Transcript
Tom Luongo (0:07)
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. 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. I mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
Marty (0:36)
Mr. Long. Oh, we meet here on yet another Friday evening. Seems to be our, our time of, time of recording, choice of recording over the years. Like I was just telling you, I need you to pull me back from the edge. I'm. I'm doom scrolling a lot this week.
Tom Luongo (0:51)
I watch we are. I don't know if you've ever read my Twitter feed, but it's three o' clock in the morning trying to like take people off the edge and go no, everything. It's just funny as I. It's good to see you Marty. And yes I do, I do like doing these Friday afternoon with you. It's like we had an opportunity to sit down kind of look at the week that was the last couple weeks for us, you know and it's a good time to do this and we're both tired after a long week. So it's like yeah man, like this. It's not going to be fireworks tonight. It's going to be, you know, that kind of thing and which is a good thing. I do enough of those, I do enough of the fire breathing Tom during the week. So it's funny since this thing began, I'll back up for a minute. In the lead up to it. I was looking at it going at first I'm like is he just playing the game? And then I saw the full two carrier strike groups and I thought about what he did in Venezuela and the way handle Venezuela and I'm like no, there's going to be an operation of some form or another here because Venezuela was very much targeted operation, you know, apparently just an insanely efficient operation as well. And then right after that he goes to freaking Davos and all of that and you know, the same weekend he's like what is he? He said where is he? He's at Davos. Yeah. And he's giving their speech and he's like, you know, he's taking on C.J. and J and, and M.G. and, and Jalisco and you know, taking Out El Mencho. I'm like, it's March. Who's he gonna take out next? And when you, you know, you know how I, I, I feel about this stuff, that this is all kind of part and parcel of the whole old money network, right? You have, you know, you have the middle layer of money, of basically imperial money flows or old colonial money flows. My wife just is driving up and so the dogs are going crazy. But I think that's where we are. We have to realize that that's a very important part of this conversation that we just don't talk. Most people can't, don't, can't talk about because they don't have a frame reference for it. And I do my best to try and make it understandable. Let's kind of break it down in three layers. You have the original. When he first came into power, the first thing he did was cut off all the public money. So, hey, at least the American taxpayer isn't directly funding the NGOs that are destroying the country. That's the easy part. He can just stroke the panel, all the land, get, take that done, take that down. Because he's the executive and he doesn't, you know, and he has that, that power. It's the next layer that's the hardest one for people to wrap their heads around, which is the organized crime, which is the system of money flow around the world, of being able to basically have the old colonial extraction system centered in City of London with outposts in places like Davos and Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong and Singapore and Hong Koover and all these other places. Right. That, you know, that's the illicit money, that's the money that runs around the world trafficking children, trafficking drugs, you know, running protection rackets, pulling in. Yeah. And now we get to find out, and we get highlighted for us, ensures all the global shipping around the world while the US Navy is harassed to enforce it all. And somehow someone else is getting paid for the defense work that we're doing. When we stop as Americans, just stop and take a look at and think about what that is. That shouldn't like, that should drive us all crazy. When you really stop to think about it, it's like we go out and we spend a trillion dollars a year on the military. So however much money we spend on the Navy to police the world and make sure that global shipping runs relatively smoothly, the only pirates that are really left in the world are the ones that somehow are linked to all the old colonial system through a network of banks and old relationships. That exist in Iran, Venezuela, Dubai, blah, blah, Hong Kong, Mexico City, all around the world. And you look around the world and you see the same thing everywhere, which is that that money cannot flow, as Alex Craner likes to point out, without complicity from the Canadian, uk, some American banks. It can't happen because it's too much money has to move that way. Not only are they making money off of that, they're insuring the ships that we're defending. Now let's stop for a second and think about what Lloyds of London actually is. I've talked to people about this and they're like, there are no actuaries at Lloyds of London. There