What the fuck? I mean, that was our government doing that.
It's just, it's just sick. We gotta fix it.
We just, I mean, these people cannot fail fast enough.
I'm just, I'm fed up.
To me, it's a mission.
It's absolutely a mission to spread the word
and get people pissed off so that we're marching
on the Eccles building down in DC
to end the goddamn Federal Reserve.
I mean, it's just, it's beyond the pale.
And by the way, these people know
that what they're doing is wrong.
They absolutely know it.
They know that what they're doing is wrong.
And, but they can get away with it
because nobody's calling them on it.
That's the beauty of the internet, right?
And that's the beauty of books
and that's the beauty of passing knowledge around.
All we gotta do, I mean, we outnumber them enormously.
They got their hands on all the levers of control,
but we're taking that away too,
because, you know, they say, well, we can tax you,
we can grab your Bitcoin, we can do the, oh yeah?
You know, Mola on the Bay, you motherfuckers.
I mean, you know, I've got 12 words.
You can't take my money.
That's the beauty of the system.
We finally got a weapon that allows us
to actually destroy their system, which,
by the way, it needs to be destroyed.
It really does.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
My name is Walker and this is the Bitcoin Podcast.
The Bitcoin time chain is 855106
and the value of one Bitcoin is still one Bitcoin.
Shocker.
Today's episode is Bitcoin Talk,
where I talk with my guest about Bitcoin
and whatever else comes up.
Today, that guest is the one and only Lawrence LaParde.
Larry is just an awesome guy.
I love talking to him
and he has a seemingly endless wealth of knowledge.
We cover a ton of different topics.
We talk about the takeaways from the Bitcoin conference,
the Bitcoin Strategic Reserve
and all the geopolitical implications of it.
The massive shift in the Overton window
that we've seen recently,
general fiat fuckery like the military industrial complex,
three letter agencies, et cetera,
the absolutely rampant corruption
amongst our government and central bank,
the Federal Reserve Cartel and a heck of a lot more.
Larry also goes on a couple of absolutely fire rants
that I know you are going to love.
And fair warning, we do swear a lot in this episode.
If you're a first-time listener, perhaps you didn't know that,
but if you've listened to a few of these shows,
you're well aware of what's coming.
So if you are scared of swear words,
you may not like this episode.
Again, fair warning.
Now that said, by the time you finish,
I think it's safe to say that you will be fired the fuck up
at all the fiat fuckery going on in this world
and ready to peacefully burn this motherfucker down.
Figuratively speaking, of course,
so that we can build a better system based on Bitcoin
from the ashes of this fiat world.
Before we dive in, do me a favor
and subscribe to the Bitcoin podcast,
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and check out my sponsor, Bitbox, in the show notes.
Or you can just go to bitbox.swiss.walker
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If you'd rather watch this show than listen,
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Without further ado,
let's get into this Bitcoin talk with Larry LaParde.
["The Star-Spangled Banner"]
Larry, welcome.
Thanks for coming on.
Hey Walker, really nice to be with you.
Well, you've been on a lot of podcasts.
I think that's fair to say.
Over exposed.
That's all right.
You and Lynn, I think anytime you guys are on a podcast,
I always see the YouTube thumbnail or the episode title.
It's always something very like,
everyone is screwed and doom and doom.
No, not. There's a lot of good stuff going on, right?
Yeah, so I always think that's funny,
but I suppose it's just pandering
to the algorithm a little bit.
Maybe, yeah.
But so there's a lot of stuff I want to get into with you.
I've got as much time as you like.
All right, that sounds great to me.
But so let's start out first,
because a few people had written and said
they wanted to hear about this.
You were a Goldbug, are a Goldbug.
But you are also a hardcore Bitcoiner
who's hugely vocal about why you are a hardcore Bitcoiner.
Absolutely.
But can you just start us off with, who are you?
How the heck did you get here today?
And how did you bridge that gap from Goldbug to Bitcoiner?
Which seems to be a chasm that not everyone crosses.
Peter Schiff sir hasn't crossed it.
Yeah, sure.
I think a lot of people have heard this,
but so I've been an investment manager my entire life.
I graduated from business school
and went into the investment management business.
I was a venture capitalist investing in technology
because technology, in my view,
is going to save us all and change the world.
It's really positive what's going on.
And even though we're in a rough period here,
I really want to portray the optimism
and the cheerful and constructive stuff
that Sailor talks about.
And so I invest in technology from the early 80s
all the way up to the mid 2000s.
And my big wins were in the internet.
I had one of the first internet IPOs,
a company called NetScape, or I mean Netcom.
And to me, technology's changed in the world.
It's a great area to invest in and I love it.
And maybe that background is why I was a Goldbug
that was able to adopt Bitcoin very quickly
because Bitcoin's technology, which I'd done.
But throughout all of that, my grandfather
was a real old stodgy guy and he owned Gold.
And he was very critical of FDR,
taking away the Gold when he was much younger.
Yeah, and he just said,
the goddamn dollar is fiat and it's not going to last
and they're printing the shit out of it.
And this was a long time ago.
This was way before Bitcoin was invented.
And so I kind of grew up with a Goldbug background,
thinking that fiat, knowing that fiat was a broken system,
knowing that Keynes was wrong,
and knowing that what Nixon did in 71 was deeply wrong,
and understanding that sound money
is the moral basis of a sound society.
And that since we drifted away from sound money,
I think a lot of things have gone wrong since 1971.
And as you and I discussed before this show,
I'm actually writing a book on that
to try and kind of explain what I think has gone wrong
and why it's gone wrong.
But to me, the going off the Gold standard in 71
was a really bad thing.
It's been really bad for this country.
And I can still remember the 70s.
And there were some things wrong then too,
including the Vietnam War, but it was a much better country.
The CEOs made four times or five times
with the guy working on the assembly line made,
not 400 times.
And there was a broad middle class
and one wage earner could support a family.
And it was just a better time, a better country.
It wasn't the way it is today.
And so I remember all that.
But bridging it to the Bitcoin thing.
So I was a gold bug, always had been a gold bug,
but I was investing in technology.
So that's kind of the general background.
And then what happened to me is I did all these internet
investments and did well.
And I kind of semi-retired after the internet bubble
because I could see that bubble bursting.
I even played the bursting of the bubble.
And I was coaching my kids' sports teams.
I know you just had your son.
And congratulations.
I'm very happy for you, Apollo, et cetera, for you and Carla.
And I was watching what was going on.
And then the GFC happened.
And I was like, holy shit.
I mean, Bernanke's response to the GFC
was just shocking to me.
We're going to take interest rates to zero.
We're going to print $2 trillion, $3 trillion.
And I realized that the money I had probably
wasn't going to last me into my 90s, which I hope to make it
there.
And I had to go back to work.
And so I pivoted from being a technology investor
to investing in gold and silver mining stocks.
And I was very fortunate.
I was involved with the Ron Paul movement.
I ran a couple of newspaper ads to support him.
And all the Ron Paul guys were talking about Bitcoin.
And I was kind of like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I had followed the prior attempts, eCash.
And there were a couple of others.
I don't recall the names now.
But as we all know, there was an etymology of Bitcoin,
pre-Bitcoin.
And they all failed.
They had the double spend problem.
We'd gotten them.
And so somebody came up and said, hey,
you got to do this Bitcoin thing.
It's going to be free to money.
It's not controlled by the government.
I was like, yeah, yeah.
That's bullshit.
We've tried that.
It hasn't worked.
And it was a natural mental response.
But it started working.
And the pizza got done.
And I wasn't paying attention.
And Max was talking about it.
And I wasn't paying attention.
And then it kind of got to $100 a coin.
And I'm like, Jesus, maybe there's something here.
And this is like 11, 12, something like that.
And I started paying attention.
And I actually started filling out the forms from my gox.
And fortunately, I didn't send them the money.
Right before I was about to send them the money, they failed.
Although even I've heard even people who had Fiat there.
I've actually got, I heard over at the conference
that somebody who had Fiat there got 135 times
their Fiat money back, even though they only got 16%
of their original coins back.
Isn't that interesting?
They lost 84% of their coins.
But the 16 that they had gave them 135x the Fiat they had
contributed.
Isn't that amazing?
That's incredible.
Yeah, it's interesting data.
Anyway, so Coinbase came out with a public offering and backed
by Reputable Venture Capitalists in San Francisco.
And I said, OK, this is the way I can buy Bitcoin.
I started buying Bitcoin.
Not a lot.
Because I still had that fear that the technology wasn't
going to work.
And the having, the difficulty adjustment, all the things
that we now understand intrinsically.
I didn't know any of those.
I didn't understand any of those because I just
hadn't taken the time.
And Safe hadn't written his book yet.
And I was going to conferences.
And I was going down to the MIT Bitcoin Forum
and sitting with core developers.
And I'm saying, hey, guys, how's this thing looking?
And they're like, it's interesting.
It's a good experiment.
And I said, do you worry about it?
I said, yeah, I worry about it all the fucking time.
I make a change.
And I think it might blow up.
And I'm like, OK, can't put too much money there.
But I kept buying coins.
I mean, small amounts.
And then, of course, 17 happened.
And it really took off.
And I was like, oh my god, I missed it.
And I chased it right up to the top in 17.
And then that run burst.
And went down to 10,000.
I doubled down.
It went down to 4,000.
I doubled down again.
Because I just believed in the technology.
We had hash wars.
And that scared me about the technology.
But what happened to me anyway is
that as I saw more and more blocks go off without any problems,
I got more and more convinced that this is technically sound.
And one could actually argue that it's a safer bet today,
maybe not as asymmetric a bet, but a much safer bet today
than it was back then.
Because it was really, it was wild west back then.
So what made it, to me, more interesting than gold,
which also goes up with monetary debasement.
And we'll continue to go up with monetary debasement,
because it's been money for 5,000 years.
8 billion people know it's money.
And of course, it'll eventually be demonetized by Bitcoin.
But I say eventually, as in decades, not days,
what got me more interesting goals,
it had two things going on.
It had the ability to, well, one,
it was ultimately going to be sounder on a stock to flow basis,
because of a 21 million cap.
And as we all know, the amount of gold
will double in the next 60 years.
The amount of gold on the planet will mine
as much as we've already mined.
So the idea of a fixed cap was very, very intriguing,
with a lower stock to flow.
And the other thing was just the adoption curve,
just the recognition that this had gone from pennies
on the pizza transaction to hundreds of dollars
to thousands of dollars.
And honestly, I don't see any reason
why that trend isn't going to continue.
I'm sure we're going to a million dollars a coin, and then
to five, and then to 10.
I mean, we all saw Saylor's numbers down at the show
this last week.
And I don't think he's wrong.
I mean, there's a band within which you can be in.
And I don't know if he's going to hit the high end of that band.
But to me, this is really pretty simple.
I mean, this is a better monetary technology.
And it really solves an enormous problem.
I mean, as I'm writing my book, I was working on it today.
I mean, for 5,000 years, for all of recorded history,
there's never been any form of money that couldn't be diluted.
I mean, think about that.
Even gold, there's dilution.
Here you have a form of money with zero dilution beyond 21.
I mean, that's just, it blows your mind.
And so recognizing that, I recognize
this is a different beast, a different animal,
a new invention.
And it's like Saylor says.
I mean, there was flight before they broke the sound barrier,
and then there was flight after they broke the sound barrier.
I mean, they're two different things.
So to me, I've really heavily pivoted.
And I still maintain a foot in the gold camp.
And I still have a fund with a lot of investors
who are counting on me to make the money in gold stocks.
And I will.
But over time, I'm obviously leaning very heavily
into the Bitcoin world.
And eventually, we'll probably be much less
involved in the gold world.
The role of gold, in my view, it's analog sound money.
Bitcoin's digital sound money.
The role of gold, in my view, is it doesn't
require ongoing energy to stay alive.
In other words, the way the Bitcoin network does,
which I don't think is a problem, but it does.
And it doesn't have the historical volatility of Bitcoin,
although I think that will dampen out in Bitcoin.
But some of my investors are quite old.
And when you have an old investor and 70, 80 years old,
and they're putting millions of dollars with you,
they don't want to put millions of dollars into an asset that
can go down 50% because their time window isn't that long.
So if you're 30 years old and your asset goes down 50%,
you know you've got another 40 years to go,
and you know it'll come back.
You don't worry about it.
But so gold, to me, represents a less volatile form
of sound money with much less upside and much less volatility
than Bitcoin.
So that's how I reconcile it.
I love people in both camps.
I try to support the people in both camps
because I think the important thing that they both share
is a hatred for the fractional reserve banking
and the fiat system, which is run by a bunch of evil criminals
that have really ruined the world
and caused enormous misery, pain, and wars
over the last 50 years.
And that shit just disgusts me.
And so anybody who's on the other side of that shit,
even if it's old fashioned gold, they're my friend.
And as I say, I've taken it upon myself
to be it's a challenge to me to orange pill gold bugs.
I mean, to me, gold is like marijuana.
It's like the gateway drug to get people into Bitcoin, which
is heroin.
If you really want to get a buzz,
you've got to be on Bitcoin.
So I don't know, that's kind of a mouthful answer
to your question.
