All right, hey there, this is Prom Constant and you're
listening to Bitcoin for Millennials.
Together with my guests on this podcast, I go on a journey to
discover how our current financial system works, why it's
flawed, and why Bitcoin is the most relevant technology that
you should understand and adopt. In this episode, I'm joined by
Lawrence Leopard. He's a career investment manager
who focuses on sound money and manages his funds related to
gold, silver, and Bitcoin. He's known for sharing his views
on the state of the global financial system, inflation, and
the need for sound investments to protect against currency
debasement. His ideas and explanations
around these topics have helped me immensely in my learning
journey about finance, so I'm super excited.
To talk Oh, you're being kind. Yeah.
Now, man, it's true. Like, First off, like I would
love to start with expressing my gratitude like it was.
Very kind, yeah. No, I just.
I'm just out on Twitter making a lot of noise.
You know what I mean? I yeah, very angry.
What the central banks have done to the world, you know, they've
heard a lot of people and. That's true.
But, like, I feel like it's somebody'd job to step up and
scream about it. That's me.
Well, I think you're doing a great job.
I mean, like, I I know how important it is to share this
because I I think it's nice to know that you don't know how far
your voice travels and as I mentioned like you really
influenced my learning. So, so I'm really.
Grateful for that. Yeah.
It's nice to hear. Yeah.
Yeah, so well, awesome. Also to see you in real life
last week in Madeira. We were both just at Bitcoin
Atlantis and that was a fabulous gathering and and really you
know, just the spirit of Bitcoin was there in a big way.
It was great. Highly recommend that you go to
shows like that if you're a Bitcoiner.
Fully agree. What was your biggest take away
there? You know, I, I, I, I get more
and more confident. I mean, I I think that, you
know, my journey has just been from, you know, I bought some
coins in 2013 and you have to remember I've been in gold
before that. And you know, they there's a the
whole etymology background history of Bitcoin is people had
tried this before Bitcoin. I mean there was, you know, E
gold and there were, there were online and there there were
people who tried to create digitally based money before
Bitcoin. They all failed you know.
Now pieces of them got brought into the Bitcoin code.
But but for various reasons none of them worked.
And so in 2013 when I first got involved I bought some but I
frankly I was skeptical. I thought, well this will
probably fail like all the other ones have and of course I was
wrong about that. But you know, and as time goes
by, you just get, you develop more and more confidence and
more and more certainty that, no, you know, it's not going to
fail. And the technology's sound and
what we see is correct. And I think I came away from it
after hearing sailors speak and talking to a lot of people.
I mean I I really, I'm beginning to feel like it's just it's
absolutely inevitable that this monetary technology will subsume
and replace all the other monetary technologies.
And that, you know, I don't know what time frame, I'm not going
to say that with certainty. But you know, 20 years out, you
know, maybe we won't be talking dollars, maybe we'll be talking
stats and it'll be like, you know that that lunch cost me 3
sats or whatever the heck it is. I don't know what the relative
values will be. But you know because a SAT is,
is an algorithmic and really determined thing that can't be
over printed. And so in terms of money, you
know, one as you know one of the key and important roles of money
is that it maintain its value. You know, there'd be a store of
value that you can earn it, hold it and know that when you
decide, you know, and that's holding it.
It's called saving. And know that when you decide,
OK. And you know, I've, I've worked
for this money. I've got some savings, You know,
I'd like to now cash it in and buy something that I would enjoy
a vacation or a car or house or food, whatever, to feel like you
haven't been robbed. You know and.
And I mean what I would suggest and what I think you you agree
and I agree and you know probably most of your listeners
understand is that inflation really is kind of a silent form
of theft. You know you you work hard, you
make money, you're paid your money.
And you know if you don't, if you spend it right away, well
then you, you don't suffer inflation per SE.
I mean you might have suffered previous inflation but but if
you if you decide to hold it for some period of time, you know
it's it's highly certain that you will your your purchase,
your actual purchasing power will decrease if you're holding
Fiat currency so. Is this the biggest thing you
think that people don't understand about the financial
system or? That's a good question.
I mean, I think some people understand it, but I think it's
a minority. I think most of the world
understands that we have inflation and that's a really
bad thing. I think that the politicians
have tried to do a good job of blaming corporations for
inflation or the other guy for inflation, when in reality it's
them and their actions and the central bank's actions and the
deficits and the stimmies and, you know, the the money printing
that has caused inflation. I mean there's at any given
point in time in the world, there's a certain amount of
goods and services and it, you know, and and the money that's
being used competes for those good and services, goods and
services. And the price is supposed to be
the point where supply and demand get balanced.
And the problem is if you increase, if you, you know
vastly increase the supply of the money, then there's more
money chasing the same amount of services and the the price for
each service is going to go or good is going to go up.
So you know and but to your question, do people understand
it? I I think that I think that
only, you know, a very small percentage of the people have an
enormously deep understanding of it, the way gold bugs and you
know, Bitcoin people and and you know, Austrian economists
understand it. I think a much larger piece of
the population understands there's inflation and some of
them have a sense that that's the fault of the government but
not all. And I think many people are
just, you know, clueless and and don't haven't really focused on
the money. And they tend to think that it's
more a function of, you know, whether it's blue team or red
team that's winning. And so they spend a lot of time
arguing over politics and my view is that both teams stink
and that, you know, really it's what what's what we need is
orange team to win, right. Because sound you know my byline
on Twitter is fix the money, fix the world.
And you know, I I think when I, when I look at the world today
at 66 and I compare it to the world I was growing up in, in
the 70s when I was a teenager, it's a much it's a shittier
world. I mean it's in some ways it's
much better. We have a lot more technology a
lot of things about are better. But in terms of the civility,
the, you know, the, you know, the income inequality, you know,
just a lot of a lot of other measures, you know, health, you
know in the US we've got a real, you know, drug, drug problem of
late. You know it it was a better
world when we had sounder money and by going to unsound money it
it it affects you know, a lot of things, the politics, the, you
know, interpersonal relationships etcetera.
So you know, do I think that a lot of people understand the
unsound money is the problem? No.
However, I will say this some of us do and and those ranks are
growing quickly. You know, I I feel like we might
we I talked about this on another podcast earlier today.
I feel like we might be kind of getting close to that tipping
point where, you know, I think once 10% of the population
understands something and feels it very strongly and yells about
it, then you start to it's Malcolm Gladwell's tipping
point, then then it can go rather quickly, you know, in the
right, in the direction of, you know, change.
Hey there. Thanks so much for listening to
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Now back to the conversation, I think it's, it's especially in
the Western world, right. And and you just asked me before
we started like oh, it's Bitcoin for millennials.
And like one of the things I think why I want to focus on
millennials also and of course everyone is welcome to listen
but we are going to inherit you know this wealth or the money in
in the world. But and then, especially in the
Western world, we never got taught what is money, how does
this work? And we never also had the urge
to learn it because it just worked, right.
And now it's so interesting, like now I am personally at a
point where I understand that my broken money worked because my
western country is still exploiting, you know, southern
countries and Eastern countries. And that's why our money still
works. And their money is broken for
10s of years already, right? Right.
And yeah, that just takes some time.
Especially when, yeah, if you don't have that the problem in
real life that your money is not working for you, then yeah, it
takes a long time to understand that.
But I also agree with you, I don't think we need a lot of
people, you know, definitely not a majority to realize you know,
the money is broken and and it has to, it has to change.
Well, and also the issue is accelerating.
I mean if you know we went off the gold standard in 71 and and
it really we we tried, we had some serious acceleration from
71 to 80 and and gold went up you know 22X and was a lot of
inflation, monetary debasement. Then Volcker slayed that for a
while and the decade of the 80s this really wasn't a very big
issue. I mean, you know, there wasn't
that much inflation, you know and and but there was some more
than was reported. And what's happened is the
problem has kind of gotten like so many things has gotten
progressively worse. And now in my opinion, we're
very close to the point at which it kind of goes critical, you
know. And so you know it, it got worse
with the bubbleofthe.com bubble and the money that was printed
when LTCM crashed to getthat.com bubble to be it to grow to where
it did. And then it got, you know, more
acute when we had the housing bubble.
You know, and and of course the reaction ofthe.com bubble was
taking interest rates from, you know 5-6 percent down to 1% and
and they almost and there were guys that were fed people who
actually consciously said it. We need to get a housing bubble
going to pull this economy out of the dive that we took
afterthe.com bubble burst and then you know so that was more
money printing and and you know and and then O eight came along
and and you know everything was going to fail.
And of course they that was real money printing.
I mean before that they'd never done quantitative easing. the
Fed balance sheet was 800 billion.
They took it to 3.7 or something.
So so that was you know and then of course they stopped with the
money printing but they kept interest rates low for a very
long period of time. You know to 2015 we got 0%
interest rates which in capitalism is really kind of a
crime. You know if the money has no
cost or no you know this cost anything to have money and money
is theoretically free, well then why is there value to it You
know it's it's kind of a tautology.
So and and that of course led to blowing of quote UN quote the
everything bubble which is what we now live in where you know
all this free money and and of course you know it it it you
know that everything bubbled. They tried to taper their
balance sheet in 1718 and of course in 19 it it, it blew up
on them. The repo blew out and they had
to start printing again And then COVID arrived and boy that was
the big print, right. I mean 3.7 trillion balance
sheet went to 9 trillion is the Fed, you know, and the money
supply you know, exploded 40% in two years.
And This is why we've had all this inflation that we've all
suffered through over the last three or four years.
And so, you know, it's it's kind of like each one of these events
gets to be bigger, more pronounced and more and more
powerful in terms of people's awareness of the problem, you
know, and and so I would submit to you.
And then there's another one coming.
Just know it because the math almost assures it.
It's. Just math.
Yeah, it is just math. I mean we're growing the debt
much more rapidly than we're growing the GDP.
GDP is the earnings power of the of the of the economy and the
earnings part of the economy is what's used to service the debt.
