Hello everybody, Welcome to another episode of Simply
Bitcoin IRL. Today we're honored to have a
very special guest, massive fan of his work and I'm of course
I'm talking about Peter St. Hodge.
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Check out swan.com today. All right everybody, no more
delay. Let's bring Peter up on on
stage. Hey, Peter, how are you?
Great. Not bad, Nico.
How are you? Good.
We met in the flesh for the
first time in Los Angeles. That was awesome.
Yes, and it was beautiful out there.
It was a great gang. It was a really good vibe at
that conference. It was just the right size.
It was. It was fun.
You had the talk after mine, or I think it was before mine.
What was your talk about? Let's see.
I was up there with Stefan Lever and we were talking about
Austrian economics. So of course.
You were with Stefan. Yeah, right.
What else? And I've actually known Stefan
for years and years. We knew each other way back when
there was free speech on Facebook.
So that was kind of, that was like my hangout, you know, And
then I got censored because I posted something about Hunter
Biden. So that ended up being my
demise. That was back when you know you
didn't know what you weren't allowed to say.
And so you would just kind. Of say stuff.
And then, yeah, you would be surprised the next day that, oh,
apparently I can't mention, let's see, I had Hunter Biden
and China in the same sentence. And you know, they were like,
sorry, an error has occurred. And I thought, well, that's odd.
And so I kept trying to rearrange the sentence and
finally I was able to post the progeny of the Democratic
candidate and a large country in Asia neighboring Vietnam.
And OK, that they allowed me to post.
That was like as close as I could get to the statement I
intended. So anyway, so I ditched
Facebook, came over to Twitter, and then thank God for Elon.
He bought Twitter and managed to do what all of our politicians
failed, which is actually giving us some free speech.
Yeah. And in a way, like, in a way,
'cause I know, like a lot of the conservative movement was like
the ones that were getting the brunt end of the stick.
But in a way, I'm glad in hindsight that they didn't
interrupt that politicians didn't step in because at the
end of the day, from an Austrian perspective, the free market
stepped in and solved the problem.
You know, you had, of course, this was an offshoot.
You had Elon stepping in, buying Twitter, and then you had the
rise of Rumble. And I'm a huge fan of Rumble and
it that platform's been growing. We've been doing pretty good
over there. So I mean, I want to get your
take on that. Yeah, I think, you know, it was
tricky when we were talking about the censorship because so
I'm an anarcho capitalist. I don't generally look to
government for the solutions. The tricky thing here is that
you were kind of in a situation where you had to build your
entire freaking infrastructure, right, Because the activists
were going to go after your payment processors and your, you
know, your web service provider. And I mean just just the entire
thing, your landlord. And so really, it took somebody
with the kind of resources that Elon has in order to
breakthrough it, right? He could basically say, well,
fine, you know, if if PayPal doesn't want to sponsor my
platform, then I'll just build my own, right?
And that's actually a credible threat.
And so PayPal is not going to screw around with that, or at
least they haven't yet. So in a sense, we got lucky.
I mean, we got the absolute perfect person, which is
somebody so freaking rich that he could cut through that, You
know, it was, it was just like a thicket, You know, it's like
it's like if you're going through a strawberry patch that
lasts for miles and just you slash through one and there's
another and another and another. So in a sense, we got lucky.
Unfortunately it it it was solved for now.
But I think it's a very real threat in the future that you
have this unholy alliance between the tech oligarchy and
governments and largely, you know, it's kind of a protection
racket. So tech including Zuckerberg,
including Dorsey, they had been free speech absolutist.
They they had actually, early on, taken on a lot of hits over
free speech because their business plan was to get
everybody on earth spending all of our free time debating crap
on Facebook or on Twitter. And so they were actually very,
very pro free speech. But I think really Gamergate
kind of planted the seeds of this sort of ongoing protection
racket where governments can threaten all these companies and
at some point they give in, right?
Partly they hire people who are sympathetic to the government's
point of view and partly they just say it's not worth the
fight. You know, we've we've got a
trillion dollar business here. And if we stand up for free
speech, you know, if we go back to the old days where you had
the warrant Canaries and all that good stuff, if we go back
to those old days, then we risk getting completely shut down.
You know, they have a head on a Pike in the form of parlor,
right. I mean, they showed exactly what
happens to you if you screw with with the rest of them.
And so I mean really, if you're the CEO of a public company, you
can't run that risk. You have a fiduciary duty not to
run that risk. So they really created this.
The polite term is corporatist. I don't want to want to get in
any trouble with any F words, but they've really built this
corporatist alliance between government and the tech
oligarchy. And the problem is that that is
impenetrable for anybody but the richest person in the world who
has balls of steel, and we got damn lucky that he's there.
But they'll be back. Oh, they and they are back.
I mean the attack with Media Matters and attacking.
It's it's endless. The crap they go after on them.
What they just denied there was a $900 million subsidy from the
government for providing like rural broadband or something.
And Starlink, of course, was in line for that because Starlink
is better than any other solution.
And so the FCC just decided that, Nah, Nah, he's not going
to qualify for that. I mean, he's absolutely endless
with their deploying about him, which gives me some sympathy for
the other cowards in the sense that I mean really they they
will destroy you, anybody less than Elon and they would destroy
him. Yeah.
And and why do you think this is happening?
So I I have you know, and of course I'm, I'm coming from the,
from the, I've been a bitcoiner I think 1/3 of my life.
So I'm coming from the bitcoiners perspective, which is
I think we're living through this very turbulent time in
history, which I call the disintermediation of information
in the the disintermediation of money.
