Tom Luongo: London Closed the Strait of Hormuz
Transcript — TFTC
Article: https://www.tftc.io/tom-luongo-london-closed-strait-hormuz-eurodollar
Transcript page: https://www.tftc.io/tom-luongo-london-closed-strait-hormuz-eurodollar-transcript
Published: 2026-10-10
Machine transcription, lightly cleaned; may contain errors.
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[0:07] Tom Luongo: You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

[0:34] Marty Bent: Probably should be.

[0:35] Tom Luongo: Probably should be.

[0:36] Marty Bent: Mr. Luongo, it's been too long, sir.

[0:39] Tom Luongo: It has, Marty. I'm glad to see you. You look well.

[0:43] Marty Bent: Feeling well. We had the Coin Center Gala in New York City last night. Brought the wife, and we wound up taking the late night Amtrak back to Philly, so I didn't get home till like 2:00 AM, but all things considered, feeling good right now.

[0:54] Tom Luongo: Yeah, I just got back from doing like 3 weeks in the American High West. So first we flew into Salt Lake and then we went up to Boise for a week, got the chance to hang out with Blaine Holt and the Amberling game and a bunch of my patrons. And my wife got to go rockhounding out in the mountains and look for agates and opals and stuff. And she had a grand time. And then we went down to 2 weeks down at Moab and just— and that was retarded. And then we just flew home. And the point of this is that we just Flew home on Monday night/Tuesday morning. We took the red-eye out of Salt Lake. We got back yesterday morning. My daughter picked me up from the airport. My wife's up in Tennessee getting things because our whole life is in flux. I'm in Florida. She's now in Tennessee while we make the final transition out of there, or potentially final transition out of there. I don't know anymore.

[1:44] Marty Bent: So you're making personal transitions. It looks like the world is making a tectonic transition. Where do we start?

[1:50] Tom Luongo: 6. Yeah, that's a good question. Where do we start? Yeah, it is a good question. Like, I don't know, because you and I haven't talked in a while, so. And I monitor your Twitter feed here and there, or at least the TFTC Twitter feed. And it's interesting. I want to touch on the stuff that I'm— because I want to, by the way, we're building this as a home and home. I want to have Marty on the GG&G podcast. Because there's a lot of stuff happening in crypto that I have no freaking clue about because I don't have any time. But I don't want to talk about that today.

[2:53] Marty Bent: I think we're in a spot where if you would've told me in February that we're still immersed in a conflict with Iran, I would've called it conflict. Doesn't even seem like a war yet. Tankers are being blown up, but it seems like we're in the the blockade phase, I would have been more dismayed than I actually— like, I would expect to be more dismayed than I am. It feels like— I mean, again, and people hate when you say this. I mean, yeah, would I prefer not to be at war with Iran? Yes. But if you look at the oil flows, particularly coming from Venezuela, if you look at how I guess resilient the market has shown. Yes, WTI, Brent, the spread exists, and diesel prices are up. And obviously, I don't like— I filled up my car today, it was like $126. We got a Tahoe, so it's not cheap, and I don't like looking at that.

[3:51] Tom Luongo: Right.

[3:52] Marty Bent: But all things considered, I don't think the Armageddon that people were calling for, the famine that people were calling for, has manifested. And if you look at the concessions that not only Iran may be forced to make, but others have made over the last 6 months, it seems like we're winning on the deal side. That's my perspective at least.

[4:19] Tom Luongo: And no, that's a good starting point. So let's talk about, you mentioned Brent WTI. While you were talking, I was I was looking at on my phone because I wanted to bring up the actual state of the markets today. Because the one thing I didn't do this morning for the patrons was actually look at the Brent to WTI spread, which is kind of important, right? And I normally do, but I was going— I had my head in quarterly charts and bond spreads and all that stuff. And like, look, we have a $12 Brent WTI spread this week. 50 and Brent is trading at $150. 50.

[8:26] Marty Bent: Right.

[14:46] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, I think Maduro being the first in the order of operations, right after National Security Strategy document or a couple months after.

[14:58] Tom Luongo: Right.

[14:59] Marty Bent: And then you look at the imports of Venezuelan crude. Yes, maybe the refinery's capacity isn't where it needs to be, or maybe the utilization of the refineries isn't where it needs to be, but I think if you're going to go attack Iran, it's like, okay, we need to show the American people that we have supply coming from somewhere else on the back end of this while there's this massive disruption. And then on top of that, I think the narratives around the strait, I think it's become abundantly clear that they were completely wrong. There was actually oil flowing through the strait to a significant degree. Yes, we're not— well, on crude, it looks like we're at pre-war levels.

