THOMAS MASSIE: The Collapse of the American Dollar (w/ Matt Kibbe)

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]95% of my opponent's money [music] comes from the Israeli lobby. AIPAC, RJC, Miriam Adelson. You know, the libertarians love me. I said I was going to free him. They all applauded. I think what's going to happen though is [music] we're eventually going to lose reserve status for the dollar. If you got any Bitcoins, we accept Bitcoin. Bitcoin is money. Real money. It's closer to real money than Federal Reserve notes.

[00:00:22]>> I'd agree. It'll be hard to get the Amish on it though. There are some obstacles we'd have to overcome there.

[00:00:27]>> As a record, I'm the only one drinking on this.

[00:00:30]>> [laughter] >> Special day at Pub Key. Welcome to Pub Key, Congressman Thomas Massie and Matt Kibbe from Free the People.

[00:00:38]Welcome. We got we we got a lot in store for the next couple of hours. We have a documentary. We have a little fundraiser and we're going to kick things off with a with a podcast right now.

[00:00:48]>> Sounds good. It's awesome. Where do we start? Where do we start? So, you've been a a vocal antagonist for CBDCs. And I think there's a little bit of a link there. You also have been a bit of an antagonist for the livestock tracking.

[00:01:02]Can you walk us through what both of the what concerns you about both of those for I guess I would say self-sovereignty of farmers and then also financial freedom of Americans? Sure. The government is without congressional approval has been pushing forward with a mandate that livestock have electronic IDs either in their ear or under their skin.

[00:01:24]These would be [clears throat] passive devices that so when you pass them through a stall, you can know which exact animal they are. So, basically to serialize the every animal in the United States.

[00:01:36]This is bad if you know anything about farming.

[00:01:42]Let me tell you why it's bad. It's basically an on-off switch for whether you can sell that animal or not because they'll have the scanning devices at every venue where you might be eligible to sell or butcher that animal. And if you run it through the chute and it and it says, "Whoop, you didn't give this We don't have any records of an mRNA shot for this uh animal." Mhm.

[00:02:05]But with the ear tags, the electronic ID, what they can do is there'll be so many onerous requirements on raising an animal, they'll say like they do with chickens, "Well, the animal's not really going to be yours, it's going to belong to JBS or Cargill, one of these big, you know, corporate conglomerates, and you'll just be raising the animal for us, and we've got all the lawyers and the paperwork and the veterinarians and the vaccines all in order, and we've got this prescribed method for raising the animal, and you'll just basically be a serf to one of these big companies." For human beings, like the central bank digital currency is basically the same thing.

[00:02:45]>> Yeah. I'm against things like central bank digital currency, but also e-verify and real ID. Yeah. People say, "Well, they're not getting any more data from me in order to get a real ID." No, they've already got all your data. The real ID is just to prove that you're the piece of meat that matches the digital signature they already have.

[00:03:07]>> Sure. Sure. Um So So, my takeaway is that the massy metaphor here is that central bank digital currency turns humans free humans into farm animals.

[00:03:16]>> Yes. Vertically integrated, raised in cages. It doesn't sound good. No, it's not good.

[00:03:22]So, in the meat space though, with the livestock, there is a lot of centralization around the processing plants, there are a lot of choke points.

[00:03:28]You can be, I guess, uh a solo farmer um, you know, with your own plot and some cattle. Um, would it affect them equally if you're just, you know, raising a a small farm? Uh I'm using I'm I'm clearly not a farmer because I'm using the wrong terminology.

[00:03:43]>> Well, no, no, no, you're you're right over the target. I'm trying to create an escape path.

[00:03:48]>> Yeah. Even under this Orwellian scheme, you could still raise one cow and eat it yourself, right? And [clears throat] that example >> One at a time. One at a time. Right now, the reason there are four meat processors that control 85% of the meat processing in the United States is there's regulatory capture of the USDA.

