Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin could mean
for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show. Thank you so
much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten podcast. Joining
me today, Larry Lippard, my good friend, laser-eyed Larry. We got to meet each other in June 2022
when we were invited across by Andre Lojar. Go back three or four episodes and listen to Andre
from Free Madeira, he invited across about 10 to 12 Bitcoiners to help him orange pill
the government and the economic advisory of that island.
Amongst that group was Larry, the others included Greg Foss, Jeff Booth, Obi Nuosu,
Christian Anders from B2CX in Sweden, Knuts from Holm, Nico from Consensus Network,
BitcoinBook.shop. It was such a great weekend and Andre did a great job because Free Madeira has
gone on to become the shining light of a small island nation trying to adopt a Bitcoin education
program and push that education out amongst the islanders and amongst the businesses and have done
an incredible job and getting to meet Larry was just a highlight of that trip. We've bumped into
each other many times now around the world at different conferences and then he dropped his
book. If you've not read it you should and you certainly will. I'm sure you'll want to pick up
a copy after this interview. It's called The Big Print and we get into why he wrote it and the
feedback he's been getting and some very personal stories which I don't think Larry's shared on any
other podcasts so yeah I look forward to you getting into this sit back relax and listen to
this one with Larry before we get into it please stack your sats you know how to do that now you
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bit play with the app you will find the video edition right there in your hand of this episode
with larry all right larry we are recording and it's great to see you and as we were just
saying to each other, you know, two times in the space of a short amount of time because you came
across the BTC Pro. Yeah, I sure did. I really enjoyed that show. That's the right kind of show
as I think you would agree with me, right? Yeah, absolutely. And we even got to hang out next to
each other and sign books and you were signing the big print, which we have right here. Thank you so
much. Yeah. I think you even sold out. I think you put everybody on. I didn't have all that many
books. Amazon made it very hard for me to get books to Prague, but I think I got maybe 150 books
or something and I sold them all. So that's good. Yeah, it's all. And more importantly, I met a lot
of the people behind the NIMS on, you know, on Twitter. I mean, you know, so I've got all these
Twitter friends I haven't met in person and a lot of them came up and said hello, which is really
great. I mean, it's hanging out with the plebs. It's just so much fun. Bitcoiners are great.
yeah that is a lot of fun when you get to meet people and you're like oh you're xyz whatever it
is exactly exactly yeah yeah very very very fun right okay lauren you're here and you're ready
to ask the first question yeah so to preempt it we were on the we were in the car just about 20
minutes ago and i i was explaining who you were and uh a little bit of your background and how
you've been uh you know well we'll get into it but investing pretty much your whole career yeah so
so lauren wants to know this uh what was the worst investment you ever made
oh boy there are lots of them lauren
well we know the best one where do i start the best one is bitcoin and we'll prove out to be
bitcoin oh i don't know i you know i was a venture capitalist before i became a bitcoiner
and before I became a sound money,
well, I was a sound money person on the side,
but I was really a venture capitalist.
And so I invested in so many things that did not work.
And that's really the nature of that game.
And, you know, probably more recently,
I would say I've invested in some gold mining projects
that didn't work, just horribly, horribly messed up.
You know, one of them was out in California,
a company called Rise Gold,
where the environmentalists prevented us from building what would be a very highly profitable
and good mind for the community, completely safe, completely environmentally friendly.
But that doesn't really matter in California because there's no rule of law there.
I would say probably the most recent one that's seared in my memory was in 2011,
to bring some monetary history into all of this, in 2000, they really started printing money
and gold was at $260. And in 2011, gold was at $1,900. So in that period, and that was,
you know, turbocharged by the great financial crisis in 08, you know, where it was, you know,
four or 500 and it went, well, no, it was more than that was 700, 800 at the time, but it went
up to 1,800. And so, you know, 250 to 1,800 is a pretty good investment. I was there.
But I was silly and I thought, well, this is great. You know, the currency system is going to fail.
and Satoshi was over doing his thing
I wasn't even aware of it
the currency system is going to fail
I'm just going to hang on to all this gold
because 1900 is just the beginning
we're going to 10,000
because they had QE1 and QE2 and QE3
and they had ZERP and everything else
I thought well okay
I'll get rich off this gold
and my wife and I even moved into a bigger house
and spent some money in anticipation
of thinking how great it was going to be
And then what happened is they changed the rules again.
They started paying interest in excess reserves.
They didn't let the added money get out of the economy and create the inflation that they
thought it would create.
And gold plummeted from 1900 back to 1000.
And my fund was down enormously in the same time period.
It was horrible.
So the whole 2011 to 2015 period was really a difficult and searing period.
It was probably the worst investment call I'd ever made.
And it was because I couldn't really see what was going on on the other side of the curtain
and all the levers they were pulling to manipulate things.
And so it cost me a great deal of money.
But it also hardened my resolve to recognize that sound money is what's going to win
and sound money is important.
And during that window, I found Bitcoin.
And so there was a silver lining to all the pain associated with the badness of that one
particular investment.
and believing in gold at the time.
And a lot of people ask me about gold today
and some Bitcoiners say, well, gold's gonna go down.
And they're right, Bitcoin's going to demonetize gold,
Bitcoin's going to outperform gold,
but in fiat nominal terms, gold's not going down.
Fiat going down much faster than gold and Bitcoin And of course Bitcoin will outperform gold but those who don want the volatility of Bitcoin gold probably your best second choice But that was a very humbling experience for me Lauren
It caused me to kind of rethink everything.
And like I say, there was probably a silver lining in there.
I found Bitcoin.
I remember those days, those frothy gold days.
