Luke Gromen: Why the CIA Doesn’t Want You Owning Gold, & Is Fort Knox Lying About Our Gold Reserve?

More gold is being shipped quietly between countries right now than at any time in history. Why? Because we’re getting a new global financial system. Luke Gromen explains. (00:00) Gold Is Still Critical to Our Economy (08:17) The Government’s Secrecy Around Gold Ownership (13:17) Why Can’t Fort Knox Be Audited? (21:47) The Intel Community’s Propaganda Around Gold Owners (28:41) Is Warren Buffet a Political Pawn for the Banks? (34:00) The Biggest Global Players in the Gold Industry Paid partnerships with: ExpressVPN: Get 4 extra months free at https://ExpressVPN.com/Tucker iTrust Capital: Get $100 funding bonus at https://www.iTrustCapital.com/Tucker PureTalk: Get an iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy for $0 https://PureTalk.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tucker Carlson?

  So it's amazing to me to watch countries spending, a bunch of countries, spending so much effort, money on gold at a moment where technology dominates the conversation and crypto and AI are the future and gold is the oldest and most primitive medium of exchange. I mean, cultures have been using gold around the world, every culture around the world for at least 6,000 years as a store of value and they still are. Why?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Because it's worked.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  It is when things get spicy, gold has a 6,000 year track record and I think store of value, your point store of value is really critical, right? Because currency has medium exchange, unit of account, store of value. Those are the three functions of money and we have moved on from gold as a unit of account. We don't, our bank accounts aren't denominated in gold. We've moved on from gold. I'm not walking around with gold coins in my pocket.

• 1:22Tucker Carlson?

  Unfortunately.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  But it has always retained that store of value component of money and critically at the, at the highest levels of finance, the global central banks who are running our currency and monetary system. As much as we have moved away from gold and those other functions, as much as we've moved to fiat currency, as much as technology's developed, as much as our economies have developed, they have always continued to hold their gold. And in the last 10, 11 years, I think one of the big origin stories of macroeconomics as they have developed over the past 10 years.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Has been the fact that global central banks on net in 2014 stopped growing their holdings of treasury bonds. So global central banks have not bought a treasury bond on net. In fact, they've sold about $300 billion worth.

• 2:20Tucker Carlson?

  US Treasury.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  US Treasury since 2014 in their, they're called FX reserves.

• 2:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Which is basically their piggy bank. And they've bought about $600 billion worth of gold.

• 2:30Tucker Carlson?

  That doesn't, I mean, okay, that doesn't make any sense at all. In an era of biotech and nanotechnology and AI and, you know, everything is abstract and digital. Everything is technology. Why would gold, which doesn't have like great inherent like value, what is gold actually worth? Like what, we can't eat it. You can't eat your house with it. Why, why this, why the stranglehold on human beings from gold? And why did it emerge in these separate cultures since we know from the archaeological record on separate continents had no contact with each other at roughly the same time they all decided that gold was the most valuable thing? Like, what is that? There is a mystery at the heart of gold, no?

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it ultimately evolved to that because it is, because it isn't used for anything, right? So there's something called stock to flow in commodities, if you analyze commodities and stock to flow is just what is the stock of inventory of that commodity? And what is the flow? How much of it do you use a year? And the lower the stock to flow ratio, the more it is a commodity and the higher stock to flow ratio, the more it is like money. And so, for example, oil has a stock to flow ratio. When oil inventories globally are really high, stock to flow of oil might be 1.2. When they're low, they might be 1.1. If they get below 1.1, you're going to know because you're going to see

• 3:53Speaker 01

  prices skyrocketing at the pump. Very low stock to flow. Wheat, copper, similar types of low stock to flows. Silvers is, I don't know, as of a few years ago, around 30 to one, right? Because silver is both a monetary metal and an industrial metal. Gold is 60 to one or more. And so I think ultimately, I don't know that these ancient cultures were thinking about gold in terms of stock to flow, but I think ultimately what they were looking at is. Stock to flow means it keeps well, right? You can put gold in. It's the most money like commodity there is. And that's why I think independently around the world, all these cultures, all these cultures,

• 4:35Speaker 01

  excuse me, arrived at gold as the savings store of value par excellence.

• 4:43Tucker Carlson?

  That's so interesting. So what you're, so I said, well, how weird that gold would be, you know, the most enduring store of value because you can't eat it or heat your house with it. And you're saying that's why it's the most enduring.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  It's precisely why. I mean, it's very, it's easily divisible, right? So in the old, even in old days, using old technology, thousands of years ago, you could, you could divide into very small amounts. It doesn't rust. And so there were obviously in the old days, in particular, very practical applications. You know, you store a bunch of your wealth in wheat and it gets mold and it's all gone, right? You oil, you have a spill, it's all gone. The gold, it's much more portable, it's divisible, malleable, it doesn't rust. So there's, I think, some practical things, but I think ultimately it's the most money like thing with those physical aspects.

• 5:31Tucker Carlson?

  And has always been for all recorded history. I do, I do think there's something at the core there that I don't understand, but, um, but it's just demonstrable. It's just true.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 5:44Tucker Carlson?

  So, and it endures even in this hyper technical age.

• 5:49Tucker Carlson?

  I would say one more thing about gold that I find fascinating is that it is the most private of all currencies. So the, the great lie of my lifetime is that crypto was going to be private and was going to free us from, you know, surveillance and control. And that is just not proven true and no one's really tried hard to make it true, which tells you a lot about how much people lie and what the real agenda is, which is control. But gold can actually be moved around privately and stored privately. I mean, there's not a digital record of gold. And that leads to my question, which is like, what the hell is going on with gold flows around the world? Gold physically moving from one country to another? Why isn't that transparent? This is public money. And this is the reserves of different countries owned by the public of those countries.

• 6:33Tucker Carlson?

  And there's no sort of transparent record of it. Am I missing something?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Uh, the transparency varies, right? So.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  In the end, it isn't very transparent and it's very attractive.

• 6:46Tucker Carlson?

  How can a country move its part of its gold reserve to another country without telling its population?

• 6:51Speaker 01

  And the funny thing is, is-

• 6:53Tucker Carlson?

  No, but like, is that outrageous or am I just missing something?

• 6:55Speaker 01

  Well, they, they, they would say, well, we tell you, you just have to pay very close attention, right? So you can look in the UK trade statistics, they show you how much gold is leaving London. They don't want to advertise that, but there are times-

• 7:06Tucker Carlson?

  Do they tell you where it's going and why?

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Uh, the Swiss data are very, very good. They show you-

• 7:12Tucker Carlson?

  The Swiss data, right. Well, Swiss data are always good.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  The Swiss are very precise. So you can, you have an idea, but again, when I say it's transparent or not, those data, as long as what it is what they classify as non-monetary gold, according to IMF shipping classifications, we'll call them, however they, you know, industrial classifications, non-monetary gold gets recorded. Monetary gold, to your point, doesn't have to be declared as it moves, is, is, is how I understand the rules. And so when you see the monetary gold movements, there is still very much an element of secrecy and non-transparency. And yes, some of that is the public's money and it's not being disclosed why it's moving

• 7:57Speaker 01

  and, and how much exactly you, it's, it's almost like, um, it's almost like, uh, the, the, um, like being in the movie Jaws, right? Where early on, you know, there's a shark out there and you see the impact of the shark and every now and then you'll get a glimpse of it, but you don't really fully see the shark very often.

• 8:18Tucker Carlson?

  Whenever you have secrecy, you have deception and fraud, period.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Generally, that's true.

• 8:22Tucker Carlson?

  That's the purpose of it, I would argue. Privacy being different from secrecy, uh, but, you know, something that should be disclosed that's not, is not disclosed for a reason. And so when you have huge movements, am I over, you tell me if I'm overstating this, but there are now big movements of gold between countries right now, correct?

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 8:42Tucker Carlson?

  And we're not exactly sure why.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 8:45Tucker Carlson?

  And, um, we don't really know the volume, as you just said. And so someone's getting rich and someone's getting poor, but none of this is public. Like I, I, I smell scam afoot.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  You know, it's one of these things where-

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Gold has long been the competitor to the dollar system. And once you start getting into competitors to government currencies, which are, as you noted, the method, a very effective method of control, right? This is why we use dollar sanctions, why we've been using dollar sanctions. That quickly gets into the reason for, I think, at least some of the reason for the secrecy around gold as it relates to governments, which is, number one, as Greenspan said, that

• 9:43Speaker 01

  the only currency that's better than the dollar is gold. And it's been that way for a long time. And that's, he said that in 2013 or 2014. And so that, number one, is there's a perception, right? Where if you're trying to be a manager of the dollar, as the US government is, that is a perception you are trying to manage. And so I think there's some element of that. I think there are other countries that have been, for example, the Chinese have been buying lots of gold. They have long said, you can find it in WikiLeaks documents from 2009, that China's buying gold to kill two birds with one stone. It's number one, it will build up and help internationalize the renminbi over time.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And also, the Americans and the Europeans, they specifically said, have historically tried to prevent gold from rising too much in order to increase the prestige and the attractiveness of their own currencies. And so we're buying gold for that reason. So you get into, gold is very much a geopolitical metal, because when you think of it in those terms, if you're China and you're buying lots and lots of gold, as China has done at times over the last 15 years after the great financial crisis, let's be clear, that can be construed in certain circles in Washington and in Brussels and in London as a tax on those nations' currencies.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  And so it is in the interest of nations that might want to diversify from the dollar, from the euro reserves, in which FX reserves are primarily...

• 11:15Tucker Carlson?

  I want to check a number while you're talking.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Primarily denominated in, it behooves those nations to have a level of secrecy around it as well. So it's that element of...

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Trying to manage currency systems from two opposite sides of the coin.

• 11:33Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, so let me, let me, this is directly to your point. This is the Google result, if you type in which countries own the most gold. Who's got the biggest gold reserves in the United States? Have you seen this list?

• 11:46Speaker 01

  I have.

• 11:47Tucker Carlson?

  I'm reading this to you because it's just so clearly bullshit. It's so clearly not true. So this is in order, the countries with the largest gold reserves. US one, okay. Number two, Germany. Number three, Italy. Italy, okay, it's got an economy like the size of Ohio. France, Russia, China.

• 12:07Tucker Carlson?

  Switzerland, Japan, India, Netherlands. You're telling me that China is one, two, three, four, five, is number six? And India's number nine?

• 12:22Tucker Carlson?

