Iran War Expected to Spark Global Energy Crisis. Here’s What Americans Can Expect at the Pump.

The first thing to know about the two wars now in progress in Ukraine and in Iran is that they're about energy because Iran and the countries around Iran produce about 20% of global oil supply. Russia, meanwhile, produces about 12% of global oil supply. So these are the biggest energy producing regions in the world and the wars have gravely affected their ability to produce that energy and to ship it anywhere else and to refine it for that matter. So that's the first thing to know. The second thing to know is that energy is the same as prosperity. The more energy a country uses, the richer it is. There is a one-to-one correlation between energy use and the size of your economy, GDP roughly measured. I mean, look the list of the countries that consume the most energy and put it side-by-side the richest countries and they are directly connected. The country uses the most energy per capita on the planet is Qatar, which is also, by most measures, the richest country, tiny population, 350,000, massive natural gas supplies, huge per capita wealth in that country and huge per capita energy use about roughly 19,000 kilowatt hours per citizen. On the other end, the poorest country in the world arguably south Sudan. Your energy use per capita, 51 kilowatt hours, the United States, by the way, about 12,000 kilowatt hours. Now, for the past 15 or 20 years, maybe 25 years, elements of the American leadership class have been scolding this country and the West for using too much energy. We use too much energy. We're destroying the earth by using energy. By the way, bombing civilian populations, someone is not destroyed the earth, but turning on the lights or having an MRI or driving a suburban, that destroys the earth. Say that people who put solar farms in the woods. But that propaganda, as absurd as it is, has effectively hidden from many Americans the direct correlation between the amount of energy they use and the lives they live and that would include their life expectancy and the likelihood their children will survive infancy and everything that is good or considered progress in our society, all of it derives from one simple fact. We consume an awful lot of energy and to the extent we consume less energy, those facts will change. In other words, we will become poorer. Again, energy is the same as wealth. So when a country uses less energy or when energy prices become unaffordable for the majority of the population, that country by definition becomes poorer. There's no debate about this. This is the iron law of economics, of reality, of civilization, energy equals prosperity. So if you take two steps back and you see one country, the United States, waging two simultaneous wars one against Iran and the other against Russia and make no mistake. The United States is at war with Russia. The Trump administration's intelligence from the CIA and other intel agencies is being used by the Ukrainian government to target drones and missiles. So the US government, us, your tax dollars is at war with the government of Russia, whether you're aware of that or not, whether you wanted it or not, and of course most Americans don't. And the effect of that is what? To destabilize the Russian regime, break up Russia into 15 separate republics? Well, no, not yet. The effect is to hike global energy prices, because once again, Russia is the producer of about 12% of global oil supply and about 5% of refined petroleum products. And the war the United States is waging against Russia at this stage, through its proxies in Western Europe and Ukraine, is a war against energy. About half of Russian refineries have been hit by missiles or drones targeted by the United States. So at some point you have to ask, like, why would we do that? Why would the United States under the previous president blow up the Nord Stream pipeline, which was the source of cheap energy from Russia into Western Europe, our allies in Western Europe, countries that are occupied still by American troops 80 years later, are closest allies on the globe? Why would we deprive them of cheap energy? Who knows? There's a story here, though, and someone should tell it. And then in this war which began February 28th, of course, the central fact of Iran, is not whether it has an active nuclear program or how many missiles it has or how many crowds in downtown Tehran chant mean things about Israel or the United States. I mean, those are interesting data points, but they're not really the core fact of Iran. The core fact of Iran is its geography and the fact that it sits on the northern side of the straight-of-form moves, which is the opening, famously at the eastern end of the Persian Gulf, through which 20% of global energy flows. And then if you look at a map, it curves around into a thing called the Red Sea. And the Red Sea is the waterway over which another big percentage of global energy flows, though getting too boring about it, Saudi Arabia, which is probably the world's still the largest oil producer in the world, kind of thought ahead, what if they closed the straight-of-form moves at some point and built a pipeline on its territory into the Red Sea? So they wouldn't have to send ships through the straight-of-form moves. Well, unfortunately, across the water is a country called Yemen. And Yemen is effectively an enemy of Saudi Arabia and the Houthi militants who we're briefly at war with are, of course, proxies of Iran. And they are now bombing shipping, attacking shipping in the Red Sea. And the main thing to know about energy shipping is that it is very expensive. A super tanker full of petroleum of crude oil is worth about $350 million. So you don't have to sink too many of these. Maybe any. You basically have to set a couple on fire or just threaten them. And there's no insurance underwriter in the world who's going to guarantee to pay back the owner of that ship if it sinks. So you can't get insurance for your cargo and ship worth a total of $350 million, you're probably not going to set sail. So in other words, instability itself, even if no shots are fired or drones launched, is enough to end the flow of energy out of the straight through the Red Sea and to the rest of the world, primarily to Asia, but also to Europe, especially Europe and to the United States. And so what you're looking at is the single largest disruption in energy markets since energy markets began, nothing like this has ever happened. It began February 28th, the people who had thought about this ahead of time, very much including people around the president, his advisors, analysts at various intel agencies. They all knew this was going to happen. And it did, this war combined with the war that we are waging against Russia in Eastern Europe have completely shut down probably a quarter of the world's energy. And what does that mean? Well it means poverty and disaster and almost certainly famine in some places in Africa because of course half of all global fertilizer is derived from natural gas, et cetera, et cetera, it means a readjustment downward of the standard of living of people certainly in Europe, almost certainly in the United States and definitely in parts of Asia. So that is the main fact of these wars. That's the fact that will affect the most number of lives. That's the fact that will precipitate shifts in power, the fall of governments. That's the main thing to know about these wars and yet it's the one thing that almost nobody ever mentions. And to the extent public officials, not just in this country, but in Europe, talk about this war, they talk about the threat posed by Islamic radicalism because there's really no religious extremism in the United States, just pride flags everywhere. You can turn a person from a girl into a boy just by wishing it so, but we're not religious extremists. And in any case, they tell you that this is really a war about ideology, but it's not a fact is on energy, which is to say GDP. So when I asked about this, it's interesting how they respond. So take a look at the Secretary of Defense. This is in June on a network Sunday show is asked about energy and the effect of this war on energy. And here's how the Secretary, I beg your pardon, of war responds to the question, watch. We have a totally different energy dynamic around the world. By the way, the way energy flows today, the Straits will be nowhere near as relevant one to two years from now. Because of the foresight of President Trump, he's made this energy independent at home or expert net exporter, now Venezuela, through our partnerships. Now we're killing foreign terrorists, leaders who have terrorized the American people, the amount of drugs and gangs that came to the world. Energy, that states of America. The prices are pretty high right now. It's a huge deal. So I don't know that the independence is coming down and we'll see them. They are. So there's a lot in that paragraph. We started out with energy and then we got immediately to foreign terrorist leaders who are terrorizing Americans, not clear who they are, not clear who the foreign terrorist leaders are, also not clear who the Americans who are terrorized by those foreign terrorist leaders were. country has probably been a long time since. one line at the grocery store mentioned for terror leaders, but in any case, it sort of jumped around, but let's move to the beginning of that short speech. And there was a very specific point in there. And it was, look, the straight-of-form moves is effectively closed. Like, that's measurable. Everybody knows that. It's been closed since April. You kind of can't lie about that, but it doesn't really matter because the straight-of-form moves is basically becoming a relevant, like, really, who cares about the straight-of-form moves? It's just 20% of global energy. No one really cares, because the energy dynamic is changing, because we arrested Maduro and his wife and put them in a cell in New York, and so the energy dynamic is changing. So, of course, in real life, it doesn't mean anything, because it was spoken by someone who doesn't know anything. But let's just take it seriously for one moment. So, pre-war, which is to say on February 27th of this year, about 20 million barrels of oil, not even including LNG, but let's just take to petroleum oil, about 20 million barrels per day were moving through the straight-of-form moves, and that number is in zero in that range right now, and has been pretty much since April. So, that's a huge amount of energy to make up for how you're going to do that. Well, of course, with Venezuela, which we know from listing to the President, has the largest oil reserves in the world, like, dwarfing Saudi Arabia, which is why Venezuela is just so darn rich, and why most Venezuelans have their own private 747, oh wait, just kidding. But in any case, we've been told that Venezuela has the most oil of any country in the world, and I guess technically that may be true, but does it matter? Well, it doesn't matter if the oil's still under the ground, so how much oil is Venezuela exporting now? Well, the good news is the number is up. Up from what it was a year ago, more oil is leaving Venezuela. That is absolutely right. Then left a year ago, what's the number? Well, it's a little over a million barrels a day. A million barrels a day. Now, keep in mind, the straight-of-form moves allowed 20 million barrels a day to go through before the Trump administration decided to kill the elderly religious leader of Iran. So that leaves 19 million barrels of oil, not including natural gas, which is also kind of shut down in the Persian Gulf, mostly from Qatar, but not only. But let's just stick to oil. Where do we get the extra 19 million barrels per day to make up for what we've lost in the straight-of-form moves, which apparently no longer really matters? No hint, because there's no answer. Because the real answer is we're not. As long as the straight stays closed, the rest of the world is going to have to readjust to a deficit of at least 19 million barrels per day. And that's just oil. Okay. So that was the Secretary of War's position. And again, we are often to killing foreign terrorist leaders who are terrorizing Americans, the danger of Islam, and she's hot. Hamas! That's Boah! You know, America's greatest problems. Not the drug cartels that control New Mexico, but Hamas. So what's interesting is that three days later, that man's boss, who would be the president of the United States, was over in Europe at the G7, was asked about the straight-of-form moves. This was, you may recall, this was last month. You may recall at that moment, he was in the middle of explaining that we were going to sign a memorandum of understanding perhaps we already had, but basically a framework that would get us to a peaceful non-violent settlement of this war. And he, because he is Donald Trump, whatever you think of him, he has these moments of kind of amazing candor. And it's refreshing candor. Again, whatever you think of the guy, he sort of says things that are obviously true from