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- [00:07]
A
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.
- [00:11]
B
If you talk about a Fed just.
- [00:12]
A
Gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven.
- [00:19]
B
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
- [00:29]
A
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
- [00:32]
B
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably, should be. Probably should be. Scott, welcome back to the show. I reached out to you last week as silver prices were going continue to go parabolic, continuing the run that they had in 2025, as it stands right now as a recording on Tuesday afternoon, January 20, Silver sitting at $94, which is pretty astonishing if you ask me, especially considering where the price was last year. What is the silver market telling us right now?
- [01:12]
A
Thanks for having me, Marty. It's good to be here, man. It's good to catch up. So let's talk about silver. Yeah. So we have sort of the big long playing out in the silver market. You have a underlying asset which is not freely available to be borrowed and loaned anymore as the supply has become extremely tight. You have industrial uses that are outpacing our mining supply. So we're in a structural deficit and large companies that need silver are hoarding it. So you have this crazy scenario with a tremendous derivatives complex built on top of a metal that is not freely available to be borrowed, shorted and loaned. And that leads to a tremendous squeeze in the underlying complex. And I think that's what we're witnessing. The question is, where does it go? Silver's so interesting because the industrial uses are so great. So whether we're talking about solar or we're talking about electronics, or we're talking about batteries, but the amount of silver that goes into any one particular product isn't that great. So that means the industrial buyers are really price insensitive because they need the metal. So we have this crazy scenario built up where the derivatives traders have made huge bets on the price of silver. We know that the listed markets are gigantic, but the over the counter markets are where all the action is. And we have no visibility into just how much silver is shorted over the counter. But, you know, seen rumors out there of 5 billion ounces. Could it be true? Maybe. I would not be surprised. Right. The arrogance and the hubris of derivatives traders can be their unwinding and their undoing. So we'll see where this goes. But at some point, you know, what's, what's so interesting to me is we've gone from essentially, let's say high 20s to 95, and not a single body has floated to the surface just yet. But we know at some point the body will float to the surface. We're going to find out where the damage is and that's where things are going to get crazy.
- [03:32]
B
I think that's the big question on, on everybody's mind and I guess to dive into a few of the things you mentioned there. First, from your perspective, how much of this price squeeze is being driven by just industrial demand? As the price goes up, the companies implementing silver into their products at an industrial scale realize, hey, we need to get more. If the price keeps running, it's going to be more expensive. How much of it is driven by that? How much is driven by a flight to precious metals because of geopolitical and fiscal uncertainty rising around the world? And then how much would you contribute to derivatives traders getting caught off sides and just letting the price actually find true discovery because those trades are being unwound.
- [04:29]
A
Wow, that's a great question. Let's say there's a fourth one in there and it goes into the geopolitical risk. But I think that there's a hot war developing. The hot war, kinetic war, not being with missiles and bombs, but being with economics. So the question is, is China squeezing the US or is the US squeezing China? And then who gets caught in the crossfire? Certainly Europe would seem likely as a potential victim of, of the fight.
- [05:06]
B
But.
- [05:06]
A
I suspect that China's move to cut exports of silver was a shot over the bow of the U.S. the U.S. will react, potentially taking countries like Venezuela that have large silver supplies and supply China with ore. We're in U.N. i mean, I'm almost speechless to try to describe how dangerous this moment is in time, but we're going to have to kind of work our way through. The derivatives guys are going to be the bodies, right? They're going to be the guys that get just absolutely demolished. And, you know, I'm curious, with everything that's going on, excuse me, with Greenland, what does that have to do with silver? And I think there's more there than probably meets the eye. I think that the US is in one way or another happy to see strife between the European continent and the us they'd like to undo the leadership in Europe, which is controlled by central banking. Remember the Fed, the ecb, the bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank. They're all essentially one entity through the bank of International Settlements. And Europe is so heavily controlled by the ecb. It's hard for me to divorce what's going on in silver from what's going on in central banking. And I think the Trump administration would like to really put the Fed behind the eight ball and in doing so, they really have to go after the City of London and the ECB and all of those entities. All of this stuff has to be tied together. Putting the puzzle together seems extremely difficult at this moment, but for me, I think they're all tied together. Yeah.
- [07:11]
B
To your point about Greenland and Europe being in the crosshairs and probably going to be the sort of benefactor, for lack of a better term, or the benefactor of the bad economic implications of whatever's happening right now. I'm sure you've seen clips coming out of Davos, the World Economic Forums going on right now. And I tweeted less than an hour ago there was Mark Carney was giving a speech and to me he's the epitome of globalist Davos rot with what he did at hsbc, the bank of England. Now as the Prime Minister of Canada, I think he's one of the globalist generals that has been trotted around and he's been stationed at different parts of the world to achieve certain things. And he was on stage today basically squirming and trying to get a point across to what Donald Trump and the United States are doing from an economic and geopolitical policy perspective is unsustainable. And the fact that he was scared, squirming and lashing out as aggressively as he was on stage, there was a signal to me like, oh, they do feel the pressure. And I guess something that the Trump administration is doing is making them squirm, which if you ask me is a good thing because I don't think we can continue down the path of the rules based international order really controlled by central banks that you mentioned earlier.
