What Bitcoin Did - THE BIG PRINT IS COMING w/ Lawrence Lepard

Episode Date: April 12, 2025

Lawrence Lepard is an investment manager and author The Big Print, which covers the broken monetary system and how Bitcoin fixes this. In this episode, we discuss Trump’s tariffs, their real economic impact, and why Lawrence believes they could trigger a major market crash and sovereign debt crisis. We also discuss how the fiscal doom loop is accelerating, why Powell may soon be forced into another round of money printing, and why Bitcoin will benefit. FOLLOW: Danny Knowles: https://x.com/_DannyKnowles & https://primal.net/danny Lawrence Lepard: https://x.com/LawrenceLepard THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS: IREN: https://www.iren.com/ RIVER: https://river.com/wbd CASA: https://casa.io/ LEDGER: https://www.ledger.com/ ANCHORWATCH: https://www.anchorwatch.com/

If I'm correct that it's a bubble, history shows that bubbles don't just deflate gradually. They tend to go quite a ways pretty quickly. I think this is a sovereign debt crisis. And in sovereign debt crises, people don't want to own the currency at all. They want to own the alternatives to the currency, which are gold and Bitcoin. Bitcoin will be a million and gold will be, you know, 12,000. This fiat currency system is in the process of dying. And it's relatively acute.

And some people say, well, we can fix all this. Well, no, there was a time to do that. That was a long time ago. Sadly, people have to learn it by getting hit in the head. You know what I mean? There's got to be pain. What Bitcoin did is brought to you by our lead sponsor and Massive Legends, Iron, the largest Nasdaq listed Bitcoin miner using 100% renewable energy.

Iron are not just powering the Bitcoin network. They also provide cutting-edge computing resources for AI, all backed by renewable energy. So whether you're interested in mining Bitcoin or harnessing AI compute power, Iron is setting the standard. Visit iron.com to learn more, which is IR. Are you looking forward to cheat code? Oh, very much so.

Yeah. I've got an amazing video from last time you were here. You were sat at the football club and it's had some improvement since then. Back then it was like a shack and you're sat there with a wedge of dollar bills stamping by Bitcoin on the morning. Oh, I know. I love that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rockstar developer had me doing that down at the Buck Bloom, so that was a lot of fun. Yeah. Have you just been a bit of Boopoo? Yeah, it was just this week. How was it? It was great. Yeah. I love Gary.

He carries us a really nice job. Yeah. Really nice. And he's now, he, very intelligent when he went from Austin with a bunch of venues and hard to move around and using Uber's to he put the conference and the hotel are together. Yeah, that's perfect. It's just a no-brainer. Was it in Dallas this year?

Well, yes, on the edge of Dallas, kind of going towards Plano. Yeah, I've not been to spit-bop, but you? Oh, you haven't? Oh, it's worth going. I mean, it falls in the bucket of a good four to 500-person show. Yeah. Right, with some really nice people. And, you know, I really got to sign books and talk to people.

I mean, I enjoy just sitting around shooting the shit with plebs, right? I mean, just people come up and hear their story, right? Yeah. How'd you find it? Why do you hold it? What are you thinking about it? What are your dreams? You know, just all that kind of stuff.

I think that's a really good size as well. Because when, like, don't get me wrong, I love the big conference, too. That's fun. But it's very different. Oh, it's a big conference. I mean, you know, I mean, I'm sure you have this experience. I went to Nashville last year. I mean, I'll see you in Nashville.

Well, I never saw him. Yeah. It was like, there's two goddamn many people. There's 20,000 people there. Yeah, I mean, I just, I didn't see people, right? Well, it should, cheat code should be similar, about four to 500 people. Yeah, I mean, did you ever go to Pacific Bitcoin? Yes, that was great.

Yeah, I mean, I really like those shows. I mean, it was just the right size. Totally. Yeah. Well, I'm very excited. So, but thank you for coming in for this. Oh, you're most welcome. Thank you for having me.

I appreciate them. As you know, I'm out there hawking books. Well, go buy the book, the big print. Yeah. This is the first time I've had the physical copy, so thank you for that. essentially the manuscript. Yeah, thanks. You're welcome. But every time I do a macro show, it seems like things just get crazier and crazier. Yeah, this is a good time to do a macro show.

It is. What the fuck's going on with tariffs? Yeah, okay, so let's start there. So, look, Trump is a disruptor, and the tariffs are not, it's not black and white, all good or all bad. As I think you and I both know, most Bitcoiners would agree, you know, the system we've got set up as designed, you know, the dollar reserve currency system, you know, Bretton Woods post-World War II, and now runs run by massive Keynesians, is flawed. You know, Triven's dilemma is real. We've hollowed out our manufacturing base. We have to export everything or, you know, or import everything because we don't make stuff anymore. And, you know, what's that done?

It's caused a lot of financialization. Wall Street's done great. Main Street's done terrible. Yeah. Trump won the election because he recognized that and he catered to that, and he wants to make America great again. And that really means make America great for all of America, which is not just the top 1% or the top 10%. And he's a part of that, but he's actually a populist, as you know. And that's why he won the election. And so I think, and he brought in a Treasury Secretary, you all know, Scott Bassett, the Pagman manager who, you know,

ran the speculative attack on the pound when he worked for Soros and obviously understands, you know, economics, money flows, macro, et cetera. And they decided that they were going to be very aggressive about trying to make the changes that are necessary to get us away from the system we've been on into a new system. whether tariffs are the perfect solution of that, it's unclear. I mean, I'm mixed on these tariffs. I mean, I think I'm not mixed on the notion of trying to return America to, you know, to get to a neutral reserve currency and get rid of this dollar-based system and, you know,

the globalization that we've had that's hurt America and really hurt a lot of the world. But, you know, and so, you know, somebody needed to do something. And, of course, the way he did it, I mean, it's like he threw a grenade into the party, right? I mean, he came out. He came out, you know, with this, I mean, I could argue that his approach, I would have taken a different approach. I would have done, you know, an Oval Office speech. I would have explained it much more clearly. Yeah.

You know, I think the poster boards with the, you know, the pseudo tariffs that other countries were charging us where the numbers were, I mean, to the best of my, you know, my, when I look at them, I think they're kind of almost made up. I mean, they weren't really what the actual tariff that our countries, it was a formula based on what they perceived to be currency manipulative. combined with the trade deficit. I mean, the UK is a perfect example of that, because the Trump admin have said that the UK charged the U.S. a 10% tariff, but there is no tariff on the U.S. So maybe it's worth explaining where that numbers actually come from. Yeah, look, I didn't dig into it in great depth.

And just because I felt like it was a waste of my time to go, you know, looking at these silly numbers, but I've talked to people who have, and I know that it's some mathematical formula based upon the deficit, the trade deficit that we're running with them combined with what we perceived, to be the currency manipulation that they've done. What does currency manipulation mean in that, in that regard?

Well, is there, is that unclear? It's just unclear. I mean, I'm not smart enough to know. And I really don't know how they calculated it. I'm sure there are guys who are digging in trying to figure out how they calculated it. But if you notice the messaging, and that is important, what they, you know, notice how what he did was he said, he tried to say, you know, Vietnam is tariffing us at, you know, 80%. Yeah. And we're only going to put a 40% tariff on that.

We're going to do half of whatever they hit us with, okay? And, you know, they really aren't tariffing us at 80%. Because I think if you want to, you know, we're not paying an 80% tariff to go into Vietnam, but the trade deficit combined with the currency manipulation, they computed that to be 80%. And therefore, we're going to put a 40% tariff on. Of course, Vietnam's coming at the table and, you know, as are so many other countries. And so they did some crazy mathematical formula, which wasn't, in my view, very well thought out. But it was, you know, again, it was, it was classic Trump, right?

He was trying to create shock, shock and awe. Yeah. And he was trying to grab a lot of time. turf, knowing that he might have to give some of that turf back. Yeah. But at least he gets a conversation started. He gets a negotiation started, excuse me. He tells the world there's a new sheriff in town, and, you know, he's not going to let

people trade unfairly with us in the past. And I completely accept that we have been mistreated and people have traded unfairly with us in the past. I mean, there's no doubt about that. And, you know, I mean, Ross Perra said this years ago and, you know, entry to the World Trade Organization. I mean, we were supposed to have reciprocal trade with China. There's no way.

It didn't happen. Yeah. They didn't let us sell our stuff there. So, you know, that's wrong and Trump's addressing it. So kudos for addressing it. Not clear that he did it in the best way possible, but Trump's Trump. And here we are. You know, what this did, the effect of it, let's talk about that.

I mean, this got announced, you know, on a Wednesday afternoon after the markets are close. The next two days, the market was down 11%. Yeah. Stock market had a heart attack. It was like, holy crap. That surprised me because even though, like, Trump had been talking about this since, like, October or something. Well, that's it.

He's been saying this is going to happen. And a lot of people thought, well, he's just kidding or he's just negotiating or he's back off or he's bluffing. Yeah. I actually didn't think that. I thought, no, he's pretty serious about it. And they're kind of giving you a warning. He tends to, like, follow up on what he says. Yeah.