[15:59] Tom Luongo: Imp of the perverse. If you're channeling your inner Neal Stephenson, then the Imp of the perverse likely is better, right? Go for it.

[16:08] Marty Bent: But I mean, you brought up the Uncary trade. And for the longest time, it's like, again, reflecting and really trying to be introspective on my priors, one of which, I mean, I'm a Bitcoiner, I've been screaming like yields are going to go up, the debt situation's going to blow up. And if you just look at the long end of the yield curve, the charts of yields over time, it looks like it wants to go into a structural bear market and the world can end. It looks like Bessent and crew know they're going to they're going to hover higher and they're just trying to manage that.

[17:17] Tom Luongo: That is the gig. No, I would agree with you completely. And what I'll— I'm going to throw— you're in the right ballpark because this is where my head has been for the last 6 months trying to work all this. I'm ready, if not 3 to 4 years, right? Trying to work all this stuff out. And so, you know, let's, let's play some, uh, some of those, those stories out. Um, who can handle the higher cost of capital better, the United States or the rest of the world? When you're the issuer of the, of the world's reserve currency, when you're the issuer, uh, when there's a— as Brent Johnson just posted a thing up just literally like an hour ago on his Twitter feed of, um, you know, the amount of The amount of dollar debt that's out there, both currency forwards and interest rate derivatives and outright dollar-denominated debt, it's $117 trillion and it keeps going up, by the way.

[26:51] Marty Bent: Well, yeah. And my, my question is like, how, how long? Like, it feels like particularly in Europe, they don't have that much time left. Like, it's I could be wrong, but I know, and I'm very happy to see that throughout the course of this year, you and Matt Dines have developed a relationship and have been collabing on podcasts with people. But I'm sure you saw this, but when it comes to— I was like, how much longer can Europe hold on? It doesn't seem like they don't have a productive economy. Their governments are getting more restrictive via regulations and just nanny state stuff. People are pissed off, obviously, in France.

[28:02] Tom Luongo: Yeah, no. And shout out to Matt. Matt's a freaking powerhouse. He came up to Cornerstone in Calgary earlier in the year, March, when we were up there. And I got to— he introduced himself. He's a patron. He's been a patron for a while and introduced himself. And we just sat there for the entire evening, entire evening, Like after Cornerstone was over, we were there with Matt Arrott's wife, Cynthia Chung, trying to explain to her what was going on. And he and I were just ripping back and forth. We started at 9 o'clock, we went till 3:30 in the morning. And then since then it's just been— and it's just been a big bromance ever since then. Like, you should see those— the stuff we talk about on my— on our private Slack server for the Gold, Goats, and Guns, uh, private Slack server. This— the man has been just an absolute powerhouse.

[28:46] Marty Bent: And I'm like, well, and he knows about everybody.

[28:48] Tom Luongo: Yeah. Yeah. And after about 2 or 3 weeks of him doing that, I'm like, I've got to get you inserted into my podcast, you know, my podcast stream. So I got him on Tommy and brought him on Rich, and we did— brought him on my podcast. We did it on purpose. I did it absolutely on purpose. I'm like, oh no, this guy needs to be in the public eye because he is so good and he understands this stuff far better than I do. I understand the geopolitics of it. Like, I made the call that France was going to be the weak link on on the European debt situation about 9 months ago when I really went— because I started adding— I don't know why I did, but one day I just said, you know, I'm going to go look at like the French-Italian spread and see what that looks like.

[30:30] Marty Bent: Right.

[37:00] Marty Bent: Yeah. Australia. I saw Australia raised last week.

[37:05] Tom Luongo: Yeah. Everybody raised except England and Canada because they're trying desperately to hold it. And the US-UK spread collapsed to 7 basis points last night. It was crazy. Then it blew out this morning to 16. basis points as the entire market. They just did a massive intervention over the last couple of days and it lasted 48 hours. Unlike Bessent's interventions, which fundamentally broke and changed the direction of the markets, by the way.

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[39:55] Marty Bent: You can access it for free at simplemining.io/tftc. That's simplemining.io/tftc. Again, how much Mark Carney is— we've talked about this before, but it's such an obvious op. It's the fact that he's the Prime Minister of Canada is one of the most laughable things.

