Hello, I want to welcome to a gold Goats and Guns podcast for November third, twenty twenty five.

This will be the first of to today.

Actually I scheduled two this afternoon, so this is episode two thirty six, and we've got a lot to talk about.

My name Style Wongo, and with me today is my good friend Bobby Chino and co host of the futures Head podcast with Jimmy Orio, and we're gonna just chat about whatever.

It's gonna be a couple of you know, ranking probably profaned Italians, you know, pissing off about market.

So Bobby, how are you?

Man?

Good?

How you doing?

That's the best introduction I've ever gotten.

Fair enough, man, I don't know like it's it's it's the you know worth thirty three days into the shutdown, the I hate to put it this way, but the great chimp out of the beginning over Snap Trump is kicking ass over in Asia.

Scott Adams is trying to die.

I don't I don't know where to start this morning.

All I know is that it's a it's a very interesting time to be alive.

What do you what do you say in this morning?

Well, first of all, I thought Scott Adams was dead already, and I mean I literally when that announcement about his illness came out, I just basically stopped looking for him.

Right.

It seemed to me to be a description of eminent death.

I mean, I don't hope.

I don't wish death on anyone.

Sure, sure, yeah, well pretty much not anyone.

But you know she's not running for re elections, so there you go.

It's not like I said, almost not anyone, but no, I really don't wish death on anyone.

So that's an interesting comment that you made in terms of the the way you described the freak out about Snap.

I'm not offended by that.

I'm sure some people would be.

There's this, I'm done with that.

But the Snap thing is, to me is funny because it really seems like like Trump is using this as a way to kind of show the amount of fraud because people, just the general public just looks at things that Trump says and it's you know, there's that whole thing about taking them seriously but not literally.

There is literal fraud in welfare and there's been forever.

I remember being in on the West Side of Chicago and having people offer me back then it was food stamps, and they would offer me food stamps for fifty to seventy five cents on the dollar if I wanted to buy them.

The Snap card was supposed to stop that, right, and it has not not even close.

There's these people that have this fantasy that Snap is only used for food.

Stop it, I mean stop it.

They don't ask for an ID for Snap in the same way they don't ask for voter IDs, So it's a pretty easy thing to defraud.

I think we're finding out that that the fraud is insane.

I mean, everything we're beginning to really really see is that the last, you know, the last three months of the Biden hunter, I would say about from about a month before the election to the entire transition was that all you saw was you know, them just shoveling money out the door, out the back door and every program you can imagine, didn't matter if they were handing out FAHA mortgages to you know, H one B holders or Snap or the ng O money.

It was just insane.

They sent you know, I mean what a grand home over it.

Energy sent out a god that was a grand home, and Energy sent out like hundreds of billions of dollars and then yet somehow that's Trump's fault or the amount of spending.

Right.

Uh, It's just I have to wonder sometimes, and I really do, and I'm not I don't know this.

I think we need to go down this down this route too far.

I hit it all the time, which is that there's just this weird, sad state of affairs inside the quote unquote I don't know, right, or the post you know Trump election, right that you know he's not doing enough, Like what on God's earth are you talking about considering how much has actually been done?

And they just keep saying, no, there's no receipts.

Dude, we're still spending money.

We're thirty eight billion dollars.

And yeah it was Biden's budget.

I was you.

All this money was ear Mark.

Like they can only slow it down as much as possible, right, So I don't know.

I just I watch all that and I just say to myself, like just trolling for clicks or do you work for somebody else?

Like?

And then anybody who doesn't like get on board with the entire idea that you know, Israel runs our everything about the entire world.

Oh you must be taking money from the from the hesbar, like fuck off, Like that's not the that's not the way the world works.

But it's clearly it's everywhere.

And I don't know what I don't know what they even think about it.

Any I have a friend actually that there's a group of the three of us that are on a group text where we send the most inappropriate stuff back and forth to each other, and one of those guys has gone completely Israel controls the US, controls the political system, controls the propaganda in the US, And you know, I mean, I'm open to it.

I just don't think it's been proven to me yet, So every once in a while I say, no, don't, I don't actually believe that's true.

And the other day he threw out, you know, you're starting to become one of the sheep like the rest of the people, and like, what are you talking about, Like you haven't proven it to me just because Tucker Carlson said it with that little pimp kid from the North side of Chicago.

I got nothing against Tucker Carlson, but like, just because you interview somebody doesn't mean your opinion is completely valid to me.

And I don't understand why I can't just think about it longer.

I'm the first person to admit I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Middle East.

I just don't.

Right October seventh was horrible, but it obviously was strange that the IDEF wasn't there in five minutes like they are for everything else.

There were some strange things that went on for that particular period.

That doesn't mean mean to me that Hurricane Marlene was started by Israel's weather control.

It's like, let's calm the fuck down, and you know, see what's actually real and what's not.

It drives me crazy, it really does.

Man, and I only talk like this really to you and the one other guy in that group text on the side where I'm like, he's completely lost it, like he's a really good friend of mine, and it's like, dude, there was lightning just now.

It wasn't Israel.

It's like, calm down about it.

But people go off the rails.

And to your point about Trump, I forget her name, Collins.

I think it's her name.

Secretary of the us DA actually just talked about on Fox News recently that she sent out letters to every single state in February that she wanted all their day for snaps so they could root out fraud, and only twenty nine stains complied, all the Red states and a couple of Blue states.

She didn't point out who, but she said a couple of most of the Blue states did not comply, and two of them suit her for asking to see the data to root out fraud.

Okay, this is something I can get on board with.

I don't think Israel's controlling that either personally, but whatever, that's something I can get on board with.

Investigating fraud and watching who pushes back and seeing what that is.

I don't know if Israel killed Charlie Kirk.

Maybe they did, maybe they didn't, But I'm not getting on board what they absolutely did because Candice Owen said so.

It just drives me crazy when people do that.

It's the same point about Trump.

Trump is doing a lot the US system of fraud as well as the US economy.

These are not speedboats, These are cruise liners.

These are massive ships that cannot be stopped on a dime and flipped around.

Yeah, I know you're right, and I agree with that basic framework.

And Bob, one of my you know, my operating heuristics for anything headline related or whatever it is that we were supposed to to be outraged about this week, is just to ask the simple question, why do they want us to know this particular thing today?

Right?

So you know this whole idea and you know, I've gone over this a thousand times and I've said it before and I'll say it to you now, which is that you know the bodies in ten seven weren't cold before we started watching the anti we started watching the lift of the algorithms, the social media algorithms allowing people to complain about Israel.

And I brought this up to Dave Column the other day and he was just like that, that's not true.

I'm like, you still can't talk about it on Fox News about you can't criticize Israel on Box News.

I'm like, well, of course, because they're part of the control system.

But we're but copbox News isn't the media anymore.

We're the media, right, We're the media.

We're the media, and you know, you know, we have to you have to understand that's where they're pushing, you know, the ideas out into the zeitgeist.

And then you can clearly watch the gatekeepers on both sides play the tension off of each other and try and push people into one camp or another, like you know again, I'm I'm with you.

I'm like, I'm not a big fan of Israel.

I don't really care, but I don't think they control everything.

And I certainly don't think that anybody who's out there today after watching how Trump has handled Iran, Israel, Daza, all of this stuff, and how he's literally remaking the Middle East where and getting all the Arab players on board, getting controlled from my perspective, clearly getting control of Ktar in the process, which is a city of London asset, Like, how can you be how can you be pushing that narrative if you're not, like so thoroughly invested in it.

I either because you literally are paid by them or you're you know, you're just delusional.

And why do they want to turn us into you know, newly minted experts on the Middle East this this week or virology during COVID or this that or anything else.

It's what I call, you know, holiday in Express politics.

Right, I'm an expert now because I stayed at a holiday in Express last night.

I'm like, oh, you know, it's it's it's insane.

So the reality is it's is that Trump is actually doing the exact same thing.

Trump has always done this, right, He's always been very good at picking up an issue that we haven't talked about, creating some tangential talking point to it, and then pointing everybody in that direction to start talking about it.

And your I think your point about about the USDA director, you know, saying, hey, we're going to point out we're going to find out where all the where all the fraud isn't snap, We're going to find out where all the fraud is in social security, disability, this, that faha, all of this stuff.