And so this is like a, you know, this is like a family that you
know, the the the breadwinner's only getting, you know, 5 or 6%
growth per year in his salary, but he's spending 30% more a
year in his his, his debt and he's using debt to to to do it.
And eventually, you know, either the family's going to go
bankrupt or they're going to, you know, in the case of our
government, they're going to print the money to cover the the
cost because you know, if they go, they won't let themselves go
bankrupt. We know that.
Well, 2 two things there. I think it is about the interest
payments are now about 20%. Yeah, they're.
Running at about a trillion, yeah.
And that's how three, 3% average interest rate on the US federal
debt. Yeah.
So as a citizen, when you work full time five days a week, you
are basically working one day a week to help your government pay
off their debt, right. And so when you earlier
mentioned, you know you have and I like that visualization,
right? Like basically you have two
buckets. One bucket is the bucket where
all the money is in, you know the units that we use to pay for
the productivity of the people and the productivity is the
services they provide or the products they create, right,
with jobs or Avengers. And the other bucket is that
productivity, but the productivity is limited in a
certain sense. You know it's also determined by
the amount of people that are actually working etcetera,
right. That's why birth rates are so
important. And then you said like if you
grow the bucket of the units of the currency, then you will you
basically and it's not in an equilibrium anymore, right.
So then you have to pay more units of that currency for the
same amount of productivity, so products or services, right.
And I think that's a great visualization for what inflation
is like. You just pay more units of the
same thing, but that doesn't mean that the product or the
service or that productivity became more valuable.
It's the other way around. It's the units became less
valuable. Right.
That's exactly right. Well, I mean, yeah, in, in, in
the, the the currency became less valuable per unit because
you know the amount of the amount of productivity is what
it is and but if you've got more currency units chasing it, each
unit buys you less. Yeah.
Yeah, I like to say, I like to say units because people, when
they think of price, they think of value, right.
So when when you say prices go up, they think, oh, the banana
is more valuable. No, same banana exactly.
It just cost you more. Yeah, because the money's been
debased. Yeah.
And so I don't have an background in economics and
finance, right. But if I hear, for example,
safety in say like economics is basically a social study, right.
It's about how we trade, trade with each other.
That's makes I I'm not, so I'm not poisoned by other like
economic point of views, right. So if I hear that, I think like,
oh that makes a lot of sense, right.
Because if you and I meet and I need something that you can, you
know, create or or or service me for, then we shake hands and we
agree upon, you know, whatever the value is, right.
And so that is the social part. I think of it.
But why are there then people who think they can engineer
human behavior? Like how?
Where do these people get their ideas from?
How does that work? I mean, I don't know.
I mean it's you know this. I mean governments and
economists and you know we've we've we've gone down a lot of
the wrong roads in terms of how we're running the economy.
And you know the the, you know, when we when when we went off
the Gold Center in 1971, Richard Nixon said, well we're all
Keynesians now and and maybe I'll talk a little bit about the
flaw in the Keynesian model. The the Keynesian model kind of
believed that what you do is growth at any cost and and all
you wanted to do was continue to grow and and therefore when the
economy slowed down it was incumbent upon the government to
step in and provide the stimulus necessary And he used the words
to rekindle animal spirits and you know he was Keynes and and
all the economists of his ilk including Ben Bernanke and
others. You know they they were all
reacting to the Great Depression which was kind of the Holy Grail
of of economics. You know things blowing up.
And, you know, they, they said rather than recognize that the
Great Depression was caused by the fact that they blew an
enormous asset bubble by, you know, when the Federal Reserve
was established, it kept rates way too low and bailed everybody
out and grew the money supply too rapidly and of course, led
to an enormous bubble in stocks and the crash in stocks.
You know, rather than interpret that as we shouldn't have had a
Fed and we shouldn't have let that bubble form, they
interpreted that as, oh, that was all normal.
But we didn't react strongly enough.
Once the bubble burst, we should have printed more money once the
bubble burst and then that would have solved the problem.
And you know, I mean if if printing money made a company
country rich, you know, Venezuela or Zimbabwe or you
know, Weimar Germany, I mean, you know, printing money does
not make a country rich. In fact, it ultimately ruins a
country by ruining the currency. So you know this, this is a very
flawed model where Keynes is trying to, you know, print money
to keep things growing. And what we really don't need is
growth. We need efficiency.
And in classical economics, the way this works is the interest
rate is the price of money, and the interest rate should be set
by the balance of supply and demand of savers and investors.
So if I save money because I've earned, you know, if I've earned
some money and I have some savings and say you're an
entrepreneur and you say, you know, Larry, I want to build a
business, you know, will you? But I but I don't have the money
to do it. But I know if you gave me some
money I could build that business.
Will you lend me some money? I would say, yeah, I would
evaluate you and the idea and the business and everything
else. And we'd we'd agree on an
interest rate. It would balance the risks and
you know and and or maybe we do it in equity but generally
speaking just keep it keeping it simple.
Keep it to the debt model. We would agree on an interest
rate that balanced the supply and demand of savings against
the supply and demand for investment projects and that
would be determined by the marketplace.
So, but as we all know, the interest rates are not
determined by the marketplace. Today.
The interest rates are determined by the Federal
Reserve and the Federal Reserve controls the discount rate and
they think they're better than the market, you know, at setting
the price of money. And I mean, this is ridiculous
because this is like, you know, the the Politburo back in Russia
in the 60s and 70s or 50s, sixties and 70s, they would set
the price of grain. If they set it too high, you
know they they ended up with, you know, way too much grain.
If they set it too low, they ended up with no grain.
And you know you can't. You can't have central planning
of prices. It just doesn't work.
You know, the way the way economy should work is prices
should be set by balancing supply and demand and the
interest rate price should be set by the balancing of, you
know, the supply of savings is against the demand for
investment. And the the government of the
central bank should have absolutely nothing to do with
it. They should be out of the
picture. But because we got away from
that, we've created this enormous boom buffs Keynesian
cycle on this, this monetary rube gold machine, which is kind
of out of control and and and we keep, you know, doing these
bigger and bigger swings and you know, eventually we're going to
one of them's going to be so big the whole thing's going to blow
up. And I think we're getting closer
to that. You know, witness the growth in
the Fed's balance sheet, witness the, you know, inflation that
we're experiencing etcetera. I think that, you know, they're
gonna have a very hard time containing, you know, the
problem they've got because we've now gotten to the point
where you know these these geometric functions are
compounding very, very rapidly. And you know anybody who knows
math and understands you know compounding of a series of
numbers recognize that eventually it goes asymptotic
almost vertical and and so you know we we've got, we've got
we're right in the in my opinion we've got and are right in the
middle of a very severe debt crisis and most of the world has
not woken up to that yet. And as more and more of the
world does wake up to that yet, or does wake up to that fact,
they're going to become more aware that what they need to do
with their savings is to save money and things that the
government can't print. The government can't print
Bitcoin, the government can't print gold, the government can't
print silver, the government can't print real estate and the
government can't print Apple stock.
So but, you know, the government can print bonds.
They they issue bonds and the bondholder is the sucker at the
table. They're going to lose a lot of
money because there's going to be a lot of inflation in this in
this hyper, you know this. I mean as I say they they're
printing and because of the way the cycle works, every cycle
they have to print more and it gets worse and worse and worse
and worse until eventually the whole thing blows up.
And so I my personal view is the whole thing will blow up
probably in 20-30 sometime between 2030 and 2035.
You know we got a few more swings back and forth but we're
headed in that direction. Yeah, so.
So when I maybe this is a dummy question, but a dummy question
is is good I. Think No, there's no there's no
dumb question. No, no, exactly.
But I think when I think rationally about it, when you
talked about the weed, right, there is a base layer demand for
weed, right. So why or grain or whatever,
right, any, any, any commodity, why do you need to influence
that with certain settings of prices etcetera like it just
that doesn't make sense to me, right.
And when you say these people want growth at all costs, it
feels for me they are talking about price, right, they are
talking about units. And so as we previously just
said, like it's not that's not value, that's just amount,
that's just phenomenal. Right.
The price is not the underlying units, right?
Yeah, exactly. So this, these these people are
lying to themselves, right? Well, like from the core from
the start of of how they see an economic system.
But as you said, they then use these arguments like we have to
go back to what did you say about certain motivation, like
nature's what? Animal spirits, yeah, that was
animal spirit. That was a phrase that Keynes
used and and others have used that said, you know, animal
spirits were dead in the depression.
We should have printed more money, you know, and that's.
Yeah, but it's so it sounds so weird to me that you would like,
incentivize natural like motivation to to create or
contribute value based on a set of numbers or something like it.
Just it doesn't. Make sense to me.
The other thing they said is they said wages are sticky.
And I mean here's one thing that does argue in their favor.
I mean, not not in their favor, but one part of their people
feel better when quote UN quote number goes up.
So in other words, if you if you own a house and there's a lot of
inflation and every year the value of your house goes up, you
know, it might not, it's the same house, right, each year,
but the price of it's going up because there's inflation that
makes you feel good, right? I mean, I have this asset that's
nominally going up in value. In real terms, it might not be
going up in value at all because it's it's just an inflation
effect. But same thing with wages.
I mean, if you're if you're a worker and you live in an
inflationary world, you know, if you know one year you're making
$30,000 and the next year you're making $35,000, well, I got a
raise now may turn out that everything you buy.
Yeah. And that's good, right.
It may turn out that everything you buy and what is that?
That's like 15% raise except that maybe everything you bought
just went up 20%. So really in terms, in real
terms you're actually behind, but the point is the the the
human beings and human minds like to see the numbers go up,
right? And and in a really sound money
system, the numbers wouldn't go up as much but but you'd have a
slightly different situation. Your wages might be flat, but
the cost of everything you buy would be falling.