are no risk assessors at Lloyds of London. There's a bunch of old. There's a bunch of guys, a bunch of limeys in there collecting writing contracts. It's right across the Thames from GCHQ, otherwise known as MI6. So MI6 goes around the world, stirs up chaos around the world, maybe with the help of the Mossad or Saudi intelligence. Elements of the CIA refuse to say rogue elements of the CIA, because the rogue elements of the CIA are the patriots, right? And creating chaos around the world, which raises the risk premium for everybody to actually do business around the world. And who's getting paid for that? So they're on both sides of the trade. They're getting paid to run drugs and harass everybody and everything else. And they're getting paid on the insurance contracts on the other side. It's all big frigging shakedown operation. And American taxpayers are getting frankly fucked. Coming, going on, the way in, on the way out, after they've left the party and after their kids are dead, Donald Trump's like, no, we're getting paid for that. So in the lead up to February 28th, or yeah, I guess it was after midnight. So March 1st, last February 28th became really obvious. If you take Trump at his word and you just read and just listen to what he said in that eight minute statement, he laid it all out pretty freaking clearly and it's very consistent with everything he's been saying for years, which is, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon because they're a bunch of crazy Persians or whatever they are. You call them Shia crazies or whatever, they're crazies of one form or another, or maybe they're just another mode of organized crime around the world. The Arabs like to talk out of both sides of their mouth because they're making money coming and going on the oil and the natural Gas. They don't really care, you know, so everybody's, like, talking on both sides of their mouth. The Israelis are, you know, are up in arms about everything, because that's who they are. And maybe they have a good right to be, maybe they don't. I don't really care. Like, I don't like Iran. I don't like the Israelis. I don't like the Saudis. I don't like the guitars. I don't like any of these people. They're all shit as far as I'm concerned. And 90% of the time, we're shit, too. But we have the opportunity because we're the ones with the big stick, that if we decide to use the big stick for our interests, whoa, we get the last three weeks. We've all been living our entire lives, especially my entire life, and I know your entire life, because you're far younger than I am, that we've been living in a world where the United States keeps doing all this shit that's not in our own best interest. We don't even know what that looks like. We don't know what it looks like when our government actually acts in a purposeful, strategic manner in the interest of the United States. And so we've been so conditioned into thinking that we can't possibly be doing that, because we never do that. We've got all this history, we've got all this DNA, we've got all this lived experience to say that they're not doing that. And then all of a sudden, we're like, we don't know what to do with it when it's actually staring us in the face. We have to distrust it. That's what's happening, Marty. It's not hard. We're literally saying, London doesn't get to pull the insurance vig. They don't get to control the pricing of oil around the world. They don't get to do this, they don't get to do that. They don't get to fund all the proxies. They don't get to play these games because London is at the center of Venezuela, Jalisco, Hong Koor, Hong Kong, Singapore, this one, all of it. And Iran and Israel. And this is the hardest part that people have to realize is that they're on both sides of the trade in a lot of these conflicts. They're fun, and they're always handing money and guns and whatnot. And again, when I say London, in some ways it's a metaphor. It's the system of the way the money Flows and who benefits from the way the money flows? That is what London represents. It all falls through City of London and its subsidiaries because of the very special rules that it has that the carve outs that it has in order to make money move that way, which it doesn't exist anywhere else on the planet, but it all happens to London that way and all the offshore banks and the Caymans and blah, blah, blah. So like, when you, when you look at it from that perspective, what Trump had to do was at some point finally call the Iranians boss and go, look, I see what you're doing. You've been told, desk, keep dust, keep negotiating with Trump. He doesn't really want to start another war. He's vain, he's stupid, he doesn't think like literally listen to, listen to the people in Europe, listen to the people in London, listen to all of them, listen to all of his critics. And they, some of them actually believe this nonsense, others don't. Others are like trying to gaslight you into believing he doesn't know what he's doing. Okay, but other people, but, but there are some