But does that take you where you wanted to go?
It sure does.
I like the gateway drug analogy.
And thankfully, Bitcoin is slightly less destructive,
I think, than heroin, which is good.
I wouldn't advocate using, I don't drink alcohol,
and I don't use drugs.
I wouldn't advocate any of that kind of behavior.
But I think it's a good analog in the sense of the path
along of adoption.
And it's kind of a perfect segue to it.
And I appreciate the background again.
This is a safe space for rants that run on as long as you want.
So there's no judge on here.
I love it.
You know you're going to get that with me.
I sure did.
I was looking forward to it.
But so I wanted to dig in a little bit because, OK,
we're talking about here both Bitcoin and gold,
both forms of sound money.
We are now at a time where it seems that money
is incredibly unsound.
Before.
We are.
How?
Yeah.
And it feels that we're at, and perhaps this
is how every generation feels.
I'm of a younger generation.
But it feels like we're on this precipice of, wow,
shit is about to really hit the fan.
And of course, much shit has been hitting that fan
and spraying through it this whole time.
So I don't even know what shit hitting the fan more looks like.
But we have also these, what some would say,
are maybe glimmers of hope when it comes to governments
looking at ways to actually operate in a more sound way.
Now, I know gold bugs for many years
have been saying, you know, the government's
got to go back to a gold standard at some point, right?
It's got to go back to it because it's just,
it will fall apart.
This machine will break down if it doesn't.
Now we have, as we saw at the Bitcoin conference,
you have folks like RFK explicitly saying,
we're going to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
You've got Trump saying it as well, not quite as explicitly.
But OK, we're going to keep the Bitcoin
that we have.
How much of that is owned by Bitfinex is a different story.
But OK, still saying at least we're not
going to sell any Bitcoin.
We're going to keep any we acquire in the future.
And then Senator Cynthia Lummis actually putting,
you know, holding a bill up there on stage, which she then
released, saying that, no, I'm going to make this explicit.
We are going to establish a Bitcoin strategic reserve.
And this is a bill.
This isn't just a campaign promise.
This is a bill that she's putting out there.
So I want to just kind of get your thoughts more generally
on, OK, your take on all.
This was a historic conference.
It was.
Undoubtedly historic.
Absolutely.
A couple of Democrats, to be fair,
more Republicans and an independent presidential
candidate there as well.
It was historic.
There was a lot said.
But talk is cheap.
What's your read on all of this?
How this actually plays out?
What was your feeling coming out of the conference?
Well, it was extremely positive.
And it was a very political conference,
as you and I discussed.
I mean, and that's because it's an election year.
I'm guessing next year in Las Vegas,
we won't necessarily attract as much political attention,
right?
You know, let's not kid ourselves.
You know, politicians, they live for votes.
And that's certainly why Trump was there.
I think Bobby was there probably on a more principle level,
a more principle basis.
But look, the Overton window is shifting.
I mean, if somebody had told you a year ago,
you would have two out of the three presidential candidates
at your conference praising what you're doing,
you just said, I don't believe it, right?
So I mean, this is a big, big change and big positive.
Even though Trump doesn't fully understand what he's talking
about, he went from hating it and not believing in it.
I mean, I think Vivek and some others orange
killed him to understanding that this is strategically important.
I'm guessing Vivek was smart up the way he probably did it.
He said, hey, look, China's going to beat us on this.
And there's nothing Trump hates more than getting beat by China.
So he was like, OK, no, there's no way I'm going to let you,
I'm going to let those guys get it.
So it's an incredibly positive movement.
It's interesting, Walker.
I mean, I think honestly, in the longer run, I'm not even going to.
I think we're going to go through so many changes that I'm not
even sure it's necessarily going to matter what nation states
think, because we're going to get totally decentralized.
And we're all going to just kind of quote unquote do what we want.
And these nation states, they're all going to kind of die.
And I don't know if that means a dissolution of the United States
or if we break into segments or regions.
Or it's hard to see.
This is a big fourth turning.
And it's hard to see exactly how it's going to unfold.
But the thing that has me extremely optimistic,
I was just writing this portion of the book I'm working on,
is just how rapid this technological decentralization
is occurring.
I mean, it's like, wow.
And furthermore, as you were saying in your lead
into the question, boy, shit is really breaking,
and shit's happening fast now.
And I mean, look, you have the chairman of the federal reserve
board citing Stein's law, which is Stein's law
as if something cannot go on forever at wind.
And he's saying this fiscal path is unsustainable.
And so that just blows my mind.
I mean, that was not on my bingo card, right?
So I mean, he's sitting there saying, OK, Jay,
so what are you going to do about it?
And then you've got guys at the top, like a Larry Fink, who
is just the ultimate fiat master, and not somebody
I particularly admire, but kind of realizing
that he's got to bend the knee, because oh my god,
this thing's going to take over.
And so it's really, we're on the cusp
of that really rapid adoption, in my opinion,
kind of the Malcolm Gladwell curve,
where you get to a 10% inflection point,
and then boom, everybody knows that you need it.
I mean, that's what Nashville felt like to me.
I mean, a couple of years before, we
were all down there cheering on Jack,
as he had orange-pilled Bukele, and El Salvador was going
to go on the Bitcoin standard.
And that was fabulous.
We had a nation state.
I mean, now we've got the biggest nation state talking about it.
You got Lummis introducing a bill, et cetera, et cetera.
So you got Jason Lowry being cited in RFK's speech.
I mean, the strategic importance of it.
So you've got the ETFs.
I mean, since you and I have done a podcast,
I mean, the ETFs have been approved.
As Sailor pointed out, and I know this was to be true with me,
too, when I would try and orange-pill wealthy friends,
their response, even if I could get them
to accept the premise that it was a good thing,
their response was, yeah, but the government's going to kill it.
Well, the government just approved an ETF.
So that argument's kind of off the table.
Now, look, when it gets to be existential,
and they realize the dollar is failing,
and particularly if Kamala wins, and Warren is her Treasury
secretary, maybe we've got a 6102 risk.
But for now, anyway, the government
is, in my view, being pretty friendly towards it.
And we're not Kamala, or not Warren and Biden,
but all the candidates.
And I don't know who's going to win this election,
but certainly if Trump wins the election,
I don't think we're going to have much trouble in this area.
So to me, the big thing that the conference showed
is that this Overton window has shifted.
And that fits in nicely with my overall macro thesis, which
is it's getting really interesting now.
I mean, they cannot stop this spending.
They cannot stop this debt accumulation.
We're over $35 trillion.
When COVID came along, they upped the spending by $2 trillion.
And you get it.
I mean, whether it's right or wrong, and COVID was fake,
but whatever, you can kind of understand
how and why they did it.
But what you would think in a normal system, OK,
that emergency is over.
Spending goes back down.
Well, no, it hasn't.
It just keeps on growing.
And so that's the way these parabolic moves happen.
And so J-PAL is going to be forced to print more money,
because as Lynn has so brilliantly pointed out,
nothing stops this train.
Right?
I mean, the fact of the matter is
that you cannot support this level of debt
without having more underlying monetary units.
And there's only one place those can come from.
And that's a combination of the Fed and the banks.
And so they're trying to pretend like they don't have to do it,
but they're going to do it.
And as always, the Fed's probably going to wait.
They'll be behind the curve, and they're
going to wait until something is going to break.
And it feels to me like we can't make it for another year,
year and a half without something breaking.
But I could be wrong.
I mean, when Silicon Valley broke,
and that was something breaking, they violated the law.
They violated Dodd-Frank.
They changed the rules, and they saved it.
And so they kicked the can.
So they do have all of the tools and the megaphone.
And most of the sheep are pretty willing to kind of play along
with their game.
But I think they've got more and more cracks in their armor.
And they're fighting a losing game.
I mean, my guess is J-PAL is sitting there thinking to himself,
why the hell did I take the second term?
And God, may of 2026 can't come fast enough,
because I want to get the fuck out of here.
I wouldn't blame him.
Right?
So there's a couple of things I want to dig into you with on that.
Because one is the can being kicked down the road.
But maybe before we get onto that, just because we did just
hit $35 trillion nationally.
I mean, congratulations, everyone.
We did it.
Nice number, $35 trillion.
We had an $11 trillion in four years.
It took over 200 years to get the first $11 trillion.
We did it in four years.
So to your point of everything kind of accelerating, right?
Can you talk a little bit, something
you've talked about a good amount on other shows
I've seen you on and just in general,
is that kind of debt doom loop?
Or I think lavish would call it the debt spiral.
James has done a great job of laying that out.
I mean, yeah, so let's just talk about kind of the math here.
I mean, so as we all know, when they run a deficit,
they have to pay for it.
To pay for it, they have to issue debt.
And somebody's got to buy that debt.
You've got to find a sucker at the card table,
as Groman says.
And so because in the past, it was a petrodollar.
And originally the Saudis and all those guys
would recycle the debt.
And then it became China.
When we let them into the WTO in exchange for them
buying the debt.
But all those guys aren't buying the debt anymore.
And so what happens is we're having a hard time finding
buyers for the debt.
And what that means is that intrinsically,
interest rates go up.
And if interest rates go up, then that
makes the deficit larger.
And the deficit being larger means
you've got to sell more debt.
But selling more debt makes the interest rates go up more.
So you can kind of see where I'm going here.
It's rinse, wash, repeat until the whole damn thing blows up.
And this is not that unusual.
I mean, if you read Dalio's debt crisis book,
if you read Reinhart and Rogar, a number of other books
about this.
I mean, this has happened in many countries.
I mean, this has happened in Venezuela.
This has happened in Zimbabwe.
This has happened in Brazil multiple times.
It's happened in Argentina.
It's kind of happening now in Turkey.
I mean, countries that can print currency,
this is the fundamental problem, right?
If they start to incur debts, originally the debt's productive.
But eventually it becomes less productive.
And then they have to issue more debt to pay for the old debt.
And it's like a family that's taken out new credit cards
to make the payments on the old credit cards.
And eventually, somebody said, we're not
giving you any more credit cards.
And in this case, the powers that
be that are running the system, though,
they kind of think, well, we can just, it's not a problem,
because we have a printing press and we can always
print the money.
But the caution I would say to that is Gresham's law says
that once everyone figures out that you can never stop,
they're not going to think the money is money good.
And so if you study the history of hyperinflations
in other countries, they occur when everyone loses faith.
And we're getting really close to that area right now.
I mean, I think there are very few people in the country who
aren't aware that we have an inflation problem.
And I think the very smart people in the country
are really aware that it's probably not
solvable without a lot of inflation or a complete collapse.
I think there's some portion of the population that thinks,
well, OK, fine.
But I'll believe the narrative, it's going to get better.
But here's the, I was trying to be an optimist earlier.
Here's the pessimistic side of this.
It's not going to really get better anytime soon.
And in fact, there's going to be a real painful period here
as it gets substantially worse, in my opinion,
in the next five years.
And I'm going to kind of talk about that in the book
and how to play it.
But yeah, once you're in one of these things,
you really can't get out.
I mean, I think we crossed the event horizon.
There was a time to turn back.
I mean, in 2008, some people say to me, well, hey, Larry,
what would you have had them do in 2008?
I mean, come on.
If they hadn't done it, the whole system would have collapsed.
I mean, the ATMs wouldn't work.
And that's the game the bankers always play.
They basically, they come at you.
They put a gun to your head.
And they say, print more money.
Give me more money.
Or I'm going to blow up the system.
I mean, it really is kind of blackmail.
And the Fed has been a blackmail artist since its inception.
And so here's how I would have handled it.
I talked about this in the book, too.
OK, fine.
I want to be the negotiator for the government, all right?
So you guys want to bail out to make the ATMs work?
OK, great.
We're going to give you a bailout.
We're going to protect all the depositors.
We're going to make sure the ATMs work all of that.
But here are conditions.
And they're not negotiable.
And if you don't accept them, we're
going to let you all fail.
You're going to give back three years of your salary
and stock options.
Your entire board of directors is going to resign.
Everybody at a C-suite level and above, they're going to resign.
And we're going to go out and we're
going to recruit small town bankers from all over America
to come into JP Morgan and all these big banks.
We're going to let them run it and clean it up.
And all you guys are all fired.
Now, if that had happened, we might
have been able to go the other direction.
We might have gone back to more of a sound money system.
But that didn't happen.
We bailed them all out.
They paid themselves $20 billion of bonuses in 2008.
And all those people are part of the powers
that fund the machine, that give huge donations
to the people that keep the system running the way the system
is running.
And the rest of us, we are kind of the screw-ease.
I mean, they're the screw-ores and we are the screw-ease.
And that's why the wealth inequality is just so outrageous.
I mean, how is Ken Griffin, a guy who basically just moves
around paper in a hedge fund?
How does he worth $37 billion so that he's
able to spend $47 million on a dinosaur?
I mean, this shit just blows my mind.
It's so surreal.
I mean, these guys got nothing on Marie Antoinette.
I mean, this is French Revolution kind of shit, right?
It really is out of control.
And I was just reading this morning
that we're spending a billion dollars supporting illegal
aliens or illegal immigrants into the state of Massachusetts.