In points, yeah. You'd have a, you'd have a more
deflationary outlook so that, you know, OK, so, so instead of
making 35, you're making 30. But because of all the the the
productivity and the sound money and the transparency that's
taking place, You know, you used to go and buy, you know,
hamburger for $5 a pound and you know, things have gotten more
efficient and now Hamburger's $4.00 a pound, so your 30,000
goes further than it did before. So it's kind of an adjustment of
mindset that people have to get used to, you know, the the way
the world will look on a sound money standard.
I mean if you go back and study the 1800s, I mean it's really
kind of amazing actually. I mean there were, you know, you
look at the price of like, you know, in fact somebody ran a,
there was a presidential campaign went.
So you know, what this world needs is a good 10 cent cigar
because, you know, cigars cost $0.10 for a long, long, long
period of time. And then there was a burst of
inflation and they went up to 15 or $0.20 and of course everybody
hated the inflation. And so a guy ran, I can't recall
the guy's name, but I should look it up.
I can Google it and find it, but you know what?
What this, what this country really needs is a good $0.10
cigar, which was a, you know, kind of a, a casual way of
saying, you know, we got to stop inflation.
You know, I mean, I mean, I mean, truly there were, there
were things that you look at the price of a lot of things in the
1800s, they didn't change. The price was the same.
But what happened is people got much more efficient and they
earned more money. So their living standards went
up greatly. I mean the one of the greatest
increases in living standards in the world occurred during the
Industrial Revolution from kind of 1800 to you know, 19, 40.
I mean I, you know, it just we and it was a lot of things.
It was technology, it was cars, radio, you know, etcetera.
But the but the point is that, you know, I mean in in the
1800s, you know, a lot of the world were kind of poor dirt
farmers. I mean there wasn't, you know,
there wasn't except for unless you were a fuel Lord or had, you
know, a huge landowner or royalty.
You know, most people were kind of scraping it by, scraping by,
you know, in the early 1800s, whereas by, you know, the early
1900s, you know, most people, not most, not not everybody.
But a lot of people had three squares and a house over their
head. And, you know, they were, they
were, they were living OK, So and and and that was, that was
during a period where monetary inflation was extremely low, you
know, with a with a brief exception of the Civil War where
they printed a lot of greenbacks and kind of messed things up.
And so when you were 12, what did the breadth cost?
Remember bread? I'll tell you the number that
was very meaningful to me, though, because I remember it
very clearly. I used to buy it all the time.
Gasoline when I was a kid was $0.25 a gallon.
So, yeah, and so. Why is it a joke?
Well, let's take the gas, right? Like, why is it a joke when
people say like, oh, the bread used to be $0.25 or the gas used
to be $0.25, right? Like that.
This is the entire point, I think.
Also Jeff Booth makes right the fact that if you agree to the
rational argument that if we approve technology prices.
Should fall. They should.
They should fall, yeah. And a bread is now $5.00.
I don't know about a gallon of gas, but isn't this what we
should, like explain to people that the entire point is we
were, it's like we are going back in time, like very far away
in time, right? Because yeah, we already had.
The biggest, the biggest thing and and and this is where I
think there's so much anger in the world and I understand it,
is that you know, living standards would and will
improve. The sounder the money is, the
more likely you know, the right signals get sent and the right
things get done and the economy works better.
I mean, unsound money finances the wars.
I mean, the United States spent trillions of dollars on useless
wars. I mean, imagine if those
trillions of dollars have been invested in education or nuclear
power or, you know, just infrastructure.
Do you know what I mean? I mean, the unsound money has
all these terrible incentives and you see people, you know,
gambling and you know, doing very speculative stuff.
There's there's not you know the the if if if things are priced
correctly people will might make the right economic decisions
they don't get misled into doing the wrong thing and so and that
and that's you know an economy is all about efficiency.
I mean what we what we all want to do is we all want more and we
want it to cost less and the we have the greatest chance of
having real efficiency when we have money to sound because it
allows people to plan and think and coordinate.
I mean you know I I like the the model I mean it's like you know
if you were a builder and you were building a house you know
you obviously use a tape measure you know to to measure the
dimensions of the house and this imagine if the tape measure is
shrinking or growing 5% a year like because of inflation how's
that house going to get built. It's just I mean it's it's just
not. I mean you've got you need to
have standards and you know people make economic
calculations based on standards and if they don't know what the
money is going to be worth and if they're or if they're afraid
that it's going to continually be worth less, you know they'll
end up making the wrong choices. So it's it's it's a little hard
to get your head around but if you study it, you know in depth
as I have for a long period of time, you can really see that
it's kind of a core issue. It's sound money you know and
and it's and like I say I I don't think that most of the
world doesn't understand it. But I think that I sincerely
believe and I think those of us who've studied the Austrian
economists who studied it will tell you that sound money would
go a long way to solving a lot of the world's ills.
It really would. It would provide the right
incentives and you know and it would probably be anti war.
I mean you know I mean part of the reason I mean the
government's running huge deficits.
You know so we're we're paying in the United States.
I'm sure it's true in Holland too.
I mean depends if you live in a high tax state in the United
States and you're in the you know you're doing well, you're
making good money. You're probably paying half of
what you make to the government and then the other half is
probably getting debased at 10 to 15% a year with inflation.
So we all, we all know the government really does the
government doesn't produce anything and the government just
you know sits there and it's a Leech.
I mean they they do do one thing that is actually very, very
important. If I were to, you know, if I
were king of the world, I mean I would I had a chance to set up
government. We we need a government to have
a system of laws and courts and regulation.
I mean somebody's got to me there's one role for the
government and that's to be the referee.
So that, you know, criminals get put in jail and the laws get
followed and the courts determine who's a criminal and
all that and and and you know, and maybe maybe natural defense,
assuming that there are some bad actors in the world but like
over time with sound money, the bad actors would go away and you
wouldn't have to spend as much money on National Defense.
And so you know what my my sense is that, you know, probably 10%
of all our incomes, we could have a really good police force,
really good courts, really fair judicial system that kind of
keeps the playing field level so that nobody can cheat.
And that's the role of government.
If you if you had that and and imagine, think about it, you
know look at yourself, look at how much money you make.
Imagine if suddenly all that money you paid in taxes, you you
didn't have to pay that. You only you know you make what
you make today but only 10% of it went to the government.
The rest was yours. I mean, you know that alone.
I mean, your living standards would go up substantially,
right? Yeah.
And it's so fascinating. Again, for someone without an
economics background, my rational thought goes to when
you, and by the way, when you say sound money, right.
For also the people listening, sound money is money that is
hard to produce, correct. So that is even right?
And when it's hard limited in supply or let's say low stock to
flow ratio? Yeah.
So it's hard to produce and therefore it's scarce, right?
Right. In my rational mind, I initially
go to well, if it's hard to create, it's also hard to
obtain. So I am forced to deliver enough
value so someone else that would be my customer or my boss for a
job would actually part ways with that.
Sounds money, right? So there you immediately create
the incentive to actually deliver failure, right?
Whereas on the other side, the soft money that is easy to
create. If you have a job, as you just
mentioned, right. And you know that half of that
goes to the government, why would you add value to that job,
right. Like why, why would you not be?
I don't know how to call that. Like they call those people like
a tourists, right? Or like some people just, you
know, they they flow through life without, you know, not
doing anything of value. Which of course is a pity, just
you know, for your existence in a sense, right.
But that is what that money incentivizes it.
It disincentivizes adding value, basically, right?
Because you know it's. Certainly some of that.
Yeah, There's certainly some of that.
And also, you know, I think I agree with, I agree with what
you said. Like what?
What could the role of a state be in?
Therefore, I don't think most people would be against paying
taxes, right? Because if the government gets
paid taxes in that hard money, they have to deliver value or
else people will not pay anymore, right?
That makes a lot of. Sense for me.
Well and as I said earlier, the inflation is a big hidden tax.
I mean it's not just the taxes we pay, it's after.
Yeah, right. The inflation diminishes
everything else. So it's you know and and and I
mean imagine, you know and This is why I think it's anti war.
Imagine a world where, you know, the government, you know, they
couldn't finance wars through inflation.
So they, you know, hey, we want to go have a war.
You know, your taxes are going to go up 35%.
Well, my sense is that the voters would say, you know,
screw that. I'm not parting ways my I.
Don't want to have a war? Exactly.
Yeah, exactly. Grab 35% more my income.
Forget about it. I'm not interested in that.
So when when people say you know if the government can print
money, why would you pay taxes? Is that funny?
Does it make sense Exactly? Right.
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's the whole point.
Yeah, that's the whole point. I mean, and and and by the way,
we're getting a lot closer to that point.
I mean, the COVID thing, the United States, I think it was
true in your country as well, really tested that.
I mean, I, you know, I know wealthy people got these PPP
loans. I mean, everybody got a stimulus
check. I mean, you know, sadly a lot of
that money went to places it didn't need to go.
And you know, they printed trillions of dollars and, you
know, gave every family, I don't know, a $1400 check or
something. I mean it's kind of like and yet
they were bailing out companies with millions and millions of
dollars. So you know the the system is
very broken, very crony capitalist.
I mean and the other thing about that we haven't really talked
about is the way that the the money gets made and the way that
they, you know, they keep these interest rates artificially low.
What that leads to is contillionaires.
And So what I mean by that is, you know if you're on Wall
Street, you can borrow at 0% and you take your money and you go
put it into an asset that yields you 10 or 15%, well that's a
license to print money. I mean that's a license to get
rich. And you know, it's kind of like
nice work if you can get it. The problem is you and I can't
go and borrow at 0%. You know, our credit cards, they
charge you 18% or 20%. And it's it's the big, powerful
vested interests that are able to go to the Federal Reserve and
borrow money at a very, very low rate.
Yeah, exactly. And that's why we, that's why
we've had this enormous growth in, in wealth, you know,
disparity. I mean, when I was a kid, you
know, the CEO of one of the big auto companies lived on the
street from us. And you know, I don't know, the
guy on the line was probably making 50,000 a year and I don't
know that CEO is probably making 250,000 a year.