- [08:42]
A
Yeah, agreed. And to that, to that point you had Besant come out just recently, just today and say Europe has no ammo in their gun and they present no risk on an economic front. So, yeah, wow. We could talk about Japan, we could talk about Europe. It would seem to me that, and here's my best guess, my best guess is that it's a large European bank that's offsides in silver in a major way. Let's just take UBS as my prime suspect. And this move in silver is coordinated to go after the European banking system. That would be My best guess as to what we're seeing. I imagine JP Morgan got themselves in a good position. Who knows about Bank America and Citigroup? I would assume that they're okay, but that's a major assumption. But again, it comes back to the fundamentals of a market like silver requires. I keep repeating this because it does transition into a bitcoin story, but a market like silver requires that you can borrow, loan and short the underlying asset. And we're seeing lease rates in silver explode, which means you can't borrow it. It's getting really, really tight. And that means that whoever's short silver is pretty much dead. Right. There's no way out of this conundrum. Wouldn't it be amazing to watch a European bank go down and UBS, they're already sitting on their GameStop problem through their Credit Suisse acquisition. Really? Possibly. Silver could be the nail in the coffin over there. That brings us to the next question, which is if it is ubs, how. How does UBS get backstopped by Switzerland? I mean, there's only so many Patek Philippes and chocolates and wood shoes that they can sell to backstop ubs. Right. So who backstops ubs? I don't know. I mean, it's could, you know, I don't know how that would play out, but you got to believe that all of these things that are happening are sort of interconnected and tied together.
- [11:25]
B
And I was doing research on the Credit Suisse acquisition to refresh my memory, because that happened in 2023. They basically acquired them in a fire sale for $3.25 billion. But you mentioned the GameStop. I think just to re educate people about what UBS actually acquired. Credit Suisse had some terribly offside bond exposure, I believe, when they were acquired by ubs. And that was a big question after they were acquired, like how much can they paper over and band aid over that terrible toxic debt problem that they acquired from Credit Suisse. If I recall correctly, almost three years ago when it was going on, people said this is just a ticking time bomb. It's going to sit on this balance sheet for a few years.
- [12:16]
A
Yeah. And to add to their bond woes, there was the GameStop story. Archegos was primed at Credit Suisse. So again, all of this paper stuff is so fake and yet silver is so real. Silver's a real asset and you can measure it. People can demand delivery of it. It's so much different than paper problems that can be covered up or papered over, as you said. You cannot paper over physical silver. Now you can paper over the losses. You can print money and fill in those holes. The Monopoly banker never goes under, he just prints more paper, but you can't print more silver. And that's where things can get really crazy.
- [13:15]
B
Well, I think they especially get crazy when people start demanding the physical. And so can you speak to the sort of development of that trend which I think we're seeing, what would be a classical vault run on the physical as people begin to question.
- [13:33]
A
Right. So if you're Samsung, if you're Samsung or you're a large solar company, or your Tesla or your Nvidia, you need silver, right? Without silver you stop your production lines. So they're going to go out and they're going to get the silver. If they become afraid that they can't get it at the comex as they are becoming. We know that Tesla's been know traveling around Peru talking to silver mines, trying to buy silver directly from the mines. That story's been out there for quite a while. So the problem in the silver market is that these large industrial users, consumers are going to go out and they're going to acquire the silver by whatever means necessary and they're not going to be price sensitive. They need the silver. At the same time, the producers, the mines, the smelters, the refiners, they're in a different position because if they've used the futures markets to hedge their positions. Well, what happens if, let's just give an example, you're a silver refiner and you buy $50 million worth of silver, you go out, it's going to take you a month to produce the actual silver from the ore. So you go out and you hedge and now your hedge goes up 50% and you get margin called on your hedge. So now you're forced into a position where you almost have to take your hedge off because you don't have the capital to protect your hedge. So the people using the paper markets are appropriately the consumers and the producers, they can get squeezed tremendously. The producers can get squeezed because they get margin called on their short positions. The consumers can get squeezed because they run in fear that the COMEX is not going to be able to give them the metal and they're going to get a force majeure scenario where they get cash back instead of the metal because the metal is not available. So you have both sides of the equation are in a really, really tough spot. And if you're a producer, you probably don't want to be hedged, right? Now, because who knows whether you have the capital to withstand silver running to 200 or 300, you might get margin called out and be bankrupted. Same thing happens to the miners. What if the miners are hedged? So the story here goes beyond just the end uses. It's the entire supply chain that you can run into trouble by a price dislocating and going crazy. Because remember, when they sell forward contracts, they have to produce margin.
- [16:37]
B
Yeah. For the forward contracts. For anybody listening, somebody will basically give them cash up front for delivery of physical at some point in the future.
- [16:46]
A
In many cases they'll go into the comex. The COMEX has been the sort of hub of silver, the lbma and they'll sell futures contracts. Well, as the COMEX continues to raise margin requirements and the price goes higher, well, they have to continue to put up capital to cover their short position. At some point they just don't have the money and no bank's going to make them a loan to cover their margin requirements. When volatility is like it is. Right. So now you end up in a real tough spot if you're just a silver miner who's been hedging appropriately, trying to do the best by your shareholders.
- [17:24]
B
Yeah, it's insane. And I think that gets to the big question on everybody's mind is how high can this run? I've seen some people commenting on the silver chart and looking like, hey, this is a blow off top, it's going to end soon. I've seen people respond to that. You're looking at it at the wrong scale. Put it on log. What do you think could happen here? Do you think this could be a blow off top where we're going to correct dramatically and we'll go back to what silver was before or something similar to whatever it was 2011, 2012? Or is this time different?