Massachusetts state is spending a billion dollars a year
supporting people who've come here illegally.
And yet, I know of cases where we've got homeless veterans
on the streets.
I mean, it's just like, what the fuck?
This society is so goddamn broken.
And it's all because of the fiat money.
And I do believe there's a god.
And I do believe he's going to come down and wreak
vengeance on all these fiat assholes.
I mean, he's going to make this fiat money worthless.
And then the rest of us, the remnant of this country,
the people who are the workers and the honest folks,
are going to, we're going to rise back up
and we're going to start transacting with each other
and adding value.
And we're going to use an honest currency to do it.
And the most logical honest currency with which to do it
is Bitcoin.
And that's what's going to happen.
So it's a very optimistic story at the end.
But honestly, the next five to 10 years
might be pretty turbulent.
And, but I'm a sailor.
We have to be cheerful and constructive.
Try to figure out how to get through it.
Now, a funny thing that I always see,
and I see this from a lot of the MMT crowd.
Oh, god.
Yeah, I know.
But they say things to folks like you or to other people
who they call like dollar-doomers or whatever they use.
They say, well, you've been calling for a collapse
for however many years.
And look, everything's still fine.
Of course, we know it's not actually fine.
And many people are really struggling.
They're fine.
But the system is not.
And neither are the people in it.
But, yeah, I mean, is it just that they
can't see the fourth turning happening while they're
in the middle of it?
Or are they just genuinely so bought
in to this hyper-Kinzianism of MMT that they actually believe?
No, no, $35 trillion in debt is a good thing,
because public debt is just a private surplus, as they say,
which is just insanity.
Yeah, I don't honestly know.
I mean, in most cases, I think they're not very intellectually
bright.
But look, to a guy who jumps off a building,
he's flying for the first 98th floor, 100-story building.
For the first 98 floors down, he's flying.
I mean, he's just up there in the air, and it's all good.
But it doesn't end well.
And so, yes, I mean, we've been calling
for this for a while, but it's because you could just,
you know, it's a bet that's very highly probable in its outcome,
but it's more difficult to predict in its time frame.
But I would suggest to you that, you know, in 71,
there was a big inflationary burst of going off the gold
standard, they got it back in the can.
And I kept it going for quite some time.
In 98, we had LTCM blow up.
That was the first eruption.
And then we had 2008, that was a bigger eruption.
Then we had COVID, that was an even bigger.
So the contractions, if this is like childbirth, which you're
familiar with now, the contractions
are getting closer together, and they're
getting larger in size.
I mean, it took Bernanke seven years to print $3 trillion.
It took Powell 18 months to print $5 trillion.
So I mean, round numbers, I don't have exact figures.
But the point is it.
And I mean, everyone was bitching about Reagan's budget
deficits in the 80s.
I mean, they were $100 billion a year.
I mean, we're running a deficit now that's 20x that.
We're running a $2 trillion deficit annually.
So it's gotten larger and larger at scale.
And when it'll happen, I don't know.
And I've been dead ass wrong about thinking
it'll happen faster than it will, because I can definitely
see what's going on.
And perhaps I'll continue to be wrong,
and this won't get resolved till 2050.
I certainly hope it goes faster.
I mean, the fourth turning model would suggest
that it's coming sooner.
But my prediction today is that this is all
going to get sorted out between 2028 and 2035.
Because each, I mean, what it takes to have it sorted out,
sadly, because nobody's forward thinking and willing to,
well, some people are forward thinking.
We talk about lumisol.
But people won't go here where we are until they really
experience pain.
And they won't really experience pain
until everyone comes to recognize what's going on.
And they want out of the money that we're using.
And that's happening, but it's still early days.
So I don't know.
I mean, if we're, let's call it, let's call money failure
a baseball game.
I mean, I'd say we're in inning two.
And it might be an extra inning game.
So we've got a ways to go.
But it's common.
You can just see it.
You can see the pattern.
So is that helpful?
Absolutely.
And one thing that I struggle with a little bit,
and I'd love your thoughts on this, is OK.
The US is obviously in a precarious position.
That said, to Stila, now that Greg Foss uses,
it's the prettiest horse at the glue factory still.
Absolutely.
If we're looking at it like that.
And you've talked previously about how Americans have really
been coddled in a lot of ways, because we have not
had a recent hyperinflation episode.
It's similar to Gladstein's point.
You had to go back to the continental, which
was the founding of the country.
Civil War had a lot of inflation, but it wasn't hyper.
So in living memory, we don't have one.
Gladstein talks about that check your financial privilege
all the time, both with access to services,
but then also in terms of you are watching your currency
get cut in half or worse overnight.
We haven't really had that.
And so I think it's difficult for a lot of Americans
to actually understand that that's a very real possibility.
But what I would ask you is, OK, let's, in this 2028 to 2035
range, is America still the last domino to fall?
Or does it somehow proceed everything else going down?
Because we are still, for now, the reserve currency.
Correct.
What does that actually look like if, by the time America falls,
does that mean every other fiat currency has already
gone to near zero?
Or how does that shake out?
That's a great question, Walker.
And I thought about it a lot.
And Brent Johnson, the dollar milkshake theory guy
is a friend of mine.
And Luke and I have talked about it as well, Luke Grohman.
And it's a little hard to say.
I mean, so yes, we are the reserve currency.
That's a plus.
But we run a much larger trade deficit than anybody else,
much larger.
And I mean, what do we export?
We export weapons and money.
I mean, people, really, there's not much else.
Whereas other people, Russian, a lot of other places,
I mean, they're exporting stuff, I mean, real valuable stuff.
What we're talking about here is, I mean,
the dollar has a bid because it was the reserve currency.
And it still is the reserve currency.
But that's fading fast.
We've got to go into something.
We'll talk about gold in here in a second.
The answer to your question has to do with,
when do countries start trading based on their trade balance
and their investment balance and not just
on the power they've got and their military power,
like what we've got?
And so the military power and the fact
that we are historically the world's reserve currency
have been how the dollar is valued.
So I could see us being the last currency standing,
but I could also see us going sooner than some other currencies
that are in countries that are much better in terms
of the balance of trade.
I mean, it's because relative currency valuations often
really have to do with just trade.
What are you exporting?
What are you importing?
Because that's what those cross prices are.
And more importantly, the real issue with the dollar
is not, I mean, Brent says, well, it's a milkshake.
It's better.
Fine.
I ignore all that shit.
They're all pieces of paper.
They're all fiat currencies.
I mean, there's nobody in the world who's really
running a sound money stance.
That really doesn't matter.
What matters is the dollar crossed to gold
and the dollar crossed to Bitcoin.
And those are the two clues that tell you,
I mean, if Bitcoin's at half a million dollars a coin
and gold's at $10,000 an ounce, well, guess what?
You know the dollar is failing on an absolute basis.
So let's kind of touch there into another area that
is relevant, which is we're seeing, and this is big to me,
in the United States, I mean, and you have to remember,
we all believe Bitcoin's the solution, and it is.
It's much better than gold.
But I mean, most people aren't where we are.
And most people in governments who are thinking,
OK, we got to do a reset, or we got to go back to sound money.
The first thing that comes to their mind is gold.
I mean, a perfect example.
This is a really nice lady.
It's a very smart name, Judy Shelton,
who's nominated for the Fed.
She's a sound money person.
And I think that the general view is that we've got to go,
if we're going to do a reset, it would be a reset to gold.
And what you're seeing out there right now
is you're kind of seeing that happen subtly, but consistently.
And what I mean to say is that everything, you know,
all trade used to be in dollars, but you're seeing now
countries trading with each other in their own currencies
and then net settling in gold.
And that's why the gold, what's very interesting to me
is the gold price has been very strong in spite of the fact
that gold ETF purchasing has gone down.
I mean, the Bitcoin ETFs have eaten gold's lunch, right?
Bitcoin ETFs have gone from nothing
to being substantial in size.
Gold ETFs have been shrinking the whole time.
OK, you look at that and you would think to yourself,
well, the price of gold should be going down.
But it's not.
I mean, yesterday, the price of gold
traded at a new all-time interday high, 2045, 2458, or something.
And the reason for that is that other countries are using gold.
They are using gold as their neutral reserve asset.
They realize that having the dollar as a neutral reserve
asset is a losing proposition.
In other words, they're very much like the French were in 71.
They can see the problem that we've got.
And they're thinking, oh, shit, I'm not
hanging onto these things.
I'm not buying any more treasury bills.
In fact, I'm selling treasury bills.
And China and Japan have both been net sellers of treasury
bills the last six months.
Other countries doing the same.
And most people, I think, are just saying,
if I'm going to try and store value, gee,
maybe I ought to do it in gold.
Sadly, and maybe some countries are doing it in Bitcoin,
but I don't think at the sovereign level other
than El Salvador and maybe some countries in the Middle East.
I went to a Satoshi's roundtable over in the Middle East.
And there were some very interesting, highly placed
Middle Eastern people there who, my sense
is they might have a sense that Bitcoin is digital gold.
But it's still pretty early days at the sovereign level
from what I can tell.
Now, that's why what Loomis said and what Kennedy said
and what Trump kind of said, but he didn't really
understand what he was saying, that having Bitcoin
is a strategic reserve.
That's why that's so goddamn important.
And I don't think any of them really fully understand
what that means.
But they've been orange-pilled and they're coming to get it.
And basically, as Saylor laid out in a speech at the show,
I mean, if the US were to go maxi on printing fiat,
I mean, if the US were to adopt the MicroStrategy Playbook,
which is to say, if they were to print fiat and use it
to buy Bitcoin, that would be a very good thing
for the US people.
It would be a very, very good thing.
Now, what they probably don't realize,
and this is where I think Trump, Bitcoin with Trump,
it's like a trojan horse.
It's now inside the circle and I don't think
he knows what he's got.
Because if we go in that direction,
that's going to accelerate the failure of the dollar.
And don't get me wrong.
I mean, I'll make it very clear.
I think my kids, your kids will be purchasing things.
I think everything will be priced in Satoshi's
in X number of years.
I don't know if it's 10 or 20 or 30,
but I don't think there will be dollar prices for things.
I think the dollar will ultimately fail.
I think Saylor thinks that and knows that too,
but I don't think he can say it because of his position.
He doesn't want to, I mean, it's, you know,
the US government's the bear
and there's no point in poking the bear,
especially when you're, you know,
Michael Saylor and you've got this huge Bitcoin operation
that you're running.
So, you know, his view is just it's this pristine asset
and that's great.
I mean, I agree with that.
That's all true, but it's going to become more than that
in my view.
Well, and that's actually, that's a,
it's a perfect leading because I wanted to ask you about,
okay, this Bitcoin strategic reserve
that's been, that's been now floated out there by, you know,
by multiple people now and now is actually a bill,
which is, you know, quite interesting.
Like, well, they're going to have to,
they're going to have to talk about that and debate it.
And that just brings, you know,
opens up that over to the window even more.
But my thought was, okay, doesn't this actually,
let's say this happens, okay?
Let's say this Bitcoin bill is passed into law.
Doesn't that actually allow the United States
to let's say kick that can down the road a little bit more
to maintain dollar hegemony,
to keep themselves solvent longer than they would have
normal because you're saying this,
you think it's going to ultimately accelerate it.
So, because I'm struggling on this.
Okay.
How does that, how does that shake out?
I listened to the Matthew Crowder, you know,
video before our talk,
because I know somebody asked the question of,
it's tricky, it's complicated.
You know, I think my, I come down on the side of no.
I mean, I think it's good strategically for the country,
but I think everything that supports Bitcoin
and makes the Bitcoin dollar, I mean, look,
one, sadly, I don't think Bill,
Loomis' bill is going to get any traction.
I mean, I think it's a great move on her part.
I'm glad she did it.
I mean, it's, you know, just like I'm glad Trump
embraces Bitcoin, not even understanding it.
It's all good, but, you know,
in terms of actually having something happen
as a result of that, I think the odds are quite low.
If it did happen and they became, you know,
they got on the bid for it and started buying it,
it's going to push the price much higher.
And you want to talk about what's going to cause
the dollar to fail.
It's going to be the realization, I mean, you know,
this goes back to Gresham's law, right?
I mean, once people realize that, you know,
once the Bitcoin price crosses 100, 200, 300, 500,000,
you know, people are going to realize, holy shit,
this is continuing to be the best performing asset
in the world.
How can I not hold this?
And more and more people are going to buy it.
And so, you know, that's just a problem
until eventually everyone goes, you know,
it's kind of like, and it's going to be slower
than this example, but it's kind of like
the example of Silicon Valley Bank.
I mean, you know, the word spread,
or like a fire in the theater, the word spread,
and as the word spreads and spreads and spreads
and more and more people realize, holy shit,
this bank is bankrupt, then one day, you know,
a hundred billion dollars a deposit,
they had $49 billion of deposits with running one day.
And one day later, the bank was bankrupt.
And so that goes to Parker Lewis's,
you know, gradually then suddenly, right?
I mean, and so, you know, there will come,
in my opinion, I mean, and you've even had some people,
like I said, you've even had some people
kind of alluding to this.
I mean, you've got the Fed chairman saying,
we've got, this is not sustainable, okay?