that really do believe this. They really do believe that they have enough control and enough people and systems and, and, and, and institutions and bureaucrats and everything around the world that they can just bleed him out over time and then, you know, we'll get back to status quo after he's gone. And I'm sure that Iran was told like, I'm sorry, the irtc, Aragachi, all these people were all told the same damn thing, just keep bleeding him out. So bleed him out for time. No different than Zelensky. At a certain point, when you look at the, and since the war has begun, and since the war has been prosecuted the way it's been prosecuted, you'll notice that the Iranians are negotiating over a war they've lost the exact same way that Zelenskyy has been negotiating over war he's lost, same thing. Why? Because he's got somebody else in his back pocket saying, don't worry about it, we're on top of this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. You just keep bleeding him out. And eventually Trump was like, no, fuck you now and then, because the Israelis are really good at what they do. Now this is again, don't hate the play, I hate the game. The Israelis are good at this because they have to be. Like it or not, you don't have to like Israel to respect their ability to play the game. And because we saw. And I wouldn't have any of this in my head. I wouldn't have this perspective. I wouldn't have had this memetic collapse of the way I used to see the world if we didn't have the 12 day war last year. The 12 day war last year was the time when I had to finally go, fuck, are we really just that much better than everybody else? Is this all just been a bunch of gaslighting by a bunch of Persians and Russians and Chinese and Indians and British and everybody else? They really are just a paper tire here. And we are really that good. We didn't spend $850 billion a year on defense or whatever the hell we've been spending and get $50 billion worth of. Worth of return on investment. We have the toys, folks. We have the men. We have the material. We have the personnel. All we needed was the political will and the organizational will from the Pentagon on down. Let those guys do what they do well. And I was talking to Joaquin for years the other day, and I was shocked. The 12 day war shocked the crap out of me, right? And because my. I wanted to be conservative and I wanted to be generous to everybody I saw on the game board. I wanted to. I wanted to say the reasonable position is the US Is lying about something. The Iranians are lying a little bit, the Russians are lying a little bit. The Chinese are. Everybody's over selling what they have a little bit. And then we just. I mean, the Israelis pulled off one of the most. Most brilliant combined arms operations in military history on June 12 last year, like it or not. I mean, with human intelligence on the ground, air intelligence forces, ground forces, the war was over before it started. So we already knew that if we. That we were capable of doing it. So if Trump was going to go for the big kill shot, not on Iran, because this war is not about Iran. Iran is a network node. This is about the United States getting control over the system that it's a part of. And it has been funding to its own detriment for 80 years. That conversation, in the immortal words of Tyler Durden, is over. Right? That moment in Fight Club when Edward Norton's at the top of the stairs and Tyler Durden's at the bottom of the stairs, he's fighting with Helena Bonham Carter, he goes, this conversation is over. Done. That's it. Now everybody understand what's happening? Oh, that's what he's doing. So if you don't think that he didn't know that the Straits were going to get closer, that Iran wasn't going to do this nonsense. I don't think they expected to be those. They've already said it. I don't think we didn't expect to be this successful. And you knew they were successful because on day two, the Iranians were threatening to close the straits. They were, I'm sure they were convinced that they were going to be able to stand up for a couple of weeks, inflict a tremendous amount of political and propaganda damage on the American military, that we were going to lose planes and lose dudes that have to do, you know, have to play, you know, and have to, have to, you know, defend this right and that they were going to use that. They didn't get that opportunity. This war was over in the first 24 hours, operationally, strategically, however you want to put it. And operationally. But strategically, it was over. The Iranians were done. It was just a matter of mopping everything up afterwards. And I said as much on Twitter the next day. I'm like, this war is over. Like, if they're not firing, if they don't fire a thousand missiles tomorrow, they're gone. Oh, they're going to play possum. And eventually three weeks from now, we're going to see 3,000. Okay, fine. You keep believing. Keep believing that we've flown 15,000 sorties, we've run out of things to kill, and they're not the groundhog from Caddyshack.