[40:17] Tom Luongo: Well, his job is just to oversee the liquidation of what's left of Canada. They know that Trump is coming for Canada. They know it. That's why they installed Carney. That's why he got the Greenland deal done. That's why he got the Panama Canal deal done. That's why he went after Venezuela. That's why we're just going to wait the Cubans out. Okay, we don't have to do anything at this point except wait them out. And then Canada's the next one on the list. So what do you do if you're Mark Carney and you were sent by the globalists to do this? You pick a trade war with the United States.

[41:42] Marty Bent: What do you think that private credit hiccup with Mark Walters at the center of it from earlier was about?

[41:47] Tom Luongo: Oh, that's part of it. I think Matt is the guy who better understands what's going on there. But Matt's the one that's been— Matt Dines has been the one that talking about, been making that connection that there's a The Brooklyn connection. There's something very hinky, very, very hinky about all these guys buying sports teams, sports betting sites. The fact that professional sports has been— hit its peak in terms of revenues ages ago. And now we've got nothing more than professional sports televised events are nothing but advertisement for the betting markets. I was watching the UFC thing with Ian Burlingame when I was in Boise, and it was like, it's all they talked about.

[43:21] Marty Bent: I mean, speaking of the game and focusing on the Treasury too, what are your thoughts on Judy Shelton? Being brought in. I love it.

[43:26] Tom Luongo: I love it. It's the most telegraphed move of all time. Was she going to go to the Fed? No, obviously not. But because they locked down that they weren't going to allow her to go to the Fed, so they move her into Treasury. And clearly the situation there, and this is going to be a long-term play, Bessent's under no time pressure here to revalue gold higher. He's not. He's openly said this. But it's going to because we have gold, the rest of the world has gold, and England and Canada do not. They have gold in the ground in Canada, but gold in the ground is— you can, you know, gold in the ground is only defensible if you can control the government.

[44:33] Marty Bent: But, um, what would Canada's response to that even be? Would it be like, they're not going to go to war with us?

[44:39] Tom Luongo: Just—

[44:39] Marty Bent: they wouldn't be able to do anything, right?

[44:41] Tom Luongo: With what?

[44:43] Marty Bent: Right.

[44:44] Tom Luongo: I've talked to Canadians about this. They're like, they were laughable. What do we do? We put a couple of M1 Abrams on the Trans-Canada Highway and call the whole of Western Canada ours. What are they going to do? All their assets are our assets. They don't have military assets. They have our assets. They're going to do the same thing that they were trying to do with Greenland, which is they knew that if we had permanent access and control and they didn't have final say over what assets we could put in Greenland, which is the point of the Greenland Agreement, which is that the United States, for all intents and purposes, is a permanent lease on the defensive Greenland. We can do whatever we want. We have final say over what goes on the on the continent or on the on the island. That deal was cut, by the way, not with the government of Denmark, but with the king of Denmark. That's a very important point.

[45:37] Marty Bent: You had the monarchy stepping up in Spain, king of Spain stepping up, saying, "I'm going to do my." My monarchical duty to protect the borders.

[45:45] Tom Luongo: M. Burlingame. M. and I had when I was out in Boise. We didn't record it, but we talked about it, and he's been talking about it here and there on the podcast he's been doing. I, I heartily recommend everybody listen to him. M. impression here, which is to say, look, The titles to all these lands have been weird since the Glorious Revolution, since the democratic, the quote unquote democratic takeover and the marginalization of the monarchs. Yes, of course, at the end of the day, might makes right. And whoever is in charge of and has the— whoever has the army over the land, possession is 9/10 of the law, right?

[48:50] Marty Bent: If you look at the domestic armies of European nations, they're not strong. I mean, look what's happening in France. Another perspective on France, comparing it to Matt Dines, who's like, oh, maybe they're inciting the riots because their yield curve is getting out of control, their bond market's imploding, and they want to instill martial law to restore order or whatever and use the riots as an excuse. Another way to look at the riots is the French government doesn't have the leverage of violence. They've let a lot of people come in, particularly in remote rural areas, and take over.

[49:24] Tom Luongo: That's a possibility. The other possibility is that they use that as an excuse to then steal everybody's savings, steal everybody's pension, and do the military buildup, which is the way they've been talking, right? Oh, we have to be prepared to go to war with Russia in 2029 or 2030. The Russians are not going to stand for that. And you don't tell everybody, I guess, like the first rule of warfare is you don't tell everybody when you're going to attack them or when you're going to go to war with them. So clearly these democratic governments, it actually speaks to Ian's point, right? Which is that in order for these kings or these old monarchies to be able to reassert themselves, the time is now while the civilian governments don't have any legitimacy and any power.