He's probably making five times as much money.
But you know, I think today if you did those same numbers, the
guy on the line is probably making 80 or 100,000 a year.
He's a pretty high skilled line worker.
That CEO is probably making $45 million.
You know, I mean it's it's, it's just, I mean the people, the
people who are running the system at the top are just
robbing everybody else, you know, because because they're
closer to the money spigot, so. And again, irrational thoughts,
right? Like that guy on the line is
probably expending more energy than the men than the CEO,
right? So Oh yeah.
And they both got different skill sets.
I mean, you know, that's true. I mean, you know, a good CEO is
disparity, good CEO is worth, like you're paying them.
But the point is that, you know, I mean there are a lot of other
pieces of that too. That CEO has got stock options
and stock options are inflated because they're doing buybacks
and they're using leverage and you know, blah, blah, blah.
I mean there's so many, you know, this Fiat money has led to
so many games. And I'll give you a good example
of the United States. General Electric used to be one
of the finest companies in United States, right.
It was around, you know, I mean it's founded by Thomas Edison,
right. It was around for 100 plus years
and you know, they were great in all of the industries they were
in. And then, you know, a couple of
CEOs got in there who were financial engineers and they
levered the shit out of it and they gave themselves a lot of
stock options. And the last guy, Jeff Immelt,
you know, made 6700 million, $1,000,000 on his stock options.
And the company's a shell of its former self.
It's highly leveraged and you know, in debt.
The stock has performed poorly. And I know GE retirees who've
had their retirements whacked back because the company's done
so poorly. So, you know, and and that's
that's just an example, but that's kind of an example of the
Fiat incentives and how they've let people game the system in
their own favor. I mean, it's nice for just ML,
you know, he's building a $50 million house on Nantucket.
But you know, what about the what about the guy who worked
his whole life at General Electric and thought he was
going to have a pension? It was going to be worth X
dollars, and instead it's worth .4 X dollars.
Do you know what I mean? I mean, and that's that kind.
That's just one example. There's there are hundreds of
those. Hundreds of those.
I mean the system. Is.
And that's, and by the way, that's why the electorate is
just so the United States is so completely and utterly pissed
off. And I can't blame them.
I mean it's, you know, it's it's unfair.
What's happened is incredibly unfair.
And the the problem is, the sad part of it all is, is that, you
know, the right to be pissed off.
But they don't, they don't really understand the base
problem, the cause of the base problem, you know, I mean, and
that's where I think it's incumbent upon bitcoiners and
sound money people, you know, to try and educate them that if
they really want to solve this problem at the base, they've got
it. We've got to fight for a sound
money, sound money standard, you know?
Maybe as a last example of this topic, what I like is if you go
to tradingview.com and you look up the NASDAQ and you put it in
the USD, then it's probably all time high somewhere around,
right? And so as we talked about that
is the price, right, the amount of units but not the value.
And then if you didn't, if you denominate the NASDAQ in M2,
which is the money supply, so the amount of units, then you
see, and that's wild, that's the value of the NASDAQ now is lower
than at the height of the.com bubble.
I was like, I haven't done that term.
It doesn't surprise me. Look that up.
Yeah, but rationally, we would disagree, right?
We would disagree. Like obviously we have better
technology than at the height of the.com bubble of.
Course we do, yeah. But the value is lower.
And again that that goes to the whole number goes up, right.
I mean, people feel really good about that NASDAQ number, but
what they don't realize is, you know, that's why they're paying,
you know, much more for everything they buy every day
because of the monetary inflation.
Oops, Graham, I can't hear you. Did you are you did you hit
mute? Accidentally muted myself.
So you studied this a lot, right?
But who? Who are what has been most
influential in like shaping your views?
About a lot of money racing economists, I mean von Mises and
you know so on and so forth. But I would say that, you know I
think the one book that I give out to a lot of people and I
think it's a very good primer on the subject and then it takes
you into Bitcoin is and I really do think it's a book that has
changed and will continue to change the world and that is the
Bitcoin standard by Safedine Amos.
I mean I I guess kind of that ought to be must reading for
every student of economics politics etcetera.
You know, it just it very crisply lays out everything you
and I have discussed with a lot of numbers and support and you
know, and then it and it also does a nice job then of of
segwaying into what you and I both know is the solution which
is Bitcoin. And so that's the Bitcoin
standard. Safedine Amos.
I mean I I I think it's a book that will change the world has
been one of probably one of the most important economic books
written in the last 20 years. And so I I feel like absolutely
everybody has to read it. And when you read it and you
understand it, you really can't Unsee it.
Do you know what I mean? It's kind of like, oh, I get it
And you know you you you get to where you are and where I am,
which is all right. This is the problem and this is
how we're going to solve it. And and the good news is, I mean
I'm, I'm complaining about all this stuff and talking about how
broken it is. But I'm actually quite
optimistic that we are going in the right direction because our
numbers are growing the the Bitcoin value is going up and
more people coming into Bitcoin, I mean and and the the existing
Keynesian monetary system is in the process of failing.
And as a result of the fact that it's failing you know it will be
replaced by a much better system.
So, you know, the the, the, the, the failure will have bumps in
it and it may not be entirely pleasant for any of us, but but
we can get, you know, we'll get to the other side.
And I'm quite optimized. My kids are.
I have three kids. They're all in their 20s.
When you get to the other side, I'm quite optimistic that we
will in the next 5 or 10 years and that when we do, the world
will look a lot better and that, you know, my kids futures will
look much more. You know, the way I felt my
future was in the 70s. I mean there's some bad things
going around in the 70s of the Vietnam War particularly.
But other than that, 70s were a very hopeful time in America.
It was a, it was a good, you know, there were a lot of baby
boomers. We were all, you know, there's a
big middle class, you know, nobody was super rich, but we
were all getting by and it was a, you know, it was a nice time
to be an American and I think we've lost a lot of that.
And for before we jump into the topic of of Bitcoin, what is
your definition of wealth and why should millennials care
about it? Well, so probably at the top of
the list is your physical health, because if you don't
have your physical health, you don't have anything.
So I think that, you know, it's, you know, I'm kind of a workout
freak. I I think that, you know, you
get given this one body and you got to take care of it and it,
you know, when you're young that's not as important because
you've got a lot of leeway in terms of, you know, you're just
you're young and strong and everything's going in your
direction. But I'll tell you when you're
quite young, but when you get to be 50, you know, you're going
to, you're going to, you're faced with making a lot of
choices. And you can either decide you're
going to work hard to stay in shape, which I think will then
make your sixties, 70s and 80s pleasant and decide you can just
let yourself go. You're gonna find a lot more
discomfort, you know, in terms of, you know, just, you know,
knee replacements and all kinds of things.
So. So I I would say the first thing
about wealth is, you know, physical health.
I'd say the second thing is just personal freedom.
You know, being in a country, in a place where you can do what
you want, you're not censored, you can speak freely.
And for all of America's faults, it's pretty good on that score,
you know, so I think, I think that counts as wealth.
I mean living in North Korea it'd be pretty hard to feel
wealthy no matter how much money you had you know And then beyond
that obviously you know dollars and and currency and and that
you know they what they provide you with in my opinion is I mean
wealth is only good insofar as it can provide you with
experiences and you know to take care of your family, take care
of your loved ones, do stuff that's meaningful work on
projects that you believe in you know etcetera etcetera.
Because you know, and I mean really I guess above all of
these the ultimate form of wealth is time.
You know, because we all have limited time on this earth and
so we all have time preferences and you know, somebody who's 20
with no money is arguably wealthier than somebody who's 90
and loaded, right. Because they've got, you know, a
lot of runway to to live their life and the 90 year old has a
limited runway. So, but yeah, exactly so you
know, and so those who are young, you know, enjoy it and,
you know, use your time wisely and and realize that you know,
you're born in a for all the problems in the world.
You were born in an age with just incredible technology and
incredibly good stuff going on, incredible opportunities,
etcetera. Now you got to figure out how to
play your cards, and you got a lot of lessons to learn that
you'll only learn by, you know, making mistakes, right.
And so, you know, get out there and make mistakes and get in the
game. But you know and and, you know,
try to try to learn. You don't have to learn every
lesson the hard way. You can ask people who've been
through it before what they learned.
And recognizing that, you know, there's there's knowledge.
You know, when somebody who's older tells you something and
they learn the hard way. I mean, maybe you don't learn it
quite as well if you don't learn it the hard way.
But I'm going to give you an example for me.
You know, I drank a lot when I was younger and you know, I
realized that wasn't taking me in the direction I wanted to go
in. And so at 35 or mid 30s, I just
quit drinking. And I I haven't drank since then
because it just, it doesn't really serve, you know my
interests. And you know, I've tried to
convince all my kids to do the same and they and they're not
they, they drink still. But I think over time they may,
they may come to where I am on this.
I mean it's just I want to be healthy and you know, substance
abuse is not something that I think goes along with being
healthy. So, and I know a lot of other
people my age who've come to the same conclusion like it's, you
know, I I highly recommend it. But but that's not to say I
didn't drink in my 20s and 30s. I did so.
So I, you know that I mean, you know, monetary wealth, I mean
that's the last form of wealth and that's right.
I mean what what it gives you. It gives you freedom, gives you
the ability to control your circumstances to help others to,
you know, to to be to live in a way that's you know that you
that that's comfortable and and that's there's nothing wrong
with that. I mean, you know, I mean, I
don't think we're all put here to suffer, you know, I I think
we need to have discipline and be prepared to suffer.
You know, when it comes to things like staying in shape,
but or, you know, being demanding of ourselves to to
perform well, 'cause I think, and we're all put here for a
purpose. And so we've got to, we've got
to live out our purpose in the best way we can, you know.
And that's what our legacy would be.
Well, you know what? What, What?
What did that life mean? You know, what did you do?
So. Yeah, I agree.
