Speaker 1: And we also have a series of shorts clips from
the documentary. They're put out there, and they have several
hundred thousand views of our short clips that are out
there on Instagram and other places in social media. And
so we're very pleased with this that we're getting making
some progress and educating people about what the FED does
and who benefits from it.
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Speaker 3: And welcome. You are listening to and watching the Financial
Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Lutz. Well, we've got
a person from our favorite institute of higher learning, and
that is the Mesis Institute Mesis University, Mesis dot org,
m I S dot org. Go there now. Tom de
Lorenzo is with us. We're talking about a documentary put
out by the Mesas Institute called Playing with Fire, and Tom,
I mean you were telling me about a pre call.
I've got to go see it. You said, it's gotten
over six hundred thousand views in a very short period
of time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we produced a thirty eight minute documentary. It features
Ron Paul, Jim Grant, myself, and a number of other
people tried to explain in plain English about what the
FED is and what the FED does. And one of
the reason why we think it's really necessary is I
told you the little story about how when Tucker Carlson
interviewed Ron Paul on his podcast several months ago, Tucker
recalled the story when Ron was running for the Republican nomination,
he had a speech to deliver at Michigan State University
and the students there, hundreds of students began spontaneously chanting
in the FED and the FED. And that's where and
Ron ended up writing a whole book called End the Fed.
But that wasn't organized by his campaign or anybody else.
The students had just listened to some of his speeches
and they did that. And Tucker Carlson's response was to say, well,
you know, I was a professional journalist at the time,
and I was covering that, and I didn't know anything
about the FED, and I'm paid to know.
Speaker 3: At least something, Yeah, some kind of superficial knowledge. It
just so surprises me because Tucker Carlson, his father was
in the Deep State, was part of the deep State
by his own admission, and you know, Voice of America
I think he was in charge of, and he'd been
intimately involved, even the speculation about being with a certain
three letter agency that we all know and love Tom
So it just shocks me that he could be that
ignorant on the topic. But I guess if you're not
concentrating on something, you're not focusing on it, then it's
understandable you wouldn't know anything.
Speaker 1: You know, if you weren't focusing on the fit, you
wouldn't understand anything about it. So that's the purpose of
our documentary, Playing with Fire, which you can look at
on YouTube. We can go to our website messas dot
org slash fire and you'll find it and it's gotten
almost six hundred thousand views in five months. And we
also have a series of shorts clips from the documentary.
They're put out there and they have several hundred thousand
views of our short clips that are out there on
Instagram and other places in social media, and so we're
very pleased with this. We're getting make some progress in
educating people about what the FED does and who benefits
from it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and there certainly are a lot of people benefiting
from it, for sure. You know, we could kind of
tie this into what's happening with DOGE right now, the
expose of frivolous, corrupt, fraudulent, criminal government spending. You know,
it's all tied together to the FED. Right. Without the FED,
they wouldn't be able to do this.
Speaker 1: All right. The FED is the state's legalized counterfeiting machine,
and there's no way around it. And so yeah, when
people in Americans see all this absurd waste of trillions
of dollars that they're discovering, it's going to be in
the trillions, I'm sure.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: It is all made possible by the FED because you know,
you tell people, for example, Okay, we're going to give
the dictator of Ukraine another fifty billion dollars, but we're
going to have to send each tax paying family, working
family a bill for ten thousand dollars tax bill. You'd
have a lot less support for the war in Ukraine,
and you see a lot fewer Ukrainian bumper stickers in
your town. But if the FED can just print up
the money, it disguises the true cost of government. And
it's not just foreign policy, it's everything. And that's what
it's all built on. Funny money, which is the FED.
And so if we were to just end the ability
of the FED to monetize the debt, you know, the
FED goes out there, it literally counterfeits money, does it
electronically these days, and it purchases the government debt, short
term debt, and that set's called monetizing the debt. And
that didn't come into existence until the nineteen thirties. The
FED was created in nineteen thirteen. But that law could
be repealed, and that would instantly go a great deal
a long way to eliminating the ability of the FED
to create price inflation and never ending boom and bus
cycles that we have in every decade we have some
sort of crisis caused by the FED, and then the
FED comes back and says, oh, we're gon We're going
to solve the crisis that we created by doing more
of the same thing.
Speaker 3: So I'm going to run something by you here, the
National Cryptocurrency Reserve or Bitcoin Reserve. Right now, it's like
we don't know how much exactly, because a lot's been confiscated,
some's been stolen, But there could be as many as
five hundred thousand bitcoins there, maybe a million. Maybe if
the a certain three letter alphabet agency created it, there
could be millions there. So what if the actual plan
here is to pump up bitcoin to ten million dollars
a coin, have fifty trillion dollars worth of bitcoin in
the reserve, and just do it debt swap. You no
longer have a US government debt. You've got bitcoin. Congratulations,
enjoy your bitcoin. Yeah, is that possible.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's it's I think it's feasible. You don't think
of that happening. But I think another thing I think
that did happen. It was Trumble announced this. There are
a lot of people who made a killing with within
in bitcoin, another killing as far as far as that goes,
But I doubt that that will happen. It's it's it's feasible,
but I doubt politically, I doubt that that something like
that is going to happen. But I mean I worried
that the government is getting involved at all. And bitcoin
the whole idea was to be able to engage in
transactions without the government constantly snooping and threatening, uh and
holding you hostage. And and so here comes Trump uh
putting government involved with with coin, and we'll see what happens.
