we're going to be shocked here. I think we both live in New England. Heating oil is up 84% from this time last year. And I live around people who are going to be very hurt by that. And that's going to be tough. It's going higher than that. New York Harbor is a place where we have,

they sell in five districts. The New York Harbor district for diesel just hit its all time high just last week. So we're going to be seeing 550 a gallon diesel again here, very short. shortly, those numbers are just going to keep going up. Yeah, and keep in mind, there's been an organized and concerted effort to discourage the use of wood stoves for the last 25 years. Yeah, don't have a woodstove. It pollutes, you know, just heating oil. That's the answer. L.P. Gas. Wow. Okay. So do you think gasoline, which is, I think, the most common retail measure of energy prices, I mean, are you going to see $6 a gallon gasoline before Labor Day? or this year, do you think? Yeah, I really do.

So I'm tracking these every week. We got another raft of numbers. If you can believe them, I'm not sure what I can believe anymore, Tucker. I'm honestly, I don't know. Would it be beyond this administration to fudge the numbers and say we have more gasoline in storage than we do? Sure, well within the realm of possible. But if we can believe the numbers as they are, we see that all of our actual stocks and inventories are going down. Now, this was tragically comedical when Trump came out and said,

we're going to go after the retailers for gouging on gas. It's like, oh, dude, that's not how this market works at all. The 7-11 is a price taker. The guy with the big tanker shows up, tells him what that cost. He's also a price taker. He goes to the distribution center, and they're price takers. And so there's no one person you can say is gouging. The refiners sell to the highest bidder.

The highest bidder has the need to buy at that price so that they can supply the people who are depending on them, and that's how it works. So there's no gouging at this point in time. But we're going to see a lot higher prices because again, all those inventories are just screaming downwards. And so there comes a point where I think we just have kind of like how did Hemingway go broken slowly than all at once. I think we're going to slowly people are going to start waking up that there's a real crisis here. These are shocking levels of inventory. And eventually there's a mad scramble and that's the all at once part of this.

But, you know, 2002, America imposed sanctions on Russia at Russian. tankers and all that stuff. And so there was the thought that maybe three million barrels a day might come offline. And that was enough to send oil from then about 80 to 120 where it stood for five months, right? And then it turned out, oh, after the news settled in, they're like, ah, I wasn't such a big deal because Russia ended up using shadow tankers and selling it. Send India. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's no big deal. So actually, there wasn't any real impact to the oil markets. And here we are now today with in arguably not just the largest energy shock ever, but by literally whole factors.

So we had the oil embargo. It starts in October 1973, runs until March of 74. And what they did was they didn't stop selling to the whole world. They said, I don't know why Norway is trapped up in this, but they said, we're not selling oil to the U.S. or Norway.

I just don't know how Norway got tangled up in that. And then what they did was they agreed as a group of OPEC nations or Arab nations at that time that they were going to reduce their production by 5% per month. So by the end of the whole thing, the world was short 9% of its oil, right? And that was enough to take oil basically from 370 a barrel to 33. It was a 10 bagger, right?

And that created a huge shock. And then we had the double wave of inflation that happened in the 70s. And it took Paul Volker coming out and ramming interest rates to 21% in order to pinch that second hump of inflation. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if we had to fight inflation that way? So there was a huge learning from that. And I believe that the lesson was, oh, if we can just keep the price of oil down, we can minimize the shock. And so they're doing that. And the problem is while they're doing that, the price is too low, even though it feels high, it's still too low to truly match supply and demand. And so supplies are just being run down. So now we've run

through, you know, the IEA said, go ahead, release 400 million barrels, all you, you know, G7 countries. And we were a big chunk of that. We were almost half of that. We had all this stuff that Iran had stored up in tankers that they suddenly released to the world. We had all the Russian stuff that suddenly got released all those tankers. We had all these tankers that were in motion at the time the war started. It took them a month or two to get to where they're going. So we had all of that to sort of work through. Now, that's all gone. And even if the straight opened up right now, You know, we would not get to 21 million barrels a day again until probably a year from now. For three separate reasons, which you mentioned, one, there's, we don't know, unknown damage to the actual oil fields because they just had to shut them off.