[00:04:04]And so, if you're a mom-and-pop butcher shop and you just want to butcher, let's say, six animals a day and you've got maybe four employees, you have to have the same level of onerous USDA supervision, full-time USDA inspectors, as the Oscar Mayer wiener factory, which has train cars of animals coming out, millions of hot dogs coming out the other end of the factory. Um and I would argue that and I have argued successfully that the small meat processor should only have the level of regulation that, let's say, the Kroger's meat department has, you know, the grocery store, or that a restaurant has. Like a local health inspector could keep up with that and probably do a much better job. And so, uh I got into this farm bill that passed last week, something called the Prime Act, which says it's it's a piece of legislation I've been working on 11 years that says if the farmer, the processor, and the consumer are all in the same state, and you're not involved in interstate commerce, then the USDA can piss off. They don't need to be involved in that transaction and that that you could inspect it under a state regime or a county inspection regime. Because right now, if I want to sell beef to a neighbor, I I can use a non-USDA facility, but the way the transaction happens, they have to pay me for the animal before it gets butchered and they have to buy the whole animal. If they can't afford the whole animal, they have to go in with another family and buy half an animal. So, the loophole that exists today, um is this loophole that says you can butcher your own animal. And so, I have to sell them an animal, I can drive it to the butcher shop, but I can't pick it up for them.

[00:05:48]And it's it just makes it so hard to market things directly to consumers. With my Prime Act, you'd be able to sell one steak to one person or package of hamburger to one person.

[00:06:01]The Amish and the Bitcoiners have a lot in common in terms of self-sovereignty and doing it yourself, but that's not super scalable. Like, the trade-off for privacy and convenience is pretty severe across the board.

[00:06:14]>> With the Amish, I buy my milk from an Amish family that's nearby. And I like to barter peaches.

[00:06:21]And I showed up one day without peaches.

[00:06:24]I have 15 varieties of peaches. So, then they get ripe in a different week. So, for several weeks I was bringing the Amish guy peaches for my milk. Like, I could have cream, yogurt, like cuz he wasn't that great at raising peaches.

[00:06:36]And even though he had peach trees, so he just traded with me. And one day I showed up without any peaches. And I said, "I'm going to have to pay you cash this week." And he looked at me. Uh and he said, "Will you have peaches next week?" And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Take the milk and bring me more peaches next week."

[00:06:52]When I was selling somebody and then like half a steer, bless his heart, like I I really do appreciate this. He didn't talk to me about how we were going to complete the transaction until he showed up. He showed up with like 1 oz of gold when it was like worth $2,000 or something. And a half of the steer was worth $1,500.

[00:07:13]And uh I couldn't make change. Like, this [laughter] is this is a problem you run into. I didn't have gold change to give him.

[00:07:20]>> Shavings. Yeah. Um so, I just I sad to say I it would have been the perfect transaction with no government knowledge whatsoever.

[00:07:30]Um but I ended up taking cash cuz I couldn't make change, but I resolved to sell him a bigger cow next time. Cattle, by the way, is is actually keeping up with gold these days. Isn't that a historical correlation? like one 1 oz of gold uh roughly equals you know, one cow?

[00:07:46]Probably. I think that there is a correlation between the two.

[00:07:51]I mean it it diverges at times, but it tracks roughly. The beef exchange index.

[00:07:56]Yeah. Yeah.

[00:07:57]>> [clears throat] >> There's there's an interesting phenomenon going I mean with cattle the the cow inventory in the United States is as low as it's been since 1950. It's never been this low.

[00:08:07]And it's good it's cyclical, but we're in the longest cycle ever. Cuz what happens is when the price of beef goes up, more people sell not just the calves, but the the heifers that would become cows. They sell them into beef. And then when the price goes up even higher because now there's no heifers that become adult cows to have calves, they start selling the adult cows, the mamas into the beef market. And so the herd starts dwindling as the price goes up as the so capacity to make more beef goes down, the price keeps going up and usually it gets to some ridiculous level and people start entering the market. But what's happened is there aren't people entering the market yet and we're like 12 years into this cycle. If you're if you're a beef farmer and you have cows, it's the good old days right now. But most of them have sold most of their cows. Jeez.