Thanks for sharing that and well, a legacy part I think is
of course Bitcoin. I think this is a nice segue
into into Bitcoin. So I've tweeted repeatedly about
the fact, you know, that understanding Bitcoin is not
about intelligence. And I saw you liked a tweet to
that said Bitcoin is not a test of someone's intellectual
capability, but a test of someone's humility, humbleness
and ego. And to me, you know, like people
like like you for example, and like Bob Burnett also James, you
know, like a little bit older, But people who are, you know,
successful in a money system that we now understand is
broken. Like people, people like you who
did like a 180 in their understanding and beliefs like
on money and and what we just talked about, right.
And and now see Bitcoin like, for me that's the highest
signal. Because I know that like that
everyone in Bitcoin goes through that personal journey.
But I think a. Lot of my friends have been
extremely successful in a Fiat world in a Fiat sense and they
just can't wrap their arms around this and it threatens
them And it's you know, it's you know it's just it's it's it's
outside of their level of understanding and you know and
they want to force it to to fit into their world model and you
know nobody forces Bitcoin to do anything.
I mean you just you have to kind of understand it and accept it.
It is what it is and and so you know I and I've always pulled a
lot of people and a lot of them came at it being very skeptical
and and somewhat rightly so. I get it.
I mean FTXI think scared a lot of people.
It's all that stuff. It's just scam shit, you know.
I mean Sam Beckman Free did Bitcoin a big disservice.
I've delayed the adoption in my opinion by multiple years.
But you know, once you've sit down and really spend the time
to to read it and understand it and think it through, you know,
you can change your mind. It becomes obvious.
I mean, I think it's, I think it's to his credit, you know,
Sailor will, every now and then he'll retweet his 2013 tweet
where he said he thought Bitcoin was a scam, you know, and I
mean, so he's a smart guy. He looked at it.
He thought it was a scam. But he kept reading, kept
thinking, kept analyzing it. And and he came back and he
said, you know what? I was wrong.
I misread this thing and that. You know that to me.
I mean, the superior intellect will change their views and
change their position when presented with contradictory
evidence. And we've now got a lot of
contradictory evidence. I mean, I was wrong in 2013.
I thought it wasn't gonna work. I thought you.
Yeah. Yeah, so what's?
What? Did you have to challenge?
I was very much I I got what it was.
I got that it was sound money. And I think sound money's a good
thing. And I was an Austrian economist.
I mean, I I got all of that. In my particular case, I was an
investor in technologies from 19 early 1980s to 2005.
I invested in all kinds of computers, disk drives, tech,
you know, the the.com bubble. I did well with that.
And, you know, I'd been around computers enough, and I wasn't a
computer scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but
I invested in them, and I knew enough about computers to
recognize that computers were somewhat unstable.
And back in the old days, you know, IBMPC used to go blue
screen and. And what did you do when your
computer crash? You just unplugged it and
plugged it back in again. And you hope that, you know, you
hope that the file you were working on had been saved
reasonably, you know, recently or so.
You didn't lose all your work. Right.
That happened a lot. And so I'm thinking to myself,
OK, we got this. We got this system where we've
got money on a computer and money is like really important.
You can't mess with it. It's got to, you know, you don't
want to the computer crashes. You don't want your money to go
away. Right.
And so I I didn't, I didn't really understand the technical
construction. And and by the way, I've seen,
you know, the etymology. I've got to get the names of all
these other types of of Bitcoin. I'm going to find that chart and
print it out. But I didn't really understand
that this was different than the prior ones.
I didn't understand the having. I didn't understand blockchain.
I didn't understand Shaw 256. I mean all the all the things
that we now know accept and understand, I didn't really
understand them in the beginning so I was convinced the
technology wouldn't work and and I was.
And that that conviction actually was somewhat supported
by. I went to some of the MIT
Bitcoin meet ups and there were a couple core developers there
and I'd ask them actually what do you think about this Bitcoin
thing They said, well it's interesting, it's good, it's
kind of working. But to be honest with you, every
time I make a change in the code, I think to myself, shit, I
crashed the I'm going to crash the network.
I thought to myself, shit, I mean here's a guy who's a real
propellerhead PhD comp sci guy working on this monetary system
and he's worried about the network crashing and he knows
shit that I don't even know. So you know I mean this is
before the forks, this is before the black sized wars, you know,
and I mean and there were back doors and problems with it that
they actually very fortuitously caught.
And so I think if you, you know, I think if you went and I've
talked to Adam back, I mean I think if you went and talked to
anybody who's a technologist who's worked on this thing from
the beginning, they will all tell you that there are many,
many times early on when it was quite vulnerable and it wasn't
going to work. In fact you had a, you had kids
and others who made the mistake, you know, they were mining it or
they were involved with it, I mean and and they, you know,
when it was a dime or or $0.20 or $0.30 and they so they had
10,000 of them and it became worth $2.00 and you know they
were in their 20s and and they said holy kodoley, I've got,
I've got $20,000 here. I need a car.
And so they sold 10,000 Bitcoin and bought a car.
You know what I mean? And obviously that, you know,
they're gonna experience regret over that for the rest of their
life, 'cause they didn't really understand, you know, what it
was in terms of a monetary, you know, medium.
But, you know, so, so my problem with it was the technology.
But I, you know it, it just was kind of layered and my, my
knowledge kept growing, You know, the blocks kept going.
There were no problems. And you know it.
Just each each block each year each technical innovation SegWit
etcetera. You know the getting to know
some of the core developers and understanding how it all
operates. You know I just watching the
nodes grow from you know a small number of nodes to what are we
30,000 plus nodes today it's a lot you know kind of got me
comfortable that all right I now believe that the the risk of
technical you know and sailor coming in he's a you know
aerospace you know engineer you know propellerhead super bright
guy and you know it meets his test.
I mean, I'm now of the opinion that the risk of a technical
failure is extremely low. It's not 0, but it's extremely
low. Yeah, so.
Did you have like a specific aha moment where you were like, OK
now? Yeah, you know, you probably
drove that around me more than anything else was price.
I mean, so I tried to get in before 2013, but you had to go
to a cafe and give somebody money and it all seemed kind of
shady. And then I was then I was close
to buying some through Mount Cox and unfortunately I I I would
kind of drag my feet and then Mount Cox failed everybody
there. And then it.
Then Coinbase came out and I think there'd been a run around
that time up to 1000. I thought oh shit, I missed it.
And then there was a correction. It went from 1000 down to 3000.
OK, I get it. I know how this works by the
dip. So I went and bought my first
ones about about 300 and and then it, you know.
Then I went back to 1000 and I bought a few more and and then I
really got pretty excited about it.
I don't know if you were around at the time but in 27 and I
went, I kept going to these meet ups and stuff and learning.
I was buying it, but not a ton. In 2017, it really launched.
It broke out from 1000 and went to 17,000 and I was like, holy
shit, this is, I mean, we have not seen anything like this
before. I mean, this is a big deal.
And I was buying it at 17,000 and then it fell back down to 10
the next year. And then it fell at four, 3 1/2
for four the next year. And I bought both of those dips,
you know, not knowing, kind of thinking to myself, I think this
is right. I think I'm right about this,
but I'm recognizing I could still be wrong.
But I kept buying those dips and then you know, it just, it kept,
you know, I mean because I listened to all the talk, it was
a bubble, it was a Tulip, it was this that and I mean I get it,
you know, to me the the two risks have always been does it
does the technology blow up. I'm now over that risk in my
mind. I don't think the technology
blows up. I think the second risk and I
don't see much chance of this, but I think there is some chance
is that everybody just loses interest in it.
I mean we need to have growing and continual adoption.
It needs to like a virus. It needs to spread, you know and
suddenly everybody's an app, Bitcoin who gives a shit.
You know then that you know that would be that wouldn't be good
and and it could kind of die away.
But you know all the numbers I look at, you know, you look at
the global hash. You look at the addresses.
You look at the wallet downloads.
A guy last night was telling me, I think that some there's a site
somewhere that tracks wallet downloads.
It's like a million a month. No, no, I think it's a million a
day. The site is saying there are
1,000,000 all the wallets. I don't know how they get that,
that data. I don't know if it's accurate.
But anyway, that's the case, 365,000,000 wallets are getting
downloaded now, OK, On a planet of 8 billion people, I mean this
is starting to really matter, right?
So as long as the adoption is continuing, which is what I call
dogs eating food, then you know it I don't see kind of hard
pressed. And and it's also, you know,
it's also Metcalf's law. I mean it's a, it's a network,
you know, the more people who join the network, the more
valuable the network becomes. And then the more valuable the
network becomes, the more people who join.
Do you know what I mean? It's, I mean it's like Google,
if we think about Google, I mean, you know, it started off
as it was a better search engine than Yahoo, better algorithm,
everyone migrated to it and and of course now you know, there, I
mean now there's still Bing and there's some other search
engines. But really if you want to list
something or search for something, you're going to use
Google because it's the superior network and that's the same
thing here. This is the superior monetary
network and it's just continuing to grow and embed itself and it
was the first mover. And so I don't really see, I
don't really see that, you know, I don't see that much downside.
I see, I see a lot of paths that are varying.
I mean, you know, as you know from the show, I mean Samson
thinks it's going to be $1,000,000 this year or next
year. I mean will it be, It could be.
I'm not counting on it. I, you know, I think it'll be a
couple 100,000 pretty soon, a million.
I think that takes a few more years but but I don't know,
nobody really does. I mean you know the thing that's
interesting about it is I've seen this on another podcast too
is we've never really seen this before.
Graham, this is a we are, we are living in an experiment because
what we have is a commodity that has a fixed supply and every
other commodity in the world, gold, oil, wheat, corn, you know
anything is is it will. The supply will vary based upon
the price. If the price goes up, mankind
will make more of it. And the supply on this thing,
it's friggin algorithmically fixed.
You know what I mean? Yeah.