I mean, unlike a lot of politicians, I mean, he, when he says and does, he says he's going to do something, he generally does it. Yeah. Now, he, you know, he can change his mind, though. And there's some chance that he will. And it's interesting because, you know, Bill Ackman and others are trying to get him and change him. Oh, no, please delay it nine days. In fact, yesterday we saw this enormous rumor that he'd agreed to, you know, and the stock market did a huge, you know, whipsaw up and down just based on fake news,

as he said, that he was going to back off on him. So, but let's go back to the impact of the tariffs. I mean, the immediate impact of the tariffs was the stock market had heart attack. And rightly so, in my view. First of all, I believe the stock market's a bubble. I mean, if you go to any of the John Hussman numbers on valuation, I mean, this is way, way out of line in the stock market. It has been for a long time.

That's all because of the cheap money that we had, ZERP from 08 to 15 and from 19 to 22, money was free. And a lot of it, you know, people were involved in carry trades where they borrow money and invest in the stock market. And so I haven't seen value in the stock market for years. And I, you know, in the book, I actually talk about how I think the stock market is heading towards an accident. And I do.

And I think we've just started it. And, you know, if I'm correct that it's a bubble, history shows that bubbles don't just deflate gradually. They tend to go quite a ways pretty quickly, and they can be violent, right? Yeah, you were saying just before we recorded, like, this could quite easily escalate out of control. Yes. Do you think we're potentially on the precipice of that? I do.

I do. I mean, I can't guarantee that. I don't want to be, you know, a scaremonger or a doom master, but I'm trying to look at historical precedent. And, you know, I mean, there's a lot of leverage in the system. And it's different this time. It's not 08 where the leverage is in the housing and the banks. Yeah. The leverage is more with the hedge funds and the basis trade.

or, you know, just generally speaking, you know, in the economy. I mean, consumers are very leveraged. I mean, credit card debt is extremely high and very expensive and climbing rapidly. The government is very leveraged. I mean, that's probably the biggest point of leverage. And, you know, in government interest expenses and we've got this whole fiscal doom loop thing going on where, you know, we have to borrow more and then rates go up and interest is higher and, you know, so on and so forth. So, yes, I mean, in every case is different, you know. basically in 08, you know, we went down 50% top to bottom.

In 2000, we went down 82% in the tech stocks and 50% in regular stocks. In 2022, we only went down 30% before Powell turned on the money spigot. But I think that what I see is that, you know, and this is possible, and we talked about this before as well, it's very possible that Trump did. I mean, in doing this, I think Trump and Bessent knew this will not be taken well by the stock market. But think about it. They must have known. They're not.

Bessent knows, he's not stupid. He knows. But they're not, you know, again, they're not stupid. Who owns stocks? I mean, we, you know, and Bessent said this in his recent, I mean, everyone should watch his recent interview with Tucker Carlson, right? He said, you know, 84% of the stocks are owned by the top 10% of the country. So what he did was he just, he just took a whack at the top 10% of the country. I mean, the bottom 50% didn't get hurt with his market decline. They don't own stocks. Now, they may get hurt in the fallout if we have a big recession slash depression and then people start losing their job. That's going to hurt the bottom 50%. But the initial part of it is, and Bacent said it, Wall Street's not going to do as well. Main Street's going to do better.

And so they took a big whack at Wall Street by doing this. And as you can see, a lot of Wall Streeters are crying. You know, I mean, Ackman came out and was bitching like he always does. And, you know, there were others as well saying this is terrible policy. And, you know, one could make that argument. I hear it. But, you know, I'm kind of like, we need disruption. The system's broken.

We need disruption. So I'm balanced. I'm with him. But anyway, the stock market went down. And by the way, as we talked about earlier, the net effect that was also a positive bond market rallied. Yeah. And Bessent has said many times that one of his key indicators is he wants to get the 10-year rate down, you know, and he's got a wall of maturity. He says, he's got a roll over.

He's got $7 trillion plus coming due this year. And, you know, he needs lower rates to do that. And he criticized Yellen for not terming it out. And then, of course, he didn't term it out. And I think he can't term it out. because there's not much demand for it, is my sense. And by the way, I mean, what he doesn't mention is that these tariffs aren't exactly going to make a lot of people love us and think, oh, well, I'll keep buying those bonds. I mean, so.

So why do bonds perform well here? Is it because people are just looking for safety, so that's where money goes? A little bit. And it's the reflexive historical trade stocks and bonds is when you're going into a recession, you buy the bonds. Okay. Right. If you're going into a recession, business is going to turn down. Things aren't going to earn as much money.

Stocks are going to perform poorly because. of the downturn and earnings. And therefore, you want earnings that are reliable and bonds provide you with reliable earnings. So it's very typical. Market gets hit. You know, the people who are sellers, they take that money and go to the safe haven of bonds.

That's a very long historical pattern. However, it's been broken in the past. And this is the thing we've got to watch. We've got to watch the rate on the 10-year. I mean, it went from mid-4-34-4, down to just under four. I think it was 38-9 or 39 something earlier, you know, earlier right after the big whack

in the stock market last week. But now it's started to go back up again. And that's not good. And that can't have percent being happy. And so if the bond market starts to fall apart and interest rates start to go higher, then the plan of whacking stocks to help bonds is not working. And I think that's what's going to happen because I think this is a sovereign debt crisis. And in sovereign debt crises, people don't want to own the currency at all.

They want to own the alternatives to the currency, which are gold and Bitcoin. Which is why, by the way, I mean, even though gold got whacked on this whole downturn, it's still very close to record numbers. And Bitcoin's not that far off. It's all-time high, and we're a lot higher than we were a year ago. This episode is brought to you by River, the best place for Bitcoiners and businesses to buy Bitcoin. With River, you can set up zero-fee recurring buys, making stacking sats effortless. And while you're waiting for the perfect buying opportunity, River lets you earn daily interest on your cash balance paid in Bitcoin, which outperforms most high-yield savings accounts.

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And at least initially, Bitcoin seemed to perform quite well, compared to everything else. It's obviously crashed a little bit of sins. Do you think, I mean, the word decoupling has been kind of everywhere, which is, I think, a bit cringe because it's way too early to say that that's the case. But do you think there is a chance that this is like a big decoupling event? Yeah, I wouldn't call it decoupling. I would call it just, there's a trend away from the perfect correlation between Bitcoin

as a liquidity indicator and the NASDAQ. And so I think, and what will happen, what I think will happen is that, I mean, I think that it will become clear that Bitcoin actually is part of the safe haven bid. Yeah. I mean, there are two buyers of Bitcoin. The guys like you and me that buy it because it's digital gold. And we're going to hold it for a long time. And we're there because there's monetary debasement.

Yeah. There are other guys who are buying it based on liquidity flows who are crypto bros and everybody else. And it's like, you know, this is the triple Q on steroids. And when the triple Q goes up, this thing goes up. And so I'm buying it because it's got a lot of zip in it. But those are, you know, those are. casual buyers, they're renting it. They're not really buying it longer term.

For sure. And when things go the wrong way, they're out. Yeah. And so, you know, what happened more recently the last couple of days? I mean, in a real liquidity event, and one could argue that we may be close to one. And, again, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be a panic marker or fear market. This could all calm down. Everything would be fine in two months, okay?

But it could also go the other way and get worse. And if it goes the other way and gets worse, what will happen, in my view, is, you know, we will trend towards what I call, you know, a liquidity event. or a credit event where all correlations go to one. And let's just look at the last one of those. The last one of those was COVID. Okay. So when COVID came along, you know, the stock market basically went down,

well, it went down 32% before Powell came in with the big guns. But before that, it was down about 20% and he started cutting rates. That didn't work. Then it went down further. And for a while, actually, in the early part of COVID, and I document this in the book, in the early part of COVID, gold actually traded up. It's a safe haven bit. Okay.

And bonds actually did well, too. They traded up, okay, safe haven bid. At the last part of COVID, when it was really intense, you know, when the market was plunging, gold was down, Bitcoin was down, the market, I mean, there was no place to hide. Yeah. There was just, I mean, everybody, and what happened is, you know, in that kind of an event, what happens is you don't sell what you want to sell. You sell what you have to sell.

You've got margin calls coming. And almost every, I mean, I actually experienced myself, I'll tell you a story. You know, I was, I had a. a bunch of silver. I had it at a depository. This is during COVID. This is during COVID. I had taken out a loan against the silver, this is talked about in the book.

I had taken out a loan against the silver. I pay a low rate of interest and I just, because I use a loan to speculate in other stuff, right? Yeah. And silver and COVID went from $20, $20, $20, $202, down to 11. And like, you know, right before Powell came in with this liquidity thing, I got a call from the deposit, you know,

so my maintenance margin, and it just said, you know, this little part of you don't wire us X $100,000 in the next 24 hours, we're going to force liquid at your silver at 11 bucks. And I was kind of like, ooh, that's not good, you know. And so actually, I had to go sell some other stocks, okay, in order to get the cash. Yeah. You know, that I didn't want to sell to not be liquid because I knew silver at 11 because, I mean, two months later, silver was at 25, right?