But I just don't in a visceral sense. I don't
like the idea of the government getting involved in with
so much with bitcoin.
Speaker 3: But really, couldn't you see them doing this?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they they've done wilder things.
Speaker 3: But when it's like, that's how you get something out
of nothing. Everybody gets their money, nobody cares, everybody's happy, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we can go on with business as usual.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, I mean everybody gets paid, right, isn't that
what it's about in the end. Yeah? And then I
don't know what happens to bitcoin after it, but it
could be the mother of all pump and dumps, right.
I actually did a video about that myself. Yeah, just
speculating on what would happen. It just like it seems
like the kind of thing Trump would pull, you.
Speaker 1: Know, Yeah, Trump and Trump and Elon Musk.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like, hey, there is no way to pay
off the debt otherwise, is there?
Speaker 1: No? The historically all governments have done is well you
could repudiate it. You can just tell the Chinese, sorry,
you're not going to get the you'll ever get your
money back from all those bars you buy it you bought,
and inflation slowly gets rid of a national debt. But
that's just like drops in the ocean as far as
that goes.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's going to be fun to watch. I think
there's an ulterior motive here, and maybe it's the only
way that it can be done. I'm not going to speculate,
but getting back to the documentary because it really does
tie into it. The arsonist at play here is the
Federal Reserve. They start a fire and then, like we
were talking about, they put it out with gasoline and
it erupts into an inferno and the next thing you know,
you got the Los Angeles burning. So if the Fed
wasn't writing the checks, they're the ultimate enabler. It's like, hey,
don't blame us. All we do is print money and
control the money supply and try to ensure stable prices
and full employment. And also their latest function is to
never allow the stock market to go down. But without them,
none of this, like we were talking about, would be possible,
would it.
Speaker 1: No, it wouldn't and all these things. You know, any
economic student, it takes econ one oh one in college.
One of the first weeks of the semester. You learn
about the bad effects of price controls. And here's the
FED constantly trying to manipulate interest rates and you know, drive,
driving them down to zero one year and then doing
the opposite the next year. And that's that's a form
of price control. And then you have hundreds of FED
economists who who rationalize this, who defend this practice. It
really is a central planning organization, and the FED does
more than monetary policy. It is involved in one of
the its own publications, it's called the Structure and Functions
of the Federal Reserve System, and it lists hundreds of
different types of regulations that the FED enforces and every
conceivable type of financial transaction. So it does a lot
more than just monetary policy. For example, you know one
simple example in the nineteen seventies, there was a law
pass that created the called the Community Reinvestment Act. This
is the law that sort of pressures banks and mortgage
lenders to make loans basically based on race and income.
And even if it made billions of loans to unqualified
bar wers by putting putting more or less a quota
system on lending, on more mortgage lending. And that's just
one of the things that the FED enforces. And that
was a part of the crash of eight, of course,
with a lot of the bad loans. And I'm not
saying it was the main cause. The fed's bubble that
it created was the main cause, but that contributed to it.
There were dozens of other laws and regulations like that.
That makes the FED sort of our grand central planning
agency because the controls more than just the money supply.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure, for sure, And we know how well
central planning works. We all were looking up to the Chinese,
how wonderful their experiment was going, and then a funny
thing happened on the way to global dominance. Everything blew up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that was you know, back in the nineteen eighties.
I remember when Japan was touting what they called its
industrial policy, which was, you know, heavy planning of its industry,
and they did things like they only wanted one national
car and at one point in Japan and the post
World War two era, and then of course the Japanese
economy went in the tank for you know, several decades
really after that, and so they quit bragging about their
version of central planning. And it's incredible, by the way,
if you study American economic history in the nineteen twenties
and thirties and forties and even past that, all the
praise that American statesman, so called self described statesman gave
for Soviet central planning, even all Samuelson, the famous textbook
author from MIT was His book dominated the economics textbook
market for forty years, beginning in nineteen forty eight. He
predicted in his nineteen eighty eight edition that the Soviet
economy by the year two thousand would be bigger than
the US economy. And so, of course, a couple of
years later, the Soviet economy essentially disappeared altogether. And so
here we are with the FED is sort of the
last vestige of early twentieth century central planning. And it
needs to go.
Speaker 3: Yes, certainly does need to go, we know, that's for sure.
But how it will go, how they'll get rid of it,
that's going to be the interesting thing. So, Tom, we
find you over at mesas dot org.
Speaker 1: Correct, that's right, that's our website. You can get a
great economic education for free. And I just happened to
have this little book on my by Friedrich Hayek on
my desk called Choice and Currency a way to stop inflation,
and it's one way to start getting rid of the
FED and allowing competing currencies. And you know, bitcoin and
cryptocurrency is one thing, but you know, currencies backed by
gold or silver or other precious metals is another way
to go. And I think that's what has to happen
in the future. The whole world relied on gold based
money for thousands of years before governments took over the money,
and that's the direction I think our country needs to
head into.
Speaker 3: Agreed for sure. Preaching to the converted here, Tom, appreciate
you coming on. As always, We'll talk to you again soon.
We'll have a link in the show notes this interview
on Financial Survival Network with the link to the documentary
and of course to mesas dot org and your bio.
Appreciate you coming on. We'll talk to you again soon, Tom,
Thanks so much, appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Thanks no good day, Thanks for listening to carry Lets's
Financial Survival Network, your solution to today's trying times. For
the latest, go to Financial Survivalnetwork dot com Financial Survival
Network now more than ever,