Well, it's, it's an experiment as you said, it's a commodity,
but it's, it's a digital commodity that can also act as
money, right. So we have, as you said, we have
Metcalf's Law, we have the Lydia effect, we have the Veblen
effect, we have Gresham's Law. So like it's all these things
intertwined, right. And I think that's also why
it's, well, it's hard to comprehend but also very hard to
predict because. But you have that scarcity
right, You have like stock to flow and there's a lot of the
lot of debate about stock to flow versus the power law versus
this and versus that. But you know, it's fun, I think,
to explore, but nobody. Has to.
We're all just guess out, I think, because it's really are.
Yeah, yeah. And it's fun.
Everyone likes number go up. I mean it's so fun when number
went down and and I think one of things people have to prepare
for is, you know I think the draw downs might become less.
I mean if you look at the historical draw downs, they've
slowly but surely been declining but not by a lot.
But the the draw downs might become less as it gets more
widely distributed. I mean eventually when it's
fully distributed, draw downs won't be very big at all.
But if if there are draw downs because it'll kind of
fundamentally be money. But that's many years out.
And one thing I the only caution I would give to people as they
look at is, you know, when you put money into it, you do need
to be prepared for the possibility that there'll be a
drawn out. You know, I mean, the only
people I've seen really get hurt in it are the people who don't
truly understand it. They chase the price at the top.
You know, they they aped into it at 68,000, You know, it went to
15. They didn't know why they bought
it. They freaked out.
They sold it, you know, even though we told them not to.
And you know, they didn't, they didn't realize what they were
buying. They didn't understand the
volatility and the nature of the asset and why dollar cost
averaging makes sense and and we, you know each cycle it just
comes at bigger scale. I mean, you know, I can foresee
and it's not a prediction, but I think it's possible that let's
say this run we go to 400, well somebody's going to buy it at
400 and that might be their first Bitcoin.
Well, let's say it corrects. It doesn't correct as much as it
has in the past, but let's say it corrects 50%, so it goes to
200. Well, somebody who bought it at
400 and that's the first buy, they're going to really feel
like shit, you know, because they just on paper, they just
lost half the money. Now you know if they wait five
years, it's probably going to be at a million.
So the $400,000 buy is going to look fine.
And if they dollar cost averaged into it and said, look, I
recognize that 400 is kind of extended, I don't want to go do
a plot buy right there. Maybe what I want to do is I
want to buy, you know, I have this amount allocated to it and
I want to buy that equally over the next 12 months, two years,
you know, and. And so if it goes up, I'll be
paying a little bit more. But if it comes down, I'll be
buying more or less and averaging down.
I mean, that's to me, that's a much more intelligent way to
approach it. I mean, Phil Miller made a
fortune investing in Amazon. And I bought it very early, held
it, held a big piece of it for a long, long time.
And yet he suffered multiple 50% drawdowns where, you know, I
mean, people would look at us like, Jesus Christ, you, you
know, you had this big markup. You lost half your money.
He's like, yeah, but I believe in it.
And every time it came back and that's.
Yeah. That's the point we say that's
the broader. Point that I'm trying to make is
people listen to this. People really need to fully
understand what this thing is. They really do.
And and I tell people we're trying to orange peel other
people. I say you've got to, you've got
to explain the risk here and you've got to explain to them
that you know at any given point in time there could be a big
drawdown. And if if they think they're
going to get scared out of it, well then their waiting is too
high. I mean, look, if this does what
I think it's going to do, the only wrong allocation of this is
0. And so seriously could if you
have some, I mean, if it does 100 bagger, 1000 Bagger, you
know and you heard about it and you didn't buy any of it, you're
going to real regret. But but honestly, I think for a
lot of people just having say, say you've got investable assets
of whatever that number is, 10% of your investable assets in
this thing. If it does what I think it's
going to do it's going to eat everything else.
You're gonna and you're gonna be really glad you put the 10% in
and and the average investor, if you think about it, you've
probably made a lot average investors made plenty of
investments over many years. You can lose 10% of your
investable assets and recover. You know, I mean you you can
you. I mean if we're totally wrong
and it goes to 0, which I think is impossible.
But if it does and you've got 10% of your net worth in this
thing or 10% of your investable worth in this thing, you know
and it and it and it craps out, you'll be OK.
You've still got 90% somewhere else and what I would say, well
I'm 90% exactly. I mean you and I are, you know,
we're on the other end of the spectrum and I'm not quite that
high. I'm, I'm you know more like 60%.
Now the price has gone up and the rest is in gold, but that's
just 'cause I have a legacy of of being a gold investor.
So, and as you get older, you need things that are less
volatile. I mean, I've got clients who
have $10 million, You know, they they've spent their whole life
earning it. They're 70 years old.
They're not going to put $10 million in Bitcoin knowing that
it could go down 50%. They just can't.
But if I they want to protect against monetary debasement, I'm
like, fine, why don't you put $4 million in Bitcoin and $6
million in gold? The biggest drawdown gold ever
had was in the 20% range. And generally speaking, gold is
up almost every year and over long periods of time it's up 8%
a year. So it's much less volatile and
you can't print it? Yeah.
So no. And so when someone says to you,
what is Bitcoin and why should I care?
Like how do you explain it briefly use, you just said
something, which I think is a main point for me in my
understanding is you said it's just a thing, right?
You said it's just a thing that works as intended, right?
Like the protocol just works as intended.
It's just chugging along, like it doesn't really matter what
you think of it, right? Is that one of those things like
when you said that I was like? Yeah, that's some reason, I say
I say one. Of those.
First of all, it's really important to understand that
it's a, it's a, it's an invention.
I mean we discovered we created digital scarcity.
So in looking at it, you need to think of it.
You know, radio was an invention, TV was an invention,
cell phones invention, cars an invention.
Printing, I mean, it is an invention.
Before we had it, we never had digital scarcity.
OK, Why does that matter? Well, because money is all about
scarcity. You need to have to have money
be good. It needs to be scarce.
I mean, you can't have sand as money because there's an
unlimited amount of sand. You can't have water as money,
as unlimited amount of water, you know and and through 5000
years of history, you know probably one of the scarcest
elements on the planet, Not the that's not the scarcest, but
it's because the small elements are scarcer.
But you know a widely distributed scarce element is
gold, right. And so 5000 years people
determined that gold was a good form of money because it's
scarce. The supply only goes up at 1 1/2
percent a year. And you know, it was the best
money that we had, you know, until Bitcoin came along and you
know Fiat money is is vastly inferior.
We don't need to go into that but and So what Bitcoin really
is, is it's it's digital gold only it's better and and the the
the way the way the reason gold is so good is that stock to flow
is very very high. In other words the huge stock of
gold in the in the world 200,000 tons and we only mine, I don't
know 3000 a little over 3000 tons a year.
So that's like 1 1/2% that we increase the supply.
In the case of Bitcoin, right now, the supply increases about
100% a year. In about 20 days we're going to
have a halving and that's going to fall in half.
So it's going to be .75, you know, 3/4 of a percent a year.
And then in another four years it's going to be, you know, half
of that and then you know, just asymptotically as it approaches
0. And so, you know, the fact of
the matter is we've got a better form of money that's sounder
than gold on a stock to flow basis.
And in value terms, stock to flow is the most important
measure for monetary value. So you know.
That said, something hard it. Is the IT is the hardest form of
money that ever existed. It's also superior to gold in
the sense that there's no cost to store it and you can
digitally move it, you know, instantly.
I mean gold costs money to store.
It's hard to verify there's been fake gold or fake gold bars that
have tungsten inside. I've sold gold bars to people
and they have to either cut them in half and charge me a re
smelting fee or they have to have the right kind of machine
that can look inside to make sure it's really gold.
And you know by the way try and take a billion dollars of gold
and move it from point A to point BI mean you know you're
going to need a, you know I don't know semi truck or a heavy
lifting airplane. So and you can use, you can move
a billion dollars of you know Bitcoin in 10 minutes.
So. So it's got a lot of monetary
properties that I think make it better than gold because you
know it is a form of quote UN quote digital gold you know and
and and the other reason that it's better than gold and and
the thing that I think is going to make it outperform gold.
There's a really couple of hedge fund guys.
One of the guys, Paul Tudor Jones, a very brilliant guy,
said, you know, in the monetary debasement race, Bitcoin is the
fastest horse. And he's right.
I mean, one, the price of gold has been suppressed.
That's a whole different long conversation.
We don't need to go there. But you got two things going on.
We know we talked earlier the government is debasing the
money. We know that.
That's a fact that's provable. You can see M2 growing
consistently for year after year and that's, you know, that's
your more supply of money, same number of goods prices go up.
OK, fine, We know that's true. We know that's a trend.
We know that trend is getting worse.
That will drive the price of everything up.
It'll especially drive up the price of things that can't be
printed, like gold and Bitcoin. Gold is fully distributed.
It's been around 5000 years. Everyone who wants gold knows
what it is, has gold. You know, it's it's got a huge
lending effect that haven't been out there.
Bitcoin's been around 15 years and the whole world doesn't know
about it yet. And so you've got to, it's cool
because you've not only got something that'll go up because
the government's printing money and there's monetary debasement,
and also you've got an adoption curve, you know, and you've got,
I mean, what, what? What do we got?
8 billion people. 21 million. I mean, every person in the
world can't have even like 1/10 of a coin.
You've got 54,000,000 millionaire in the world.
You got 21 million Bitcoin, some of which have been lost.
But forget that for a moment. Every millionaire in the world
could only own half a Bitcoin. I mean, right.
And so and and by the way, most of them aren't aware of it yet.
And so you know, we're not even at that 10% tip, 10% tipping
point. So we're just so very, very
early, Bram, in terms of acceptance.
And you know, the way I tend to look at it is at a macro level,
it's about 700 trillion of wealth in the world.
That includes real estate. Let's take the real estate out.
Let's say there's 350 trillion of real estate and 350 trillion
of stocks, bonds, you know, currency, paper, all that kind
of stuff, gold, You know, the entire market cap.
Right now, Bitcoin is 1.3 trillion.