[53:18] Marty Bent: Freaks, look at me. I'm glowing. I've got like an angel's halo going around me. You know why that is? Is I feel good. I feel taken care of. I feel blessed, healthy, happy. And that is because I'm a CrowdHealth member. My family and I have been CrowdHealth members for 5 years now. Literally this month, 5 years ago, we joined CrowdHealth. We've had 2 babies, we've had multiple health events, and we're never going back to health insurance. CrowdHealth is crowdfunded healthcare. So you sign up for CrowdHealth, you pay a monthly fee, You help out with other people's bills and it's significantly cheaper than health insurance. We were on COBRA as a family of 3 when I, when I left my last job before I went full-time with CFTC, went on The Crowd Health.

[55:43] Marty Bent: Well, this is one of the things I was talking about with Susan, which is, uh, it's just so confusing. It's like, why does he message it this way? Like, I feel like the messaging of the administration is not aligned with— because I mean, if you sell that vision, I think people would get on board. But other, other people see the $5,000 dividend checks, they're like, he's just trying to buy our votes.

[56:05] Tom Luongo: Yeah, I, I know. And I, and He's got 25 days, 26 days to make that sale. And I think that he may make that sale before this is all over. Remember, Trump made a lot of moves in 2016, that last week or two of the election cycle. I don't know if you remember back that far. I did. I remember watching it really carefully because I was not on board with him at all. I was still in my law retardian phase of don't vote, it only encourages them. And I only made the choice to pull the lever for Trump like 3 days before the election, by the way. And because I just didn't believe it, I didn't believe that. But then he dropped a number of things all at once that said to me, okay, what's the worst that can happen? I'm going to get Hillary Clinton as president. And that to me is the worst thing possible. This guy could at least be hilarious.

[57:07] Marty Bent: Right?

[57:07] Tom Luongo: And I think between now and then, he's got at least three or four big things up his sleeve he's going to do. But he's, as always, you're always waiting for your opponent to make the first move. They made their. I think they made their first move the other day with this this thing up in Rareford, up in England. You know, with the the the potential attack on. RAF Riverford.

[57:34] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[57:35] Tom Luongo: And the way the British government handled it, like, oh yeah, our bad. It was just a bunch of kids having fun. Like, bullshit. Those guys were all MI6 assets.

[57:43] Marty Bent: They were jacked. There's a picture of them with their shirts off. Yeah, they weren't kids.

[57:47] Tom Luongo: Yeah, bullshit. You guys were all SAS and/or Ukrainian special forces or whatever. You were some British fucking carve-out and you were going to leave a whole bunch of Russian passports at the scene of the crime. Let's not kid ourselves, because you wanted the casus belli. You needed to attack something that would force the United States into a casus belli per our military doctrine. That's what that was. And I think it was going to be timed with— I still say this, I think it was going to be timed with the first Monday in October, which just passed. That's the perfect time that they always pull this shit.

[59:48] Marty Bent: Bunch of dudes just got together like, yeah, let's go blow up a B-2 bomber.

[59:52] Tom Luongo: Yeah, let's just go do that. Because that's what fucking Brits do when they have an extra pint. I'm surprised that Andy Burnham didn't turn around and go, see, they were drunk and we now need to shut down more pubs, local pubs, to make sure that that never happens again. No, they didn't even do that. They didn't even use that crisis to get rid of more pubs because they've been trying to shut all the pubs down in Britain because they know damn well that that's where revolutions start, is all in the taverns and the pubs. They know this. Old America, dudes. That's where it started here in America. So where it started the first time that they lost control of shit, right? Yeah.

[1:00:29] Marty Bent: I mean, and leaning back into midterms, you say it doesn't matter because they'll just use the executive. function as he has been. They can slow him down trying to do impeachments. Like, how— I mean, and as it pertains to midterms, I think on the right there's a contingent who are completely dismayed, like, we're not voting, we're not going to do it. He hasn't been following up on his promises. And, uh, there's a lot of people dejected on Frog Twitter, very much against this administration. And, uh, They say it doesn't matter, but what is the threat? I mean, how big is the threat of impeachment if the Democrats—

[1:01:11] Tom Luongo: Zero.

[1:01:11] Marty Bent: Zero.

[1:01:12] Tom Luongo: Zero. They're not going to take the Senate. The Republicans, I mean, I could see a weird outcome here. Don't get me wrong. I'm not going to tell you that I think the midterms are in the bag or anything. I'm not going to say that.