time to time. And he said this three days after Pete Hegg says, said that, Trump said this. If I went out and continued to bomb them for another four, just bomb the hell out of them, I get a bad person. No, there's nothing I can do. But what this does is it allows the ships to go. If we keep bombing those ships won't be going. And you're talking about 500, 600, 700 million dollars a day. It's a lot of money. A lot of money. That's why the world is okay. It's liquid. It's fine. Also, we run out of reserves about four weeks. You know, there are reserves all over the world. And we would really run out. And there'll be a time when you wouldn't be able to get it. And you want to see bedlam? Wait a second. Three days after the Secretary of War, not defense war, hopefully direct war. Three days after he told us on CBS, and actually, you know, like who cares about the street? There's the president of the United States saying actually got four weeks to go until we run out of oil. You can't get any. And then there's quote, bedlam people are just eating each other. It's out of like, I'm medieval woodcut. People are just fighting in the street because they have no oil. Bedlam craziness. Now, probably both of these are an exaggeration, but the latter, the president's assessment is, of course, obviously closer to the truth. And we know that because for the duration of this war, a war over a straight that apparently doesn't matter, well, then why are we fighting over it? The United States has been in the process of draining its strategic petroleum reserve, something like 172 million barrels taken out of the SPR since this war began. Now, why would we do that? If we didn't need the energy, if it didn't matter, if energy flows were changing in the world, and the straighter for moose was becoming irrelevant, probably wouldn't be drawing down the strategic petroleum reserve. In fact, we probably wouldn't be fighting this war in the first place. We probably wouldn't even be talking about humiliating mo you with Iran, in which we admit we're powerless. Why would we go through any of this if we didn't very desperately need to keep that straight open? Well, of course, the answer is we wouldn't. So, if you ignore what people say, as always, and watch what they do, a very clear picture emerges. And of course, it's the picture of desperation. It's the picture of a group of people who went into a war with certain expectations, hopes, anyway, delusions. They told themselves certain things were going to happen. Those things didn't happen. Another desperate. It's all very obvious. Again, you probably wouldn't drain your strategic petroleum reserve and get 18 million Americans killed and go through the whole drama of all of this if you didn't have to. All of which leads to maybe the most interesting fact of this entire exercise, which is oil markets. Now, if you grew up in the United States, you have learned the hard way that a lot of the things you were taught as a child were not true. Diversity is not our strength, actually. The government is not necessarily on your side, etc, etc, etc. But one thing you likely still believe is that markets are real. And you have every reason to believe that because markets as conceived or as sold to the American public are completely transparent. We can watch them on a ticker. We know exactly what the price of shares in any publicly traded company is doing at any moment and in commodities, whether it's oil or gas or soybeans, wheat doesn't matter. We can watch it. And we know that fluctuations in price are driven, maybe not exclusively, but in the end, primarily by the supply of whatever's being traded. The principle of supply and demand governs markets. If something is scarce and much sought after, it's expensive diamonds. If something is abundant and has limited use, sand on your beach, it's cheap. Supply and demand govern price. Very few people from Keynesians to Austrians, it doesn't matter what kind of economic theory you buy into. It doesn't matter if you're a DSA member or a Neocon or a Newt Gingrich Republican. You can understand how markets work because it's very, very simple and you see that principle reflected in daily life from many, wake up, so many go to bed. So it hasn't dawned on most people to suspect that commodities markets are rigged. How could you rig a commodities market? An international commodities market. It's not controlled by anyone person, you don't think. So how could that happen? Well, it's time to start thinking deeply about this. And by the way, for those who are interested in exploring this, we recommend so strongly a piece by Ron Huns came out a couple of days ago in the UN's review. You can find it online. Last name is UNZ, one of the deepest and most interesting thinkers in the United States wrote a piece about what is happening in oil markets. And again, it's worth the read, but to summarize it in four sentences. So the price of oil that the consumer understands mostly, if you're a CNBC watcher, you judge it by something called the price of Brent Crude. Brent Crude, there's a Brent oil field under the Shetland Islands in the North Sea. It's actually, I don't think operating anymore, but Brent Crude is the name that oil traders use for sweet light crude. That means less viscous, low lower self sulfur content, easier to refine into gasoline and diesel. It's the majority of oil traded in the West is light sweet crude, we call it Brent crude. So if you want to know what oil prices are, you look up something called the price of Brent crude. And it's kind of a commonly agreed upon measure in the West for what oil costs, and you can look it up on your phone. It's like the price of gold or silver or any other commodity. And so when this war started, the price was maybe 70 bucks, something like that. I think it was about 72 hours, something like that. That would be the end of February. So again, the war is taking place at the center of the global oil trade, which is the Persian Gulf. And so naturally the price went up, and then in April, the trade is closed and oil predictably shoots up to maybe get the number wrong, but maybe 118, $119 a barrel for Brent crude. And that seemed honestly a little bit low considering that 20% of global oil just got taken off the market just wasn't flowing out of the Gulf. And there was also extensive damage to oil extraction, facilities to oil refineries, to petrochemical plants. I mean, there's a lot of damage, you know, not just to the oil wells, but to all the downstream machine, machinery involved in refining oil. So anyway, it seemed a little bit low, but at the end of April, it reached what turned out to be its highest point, and then it did something quite amazing and it went down. There was a time this month, with a straight basically still closed, when oil as priced on the Brent crude market, oil was cheaper by a few cents per barrel than it was before the war started, even though the straight was closed. Now you don't have to be Larry Summers or a Harvard trained economist to wonder like, what the hell is that? How could that possibly be? You take 20% of the supply offline, and the price goes down? Any of your people say, well, China stopped importing a lot of oil, true. But this is a market, and the people investing are basically making a bet on what's going to happen in the future. These are futures. So China can't stop buying Gulf oil forever, and there aren't an extra 20 million barrels a day of oil anywhere on the planet that we can just like fire it up and be like, okay, we'll just replace the oil with this. So there's a global shortage of this commodity, and the price goes down, so the run-ons piece has all kinds of different potential explanations for this that are very interesting. And it's not clear that we can settle on any one of them, but we can say unequivocally at this point that oil markets, at least the Brent crude market, do not reflect reality, just to say they're fake, and they're either being manipulated by people, and as run-ons points out in the space, that's not a crazy idea. I mean, GameStop, famously, publicly traded company that was tanking, became an incredibly valuable company because a bunch of guys in their boxer shorts and their rec rooms decided to spike the price by buying shares, same with Hertz during COVID. So we have precedent for small-determined groups of people manipulating public markets. Like that happens, could it happen in a market this big and this closely who knows? Another possible explanation is AI. So it turns out one of the many facts that you learn in watching this war, that the majority of oil futures trading, I think about 70% is done by machines, it's done by AI. There's no people done automatically in the way that we target drones and missiles now. We just let the machine decide who to kill. So apparently in futures markets, oil futures markets, the machine decides when and how much to buy. How does the machine make that decision? Well, of course, the same way that AI makes all decisions with use of language. And so one theory is that by making public statements that the straight of Hormuz is relevant and the U.S. government, President Trump, have this completely under control and that energy prices are not actually rising, in fact, they're going down when you look around. They are rising. And by the way, if you try to buy a barrel of oil, let's say on the internet, it tells you they're priced at 72 bucks or 84, I think it's 84 today. Can you actually buy a barrel of oil for 84 bucks? I'm going to buy a barrel of sweet like crude for $84, where would I find that? And no news organization has bothered to actually call the biggest retailers around the world. That's like, what are you actually selling a barrel of oil for? No one's decided to do that for some reason, probably because they all support this war. But if you were to do that, you probably wouldn't find anybody who would sell you a barrel at the price listed on the internet. So the internet price is not the real price, right, by definition. But how did they get to that fake price in the first place? And it may be that the AI traders read news stories about the price of oil and prominent in those news stories or statements from American officials saying actually prices are down. They're never going to go up. And they calculate their decisions about the future price of oil based on those statements, which of course are not only lies, but probably made in the first place in an effort to influence AI trading in oil futures. If that makes sense. In other words, you can speak the truth into existence because AI, far from being smarter than people, is actually dumber even than Kamala Harris, like that's possible, though it sounds kind of shocking. So if you were going to do that, what would you say? Well, here's the Secretary of Interior Doug Bergevin. By the way, in the executive branch, Secretary of Interior has more day-to-day authority over oil questions, the Secretary of Energy who's most Americans think the Secretary of Energy is better energy. It's really about nukes. The Secretary of Interior has jurisdiction over a lot of federal lands that produce oil and gas. And so he's, and we have a Secretary of Interior who's pretty knowledgeable on energy questions. Again, Doug Bergevin with North Dakota. And with that in mind, the idea that it's possible that Trump and those around him are trying to influence computer-driven futures trading by making false statements about energy watch this. And every barrel that goes out now gets replaced by 1.2. So think of it. Ten barrels go out. Twelve barrels are going to come back in for the same price. They've already saving Americans billions of dollars because we've got business leaders like President Trump driving our energy policy. Right. Okay. So, energy prices have gone way down. You may have noticed that, oh, wait, no. The price of gasoline and diesel fuel and jet fuel, and by the way, electricity have all gone up a lot in the last year, a lot, not a little bit a lot, way outpacing inflation. And of course, in the end, driving inflation. So energy prices have not gone down. And for every barrel that goes out, we get too back or what does that even mean? Well, not explained. And it probably doesn't need to be explained because it may be read by these machine future traders as good news that they factor into their calculation with the future price of oil. They're by keeping the present price down, at least on paper. And thereby creating a feedback loop where the people making decisions keep the price artificially low, not the actual price at which you can buy or sell the product, but the price reflected in markets, which we thought were real but aren't. And then those same decision makers read the markets which they've manipulated and believe them. Oh, yeah, and believe them. So if you're Trump, last month, you were saying, we're about to run out of oil. The SPR is almost dry. These are salt caverns and we're getting to the salt part of the oil. You can't even refine it. It's too salty. That was last month. But subsequent to that oil prices have