Luke Gromen "print the money or trigger the revolution"

About this episode

Long-form interview with macro economist Luke Gromen (FFTT), framed around the book "The Mandibles" and Gromen's core thesis: the US faces a binary choice — "print the money or trigger the revolution" — because tax receipts are fully consumed by entitlements, interest, and defense, leaving no room to cut spending without a political crisis. Gromen and Vance connect this to farmland: land prices have decoupled from crop economics due to the Cantillon effect (people who get printed money first, like hedge-fund-manager landowners, bid up land ahead of everyone else), and Bitcoin is "demonetizing" land, gold, and housing by rising faster than dollar-denominated assets. They cover gold's resurgence as central banks and oil exporters (Russia, China, Iran) shift away from dollar-denominated commodity trade, stablecoins as a mechanism to prop up short-term Treasury demand (which Gromen calls secularly inflationary), AI-driven job losses as a coming deflationary shock the Fed will have to counter with money printing, and a detailed mechanism by which the Treasury could revalue US gold reserves from $42/oz to market price to generate a multi-trillion-dollar windfall. Gromen closes by describing his firm FFTT and his personal fondness for the farming community.

“Print the money or trigger the revolution... that's the choice that Powell's been faced with... The United States... we have record treasury receipts of about five and a half trillion dollars. We are spending about 70% of that on entitlement payments... So we are literally spending a hundred percent of all time record receipts on things that are interest or interest-like obligations.”

“To me, Bitcoin is demonetizing land. It is pulling that monetary premium out and people don't realize it because they're still valuing their land in dollars.”

“The economic policy of the United States government since roughly 1982 has been subjugate the US middle and working classes in order to support the bond market in Wall Street.”

Key moments

• Gromen explains "print the money or trigger the revolution" — with US receipts fully consumed by entitlements (70%) and interest (30%), there's no room to cut without a political crisis.
• Vance connects this directly to agriculture — farm transfer payments (13.5% of typical farm income) as a smaller-scale version of the same Cantillon-effect dynamic, with the largest landholders (baby boomers) benefiting most.
• Gromen shares his personal story of owning/renting Ohio farmland since 2011 and watching land prices rise even as crop economics didn't support it — direct evidence of the broken system.
• Vance articulates his ATR "Bitcoin land price report" concept — Bitcoin appreciating 50-100%/year while land stays flat in Bitcoin terms, meaning land is quietly losing value once measured outside dollars.
• Gold vs. Bitcoin explained through an "energy store" framework; Gromen recommends farmers (especially younger ones) allocate 2-10% of net worth to Bitcoin to "cut to the front of the line" of the Cantillon effect.