[1:01:26] Marty Bent: I don't have a crystal ball.

[1:01:28] Tom Luongo: But what I will say is the following. Enough has been done to shore up voting rights in enough of the places. The early voting numbers were all terrible for the Democrats. They're not gonna take the Senate. They can publish as many fake polls as they want that Susan Collins is gonna lose in Maine, and then she's gonna win by 15 points again, like 8 points or whatever she does, she's gonna win. They did this the last time she came in 2020. Like Seth Kessel was hilarious. Somebody posted up, well, all the polls can't be wrong. 6%. Like, yes, they can actually all be wrong. The polls are not, you know, they're not real.

[1:03:37] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:03:39] Tom Luongo: Just from primaries, retirements, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that, again, making the past as prologue argument about how American politics works is normally the right framework. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against using that as your base case, but we're not in the past as prologue. We're in a much different place than we've ever been. And again, because of the particulars of this election cycle, because of who's retiring and everything, I think it's just a different thing. So I want to believe that it's going to be a quote unquote Trump landslide. I'd like to believe it. I may be wrong. I don't care.

[1:07:18] Marty Bent: Well, you mentioned the yuan not being included in that top 5 currency, but that brings up another thing that's become more apparent to me. Again, checking priors, it's like this whole kayfabe of the US versus China existential— I mean, it seems existential battle heading towards World War III in this fight over AI. I mean, I think the last month has shown that we're more willing to work with China and just say, hey, you take care of the East, we'll take care of the West, and let's get along and figure out how to do it.

[1:07:48] Tom Luongo: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that's— I don't think that that's— I mean, it's— don't get me wrong, it's not going to be a rosy relationship or anything, but it's not going to be, you know, a a perfectly adversarial one. Like Zeke said, we don't have to be adversaries. We could be rivals. We don't have to be adversaries. We don't have to fall into— he actually, I think him invoking the Thucydides trap, saying we can avoid it, was a big— because Thucydides trap is a bunch of bullshit that Henry Kissinger and Grant Allison made up in the '70s. It's a bunch of bullshit. Doesn't even exist.

[1:09:29] Marty Bent: Did you see this?

[1:09:30] Tom Luongo: This statue that they just— this piece of art that they just put up in the—

[1:09:35] Marty Bent: European Parliament, right?

[1:09:36] Tom Luongo: In the European Parliament of a fat Trump sitting on a— standing on the shoulders of a slave or whatever. I'm like, oh, is that not projection? Because that's who you people are.

[1:09:48] Marty Bent: Yeah, I mean, it is. It seems like the cognitive dissonance in Europe is insane. They don't realize that.

[1:09:56] Tom Luongo: The European leaders, certainly not the European people. The European people. No.

[1:09:59] Marty Bent: Well, that's a— Yeah. The European leaders— That's the question. Do the European people get control and their sovereignty back? Do they get the money in sovereignty?

[1:10:09] Tom Luongo: I think that doesn't happen until we can draw the collateral stack and then change the money flow. And this gets into where you and I have to do the other side of this home and home and start talking about what's happening in crypto and how that's going to fundamentally alter the way the world works. It's funny, Marty, I've been thinking about this a lot recently and you know how I— you and I have known each other long enough to know that I like to put up ideas, put forth hypotheses that I don't even believe in just to see if I can test them and play around with them and steelman them or just to see, right?

[1:11:50] Marty Bent: Yeah, it's funny. I was actually—

[1:11:53] Tom Luongo: DARPA, get on that shit. Put something together. And then they launch it right after they steal Fannie and Freddie and install their Manchurian candidate, Obama, to destroy the country.

[1:12:05] Marty Bent: Yeah. October 31st, 2008, right before. Right before the election.

[1:12:12] Tom Luongo: Think about all of that and then go, maybe the nugget of truth is, yeah, they created it by DARPA, but then they turned, then they body swerve it. They twist that into something evil when the reality is that was always there as the thing that would be the antipode to the gold, to the completely corrupt gold and silver markets. Right? Because the gold, silver, and oil markets are all terminally corrupted by this Eurodollar flow. So now, if you have an ability to aggregate capital into an asset that they don't like, and notice that who's mostly who's who hates Bitcoin more than anybody else?

[1:12:52] Marty Bent: The Europeans. The MICA licensing regime that they they just wiped out like eighty percent of exchanges with that burdensome MICA license regime. MICA.

