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Hey everyone, Michael here with the Bitcoin Way podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Today on the

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show I have Peter St. Ange. Peter is an expert in many things. He is a bartender turned economist.

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He can go deep on geopolitics, so many things. So we covered Iran, Venezuela, counterterrorism

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operations in Ecuador for the United States. We covered tariffs. We covered really a range of

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topics and ultimately it came down to what is the impact on Bitcoin? Where does he see the world

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headed over the next 5, 10, 20 years? And I think you're going to find this fascinating. It was a

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great conversation. Hey, everyone. Like I said in the intro, I've got Peter here. Peter,

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welcome to the Bitcoin Way podcast. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, I'm excited for this. Man,

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2026, we have so much to cover. And I'm going to start with the most important thing. So you are a

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former bartender turned economist. So I have to ask you, what's the best cocktail?

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It is not an impressive cocktail. I'm not proud, but my favorite is Kahlua and milk.

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Obviously, you can put vodka in it, which makes it a white Russian. Absolutely delicious. If you've never had it, it's addictive.

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Okay. What was the most popular cocktail that you served then? What was everyone ordering?

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Almost everybody just does gin and X or vodka and X. So like the screwdriver, gin and tonic, those are like 80% of orders are going to be really boring.

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stuff like coke and uh rum and coke just pretty pretty boring stuff the pain in the butts are the

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frozen drinks and the freaking long island iced tea you gotta like clear your entire shelf yeah

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for long island like everything's in there it's like remember when you're a kid and you go to

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burger king and you get the coke and you're like well i like coke but i like sprite too and so you

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just go ahead and put everything in your like that's long island iced tea yeah except for it's

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not all ready to just press a button and fill for you you've got to you got to prepare it

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Yeah.

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I mean, I guess nowadays you probably have Long Island iced tea mix, I bet.

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But when I was coming up, we had to walk uphill both directions.

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Yeah, no, I hear you.

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I hear you.

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Okay, let's get into the less important stuff.

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You talked about on a recent video you did, one of your daily videos, which by the way,

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I love.

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I think so does the rest of Bitcoin Twitter in the world.

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a I think it was a must must pass housing bill that somehow a CBDC or some sort of a reference

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to a digital currency of sorts is seems to be slipped in. What's the nature of the bill? And

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then what was the language being used that you call that out? Yeah, so they've got this housing

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bill. Everybody in America is pissed off that housing is so expensive. It's one of the big

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pieces of the affordability problem, along with health care is probably the other big one.

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And so Congress knows that they have to fix it. Inflation is the top voter issue. Before the war,

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inflation was actually really low. Like Truflation does private sector alternative to government

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statistics on inflation. They scrape, I think it's like 13 million numbers, something in the

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state. And they literally scrape them. They don't have economists who, you know, throw

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dildos at the wall and make up numbers, right? These are like actual direct scrapes. And according

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to them, inflation was down to 0.7% before the war, which that is so low. Like literally,

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that is the point where the Fed starts trying to create more inflation. Like as long as you

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have a central bank, you're really never going to get that low. So that's essentially zero

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inflation with a central bank. And now it's up because gas exploded and the gas feeds through

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everything else. And I was like one and a half, one six. But the moral of the story is that

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inflation was actually very tame. But the issue is psychologically, because prices went up so much

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during Biden's term, people still feel like everything's really expensive. They still feel

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like inflation is really high, even if it's bumping along to 0.7 percent. Moreover, during the election,

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Trump said he was cut everything in half. Right. This is how Trump talks. But anyway,

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houses are going to cut in half. Everything's going to be half the price. And of course,

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I mean, that's not economic. Like, even if you could somehow do that, like, you know,

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if you wave the magic wand and Caesar takes over and puts in all the good policies, you have Javier

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Malay take over the U.S. with a chainsaw. Even if you did all that, the Fed actually wouldn't allow

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that. They would, again, they would create inflation. But having said, the issue is that

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voters are really pissed off about inflation. So they have to do something. They don't want to touch

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medical. There's a lot of donors. It's an absolute mess. That's just a landmine.

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So instead, they're looking at housing. So they have this housing bill and they do some useful

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things in there. They try to get rid of red tape, local zoning, which is a big reason why houses

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are so expensive in San Francisco or New York, rent control, punishing locations for rent control by

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withholding federal construction funds. So there's a couple of useful things they're doing.

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There's some other less useful things that they're doing, like allowing community banks to lend more money that they don't have.

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So that's fractional reserve banking, letting them get closer to the big too big to fail banks, which keep about seven cents in the vault, whereas community banks keep about 10 cents in the vault.

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They're upset because they want to inflate just like everybody else.

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So that's the housing bill. And they're they're doing so.

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There's two ways that crypto, broadly speaking, intersects with it.

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And one of them is stable coins, where the ability to pay interest on a stable coin has now become sort of a political football that the House and the Senate are trying to use to get this housing bill through.

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And the reason for that is that fractional reserve banks, of course, don't want competition from a stable coin, which given the Genius Act last year, stable coins have to be backed in practice back with treasuries, which is essentially as good as cash.

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And so that means that a stable coin then becomes a full reserve bank that pays 5% interest, whereas your bank has 7 to 10 cents on the dollar and pays zero interest and charges you a bunch of fees.

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So Wall Street, of course, is very strongly opposed to that.

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So they're trying to stick that in there to get that banned.

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On paper, it's banned.

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But like Coinbase has a rewards and loyalty program.

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Like it's not really banned.

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So they want to extra double ban it.

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And then the other one that they snuck in there, which like this was unbid.

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Well, I presume, honestly, I presume Ripple paid for it.

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but is this little detail in there that allegedly it's a CBDC ban.

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Republicans have done this a couple of times.

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They do these CBDC bans, but the trick is the ban only,

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it is written in a way that it only bans what's called a retail CBDC.

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Okay, it does not ban a wholesale CBDC.

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Now, a retail CBDC is where you treat the Fed like a bank.

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Okay, so you've got basically U.S. government stable coins, CBDC.

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Those would replace the U.S. dollar. And those are parked at the Fed. And the Fed cannot go bust because it's a money printer. Right. So the Fed will always be safer than a bank.

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And so, you know, the bankers fear again is that this time the Fed would wipe them out because it's not that the Fed's fully banked, but the Fed's, you know, it's a money printer.

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So in order to prevent that, OK, they want these CBDC bans that only focus on retail, but they leave alone a so-called wholesale coin where the Fed does the CBDC to banks and then banks can pyramid on that.

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And so the issue there is that the only thing that's keeping a CBDC out of law is that the banks are afraid of it.

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But if you do a partial ban of retail, then you have taken all the spikes off a CBDC.

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You have turned it into something that banks catastrophically fear into something that banks get a cut.

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Sure. Why not? Right.

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And so government itself always wants a CBDC because it gives them control.

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It gives them, you know, they can monitor what you're spending on.

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They can control it.

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They can literally, for instance, they could enforce negative interest rates so that if

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you don't spend your money, it melts.

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Right.

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Which would be excellent stimulus for the next time there's a recession and they have

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an election coming.

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So governments always want this.

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Right.

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They want the surveillance.

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They want the control.

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The problem with this partial CBDC ban is that it flips banks from being against the CBDC to being pro.

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Now, people might ask, like, what the hell is a CBDC bill doing, you know, doing a housing bill?

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And that's that's how Washington operates. Right.

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The game is you you you horse trade to give people things.

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And in practice, the things you're giving are things that your donors requested.

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In this case, the bankers want a ban on retail CBDCs, but only retail CBDCs.

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Ripple also would like a wholesale because Ripple delusionally imagines that they are somehow going to be the CBDC.

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That's not how it works. Governments don't give that kind of prime real estate away.

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But at any rate, that's what Ripple thinks.

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And, you know, Ripple is swinging and swimming in so much money because, of course, they, too, are a money printer.

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And so they I believe that they channel a lot of that money.

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You know, when I and a team at Heritage Foundation, we were trying to figure out why, you know, because like the Republicans were running around doing this partial ban of CBDC.

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And we explained to them, you know, this is very dangerous because it flips the banks to the other side of CBDC.

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And they kept saying, yeah, yeah.

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And we were like, so change it.

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And they were like, can't do that.

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And we were like, you know, it's kind of like if you're an astronomer and you see this gravitational field and you don't know why it's there.

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You can see that stuff is reacting to some gravitational field.

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And so you have to assume there's a planet there.

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You don't see it, but there's a planet there.

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And so there is some gravitational field happening in CBDCs that is pushing specifically for this partial ban, which effectively makes a wholesale CBDC, which is still government controlled.

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thing, just push a button, makes it much more likely. So I was actually going to ask you something

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along these lines, because I think you've described CBDCs as government run crypto with a centralized

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database, which is, I think, an apt description. However, something we talk a lot about the Bitcoin

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way is a concern of stable coins actually being this like a tether, for example, where they already

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censored transactions based on what the FBI tells them to do, being sort of this very seamless

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path to a CBDC and also never mind the fact that the government is completely inept and building

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out the infrastructure themselves, probably going to be catastrophic at best and, you know, much,

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much worse potentially. I mean, could you see like the stable coins themselves being the,

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they're privately controlled, you know, but really at the end of the day, it's, it becomes a,

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as you describe a government run crypto on a centralized database. Is that something that

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you could anticipate happening? Or do you have less concern about that?

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Well, I think it's a good point. The trick is that a stable coin, so a CBDC is going to be sold

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as, you know, instant transfer, zero fee, like crypto or, you know, blockchain technology has

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certain benefits over centralized systems, basically speed and price. And, you know, when

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I was working with senators' offices, for example, Republican senators, they were excited about a

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CBDC because, for example, it would lower the costs of exporting corn. Okay, so cross-border

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payments are a big deal for the constituents they represent. And so the benefit of a private CBDC,

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a private stablecoin, is that it removes those advantages, right? So you can have those cost

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and speed advantages in, you know, Tether, for example, in which case the CBDC brings

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nothing to the table.

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So that's the benefit of it, is that it basically guts the use case or the argument and a lot

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of the political support for a CBDC.

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The downside is exactly what you're describing, which is that fundamentally any centralized

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organization that the U.S.

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government can get its hands on, which is pretty much everywhere in the world, there's

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like five countries that the U.S.

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government isn't allowed to go arrest people in.

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those are always going to be captured to a certain degree. So it's a trade-off. But yeah,

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the risk you're describing is real. So, okay. So how likely if you look out into the future,

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because I don't know where we're at in the legislative process on something like this,

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how likely do you anticipate this must pass housing bill to be passed? What do you think

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ultimately gets incorporated in terms of a CBDC stable coin? Like, do you think the yield for

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stable coins are coming or do you think they're going to the banks are going to win?

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How do you think this plays out if you were to guess?

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Yeah, I think it's a toss up on both.

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The CBDC thing is more likely because there's so little attention paid to it.

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Most Americans don't know what a CBDC is.

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They're not angry about a CBDC.

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So, you know, I and others try to raise awareness of it.

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You know, most Bitcoiners, I think, understand it, but most normies do not.

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So that could, you know, slip in there.

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The stable coins one is interesting because, you know, traditionally banks have had much, much more lobbying heft.

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They're one of the biggest donor groups.

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They're up there with health care.

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Really, it's those two that own Washington health care pharma.

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And banks, you know, traditionally basically gotten anything they wanted.

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So they would loosen the rules so they could take more risk or print more money or get bailouts or whatever it is.

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what we saw with the Genius Act is that if crypto, not Bitcoin, but crypto, sadly,

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there's not that much money in Bitcoin because we're not scammers. We don't have outrageous

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profits in our industry, whereas other companies do. At any rate, there's enough profit running

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around in shit coins that they, during the Genius Act, they pretty much matched Wall Street

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toe to toe, which is pretty striking. I think that's really one of those sort of unsung,

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plate tectonic shift last year was that somebody took on the banking cartel and won. Now,

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it didn't win entirely, right? So it did ban interest, for example, but it was a toothless

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ban so far. So I think it's 50-50. Does the shitcoin industry mobilize again so that they

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can outbid Wall Street? That's really a question. But you think that's a real debate, and this isn't

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Like Brian Armstrong and JP Morgan, you think this is a real them butting heads and not some sort of political theater where the outcome has been pre-negotiated?

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Because I've heard that.

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Like, hey, behind the scenes, like these guys are sitting in backroom deals.

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They know what the end result is going to be, but they have to make it look like it's the freedom fighters versus the banks or whatever the narrative is.

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It's always possible.

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Policy is a small world.

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And a lot of these guys like there's no laws against coordinating your donations.

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You know, there's like laws against price fixing, but not coordinating your donations to put pressure on people.

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So, I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if that's what they're doing.

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The economic interests are definitely on the other side of it.

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So, you know, like when they come into the battle, they're definitely on different sides of it.

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Stable coins do stand to drain resources from fractional reserve banking.