And then you say to yourself, Okay, if you don't think that Trump has changed anything, do you think that, like, have you totaled up the numbers, the potential numbers of billions of dollars that we're spending every year on this fraud and if we get rid of any of it, you don't think we can't balance the budget.

It's funny how there's these statements about you know, you hear all this bullshit from influencers and the like a lot of celebrities do this.

I'm telling my story now because if I could save one person, it's good enough.

Not because you want to be in the limelight, but if you could save one person, it's all bullshit.

But people are like, what did Trump save fifty million on that?

That's nothing?

Well what happened to me?

If I could save one person, if I could save one dollar, it's something.

And actually the new CBO report came out including tariff revenue.

Now I'm at my core, not pot, not four tariffs.

But if there are tariffs, I want to use them too.

It's like being a gunfight and saying I'm anti gun, but all these people are shooting at me.

So but I'm anti gun, I'm not going to pick one up, Fucky, I'm gonna pick one up if somebody Now I'm not anti gun.

I want to stress thattually very pro gun, but yeah, if we have a lot of guns in this house, we also have gold in this house.

But I'm pointing out the guns and the gold at the same time because you probably should try and find out where I live and try and get my Yeah, I'm going to shoot at you if you're trying and take my gold.

Anyway, It's that same thing where like, well, fifty million is not enough?

What's enough?

And then you include the tariff revenue into the CBO budget estimates, and you now got the first decline.

Since I mean going back a long time of the debt to GDP ratio in terms of the deficit, you're getting the first decline when you include the tariff revenue.

All right, So it's funny to me because we're not seeing inflation from the tariffs, I'm happy to say yet.

But my point about tariffs to everyone else is if tariffs are more than a one time price jump, they can only be a one time price jump or a drop if they affect inflation at all, because if it becomes, you know, an actual cycle of inflation, then something else is wrong.

If I had if I was paying for steel to make my product or to provide my service, and steel went up ten percent and I raised my prices to you by ten percent, by the way, that would already be too much of an increase because a few years of using steel in one way or the it's only one input and it's the only input that's got a pricing increase.

But if my one of my inputs one up ten percent and I increased my price is ten percent.

That should be it.

It should be done at that point now, and you do that for each input, and you raise your prices, and that's that.

That's not the definition of inflation.

First of all, the definition of inflation has nothing to do with prices.

You and I both know that, because we're old enough to remember.

What inflation actually meant was an expansion of the moon.

Is it money supply and that's the FED.

That's not tariffs.

But anyway, I'm digressing a lot off.

I want to I want to pull on that thread just for a second, because this is one of the This is I think I finally figured out a good talking point about how to counter all of this stuff.

Because you have a lot of these I'm not calling them Laubertarians and Austrian types who will who will complain that terroriffs are inflationary.

We got Rampaul out there screaming about it and voting us to one big beautiful bill.

We've got you know, every every Austrian and every Stripe screaming that you know, terroffs are attacks and or this and that.

Okay, fine, I need you to define inflation for me.

Is it a rise in prices, which is the modern Kansian definition or is it a change in the money supply, to.

Change the money supply, that's what it was always described as and defined as.

No, I agree with that, now I'm not.

I'm not arguing that point I'm saying is listen to their arguments and you'll see that they conflict those two in order to win their argument.

Yeah right, they'll say, oh, they raise prices, they're for inflation.

Yeah, but but tariffs don't print money, no, exactly.

All they do is reapportion the amount of money that's actually out there.

And every time, regardless of what side it is, when a definition is changed, there's a problem here or coming mm hmm, it's always the case.

You know.

You just go back and watch those I wish Milton Friedman were alive, and I wish Thomas Soull got more attention.

While he's still alive.

You're starting to hear his manner of speech decline, so we know that you know the end is near for him, unfortunately.

But when you talk to these guys, or listen to these guys rather, yeah, I wish Thomas soul would have gotten a lot more attention.

He's getting old.

Now we've been trying to get him on the show, and I think they're probably limiting his interviews at this point.

He's in his nineties, I think.

But these guys like Friedman and Soul have always spoken so clearly about what is what.

And I don't personally consider economics a hard science because you can't really do an experiment against a control group and come out with a concrete result, right, So it's more of a philosophy in a way to me.

But you see certain things that are empirically provable, and one of those is that if you get a one time input in East that doesn't cause an expansion of the monetary base, right.

And there's the economic theory of product replacement right where steak goes up, you buy chicken, that kind of thing, And that's happening all over the economy with companies trying to pass on these inflationary price ikes.

And to a side point to this, people called Trump a bully.

The CEO of Walmart announced they were going to increase prices because of tariffs, and Trump essentially said, and I'm paraphrasing, you better not, and they didn't.

So does that mean that they had to increase them or they wanted to increase them, right, right, CEOs can be as evil as the worst politician out there.

So, you know, the tariffs, while again I'm not a fan of them at my core, when you're dealing in a global economy that levies tariffs against you, and people are saying it's a moral for you to levy teriffs against them, I say, again, fuck off pretty much.

I mean it's like, well, this has been the argument I've had for a while about the Federal Reserve.

Like I have no problem arguing, you know, in philosophical terms, in moral terms, or any other terms except pragmatic terms about the Federal Reserve.

If you've got a FED that's actually acting in the national interests as opposed to the global interest then and you're fighting a cabal of other central banks and you have the most powerful central bank in the world, and you're going to go into that war by disbanding your army.

Really, like that makes no sense to me as opposed to especially and I know that you know, you and I are having this conversation today because of the work that I know that I did, and that got you know, the enough attention for me to finally say to break with all the all the orthodox you say, maybe Drone Powell isn't a moron, Maybe he's actually acting in America's best interest.

Maybe this whole shift to sofa is a is a good thing, and on all of these things.

Right, So, and you know, we here, we are for years down down the road from that, and now we've got a president who believes the same thing.

We've got a federal Reserve that's obviously acting in that in that capacity and very in a lot of ways.

There's plenty to criticize Powell about and fly at the at the edges, but that but those those marginal cases, those edge cases, are not a way of proving that therefore we need to end the FED tomorrow.

That's bullshit.

That's not argumentation, and it's and it's it's you know, look, we're not arguing the shit on Reddit, for Christ's sake.

But we act like we are when we come when we talk about national policy, like I'll be honest, like for example, like think about you know, if you don't think that that the FED is not acting in concert with Donald Trump, for example, even though Trump, like you know, screams about Powell all day and let all day left and right, Why did Powell get rid of the two percent inflation target?

Like he was under no compunction.

I mean, if he was acting in the Bank of England's best interest or in the ECB's best interest, he would have kept the orthodoxy that two percent inflation is you know, the central banker's orthodoxy that two percent inflation is good, which is what they've sold us since two thousand and seven when Bernaki unilaterally over Powell's dead body, when Powell was a junior member of the FOMC.

Him, him and Richard Fisher and a couple others were all like, this is bullshit.

Where is this coming from?

Yeah, And then he finally got rid of it, you know, when it was politically expedient for him to do so, when Trump had opened up the avenue for him to do so, because Trump had criticized openly the Federal Reserve.

And so what did he do.

He said, we're scrapping the two percent inflation target.

We're going back to the dual mandate with an emphasis on labor.

Labor.

And there's a second second component that Jimmy Aurios actually brought up, and I think he may be a little bit early on it, but it's something to think about.

AI is getting rid of jobs for people that vote.

White collar jobs are starting to dwindle through AI, and it seems to me, and Jimmy again is the one to put this in my head.

He said it first, so I want to give him credit on that.

It seems to me that maybe Jerome Polell is trying to get ahead of that in a way.

You know, let's go ahead and put the focus on labor so that possibly future chairman and people will understand that labor is a lot more important than pretty much anything else at this point because we have one of the sort of biggest job destruction disruptive technologies out there, which is AI.

I've already used AI as my attorney for small things multiple times, just done it myself and have not hired an attorney.

I've done some portfolio experiments through AI myself for my own personal portfolio and not the stuff we do in our newsletter.

And that's actually the article Jimmy wrote.

Jimmy starts our newsletter with a He's usually around six hundred words or so on what he's thinking for this week, and that's what starts our newsletter.