[1:13:04] Tom Luongo: And if you look at and if you look at the way Bitcoin's been attacked. since the double top at $125 grand, it's always been like agents of the old system coming in at this particular moment and pushing the price down in an uneconomic manner.

[1:13:18] Marty Bent: And I'm not sure if you've been aware of it, but France is just letting rich crypto holders get kidnapped and tortured.

[1:13:26] Tom Luongo: I did not see that.

[1:13:30] Marty Bent: Like, governments— Thoroughly. Yeah. People working like in the tax authority, they're selling like KYC AML data of all the the rich Bitcoin holders to Moroccan gangs that are kidnapping them. So there could be some sort of social campaign to prevent people from wanting to adopt it because they think they'll get kidnapped and tortured.

[1:13:49] Tom Luongo: And then to your point, they can also get the Bitcoin, sell it onto the market, use it to dump the price. Because look at the volatility in Bitcoin over the last 6, 7 days since the break above 86. Okay. So the The quarterly close. This is an interesting thing. So again, this morning did the quarterly closes for the market report and I was going through all of them, right? And gold and silver were— gold was bearish but kind of neutral. Silver was bearish and bearish because it was an outside bar to the downside where we broke the Q2 low. So it was less strong than gold.

[1:18:17] Marty Bent: Well, let's stay on this. I do want to come back to the DARPA Bitcoin thing because it's funny. I was talking about that last Friday, but on that night we woke up to the headline of Ukraine bombing the Russian tanker this morning. And that, that's what I think the wild card in the situation is like, do they try to escalate that?

[1:18:35] Tom Luongo: Okay. They're clearly blowing up tankers, blowing up all the Russian royal refineries, a mysterious event in Venezuela 2 days ago. It was funny when I was writing last month's issue, Dexter, as the editor on my work, pinged me for a line I had in the article about the refinery in Indiana, the Exxon refinery in Indiana or Illinois. Illinois. That was shut down for an electrical problem of unknown origin. Right. com directly. That was how they reported it. I didn't put it in quotes though. So he just looked at me and said, dude, that's way too conspiratorial even for you. So rewrite it. Like, what's really funny?

[1:24:12] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, no. If you look at just last month, to your point about multiple games being played, I mean, you had Greenland, the China meeting, and then the AI summit where Trump basically shoved Dario I'm a day in the corner and said, no, we're accelerating. You're not slowing down this reindustrialization. We're not giving you your regulatory moat.

[1:24:31] Tom Luongo: Yeah, not only that, but we're going to drive your stock price into the frigging dirt. You're going to force you to IPO when you don't want to so we can buy the fucking shares for $0.05 on the dollar and stick them in the sovereign wealth fund. Fuck you. Yeah, that's what's coming, dude. I don't know if anybody else hasn't seen this play.

[1:24:48] Marty Bent: Well, that's like maybe like putting Putting Uncle Tom on the shoulder and thinking through the lens of the City of London. I mean, the effective altruists, they basically stem out of Oxford. And we have, I mean, one of the leading frontier labs is run by a bunch of Oxford effective altruist acolytes.

[1:25:13] Tom Luongo: Pete Hegseth put a defective altruist. Larry, my God. Like, oh yeah, he's been hanging around Trump too much. It's good for him. I agree. No, I've never thought that that was anything other than— that was just communism for Zoomers. Yeah, that's just communism repackaged for Zoomers. That's all that is.

[1:25:36] Marty Bent: But is that the City of London sleeper cell in the US?

[1:25:40] Tom Luongo: London High Table again. I don't like to just use the City of London thing. I want to clarify this for some people because they misunderstand me. And I've said this to Dexter. I said, look, I have a messaging strategy like everybody else has to have one, which is that London has always been the third rail of geopolitics. We're not allowed to talk about the British Empire existing anymore because it ended in 1946, miraculously, after World War II. That's bullshit. Okay, that's just bullshit. I'm not saying that they're all-powerful. I'm not saying that they have ultimate agency or that they have ultimate control over anything. That is not what I'm saying and never have said.

[1:28:49] Marty Bent: No.

[1:28:50] Tom Luongo: Rules and consequences. You guys broke the fucking rules, and I don't give a shit. I'm taking him out because it's wrong and it's against everything. I was a bad man when I worked for these people. Now I'm not working for them anymore. Fuck that. And it's a perfectly adequate metaphor, and it works better if you actually think of it that way, because that way there's not one star chamber. There's a plethora of little star chambers that get together every once in a while and think that they decide to control the world. And I've always said this, I've always described Davos as those who think that they control the world. They don't control the world. They just think they do. They just make you think that they do. And they spend all of their time trying to convince you that they're all powerful and you have no power. And that is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. Because if that were the case, I'd already be dead.