- [17:57]
A
No, I think it's different. I think you're seeing a structural repricing. So imagine you're sitting on land in Texas at $500 an acre and then all of a sudden somebody figures out there's oil under that land and the next day that land becomes worth $10,000 an acre. Right. And you see a structural repricing in the price of that land. I think that's what we're seeing in the silver market.
- [18:25]
B
What does a structural repricing look like?
- [18:29]
A
Well, we don't know. Again, a lot of this depends on what happens in the derivatives complex. Do we get to a force majeure? How tight is the supply? Do governments begin to hoard in the, in the recent military bill that was just passed, two and a half billion dollars was allocated for purchasing strategically important metals resources. Silver was on the top of that list. So if the US Government starts hoarding silver and the Chinese government's hoarding silver, we're talking, you know, these are. The number becomes sort of irrelevant at the point when you have a printing press and you're trying to buy the metal. So how high could we go? We could go really, really high. Much higher than anybody expects. Yeah.
- [19:22]
B
This ties into. To your point. I can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes right now. People trying to plug holes in balance sheets and basically bail out behind the scene without announcing it. We just went over $95 again. But then something we alluded to earlier, then you have other things going on in the market, like the Japanese yield curve blowing out at the same time as all this is going on. And it makes you wonder is how much can they actually, how much can they help this situation? Can they actually pluck the holes? If all this is happening at once and if you're an institutional fund with exposure to all these different markets, how much is too much all at once?
- [20:11]
A
Yeah. And the question is, how big are the unrealized losses? Right. At some point they're going to come to the surface. We're going to find out who's in trouble, and I suspect we're going to find out fairly soon. Blowing out yield curves and seeing, you know, long bonds take off, well, somebody owns those bonds and they're sitting on substantial losses. Now in the case of Japan, it's probably less of a problem because they own 50% of their bond market. But in the case of the US it becomes a real problem as capital gets repatriated from Japanese, investors start bringing their money back and buying those bonds. That's the real risk here. The risk is to our bond market at the same time. Now, the Europeans, they plan on going to war with the United States, which you're watching pictures of troops landing in Greenland, the Danes threatening to sell their government bonds, and it's just chaos, right? It feels like Operation Chaos.
- [21:11]
B
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- [24:09]
A
I think that's the correct take. Right. Look, as guys who've studied markets for forever, feels like forever, we become experts in pattern recognition. So we're trying to look at these patterns, and we're trying to look for previous patterns that look like this and things that we can learn from history. But I don't remember in my lifetime seeing patterns quite like this one. Right. So it feels like something tectonic is happening below the surface, and we just don't know because we're not privy to those discussions. But it does. You know, I don't think we can ignore the Ukraine war. I think that's playing a major role in what's going on here. I think Trump wants that over, and Europe wants nothing more than to continue fighting for whatever reason. And we don't understand that. You've got the sort of crazy immigration story in Europe and here in the United States that seems to be bubbling over. We haven't even discussed what's going on in Minnesota. That's tremendously destabilizing. So, man, at every level right now, there's so many things happening that it's hard to follow the ball. I'm looking at bitcoin's price. I find that interesting because I think that bitcoin's the true measure of global liquidity. And I think liquidity is stressed right now. So at some point, somebody's going to break, and we'll see where that breaks. My guess is Europe.
- [25:46]
B
Yeah. Yeah, it is. Watching bitcoin fell below 90k. And then you bring it home domestically. You look at Trump versus Powell and this sort of saber rattling that exists between those two, with President Trump adamant about getting rates down as quickly as possible. And then you have. This is another thing. Never had this in terms of a pattern emerge throughout one of these crises where you have Jerome Powell on a Sunday night release a. A video that looks like a hostage video.
- [26:17]
A
Hostage video, for sure.
- [26:19]
B
Opining on the inappropriateness of the politicization of the Federal Reserve and reassuring the markets that independence is key for the Fed and that the federal government should stop playing political games by filing a lawsuit against them for their work on the Federal Reserve.
- [26:42]
A
Meanwhile, the Fed, who cut interest rates About a month before the election in September, 50 basis points unsuspected to try to help, Kamala Harris is now pleading, hey, we're not political. They're the most political body on earth. And again, it's not just the Fed, right? It's the Fed, it's the ecb, it's the bank of Japan, it's all of these entities and we have to look at them as one. And that's why what's happening in Japan and what's happening in Europe is all about what's happening at the Fed and what's happening at the bank of International Settlements. They must be in an outright panic right now. I just don't. Again, as guys who rely on pattern recognition, when we go outside of the patterns, we don't really know what to do. We just kind of look back and go, wow, this is interesting, and try to draw conclusions. But sometimes the best thing to do is say, I don't know. That's how you keep yourself out of trouble.