And he put this out in the public with this weekend's newsletter, and he said, basically, he thinks to your own pile is actually because he was in the private sector, sees a problem that maybe people were recognized in the next two to five years that AI, that AI is the reason we need to focus more on labor and less on inflation.

And you know it's funny, Tommy, We've got there's all these people out there that think Trump is an idiot, and that to me is probably one of the most aggravating things that I can hear.

You're called calling a guy who whether he got ten million dollars first from his dad or not, it is not easy to turn ten million dollars into one point nine billion or wherever he's at right now.

And you have other people saying he is a bad businessman, you're a bad analyst of business people.

Then well, all he had was a successful show.

You're telling me a dumb guy is going to realize that maybe he's not able to make as much money in real estate, so he should get his marketing had on and get his branding head on and get his brand so big that he could win the popular vote in the election.

How is that a dumb person.

I mean, it's just dumb to think that.

I get there's people out there maybe taking it too far with this four D chess thing.

The economy to me is Trump being smart enough to listen to Scott Bessend, who worked for Soros and knows how to do things both morally and immorlly to get.

Where he wants to go.

You know, I mean he to me, this is Scott Besson's economy as much as it is Trump's, of course.

And they started on the FED right right fucking away from day one when they got in the office.

Yes, they said, we need ray cuts, we need ray cuts, we need ray cuts, because they knew that even though they're not cutting as much spending as a lot of people would have liked to have seen, as if you can just walk in slash it, throw the economy into one of the worst depressions you'd ever see if they did that, because you know, the sugar high is the sugar high, and you know, the the absolute withdrawal that the economy would get from this if you just cut it immediately, would be brutal, and they'd be writing stories about it in history books forever, and they'd be blaming Trump and rightly so.

Trump is uh an, I want to be loved more than feared guy, But I'm happy to be feared if I can't be loved.

That's a very good way of putting it.

And I like to look at him as a mob boss.

Yeah, I like to call him Don Trumploni.

I think that that's a fair you know.

I vibe with that, you know, yeah, so I mean, and because you watch how he operates, and he really does operate that way.

He's think, look, you and I can have you and I can get along great as long as you don't betray me.

And he's finally got people around him that he trusts and and can operate with and give them all the rope they need to hang themselves.

And now he's in a position to know again that we're getting rid of you now.

And every time he you know, my friend Paul's the English posted said the other day on the podcast, he's like, you know, I ever noticed how you know, you give somebody an option, a task, and then when they betray him on it, he just fires them and hands the job to Marco Rubio.

You know, to your point, did you see the irishman?

If I have it's been a long.

Okay, it's not a good movie to me.

I mean it's just it's uh, that's a different thing.

Yeah, I mean he's just Scorsese is just starting to overdo it with his mob movies.

But I will tell you that Russell Buffalino played by Joe Pesci, I don't know how the real Russell Buffalino was.

I have no like deep knowledge of Philly mob stories or Philly mob lore.

I know about the Chicago outfit.

I deeply know about Chicago outfit, but I know nothing about the Philly families.

The way that Joe Pesci characterized Russe Russell Buffalino to me is Trump.

Russell was sort of like this kind quiet guy who really wanted everybody to like him, but if they didn't like him, they were in the ground.

Basically, it's the way that that Pesci portrayed him.

That's how I see Trump.

You saw a Bronx Tale and Chess Promonary's character said they asked him, would you rather be loved than feared?

He said, I'd rather be I'd rather be feared.

That's not actually Trump.

And chess Promentary's character's point was, if your loved people will betray you if you have feared they won't.

Trump would rather be loved, in my view, But then if they betray him, he wants to bury those people because well.

He has to, I mean, especially in the position, especially in the position HEAs and now, especially being the guy that you know he grew up being, right, I mean, so yeah, I mean, and and go back to your point previously, I think it was biggerly obviously to your point about Besson.

Besson's been on both sides of the Aisle yep, and he understands the plumbing.

He understands how to to structure trades, especially in the US dollar, and how to use the US treasury market to his advantage and to support whatever it is that Trump's doing.

I think the two of them working together.

I think Trump has been has had his plans for how to remake America.

They're going back forty forty five years.

I mean, people talk about the old interviews and Playboy when he was you know, when he was twenty five years old or thirty years old or whatever.

It's nothing shamed for him.

The Promethean action ladies, the inheritors to LaRouche will tell you that this is the American system of McKinley and and and and Alexander Hamilton.

I can't argue with that, like and so I can see what they're trying to do, what he's what they're trying to accomplish in the context of the modern markets and the way they operate, where you and I watch on a daily basis, we watch, you know, the bond markets and then and the movements of currencies and all this stuff.

You realize that you need people who have that real experience to then implement that system and support the implementation of that system through the issuance of treasuries, the you know, the the manipulation of rates, you know, and all of that stuff.

And that's what I've been watching.

And if you watch Trump carefully, if everybody keeps making these points, it's not a unique point even at this point about the trade deals that he's cut.

It's not just the teriff rate or this or anything else.

It's that he's also basically told them and you're going to pay to recapitalize the United States.

You're going to pay us back the money you stole from us to currency, the arbitrage and all the interests that you got paid on the treasuries that you've been holding as reserve.

You're paying us back to that, and you're putting that money back in the hands in the pockets of the lower middle class of America who paid for you to live high on the hog all these years.

And Scott Bessett and Jerome pell have implemented that how all a by keeping interest rates high and forcing all the other central banks to cut against the deflationary forces of howls high interest rates where everybody is dollars GENI, yeah, it's actually not even.

All he did was reverse the freaking preade that was run against us for all these years.

It's not that hard, folks, and it's staring you in the face.

And then you're looking at the money coming in and you're looking at the And to your point about the CBO report earlier, about how we're watching the projected projected admitted the devisit go down.

I remind everybody that you know, take the CBO data with a grain of salt and take a course.

Commentators out there who used the CBO report for the one big beautiful bill.

The scoring on the CBO report, the one big beautiful bill that was going to that was off by eleven orders of magnitude.

Right.

I mean it's interesting too, since, like, since this process has started, to your point, the dollar has strengthened almost four percent, while the Feds theoretically in a cutting cycle.

And I think there was very much.

It was very much the plan of Powell and whoever he's talking to.

You could say it's best than Trump, and I wouldn't disagree with that to basically say, hey, December is not a given, right, just the December ray cut is not a given.

And it's funny in part because the government shutdowns about to reach a new record.

Right.

The previous record was thirty five days under Trump.

Again, right, But the difference between that one and this one is the public blamed the Republicans in that one.

They're blaming the Democrats.

Now.

My X feed was positively inundated with people talking about how people are going to lose their healthcare and starve, and it was all democratic stuff.

It was just like one right after the other, and I'm like, you're telling me is Israel runs everything?

I mean, it was unbelievable.

I had to start hitting that button on X that said I'm not interested in this.

I'm not interested in this one right after the other, trying to show all these examples.

The left is in a panic right now because they've lost the plot.

They've lost the support of even their own people by giving in to that radical side of the left.

So what does this have to do with economics.

Trump was going to crash the economy, didn't happen.

Trump was going to increase spending sort of happen and now is not happening anymore.

Tariffs were going to kill the global economy and drive inflation, didn't happen.

All of these things didn't happen.

And we've got midterms now, and so they're trying everything.

To me, the Democrats tried the shutdown deliberately to try and affect the voting coming up for the midterms.

Not working again, and your common person is seeing that none of what they say is true.

Even Bill Gates has flipped on climate.

It's like that particular cult can never get anything right in the medium to long term, and slowly their psyops or their propaganda for the short term has stopped working.

And this, to me is an amazing thing.

Because somebody asked me on a podcast on our podcast, probably about a year ago, do you think that the US can be saved.

I said, I'm in the camp of no.

I've moved into the camp of maybe.

And you tell me Trump did nothing, he got nothing done.

He moved me to maybe.

Hey, I you know, I've been saying for four years because I refused to you know, it's funny I went from no ages ago to we elected Trump now it's maybe.

That was twenty seventeen.

And then in the interim during the Biden Hunter, when I watched Powell doing who he was doing, I'm like, why can't we Why can't we be saved?