And that's, that's bad. That's not how you treat oil wells. And so we'll see when they turn them back on how much damage happened. Two, they got to fix all the stuff that got tuned up, right? So refineries got hit and loading docks got hit and oil platforms and all that. And probably one of the biggest things is just unbursed. bollixing the all the shipping, right?

So it wasn't just oil tankers coming out. There were cargo containers and Vulcan carriers and all this stuff. And that whole perfectly choreographed just in time symphony of thousands of ships going hither and yon, that all got completely shredded. So that all has to sort of be reformulated and rebuilt. Shipping experts I talk to say minimum,

three, four months just to sort of uncork that and figure out where things are. And that's if and only if my magic. finger snap made things stable and insurable and, you know, believably so. And, and I don't think we're anywhere close to that. Literally nowhere close to that. Now, for, I feel like many Americans recall or have read about the oil shock of 1973, which, as you just said, had downstream consequences that lasted almost a decade and changed the country, changed so we've manufactured cars, changed the culture, changed the birth rate. Like, it really was a big deal, though it was much

smaller than what we're facing now. Very few people remember why that happened. Do you remember why? Do you remember why OPEC shut us out in Norway? And doorway? Well, you know, there was just, guess what? I think Israel was involved. Yeah, that's exactly right, because we sided with Israel in the Amkipur War of 1973. That's exactly why. So we paid a huge price in 1970. I mean, not to be pedantic about it, but it's just a fact. We paid a huge price in 1973 for our support for Israel, which was not to our strategic benefit. It was for sentimental or other reasons, maybe darker reasons, but it wasn't like we were getting anything out of it. We didn't. We lost. And once again, 50 years later, it's a replay, but 10x. I just can't help but notice that.

Yeah. Even then, though, I feel like there was more reality sort of in the system. We live in a super unreal time right now. I can't believe like Trump can just say things like, oh, we've completely beaten them militarily. Why can't we stop any of those missiles or drones? You know, it's just it's. Then why are we drawing down the SBR if the straight of Hormuz doesn't mean anything? It's, yeah, it's just and we're the journalists. I mean, just ask a follow-up question, you know, I did see on with Pete Hegseth Department of War. I struggle with that too, you know, saying, but prices are high. Lady, you ain't seen nothing yet. We are just getting started on this.

This could get a lot higher. And here's my concern. The destination doesn't bother me. If you said, hey, we have to find out how to live with like, you know, 13% less energy and we've got five years to sort it out and prices will climb to give us. That's fine. The destination doesn't bother me. We'll sort it out. But it's the pace of change that gets you.

Right. And so if we just slam into this, an oil or gasoline suddenly goes from five to 15 or whatever it's going to do suddenly, that's where the shot. That's where the shock happens. That's where the damage happens. That's where the uncontrolled things happen. And this is why I research and I look at neither of these two things independently. I always look at energy and the economy. And so here's what we have to understand.

The United States in 1973 had some debt, not $39 trillion of debt, right? With a structural deficit of two to three trillion per year for the next 10 years, right? Just by law, nothing we can do about that. It's all baked in the cake. derivatives numbering one to two quadrillion depending on how you count these things. Nobody knows what they are. Don't ask me, but literally nobody understands how the whole things operates. But what they do is they provide insurance, Tucker, at a moment when you don't really need

it, you know, but if things get a little out of parameter, as they say, like a, you know, interest rates suddenly do something really crazy like they did in the long-term capital management. They had all these fancy derivatives and all of a sudden, oops, you know, Russian bonds went a little further than they thought in the wrong direction and boom, six billion out the window. and Alan Greenspan had to fix it, you know. If these derivative markets freeze up, what we're going to see is the complete freezing of our financial system in markets. And that'd be very bad. And, you know, sort of my dark horse candidate for kicking all this off is going to be Japan.

Their yen is weakening really a lot right now, and they're trying hard to make that not happen. And also, they've lost control of their bonds. And the yields are spiking higher. And that's a very rare combination. to lose control of both the price of your money and your interest rates. You know, that's, so that could be a situation where if that really starts to spiral out of control, they're going to have to do something. And that would mean closing markets, shutting things down, you know, and what would that look like?