- [27:41]
B
Yeah, I'm a big believer in that. Admitting when you don't know, especially when you know, you don't know. And I think that's the case here. I don't know exactly what's going on. But I will say, I mean, you brought up Minnesota and it feels like there is a degree of stress in the air, particularly in the financial sector and people in the finance sector looking at gold and silver run and now the Japanese government bond yield blowing out. And I don't think anybody's running around with their hair on fire quite yet. But like we've been alluding to behind the scenes are probably very stressed out and it seems like the markets are calling bullshit on the scam of the Fiats and the sovereign debt system as it exists today. And I think a lot of people get worried, like, we can't have the financial system meltdown. We need everything to be bailed out. Government central banks need to step in. But then you look at something like the Minnesota fraud, the fraud that was unearthed in California. Now there's just been a bunch of copycats following in Nick Shirley's steps and unearthing fraud that exists across the country. Not only Minnesota, but in states across the country. I think it's pretty confident in saying that the fraud that was unearthed in Minnesota, we can just assume that exists in every single state to some degree. And when you aggregate the amount of money that is simply being pilfered away from us taxpayers and printed in debt and pointed towards overt fraud, the whole system's Completely fraudulent. And point I bring this up, reason I bring this up is because, okay, if we're calling bullshit and there's going to be some financial turmoil, it's probably a good thing. At the end of the day, let's just get all this fraud, waste and abuse out of the way, reset the system and get back to a sound money standard where the governments and central banks don't have the ability to pilfer taxpayer money and debt taken out in the name of taxpayers, to simply hand it to people who are just, essentially just stealing it for their own good, whether they're buying new cars in new homes or taking that CA cash and sending it to a foreign country to fund terrorism.
- [29:57]
A
Yeah. Worse yet, right? And Elon Musk went on Joe Rogan, I don't know if you caught it, but he said 50% of the government budget is fraud. 50%, that's what, $7 trillion, that's three and a half trillion in fraud. And then you have other talking heads coming up and saying, well, we got to get back to a little bit of fraud. And I think a little bit of fraud is like telling a drug addict to smoke a little bit of crack, Right? It doesn't work. We are a nation of laws, right? That's been what made America so investable. And the fraud story is an investment story. In the end, are you going to invest in a company that has 20% of their budget is fraud? No, of course not. So why are you going to invest in a country where 50% of their budget is fraud? And let's just take Elon at his word. I think he knows because he was in there with Doge. I think he got a look under the hood and said, oh, my goodness, what in the world is going on here? I really do think that it's crazy.
- [31:03]
B
And the whole meme of fiscal dominance that's really taken hold of the markets and become basically. There's a rote description of the environment we're living in. It's like, oh, we're shifting from monetary policy dominance to fiscal dominance. And that meme has been growing for the last two years. It makes sense. The government is issuing all this debt to basically figure out what they're doing with their yield curve. And it's like, okay, we're living in a system of fiscal dominance as dictated by the treasury and the federal government spending our money. And to your point, we're finding out that 50%, almost, almost $4 trillion of that fiscal dominance is overt fraud. And I would not be surprised if that 50% estimation by Elon is even low. It's probably much higher, especially when you factor in the military budget. To think that there's not waste, fraud and abuse happening within the black box of the military budget, which hasn't passed an audit in over a decade, it would be extremely naive. And so we literally live in a fraudulent system here in the United States. The rule of law is not being respected. It's pure anarcho tyranny. And that's the thing, I think, getting the message out to the American people and helping them realize, well, I do think Trump and his administration are doing a lot of good things. I think it's important to highlight that this fraud, waste and abuse is bipartisan, is happening across both sides of the aisle. We're in the loot, the treasury stage of late stage empire.
- [32:41]
A
Yeah. And I think that's right. Elon made that point that this is impossible to clean up because it's both sides. Look, when you talk about late stage, you know, I've been in the crack up boom category for quite some time now. And I think what we are witnessing is the early to middle stages of a crack up boom. At which point, look, there's two ways to get to a depression. You get there through a deflationary spiral. That's what everyone kind of thinks of when they think of a depression. But you also get there through an inflationary, hyperinflationary environment. And that's the risk here. The risk here is that we can't allow our interest rates to go to a point that they make sense because that would kill the economy and the deficit would get worse and the printing would get worse. So we're really stuck. We're in a box. The government's going to have to step in and do some form of yield curve control or our rates will go to north of 10%. At what rate would you loan the US government money for 30 years? I mean, for me that number would be north of 20%, easily given. Yeah. So given that that number is, is looking at 5% right now, and we know above 5%, you're going to have real problems, especially in the 10 year with, with housing, with the auto loans, the entire economy would come grinding to a halt. So we're stuck. And the only, the only way out is to print more money. Right. Larry LEPARD'S GOT IT 100%. Right. The big print is coming. It's coming in the form of yield curve control. But it all leads to a crack up boom. I mean, eventually the dollar becomes worthless.
- [34:30]
B
How quickly do we. Do we get to the government intervention? Do the bodies need to show themselves and float to the surface?
- [34:39]
A
Yeah, I think so, but I think that's happening in 2026, right? I don't think we're making it much longer. And look, I think when we step back and look at everything that's happening here, we can't discount that this is about the midterms. This is about defanging Donald Trump and dethroning him. And I think, look, 2026 has the potential to get absolutely wild. I think the powers that be, the.
- [35:12]
B
Federal Reserve potential, it's been a hot start.
- [35:15]
A
Yeah, we're off to a great start. But the powers that be in the monetary kind of universe, they would like nothing more than to crash the economy and see Donald Trump removed in shame. And that's a real scary proposition when you have the Federal Reserve, the European banks, the whole financial world wanting to crash the system simply to remove an American president and to defang him. That has a lot of potential to go sideways quickly.