Disintermediation of information start happening 1st and then the
disintermediation of money is like kind of overlapping it.
And I think there's the government's had so much power
controlling the narrative for so long, but the Internet came
along and you know, people like me and you, we just have a
camera, we have a microphone and all of a sudden we can speak
directly, peer-to-peer with our audience without going through
these so-called intermediaries. And I think it freaks them out.
I think it puts the fear of God in them.
Yeah, I think you describe it perfectly.
That's exactly what happened. If we had to put a date on it,
it would be Brexit and then Trump.
So 2016, the lesson, you know, they had spent the past, really
the past 100 years just kind of leaning back and racking up
their wins. You know, they launched, it's
called the the the long March through the Institution.
So that was an explicit socialist goal to try to take
over institutions like education or media.
They succeeded wildly. And at that point, you know, if
you're in a democracy and if you own the two industries that can
shape thought, just kick back, you know, every single
generation is going to be more and more indoctrinated.
You know, This is why Republicans in Washington get a
lot of heat, including from people like me for not fighting.
But I do understand why they don't fight because every
narrative is going to go against them.
If you're talking about the debt ceiling limit, for example, that
is entirely going to be framed. You know, for 70% of voters,
that's going to be framed by the left and the left alone.
So anyway, they were living this in in this great world.
They could just kick back. They could cash the crony
profits. You know, they could just every
day they would pick up the newspaper and it's just endless
good news. Everything is getting better.
OK That was the world that they got used to for really about 100
years. And, you know, if we put a date
on it, really accelerating probably in the 1960s.
So you're talking about 50 years of just on remitting advances
and then you get Brexit followed soon after by Trump.
And you know, those were two events where they deployed the
entire fought industrial complex or sent propaganda industrial
complex towards, you know, rejecting Brexit and rejecting
Trump. And it didn't work.
And I think you're absolutely right, that freaked them out.
They started saying, wait a second, we're not actually going
to win, we're losing. And the reason was the Internet
obviously. Right.
So that allowed you to bypass the gatekeepers.
People like you or I can talk to people directly.
A lot of my videos get a million views.
This is, you know, I think that would make it the top rated show
on MSNBC anyway. You know and and what what I
shoot on an iPhone with a with a mic and anybody can do this.
Like, I've had dozens of people reach out and I've kind of
mentored them and taught them how to do it.
And OK, you know, you got to do the sound key detail.
If anybody's listening and wants to start doing videos, don't
worry about the video. Nobody cares.
Nobody cares about the video quality.
I'm not actually that good looking sound.
The sound has to be perfect, all right?
If the sound is not perfect, people will turn it off because
it's unbearable. You yourself do this, so put
yourself in the eyes of the audience.
But at any rate, that ability to bypass the gatekeepers, right?
They'd put all their eggs in the gatekeepers, OK, they had they,
you know, in their long March through the gatekeepers and then
we just, I mean we we completely bypassed it, right?
So we did for information. Well, the Internet did for
information. Really.
What Bitcoin does for money, right?
Just completely disintermediates, right.
It makes it a relationship, like a peer-to-peer relationship as
opposed to the sort of broadcast relationship where it can be
censored at the centre. So absolutely, they freaked out.
They put everything they had in the censorship.
They they will not give that up. It's going to take I think
ultimately the Supreme Court, Elon has been fighting, he's
been absolutely astounding. But you know, there's many
countries where this is happening.
Elon is one man. He does not have the resources.
You know, if you look at what happened in Brazil for example,
where questioning the election got people thrown in prison, I
think it was 20 year terms for questioning the election, doing
nothing further than that. So I mean the the censorship is
on the March in every country on earth.
Elon is fighting the good fight. But ultimately the Supreme Court
of the United States I think is going to be the most important
institution and what it has to do is to stand up and defend the
1st Amendment. If it can do that, then, you
know, as long as you have free speech in the USI think that is
a kernel for the rest of the world to look to.
Fundamentally, there's really only one good ruling document,
one good sort of legal system in terms of censorship.
There's only one good one in the entire Earth, and that is the
United States. Everything sucks in the rest of
the world. So a lot, I think fundamentally
is riding on the Supreme Court. I love what Elon's doing.
I think a lot of what he's doing is winning people over to our
cause. So I do think that we have more
and more converts, like more and more voters who think that
censorship is a big issue. But fundamentally, I think it's
kind of come to the Supreme Court.
You know, if if you look just a couple years ago, you had even
conservatives writing papers. I remember there was one in 2019
where they were calling it so-called censorship or, you
know, they would say people who who feel that their censor or
imagine that. And I mean it was, it was
relentless back then, right? That was long after Alex Jones
got kicked off. That was long after the the
whole witch hunt, right, Because that that really started
immediately after Trump. So they had chased all these
people off. We all had to be careful what we
were saying. You couldn't, you know, quote
Thomas Jefferson about the, you know, tree of Liberty.
That would be, you know, that would be bannable.
That's completely insane. Thomas Frickin Jefferson.
But even conservatives, you know, they were calling it
alleged and so-called and imagined.
So, you know, I think we've come a long ways now.
You know, if you talk about censorship, nobody shakes their
head and kind of looks at you like, well, maybe maybe just
nobody watches your stuff, man. OK.
People, I think widely the majority of the population
certainly on the right and I think even in the middle they
accept that there is a lot of censorship going on that this is
material in terms of public policy.
So I do think that we're advancing but but I think it's a
long road from here and hopefully the Supreme Court's
going to weigh in. They just took up a couple cases
that they might. Yeah.