You know, we'll wake up one day and they'll say, oh, you know, terrible things happen at Nomura Bank, but don't worry, it's very temporary. Oh, actually, Japan's going to have to shut their Niki down for just a couple days. Actually, hang on. we're going to have to shut down one of our banks over here for a little while, and then it'll be Wednesday, and they'll be like, we can't open it. This is how this is going to sort of play out at some point. But that's because we allowed, you know, we had the great financial crisis.

And they're like, oh, that was terrible idea. We had all these collateralized debt obligations and all that stuff. We shouldn't have done that. So learned our lesson. Today, derivatives exactly like that are still saturated through the market. They're twice as large as they were back then. No lessons learned, except they did write some laws that if the banks get in, trouble, they're going to take your bank account to help make them whole again. They did write

some laws. So they got that done. It's, of course, theft at scale. Let me just ask, though, I mean, Japan is the biggest or one of the biggest holders of U.S. treasuries. So what effect does that have on treasuries? Well, it has a lot. So Japan is going to have to sell those treasuries just to begin defending its currency. Right. Because they're going to need to, that that would be part one. But part two is Japan imports 100% of its hydrocarbons. It has no domestic reserves. So as the price of oil goes up and oil products goes up, they're going to have to buy those at higher and higher and higher yen costs.

So the poor people of Japan are getting hit with a double whammy, right? First, their yen is weakening. That imports inflation. Second, when they have to buy oil that's also going up in price, it's with a weaker currency. So they're going to be feeling it sort of at a 2x rate of speed. And that creates social unrestically political problems. It's going to create a lot of pressure to do something.

And unfortunately, there's not a lot that can be done for as long as the straight of her moves remains closed. I predict a bailout by China, thereby neutralizing the Japan problem, which is one of China's biggest problems. And they're, you know, obviously historically, Japan occupied a huge part of China for a long time. And Chinese haven't forgotten it. And they're concerned about Japan. They don't want American troops in Japan. They don't want Japan of a nuclear weapon. And a desperate Japan is good for China.

That's just my guess. Let me ask you about, and I don't want to get too dark with this, but like the hope of the U.S. economy at this point, the entire future of the state of California is all predicated on the success of AI. And AI doesn't famously produce anything. It doesn't, you don't make anything with AI. really just consume energy. And AI, like Bitcoin mining, is just a function of energy.

Like, what's the price of energy? How in the world are you going to transform our economy from a manufacturing economy to an AI, cryptocurrency economy, with energy prices like this? How does that work? This is one of these big sour notes. I can't figure this one out, Tucker. But I just wrote a huge report on AI, my most recent one.

I called the Renaissance Report. which is overselling myself. I just have unmanaged adult ADHD. That's the spirit. Yeah. But AI itself is very concerning because we've thrown trillions of dollars of Kappex at this. So it's kind of all in.

We have to beat China, right? Okay. That's the story. But if we were really serious about this, let's say we've got some idea that what we're going to do is we're going to get God in a box, right? And we have to get God to box first. And then we'll be able to run this whole thing.

But the implicit assumption baked in there is we're going to have, these data centers and they're now permanent part of our architecture going forward. All right. They take a lot of energy, right? I call them toasters that don't make toast. You know, they make cat videos, but they just, they just basically just turn natural gas into waste heat. You know, that's what they do. And so you would think if you had a comprehensive, beautiful five-year plan of energy strategy,

somebody would be gone, where's the energy for that coming from? Well, now wander with me over to the world where actually our own energy information agency administration, the EIA says, we're kind of at peak oil right now. The shale beds of all sort of, they've done what they can. They don't go to tomorrow, you know, zero by Tuesday, but we're not going to be putting more on going forward. And similarly, natural gas, there's a lot there, but it's kind of, wouldn't you know, it's kind of bump it along and, okay, so you would think somebody would be saying, look,

we need these boxes permanently. This can be part of our control grid. It's how we conduct business. It's going to be woven into everything. We're all going to have digital IDs. and if this AI system goes down, wow, we're really screwed. We won't know how to get people on flights.