- [35:48]
B
Yeah, I mean that it's. Having had multiple conversations with geopolitical and macro analysts over the last couple months, particularly leading up to the end of 2025, beginning of this year, a lot of what do we have to look forward to? Or what are you expecting to happen in 2026? And I was, I don't want to say dismayed, but it was a bit shocked to hear multiple people respond almost immediately, civil war, and like, number one on the list headed into 2026. And to your point about the year starting hot, I mean, you look at what's happening in Minnesota, you see all these ice protests and then obviously the saber rattling from a geopolitical perspective, with what we did in Venezuela, what's happening around Greenland right now, and the sort.
- [36:38]
A
Of.
- [36:41]
B
Battle of words that's playing out in Davos right now, it seems like the rhetoric is getting hotter and hotter by the day. And to your point, a conflict being forced on the public to push the economy or the political will of the country in one direction or another seems very obvious at this point.
- [37:06]
A
It does. And I would argue what we're seeing in Minnesota is a civil war. It's just only one side's fighting right now. And if the other side starts to fight, that presents a real problem, and that's not good for any of us. The civil war is the worst possible outcome. So I'm hopeful that somehow they step in. But again, when you look at the sort of the landscape that we're in, Right now it's hard to be optimistic, I'll tell you that much.
- [37:36]
B
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- [39:35]
A
Yeah, look, the bitcoin story is a story of self banking. So a banking crisis will be a boon to bitcoin. That's clear to me. In any type of financial stress, bitcoin is the off ramp from their financial rails. And you know, it's interesting, we sort of default to this position of a bailout and the one thing no one's talking about is a bail in. So I'm going to be a contrarian here and say I've got my eyes on the potential for bail ins. Imagine that scenario where you wake up on a Monday morning and everything you have in the bank over a certain number, let's just say $100,000 a seized, that's, you know, I know that's sort of a low probability take, but I'm not sure that there's the ability to take, to conduct another bailout without inflating away everything. So it's interesting to me that nobody is discussing the potential for a bail in. And yeah, I've got my eyes keenly focused on potential. But look, either way, in any type of banking crisis, bitcoin's the only off ramp. You're not going to be able to take delivery of gold or silver. So what are you going to buy to get out of their system as their system runs into trouble? You're going to buy bitcoin, you're going to buy bitcoin, you're going to yank it off the exchange in under an hour. That's your off ramp. And the largest institutions in the world already have the money sitting in the Caymans outside the US where they could ship it over to Dubai or Singapore and get into bitcoin in size. Right. Like where else if you have a billion dollars, where in the world are you going to put it in 0809, this didn't exist. You and I have discussed this previously. Right. Bitcoin is this crazy off ramp that enables you to get outside of their financial rails.
- [41:40]
B
Yeah. It seems like with the price action in recent months, obviously 20, 25 and now into this year, obviously we had a little pump to start the year, but we're falling back towards where we ended the year. But it does seem like there's almost a lulling complacency entering the bitcoin market where people are becoming more convinced like, oh, gold and silver were the horses we should have been on. And bitcoin doesn't seem like it's stepping up to the plate in terms of acting as this neutral reserve asset for the digital age that people fall back to when things get chaotic. And I would posit to those people, just zoom out three years, look at where Bitcoin was. It did an 8x between November 22nd and October of last year. And maybe it's cooling off a bit. But to your point, like, where are you going to go? Are you going to buy, especially if you're a large institution, buy billions of dollars of gold, have it physically delivered and sit in a vault, which in recent years, gold sitting in vaults has been susceptible to confiscations, particularly Venezuela and Russia, I believe. And that's what I wear for particularly bitcoin retail investors. They get lulled into the state of complacency where they convince themselves that the bitcoin story is over. And then at some point you have something like a bail in, which I'd be interested to get your thoughts on how they would justify a bail in. But I think that would be a massively triggering event for flows into bitcoin as well.
- [43:16]
A
Yeah, of course. Right. But either way, right, bail in, bailout, you get to the same place. Arguably the bail in is tremendously deflationary, the bailout is tremendously inflationary. But like I said earlier, they both end, both scenarios go to both roads go to the same place in the end. So the question is, with 90% of our populace really kind of struggling right now to make ends meet, is a bailout and massive money printing and another huge round of inflation, is it even tolerable? Add to that we have the AI story on top of everything. You know, like, we're going down a rough road, man. It just seems like a really, really rough road. The bail in, remember bail in was done in Cyprus. The trial run has been completed. They know what, they know how to do it. They know how it works. We kind of go down the great taking route with David Rogers Webb. That's really interesting, but at some point here, look, they're going to have to recapitalize the system. Let's see where it goes again. I'd bet everything on yield curve control if it wasn't for the midterms and the fact that the central banks so badly want to destroy Donald Trump. So I think we can go into a really, really dark place here leading up into the midterms.
- [44:46]
B
How do you defend against the central banks and the globalists trying to do this? Is it a public messaging thing? Is there mechanical stuff so you can do from a market structure basis to defend against this? How would you make it clear to people that, hey, this is an attempted takeout of Donald Trump because these people don't like him, because they don't like that he's not on board with the globalist agenda.
- [45:16]
A
Yeah. I think the only way to defend against it is not to have debt. Debt's what's going to be the undoing of so many. Leverage always kills you when you have a deleveraging. And it certainly would seem that we have a massive deleveraging coming our way. Now, in the case of an asset like silver, just to go back there again, the deleveraging can be to the upside. If all the leverage is on the short side, you better be careful, because things can get crazy in bitcoin. It probably sees, you know, we go lower until there's a financial crisis. At the first sniff of a financial crisis, bitcoin rips.