  That's a lie. That's just a flat out lie. Like, that is not the actual ranking.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  That's not the, and those-

• 12:27Tucker Carlson?

  There is no, you're telling me France has bigger gold reserves than China?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  And this is why, when I say it's a political and a geopolitical medal, right? Because those are, those are the official monetary reserves. Chinese have been bringing in thousand plus tons of gold every year.

• 12:41Tucker Carlson?

  The Indians have been doing, the Indians have been stockpiling gold for thousands of years. I mean, to their great credit, I'm not criticizing them.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the chart of gold in Indian rupees looks like apple in dollars. It's up and to the right forever.

• 12:52Tucker Carlson?

  So I guess the only point I'm making again and again and again, is that the heart of this incredibly important phenomenon, the movement of gold around the world, is a lie. Like, there's lie, like, we don't actually know what the state of play is.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  There's not great clarity, no.

• 13:05Tucker Carlson?

  Not great clarity, right. There's massive lying. And again, whenever there's massive lying, there's gonna be massive fraud.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  And there's a reason for it, right? There's always a real reason why that is. Why, you know, for that, for that-

• 13:18Tucker Carlson?

  So Fort Knox is one of the places, the physical places in the United States, where we're told our gold is stored. Half, maybe, supposedly, of our reserves, or some big chunk?

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I wanna say, there's some there, there's some in Denver, there's some at this point.

• 13:29Tucker Carlson?

  Right, right. Spread around. Fort Knox is the famous one.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:31Tucker Carlson?

  And, you know, members of Congress, almost all of them with the last name Paul, have been calling for an audit of Fort Knox for, I mean, just decades. And if you really press, it doesn't look like Fort Knox has been actually audited for close to a hundred years since the 30s. I think that's right. I stand open to correction. They said it was audited in the 70s, but it wasn't actually audited. It was like, some of it was audited.

• 13:57Tucker Carlson?

  Why is it so hard with a federal workforce, you know, including contractors, like 10 million people, to just like go through the contents of the vaults and weigh them and make sure that they're not gold plated titanium and make sure they're all there and then figure out who owns them? Like, why is that so hard? We're told, oh, that's too complicated. Really?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  No, I don't think it's anything to do, to your point. It's not complicated at all. I think it comes down to policy and that gold is a geopolitical metal. And if you go back to, again, declassified documents and of conversations and memos around a lot in the 70s, and you'll see some familiar names there, Volker Kissinger.

• 14:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Weintraub, some of those types of names. The US in the 60s was losing a lot of gold, right? The system was essentially dollar is pegged to gold $35 an ounce. Everything else is tayed to the dollar. And it started becoming clear as we got deeper and deeper in Vietnam and guns and butter with LBJ that we didn't have the gold to cover our debt offshore at $35 an ounce.

• 15:05Tucker Carlson?

  And were countries trying to redeem their gold?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  They were. Yeah, we went from, I want to say after World War II, we had 18,000 tons of gold, official gold. And by the time we got to, call it 71, we were down to the 8100 we have today. And that's where

• 15:18Tucker Carlson?

  No way.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  So we shipped out about 10,000 tons of gold to satisfy these deficits.

• 15:23Tucker Carlson?

  Actual physical gold?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely.

• 15:25Tucker Carlson?

  Like, here are my dollars, send me my bars?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  If I recall the story correctly, the French sent warships into New York, pick it up. Oh, yeah.

• 15:31Tucker Carlson?

  No way.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we were sending, you know, if I recall correctly, we were sending an airplane a month to Riyadh with bullion, right, to settle gold deficits as we had agreed to.

• 15:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, by the way, Saudi, one of the richest countries per capita in the world, is not even in the top 10 for gold holdings.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Saudi owns so much gold. It's just not on the official list.

• 15:55Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry, I'm just, again, I'm making the same point again, which is the numbers are lies.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Right, so, but, and I think the reason why the numbers are lies is when you, or why there's not great clarity, right, why they manage the optics in the way they're clearly managing the optics, is, um, you can go back, once we closed the gold window in 71, Nixon said, hey, no more gold, you know, the dollar's now free-floating, and you can read from these declassified documents that the US very much had an interest in getting gold out of the system. We didn't want, because there were, there was a, um, one, one of the declassified documents in, in question, uh, there is, there was a proposal that was afoot in, uh,

• 16:39Speaker 01

  73, 74 by the Europeans to revalue their gold to settle oil deficits, right, because Europe doesn't have a whole lot of oil, they were importing a bunch of oil, oil had gone up a bunch in price, so they had a bunch of oil deficits. They were looking to basically revalue gold and then settle deficits with OPEC in gold, and the Americans in question, excuse me, um, uh, Kissinger, Weintraub, Volcker, said, this isn't in our interest, this is not what we want. We want the Saudis not getting gold, we want them getting treasury bonds. And so, right, the famous Bill Simon deal, and so I think, I think-

• 17:16Tucker Carlson?

  I can't believe they took that deal.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think it might have been a gold or the lead type of deal at that point in time. Um, you know, we'll give you not only, you know, you take the gold, you take the lead, and the gold is, we'll provide you protection, we'll provide you weapons, we'll let you access to our markets, and if you don't do it, we're gonna regime change you, and oh, by the way, we'll give you maybe a sweetener on your, you know, I think it's very possible they were getting higher than market interest rates on the treasury bonds for decades as part of that deal, who knows, but-

• 17:43Tucker Carlson?

  What do you mean, who knows?

• 17:44Speaker 01

  It's, it's, that's not something that's ever been disclosed, but-

• 17:48Tucker Carlson?

  Well, how can, wait, we, we, we give country-specific interest rates on treasuries?

• 17:54Speaker 01

  I think, I have heard credible rumblings from people that were around then, that part of that deal may have been, not, not just countries, just Saudi, may have gotten a sweeter deal than other countries.

• 18:06Tucker Carlson?

  How can, but how can that not be disclosed?

• 18:09Speaker 01

  That's how you get a $10,000 wrench at Department of Defense. Wrenches don't cost 10 grand. It's, right, you, the-

• 18:17Speaker 01

  You move stuff around a little.

• 18:18Tucker Carlson?

  This is why they're always encouraging us to get mad at each other about race and the tranny stuff. You know what I mean? It's like, cause the big things are just not even, not even.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Well, you know, in fairness, I, I, I think, you know, it's always about power and control, right? This is about control of the system. This is the dollar system. Clearly 71 was a default in the gold. And so we were trying to sort of get around this. And so I think sort of the original sin, or again, original, origin story of the refusal of wanting to even talk about, or, you know, what is an audit, you know, what it, what is, is, you know, as it relates to audits of Fort Knox is, once we close that gold window, I think that, you know, generation of leadership 70s, 80s and didn't want to talk about gold, and going into audit it, brings gold back up and brings it back up

• 19:07Speaker 01

  that, hey, we defaulted on our gold clauses, like twice in the past 80 years, by the way, FDR defaulted on gold clauses to, to the domestic Americans. So I think the original origin story was about this reticence about is the gold there? Has it been audited? What is an audit? Has it been fully audited? Has it been fully assayed? All of the things you would think are pretty easy to do. I think go back to that policy of petrodollar, we don't want gold back in the system. The Europeans do, we don't. This is the deal. We threw our weight around in the 70s and sending people into Fort Knox to show them we have the gold, doesn't help us remove gold from the system. And, and ultimately, why do we

• 19:50Speaker 01

  want to remove gold from the system? Control and it's easier to run deficits without tears.

• 19:54Tucker Carlson?

  Sure. Cause gold is a, is an anchor in reality.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:57Tucker Carlson?

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• 23:10Tucker Carlson?

  They don't want to talk about gold and they haven't since the default of 71, which is never described, by the way, as a default.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  And it was.

• 23:16Tucker Carlson?

  Well, of course, right. You're not making good on your promise.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  It's a fault.

• 23:20Tucker Carlson?

  Um, and they don't want to talk about gold. The US government doesn't want to talk about gold. Ever since then, which is my whole lifetime, people who are interested in gold have been derided as quote, gold bugs. And it just, it just occurred to me, it's, it's one of those phrases. It's so devastatingly effective. You're like, you're a nutcase.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:37Tucker Carlson?

  You're buggy.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:38Tucker Carlson?

  You're crazy.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:39Tucker Carlson?

  Bug house.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 23:40Tucker Carlson?

  Mental patient. Um, and it reminds me so much of the term conspiracy theorist. So CIA, possibly with the help of a foreign government, uh, murders the president of the United States. And it's super obvious that that happened in 1963 and nobody believes the Warren Commission. And it's like, it doesn't make any sense, actually. And so they start calling anyone who raises questions about it, a conspiracy theorist. And that was a phrase that was devised by the intel community to discredit people who asked uncomfortable questions. And you sort of have to wonder if the phrase gold bugs, just occurring to me now, isn't a species of that, right?

• 24:14Speaker 01

  It's entirely possible.

• 24:15Tucker Carlson?

  Shut up, gold bug.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  It's entirely possible.

• 24:17Tucker Carlson?

  And even to this day, people who, and I know some of them, who are interested in gold and sort of follow, you know, it's global movements and buy gold, physical gold, I'm non abstract gold, they're embarrassed of it.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:31Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, there's like a social sanction to even talking about gold.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Oh, it's, it's fascinating. I've been working in investment research for 30 years and at high levels at major institutions around the US, around the world, uh, as, uh, you know, doing investment research for major money managers. And it's fascinating what you say, cause it, there is always, not amongst all of them, but amongst a, a, a lot of investment professionals, they watch gold. They're, they're, they watch it more than you, more than you'd be, would think, more than the average American would think. They own it. Uh, but there is that stigma where it's sort of, you know, you know, hey, you see gold, you know, it's, it's, it is, there is, there is a stigma is too strong a word, but there's a, um,

• 25:19Tucker Carlson?

  Kind of.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  A little bit.

• 25:20Tucker Carlson?

  I was with one of the richest people in the world the other day, a very famous investor. I'm sure you know him. Wonderful guy. And somebody said to me, you know, he buys gold. And I said to him off camera, do you buy gold? And he's like, yeah, you know, among other things.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 25:32Tucker Carlson?

  I said, do you buy a lot of gold?

• 25:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, buy a lot of gold.

• 25:34Tucker Carlson?

  But he clearly just didn't want to, it's even, even to someone, you know, open minded, brilliant person. It's not something that people talk about in public. It's almost like admitting you have some kind of weird fetish or something.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  It, and.