We won't know how to distribute, you know, lorries to Walmart. Everything breaks, right? So you'd think, wow, we should have a comprehensive plan. Well, first, we're not going to have natural gas forever. It, two, like all good things, runs out. So we would be doing something smart. You would know that they were serious about this if they were slapping in small modular nukes and nuclear plants all over the place because that's the answer for that.

nuke make beautiful electricity, a big fan of them, but we're not doing that, right? Not at scale. And we haven't even figured out where we're going to get the uranium from to continue operating our own. So it's almost, it's this very unserious thing, Tucker, which I can't figure out. It feels like they don't care about the future. They just, there's some goal line. They're trying to just like furiously cross over with the, with the football. I feel that way too. I felt that way since, really since Trump's inauguration. and then I realized the goal line was the Iran regime change effort. Like that's everything in retrospect about the staffing and the administration, the transition, all of it was designed to make February 28th possible.

But what I haven't figured out is what the point of that was. Do you have the thought? I wrestle with this all the time, you know? It's, what do you do? You pick, it's either really rank incompetence or it's malevolence. But malevolence on a scale that doesn't have a lot of precedent in history, I mean, that we know of, I mean, a lot of history, most history is unrecorded, but to the extent that we know what previous empires did and why, nothing like this has ever happened at this scale, including in the 20th century, where you clearly the U.S. government or elements within the U.S. government are trying to destroy global energy markets, which, as you said at the very outset, is one-to-one correlation to the strength of the through the economy GDP. So like,

prosperity? Why would you, why would you wipe out civilization? Why are you trying to do that? Like, what is this? All right. Well, for what it's worth, my ponderings,

and I'm, I reserve the right to change this in 10 minutes, but here's what I came up with. So back in 2016, there was this cheesy little W.E.F. video, right? And the first thing was, you'll own nothing and be happy.

And that got a lot of air time. Famously, yes. Yeah, number four was you'll eat less meat, you know, and here we are with like, you know, alpha gal ticks running around and, you know, hamburger at seven a pound. And then, but number eight was the one that caught me the most because this one really bothered me. And number eight was by 2030 Western values will have been tested to the breaking point.

Now, why Western values? Why not Chinese values? Why not African values, you know? And ever since then, I've had this strong sense that my country is under attack, right? Kids don't know. They're confused about gender. We don't even have a border anymore. the pillars of everything, like morality, like Pete Hexed saying, it's totally okay to take boats in the Caribbean, as long as we suspect they're running drugs, just summarily execute them. These are not Christian values. They're not my Western values. We only punish the guilty, period. I mean, that's the essence of Western values. You punish the guilty. You spare the innocent. You don't kill innocent people. That's why we're different from Stalin's Russia and from the Mongols. And like, that is, that is the West. It's why we're different from Israel, which is not part of the West.

So, yeah, that's, I've never heard that before. Can you restate that in the World Economic Forum 2016? They put this little video up. Yep. Yep. And it's Western values would be tested to the breaking point. Mm-hmm. And so people's, you know, I'm this kind of a guy.

If somebody says they're going to do something and then it happens, I'm thinking maybe they did it. You know, it's just how I'm constructed in this story. So. That's a legal principle. Yeah. Well, it's something I live by, but this has been, you know, just watching this unfold. So on the one hand, this is all just errors of judgment and late stage empire and things rot and fall apart. Okay.

On the other hand, you say, it's just too deliberate. So, you know, in my community at peak prosperity, we have a framework we use. We call it the easy, hard framework, right? Develop by one of my subscribers. And so here it goes like this. If something's easy, well, the elites want it. And if it's hard, they don't really want it. So I've been astonished to how easy it was for these flock cameras to suddenly appear everywhere, you know, 100,000 of them.

Every one of them requiring municipal decisions. I work on the local town offices down here in my spare time. Nothing's easy at this level. But somehow 100,000 cameras went up and that's all about invading our right to privacy, right? Our sense of privacy, fourth amendment, you know, just to be secure in my persons from searches and seizures. and somehow that was easy. Now, if on my farm, I wanted to dig a pond, which would support life. And if you dig a hole in the ground and water goes in it, everything shows up magically.

That would be very hard. It would be super hard, right? You know, if I wanted to do that, that would be very hard. But if I wanted to go down to Home Depot and buy pesticides and spray them all over my property, go for it, how much have at it. So I kind of feel like this easy, hard framework when I start looking at this way, the easy stuff is the stuff that's not, affirming of of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, everything I hold dear. And the hard stuff is stuff that actually makes life better, right?