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Having said, you know, did they sit and have a steak dinner and work out some compromise that they can both live with, which would probably look like, you know, allowing interest, but doing it in some way that it's only capturing the crypto people.

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It's not capturing the normies. And, you know, there's different ways you can structure that so that a normie would like your grandma is probably intimidated by the notion of opening a Coinbase account and then replacing.

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her bank account with it. Now, she doesn't understand that if she were to do that,

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those stable coins are fully backed, whereas her community bank up the street that puts out

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cookies at Christmas, that money is actually in some hedge fund in Peru. So she doesn't understand

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this. But as long as she doesn't understand that, it's not an existential threat to the bank. So you

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can structure it in a number of ways so that from the bank's perspective, the damage is done within

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the crypto bros, which is not a large market for them anyway. A, they're young. B, a lot of their

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money is in crypto. It's not in dollars. Yeah. Okay. So I want to sidetrack us for one second

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before I move on to the next subject. I'm curious. You mentioned, you know, like your work at

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Heritage. What is, what's sort of the take on Bitcoin? I still see a lot of gold bug sort of

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folks from like the places I would expect to see that. What's been the response? You going really

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hardcore into Bitcoin. Are people getting more receptive to that on the sound money front? Or

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is there still a lot of resistance in your mind? Yeah. So, you know, I think the funny thing about

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Bitcoin is it's progressing birthday by birthday. You know, so 10 years ago, you know, the average

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Bitcoin or whatever was 28, now they're 38. So you do have a lot more people who are in positions

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of influence in normal organizations who understand Bitcoin, who advocate for it.

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So you are seeing a gradual shift within Heritage. When I joined, gold was crazy when I joined in

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2021. And Bitcoin was just completely insane. Like, you know, you got to see a therapist.

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So I know Heritage has shifted massively. We are 100 percent pro-gold, pro-Bitcoin,

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anti-fractional reserve banking. So we've shifted massively. Most of the think tanks in Washington

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have not. So they're generally hostile. They regard Bitcoin as like a sideshow,

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but it'd be way too risky to actually use it for anything important. They generally regard gold as

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a sideshow, even though, of course, gold has a heck of a track record. So, you know, but policy

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circles like in Washington, I think they're several decades behind the rest of the country.

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So like whatever normal people are thinking about money, it takes a lot longer for that

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to percolate into Washington.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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That's fair.

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Okay.

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Let's talk about the war in Iran.

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Could you maybe, I'm having a heck of a time following this.

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There's just, it feels like every day there's new conflicting information.

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I have to hit grok on everything I see on X to see what, what I can kind of confirm.

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What's your assessment of what has happened so far?

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What's transpired to the best of your ability?

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And then we'll talk about sort of the economic consequences downstream in a minute.

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Yeah, so I don't think the war has turned out the way that Trump wanted so far.

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I think the original hope was that you would club, you know, you would decapitate the regime,

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you would destabilize them.

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And then one of two things would happen.

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Either what happened in Venezuela, which is that the remainder of the government,

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Somebody steps in and says, I'll take over. And can we be friends? What do you need from us?

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So that worked fantastically in Venezuela. Venezuela is now basically a client state of the U.S.

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It does what we tell it to. Or their hope was alternatively that there would be this spontaneous, you know, Iranians would rise up and they would topple the government.

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So neither of those had happened. I think the Iranian leadership is much deeper than we expected.

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In other words, there's there's more layers who are who are like into this thing so they can just keep going.

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And the Iranian people have not risen up. That may be because 10,000 of them got murdered in January.

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They did try rising up. So I don't know if I should laugh about that, but it's sad.

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At any rate, for whatever reason, the Iranian people have not risen up.

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The regime is still capable of crushing dissent, intimidating people.

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Now, having said, you know, Trump, one of the things that I think is unique about Trump is that he takes his promises very seriously.

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So I know from working in Washington, the people in the administration, there are people in the White House who sit and track every single thing Trump ever promised.

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And, you know, they're very eager to get a checkbox on that.

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Most presidents don't. They just say crap. And Trump looks like he just says crap.

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But he actually does take that stuff seriously.

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And one of the big promises that he made in this war even more than whether we get their uranium or the Strait of Hormuz or whatever the outcomes are one of the biggest things he promised was four to six weeks So I think that the war has not gone as maybe some of the promoters hoped However I think that

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Trump is very eager to stick approximately to his timeline. Pete Hegg said, I said,

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stretch that to maybe eight weeks or so. But I mean, we're coming up on that. We're about two,

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three weeks away. So if you look at sort of personality wise, you know, you've also got the

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midterm elections coming up. Even if oil prices go down tomorrow, it takes a while for the economy

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to recover from all this. It also, once the economy recovers, there's also a lag with perceptions.

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You know, so like if, if companies are firing people and if prices are going up,

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your paycheck doesn't make ends meet. If that fixes, it still takes a long time for voters to

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feel like that fixed. So the question is getting that in there by midterms, which, you know,

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they're what, seven months away. But when you're talking about economic perception, seven months

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is not very long. So there's a bunch of things that are pushing for a short war.

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On the other hand, if you look at, you know, you can look at prediction markets,

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say that we're probably 50-50, that'll go into June. They're saying 25% odds it goes into 2027.

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If you look at oil futures, those are saying basically August is when oil futures start coming back down.

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So the difficulty at this point is like sort of everything is on hold.

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You know, Bitcoin prices, gold and silver prices, the economy in general, markets, of course, all of that is on hold for the war.

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And nobody has any idea how long the war is going to go.

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Trump is almost uniquely chaotic. I think that is absolutely intentional. He wants to keep the other

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side off balance. But the end result is, you're even seeing now, when Trump makes some noise how

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the war will end soon, the market reaction is relatively muted. Today, he floated that

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we might drop control of Hormuz, which raises the prospect of a much shorter war.

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and the market jumped, but it didn't jump as much as it should have based on that.

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So I think that at this point, you know, on Wall Street, they're calling it headline fatigue

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that just nobody knows what this president's going to do.

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I know because I make daily videos. Right.

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And so, you know, I have to make the video the night before.

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And I lay awake in a cold sweat wondering what the hell Trump is going to do tonight,

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because maybe like tomorrow's video.

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Yeah, I don't know. Maybe he'll win the war or he'll, you know, like who knows?

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So it's tricky being an investor.

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Now, of course, if you're a true Bitcoin, you just hodl.

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You don't care what's happening.

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And so it's not that big a deal.

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But for, you know, for, I mean, I guess you could argue there's like another sigma class

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of Bitcoiner where they do care because every last penny is in Bitcoin and they got to pay

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the rent.

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So I guess for those people, they would care.

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So I just began learning and I'm scratching the surface as to how oil and energy flows

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about the world. If Trump, what you alluded to there, Trump's comment that maybe we end the war

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and the strait stays in Iranian control, or it stays closed or blocked, you know, largely.

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What is the impact on U.S. economy, I guess global economy, if that were to continue to be the case,

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even if the war ended? Because to me, that seems, from what I'm gathering, that's highly

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consequential or could be. Is that fair or no? Well, it's consequential in terms of the U.S.

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exiting the war. The way that it's being framed a lot in the media, they're focusing on his

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comments saying that the rest of the world has to handle the straight on their own. So if they want

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the oil out of the straight, then you guys have to go take it. You have to man up, grow a pair.

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Realistically, if the U.S. declares victory and goes home, then at most, Iran would put a tax

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a toll on ships going through the Gulf,

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or going through the Straits,

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they're already doing that.

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I don't know if they're doing it today,

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but they were doing it in the recent past,

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where they were charging each ship $2 million.

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That comes out to about a dollar a barrel.

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So they'll just pay it.

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Realistically, the Europeans, Japan, Korea,

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they do not have the force projection

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where they can actually do anything about it.

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Iran's neighbors don't want to do anything about it

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because it would be a mess.

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China is sensitive, but they also don't want to do it.

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I think what China is afraid of right now is that their air defense systems are apparently garbage.

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There's speculation that they executed the guy who was the head of the missile defense.

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It failed in Venezuela, it failed in Iran.

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He's either disappeared or he's executed.

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I think China doesn't want to do anything militarily because they're concerned that all of their stuff is garbage.

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And if the whole world knows that, they lose leverage with Taiwan.

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They lose leverage with India.

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They have a lot of neighbors who they have various conflicts with.

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Vietnam, you know, there's sort of been a permanent Cold War with Vietnam ever since they got their butts handed to them in the in the 70s.

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So I think China definitely doesn't want anything. So worst case scenario, which I think would be a nice scenario, is that the U.S. declares victory and goes home.

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And I, you know, Iran probably tries to tax oil. Dubai and Saudi and Iraq won't like that.

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But you know what? They have big, beautiful militaries. If they want to do something about it, they can.

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And so I just had a tweet earlier where I was saying, you know, that it's too early to dream big.

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But there is the possibility that because of this war, NATO could break.

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Trump's fighting with NATO because they're closing their airspace when, from his perspective, we need them.

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So NATO could break and maybe we could shift the rules now where like China has to protect its own oil.

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Like we don't do it for free anymore.

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Interesting. Interesting.

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So to what extent have you, like, as you've watched this unfold, the war, what are you, like, I tend to imagine that the average normie probably isn't seeing this, but there's probably some metric or some data that you're seeing that you're like, man, like, this is a glaring example of just how fragile the fiat system is, the supply chains that fiat have constructed are.

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Or is there anything in particular you could point to that if someone's like not really clear on why, you know, why fiat is garbage and why Bitcoin might fix some of the challenges we face that you're like, this war demonstrates that?

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I think the biggest takeaway is that what fiat does is enables all of these adventures.

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Right. So, you know, if you go back, I mean, really, for the past hundred years, every time governments screw something up, the way that they get out of it is that they shoot their central bank, shoot a trillion dollars at it over and over until the problem goes away.

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And the end result is that every crisis converts into inflation.

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But what it also does is it finances every crisis.

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So like the central bank becomes the venture capitalist of the crisis industrial complex.

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So, you know, America, let's see, we have a close to $2 trillion deficit at 7% of GDP.

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That is deep war level.

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OK, we were relative peace the past couple of years.

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7% in peacetime is obscene.

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That's, you know, third world basket case territory.

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And why is that possible?

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Because the Fed stands ready to print it off.

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The Fed fundamentally backs up with a giant money printer.

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The example I like to give is COVID, right?

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So if you imagine some random country like Canada, and you get the COVID thing, and you have the staff meeting, and they all say, okay, so what are some options?

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And let's say you don't have a central bank, so you have some junior bureaucrat who says, okay, I got a crazy idea.

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Let's shut down the entire economy.

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Tax revenue will drop by half or more, but that's okay because we just lay off all the federal workers.

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We just cut all the government expenditure.

348
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So you would get fired, right? You would get sent to like, you know, the deep north up in Siberia.

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Yeah, you'd be out of here tomorrow, right? The only way that that plan could work to shut down the entire economy and pay all the voters to sit on the couch so that they support lockdowns and, you know, they watch dancing nurses.

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The only way that you could make that work is with a gigantic money printer. That's exactly what happened. Right.

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So they did the lockdowns. They, you know, did the virtue signaling. I uniquely care about grandma. You, you know, anti-vax bozos have blood on your hands.

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Very, very expensive virtue signaling. Right. It cost them. I think at one point it was seven trillion that the Fed balance sheet increased.

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But, you know, they they were able to do it. Not only could they do it, but shooting all that money at it made everything go up.

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It was weird. Like you shut down half the world economy and all the stocks went up.

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Bitcoin went up. Gold went up. Everything went up. Amazing. Right.

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Because they shoot the money. The money first goes into markets and then it dribbles out into consumer prices.

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So the you know, when I look at this war. The near term, the fiat is helping in the sense that, you know, like everybody knows, markets know if everything goes to hell, then they'll just shoot money at it.

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And so, you know, the so-called Fed put. But the wider issue is that the reason that we are in this war, the reason we were in all the wars, the reason we were in World War I, as Safedine discusses, all of those are because of central banks.

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They are the venture capitalists of the crisis industrial complex.

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Interesting. So you mentioned Venezuela. I have to ask. To me, like, I feel like I woke up, saw the news, blinked, and then we moved on to something else.

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we did depose a world leader. And to be fair, we had like, I'm not an interventionalist. You

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probably guess that about me, Peter, but we, we had someone come on a spaces that we did,

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who was from Venezuela, living in the States. And he was talking about how he's like, Venezuelans

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are cheering this on. Like it was, it was bad, you know, and I can sympathize while not agreeing

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that I want my tax dollars or, you know, my children to have to pay debt on some intervention

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that doesn't directly affect me.

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But what was your take on,

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was there maybe like a more,

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like it felt like just this impromptu,

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like we're gonna just pull this thing together.

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But then I hear about people talking about,

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hey, migrating to a multipolar world.

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We need to own the Western hemisphere

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with the Monroe Doctrine.

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Like, how do you look at what happened there?

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And is there sort of a continuing story

377
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in the background that we're so focused on Iran now that we're not even seeing with Venezuela?