And it and, you know, to to add to your point, but the long
walk, you know, through the institutions and I'm originally
from Venezuela, right. So I saw collectivist ideology
destroy the country. And I remember the early days of
Trump. I was like, this looks familiar.
It's almost as if America is going through a cultural
revolution light, right. I think it was Granchi that was
responsible for that. And then it was.
And then the the tactics really, they're, they're taking a cue
from Saul Alinsky and Rules for Radicals, right?
Which is whatever, Whichever way your opponent reacts, you win.
In every situation, your goal is just to get your opponent to
react. And then you just see people
walking into that trap over and over and over again, 'cause
they're just not worth versed in that philosophy.
But I I would agree with you, they were extremely successful
in this and in a way that honestly is a tragedy, right?
Which is you see my generation and the younger generation,
they're blaming capitalism for a lot of these woes.
And they're like they're asking for more collectivism, they're
asking for more government intervention.
And it's the government intervention that caused all
these woes in in in the 1st place.
Now my question to you is, and I, I I think I had the honor of
talking to Seifidine about this. I don't think that collectivist
ideologies are politically viable under a sound money
standard under Bitcoin, right. I don't think it's possible.
And the reason I say that is you take away the most effective,
what the most effective method they have of wealth, wealth
redistribution, which their ideology depends upon, which is
the wealth redistribution mechanism of inflation.
So if you take that away, what do they do?
You know, how do they, how do they pay the right people?
How do they continue to grow the administrative state that keeps
them in power in the first place?
Yeah, I mean you can certainly still do it.
The Inca empire was communist, it was totalitarian regime, you
know, and they they actually had a Fiat money, I believe.
I believe it was based on threads, but at any rate, it is
certainly possible without control of the money, but it is
certainly a lot harder, right? You've had various times in
history, even under gold standards, where countries have
nonetheless gone totalitarian. Now generally they get off the
gold standard as one of the first things they do, right?
And so you have to kind of zoom in and and see the specific
timing point is that you can get power even in a commodity
standard system. However, once you get
totalitarian power, you know, you have kind of this honeymoon
period where you know, you, you, you raid the warehouses and you
eat up and you know, everything's free.
And at that point everybody says, my God, the socialists
were right. It does work.
Look at that. Everybody's got free food.
And of course, you know, at some point you've eaten up the
warehouses. Typically you've got like a year
or two of stock just kind of lying around.
So once you've eaten up the seed corn at that point, it quote, UN
quote goes wrong. So you know, and and that's kind
of like the history of how these things work and when that
happens in a commodity system, right.
So when a commodity system goes communist, typically you'll have
that kind of grace period where everything is wonderful and then
the hungry times start hitting, they start losing public support
and that's the point that they typically go inflationary.
But having said, you know, your broader point, that money
enables the authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, I think
that's absolutely true. You know, if you sit down and
and work out the numbers, I would guess that about half of
the federal government's ability to capture power in the US has
been because of the Federal Reserve.
There's a couple mechanisms for that.
But fundamentally, if you control an organization that can
print up bidding tickets that you can use to take every single
thing in society, including to make people work for you.
OK, So you can use those, those, you know, confetti, that Fiat
money to harness all of society's resources.
It it, it's actually kind of surprising that that doesn't
automatically lead to a totalitarian outcome.
Maybe it does. Maybe it's just with a delay,
which is, you know, we are the ones who are trying to delay it.
So, you know, I think the short of it is that if you are in a
Fiat regime, you are nearly guaranteed to ultimately end up
in an authoritarian system. On the other hand, if you have a
commodity based money system, whether it's gold or Bitcoin,
you will have taken one of their main tools away.
You would have taken at least half of their power and at that
point you have a much better fighting chance.
So then you know, then we move to the next sort of question in
the equation, which is you know, the ability to control the
narrative and and and that gets into some of the Internet stuff
that we were just talking about. But for sure getting rid of the
Fiat I think radically evens up the game.
And you know if we zoom into particular moments, so if we had
to put a date on when the world started going downhill, I think
I'd put that around 19131914. So really the lead in to World
War One. I think Safety Dean has talked
about this as well and I suspect that he also tags that period as
as basically the beginning of the crisis.
And in that period, you know the, the, I mean the money
obviously was a huge enabler of that.
OK. I question, you know if we
didn't have the Federal Reserve. Would would the European allies,
France and Britain, would they have felt like they could count
on the US to enter the war, right?
Because The thing is, once you have Fiat money, you can hide
the cost of things like war, OK? People don't have to see it
because you can just print it up, right?
So you can hide the cost for long enough to the war, for the
war to go on to the point where you've got casualties.
People are angry now they're they're angry at the Huns who
are rampaging across Belgium. So in a sense, Fiat acts as kind
of a venture capitalist for a lot of these crises.
OK, so saying that, Fiat takes away half the power sketched
large. But if we zoom in to specific
episodes, like that key episode, the beginning of World War One,
I think Fiat. Without Fiat, that war would not
have happened. There's no reason for the war.
Everybody at the time said this is so weird, there's no reason
for the war. Why are they fighting over
Sarajevo? Who cares?
It was this little backwater, nothing.
Nobody really cared that much. Everybody understood that
Austria had an emotional reason why they had to do something
about it. And beyond that, it was it was
kind of like everybody wanted to pick a fight.
Why did everybody want to pick a fight?