I was in the COVID thing. I was full on warrior. You know, I worked with Pierre Corey and Paul Merrick and the FLCCC and I'm still on the board at the IMA. And the people are just like, look, can I just use this repurpose cheap, very safe drug? Like doctors have always used. If they choose to use something off patent, fine. And that was very hard.

I mean, the whole weight of the system came down on them. Oh, you want to put people in ventilators and give them remdesivir with an upwards of 85% kill rate? Easy, rewarded. And so you just notice this over and over again. And then you finally get to, I think the last great thing to skewer here is that we have markets. They're free. They're fair. They're trustworthy, maybe imperfect, but they there were honest participants.

to set prices amongst each other in a fair and open way. And that's just not the case anymore. And it hasn't been for a while. That's the final black pill for me. I mean, it was one thing to discover that, you know, building seven probably didn't just fall in on itself because it had airplane parts on the roof or that multiple people were involved in the Kennedy assassination.

Okay, you know, those those truths dawned gradually for me, but markets? I mean, markets take place on the basis of the most simple and self-evident principle in life. It's almost like a principle of nature, supply in demand. And they take place transparently or so I thought. I mean, it's really hard as an American to accept the fact that markets, and I think I speak from many when I say this, are fake. Mm-hmm. I would agree.

I would agree. You won't think of something that's hard? You know, it's hard? Getting the gold at Fort Knox audited. Oh, my gosh, that's so hard. Yeah, I wonder why that is. Because it's not there. My last question to you is, what counsel would you give,

if people have made it this far into the conversation, they, I'm certain, agree with the way that you think, you know, putting truth at the center of your decisions. It's the only way to think. What advice would you give to people about their personal finances in a moment of turmoil like this? Well, this is the, Excuse me.

Woo. Good night. Got a little cold. Sorry. Good to get those out. Just let them go. Well, this is, this is, so I don't do what I do, Tucker, so that I can like make people feel anxious. I don't like stirring things up.

I really don't like that at all. What I want to do is find enough truth where I go, look, if we put these dots in a row, what conclusions do you come to? And sometimes they're not easy conclusions. And I understand I'm not really in the data business. I'm in the belief challenging business. So you mentioned the red pilling, right? Yeah, so when I say like, you know, the whole thing that happened with COVID is kind of like, oh, you know, look, there's this really awkward stuff that's happening.

But for people to accept that, they had to give up some really important things, maybe like faith and authority, right? A belief that the medical system is there to help them. They're like powerful beliefs. And that's an emotional process. So I understand I put up pretty hard information for people because it challenges big beliefs. But I've gotten very good at it. And if you can get through that, then you get to some conclusions, which is like, oh, maybe I should be a little bit more responsible for my own outcomes in the future, right?

Maybe I should grow a little bit of my own food, not 100%, but maybe 3%, and, you know, going from 3% to more is easier than going from zero, right? Zero is a hard place to start from. Maybe I should be responsible for my own safety and security. Maybe once I understand how the markets actually work, that, in fact, everybody should understand completely how the money system works, right? I got an MBA. They taught me how to compete for dollars.

I was in the arena, and then finally I read Creature from Jekyllime, I was like, that can't be true, how money is made. And you find out banks make money out of thin air. That's what they do. And there's no limit on it. And when you figure out, wow, humans with no limits and perverse incentives, we're going to get more money printing. So I'm like, great, what do you do with that conclusion?

Nothing I can do about that. Oh, well, I can hold some gold, some silver, land, like things that stand the test of printing over and over again in history. And so my counsel of people is, you know, get really, get in so much content. text as you need, no more to begin to figure out if you have to make some changes in your life. And for a lot of people that come to conclusions, like, oh, I should safeguard my wealth a little bit more, which means you have to actually understand what wealth is. It's not dollar bills.

And so once you figure that out where wealth originates from, you can start to make different decisions. And the way I think about it is there's primary wealth. So if you live on a rocky stretch of New Mexico desert, you've got very little primary wealth. But if you're on a, you know, 18 feet of Iowa tops oil, you got a lot of wealth, right? So the primary wealth is is in the land itself, right? Oil in the ground, coal, all that stuff. Secondary wealth is what happens when humans bring that stuff to market, right?