• 25:48Tucker Carlson?

  I dress up in a chicken costume. I don't want to talk about it, but you know what I mean?

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's, and it's fascinating, right? Because it is, I think it goes back to that original point of why those movements are shrouded in secrecy, which is

• 26:01Speaker 01

  gold on some level is a hedge or an insurance policy against the existing system as it has been allowed to evolve over the last 50 years. And so, once you get to a certain level of wealth, power, influence within that system, you clearly understand the Achilles heels and the risks and how that system will at some point, mathematically certainty, it could be next week, it could be 50 years from now, will at some point need to be reset in some fashion. You understand that. And it is not in your interest socially, financially, et cetera,

• 26:44Speaker 01

  to advocate or advertise that you are hedging or insuring against the collapse of that system.

• 26:51Tucker Carlson?

  No, right.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  For the restructuring of that system.

• 26:52Tucker Carlson?

  No, I mean, you know, you make a great point and I shouldn't, thank you for saying that because it's, it's not just yet another intel community inspired conspiracy, though it is that, obviously. But it's also, it is in some sense, like almost unpatriotic to say, you know, I'm, I'm all about gold and land or whatever, about physical assets. Because what you're saying is I don't, I don't believe in the system of the US government.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Well, which is, which is horribly ironic because if you go back to 1948, Warren Buffett, famous investor, poo poos gold every chance he has.

• 27:24Tucker Carlson?

  I noticed.

• 27:25Speaker 01

  And his father, Congressman Howard Buffett, from the state of Nebraska, wrote a missive, you can still find it online, saying, gold convertibility is essential to human freedom. In which on the first page, he says, look, the first thing autocrats and evil empires that we just got done fighting, right? This is 1948. First thing they did when they got to power. Was remove the convertibility of their currency to gold. So it's ironic, it's always ironic to me, people say, well, you own gold, you're anti-American. I said, there's nothing more American than gold. People say, well, what does gold do? It's useless. I said, no, no, gold, the very use of gold is that as long as you can convert your currency into gold, you are still a free person.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  When you can no longer do that, your vote really doesn't matter because they control the currency, right? It's the famous statement, give me control of a nation's currency, I care not who makes its laws.

• 28:19Tucker Carlson?

  The Warren Buffett thing, man, that's like, I mean, it, right. He's famously mocking gold buyers, right?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 28:28Tucker Carlson?

  I would say Warren Buffett, you know, so much to admire there and be impressed by, and I am, and all that, but he's, he's a political player, among many other things.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  He's a very powerful political player, and in particularly for the banks, right? Think about who they go to. 1989 or six with Solomon, who was a big player in the 98 Long Term Capital Bank rescues Buffett.

• 28:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, and Buffett has lots of great investors out there. Warren Buffett is, you know, near the top of that list, of course.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And he's a legendary investor, of course.

• 28:56Tucker Carlson?

  Of course. However, massive propaganda around Warren Buffett. Of all the investors in the world, who's received more slavishly, sort of ass-kissingly positive press than Warren Buffett? Like, there's never been a bad word, you're not allowed, he's like the Oprah of investing.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the awe shocks, yeah.

• 29:16Tucker Carlson?

  But no one has been promoted more aggressively by the American media than Warren Buffett.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  I, I think that's fair, and it's, you know, it's interesting, because it's-

• 29:24Tucker Carlson?

  But he's a hard asset guy.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  He's absolutely a hard asset guy.

• 29:26Tucker Carlson?

  He literally bought Boerseim's jewelry store, which sells gold.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  People bought railroads, right?

• 29:31Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Railroads and-

• 29:32Tucker Carlson?

  Omaha Steaks, and like, this is not, this is a guy whose whole philosophy is about, you know, buying physical things.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, absolutely.

• 29:40Tucker Carlson?

  With inherent value.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  And he's, he's, you can go back to-

• 29:42Tucker Carlson?

  He's against gold.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, you, he's not against gold. He's, you can, you can see, you know, and this goes back to that conflict of, once you become big enough within the system, it's not in your interest to, to, to, to, to highlight some of these things. I mean, one of his Berkshire letters from late 60s, early 70s, he highlights that basically Berkshire, maybe in the late 70s. Berkshire stock priced in gold had gone nowhere for 10 or 15 years. And I mean, that flat out shows you, right? So all of these productive business and all these things he says about these productive businesses over time, 100% true. And there are instances in history where gold outperforms, where gold preserves purchasing power, currencies are being debased. It's interesting. He frequently talks about, well, I started investing in, I think it was when I was 10

• 30:27Speaker 01

  years old, I bought my first stock, which would have been 1941 or 42, which just happened to be basically the all time generational low of US stocks. Because we won the battle of Midway. And at that point, it was sort of obvious we were going to win World War II and so on, so forth. But I always say to clients and friends, like, yes, and look back 15 years. The prior 15 years from 1918 to 1939, 1915 to 1931, were catastrophic for financial assets of all types in the West. Gold, like, all you wanted to own was gold. And so it's interesting, I think, part of, you know, the point being, part of, I think, your view of the world depends upon when you're born and what happens as you're growing up.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  It's sort of that cycle theory of, of, you know, the fourth turning. I think it affects your views on investments, too.

• 31:17Tucker Carlson?

  Why wouldn't it?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 31:18Tucker Carlson?

  And it affects your views on the future in general.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:22Tucker Carlson?

  And, and as you just said, the, the degree to which you're vested in the system currently in place affects your outlook and affects very much what you're willing to say in public.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  And the bigger you are within that, the more pressure can be applied to you, right? Or if, if you, you don't get deal flow on Sunday night if you are pumping goals, if you're Warren Buffett, or you have, you know, you don't get the approval of whatever thing you need approved or from the Congress. I mean, it's just, look, I'm not opining on it, it's just how the game is played.

• 31:56Tucker Carlson?

  Well, it was so obvious, I'm not a financial expert, that's for sure. But I have been in the media my whole life and I know what a fluff job looks like. And I know, no, I do, I know a lot about it. And I watched Warren Buffett, I've never been against Warren Buffett, I'm not against him now. But I mean, the amount of promotion that guy received from the system told you everything about his orientation and his, the incentives in place for him. And like, they were promoting Warren Buffett and Warren Buffett's worldview, like, very aggressively. And so, you know, I didn't believe half of it and you shouldn't either. That's my view.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you always want to think critically about this stuff because it's.

• 32:31Tucker Carlson?

  Think? Yeah, I think so.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 32:33Tucker Carlson?

  So give us a sense of where gold is flowing in the world right now, to the extent we know.

• 32:38Speaker 01

  To the extent we, what we can see, I would describe it simply as from the UK and the EU, to a lesser extent, into the US. It's still flowing into China. It flows into China all the time. But there, the big delta, the big change in, since the Trump election, essentially, has been a significant ramp up in the flows of gold out of the UK into the US.

• 33:05Tucker Carlson?

  So that would seem good for the US.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, historically, when you see where gold is flowing, that's your economic winner. That's who's winning. And where the countries that are losing gold, those are the countries that are losing. That goes back several hundred years. That's, that's sort of how it works, which makes sense, right?

• 33:23Tucker Carlson?

  Several thousand years.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 33:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Tucker Carlson?

  So do you, and I should have asked this earlier, do you anticipate any time in the future where gold is no longer regarded as a measure of economic strength and health? Does it ever get eclipsed by crypto?

• 33:40Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so. I don't, you know, at some point Bitcoin could compete with it, in my opinion, possibly, but I think that's far down the road. And failing that,

• 33:53Speaker 01

  it would take something unforeseeable, right? We discover, we discover an asteroid that has, you know, gazillions of dollars of gold on it and we develop the ability to go up there and bring it back cheaply in a way that competes.

• 34:05Tucker Carlson?

  What about, okay, so gold is almost hovering at about 3,000, a little under 3,000 an ounce. It's clearly going to make it to 3,000, I would guess. Is there a threshold at which, like, it becomes, because there's a lot of gold actually on the Earth's crust, a lot, and it's just too expensive to extract it. But is there a threshold at which, like, gold production just ramps up dramatically? It becomes worth it to, like, extract a lot more gold and it affects the price because of supply and demand?

• 34:29Speaker 01

  Yes, is ultimately it's supply will be a function of price and then

• 34:35Speaker 01

  there's a lot of it in the ocean, right? In theory, if you sort of dry out the oceans and filter it.

• 34:39Tucker Carlson?

  Filter it, yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  You know, you could, and that's just a question of price and the question of price is ultimately a question of energy efficiency, right? If you wanted to, you know, that's, that's how much energy do you need to expend to to dig and get that out of the crust where it is and refine it down so that it makes sense? And right now, it's going to cost you way more in energy in order to get that. And so they're not, you're not going to do that. And so if price goes up enough, then it makes sense for you to expend that amount of energy to do that. And I think that's a really important point. It ties back to our stock to flow and why gold is valuable. When you think of it in those terms of is, is we need to expend a lot of energy to get gold

• 35:23Speaker 01

  and the price of gold determines how much energy you're willing to expend to get it. It's just a compressed and portable storage of energy. And, and

• 35:33Tucker Carlson?

  So that raises a deeper and more fundamental question, which is do the great powers have a built in incentive to keep energy prices higher than they would naturally be in a truly free market?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Depends which great power, right? The Chinese, all else equal, want to build a consumer society. They would like to have energy prices cheaper. America, we like cheap oil, but not as cheap as we used to like it because now we have shale. So we want, you know, we want Goldilocks oil. So, you know, above $90 starts to be a problem for our consumer. Below $70 starts to be a problem for our shale industry and, and so if you look at the price of West Texas crude, WTI crude oil over the last two, three years now, oil's been 70 to 90. And I think that's so like, we need Goldilocks oil. The Europeans, same kind of thing. They need a cheaper oil. The Russians, they would probably like more expensive oil. The Saudis, more, you know, Saudi has $90 fiscal break even.

• 36:29Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  You know, anything, anything below 90, they're borrowing money and things get spicy over there if they don't maintain their promises to their people.

• 36:38Tucker Carlson?

  So, but, okay, so you're talking about hydrocarbons.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 36:41Tucker Carlson?