So selling an 11, but that's how it happens, right? Everybody who's got any form of leverage, you become a full seller. You become a fourth seller, right? That's a correlation of one. So with this the tariff play and market's crashing, do you think part of this is Trump trying to force the Fed's hand? Because him and Jerome Powell have been like butting heads quite a bit. Absolutely.

So obviously, like, I think rate cuts are kind of priced into the bond market anyway. Yes. Do you think what's he trying to make Powell do? I think he's trying to make Powell Crump. I mean, just completely have to have to pivot. Powell doesn't want to do it. He wants to be a vulgar. You know, the inflation picture is not good.

Gunlock was on the TV yesterday talking about how inflation. since heating up again. And there's evidence of that in several places. I haven't seen it. But yeah, I think Powell is, I mean, I think, I think they are basically forcing Powell into the big print. Interesting. Yeah, and because he wouldn't do it on his own.

And by the way, maybe Powell's okay with being forced into it. You know, they, he needs political cover. Yeah, right. If he were to go and start doing it right now, everyone would say, oh, yeah, you know, you're Arthur Burns. not Paul Volcker, right? Look at you, you're printing money again. If, you know, let's just draw out a scenario, market falls another 15 or 20% from here. And by the way, it took 32% before they came in. So we're down 20. So if we went down another, and maybe this time it'd have to be

bigger, but if we went down another 20, okay, that's, that's going to be a big deal. Yeah. And, you know, at that point in time, my sense is, you know, things would start to not work and Powell would have to come in. The other thing I think is important. to point out in COVID, when that thing happened, when that big plunge happened, there was a time where the US government bond market went no bid. Okay, it was talked about in the Treasury notes, in the Fed notes.

And that was what, I mean, that's just not acceptable. Yeah. And when that happens, that's when they know they have to come back with all this. And, you know, we've seen Powell turn on a dime, right? I mean, inflation is a transitory until it's not. You know, we're never, not even thinking about thinking rates until suddenly we're gonna jack them up really quick.

You know, we're not even thinking about stopping jacking up until the, you know, 10 year goes to five and, oh, no, we're done. I mean, basically, if we get a down 20% market, Powell's going to become a dove so fast your head will spend. He's going to turn around. And what he's going to say is, look, we recognize that there is inflation risk, but having, you know, but with the lowering of demand and the downturn that we're seeing in the economy, our employment mandate is more important than our inflation

mandate, and therefore we are going to, you know, chop rates, do this, you know, blah, blah, blah, go to QE. So that's why the bond market, the yields going up again is kind of the indicative. I think that's right. I think the bond market is sniffing that out. The other two things that are really sniffing it out, I mean, let's not forget this. And I know a lot of Bitcoin guys don't like gold, but you should love gold if you're in Bitcoin because it's such a good leading indicator. Yeah.

The fact that gold had a relentless bid. Gold is up 50% in the last year. You know, so it went from 2070 area back in March of last year up to, you know, 31 and change, you know, not long ago. It's off that. is at 3,000 roughly now. But, you know, my God, there aren't many years when gold goes up 50%. Yeah. That's a signal.

I definitely want to get more into percent, but while we're on gold, what went on with all the gold leaving London and going to New York? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I know what I read on the web, and I know, you know, Rona Manley and a lot of the other guys on Twitter are very smart who follow these flows, you know, suggest might be happening. A couple things. One, I'm pretty sure based on the forensics that have been done that we don't have

the gold we're saying we have in Fort Knox. And the percent is lying when he says, oh, yeah, it's there. You can come see it. I think he's been read in. And I think that's just the party line. I don't think they're ever going to audit it. I don't care of ever going to let us see that. What do you think they've done with that gold, that?

Well, I think it got re-hypothicated and it's sold. Ronan Manley is a guy in Twitter, who's a gold guy I've known for years and very excellent analyst. And he dug some stuff up, some forensic stuff up from the 60s. If you're calling the 60s, there's something called the London Gold Pool. Okay. Before we went off the standard in 71, we were suppressing, that pool was suppressing gold. The $35 reference price from Bretton Woods was being beat up. And so, you know, the central banks had to sell gold to keep the price from going up. And he's uncovered some documents that would suggest that some of that gold came out of Fort Knox.

That would be crazy. Right. But back to, you asked an earlier question, though, what do I think the gold, why do I really think all the gold's coming back? I think it's pretty simple, actually, Danny. I think what's going to. I think what's going to, on is that the knowledge that you have and that I have, a lot of people have about the unsteadiness and how messed up the fiscal situation is in the United States, that's spreading. Yeah, 100% is.

Right? I mean, like, that's really spreading. And so, you know, it used to be Paul Tudor Jones saying, hey, you know, we got a monetary debasement. Now it's Ray Dalio, now it's Larry Fink. I mean, we got to, and, you know, you're a billionaire, and, you know, a lot of billionaires in the United States, and you're thinking to yourself, you know,

maybe I need some gold and you're aware of the paper gold issue. Maybe you just say, hey, just go to the comics and let's take delivery of X billion. I mean, I had a client, you know, one of my clients who bought, you know, $30 million worth of gold bullion. I mean, he's not a client anymore, but he, you know, it's, I mean, billionaires do that kind of thing, right? And they don't settle for, oh, yeah, I've got a paper claim. They want physical gold in a vault that they can see and touch because they're aware of the paper games. On the Larry Think Thing, think thing, did you see recently in his letter that he mentioned that Bitcoin could become wild? So he said it could become, I think he said potentially a neutral as a asset. Yeah. And I think he even said replace the dollar. I don't have the exact wording. Yes, I think that's right. Potentially replace the dollar. That's what he said. That's what he said. And he kind of said, I don't really want this to happen, but it could. I didn't hear that. I didn't pick up that piece. But yeah, I mean, look, the problem is getting to be pretty widely known. And this is,

What is this, the Overton window or the common knowledge game, right? I mean, we're kind of, I mean, I feel, that's why I feel like we're at the tipping point here. I mean, you know, my book, I mean, you know, I was lucky because I, and I had a race to get it out. My book couldn't have come out at a better time, right? Especially if we do get the big print soon. Well, you know, yeah, and I was terrified that it would happen before the book came out. And I, my sense is it's going to, there's a good chance that, you know, I don't think we're two years away. Yeah.

I think, and we could be able, we could be two weeks away. I mean, let the market fall another 20%. you know, what's my guesstimate? You know, I think it happens in the next six months. Wow. That's my sense. I mean, well, you know, it depends on a lot of things. I mean, let me tell you some other stuff about the Trump stuff that I think is important, okay?

You know, look, they want to resure stuff. I mean, and I think Lutnik is just, you know, I love him because he's a bitcoiner. Yeah. He gets Bitcoin. He believes in Bitcoin, okay? But he's a bond salesman. Yeah. Okay.

And he's just happy, happy, happy, happy. And the whole notion that we're going to resure all, I mean, It took 50 years for the system to get this effed up, okay? And, you know, we're not going to resure all that in one presidential term, right? I mean, there's just no chance. And there's no American who's going to sit here and assemble iPhones for, you know, $5 a day. That's just, that's just not, and we don't want them to. And I don't want to have a $3,000 iPhone.

So, you know, I mean, again, I think I'm glad they're trying to disrupt and take us in the right direction. but the notion that we can quickly solve this problem is a fantasy. Yes. Just like Doge was a fantasy. I mean, Doge is a good thing. It's going in the right direction. But, you know, we've got a gaping $2.5 trillion deficit. And, you know, Conilac was saying yesterday on CNBC, he thinks maybe Doge has saved

a hundred million a year, on a billion a year. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's 2.2. 100. We've got a ways to go. I think the Doge thing, like obviously, getting rid of corruption in government is a great thing. but it's, I think it was naive.

And so I listened to- It's a good thing to do. It's just, yeah. But yeah, maybe naive in what they stated was the objection. Yeah, I mean, Elon, I mean, this is a classic Elon, right? Elon said, we can save $2 trillion a year. No, you can't, unless you cut Social Security in half. I mean, this is, I mean, look, you know,

everyone, people have strong feelings one way or the other on Elon. I mean, I, you know, like most human beings, he's complex, right? And brilliant and it's done a lot of great stuff. But one of the things I don't like about Elon, and I guess this is how entrepreneurs operate. is he just, he gets way out over his skis. I mean, in 2018, he said you were going to be able to buy a Tesla and rent it out as a taxi immediately. And the self-driving wasn't anywhere near that.

But to give him credit, I rode in a Tesla Y, you know, a couple of months ago. And back in Massachusetts, you know, with my partner. And, you know, he said, take us to downtown Boston. The damn thing drove us the whole way there flawlessly. I mean, I was stunned. They have it. Have you been in a Waymo yet? I have not.