That's not normal. And I think that was really Fiat
money that did that. You know, COVID, I think is the
same story. So, you know, if you sort of do
a thought experiment and you ask, all right, COVID hits, we
have a commodity system, whether it's gold or whether it's
Bitcoin. And some junior bureaucrat shows
up the planning meeting, he goes, OK, I got a crazy idea,
we're going to shut down the entire economy.
All right. Tat, I know taxes are going to
plunge, right? We might lose half tax revenue,
but that's OK because we can just lay off the government
workers. Right.
So he would have been fired, right?
That would have been it for him. He would have been exiled out
to, you know, Alaska or Guam. In fact, what they had was every
country in the world knew that they had a gigantic money
printer, and they knew that if they talked about dead grandmas,
then no central banker would have the balls to stand up to
them. And so when that junior banker
came in or that that junior advisor, they all said, well,
that's, you know, he could say let's shut down the economy and
we'll just have Jerome Powell print up the money.
And they all say, well, that's a fascinating idea.
So you know, I think if you zoom into every crisis, the vast
majority of them only became a crisis because governments had
access to Fiat money. I mean and I completely agree
and and it it if you kind of break it down and and safe he
did do a great job on this in the Fiat standard listening to
the audiobook not too long ago. But my question to you, Peter is
like and and you know, I think Michael Saylor has said this, I
said this to my girlfriend when I was super excited about
Bitcoin. I was like, it's the best money.
This is the most soundest money. And then Michael Saylor, I
remember he was asked this question and then I connected
the dots. He was asked this question on
the Coin Stories podcast. Shout out Natalie Brunell.
And Natalie asked him like, hey, what keeps you up at night?
And sailor said the exact same thing that my girlfriend now my
wife said, which is like people just don't care about sound
money. And that part worries me a
little bit. And I'm going to kind of mix in
what, you know, the recent events that's happening in the
US where Elizabeth Warren's bill that would essentially kill
Bitcoin in the United States continues to gather momentum.
And people are just kind of like they're they're distracted,
they're distracted by the bread and circuses, so to speak.
So does that worry you at all? Right.
Because, you know, Austria and Khan, I agree.
It's like we haven't figured out, you know, it's sound money.
The money's broken, but I still see so many people asleep until
the money breaks. And then you'll get a situation
like Argentina and something like that.
But the money hasn't broken yet, so therefore the incentive isn't
there for people to seek an alternative.
What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, correct.
And you know, in a way that's that that's just how it works.
You know, people don't worry about something if they can't
see it, you know? So I agree with you.
In the past couple of years we've had a lot of people wake
up to inflation. It had seemed very academic and
remote. 1970s was the last time that we had double digit
inflation. That was a long time ago.
And so I think that a lot of people have woken up, but at the
same time we're up against 12 years of indoctrination and
specifically indoctrination of children.
You know, if you look at like the Khmer Rouge, which
specifically aimed to indoctrinate children, much like
public schools do, it's it's very, very hard to break them
out of that. And generally there does need to
be some kind of crisis at, at which point, you know, that's
kind of Showtime and we see whether the frog jumps.
I believe I'm optimistic that when if a crisis comes that the
American people will jump. Many other countries have not,
unfortunately, if the crisis comes and people sleepwalk into
it or the system is too difficult to change by the time
the crisis hits, and so people get angry, but it's just kind of
dissipated. So you know, that's that's
really going to be Showtime if a crisis does hit.
My, you know, what I far prefer to do is what people like you or
I do, which is tell the frog that the water is boiling.
Put a thermometer in them and show them the thermometer.
Ask them, do you remember? Do you remember 20 minutes ago
when you felt chilly and you don't feel chilly anymore?
OK, so, you know, trying to get people to see what's coming
before the crisis actually hits because once the crisis hits,
that opens the window for governments to impose controls
that can make it difficult for people to fix it when all of a
sudden everybody wakes up. If you take Venezuela, I'm sure
that there was some point where pretty much everybody knew that
the system was broken. I'm sure the government was
talking about, you know, capitalist plots and and, you
know, US, CIA this and that. But, you know, given how bad
things got, I'm sure there was a moment where the the Venezuelan
people were ripe to hear a message that maybe they need to
reform the system. You know, the kind of message
the Argentinian people just voted on.
But I also imagine that by the time it got that far, it was too
hard to change the system, right?
It was too hard to set up a political party, arbitrary
arrests, you get all kinds of things that are pretty standard
once you get to that stage of it.
So I do think on the right, there's a lot of people who are
almost cheering for the crisis acceleration is because their
assumption is that once we get to the crisis, the frog wakes up
and then the long nightmare ends.
But I do think there's a caveat on that that, you know, there
are many, many countries where it fails and it gets worse,
Venezuela being an example. And, you know, governments will
see that coming and they will take measures to try to prevent
that. You know, I think January 6th
was essentially, you know, part of laying the groundwork for
that kind of a system where if if we get to the point where the
water is boiling, they want to have a legal infrastructure that
they can stop people from doing much about it.
Yeah. And and the the January 6th
thing was fascinating because you know and and again this goes
to I think this is the Frankfurt School which was repressive
tolerance, right. Which is you had movements
protest from you know we we we tried to stay as as politically
neutral on this show Peter. So we say collectivists, let's
say the collectivist of and I know what you, I know you know
what I'm talking about. So the collectivists, they put
on certain types of protests, but that's fine.
You guys are OK. You guys are in the capital
protesting for certain things, that's OK.
But when there is a political movement from the more
individualistic side, it's repressed, right, It's
demonized. These people are a threat to
national security, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And it's it's almost in your face.