Why do we have to accept the fact that we're always going to spend one point seven trillion dollars more than we take in.

Why are we thinking in these terms, like we beat Bill back better, we beat the infrastructure bill, we beat Pelosi at our own game.

Like I watched Powell durin the the euro dollar system, destroy it and make it ours again.

I'm like, you mean to tell me that the very same people and is there, you know, my formerly libertarian brethren or you know, likes to sit there and scream about how much waste, fraud and abuse there is in the goddamn government.

And then tell me that you can't cut spend there, Like, which is it?

Which version of inflation do you want to believe in?

Rising prices are change in the money supply?

Right?

Like you can you can stop conflating all this bullshit because you just want to be right as opposed to actually fix anything when the reality is I'm like, you mean to tell me we can't go back to the twenty nineteen budget.

Really, you're trying to tell me we can't go back to twenty nineteen.

My funny part, the funny part about this shutdown is that, like there's people out there saying, you know, people can't afford their healthcare.

These were the pandemic subsidies.

They were based on the pandemic, not anything else, Right, And we have a stronger economy now than we did pre pandemic by every measure I look at, and you're saying we can't go back to pre pandemic levels for a bad healthcare bill that was passed by Obama.

I mean, you are the guys that made it expire.

You're the ones who voted for it to expire.

And the public seems to be understanding that now.

Yeah, No, it's fascinating.

I just I look at it and I'm like, I've been saying this for a little one of the things that I've been thinking about.

I mean, the second point that I made all these all during all of this, is that don't you understand that global capital is looking to what the United States is doing.

Global capital does not care about the way things are now.

They are projecting where to put their money.

Five years from now, ten years from now, twenty years from now.

They want to put They want to make an investment in a place and have it payoff over the course of the next generation.

If you change the way the United States spends money, organizes its capital, taxes its capital, and everything else where, do you think that money is going to go?

You think it's going to go to Rhodesia, you think it or whatever they're calling it this week.

You think it's going to go to France.

Do you think it's going to go to Bhutan or Thailand or anywhere else?

No, it's gonna come fucking here because we have law.

We have the best corporate law in the world.

We have all of these things.

Oh and we have the lowest tax rates, and we and we have the and we have better capital protection and remember to the United States.

So Americans, we are told over and over and over again by evil, fucking British press that we're a basket case when we're the biggest offshore tax haven in the entire world for everyone else, and we're only getting better.

And where do you think that money's gonna flow.

It's going to flow into the US.

And if it flows into the US in such a way that it's going to empower the lower middle classes through product through reindustrialization, it's not going to be the kind of inflation that you think you're going to get already.

It's one of the problems I have with our mutual friend, Dave Colum.

It was one of the smartest guys I've ever met, but he looks at things still in the theoretical.

He thinks things, He thinks through things too much.

And I want to be careful because I really really like him, and I don't ever want to disparage anyone that I really like and respect.

But sometimes when he says things, I'm like, you know, you haven't lived in that world, my friend.

You don't have to, right, I don't have to have been an NFL player to say the Bears have a bad defense.

Right, So you can observe some things and say, but there's some things that people who've traded and been in the financial sort of pits, right, Jim and I were actually in the Chicago pits.

You were in the virtual pits in New York for a long long time doing what you did when you were trading.

Where you look at these things.

I never I never actually worked.

I never actually worked on all three.

Oh I thought you did.

Oh no, no, No, I'm just I'm just like Dave.

I'm just like I'm just a dude.

No.

Vin Spanchi.

On the other hand, that guy and I you know so.

Well to me.

You know you have you have a deeper understanding of real world economics than most people in your sort of bucket do.

So that's probably why I thought that.

And this idea that you can come in and slash the government without the absolute, absolute carnage that would happen being your fault historically, because the people who write history is silly.

And this, this drive of Trump to be loved, to me, is stronger than the drive to completely You could destroy the American economy to the point where you get your moral victory.

But we become the third or fourth economy in the world, which takes our strength away.

Right, our strength is in our money and our military.

And I think our money is.

Stronger and our constitution a rule of course, of course, and and and remember that this is where I get into the philosophical stuff of why are we being attacked again?

I keep focusing on you know what I call you know, you can call it city London, you call it Davos.

I like my latest version of it, this is called the High Table from John Wick.

It's the exact same It's the exact same group of fucking people.

They fundamentally believe they're royalists.

Ultimately, they fundamentally believe that a group of oligarchs should control the world and have every right to take lesser beings and turn them into tax cattle for them and manage us like fucking like a herd.

Yeah, that's nice.

This is why the British and the Indians get along so well together.

They both have a cast system.

Now, I don't believe that.

And if you look at the American Constitution, and you look at all the other constitutions of all these other old great colonial powers, you will see that they still have the bestages of that old system, so a set in a sense, it is, as my friend Alex Craner likes to point out, a fight between two systems of governance over are the people sovereign over the government or the government's sovereign over the people.

That, from my perspective, is why they have to destroy us.

So it's funny, and that's to destroy us because they have to destroy to all of humanity that the great American experiment of individual sovereignty.

It's greater that we, the people who in trying to ordain this constitution is a false outcome.

And this is why I love the Ted Nugens and the kid Rocks of the world, because I think the start of that project that you're talking about started by making us think we were culturally inferior to the old world.

And that's never really resonated with me.

I'm the child of immigrants, right and I spoke Italian before I spoke English, and when you're the child of people who came here for a better life.

I have a video.

I'm fortunate enough to have this video.

My father's from Calabria, Italy, and a film crew from Calabria came into a documentary on Native Colabrians that came to the US and made it.

Now, they considered my father to have made it because he still worked seven days a week.

It is well, until he passed away.

Honestly, he created an Italian bakery that he then turned into a food company that he then turned into a bunch of what Italians would call Tavo Localdo's, which means hot table.

And he had a bakery cafe with hot food as well.

And he did all this and he became upper middle class, right.

He built a five bedroom house with a three car garage, and his wife had a Mercedes, and he had an Infinity, and that to him was a bentle a Rolls Royce, a Lamborghini, and a mansion on Cape Cod.

To him, this was in Mount Prospect.

It was in a suburb of Chicago, and he felt he was the richest guy in the world because he had his fig tree in his backyard.

He could go out there in his socks and slippers and pick figs off and then build a greenhouse out of plastic he got from the neighbors that they were throwing away.

And I mean he was just he was the ultimate Italian hillbilly.

That was the richest guy in his family.

Right, So I have this video from where you know, he's speaking to this film crew in a V neck T shirt with way too much hair coming out, in a gold chain resting on the hair coming out of his chest and a baker's hat on right, and to the people in Calabria, this was a successful Italian immigrant to America.

It wasn't a Kennedy, and he never wanted to be a Kennedy.

Right, I'm getting too.

Oh no, you're doing great, dude, like emotional, this is this is awesome.

Yeah.

So he does this interview and he basically says that his heart is still that of an Italian man, His heart is still Italy, but to move back there, it's just a dream.

And what he meant by that was it's a dream because Italy is a frickin mess and he can't go back to that life where he played cards with his buddy at the espresso bar because there were no good jobs, right, he can't go back to that.

He'd rather work himself to death in America and pay for his kids to go to college and pay for his wife to have a little C class Mercedes, which to her was the most amazing car on the planet, right, and this was the life he wanted to build, and he couldn't do that in Italy, right.

And then I go back to Italy a couple of times.

I remember one of my cousins saying to me, you know, we hate the most about Americans when they wear socks and sandals, when they go to a restaurant in shorts.

And I remember telling my cousin, that's what you hate the most about Americans, Or that we can afford to come here and wear socks and sandals and not give a fuck what you think about it.

That's the Ted Nugent kid rock that I'm talking about, right right, right right, and we need to embrace this particular.

I'm not saying that you have to have tattoos I do.

I'm not saying that you have to have a mullet I don't.

I'm just saying that we can be who we are as Americans.

And when people say they, you know, they hate Trump.

They kind of like some of his policies, but they hate him.

I'm like, don't try and be European.

Trump is from Queens.

Go spend an hour in Queens.

They're all like that, that's right.

Okay.

If you tell them.

There need too much McDonald's, they'll tell you you're fat and ugly.

They don't care, and they walk away without any guilt.

Because this Americans are different in different parts of America.