gone up and down like they always do, but they've gone pretty low because the markets have been manipulated. And it's entirely possible that Trump and those around them are looking at this and being like, wow, I thought this war was going to cause massive spikes in the price of energy. And because they're not calling around and asking people, hey, gas prices up, like what are you paying per kilowatt hour at home? Have you noticed a change in the price of everything? All of which is affected by the price of energy. Instead of doing any of that, they're just looking at this one number Brent crude pulling it up on their iPhone and being like, everything's fine. It's possible that's what's happening. The dumbest and most dangerous feedback loop of all time. And then the fact is to get us back into not just a war, but a ground war with Iran. It looks like that is happening. It's so crazy. It's so crazy that even the Israelis who are world famous for [BLANK_AUDIO] reckless bloodthirsty behavior. And there are partners in this venture, keep in mind, are now saying, ah, I don't know, I'm out. And if you don't believe it, watch this. This is the secretary, finance, finance secretary of Israel. He's in the Netanyahu cabinet, very famous man. Mr. Smotrich, basically saying, it looks like America's going back in this war, but we're out because, you know what? He and I don't want to die for Israel. Watch this. It takes a lot of, well, Hutzpah to say something like that in public, if you were a cabinet minister in the government that the US military is partnering with in this war because you just saw what he said. And if you don't speak Hebrew, you could read the subtitles. He said, yeah, what the US is doing is helpful to us. We have no interest in like a liberal government or a pro-Western government in Iran. We don't care about the protesters. We were weeping about, you know, oh, they're killing protesters. We never cared about that. We want the country in a bloody generational civil war. So we don't have to deal with it. So we can take Southern Lebanon and parts of Egypt and kill the rest of the people in Gaza or whatever. We don't want to be constrained by this country and the other side of the Persian Gulf. So we want the United States to take them out. And we're happy about that. It serves our interest. He just said it. But the one thing we're not going to do is die for it. Yes, this is for Israel. This war is for Israel, but I'm not dying for Israel. Amazing, you could say something like this. It's unclear that there's a single American leader, this honest, hopefully not this evil, but leaving moral judgments aside, this honest, this direct. What was I to an American leader say to anything? That's straight forward in public ever. It never happens. And this laser focused on his own country is interest. Now that's a criminal country that's committing genocide. I don't want to be that country, obviously. But you would like leaders who are willing to say unapologetically, I'm in this for my team. Meanwhile, the entire House of Representatives, every Republican but seven today, minutes ago, just voted to merge. Merge. The US military, the $1.5 trillion US military with the tiny reserve force IDF. Does that help us? No, of course helps them. Merge. American intelligence, the 19 intel agencies with Mossad. What? Of course, basically accumulation ritual. Whatever you want is real. If it hurts us, that's fine. Actually, it feels good to sacrifice for you. It's like everyone in the entire government is my copy now. Craven, self-hating. Well, so there is something sort of nice about seeing a government minister say, yeah, my people are not dying for this. But as Moshear's just said, happy to see Americans die for it. And of course, they are. And more will, apparently, because the president appears to have convinced himself completely that because he arrested Maduro in January, we don't need, well, what's the real number? If you combine Persian Gulf and the Saudi pipeline into the Red Sea, both of which could be closed, 25% of all global energy offline, we don't need it. Here's Trump today. -Track, if you combine us and Venezuela, we have about 62% of the world's oil market. So we don't need straights. We don't need anything. -There's no measurement by which I mean, not to like, but I mean, it's like, it's crazy. If you combine America and Venezuela, we have 60% of the world energy market. It's not even code that means. But in no sense is that true. Venezuela and the United States don't produce 62% of the world's oil. They don't buy 62% of the world's oil. Nothing, I mean, nothing about that is real. Once again, Venezuela exports as of right now, a little over 1 million barrels a day. 20 million barrels a day went through this trade and from moves out of the Persian Gulf, that no longer happens. Where 19 million barrels of oil short just in the Persian Gulf, that does not include what's happening in the Eastern Europe, that does not include apparently the now the closure of the Red Sea. So this is a crisis and every American will feel it. Europe will be crushed. When winter comes and there's not enough natural gas to heat London, which is exactly where we're moving, thanks to the Trump administration and the Biden administration before it, it's going to be impossible even to care what the AI-generated Brent crude futures say. No one will care because reality itself will intervene. And in the end, always, that's what matters. Just because the battles stop doesn't mean war stops hurting the people who fight them. No, for many veterans, the effects of what they've been asked to do continue long after they return home. They're injured physically and psychologically and those injuries can last a lifetime. Roops like the Hunter 7 Foundation are here to help them. Hunter 7 Foundation works to identify, to study, and to address the long-term health effects of toxic exposure during military service. They help veterans get care, get answers and advocate for their health and their future. It's a nonprofit, 107 rise in the support from other proud American companies and Black Rifle is one of those. Black Rifle Coffee proudly supports organizations that stand up for soldiers who risk their lives because no veteran half should have to fight for their health by themselves. They should have the entire country's support. To learn more about this good cause, find resources for yourself or a loved one or help support the mission, visit hunter7.org today that's hunter7.org. So most people don't wake up in the morning and decide to feel horrible, exhausted, foggy, disconnected from themselves, but it does happen and it happens slowly. You're working hard, you're showing up and your energy disappears by midday, your focus is dull, your weight won't move, a lot of people are told that's just getting old. That's what it is, but that's not actually true. For many men and women, these are not personal affairs, they are signals tied to your metabolism, your hormones and nutrient in balances that go undetected for years, you don't even know, you're deficient. And that's why we're happy to partner with join Blokes, a company that was built for people who were all done guessing and ready to figure out what exactly is going on. And that starts with comprehensive lab work and a one-on-one consultation with a licensed clinician. An actual human being explains what's happening inside you and builds a personalized plan which includes hormone optimization, peptide therapy, targeted supplements. So don't settle, go to joinblokes.com/tucker, use the code Tucker for 50% off your lab work and 20% off all supplements. That's joynblokes.com/tucker, use the code Tucker, 50% off labs, 20% off supplements. Join Blokes, get your edge back. Chris Martinson deals in reality. Full time, he is a reality-based energy researcher, one of the most respected in this country, one of the most honest. And we are grateful to have him join us now to give us an overview of where exactly we are. Chris thinks so much for doing this. I got a little excited there and I wonder if you think I overstated the case. You've much more knowledge on the subject than I ever will. Well Tucker, thanks so much for the opportunity to come here. And yeah, this is my passion, it's my mission because if anything you understated it, energy is life, energy is our economy. The path we're on is headed for complete disaster at this point in time. And the people who are driving us there, as you hinted at, not my first rodeo, I've seen these people in operation, what they did to Libya, what they'd done to the Middle East, generally, they don't do consequences. And unfortunately, this is reality we're talking about and you've been talking about the markets and there's these narratives that they push. And if they can just pretend for a little bit longer, it'll all sort of sort itself out, but this is different. These are molecules, this is physics. This is very simple stuff, exactly. Exactly, but it's, you know, physical reality is so unfashionable, it's so unfashionable you got transgenderism, but it's, I think since the invention of the internet, people just imagine that things happen. Electricity's created, dams are built. You know, the world just sort of moves, [BLANK_AUDIO] high chains organically organized themselves or whatever like they have no sense of how things actually work. So you do. What does this mean for the life of Americans and Europeans? Well, it's unfortunately, it means the same thing. It kind of always means they're going to have these people who are going to accidentally wreck some stuff and energy costs will go through the roof. And then it's going to be the poor people. The poor countries are going to have the worst run of that as they start out. But we're looking at something here that could very easily upend our economy in a big, big way. So you mentioned it in your intro, there's this sort of straight line relationship between how much energy an economy uses and how big it ends up being. It's like a straight line on this chart. And that's a really powerful chart because we've all grown up in an age of amazing energy abundance. I'm absolutely thrilled with it. I'm a conservative. I would love for us to keep this prosperity we have. But I fear that the people who are making decisions, they've lost that grounding. They don't understand that. I don't know, there are like three generations from anybody who had dirt under their fingernails. Right. That's been too long. So once we get grounded back in that though, here's a simple thing. The world was consuming just oil, just crude oil. That's the tasty stuff. We turned that into jet fuel, diesel kerosene, and deck gasoline. And so that we were burning about 80, consuming burning 86 million barrels a day before the war started. And now we're missing for sure about 12 that's just missing missing because they did some work around here and there. Well, the question is, when was the last time the world globe was burning 12 million barrels a day less? That brings us to 74. So we go on our little chart and we look back. We find out that number is 2011. The world was burning 74 million barrels a day. Problem. The world's economy was 36% smaller back then. And so this is what I work really hard at is because I do what I call put on my energy goggles. And it means when I go out, I don't just see a maddening, infuriating traffic jam. I just see energy. I see people burning oil, I'd gasoline, I see cars that took oil and diesel to manufacture them. I see jets flying. I see bridges that need to be repaired and all of this is just energy, right? And it just sort of makes sense, right? So the economy requires people to do things like we all have to do some work, even if we have a service job or still doing work, will work requires energy. And so therefore the economy requires energy, we can just put those pieces together. And so when you have less energy flowing through an economy, by definition, it starts to skinny down, it gets simpler, which is a euphemism for it craters. And so we are actually risking the cratering of the world economy. Trump saying, oh, we're insulated, I know we broke that stuff over there, but we'll be fine over here. I just, how's that going to play in, you know, diplomatic circles as it goes on? I mean, we're about to unleash, we the United States with Israel. We're about to unleash the worst catastrophe on economies, financial markets, and potentially because of the impact on fertilizers and other stuff, maybe even food, maybe even famines, things like that. This is what's at risk. And I wish we were having serious conversations, not headsets jokingly saying, we don't even need a straight. It's so cartoonish, I don't even know how to form words sometimes. So let's just assess specifically what that would mean for the US. Like you often hear the president, but not just the president, politicians going back, at least 10 years, say, this country is energy independent. It's a net exporter of oil. So if the country's a net exporter of oil, what is, is that true? I don't think it is true, but I'll