And unless you really kind of understudy, unless you really
understand and study the tactics as they're using, it's really
not quite obvious to you. And they're on purpose, they're
they're meant to demoralize you. They're meant to take away all
hope in order to achieve a certain, in order to achieve a
certain end goal. And and that comes in that,
that's a segue to my next question, which is I think
Bitcoin is not compatible with current US sanction policy.
I think Bitcoin is not compatible with the way that
governments worldwide have weaponized the money.
And I think that there is going to be an inevitable clash
between the two. You have an open monetary
network where you can sign up, download a wallet, you don't
need a KYC. And then you have a system where
it's completely, even though it's not really, you know, the
AML system, it's not really that effective.
So what's that clash look like to you?
You know, what's your take? Yeah, I think more than a clash
in the near term anyway. I think it's closer to lifeboat,
you know, if you sort of zoom in to the competitive situation.
So if you take sanctions for example, So the way that you can
sanction somebody with AUS dollar is that you can
effectively stop them from using the dollar.
The thing is, you know Bitcoin has a quirk where you can
identify wallets. And so assuming that there's
some real world Nexus that is ultimately exposed to the US
government, then you know if a Chinese company is exporting
product to, you know, whatever Egypt there, there tends to be
some kind of Nexus there like some some paper trail.
And so there are a lot of situations where I think that
Bitcoin directly threaten sanctions less than it might
seem on the face. Certainly for for sort of Gray
market transactions which don't leave a paper trail anyway,
that's true. But then for a lot of those
transactions, they also managed to use the dollar one way or the
other through bribes and so on. So I I don't think there's so
much a direct clash. I think it's more like we are
draining, you know the explosive out of the OR the air out of the
balloon to use less kinetic terminology where you know
you'll have a lot of commerce that will migrate over to
Bitcoin. And then if there's a large
amount of commerce in that area let's say I don't know, content
or or even export import, then you could get more transactions
making use of that in order to avoid sanctions.
But I think it's it's it's not quite as direct as it might seem
on the face. I think the larger issue and you
know the thing that has people like Elizabeth Warren in a bunch
is that sort of head on substitute or conflict between
Bitcoin and financial markets. So the financial oligarchy,
every single country on earth, if you go to the capital city
and you look for the tallest skyscrapers, chances are it's a
bank, right? Every so often you'll have like
a resource, you know, company because whatever, Malaysia or
something. But generally speaking, almost
all the skyscrapers are banks. Banks are fantastically
profitable, as you would expect in a crony Fiat system.
They have enormous power everywhere.
So more than sanctions per SE, I think that that's that's really
where the battle comes in. I think that's who Elizabeth
Warren is carrying water for. It's not doing it for the
Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, they donate
money but they don't donate the politicians.
I think she's carrying it for the banks and that's, that's, I
think, the grand battle. Yeah, And and and it's
interesting, 'cause you would think it's an she, you know,
when the Occupy Wall Street movement was a thing, she was
like the main proponent of that. When he talks.
And now? His donations speak loud.
And they do, don't they? And then she gets Jamie Dylan.
Go ahead. Yeah.
I mean, going back to the earlier discussion of kind of
why things broke this way, I did not expect that to happen, all
right? I I did not expect the largest
companies in the world to make common cause with the
socialists, all right? I assumed that they would go
with the sort of soft socialism of the US Republican Party.
You know, we want low taxes, we want, we want light regulation.
And what what, what surprised me anyway, is that, boy, they just,
they just went all the way over. So, you know, I assume what
they're thinking is that with enough campaign cash, you can
kind of tame the beast, right? So, you know, you can put people
like AOC or, you know, you can, I don't know who are some of the
more extreme anyway, the squad. You can put them in a box and
then, you know, you can make enough friends with Elizabeth
Warren and Nancy Pelosi that you can basically disarm the
socialists from within. I assume that's what that's what
they're aiming for. But anyway, I was surprised by
that. I assumed that, you know, once
money really made its way into politics and we got this sort of
corporate corporatist union of state and company, which again
has an F word that becomes an ISM.
But we have to avoid that word. I I didn't think that they would
make common cause with the socialists.
Yeah, I mean it's it's almost. I mean, but this isn't that what
always happens though that's that's kind of, you know like I
forget what the. In 1930s Germany they went the
other direction, so they took the lesser of two evils and they
teamed up with the National Socialists as opposed to the
International Socialists. OK, OK, fine, fine.
But Peter, we all know that it's both.
It's two sides of the same coin. They're.
Almost. They're almost identical.
I have to put. Have to go full.
I have to go full screen. So if you go like all the way.
I don't know if I'm left right now, but if you go all the way
left, there's communist and then there's you go a couple steps to
the right, there's fascists and then you go all the way to the
other side, then you get like individual individualists and
libertarian and all that. So I, I, I, I and I mean and
it's in the name. It's in the name what the party
that was in power in the 30s, they put it in the name.
That word socialist. Yeah, yeah, literally, right.
So you know, if we put them like if we array them on a scale of M
cap to communism, so OK, these are random numbers.
Don't quote me on this. The German communists at that
time in the 1930s, let's call them a 60, and then the National
Socialists were like A50 in terms of their progression
towards communism. I mean, they were almost the
same freaking party. But The thing is, the
capitalists chose the lesser of two evils from their
perspective, right. The main difference being that
the National Socialists were OK with companies running their,
you know, making profits, getting nice, take home pay,
keeping the original staff. Nobody has to go up against the
wall. What they said is, look, you can
do whatever you want as long as you obey.