Were you there at the time?
were you involved in that area yeah well i was on foreign exchange broking desks uh but with uh
on our desk we had the uh the gold options as well and yeah so that's that's where all the eyes were
looking all the attention shifted there everybody wanted to be the next gold broker and everybody
wanted to be the next gold trader and you know the retail market was frothy as all hell all of the
the financial advisors their their lackeys were on the phone pushing you different funds
you want to get in gold mining funds yeah you want to get in gold stocks yeah everything was gold
yeah it really was it was it got overheated like so many things and it's fundamentally you know
we've now exceeded those highs but you know that was also you know 10 years ago so all these all
these markets are cyclical and uh yeah it's um you know it humility i mean if you don't if you're
not humble as an investor the market will deliver a dose of humility to you at least that's been my
experience having done this for 40 years and so you know i try to frame everything in terms of
probabilities you know nothing is for sure but you can stack the odds in your favor 100 right
Lauren, thank you for your question. Did you have any follow-ups or are you done?
I think I'm done, but thank you so much for answering my question.
Thank you, sweetie. That was a great question. You're lucky to have such a squared away dad.
You guys are going to be in a very good position as you grow up because you're going to see this whole thing unfold.
Yeah, thank you.
Thanks for your question.
Okay, this one?
Okay.
thank you thank you smart girl pretty how old is she 14 there you go growing fast yeah
i was thinking larry actually back to the first time we met and that was back in madeira
yeah june so just over june 22 just over yeah just over three years ago that's wild that's when
you know the the free madeira thing was being formed and andre was putting all that together
and we had such a great time i remember it well and probably most pointedly what i remember is
we were walking down to some event or thing we were going to or we're going to take an elevator
down to the beach or whatever and you and i were walking next to each other and we started talking
about sam bankman and freed and we both looked at each other said you know there's just something
not right with that guy you know there's i mean he's just that the guy's got to be a fraud i mean
And there's just no way that it just doesn't add up.
He's not worth $8 billion.
His coins aren't worth it.
He's a shit coin or blah, blah.
And we both looked at each other and said, yep, it's absolutely certain that thing is going to blow up.
And that was it.
We just kind of ended the conversation.
But it wasn't that far after that that what we had both been discussing actually came to be true.
And it was the same weekend as well that we were spending with each other that the will started coming off at Celsius.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
Yeah, that shitcoin scheme unraveled.
Yeah.
So and I, you know, it's so amazing to me that there's so many shitcoiners still around.
I mean, you see some of the big Bitcoin people doing podcasts with a few of them, which is
kind of disappointing to me.
And then recently I tweeted something.
I think I did a pod where I talked about how they're all going to zero.
And I think the guy who did the interview had a pretty big shitcoin following.
So he retweeted it.
And boy, oh boy, I mean, there are a lot of shitcoiners still and crypto bros still around
because I just got flamed.
It was great.
I mean, I managed to block like 200 people in an hour.
I just got flamed by the XRP crowd and the Solana crowd and all of it.
It was just like the ETH crowd.
It was like, oh, my God.
These people still believe.
I mean, the Doge crowd.
I mean, how can Doge have any meaningful market value?
I just don't get it.
It makes no sense to me.
But there it is.
It does.
BSV is the one for me.
that's that's which one bsv bitcoin satoshi vision oh yeah that one too yeah you know craig was proven
to be a fraud and he has fled the country but yet you if you ever meet a bs via they're still
so like it like the programming they've been through is so bad that they can't see it you
And they've got all of these cope arguments.
And it's just, wow, you guys.
It is.
I'm sorry.
I didn't realize Craig had flown the country.
He didn't want to pay the fines?
Or is he arch and anonymous?
Or where'd he go?
I hadn't realized either until I had a couple of guys on the podcast the other day yet to be released.
So Mark Hunter and Arthur Van Pelt.
And together they're writing a book about fake Toshi.
And this book has been is taken over their lives for the last couple of years.
And there's going to be three separate books. They're trying because it's so like the information just keep that they keep on turning, just keeps coming in.
So they're going to take you through like an arc of like the journey of how it all came to be.
And yeah, it was those guys that informed me that, yeah, he's he's gone. He's hopped town, which is the classic way charlatans work.
right i mean if you think about in the u.s for a perfect example over on especially you know go
west young man right you you've got the charlatans the snake oil salesmen the horse rustling folk
you know they would get run out of town as soon as they found out they literally do get run out
of town once people figure them out yeah that's right yeah we we need more of that we need more
we certainly we certainly do i mean shaming in the public square right i mean it's um
And yeah, they're, you know, I mean, sadly, whenever there's something where there's a lot of new money coming into it, you're going to attract grifters and you're going to attract con men, you're going to attract, you know, false profits.
And, you know, there's enough of that around Bitcoin.
In fact, I had to, I spent a piece of the book talking about that, trying to kind of address the fact that I, you know, because as you know, I come from the gold community.
And so, you know, gold people are pretty good at sniffing out bullshit.
And a lot of them saw that and they were like, God, I'm not touching this thing.
Look at these grifters.
And, you know, my response was, you're right.
You're right.
Those people are grifters.
But that don't let that obscure the technological development that Satoshi created.
You know, Satoshi created a new technology.
It's an enormously important development.
and yeah you've got you know people who are fakes hanging around trying the hoop trying to make
money but the development's real and um you know you can't ignore it um or the cost of ignoring
it's going to be high yeah absolutely it is well let's let's get the listeners yeah where do you
want to go well i want to i want to go all the way back because in your book uh i i told you this in
Prague, I really loved like the personal touches, getting to know, getting to know the real Larry,
you know, you can go on, you can go on macro podcasts and talk about this, that and the other
thing as much as you like. But it's, it's the real details, the personal details that I think
draws people into. Thank you. Yeah, you know, I, I did it that way, because people like stories,
you know, people watch movies that are stories, and people, people don't read textbooks. And,
you know, there are much better books on Bitcoin that have been written than mine. I mean, say,
Dave's is one, Lynn's is one, Jeff's is one.