defer to you. Does it mean we can set the price of oil? That why is that relevant? Will you explain the system for people who might be confused? Yeah. This detail is important. So when I was growing up, patrolling them in oil were synonyms. You could use them interchangeably and nobody would get confused. And they're just like, remember under COVID, suddenly the CDC lost the thread on what's herd immunity or a vaccine. Yes. They started changing definitions. So sometime about 10, 12 years ago, our DOE energy information administration decided you can all that. We're just going to change the definition here a little bit. We're going to call petroleum anything that comes out of the ground that you can set on fire, right? So oil is the thing we really care about now because we're doing all this shale oil drilling, very exciting and doing all this shale gas extraction. We have a lot of this stuff called natural gas liquids. Okay. That's propane. Works great in my grill. I love it butane. It's good in the lighter. Ethane turns into plastics, all that. But they lumped all that together and said, oh, when you put all of this stuff in one pile on a net basis, we're an exporter. These aren't fungible. You don't decide one day I'm going to put gasoline in my car or maybe I'll put butane in my car, right? They're just not. They don't have very different purposes. Those natural gas liquids, they're industrial. We use them. They're fantastic. They're industrial. We have way too many of them. We export a ton of them because we can't use them fine. We're still a net importer of crude oil. And even more to the point, we get all this stuff out of the shale basins, right? You got the Permian. You know, you got places like that, the Bakian and North Dakota. So that stuff that comes out is really light and it's really sweet and it doesn't go into our refinery. So we package that up in ships and we send a good chunk of that away. And then we import heavier stuff from Canada, from Venezuela, but also the world. And so to your point, this idea that we'll just insulate ourselves from the world is untrue. Whatever we're paying for jet fuel here has a big relationship to what they're paying for jet fuel in Europe because it's open to the highest bidder. And if it's worth it to put it on a ship and sell it to Europe, that's exactly what's going to happen unless we do something really catastrophic, which is closed down our borders to exports. That would be a bad idea for a country with a hundred billion dollars last month trade deficit. It was like, nah, we're going to keep all our good stuff. We're going to send you our treasuries. We're good. It's going to be a terrible idea. What would happen if we did that? I mean, at some point there will be pressure because the public has been told for a generation that we have an abundance of petroleum, as you said, the definitions, not what they thought it was, but we're an exporter. So people are going to say, well, it's eight dollars for a gallon of unleaded. Why are we selling this abroad? Why can't we just keep it here? So if politicians decided, okay, we're going to do that, we're going to stop petroleum exports. What would that mean? Well, first off, you'd have a heck of a legal battle on your hands because that would sort of break the fundamental contract that we have with how business operates. Second, we have legitimate contracts for LNG, for other petroleum products, things like that that would have to get broken. But more to the point of it, isolate us really badly in a time when we need at least the appearance, if not the reality of free trade happening where things go freely across our borders to take one portion of that and shut it down. I think it would be as damaging as when it was a February 2022 when the United States Treasury under Biden decided to freeze Russia's sovereign assets, reserves, neither sovereign nor reserves under that scenario. And that kicked off a whole lot of things where people started walking away from the dollar. We started to see the treasury weren't getting big, gold started to spike. There were real consequences to actions like that. And so I just think that would be, it would be very destabilizing, it would be the kind this term I could put here. So that's not likely to happen. You think? Hope not. Home ownership has always been at the center of the American dream. 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If you want out, call 800-685-5696-800-685-5696 or visit Americanfinancing.net/tucker. How high could gas get? You know, I could ask this a lot. So, there's a little thought experiment. So imagine, and I've got a Nissan Pathfinder. It's totally dry. I put a gallon of gas in there and then I drive it until it runs out and then I have to turn around and push it home. Question, how much is that worth? Because I'm about 22 miles away from home, probably taking me out, I don't know, three weeks to do that. So, people will pay a lot for gasoline. People will pay a lot for diesel. It could easily get to $3, $400 a barrel and people who are riding little scooters all over Bangkok. They're still going to be paying that because they're using it so efficiently in their markets. But it's worth every penny of that. I have a farm. I have a tractor. You know, I pay bailing. I would really rather not go back to hand hay bailing. I would pay a lot personally for a gallon. So the question is, what's it worth? It's severely underpriced at this point in time in terms of its actual worth. That's okay. We've had a lot of it. We've got a little lazy with the whole thing. But, you know, could we, would people pay 200? Easy. A barrel. 400? Yes. Absolutely. What would that mean for gasoline and diesel prices? How would that be reflected at the pump? The fabled pump. The pump? Well, you know, this is interesting because we have the quoted price of oil. The futures price. price, right? 85 right now for WTI, maybe 95 for Brent. But on the other end of that, I don't put oil in my car. I put gasoline in my car. So the question is, after it goes to the refiner, how much of those products worth right now? Okay, so if you in Rotterdam this morning wanted to buy a barrel of jet fuel, you had to pay $158. If you want to buy a barrel of diesel, same market, about $148. So that's what it's actually selling for. Well, what's the point of having Brent market WTI, West Texas? What's the point of those numbers if they don't correspond to reality? It's narrative control. It's really, I think that's what we're down to at this point in time. So I've been watching markets for a long time. And I used to trade futures. And my specialty was gold, also silver. And I didn't dabble in oil all that much, but they all operate kind of the same. And so the futures market were this awesome invention that allows speculators to really be very dominant in setting the price for things, not discovering the price. I'm using this terminology careful. They set the prices for things. So right now on a daily basis in the oil market, you're a producer, I'm a consumer, you're an oil company, I'm a refinery, right? That would be the actual price discovery mechanism. We come to some agreement. That would be a one-to-one relationship. However, on top of that, we've allowed, because our regulators fell asleep at the wheel, we've allowed the speculators in that story to become 50 times larger on a signal basis than the actual deal that happens at the bottom. So when you have a 50 to one margin, it's the paper that's setting the price up there right now. And we've watched this for years, 130 in the morning, and this is happening with oil now constantly, 132 o'clock in the morning when there's almost no trading happening, everybody's asleep. And all of a sudden, somebody will come in, and I've seen the several times now in suddenly sell a million and a half barrels of oil in a single one minute window, and it just crushes the price. And they do this over and over again. And then of course, you have all these algos and they're mostly momentum, a lot of them are momentum algos. And so they're like, oh, look, prices are falling. So they pile on and you get the whole sort of herd moving in a direction, and it's just completely fake. It's been this way for a while. And I think it's because, I mean, you've probably seen the same clips, right? Trump comes out. He's like, oh, people told me the oil is going to be 300. It's only 70 in the stock markets up. Those are really important narrative moments for him to be able to say, look, I did this thing and markets approve of it. If they didn't, stocks wouldn't be so high and oil wouldn't be so low, right? I think that's the point of this stuff. It's political narrative shaping right now. So it's lying because the price of something is the point in which the transaction occurs. What's it worth? What will you pay for it? I mean, that's, that's what a market. I mean, correct me. I'm not the economist here. You are, but like, right? So if I say the price of something is $5, but nobody would buy it for $5, it's not worth $5. This is so nuts. It's just not real at all. It's a lie. So why isn't there an effort among policymakers or even the media to discover and publicize the price of oil? The price of oil is what people are buying it for. Yeah. It's a big mystery. So here's the thing. You mentioned the most important thing. There's like, if you get, take economics, there's one chart, they call it the PQ chart, price supply demand, right? There's a curve. You can point to it. That's how it's supposed to work. Right now we're holding the price lower than actual supplies, right? So what's happening is demand is too high. And so we're burning through our stockpiles right now. And if you want to see something alarming, just look at the actual amount of crude oil we have stored in the United States, the SPR+ commercial inventories, or we could look at how much diesel do we have in tanks kicking around? Hey, or how much gasoline do we have in tanks? And all of these are just plop powering low. Now why is that? Because the price is too low. The only way you can get price, you know, supply and demand matched again is you have to use prices. So prices rise enough. People decide, I'm not going to drive my car today. We'll take a lesser vacation, whatever. That's how this thing sorts itself out alternatively. And I'm really worried about this in a post-COVID seesaw telling us who's essential and not environment. They were just going to run this down Tucker until we get to mit scary minimums. And then we're going to have government rationing temps. They're going to try and decide who gets it. You're not important. You are. Imagine that amongst California Democrats. That'll be amazing. But I think this is where this is going is we're actually just going to sail into absolute minimum. And then the crisis comes out. And I'm starting to wonder if that hasn't been the point all along. So the point of this, destroying global energy supplies and capacity, including refining. The point of that, I mean, clearly there's a point. The United States is fighting a war against Russia, aimed at Russia's energy sector. And the United States is doing that. The Trump administration is fighting a war against Russia against Russia's energy sector. And knowing what it's doing. And then it started this war knowing what would happen that the LNG ports in Qatar would be hit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So like, you think the US government, the Trump administration wants rationing? Maybe that, I'm not sure if that's the ultimate end goal. But so February 28th, we conduct this, you know, the capitation strike, right? Kill the Iran's version of the pope. That's somehow it's going to work out, right? So we do that on the second of March is when Ukraine, with some help, obviously, started really dialing in on Russian refineries and oil depots. And this is very poorly reported, I feel, in our country, but you know, it's all over Twitter and other places. But you can see, and they were very effective. They were blown up all kinds of refineries and big black smokey things. They had even like struck right downtown in Moscow and took out their main refinery. And as of three days ago, every single major refinery in Russia had been attacked at least once. None had been missed. And this is very effective. And some of them were 1500 miles all the way inland. And that's not something Ukraine could do all its own, because Russia has mobile air defense units. And so you have to thread all these needles to get your little busy drones all the way over there. But they, you know, they're getting that targeting information. And so all that's going on. And then also poorly reported, probably the single greatest loss of merchant marine vessels in the C of A's off in the black sea because of drone attacks by Ukraine on Russian shipping. Any kind of ships, fairies, little merchant barges, you know, oil tankers, whatever, if it's a ship, it's getting hit. And then of late, we've really stepped it up because Russia has the, their version of Amazon's called wild berries. And they have huge