OK, Now the obey, you know, ultimately got real close to
communism. But anyway, so, you know, in
that grand scheme of socialism, they were slightly less
socialist from company's perspective than the communists.
And so the companies went with the lesser of two evils.
What surprised me in the US and I think really around the world,
and, you know, maybe this is the genius of Klaus Schwab, but what
surprised me was that, you know, generally the main parties in
every country are socialists. I can't think of a country at
the moment where the main party is not socialist.
They're just two flavors of socialism.
But what surprised me is that these big companies went with
the the worst of the two. They didn't go with the lesser
of two evils. They want the greater of two
evils. And I think, you know, I don't
know that they plan this out in their heads, but I think
ultimately they've put a bet that they can bribe the the, you
know, worst of two evils into at least punishing them last.
I'm trying to avoid violent words.
We used to be able to say a lot of things we can't, but anyway,
they want to be punished last by these people.
But that that really surprised me.
I assumed when the corporatists made their play to take over the
country that they would go with the soft socialists and not the
hard socialists. But of course.
See people like Elizabeth Warren I mean so far their strategy is
paying off. You know I'm I'm I'm very
impressed. It's working out just the way
they wanted where people like Elizabeth Warren are now going
from, you know anti Wall Street to you know discovering how
important it has to have a, you know stable financial system
that has no outside interference.
So I mean kudos to them boy. It's it's It's worked like a
charm so far. Yeah, it's it's it's crazy if
if, if you haven't been paying attention, if you're not, well
read on these things, you know you're it's it's to me, it's
obvious. And then perhaps it's 'cause I
immigrated and I came here and, you know, and maybe you see
things, and maybe that's why Miami-Dade County voted a
certain direction versus every other metropolitan city in the
US, 'cause you're like, I've seen this.
I I spent most of my life out of the US, so I grew up in Germany,
Japan, about five years in Mexico.
So it's the same like once once you've been outside long enough
and then you sort of see the comparisons with, you know,
places like Indonesia or Argentina, it it's really clear
what's happening. And you know, in fairness, a lot
of Americans now are waking up to it.
I think Americans imagined it could never ever happen here,
right? We felt protected partly by the
civil society, partly by the Constitution.
But the past couple of years, I think I've woken up a ton of
people. And then the economic problems
are they're waking up a lot of people who may not have been
open to the idea that we have fundamental problems, but now
they are right. They're starting to question the
system. And once you question the
system, you start listening to both sides.
And once people start listening to both sides, I say this in all
honesty, our arguments are better.
I mean across the board. You know, if you look at the
kind of just look at the kind of engagement, OK, like when CNN
does an article and it gets a lot of view because CNN has, you
know, bought audience over the years.
This is all media companies by audience.
If you do that in our gig, you're you're a fraud.
But anyway, you know the New York Times, CNN, all of them
bought their audiences. And when you look at the kind of
reaction they get when they say things, nobody's people see it
because they bought this audience, but nobody listens to
them. Nobody cares about it.
People don't sit there and debate.
I mean it's it's it's a tiny amount of engagement that
they're getting. Nobody cares about their
arguments. Even the people who are already,
like they're installed, bought, base, don't care about it.
So, you know, if you've got somebody who's politically up
for grabs, OK, they're like a political independent and
they're pissed off about the cost of living, all right.
And so they start questioning things, to start looking at
different narratives. They're going to see one article
from CNN and then they're going to see another article by the
kind of free speech people that we have on our side.
It's no competition. Of course, they're going to come
over to our side. So, I mean, we are winning
hearts and minds, but at the same time, you know, we are up
against that sense that propaganda.
You know, you've got the 12 years of propaganda, you've got
new kids running through it every single day.
You got new ones coming out who, you know, we have to deprogram
as if they're in a cult, you know, So even as we win, we're
still like, it can look like we're just treading water
because they have so many of these institutional benefits.
Yeah, 100%. And then once the, you know,
like once, like what I noticed is once they started losing,
essentially they implemented really the open border strategy,
right. So you kind of flood the system,
get people, you know, hooked so to speak, to that free, that
sweet, sweet, sweet free money. And then all of a sudden you
have a whole new block of voters.
This has been done so many times.
It's it just hasn't been done here.
So like, it's very shocking for it to happen here.
But Opti and I and my producer who's hanging in the back, we,
we've been talking about this for quite a while.
I'm really optimistic for the US for three reasons, right?
Versus the 1st Amendment, which is getting badgered.
Second is the Second Amendment and then the sovereignty of the
individual states, which creates competition between the states,
right. So yeah.
Which, yeah, yeah. You could summarize that as the
10th Amendment, which constrains the federal government to a
very, very small number of things and everything else
belongs to the states. And then the states can be the
laboratory of democracy and they can experiment with all kinds of
things. By the way, the 10th Amendment
does not give the federal government control over money.
So that would mean that both, I mean, any kind of financial
management that Treasury does is not constitutional.
That's that's that's not delegated.
And of course, the Federal Reserve would be
unconstitutional. It's not delegated according to
the 10th Amendment. If the power is not literally
listed in the Constitution, then the federal government is not
allowed to do it, and there's certainly nothing in there about
printing Fiat money. Yeah, yeah.
But they got away with it anyways.
And someone in the comments mentioned this about 1913.
They said wasn't that a federal income tax implemented?
Yes, it was implemented the same year as the Federal Reserve was
was created or you know, began. That's not a coincidence, right?
Yeah, no, that was really their moment.
I mean, that was the, you know, miracle year for socialists
really all across the West. That's when they captured it.