So I got in one of those in Austin, just a completely. complete driverless taxi. Work okay? Perfect. I mean, it's weird and it's very, it's like very cool and dystopian. I mean, three or four years ago when somebody said, we're going to have self-driving in a few years, I didn't believe it. Yeah. But to be frank, I mean, I was wrong, dead-ass wrong.

I mean, we're, you know, they have self-driving now. They really do. Yeah. Just one other thing on the on the gold side. Did you see, I don't know if it was yesterday the day before, Germany came out saying they may try and reshore all their gold. Yeah, yeah. Good luck. Do you think that's impossible for them to do?

Well, no, it's not impossible for them to ask. I mean, the delivery time, you know, might be slower than they want. And they did this once earlier. This happened, again, Ronan Manley is the best source on all this stuff. They did this once again, you know, a few years back. And they asked for a lot of their gold back. And we quoted them like seven years to do it. And we beat that time frame.

The other thing that was very interesting is in theory, when that occurred, in theory, those gold bars, they sent us specific gold bars. They had numbers on them and, you know, they were, you know, et cetera. We didn't send the same. one's back. We returned the gold in terms of amount, which really, I mean, that's kind of suspicious, right, that we didn't have the ones you sent us. I mean, in theory, when you're depositing a gold with somebody, you're supposed to be able to get the same thing back, and we didn't give them the same thing back. So a lot of us looked at that and said, huh, I wonder why that happened.

Yeah, you can't put it down to two things. What happened to the original, right? I mean, did you have to go and then replace it? Right. Yeah, it's either like terrible logistics and you don't know way you put in the gold, which is bad enough, or you don't have the same gold. You don't have the same gold because you use it for something else. You had to replace it to backfill it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So on them, I'm kind of jumping back and forth here, but on the percent stuff, he came

out with kind of two or three objectives. One was to weaken the dollar, which these tires are. Well, yeah, he's, on that, he's really been back and forth, you know, he talks about a strong dollar policy, you know, or he wants the dollar to remain the reserve currency, but, and other times he's even saying, you know, he's really been back and he wants it to be strong vis-a-vis other currencies, but in fact, mathematically, they have to weaken it. Yeah.

If he wants to accomplish an elimination of triven's dilemma, the dollar has to be massively devalued, in my opinion. And the tariffs have done that to a degree. They have. And do you think that's part of the reason they've done this? Yes, I do. Yeah, I do. And then the second part of this, and this is more out there,

is this theory that, because the other thing he obviously wants to do was to issue on the long end of the bond market again, Is this intentionally crashing stocks to be able to do that? I think he is. I actually think he is. He's too smart not to understand what the implications of what he's doing would be. Yeah. I mean, and, you know, I think they're figuring, look, we've got a stock bubble.

And to the degree that goes down now, we might have a chance of blaming it on Biden and all his policies. I think that makes a lot or made a lot of sense until this tariff thing became such big news that now it seems like a Trump issue. I think it is, sadly, I think it is going to be a Trump issue. And further, sadly, you know, if, you know, look, what they're hoping is that the deregulation and AI and productivity improvements and a lot of the good things that they're doing, you know, bringing onshoreing, bringing jobs back here, bringing businesses back here, they're hoping that all of that will kick in to offset the effect of a declining stock market. I mean, let's just, let's just go through a declining stock market. market what it means. And I don't think the average person necessarily thinks about this, but we're running a six or seven percent budget deficit right now. That's with full employment and, in theory, a reasonably healthy economy. Okay. In the last two big downturns, 08 in 2000, the stock, the deficit went up between six and nine percent of total GDP. So, and, and, and like California, it's been shown that, you know, a big part of California's budget, when the stock market goes down, the

California, you know, state really doesn't, their budget becomes a mess because they make so much money off capital gains taxes for all the tech entrepreneurs that live there. Yeah. And that's true in the United States, too, and I don't know the exact percentage. I wish somebody, somebody hasn't sent it to me, but some meaningful percentage of U.S. federal income taxes are based on capital gains and stock gains. Well, you don't have those when your stock market goes down 40%. And so the other thing it happens is unemployment goes up. And so you've got unemployment insurance, you've got bigger food stamps, You've got all the social spending increases when you have a downturn.

And so the combination of those two things, you know, okay, so Doge maybe cuts a couple hundred million, but those two things are going to shove it up the real wrong way, putting it, you know, into a bigger fiscal doom loop, right? So it's, you know, I mean, sadly, this thing is so damn broken and Trump got handed such a bag of shit.

Do you know what I mean? That I don't think Jesus Christ himself could fix this thing. I just don't. I think the damn thing is broken. And what I'm terrified of is that, that, you know, it's going to be broken enough that, you know, in four years, the, you know, the Blue Team will win

because, you know, the voter, not fully understanding everything that's going on, you know, tends to think. I mean, if you look at all the, if you look at a number of series of elections here, what other voters done? They've thrown the bum out. Yeah. Do you know what I mean?

There hasn't been a two-term president for a while. I think it was since Obama, right? So, you know, my sense is if things don't get better in four years, they're going to throw them out. And we're going to go, you know, massively socialist, right? So that's the theory that I could entirely buy is that Trump's doing this now to try and blame on Biden. Whether he'll successfully do that, I don't know. And then run it really hot into the midterms to try and, like, strengthen his. I think that's exactly right.

I mean, I think, you know, and his hope, I assume, I think what his hope is is that he will, they will let inflation run hot. Yeah. They have to let inflation run hot, but inflation is what's killing everybody. But if inflation's running hot and everybody has a job, you know, because of the reshoring and all these new programs, well, then maybe people will live with it. But here's my, I guess my point is, I think Trump and his team have got to get one hell of a lot better at messaging and communicating what the hell they're doing. Yeah. Because, you know, they did a little bit of it. You know, we got to endure some short-term pain to get to long-term gain.

They're doing it a little bit. but they got to they got to amp that up because otherwise they're going to lose you know the swing voter you know the person in the middle they're going to lose them and they're going to think well you know the other sides promised me stimmies and you know this that and the other right i mean and they're going to go over there for money yeah they're going to go over there so you said that you think recession's very possible in the kind of short term i guess and people have been kind of screaming recession for a few years now and we've not really seen it um do you think they'll let that happen, or do you think the Fed steps in and does the big print before? Well, so let's just come out. First of all, let's examine why those of us have been screaming it for a couple years have been wrong. We've been wrong because federal government spending has made up the difference. And remember, the government doesn't do anything.

It doesn't produce anything. It doesn't produce goods and services. It just prints money and, you know, gives people jobs. I mean, I've heard there's kind of a recession and housing in Washington, D.C., because of all the U.S. aid people and the cutbacks that all the agencies are going through. So, you know, it was fake spending that was keeping the government, that was keeping, you know, the appearance of the economy being healthy. Yeah. Take all that spending out.

Economy is going to turn down, okay? And the thing that I think is important is just for people to understand how reflexive things are, you know, I mean, at the margin. So, I mean, okay, the top 10% of the country was, we saw the statistic recently, was, is about 50% of consumer spending. Okay. And the top 10% of the country, you know, has more wealth than the rest. fine. Top 10% of the country is in the stock market. Okay.

They have retirement accounts. They're boomers in many cases. You whack their wealth by 40%. Guess what happens? They don't buy the second house. They don't buy the new car. They don't take the trip. They don't go to the restaurant.

You know, it just, it flows through everything. Yeah. And, you know, Trump says, we're going to help Main Street, but, you know, having high unemployment doesn't necessarily help Main Street, right? And so, you know, Danny, it's a mess. And so, but, but having said that, they will start, you know, my senses, because the pattern is just so clear, they will start printing money. But they, you know, and a lot of people think, well, okay, like, you know,

there's some well-known people in the, in our space who were like, yeah, we'll be in new all-time highs in six months for a year, the stock market. Yeah. Okay. One big guy in New York who has a gazillion followers, I'm going to name them. You know, you tweeted the other day that we're going to all-time highs in the stock market. I'm like, no. That's not happening.

Even with a big print. Even with a big print. Because when a bubble bursts, all those excesses get corrected. I mean, we had a big print in 08, and it didn't happen. We had a big print in 2020. Well, in 2020, it kind of happened. But we had a big print coming off of 2000. It didn't happen.

I mean, the bubble is in everything. They don't have another layer to build it on. I mean, in 2000, we built a housing bubble after it in 2008. It took a long time. They printed a lot over a period of time. I mean, we kind of got an everything bubble going as a result of the carry trade and the cheap money. But in 2022, you know, they turned it around and brought the stock market back up to new highs. But, you know, it's teetering in my view.

And so how long do you think it would be until we saw like all-time highs again then? I don't know. If this is the bubble that I think it is, I think it would be 10 or 15 years. Wow. Yeah, I think. When was the last time we had? have 10 or 15 years. Well, I think from 29 to 40 something was 25 years.

So the crash of 29 took about 25 years to recover from. I think there was a period of time in the 60s from 60s something. The peak in 67 or 68, 69 wasn't exceeded until 82 or 3. So it was a good 15 years in that particular one. I mean, there are periods of time when stocks do not do well. So do you think this is going to be worse than 2008? I do. Wow.