distribution warehouses. And they have six massive distribution warehouses. Oops. Now they have four because four of them have been completely attacked. This is an economic attack. And of course, the scary part with this is that Russia just, I don't know what was it a few months ago. They revamped their nuclear doctrine to say, you know, it used to be, we would only respond if attacked with nukes, but we're widening that to say we can use them if we're facing an existential threat. And the thing that drives me nuts is, as we're poking the bear, nobody's bothered to come out and explain to me, what's the upside here? And what do we get out of this? What's the point of this? Why is the Trump administration doing this? They told us they were going to end the war. They told me they were going to end the war. And CIA is providing an NSA or providing targeting to warehouses and refineries. Like, I don't know what is, what is the point? I don't know the answer. Do you know? It seems to be a provoker reaction. I'm just having, you know, I just got to speculate like anybody, but I know it's dangerous. I know that if those things are happening to us, we would respond pretty vigorously, musk it early. I bet. So it feels, that feels dangerous, but it's just the timing of it that a, the straight gets closed down straight up from moves. B, Russia really starts to get dialed up. Now, C, we've pushed it all the way to the point that the Bobbleman Deb straight in there on the Red Sea is now closed. And so you said it before, I don't, I no longer trust a thing anybody says. What are they doing? So they've said, oh, we've tried to get this memorandum of understanding, which is an understanding about how you're going to get to an understanding. It's not even a thing, but, you know, and we couldn't even abide by that, right? And so what are we doing? Everything we've been doing is to further inflame this war, get caught in a little bit deeper. Trump has been talking about, you know, escalating constantly at this point in time. Oh, if you strike a ship, we'll blow up a plant, right? And, and so the actions are, they're trying to keep it closed. And here's the part that I'm worried about is I don't think they, I mean, I think they know not what they do. I don't think they understand the relationship between how an economy is undergirded by energy. I think they just think it's all intangible. It's all, it's all narratives, right? I truly feel like there's people who live in a world of reality. Oh, yes. And then there are these abstractionists and they live in an abstract world. It's all just, yeah. Yeah. And so what happens if we push down that abstract world? Well, you know, as Anne Rand said, you can ignore reality, but you can't ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And, you know, I almost have to have a little chuckle because it's really dark. Like what they're doing, if I could communicate to people clearly, is they are risking everything, everything that we hold dear about our way of life, about the ease of our lives, about the jobs we do, where the future is going, what we tell our children. It's, and we're not having really any serious conversations outside of say this podcast and others like it. So is the world getting more stable or less stable? That's a rhetorical question. We're not in charge of the world, unfortunately. but you are in charge of, in fact, responsible for your own family and your savings. So the dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power since 2020. That's crazy. The dollar has lost nearly a third of its purchasing power in six years. You know, it hasn't gold. Gold has been a trusted store of value for thousands of years, and that's one reason you should think about gold right now. It's about 25% below its high from earlier this year, which is amazing. Some of the world's biggest financial institutions are making the move because gold relative to its power and endurance, as a means of exchange, is pretty cheap right now. Central banks are reducing their reliance on treasuries and increasing their holdings of, yes, gold. They're not alone. Individual investors are doing the same. Radalio, founder of the world's largest hedge fund in a friend of ours, recommends holding up to 15% of your portfolio in gold. We've long believed in gold, we've been vindicated. We started battalion metals to give Americans an honest, fair, priced way to buy metals, gold and silver because a lot of these companies are scams, ours is not. You know, we have like three points over spot and we'll ship it to your house. 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And the reason for that is that they have two fields. They have the Mary field, which we're currently drawing from. It's nice. It's very heavy. It's sour, which means it has sulfur in it. It's called sulfur sounds bad, which we call it sour, but it's actually tasty in the sense that we use it for all kinds of things, right? So that's actually high value oil. The rest of it is in this stuff called the aura noco belt, it's a big belt, but it's not oil. Like you couldn't like the easiest way to get out of the ground is with a spatula, right? It just doesn't flow. It's like, it's really tar. It's like a, it's basically, imagine a really hot road on the August day. It's like asphalt. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty much asphalt. And it's packed with asphalt teams component of that. So it's hideously expensive to get that stuff out of the ground. You have to do all kinds of very fun things. You have to either you steam, which means you have to create steam. So you have to build a power plant on site and inject it down there, or you have to put a diluent down some kind of solvent that you just inject in the ground and suck it back out again. It's tricky. So remember, Trump goes down there and he brings in all the exon and all these people, gets mad at them because he said, go down there and get that oil boys. And they said, it's, it's uninvestable because there is probably a hundred and 150 billion. It would have to be invested down there. And defending an oil infrastructure in Iraq is relatively easy because it's all flat desert. Yes. Defending oil infrastructure in the jungle is a whole different beast if things go south on you. So they said, you can't do that unless you give a security guarantees. And that's that way. That's awkward. How do we do that? So they couldn't come to any agreement and Trump just got mad at exon. But it's not trivial and it's very expensive. And if we started today with complete security guarantees and also contract guarantees in a socialist regime, they took Maduro out but the whole rest of the structure remained intact. So I'm not real clear what happened there. It would still take five to 10 years to get that flowing and we don't have five to 10 years. We've got like two or three more months here. But if it was flowing at full force, would it compensate for the 19 million missing barrels of oil a day through the straight? Hard to imagine. Here's as close as comparable is the betouume in the tar sands, Canada, like they've rebranded at oil sands. But all that beautiful stuff up in Alberta, a very capital intensive over, you know, the past 15 years they've managed to bring that up to a very respectable 4.67 million barrels a day of flow. And it took tens, if not hundreds of billions of capital, it takes a long time. You don't just turn a tap on and it kind of comes out. You have to each chunk of the field has to have pipes put in it and infrastructure and steam and all kinds of stuff. Listen, if that's comparable, I would say if you could be as stable as Canada, I would imagine in the next 15 years, you could probably get that up to four or five million barrels a day if they're comparable. And listen, I'm simplifying a lot. Some oil people calling me up and yelling at me, but just to keep it sort of roughly comparable. Four or five million barrels a day under best case circumstances with political stability, security, and massive $100 billion infrastructure investments, you could get it to five million barrels a day. We're 20 million barrels a day offline. So there's kind of no way around, I don't care what Doug Bergham or the Secretary of War says, there's no way around the reality that we are short off a lot of oil in the global markets. So is that a misreading this, that's the fact, right? Yeah, that's the fact. And I guess again, the administration officials I've seen, they kind of keep going, shrugging and going, well, we'll be relatively okay. But what they're really saying is the person, the country that we're going to hit the most is the largest importer of oil is China. And China may decide it has to say something about this at some point in time. They've been very quiet so far, pretty suspicious, but it was May 13th, Trump goes over, brings over Tim Cook and all these other Elon Musk CEO types. And it was shortly after that that they really dialed back their imports. So I'm pretty sure there's a quid pro quo. The quid was, we'll stop importing for a while. I don't know what the pro quo was. It was Taiwan. We don't know. We'll have to figure that out later. But China can't do that forever. They've been, I think, a little fairly gracious so far, but they are starting to re-import and bring their imports back up. And they can't have this area shut down for the next year. They're going to have to intervene in some meaningful way. I would imagine because, again, energy is everything. And they know that. It's beautiful five-year, sets of five-year plans. Their energy policy, actually, when I read it, I weep because I wish my country had one. It was so comprehensive. It's very thoughtful. It only brings on alternative energy slowly up to a certain percentage, and they're pursuing nukes and alternative nukes and small nukes and thorium reactors and a plank of their energy policy is have good relations with the people we get our oil from. German, you could take a lesson from that book, right? So they're obviously dialed in on energy. They know it's important. And eventually, they're going to have to intervene here, I think, if we continue to mess this up. How long till American consumers are shocked by what they see because of rising oil, energy prices? Well, we're going to be shocked here. I think we both live in New England, heating oil is up 84% from this time last year. And I live around people who are going to be very hurt by that. And that's going to be tough. It's going higher than that. New York Harbor is a place where we have, they sell in five districts. The New York Harbor District for diesel just hit its all time high just last week. So we're going to be seeing 550 gallon diesel again here very shortly. Those numbers are just going to keep going up. Yeah. And keep in mind, there's been an organizing concerted effort to discourage the use of wood stoves for the last 25 years. Don't have a wood stove. It pollutes, you know, just heating oil, that's the answer, LP gas. Wow. Okay. So do you think gasoline, which is the, I think, the most common retail measure of energy prices? I mean, are you going to see $6 gallon gasoline before Labor Day or this year? Do you think? Yeah. I really do. So I'm tracking these every week. We got another raft of numbers. If you can believe them, I'm not sure what I can believe anymore, Tucker, honestly. I don't know. You know, would it be beyond this administration to fudge the numbers and say we have more gasoline in stores than we do? Sure. Well, within the realm of possible. But if we can believe the numbers as they are, we see that all of our actual stocks and inventories are going down. Now, this was. tragically commedical when Trump came out and said we're going to go after the retailers for gouging on gas. It's like, oh, dude, that's not how this market works at all. The 7/11 is a price taker. The guy with the big tanker shows up tells him what that costs. He's also a price taker. He goes to the distribution center and they're price takers and so the people, like there's no one person you can say is gouging. The refiners sell to the highest bidder. The highest bidder has the need to buy at that price so that they can supply the people who are depending on them and that's how it works. So there's no gouging at this point in time but we're going to see a lot higher prices because again, all those inventories are just screaming downwards and so there comes a point where I think we just have, like how did Hemingway go broke in a slowly than all the ones. I think we're going to slowly, people are going to start waking up that there's a real crisis here. These are shocking levels of inventory and eventually there's a mad scramble and that's the all at once part of this but in 2022, America imposed sanctions on Russian tankers and all that stuff. So there was the thought that maybe three million barrels a day might come offline and that was enough to send oil from then about 80 to 120 where it stood for five months and then it turned out, oh, after the news settled in, they're like, oh, I wasn't such a big deal because Russia ended up using shadow tankers and selling it to India. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no big deal. So actually there wasn't any real impact to the oil markets and here we are now today with in arguably not just the largest energy shock ever, but by literally whole factors, right? So we had the oil embargo starts in October 1973, runs till March of 74 and what they did was they didn't, they didn't stop selling to the whole world. They said, I don't know why Norway is trapped up in this but they said, we're not selling oil to the US or Norway. First of all, I don't know how Norway got tangled up in that. And then what they did was they agreed as a group of OPEC nations or Arab nations at that time that they were going to reduce their production by 5% per month. So by the end of the whole thing, the world was short 9% of its oil, right? And that was enough to take oil basically from 370 a barrel to 33, it was a 10-bagger, right? And that created a huge shock and then we had the double wave of inflation that happened in the 70s and it took Paul Volker coming out and aiming interest rates to 21% in order to pinch that second hump of inflation. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if we had to fight inflation that way? So there was a huge learning from that and I believe that the lesson was, if we can just keep the price of oil down, we can minimize the shock. And so they're doing that and the problem is while they're doing that, the price is too low, even though it feels high, it's still too low to truly match supply and demand. And so supplies are just being run down. So now we've run through, you know, the IEA said, go ahead, release 400 million barrels all you, you know, G7 countries and we were a big chunk of that, we're almost half of that. We had all this stuff that Iran had stored up in tankers that they suddenly released to the world. We had all the Russian stuff that suddenly got released, all those tankers. We had all these tankers that were in motion at the time the war started to took them a month or two to get to where they were going. So we had all of that to sort of work through. Now that's all gone and even if the straight opened up right now, you know, we would not get to 21 million barrels a day again till probably a year from now for three separate reasons, which you mentioned one, there's we don't know unknown damage to the actual oil fields because they just had to shut them off and that's bad. That's not how you treat oil wells. So we'll see when they turn them back on how much damage happened to they got to fix all the stuff that got tuned up, right? So refineries got hit and loading docs got hit and oil platforms and all that. And probably one of the biggest things is just unboliccing the all the shipping, right? Because it was just oil tankers coming out that were cargo containers and bulkened carriers and all this stuff and that whole perfectly choreographed just in times symphony of thousands of ships going hither and yon, that all got completely shredded. So that all has to sort of be reformulated and rebuilt shipping experts. I talked to you say minimum three, four months, just to sort of uncork that and figure out where things are. And that's if and only if my magic finger snap made things stable and insurable and you know, believably so and and I don't think we're anywhere close to that. Literally nowhere close to that. Now for I feel like many Americans recall or have read about the oil shock of 1973, which as you just said, it had downstream consequences, it lasted almost a decade and changed the country, changed how we manufacture cars, changed the culture, changed the birth rate. Like it really was a big deal, though it was much smaller than what we're facing now. If you people remember why that happened, do you remember why? Do you remember why OPEC shut us out and Norway? Norway? Well, you know, there was just, I guess what, I think Israel was involved. Yeah. That's exactly right. Because we sided with Israel and the Umbrella War of 1973, that's exactly why. So we paid a huge price in 1977, I mean, not to be pedantic about it, but it's just a fact. We paid a huge price in 1973 for our support for Israel, which was not to our strategic benefit. It was for sentimental or other reasons, maybe darker reasons, but it wasn't like we're getting anything out of it. We didn't. We lost. And once again, 50 years later, it's a replay, but 10X, I just can't help but notice that. Yeah. Even then though, I feel like there was more reality sort of in the system. We live in a super unreal time right now. I can't believe like Trump can just say things like, oh, we've completely beaten them militarily. Why can't we stop any of those missiles or drones, you know, it's just, it's the, why are we drawing down the SBR? If the straight of our moves doesn't mean anything, it's yeah, it's just, and we're, we're the journalists. I mean, just ask a follow-up question, you know, I did see on with Pete Hegseth, Department of War. I struggle with that too, you know, saying, but prices are high. Lady, you ain't seen nothing yet. We were just getting started on this. This could get a lot higher and here's my concern. The destination doesn't bother me. If you said, hey, we have to find out how to live with like, you know, 13% less energy and we've got five years to sort it out and prices will climb to give us, that's fine. We'll sort it out, but it's the pace of change that gets right. And so if we just slam into this and oil or gasoline, something goes from five to 15 or whatever it's going to do suddenly, that's where the shock happens. That's where the damage happens. That's where the uncontrolled things happen. And this is why I research and I look at neither of these two things independently. I also look at energy and the economy. And so here's what we have to understand. The United States in 1973 had some debt, not $39 trillion of debt, right? With a structural deficit of two to three trillion per year for the next 10 years, right? Just by law, nothing we can do about that. It's all baked in the cake. With derivatives, numbering one to two quadrillion, depending on how you count these things, nobody knows what they are. Don't ask me. But literally nobody understands how all things operates. But what they do is they provide insurance, Tucker, in a moment when you don't really need it. But if things get a little out of parameters, they say, if interest rates suddenly do something really crazy, like they did in the long term capital management, they had all these fancy derivatives and all of a sudden, oops, Russian bonds went a little further than they thought in the wrong direction. Boom, six billion out the window, and Alan Greenspan had to fix it, you know? If these derivative markets freeze up, what we're going to see is the complete freezing of our financial system and markets. And that'd be very bad. And you know, sort of my dark horse candidate for kicking all the softs can beat Japan. Their yen is weakening really a lot right now and they're trying hard to make that not happen. And also they've lost control of their bonds. And the yields are spiking higher. And that's a very rare combination to lose control of both the price of your money and your interest rates, you know, that's so that could be a situation where if that really starts to spiral out of control, they're going to have to do something. And that would mean closing markets, shutting things down, you know, and what would that look like? You know, we'll wake up one day and they'll say, oh, you know, terrible things happened at Nomura Bank, but don't worry, it's very temporary. Oh, actually, Japan's going to have to shut their knee-kate down for just a couple days, actually hang on. We're going to have to shut down one of our banks over here for a little while and then it'll be Wednesday and then we'll be like, we can't open it. This is how this is going to sort of play out at some point. But that's because we allowed, you know, we had the great financial crisis and they're like, oh, that was terrible idea. We had all these collateralized debt obligations and you know, all that stuff. We shouldn't have done that. So learn our lesson. Today derivatives exactly like that are still saturated through the market. Their choice is large as they were back then. No lessons learned except they did write some laws that if the banks get in trouble, they're going to take your bank account to help make them whole again. They did write some laws. So they got that done. It's, of course, theft at scale. Let me just ask though. I mean, Japan is the biggest or one of the biggest holders of US treasuries. So what effect does that have on treasuries? Well, it has a lot. So Japan is going to have to sell those treasuries just to begin defending its currency because they're going to need to, that would be part one. Part two is Japan imports 100% of its hydrocarbons. It has no domestic reserves. So as the price of oil goes up and oil products goes up, they're going to have to buy those at higher and higher and higher yen costs. So the poor people of Japan are getting hit with a double whammy, right? First, they're yen is weakening. That imports inflation. Second, when they have to buy oil that's also going up in price, it's with a weaker currency. So they're going to be feeling it sort of at a 2x rate of speed, and that creates social unrest, political problems, it's going to create a lot of pressure to do something. And unfortunately, there's not a lot that can be done for as long as the straight up removes remains closed. I predict a bailout by China, thereby neutralizing the Japan problem, which is one of China's biggest problems. And obviously historically, Japan occupied a huge part of China for a long time, and Chinese haven't forgotten it, and they're concerned about Japan. They don't want American troops in Japan. They don't want Japan to have a nuclear weapon, and a desperate Japan is good for China. That's just my guess. Let me ask you about, and I don't want to get too dark with this, but like the hope of the US economy at this point, the entire future of the state of California is all predicated on the success of AI. And AI doesn't famously produce anything, it doesn't make anything with AI, you really just consume energy, and AI, like Bitcoin mining is just a function of energy, like what's the price of energy? How in the world are you going to transform our economy from a manufacturing economy to an AI cryptocurrency economy with energy prices like this? How does that work? This is one of these big sour notes, I can't figure this one out, Tucker, but I just wrote a huge report on AI, my most recent one, I called the Renaissance Report, which is overselling myself. I just have unmanaged adult ADHD, but AI itself is very concerning, because we've thrown trillions of dollars of CapEx at this, so it's kind of all in, we have to beat China, right? Okay, that's the story. But if we were really serious about this, let's say we've got some idea that what we're going to do is we're going to get God in a box, right? And we have to get God in a box first, and then we'll be able to run this whole thing, but the implicit assumption, we're going to have these data centers, and they're now permanent part of our architecture going forward. All right, they take a lot of energy, right? I call them toasters that don't make toast, and they make videos, but they just basically just turn natural gas into waste heat, you know, that's what they do. And so you would think if you had a comprehensive, beautiful five-year plan of energy strategy, somebody would be gone, where's the energy for that coming from? Well, now wander with me over to the world where actually our own energy information agency administration, the EIA says, we're kind of at peak oil right now, the shale beds of all sort of, they've done what they can, they don't go to tomorrow, you know, zero by Tuesday, but we're not going to be putting more on going forward. And similarly, natural gas, there's a lot there, but it's kind of when you know it's kind of bumping along, and okay, so you would think somebody would be saying, look, we need these boxes permanently. This can be part of our control grid, it's how we conduct business, it's going to be woven into everything, we're all going to have digital IDs, and if the, if this AI system goes down, wow, we're really screwed, we want to know how to get people on flights, we want to know how to distribute, you know, lorries to do all our, everything breaks, right? So you'd think, wow, we should have a comprehensive plan. Well, first, we're not going to have natural gas forever, it's all two, like all good things runs out. So you, we would be doing something smart, we would be, you would know that they were serious about this if they were slapping in small modular nukes and nuclear plants all over the place, because that's the answer for that, nukes make beautiful electricity, a big fan of them, but we're not doing that, right, not at scale. And we haven't even figured out where