One of my favorite if you ever watched Downton Abbey, which my
wife loves it, which means that I love it, or at any rate, I
have to watch it. And what's funny about it, So
it's the series and it spans multiple years.
And you know, a bunch of the episodes are before World War
One and then a bunch of them are after.
And I think it's just, it's just great for sort of showing people
how the world changed. World War One was, I mean, it
was the most transformational. I can't think of anything,
certainly not, I don't know, maybe in a millennia, maybe not.
Since the Mongol conquest, it has been such a massive change.
Everything changed. It gutted the traditional
institutions and replaced them with government versions of it,
whether that was education, the, you know, moral suasion that
used to be handled by the church.
So that was independent from the government, OK.
It captured all these things. And fundamentally it was the
Bismarck plan, right? That was Audubon Bismarck in
Prussia. His idea was that you want the
state to take over all of these social institutions so that the
state makes itself necessary and so that, you know, individual
like people don't rise up against the state because they
need the state, right. The state is paying their
pension or they work for the state, whatever it is.
So I mean it was, it was a very intentional plan he implemented
in Prussia and then World War One was really when they managed
to implement it really across the West.
Yeah, no. And I I think you you, you hit
the nail on the head. So, OK, so we've been talking
about some dark, dark things, dark subjects, right.
You know a bit of history this collectivist take over, put it
nicely and let's talk about you know what Corey says, CEO of
Swan, the bright orange future, which I think that Bitcoin is.
Bitcoin and the Internet, both things play a very critical part
in that in that future. So how long do you think this
transition will take? I think we'll win.
The reason that I think we'll win, Peter, is because I think
bitcoins incentives are greater than than anything they have in
my opinion. I think they're going to rely on
coercion, but my money's on incentives in in, in my opinion.
So how long is this transition going to take?
Do you think bitcoins going to win?
Is it is it a foretold? Like, you know, just check that
box or do we need to fight peacefully, right YouTube Fight
peacefully. It's a metaphor.
What? What are your thoughts, Spar?
Sparring between friends. So I think there are two
dynamics. One of them is Fiat versus
commodity and the other one is gold versus Bitcoin.
OK. So if we ask is Bitcoin going to
win? I think those are the two
dynamics, and I'll take the simpler of them, which is gold
versus Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is fundamentally
superior to gold. It has actually better supply
dynamics. You know, gold is new, gold is
dug up. And so that's an inflationary
impetus. And that's pretty standard at
about a percent and a half a year, actually amazingly like
over centuries and all kinds of different technology in the
industrial revolution. All the rest of it, gold just
marches like clockwork, about a percent and a half a year.
And Bitcoin, meanwhile, you know, of course it's it's going
to have a lower inflation rate than that.
And, you know, you have different supply caveats to
gold. Like what if we find the
asteroid that's made of gold and Elon can mine it with robots?
Or, you know, what if they figure out a way to extract gold
from seawater, which, you know, it's been like a perpetual
motion machine that cranks have been trying for a long time.
But fundamentally, there's a there's a lot of gold in the
ocean just floating around. You go to the beach, you when
you come out of the water, you've got gold on you.
There's a bunch of it. And so anyway, there are these
kind of weird little quirks to gold where the supply dynamics
are not as good. And then the other one, of
course, is that Bitcoin can't be seized the way the gold can,
right? So I I love gold dearly.
But if you are talking to, like if you're a gold bug and you're
talking to a paper money bro and after you got done explaining
how amazing gold is, he's going to ask you, OK, if it's so
super, why does no country use gold?
And the simple answer is that violence is very profitable, you
know, So if you want to have a gold backed currency, then you
have to tell the world where your gold is, right?
You can't say it's backed by gold, but it's hidden because I
don't want the government to find it, all right?
So nobody's going to accept him because I can do that.
And so you actually have to prove it, right?
You have to, you have to show where it is.
You have to give the address. You have to, you know, do assays
you have to do all this. And of course, governments can
also find the address. They can look it up on Google
Maps, and then they're going to come and visit your gold
facility and they're going to have a chit chat.
So governments, you know, I mean, really gold makes it
extremely easy for governments to seize the monetary system.
You know, there's about 20 locations, even for a country
like the US, but for a smaller country, I don't know, you got
like 2-3 neighbourhoods. You could literally get a squad
of a SWAT team and split them up and seize the entire money of
the nation in one go. It's got a fundamental flaw, and
I think it's ironic that the fundamental flaw of gold is the
very fact that it's physical, right?
This is why people like gold. They say no, no, you can't drop
Bitcoin on your foot. You know gold is real.
You can bite it. You can't eat it, but you can
bite it and that turns out to be the fatal flaw of gold.
It is exceptionally easy for government to seize a gold based
system. I mean it very obligingly
actually goes out and gathers up all the gold and puts it in one
spot and then tells the government where it's located.
It's, you know, from that perspective it's it's kind of a
dodgy prospect. OK, so I think the Bitcoin is
absolutely superior to gold. The next question is Fiat versus
commodity. And there, you know, I think
that the question is timing, OK. So if the system is going to
collapse like in the next 5 or 10 years, which I think is
unlikely, then people are going to kind of go with what they
know, right? And in terms of market share,
the vast majority of people still don't understand Bitcoin.
Gold is exceptionally easy for people to understand.
Even if you've never heard of gold, like if you've been living
in the Sentinel Islands in India and you've never heard there's
such a thing as gold, I imagine it's pretty easy to explain
what's happening here. Commodity money, physical
commodity money is, is very sort of intuitive.