378
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Yeah, I mean, so the Venezuelan regime is garbage. They're communists. I encourage anybody to depose

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communists at any time for any reason, using their own money and their own lives. Of course,

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I don't want the government to do this because there's a lot of crappy regimes in the world,

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and we would, you know, we would spend everything we have doing it. Plus, we're already $2 trillion

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in debt, which is, you know, already inviting a financial crisis. So I would prefer we not do it.

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But having and, you know, the whole dominating the hemisphere, you know, Switzerland dominates nothing. Right. It has no external military. It invades nobody. It has no sphere of influence. Liechtenstein is arguably a sphere of influence. It dominates nothing. And it does just fine. Why? Because it goes out and buys crap.

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It can buy lithium and it can buy oil and it can buy food and all the rest of it.

385
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So to me, it's a fallacy.

386
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Why do you have to dominate stuff?

387
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To what end?

388
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Our being a major player in the Middle East, what precisely has that done for us?

389
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Us being influential in Africa, again, what exactly did we get for that?

390
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So I think it's – I've met Venezuelans.

391
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They are absolutely thrilled at Trump.

392
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They love the fact that he told the oil companies, you can't just take the revenue out.

393
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You know, like the oil companies had longstanding lawsuits from when their resources were seized by the government.

394
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He said, no, no, no. We're going to put those on the back burner because the resources are for the Venezuelan people.

395
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I think if you're Venezuelan, you should absolutely love this president.

396
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I mean, he's just been astounding. However, that's not his job.

397
00:33:31,132 --> 00:33:37,512
And he has said this 100 times. He said, you know, when people talk about how nobody likes you in Europe and he says, my job's not.

398
00:33:37,552 --> 00:33:43,072
to be liked in Europe. His job is not to be liked in Venezuela. I sympathize with Venezuelan people.

399
00:33:43,292 --> 00:33:48,812
I encourage any, you know, bored billionaire to go raise an army and go do it on his own. But

400
00:33:48,812 --> 00:33:54,012
fundamentally, yeah, it's not our war. There's a lot of wars in the world and we can't afford them

401
00:33:54,012 --> 00:33:57,992
all. We can't afford what we're doing now. You got a lot of Somali learning centers that need to be

402
00:33:57,992 --> 00:34:03,332
funded. Exactly. Exactly. There's a, yeah. And potholes that need to be paved would be my

403
00:34:03,332 --> 00:34:10,432
preference. So do you think the reason for that, are you optimistic about Trump's intentions that

404
00:34:10,432 --> 00:34:15,772
it was to help the Venezuelan people? Or was this an oil natural resources play? Is there something

405
00:34:15,772 --> 00:34:20,752
else happening that is, or at least that Trump perceives to be benefiting the American people

406
00:34:20,752 --> 00:34:27,032
long-term or something else? Yeah, I think for better or for worse, Trump, whatever filter Trump

407
00:34:27,032 --> 00:34:30,952
used to have is not there anymore. He gives speeches now where he's like, you know, I like

408
00:34:30,952 --> 00:34:35,792
to be around dumb people. Dumb people, you know, I don't like people who are too smart.

409
00:34:36,752 --> 00:34:41,872
The man has no filter. Okay. Like tactically, that's, that's not a good thing to say,

410
00:34:41,932 --> 00:34:47,132
even if that's true. At any rate, he's got no filter. So I honestly, I take it as work. I think

411
00:34:47,132 --> 00:34:53,952
he invaded some sympathy for the Venezuelan people. I think more of it was that the Venezuelan

412
00:34:53,952 --> 00:34:58,072
government was causing a bunch of problems, right? They were sending the narco boats. That's a

413
00:34:58,072 --> 00:35:02,692
legitimate issue. The number of Americans who die every year from overdoses is roughly the number

414
00:35:02,692 --> 00:35:09,272
who died in the entire Vietnam War. That is like a legitimate self-defense issue. There's other

415
00:35:09,272 --> 00:35:13,532
smaller things. For example, Venezuela was not, you know, they emptied their prisons to a certain

416
00:35:13,532 --> 00:35:18,832
degree and just dumped them all north so we could have them. And they were not taking them back,

417
00:35:19,072 --> 00:35:23,592
right? So we would arrest these criminal Venezuelan migrants and then Venezuela would say,

418
00:35:23,592 --> 00:35:30,072
yeah, no, we don't want them. So, I mean, there were some legitimate grievances. I think the

419
00:35:30,072 --> 00:35:37,012
single biggest one was that he genuinely doesn't want China having influence in Latin America.

420
00:35:37,612 --> 00:35:43,072
You know, China has been very big into buying friends with the checkbook. I mean, frankly,

421
00:35:43,132 --> 00:35:49,952
I don't know why we care if like Swaziland is friends with China. Like, you know, yeah,

422
00:35:49,952 --> 00:35:55,052
what are they going to do? So it doesn't bother me, but I think that it does bother Trump. He

423
00:35:55,052 --> 00:36:00,212
wants the U.S. to be the uncontested power, at least in the Western hemisphere.

424
00:36:01,112 --> 00:36:05,412
Okay. And we'll get out of Central America, South America here in one second. But

425
00:36:05,412 --> 00:36:12,132
in the midst of all of this, I saw we were doing some sort of an anti-terrorist campaign in Ecuador.

426
00:36:14,492 --> 00:36:18,732
Was that just that? And it happened to come on my radar? Or was there,

427
00:36:18,732 --> 00:36:20,932
in your view, some other play at hand?

428
00:36:21,072 --> 00:36:24,492
We, I mean, we do those everywhere. I think, uh, you know,

429
00:36:24,512 --> 00:36:28,112
people have tried to tally how many bases we like formal bases. We have,

430
00:36:28,212 --> 00:36:32,332
I don't know, 150. I mean, it's, it's, it's astounding. You know,

431
00:36:32,352 --> 00:36:34,912
every so often you only hear about it when somebody gets killed.

432
00:36:34,912 --> 00:36:37,452
And so like somebody will get killed in what was it the other year,

433
00:36:37,532 --> 00:36:40,712
Niger or something. And then people were like, what, what,

434
00:36:40,712 --> 00:36:44,812
why do we have soldiers in Niger? Yeah. So.

435
00:36:44,812 --> 00:36:51,872
So, yeah, the good thing is all of our intervention is teaching people, Americans geography that they don't learn in public school.

436
00:36:52,932 --> 00:36:54,392
Which, again, what are you going to do with that?

437
00:36:54,472 --> 00:36:56,272
What are you going to go vacation in Niger?

438
00:36:57,792 --> 00:36:59,832
Hey, everyone knows where Ukraine is.

439
00:36:59,952 --> 00:37:01,732
Everyone knows where Iran is now.

440
00:37:01,852 --> 00:37:03,872
Everybody knows what a straight up or lose is now.

441
00:37:04,272 --> 00:37:05,852
And we're all experts on it, too.

442
00:37:05,952 --> 00:37:06,092
Yeah.

443
00:37:06,332 --> 00:37:07,752
The yen carry trade.

444
00:37:07,812 --> 00:37:09,152
I became an expert on that overnight.

445
00:37:09,532 --> 00:37:10,032
That's true.

446
00:37:10,212 --> 00:37:10,632
That's true.

447
00:37:10,632 --> 00:37:18,692
Yeah. So let's talk a little bit just sort of macro, I guess. We U.S. debt recently hit thirty nine trillion dollars.

448
00:37:19,192 --> 00:37:25,232
I think the what would it be? The CBO is looking, you know, a decade out.

449
00:37:25,632 --> 00:37:30,552
And we're talking the U.S. debt doubling here very, very quickly.

450
00:37:30,812 --> 00:37:35,212
And it tends to be very conservative projections, obviously, that the government's going to put out.

451
00:37:35,212 --> 00:37:42,292
what do you, I mean, I assume you agree that's going to get higher, higher, higher. Any other

452
00:37:42,292 --> 00:37:47,152
comment on that before I proceed with questions though? Is that where we're going?

453
00:37:47,772 --> 00:37:51,832
Yeah. Yeah. I think absolutely. It's going to keep getting higher. You know, unfortunately,

454
00:37:51,832 --> 00:37:59,172
the incentives are, there is no predator, there's no natural predator spending in Washington and

455
00:37:59,172 --> 00:38:04,732
everybody, no matter what the party, you benefit, you as a Senator or Congressman or President,

456
00:38:04,732 --> 00:38:10,532
you benefit from spending more. So everybody wants to spend more. There is no countervailing force.

457
00:38:11,072 --> 00:38:19,992
The only limit on it is either a crisis or going back to that central bank with the crisis

458
00:38:19,992 --> 00:38:25,572
nestro complex. You know, if you get a crisis, the Fed will shoot the trillions at it, get out

459
00:38:25,572 --> 00:38:29,732
the bazooka trillion after trillion until it goes away, which converts into inflation. So I think

460
00:38:29,732 --> 00:38:35,012
fundamentally, it will keep going to a crisis. It will probably take longer than people expect.

461
00:38:35,372 --> 00:38:40,872
You know, people in the 1970s thought that we were right on the edge of apocalypse. And 50 years

462
00:38:40,872 --> 00:38:48,032
later, we're not. Anybody who invested the apocalypse in 1978 lost money. So, you know,

463
00:38:48,032 --> 00:38:52,172
it'll probably take longer than it seems. But unfortunately, I think there's, you know,

464
00:38:52,172 --> 00:38:57,472
we just had a natural experiment with Doge where Trump, believe it or not, had been hostile to

465
00:38:57,472 --> 00:39:02,272
federal spending. Every single budget in his first term, he tried to cut $100, $200 billion,

466
00:39:02,492 --> 00:39:09,372
big money back then. Every single time Congress walked away. Doge, of course, Elon is a force

467
00:39:09,372 --> 00:39:15,372
in nature. He can do things no mortal can imagine. Bounced off Washington, didn't even make a dent.

468
00:39:16,212 --> 00:39:22,652
By their own tally, Doge claims $200 billion in savings. Well, that all got gobbled up in a single

469
00:39:22,652 --> 00:39:28,612
year from Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid, no doubt, welfare fraud. It gobbled all of it up.

470
00:39:28,832 --> 00:39:32,432
And that was one time doge. That was one year it gobbled up. Next year is going to gobble it up

471
00:39:32,432 --> 00:39:36,792
again and again and again. So we just had a natural experiment. We had the perfect storm.

472
00:39:36,972 --> 00:39:41,552
We had, you know, Republicans promised they were going to slash federal spending for 50 years. We

473
00:39:41,552 --> 00:39:47,432
had unified Republican control. We allegedly had fiscal conservatives. We had Elon Musk,

474
00:39:47,432 --> 00:39:51,812
possibly the most capable human on Earth heading this thing up.

475
00:39:52,232 --> 00:39:56,892
We had Trump, who by all accounts, he is very hostile to the federal government.

476
00:39:56,992 --> 00:39:58,792
He does not believe that it is a force for good.

477
00:39:59,332 --> 00:40:00,412
All the stars aligned.

478
00:40:00,812 --> 00:40:02,632
Every single planet was in sync.

479
00:40:03,032 --> 00:40:03,292
Nothing.

480
00:40:04,512 --> 00:40:07,032
So I think the takeaway from that is it's hopeless.

481
00:40:07,032 --> 00:40:10,712
And I think that's why gold and silver were taking off before the war.

482
00:40:11,272 --> 00:40:12,332
They exploded last year.

483
00:40:12,412 --> 00:40:15,392
I think silver was up three X, just numbers.

484
00:40:15,392 --> 00:40:19,872
They were both in backwardation, indicating severe supply stress.

485
00:40:20,452 --> 00:40:23,532
So I think that precious metals saw that.

486
00:40:23,992 --> 00:40:28,552
Now, Bitcoin, I think, didn't move up because Bitcoin still had a big run that came from,

487
00:40:28,852 --> 00:40:30,332
you know, there was a lot of hope when Trump won.

488
00:40:30,432 --> 00:40:32,492
He said he was going to pay the Bitcoiners back.

489
00:40:32,952 --> 00:40:35,632
I think that has not turned out as much as people might have expected.

490
00:40:35,992 --> 00:40:39,692
So Bitcoin sat that one out for that reason, or put differently, it got its rally early.

491
00:40:40,052 --> 00:40:43,912
But gold and silver basically said they took one look at what happened to Doge.

492
00:40:43,912 --> 00:40:49,512
you know given the republican congress given trump and they said it's game over right there is

493
00:40:49,512 --> 00:40:55,812
nothing stops his train as lindon says yeah no i think that seems that seems about right because uh

494
00:40:55,812 --> 00:41:01,112
like i was i'm i'm no longer real optimistic when anyone takes office even if it's someone who i

495
00:41:01,112 --> 00:41:05,712
you know align with or like some of the the things that they say to me i just i look at

496
00:41:05,712 --> 00:41:14,232
the, um, kind of to your point, there is no one who is incentivized to go after the spending.