But there wasn't, that didn't seem to me,
I thought there was a missing spot in the marketplace for a book that kind of
told one person's story and had enough interesting angles to it that people
would get hooked. And then my book agent read it and said, you know,
this story about you at Harvard business school,
we got to put this right in the front because this is going to hook them.
And, you know, I've, I've had a very interesting sound money life,
And it's kind of all led up to the writing of this book. And I'm 68. And this is kind of my,
frankly, this is probably my last public act. I mean, I, I wrote the book, it'll stand the test
of time, I hope, I mean, I hope there will be a big print in five years, I'm pretty sure there will
be. And I intend to, you know, kind of pull back a little bit more from the community, not be as
involved. And, and, you know, there's not a book to coming, and I'm not selling newsletters. And
I'm just, I'm going to kind of glide more into retirement and focus on, you know, family, friends,
and fitness. And so, but I, so I laid it all out there. And I, I also thought that, you know,
it's very hard to, for people to know in the investment world, who's honest and who's not.
And so, you know, I, I showed a lot of warts in that book, you know, my successes and my failures.
And I thought, well, if you're willing to do that, that shows a certain amount of strength.
And then I think it builds a certain amount of credibility. And so that's why I did it the way
I did it. You know, I, that's why I liked Lauren's first question.
Why she come up with that straight away because in the book,
you talk a lot about the failed investments.
Oh yeah. I've made, I've made a ton of mistakes and that's why I caution people.
I might be wrong about this too. I don't think I am. And I think, you know,
I look at sailor and I look at all the other bright people hanging around the
hoop and I'm pretty sure we're all right, but you know,
nothing is certain in this world.
so let's take it back because you talk about when you're a young man and i think there's something
else that happens to us bitcoiners when we find bitcoin we realize where we were predisposed to
find it in a past life with something that happened when you know it's like a touch point
so there was a story in the book about you growing up and something happening to to the family
business did you want to take us through that and what that was like to to witness as a young man
Yeah, it was very, very traumatic. I'm probably older than most Bitcoiners. I go to these shows,
I talk to people about 2008, and they say, well, I was in grade school or I was in high school.
So in 1979, Nixon broke the gold standard in 71, which is the wrong thing to do. And they had
massive inflation throughout the 70s, as everybody knows. And in order to get it under control,
this man that all the Keynesians call a hero, Paul Volcker came in as the Fed chairman,
and he jacked up rates very, very high, higher than they'd ever been, actually, 20% on the Fed
funds rate. We're going to defend the dollar, and we're going to crush inflation.
So wait, he hiked it 20% or 20%?
He hiked the rates to 20%.
To 20%.
The nominal interest rate on borrowing money was 20% a year, like a credit card, just under
the credit card rate today.
Right.
And my father was running a retail furniture business in Ann Arbor, Michigan,
and he carried a big inventory of furniture that he put out on the floor.
People would say, oh, yeah, I like that couch, you know, deliver it.
And I can't recall the dollar figures, but they were substantial.
And of course he didn own the furniture He didn have the money always to carry the inventory So he borrow to carry the inventory And so if he was borrowing at 5 well that was one number If he was borrowing at 20 that was 4x the number And also at the time the economy was
kind of going through a downturn or recession, people weren't buying as much furniture. And
I'll never forget it. I mean, it was very, very scary, you know, watching him suffer through that
because he was very afraid he was going to go bankrupt as a result of this Fed policy move.
And he wasn't the only one. I mean, there was, you know, farmers and other people who had borrowed money. I mean, there was a guy, there's a great story of a guy who was a farmer who drove his tractor into Washington, D.C. with a shotgun and, you know, intended and tried to assault the Federal Reserve building, you know, to go take a shot at Volcker.
I mean, this is, you know, right. I mean, I mean, what I'm what I'm getting at is I don't think the Fed always understands the implications of all of the things they do to them.
It's all just Keynesian theory. And, oh, yes, you know, our models say we should be at 20 percent or at zero percent.
Nobody nobody knows what the right interest rate is. The right interest rate should be set by the market.
The book talks about that. It's supply of savings against the demand for investments.
And we all know that that's classic theory. But the Fed doesn't operate that way.
I mean, the Fed is the one area of our economy that's still a government controlled price, which makes no sense.
I mean, Russia had government controlled prices. They failed.
So, you know, they and they do it. And what they don't what they don't necessarily understand is, you know, their downstream implications.
They're real people behind those numbers. My father, you know, got sick.
I recall, you know, we were eating, you know, tuna fish sandwiches and peanut butter and jelly for dinner because we, you know, I mean, buying meat was not something we were going to be doing in those conditions.
I mean, it was just, it was tough. And, uh, you know, I, I remember,
I remember seeing him scared and, um, what's that? I was, uh,
in 79, I was 20, uh, well, no 22. I was born in 57. Right. Yeah.
So I was 22 years old.
So a young man, you know,
old enough to know exactly what's going on and pick up what more to pick up on
the signals. Like, you know, yeah. Like, Holy shit, dad. I mean,
are you going to fail? Is your business going to fail? And he was like,
I don't know, maybe, you know, I mean, it was, it was, it was,
it was terrifying to be frank. I mean,
there's a guy who's my hero and he's talking about, you know,
you might go bankrupt. I'm like, what, you know?
And of course at the time I didn't understand,
I didn't understand everything I understand now.
I didn't understand how he got there, but now as I piece it all together,
I'm like, Holy shit, that's what did it. You know? And I mean,
the flip in the same story in the book I talk about too,
the related event was, you know,
my grandfather ran the same business in 1929.
Got all the wrong signals from the Fed, which is we're in a boom in the roaring 20s because they kept rates too low and they inflated a bubble.