When I go to New Orleans, I can't understand them because I'm from Chicago and they can't understand me.

And that's the way it's supposed to be here.

So stop thinking your inferior to Europeans because they can tell you which castle was defended by William Wallace.

I don't give a fuck about William Wallace.

At the end of the day.

I grew up in upstate New York and my my mom's family was from Queens.

My dad's family was from Brooklyn.

I'm second you know, both sides, second generation Italian.

My grandparents came over on the boat.

I've told this story before.

My grandfather was you know.

My grandfather was also a similar to your to your dad, a successful man, came over on the boat, built himself as a brick you know, started as a brick layer, built himself a masonry supply shop on Northern Boulevard.

Was forced to retire at seventy because of those security back then, and you know, lived want to retire.

No, he didn't want to retire.

He was still you know, we still kept putting them.

My dad kept putting them to work on our house in upstate New York, building a stoop and building this, and building a rock wall.

When we when we uh the building, when we we we finished out one of the two cards, one of the the of the garages in the house I grew up in.

I was telling her the story last night to a friend of mine.

And at the end of the and and how was that?

How was how do we fill that in?

Did we just build a stud wall?

Now?

My grandfather came over and built a rock wall.

That was beautiful, you know, beautiful rock wall.

My father put a big father and then my dad then built an eight foot you know, a long bar at the end of it.

It was my father's man cave.

And that's where I spent like most of my my my my teenage years, listening to.

Music that had to be the best.

That was cool, It was great.

My dad was you know.

And but at the end of the day, and my grandfather, you know, he was a successful guy, you know, And and I and and you think about it, and you know, and he was a perfectly middle class.

The man drove his nineteen sixty six dark forest green Chrysler in New Yorker beautiful, like literally the batmobile, like the old Batmobile from the he owned one of those.

Okay, of course it's amazing or just freaking car own that car.

Finally turned it into like nineteen eighty four and then got a fucking k car version of it, and it was terrible, but you know, but they drove that thing forever in a day, and and it was just like you know, and you know, lived on the lived on the corner.

His brothers lived across the street.

To go down to we go down to visit them in Flushing, and and uh, on Sunday afternoons, Sunday mornings, they didn't go to church, but all the wives did.

They sat and played Guinea street poker in the bat in the in the basement of in the garage at Uncle Frank's house, and like that's what they did.

And it was like and you know, these guys were all successful in their own way and and uh they and they helped build but yeah, those guys didn't take ship from anybody.

Mm hmm not a thing.

My grandmfather's family same damn way.

Like they were all builders.

Like two of my my uncles were architects, and you know, they went to college.

They were the only ones to go to college.

And my the entire Luongo side of the family, they went and everybody else's went went to work.

Right, but my grandparents had enough money to send two of them to college.

They both became architects and there you know, and their names are on cornerstones all over Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Right, you'll when we when we get done, I'll text you that video my dad and you'll understand why.

Like I'm so so for like happy that I have this video of him explaining this.

Because the stories you get from immigrants and children of immigrants and grandchildren of immigrants, where they just they're like, we just wanted to have a good life.

It's not that big of a deal.

And you know, people I have friends who are democrats.

I don't even want to say democrats.

They just they talk about things nonsensically.

I'll just call them that.

And they say to them, you're an immigrant, do you like what's going on right now?

I mean, my parents got in line came here legally.

They were basically laughed at.

My father said to me, my father died with an Italian accent.

And he said to me years ago, he said, I know I have an accent.

He goes, he said, I speak broken English.

That's what you used to say all the time.

But he said, you know, people think I'm dumb, and I'm okay with that because sometimes I use it and sometimes I just take it.

You know.

He says, people think I'm stupid, but I'm not stupid, and they underestimate me.

Basically explained to me, and he said, I'm kind of okay with that.

Was kidding with my wife that during the the height of woke, Family Guy was this show that we used to watch every once in a while.

It was funny because they made fun of everybody, and they made fun of black people, gay people, Jewish people, Italian people.

They just made stupid Americans.

They made fun of everybody, and when the woke was kind of ramping up, they stopped making fun of everybody except people like Trump and Italians.

I happened to be both of those, right And I said to my wife one day, kidding around, and said, you know, I don't know why it's still okay to make fun of Italians and it's not okay to make fun of anybody else.

Why is it still okay to make fun of Italians?

My wife is an American, she's German Croatian, right, she said, because you guys don't give a shit, because you guys don't get you don't care what anybody thinks of you, because you're the only race that legitimately doesn't care when anybody thinks of you.

Well, there's a reason for that bomb, Yeah, you know what that The reason is, though.

Well, tell me you're right.

I know.

Well, my reason, though, were better, We're better than everybody.

I was literally gonna say my reason was because everybody wishes they were are Italian.

Yeah, it's like it's culturally cool to be black now, we're the closest thing to black people that's white.

So it's like, you know, that's the way that I always explained it, right, It's like all of the cultural norms in the urban African American started with the mob guys, the sweatsuits, the white wall tires.

We all did that.

But my point to this being is that my father, when he started to make a little bit of money when he started to get out of upper class poor and creep into lower middle class.

Right, He's like, well, your stone wall reminded me of this.

He said, well, you know, I want to lay it.

He goes.

I can lay a patio myself.

He goes, but I can't make the nice brick wall with the patterned cinder blocks in between it to make it look like a wall in Italy.

So I got to find an Italian bricklayer.

I said, why do you got to find an Italian bricklayer?

It goes, It's important to help your own community first, he said.

If I can't find an Italian bricklayer, then I'll look for a neighbor.

And if I can't find a neighbor, then I'll go to the yellow pay right.

But it was important to go from the inside out.

And that's the strange thing about national politics bleeding into individual economics.

I say to my friends, the couple of friends I have on the left, and like, if I tell you everything that Trump wants to do and explain to you how it's going to help your household finances, you'll say, yeah, but I still hate Trump.

That's dumb.

That's just dumb.

Help your house help your neighbors, help your community, then help the country go out, go from the inside out, of course, because that's what you should be doing.

Yeah, I mean even if you again, even if you don't like the quote unquote like this is the biggest This is the biggest issue.

Is is how we You're bringing up a really important point, which is that we're trained by social media, we're trained by the media, by this to think in terms of the country.

Yeah, now you start if you you can't fix the country, that's not your job.

And you can have an opinion about the and then then you should and then if you want to, that's fine.

But at the end of the day, what are the freaking we're all the the Marxists tell you, you know, think globally, act you know locally, right, Well, guess what, Okay, I think country.

But you fix the country by fixing you know, your family, by fixing yourself, fixing your community and all that.

You can't fix anybody else until you fix yourself and you get yourself right with you know yourself and you know you're and who you want to be and what your ethos is And do you even have an ethos?

Because if you don't have an ethos, then you don't have a t mos, and then this is the only time the Greeks are actually relevant here and this is why.

But sorry, that's you know, no, I love that so but sorry, you know, but it's it's that these are the important things and this is the way.

You know.

So if you're so, why don't just stop worrying about this, that or anything else about what Trump?

What you think Trump is doing right or wrong.

If Trump does it all wrong, we'll get rid of him in four years and we'll keep moving.

But you can still fix your community, and you can still fix you know, what's wrong.

And you know when people ask me all the time to say, okay, everything you say, thoms sounds great.

I can see what they're doing at the national level, I can see what the geopolitics are, I can see what's happening in the market.

Is okay, how do what do I do?

I'm like, you fixed your home.

You go into your community and you go what's missing, right, okay?

And if you if you do that, you're gonna make the You're gonna make your home better, You're gonna make your You're gonna fix that, You're gonna you're gonna figure out how to get that pothole fix at the end of the road, right, even if the county won't do it, then you know, here a do it, Like, yeah, the county should do it.

So what the county didn't do it, it's not gonna do it.

You know why the county is not gonna do it because the county fucking hates you.

That's why.

So stop stop bitching about it and just go get it done, you know.

And you know, and even if you never get any credit for it.

I used to live back a private road, and and you know, my my home in North Florida is off the private road.

So I'm up here in my my second place up in Tennessee now, but you know, in my luxury RV BIV, waging in the middle of freaking central Tennessee, having a grand all time, enjoying the fact that you know, winter it still happens somewhere on the fucking planet.