Yeah, I do. Because it's in everything. The misallocation of resources, it's in everything. And, you know, having said that, there's a way that it's not worse than 2008 for stocks, and that is we almost do a crack-up boom. Explain what that is. Yeah. So a crack-up.

boom is where they literally print so much money that, I mean, this is, I mean, in, in countries where currencies have been failing or have failed, like the famous charts of Venezuela and Weimar, Germany, stock market booms. Because the money's worth nothing. Because the money's worth nothing. And the stocks, I mean, remember, stocks do represent a claim on the earnings power of a business. Yeah. If the business can adjust the prices to account for the inflation, well, then it does have some

earnings power. So, you know, I think it's entirely possible that if we go into red-hot printing, we could reach nominal new highs much quicker than I'm talking about. But, you know, so what that, the question that gets asked there is, is this the big one where we go into, because a crack-up boom is, you're on your way to hyperinflation or extremely high rates of inflation, you know, like Israel had and others have had various times. Are we going to that? I don't know. I mean, you know, here's a scenario, right? You know, we have the four years here. Trump's thing doesn't work.

We print a lot of money, but the money remains relatively sound. It's not a, you know, crazy big print. The economy muddles along. Red team gets thrown out. Blue team comes in. Andrew Yang is now vice president. You know, I don't know who's president. Maybe he's, you know, whatever.

Stephanie Kelton is now Treasury Secretary. And they do universal basic income for low-income folks. They increase taxes on everybody. They do massive stimmies, you know, to help people. And they make it very clear they're not going to worry about government deficits. I mean, you know, Bitcoin will be a million and gold will be, you know, 12,000, 15,000, right? I mean, and that's, and the stock market might be hitting all the all time new highs. I mean, that's a scenario that could happen.

I mean, that's a bit of a terrifying scenario. Well, I think so. Yeah. Because what happens to society in that scenario? Yeah, well, look, society is going to have difficulties almost no matter where we go because we've gone into this bad condition with Keynesian economics. I mean, let's talk about the positive. Let's talk about how we fix this. We've got to return to sound money.

And there's a chapter in the book called Policy Response where I wrote the speech I think the president should give. I wrote it. And it's pretty simple. It comes back and it says, look, Keynesianism is flawed. Here's why we should be pursuing productivity where we balance savings with investment and let the interest rate find its natural market-driven level. Okay, that's the basis of it. And we pursue this Keynesian model, which is wrong. And therefore, what we need to do is we need to return to sound money.

So starting immediately, gold, silver, and Bitcoin are going to be money. They're going to be legal tender with no capital gains tax. So you can transact in anything you want. You can use a dollar. We'll let them all be free. Okay. So that's step one. Step two, we are going to eliminate the Federal Reserve.

There's going to be nobody backstopping the banks. You know, there'll be nobody buying bonds. There'll be nobody. If a bank fails, a bank fails. So you better start thinking about where are you going to put your money in your bank deposits. And three, we're going to eliminate the FDIC. So, you know, you're not going to, I mean, we all know it's a joke anyway. I mean, one of the ways they managed to print money was like in Silicon Valley Bank.

They printed a lot of money. And they did that because, you know, Ackman cried and they talked about a systematic banking crises. And so they came in and they broke the law. They broke what Dodd-Frank said they would never do. They did it. So as long as we have a backstop on the banks, the banks are going to continually over lever, make a lot of money. When things go wrong, they're going to turn around and say, bail me out. And what they've got, what the banks have done is they effectively got a gun to the head of the economy. And they said, give us our damn money when we make a mistake or else we're going to blow your brains out. And it happened in 2008. It happened in 2020.

to a degree and it could happen again. So that's the problem. That's the underlying problem. And so if we return to sound money, that won't happen anymore. And, you know, let's not kid ourselves. Getting from here to there, it's not going to be pretty and it's not going to be fun

and they're going to be losers, particularly debt holders are going to be massive losers. People on fixed incomes, older people who don't have their earnings history in front, you know, earnings capability in front of them. However, once we return to sound money, it's going to be really great, okay? I mean, like, fabulously great.

Like, I was on a podcast the other day with a guy from Argentina, who's a teenager in 1990, 91. His mom would make money. She'd immediately go to the grocery store by the food because it would be more expensive. One day later. Yeah. He said it was horrible.

I mean, the country, everything fell apart. It was awful, okay? Nobody had enough to eat. Everyone was at each other's throats, the whole nine yards. Currency totally failed. They reset to a dollar, they started using the dollar, basically a dollar standard currency in Argentina. He said, within six months or a year, things were great.

It was much better. And that's Derek Quiven, I've got. going to a sound money. Yeah, I mean, the dollar is still unsound, but back then it was a lot sounder than what they had. Yeah. And that, if you read history, that's the case. I mean, there have been many, many hyperinflation.

The problem is it usually leaves a big scar like it did in Germany, which then led to them falling for the Hitler lie. Yeah. But hyperinflations, once they're over, if, you know, as long as people haven't killed each other, as long as you haven't, you know, torn the thing apart, and you go back to sound money, it fixes itself. You know, I mean, human beings just want to get up and go to work and do honest things,

take care of their families and know that they can live in a secure fashion. And sound money allows that. Unsound money makes it a challenge, an enormous challenge, right? I mean, I just did the show with Joe, which was entirely about this. When you say sound money, do you think it's more likely that gold fills that whole, at least in the interim? That's a great question. Well, gold is flawed as you and I both know, but not as flawed as Fiat. And, you know, sadly, I mean, well, it's a complicated question because I think, I think for some countries and some people, that would clearly, that's right.

I mean, China is betting on a reset based on gold. They've accumulated a lot more gold than they say they have. We know they're doing that, okay? And they don't like Bitcoin. They outlawed Bitcoin mining, et cetera. So the United States has a chance to leapfrog China. Okay. Politically, if we were to say we're going to sound money standard

and it's based on Bitcoin, we would actually hop in front of China. Yeah. And we should. Now, whether we're smart enough to do that or not, who knows? And I've talked to Jeff Booth about this a lot. We both kind of agree that there's a good chance that they try gold before they get to Bitcoin. Yeah. And the reason is just Bitcoin is just still so early, you know, and from the perspective,

not from yours and my perspective, but from the perspective of the world, it's untested and it's just not deep enough yet to go to a Bitcoin standard today. This episode is brought to you by CASA, the leading Bitcoin self-custody solution. I've been using CASA since 2019, and I can't recommend them enough. Kasa have options for all Bitcoiners from a two of three, multi-sig to a three of five and a private client option for absolute best in class security. CASA also do inheritance which I very recently set up and it really couldn't be easier. My inheritance plan has gone from a vague treasure map for my wife to a rock solid security plan

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Last year was amazing. This year is going to be better, but tickets will sell out for this. So if you want to come, head over to cheatcode.cote.uket.uk and grab a ticket. Do you think the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is kind of their hedge in this, where they may do both, and the Bitcoin is there in the background just in case. Yes. Oh, it's more than a hedge. I think, I think, I mean, Saylor knows it. I think Bacent knows it.

I think maybe even Trump knows it, although sometimes I wonder about its understanding of Bitcoin when he runs these meme coins. But I've been told that he was just misled and it wasn't really him. But anyway, yes, I mean, I do. And, you know, Lumis understands it. For sure. You know, so, you know, I, I think, I mean, well, Jason Lowry will tell you,

the CIA understands it, the Pentagon understands it. I mean, it is the soundest form of money in the world. And so it's ultimately going to dominate. I mean, this is a safe point about, you know, you can't be fighting with, you know, swords and blades when, you know, gunpowder arrives. I mean, you just can't. Yeah.

And so this is gunpowder. I mean, this is a form of money that can't be diluted. Full stop. It's the hardest money ever created. So with that as a backdrop, that's where everybody will go, has to go. So, you know, it's just game. theory of who wants to be smart and get there on the early, you know, on the early, in the early days

and who wants to be slow about it. So I think they'll get there. I mean, I think they'll get there eventually, but I do, I could totally see a gold interim step. Absolutely. With the strategic reserve, obviously they're most likely going to start acquiring Bitcoin through that. We've yet to see it, but I imagine that'll happen. And Cynthia Lomasbill is, from what I've heard, far more likely to pass than they originally thought of that. I think that's right. I think it's gaining some momentum. Yeah. And then the third part of that is probably the BitBonds.

Yeah, that's a brilliant idea, right? It seems like a genius idea. Yeah. The thing that I can't quite figure out is if that's like a massive signal that the U.S. has lost its faith in the dollar and what that means for the rest of the world. Well, I don't know. I mean, so is that my understanding of BitBonds? You're talking about Andrew Hohn and the things he's proposed.