[1:29:49] Marty Bent: Well, I think— and I think the veil is being lifted, particularly here in the United States. I mean, you mentioned the old oligarchs here in the US. I mean, Hillary Clinton's been making the rounds, like, talking about AI and other stuff, and everybody's just like, go away. Like, Bill Gates is coming out talking about AI. Everybody's like, go away, dude.

[1:30:07] Tom Luongo: We're putting you in the hole, dude. What we have here is a failure to communicate. I'm going to induce what the Paul Newman— HUD? Whatever that freaking movie is, the one where what we have here is a failure to communicate and then they put him back in the hole. That's what I'm talking about. That's where Bill Gates needs to go. He needs to sweat it out in the hole. All of them, they all— it's fine. Let them play their games. Let them have their say. Let them spend their money. Let them spend their capital, let them try and extend and pretend. But if we decide we don't want to live in that world anymore, and enough of us say, that's enough, we're not living under your rule anymore, and we explain to enough people why you should never want to live under their rule anymore and fall for their bullshit, we win by default.

[1:31:12] Marty Bent: Yeah. It was never going to be easy and it wasn't going to happen overnight. That's the frustrating part of— because it's obvious on all fronts, the domestic economy on the reindustrialization, on the monetary level, what's going on with stablecoins, they're actively trying to re-architect But the physical economy and the financial economy in front of our eyes. And to your point, people want a 49 to 0 blowout. It was never going to be that way.

[1:31:39] Tom Luongo: Right. And again, look, when you're in opposition, when you're losing, standing on your principles, shouting them from the high heavens is the right play. It's how you aggregate people to you to form an intentional community, to build the resistance necessary to get to the point where you could begin winning and get out. But once you're no longer in the opposition, that's when you have to take the opportunity that's in front of you and make the absolute most of it. And this is the part that the libertarians are just refusing to get through their heads. And I'm serious when I say this because they're doubling down at every turn.

[1:37:16] Marty Bent: And I'm not going to feel bad about it.

[1:37:19] Tom Luongo: Yeah, that's it.

[1:37:20] Marty Bent: Well, then again, like, bring it back again, looking at the wins, like, it does seem pretty— like, I sit on the board of a data center company and like, we just like the whole data center, anti-data center rhetoric that's been going on, it's just like completely false. Like, it is creating a ton of construction jobs, a ton of electrician jobs, welding jobs.

[1:37:41] Tom Luongo: It's going to lower electricity prices for everybody.

[1:37:44] Marty Bent: Yeah. Like, we just, I mean, I don't know how far you are, but we just, we just announced this PR yesterday, but Hopkinsville, we have an operation there. We're actually expanding by 50 megawatts. And to do that, we need to build a 65-megawatt substation, and that's going to be fully funded by us. Like, the taxpayer's not going to pay for it.

[1:38:02] Tom Luongo: Right. Well, and the taxpayers actually get the benefit of when you don't use the peak electricity load and you feed it back into the grid, which is what Trump said originally. And actually, what I do know is I heard a thing recently, it's like, I think it's in Georgia, I think 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 of these data center plus power generation colocation projects have gone online in Georgia and everybody's electricity bills are dropping like Yeah. Because it's the right way of going about it. Look, I have no problem with that model. I think it's a great model. It's a way of building everything out.

[1:39:19] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:39:20] Tom Luongo: They've been doing this shit for years. And it's awful. But, you know, they have some of the highest— they have some of the highest property tax plus, you know, utility rates in the state. It's awful. I don't live there, thankfully. That's why I live north of Alachua County. I made that decision 25 years ago on purpose because I'm not an idiot. That's, that's where being a libertarian is of a benefit to you personally, because you can think through these things and you can see these systems for what they are and the risks for what they are. But then there's a point where, you know, hold your principles.

[1:40:14] Marty Bent: Yeah. No, it's— I mean, last topic here domestically, thinking like immigration too. I think that's one thing everybody's like, they're not all— they haven't all been sent back yet, and so therefore it's a failure. But if you look at net immigration, obviously there's been comments around H-1B visas and how that's being gamed and how we're going to fix that. And then heading into midterms, I'm sure you've been seeing what's happening, uh, in, uh, Minnesota with like these Somali gang outbreaks. Like, I don't— I think that's If anything, that's going to create a reason to even get more aggressive with it moving forward.