So all the Bitcoin in the world is worth 1.3 trillion.
All the other stuff in the world is 350 trillion.
As that 350 trillion becomes aware that they are being
consistently and systematically debased, IE that they're losing
out to inflation. Not all of it, but some of it is
going to say, huh, I need to sell this stock.
I need to sell these especially bonds.
I need to sell these bonds. I need to take this currency and
I need to buy something that's really hard, that's not going to
be debased and I'm going to buy Bitcoin now.
And as we've seen, you know, there's a real multiplier effect
because a lot of the coins are in strong hands, 70% haven't
moved in over a year. You know, the Bitcoin, since the
ETFs came in, ETF comes in and the market value of Bitcoin, I
think it's gone up by about 300, three, $100 billion.
And I think the Bitcoin, I think there's been about $8 billion
that's gone into the ETFs. I could be a little off on this
because it changes every day, but let's just think about this.
So $300 trillion of market appreciate $300 billion that
bitcoin's gone up on 8 of new flows.
So that's 37 times. So this is the multiplier.
So that suggests that for every billion dollars that comes into
Bitcoin, the price goes up by 37 times that amount.
So there's remember, there's 350 trillion, not billion trillion
dollars out there. OK, right, let's.
Take 1%. 1% of that is 3 trillion.
OK, the entire market cap today of Bitcoin is 1.3 trillion, and
I can assure you that that entire 1.3 isn't for sale.
You follow where I'm going here. So if if that if that 3 trillion
came over and said, you know what, I want to buy some of this
stuff, I got to get it. I mean This is why the mistake
people are going to make with this asset.
And I had a friend who did this. I was talking to me the other
day said, well you told me about it at 25 and it's at 50 now.
I can't, I can't chase it. I can't.
And I was like, dude, this thing's going to $2,000,000, you
know do you care that you're paying 50 grand for something
that's going to be worth and then four and then six and then
eight. I mean you know it's it's, it's
got so far to run and we are so early.
I mean we know for a fact that we're under the 10% penetration
level and yet it's growing rapidly.
And so you know as I say in many podcasts, I've never seen such
an asymmetric bet. I mean, I just, it's it's, it's
kind of stunning to me that it exists.
And you know, I've been in the business of investing in stocks.
And the hardest part about investing in stocks is that
you're investing in companies and companies are run by people,
and people, people screw shit up.
You know what I mean? I mean, sadly, you know,
management teams screw things up and here you've got a really
good monetary investment that's kind of on autopilot.
You know, you got the core developers who could
theoretically screw it up, but there are a lot of them and
anything they do is got to be approved by the consensus.
And so I I think the odds of this thing getting screwed up
are pretty damn low. So I don't know.
I mean, I I don't think I have to convince you because you're a
bitcoiner. You totally get it.
But I mean, you know, to me this really with my friends and the
people I've tried to orange, but this really is kind of a I'm
pounding the table, you know, and fine, I get it.
If you're afraid of it, I totally get it.
I'm not suggesting that you need to put all your money in this
thing. But what I am suggesting is that
if you don't buy some of it, someday five years, 10 years,
15, and you heard about it and people tried to convince you to
do it and you said, Nah, I'm not going to do that.
I think you're going to experience regret.
I think it's interesting that that ego test or like personal
challenge test comes back again, right?
Because I think what you just said, like some people don't
like that sentence, right? We are still so early.
But I I do agree. But that is the that is what
makes it so hard. Like when you see this entirely.
Am I really? Here.
Yeah. Am I really here?
And the other thing is you can it's very easy to have FOMO or
you know, revert old time FOMO and you know, you know
something. I mean, look, I've met people
who bought it at $2.00. I met people who bought it at
$1.00. I mean Max Kaiser bought his
first coins. I was told this story the other
day that was fastened. He paid $0.50 for his first
coins. So there's a guy in front of him
named Trace Meyer who was really early who paid $0.30 and Max
thought he was overpaying. Max thought he was too late.
And $0.50, OK. I mean, right.
I mean, this is, you know, this is kind of, this is where we
are. So, you know, I've got coins I
bought at 300, I've got coins I bought at 1000, I've got 5000,
you know, whatever. I mean, I'm totally comfortable
buying coins at 69,000. I just don't care.
I mean if I have some excess savings or some earnings or you
know, other things pay off, I'm going to put them in at whatever
the level is at that point in time, recognizing that at any
time the 69 could go to 30 and I've got to be prepared to live
with that. But I am, you know I am.
And so since I am, because I know that in 10 years, 20 years,
30 years, it's going to be much, much higher because you know, as
I say, if adoption continues, what's, you know, what's going
to stop it, right? So is the risky thing here like
losing the faith? In yourself, I mean I, you know
I. Basically right if the well or
like the understanding, you know the the trusting of your
understanding right? And then when it goes down,
inevitably. That you?
Yeah. I mean I have to say when I
bought it at 17, it went to 10 and then four.
I had some moments of doubt. I mean I was kind of like, yeah,
I mean I was like, oh shit. Of course, you know you might
have really fucked up on this thing but but I but I didn't.
I, I went back to the core thesis and I understood stood
the core thesis of base level and I thought to myself, no, you
know and and I mean the benefit everybody has now is how many of
these drawdowns we got five or six.
I mean we've now seen this you know investments tend to exhibit
patterns and we've seen this. We've got pattern recognition
Now. We've had a bunch of drawdowns,
you know which, which which the the doubters would say, oh,
there was a bubble bursting, OK, But in every case that bubble
burst and then it came back stronger.
So it's not a bubble, it's just not, I mean we've had six bubble
bursts and every time it comes back stronger.
So. So really that's that's not the
right model. So but yeah, I mean if look if
you bought your first coins at 69 three years ago and you know
FTX happened, I mean no doubt you felt like shit, you know.
But again, the way you deal with that is you have to take a
portfolio approach and you have to take a probability weighted
approach. I mean I was particularly suited
to this because I, you know, I went to Business School, we
studied monetary, we studied economics and you know what you
do is you look at the potential reward.
I mean the the beautiful thing about this is asymmetric.
What does that mean? You can only lose 1 if you put a
dollar into it. You can only lose the dollar,
but you can make $10 a $100 a thousand dollars, $10,000
depends on the time frame, right.
And that's a that's an asymmetric bet.
So what you've got to get comfortable is that what you put
into it, you could lose it. You've got to get comfortable
with that but but and and you've got to you've got to get
comfortable that it's worth the possibility of losing that for
the for the upside of potentially making 45101520 a
hundred times your money which I think it still has that upside.
I mean it's interesting Sailor made a comment over in Madeira
that I I think he meant for because Williams was on stage.
He said, he said, look, the next 10 years are going to really be
the gold rush period in Bitcoin because we're at about 90% of
the coins have been mined to date, and between now and 2034,
the next 9% will get mined. So at 2030, four, 1% of the
remaining coins will be mined over the next 100 years as that
asymptotically, you know, the halvings occurred.
So effectively at that point your stock to flow is, you know,
there's there's no flow. I mean you're getting just a
trivial amount of flow. So you're, you're all the coins
are out there. And so at that point in time, it
becomes even harder. And you know, my sense is we're
just going to go on an incredible ramp here, you know,
during these next 10 years. And people, I think, are going
to be shocked at how valuable these things are.
And so in the world that I foresee in the future, you know,
and this is going to be hard for some people, there are literally
going to be those people who bought Bitcoin and those who
didn't. And the people who bought
Bitcoin are going to be silly rich, just silly rich in in Fiat
terms. And the people who didn't might
be really bitter. And and and you know, if you can
live with that, fine. But if if you're if you're
listening to this and you can hear this and you can understand
it and you can think it through, you know, I beg you to buy some.
And I've, you know, I've orange peeled a lot of people who are
extremely skeptical. They almost had to hold their
nose to buy it. They were terrified of it, you
know, and and this is five, 6-7 years ago and to a person,
they've all come back to me and said thank you for pushing me on
that. Thank you.
I really appreciate it. You know.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so maybe to reiterate, as you said in your entire career,
I've. Never seen anything.
But you've never. Seen any friggin believable.
It almost sounds too good to be true and and it would be too
good to be true if it wasn't the case that it was a technical
invention. I mean, I'm sure if you had
spoken to somebody in America in 1890 and told them, you know, in
30 or 40 years you're going to be able to get on an airplane
and go from New York to LA in 4 1/2 hours in a chat, they just
said you're out of your fucking mind.
That's too good to be true. There's no, there's absolutely
zero possibility of that, right? There's just, there's zero
possibility. The best I can do is hop on an
overnight train and I'll end up in California in 36 hours or
whatever the hell it is, right? You know, I mean and and that's.
That's the. That's the point.
That's what we're talking about. We've got a technical innovation
here. And so, you know, I mean, I
just, I told it's set up on the stage.
I mean in Madeira I made the mistake of selling Microsoft.
It was the base layer of, of computing.
I mean, I didn't know what I owned.
You know, I didn't realize it. But to me this feels the same.
I mean that's one of the advantages.
I started investing in the 80s, early 80s, you know, So what
I've been doing 40, you know, 43 years or something.
I mean, no more. I mean, yeah, 43 years.
So 44 years. So, you know, basically this
reminds me so much of, you know, the computers and Microsoft as
the base layer or of the Internet as the base layer.
I mean, it's the same thing. It's the exact same thing.
And, you know, is it going to all happen tomorrow?
No, it's not going to all happen tomorrow, is it?
Is it a relentless trend? Yes.
And you know that Microsoft stock is up 4700 times the price
I paid it for in 1986. I wish I'd hung on to it.
I didn't fucked up. Yeah.
Well, maybe fun.
Fun for me to share with you. Like when I heard you say this
right, Like this is the biggest asymmetric bet I've ever seen or
what Greg Foss says, right. Like, I've been in Wall Street
for 35 years and you know, I've never seen anything like this.