Well, I mean, I guess another model of this is,
the emperor's got no clothes on, the US is bankrupt,
and we're spending way too much money.
We've got an uncontrollable financial
and fiscal situation.
So the question really is, you know,
who's gonna be the little boy that says,
hey, this guy's naked?
And then everyone goes, oh yeah, you're right.
I mean, you know, I mean, another perfect example
of the exact same phenomena was, many of us were saying,
you know, Biden is, he's senile.
I mean, the guy has totally fucking lost it, right?
I mean, we've known this for a year or two,
and you know, they gaslit at us and said,
oh, no, no, he's great, everything's fine.
And then finally, one day, they put him up on a stage
in a debate, you know, and guess what?
We all know he's senile, you know,
and therefore, he's no longer running for president.
And that's what's gonna happen.
I mean, you know, maybe not that quickly,
maybe not that dramatically,
but that's the kind of mental phase shift
that's going to happen.
And you know, by being aware of it today,
you know, my view is, you know, the whole financial saying was,
you know, you panicked first, panicked best.
I mean, you know, if we're gonna have a panic,
if we know the dollar's gonna fail,
we'll get the fuck out now, you know?
I mean, because I'd much rather buy Bitcoin at 70,000,
you know, a coin than at 700,000 a coin.
I mean, they're both gonna protect you,
but you know, I mean, I wish I'd been maxed,
I wish I'd been buying at $2 a coin,
but I wasn't smart enough or aware enough to do that.
And that's why I'm not a billionaire.
Yeah, he is, but you know, it's just,
to me, it's just an inevitable trend.
And therefore, you know, that's why I do what I do,
and I just pound the table to people to try to protect themselves
because I can just, you know, it's pattern recognition.
I can just see this pattern.
I've seen it in financial things for 40 years.
And you know, this is gonna go much, much, much higher.
You know, the only thing in my opinion,
Walker, that could change it would be incredible change
at the government level to get more fiscally responsible.
I mean, if, you know, when people come to invest in my fund,
sometimes they'll say, well, if they're smart,
they'll say, what could go wrong?
How do I, you know, how do I lose money, Larry?
What, you know, what changes, this gets fucked up.
And I say, okay, it's pretty simple.
And they laugh when I tell them this.
I say, you know, if suddenly the government says,
all right, we're gonna balance the budget,
we're gonna means test social security,
we're gonna raise the retirement age,
we're gonna close all the military bases,
we're gonna stop sending over money overseas,
and we're gonna completely balance the budget
so that we're no longer running a deficit
and we don't have to print money.
Well, okay, then suddenly having sound money
isn't gonna be as important, you know,
and the price of Bitcoin is not gonna go up as much
and the price of gold is not gonna go up as much
because the dollar won't be being debased as quickly.
But, you know, as you were smiling, as I said that,
because we all know, what are the odds of that happening?
Right?
I mean, they would seem to be pretty low.
They see, yeah, they're either low or they're zero.
But that, you know, in both cases, I mean,
I know which side of the straight I wanna be on, right?
Absolutely.
And, you know, it's an interesting thing
because one thing I, Trump said a lot,
and honestly, during his speech, I mean,
I think he's hilarious.
He's like, you know, he's a lot funnier than I thought.
Oh, yeah.
He has very funny lines.
I mean, he knows how to work a room.
I think he's a natural standup comic, honestly.
He's a little bit goofy, but, you know, I mean.
He works it well, though, and it works very well.
One thing I did not hear, though, unless I missed it,
but I didn't hear him talk at all
about shrinking the size of the government.
No.
I mean, I didn't hear him say anything.
And what, that would have been the venue to do it.
You're talking to a roomful of people who, predominantly,
if you asked them if the government
should be bigger, smaller, the same size,
they'd say smaller and as small as humanly possible.
Or, if someone would say non-existent, right?
Right.
But I didn't hear anything about that.
And so, maybe another way to look at this is, you know,
there's obviously a massive difference
between someone like Trump and someone like Kamala
or whoever, perhaps, ends up being the actual candidate.
Maybe it is going to be her.
But are they both just going to keep printing money
because nothing stops this train?
I mean, I think that's right.
I mean, I think, look, I think Trump is pretty much,
he's pretty narcissistic, and I think he's pretty much
driven by his ego.
I think he'd be, obviously, be a better choice than Kamala
because at least he's competitive.
And I think he would think of America first, you know,
vis-a-vis China and other places.
But I don't think anyone is thinking, you know,
anyone in these government roles, including Trump,
is thinking smaller government, you know,
more restraint cutting back.
And as Trump has always said, you know,
he's the master of debt, you know, I mean,
he was, you know, Mr. Leveridge.
And we know he wants lower interest rates.
And so, I don't think Trump at any kind of fundamental level
really understands that the money is broken
and that sound money is the solution.
I mean, which is not to say, though,
that he couldn't get advisors that wouldn't educate him
on that.
I mean, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
I don't think, you know, he's not a socialist
and he's gonna close the borders.
And I mean, a lot of his policies make a ton of sense.
So, you know, he's clearly, in my view,
the better choice of him versus Kamala.
But to be honest with you, you know,
listening to them all carefully,
the only one I can get any bit excited about
is RFK Jr.
Because, you know, I think he does deeply understand
the problem.
He does deeply understand how broken the society is,
you know, and he does wanna address the fundamental issue.
I mean, part of what's caused all this debt,
and we haven't talked much about this,
is just kind of the warfare state,
you know, the military industrial complex.
I mean, you know, we pissed away six or $7 trillion
in the Middle East, you know, trying to secure oil
and, you know, just all kinds of other stupid things.
And, you know, we've got, you know, veterans I see
in the airports with limbs blown off from IEDs.
And I mean, it's just, it's fucking tragic.
You know, not to mention all the foreigners we killed,
many of whom were innocent.
So, you know, the, sadly, I mean,
this is another piece of the centralization.
I mean, so my view, Walkers, in 46,
we hit peak centralization, you know, when,
I mean, World War II, you know,
because of Hitler's misbehavior,
we, you know, we slaughtered 50 million people,
50, 60 million people in World War II.
And that was peak centralization.
And now, thank God for technology,
thank God for, you know, Shockley
and the, you know, the development of the microchip
and then, you know, Fairchild and Intel
and everything that came after it.
Because what that has done is it's created the internet
and the internet is the biggest, most powerful,
decentralized force in the universe.
Because now guys like you can be equal
to Walter Cronkite, what he used to be.
I mean, we got our news from three sources
when I was a kid and it was all the news
that the government wanted to let out.
And of course we all now know the government lies
about just about everything.
And the only way to get the truth is to find it
from real truth tellers on the web.
And this is why, you know, Rogan and Tucker
and a ton of other people have gotten a lot of attention
because, you know, they represent an alternative
to what we know are lies.
And so this decentralization in my view
is gonna make your life and your son's life
just a whole lot better.
And it's long overdue.
Because these big centralized organizations are so corrupt
and have just gotten so broken and just don't work for us.
I mean, I'm writing about this in my book.
I mean, Janet Yellen getting $7 million in speaking fees.
I mean, come on, that's just a fucking bribe.
And it's just one of many instances.
I mean, another one that I just dug up,
I'd forgotten about this.
You probably don't remember it.
I don't know if you were paying attention at the time,
but you know, in 2008 when the GFC happened,
they created this thing called Health,
which is troubled asset lending facility.
What it allowed people to do
was to borrow money from the government.
So, Christy Mack, who was the wife
of the chairman of Morgan Stanley
and another Morgan Stanley executive's wife,
they borrowed $220 million from the federal government
non-recourse and used it to buy assets.
Okay?
And so Walker, it was a no lose for them.
If those assets had gone south, they didn't know a dime.
And if those assets went up in value,
which of course they did,
they made millions and millions of dollars, right?
Yeah, this is just the wife of the chairman of Morgan Stanley
was allowed to do this.
I mean, it's just one of thousands of examples.
I mean, when Paulson went to Washington DC
to become Treasury Secretary for Bush,
he had a $700 million sale of his Goldman Sachs stock
and he had to pay no tax on it
because they wrote a rule that allowed you to do that
when you were going into government service.
And that's why, I mean, Jamie Dimon has been rumored
to maybe become a, to go into government service
and in large part because he could take his billion dollars
of JP Morgan stock and be able to dispose of it tax-free.
I mean, this is the way the system is set up.
It's just so fucking broken.
It's just disgusting.
It's absolutely disgusting, you know?
I did not know about the Morgan Stanley wife thing.
It's not amazing.
Yeah, you know, Matt Haiby wrote about it.
You can Google it.
In fact, I encourage your listeners to Google it.
Google the real housewives of Wall Street Matt Haiby.
It's free.
It's not behind a paywall and read that story.
It'll blow your mind.
You're just like, it's just like, what the fuck?
Like how is it possible that this was allowed to happen?
Well, and that's the thing that, you know,
the longer your eyes are open,
you start to realize that these insane things
that you're like, well, no, that can't possibly be true.
It's like, oh no, it's true.
And it's happening far more frequently
than you understand.
Oh, absolutely.
Far more.
And that's why I'm writing the book.
I mean, I've got 40 years of watching this shit
and it's just like, it's just piling up
and I'm just so disgusted.
I mean, you know, they blew away Kennedy.
I mean, the CIA blew away Kennedy because Dulles,
you know, was pissed off that he fired him
after the Bay of Pigs where he tried to bag him there.
I mean, there's just so many, you know,
the more you dig, I mean,
it's just like going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole.
You wanna go down the government corruption rabbit hole?
Holy fucking shit.
You start listening to Whitney Webb?
I mean, oh my God.
Oh, I know.
It's unbelievable.
I mean, what our government has done in our name
and I've been around to see it.
I mean, here's a perfect example.
I mean, everyone, you know,
I mean, everyone talks about how bad World War II was,
how many people were killed all of a sudden.
You realize that in Vietnam, Walker,
we killed 3 million Vietnamese citizens.
I mean, and most of them were just fucking rice farmers.
I mean, you know, okay, so the thing about we,
our government, our federal government killed
3 million Vietnamese, those were lives.
Those were actual human lives, right?
And I remember very clearly,
because I was a teenager,
I mean, Nixon was like, he's trying to win the election
and he decided, you know, we're gonna carpet bomb
North Vietnam with B-52s.
I mean, what the fuck?
You know, what the fuck?
I mean, that was our government doing that.
And you know, why did that happen?
Well, the guys making the B-52s and the bombs,
they made a lot of money, you know, right?
I mean, and it's just, it's just sick.
And you know, we gotta fix it.
We just, I mean, these people cannot fail fast enough.
And you know, therefore the podcast,
therefore the book, therefore the movement, all of it.
I mean, you know, I'm just, I'm fed up and you know,
to me, it's a mission.
It's absolutely a mission to spread the word
and you know, get people pissed off
so that, you know, we're marching on the Eccles building
down in DC, you know, to end the goddamn Federal Reserve.
I mean, it's just, it's beyond the pale.
And by the way, these people know
that what they're doing is wrong.
They absolutely know it.
They know that what they're doing is wrong.
And, but they can get away with it
because nobody's calling them on it.
And you know, that's the beauty of the internet, right?
And that's the beauty of books
and that's the beauty of passing knowledge around.
All we gotta do, I mean, we outnumber them enormously.
The 1%, you know, I mean, they're literally 1%.
The other 99%, we got, in terms of numbers,
we got them beat, you know, hands down.
Now, they got their hands on all the levers of control
but we're taking that away too because, you know,
they say, well, we can tax you, we can grab your Bitcoin,
we can do the, oh yeah?
You know, mull on the bay, you motherfuckers.
I mean, you know, I've got 12 words.
You can't take my money, you know?
I mean, seriously.
It's like, I mean, that's the beauty of this system.
We finally got a weapon that allows us
to actually destroy their system, which,
and by the way, it needs to be destroyed.
It really does.
So you wanted to rant, I mean,
it was like, wind me up, man.
You got me going.
There we go.
Well, no, and you can keep winding it, absolutely.
I better back it off or I'm gonna see some
three letter agencies at my door.
You know, we're all on lists already.
Let's be honest, you know, that's a fact.
I think we can all agree the fiat system is absolutely fucked.
But thankfully we have Bitcoin,
but that Bitcoin doesn't do us any good
if we don't keep it safe, if we don't take self-custody.
So go to bitbox.swiss slash walker
and use the promo code Walker for 5% off
the fully open source, Bitcoin only,
Bitbox O2 hardware wallet.
Then get your Bitcoin the hell off that exchange.
What are they doing on there anyway?
And take them into your own self-custody.
The Bitbox O2 is easy as hell to use
whether you are brand new to Bitcoin,
it's your very first hardware wallet,
or you're a seasoned psychopath.
It is Bitcoin only, and again, it is fully open source.
You can add to their GitHub and verify that for yourself.
There's no need to trust me or to trust Bitbox.
When you go to bitbox.swiss slash walker
and use the promo code Walker,
not only do you get 5% off an awesome piece
of open source Bitcoin hardware,
but you also help support this fucking podcast.
So seriously, thank you.
You know, okay, there's a lot to touch on there.