And h but I looked back at private road, you know, and the private road was eating cars.

It was so bad.

And finally we just I just looked at my wife and we finally made a little bit of We were finally making a little bit of money.

And you know, it was actually sort of this project when I was first working for Newsmax and making halfway decent money in news Max.

I'm like, my house is paid off.

I'm good.

Hey, we need to get this section of road fixed.

So let's so do me a favor.

Let's start the process of like, see if we can get the community to come together, throw some money in, I'll match whatever they whatever they put in, and we'll get and we'll get some work done on the road.

If I put a thousand bucks into that, into that seven hundreds feed of road over the last five years, I put ten thousand dollars in there, and my driveway why because I knew it would be cheaper in the long run then having to get my brakes in every fifteen thousand miles, wading through muddy limestone pot you know, puddles all summer long.

So at the end of the day, you know you do it.

And did did I get to thank you from anybody else in the in the neighborhood.

No?

Did I care?

No, why they should care?

So whatever, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that got done right and that everybody benefited from it, and I benefited from it.

I'm not you know the I'm not.

I know you're going to be shocked to hear this, but I'm not the most you know, sociable neighbor.

So shocked, shocked, shocked I am to hear it.

So this is my way of saying, you know, I'll get back to the neighborhood by getting this done done do it?

Yeah, you know, so I don't know where that does, but you know that's where that's where we are.

Well it points out the key thing again is that like when you I think voting is voting is important, but I don't get on people that don't.

It's like, look, if that's the way that you want to express how you feel about this, But what I do say to people is that if you choose not to vote, I don't feel you should be a dramatic bitcher about what's going on.

Part of the reason I moved to Florida is because it was purple.

It was a very small reason, but it was part of why I was excited to be here.

So like, okay, in Illinois, my vote didn't matter, although I still trudge through the snow and voted right because it just felt I needed to do that because I did never want to be in a debate or a conversation when somebody says, what do you care?

You don't even vote.

I just wanted to make sure that was my base was covered for debates because in Illinois it was going to be blue.

It didn't really matter.

It was going to end up blue.

Here that wasn't necessarily the case.

But now I see how much better this state operates, and I'm like, I should have been here ten years ago, purple or not, it was moving in the right direction.

And you know, with DeSantis now talking about trying to figure out a way to get rid of property taxes, that is my biggest pet Peeve Thomas property taxes because it's like, what are you talking about, like inside of an hoa where I can't even do to my property theoretically what I want to I have to pay the county property taxes, Like what are you giving me?

We pay for our security, we pay for our trash pickup, we pay for everything here in the community with our HOA dues?

What am I getting the road outside that I don't care about the road I don't like to leave the house, So what does the road outside the community matter?

To me, And you know, I have a huge V eight engine and I have a jacked up golf guard, Like, what do I care?

Can I get everything I need?

If the water is too high, I can get in the golf guard, and as long as it's not three feet, I could trudge through pretty much anything.

But I've just never understood property taxes value proposition.

I've never understood it, and especially as somebody who doesn't have kids, who's not taking advantage of whatever part of my property taxes pays a school system.

I do understand that educating the kids that live around me is important, so I don't bitch about that too loud.

But I also have guns, and you know, when they're eighteen, I can shoot them.

Well, here's the thing I agree agree with you completely.

I've always I've always thought that, I've always, you know, always said that the property taxes kind of like an original sin doctrine, except there's no there's there's no baptism the white boys.

You continually pay one to four percent of the value, and this is even more egregious that you're then paying it on paying based on the value of the perceived value value of the home right, which is which is also retarded.

So the there are a couple of things that we can unpack her.

What this antis is serious about getting rid of property taxes?

I hope he is for primary residents homesteaded properties in Florida, only primary businences.

I've done the math.

I looked all this stuff up.

It's it brings in about eighteen billion dollars in years or is it twelve but it's it's twelve percent of the State of Florida's budget or receipts.

We're running a three billion dollar surplus in Florida right now.

It's only going to get better, right so you're not talking about a tremendous amount of money.

Add ALRM taxes and a lot of that goes to the school boards.

And the school boards were all super packs for the freaking DNC anyway, now and with and and those numbers have have skyrocketed, right with with everybody moving to Florida and all and everybody now paying a higher step up basis after the sale of the property because a lot of those old homes previously were home seted in For those of you who don't know, in Florida, the state or the county cannot raise your if it's homestead exempted, cannot raise the value.

Cannot raise your property taxes the assessed value of your property taxes more than three percent of a year.

So if your house is you know, assess one hundred thousand dollars this year, even at the value of the property on the open market is three hundred grand, they can only raise the one hundred and three thousand this year, and you know one point three over that next year.

Blah blah blah blah.

Right, that's it now, So that and that ULTI also, by the way, is and there are rules on transference from one property to the other, and there's all sorts of cool things that you can do with it.

The exemption is that you're also you get fifty thousand dollars off of the first seventy five thousand dollars with the value in the added worum tax, but only twenty five thousand against school board, So the schools are get to get disproportionate amount of the money.

Also now get rid of all of that.

And that's and and it's only going to get worse for Florida in this respect.

So you know, property taxes in Florida too high.

Period they're not necessary.

We can fund the state in other ways.

Like, here's the thing, why not why are we doing this via property taxes, for example the schools.

Why not just say, look, let's set a budget, how much we're going to spend for student flow a freaking bond and have to stay paid for it or the in the state, the state and the counties pay for it, and we'll figure out how to pay for it and even if it winds up costing us more in some ways.

But we're not paying rent to the government in perpetuity against our homes.

This is a fucking institutional serfdom that was created as a system created given to us as always by the fucking British going back, you know, going back to like about a thousand years now.

It's dumb and it's and it's absolutely unacceptable.

It's designed, like the income tax, to ensure that the bondholders, who are the real owners of the society, get their income stream.

You want to stop, you want to defund the high table, Let's start with property has at the end of the at the end of the day, I am a as much a revolutionary as your average mark system.

Just not Yeah, it's funny because you just you just oh, I got to think of a word for this.

You just Tom Longo and Dave call them my regular life thesis on you know, on property taxes, my everyday life thesis.

And I mean, it's just I don't mind helping the government do what they're supposed to do.

I mean, I understand, you know, income tax was an amendment.

It wasn't originally in our documents, right in our founding documents, and I understand why it wasn't, But it has constantly just gone in one direction until really Trump.

There's been a couple of times where income tax have been dropped.

But I mean, I am a massive flat taxer.

I don't mind income taxes as much as the next guy.

I don't mind a graduated level of income taxes, you know, two percent, seven percent, seventeen percent.

That does doesn't bother me so much.

I think most people would do it voluntarily.

The vast majority of people who make a lot of money wouldn't have a problem overpaying for their community if they needed to.

I don't want to pay for anything in San Francisco.

Quite frankly, I don't want to pay for anything in the state of California.

I lived there for four and a half years, and while it was some of the most beautiful land I've ever been around in my life in any country, the people there are bat shit and they're stupid and they're annoying.

I'll tell you a quick Californian story if you want.

Sure everybody in there.

My ex wife was an attorney and I was in finance and theory, right, and everybody we met attorney financed, nobody cared.

But the minute they found that I was on CNBC and Fox and did TV spots, they were more interested in me than her, because it was something about being on that magic tube that made everybody, you know, all of a sudden think you were something.

Right.

So I met a guy I used to go to.

This restaurant called Beach Street Cafe was named after the same street somewhere in New York City.

I don't want to say which borrow was in, But a producer opened this restaurant because he was from that particular place, lived on that particular street, and he used to like going to an Italian restaurant there.

So he made an Italian restaurant called Beech Street Cafe.

I'm making a short story alone.

I was sitting at the counter there one day eating and there was a guy there.

It was obviously divorced dad's Thursday, and he's there with his kid, and his kid is screaming that he wanted a cupcake, and the father is audibly saying, look, I left my wallet up on the hill.

I don't have any more cash.

I can't get you a cupcake.

So I talked to one of the normal servers that I knew from going there all the time, and sad, look at the kid a cupcake and charge me for it.

And the guy came over and he said, you know, that was really nice of you.

You know, blah blah blah.

