Speculation Culture and Prediction Markets

The Last Trade: Jeff Deist explains why “saving” died in the fiat era, how markets morphed into a casino, why gold is quietly re-monetizing, and what Bitcoin’s financialization gets dangerously wrong as younger generations face a broken denominator, housing despair, and a culture of Hail Mary bets.

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🎙️ About This Episode

With Jeff Deist (General Counsel at Monetary Metals, former President of the Mises Institute, former Chief of Staff to Ron Paul), we go back to first principles: what Austrian economics actually is, why “macro” often becomes storytelling, and how sound money frames human cooperation, scarcity, and long-term civilization building.

From there, we diagnose the modern U.S. economy through Deist’s lens: the post-1982 debt era, collapsing savings as a virtue, and the way suppressed rates turned equities and housing into de facto “savings accounts.” Jeff argues this is why under-40s feel trapped, why wealth inequality becomes socially corrosive, and why a culture that can’t save drifts toward speculation, despair, and even prediction markets as financialized entertainment.

We then zoom in on gold’s breakout year and what it signals. Jeff makes the case that gold’s premium still reflects “moneyness,” especially outside the West, and explains Monetary Metals’ model for earning yield in ounces through gold leases and bonds. Finally, we close on Bitcoin’s institutional path and the risks of financialization: why Deist dislikes BTC treasury companies, how distorted incentives pull talent into financial engineering over real production, and what it means for capital markets when “numbers go up” becomes the organizing principle.

The Last Trade: a weekly, bitcoin-native podcast covering the intersection of bitcoin, tech, & finance on a macro scale. Hosted by Jackson Mikalic, Michael Tanguma, & Brian Cubellis. Join us as we dive into what bitcoin means for how individuals & institutions save, invest, & propagate their purchasing power through time. It's not just another asset… in the digital age, it's The Last Trade that investors will ever need to make.

🧠 Chapters

00:00 – Welcome + Jeff Deist’s Background

02:17 – Discovering Austrian Economics

04:38 – Libertarianism vs. Economics

08:43 – Bitcoin as a Sound Money On-Ramp

14:13 – Inequality, Housing, & the Under-40 Squeeze

19:17 – Distorted Capital Markets & Malinvestment

23:30 – What Money Is: Rates, Inflation, & Savings

28:11 – Why Savings Died

39:12 – Speculation Culture & “Betting on Everything”

42:03 – Gold’s Breakout & “Moneyness”

46:23 – Gold vs. Bitcoin

51:33 – Preserving Wealth in Uncertainty

56:43 – Government, Fiscal Dominance, & Tech Deflation

01:04:15 – Learning as the Real Edge

01:12:42 – Bitcoin Financialization & Treasury Companies

01:21:38 – Outro & Disclaimer

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