  But, you know, there's been, for all the talk of the Green New Deal, now we're getting far afield, but I think it's really fundamental to the world, where all the talk of Green New Deal and all these new forms of energy and, you know, renewables and green technology, it's really been pretty shockingly lame, really, and it's like windmills and solar panels, both of which are just like kind of absurd. There are like a lot of advanced technologies, particularly in biotech, that are moving like crazy fast, AI, crazy, crazy fast. Energy generation technologies are not moving crazy fast at all. Like, no one's like, hey, actually, there's a brand new nuclear breakthrough. Like, we're not building any nuclear. Like, you conceivably, if you got off hydrocarbons,

• 37:23Tucker Carlson?

  could, I don't know, why isn't there a greater effort to figure out cheaper ways to produce energy?

• 37:31Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it is on some level political, right?

• 37:33Tucker Carlson?

  Okay, right. So, maybe if, maybe the Green New Deal, I mean, obviously, it's anti-civilization, it's anti-human, it's really dark, and it's built on a lie, but it's also built on geopolitical realities, right?

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I think, I think so, yeah. I mean, it's, look, there are things we could do that would ramp up energy production fast, and that is nuclear. Like, we should have, we should be building nuclear plants, a bunch, every year, as far out as the eye can see.

• 38:04Tucker Carlson?

  But if you really got, you know, nuclear or any form of energy down in, in hydrocarbon equivalents to like $10 a barrel oil, equivalent, you'd like blow up the, like, the world financial system, kind of?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Um, I think it depends. There's a lot of other puts and takes.

• 38:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  You know, um, and some of that gets into...

• 38:33Speaker 01

  You know, how you would have to, you'd probably have to restructure some debt. Some of that is how gold, right? Cause the Saudis at $10 a barrel. But again, that then gets into gold, right? Where we go, okay, well, as partly some grand deal. Now, this is far afield, but some sort of grand deal. We are going to revalue oil and gold reserves, right? Or we're going to revalue gold. So that Saudis, like Saudi doesn't care how they get paid. If, if, if oil goes to 10, but their oil gold goes up to 10,000, they still have all the money. They get compensated for past.

• 39:05Tucker Carlson?

  Well, right, but if energy, as you just said, if energy prices dropped, you know, far below what we can currently imagine, then the price of gold would also drop because the price of extraction of gold would, would drop.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  So you have a. Maybe, well, yes, yeah, fair, fair. If you can apply that energy, yeah.

• 39:20Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, sure, right.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  But you'd have two competing forces. Your, your cost of energy to mine gold would go down. But at the same time, that if you drop energy, there's two groups of, you know, nations in the world. There's the US as a reserve currency and there are US creditors that import energy and US creditors that export energy.

• 39:35Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  And they all own a bunch of bonds.

• 39:37Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  And they own a bunch of financial assets. And so if oil drops really low, all of your oil exporting creditors are going to sell their dollar assets. Because they're going to need to, because, right? Saudi owes money at $90 a barrel. And if they don't pay that money for social programs, et cetera, place, the place has political problems.

• 39:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Uh, and so they're going to be selling treasury bonds. They're going to be selling stocks and that creates, and the US economy is so leveraged that that it's not going to take a lot of selling to create an economic crisis from it. So you'd have to reach, basically you would get into a situation where in some way, shape or form, the Fed would be printing money again as a result of oil prices getting too low, which is in theory, a good thing, which then could actually be net good for gold, right? So there's. There's, there's puts and takes depending on.

• 40:28Tucker Carlson?

  Basically, you're describing a world that's so complex and interconnected where, you know, global finance, the cost of energy, and then, you know, the geostrategic stuff, you know, military rivalries, it's all of a piece. So it's like pretty scary to mess with any single factor in that in a dramatic way.

• 40:48Speaker 01

  It's disruptive, or it's potentially disruptive.

• 40:51Tucker Carlson?

  Super disruptive.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's potentially, and, and I think that's ultimately the, the power and the encouraging thing about gold. Gold is always thought about as a, oh, you're buying gold, you're a doomer, the world's gonna end. No, part of the problem of what I just described, change in and of itself isn't a problem, but rapid change when you have high levels of debt, it's the debt that creates the problem. And so if you, when you look around and you see these central banks buying all this gold and having all these countries buying this gold, if you revalue gold enough to basically re-collateralize or buy down, effectively buy down your debt so that you have low debt levels, then you can make dramatic, more dramatic changes to the economic system and

• 41:34Speaker 01

  its connections without running the risk of blowing up the financial system, right? Because whether gold, you know, once you take, you, you introduce something deflationary into a debt-based system, the debt starts to go boom, right? People don't, don't generate the income to pay the interest.

• 41:53Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  In a more equity-based system, or in a gold, I hate to say gold-based because it's, I'm not talking about a gold-backed currency, but if your debt to GDP is low because you've revalued your gold much higher and, and restructured your balance sheet, a deflationary recession, or a restructuring of the economy that is deflationary, or a good energy introduction, or AI productivity enhancement that is deflationary, that can be weathered and benefited from without blowing up the debt-based system. So gold is paradoxically a way. To foam the runway for a major change, be it geopolitically, or energy, or AI, something deflationary.

• 42:37Tucker Carlson?

  Foam the runway. So there's been a lot of talk about changes to the US tax code, especially changes that affect cryptocurrency investing. What are those changes? Well, what if there was already a way to invest in the market with tax advantages? Well, I trust Capital makes that possible. I trust Capital is a software platform that lets you invest in crypto using a self-directed IRA. That means with a traditional IRA, taxes are deferred, and with a Roth IRA, you won't have to pay taxes on your crypto gains, just like a retirement account. On top of that, the crypto market never closes. You can buy or sell 24/7 in case you stay up late. I trust Capital makes investing easy, safe, and accessible. You don't have to be an expert. Their website has easy-to-understand articles, videos, and if you ever need help, you can

• 43:21Tucker Carlson?

  speak with an actual person in the United States, because the whole thing is based in the United States, the whole company. So if you're looking to add crypto to your retirement portfolio, sign up today at Itrustcapital.com/tucker and use the promo code TUCKER for a $100 funding bonus. So you said a minute ago that, big picture, over time, countries that are acquiring gold are stronger, and countries that are seeing their gold reserves depleted are weaker. Seems obvious.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Over time, yeah, you're running, right? You're saving more than you're spending, essentially.

• 43:52Tucker Carlson?

  And the United States is acquiring gold, because why?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  That's the $64,000 question in markets right now. It is the official nominal reason being given in markets and in the media is that Trump's administration may or may not put tariffs across any number of countries, as we've discussed, including possibly gold hubs like the UK. And if you put a 25% tariff on the UK across all items, just to pick a number, you run the risk. What the mechanical impact of that would be to increase the price of gold? 25% and the problem is is that

• 44:36Tucker Carlson?

  Tariffs against American imports of British goods?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 44:40Tucker Carlson?

  But other than like shortbread, is there a British export?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Not really, no.

• 44:44Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  They're a twin destination, no.

• 44:47Tucker Carlson?

  They don't make anything, right?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Not on net, no.

• 44:49Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Not on net.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  And so this is this, this is what the story is, is that this, there's been this massive flow of gold out of the UK to the US because tariffs might happen, which would impact the price of gold in a manner such that it would be very disruptive to what are called basically spread trades, that gold traders in New York or London, bullion banks that, that traffic in gold bullion, they may have a position on in gold futures in New York and a physical gold position in London. And if a tariff were to change the price relationship between those two, it could create significant losses for them. And so the response is basically bring the gold here to mitigate that risk.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  That is the official story. There is absolutely a, a, a strong element of truth to that. With that said, the longer this goes on and the gold flows continue, the less that story holds up as the sole reason. When we go back in time to 2020 and during COVID, we saw a very similar spike in gold futures relative to spot prices in London and it was driving a massive flow of gold out of London here because of COVID, because supply chains broke down with the shutdowns of flights and what have you. A lot of gold is shipped on inner, in a transatlantic commercial airliners in the cargo holds.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  And so those flows stopped, it drove a mismatch and what the COMEX, the, the gold futures exchange in the US did. Ultimately, one of the things to sort of settle those markets down was to, what else say, change the rules for the layman. They introduced a gold futures contract that made the good delivery denomination, I think 400 ounces in London, 100 ounces in New York, either or, right? So that, okay, well, the gold that's here is fine, so we don't need to move it. So they took a step to change the rules to settle the market down. Another famous example, we were talking before, talking about before we got on air was the Hunt Brothers, run on silver. They tried to corner the silver market in the 80s. This was COMEX, and they

• 47:05Speaker 01

  changed the rules on the Hunt Brothers. Once it became apparent that the Hunt Brothers were successfully cornering physical silver, they changed the rules. They set, they set the market to sell only. You could, you couldn't buy gold or silver futures, and you could only sell, and the market promptly tanked. At any point in time, Trump, Besse, Rubio, other American officials could come out and say and clarify, we're not going to put tariffs on gold. There will never be tariffs on gold. There's a lot of countries in the world where there's no VAT, that have VAT, that there's no VAT on gold. So this is the long, my point being that the longer this goes on without a rule change or a political pronouncement

• 47:47Speaker 01

  about tariffs, political clarification about tariffs, the more likely it becomes, in my opinion, speculatively, that the tariffs are on some level as reason for the gold flows cover. That the gold's being brought here for some other reason, and they're just saying...

• 48:04Tucker Carlson?

  So what could, I mean, and that always is the likely explanation, that there's something else that accounts for at least part of a phenomenon that you're watching. So what could that other reason be?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  I think there's two things. There's a tactical reason, there's a strategic reason. The tactical reason is...

• 48:25Speaker 01

  If you Google gold revaluation, you'll find a number of stories in any mainstream financial media over the last two, three, four weeks. There has been increasing speculation in the aftermath of Trump's election, and in particular, in the aftermath of Scott Besen being approved as Treasury Secretary, that there is a gimmicky but completely legal and mandated in the rules way by which the United States could revalue its gold, which it currently holds on its books at $42 per ounce, up to the current market price, and

• 49:03Speaker 01

  in so doing, or even higher, and in so doing, it creates a bank deposit, basically, at the Treasury's bank account at the Fed, that the Trump administration could then use to buy down debt, to not have to borrow as much. It's effectively money printing through gold. It's creating money supply using gold through, basically, an accounting gimmick that is already on the books.

• 49:31Tucker Carlson?

  But that gold would never be sold to anyone?

• 49:33Speaker 01

  Never be sold to anyone. It's just literally an exchange of paper.

• 49:35Tucker Carlson?

  So the United States would not lose its gold reserve?