Yeah, and the stuff like Brian Estes has done. Yeah, right. Yeah. Well, yeah, from Bitcoin. it makes totally sense. I mean, I haven't seen anybody in the administration embrace bit bonds, right? I mean, or in the government embrace bit bonds. I mean, there have been some, I mean, a wonderful woman, Judy Shelton,

who's a gold bug who, you know, was, talked about her in the book, terribly treated by the, you know, the Congress when she was trying to get a Fed seat, you know, Trump appointed her and she was turned down. She's proposed the same kind of thing with gold. Yes. You know, and yes, I mean, I think, I mean, as Sailor points out, I mean, the smartest thing we could do right now would be to sell all our gold, of course, we probably don't have it. and use the proceeds to buy Bitcoin.

The problem behind that, and I'm sure even Saylor would admit this in private, is that that would just destroy the dollar. I mean, that basically is saying we don't care, you know, we just don't have any confidence of the dollar anymore. Because why would selling the gold do that? Well, because buying, if it's the buying the Bitcoin, it would buying the Bitcoin that would do it. Yeah, not the selling the gold per se.

Yeah, okay. It would be, we would say we're making it, we are making, making a bet that this is a much better asset to hold than our dollar. Yeah. And therefore, you know, follow us in that bet, right? And if we do see the stock market continues to crash, going to recession, it's this bloodbath that you're talking about, what do you think Bitcoin does? Because like historically, like COVID being the most recent example, like Bitcoin goes down

with everything else, do you think that breaks? I do. I think, but not immediately. And I was at a mining disrupt a few weeks ago. I said, guys, they were asking me, these are miners, they were asking me, what do you, give us your macro outlook. And I said, you know, honestly, I think the stock market is starting to get wobbly. I think the stock market is going to break. It turns out I was right about that.

And I think when it does break, we're going to see 70K Bitcoin. And it turns out I was right about that. Yeah. But I said, and I said, that's the bad news. The good news is that's the market breaking and that kind of a liquidity, you know, I mean, Bitcoin is like this great liquidity, which it tells you almost how much liquidity there's in the system. When there's a lot of liquidity, it goes up. Yeah.

When it's low, it goes down. So basically, you know, in my view, what will happen is we are headed to a big print in the next three to six months, you know, probably, you know, more like the three. And at the end of the year, I still think we'll be at 140 to, you know, 200. I mean, perhaps the, you know, 400, 500, 70, I mean, who knows, that's kind of out there. But it's clear to me that the correlation is being broken and more and more. more people are coming to see this as digital gold. And, you know, in sovereign debt crises, gold does incredibly well. And so Bitcoin as digital gold should also do incredibly well.

So if that's the case, do you think that means the kind of classic four-year cycles of Bitcoin may be over? No, not really, because we're kind of in a four-year. And what, I mean, so what would the peak of this four-year? I mean, wouldn't the peak of this four-year looking at kind of 26-ish? Yeah, I think, like, end of this year, maybe early 26. Yeah. So I think we might still hit that.

But I don't know. I mean, look, macro events can probably break that cycle because this is, I mean, that cycle was, I think, driven on a supply thing and, you know, technological adoption and some other stuff that were the underlying cause of that cycle. I think we're now in a situation where, you know, this has really become a macro asset. I mean, you've got, you know, look, we've got the ETFs. You know, we've got nation state phomo going on, right? I mean, you've got, you know, the UAE buying it. You've got the Saudis probably buying it. Obama admitted they have it.

I mean, and at this stage in time, when we did that strategic Bitcoin reserve, you just have to know that there were people in China, Russia, all the other countries were like, hang on a second. Are we sure we're on the right side of this? I mean, I do wonder if, like, Russia being a perfect example, I imagine they've been stacking Bitcoin. Even though China have been outwardly against Bitcoin, I wouldn't be surprised. It wouldn't surprise me if they were.

I'm almost sure Russia must have been. I mean, some of the things Putin has said about you can't stop it. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of becoming common knowledge. I mean, it really is. I mean, I tell you what I thought, one of the ways I took, one of the things I took away to get me absolutely convinced that that's the case. Let's, let's look at the case of Larry Fink. Okay. So, here's a very smart man who runs the largest asset manager in the world. I mean, trillions and trillions. I think it might be seven trillion of AUM, Black Rock, out of New York. And he was very anti-Bitcoin. Yeah. I mean, it's Pet Rock. It's nobody needs it. All the negative shit, right? And yet he's not a stupid man. And so he obviously got read in and started reading it and studying it and thinking about it. And what, you know, he came to the conclusion. Just as Putin said, I don't think there's anything can stop it. So he gets it. That statement alone tells me when somebody says there's nothing that can stop Bitcoin that tells me they get it. Okay. You know, Fink got read in or he studied it. And he came to the conclusion. He said, well,

Let's see. This is probably going to happen. I got a choice. Am I going to keep knocking it and not, you know, and miss the boat? Or am I going to accept that that's the new reality? And maybe I should figure out how to make money off it. And of course, he has. He's got the largest ETF in the space. He's become positive about it. As you mentioned, as most of the recent quarterly report or annual report, he talked about how it could be. I mean, he gets it. I mean, he totally gets it. And, you know, that means that there are going to be a lot more of him in the future, you know. Well, it was like when he was pushing the ESG thing, like whatever he says, everyone follows. Well, that's right. And I mean, I mean, and, you know, again, it's, it's how comfortable are people being out on the ledge? You know, I mean, take Ray Dalio. Ray Dalio is a brilliant macro manager, you know,

runs Bridgewater, built and runs Bridgewater. A gold guy, you know, and, you know, if you don't own some gold, you don't understand money or history, is what he said, great. And, you know, originally, I remember his comments three, four, five years ago, he said, yeah, Bitcoin, He wasn't poo-pooing it, but he just didn't really buy it. More recently, it's kind of like, this is an emerging reserve asset.

Yeah. You know, he gets it now. I mean, he owns some back then, but he owns more now. I know that. And so, you know, it's just seeping into everybody's consciousness. What about on the gold side? Is it seeping into the conscious there? Because you obviously are still like how at least half a foot over in the gold card.

And I get flamed by all my old gold peers who do they think of the book? I think they like it. Look, the first half of the book, is, you know, the problem, Keynesianism, money printing, you know, Fiat, I mean, what's not to like? And the first half of the book has nothing about, well, very little about Bitcoin. It's all about the problem.

So I think every gold person who reads the book, go, yeah, nailed it, great. And that's why I own gold. Yeah, perfect. Second half of the book is why Bitcoin is the best solution by far, like far better than gold. They don't always like that, you know, like a Frank Juster, for example,

was a billionaire, you know, and gold investor out in Vancouver. And, you know, I know, I know, and, he just doesn't accept it. And I get some really, you know, nasty and angry DMs from Canadian guys who were like, you know, you idiot, you know, I mean, just, they just don't want to accept that, you know, I mean, and really, you know, scholarly brilliant guys, got like James Grant, who runs Grant's InstroState Observer,

you know, in New York, and this is kind of one of the, one of the pillars of sound money economics in the United States for the last, you know, 40 years that he's been writing. And yet he just can't get there. It's just they can't, they can't get their heads around the concept that there could be a technological solution that creates immutable digital scarcity. They just don't, they just can't get there, you know. Is that because they're so wedded to the gold idea because they've been on this train for however long, 30, 40, 50 years? Yeah.

Do you think that's the reason? Or is it the fact that they just don't understand the technology of Bitcoin? Yeah, that's a great question, Danny. To tease it out, I think, I think, I think some of it's. the technology, you know, I mean, I know my initial reaction to it was, well, they've been tried, this has been tried before and it didn't work, you know, digit cash and all those things. My other reaction to it was, how can you have money based on a computer? Computers crash. Yeah. Right? Well, okay, redundancy, blockchain, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know,

I think some of it's the technology. I mean, I think some of it's just, you know, angry and bitter that, you know, hey, we've nailed this whole thing. We've got the sovereign debt crisis, right? Who are you guys to come along and steal our thunder. You know, I think some of it's the way everyone in the crypto space behaves. I mean, it runs against, I mean, old people are generally speaking, old-fashioned, very conservative, very, you know, traditional, you know, and to see guys running around like Sam Bankman-Fried and, you know, all the crypto bros. I mean, that's just like, this is the biggest bubble bullshit, you know, tulip thing I've ever seen.

And they're right about crypto. What they didn't, what they're missing is that in all that noise, there's this one little thing that's true signal. Yeah. And they're missing that, you know, so. I almost feel sorry for is the wrong word, but I always feel sorry for the goalbooks because like they've been right forever. And yet when this thing finally happens, because it's going to happen at some point, maybe they're not the ones that win. Well, they will win just not as big. I mean, they're not going to entirely lose.

I mean, don't get me wrong. Bitcoin will demonetize gold. But not, I mean, a lot of people think that's going to happen within, you know, single-digit years. I just don't think that's the case. Yeah. I think it's a couple of decades. And so, you know, and both versus Fiat, both will win, Bitcoin will win an order of magnitude better, right? Which is why we're all here because we just know that it's because, I mean, really, you know, they're both benefiting from Fiat to basement, which is going, I believe, is likely to increase and get worse.