we're going to get the uranium from to continue operating our own. So it's, it's almost, it's this very unserious thing, talker, which I can't figure out, it feels like they don't care about the future, they just, there's some goal line. They're trying to just like furiously crossover with the, with the football. I don't, I feel that way too, I felt that way since, really since Trump's inauguration, and I then I realized the goal line was the Iran regime change effort. Like that's everything in retrospect about the staffing and the administration, the transition and all of it was designed to make February 28th possible. But what I haven't figured out is what the point of that was, you have the lot, I wrestle with this all the time, you know, it's, yeah, what do you do, you pick, it's either really rank in competence or it's malevolence. But malevolence on a scale that doesn't have a lot of precedent in history, I mean that we know of, I mean a lot of history, most history is unrequited, but to the extent that we know what previous empires did and why, nothing like this has ever happened at this scale, including in the 20th century, where you, clearly the US government or elements within the US government are trying to destroy global energy markets, which as you said, the very outset is one-to-one correlation to the strength of the economy at GDP. So like, why would you, why would you wipe out civilization, why are you trying to do that? Like what is this? All right, well, for what it's worth, my ponderings and I'm, I reserve the right to change this in 10 minutes, but here's what I came up with. So, back in 2016, there was this cheesy little WEF video, right? And the first thing was, you'll own nothing and be happy and that got a lot of airtime. Famous, right? Yes. Yeah, number four was, you'll eat less meat, you know, and here we are with like, you know, alpha gal ticks running around and, you know, hamburger at seven a pound. And then, but number eight was the one that caught me the most because this one really bothered me. And number eight was, by 2030, Western values will have been tested to the breaking point. Now, why Western values, why not Chinese values, why not African values, you know? And ever since then, I've had this strong sense that my country is under attack, right? Kids don't know, they're confused about gender, we don't even have a border anymore. The pillars of, of everything like morality, like Pete Hegg says that saying, it's totally okay to take boats in the Caribbean, as long as we suspect the running drugs, just some early execute them. These are not Christian values, they're not my Western values, they're not Western values. We only punish the guilty period. I mean, that's the essence of Western values. You punish the guilty, you spare the innocent. You don't kill innocent people. That's why we're different from Stalin's Russia and from the Mongols and like, that is, that is the West. So I were different from Israel, which is not part of the West. So yeah, that's, that's, I've never heard that before. Can you restate that in the W. World Economic Forum 2016, they put this video up. Yeah. And it's, Western values will be tested to the breaking point. And so people's, you know, I'm this kind of a guy. If somebody says they're going to do something and then it happens, I'm thinking maybe they did it. You know, it's just how I'm constructed in this story. So, so that's illegal for a single. Yeah. Well, it's something I live by, but this has been, you know, just watching this unfold. So on the one hand, this is all just errors of judgment and late stage empire and things rot and fall apart. Okay. On the other hand, you say, it's just too deliberate. So, so, you know, in my community at peak prosperity, we have a framework we use. We call it the easy hard framework, right? Developed by one of my, one of my subscribers. And so here goes like this. If something's easy, well, the elites want it and if it's hard, they don't really want it. So I've been astonished at how easy it was for these flock cameras to suddenly appear everywhere. You know, 100,000 of them, every one of them requiring municipal decisions. I work on the local town offices down here in my spare time. Nothing's easy at this level, but somehow 100,000 cameras went up and that's all about invading our right to privacy, right? Our sense of privacy for the amendment, you know, to be secure in my persons from searches and seizures and somehow that was easy. Now, if on my farm, I wanted to dig upon, which would support life and if you dig a hole in the ground and water goes in it, everything shows up magically, that would be very hard. Yes. Super hard, right? You know, if I wanted to do that, that'd be very hard. But if I wanted to go down to Home Depot and buy pesticides and spray them all over my property, go for it. How much, you know, have at it. So I kind of feel like this easy hard framework when I start looking at this way, the easy stuff is the stuff that's not affirming of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, everything I hold dear. And the hard stuff is stuff that actually makes life better, right? I was in the COVID thing. I was full on warrior, you know, I worked with Pierre Corey and Paul Merrick and the FLCCC and I'm still on the board at the IMA and the people are just like, look, can I just use this repurposed, cheap, very safe drug, like doctors have always used, if they choose to use something off patent, fine. And that was very hard. I mean, the whole way to the system came down on them. Oh, you want to put people in ventilators and give them rimbed reservoir with upwards of 85% kill rate, easy, rewarded. And so you just notice this over and over again. And then you finally get to, I think, the last great thing to skewer here is that we have markets, they're free, they're fair, they're trustworthy, maybe imperfect, but they, there were honest participants come to set prices amongst each other in a fair and open way. And that's just not the case anymore and it hasn't been for a while. That's the final black pill for me. I mean, it was one thing to discover that, you know, building seven probably didn't just fall in on itself because it had airplane parts on the roof or that multiple people were involved in the Kennedy assassination. Okay. You know, those, those truths dawned gradually for me, but markets, I mean, markets take place on the basis of the most simple and self-evident principle in life. It's almost like a principle of nature is a fine demand. And they take place transparently or so I thought. I mean, it's really hard as an American to accept the fact that markets, and I think I speak for many when I say this, are fake. Hmm? I would agree. I would agree. You want to think of something that's hard? You know what's hard? Getting the gold at Fort Knox audited. Oh my gosh, that's so hard. Yeah, I wonder why that is. So, because it's not there. My last question to you is, what council would you give if people have made it this far into the conversation, I'm certain, agree with the way that you think, you know, putting truth at the center of your decisions is the only way to think. What advice would you give to people about their personal finances in a moment of turmoil like this? Well, this is the, excuse me, woo, woo because tonight we got a little cold, sorry. Good to get those out. Just let them go. Well, this is, this is, so I don't do what I do, Tucker, so that I can like make people feel anxious, I don't like stirring things up, I really don't like that at all. What I want to do is find enough truth where I go, look, if we put these dots in a row, what conclusions do you come to? And sometimes they're not easy conclusions. And I understand I'm not really in the data business, I'm in the belief challenging business. So you mentioned the red pilling, right? Yeah. So when I say like, you know, the whole thing that happened with COVID is kind of like, oh, you know, look, there's this really awkward stuff that's happening, but for people to accept that, they had to give up some really important things, maybe like faith and authority, right? A belief that the medical system is there to help them. They're like powerful beliefs and that's an emotional process. So I understand I put up pretty hard information for people because it challenges big beliefs, but I've gotten very good at it, and if you can get through that, then you get to some conclusions, which is like, oh, maybe I should be a little bit more responsible for my own outcomes in the future, right? Maybe I should grow a little bit of my own food, not 100%, but maybe 3%, and you know, going from 3% to more is easier than going from zero, right? Zero is a hard place to start from. Maybe I should be responsible for my own safety and security. Maybe once I understand how the markets actually work, that in fact, everybody should understand completely how the money system works, right? I got an MBA. They taught me how to compete for dollars. I was in the arena and then finally I read preacher from Jackaline and I was like, that can't be true. How money is made. And you find out banks make money out of thin air. That's what they do. And there's no limit on it. And when you figure out, wow, humans with no limits in perverse incentives, we're going to get more money printing. So I'm like, great. What do you do with that conclusion? Nothing I can do about that. Oh, well, I can hold some gold, some silver, land, like things that stand the test of printing over and over again in history. And so my council of people is, you know, get really, get in as much context as you need to know more to begin to figure out if you have to make some changes in your life. And for a lot of people, they come to conclusions like, oh, I should safeguard my wealth a little bit more. Which means you have to actually understand what wealth is, hint, it's not dollar bills. And so once you figure that out, where wealth originates from, you can start to make different decisions. And the way I think about it is there's primary wealth. So if you live on a rocky stretch of New Mexico desert, you got very little primary wealth. But if you're on a, you know, 18 feet of Iowa, top soil, you got a lot of wealth, right? So the primary wealth is in the land itself, oil in the ground, coal, all that stuff. Secondary wealth is what happens when humans bring that stuff to market, right? So trees become lumber, fish get to market. So secondary wealth is the means of production. And then tertiary wealth is dollars, it's representations that point to that. But money itself, currency has no value if you can't buy something with it, you know. So what do you do with it like, you know, and so I tell people almost everybody's been marketed to incessantly that they have to have all their money in this little tertiary system. All has to be here. You should have stocks and bonds, diversified currency, big bank accounts. But if you don't have a lot of stuff underneath that, I submit you a very little actual wealth. Because this stuff is a claim on wealth, right? What do you do with dollar bills on a deserted island? You know, start a fire with them, I guess, you know. But so once we start to understand where real wealth comes from, this is how I think people protect themselves. You move if you're 100% exposed in tertiary, get down into primary secondary wealth forms as much as you can. For me, that's meant, you know, I live on a farm. I know not everybody can do that. And I have a lot of the ability to sort of attend to my own energy food, water needs here, not all of them, but significant proportion. And because of that, I've built up a buffer in my life. And so that's what I tell people to start building buffers. Not crazy bunker Idaho guy who's going to like survive forever on his own wits and skills and beans. Right? Nobody can do that. But again, remember the pace of change. If big shocks are coming and I'm convinced they are, you want to have as many buffers out there in your system as you can so that you can absorb that shock as much as you can. I think that makes for a happier life. And I started all this because I was a little worried that things could break apart in any moment. Turns out they're more durable than I thought. But now that I'm here, Tucker, I realize this is such a, this is how I was meant to be living. Anyway, in much more close connection with nature, you know, and feed on the ground and having real relationships with our cows and our chickens and all that other stuff. And also deeper relationships with my neighbors. And so, A, everything is going to get local, right? B, you're going to not have to do everything, but you're going to have to find out what you're good at and bring that to your community. C, I just, if I could cancel, this is the deepest thing I want to cancel is whatever we're about to go through, I don't want the people I love to have to accidentally lose their humanity. What does that mean? Hard decisions are probably going to have to be made at some point in this particular story. And I feel like everything that my