• 49:37Speaker 01

  No.

• 49:38Tucker Carlson?

  There's no chance of that?

• 49:39Speaker 01

  Not under that transaction, no.

• 49:42Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  As I, as it's been explained to me.

• 49:45Tucker Carlson?

  You'd hate to get to a point where the nation has so much debt, backed by nothing other than its navy, which may become irrelevant things to drones. So you could see this all moving very fast. It's like, all of a sudden, we owe the world trillions of dollars, but where's the collateral? Where policymakers are forced to sell off physical assets that belong to the country? Oil, water, because we have the world's largest freshwater reserves in the Great Lakes, and gold. I don't think, is that a crazy way to think?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  I don't think, I don't think, I think ultimately, there'll be no need to do that because you've got the assets and you've got a printing press, right? So ultimately, it's really a function of the currency.

• 50:27Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, as long as you're the world's reserve currency.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  And even if we're, I mean, I think we will be, but they'll always have the ability to print dollars. It's just a question of...

• 50:34Tucker Carlson?

  But what if nobody wants them?

• 50:36Speaker 01

  It would just depreciate faster.

• 50:38Tucker Carlson?

  Right. But I mean, like, at some point...

• 50:42Tucker Carlson?

  Like if I, you know, take a loan against my house, if I have a mortgage on my house.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 50:46Tucker Carlson?

  And also if I don't pay it, you know, the holder of that mortgage gets my house.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:50Tucker Carlson?

  There's collateral. So like, where's the collateral in the United States, other than like, I don't know, people like us? I don't, you know, what is the collateral?

• 50:58Speaker 01

  The collateral is, it's a complicated question. It's, I mean, on some level, it's the threat of violence. I think some of what we're seeing in terms of these, you know, discussions around, will we leave NATO or will we not? Um, this is a, this is a discussion that goes back to the seventies. There was something called the blessing letter. Karl Blessing was a governor of the Bundesbank, the German Bundesbank. And the French were asking for their gold back. Others around the world were asking for their gold back in the, in the sixties and seventies. Um, I guess the blessing letter might've been late sixties. Uh, the Germans started hinting about asking about their gold back. And the Americans sent a letter that essentially said, you know, if you ask for your gold back, we will have to reconsider store, stationing

• 51:41Speaker 01

  US troops in West Germany to protect you from the USSR. So you're going to keep taking dollars or else we're going to bring our boys home and you can deal with the Soviets yourself. And the Germans never asked for their gold back. And so what collateralizes is of a complicated multi-body, right? It's, it is goodwill, protection, access to markets. So the threat of violence, military protection. There's, gold is way, way down there. I don't think the gold is thought of as collateral, but it could be as a reserve asset if we wanted to change the system. We would need to have it if we wanted to change from the

• 52:22Speaker 01

  system we've, we've been in for the last 50 years. And that kind of gets to the strategic side of it.

• 52:28Tucker Carlson?

  What if we have no choice? What if, I mean, because we're not the only decision makers in this process?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  We're not, uh, true. Um, I think you would see some sort of, uh, grand deal be discussed, uh, ahead of that. And I think that's, you know, some of what we're seeing in real time, when we talk about us and the Russians and the Saudis and the Chinese all getting together in Saudi and talking about, you know, probably not how the Yankees are going to do this year. Um,

• 52:53Tucker Carlson?

  And probably not just the end of the war in Ukraine.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  No, I absolutely, I don't think it's only about the war in Ukraine.

• 52:58Tucker Carlson?

  Of course not.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  You know, those are think about what you've got there.

• 53:01Tucker Carlson?

  Because the war in Ukraine is not about Ukraine and never has been.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  You know, you've got the four big, you know, Saudi, US, China, Russia, although that's 40% of global oil production. And US-China is, what, probably 60% of global oil imports? Global, global oil, uh, so you can, oil's gonna have a role there. Now, the strategic side of what I think we're seeing, the gold movement is ultimately what, if you, if you take a step back and try to see the forest for the trees of what the Trump administration is trying to do.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  The Ukraine war showed us, we got outproduced by the Russians badly. We couldn't produce shells, we couldn't produce Stinger missiles, we couldn't, we were reliant on essentially China to supply our industrial base, to supply our defense base. We have been borrowing money from China to build weapons to face down China using Chinese components. It's not a good strategy when your biggest geopolitical adversary is China. And so, starting with COVID.

• 54:10Tucker Carlson?

  Could it be that we were using Chinese components to arm the Ukrainians in a war against Russia, which is allied with China?

• 54:19Speaker 01

  I think that absolutely could be the case, and I think that China, we know that Chinese were supplying Russians with dual-use goods as well, and the.

• 54:27Tucker Carlson?

  So China's on both sides.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  China's on both sides, and critically, think about, think about the implications of this, right? So we, America, when we were the dominant power, we were the ones supplying the weapons to these types of conflicts. Now, we didn't really have the ability to, to credibly say, Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel, we can supply all of you at once. Empirically, we demonstrated over the last three years, it was impossible. We were moving Patriot systems out of Israel to, to Ukraine, and then, you know, having to, having to backtrack in certain areas um, in, in different conflicts as a result of that.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  When paired with what happened in COVID, which was, hey, we need more PPE and supplies and what have you, and China said, just as soon as we get, you know, ours, we were dependent on China in COVID. And we, it was made crystal clear to Washington that the defense industrial base has been too hollowed out by this currency system whereby we export dollars and, and we export our factories and our workers and China sends us stuff and we send them dollars and they send us, uh, goods and, and, um, I'm sorry, they send us goods, we send them dollars and then they reinvest those dollars in our financial markets. And that's fine. That has been how the world has worked for 50 years. And it's been great for Wall Street, it's been great for Washington, it's been great

• 55:53Speaker 01

  for China, it's not been great for the, the American middle and working class whose factories got offshore to China. And Washington was fine with that until all of a sudden they realized this process has gone so far, we cannot credibly fight a war without Chinese factories. And the Defense Department is saying, and they began saying it 10 years ago, no mas, we're done here. This is, we need to start reshoring as a matter of national security and the, the origin problem is the structure of this dollar system. And so we need to get out of the business of supplying China the dollars to buy up the world. We, and that means we need to change the currency system that's been in place for 50 years. Well, when you say these types of things, the instant response, the correct response

• 56:38Speaker 01

  is, well, okay, if the US isn't going to run deficits, run up debt to supply the dollars to the world, who will? No one else will. The Chinese won't and no one else can. And that is correct. And the answer is, is then you're going to have to settle deficits in something else that is nobody else's debt, nobody else's liability, and that is gold. And I think that's where this is going, which is, and I think it's part of the reason why the US is actually buying gold is to try to Turbo charge this change to this system. When you hear President Trump say, we want to go back to tariffs and cut income taxes. When you hear Marco Rubio in his confirmation hearing, say, within 10 years, we are going to be dependent on China for everything if

• 57:21Speaker 01

  we do not take aggressive actions to change and start to reshore, change this currency system and reshore. When you have Senator Vance say what he said in 2023 to Powell about the dollar increasingly being a resource curse, about which Vance is very familiar, having grown up in West Virginia and Southern Ohio and seeing the deindustrialization. The chapter and verse, this administration understands this problem.

• 57:47Tucker Carlson?

  What, um, what the current Vice President J D Vance said to the Fed Chairman?

• 57:53Speaker 01

  So in 2023, he said that the dollar shows the hallmarks of a resource curse, which is, uh, it's, it's often called Dutch disease. I might, I may refer to his error, which is effectively, if you're Saudi Arabia and you discover that you are the biggest, lowest cost producer of oil, you produce a lot of oil and the rest of your economy shrivels up and does nothing, you know, it withers away and it ultimately becomes a strategic handicap or strategic risk.

• 58:22Tucker Carlson?

  And you get corruption every time.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Exactly. And Vance's point was that the dollar's reserve status, we are the Saudi Arabia of money. That's how the system has worked for 50 years. We produce the world's reserve currency. We're the Saudi Arabia of money. And what has followed is the hollowing out of industries other than those most closely tied to the money printer, to the dollar, Washington, Wall Street. And his point is that it is becoming this resource curse of, of being the Saudi Arabia of money is increasingly not good for the American middle class, the American working class, the U.S. Defense Establishment. He specifically cited our

• 59:04Speaker 01

  inability to, to produce shells for Ukraine in his question to Powell in 2023. And you can find this online. You can Google it. I think it was April or March of 2023.

• 59:14Speaker 01

  And so it showed a fundamental understanding of this connection between the structure of the dollar system over the last 50 years and the situation in which we find ourselves where our defense industrial base is so hollowed out and our debt level so high, we cannot credibly fight a war against our major adversaries without them supplying us and our debt is so high that they can weaponize their debt, our debt against us. And so ultimately, I think the strategic reason why we're starting to see gold re-enter the conversation, why central banks have been buying gold for 10 to 12 years, why

• 59:54Speaker 01

  the US is, gold is, we're likely moving to a system advocated for by the policies of the United States, if not outright saying, hey, we want gold to be, to, to, we want to, we want gold to be a neutral reserve asset, but we can see the policies and they are functionally, they're functionally indistinguishable from saying, we want gold to be the neutral reserve asset. I think what we're going to do is move toward a system where the foreign capital flows, basically, we bring factories that we put tariffs on, we lower income taxes, US consumer spending rises, the dollar, we start to see foreigners send goods here,

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  also pay us tariffs, start to reinvest in our factories instead of just buying our treasury bonds and our financial assets. Employment goes up, building goes up, growth goes up. Ultimately, though, if they're not recycling their dollars into, you know, they can only put so much in factories, they're not putting them in treasury bonds anymore, they haven't for some time, what are they going to put it in if they have a surplus left over from dealing with us, where they can put their surplus dollars, et cetera? I think the answer is gold. And I think that's, I think the flows of gold, the longer we go.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Where the tariff story, you know, it's just tariffs and it just keeps coming and it just keeps coming, which I'm hearing is still to this point continuing to keep coming, gold flowing in, the more likely, in my opinion, when married with the pronouncements from Trump, Rubio, Vance, Stephen Mirren, the Council of Economic Advisers, Besen, the more likely it is that these flows of gold into the US are effectively front-running what will likely be a higher price of gold, driven there by the recycling of global trade, more into gold and less into US financial assets than has been the case over the last 50 years.

• 1:01:53Tucker Carlson?