It's the problem of our age, okay? What they're missing is that they've got the fully distributed, you know, complete, it's out there solution. And we've got the, nobody knows about it. It's emerging solutions. So this is like cell phones or, you know, it's like any new technology where they have early adopters, that's us. And then you got latecomers. And that'll be the, you know, the last troglodyte gold guy who says, oh, you know what, this stuff does work. Yeah.

And so, you know, it's one of those things where, and because it's, you know, it's a lot of those things where, And because it's a limited supply, fixed supply, and it's a perfectly inelastic commodity, which, you know, there has never really, and the thing is, I think the thing is hard for all human beings to get their heads around. There's never been anything like this before, ever. There's never been a commodity where the price

or the supply doesn't respond to price. Never. Yeah. That's hard to, that's hard to get your head around. I mean, I truly think that when history is written in 100 years, people will say, you know, there was the time pre-Bitcoin and the time post-Bitcoin. because of that thing being that big a change.

I mean, it'll be comparable. I mean, just a different metaphor, but there was a time when mankind did not fly, you know, and then flight occurred, and there was a time when mankind did fly. And it's just before and after, you know. It's crazy. If you had to put like a time frame on it,

how long do you think it'll be until we have like gold, Bitcoin parity? Oh, I think that's coming pretty quick. Yeah, I think so too. Yeah, I think that's within five years, I mean, so Bitcoin, I mean, today it's, you know, I mean, let's use 100,000, which it was at recently, I'll be back there soon. So that's, what, 1-9, almost 2 trillion of,

and gold is about 20 trillion of total market value. But think about gold, people have to keep this in mind. It's 20 trillion, but that's if you include, you know, museums, antiquities, central bank gold, which isn't moving very much. I might not be there. Yeah, and might not be there. And all the jewelry that it's around, you know,

ladies' necks in India and China. all over the world. Now, that could be melted down. Don't get me wrong, but right now, it's ornamental. So, you know, I mean, out of that 20, maybe seven, I'm just estimating a trillion is available for sale in bullion and coin form, which the major forms. So really, you know, Bitcoin's at two and that's at seven. I mean, it's closer than you think. But, you know, I think the power law and other things would suggest to me that, I mean, I like, I'm sure you've seen and it's in the book, and I think it's just one of the great charts out that's iconic, as I said to Jesse. Jesse Mayer's chart about, you know, the total market, total of market size.

I mean, 900 trillion of financial assets, you know, of assets in the world, including real estate. Point, you know, two trillion of, so it's point true. Bitcoin is point two percent of all the assets in the world. So hang on a second. You know, this is the soundest form of money ever created and it's 0.2% of all the other. That doesn't make, that makes no sense. And so we could go up 10x. So you could go from 100 to a million, a coin.

And it would still only be 2%. And there were times, you know, back in the 1980s when gold was a little bit of a bubble, but when everyone was afraid the currency, the U.S. currency was failing because of going off the gold standard. There were times when gold was 10 or 15 percent of, you know, total assets available. And those types of assets are also growing. Yes. Well, that's the thing. That's the thing.

I mean, and that's what makes Bitcoin price projections so hard. Okay. So Bitcoin can get to a million. Bitcoin can get to $10 million. but tell me what the cost of gasoline is. Are we paying $100 a gallon for gas? You know, because that's where we're headed. Yeah.

I mean, everything's growing in a fiat system whereby you have to grow the units of, you know, the monetary units outstanding. Price of everything's going to grow. I mean, when I was a teenager, gas was 25 cents. But do you think so inflation next decade is going to continue to rip? I do. I think we live in an inflationary age. I think that, you know, when we hit peak deflation with 18 trillion of negative.

bonds outstanding and you know the long bond or the 10-year being at 50 basis points you know in the middle of COVID and now we live in an inflationary world and mainly because you know labor is going to push up prices the by the way we haven't talked about it much that these tariffs are inflationary fundamentally not they're not money printing per se but they're attacks and they're going to cost of goods is going to cost of goods will go up and it will get measured in CPIs and you know CPIs will then force the government to spend more on Social Security and so Yeah, I believe we live in an inflationary age.

I believe inflation is going to get worse. It's going to look like the 70s. And I believe that this fiat currency system is in the process of dying. And it's relatively acute. I mean, the book talks about that. I mean, if you look at the, you know, the growth of U.S. federal interest expense, the growth of the U.S. federal deficit, I mean, some people say, well, we can, we can fix all this. Well, no, there was a time to do that.

That was a long time ago. Yeah. It's going to be really, I mean, to figure, I mean, to figure, I mean, just to give you an example, To fix it, people estimate we would have to cut Social Security, Medicare, interest, and defense by 50%. So I think you could, you know, David Stockman, who I met a few weekends ago, he said we could cut defense by 50%. We waste a lot of money there. Interest, you could do it by taking interest rates down, but that would be inflationary. But Social Security and Medicare, boy, be careful there.

I mean, the boomers are a huge voting block. You're going to have a hard time touching that. But, you know, arguably we should. I mean. And so in terms of Fed's response now, you think, so they're doing quantitative tightening, but that's slowed. You think that becomes QE very quickly? I do you think rates go, will they go back to zero, do you think? I think eventually.

I mean, Gunlach was talking yesterday, and he said he thought that they might actually mess with a balance sheet before they mess with the rates. What does that mean? Well, that would mean that they would start, they would try to provide more monetary accommodation. I mean, in the past, let's just talk about this. In the past, why did QE start? QE is monetary accommodation, right? It's buying up bonds, putting money into the system, okay, reserves into the system.

And Bernacki initiated that when, you know, when interest rates got to the zero bound, you couldn't go. There's nowhere else to go. So, okay, fine, we still are deflationary or going to, we're going to print money to, you know, that was his printing press speech. You know, we have this technology,

digital printing press. Okay. So that's the theory behind it all. When the interest rate hit the zero bound, do QE. Well, there's now been talk, and I'm guessing because gunlock's pretty well connected in the government and just in all those circles, so we must kind of have a sense of what's going on, that they're talking about, well, you know, maybe we've got, we recognize we've got an inflation problem, okay, so maybe we don't cut the rates down that low. Maybe we take them down to three

or something, you know, lower than they are today. But we also recognize that we've got a, the money supply is not growing problem, and, you know, things are seizing up. I mean, we haven't talked about the basis trade and the risk's inherent there. But, and so the Fed, you know, I mean, and it's interesting to me. I mean, and I love the way Powell messaged it, right? We're taking the runoff on the balance sheet from, I think it was 25 to 5 or 30 to 5, whatever. He took it down by a lot, right? But this doesn't really mean, you know, nothing to see over there, folks. It doesn't really mean anything. It's not a change in mind. Bullshit, it's not. I mean, that's, you know, you were tightening your balance sheet and you're taking the tightening back a long way. And even more,

if you look at it really carefully, he's thinking, well, we might still let, the MBS runoff, but we might use the MBS proceeds to increase to buy more bonds. So that's kind of a subtle. That's like a shady QE. It's a shady QE, right. So, you know, so maybe they start to initiate some form of QE. I mean, we know because other things we've seen that I think are relevant is, you know, and James Lavish did a great job of this in his newsletter a week ago talking about it.

You know, the Brookings Institute talked about, putting out swap lines, preemptive swap lines in advance for the hedge fund community that's involved in the Treasury Basis trade. So we've got to take a minute to explain what that is. Yeah, because swap lines, I thought that was a way that the Fed can basically give money to other countries. How does that work in terms of giving it to hedge funds? A swap line is literally just the Fed printing money and taking a liability against it.

Okay. Giving anybody who's financially distressed can go to the Fed. It's like the discount window. They go to the Fed and say, hey, I'm in trouble here. I got too much leverage. Something's blowing up. You don't want me to fail. Give me some money, and I'll give you a note for it.

And I'll pay back when I can or maybe not. But that's a swap line, okay? And the basis trade is that a lot of these funds, particularly Citadel is probably the largest, but they're three or four others like them. And some of the banks do it, too. Other hedge funds, they buy Treasury security. and they arbitrage between the futures and the current treasury. And they can make a small interest rate spread

between the price to future and the price the current. And that spread is so minuscule that the only way it really works is if they lever it up a lot. So they borrow more money from the Fed in order to lever it like 50 or 100 times. Okay. And it's all fine. And what the Fed likes about it is it creates, and the Treasury like about it is it creates demand for treasuries,

which is a big issue because you don't want the interest rates to go up, the Treasury interest rate to go up because then the budget deficit gets worth. Okay, that's the backdrop. So, and it's all fine when markets are stable. When markets get unstable, the things blow out, and you can, quote, unquote, blow up. And this is what happened to long-term capital management. A version of it happened in 2008, and it really happened in 2020 when it's pretty certain.

Most people know, and I've seen some guys who are in the circle that would know, have said that they basically gave a big swap line to Citadel, because the basically his trade had blown up and Ken Griffin wouldn't have been bankrupt if he hadn't gotten the swap line. And the reason they, the way they did that and the reason they justify that is that, you know, Citadel accounts for X percentage of the market and has counterparties at every single bank in the street. And if they fail, the whole system will fail and we can't have that happen. It's like a Lehman. Yeah, it's once again.