[00:09:02]Let's talk a little bit about I guess Bitcoin and stablecoins Clarity Act.

[00:09:06]Where do you Where do you stand on the the Clarity Act? Um Well, you and I were talking about it before Mix Bag. Yeah. Mix Bag.

[00:09:14]Bitcoiners are not super interested in it. It's not too relevant. There are some provisions that protect developers, which are quite important, particularly open source software developers. If they write code and somebody uses it for criminal activity, they're not held liable for that, which has not been the case recently. The DOJ has been pretty aggressive.

[00:09:32]>> I assume moth the mafia uses Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft is not liable, right? Like So, >> [laughter] >> there should be some >> I think they still like Citibank.

[00:09:45]I mean, now with AI, isn't that going to be even trickier?

[00:09:51]Cuz who's writing the software?

[00:09:53]For sure. Uh it's going to be difficult to untangle, I think. The um publishing houses made a pretty strong push against the copyright violations in the early days when AI was first taking off and that kind of just went nowhere. Mhm. But the issues are going to be far and far more complicated when >> [clears throat] >> uh it's medical advice, legal advice, financial uh financial advice. So, speaking of liability and criminal prosecutions, I got to tell you my Ross Ulbricht story.

[00:10:18]Oh, please. Uh so, I met with his mother several times at Freedom Fest, Lyn Ulbricht, and was advocating for him to get a pardon um during the first Trump administration.

[00:10:33]And um she was his best, you know, supporter, booster for that, and she never gave up. And in 2024, the fall of the, you know, our most recent election where before Trump won, uh I called him up to talk about giving him an endorsement to try to bring on more independents and libertarians, and he was excited about that. And he said, "You know, the libertarians love me. I spoke at their convention.

[00:11:03]They loved me. And it And he said, 'You know, when I mentioned that kid they locked up 100 years, uh uh I said I was going to free him, they all applauded.' And he said, 'Put that in your endorsement. Tell them I'll free him.' And he said, 'The libertarians will love it.' So, in my endorsement of Donald Trump, you know, I'm talking about saving the country and everything else, and there's this incongruous sentence that says, "And he'll free Ross Ulbricht."

[00:11:31]>> [laughter] >> And um the way we made it stick was I said, well, how do we how do I announce this endorsement because Bobby Kennedy has suggested I go to Wisconsin and get on stage with him and Tulsi to announce my endorsement of Donald Trump and I didn't want to go to Wisconsin.

[00:11:48]Nothing against Wisconsin. I just it was not good timing and it was getting cold and so I asked Trump. I said, so how do we get this endorsement out there? And he said, just tweet it. I'll retweet it.

[00:12:00]We'll get we'll get it out there for you. And so he ended up retweeting the tweet that I had that said he was going to free Ross Ulbricht which kind of you know, locked it in at that point.

[00:12:12]Yeah. And sure enough on the second day in office he did free Ross Ulbricht and I took Ross Ulbricht to the State of Union.

[00:12:20]So that was pretty fun. That's amazing.

[00:12:22]>> One of his first sort of public appearances. Also the story about his mother, what a lioness. Like the the the effort that she put in to galvanize the Bitcoin community. She went to all the conferences. Bitcoiners were supportive but we're kind of unruly. Just an unbelievable story what what Lynn did.

[00:12:39]Even more unruly than libertarians, I think. At times, yeah. Which is hard to do. Yeah, she's she's a she's a rock star and and it you're you're making me almost romantic about the old days when there was so much hope that the Trump administration and the president would keep maybe more of those promises that he made. It's not the same anymore. No. But there's there's there's a lot I think he could do by executive order and by rule making in the administration to protect cryptocurrency and preserve it. Yeah, it seems like a lot of the attention has shifted to stable coins. I think that Bitcoiners are okay, generally speaking, with stable coins, less so with broader crypto and some of the the tokenization stuff. I think that, you know, that's where a lot of the nefarious activity happens and Bitcoin always gets caught up in that.