Maybe one of the things is just talking about,
because just because you mentioned Kennedy
and we were talking about RFK earlier,
you know, one of the things I heard RFK bring up
in a slightly smaller setting was
he brought up executive order 11110.
Did I say four ones?
Yeah, four ones and a zero.
The silver one.
The silver one, which I'd never heard a politician
bring up before.
And I had been researching it for a while
because of Carla's dad who escaped communism
and pays attention to government overreach,
hadn't told me, why don't you look this up?
And started going down that rabbit hole a bit
and seeing that, ah, you know,
a lot of conspiracy theorists, quote, quote,
think that maybe that's also one of the reasons
that, you know, Kennedy needed to go
because you can't take power away from the Fed
and give it to the Treasury.
But I was curious if you had any thoughts on that,
but then I wanna,
well, I'll stop there for a second and just,
do you think that's something that there is ever
the possibility of getting floated again,
taking away some of the power of the Fed
to have the, because they are a cartel, right?
They have, it's a private bank cartel.
Yes, I know that they're, quote, public and private,
but we all know that that's BS, right?
So is there any situation in which the Fed ends up
having some of their power taken away?
It doesn't seem that Trump's keen on that,
doesn't seem, Kamala, I don't think,
even knows what's going on there.
Maybe Kennedy would, maybe.
Yeah, I don't know.
That's a fabulous question.
I mean, so, look, the Fed was established by Congress,
the Fed could be abolished by Congress.
I mean, Ron Paul, or, you know, I mean, we could,
somebody, anyone could introduce a bill and say,
you know, we're gonna shut the Federal Reserve down.
And again, in the book I'm writing,
I talk about that as one of the solutions.
I mean, literally, we should just close the Federal Reserve.
I mean, there should be no Federal Reserve.
And banks, I mean, the Federal Reserve was established
to be a cartel for the banks
and to provide banks with a backstop.
We should take it away.
And so basically, if a bank wants to do fractional reserve
lending, get out of their skis and blow up,
well, the depositors should lose all their money.
And so, you know, banks should be responsible.
They should balance deposits against, you know,
demand for loans.
But back to the Kennedy thing, I'll touch on that briefly.
I think that silver thing was a piece of it,
but I've read it, I've read more than you could possibly read
about the Kennedy thing, and I've read some books
that weren't even published that were kind of
pretty dark web sort of stuff.
And of course, I know the government did it.
And there were a multitude of reasons.
The silver thing was clearly a piece of it.
I think the bigger, and they really tried
to justify themselves in lots of ways,
if you read this stuff carefully.
I mean, I think the biggest piece was
the military industrial complex wanted to have
a nice war in Vietnam, and he didn't want that.
He was gonna try and wind it down.
So to me, that was the biggest issue.
But I mean, they did other things.
They were related issues.
You know, as you know, Kennedy was a Flandreur.
It was one of his weaknesses.
And he had an affair with actually,
with a Russian agent, unknowingly.
Yeah, and so I think one of the ways they justified,
I mean, here are men talking about killing
the president of the United States.
And I think in their minds, one of the ways
I'm sure they justified it was they said,
well, look, this guy's a national threat.
Because look at him, he's screwing anything that moves
and he had a bear with a Russian agent.
So that was another reason behind why Kennedy got killed.
Yeah, it's, I don't know,
I kind of got off on a tangent there,
but what was the rest of your question on that?
Well, I guess just, is there anything that ends up
taking away the federal reserve's power?
Back to the Fed, yeah.
Well, look, what will ultimately take away
the Fed's power is hyperinflation.
I mean, because I think, and sadly,
unless we get a lot smarter,
and maybe we will, I mean, maybe,
I think if you've got an RFK in there
and you've got a Judy Shelton on the board
of the Federal Reserve and you've got guys like me
and other sound money people, James Grant and others,
talking to the right people,
we could talk about how to fairly do a monetary reset
to go back to a sound money solution.
But honestly, I don't see any,
I don't see a big movement for that now.
And I think inflation is gonna have to get a lot worse
before that happens, but it could happen.
I think the more likely case, sadly,
is inflation and then big inflation
and then ultimately hyperinflation.
And at that point in time, I mean, it's pretty easy.
If we have hyperinflation,
it's pretty easy to know how that happened
and that was the Federal Reserve.
And at that point in time, I think a lot of questions
are gonna get thrown on the table
and there's gonna be a batch of politicians who just say,
gosh, you just, you know, you're ruining the currency,
you can't create another fiat currency.
We need to have a currency that's tied to gold
or Bitcoin or both or some basket of commodities.
I think the obvious and correct solution will be Bitcoin.
I think that's what the market will choose.
And maybe the market will be the decider in the end.
It won't even be a political decision.
I mean, everyone will just be transacting in Bitcoin.
I mean, one of the things I hope for
in terms of this transition is,
I don't hope for hyperinflation
because it'll be horrible for everybody,
but what I hope for is if Bitcoin does extremely well,
more and more people will transition to it
and we'll just kind of shrink
and the dollar will just kind of fade away.
And that, it will become worth much less in Bitcoin terms
and everyone will migrate to Bitcoin.
And I can see a way out of this without hyperinflation.
It's more just kind of the dollar,
people just aren't transacting in it anymore.
I mean, it's, but we're a long way from that.
I mean, as you know, the principle use case
for Bitcoin today is store value.
And we've got to get to medium of exchange.
I mean, I was speaking to Jeff Booth the other day
and he said, he disagreed with Sailor.
I mean, so Sailor is pushing store value
and he doesn't want to push medium of exchange
because he doesn't want to poke the bear.
And I get that, that's smart.
Booth disagrees with him and told me so and said,
and maybe writing a book on this topic and said,
look, we got to get medium of exchange.
Let me tell you why.
If we just go store a value,
they're going to 61 or two us, just like they did with gold.
We've got to get this into the fabric of the system.
And I said, that's great, Jeff, I agree with you.
God damn it, let's get this lightning shit to work.
Because if you were to ask me,
what are you frustrated about with respect to Bitcoin?
I have to say one of the things
I'm a little bit frustrated about,
I would like to have thought, my experience,
and maybe I'm not the best guy to know,
but I'm a typical older boomer,
my experience with lightning,
it hasn't been as seamless and as easy to use
and as good as I would have hoped.
Now, I recall back to the days of the early internet
in three and four, 93 and four,
when I had to take a phone and put it into a modem
and listen to it, dee dee dee dee dee,
and it was 1200 bought and it was a green screen.
So, maybe that's kind of where we are on lightning.
And maybe in five years,
lightning is going to be a thing of beauty.
But from what I can see today,
and I'm happy to be corrected on this,
I'm not trying to criticize lightning people,
we got a little ways to go there, right?
Yeah, I think we definitely have a ways to go
in terms of non-custodial lightning.
Because custodial lightning,
there are a lot of wallets now that have
big fat channels open with each other.
I think Bitfinex provides something like,
don't quote me exactly,
they've got somewhere around like,
maybe it's a third or it might even be,
it's either a third or a half of the liquidity
on the entire network.
So, they've got massive channels open.
Some other, you know,
Are you aware of people making
10, 20, $30,000 lightning transactions without a problem?
I am not, I am not.
Yeah, that's the problem.
I mean, I mean, I've given experience I had.
I gave, I gave Sam and Natalie a wedding gift in Nashville.
You know, and it wasn't trivial.
I'm not gonna say how big it was, but it wasn't trivial.
And, you know, I was using Moon and I know people say,
oh, that's old technology, stupid you using,
well, okay, fine, that was all I knew how to do.
And that is where my money is.
And, you know, it took an hour for it to settle.
You know, I mean, it was.
Yeah, what I would say about Moon is that,
and I'm not, I'm not the most, the most technical, obviously,
but I know that Moon does these, these atomic swaps.
So there, a lot of people will say, well,
Moon's not actually, actually using lightning.
Sure.
But, but, you know, to your point, again,
I think that of course this still needs to improve
and needs to be able to scale more,
but also scale more in different layers.
That's why I think it's great that there's things
like Fedement, which are, you know, again,
everything has trade-offs, right?
Lightning has trade-offs.
Bitcoin base layers for when you want to send money
in an uncensurable way without any sort of third party
needing to be involved in any way.
As you go down the chain of layers,
you are making trade-offs.
That's how the whole thing works, right?
And that's why you don't try to do everything
on the base layer, because if you try to do everything
in the base layer, you have to make those trade-offs
on the base layer, which is then you get a Solana
or an Ethereum or whatever it may be.
We know we don't want those trade-offs in the base layer
because we want a sound base layer.
We want a truly sound money as the base.
But I think, you know, I always get inspired
going to these conferences,
because I see the people that are building this stuff.
Kali, an incredible developer, he's building,
he wrote the protocol for Kaxu, which is Chamin E-cash.
Which again, has trade-offs.
You've got to trust a custodian to amend.
But the other side of the trade-off
is you get near perfect privacy,
and it's faster than lightning.
So there's trade-offs all the way down.
And I think that these experiences
are going to improve massively.
I think that also things like Noster,
where you're adding basically a social layer
to that lightning network is really powerful.
Because then you just look up somebody who you know,
I just look up Larry, I need to use some money.
Okay, great, you're creating a Venmo-like experience
for people, except better.
Which is fantastic.
And so I have a lot of hope for that.
But of course, still early days.
I'm completely, you know,
I'm long-term very bullish on it.
I just, you know, like everything.
I mean, you got a long runway.
You're younger than I am.
Very, very.
I'm like, come on guys, let's go.
No, no.
Let's just get up now.
Absolutely.
And I think that, you know,
I think we're also going to see
as more attention comes to this,
there's and more, honestly, you know,
more investment in projects
that are trying to build solutions on Bitcoin online.
Absolutely.
On layer 2.
That accelerates too.
Yes, absolutely.
I mean, the more, I mean, look,
this is, it's better today than it was two years ago.
It's better than four years ago.
I mean, so it's all going in the right direction.
Don't get me wrong.
I just, you know, we all want it to go faster.
And it will.
Amen.
And, you know, it's only, I think,
also by being honest about what the shortfalls are right now
that we see meaningful change.
Cause if we all say, yeah,
sometimes there's this tendency like to say,
like, no, no, no, everything's perfect.
It works great.
It's like, this is why I appreciated
just on a slightly different note,
but Matt Corallo who gave his presentation
right before Trump,
which was awesome that they gave him that slot
because I think he's consistently
one of the most realistic yet optimistic people out there
in terms of talk about, look guys,
mining centralization is a problem.
Like we should talk about this.
We can't just pretend it doesn't exist.
And so I think those,
we need to continue having conversations where we,
we say the uncomfortable truths that maybe we don't want to,
cause we don't want to be flooding Bitcoin
or flooding lightning or flooding E-cash or whatever,
but we got to have those conversations.
And it's good to have them publicly.
Absolutely.
Yeah. No, I, look,
I mean, we had, you know, we had the black-sized wars.
We got, you know,
we will get through all of these challenges.
I have no doubt about that.
Absolutely not.
I'm extremely bullish.
So, well, another thing,
just changing gears a little bit,
but so we've talked a lot about the, the US
and, and obviously the US has its fair share of problems
from a, from a monetary perspective,
but those problems ripple out as well, right?
And, and whether that be because we have the,
you know, a big-ass military that can stomp its, its feet,
or because we have, you know,
our biggest export is those dollars,
the rest of the world feels the brunt of that as well.
Absolutely.
And, and you see countries like El Salvador,
and I think you were recently down there this year,
is that right?
Yeah. Was that your first time there?
It was. I went for the having party that
big shot through. It was great. It was a lot of fun.
That's awesome.
But, you know, so,
Bukele took a, a very kind of finger to the IMF approach,
the IMF, which is ultimately a US institution
at the end of the day.
And, and they have been steadily stacking Bitcoin.
They had the Bitcoin legal tender law, obviously.
I'm, I think that we're,
a lot of people saw that happening and thought,
oh, other countries are going to be picking up this baton
really rapidly. And, and we haven't seen that as much.
I think now maybe we're starting,
now that the US is more publicly getting pro Bitcoin,
let's say at least some factions
of the United States government are,
maybe we see that shift.
But I'm, I'm wondering if you see, okay,
so again, let's, to bring it back to the US,
we see the, the United States adopted
Bitcoin strategic reserve.
Right.
That obviously in the short term,
I would say strengthens the dollar's position.
I assume you've, you've made a case for that in the long term,
it is that Trojan horse that accelerates the decline
of the dollar because Bitcoin is repricing it all.
But do you think you start to see other large nation states,
you know, follow the lead of the US?
If the US kind of gives it its stamp of approval,
do you start to see that domino effect happen really rapidly?
Or do they kind of say, maybe this is the US trying to pull
some one of their other tricks on us?
You know what I mean?
I'm not sure they conclude that.
Well, first of all, I'm not really sure.
I mean, it's a little bit of a hypothetical in the sense
that the US really starting to do it because I,
in spite of all this political rhetoric,
I don't, I think the actual action on it,
like I don't think Limbuss's bill is going to get traction.
I don't think Kennedy's going to win.
He would buy it, but you know,
and I don't think Trump is going to buy it.