So I think, you know, if the system is going to die in five
years, then most likely we're going to revert to the gold
standard that Nixon broke. There's still living memory of
that. On the other hand, if the
collapse is going to take longer than that, you know then in in
in the background because Bitcoin I think is superior
money. It's constantly winning new
converts, partly by people like us explaining what Bitcoin is
like this specific conversation we're having.
But also just age. You know a a sort of quirk of
the world is that old people are more resistant to new ideas.
You know, if you look at say Austrian economy like people who
would self describe as Austrian economists, right, Anybody over
age 60 is almost certainly a gold bug and only a gold bug
anybody underage, 40 is almost certainly a bitcoiner and only a
bitcoiner, right. There's a very, very strong age
aspect to this. So if you kind of sum that up.
So I think absolutely Fiat is doomed.
The only question is when will it take five years, Will it take
30 years? If it's closer to 30 years, then
I think the inherent superiority of Bitcoin, we'll have gained
enough mental mind share by 30 years from now that we're going
to skip gold and we're just going to go direct to Bitcoin.
If on the other hand, the collapse is coming in, you know,
five years, then I think I will certainly we go to gold and at
that point, you know, we basically live in the world we
do now where Bitcoin continues taking mind share, but in this
case it takes it from gold, not from Fiat.
Gotcha. Interesting.
OK, so we are.
I do want to be respectful of your time.
We are getting to the top of the hour.
So my question for you, Peter, is we are heading into the year
of the halving and we're also heading into one of the most
turbulent elections in American history.
And these are some crazy, crazy times.
So what are your expectations for Bitcoin?
You know, the next couple of years if if history repeats
itself, right? Bitcoin tends to go parabolic
about a year after the halving, so 2025.
But it really starts to, you know, turn on its engines the
year of the halving and you start to see that slow crawl up.
So are you optimistic about Bitcoin's future in these
turbulent times? What's your take?
Final question. Yeah, I am.
Of course prices can do you know anything?
Who knows? It could drop 90% because
governments could try to hunt it down.
Anything could happen. However, I think that the most
likely outcome is that it will soar.
I'm not a huge fan of having as a price driver per SE.
You know, normally in statistics you need a fairly decent sized
sample and you know when we're talking about havings, what we
have what 3-4, we don't have many.
So you know, who knows. Every time it's happened in the
past, there have been various situations. 2016, the economy
had been going slow for a long time and then it it bounced back
up. 2020 was weird in many ways. You know, 20/20/12 you have the
European debt crisis. You know, you've got noise in
every one of these. So I wouldn't put a whole lot of
stock into having per SE. I mean it's fun to cheer it on,
but I think the larger issue is what you're talking about, those
those crises coming in. So, you know, inflation is very
much alive, remains alive. The progress that's been made so
far has largely been a freebie from oil coming back down.
It generally does that whenever a recession is coming.
In fact, in 2008, oil dropped 80% and other than that,
inflation has not come down very much.
So, right. I think inflation is driving it.
I think the other thing is the political instability that you
mentioned. You know, one of the things I
think that's fascinating about Bitcoin is that it was invented
for more or less bank bailouts, right?
And, you know, that was the genesis block.
But then we keep discovering, you know, there's like a sort of
the running joke where we say Bitcoin fixes this and then the
other guys are like, what is it going to, you know, is it going
to cook my bagel? What?
Bitcoin fixes everything? And the irony is that we keep
having these crises and every single one Bitcoin fixes it.
So, you know, you take Trudeau with the speech, you know,
cracking down on free speech up in Canada, you know, and you had
bitcoiners who, I mean, it was, it was fantastic, right?
You had hundreds of bitcoiners who just jumped in their car,
dead of winter, drove out to Ottawa to to, you know, help
truckers actually get donations so they could eat.
Right. You know, the inflation when
when Satoshi, you know, put out the Genesis block, you could
argue, I mean, of course inflation was back of his mind.
That's why he modelled Bitcoin on gold.
But it it's like we we we just keep discovering that every
single crisis that we keep coming into Bitcoin, you know
finds a new purpose or well, I mean Bitcoin doesn't find it.
People people discover that yes, Bitcoin does fix this and it
fixes that and it fixes the next one and so on.
So I don't know what the crisis is going to be.
You know, the in the horse race for what their next COVID is,
cyberattacks seems to be a popular one.
War, you know, of course, but I mean, you know, war is kind of
their permanent shtick. So of course they're pushing
back that. But yeah, cyber.
And you know, we have some of the smartest people on our side
and like in terms of programmers.
And you know, if you take the people who are suspicious of the
state and are interested in finding ways to go around it, I
mean, Bitcoin has like a 99% share of those kinds of heroes
on Earth. So whatever they come up with, I
am certain that Bitcoin is going to show us some awesome new
function to get around it. Beautiful, Beautiful.
I completely agree. I say personally, Bitcoin or
slavery. I think that's, you know, that's
really the two choices that we have in front of ourselves.
I do agree. I do agree with you.
We have the, you know, the best team of ours on our side.
That's fuelled by incentives, that's fuelled for, you know,
the thirst for freedom. Go ahead.
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
Yep. I'm, I'm, I'm very happy with
our team. I know that they have all the
institutions. They have all the power, they
have all the money. They they outnumber us like a
million to one. But I love our team.
I I am thrilled to be on the wall with all y'all.
Absolutely honored to be in the trenches with you too, Peter.
Peter, thank you so much for joining us on Simply Bitcoin.
IRL guys will be back with the live show tomorrow at Trophy 15
PM Eastern Standard Time. Until then, have an amazing
night. See you guys later.