You know, borrowed money to increase the size of his business.
You know, bang, the stock market collapse hits and the credit bubble bursts.
And he spends the next 10 years begging the bank not to not to foreclose on him.
You know, and my grandmother and grandfather were badly, badly scarred from them.
They always talked about it.
They were always, I mean, you know, she was one of those people who would, you know, she kept the wax paper after she'd used it.
She'd keep the tinfoil after she'd use it and reuse it.
I mean, she, you know, these were people who, I mean, she told me about how, you know, coffee was a luxury and, you know, biscuits were standard fare for, you know, for food in those days.
I mean, it was tough.
And same thing, you know, I mean, given, driven by misdirected Fed policies that created the Great Depression.
I mean, the Fed tries to claim that they're saving us from another Great Depression.
That's bullshit.
They created the first one.
So there's that.
And then, of course, it came my turn, which on a much smaller scale, but I'm running a fund in 2008.
And I've got the housing thing correct.
And I'm short all the housing stocks.
And I'm short all the financials that have lent to the housing stocks.
I know they're all over levered and going to go bankrupt.
And then they changed the rules.
And they banned the short selling.
And so they took away all.
I mean, I would have had a great year and they took it all away from me.
So it's just, you know, it's just over and over again.
So, I mean, I've seen this pattern.
I know how this works.
I know how this impacts people.
And, you know, and I've seen my family suffer from it.
And so, you know, I figured somebody's got to just stand up and say, hey, this is, it's not right.
I mean, I wrote the book, Princey, because I felt like there's just it's just so few people understand how what the real root cause of this problem is.
So few people truly, truly understand it.
And, you know, the brainwashing, the Keynesian brainwashing has just been so extreme that, you know, I mean, it's like I'm absolutely convinced I'm on to something that's completely true.
And yet imagine if the whole world didn't know it.
You know, I mean, I guess, I mean, I'm sure, you know, Copernicus and Galileo had the same feeling.
It's like, no, you guys are idiots.
You know, this is this is not the way it works.
I can prove to you that the planets are going around the sun.
There was no, no, no, that's not true.
You know, it's just not that way.
And that's that's how this is.
I mean, you know, this is just so broken.
This monetary system is just so broken and it has been broken for a long, long time.
And so it feels normal to everybody, but it's not.
It doesn't have to be.
So, you know, they're for the book, right?
Yeah, well, well done, mate.
Well done for Ryan.
I'm sure you've had a lot of good feedback.
So we'll go to the opening scene because so you had grandparents, family business passed down to parents, family business.
Then you decide you're not going to go sell furniture.
You're going to go on to Wall Street.
Was that the path?
Yeah, pretty much. I mean, I went to business school and Wall Street and then into investment management.
Right. Right. OK. And then fast forward to so actually, no, before we get to 2018 and the opening scene in the book, what was that like for you?
Like you're on Wall Street in what, like the 80s, 90s?
Yeah. So when I say Wall Street, it was actually kind of a subset of Wall Street because I was actually a venture capitalist.
I spent a couple of years on Wall Street as a financial analyst before business school.
I went to business school and I got out and I got in the venture capital business.
So it was finance and it was investment management.
But what it really was, was investing in small technology companies that were private and
sometimes public.
But we had funds under management and what we were, the theme we were playing, and I
was at two different firms throughout my career.
The theme we were playing was this technology is going to change the world.
And, you know, the IBM PC was introduced in 81 and I started in the business in 82.
So, you know, we just, we were buying disk drives and graphic cards.
And I mean, you name it, Dell Computer, all these all these great businesses that sprung out of, you know, a non-digital world we participated in.
And it was fantastic. I loved it. It was, you know, and it was honest, too.
I mean, you know, you put your money in the business to get better.
You know, you'd sell it, you know, when it when it had matured, et cetera.
I mean, there was no there wasn't a lot of sleight of hand in it, although there was some at the fund management level and some of the bullshit some of the venture guys pulled with their limited partners.
But setting that aside, in general, the process of finding a person who had an idea, had a business that was growing, they needed capital to grow it.
You gave them capital, they grew it, and then later on it went public or whatever, it got sold, and you made a profit.
That was beautiful.
And I did that really from 83 until, you know, into the early 2000s.
And kind of my last cycle was Internet.
I got very lucky.
I found the Internet in 93 or 94.
I bought a bunch of private Internet companies.
They went on to go public, made a ton of money, did really well.
So but then actually, you know, in 2000, 2001, I could feel that that was a bubble, too.
That even though the Internet was very real, it was going to continue to go on.
The price of the stocks were way, way, way ahead of themselves.
And so so I kind of moved away from that, took and retired from the venture business and started managing my own money, you know, with a theme of just trying to do growth at a reasonable price.
And I did some interesting things.
I went to India, bought a bunch of the cell phone manufacturers in India or cell phone providers in India when it was growing very rapidly.
I was just looking for growth at a reasonable price, which is the name of my fund, the GARP fund.
So, you know, and then when the bubble emerged in the tech in the financial area, GFC, I became very obvious to me in 06 and 07.
And so I was like, OK, well, I'm going to do half of this stuff as growth at a reasonable price.
I'm going to do the other half. I'm going to short these things because this is going to blow up.
And so I was where Michael Burry was, but I didn't even know what a CDS was.
I mean, I didn't, I had no idea.
All the great levered, sophisticated things that he was able to buy.
You know, I didn't have a broker swap, swap dealer agreement, any of that kind of stuff.
I was just shorting the stocks.
And it worked.
It was working great.
I was short Bear Stearns at work in March of 2000, or I mean, 2008.
You know, I was short a lot of the subprime companies.