497
00:41:14,232 --> 00:41:19,212
There, there are too many handouts, votes to buy, or you could say accumulate if you,

498
00:41:19,312 --> 00:41:25,432
if you want to be a little more gracious. Um, but I, I would have guessed, I knew Doge was not going

499
00:41:25,432 --> 00:41:32,892
to fill the deficit, right? That to me just seemed insane. I was a bit surprised that they

500
00:41:32,892 --> 00:41:48,104
couldn muster up a little bit more political capital to do something meaningful that wouldn be gobbled up in the first year But maybe in retrospect you know I kind of threw my hands up I don know if like going into Doge what was your anticipation

501
00:41:48,304 --> 00:41:50,344
Like, did you think they were going to bounce right off of Washington?

502
00:41:50,344 --> 00:41:55,484
Or did you think there was a real a real shot at making some meaningful impact?

503
00:41:57,044 --> 00:42:03,944
The problem is that if you're really going to make a big impact, there's only so much

504
00:42:03,944 --> 00:42:04,784
you can do as president.

505
00:42:04,984 --> 00:42:13,244
a lot of it has to come from Congress because there are these forests of laws that are passed

506
00:42:13,244 --> 00:42:17,264
in there. They're crony laws and they protect all this stuff. Right. So when people complain

507
00:42:17,264 --> 00:42:22,164
about the Obama judges and the Biden judges, those guys are downstream of these corrupt

508
00:42:22,164 --> 00:42:28,164
laws that are stuck in there by Congress because some donor paid them to. So to get rid of all of

509
00:42:28,164 --> 00:42:34,164
that garbage, to get rid of the spending, to get rid of the fraudulent, all the money going out in

510
00:42:34,164 --> 00:42:39,364
Minnesota and California. To do all that, you need Congress to do it. And Congress cannot do it

511
00:42:39,364 --> 00:42:44,144
because of something called the filibuster, right? So you need 60 votes to pass. Almost never does

512
00:42:44,144 --> 00:42:48,784
one party have 60 seats. There was a time when they would horse trade and they would sit the

513
00:42:48,784 --> 00:42:52,784
back room over cigars. They would cut deals. They don't do that anymore. So in practice,

514
00:42:53,124 --> 00:43:00,064
nothing major can get passed anymore. So we're essentially frozen more or less at the FDR

515
00:43:00,064 --> 00:43:06,204
revolution. So, you know, FDR gutted the republic. It was essentially a constitutional coup.

516
00:43:06,984 --> 00:43:13,844
He, you know, imposed this administrative state, the deep state. That is essentially frozen in

517
00:43:13,844 --> 00:43:23,964
place because of the filibuster. Now, I guess the good news, the short-term bad news, long-term

518
00:43:23,964 --> 00:43:28,804
good news is that it looks like the Democrats are planning to cut the filibuster next time they get

519
00:43:28,804 --> 00:43:35,984
power. If they do that, then short term, a lot of terrible stuff happens. Basically, whatever

520
00:43:35,984 --> 00:43:41,384
Kamala promised happens, if you get rid of the filibuster. However, it moves us a lot closer to

521
00:43:41,384 --> 00:43:46,944
finally being able to break this logjam because, you know, what I think the past year has shown us

522
00:43:46,944 --> 00:43:53,144
is that the FDR super state is indestructible the way it is. You can't get it out without breaking

523
00:43:53,144 --> 00:43:59,764
the filibuster. Okay. So are you a, like, do you adhere to the thesis of the big print? Is that,

524
00:43:59,764 --> 00:44:05,224
is that what we do with the 39 trillion in debt, the war, the everything going on? Like,

525
00:44:05,264 --> 00:44:09,084
is, are you and Larry Lippard pretty well aligned on, on where you think this is headed?

526
00:44:09,844 --> 00:44:14,564
Yeah, I think absolutely. So, all right, take a Biden inflation. So depending on how you counted,

527
00:44:14,564 --> 00:44:20,784
it was at least 20%. That effectively paid off 8 trillion of debt or what? 7 trillion of debt.

528
00:44:20,784 --> 00:44:27,904
right so you know because when you have inflation the economy keeps up with inflation sort of by

529
00:44:27,904 --> 00:44:33,284
definition but the debt does not because the debt is in nominal dollars so that effectively that was

530
00:44:33,284 --> 00:44:39,124
the biggest like forget the 1990s right bide inflation paid off in an enormous amount of debt

531
00:44:39,124 --> 00:44:43,784
seven trillion dollars in debt now it did in a horrible way right it did it by gutting the

532
00:44:43,784 --> 00:44:49,004
american people and impoverishing us and now you know kids moving in with their parents is at great

533
00:44:49,004 --> 00:44:54,804
depression levels. I mean, it was absolutely horrific. But if the only thing you care about

534
00:44:54,804 --> 00:44:59,944
is the debt to GDP ratio, then you loved Biden inflation. You would want a heck of a lot more of

535
00:44:59,944 --> 00:45:07,004
it. You know, famously, the Weimar government in the 1920s, the national debt was eating the

536
00:45:07,004 --> 00:45:11,844
country alive. I think it was three or four times GDP. This is from absolute memory. Anyway,

537
00:45:11,964 --> 00:45:17,404
it was very large. It was larger than our debt is today. And they had a couple of years of

538
00:45:17,404 --> 00:45:24,204
hyperinflation and then the national debt costs the same as a loaf of bread. So that's the concern

539
00:45:24,204 --> 00:45:29,064
is that if you let things keep running and, you know, we've already got the template or I was

540
00:45:29,064 --> 00:45:33,104
talking earlier about the Fed shooting a trillion in every crisis, we already have the template,

541
00:45:33,304 --> 00:45:38,204
right? If anything goes wrong, every time short-term interest rates spike, for example,

542
00:45:38,264 --> 00:45:42,284
which they do about every two, three years now, that used to be called a crisis. Now the Fed just

543
00:45:42,284 --> 00:45:48,624
shoots money at it, right? So all of these disasters, they all convert into a big print.

544
00:45:49,184 --> 00:45:53,564
Now, they're going to try to make it go slow, because I like to joke that we don't have a

545
00:45:53,564 --> 00:45:58,224
gold standard, but we have a pitchfork standard, which is that, you know, like, why does the Fed

546
00:45:58,224 --> 00:46:02,264
try to keep inflation around 2%? There's no scientific reason for it is because they know

547
00:46:02,264 --> 00:46:06,544
empirically that you go beyond that and people start getting upset. And then they start putting

548
00:46:06,544 --> 00:46:11,304
pressure on Congress, then Congress, you know, starts to clip their wings. So in practice,

549
00:46:11,304 --> 00:46:17,344
this, you know, it's like a gasoline thief. You know, you take one gallon a night. You don't

550
00:46:17,344 --> 00:46:20,984
drain the whole tank at once, right? Because they're going to notice that, right? You take

551
00:46:20,984 --> 00:46:24,604
a little bit. You take like a quarter gallon every single night. You're going to make a lot more

552
00:46:24,604 --> 00:46:29,484
doing it that way than you will stealing all the gas all at once. So, you know, I don't think it's

553
00:46:29,484 --> 00:46:34,224
going to come all at once. They are going to try to restrict it. Central banking has it kind of

554
00:46:34,224 --> 00:46:39,964
down to an art where, you know, they can just shave off a little bit here and there. And by the way,

555
00:46:39,964 --> 00:46:41,064
They steal a lot more than it looks.

556
00:46:41,144 --> 00:46:43,104
They don't steal 2% a year, right?

557
00:46:43,584 --> 00:46:45,424
People think, okay, 2% inflation.

558
00:46:45,784 --> 00:46:50,404
So the Fed printed or stole and gave to somebody 2% of all the money in the world.

559
00:46:50,624 --> 00:46:56,844
No, they took a lot more than that because an economy naturally is deflationary, right?

560
00:46:56,844 --> 00:46:58,624
Because you have all the money in existence.

561
00:46:58,624 --> 00:46:59,704
You have all the stuff.

562
00:47:00,204 --> 00:47:05,184
If your population goes up, if you're more productive, if you're using computers and AI

563
00:47:05,184 --> 00:47:07,744
and whatever to make more stuff, then you have more stuff.

564
00:47:07,824 --> 00:47:08,584
You have the same dollars.

565
00:47:08,584 --> 00:47:10,464
so you actually have deflation.

566
00:47:10,864 --> 00:47:11,684
The stuff gets cheaper.

567
00:47:12,344 --> 00:47:14,624
So what the Fed manages to do is soak all that up.

568
00:47:15,144 --> 00:47:16,424
Probably the biggest deflation we had

569
00:47:16,424 --> 00:47:17,724
over the past 20 years was China.

570
00:47:18,984 --> 00:47:21,164
So when I was a kid, buying a toaster,

571
00:47:21,704 --> 00:47:22,704
you had to think hard about that.

572
00:47:22,784 --> 00:47:23,624
You had to shop around.

573
00:47:23,724 --> 00:47:24,884
You had to go buy Consumer Reports

574
00:47:24,884 --> 00:47:26,304
and figure out which toaster was good.

575
00:47:26,644 --> 00:47:28,784
Why? Because adjusting for inflation,

576
00:47:28,944 --> 00:47:29,624
they were like $150.

577
00:47:30,904 --> 00:47:33,424
Today, you can get a toaster for $7.99.

578
00:47:33,724 --> 00:47:34,844
Maybe not today, today,

579
00:47:34,844 --> 00:47:37,384
but they're very, very cheap because of China.

580
00:47:37,384 --> 00:47:44,584
So China was a massive deflationary impetus that created political issues because it stole a lot of jobs.

581
00:47:45,104 --> 00:47:53,124
But in terms of inflation, quality of life, consumer spending, we should have just gone through over the past 20 years, we should have gone through this massive deflation.

582
00:47:54,224 --> 00:48:03,604
We should have got like 30 percent deflation. All of that was gobbled up by the Fed and handed to Wall Street, to the federal government subsidizing debt.

583
00:48:03,604 --> 00:48:07,704
So they take a lot more than it looks, probably on the order of six, 700 billion a year.

584
00:48:08,604 --> 00:48:13,404
So that effectively, they're borrowing so much that the debt keeps growing.

585
00:48:14,024 --> 00:48:20,224
But if they get to a crisis, a lot of the sort of black pill crowds imagines that there's going to be this great crash.

586
00:48:20,904 --> 00:48:22,644
And then the righteous shall prevail.

587
00:48:23,124 --> 00:48:28,724
And I know it'll all convert into inflation, which is nice if you happen to be a Bitcoiner or a gold bug.

588
00:48:29,164 --> 00:48:30,224
Silver is a little bit trickier.

589
00:48:30,884 --> 00:48:32,224
You will inherit the earth.

590
00:48:33,024 --> 00:48:34,224
It's so interesting.

591
00:48:34,384 --> 00:48:36,704
I actually had this conversation with a friend recently.

592
00:48:36,924 --> 00:48:38,064
I was explaining that.

593
00:48:38,464 --> 00:48:43,704
Even if you take them at their 2% CPI, that's how you perceive inflation.

594
00:48:43,824 --> 00:48:46,324
I was like, first of all, that's not really what inflation is.

595
00:48:46,404 --> 00:48:47,964
I mean, look at monetary inflation.

596
00:48:48,504 --> 00:48:53,044
You're looking at probably 7%, 7.5%, 8% or something like that over the last two decades.

597
00:48:53,804 --> 00:48:57,024
And so that's really what they're stealing from you because you know that 2% is a lie.

598
00:48:57,024 --> 00:49:01,984
But prices should be decreasing by, let's say, 3% a year.

599
00:49:02,224 --> 00:49:04,184
Like the Delta is 10%.

600
00:49:04,184 --> 00:49:06,504
Like that's what you're being robbed of.

601
00:49:06,504 --> 00:49:14,044
Like you could be getting 10% wealthier each year, or at least you could be 10% better off, I guess you might say.

602
00:49:14,564 --> 00:49:16,664
And it's just so distorted.

603
00:49:16,844 --> 00:49:21,804
But honestly, it's fractional reserve banking, central banking.

604
00:49:22,004 --> 00:49:31,504
It's all of these forces that are so opaque to most people that you have to really be interested and really be curious and study hard and read a lot of books and listen to a lot of good podcasts.

605
00:49:31,504 --> 00:49:34,844
that most people just have no idea.

606
00:49:34,944 --> 00:49:36,184
Like if they heard what you just said,

607
00:49:36,284 --> 00:49:39,344
I think they'd completely misunderstand

608
00:49:39,344 --> 00:49:43,224
just how serious the situation was.

609
00:49:44,044 --> 00:49:47,444
And if you paint a picture of what's possible,

610
00:49:48,004 --> 00:49:49,504
I think that's really important for people.

611
00:49:49,504 --> 00:49:56,344
Like they might understand Bitcoin on a life raft view.

612
00:49:56,624 --> 00:49:57,504
Like, okay, I can understand

613
00:49:57,504 --> 00:49:59,064
you want to protect yourself from the fiat system.