So trees become lumber, fish get to market. So secondary wealth is the means of production. And then tertiary wealth is dollars. It's representations that point to that. But money itself, currency, has no value if you can't buy something with it. You know, so what do you do with it? Like, you know, and so I tell people almost everybody's been marketed to incessantly that they have to have all their money in this little tertiary system.

All has to be here. You should have stocks and bonds, diversified currency, big bank accounts. But if you don't have a lot of stuff underneath that, I submit you have very little actual wealth. Because this stuff is a claim on wealth, right? It's like, what do you do with dollar bills on a deserted island? You know, start a fire with them, I guess, you know. But so once we start to understand where real wealth comes from, this is how I think people protect themselves. You move if you're 100% exposed and tertiary, get down into primary secondary wealth forms as much as you can.

For me, that's meant, you know, I live on a farm. I know not everybody can do that. And I have a lot of the ability to sort of attend to my own energy, food, water needs here. Not all of them, but significant proportion. And because of that, I've built a buffer in my life. And so that's what I tell people to start building buffers. not crazy bunker Idaho guy who's going to like survive forever on his own wits and skills and beans, right? Nobody can do that.

But again, remember the pace of change. If big shocks are coming and I'm convinced they are, you want to have as many buffers out there in your system as you can so that you can absorb that shock as much as you can. I think that makes for a happier life. And I started all this because I was a little worried that things could break apart in any moment. Turns out they're more durable than I thought. But now that I'm here, Tucker, I realize this is such a, this is how I was meant to be living anyway, in much more close connection with nature, you know, and feed on the ground and having real relationships with our cows and our chickens and all that other stuff. And also deeper relationships with my neighbors. And so, A, everything is going to get local, right?

B, you're going to not have to do everything, but you're going to have to find out what you're good at and bring that to your community. see, I just, if I could counsel, this is the deepest thing I want to counsel is, whatever we're about to go through, I don't want the people I love to have to accidentally lose their humanity. What does that mean? Hard decisions are probably going to have to be made at some point in this particular story. And I feel like everything that my culture is pushing towards is asking us, me to be,

inauthentic, disconnected from self and capable of doing really horrible things. I just, you know, this has become, I didn't start out this. This was crazy, Tucker. It was actually a tweet that did it for me. I grew up Protestant.

I think church was Easter, Sunday, and Christmas. That was the whole game. Been there. And hadn't read the Bible at all. And I saw this tweet that said, I've turned to God not because he spoke me but because evil made itself known. Exactly.

And man, it landed on me and I said, got goosebumps. I was like, oh, that's, that's kind of true, isn't it? And that's my, that's the organizing principle that everything fits in right now. And because to me, what's evil? That's a short word, but it means something that revels in and promotes death, destruction, debauchery, demoralization, decay, just anything that it can do like that. And so the number one way that. evil has its way, of course, is by distracting us and keeping us hopelessly, endlessly distracted

with things. And if the other side of that is good, well, good's hard, right? You know, good takes conscious decision-making and you have to keep practicing it and you fail at it. And so that's when I first started reading the Bible. It was just a few years ago. It was such a page shirt of reading it out to my wife, Evie. I'm like, hey, humans have done this before. Look at this Romans. Exactly. there's nothing new under the sun. And so I honestly truly believe that this AI thing, this is our Tower of Babel. It's a device by which we've convinced ourselves, we can finally get that exalted seat next to God, even parity.

We are God now. We can be one of the team, you know. And of course, that lack of humility, that pride, that arrogance has always backfired. And I'm convinced it's going to backfire again. And I just, while that backfiring is happening, I don't want the people I love to have to lose their humanity, which means engage in the destruction as it unfolds around them. I couldn't agree more. I had a path so similar, it's almost identical, but it was, you know, seeing evil that drove me to God. And to the Bible and to the realization that we've done this before.