Then at one point I realized when I saw that you two, I think
in one week saying the same thing, I was like, I'm 35, like
what the hell do I know? You know, like, I think it's
interesting because we ended up at the same point of
understanding this thing called Bitcoin.
But you have this life experience that I don't have,
right? So I can go in my head and think
like, oh, I doubt myself in this or this way, but but when I hear
you say that for me that's such a signal, it says so much to me,
right like that. That is information that I can.
Use. I mean, I've seen a bunch of
these cycles. I have seen a bunch and I and I
this is the same, same old, same old.
That's why. That's why I have so much
conviction in it. And I'm not sitting here trying
to pump my bags or anything else.
I'm I'm actually just trying to help people you know, to
understand it. And I just it's you know, and
that's why I have such a deep conviction in it.
And I I think that's why Sailor is, I mean you know, all of us,
once you see it, you can't Unsee it.
And I've I've had a lot of people come to it that way.
I mean this guy on on Twitter is a good friend of mine, Chris
Irons who runs quote the Rape. And I mean he was a very big
skeptic, but he's a very smart guy who's very open minded, very
open minded, very and very smart.
Oh my God. He's, he's too orange.
Valiant. I mean, it's crazy.
It's totally crazy. It's just like at some point it
went off in his head like, holy shit, you're right, Larry.
I think it was actually when I said it was a digital, you know,
we invented digital scarcity. I really think it helps to think
of it in those terms. It's not just an investment.
I mean, you know, seeing like, it's all wonky and engineering.
He says, oh, that's digital energy.
Well, what does that mean? No, no, no.
This is an invention. This before this thing came
along, it did not exist. We had tried multiple times to
make it exist and they failed. They failed because the
technology was in one way or another flawed.
But eventually Adam Back and everybody contributed pieces to
it and they all put it together and we now have an unflowed
technology that really gives you digital scarcity.
And that's that's a that's a fundamental technical
development that did not exist before this thing existed.
And now we've got 15 years of history, you know, so it's, I
mean, this is even less. And then Foss and I talk about
this a lot, You know, You know, you're paying 69 for it right
now. I mean, I'll tell you, the buy,
the buy of all buys was after FTX when I went back down to 15.
I mean, hell, I was paying 17 for it in 2017.
So here you were six years later and you got a second chance.
Do you know what I mean? Unbelievable, right?
But I mean, even at 65, I look at it and I think to myself,
given how much we know and how many, how much of the risk we've
rung out of it, I mean, Oh my God.
I mean it's just, it's it's a, it's a better bet at 65 arguably
than it was at 2017 at 17 because we know more about what
it is and where it's going. I mean these ETFs, I mean this
is huge, right? So.
Yeah. And and what you said about the
digital scarcity, right I think also for and I see my
generational peers all into shit coins still I try to say, you
know bit Bitcoin is a decentralized protocol that
represents that discovery of digital scarcity.
And crypto quote, UN quote is an attempt.
Yeah no. But it's an attempt by startups
to create a technology where some token fuels the use of
their system, right. It's.
Totally different. It's so different.
It's. Something, yeah, I get it.
I mean, I can help people in Web three and technology, I mean,
but that's all very Fiat, like that's very Fiat.
Me too, and. This is different, yeah.
Oh, we dabbled in that as well. Before we all, we all do.
I was already into Bitcoin. I always tried it out a couple.
Of hours. And then, yeah, the more I
learned about it, the more I understood about what their
monetary policies were, the more I came and said, no, you know
what? I'm a I'm a maxi.
That shit's not going to work. Yeah, so.
Yeah, yeah, I agree. Same here.
Yeah. So last, last, last two
questions I wanted to ask you about.
I saw you, you tweeted about Gresham's Law and I wanted to
ask like, can we talk a bit about the idea of like Bitcoin
replacing Fiat currencies? Like how does that play?
Out nobody like how? Long does.
That nobody knows for sure. And I saw that take tweets.
Where you mentioned that. The point on those tweets,
though, was just that in the digital world where everybody's
connected, things can happen fast.
I pointed out the Silicon Valley bank failed in six days, and in
one day the Silicon Valley bank had withdrawals of $45 billion,
which is 45% of their deposit base.
So when. Yeah, when everybody comes to
the conclusion that Fiat currency is doomed, we're gonna
have a God candle that's gonna be, you know it's it's gonna go
to Infinity. I mean there's a chart on that
my friend Dan Oliver of Merma can has put up.
It's all over Twitter that shows the how the Deutsche mark went
to Infinity in terms of gold in the German hyperinflation from
1919 to 1923. And you know, at some point in
time, I mean what happened to the Silicon Valley bank is
everyone came to the conclusion this bank is bankrupt.
I got to get the fuck out of here now or I'm going to lose
all my money, OK? At some point in time, I
sincerely believe that the governments will be doing so
much money printing and it will be so out of control that
everyone will come to the conclusion that they are, those
currencies are doomed and they will be panic buying anything
that's not currency and that includes food and cars and
houses and. But you'll realize that if you
have $100,000, it's going to buy more today than it'll ever buy
in the future and that you got to get the fuck out of it.
And so you're going to buy gold, silver, Bitcoin or something
tangible because eventually you know it's going to they're going
to be worthless. And this is how all
hyperinflations have happened, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etcetera.
All it takes for hyperinflation to occur, all it takes is for
everyone to come to the conclusion the government can
never get responsible again. And you know, I've already
reached that conclusion, but you know, I it's going to take a
long time until everyone comes to that conclusion.
So what's the time frame for that?
I don't know. I think it could be as late as
2038. I kind of tend to think it's
probably in the early twenty 30s.
It's a fourth turning. They tend to last ten, 20-30
years. We started in 2008, 10 years is
2018 hasn't happened, 20 years is 2028 could happen by then.
Yeah, it feels to me like we got a few more you know zigzags back
and forth by 2038 this is going to be all over.
It's it's just going to be obvious.
So, but I, you know, I I could be surprised.
I mean if you know if Samson's right and then and we go to
1,000,000 bucks you know in the next year or two, I mean that's
going to be a wake up call that's going to be a big wake up
call. And then the other thing is
how's the other side going to play it?
How much money is the government going to print?
Are they going to try and ban it?
Are they going to throw sand in our eyes?
You know, I I I mean it, it will be existential.
I mean you know we're playing for all the marbles when we're
playing, when we're playing for what is the world's reserve
currency that people trust. We are playing for all the
marbles and that's how big it. Is.
But this is how big it is, right?
This is how how big it is. Especially, I think last week
there was a tweet from the European Central Bank about
Bitcoin and I tweeted like, the fact that they pay attention to
some random idea getting thrown out on the Internet 15 years
ago. Like that is the signal.
Like why? Do you know how many random
ideas there are on the Internet, On the Internet forums?
You know, like. Right.
Infinite. Why are you?
Paying attention. Why?
What are you doing? When they get it too, they get
it too. So, yeah, of course, you know,
look, I look, I don't like calling for hyperinflation.
Some people call me a dumer or something, you know, gold bug, a
negative guy. But I just, I just look at the
math and I, I don't really know. I mean, I, I, I think we could
arrest it somewhere in the interim.
They could reset to gold, they could reset to Bitcoin, they
could cut the government expenses.
They could try and balance the budget.
I mean there are things that could interrupt this process,
you know and and then this just becomes a nice digital gold and
it's, you know, it's a form of savings and that'll take it much
higher than it is today. I mean it hasn't, you know, the
total total gold market today is roughly $13 trillion and Bitcoin
today is $1.3 trillion. So it hasn't even surpassed
gold, you know, and it will at some point.
So, so we, you know, we've, I I think it's going to do very,
very well. You know, do we get hyper
bitcoinization where the dollar is dead and we're pricing
everything in SAS? I think we will.
My belief is it will actually get there, but you know if we
don't get there that, you know, that's fine too.
I think it'll, it'll still be a very good sound money
investment. Yep.
So. What you just said, if you have
100,000 cash, you should realize that it will never buy more than
today in the future. It's true though.
I mean, it's a fact. It's pretty crazy actually.
Pretty much more. I know, but it's it's.
I never thought about it like that.
But once you realize that you like now for anyone listening
like now, just realize that that is that is the get off your.
Ass right. Instruction.
Yeah. You can't just have money
sitting in a bank account, a savings account.
No, I mean, it's yeah, no, it's tragic.
It's really tragic. They're gonna, you know, I mean,
your pension, all this stuff. I mean it's.
Yeah, wow. Yeah, it's the monetary
debasement's a very evil thing. It really just hurts a lot of
people. It really does.
Yeah, OK. Let's let's handle end on a high
note I I ask everyone the same question as the last question
and that is what is a core belief you will never let go.
Well I I believe that that there's a higher power and that
we're all here for some God-given reason and I believe
that humans are fundamentally good.
Most humans are fundamentally good which doesn't mean that
there aren't some who aren't. But I'll never let go of kind of
optimism and and the belief that in spite of all these problems,
in spite of the turmoil that we're going to go through and
you know, I mean hyperinflation we have is going to be very
unpleasant, but that we are we are continually and surely
moving and evolving toward a higher plane and a better
society and a fairer society and a better life for more people.
I mean, you know, in spite of all these problems we have still
life. Until very recently, life
expectancies worldwide have gone up and you know look at all
these technologies we've developed.
And I mean I just, I I'm a, you know I fundamentally I will
never give up on being an optimist.
I'm very bullish on the world. I'm very bullish on mankind and
I think that everything is gonna work out great.
But I I also think that you know that that doesn't mean that you
don't grab an umbrella when it looks like it's gonna rain.
Yeah. I agree.
Well, thanks so much for sharing.
You're a good friend, but I'm happy to be the same time you
like, you know, it's it's. I'm sure you got a good audience
and if I can help out in any way let me know.
Thank you. I hope you enjoyed this episode.
If you did, it would be amazing if you could rate, review and
subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice.
It will help us educate more millennials on the importance of
Bitcoin. You can follow and connect with
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