614
00:49:59,364 --> 00:50:01,084
But in terms of the wider question,

615
00:50:01,084 --> 00:50:14,404
Like what happens to society if you return to sound money? And there, you know, you can look back at the period before the, you know, two worst policies in American history, which were the income tax and the Federal Reserve.

616
00:50:14,404 --> 00:50:27,564
Those came at the same time. They essentially gave the government the ability to seize unlimited quantities of society's resources and then use those for wars or cronies or whatever it is.

617
00:50:27,564 --> 00:50:48,064
So you can look back at the period before then. I call it the top hat singularity. But the period from about 1875 to 1913, it is an astounding period. Everything was invented. If you take every single thing that Elon is famous for, every one of those was invented in that 40 year period.

618
00:50:48,064 --> 00:50:55,104
computers, hyperloops, rockets, airplanes, helicopters, everything, magnetism, electricity,

619
00:50:55,804 --> 00:51:01,764
telephones, everything was invented in that 40-year period. I think people have no idea what

620
00:51:01,764 --> 00:51:07,124
we've lost. Since then, we have been running on the fumes, commercializing everything that was

621
00:51:07,124 --> 00:51:15,704
invented in 1875 to 1950, or 13. So in other words, if you imagine a counterfactual where we did not

622
00:51:15,704 --> 00:51:20,684
do the Fed. We did not do the income tax. Therefore, we did not have World War I because

623
00:51:20,684 --> 00:51:27,124
there was nobody to finance it. They would have mucked around for six weeks on the border and

624
00:51:27,124 --> 00:51:33,984
called it a day. If we didn't have those things, it's depressing to think where we'd be.

625
00:51:33,984 --> 00:51:38,164
You know, like Starbucks, people working at Starbucks would make a quarter million,

626
00:51:38,504 --> 00:51:45,684
meaning that they would only do it for like five, seven years and they go backpack for their, you

627
00:51:45,684 --> 00:51:50,704
all the things we would have if we hadn't strangled it in the crib in 1914.

628
00:51:51,444 --> 00:51:58,664
Yeah, I've said before that it's hard to imagine a world where we hadn't hampered nuclear and where

629
00:51:58,664 --> 00:52:04,544
we could have accepted Bitcoin in 2009 as the form of money. You combine those couple of things.

630
00:52:05,424 --> 00:52:08,944
And you're right. I've actually given those examples before. I think the combustion engine

631
00:52:08,944 --> 00:52:14,724
was invented around the same time. I was trying to explain this to another friend. This was like

632
00:52:14,724 --> 00:52:20,484
a year ago that all of the cool things Elon does or, you know, anyone, you know, name your tech

633
00:52:20,484 --> 00:52:29,804
billionaire, all of it is incremental improvement on technology that is 120 years old. All like all

634
00:52:29,804 --> 00:52:33,924
of it. And they're like, no, this is like the most technologically crazy age. I was like, no,

635
00:52:34,304 --> 00:52:39,604
imagine going from, I have to open my windows when it's 95 degrees out just to get some,

636
00:52:39,604 --> 00:52:44,784
just to get a breeze to like, I have air conditioning in my home. I can be comfortable

637
00:52:44,784 --> 00:52:51,644
24 hours a day. That is a way bigger lifestyle upgrade than Elon shooting rockets off, which

638
00:52:51,644 --> 00:52:56,184
has no bearing on my life. Right. So I think it's, uh, it's just hard to conceive of if you,

639
00:52:56,364 --> 00:53:02,624
if you don't go do the, do the studying of the history. Um, Peter, uh, I actually just typed

640
00:53:02,624 --> 00:53:08,084
this down cause I hadn't, didn't have this on my list, but tariffs, I have completely lost track

641
00:53:08,084 --> 00:53:09,284
of where we stand on tariffs.

642
00:53:09,364 --> 00:53:10,704
I was following this for a while.

643
00:53:11,204 --> 00:53:13,764
I would love your opinion on tariffs generally,

644
00:53:14,064 --> 00:53:17,324
just your view of tariffs as an Austrian.

645
00:53:17,324 --> 00:53:22,444
And if you have any sense as to where we currently stand

646
00:53:22,444 --> 00:53:25,184
with 200 some odd countries,

647
00:53:25,344 --> 00:53:26,904
I would love to hear your analysis.

648
00:53:27,844 --> 00:53:29,064
Yeah, I kind of dropped out of the headlines.

649
00:53:29,464 --> 00:53:32,924
So broadly speaking, a tariff is a form of a sales tax.

650
00:53:33,064 --> 00:53:35,364
It's a sales tax on a particular class of goods, imports.

651
00:53:35,844 --> 00:53:38,944
Like all sales taxes, it's therefore evil.

652
00:53:39,204 --> 00:53:40,684
It transfers resources to the government.

653
00:53:40,824 --> 00:53:42,284
It drains the lifeblood of people, et cetera.

654
00:53:42,844 --> 00:53:45,664
So tariffs are terrible for the same reason taxes are terrible.

655
00:53:46,284 --> 00:53:52,264
Having said, Trump had two goals with his tariffs, which is why I've been generally going easy on them,

656
00:53:52,784 --> 00:53:56,244
which are, number one, to get other countries to reduce their trade barriers,

657
00:53:56,984 --> 00:54:01,804
which if you can threaten other countries and they remove their trade barriers and then you remove yours,

658
00:54:01,984 --> 00:54:03,524
that creates a better world for everybody.

659
00:54:03,724 --> 00:54:04,804
I think everybody agrees that.

660
00:54:05,364 --> 00:54:10,444
The second one is to reshore production. So to bring factories back to America.

661
00:54:10,784 --> 00:54:14,304
That worked with Ronald Reagan, for example. He threatened the Japanese with tariffs.

662
00:54:14,764 --> 00:54:20,524
They moved production to the U.S. to the point where almost half of Japanese cars sold in America are actually made in America.

663
00:54:21,004 --> 00:54:23,764
And the Japanese don't care. Right. They just want to make money.

664
00:54:24,144 --> 00:54:26,604
OK, they'll make it in America. They'll make it in Japan. They'll make it in China.

665
00:54:27,164 --> 00:54:32,304
They don't care that much where they produce it. The country of Japan may be nationalist, but Toyota doesn't care.

666
00:54:32,404 --> 00:54:34,584
Right. They're paid to make profits. They don't care where they make it.

667
00:54:35,364 --> 00:54:53,024
So those were the two goals. Now, the reshoring, I think, is that was turning into the more interesting of it because Trump, the way that he was negotiating with countries was he was saying, look, I can hit you with this catastrophic tariff or you can build a bunch of factories in America and I'll let you off easy.

668
00:54:53,024 --> 00:55:08,384
And that's what countries were going for. So Korea, Japan, Europe, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia, the Middle East, all of these guys, they were promising a combined, it was over $4 trillion of investment that they were going to build.

669
00:55:08,384 --> 00:55:14,384
So, you know, Taiwan, a semiconductor is building a hundred billion dollar plant in Arizona, a whole bunch of projects.

670
00:55:14,904 --> 00:55:18,764
And the rule of thumb is that every trillion dollars is worth about a million jobs.

671
00:55:19,684 --> 00:55:24,064
Right. So that's that's enormous. Right. That would cut our employment rate in half.

672
00:55:24,144 --> 00:55:27,664
That was a very big deal. So this is what Trump was getting. Right.

673
00:55:27,704 --> 00:55:30,924
He was threatening with these massive tariffs, you know, 40 percent.

674
00:55:30,924 --> 00:55:37,364
and the country would say, okay, you got me. I'm going to take all, like Taiwan took 99% of its

675
00:55:37,364 --> 00:55:41,644
tariffs off American goods. It was obscene they ever had them because we protect them for free.

676
00:55:41,704 --> 00:55:47,064
But anyway, setting that aside, they got rid of 99% of the tariffs and they sent, I don't know,

677
00:55:47,064 --> 00:55:52,364
300 billion or something, which would be, well, that'd be about 300,000 jobs that they were going

678
00:55:52,364 --> 00:55:56,664
to be creating in America. So Trump has been very transactional, has been very, very clear.

679
00:55:56,664 --> 00:56:01,744
Japan, Taiwan, Korea, they understand their media.

680
00:56:01,964 --> 00:56:03,004
I mean, they're smart.

681
00:56:04,024 --> 00:56:05,744
Their media is a lot smarter than ours.

682
00:56:06,204 --> 00:56:09,544
And they sit down and say, OK, they say, look, Trump is transactional.

683
00:56:09,624 --> 00:56:10,624
Here's what Trump wants.

684
00:56:10,784 --> 00:56:12,424
You know, he wants he wants factories.

685
00:56:12,544 --> 00:56:13,304
He wants the trade barrier.

686
00:56:13,484 --> 00:56:17,264
And they sit down and they give it to him to stay on his good side.

687
00:56:18,224 --> 00:56:22,424
So in light of that, right, on the one hand, tariffs on themselves are bad.

688
00:56:22,424 --> 00:56:35,384
On the other hand, Trump was getting so much good out of them. And, you know, if you look at most countries like in Africa or Brazil, for example, tariffs have failed catastrophically.

689
00:56:35,564 --> 00:56:41,504
When you read like in The Economist magazine or The Financial Times and they criticize tariffs, they're thinking of those tariffs.

690
00:56:41,504 --> 00:56:53,004
Now, the key there is that if you pass tariffs and you fail to make it attractive to produce in your country, right, this is what typically happens in Brazil or Africa or somewhere.

691
00:56:53,424 --> 00:56:55,224
They say, OK, we're going to tariff everybody.

692
00:56:55,744 --> 00:57:00,104
But if you try to produce here, you know, the tax rates are going to be astronomical.

693
00:57:00,384 --> 00:57:02,204
The red tape, you get a bribe of everybody.

694
00:57:02,584 --> 00:57:06,304
You know, who knows if the minister of whatnot wants to give your business to his son?

695
00:57:06,364 --> 00:57:06,904
Maybe he will.

696
00:57:07,624 --> 00:57:08,584
You know, property rights.

697
00:57:08,584 --> 00:57:17,104
So in those contexts, yes, tariffs are catastrophic. Brazil, Africa should not have tariffs. They're not adult enough to handle tariffs.

698
00:57:17,464 --> 00:57:24,844
OK, but what Trump was doing here was, first of all, he was, frankly, extorting the foreign investment into the country.

699
00:57:25,444 --> 00:57:32,184
Secondly, he was trying to get tax rates down. He cut the income, the corporate income tax in half, which is the most important for investment.

700
00:57:32,184 --> 00:57:42,764
He was cut, you know, he cut taxes across the board. The one big, beautiful bill, which extended his first term tax cuts, slashing regulation. Right. Zero help from Congress.

701
00:57:42,764 --> 00:57:48,324
He got rid of the global carbon dioxide endangerment rule, which claims that CO2 is a pollutant.

702
00:57:48,924 --> 00:57:53,344
Huge issue in manufacturing, basically wipes out small manufacturers.

703
00:57:53,904 --> 00:58:03,764
So he was getting rid of the two biggest problems to manufacturing in America, which are the tax rates, especially for small businesses and the regulations.

704
00:58:04,444 --> 00:58:10,444
So if you're doing that, if you're putting tariffs on, you're actually making it attractive to produce in your country.

705
00:58:10,444 --> 00:58:18,064
Right. Just kind of to imagine the end result of that, like if Trump were king, then he would put the corporate rate at zero.

706
00:58:18,824 --> 00:58:26,564
He would get rid of all of the regulations, you know, basically roll us back to the 1950s when, you know, people were not eating each other in the street.

707
00:58:26,564 --> 00:58:31,964
But we didn't have this this this crony regulatory state laid on top of it.

708
00:58:32,404 --> 00:58:35,764
If you were to do that, you wouldn't have to threaten countries.

709
00:58:35,764 --> 00:58:39,924
Everybody in the world, like every Japanese company would be trying to move to.

710
00:58:40,184 --> 00:58:46,584
He has zero tax. He got less regulation. You know, it's we have tons of oil, tons of resources in the U.S.

711
00:58:46,684 --> 00:58:57,604
They would be falling over themselves to move here. So in light of that, I think that, you know, that's why I've been supportive of his tariffs, even though in general I oppose most tariffs.

712
00:58:57,604 --> 00:59:03,644
Now, where do we stand? The Supreme Court struck them down under the law he was using, which is called YIPA.

713
00:59:03,644 --> 00:59:09,124
there's three other laws with four other authorities so things like discriminated

714
00:59:09,124 --> 00:59:15,684
against u.s exports national security threats which by the way they're using national security

715
00:59:15,684 --> 00:59:20,544
for upholstered furniture so it's a very expansive definition in washington so they could basically

716
00:59:20,544 --> 00:59:24,724
block anything through these other laws the thing is that those have to be litigated as a process so

717
00:59:24,724 --> 00:59:30,544
that's slow so what he's trying to do in principle is to replace the epa tariffs the epa tariffs were

718
00:59:30,544 --> 00:59:34,824
super clean. That was, you could declare an economic emergency and just hit anybody with

719
00:59:34,824 --> 00:59:39,624
anything. These other tariffs has got to go through step by step. So he's trying to recreate them.