They all went down that work.
but the big one was obviously in the fall and then and of course i was short i mean i was doing very
well and then they changed the rules made me cover my shorts at a loss so the year you know turned
out to be a crappy year for me but not a big crap how did they how did they do that how did they just
blew a sudden say no you can't sure it's it was just an sec it was an sec directive so i mean if
you google you know sec ban on short selling 2008 and you'll you'll see the the press release i think
it was September 21 or 22. I think it came right after Lehman failed. And they realized they really
had, you know, a shitstorm on their hands. And this was before TARP and TARP was soon thereafter.
And they're like, oh, my God, this whole system is going to implode if we don't stop this.
And they also realized that some smart hedge funds, me plus others, were shorting these things.
And they just said, you know, here forth, we are putting a ban on short selling of all financial
stocks in the United States. And if you are short, you need to cover them right now.
and so as you can imagine what that did was for a very brief period of time all those stocks went up
very very rapidly and so you know i might have had a profit in something and i'd lose half or all of
that profit as it rallied and then of course once all those shorts had covered they went back down
and a lot of them went to zero so they would have been shorts that would have been highly profitable
but of course we weren't there anymore because they changed the rules and you know i mean this
is a similar thing you know just as a data point there's a time back way back in time it goes back
quite some time now where the hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market and they did and they
pushed the price and you know the cme and the sec they literally changed the rules and said it's
illegal to buy silver law just categorically it's illegal to buy silver luck the the exchange is only
going to accept sell orders and sure enough that caused the silver price to collapse um and so you
I mean, they did it with GameStop, right?
I mean, there's a great movie about it that came out
that showed how Ken Griffin intervened,
and they got the company to issue some more shares,
and they got Robinhood to shut down at the right points in time,
and so on and so forth.
I mean, Wall Street was cornered,
and they pulled the card where they changed the rules.
And that one is so disgusting,
because the Robinhood users were just your retail guys.
Oh, absolutely.
And retail had won.
It was done.
Absolutely.
There were more shares short than there were shares outstanding.
I mean, they should have driven Ken Griffin into bankruptcy.
He should be bankrupt.
And instead, he's worth $40 billion.
And he holds forth on stuff on Twitter.
Whenever he holds forth on Twitter, I just blast him.
I mean he like this guy Lloyd Blankfein who ran Goldman Sachs who comes out with all these policy suggestions and so forth on Twitter And I always just blasphemy I say you know dude shut the fuck up You were bankrupt and we bailed you out
We don't want to hear what you have to say.
I mean, these people play by two sets of rules.
So, yeah.
Their in lies the problem.
I mean, these two sets of rules allow them to get bailed out.
that bailout comes as a form of printing money, which they benefit from because they can ride the
inflation wave. And the rest of us pay more money for groceries. I mean, you know, the one thing I
will say is this is a sophisticated fraud, Princey. I mean, it's a this is not, you know, it's not for
I mean, like when I wrote my book, I handed it to my wife and she started reading. She said,
hang on a second here. What's the Federal Reserve? You know, my wife was very smart,
but this is just not her area. She's an author. She's not her area of expertise.
and says, you've got to explain this.
And so they've created a system that really benefits them,
and they've wrapped all these words around it
to make it sound like it's in all of our best interests,
but it's really not.
It's rigged in their favor.
And we've got to call them out on it.
We've just got to call them out on it,
and that's what the book tried to do.
I totally agree with you.
And like we've said here on this podcast just today,
the money system is broken.
but it's it's working as designed larry it's working that's a fair point yeah it's very good
but that's the dark side from their point of view it's not broken at all no it's running along
tickety-boo but yeah it's absolutely working as designed absolutely they can do whatever they like
whenever they like and affect the markets and create the bubbles and then pop the bubbles
but you know like uh the the great wall street crash of uh 27 28 whenever it went down completely
engineered totally well and and that's why you know that's why we have the cross of gold speech
and everything else i mean the banks have been very smart and very sophisticated they get all
the farmers into debt i mean you know and even thomas jefferson said this one of his famous
quotes through the process if you're a financier and you can control the money and you can inflate
and deflate at will, you can get everybody else off sides. And so, you know, you crash everything
and asset prices fall and everybody who's levered up goes bankrupt and loses those assets. And then
you buy those assets for pennies on the dollar and you end up getting rich. I mean, you know,
an amazing, more modern case of it is Jamie Dimon is a billionaire based on stock options that he
issued to himself in 2008. You know, JPM was right at the edge of bankruptcy. They gave him an enormous
I mean, how do you become being the CEO of a bank?
How do you become a billionaire?
I mean, that's just that's just unheard of.
That had never happened before.
And yet, if you issue stock options to yourself at a very low valuation, when it looks like
the world is ending and you know it's not because you're tied in with the government,
you know, the system, you know, and you reinflate, you will end up silly rich.
And he has.
So, you know, it's it's a it's a very broken system.
And, you know, the hope here is that the book will go viral and we'll get enough people to understand this and support sound money and honest politics and the alternative.
And, you know, I know it's I mean, there are people who have accused me of being kind of Don Quixote here.
I mean, whether this is going to work or not, I don't know. Right.
But, you know, I mean, Satoshi gave us a really good weapon.
So, you know, I think the answer is I'm highly confident it's going to work.
The timeline, you know, we may have to be more patient than I'd like to be.
But because, you know, history shows that human beings do gravitate towards the best ideas.
I mean, maybe not instantly, but eventually.
And I can't I haven't found the large logical reason why Bitcoin is not the best monetary idea out there.