I think he's just going to not sell it
because he doesn't want China to get ahead of us.
But, and, and, and by the way, to the degree that other
countries that we consider to be strategic competitors,
and the biggest ones I would obviously name in the world
would be China and Russia.
My sense is, if, if, if they're seeing it, look at,
my sense is they might be probably not China,
but certainly Russia, that they might be mining it
on their own.
I mean, you know, look, I mean,
in private conversation with Jason Lowry,
my partner and I, we've learned that within the United States
government, the CIA, the Pentagon,
the Department of Defense, they get it.
They actually get how important this shit is.
I mean, they, they understand it, you know,
the power protection of having the Bitcoin,
which probably means that the same agencies
in China and Russia get it too.
And my, but my sense is, you know, you don't see,
if you, it's like gold, if, if, if you want to buy it,
you don't signal that you want to buy it.
Why, you know, you're only going to have to pay more for it.
So you keep your mouth shut and you just, you know,
you look at all the hash that's coming out of Russia,
my sense is that some of that might be government hash.
I also think that the Gulf States get it.
I really do. What I saw at Satoshi's round table,
what I've heard, what we've seen, I just,
I have the sense that there are probably, you know,
whether it's the UAE or Saudis or who knows,
but I have a sense that part of the GCC, you know,
some number of members of the GCC Council gets it
and they're starting to stack this pristine asset.
I really, I think that's true.
You know, you might see some other smaller companies
countries doing it.
I mean, I don't know, maybe Argentina could do it eventually.
Maybe Brazil could do it.
Maybe Latvia, I mean, you know,
it wouldn't surprise me if some other countries pick up on it,
but it'll start with the smaller countries first,
I would imagine.
And, you know, the real winning strategy,
as Sailor points out, is a country that can issue fee
out and buy Bitcoin.
I mean, good God, what a deal.
You know, I mean, it's,
and Sailor is really just doing the Hugo Stena strategy of,
you know, he's issuing claims and something that he knows
isn't going to go down in value.
And he's buying the thing that he knows is going to go up
in value.
I mean, it's just like a turn the crank kind of money machine,
which is why MicroStrategy is such a fabulous stock.
You know, I fund owns it and I own it personally
and so on and so forth.
I mean, it really is brilliant.
So, you know, it's, I would imagine that other countries,
other smart countries will pick up on it,
but you know, the whole EU,
I mean, no, they're all stupid as shit.
I mean, they're not going to get it.
You know, I mean, I don't, you know,
I don't think you're going to see anybody there.
They're going to pick up on it anytime soon.
That's kind of my take.
I would definitely agree on the EU side of things.
I think they've shown in many ways more outright hostility
than even China or Russia.
Because, you know, even though China,
I mean, how many times is China banned Bitcoin now?
But there's still hash coming out of there.
Yeah, right.
And the government knows what's,
we know that the Chinese government does a great job
of surveilling their people.
So, you know, it's not the word it is.
Yeah.
And maybe it's government hash.
We don't know.
I mean, it's, yeah.
So, it's going to be an interesting couple of years here.
I mean, things are happening extremely quickly.
And just as an aside, you didn't ask about it,
but I'll just shift gears.
I mean, I think another,
I think another accelerant to all of this is,
I think the US stock market is an enormous bubble.
I mean, so, you know, I've been an investment manager
for my whole career,
and I've seen two very big bubbles in my life.
The dot com bubble in 2000,
and the housing bubble in 2008.
And I got to tell you,
this one is bigger, bigger than both of those.
It's the everything bubble.
It's driven by low interest rates and ZERP.
And I personally believe that this stock market
could fall 70 or 80%.
And that's actually a tail risk event
that I would ask everybody to kind of consider.
And I'm going to talk about this in the book as well.
And that is the true risk of outright deflation
like we had in the 20s and 30s.
I mean, and look, the government will try to address it
by printing money, and we know they will.
They did the same in the 20s and 30s,
but what happens if it overwhelms them?
What happens if it's so much
that they can't print enough to stop it?
You know, or printing enough to stop it
leads to hyperinflation.
And so, you know, that's the case for holding forms
of sound money.
And in that case, you know,
we don't necessarily get Bitcoin hyper, you know,ization.
But what we do get is we'd actually get a falling
and collapsing price structure.
I mean, so in the 30s, which was the last case
and really the only case of worldwide deflation,
major deflation, you know,
the prices of houses fell 70% from 29 to 33, 70%.
So everyone who's storing value in their house,
you know, keep that in mind, right?
And how did you do well in the 30s?
You had cash, and you know, gold was cash,
and cash was cash.
And so, you know, I still think gold and Bitcoin will be,
they're cash, you know,
they're money that the government can't print.
So it's, you know, it's gonna be really, really hairy,
Walker, because, you know, you've got, you know,
with this big a bubble and this much debt,
and you know, in a normal cycle,
you would have just a massive, I mean, you've borrowed,
you know, debt is consuming in advance of production.
And when debt collapses, you know,
the whole price structure just collapses.
And so, you know, this is,
so this is the argument for, you know, food stores
and cash and just being prepared.
I mean, I don't think most people understand
that, you know, the prices of these things could go down.
I mean, a lot of things could go down.
I mean, these people who are buying 10 and 20
and $50 million mansions, I mean,
that happened in Newport, Rhode Island in the 20s as well.
And, you know, they're now all museums,
because nobody could afford to maintain them
on a go forward basis.
And so, I would just ask people to study history
and understand what a true deflationary collapse,
Allah, 1929 looks like.
And therefore, to further understand
that given the kind of bubble conditions we've got,
that kind of a thing could occur.
And, you know, we know that the government
would print like absolute crazy,
but that printing like absolute crazy
would lead to hyperinflation.
So, so you're kind of trapped between these two extremes,
these two terrible monetary extremes, right?
You know, one is just a complete collapse
where nobody has any money and all the debt's worthless
and, you know, the price of everything falls
and you're scrambling for liquidity.
And then the other is the government says,
okay, no, don't worry about it.
We're gonna give you the liquidity.
We're gonna, you know, we're gonna send you a UBI.
We're gonna send you checks.
We're gonna print a gazillion dollars
and we're gonna send it out
so that everything keeps functioning.
But everyone goes, hang on a second,
what's this money really worth?
You know, and yeah, thank you government
for sending me the money,
but how am I gonna pay for my $20 gallon of gas?
I mean, you didn't send me enough, you know?
I mean, it's-
All roads lead to nothing stops this train, basically.
Yeah, I guess that's right.
I mean, and to be honest with you,
I'm just as scared about it as anybody else.
I mean, I think I've got the right assets
and I pray that we make it through it with, you know,
not a war and not a lot of people dying
and the minimal level of suffering.
And that's why I think what all these people have done
is just unbelievably irresponsible
to put us in this position.
But, you know, there is a way back from it
with good leadership.
We could do a monetary transition, you know,
from unsound money to sound money.
And, you know, that's kind of what Roosevelt did.
I mean, Roosevelt grabbing the gold
was wrong and evil and illegal,
but it actually did reset the system.
And in 34, the market rallied like crazy
because he had, you know, basically,
you know, what's happening here
is all these paper currencies are just overvalued.
They just are.
And therefore, the price, you know,
if you look around the world,
I mean, the price of everything is just,
they're all just fake prices.
And so we need to get back to what would quote unquote
be real prices.
And the only way to determine what the real price
of something would be is to measure it with a yardstick
that doesn't move all the time.
And that would be a fixed, you know,
a currency that's sound or sounder.
And of course, almost anything is sounder than the dollar.
You know, and obviously Bitcoin and gold
are the two, you know, natural choices.
Obviously I prefer Bitcoin, but I'm just, you know, either,
I mean, gold would certainly be better.
The problem is, you know, as you know,
gold's been captured and all the other stuff.
I mean, then they would, you know,
they would continue to manipulate it the way they have.
And it's harder to do that with Bitcoin.
But I don't know, man, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a mess.
I mean, these fourth turnings are no fun,
but on the other side of it,
which I hope isn't that far out, you know,
I would prefer to get it over with,
take the pain, get to the other side.
And then I think we were, you know,
it's really gonna be good.
I mean, we're gonna have, you know,
very, very healthy and strong society.
And the promise of, you know, I mean,
all the technology that we've developed
in the last 40 years, it's fantastic.
It really is.
We should all be working 20 hour work weeks.
I mean, it's just absolutely fantastic.
And we're not because all the value has been siphoned off
by the people at the top.
Amen to that.
You know, I was just thinking because
you were talking about just technology here.
And the fact that you're right,
there is obviously, we have developed
so many incredible things.
And even just recently,
that pace of technological development is also accelerating.
Right, AI.
Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
And that's as Jeff Booth has talked about many, many times,
technology being a naturally deflationary force.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I have to wonder how much technology
has allowed governments and central banks
around the world to paper over the actual amount
of debasement that has occurred.
Because, you know, things,
we do keep getting more efficiency.
Assembly lines are incredible now.
Automated, you know, all the robotics that we have in play,
but things are still getting more expensive
and more expensive.
So when you're looking at, okay,
how much are they really stealing from us?
You don't just take it down to the baseline.
You've got to take it below the baseline.
This is great stuff.
And again, the book talks about this.
I mean, so, and what it does,
you know, what all the money printing does is,
I mean, it helps by suppressing the inflation.
The productivity helps by, you know,
we should be seeing lower prices than everything we're not.
They're actually going up
and they're stealing the difference
between how much they're going up
and what they should be on the going down thing.
The other thing that happens is with the money printing
is it doesn't necessarily always go
into the consumer products.
It tends to sometimes go into, it goes into the assets.
And this is what's created the contillionaires.
And this is, it's actually the same thing happened
in the 1920s where one of the reasons
why the Fed was so loose
and why they let the 1929 stock bubble
get to where it got to was because they didn't have
consumer goods inflation.
The reason they didn't, they did,
but they didn't look like they did
because they had so much productivity improvement happening
that, you know, that they were therefore running
a low inflation number.
But really the inflation number was, you know,
in my view, the best measure of the inflation number
is just money supply growth.
I mean, you know, if you really look
at money supply growth, that's your inflation number, right?
Forget what the CPI says, that's cooked.
And so, yeah, I mean, because you're getting,
prices are going down because of the deflation
that naturally is present as a result of better technology.
And yet, you know, that may hold prices flat
when, you know, they're not printing too much
or they print too much, then prices really go up.
Yeah, so you're right.
There's an even wider gap in there
than is naturally reported.
And it's, you know, it's funny to me, Walker,
because I mean, I talked to a lot of people,
I'm sophisticated people, people in the financial,
but it's trad-fied people, et cetera.
And, you know, and I'm trying to counter this in my book.
I mean, the traditional view is, yeah, inflation's just
natural and in fact, you gotta have inflation.
I mean, the Fed has kind of normalized it.
You know, in 1977, that's when they changed the rules
at the Fed and they said, you got two mandates.
Before that, I was just kind of a broad mandate.
And, you know, I said, full employment and price stability.
Okay, so to my way of saying it, price stability
is zero inflation, right?
That's price stability, stable to zero.
But, you know, if you read all the Fed papers
and I've done it and doing research for the book,
I've done it, what you find out is that, you know,
they somehow managed to kind of sneak it in there
to where 2% inflation a year is price stability,
which I don't get that.
That's not price stability to me, you know?
That means in 10 years you're still on 20% of my money,
you know?
And I guess, you know, I think the reason they've done that
is just that it gives them power
and it allows them to continue their game.
And that's kind of the largest number they figured
they could get away with.
But, you know, I think what they're gonna do, probably,
you know, and I've seen some of them,
some of them tried to do this.
Actually, Krogman had some stuff on this, you know,
maybe two is a little too low.
Maybe we need to be at three or four, you know?
And that's just, that's the nature of it.
Yeah, old Paul was, he was floating it out there.
You can see he's testing the waters.
Yeah, oh yeah.
Well, and it's interesting too, because I think that,
to your point that you talk with a lot of very,
you know, sophisticated people,
people have done very well from themselves.
Sure.
Who may still have been kind of,
not necessarily through any faults of their own,
but just kind of brainwashed by this idea that,
well, inflation's just there.
Or, you know, or even worse,
maybe it's just the animal spirits of the market, you know?
Right, well, and you need those.
That's, that's, that's changed this whole argument.
You need those to keep the market healthy,
which is bullshit, but go on.
Yeah, it's just insane to me.
And the other thing that I think that people,
there's this disassociation between asset inflation
and consumer goods inflation.
Correct.
And we know that, I mean, the, the,
Cantillon or Cantillon, however you want to pronounce it,
in fact, is telling us that, okay,
when new money enters the system,
it does not distribute evenly.
Of course not.
And, and we also know that monetary policy affects price,
you know, consumer good price inflation with a lag.
And that was actually another thing that it jumped out at me
from Trump's speech is he said,
we had effectively no inflation during my administration,
you know, like none.
And I'm just thinking, well, that's a lie.
Like because you had a massive amount of monetary inflation.
Now that didn't, what did it go to first?
It went to the assets.
You look at home prices during that time.
You look at the stock market, which, you know,
bounced back so violently.