720
00:59:39,704 --> 00:59:45,124
He's trying to homebrew them. The problem is that that takes time. And all these countries that

721
00:59:45,124 --> 00:59:49,704
were going to invest billions or trillions of dollars, they're all waiting to see how that pans

722
00:59:49,704 --> 00:59:57,284
out, right? Because maybe they won't have to do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you would say you approve

723
00:59:57,284 --> 01:00:03,324
of the notion of tariffs in this sort of unique case by virtue of the context in which they're

724
01:00:03,324 --> 01:00:09,504
happening, the intent that you perceive there to be, how would you rate the execution? Because this,

725
01:00:09,904 --> 01:00:14,004
this, when we were talking about this on our show, it, it just felt like we were getting jerked

726
01:00:14,004 --> 01:00:18,764
around with, okay, we're extending, you know, no tariffs until this date and then this date,

727
01:00:18,764 --> 01:00:24,164
and then we're going to slap a new one on. And on one hand, maybe that, you know, I've heard

728
01:00:24,164 --> 01:00:29,764
enough references to 4D chess to be skeptical. However, I don't understand how a lot of this

729
01:00:29,764 --> 01:00:34,464
stuff works in practice. Maybe there's maybe the volatility that we saw with the tariffs was

730
01:00:34,464 --> 01:00:40,584
by design. What do you think of that? Yeah, that's the great debate with Trump is,

731
01:00:40,864 --> 01:00:45,204
you know, in the back of his mind, is he running a TV show where he's got to keep it interesting

732
01:00:45,204 --> 01:00:53,504
every month? And so something weird has to happen? Or is it 4D chess? So, you know, the charitable

733
01:00:53,504 --> 01:00:59,724
take, I mean, it would be that this is intentional. It's a way to force countries. You know, I think

734
01:00:59,724 --> 01:01:05,144
that partly when he first came in, he wanted to communicate to countries that, you know, for a

735
01:01:05,144 --> 01:01:10,384
long time, there's been these very narrow norms of what the U.S. would do. Like, if you piss off

736
01:01:10,384 --> 01:01:16,164
the U.S., then we'll, you know, do this tiny little whatever. We'll not issue as many loan

737
01:01:16,164 --> 01:01:20,284
guarantees for your companies or like just tiny little tweaks. Right. And I think he wanted to

738
01:01:20,284 --> 01:01:25,324
send the message that, look, everything's on the table with me. All right. I will take Greenland.

739
01:01:25,604 --> 01:01:30,764
I mean, I will do things you haven't even dreamed of. So I think that was absolutely intentional,

740
01:01:31,084 --> 01:01:39,024
right, is to raise the threat level. And his goal is to get countries to fold. I don't think he

741
01:01:39,024 --> 01:01:43,264
wants to go to war with countries. He wants to bully and intimidate them. And, you know, that's

742
01:01:43,264 --> 01:01:47,264
his job. He represents the American people. He doesn't represent the European people. Screw them.

743
01:01:47,264 --> 01:01:53,804
his job is not to represent foreign countries. Now, I encourage Europeans to have nationalists

744
01:01:53,804 --> 01:01:58,004
who represent them. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't dislike Europe or Korea or whatever,

745
01:01:58,544 --> 01:02:02,784
but the job of every country is to advocate for itself. And I think that that's what the bullying

746
01:02:02,784 --> 01:02:08,484
was. Now, having said, you know, yanking them around does something interesting because if you

747
01:02:08,484 --> 01:02:14,104
yank the rates around enough, at some point countries just, they can't make a deal anymore.

748
01:02:14,104 --> 01:02:17,804
Like, in other words, negotiation becomes impossible.

749
01:02:17,804 --> 01:02:39,496
You know there a famous game from the 1950s called Chicken where you know two hot rodders aim cars at each other and then whoever swerves first loses right He the weak guy You got to be careful about words I not exactly sure what he going to post At any rate but well

750
01:02:39,616 --> 01:02:43,296
there's a way to win chicken, which is that you remove your steering wheel and you hold it out

751
01:02:43,296 --> 01:02:48,916
the window. Okay. So now the other guy has to, he's got to turn. If he doesn't turn, he's literally

752
01:02:48,916 --> 01:02:54,176
dead, right? So you indicate to the guy, I can't turn. And so in this case, if you yank the rage,

753
01:02:54,176 --> 01:02:57,456
20%, 10%, 50%, 70%, 120%.

754
01:02:57,456 --> 01:03:00,196
If you yank them all over the place, you're basically saying,

755
01:03:00,396 --> 01:03:00,996
that's a steering wheel.

756
01:03:01,096 --> 01:03:02,216
I can't negotiate with you.

757
01:03:02,296 --> 01:03:03,676
Your companies have to move here.

758
01:03:05,036 --> 01:03:07,956
So that's an interesting question where at some point the companies,

759
01:03:08,256 --> 01:03:11,316
they can't walk away from the U.S. market because the U.S.

760
01:03:11,356 --> 01:03:12,776
is one quarter of the world economy.

761
01:03:13,076 --> 01:03:15,116
I don't think Americans understand how dominant we are.

762
01:03:15,436 --> 01:03:17,256
We are a quarter of the world market.

763
01:03:17,816 --> 01:03:21,176
We tend to be the highest income consumers.

764
01:03:21,176 --> 01:03:26,456
So you make like there's a lot of industries where you make all your profit in the U.S. and then everything else is just gravy on top of that.

765
01:03:26,816 --> 01:03:31,756
So they can't walk away. So they can't walk away. And the tariffs could be 70 percent tomorrow.

766
01:03:32,216 --> 01:03:36,756
At some point you say, you know what, screw it. Just build a factory in North Carolina.

767
01:03:36,956 --> 01:03:42,556
The wages are cheap. The energy is cheap. The energy is like a third the cost of Germany, half the cost of Japan.

768
01:03:42,996 --> 01:03:48,316
Just pull the trigger. So it may be intentional, basically holding the steering wheel at the window.

769
01:03:48,316 --> 01:03:49,496
So that's interesting.

770
01:03:49,976 --> 01:03:50,156
Okay.

771
01:03:50,176 --> 01:03:54,496
So my last sort of topic I wanted to cover with you is just broadly the U.S. economy,

772
01:03:54,496 --> 01:04:00,916
because I've seen you, you've done a number of videos on, I didn't even like prepare this

773
01:04:00,916 --> 01:04:05,576
question exactly, but I saw you talking about like number of college grads who are not,

774
01:04:05,716 --> 01:04:12,136
who aren't able to find employment in their field of study or at all, probably in many

775
01:04:12,136 --> 01:04:15,376
cases, obviously like rising healthcare prices.

776
01:04:15,376 --> 01:04:24,436
You go down the list, I feel a bit insulated, as a Bitcoiner, I feel a little bit insulated from what I see on some of your videos, for example.

777
01:04:24,656 --> 01:04:28,616
But the data suggests that there are a lot of people struggling.

778
01:04:29,276 --> 01:04:32,436
And we've seen unemployment at like the big tech companies.

779
01:04:32,636 --> 01:04:34,656
AI is going to obviously replace many.

780
01:04:35,716 --> 01:04:42,056
At the very least, I think most people agree a lot of white collar jobs are probably going away because of AI, at least over the next few years.

781
01:04:42,056 --> 01:04:48,436
Um, like what's your, uh, what's your take on what's, what is actually happening on main street

782
01:04:48,436 --> 01:04:52,656
that maybe you don't hear in the political narratives that you don't see on mainstream

783
01:04:52,656 --> 01:04:59,616
news. And what do you think this looks like for the next, you know, five, 10 years? Does it get

784
01:04:59,616 --> 01:05:04,916
better? Does it get worse? Do they just blow a trillion dollars at the problem? Like what's the,

785
01:05:04,916 --> 01:05:10,556
what's the exit for it? Yeah, I think economically,

786
01:05:11,056 --> 01:05:18,076
sorry, I think economically, we are in one of the golden ages of all history,

787
01:05:18,076 --> 01:05:21,436
because of technology, not because of the government, the government is trying to screw

788
01:05:21,436 --> 01:05:27,476
it up as much as they can. And, you know, this is partly things like AI, computers,

789
01:05:27,696 --> 01:05:32,096
the internet, even just computers and the internet, they have not finished

790
01:05:32,096 --> 01:05:38,696
raising productivity, raising incomes. A lot of it is foreign countries. You know, so

791
01:05:38,696 --> 01:05:44,736
if you go back 30 years ago, roughly 1 billion people in the world were really productive in the

792
01:05:44,736 --> 01:05:50,416
global economy. Now it's like 4 or 5 billion. You get innovations, you get, you know, if you look at

793
01:05:50,416 --> 01:05:55,056
Chinese manufacturing, for example, it's genuinely impressive. There's a lot of fields where the

794
01:05:55,056 --> 01:05:59,516
Chinese are actually leading edge. A couple of years ago, the city of Akron wanted to have like

795
01:05:59,516 --> 01:06:05,116
a hundred year anniversary of, of like highlighting Akron's history in glass.

796
01:06:05,216 --> 01:06:08,196
They were like the seventh, the Silicon Valley of glass a hundred years ago.

797
01:06:08,396 --> 01:06:11,796
So they were going to build this curved glass wall to, to, you know,

798
01:06:11,796 --> 01:06:13,656
show off because that was invented in Akron.

799
01:06:13,856 --> 01:06:17,596
The thing is that no American company can make a curved glass wall.

800
01:06:18,156 --> 01:06:20,336
It's a hundred year old technology. Nobody can make it here.

801
01:06:20,436 --> 01:06:23,296
So they had to buy it from China. You know, Akron, Ohio,

802
01:06:23,296 --> 01:06:26,756
did not want to buy from China. Right. That was going to be in the news.

803
01:06:26,856 --> 01:06:29,176
These are all union guys. Okay. They tried.

804
01:06:29,516 --> 01:06:34,896
impossible. So if you look at it from a technology perspective, I think we are an absolutely golden

805
01:06:34,896 --> 01:06:40,336
age in terms of rising incomes. The government is, of course, going to try to take everything

806
01:06:40,336 --> 01:06:44,616
it can. But again, putting that in perspective, governments have been rapacious for 100 years.

807
01:06:45,536 --> 01:06:50,476
There have been many times when people thought that the end was nigh and it gets postponed.

808
01:06:50,836 --> 01:06:54,856
And the reason is that what governments are doing is parasiting some of that technological

809
01:06:54,856 --> 01:07:01,096
advancement, right? Like with China, right? They gobble it up. They pay the cronies. They buy the

810
01:07:01,096 --> 01:07:06,976
wars. They do all this. So what they end up doing is, you know, tech moves us three steps. Government

811
01:07:06,976 --> 01:07:14,136
knocks that back one. I think most likely that process is going to continue. I think the biggest

812
01:07:14,136 --> 01:07:20,296
fear that people have right now is jobs, specifically with AI. But it's not just AI,

813
01:07:20,296 --> 01:07:37,956
It's factory automation. If you look at the jobs lost since 2000 in manufacturing, for example, only about a third of that was China. Two thirds of that was automation. So if you go into an American factory nowadays, remember I visited a rubber factory in Kentucky a couple of years ago.

814
01:07:37,956 --> 01:07:44,796
and it's amazing right every workstation had either one guy or zero guys just having a little

815
01:07:44,796 --> 01:07:49,476
alarm that would call the guy over if something went wrong you had like i don't know 15 steps that

816
01:07:49,476 --> 01:07:53,496
each had zero to one person and then you had a last step called flashing where they cut off the

817
01:07:53,496 --> 01:07:59,216
little little nipples on the on the rubber okay and that had like 80 80 women sitting there with

818
01:07:59,216 --> 01:08:04,016
scissors right and you're just looking at this thing and like you can see the process right one

819
01:08:04,016 --> 01:08:09,676
by one, they replaced, you know, because each of those steps probably had 10, 20, 30 people.

820
01:08:10,396 --> 01:08:14,776
So, you know, it was a whatever, a 7000 person factory and a shrink, shrink, shrink, shrink.

821
01:08:16,176 --> 01:08:21,116
So that's all going to continue. But that's that's been going on for 150 years. Arguably

822
01:08:21,116 --> 01:08:25,796
has been going on for a lot longer than that. You know, in ancient Greece, they worried about

823
01:08:25,796 --> 01:08:29,916
oxen replacing farm workers and they'd have all these extra men who wouldn't be able to raise a

824
01:08:29,916 --> 01:08:34,216
families. You have to send them to war or else they're going to cause trouble. In medieval Europe,

825
01:08:34,336 --> 01:08:39,656
it was water wheels and windmills were going to take all the jobs away. The Industrial Revolution,

826
01:08:39,776 --> 01:08:44,176
of course, that was going to wipe out all the jobs. The internet was going to take away all

827
01:08:44,176 --> 01:08:49,916
the jobs. It was going to replace all the white collar workers with spreadsheets and Word documents.