[00:13:31]We're kind of like the goalkeeper in soccer. It's never our victory, but it's always our loss. So, if like FTX collapses, the news articles say like, you know, Bitcoin exchange collapses and it's like, well, you know, not because of Bitcoin. Right. Um so, it's a bit, you know, frustrating to see it move in the direction of stable coins.

[00:13:49]Um But what what's your view on on stable coins versus CBDCs? Are they, you know, effectively the same thing? Like and, you know, uh would love to hear your thoughts on on Bitcoin as as well.

[00:14:01]Well, we got to keep the government out of it, I think. But also, you know, this I'm I'm worried that they'll use a form of stable coin and that'll be their central bank digital currency.

[00:14:14]Um and that instead of having the government do it, it's kind of like the Federal Reserve, they'll get the banks to do it. So, it won't look like the government's doing it. So, you got to watch that they don't If the government endorses anything, I'm going to be against it, I think, already. Yeah. It's a simple hat.

[00:14:32]>> I trust the ones I trust the the the coins that the government doesn't like.

[00:14:36]Yeah. They're going to be resistant because, I mean, our whole government is predicated on their abil- right now, unfortunately, on their ability to just create money out of thin air. If we didn't If they couldn't do that, we wouldn't have so many wars, we wouldn't have so many government programs that make people dependent on the government.

[00:14:57]Uh but they depend on creating more money. Mhm. And I, you know, I first got to Congress, I thought there's no way this last more than 10 years, this whole debt thing.

[00:15:08]That's, you know, this is my debt badge here that I built. Gave you one of them.

[00:15:13]Um >> It's in our shrine. I tried to I created it to induce anxiety among my colleagues and it didn't work because they think it's a step counter.

[00:15:22]Like nobody can step 85,000 [laughter] steps a second. But I think and so I'm surprised that the music in this musical chairs game hasn't stopped sooner.

[00:15:33]I think what's going to happen though is uh we're eventually going to lose reserve status for the dollar. And um you know, these stable coins may have may play a part in that or Bitcoin as a reserve.

[00:15:50]I know I think you prefer to use it as a transactions. Bitcoin is money. Yeah, real money. It's closer to real money than Federal Reserve notes. I'd agree.

[00:15:59]It'll be hard to get the Amish on it though. There are some obstacles we'd have to overcome there. That's all right. They'll barter. Which I think actually I think barter is actually better than Bitcoin like in the hierarchy of things. I was talking about inflation to my Amish guy because they do buy a few things from the outside like propane and bleach. Mhm. And he was talking about inflation. I said, "Well, it's all those checks they printed. You know, that was part of it during COVID.

[00:16:22]They just created money out of thin air and they made those stimulus checks."

[00:16:25]And then I looked at him and said, "But you probably don't even know what I'm talking about, do you?" He says, "Oh no, we got the checks."

[00:16:32]And I said, "What'd you do with them?"

[00:16:33]He said, "We burned them."

[00:16:35]>> [laughter] >> And I'm like, "Why Why'd you do that?"

[00:16:37]He said, "If If you start taking their money, they'll conscript you to war."

[00:16:42]Like they understand that they're better off having this separation and anything that blurs that separation between them and the government will take away the the privileges that they've, you know, achieved. Which is conscientious objector status for the whole Amish nation if you want to call it that.

[00:17:03]Fascinating. But on the here's what I think's going to happen to our reserve status. It is I I've never voted for a sanction of another country, which gets me in a lot of trouble. I've never sanctioned Russia, I've never sanctioned Iran, they've never sanctioned China or North Korea. What happens every time we do that, the governments figure out another way to do transactions. Hopefully, we're starting to see that with oil. For sure. Um but before we sanctioned Russia, 75% of their transactions were in dollars with other countries. Now it's less than 20%. And in order to have these transactions, you have to hold dollars.

[00:17:41]Right? Yeah. You can't buy something with dollars if you don't have dollars.

[00:17:45]And so um they're less incentivized to hold dollars. So our Ponzi scheme of printing more dollars and taxing the rest of the world because they're holding dollars is going to collapse. And then we'll only be able to tax ourselves. When J.D.