In fact, it's on a loop, and the root of it is man's desire to be God. which is a evil but but also fruitless quest I mean it's you know it results in the Tower of Babel I couldn't agree more so but but when you say lose their humanity what do you mean participate in a system that strips them of their humanity yeah yeah I feel like it like pretty much every everything that's easy that's arrayed around us are just invitations to begin losing our morality they're their invitations to betray ourselves and and our sense of integrity. And because they never just ask you one day to just line up and shoot somebody in the back of the head and push them in a ditch, right?

There's a long series of mini usurpations along the way and it all begins with the small things. And that's where they start. And so I've completely changed my opinion about all kinds of things, you know, pornography and how easy that is, right? And, you know, you're only five minutes away from an alcohol store in any community, you know. It's just, everything that's easy is just something that's, I think, think designed to pull us off of our game. And our game is, it's a short life. You know, we're all here for a reason.

And I think the reason is to find out what you're really good at and bring that to other people and to make everything around you better. And honestly, I'm here talking a long story. But the thing that gives me the most grief is that I can open a window now on a July night, leave a light on. And in the morning, there'll be one little desultory. white moth flapping about. And when I was a kid,

if I had done that, it would have been this frightening menagerie of rhinoceros beetles, lunar moths and giant walking sticks. And it's all gone. It's gone. We are destroying life. And I'm really clear about this. We're here to shepherd this. And it's not just about humans.

If we improve life for everything around us, humans are part of that. And I think it's our job to be conscious of that and treat that as well as we can. And we're just not. And that's, yeah. Though I have to say, I cleaned bugs off windowsills this morning. Fortunately and unfortunately, that's not true where I live.

We still have a lot of insects. Let me ask you one final specific question about markets. And it's about the gold market as measured by the famous spot price that you pull up on your phone. Beginning with the 2022 Ukraine war, it was really clear to me that the U.S. dollar was on a course toward irrelevance and that we would lose our status as the holder of the World's Reserve currency. It was just very obvious

based on what the Biden administration did. I think it was going to happen anyway, but it was accelerated with that with kicking Rush out of Swift. That was my opinion. So I started buying gold, and I saw it go up, up, up, up and up. This war starts in February.

It goes up, over five grand an ounce. And then it drops. And I've never understood why that happened. It doesn't make any sense to me. I'm still a gold buyer. We have a gold company. I mean, I believe in it,

a non-scammy gold company. I mean, I'm, I still buy gold, but I don't understand its movement. Do you? I don't think anybody

actually really does. But even before 2020, there was this giant tectonic thing that was happening where gold was really just going from west to east, right? Yeah.

So I used to track very, very carefully, some of the big Swiss refiners, right? They would just report, like how many kilo bars and where are they going? They were all headed east. They were all headed to China.

And this is way before 2022, which is what I wonder how much gold actually sits, you know, in London or in New York. And so, so for a long time it was like, oh, nobody cares, right? Because gold at that time was, you know, thousand, two thousand an ounce or something like that, right? So nobody cared. So then the war happens. And obviously what should have happened was gold should have just absolutely skyed

on all that uncertainty, right? Exactly. And silver as well and oil and all that. The exact opposite, all this things happen. So markets, right? But our trade data just came out. And so for January and February and for March, we've never exported more gold ever in our history, probably representing 10 to 11 million ounces, depending on how you score the spot price during that period. And that's a huge number.

And where did that go? That was actually our number one export, even more than oil, right? Like, it's a pretty big deal. So we're hemorrhaging our gold. is if we don't care, and I'd get back to China. I wonder if that wasn't the quid pro quo. Hey, you know, you're going to do this war thing. We'll help you.

But we don't want to pay 5,000 an ounce for your gold. We'll give you four or something like that. That could be part of the deal. So this is gold held by the federal government? This is called non-monetary gold. And so that's something non-monetary gold is held in comics, for instance. It's not the stuff held at the Federal Reserve. We think.

I'd also love an audit of the Fed. Can we get one of those? That would be a fine thing to see what's going on there. But the flow of gold around the world, it's kind of, it's a funny thing. If you really want to get into gold statistics is very hard because they're super opaque. And they tell you it's a barber's relic. It's not important, but no, you can't see any of this data, right? The London data is really hard to get.

You can more easily find instructions on how to build nuclear devices, right, on the internet. It's just like, it's this weird thing. So I know it's important because they won't tell me how much we have. They won't let me see the statistics, you know, but they say it's not that important. So we know it's important. And we also know that central banks around the world have been accumulating to the point now that gold is actually a larger holding in central banks around the world than treasuries. Big crossover moment there.