828
01:08:50,736 --> 01:08:56,596
Every single time, right, thousands of years of automation, every single time what happens

829
01:08:56,596 --> 01:09:01,256
out the other end is that you have, you find new jobs because human wants are unlimited.

830
01:09:02,256 --> 01:09:07,596
And those jobs pay much, much better. So it's an escalator. So what happens is the automation is

831
01:09:07,596 --> 01:09:11,956
the escalator that every so often you have to take a step down. So you used to be an accountant.

832
01:09:12,436 --> 01:09:17,556
Now you have to drive for Uber. But the thing is that the automation itself is raising the wages.

833
01:09:17,556 --> 01:09:24,096
So if you look at the industrial revolution, for example, a farm worker today, if they're American,

834
01:09:24,096 --> 01:09:29,076
they make about 25 bucks. If they're like an illegal, they make more like 15. Okay. Compare

835
01:09:29,076 --> 01:09:35,416
that to what a farm worker made in 1800, right. In modern terms. I mean, it was like, it was like

836
01:09:35,416 --> 01:09:42,796
$14 a day. Right. So even, even the jobs that step down, the automation picks it up. The problem

837
01:09:42,796 --> 01:09:49,656
is that the timing doesn't matter. Right. So, you know, you do have accountants who have to go drive

838
01:09:49,656 --> 01:09:55,996
for Uber. I just saw a statistic that the average babysitter in the U.S. makes over $20 an hour.

839
01:09:57,016 --> 01:10:01,896
Babysitting is just about the lowest skilled job possible. You can be a 16-year-old in high school

840
01:10:01,896 --> 01:10:10,616
with no experience and you can babysit. $20 an hour. That's striking. So people are not going

841
01:10:10,616 --> 01:10:16,116
to starve to death. The automation is going to create more jobs because automation makes you

842
01:10:16,116 --> 01:10:22,556
richer, as you get richer, middle-class people consume things that only rich people used to

843
01:10:22,556 --> 01:10:27,516
consume. So consider that today, even like the poorest Americans, people on welfare,

844
01:10:27,876 --> 01:10:31,856
they get their nails done, they get their hairs done. They don't raise their own chickens. Okay.

845
01:10:31,856 --> 01:10:37,536
They go to the store and they effectively hire butchers. They hire farmers to raise chickens.

846
01:10:37,536 --> 01:10:43,556
They hire butchers. They hire people to bring it, in many cases, to bring it literally to their door.

847
01:10:43,556 --> 01:10:50,456
this is a level of services this is the poorest people in america do this right they use like

848
01:10:50,456 --> 01:10:58,056
uber eats you know so and and this is what happens in a rich society is that services spread uh you

849
01:10:58,056 --> 01:11:02,896
know also as a society gets richer people have more stuff you know so the average house in america

850
01:11:02,896 --> 01:11:10,616
in 1950 was 950 square feet like if you think of how big that is yeah it's like a apartment now

851
01:11:10,616 --> 01:11:11,836
It's like a one-bedroom apartment.

852
01:11:12,456 --> 01:11:14,696
The average house today is like 25 square feet.

853
01:11:15,036 --> 01:11:15,856
So stuff gets bigger.

854
01:11:15,936 --> 01:11:16,896
People have second homes.

855
01:11:16,996 --> 01:11:17,776
They have swimming pools.

856
01:11:17,876 --> 01:11:18,716
They need the pool guy.

857
01:11:18,836 --> 01:11:19,816
They need the electrician.

858
01:11:19,896 --> 01:11:20,796
They got more to go wrong.

859
01:11:21,776 --> 01:11:29,376
The fundamentally demand increases for all of the other jobs that AI does not replace.

860
01:11:30,116 --> 01:11:34,496
And so what's fascinating to me is that it's almost an inverse of the Industrial Revolution.

861
01:11:35,156 --> 01:11:38,436
So the Industrial Revolution wiped out physical labor.

862
01:11:38,436 --> 01:11:45,636
And so but it made everybody much richer because, you know, a tractor is 50 times more efficient.

863
01:11:46,016 --> 01:11:49,136
So everybody got rich, but the blue collars got knocked down.

864
01:11:49,616 --> 01:11:54,836
And when the smoke cleared, blue collars today make much more, you know, seven, 10 times more than they did.

865
01:11:55,116 --> 01:11:58,436
But white collars make 50 times more. Right.

866
01:11:58,476 --> 01:12:04,876
So if you look at what's the equivalent of a professor before the Industrial Revolution, it was some crazy guy sitting in a park yelling about stuff.

867
01:12:04,996 --> 01:12:07,916
I mean, literally. Right. That's what the philosophers were in ancient Greece.

868
01:12:07,916 --> 01:12:18,896
They were all they were effectively homeless like Socrates. One of them lived in a barrel. Right. So these white collar jobs were not valuable before the Industrial Revolution.

869
01:12:18,896 --> 01:12:27,596
What happened is we got rich. A certain amount of that was siphoned off by special interests who then funneled into the universities or, you know, medical care, of course, advanced.

870
01:12:27,596 --> 01:12:34,216
So being a doctor is much more, it requires a lot more brain work than it did in, you know, 1800, so on.

871
01:12:34,316 --> 01:12:39,016
So it's sort of, the escalator went up for everybody, right?

872
01:12:39,056 --> 01:12:41,096
Even blue collars in America have air conditioning.

873
01:12:41,516 --> 01:12:42,736
However, it reshuffled.

874
01:12:43,376 --> 01:12:46,476
And what I think is going to happen with AI is going to reshuffle the other direction.

875
01:12:47,156 --> 01:12:53,476
So very specifically, highly educated, high income, older, by the way, white women.

876
01:12:53,476 --> 01:12:58,716
So Karen, if you look at the demographic profile, they are like around zero.

877
01:12:59,896 --> 01:13:04,496
What's also fascinating to me is if you think about the people who write AI doom porn.

878
01:13:05,356 --> 01:13:09,756
OK, so professors, people who work at think tanks, journalists.

879
01:13:10,476 --> 01:13:15,376
OK, everybody writes AI doom porn is 100 percent the people who are going to get replaced by AI.

880
01:13:15,816 --> 01:13:18,516
Plumbers, plumbers are not writing AI doom porn.

881
01:13:18,996 --> 01:13:23,316
Right. So they are terrified of a world like already today.

882
01:13:23,316 --> 01:13:26,076
hey, the plumber makes more than the journalist.

883
01:13:26,256 --> 01:13:27,436
He might make more than the professor.

884
01:13:27,916 --> 01:13:29,316
They're terrified of a world

885
01:13:29,316 --> 01:13:31,396
where the DoorDash girl makes more than that.

886
01:13:32,316 --> 01:13:34,556
I think that's what happens with AI.

887
01:13:34,736 --> 01:13:36,476
So again, the escalator goes up

888
01:13:36,476 --> 01:13:38,636
because AI makes everything so efficient.

889
01:13:39,256 --> 01:13:40,516
It cuts prices.

890
01:13:41,396 --> 01:13:44,016
Now, people always say, no, no, no, AI is BS.

891
01:13:45,236 --> 01:13:46,356
It's just pretending.

892
01:13:46,776 --> 01:13:48,856
It's mimicking what it read on Reddit.

893
01:13:49,276 --> 01:13:49,756
Okay, fine.

894
01:13:49,776 --> 01:13:50,936
If that's the case, then false alarm.

895
01:13:51,076 --> 01:13:51,516
Forget about it.

896
01:13:51,716 --> 01:13:52,456
AI is not going to do anything.

897
01:13:52,456 --> 01:13:58,636
but I think it is pretty significant because I use it every day. It is brilliant. It is as smart

898
01:13:58,636 --> 01:14:02,776
as the best economists. You know, people used to ask me these like really far out sci-fi questions,

899
01:14:02,776 --> 01:14:06,936
like what happens if, and you know, I'd be like, oh no, this is a good challenge. Let me,

900
01:14:07,056 --> 01:14:11,956
and now like I ask AI and I'm like, yeah, I didn't think about that. Okay. It's, it's freaking

901
01:14:11,956 --> 01:14:17,976
brilliant. I can say as a practitioner. So I think that AI is absolutely going to change things.

902
01:14:18,416 --> 01:14:21,556
Specifically it's going to do what the industrial revolution did, but this time it's going to

903
01:14:21,556 --> 01:14:27,156
dethrone the white collars who tend to be Democrats. They tend to be influential.

904
01:14:28,196 --> 01:14:32,576
They tend to, you know, they're the ones who influence institutions and the government and

905
01:14:32,576 --> 01:14:37,776
the AI doom porn. So I think that there will be an institutional backlash to it because,

906
01:14:38,236 --> 01:14:43,236
right, when the Industrial Revolution came, the guys who pitched hay, they couldn't stop it. The

907
01:14:43,236 --> 01:14:48,776
most they could do was like burn down factories every so often, right? The Luddites in this AI,

908
01:14:48,776 --> 01:14:51,536
why, okay, this is the ruling class.

909
01:14:51,676 --> 01:14:53,976
This is the elite who's getting dethroned.

910
01:14:54,116 --> 01:14:55,736
So I think it's going to be absolutely fast.

911
01:14:55,836 --> 01:14:56,576
I'm there with popcorn.

912
01:14:57,236 --> 01:14:59,516
Yeah, I probably tend to agree with that.

913
01:14:59,636 --> 01:15:03,036
And the amazing thing is a lot of it's going to end up being open sourced.

914
01:15:03,356 --> 01:15:05,276
And it's like Bitcoin.

915
01:15:05,436 --> 01:15:07,696
It's like anything that they try to do to stop it.

916
01:15:08,056 --> 01:15:09,356
There's going to be a workaround.

917
01:15:09,516 --> 01:15:13,056
Someone in another country that doesn't fall under the king

918
01:15:13,056 --> 01:15:15,756
is going to figure something out and open source it.

919
01:15:16,716 --> 01:15:18,116
So I lied to you.

920
01:15:18,116 --> 01:15:20,256
I was going to ask, I said that was the last topic.

921
01:15:20,376 --> 01:15:22,456
I do want to ask, in everything we've discussed, right,

922
01:15:22,696 --> 01:15:26,216
we've got war, we've got AI, geopolitical turmoil,

923
01:15:26,616 --> 01:15:27,756
tariffs, all these things.

924
01:15:28,416 --> 01:15:30,576
What does all of this mean in aggregate?

925
01:15:30,956 --> 01:15:32,716
You have to go one by one for Bitcoin.

926
01:15:33,056 --> 01:15:36,756
And is there a reason you think, like, do you see,

927
01:15:36,916 --> 01:15:39,716
do you look at Bitcoin adoption as, you know,

928
01:15:40,096 --> 01:15:43,096
you're bullish on where we're going over the next 12 months?

929
01:15:43,696 --> 01:15:45,496
I don't really care about price too much,

930
01:15:45,496 --> 01:15:48,016
but are you kind of think we're done with the stickiness

931
01:15:48,016 --> 01:15:50,516
of the $60,000, $70,000 range here soon?

932
01:15:50,596 --> 01:15:51,756
Or what's your take?

933
01:15:52,756 --> 01:15:55,636
Yeah, I mean, price, I have no idea.

934
01:15:56,936 --> 01:15:57,976
That's the right answer.

935
01:15:58,236 --> 01:15:58,776
That's correct.

936
01:15:58,776 --> 01:16:02,236
Yeah, I think adoption continues.

937
01:16:02,616 --> 01:16:04,296
I think adoption got a little bit of a slowdown

938
01:16:04,296 --> 01:16:06,696
simply because the paper hand tourists

939
01:16:06,696 --> 01:16:09,476
are playing in silver.

940
01:16:09,776 --> 01:16:11,996
They're not anymore, but for a while there,

941
01:16:12,056 --> 01:16:14,996
they were playing in silver and gold and other things.

942
01:16:14,996 --> 01:16:20,076
So, you know, I think that's why price took a hit recently.

943
01:16:20,416 --> 01:16:24,876
But having said in the long run, you know, the long term adoption, I think, is still solid.

944
01:16:25,416 --> 01:16:35,176
I think it's interesting that, you know, when we talk about the potential crises, the solution to all of those because of central banking is inflation.

945
01:16:35,716 --> 01:16:43,136
So like every crisis can, in a sense, be translated into inflation, which means that every crisis accrues to Bitcoin.

946
01:16:43,136 --> 01:16:53,936
So I think in the long run, I mean, certainly as a hedge, you know, anybody who's invested in stocks or something, I think absolutely has to have a chunk in Bitcoin.

947
01:16:54,936 --> 01:17:03,956
But I think as time goes on, you know, all of those crises, like each crisis gives a boost to Bitcoin price and also the Bitcoin adoption.