My name is philan blank, doesn't matter, say goodbye.

A couple days later, I see him there by himself, and he comes and sits by me and we gets talking.

Turns out he's a small time producer and he's in charge of his company's pension fund.

So he says, hey, can we have lunch someday and you know, talk about how I can do my bension bun better.

I'm like, yeah, sure we can do that.

I get a call from somebody and he says, I'm mister fill in the Blank's assistant.

He would like to set up a lunch for you.

I'm looking for Bobby ay Echino's assistant And I said, well, you were talking to him.

It's me, right, so I said.

He goes, well, I'm sorry I was.

Can he set a lunch date with you?

I'm like, sure, we'd like to meet at the Ivy.

Like, come on, man, that's like forty five minutes from me.

We both live in the same neighborhood.

Can we at least do ivy by the shore, which was closer to where we both live.

Let me check with him.

Yeah, he says that fine, So we set up a lunch.

First of all, why do you want me to go to the Ivy?

And I don't care about that shit, right, So we go to a place that was ten minutes from both of our houses.

I get there and he's there before me, right, And he's standing at the bar and he's wearing a support coat.

I'm in shorts and a T shirt like I always am.

And he sees me and he comes running over and he gives me a hug, and I'm like, it's a little early for a hug, but whatever.

He hugs me and is like thank you for coming, thanks for showing up, Like, no problem.

We sit down and the server comes over and he's like, how you doing, mister fill in the blank.

He knows the guy and he turns to me and goes, do you eat meat?

I go, yeah, I eat meat.

He goes the skirt steak here is amazing, Carlo skirt steak for two please, And I'm thinking, did he just order for the lady?

You know what the fuck is that?

I ordered my own food or two guys, right?

And I called Carlo back over and I said, and give me a bourbon neat please, because I'm gonna need it for this conversation.

So I think we're going to start off with Bulls versus Lakers, you know, Dodgers versus Cubs.

I don't think it's going to be that kind of conversation.

The first thing he says to me and goes, so, Sonya is not emotionally there for me.

My father back in Cleveland is dying of thyroid cancer.

And Sonya wants back.

I'm like this, hold on a second, who the fuck is Sonya?

Like?

What are you talking about?

Right?

And he starts telling me these deep things about himself, his life and his father's cancer and his relationship.

And I'm like, I had three four bourbons by the time lunch was over, right, And then he gets up at the end of lunch and he goes, thank you for showing I really love you for that, and he gives me a hug and I push him away.

I'm like, you don't love me.

He goes, I'm sorry.

I'm like, you don't love me.

We just met.

You don't love me.

He's like, I'm straight.

I'm like, I don't give a shit if you are or not.

You don't love me.

And then I paid for lunch.

That's California.

That's what California wants to me.

The guy just met me started telling me about his inner feelings.

The entire state to me, for me, from my anecdote from my experience, was just a walking big lie.

Everybody was full of shit and I hated it.

And so when it came time to move somewhere warm again, it was between Texas and Florida.

I was never going to cross that border and had any further west.

It was just not going to happen for me.

Yeah, yeah, I mean it's funny.

I've been living in North Florida since I So I came to school after growing up in New York.

And it's funny way we just just and I lived in that area outside of you know, outside of Gainesville for twenty two years, and it's just you know, you know, I braised goats.

I've you know, interfaced with people who you know, I you know, I've been out you know, getting hey and this and that and you know being you know, like and I've lived in among and those are my people, right, Like I we really do, like I don't they don't see me that way, but I see them that way.

Right.

I came up here to Tennessee and uh, over the weekend, we had to go get get some firewood, and uh the first thing we did is we found an old man, got some firewood and chatting with him.

And you know, before I even you know, before we got done, I'm like, you know, talking about where you know, I know a guy who will you know take your well for you You need some gravel, you need this?

Y Yeah, I'm like you had I just turned in my mind.

You have him in the phone, right, She's like, oh yeah, good, Like that's all I need to know, Like, you know, I need to have my I have, I mean the property out here.

We have a guy that's been helping us get the property developed.

I'm like, I, you know his name is his name is Thomas, but I call him Brad.

Why because I have a Brad down in Florida who whenever I needed something, I could call Brad and Brad knew somebody or Brad had a family member right that could get me the thing that I needed.

I had had a tree down on my fence and it's too big for my chainsaw, get Brad's brother to come out and take care of the problem or whatever it was, and never had to worry about.

You know, you had a network people around you.

And it's like that's the first thing we started doing when we started, you know, figuring out what we were going to do up here.

It's like, you can't get this stuff done without knowing real people and and like so it's the exact opposite of the problem, the acxact opposite of the situation.

So yeah, it's just fascinating, man.

But that's how we're going to, you know, get through this.

You want to go from can the country be saved?

From no?

To maybe I'm like, no, the country can be saved because all we have to do is remember that Brad is right around the corner and as well.

They do freaking work for us if you if you just treat them with a you know, even a modicum of respect.

He's the dude that gets shipped done.

And Brads are everywhere, and they're the best people.

And by the way, they're the best fucking people you'll ever.

Hear, the best people.

I think people should embrace their inner kid Rock or Ted NuGen.

Eat a steak covered in blood.

You know, it's just get blood on your shirt.

Just be normal and don't worry about what Europe or the UK thinks about what we are culturally.

We're better read and we understand more than they do.

And even when we don't try and get one of them to dig a road, they would have no idea how to do it.

This is the best country that has ever been in my view.

And you know it's funny.

I was I was looking this is.

You can actually find this on my ex if you look for it.

I don't know where it is because I don't usually care what I said before, but this particular time, I do want to pap myself on the back after Trump won the election, I said, we're going to get a fifteen to thirty percent drop in the equity markets, and depending on which one, the NASTAK fell over thirty percent, I think the SMB dropped about nineteen and a half percent, something in that range.

And I said, and then after that, it's going to be a multi decade bull market for assets, I said, the stocks.

Realizing I meant assets, I went deeper into gold at that point.

I bought my first gold coin in nineteen eighty six, when the American ego first was minted.

I just thought it was a cool coin, you know, and so I've been buying little bits of gold just because I thought it was cool.

And I'm Italian.

We like chains and stuff, so gold always mattered to me culturally.

And I said, after that, it's going to be a multi decade bull market.

And I still believe that because I think the mid term is going to go Trump's way, the mentorm elections, and then I think you're going to really see a ramp up of what he's doing.

I think he's been cautious because of the midterms and because whether it's him or best in his ear going slow down, we'll be able to do this, but we've got to keep it into your second term.

He's gonna be the first non lame duck we've ever had, right because he's just going to keep doing things, and I think people should have faith in what's going on.

I moved into the maybe camp.

I'll go into the yes, we can be saved camped if a JD Vance type wins when Trump is gone.

But I think aesthetically, like looking at the falling gold.

I told you how that we own a lot of physical gold, you know, for our particular net worth.

I don't want to exaggerate the level of that is.

But the last two corrections in gold have been sideways corrections.

People don't really know what that means.

But what happens a lot of the time when an asset rallies and then moves sideways.

People get bored, They get tired.

They think it's not continuing to appreciate.

So I'm going to sell out a sum or all of it and buy something that may perform the way that that asset recently did.

And this is the first time gold actually I'm putting this in air quotes for people who are listening, collapsed, right, But it didn't really.

It collapsed and it's stabilized, and as I'm speaking right now, it's back above four thousand dollars and it's likely to move sideways from there in my view, And if it does, if I'm right about that, it's pausing for the next leg up.

It's not moving lower.

When gold did about forty two hundred, I told my wife, I said, you know, this has been a kind of an exhausting move, what technical analysts would call an exhaustion move.

But that comes from people going, wow, I don't have any more money.

I hope this keeps going up, and they see the money they've made and they're like, I'm going to take some of it out.

I did that about a couple of years ago.

When gold did nineteen hundred, I sold one coin and went out and bought two bicycles because my wife and I wanted new bicycles, and to me, there were free bicycles because they were the cost of a coin that I probably paid seven hundred dollars for.

Right So.

From that perspective, sideways corrections are an indication of a move.

Higher corrections are an indication of a future move higher.

When gold sold off, my wife said, oh, we should have sold all of it and then bought it back lower for the time.