Almost borderless.
I mean, insane.
And, and okay, you know, people don't,
people don't tend to think of asset inflation
as a bad thing because it's like,
hey, if I'm holding assets, I'm getting rich.
I'm not about to, well,
don't look at gift towards them.
I'm not complaining, but it is inflation, you know?
Absolutely.
And we've talked a lot about, you know, why,
I had a lot of good conversations to the show
about why wealthy people don't understand the need
for Bitcoin.
And we all kind of conclude is they don't feel the pain.
The system is working for them.
I mean, I, you know, I can't tell you how many people I know
they own, Google they own, they've owned all those stocks.
They've owned the Mag7, they've owned NVIDIA, you know,
and it's just, it's working for them, man.
It's all good.
Well, why are you guys messing around with this money?
What are you talking about?
Everything's good here.
And, you know, okay, fine.
Let's see how good it is in five or 10 years.
Cause, you know, the tide has definitely shifted here.
I mean, they lived in 40 years of deflationary world
from, you know, Volcker and 80 to the peak deflation
when the tenure hit 50 basis points in March of 2020.
And, you know, that tide has turned
and we now are in inflationary world
and it's going to get worse.
It's been bad.
It went from, you know, 2% to nine.
They brought it back down into the threes.
These are all quick numbers anyway,
but the general trend holds true.
And, you know, my guess is the threes is going to be
about the low of this cycle.
And then the next one's going to start.
We're going to go up to 12 or 15 on the next run up.
And because they just, you know, it's the nature of the beast.
I mean, it's Lin's point and it's the, you know,
it's the debt structure that requires the underlying money
to pay the interest.
And so if they don't create additional money, you know,
the whole thing's going to collapse.
I mean, I've long said the Fed is like a guy driving
a clown car on an icy road.
One side's deflation.
One grad rails, the other one's inflation.
And they're going to break through one of them eventually.
And it's going to be a mess.
It's going to be a real mess.
Well, you know, I would like to actually just because, you know,
you have this incredible amount of firsthand experience.
And it sounds like that's a lot of what's going into your book.
Yeah, it is.
Let's talk about that a little bit
and just kind of what kind of,
what kind of book you're trying to write
and really, you know, what kind of story you're trying to tell
to get people to wake up because, you know,
for someone who has been trying to get people
to wake up for a long time,
I can imagine that's frustrating.
We all are.
Yeah, sometimes you feel like you're just yelling
in the wind, huh?
Right, yeah.
Well, you know, usually what happens with people,
they tend to respond to pain.
And I think most people in this country
are feeling pain of inflation.
I mean, it's hard, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone
who's, oh yeah, these prices are fine.
Right, I mean, we've all,
every American in the last three years, in my opinion,
has had some price shock where you're just like,
what the fuck?
I mean, you know, it's just stunning, right?
My car insurance goes up 40% or whatever it might be.
So everyone knows that there's a pain with inflation.
But I think sadly, because of the lack of education,
lack of focusing on it,
the fact that inflation wasn't a problem for so many years,
most people don't really understand how we get inflation,
why we get inflation, what it all means.
And so, I'll tell you the title of my book is,
what happened to America?
Why it is broken and how sound money can fix it.
Fix the money, fix the world.
And so the mission of the book
is to present the case to a broad audience
from the top, the tippy top, financial guys,
all the way down to a guy sweeping a broom as a janitor,
or working a very blue collar job, the heartbeat,
the soul of America, the people who make shit work.
And so they could read this book and say,
oh my God, I get it, I'm being fucked and here's why.
Here's how they're doing it.
I mean, I thought it was a red, blue issue.
I thought it was a this, I thought it was a no.
This is really the core issue.
This is what we got to, if we wanna truly drain the swamp,
I mean, all the people who voted for Trump,
rightfully because they were very pissed off
and the country's in a mess,
I wanna get them to refine their view
on why it really is a mess
and that it's the broken money that's creating the mess.
And I'm gonna give them so many examples
of the corruption and the bullshit around the broken money.
And I'm gonna give them examples of how in the past
it wasn't broken and it worked better
that hopefully they're gonna come out of the book
and they're gonna wanna grab a pitchfork and a torch
and go marching on the Eccles building
down in Washington, DC, you know?
And say, we wanna string up J Powell.
I mean, God damn it.
I mean, that's the fundamental problem.
I mean, we've got to, you know, and by the way,
there's a proposal in here, right?
I mean, I write a chapter on what's the solution.
I'm not gonna give it all away now,
but there are solutions to all this.
And so there's a proposal in here,
hey, we do these things, we're gonna fix this shit.
And so I wanna try and get everybody in the country
on board with this message and understanding
that this is the fundamental issue.
I don't know if I'm capable of doing that walker.
I'm just, but I do feel like, you know,
if not me, then who?
Because I've been aware of this shit for 40 years.
I've been in this business for 40 years
and I fully understand it very clearly.
I know where the bones are buried.
You know, as I've told you,
but some stories we've talked beforehand about, you know,
we talked earlier about the real housewives of Wall Street.
I mean, I got a lot of stories like that.
And I think that if the people read this book
and what they'll realize is this is a recurring pattern
and, you know, until we fix it, it's not gonna get better.
And so, you know, we've got to vote for and protest
and make noise and write articles
and orange pill our friends and all the above
because all of those things increase the odds
that we will fix it.
I mean, and speaking to Jeff, you know,
a couple of weeks ago, I mean, he just said, he said, Larry,
you know, if we could get everybody to use Bitcoin,
this thing would collapse instantly and he's right.
But, you know, we're a long way from that point, right?
So the book is my contribution to trying to get everyone
to understand what's going on and then to be pissed off
and then to choose to opt out of the system
like you and I have and to fight for a fairer system.
So that's, you know, that's gonna be the message.
I love it and I can't wait to read it.
And one thing you said that just really jumped out at me
is, you know, getting people to realize
that it's not a red, blue thing.
Oh, no.
People don't seem to understand that it's like,
it's my team against your team, you know,
my color against your color.
That's all a distraction game.
Absolutely, that's a complete Hegelian dialect
where they're just trying to get you to fight
with each other so you don't focus on them.
No, I'll tell you who it is.
It's the 99% against the 1%, right?
I mean, that's really the issue.
I mean, we gotta grab the power back
that we should rightly have,
which is to have a sound monetary system.
And that got stolen from us in 1913
when the Federal Reserve was created.
That's what we've gotta do.
And so, you know, it's not red, blue.
It's all of us against the elites who are running a system
where the game board is tilted in their favor heavily.
That's the problem.
You know, I mean, it's just, it's so clear.
It's so sad too because you look at, I mean, you know,
1913 when the Federal Reserve was established
and you just look at the basically nonstop wars
that we've had since then.
Going back to the military industrial complex
and what was it?
Was it the McFadden Act
that renewed the Federal Reserve's charter in perpetuity?
I think it was the McFadden Act, right?
I don't recall that one specifically.
I've heard of that, but I'm not a lawyer.
But they've got a charter indefinitely,
which is just insane.
It's insane that there's no expiration date on that.
I gotta look that one up.
Yeah, yeah.
I believe it's McFadden Act and I wanna say
it was 28 or 32, somewhere in there.
Don't quote me on that,
but it's just insane that we've got this system in place
where they are able to basically have the carte blanche
to do whatever they want.
The whole world hangs on the words of one guy,
Jerome Powell right now,
but whoever it was throughout history,
hangs on the words of one guy
to see what kind of hints he gives.
They used to have the briefcase,
or how thick is his briefcase?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, this is insane.
It's insane.
It's like some witchcraft or something like...
You know, words of my book,
our grandkids are gonna look back at this
like we look back at bloodletting, right?
I mean, they were draining blood to help people medically
in the middle ages and it was barbaric and it was absurd.
And our kids and grandkids will look back at this
and they'll have the same reaction.
Hang on a second.
Everyone knows free markets are what provide prosperity
and you let the market for money,
you let that be set by 12 guys
who could rig it in their favor.
What the fuck were you doing?
That was insane.
I mean, in my lifetime,
I mean, we've had 0% interest rates,
we've had 20% interest rates.
The 20% interest rates almost bankrupted
my father's business.
I mean, really close.
It was very stressful in our family at that time.
I remember very well.
And then we've had 0% interest rates,
which totally hammered all the savers.
I mean, so, you know, I mean,
and I know people like this.
I mean, my in-laws fall on this bucket.
You save your entire life.
You've got some number, I don't know,
it's 200,000 or a million, whatever it is.
Your life savings, you know, you're retired
and you put it, you know, you used to be able to,
before Zerp, you used to be able to put it in a bank CD
and earn 5% or 6%.
And that helped supplement your social security
and if you lived through it and your house was paid for,
you know, you're okay.
Well, when Zerp came along,
all those people, their income went to zero.
Their interest income went to zero.
Did the Federal Reserve care?
No, they didn't give a shit.
You know, they wanted to save Wall Street
and they wanted to get the economy going again
and tough shit.
All you retired people who were saving money,
well, fuck you, we're not gonna let you
have any interest income.
I mean, what the fuck?
You know, the cap, I mean,
0% interest rates are the tautology.
I mean, if you're saying money won't pay any interest,
you're basically saying money has no value, right?
I mean, it's pretty good.
The quiet part out loud, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's just, I mean, once again, Walker,
you've got me ranting and raving.
No, I love it.
I love it.
You know, and that's the thing.
I think this isn't just like a situation of, you know,
young people trying to buy a house getting screwed.
This is a situation of people across the spectrum
of all ages.
Everybody's gotten screwed.
Everybody.
I mean, I can't think of somebody who hasn't gotten screwed.
I was talking to my sister last night.
You know, she bought a house in the housing bubble,
paid market, figuring market was what you gotta pay.
She put 20% down.
She did it all right.
You know, everything normal.
And then her job moved her.
She had to, and she had to sell the house, okay?
In 08, right?
And she lost 50% of her house value.
You know, and she was, I mean, she's not a, you know,
she's not a financial wizard,
but, and she was just buying at the market
and then being forced to, I mean, how the fuck did that?
I mean, that happened because they promulgated the bubble
that blew the house up to an unrealistic view
and she paid the market at the time
and then she was forced to move and she had to, I mean,
it's just, it's so sad.
I mean, it's just, it's just so sad.
And this has happened to people all over the country.
I mean, you know, and, I mean, you and I have been
pretty fortunate.
I can't bitch.
I mean, I'm, you know, I've been fine.
And I got nothing to complain about,
but I can see what it's done to the fabric of the country
and I can see how badly it's hurting so many people.
And that just makes me sad and angry
because I know who did it.
You know, I mean, you know,
the guy who's got himself on the cover of the Atlantic,
you know, called the hero.
I mean, Ben Bernacke is a financial terrorist.
I mean, he is a bad, bad, bad guy.
And, you know, the sooner we all figure that out
and realize it, instead of giving him awards and prizes,
you know, we criticize him for the behavior
and the pain that he's caused, I mean, the better.
I mean, amen.
It's, we've started to just like,
we hold up these, you know, like these financial wizards
and oh, like, we forget that these, you know,
the savior is also responsible for causing the problem
in the first place.
It's like, you know, it's like somebody punches you
in the face and then you thank him for handing you an ice pack.
I mean, it's like, yeah.
No, I mean, the analogy we all use is, you know,
the Fed is an arsonist and a firefighter at the same time.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Breaking windows then coming along to fix them
and calling that GDP growth, by the way, at the same time.
But by the way, you know, they do just fine.
Thank you very much.
I mean, somehow they managed to escape the damage themselves.
You know, my classmates in business school, you know,
Kaplan, Rob Kaplan, who was the head
of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank.
And, you know, he was insider trading on Fed knowledge,
you know?
I was just gonna bring that up.
Him and Rosengren was the other one, right?
Rosengren, same thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's insane.
I mean, that's insider trading at the highest level.
Like you're literally in control of the money.
You're insider trading based on the most material
non-public information that exists.
And what happens?
Well, I guess I'll just resign now
and I'll go back to, you know, my six-figure salary
wherever it is.
The other one that was really fun, I mean,
and this will be in the book too.
Remember Tim Geithner?
Do you remember him?
You remember Turbo Tax, Timmy?
Oh, okay.
You probably don't.
Tim Geithner was, I can't remember the,
was he Treasury Secretary when the whole thing went down?
No, he was,
I can't remember exactly what position he held,
but he was a part of the whole troika
that did the 2008 bailouts and everything else.
And he got caught cheating on his taxes, okay?
And yeah, and he claimed that Turbo Tax had made a mistake.
He claimed that it was an honest mistake
and based on Turbo Tax, you know,
so he got the nickname of, yeah, right?
Turbo Tax, Timmy.
I mean, it's just, you know, these people,
the rules just don't apply to these guys.
I mean, they, you know, they think they're better than we are
and they can do whatever they want.
You know, and this is,
I'd love to,
because I wanna be conscious of your scarce time,
I'd love to transition to a little bit of a white shell.
Because we've thrown a lot of black bills out there.
Pardon my French, but shit is fucked.
There's a lot of darkness in this world.
There is, you know, but for somebody who's,
and who's hearing all this and saying,
oh, like this is so much worse than I even thought it was.