It's the gun to the head, you know, give us the damn money or we're going to, you know, we're going to blow up your system. So, yeah, it is like a Lehman Brothers moment. So anyway, back to the original part of the story. the James Lavish article, which talked about it, which is that the Brookies Institute has preemptively, it just came out there, there's floated a paper out there, and it's interesting, though, the timing, hey, maybe we should have preemptive swap lines with these hedge funds in case this basis trade gets in trouble. Well, what that says to, that combined with Powell decreasing the QT, says to me, I mean, the things are getting tight. Yeah.

Right. Is that then basically saying this is going to blow up? Feels that way to me. Yeah. Feels that way to me. I mean, look, it's a bit. math, okay? It's really simple math. And the timing and the event and the size of the bloke, nobody knows it. I don't know it. You don't know it. Nobody can know if somebody says they're full

shit. But I do know this. If you're growing your debt at one rate and you're growing your underlying GDP at a much lower rate, and in our case, the GDP is not growing much at all, but the debt is definitely growing every year, six, seven percent. Eventually that gap gets too wide. Something breaks. You've got to, you know, you've got to inflate the GDP. to service the debt. Yeah. Or you've got to inflate the money supply to service the debt. I mean, every, it's a problem with a monetary system based upon debt creation.

You know, every debt you create creates an interest expense. Well, to pay that interest expense, you've got to create more debt. So it's like a shark. It's got to keep swimming and getting bigger and have built-in monetary debasement or else it fails. Yeah. That's the problem with Fiat currency, and that's the problem with the Keynesian model. It's just a fundamental flaw, and we've all been led down this garden path for two hundred hundred years, but, you know, since 71, it got bad and it's gotten more acute. And with each

event, it's gotten even more acute. I mean, the book is called the big print. There's been two big prints. 2020 was a big print. They printed more and faster. They printed, you know, $5 trillion in 18 months. You know, 2008 was a big print. They printed $3 trillion in three years. You know, the next one, they're going to probably have to print $7 to $10 trillion in weeks. I mean, I'm making that up. But you understand the concept, right? The magnitude gets bigger. The magnitude gets bigger and they seem to be getting closer together. And you know, and you can see the signs. I mean, people say, well, how will we know when we're in it?

Well, two reasons I think we're in it. Gold and Bitcoin price. They're an indicator of they know gold sniffs out monetary debasement really well. It does. And then the other way we'll know we're in it is when the bonds start to fail. You know, like the, like the Liz Trust, you know, UK moment. Yeah. Right.

Where she, you know, the bond market started to fail and they had to reinstitute QE. I mean, the Fed, most people don't remember this, but in the fall of 2023, the tenure went up above 5%. And remember that. So he started, Powell started rate hiking in early 2022. And, you know, he took him very quickly, right? And this was after we're not even thinking about thinking about raising rates. And suddenly he starts raising rates like crazy, right? Which, by the way, caused the failure to Silicon Valley.

So, you know, but by the fall of 2023, basically the bond market started to kind of go the wrong direction. And rates got above 5%. And apparently that's kind of a line in the sand, I think, for the Fed, that above 5%, you know, the 10 year is a problem. And within like two weeks, 12 Fed governors had come out and said, yeah, this rate, you know, we're probably done with us. The rate hiking cycle, I think we're at the end of this thing. And so they jawboned it and went from five back down to the low four.

So they, you know, they averted the crisis. But the point is that, you know, if the bond market smell, the bond market's the sucker at the table. So if the bond market smells that they're not going to get paid back in full, they're going to start to slowly but surely walk away. And these tariffs aren't going to help. No. I mean, you're China, and Trump is doing this stuff.

And China owns a lot of our bonds. I mean, you know, does China start selling? It's possible. And then if China starts selling, you obviously need increased demand, so that's game over. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, yeah, it's game over. And higher rates, you know, make the budget deficit bigger, bigger, bigger deficit means you got to sell more bonds.

I mean, you know, I mean, it's hard because I don't want to, again, I don't want to be a profit of doom, okay? Well, you black pilled me on the economy here. Yeah, yeah, I mean, but I, you know, from my experience, having watched these markets and watched the cycle play out over and over again, I mean, this is this is not a pretty picture. No. This is not a pretty picture. And anyone who thinks that we're going to sneak out of this with, you know, this will be okay. They'll print some money. It's all going to be okay.

stock market will go on to new highs, I'll take the other side of that bet. I don't think that's going to, I don't think it's going to work out that way. I think we're going to have a lot of inflation and, you know, and the bad news about all that is going to be painful. The good news about all that, that's what's going to lead to the solution. I mean, the thing I proposed in the book, I mean, we couldn't do that today because nobody even knows what the problem is. And so, you know, sadly, people have to learn it by getting hit in the head. You know what I mean? There's got to be pain. So market goes down, they print more money, and inflation gets higher. And this is partly why I wrote the book, you know, people collectively realize, God damn it, you know,

this fiat shit is killing us. We got to start electing sound money politicians. And so, and I, you know, I wrote the book because I was watching, I was watching debates, I was watching the American public argue about stuff that doesn't matter. I mean, it's like all comes down to the money. it comes down to this. This is what really matters. This is going to cause enormous economic pain and turmoil. In my opinion, this monetary issue is going to cause enormous economic pain and turmoil. It's a fourth turning, and it's going to happen in the next few years.

And when it does, you know, I hope and I pray that we have enough of us who understand what it really is, that the problem is the money is broken, that we go to, you know, we elect politicians that understand that the course answer to the problem is to go to science. money not to go socialist, print the money, tax the rich, you know, to go, you know what I mean? And that's the big question. It's like whether they pick the right path there. Well, that's right. That's right. Because if things get really bad, you know there's going to be a siren song of the other side saying. And people love to vote for the person that's saying they're going to give them free money. Absolutely. Absolutely. And so, you know, that's, and that would be, that would be really sad and really unfortunate. Now, you know, but, but again,

maybe that's what would drive. That's what, you know, I mean, and then, I mean, if we really go in that direction, we will have hyperinflation. Yeah. We will. We will have complete hyperinflation. And guess what? Hyperinflation will solve the problem.

Yeah, that's for sure. You know, it'll be incredibly painful, but it will solve the problem. And at that point in time, there will be no doubt about what cost it. Yeah. Right. And everyone will go, okay, I get it. People are going to learn the lesson one way or the other. That's right.

That's right. Well, I think you wrote the book at the perfect time. I think so. I hope so. I mean, as I said on many other shows, my measure of success is Normie conversion. Yeah. How's that gone?

Well, it's gone reasonably well. I'll give you, I think I give you some states. I think I've got a couple of outlets I'm selling it through, so I don't have the exact current numbers, but I've sold about 15,000 books so far, which is a great start. That's audio and other stuff. I don't know how to compare that to other things. I mean, you know, there are guys who've written finance books that have sold five million books.

I think this is an important book, and I'd like to get it. I mean, I just want to see it, you know, widely spread because we've got to get this knowledge into as many, you know, Americans. You know, one, people need to have this knowledge to protect themselves. But two, they need to have this knowledge so that we have a good chance at taking the right path to return to sound money. And that's the key. Well, thank you so much, Larry. Thank you for the book. Oh, you're most welcome.

I'm going to buy my dad a copy of this because I think he needs to read this as well. Yeah, it's good for boomers. Yeah, exactly. But I really appreciate time. Thank you for kind of T-code as well. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm looking forward to it and seeing everybody, so it should be good.

Before we close, though, where can people go and buy this? Yeah, so it's on Amazon right now. It's also on the Bitcoin Infinity store. If you're in Europe, you can pay with SATs. I've heard the shipping costs from Europe to the US is ridiculous. So I wouldn't recommend Americans buy it there. But yeah, Amazon has it's in four formats. It's hard copy, paperback,

e-pub, Kindle now, and then Walker America read it and did a really good job reading it. He's got a great voice. He's got a great voice. He did some of the quotes in period quote in his, you know, in the period language. It's fantastic. So it's 12 and a half hours. If you listen to 1X and I had a friend who was telling me, no, this one, I'll listen to six hours. I don't know how anyone listens to anything at 2x. Yeah, no, but not something like this. No. Yeah. But it's, but I want to emphasize it's written in everyday language. It's written in a way and it's written. with a narrative and a story.

And I've been told by people that it's easy to read and it's fun to read, which was the goal because, what good is a book if no one reads it? Yeah, it's not just another textbook. It's not just another textbook. But there are a lot of charts and facts. And that's why I, you know, versus a Kindle or well, Kindle works, but versus the audio book.

And by the way, I should mention the audio book has a PDF attachment with all the charts. Nice. So if you buy the audio book, make sure you download the PDF because he'll say, I'm referring to the chart on page 37, he'll describe it, but then you can actually see it with their PDF. Yeah, you need to see that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's helpful.

But thank you so much, Larry. Thank you, Danny. I appreciate that. Yeah, thanks so much. Cheers. Cheers.