- [45:55]
B
Yeah, it is crazy times. What. What else are you looking out for in terms of things that would signal that we're getting closer to this deleveraging event where the body's rising to the surface of the water?
- [46:15]
A
Look, I think we're. We're really, really close again. I'm expecting at some point here soon, somebody to float up to the top. And if not, they're going to push these prices, they're going to push yields higher, they're going to push gold. It's over. Higher until they get there. Right. Somebody's going to float up to the surface. And it seems to me that this is what the Trump administration wants. So the US has the world's largest printing press. They'll get to where they want to get to. Don't bet against the Treasury.
- [46:49]
B
And one thing that's been interesting, too. I'm not sure if you've been following this, but the delay of the Supreme Court's ruling on the tariffs, it feels like every time they push that back another week, the probability of them giving the green light to the tariff regime goes up significantly. And I think that would be massively beneficial for Trump's economic policy. That's another thing that could be destabilizing if they have to unwind those as well. You're talking hundreds of billions of dollars that we need to figure out what to do, how to give it back.
- [47:24]
A
Just. It's crazy times. I. You know, again, wherever you look, there's another grenade sitting underneath a. You know, some leaves. And you just got to be careful. It's like landmines are everywhere. And I've never, in my career, I've never seen a setup like this. I just, I've never been more defensive in my opinions than I am right now because honestly, I just, I don't know. You know, I try to go revert back to first principles and first principles tell me that the derivatives complexes that again, it's not just silver. We could talk about Treasuries. If silver breaks, what happens to treasury derivatives? If they break, the whole thing breaks. If you think the silver market's big, you should see what's going on in the basis trade out of the Caymans, which is trillions of dollars. We have estimated a quadrillion dollars in derivative exposure. These are not numbers that we can even quantify. We can't even understand them. And the entire system is held together by counterparty counterparties that trust each other. And if we see one large counterparty fail, the entire system crumbles.
- [48:41]
B
Yeah, and I mean, you mentioned earlier the Danes saying they're going to dump all their U.S. treasuries. Granted, they only have $100 million of U.S. treasuries on the balance sheet they've been dumping for years. Obviously it's not going to have a material impact on the structural integrity of the treasury market as it stands today, but it is sort of a market signal. Like, hey, they could be the first to say that. Who knows, maybe some bigger country out of Europe with a larger exposure says, hey, we're going to follow the Danes, maybe get China, Japan saying something similar. Japan would be, we need to defend our own yield curve, so we sort of need to dump this.
- [49:22]
A
That's the big one, right? It's Japan. The Chinese, we know they'd love nothing more than to see the dollar collapse. The Japanese are really caught in a box themselves. Right. They're going to have to at some point here, step in and defend their yield curve. They have to defend their bond market. I just can't. We know that these losses are in the system, whether it's pension funds, whether it's, you know, banks, Japanese banks. My guess is that there's structural insolvencies around the world right now and we just haven't. We. No one's raised their hand yet, but it's going to happen.
- [49:59]
B
Yeah. I mean, as it pertains to Japan specifically, just looking at the charts, like left side of the bell curve, caveman chart analysis. It's like it feels like something has to happen soon because they're going to parabolic straight up and to the right.
- [50:14]
A
Last night was a Six Sigma event. Right. Every time there's a Six Sigma event, we learn about the bodies really soon after. So my guess is we're about to find out about who lost a metric shit ton of money and we'll see where it goes from there. But that's going to be the spark on the Bitcoin story when you have de facto bank runs. The ultimate bank run now exists and it never did before. Right. There was nowhere to hide. You could pull your money out of one bank but you had to put it in another bank. Well, now there's a place you can go where you don't put your money in any bank and that will cause a global bank run the likes of which we've never seen before.
- [51:01]
B
Well, I know you're having in this conversation with many individuals on a weekly basis in the bitcoin today space is what is the most common retort you get when you put this thesis out there?
- [51:13]
A
Look, I think there's just so much normalcy bias that's been built up over the last 20 years that people just can't see the obvious. You get away from first principles when you believe in normalcy. Things are fine today, they'll be fine tomorrow. But as people that have been around markets for decades, we know that's not true. And then as guys who study pattern recognition we know that what we're staring at is not normal. It's not even something we can go back and point to in history. I would have to go back to the Weimar Republic to even get close to some of the things we're witnessing. And look, it shouldn't be lost on anybody that it's not just the monetary effects. We have social, you know, social problems as well. And all of this was kind of mirrors what we saw in Limar Germany in the 20s. So that's why I kind of lead towards the crack up boom thesis. Just my pattern recognition goes back to just first principles of Austrian economics.