I just haven't found it.
and so and i think those of us who are in it know it and those of us who know it our numbers are
growing every day and so you know we'll go through the gladwell adoption curve and eventually
everybody will know it and then of course it'll just be money and your kids and my grandkids will
talk about things well that car costs 30 satoshis or whatever the heck it costs i mean
i you know it gets it's funny sailor talks about 21 million dollar bitcoin 21 years i'm like yeah
okay that may be true and that's all great but what'll get what's gasoline gonna be you know
it's going to be a thousand dollars, you know, a liter. I mean, we don't know. I mean, and the
problem is the measuring standard we're using, which is fiat currency is getting inflated. So
damn rapidly, it's almost like some of the stuff has no meaning, right? It's hard. So, yeah. And
therein lies the beauty of the meme. One Bitcoin is one Bitcoin. Exactly. I mean, and it can't get
inflated. We know exactly what it is. It's, I mean, the fact that for the first time in human
history. We have an uninflatable source of money. That's such a big deal. It's just, it's huge.
So being a gold guy as well, you'd have, and to take us back to the end of the 1920s again,
when America was on its absolute knees, you're seeing, you know, you're seeing starvation,
you're seeing all kinds of just complete and utter destitution, people completely destroyed by what
they did at the back end of that decade.
And then you go into the new decade and you've got all this hype.
You've got FDR coming in with this big new deal in 33.
And the first thing he does when he's voted in is he signs the Emergency Banking Act.
And then the second thing he does is sign Executive Order 6102 because he can do that
under the Emergency Banking Act, which he had just signed in like a week before and
steals everybody's gold, for want of a better word.
Yeah, that's exactly what he did.
Yeah. And the Supreme Court doesn't call him on it. Yeah. No, it's it's unbelievable. I mean, it's you know, we've got, you know, the founders, you know, what would have been say, you know, a republic if you can keep it right.
You know, the founders set up this document to try and limit the powers of government.
And, you know, probably better than most other governments in the history of the world.
It's done so. I mean, I still prefer America to, you know, China, Korea, Russia, a lot of other places.
But a lot of the original founding fathers principles have been badly compromised, you know, badly, sadly.
And, you know, having said all that, if we wipe the monetary slate clean, we might get a chance to rewrite the Constitution and reinforce some of the core, you know, principles that were in the original document.
Or maybe we evolve towards a system that's much more like Switzerland, where, you know, do we really need these enormous nation states that can have nuclear weapons and bombers and aircraft carriers and all this?
I mean, you know, maybe we can devolve into a lot more, you know, smaller regional governments.
You know, and the funny thing is, I mean, war is a really funny thing.
I mean, I don't know many sane people who really want to go somewhere else and kill other people.
I just don't know. I don't, you know, like most people just want to live their life, raise their family, you know, die peacefully, et cetera, et cetera.
And yet there are some people who decide they want to kill other people.
and of course if they migrate to the top of a big power structure
like Hitler did, they can do it
we've got to stop that
and one of the things that enables that is the broken money
because they can do it without paying for it
and if they suddenly had to pay for it and we all had to vote on it
I think the vote would be kind of an overwhelming and a resounding
no, we're not doing that
Yeah, it's a very sick part of the whole fiat game
that right you can yeah how many people are employed by the militaries all around the world
that can be shipped so they're trained to kill other human beings like that's the most
inhuman like that's you know there's a primal instinct in you to do no harm correct in clown
world if you're if you're healthy if you're healthy i mean there are you know there is i
I mean, I don't know what the psychiatrist would say.
There's some portion of the public that are psychopaths.
I mean, you know, there are some.
There are some people who are sick.
There's no doubt about it.
And frankly, that's why we do need, in my opinion, we do need some government.
I mean, I want sick people to be thrown in jail.
You know, I want rule of law.
And I'd be happy to pay 10% of my earnings or my net worth to, you know, to have that occur.
but you know it's gotten so that we're so far beyond that 10 percent level that it probably
would require you know i think most of the world i was i was talking to a guy when i was in prog
show in italy from italy i said i want to move to italy he said no you don't i said why not he
said because at the margin i pay 65 cents of every you know euro i make to the government i was like
oh my god that's crazy it's just crazy yeah uh i think most companies i think most people would be
shocked to figure out that you know come the end of their you know working career their working life
they're probably handed over anywhere between 60 to 85 percent and it's just unreal and then
but i know i know it's got to be 40 50 when you consider all the added taxes i just you know
yeah it's it's gross it's really gross so let's go to you're sitting at this conference at the
Harvard Business School. Have you got the... No, no, it's good. I'm fine. Okay. You're sitting in...
So what... Yeah. Why did you go to this conference? And what happened? What made you stand up and
challenge the guy? Well, I'm the Mark Baum character, right? I mean, so I went to the
conference. Let me tell you, let's set the scene. So the conference is Harvard. It's 2018. So it's
now 10 years after the GFC, which occurred in 2008. And I think the conference was billed as,
you know, a review of 2008, you know, what have we seen? What have we learned? And the, you know,
the speakers were, you know, Paulson, Geithner, Larry Summers, Bernanke was not there, but,
and a few other Harvard professors and econ types. They were all up on a panel. And the best way to
describe it because it was kind of a victory lap you know they were kind of like look you know 2008
was an incredible event you know we didn't expect it there obviously there were regulatory errors
that happened that allowed it to occur but god damn didn't we do the right thing you know we
we really we came in here and we were the committee to save the world and save the world we did and
we acted courageously and aggressively and this you know i mean it's just and you know um i mean
And literally, they were making speeches similar to that.
I'm paraphrasing, obviously.
And, you know, they'd get, you know, resounding applause, right?
You know, 400 people, resounding applause.
And, you know, I got to give Geithner credit that he had the balls to ask this question.
But, you know, he figured, wait, what the heck, let's have some fun.
And he got up and said, is there anybody here who thinks that we didn't do the right thing?
And nobody's hands went up.
So I put my hand up.
And I, by the way, as this whole thing was going down, I was just getting sicker and sicker.