[00:17:59]Vance was a senator, he and I were fighting this bill. It sounded great, but it was a terrible idea. It was to seize all the sovereign Russia's sovereign assets in the United States and to use them to pay for the war in Ukraine.

[00:18:18]Well, J.D. Vance has you know, a finance background and I have suspicious view of the government background. And we both realized that the only sovereign assets that Russia has in the United States are treasury notes on the ledger. And basically what we the bill was going to do was default on those notes to Russia.

[00:18:40]And therefore free up some more virtual cash to buy weapons for Ukraine.

[00:18:45]Well, what happens when you start developing a reputation of defaulting on your loans, the rate that you have to pay for your other loans goes up.

[00:18:54]>> Yeah. So anyways, bad idea and J.D.

[00:18:57]spotted it and we worked on that a little bit together.

[00:19:00]It's crazy.

[00:19:01]Well, we we are out of time.

[00:19:03]Um I want to make sure we get you down there for everybody. That's um very excited to see you. Um you know, one let Go for it. No, I'd just say let's let's take 2 minutes and let's get a quick update on your campaign, which is imminent. Yeah. So, it's very close.

[00:19:17]Um our poll showed me with a single-digit lead.

[00:19:22]And um I've It's going to It's Somebody said it's the second most expensive primary in the country. It's the most expensive primary in the history of Kentucky. Uh already $20 has been spent on this Republican primary. It'll be 30 million by the time it's over in 2 weeks. I can't wait for that to happen like 2 weeks from now.

[00:19:40]Um but it's a close race and the the biggest disparity in the cross-tabs, you know, when you do polls, you ask a demographic panel. It's What religion are you? What race are you? How old are you? You know. Uh Where do you get your news? That kind of stuff. The The most interesting cross-tab is age.

[00:19:59]And I am just killing it with everybody under 40. Like four out of five are voting for me. But when you get above 65, it's like two out of three are voting against me.

[00:20:11]And then in the range from 40 to 65, I'm doing well.

[00:20:16]Um but guess which demographic is most likely to show up and vote in a low-turnout scenario.

[00:20:23]It's It's the older demographic. Is that a Fox News effect, maybe?

[00:20:26]>> It's They get Fox everywhere. They watch Fox all day long. And I've been black Yeah, I've had a blackout on Fox. Like they haven't had me on in 18 months. I used to go on there like once a week.

[00:20:37]>> Mhm. I'd go on Laura Ingraham or one of those other shows and they just don't have me on anymore. So, talk about um I I know I'm getting glared [clears throat] at. Oh my gosh, my wife's Yeah. But it's Like like final thought, maybe. Uh talk about the the money bombs and the insane number and diversity of donors versus your opponent. Yeah, well, we're going to go to a fundraiser downstairs. That's what we're going to be late for. So, um 95% >> Already >> paid, so.

[00:21:06]>> N- 95% of my opponent's money comes from the Israeli lobby, APAC, RJC, Miriam Adelson, all of those folks are >> Big big checks. Yeah, billionaires writing million-dollar checks against me because I don't vote for foreign aid and I don't vote for sanctions. And that includes no foreign aid to Ukraine, no foreign aid to Egypt, no foreign aid to Israel. And that ticks off the Israeli lobby. So, that's what's got me in trouble with the big money folks, the billionaires. Our campaign has been funded $20 at a time, $50 at a time. I have some donors who give the max, 3,500, but the average donation of the 30 over 30,000 donors I have is 94 bucks. So, it's a grassroots campaign. It's almost a movement, not just an election. And it's going to be a referendum on does the does the a foreign lobby and does the get to pick who a congressman in Kentucky is going to be. All right.

[00:22:08]We'll leave it there. Yeah.

[00:22:10]And if you've got any Bitcoins, we accept Bitcoin.

[00:22:14]>> [laughter] >> Thomas Massie.com.

[00:22:16]Thank you for being here.

[00:22:17]>> Thank you. Nice clothes.