948
01:17:06,756 --> 01:17:10,696
And then sort of the meta question is, can fiat go on forever?

949
01:17:10,696 --> 01:17:17,556
However, you know, is there some point where the inflation, you know, the crises get big enough that the inflation gets run away?

950
01:17:17,916 --> 01:17:22,476
There's some point like 50 percent a year where inflation tends to accelerate very rapidly.

951
01:17:22,656 --> 01:17:28,736
People just dump all their cash. And if we get to that point, which has happened many, many times in history.

952
01:17:29,356 --> 01:17:32,536
Right. I mean, history is really just a cycle. Right.

953
01:17:32,536 --> 01:17:35,536
Where you have inflation and then everybody wises up and goes to gold.

954
01:17:35,656 --> 01:17:38,456
They get inflation again. They wise up and go to gold and you do it again and again.

955
01:17:38,456 --> 01:17:48,556
And of course, it's a cycle because every time they go to gold, you know, the fundamental problem with gold is that you can't like you can't in the modern day.

956
01:17:48,556 --> 01:17:51,436
You can't have a currency that is literally gold coins.

957
01:17:51,916 --> 01:17:53,096
It's it's too expensive.

958
01:17:53,956 --> 01:17:59,456
It's you know, you have to have some currency, whether it's electronic or paper, that's backed by gold.

959
01:17:59,616 --> 01:18:06,216
Now, the problem is that if you back it with gold, you can't say that your gold is in a secret place and you can't tell anybody where it is.

960
01:18:07,036 --> 01:18:07,476
Right.

961
01:18:07,476 --> 01:18:13,776
You have to give the address. You have to show the camera with the sharks with the lasers on their heads.

962
01:18:13,776 --> 01:18:20,596
And so you have to show it. And once you do that, government is going to is going to give you a visit and they're going to have opinions about what you should do with this goal.

963
01:18:20,876 --> 01:18:25,996
It's very risky to leave it here. Why don't you leave it with us over at the Fed, in which case it'll be rehypopulated.

964
01:18:26,096 --> 01:18:34,796
We reland down. Right. So it'll be gone. And so, you know, the I think it's ironic because for gold bugs,

965
01:18:34,796 --> 01:18:40,556
they say that the reason why Bitcoin is BS and gold rocks is because gold is physical, right?

966
01:18:40,576 --> 01:18:45,576
You can drop it on your foot. It's real. You can hold it. Okay. But that is also the reason why it

967
01:18:45,576 --> 01:18:50,816
is terminally vulnerable to government seizure. The government doesn't have to seize it. They just

968
01:18:50,816 --> 01:18:56,236
have to have opinions about what you should do with it next. And so for that reason, we keep

969
01:18:56,236 --> 01:19:01,376
going through the cycle. What is exciting for me about Bitcoin is that once you get into Bitcoin,

970
01:19:01,376 --> 01:19:06,796
you don't have to get out, right? Because government cannot capture it. So then the

971
01:19:06,796 --> 01:19:13,276
question becomes, okay, well, you know, if Fiat is going to die, which on a long enough timeline,

972
01:19:13,396 --> 01:19:17,916
it will, the question is, you know, when does that happen? If it happens like in the next 10 years,

973
01:19:17,976 --> 01:19:23,336
which I think is extremely unlikely, then we go to gold because there's some institutional memory,

974
01:19:23,736 --> 01:19:29,376
because the older people who have more influence on the world are still gold bugs, okay, over the

975
01:19:29,376 --> 01:19:35,496
next 10 years. If the end doesn't come for 30 years, then I think at that point, it's more

976
01:19:35,496 --> 01:19:40,236
likely that you go to Bitcoin. Because if you look at young people, young people who understand

977
01:19:40,236 --> 01:19:46,916
central banking, who care about the basement, almost none of them are in gold. Yeah, like,

978
01:19:47,156 --> 01:19:52,876
you know, almost like, I guess, 45 or 50 is roughly the dividing point. I used to say 40,

979
01:19:52,956 --> 01:19:57,876
but that was five years ago. So let's call it 45 is the dividing point. Anybody over 45 or 50,

980
01:19:57,876 --> 01:20:01,276
they just want to hear about gold. Anybody under that age just want to hear about Bitcoin.

981
01:20:01,636 --> 01:20:08,076
So ironically, in a sense, Bitcoiners should be rooting for the fiat system to keep going a little

982
01:20:08,076 --> 01:20:13,836
bit longer so that the gold bucks flip over to Bitcoin. Now, having said, if it does happen in

983
01:20:13,836 --> 01:20:19,176
the next 10 years and we go to gold, then at that point, you know, even the people who own gold,

984
01:20:19,176 --> 01:20:22,656
I think are going to be much more receptive switching over to Bitcoin because Bitcoin at

985
01:20:22,656 --> 01:20:27,856
this point has a lower inflation rate than gold. Gold is mined, I think, around 1.2 or 1.5% a year.

986
01:20:27,876 --> 01:20:32,196
it's effectively its inflation rate whereas bitcoin is now below that so even if we do go

987
01:20:32,196 --> 01:20:37,016
in the next 10 years i think we revert to gold as we have hundreds of times through history

988
01:20:37,016 --> 01:20:41,336
uh and then at that point you know bitcoin continues eroding the market share of gold

989
01:20:41,336 --> 01:20:46,176
so i think either way yeah if we zoom out 30 50 years i think there's a very good chance that

990
01:20:46,176 --> 01:20:52,976
we'll have a bitcoin standard yeah i think uh in a worst case scenario if we had to if we were to

991
01:20:52,976 --> 01:20:57,956
migrate to something like a gold standard or migrate to gold is like a more meaningful aspect

992
01:20:57,956 --> 01:21:04,436
of commerce. I think very quickly we realize, oh, maybe this could have worked in the 1970s,

993
01:21:04,436 --> 01:21:10,436
but not in the digital, not in the digital global economy that we have in, you know, 2020 or 2030

994
01:21:10,436 --> 01:21:17,256
or 2035 or something. So I think we run out of, we spin out of gold pretty, pretty quickly would

995
01:21:17,256 --> 01:21:22,136
be my guess. You, you necessarily have to decentralize gold because it's made of atoms.

996
01:21:22,136 --> 01:21:27,796
You have to store it somewhere. And once you store it somewhere, it's centralized. It's got all the vulnerabilities.

997
01:21:28,576 --> 01:21:32,496
Makes sense. All right. My last question for you, Peter. I promise this time.

998
01:21:33,116 --> 01:21:38,356
What is an unpopular opinion that you have and you get some bonus points if you offend Bitcoiners with it?

999
01:21:39,036 --> 01:21:41,996
OK, so offense. I don't know how offensive this is to Bitcoiners.

1000
01:21:41,996 --> 01:21:53,496
So I think that as much as Bitcoiners hate the Fed, the Fed is the best salesman, the best promoter on earth for Bitcoin.

1001
01:21:54,716 --> 01:22:10,156
You know, if we had a system where either central banks were disciplined and careful and were actually protecting the dollar, which they did for a minute in like 1920, if we either had that system or if we were already on a gold standard, then I think that it would be.

1002
01:22:10,156 --> 01:22:16,136
it'd be much harder to get people to appreciate and understand the power of Bitcoin. So,

1003
01:22:16,556 --> 01:22:20,636
you know, in a sense, Bitcoin is created by central banking. It's sustained by central banking.

1004
01:22:20,636 --> 01:22:28,016
I hate central banks. So, yeah, the Fed is Bitcoin's biggest champion.

1005
01:22:28,896 --> 01:22:33,356
And the worse the Fed gets, you know, the more incompetent it gets, the more that helps our case.

1006
01:22:34,136 --> 01:22:39,976
So it's it was the curse that instigated the I guess the origin of Bitcoin. And now it's the

1007
01:22:39,976 --> 01:22:46,396
blessing that demonstrates why we need bitcoin so very badly a bitcoin would not exist if not for

1008
01:22:46,396 --> 01:22:51,036
the creature of jekyll island yeah well said all right peter thank you so much for your time man

1009
01:22:51,036 --> 01:22:54,736
why don't you tell people where they can uh find you read your sub stack listen to your podcast

1010
01:22:54,736 --> 01:22:58,776
anything else you want to send them to yep so i make daily videos and a little three and a half

1011
01:22:58,776 --> 01:23:04,996
minute shticks on liberty and freedom or liberty and economics rather those go up on x the artist

1012
01:23:04,996 --> 01:23:10,776
for really known as Twitter. I also do deep dives every week on profstaydons.com and I

1013
01:23:10,776 --> 01:23:14,276
do a podcast where I round up all the videos at profstaydons.com.

1014
01:23:14,716 --> 01:23:19,936
I love it. Everyone needs to check these out. You learn a lot very quickly. I'll tell you just

1015
01:23:19,968 --> 01:23:25,908
personal story. I've got a sister who's a teacher and I've been, I've sent her your videos like

1016
01:23:25,908 --> 01:23:31,288
20 times. I'm like, you need to do this in your domain. Like this, like these three,

1017
01:23:31,428 --> 01:23:36,548
five minute videos, people love these things. It's something about them just like connects.

1018
01:23:37,268 --> 01:23:43,248
What's funny about it is that you can, you can get really deep on stuff because it's only like

1019
01:23:43,248 --> 01:23:50,408
three and a half minutes right so like a single thing yeah like um like people don't get tired

1020
01:23:50,408 --> 01:23:58,428
right so like if i do something on like central banking and m2 you know money supply and then

1021
01:23:58,428 --> 01:24:02,808
how that relates to inflation if you're doing that for 20 minutes especially at like eight in the

1022
01:24:02,808 --> 01:24:13,188
morning no yeah yeah it's got to be short it's got to be as simple as possible uh

1023
01:24:13,188 --> 01:24:15,428
you know, so you can explain difficult concepts to people.

1024
01:24:16,548 --> 01:24:19,268
But I think there's a ton of fields where there's massive

1025
01:24:19,268 --> 01:24:21,688
appetite for that, you know, whether it's psychology,

1026
01:24:21,688 --> 01:24:25,028
anything to do with science. There's a lot of people who,

1027
01:24:25,268 --> 01:24:37,148
you know they just love learning different things like paleontology or chemistry or whatever I think there huge appetite for it Yeah we need a Peter St Ange doing three videos in every discipline And everyone would be a lot smarter

1028
01:24:37,468 --> 01:24:39,028
So Peter, thank you so much for your time.

1029
01:24:39,208 --> 01:24:40,348
We'll catch up again soon.

1030
01:24:40,988 --> 01:24:42,188
Awesome. Thanks for having me on.

1031
01:24:42,588 --> 01:24:42,888
Cheers.

1032
01:24:43,648 --> 01:24:44,448
And that's a wrap.

1033
01:24:44,548 --> 01:24:46,888
Again, I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Peter.

1034
01:24:46,988 --> 01:24:47,528
I know I did.

1035
01:24:47,588 --> 01:24:48,788
He's an awesome guy to talk to.

1036
01:24:48,888 --> 01:24:50,008
Go check out his videos.

1037
01:24:50,108 --> 01:24:52,048
His three to five-minute daily videos he does

1038
01:24:52,048 --> 01:24:54,028
are incredibly informative.

1039
01:24:54,028 --> 01:24:56,908
and you'll learn a lot just sitting down

1040
01:24:56,908 --> 01:24:58,428
and listening to an expert for a few minutes

1041
01:24:58,428 --> 01:24:59,208
every single day.

1042
01:24:59,648 --> 01:25:01,808
Of course, if you need help taking your Bitcoin

1043
01:25:01,808 --> 01:25:03,928
into proper 100% self-custody,

1044
01:25:04,108 --> 01:25:06,828
go to thebitcoinway.com slash podcast.

1045
01:25:06,968 --> 01:25:08,528
You can schedule a free 30-minute consult

1046
01:25:08,528 --> 01:25:09,388
with a member of our team.

1047
01:25:09,468 --> 01:25:10,908
We will walk you through what it is we do,

1048
01:25:10,988 --> 01:25:13,368
how we do it, why you need to be your own bank,

1049
01:25:13,388 --> 01:25:15,728
and we can train you and get you across the finish line

1050
01:25:15,728 --> 01:25:17,488
to do just that.

1051
01:25:17,868 --> 01:25:20,148
And of course, if you need help with online privacy,

1052
01:25:20,148 --> 01:25:21,528
setting up your privacy phone,

1053
01:25:21,608 --> 01:25:23,248
we have a plan B residency option.

1054
01:25:23,248 --> 01:25:25,668
So all of your self-sovereignty needs, we've got you covered.

1055
01:25:26,028 --> 01:25:29,008
Again, go to thebitcoinway.com slash podcast.

1056
01:25:29,248 --> 01:25:30,148
You can schedule a time.

1057
01:25:30,708 --> 01:25:35,628
Until next time, stay safe, stay sovereign, and remember the yield on Bitcoin is freedom.