So my sense of gold is somebody's working extra hard to just keep it tamped down because it would be really awkward right now if it went up in price and signaled something inappropriate. And so that's what I've learned about our markets. They're actually signaling devices. They're not legitimate places of inquiry and price discovery between honest buyers and sellers. they're often used to set prices. So do I have time for good story about this? So they're like cable news that way.

I mean, they don't, they're not there to tell you the news. They're there to shape your opinion about the news. Yeah. Yeah, of course, please tell me a story. I would love it. This is a great story. So gold was illegal from 1933 to 1973. Right.

And then, okay, so there was a lot of concern. They're going to make it legal for U.S. citizens to own it again. So they're very concerned that it was going to go up in price maybe a lot. And that would send the wrong signal. And of course, they just spent 1968, 69, when the London gold pool surreptitiously battened all the, you know, London and New York just working extra hard to keep the price of gold down for reasons. And so all of this was going to be very awkward. And they just didn't want gold going up in price. So we have because of WikiLeaks, a cable that went between New York and London.

And they said, hey, here's our plan. The primary gold dealers tell us that if we start this thing called futures for gold, we can so overwhelm the actual real price of. gold with this paper price that we will create enough volatility and that people will lose interest in it and we can we can diminish their desire they said to hoard gold so they just they conceived it right away they're like look if we can make this paper price thing we can wang the price around until people get frustrated or lose interest and and that that's how we can control this so that's how it started think of a bakelight phone you know the phone connected to curly cord in 1973 think how much more sophisticated the application of these algorithms are today to manage prices. And they did

that for optics. They did that for political reasons. Is it any less important today? No, of course not. Spiking price of gold signals a loss of confidence in our fiat debt-based money, which is fundamentally a faith-based currency. You can't have something poking needles at your faith. But one faith that's never dimmed is in gold. So the Chinese believe in it, the Brits believe in it, we believe in believe in it, the Germans, I mean, everyone believes on it. That's interesting to me. So as a store of value for, like, the average American family, because the price is down relative to what I think it ought to be,

what it was six weeks ago, is it a good time to buy it now? I've been a consistent buyer of gold for 25 years now. And I'll tell you this, every time I bought it, it's hard. It was really hard when I first bought it at 300. And 500 was extra hard. 800 was super hard. It's always been a hard decision. But over the long haul, you know, gold has performed better than the stock market over that entire period by a wide margin.

And it will continue to do so because we're going to print and we're going to print more money and we're going to print a lot of it coming up. The Fed's already printing money right now, $200 billion over the last six months. You know, the U.S. government effectively prints because we send out right now $1.2 trillion of interest payment. which is cash that goes back to the market that we have to then borrow more, which the Fed enables. So this is all, we're just going to print and print more,

and that's the game. And to put a story on this, you know, the United States, it took all the way to 1990 before we accumulated our first $3.5 trillion of federal debt. So from the founding of the country,

the 1990, yeah, three and a half, you know, what do we do with that first three and a half trillion? Well, we built interstate road systems and,

you know, every bridge schoolhouse, And we did a lot. We, the U.S. government's tacked on three and a half trillion dollars of debt in the last 12 months. And what, do we build a lot of interstate highway systems at new schools? I can't name one thing, to be honest. And I don't want to Howard Lutnik.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. And foreign wars. And, yeah, it's just that, that's the thing. But, you know, on that basis, though, that's going to be three and a half trillion every six months. And someday we'll wake up, it's every one month. and then it's $3.5 trillion every week.

And this is just how this story of Fiat money has gone literally hundreds of times throughout history is best of intentions, but you lose the breaks. We lost our breaks in August 15th, 1971 when we severed from the gold standard. And ever since then, it's been sort of like Dick Cheney growling out of us that debts don't matter, you know, but they do and they will. Yeah.

Chris Martins, and thank you for that, for the clarity and the honesty and the wisdom. I appreciate it. I hope we'll come back. Thank you. Me too. That's it for us tonight. We will see you tomorrow and next Wednesday, 6 p.m. Thanks.