  It's just, it's just an incredible story. If what you're saying is right, it's incredible. Because really, it's not, it's, it's, it's a move toward the fundamentals, toward the past. It's actually moving backward. What you're saying is the future is like building more factories and buying more gold? Really? I thought, I thought we were moving to a far more abstract, I mean, I'm thrilled by it, let me just say. But it's the opposite of what I think many of us anticipate, which is a world that is increasingly abstract. And you're describing a world that is increasingly concrete.

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  I think-

• 1:02:26Tucker Carlson?

  Or an economy.

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  An economy. And I think, I, I, I think there will still be growth in services and the abstractions and these things. The techni, this doesn't mean technology stops progressing. And when I say factories, I would use the broadest possible definition of factory, right?

• 1:02:43Tucker Carlson?

  We're making things.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  So if you're-

• 1:02:45Tucker Carlson?

  We're making things.

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  They may be robotic factories, but they're making things. Exactly. And that, I think, is where this is going. And again, critically, I think the reason it's going there, and I think the reason these policymakers, again, Trump, Besen, Rubio, Vance, Mir, like, chapter and verse, is it has become clear that the status quo dollar system has become an acute national security threat to the United States on two fronts. We can't make weapons, which we keep hearing, we can't make them fast enough to credibly defend our allies and, and, and, and project power.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  And our debt has gotten so high that that too has become a national security threat. And this sort of checks both boxes of, in terms of this systemic change. It, and it, it makes America great again.

• 1:03:40Tucker Carlson?

  So the people who built this country built it because they wanted freedom. One word, freedom. They wanted freedom from oppressors who forced them to buy overpriced tea, then blockaded them when they tried to dump it into the ocean. How'd that work out? Well, we built America in response. So it's time to throw your big overpriced wireless contract overboard to a new tea party. You don't have to pay a hundred dollars a month just to use a phone. Most people don't use that much in services, but they pay it anyway. Our cell phone company, Pure Talk, says no to those prices. With a qualifying plan, you can choose an iPhone 14 or a Samsung Galaxy for nothing, zero. Get premium service on America's most dependable 5G network. It only takes a minute to switch. We highly recommend it. No hassle, no gimmicks, just honest to goodness wireless priced right.

• 1:04:26Tucker Carlson?

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• 1:04:40Speaker 03

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• 1:05:25Speaker 03

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• 1:05:41Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, it's an amazing story that you're telling. I guess here's the flying the ointment. There's an entire class of people, some of the richest people in our society, some of whom I know, you know, too, who've gotten, you know, rich beyond the dreams of Croesus by really doing nothing and adding nothing, just as parasites on the financial system. You probably would be more generous than I am in describing what they do, but they're useless people who've looted the country, but they're really powerful. They're the biggest donors. And so they're going to stand by and just let their world collapse?

• 1:06:15Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think so. I mean, I don't, you know, it's one of these things where I think, you know, what's Charlie Munger say, "You show me an incentive, I'll show you an outcome," right? It was one of Charlie Munger's famous quotes. And so I don't, I don't see them as, I don't see them as parasites or whatever. I think, I see them as rational people responding to it.

• 1:06:33Tucker Carlson?

  They are, they are. I don't think you can stand back and say, like, you know, I don't know, I don't want to be too mean. I don't want to be too mean, but like, it's, it's harder for the layman, me, to understand sort of the added value, is that the term that they use, of some of these, quote, "industries." It all seems fake. It all seems sort of the product of short-term thinking. It seems very mercenary. It seems disconnected from the national interest. It seems greedy, among other things, and basically disgusting. And it hasn't made the country stronger. It's made it, in fact, weaker. It's described, it's made the country you just described. It's like totally overwhelmed by debt and can't even produce artillery shells, like.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  So then think about it, right? So like, the system we set up, when you're the Saudi Arabia of money, as we've been since 71, you're going to have Dollar Dutch Disease. This is the resource curse Vance talks about in 23. And so you're going to have two sectors grow to the detriment of all other sectors. Federal government. Yep, yep. And finance, insurance, real estate. Right. The fire industry, finance. Now, both of those industries are absolutely, and I'm not calling them parasites, but they are parasitic industries. They make money. Oh, I know. By taking a small cut of everything that comes in. Yeah. And if you just think about this intuitively, biologically, in the natural world,

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  if you have a small parasite on you, you have a small, whatever, gut parasite, it takes a little bit of every meal you eat. Maybe you don't feel 100%, but you're fine. The parasite is great and you're fine. Right. At some point, the parasite gets so big, if it's allowed to get so big, that it's taking too many of your calories, you start to wither and you die ultimately. And that is where we're at. Unfortunately, that's, the symptoms of this are 100,000 people a year dying of drug overdoses. Uh, the inability to make shells, uh, the hollowing out of the defense industrial base. Uh, and these are the things

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  that this fixes. I mean, it's, it's, you know, I, I look at myself, I was fairly smart kid, I was going into architecture, didn't like architecture, I could have done engineering, but I absolutely, 35 years ago, looked at and said, okay, well, I could study really hard. Right. And never go out to the bars and graduate in five years in engineering, or I could get really good grades, a lot less effort, go out to the bars three, four nights a week, and graduate in four years in business and in finance. And I, you know, I made a self, uh, you know, I made a, it's a tragedy of the commons problem, right? I did what was best for me. I've, I've. And my family. Most of my friends made the same choice. I'm not, you know, I, I, people respond to incentives. Of course. Exactly.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And this, but this, this fundamentally changes the incentives. And when you do this neutral reserve asset. So to answer your question. There are a lot of people vested in the. A lot of people vested, yes. Powerful. How are they, I think what we have been watching over the last five years, and I think this is part of the, the, you know, the Trump versus, you know, the, the. No question. The, the, the animosity to him. Manifest in party politics. Oh, yeah, I think absolutely. And I think there has been a.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Sort of the a progression of the US, you know, what was, you know, 1960 to 1980, what's good for GMs, good for America. And then from 1980 to 2020, what's good for Goldman Sachs is good for America. And I think starting, Trump introduced some of these concepts, 16 to 20, but I think COVID and then the war in Ukraine reinforced it. I think we're shifting to a what's good for the US defense industrial base and middle and working class is good for America. And so there's, you know, this, to your point, this old, what's good for Goldman Sachs is good for America, wing of the world, the Robert Rubens and the, you know, the Larry Summers and a lot of

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  these guys you're seeing lament against all the tariffs and all this stuff, they're absolutely fighting. I don't know that it is terrible for their interests if, because what you're talking about, the two most pronounced dynamics are going to be the real value of long-term treasury bonds, long-term dollar bonds will fall relative to industrial assets, production, equities, etc. So these guys may have less political power, but the reality is, is that's just a marking to market. Their worldview has been proven wrong. We can't make shelves. There are 100,000 people dying of drug overdoses every year. You do have a hollowed out defense industrial base. We do have too much debt. Like, those things are no longer debatable. They're all empirically

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  true. They're all empirically shown to be hurting the US. So they can't argue on the merits. So they've got to attack the people trying to implement it. But in the end, I don't think they can win this argument anymore because events have proven them wrong. The system is is going to change because the US military is not going to sit here and go, you know what, guys, you're right. Let's keep that system and we'll just have China make everything for us in five years. And then, you know, when you want us to face down the Russians over in, you know, Georgia or in, you know, Lithuania, you know, we'll ask the Chinese to make weapons for it. Like, that's not going to happen. So if that's not going to happen, and if we're not going to default on our debt,

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Then the only outcome is they're gonna have to restructure this system in this way, which will be good for these people's equity basis, right? There'll be a lot more bank loans. So it's just more, it's not catastrophic, it's just catastrophic to a worldview. But the worldview, like to any objective observer is already dead.

• 1:12:14Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, just to ask a kind of Google question, because I can't control myself, but you know, you'd hate to see manufacturing come back and then discover the only manufacturing is like machines that kill other people. Could you also, because that's totally disgusting. You can't be proud of a country whose only export is bombs. I mean, that's, you know, you can't be proud of that. That's totally immoral. So you need military, you need weapons, but you also want to build things that are beautiful and uplifting and life enhancing also. Could you get that too?

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  I think absolutely. I mean, ultimately, you think about everything we've shifted to, you know, this system has required us offshoring, infrastructure, manufacturing, et cetera. That stuff needs to be rebuilt, right? We're sort of, when you look at the flows of the last 50 years, our infrastructure looks like we lost a war. It's been hollowed out, it's been dilapidated. And so there's decades of open field running of, I mean, I'm an investor in a private equity investment in US electrical infrastructure. It's a boring business. They just make metal bending stuff that goes into transformers.

• 1:13:28Tucker Carlson?

  No, it's not boring at all. It's the future.

• 1:13:30Speaker 01

  It's absolutely the future. And they've got so much demand, they can't hire enough people, they can't, you know, and so there's, once you get the right incentives in place in terms of the monetary system and those flows, the markets will start to work and they'll start to feed on themselves. And then we can get into things, okay, wow, we have enough, you know, we've got enough demand, now we need to build the power plants. Once we build the power plants, then we can build more high-speed rail. We build more high-speed rail.

• 1:13:57Tucker Carlson?

  We need more master electricians, too.

• 1:13:59Speaker 01

  We need more electricians, we need more.

• 1:14:01Tucker Carlson?

  Totally.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  And it can feed on itself. It's not easy. There's a high degree of executional risk, not least of which is because we have dawdled so long, because this other wing of Washington has been so successful in fighting off what has long been obvious to the military and others, we gotta run fast. We gotta run not quite on a Manhattan Project type of timeframe, but we, like, we don't have. You know, we need to be aggressive in doing this. And I think it's part of the reason why we've seen the Trump administration be so aggressive with some of their moves so early on. I mean, it has been fascinating how quickly they've been doing things and moving fast and breaking stuff. And some of the stuff is like, oops, we didn't need to do that. Let's turn. But I think that speed reflects, in my opinion, my read of

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  that speed of action by the Trump administration is a nod towards understanding that this needs to get going fast.

• 1:14:53Tucker Carlson?

  It's so big picture. It's just so impressive. Um, you know, just from a management perspective, like that they're thinking in these terms. And I think we know that they're thinking in these terms.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  Oh, they absolutely are. You can see it in their public pronouncements.

• 1:15:08Tucker Carlson?

  J D Vance specifically, maybe I'm, tell me if you think I'm giving him too much credit, but he seems to have thought about this like holistically, like in a big way. You described that exchange with Jerome Powell. I mean, are you getting indications that Vance has, has a big picture in mind?