- [52:22]
B
Yeah, I mean on the social side of things, you look at how polarized things are, there's a large subset of the country and I'm going to clue to myself in that is like okay, finally as it pertains to immigration and fraud, we're getting back to law and order. If you're an illegal immigrant, it's time for you to go home. And if you're fraudulently taking money from Medicaid Medicare programs, we're going to come find you and reprimand you appropriately. And then on the other side you have something I'm sure you've seen at the Virginia just what's happening on the ground within the state of Virginia now that Democrats are in control of the governorship. And the legislator there, the laws that they've passed since the beginning of the year and basically increase taxes on the rich, get rid of mandatory minimums, try to create more opacity around voting and make it easier to vote from home or do absentee ballots. And it's just going in completely opposite directions. For on the right it's like, okay, we do want to bring back law and order as particularly as it pertains to immigration and federal government fraud, abusing programs like Medicaid, Medicare. And then on the left it's like, no, we need to speed run this color revolution and make sure that we get, make it so that we can just do whatever we want by passing all these laws that lead to more anarcho tyranny.
- [53:55]
A
Yeah, it feels that way. Right. And the division just keeps getting wider and wider and I'm at a loss as to what they expect to achieve with these policies, where do they think this is heading? And, and you have to ask yourself, would any sane person want to go down the road that the far left is taking us down? And by the way, these policies weren't even considered extreme 15 years ago. This concept of no borders, open borders, this would have. Fifteen years ago it was commonplace for people, you know, for ICE to function in our society and today it's not. It, it's just, I can't explain it, Marty. We've, we've completely departed from rational self interest. And yeah, you gotta ask yourself like, do they think that money's printed on trees and that you can continue down this road forever? And on some level I think they do. I think they just believe that you can print money at infinitum and that you won't have a problem. And I don't know, is it foreign influence that's doing this? Are the Chinese behind this? It's possible.
- [55:18]
B
I would not be shocked. And it's like to highlight the complete insanity and hypocrisy of modern day policy on immigration policy here in 2015. I don't know.
- [55:32]
A
I think actually that guy looks familiar.
- [55:35]
B
Yeah, it's Tom Homan. Okay. It appears genuine. I was gonna say.
- [55:42]
A
No, that's real. Yeah, that's real.
- [55:44]
B
Yeah, so I, it looked a little AI, so I just want to make sure. But this is a real picture. In 2015, Barack Obama awarded Tom Omen the Presidential Award for Service for Making America Safer at ice. Ten years later, liberals want him killed. But it is, I mean this, yeah, this mass psychosis that is taken over where something that was once common sense, even on the left, and I'm sure you've seen many others, have seen the campaign videos of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama two decades ago, making it a point to say we're going to secure the border and make sure any legal immigrant is sent home. Now today you're a right wing Nazi if you think the same. And again, with all the fraud being laid bare, it's completely mind boggling that anybody would think this is not a worthwhile and virtuous policy, especially if you're an American taxpayer. It's like, hey, there's literally just taking money from us. I don't see why there's big effort. To your point, I would not be shocked if there's foreign influence. It does feel very color revolutionary when you look at antifa how they operate. And I think it's an extension of the Weather Underground movement from the 60s and the Marxist influences that have infiltrated the university system specifically.
- [57:02]
A
Yeah. And then look, we can even go as far as to talk about H1B visas, right? So we have legal immigration problems, corporations choosing H1B over hiring young Americans and then hiding behind, well, there's no one here to do the job. So even Trump said that, right? Like, are you crazy? Like, how did we, how did we do this before H1B visas? And the whole story is just ludicrous at every level. Again, going back to pattern recognition, I can't find anything in my quiver that can parallel what we're witnessing today in society. It's, the story is just almost too much. Right. There's so many different fires going on all at once, all over the place, that it's really hard to put your finger on. What do you tackle first?
- [57:57]
B
Well, that's a question that's been lingering in my mind. I haven't articulated it or expressed it publicly yet, but it's like I'm beginning to question the system as it stands. Say the fiat in the sovereign debt system as it exists is late stage, the point at which fraud is completely necessary because they need the ability to print money and just push money into the system by any means necessary, even if it's objectively and abhorrently fraudulent, just to keep the charade alive.
- [58:30]
A
Well, and that's the point, right? The GDP lie that we're all told is that we need GDP and the GDP comes from fraud. Money stolen is spent much faster than money earned. So from the perspective of the government, if you cut out the fraud, we go into a deflationary spiral tomorrow. So again, I don't know how you fix these problems without resetting the money. The money is what's broken. It's the money that's causing all of these extraneous issues. And without fixing the money, we just keep going down this road until it leads to pure civil war. And again, I don't see a way out.
- [59:15]
B
Yeah, now that we're going further down the story, just thinking generationally, I'm sure you saw the stats came out like average new hire in 2025 was 42 years old, an increase of one and a half years from 2022. The median home buyer is somewhere around 59, 60 years old. So young people. Another stat I saw the other day and talked about on a video that we released this morning is since 2023, 85% of American citizens under 25 have essentially dropped out of the job market, are not looking for jobs because they don't think it's, it's worthwhile, which is insane. And to your point, like we're getting to a generational point too, where the young people who are supposed to have all this opportunity and be in the prime of their lives and having the prime of their lives manifest in financial stability and hopefully family formation and home buying is just simply not materializing. And I mean this is something that is true throughout history. When you have a completely dejected cohort of young, predominantly or young male generations, they are going to react in one way and it's usually not a good reaction. And so again, going back to my point, like a fraud is completely necessary just to sustain the system. I think that's just like a philosophical and social question we have to all step back and ask ourselves at what cost are we trying to just prop up the system?