Like, you know, you guys are a bunch of fucking frauds.
You didn't do the right thing.
I can't believe you're sitting here.
Not only did you fuck everybody over with your response to this thing and hurt the middle
class and all the people lost their houses, et cetera, et cetera, but you also, here you
are, you have the gall to come here and try and brag and pound your chest, I mean, like
as a redemption tour.
And I think at that point in time, Geithner and somebody else might have just released
about, you know, and Bernanke's The Courage to Act was already out and all that kind of stuff.
So they were, you know, it was a victory tour. And I just couldn't, I couldn't bear it. And I
just said, fuck it, somebody's got to say this, right? And so I raised my hand, they called on me,
I stood up, I said, hey, no, you didn't do the right thing. You know, there were a lot of other
solutions. People lost their homes, people lost their jobs, you let the whole bubble occur on your
watch, you know, and there were 10 other ways to deal with it that would have been incredibly fair.
and you chose the one that, you know, bailed out the guys who did it.
And, you know, I would have proposed something different.
Actually, if you read my book, I've got my proposal in there in detail.
Let's not go through it here because it's too long.
And as you can imagine, you know, Guy Thorn was taken aback and he said,
well, what you're proposing is Old Testament justice, you know, an eye for an eye.
And I was like, dude, this isn't, you know, about justice.
I mean, this is about just basic human fairness.
And, you know, and this is an Old Testament.
I'm not poking your eye out. I'm just suggesting to you that the people who committed the crime should be held responsible for it.
Anyway, I got drowned out. They moved on to other questioners.
It was very clear they didn't want to hear what I had to say. And that was fine.
I expected nothing less. But I did, you know, I did make my point.
And, you know, I had a lot of hateful stares at me.
I had a lot of people glaring and taking snide remarks as I went out to coffee.
but as I said in the book there were a handful of people came up to me and said dude that took
fucking guts man and I agree with you you're right you're absolutely right and they needed to hear it
so you know so there's that and I just figured you know I'm just not going to let this stand I mean
if somebody who knows what happened and knows it's wrong can't stand up and say it you know in
America and with freedom of speech and what's the point right and so I said it but you know the impact
is quite low in terms of their thinking, I'm sure. So on that panel, let's get people up to
speed in case they're just names flying over their head. Hank Paulson, he was at Goldman,
I believe, during the time. He was the CEO of Goldman and he was the Treasury Secretary during
the GFC. And so he was the guy who initiated TARP, which is the Troubled Asset Relief Program,
where they borrowed 700 trillion or billion dollars. And he begged, he was on his knees in
Washington, D.C., begging Nancy Pelosi to approve TARP. And by the way, the first time they put TARP
out there, the Congress overwhelmingly, I mean, there was, you know, thousands of phone calls to
D.C., you know, reject this. It's a bailout of the bankers. And the Congress overwhelmingly
turned it down. And then days later, the stock market fell eight or nine percent. By memory,
I could be off by a little bit very rapidly, one of the largest falls ever. And, you know,
it was very clear that if they didn't do it, you know, the economy was going to melt down.
And so, you know, all the financial types leaned on all the Congress people and said,
you guys don't have a choice. You have to do this bailout or else, you know, the ATMs aren't going
to work and everything's going to melt down. And that's, by the way, what the financial class has
always done to rip us off. It's like they've got a gun to our head, you know, print the damn money
so we can benefit. If not, I'm going to blow your financial brains out, you know. And yeah,
the inflation will hurt you later, but you don't want to have your brains blown out now. So you say,
fine, we'll print the money. I mean, that's the game that got started when we put in the Federal
Reserve backstop in 1913. And that game has only gotten more and more extreme and the numbers are
larger and larger as we go forward. So yeah, I mean, it's, and it led to all kinds of distortions.
One of my favorites in the book, and I want to mention this, I mean, because it just blows my
mind every time I read it. And it wasn't just me. This was documented by Matt Taibbi of Rolling
Stone. When that whole thing went down, the wife of the chairman of Morgan Stanley and borrowed
$200 million, okay, non-recourse from the Federal Reserve at a low interest rate in order to buy
distressed and troubled assets. And so what that meant was that if those distressed and troubled
assets recovered and became worth 300 or 400 million dollars she was going to make 100 to 200
million dollars and if and she had to put up some money a few million bucks but um and if those
troubled assets failed she'd lose the few million bucks that she put up but the 200 million that
she borrowed the fed would cover it right so this is just blatant blatant corruption and this is all
i'm not making this up this is all detailed in matt taibbi a great investigative reporter
you know, Rolling Stone interview, he called it the real housewives of Wall Street,
because it was actually Morgan Stanley's chairman and wife. And there was another
senior Morgan. So these two women borrowed $200 million from the Fed.
I mean, with no financial background. You know, I mean, it's just like, what? I mean,
this is the system we're running. I mean, you know, you can't borrow $200 million from the Fed.
I can't borrow $200 million. The average citizen wants to borrow money. They got to go to these
loan sharks called the credit card companies that pay 25%.
And I'm old enough to remember how back in the olden days, there were usury laws, which
prevented the credit card guys from charging more than 10 or 12%.
So you couldn't get yourself into the debt hole that a lot of people have gotten into.
You know, and everyone says, well, they got to have that.
So they take on riskier credits.
Bullshit.
You know, cap the interest rate at some fair level.
And if the credit is too risky, then don't loan them the money.
But instead, what they've allowed everybody to do is to get into a debt trap, just like
the government's in a debt trap.
and guess what if you're in a debt trap they own you you know you don't you do not have sovereignty
anymore you know you're just you're you're a hamster on a treadmill just trying to get that
salary to pay that debt and you know millions of student you know student borrowers know it
i mean here's a good here's a good example i mean i i don't agree with absolutely anything that
with elizabeth warren says except one thing i will say i agree with her she said hang on a second
You mean to tell me we're charging 6% on student loans and we're lending money to Wall Street at ZERP at 25 basis points?