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  I think Vance understands it at a level as good as any politician that I've seen in this country in my, in, in, in decades. And I think some of that is, you know, if, if, if viewers haven't watched Hillbilly Elegy or read the book Hillbilly Elegy, he understands it at such an intuitive level because he lived it. He was in Middletown, Ohio. He saw what happened in Middletown, Ohio. He saw what happened to his family. He saw, he saw the hollowing out. I mean, so much so that Larry Summers, one of the people that trying to fight this, was publicly praising Vance and Hillbilly Elegy in 2017. You can

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  find it on X, saying, oh, my gosh, I had no idea this was happening. It said, so I think Vance.

• 1:16:12Tucker Carlson?

  He's such a foolish man, Larry Summers.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a whole different topic.

• 1:16:16Tucker Carlson?

  No, but just like for it's, I mean,

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  As smart as he is, it's, yeah, he's.

• 1:16:19Tucker Carlson?

  As smart as he is, I mean, air quotes, because. I mean, we're consummated by the propaganda about how smart all these different people are. Oh, they're so smart. Really? Are they so smart? How are they? How do they order their own lives? For one thing.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  They're smart and common sense, right?

• 1:16:32Tucker Carlson?

  Like, how's your marriage doing? Like, do your kids respect you? Like, how smart are you actually? What's the, you know, what's the, your output? What have you created that's worth having? Like, smart people, almost by definition, would have sort of successes, right? What's his success? I don't really get it. Gathering, you know, merit badges, whatever. I'm sorry.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Anyway, so, yeah.

• 1:16:49Tucker Carlson?

  The whole leadership class is like that, though.

• 1:16:51Speaker 01

  There's a, there, yeah.

• 1:16:52Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, you're so smart? Really? Show me how.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  And it's, you know, so Vance, I think, really gets at a fight. He lived it. He saw, like, more than anyone in that seat that we've seen in our lifetimes, I would argue, saw and has spoken about,

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  has spoken about the resource curse. And so Vance, you know, the Dollar Dutch Disease, what happened to manufacturing, what happened to families, what happened to the social fabric of the middle and working class across America. And he wrote about it. He's, you know, the movie's about him. And, and in 2023, he specifically linked reserve currency status of the dollar, specifically said it might not be a good thing for the US, specifically said we are getting wildly outproduced by the Russians and Ukraine, and we can't credibly maintain our defense obligations because we don't have the industrial base to do so because of the dollar system and the resource curse. And kind of left it open for Powell to kind of say, hey, you know, you got two minutes to answer.

• 1:17:54Speaker 01

  You know, what do you think? And, and I think he gets it so fundamentally from, we talked earlier about, you know, where you grow up leads and influences your views on investing in the world, et cetera, the timeframe in which you grow up and where you grow up. Think about the timeframe in which he grew up and where he grew up. And, and he's brilliant. And his ability to just synthesize data and understand not just the direct linkages.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  But the second and third derivative implications and the policies that could be taken, the levers that could be pulled to move those second and third derivatives in a way that is beneficial to fix, to really fix the issue and not just, you know, print money and try to paper over it.

• 1:18:42Tucker Carlson?

  Totally right.

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  It's, he's, he's very encouraging, in my opinion.

• 1:18:45Tucker Carlson?

  Kind of shocking. I think a lot of, I mean, you don't want to curse at me, he's the vice president, not the president. So, but on the other hand, I think some people in the last month have looked at some of the things JD Vance has said and written and been sort of stunned by how deep and well expressed they are.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Think about like-

• 1:19:00Tucker Carlson?

  You're not used to that.

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  No. And, and, you know, last weekend's a perfect example. And, and again, I, it goes to that whole, the existing system that's empirically been proven to not be what's right for us. All you heard about last weekend was how he had insulted free speech in the UK and in the EU and, and I thought that was-

• 1:19:21Tucker Carlson?

  Is that what they were saying?

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  Oh, they, oh my goodness. They were, they, they, every-

• 1:19:26Tucker Carlson?

  The monkeys on-

• 1:19:27Speaker 01

  Wilting flower about, oh, liberal free speech and blah. And I think they missed the, they buried the lead. They missed the point.

• 1:19:33Tucker Carlson?

  Well, they're idiots. I mean, they're just liars. Who cares?

• 1:19:35Speaker 01

  He said, Germany, you were the only country that did not follow, and I quote, "The stupid Washington consensus of the seventies, eighties and nineties that deindustrialized all of us." And now you're choosing to deindustrialize? Like, that's-

• 1:19:53Tucker Carlson?

  Well, not just choosing-

• 1:19:54Speaker 01

  Passage alone tells you-

• 1:19:55Tucker Carlson?

  The Biden administration blew up their effing natural gas pipeline. I mean, it deindustrialized the country for them and they're such self-hating cucks that they said not a word about it. They've been trained for eight years to hate themselves and the net result is the total destruction of the heart of Europe, which is Germany. Sorry, it is.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  It's, it's been, it was shocking to me.

• 1:20:12Tucker Carlson?

  How is this good for the world?

• 1:20:13Speaker 01

  It's not.

• 1:20:14Tucker Carlson?

  How is this good for the United States to destroy Europe?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  It makes no sense.

• 1:20:19Tucker Carlson?

  It's vandalism on a scale that most people don't understand and I, anyway, God bless T. D. Vance for saying that. He's absolutely right.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  And he's, and yeah, and that ties back into this whole point of these policymakers are telling, when was the last time you had the Vice President of the United States call the seventies, eighties, nineties, holy grail, this is the dollar system, stupid, the stupid Washington consensus. I don't ever remember hearing that. And if it was a one-off, okay, whatever, but we've heard it, the interactions with Powell, Trump saying, I want to make us like great like we were 1870, 1913, which is tariffs, low income tax, no income tax. Rubio saying, listen, guys, we can't make stuff. In 10 years, we're going to be dependent on China for everything we need. Besen saying in his confirmation hearing, Wall Street's

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  had a great run. Main Street has really suffered. It's Main Street's time. We need to pursue policies that bolster Main Street. Wall Street will still be okay. They'll still do fine, maybe not as well, but it's Main Street's time. We need a Main Street. These policymakers are telling us and it all, in my opinion, goes back to the structure of the system, which is as long as we store global surpluses in our financial markets and in particular treasuries, that system's going to continue. You move to a neutral reserve asset like gold, because now when they store money in gold, price of gold goes up, currencies can move around, we can, it's a natural rebalancing mechanism. The dollar will weaken against other, against the yuan, right? What have we been saying? We want the Chinese to weaken the yuan, weaken the yuan, or excuse me, strengthen the yuan,

• 1:21:51Speaker 01

  strengthen the yuan, strengthen the yuan, strengthen the yuan. If gold goes up in dollars and doesn't go up as much in yuan, by virtual flows into, you know, dollar flows into gold and fewer yuan flows into, into gold, the dollar's going to go down versus the yuan, which is the very thing we've been trying to get the Chinese to do to stop dumping so much product, cheap product here. Gold will take care of it.

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  It just does what it's

• 1:22:19Tucker Carlson?

  Are you advising the new administration?

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:22:23Tucker Carlson?

  I hope you will. The I see only criticism I would have of your critique, which I think is kind of brilliant. And very well explained. Is that I think you may be undervaluing or underrating. The ferocity of the response, I just

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  I don't disagree.

• 1:22:38Tucker Carlson?

  I'm from DC, I'm from DC and I I just think the stakeholders, as we call them, the people who are benefiting from the system in place. Can be really ferocious in protecting that.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  I agree, and one of the things I've. I don't have as much familiarity with that, and so I would admit naivete towards the degree of that to a certain extent. One thing I would say to me.

• 1:22:57Tucker Carlson?

  Just killed like a million people in Ukraine for like no reason. So clearly they don't care about the human cost.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  Well, and it's the from a layman's perspective. I thought a lot of the Trump. Appointments were interesting in and of themselves, but as you know, there's appointments and then there's confirmations. And so I was withholding judgment to see. And I think there is some to me, again, as a as a Washington layman.

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  Encouraging.

• 1:23:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:25Speaker 01

  That he picked Vance, number one, after what Vance said.

• 1:23:27Tucker Carlson?

  Most important, most important thing, I agree.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Um, so, OK, Vance gets it on that policy, but then when you see, when you see. Tulsi, very unpopular in the Beltway, OK, not only she get picked, she gets confirmed. RFK Junior.

• 1:23:42Tucker Carlson?

  I know.

• 1:23:42Speaker 01

  Not only gets picked, but gets confirmed like. Gosh, yesterday, OK, another, so. Point being that you are seeing. You know, Hegseth. Unpopular confirmed, so there's this slate of people. That are non sort of. Deep state, if we will. Get picked. And get confirmed, and so to me, you know, I would, I would defer to your joint, but as a layman to Washington, the fact they got picked. And then that they got confirmed. Is at least encouraging that.

• 1:24:17Speaker 01

  That fight that I think is presents executional risk to this optimistic view of where we could be in two, three, five, 10 years. In my opinion, it's those appointments and what have you have have on some level mitigated, or at least they're victories. They're victories.

• 1:24:35Tucker Carlson?

  They're huge victories. And, you know, we're now 31 days in. I don't know when this is gonna air, but we're a month and a day into the administration and they've won almost everything except Matt Gaetz. And, um, you know, I think it's incredible. I've never seen anything like this. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime in Washington. On the other hand, it was really a victory over the Republican Senate, which is a collection of some of the worst people I've ever met, but also some of the dumbest and weakest. And, um, so it's a, it's a great victory and I love to see them humiliated. And, you know, every day that some of these people weep is a happy day for me. On the other hand, like they're not, you know, some of the stakeholders in the current financial

• 1:25:16Tucker Carlson?

  system are smart and serious and they, you know, they are not people to play with at all. I think they're completely ruthless. I think they are, you know, willing to resort to things. It's hard to even to imagine. And I don't know, I just think there's a fight ahead.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  I think it's, I would defer to your judgment on it, but I intuitively makes perfect sense to me.

• 1:25:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. One last question. Um, where does this leave the, the average person, the retail investor, whatever we're calling that person now on the question of gold? Like, you know, I mean, if governments love gold, if gold plays a really essential part of the global financial system, which you've described, I think in great detail, is it wise for the average person to take delivery on gold and bury it in his yard?