I can't predict that stuff.

I've been actively trading for thirty four years.

I've bought the low and sold the high four times, so I don't I'm not the person who thinks I can do that.

We didn't sell one coin on the selloff.

We didn't sell one bar on the sell off, and I didn't sell one futures contract because I'm currently a long in the futures because it is going back up.

In my view, I've been wrong.

I want to stress that I don't want to see people, you know, mortgaging their house to go into gold.

But I think gold is going to hit ten thousand, uh, possibly before we speak two more times, possibly before.

We that's more bullish than I am.

I mean, you speak publicly two more times, you and I talk all the time.

Well again, I know that's I know what you meant, and that's more bullish than I am.

But I agree with you that the uh, this is a sideways, this is just this is just consolidation.

What you know, what I called consolidation.

And I'll tell you why.

And my my my argument is very simple.

We have to recollateralize the country.

We have to recollateralize our our debt markets.

And you recollateralize the debt markets by and if you want to beat London at its game, who doesn't have any gold?

Right?

London, London and Ottawa?

Who does have gold in the United States?

Mm hmmm.

So people people made too much of China buying it.

There's still ranked fifth or sixth in the world in terms of that's that's thesion of gold they had.

That's that's the official numbers.

I think.

I think, I've always I always agree with your mercers.

It's you know, probably hired, and that same thing with the Russians.

So that's only the official gold reserves.

Then there's the stuff in the sovereign both run.

Then there's the stuff.

Then there's the stuff in the basement of the fucking Kremlin.

Then there's this.

Then there's the Yeah, I should I should I should have I mean, I should have known you would say that, because that's correct.

I had a friend that worked for China Construction Bank for years and he just said to me when he goes, none of this is what, none of this is.

No, this is true?

Right?

Yeah?

And then there's that, and then there's the goal that that that the people are buying that they're pulling off a sheet every day.

And then so what I mean by this is that you know, in order to you know, in order to recapitalize the FED, for example, in order to recapitalize, right, if we're really need to keep the FED in its current role, which I don't think we will, that's a different conversation for different days.

So we should just kind of wind this up now.

Which is that?

Which is that?

Yeah, this four thousand level, you know, we may see a correction down at the thirty five we do forget to buy with both discus and it's going it's going to shoot right the six because will be a classic kind of Martin Armstrong false moved down like we saw in the equity market.

It's earlier and near on the tariff tantrum.

To your point, there are things that are happening that you know, we didn't talk to you and I didn't talk about today that I know that I can I can feel and I can see we're setting up for the next leg of this right now.

It's China's turn.

Vince Launch would say, it's China's turned to buy gold.

It's our turn to back off and let China buy, and then they're gonna buy for a little while.

And nineties don't tend to tend to like to overpay for their gold, so little trade side.

It was for a little while, and that's fine, and then we'll move up to the next level and the next level or the next level.

So if it goes to ten grand in that amount of time, that would actually be too dramatic for me.

And the reason is that I would say that, then we've lost control of the situation.

I want to see.

I'm a you're Chicago guy.

Yeah, I'm a New York guy.

I'm a Tuna guy.

I'm I believe in three yards and a cloud of dust.

I believe in don't build oursels, smash mouth football seventeen fourteen, kick a field goal with fourteen seconds left and ConTroll the cock for forty five minutes.

That's my that's my gig.

And I never like to see gold go parabolic or you know, in the short term or in the medium term.

Never same thing with something with you.

I hated seeing the Bears win forty seven to forty two yesterday.

I hate those kinds of.

Games, right, I'm a I'm a three two baseball game kind of guy.

I think some young winners should have an ERA under three.

I think they should pitch.

I think they should pitch pitch nine innings.

I'm an old school baseball guy.

I'm an old school football guy, and I'm certainly an old school hockey guy that like the dead puckier more than anything else, goaltenders should rule.

But that being said, we don't live in that world anymore.

We live in an inflated version of everything because people like points, so whatever.

Okay, so, but that's where we are.

So you know, I want to see a nice, gradual grind it out, make the bears in the markets completely and utterly unnerved on every period, because that's the way you get durable price discovery.

I got one last question for you.

I was on a podcast recently.

You were on it as well, cipher Punked, and they were trying to what they called redpill me on bitcoin.

Now.

I said, look, I've traded bitcoin a lot, I've owned it, I've sold everything that I know quote unquote was holding.

I'm not going to use total I think that's one of the dumbest things anyway, I recently told them that two of the biggest problems for bitcoin is you're basically still tied to the dollar because there's no exchange that prices everything in bitcoin.

You don't have like a giant Walmart or Costco or Amazon, where everything is priced to bitcoin.

Everything is still priced in dollars globally.

And you can't say bitcoin is worth one bicycle.

Bitcoin is worth one hundred and seven thousand tunes.

I could take nine hundred dollars of that and buy a bicycle.

That's what it is.

So you guys are still tied to the dollar.

Gold is actually not like that.

Yeah, they priced golden dollars, but you can also price it in proper or the euro or different things.

That's why I go better.

I'm not disparaging bitcoin.

I think it's an asset, but I just don't know what kind of asset it is.

Part two.

None of you believe that it can crash to zero.

I believe that it can.

If you ask me how, I don't fucking know.

But you guys have this view similar to the people who are selling horse and carriages when the car came along, that nothing new can beat your current method and that nothing could break into your system and damage it.

And his answer to me was, well, the top cryptologists and hackers and mathematicians.

I'll say, I go, those are the top ones.

Now we used to bleed people to cure the flu.

Those are the top medical professionals at the time.

But twenty fifty twenty one point fifty, I don't know what the hell's going to happen.

My point is, people who think bitcoin cannot fail are the people who invested in Birdie made off.

They're the same kind end of people.

Talk to me, respond to I agree.

You know I've been I have been called a shit coiner, like anything to given Thursday Bob, I will be a Russian asset, I will be a Zio cuck.

I will be a shill for the Israelis taking my seven thousand dollars a day payout.

And I we're a maga lover.

You're ever a maggot card, a cute hard and a shit coiner.

And why for the exact same argument that you just made about bitcoin.

I don't believe technology ends.

I believe bitcoin is fascinating monetary technology.

I don't believe anything ends.

To quote John Osterman, doctor Manhattan, at the end of Watchman.

No, in the end, Adrian, nothing ever ends.

So technology doesn't end.

There's always gonna be a better mouse trap.

There's always gonna be something better.

Will bitcoin affect the history of money?

Yes?

Will it be the end of the discussion about money?

No?

And if you and even if you believe, even in my heart of hearts, right, I can.

And I've said this to the bitcoiners.

I'm like, I'm happy to be wrong.

Yeah, I'd love to be wrong.

I'm also happy to, you know, to say, maybe you're you're correct.

I mean, I read the white paper in June of twenty ten, yeah, and mind a fifty block.

I've since I lost those coins, of course, of course, but I was there.

I read the white paper and went, oh shit, cool, I get it.

I explained me, I explained how it?

You know?

How it?

You know?

Satisfied me as a regression theorem to the little rock ball guys who called it, you know, funny money and all of this stuff back and back then.

Did all that been there done that got that T shirt us your thirty six in the old bitcoin forms, YadA YadA, YadA, can believe in it?

Still have to remind myself every day.

There's always the possibility that I'm wrong, and you have to lay.

You have to leave that in there, otherwise you become a religious zalot.

I refuse to be ideotically possessed by anything.

And we'll go from there.

Not even Trump.

Right on the same page, buddy.

So anyway, I got a hard stop here, man.

So do why I've got I've got another one in like two in the five minutes.

So Bob, it's you know, thank you, thank you so much for the afternoon and and your time.

Man.

You're you're you know, it was great.

Tell everybody where they can find you or to do the thing, and let's get out the door.

Yeah.

So our newsletter you can find at Unfiltered Investor dot com.

I also attracked it from the Unfiltered Investors, so it doesn't matter where he goes.

Uh.

The show is Future's Edge Finance unfiltered.

It's everywhere.

You could follow me at X on X at Bob Underscore A A Chino And that last name is I A C C I n oh, so it's difficult to spell, but it's Bob Undersquare alright, you know, Yeah, reach out, love to talk to any of you all right, And.

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