- [60:51]
A
Look, the measure of a society should be how well 30 year olds are doing and how often they're getting married and are they having three kids and are they buying a home? That would be success for our society, not gdp through wars and forever wars and military budgets and theft and fraud and everything else that's built into the system. So if we really look at our 30 year olds getting married, having three kids and buying a home, the answer is no. And that should be the ultimate metric of are we a successful society? Not what is our gdp, what are all the CPI and all the CPI I should call it, and everything else. The whole thing's become a fraud and the only thing that's going to fix it is getting back to hard money is breaking the back of this dollar enterprise. I don't see another way to get there. And I guess the Good news is that we're probably getting there sooner than most people expect. And yeah, it's going to be really, really hard if we hyper inflate the dollar. It's going to be brutal. But out of the ashes of that, we'll be born a new system based on real money and people will earn a good living and kids will be happy again. And yeah, the boomer class is going to get smoked, but that, that's the way it's going to play out. It's pretty obvious to me.
- [62:20]
B
It's interesting how the Trump administration has its blind spots here too because of the, the whole $200 billion mortgage bond buyback using the proceeds of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac or the profits from them to, to try to force down interest rates and positioning it as this bailout or not bailout positioning as a way to bring down housing prices for, for younger generations. Like no, it's going to have the complete opposite effect. You're going to bring down mortgage rates which is just going to push up the price of housing and it's essentially another bailout for the boomer generation. But then only a week, two weeks later, after announcing that $200 billion bond buying program, we have the 10, 10 year and 30 year blowing, blowing out to the upside towards 5% which would prove, I don't know if they started buying these bonds yet, but it certainly didn't have the effect that he would have liked it to have, even if it was just a headline two weeks out.
- [63:23]
A
Yeah, it's pretty clear that our leaders aren't on top of things the way many think they are. I'm no fan of Scott Besant. I think that they are looking at the situation from the wrong lens. They should be focused on restoring free markets and getting out of the fraudulent game, but they're not. They're just trying to continue to push on a string and eventually that string is going to break.
- [63:52]
B
Why do you think that is? You think they don't recognize it? Or do you think they understand the gravity of what would happen if you ripped out all the fraud?
- [64:06]
A
Well, I'll tell you, I think Trump's focused on legacy more than anything else and he doesn't want to preside over economic collapse, but we need economic collapse at this point. That's the only way you're going to fix the system. So it's interesting again, I think it comes back to midterms and the entire four year cycle of the way the United States works. Right. It's clear to me that a benevolent dictator is A far better form of government than what we have with a broken republic, because at least you get things done here. We can't get anything done. And then every two years we got to reshuffle the deck. That being said, we do have a constitution to fall back on. And if we get back to being a constitutional republic, it's right there in our constitution. We need to have hard money. So it was getting away from our constitution which got us into this plight, but we're so far away now, I don't see the road back.
- [65:10]
B
Yeah, that's really disconcerting. I mean, this has become a very popular thought over the last year, particularly as some Trump voters became sort of disillusioned by what he's actually done since he got it in office for the second time versus what he campaigned on. And you have particularly young men calling for a Franco like strongman to come in and make everything right. And a lot of people pointing to what Naim Bukele has done in El Salvador and saying, why can't we have that? And then obviously you have the other side of the spectrum, which is we need to 10 exercise the government and get more control in the middle of everything. And it is a chaotic time to be alive, to say the very least. A very hot start to 2026.
- [66:01]
A
Look, the Bukele story is the benevolent dictator side of things. Right? That's what I'm referring to. But that requires suspending constitutional rights and throwing people in jail. And a lot of people in jail. A lot like building prisons and throwing a lot of people in jail, including politicians, judges, and there's not the political will in the United States to do it. So I just. Again, how do you. People are calling for Don Lemon to be arrested for the issue in Minneapolis the other night. Do you really think even if we arrest them, isn't a liberal judge just going to throw it out of court? Have we got to the point where we can't even enforce law because the system is so broken? Again, I just, I don't see the path out of this other than the collapse of the dollar. Right, that you collapse the dollar, you collapse the system. You can rebuild the system based on the Constitution, but we're so far away from that that I just don't see how we get there.
- [67:07]
B
Yeah, stay frosty out there, stay away from debt, Keep your bitcoin in cold storage. And I think that's the best advice we can give right now. Right?
- [67:20]
A
I think so. I honestly think that's the answer right now is when you don't know what to do. Do nothing.
- [67:27]
B
Yeah. Well, thank you for joining us. We'll have to do this again. We can't wait six months. We'll probably have to catch up in Q2. Again, an update on all this, I think as we described earlier, it seems like things are progressing rather quickly right now, particularly in financial markets and even in the geopolitical realm. So it could be a completely different landscape just a month from now.
- [67:53]
A
Yeah, I agree. I suspect things are going to move very quickly.
- [67:59]
B
Yeah. All right. Well, thank you for your time.
- [68:03]
A
Thanks, Marty. Thanks for having me. I wish we had a more upbeat space, a more upbeat discussion. But look, we got to play the cards we're dealt, and right now we're dealt a very difficult hand. So play it close to the vest and keep yourself out of trouble.
- [68:18]
B
Yeah, I think it's great advice. Sometimes you need a sober recognition of reality, which I think the last hour and five minutes certainly was that. So thank you for that. And again, we won't wait six months. We'll do it. We'll do it in Q2. We'll do catch up.
- [68:35]
A
Sounds good, sir. Thank you so much for having me.
- [68:38]
B
Thank you. Peace of love, Freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.