• 1:25:59Speaker 01

  Yes. I think, I think the average investor should have probably five to 10% of their net worth in gold bullion coins. Um, it's fascinating throughout. I've been in the investment research business for 30 years and one of the, it's offensive on some level, but it's, it's, it's, it's an old saw because it's true. It's once you start to see retail investing, retail investors plowing into something en masse.

• 1:26:22Tucker Carlson?

  Right. Run away.

• 1:26:23Speaker 01

  And a lot of times the banks too, by the way, the commercial banks.

• 1:26:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Run away. And, you know, we saw that with, you know, dot com stuff in the late 90s.

• 1:26:31Tucker Carlson?

  EToys, Pets.com, Redfin.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  You remember them. I remember them well, right? And then it was, you know, sand state, real estate, subprime mortgages and those kinds of things. And In the last three to four years, the biggest marginal buyer of long-term US Treasury bonds has been, da, da, da, US retail. They've been investment funds, right? So, the biggest buyers of two, three, five, seven, 10, 20, and 30-year US Treasury bonds, they've been buying anywhere from 60 to 70% of new issuance for the last three to four, five years. And that's, I'm not saying there's any risk to Treasury bonds on a nominal basis, there isn't. However-

• 1:27:14Tucker Carlson?

  No, it sounds totally safe.

• 1:27:16Speaker 01

  You're gonna get every dime you're promised, but we can't guarantee you what that, those, those dollars will buy you in the real world.

• 1:27:24Tucker Carlson?

  What those dimes will be worth, right.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  That's why, you know, when you've got this dichotomy where for 40 years, you know, from 1974 to 2014, global central banks were buying Treasury bonds, and they were selling gold.

• 1:27:37Tucker Carlson?

  Why would you ever buy a bond from, from the same person who can print the currency? I just don't understand that. I mean-

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  If you believe the inflation numbers, and that, like, look, there are-

• 1:27:47Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, it's, it's kind of like a rigged system, right? Like, the government is issuing the debt, which is held in a specific currency, but that same government prints that currency.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's why they're, they're so hyper-focused on the Fed managing inflation. Oh, I know, it's, it's-

• 1:28:03Tucker Carlson?

  It doesn't make any sense, it's like, kind of a rigged game.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:28:06Tucker Carlson?

  My ignorance protects me from bad investments, because like, if it doesn't make sense, I'm not, not that I invest, but like, you know what I mean?

• 1:28:12Speaker 01

  No, and intuition is, is to be trusted.

• 1:28:14Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that just, like, that just doesn't make any sense.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  That, that was ultimately why I first got an interest in gold.

• 1:28:19Tucker Carlson?

  Because, well, the key question is not, do you get paid back what they owe you? The key question is what you just said, which is, what is the value of what they pay you back? You may get every dime back, but maybe those dimes aren't worth anything.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Well, and that's-

• 1:28:31Tucker Carlson?

  And they determine what the dimes are worth, so it's a rigged deal!

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  And it's, that's why I first got involved in gold. I never owned gold before 2000, late 2008 or early 2009, when they've, when the US, you know, depths of the great financial crisis came out and they said, "Okay, now we're gonna print a trillion dollars and we're gonna buy Treasury bonds, QE." And I remember thinking to myself, going- How can an oil producer like Russia or our factory base like China, look at that and say, so I'm gonna expend all this energy to pump this oil and produce it and refine it and ship it and send it and pay you for dollars and then put that those dollars into treasury bonds? And you're just gonna click a couple of keys on a computer and buy a trillion dollars of treasury? Why would I sell my oil and store my surpluses in treasuries?

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  That was what first, and sure enough, guess what happened later in 2008? Or in into 2009, 2010? Russia started buying gold in their reserves.

• 1:29:27Tucker Carlson?

  Of course.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  The Chinese, same thing. How could you sell all this stuff to the United States?

• 1:29:32Tucker Carlson?

  Like actual stuff?

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  Store them in treasury, yeah. And, and store it in treasury bonds and then have the Americans print it? And sure enough, Chinese gold purchase started ramping. So for me, when you, when you go back to what does it mean for US retail? It's the same type of dynamic. The United States government owes its baby boomers right now, it's, United States takes $5 trillion a year in tax receipts and right now we're paying baby boomers and entitlements $3.3 trillion of that. So about 70, almost 70% of receipts are going to boomers entitlements.

• 1:29:59Tucker Carlson?

  Has there ever been a generation that deserves it less?

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  That's a funny question.

• 1:30:04Tucker Carlson?

  I'm serious. Does there ever been a generation? Has there ever been a more destructive generation, a more self-involved generation? A more annoying generation? If I could just say.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  I just, I take, you know, as a Gen Xer, and I take it again, it's, it's, I try to put myself in their shoes and it's, it's, look, if I was born when they were born and their parents came home from World War II and basically had, you know, 16 kids and like, let them to go be free range chickens and they, they just sort of.

• 1:30:28Tucker Carlson?

  I love all that.

• 1:30:29Speaker 01

  They were, they were general, they were, they were a product of the environment and the time they lived.

• 1:30:34Tucker Carlson?

  But they never stopped talking about themselves. That's, I, I love huge families, I love prosperity, I like peace and freedom, I like all that stuff. What I don't like is self-involvement. And. Those people never stopped telling their own story. The stupid Vietnam wars, every cliche about Woodstock and the dumb civil rights movement, which actually didn't really help anybody. And everything about it was just like, it was just, they were drowning in Lake Me. And I was raised around people like that. And they were my teachers. And I, every single one of my teachers went to Woodstock. Every single one of my teachers was at some sit-in at some lunch counter in Greensboro. So it's like, they all were participating in these same mass market cliches, which they thought were like a sign of, you know, unique individualism or something. But they were all like a herd.

• 1:31:19Tucker Carlson?

  They were like dumb and narcissistic and mediocre. Did you not notice that?

• 1:31:24Speaker 01

  I would agree with the narcissism. As a generation, yeah, I would agree with that.

• 1:31:30Tucker Carlson?

  Talking about Selma all the time. And I would be like, how is Selma? Have you been to Selma? Like, it's an actual place with actual people. Like, are they thriving? You know, all these people are like, you know, just lecturing you about how great they were because they were at Selma. And I was, I was wanting to go. And then I wound up in Selma. You ever been to Selma?

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  I've never been to Selma.

• 1:31:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, you should go to Selma. And then you can tell them to like, shut up, actually. Because like, the sum total of your efforts was, you know, like poverty, despair and chaos. Like, you didn't actually achieve anything. So be quiet. Sorry, you can feel my resentment.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's, it's, so with, so think about that, right? So if you're getting 3.3 trillion in receipts.

• 1:32:08Tucker Carlson?

  You're so rational and nice and I'm like such a lunatic. So, excuse me, excuse me.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  But how do you get them to pay more for their own care? Well, simple, you get them into treasury bonds. And then you tell them inflation's four, you give them a 4.4% on the treasury bond, and you actually let inflation run six, eight, nine.

• 1:32:27Tucker Carlson?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  And that's why you need to also, as an investor, whether you're a boomer, whether you're not a boomer or younger, you need to own some gold. Because over time... You'll lose on your bonds, but your gold will more than compensate you for that inflation. You maintain your purchasing power and I think your stocks will in certain, you know, if broadly diversified, but that gold is ultimately the release valve that that is happening, that that and it needs to happen. But basically, we're not going to be able to have an election where and say, hey boomers, we need you to pay more for your care. Then no politician will be in office after trying to do that if they raise taxes on boomers to do that.

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  So what do they do? Because they can't do that. They take sort of a politically uncourageous way out, which is you inflate. You have to inflate and that's what they're doing, what they have been doing, what they're going to continue to keep doing, in my opinion. And that's why I think you want to own, I think retail investors need to own 5%, 10% of their of their assets in gold bullion.

• 1:33:28Tucker Carlson?

  So it's at what? I didn't check the spot price this morning, but 2950 ish.

• 1:33:33Speaker 01

  Ish.

• 1:33:34Tucker Carlson?

  Where do you think it goes in the next? I know you hate questions like this, but like, I mean, I can't resist. Final question, where, you know, where could gold go?

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  So is it something in our business? I say, if you give a price, never give a time.

• 1:33:49Tucker Carlson?

  Right now, of course. I'm sorry. I know.

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  It's okay. It's okay. No, I do it to be self-aware and parody myself on some level. But in all seriousness, over time, one of the metrics I have looked at when we're talking about a restructuring of a system, we talk about the debt levels being a problem, all these things. I have a metric that looks at the market value of US official gold, right? So let's, let's pretend it's all there. We had that discussion already. Let's pretend it's all there or it's being brought back here, maybe as we speak, but it's all there. There's a metric that I follow that is the US official gold as a percentage of the foreign held portion of the US federal debt, right? So it's what percentage at market price, what percentage is the United States official gold collateralizing our foreign held debt?

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Because in the end, we can cram down our own people, but we have to, we have to

• 1:34:40Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Maintain foreign.

• 1:34:41Tucker Carlson?

  Creditors, yeah.

• 1:34:42Speaker 01

  So long-term, the average going back to, I think, 1960 or 1950, that number was 40%. US official gold at market price collateralized our debt by on average 40%. As recently as 1989, that number was 20%. In the, in the dollar crisis of 7980, that number was 135%. That was a true gold bubble. In other words, if our foreign creditors would have been so inclined, we did it. They could have demanded gold for treasuries and we still would have had a third of our gold left over. Okay. Where is that number today? That number today with gold having risen 40% in the last year is at 9%.

• 1:35:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, that's bad.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  So gold, in my opinion, would minimum over time, probably has to rise at least 2X and probably more like 4X just to get back to historical levels, assuming no further growth in the debt and assuming no ever again, and assuming no, um, no dollar crisis that leads it to go over 40%. Uh, and so I, it's still paradoxically one of the cheapest assets on the board when you look at it relative to the debt outstanding and the way this probably needs to be resolved from a debt perspective and an economic restructuring perspective.

• 1:35:56Tucker Carlson?

  China clearly thinks so.

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:35:57Tucker Carlson?

  If people found what you said compelling and smart and really insightful, my views, where do they read more of your insights?

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Uh, we have institutional and mass market products at FTT LLC.com.

• 1:36:13Tucker Carlson?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:36:15Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you.

• 1:36:20Tucker Carlson?

  We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day. We know the people who run it, good people. While you're here, do us a favor, hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode. We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter, telling the truth always. You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell. We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.