[1:40:48] Tom Luongo: We are. And again, when you say things, when people say things like, just get them all out of here, I'm like, okay, how? You got 20 million of them. How are you going to run? Are you going to devote your weekends to this process? What are you going to do? Are you going to pay for the plane tickets? Are you going to pay for the ship captains to show up at Report to Jacksonville and stick 50,000 of these guys and ship them back to frigging Pakistan? Is that what you're going to do? Are you putting that money on the table? Do you know how much that costs?

[1:44:16] Marty Bent: Yeah. And again, bringing it back to Judy Shelton, who knows what the plan is. I mean, maybe gold-backed bonds, maybe Bitcoin-backed bonds, but recollateralizing the system too, I think is part of a plan.

[1:44:33] Tom Luongo: It's absolutely part of the plan. It's not even a thing, but we're going to recollateralize That debt. We're going to open up the asset side of the balance sheet, which we're doing, and then we're going to recollateralize the debt side of the balance sheet. And we're going to do that at our pace, and we're going to do so in a way that is the least disruptive for the entirety of the global economy so that everybody benefits, so that the pain of that reorganization is felt by as few people as possible. Except for the fucking globalist shitbags at the high table who want to destroy us all. Why don't— why can't— nothing would make— like, how do you destroy a narcissist? You ignore him and then you destroy his reputation. You don't string him up by his toenails and feed him to dogs. I mean, that's— well, satisfying.

[1:45:29] Marty Bent: Yeah.

[1:45:30] Tom Luongo: If he's a traitor. No, the best thing to do is to let him Watch him bleed himself out and go from hero to villain and then have to live with the villainy while you move on without him. And you aren't locked in this fucking codependent relationship of his narcissistic view. That's how you deal with it, how you deal with a narcissistic parent, how you deal with— it's how you deal with an abuser. You walk away from them and you go build something Construct it for yourself. Think about construction, not destruction. There will be plenty of time for hangings and waterboarding and all the rest of it. Just remember, folks, it's not waterboarding if you use diesel fuel.

[1:46:17] Marty Bent: Sorry.

[1:46:17] Tom Luongo: I saw that on Twitter. I thought it was cute.

[1:46:20] Marty Bent: Well, it's funny too, talking about they're going to go at their own pace. Again, last Friday, I recorded with a Roman historian, and one of the focuses of that conversation was how Constantine brought the empire back to a gold standard. And the way it was described is it took a while. He introduced the solidus, and it took about 2 decades of him working on it. But then after that, you had 700 years of basically a gold standard in that part of the world. something beginning to happen here too. And maybe that's like when I'm on your show, we can talk about how that may play out with Bitcoin and stablecoins. Because you had the solidus and then you had the silver coins on top of it that were spending, but the solidus was the gold coin that was used as the reserve asset. And I could see that being part of the plan with Bitcoin and stablecoins.

[1:47:14] Tom Luongo: Yeah, absolutely. We should probably leave that for when we do this. So when we get— we should probably wrap up here. This is, I think, a good place to stop. And, and leave it off for as part 1. And then you and I will pick it up on my podcast in a week or 2, whenever you get a chance. So let's do it. That sound good? Let's do it. Sounds great. I love it. It would be good to— it would be good. I really do feel like I'm missing part of the whole crypto revolution thing and I need to reach out to Caitlin Long. I want to get her on the cast as well. We just got to— I got to go. Got to get back on the— got to get back on the hump, guys. Got to, you know, vacation's over. It's now time to get serious.

[1:47:49] Marty Bent: The one thing I'll say, how it ties to this conversation, is to your point, midterms don't matter. They're going to go along with— they're going to go execute their plan no matter what. I think we've seen a precursor to that with the failure of the Clarity Act to get passed. They're just like, all right, SEC, CFTC, OCC, just go write the rules anyway. We don't care.

[1:48:06] Tom Luongo: Yep. And then we'll solidify them and we'll enshrine them as law later on. That's fine. We can do that later. Yeah. Sounds great. Marty, as always, dude, Beautiful, beautiful to see you. Great chat. Like, well, we'll do it again soon. We'll do it on my— we'll do it in my crib. You know, you won't have to— and folks, you won't have to look at either of our ugly mugs. Audio only. I have the purity of the audio of the audio-only podcast. So there you go. We'll talk soon. Okay.

[1:48:33] Marty Bent: Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.