culture is pushing towards is asking us me to be, you know, authentic, disconnected from self and capable of doing really horrible things. I just, you know, this has become, I didn't start out this. This was crazy. Tucker. It was actually a tweet that did it for me. I grew up Protestant. I think church was Easter, Sunday, and Christmas. That was the whole game. Been there and hadn't read the Bible at all. And I saw this tweet that said, I've turned to God not because he spoke to me, but because evil made itself known exactly. And man, it landed on me. And I said, got goosebumps, I was like, oh, that's, that's kind of true, isn't it? And that's my, that's the organizing principle that, that everything fits in right now. And because to me, what's evil, that's a short word, but it means something that revels in and promotes death, destruction, debauchery, demoralization, decay, just anything that it can do like that. And so the number one way that evil has its way, of course, is by distracting us and keeping us hopelessly, endlessly, distracted with things, yeah. And if the other side of that is good, well, good's hard, right? Good takes conscious decision-making and you have to keep practicing it and you fail at it. And so that's when I first started reading the Bible, it was just a few years ago, it was just such a picture. I'm reading it out to my wife, Evie, I'm like, hey, humans have done this before. Look at this Romans, you know, sacceles. But there's nothing new under the sun and so I honestly truly believe that this AI thing, this is our tower of bobble. It's a device by which we've convinced ourselves we can finally get that exalted seat next to God, even parody. We are God now. We can be one of the team, you know, and of course, that lack of humility, that pride that arrogance is always backfired and I'm convinced it's going to backfire again. I just, while that backfiring is happening, I don't want the people I love to have to lose their humanity, which means engage in the destruction as it unfolds around them. I couldn't agree more. I had a path so similar, it's almost identical, but it was, you know, seeing evil that drove me to God. And to the Bible and to the realization that we've done this before. In fact, it's on a loop and the root of it is man's desire to be God, which is evil, but but also fruitless quest, it just, you know, it results in the tower of bobble. So, but when you say lose their humanity, what do you mean participate in a system that strips them of their humanity? Yeah. Yeah, I feel like it, like pretty much every, everything that's easy, that's arrayed around us, are just invitations to begin losing our morality. Their invitations to betray ourselves and our sense of integrity. And actually, never just ask you one day to just line up and shoot somebody in the back of the head and push them in a ditch, right? There's a long series of many usurpations along the way, and it all begins with the small things. And that's where they start. And so I've completely changed my opinion about all kinds of things, you know, pornography and how easy that is, right? And, you know, you're only five minutes away from an alcohol store and any community, you know, it just, everything that's easy is just something that's, I think, designed to pull us off of our game. And our game is, it's a short life, you know, we're all here for a reason, and I think the reason is to find out what you're really good at. and bring that to other people and to make everything around you better and honestly I'm here talking you a long story but the thing that gives me the most grief is that I can open a window now on a July night leave a light on and in the morning there'll be one little desulterie white moth flapping about and when I was a kid if I had done that it would have been this fricking menagerie of rhinoceros beetles luna moths and giant walking sticks and it's all gone it's gone we are destroying life and I'm really clear about this we're here to shepherd this and it's not just about humans if we improve life for everything around us humans are part of that and and I think it's our job to be conscious of that and and treat that as well as we can and we're just we're just not um and that's yeah though I have to say I I cleaned bugs off windows this morning um fortunately and unfortunately that's not true I live we still have a lot of it's like let me ask you one final specific question about markets and it's about the gold market as measured by the the famous spot price that you pull up on your phone the beginning with the 2022 Ukraine war it was really clear to me that the US dollar was on a course toward your relevance and that we would lose our status as the holder of the world's reserve currency it was just very obvious based on what the Biden administration did I think was going to happen anyway but it was accelerated with that uh with kicking rush out a swift that was my opinion so I started buying gold and I suck up up up up and up this war starts in February it goes up over five grand announced and then it drops and I've never understood why that happened it doesn't make any sense to me I'm I'm still a gold buyer we have a gold company I mean I believe in it a non scammy gold company I mean I'm I still buy gold but I don't understand its movement do you I don't think anybody actually really does um but there were even before 2022 there was this giant tectonic thing that was happening where gold was really just going from west east right yeah so I used to track very very carefully um some of the big Swiss refiners right they would just report like how many kilo bars and where are they going they were all headed east they're all headed to China this is way before 2022 which is what well I wonder how much gold actually sits you know in London or in New York um and so so for a long time it was like oh nobody cares right because gold at that time was you know thousand two thousand announced or something like that right so nobody cared so then the war happens and obviously what should have happened was gold should have just absolutely skyd on all that uncertainty right and and silver as well and oil and all that the exact opposite all this things happen so markets right but our trade data just came out and so for January and February and for March we've never exported more gold ever in our history um probably representing 10 to 11 million ounces depending on how you score the spot price during that period and that's a huge number yeah and where did that go that was actually our number one export even more than oil right like it's a pretty big deal so um we're hemorrhaging our gold is if we don't care and I you get back to China I wonder if that wasn't a quid pro quo hey you know you're gonna do this war thing will help you but we don't want to pay five thousand announced for your gold we'll give you four or something like that that could be part of the deal so this is gold held by the federal government this is called non-monetary gold um and so that's something non-monetary gold's held in comics for instance it's not the stuff held at the federal reserve we think I'd also love an audit of the Fed can we get one of those um that would be a fine thing to see what's going on there but I the flow of gold around the world it's kind of it's a funny thing if you really want to get into gold statistics is very hard because they're super opaque and they just they tell you it's a barbarous relic it's not important but no you can't see any of this data right the the London data is really hard to get um you can you can more easily find instructions on how to build the nuclear devices right on the internet it's just like it's this weird thing so I know it's important because they won't tell me how much we have they won't let me see the statistics you know but they say it's not that important so we know it's important and we also know that central banks around the world have been accumulating to the point now the gold is actually a larger holding in central banks around the world than treasuries big crossover moment there so my sense of gold is somebody's working extra hard to just keep it tamped down because it would be really awkward right now if it went up in price and signaled something inappropriate and so that's what I've learned about our markets they're actually signaling devices they're not legitimate places of inquiry and price discovery between honest buyers and sellers they're often used to set price so so they're like cable news that way I mean they don't yeah they're not there to tell you the news they're there to shape your opinion about the news yeah yeah of course please tell me a story I would love it this is great story so so gold was illegal from 1933 to 1973 right and then okay so there was a lot of concern they're gonna make it legal for US citizens to own it again so they're very concerned that it was gonna go up in price maybe a lot and that would send the wrong signal and of course they just spent 1968 69 when the London gold pool surreptitiously batten all the you know London in New York just working extra hard to keep the price of gold down for reasons and so all of this was going to be very awkward they just didn't want gold going up in price so we have because of wiki leaks a cable that went between New York and London and they said hey here's our plan the primary gold dealers tell us that if we start this thing called futures for gold we can so overwhelm the actual real price of gold with this paper price that we will create enough volatility and that people will lose interest in it and not we can we can diminish their desire they said to hoard gold so they just they conceived it right away they're like look if we can make this paper price thing we can wang the price around until people get frustrated or lose interest and and that that's how we can control this so that's how it started think of a bake light phone you know the phone connected to the curly cord in 1973 think I'm much more sophisticated the application of these algorithms are today to manage prices and they did that for optics they did that for political reasons is it any less important today no of course not of spiking price of gold signals a loss of confidence in our fiat debt-based money which is fundamentally a faith-based currency you can't have something poke needles at your faith but one faith that's never dimmed is in gold so the Chinese believe in it the Brits believe in it we believe in it the Germans will never believe in it that's interesting to me so as as a store value for like the average American family because the price is down relative to what I think it ought to be what it was six weeks ago is it a good time to buy it now I've been a consistent buyer of gold for 25 years now and I'll tell you this every time I've bought it it's hard it was really hard when I first bought it at 300 and 500 was extra hard 800 was super hard it's always been a hard decision but over over the long haul you know gold is performed better than the stock market over that entire period by a wide margin and I can I it will continue to do so because we're going to print and we're going to print more money and we're going to print a lot of it coming up the feds already printing money right now 200 billion over the last six months you know the US government effectively prints because we spend out send out right now 1.2 trillion dollars of interest payments which is cash that goes back to the market that we have to then borrow more which the fed enables so so this is all we're just going to print and print more and and that's the game and to put a story on this you know the United States it took all the way to 1990 before we accumulated our first three and a half trillion dollars of federal debt so from the founding of the country the 1990 yeah three and a half you know what do we do with that first three and a half trillion while we built interstate road systems and you know every bridge schoolhouse you know we did a lot we the US government's tacked on three and a half trillion dollars of debt in the last 12 months and what did do we build a lot of interstate highway systems at new schools I can't name one thing to be honest I don't want you Howard Blutnik yeah right yeah and foreign wars and and yeah it's just that that's the thing but you know that on that basis though that's going to be three and a half trillion every six months and somebody will wake up it's every one month and then it's three and a half trillion every week and this is just how the story of fiat money has gone literally hundreds of times throughout history is best of intentions but you lose the brakes we lost our brakes in August 15 1971 when we severed from the gold standard and ever since then it's been sort of like Dick Cheney growling at us that debts don't matter you know but they do and they will yeah Chris Martins and thank you for that for the clarity and the honesty and the wisdom appreciate it I hope you come back thank you meet them that's it for us tonight we will see you tomorrow and next Wednesday six p.m thanks