You know, and wondering like, what the fuck do I do?
What, how can I have hope for the future?
What makes you hopeful?
What, what, you know.
Oh, I'm incredibly hopeful.
Yeah, well, what makes me hopeful?
So Bitcoin is the biggest source of hope in the world,
first of all.
And hanging out with Bitcoiners will get you hopeful,
no matter what.
So my first thing to advise to anybody is,
if you're not involved with Bitcoin,
you gotta get involved with Bitcoin,
you gotta go to Bitcoin Meetups,
you gotta talk to Bitcoin people,
because we all get it.
And I know that's a very self-serving comment,
but it, you know, being involved in the Bitcoin community
has changed my life.
I mean, I'd be depressed if I didn't realize there's a way out.
You know, how fast the way out happens?
Well, okay, as we said, this could be tough, you know,
but I'd rather be on the right side.
I mean, look, you know,
and the American Revolution was going on,
I mean, we were losing for a long time.
And, you know, but you, you know, if you were a patriot
and you knew you wanted Britain out of your country,
you wanted to have your own country,
you know, you were willing to say, all right,
I'm gonna lose and I'm just gonna keep fighting for it
until we get it right.
And that's a similar thing.
It's another, that was a fourth turning, by the way.
So I'm just hopeful because I think fundamentally,
this is a good country and there's enough,
there are enough people in this country
who are fundamentally good people.
That we will get to the right solution.
Like, you know, Churchill said,
we always do the right thing
after we try everything else in America.
We'll get there.
And so I believe, you know,
the country has not been destroyed yet,
but it's in a dark place.
And we need, you know, we need some things to happen
that are gonna, you know, to push it in the right direction.
But I think those things are happening.
I mean, the money is failing,
which is therefore gonna take away from the power
from the bad people.
And a new money is gonna emerge.
And those people who are playing in the new money
are gonna be, you know, do extremely well.
And, you know, ultimately the people with the new money
are gonna be able to rebuild the society
on a system that's sound.
I mean, I've said this before, I think it is true.
I think Michael Saylor wants to be president.
And I think he probably will be in two or three cycles.
I also think he'll be the richest man in the world.
So you heard it here first.
But I'm very optimistic,
primarily because of the technology
and what Jeff Booth talks about.
You know, deflation is a natural thing.
We are figuring out how to do everything
better, faster, cheaper.
AI and other things will make it even better still.
The internet is disintermediating,
the big, sclerotic, decentralized organizations.
And we've now got a perfect form of money
that never existed before.
So I put all those together and I'm like,
oh boy, this is great.
We are going to win and it's gonna be really good.
But again, you can't ignore the fact
that getting from here to that great point
isn't gonna be easy.
But you know, nothing, you wanna stay in shape,
you gotta work out, working out hurts.
But when you work out, you get in shape, right?
And so we wanna have a really good society
on the other side, well, we're going to, but guess what?
We gotta do a lot of work between now and then.
And because we know it's correct,
we can feel good, I mean, when you're working out sometimes,
you think, God, this really sucks, I'm suffering here,
but you know what?
I gotta keep going because I'm committed to doing this shit.
And this is proof of work, right?
And this is a very, it's a very similar kind of thing, right?
We gotta do proof of work for money.
I mean, obviously the miners are doing it for Bitcoin,
but the rest of us have to do it within the society,
which is to say, we've gotta do proof of work
to convince all our fellow citizens
that we're right, they're wrong,
and that this will make all of our lives better.
That's kind of how I see it.
That's what I think is the most important approach.
Hey, Mende that.
And I genuinely believe that in the decades to come,
Bitcoiners are going to become the most powerful,
both economic, but also cultural force in the world,
because I think that much of culture is downstream of money.
And I think they sometimes switch their places a lot.
I think that's right, and by the way,
it's gonna place an enormous responsibility on us
to be honorable and respectful and kind to those
who've suffered and don't have Bitcoin,
and to try and not be fiat-like.
Do you know what I mean?
I mean, I'm not gonna live of,
even if my Bitcoin goes to gazillions,
I'm not gonna live a fiat lifestyle.
I mean, I've got what I need.
I don't need a, this whole, when Lambo shit,
I mean, Jesus Christ, I have no interest in any of that.
I just wanna have three squares and peace
and time with my family and maybe take some trips
and enjoy things and read books
and try and make charitable donations,
help other people out, all those things.
I mean, that's, to me, that's a great life,
if you can do that.
And, but we will all get there, but yeah, it's,
I've said to other friends, I mean, I really do think,
I mean, to my kids, in 20 years,
you're gonna know who had Bitcoin and who didn't.
You know what I mean, there's gonna be a big difference.
And that's why I say to some people, just get off zero.
I mean, because you don't wanna miss this.
I mean, you really don't.
I mean, your kids, your grandkids are gonna say,
Jesus Christ, you're aware of that.
Why didn't you buy some of that stuff?
It's gonna be a tough conversation to have,
if you didn't, and especially for folks
in my generation right now,
we are very, very fortunate to be at this point
in our lives.
If you're in your, you know, your 20s, your 30s,
I mean, heck, no matter what age you are,
if you're aware of Bitcoin
and you start accumulating a little bit of it,
whatever you can, that's great, you're very fortunate.
But if you're younger right now,
and this is something I talk about a lot,
is just you have a chance right now,
we were not necessarily,
we were handed an amazing technological age.
We were not handed a great monetary age.
We were handed a pretty rough one,
where it's really difficult to get ahead,
you can bust your ass,
you can do everything you're supposed to,
you can save, but that savings
isn't gonna get you that far.
And your investment in your 401K,
that's just trading indexes,
that's just keeping up with monetary expansion.
That's treading order at best.
Well, unless you can use it to buy F-Bit or I-Bit.
Right, right, then you've got a darn good shot.
And that's the thing, you have these opportunities now.
And I think so many people are, again,
they understand that something's broken.
They understand that things are really messed up.
And maybe they even get that it's not a red blue thing.
Maybe they even get that,
but there's still one leap away from realizing,
yeah, everything's broken and breaking,
but there is a solution out there.
You don't have to despair,
because there is a lifeboat here.
There's a trap door, there's a way out of this.
But you have to be humble enough and curious enough
to take a look at it.
And so that's one of the main reasons
why I'm actually, I'm very glad
for all the political focus on Bitcoin for that reason.
Because it makes people who may not have paid attention
previously, maybe it's the final thing they needed to say,
oh shit, Trump's talking about this,
RFK is talking about this.
What am I missing here?
Maybe I need to give this another look.
And I hope that's the case anyway.
I'm sure it will be.
I mean, look, good ideas spread.
They just do.
And this is just to me, it's just inevitable.
And so my view is people obviously need to try
and grok it sooner rather than later.
And there'll be a real, I mean, look,
I wish I'd grok it when Max Kaiser did,
but I didn't and so be it.
I mean, but someday people maybe look back at me
and say, Jesus Christ, that guy was buying coins
at 4,000, 10,000, 20,000.
God, who can imagine these coins are $2 million a pop.
So I don't know.
I don't know where they're gonna go.
But the point is that, yeah, it's, I mean,
I've noticed since I heard about Bitcoin
and I've gone down the rabbit hole,
I felt just a whole lot better about everything in life.
And to me, it's kind of like, you know,
we're all just kind of happy warriors.
And, you know, look, from time to time, you know,
I get, like any human, I get impatient.
I want it to happen faster as we all do.
But it really, you know, if you really step back a moment
and look at how far we've come and, you know,
things like two presidential candidates
talking positively about it, you know, it's an ETF.
I mean, honestly, when the ETF was approved,
I was kind of shocked.
I thought, I thought they were gonna figure out a way
not to approve the ETF.
I really did.
And when they approved that, I was like, holy shit,
this is a big deal.
I mean, that's a really, really big deal.
I mean, it hasn't fully expressed itself in the price,
but it will.
And so, yeah, to me, there are many, many reasons
to be optimistic.
There are a few reasons to be concerned
about the next few years.
You know, it's gonna be some rough sledding,
but we can all figure out how to handle that
if we pay attention and, you know, help.
And I think the task that we're all called upon as citizens
is to try to, you know, because we're part of a larger
community, we're part of America, we're part of the world,
is to try to help other people, you know.
And, you know, I orange pill everywhere I go.
You know, I was at dinner the other night,
I had a waiter who didn't know about it.
You got a cell phone, yup, come over here, okay.
Type in moon, you know, download a moon wallet.
I gave him his regular tip, and I said,
I'm gonna give you $10 on moon.
And I said, I'm telling you, oh, really, thank you.
And he said, you know, and we had a 20 minute
conversation about it.
I explained it to him, and you know,
I think he's probably gonna go buy the Bitcoin standard,
right, and read the book.
And, you know, and I mean, how many people does he know?
He probably knows 50 people, and right,
and so it's, this is how it spreads.
And in my view, this is what we all need to do.
You know, if we wanna try and help people
and fix the world, we gotta spread the word
on the way to fix the world,
because this is what will lead to less wars,
this is what will lead to less strife,
this is what will calm down the political blue-red bullshit,
you know, all of it.
It's a much better system, so.
Amen, and you know, I think that's a heck of a note
to wrap up on, I think.
Okay.
The last thing I would ask you is,
so you're writing a book right now.
Are you reading anything as a result of, you know,
writing this book, or that you'd really recommend right now?
Oh gosh, yeah, I'm reading a lot of historical stuff.
I'm reading a lot of Murray Rothbard.
I'm gonna have, it's gonna have one hell
of a bibliography in it.
I mean, you know, I think the two books I've recommended
a lot on Twitter, and I think just in general,
that everyone needs to read.
I think you need to read the fourth turning,
because you need to understand societal change.
Obviously, you need to read the Bitcoin standard.
The other one, I'm a big fitness freak,
and for the older listeners,
I would suggest that the only way to get old
and not become infirm is to exercise.
And the best book on that topic
is something called Younger Next Year by Crowley.
And I've given away tons of copies to my older friends.
Most of them haven't followed the advice,
but the point I would make,
because I know I'm not young, but I feel like I'm young.
And the reason for that is because I get up every morning
and I go do a CrossFit workout at 6.30 in the morning.
And I think that that has changed my life
in a very meaningful way.
And so I would suggest to everybody
that you find a way to do that,
because I think your later years will be much better
if you're physically fit.
So those are my top book recommendations.
It's, yeah, feed your mind
and nourish your body at the same time.
Well, I know you work out a lot.
I mean, as we all know,
I mean, working out is proof of work, right?
I mean, it's not easy,
but you get out of it, what you put into it.
And I mean, I think the sick care system,
the depression we have, all the SSRIs,
everyone's all that shit that would all go away
if everyone did CrossFit.
I really believe that, I mean,
or something equivalent, I mean,
the CrossFit is the only source.
At least go for a nice walk in the sunshine.
Absolutely, I mean, walking is underrated.
I mean, I try and get 10,000 steps,
I generally don't make it, but yeah, it's all good.
Well, no, it's great advice.
And so where do you wanna send people?
I'll link your Twitter.
No, we're gonna go to my email.
So as you know, I make a lot of noise on Twitter,
sometimes on profane.
Some people call me un-Christian for being that way,
but I think, I don't know,
I never take the name of the Lord in vain,
but I do call people bats shit, particularly the fed.
So I'm on Twitter at Lawrence LaPart.
And then I have a website called EMA2,
www.ema2.com.
My partner and I, we read a quarterly letter
talking about all this stuff,
sound money, macro, where we're going, et cetera.
It's free.
So, and we got three years on there,
so you can go, you can read the past ones,
you read the most recent one,
we just put it out for the June quarter.
And you can actually sign up on there.
If you go down the bottom of that website,
there's a little place you put in your email,
and you'll automatically get it.
I'll never spam you, I'll never sell that email list.
Just four times a year, you'll get an email,
say here's the quarterly letter, that's it.
So, people should feel free to do that.
And then, as I say, I'm working on the book.
I hope to have the book out the end of this year.
It's almost written, but then there'll be a lot of editing.
So, and I'm just talking to a book agent now.
So, I'm not quite, I've never done this before.
This is probably my only book.
So, it's a little bit of an experiment.
It could slip a tad, but I don't want it to slip.
Cause I think the message is really important.
I wanna get it out as quickly as I can.
So.
I can't wait to check it out once it's live.
Larry, thanks so much for sharing your scares, Tim.
Thank you, it was great to see you.
This is a pleasure.
Say hi to your beautiful, better half.
Yeah, I sure will, I sure will.
And hope to see you.
You're a lucky guy.
I tell myself that every day, don't worry.
Yeah, I know, I am too.
My wife is absolutely beautiful as well, like yours.
So, we're both lucky guys.
All of us men marry up, I think.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I'm in way over my head.
Many people have told me that, and I say, I know it.
And she reminds me of it too.
Yeah, like any good wife should.
Yeah, sure, there's a cost to it.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Oh, well, Larry, thanks so much for your time.
I appreciate it.
Very much.
I'm happy to come back anytime.
I'll talk about sound money anytime anywhere.
Well, I'll take you up on that.
Okay, feel free.
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