Please explain to me why Wall Street can borrow at a lower rate than a student who represents the future of our country.
She's got a point.
I mean, she's really got a point.
And the answer is that student doesn't have the lobbyists and the power and the money that Wall Street has to corrupt the system.
so anyway enough of a ramp it's so disgusting you hit you hit on the thesis of my whole book and
yeah i feel i feel strongly about this shit as you know well you brought up usury and usury is a
really interesting one uh and in the same conversation here we've already mentioned
interest rates and you were saying quite correctly the interest rate should be decided by the market
the fact that the fact that there is a an entity out there dictating to us what the interest rate
is, is absolute complete nonsense. But when you look at how, so usury laws, for those that aren't
aware, usury is the exorbitant charge of interest on borrowed money. Now, if you look at our current
system, everything is pure usury because the money you're borrowing didn't exist in the first place.
You go to a bank to get some money as a loan, they just print that they just loan you. The
The deposit is the loan.
They deposit the money in your account.
And then you have to pay interest back on money that didn't exist.
So it doesn't matter if it's half a percent and you think you got a great deal.
It's usury.
It's just so disgusting.
Yeah, when people understand the advantage that the banks have against the average human being, it's mind-boggling.
It's just absolutely mind-boggling.
and how as a banker you don't end up wealthy
it's impossible
because they've got the game rigged in their favor
so
yeah
it's nutty
hang on one second
hang on
there you go
let's go sweetie
yeah so
I have
my business partner has a golden retriever
right
visiting with me
uh gold yeah how how have your your gold bug buddies uh watched you they must have been
watching you closely i'm sure some of them have come with uh you know advice of it comes from a
place of love right i'm sure people that does people that respect you and have known you for
long time have probably been in your ear like, Larry, you're losing your fucking mind with his
Bitcoin. Absolutely. Absolutely. I've had all that. Yeah. And it does come from a place of love. And
you know, I just try to explain them. And you know, I understand their arguments. I mean,
probably the one that I think they that the smartest ones have hung on to, okay, I will say,
is that something this volatile can't be money. And I flip it and say, yeah, you're right,
The dollar really is volatile.
One Bitcoin is just one Bitcoin Now the dollar price of Bitcoin Well that all over the place and you right the dollar is not money but um that that probably the last remaining argument
to get knocked over with probably the smartest of my gold bug friends um the other arguments
one of the biggest ones the other big ones that got knocked over i think relatively decisively
and although it could change was the the government's going to shut this thing down
you know and that was a you know in 2018 19 okay you know that's i hear you but we're you know we
got an etf we got a strategic reserve now you know if trump fails or if the you know red team
fails in three and a half years and blue team wins um you know they might take another crack at
coming after crypto or coming after bitcoin you know big taxes you know taxing the off ramps
outlawing self-custody i mean a lot of things i think hopefully the horse is so far out of the
barn they won't get anywhere on that but i do worry about it a little bit yeah my worry is going
back to executive order 6102 if you know that too if you read some of the if you read the order
and some of the uh literature leading up to it fdr was blaming and pointing at people and calling
them hoarders right so that's what we are right we're hodlers we're hoarders and they could just
pull the same narrative bullshit again absolutely and we're profiteers and we're taking advantage
of the existing beautiful fiat system and the Keynesian model.
And by the way, they have some really nice honeypots now.
I mean, you can be sure that if they called up Fidelity and they called up BlackRock and
they called up the big ETF pools and said, guys, the law has now changed.
Send us those Bitcoin and cash all your customers out at the last Bitcoin price.
They'd have to comply.
I mean, it would be if it were the law of the land.
Now, and the interesting thing there is it doesn't necessarily, I mean, I've had this
discussion on other pods. I think it's an interesting discussion that in theory, the
monetary policy of the country was determined by the Constitution where, you know, Article I, Section
8, you know, gold and silver money, et cetera, et cetera. But in practice, executive, you know,
the chief executive, the president has actually driven the monetary policy. Lincoln did it with
greenbacks, which he shoved through, you know, while the Congress put in the Fed, but then Wilson
approved it. But, you know, Roosevelt did things just kind of unilaterally, right? 6102,
revalue gold, et cetera. And then Nixon did it again in 71. You know, we're just we're reneging
on this promise to pay you gold for your dollars. And so, you know, it does get a little scary. So
Team Blue is now in charge. You know, hey, we think gold and Bitcoin are hurting the underlying
safety and security of the dollar. We think that the capital gains on those two assets should be
taxed at 60%. Furthermore, we even think we should, you know, we should seize them. And you can't own
those assets, we're gonna we're gonna bring them in. And, you know, if the voters were all like
the New York City voters who just voted for an avowed socialist, you know, I mean, it's this guy's,
I mean, this guy went to Bowdoin, right? He's from an upper middle class background, he went to
Bowdoin, it's one of the best small liberal arts schools in the country. And yet he's a socialist.
I mean, good luck with socialism working, that's not going to work. But you know, there, I mean,
And, you know, when I look at an AOC or I look at a Bernie, and I think, you know, they're complaining about what's wrong.
And they're right.
They've got, you know, things are broken.
OK, they've got their solutions just wrong.
Do you know what I mean?
And so but and so that's why it's really incumbent upon all of us Bitcoiners and other people and Austrians and so forth that we've got to educate these young people that, yes, you're right.
The system is broken.
This isn't really capitalism.
It's crony capitalism.
But the system is broken and we do need to fix the system.
But the way we need to go is back to sound money, not socialism, because socialism is going to only make it worse, you know, much worse and quickly.
I mean, you know, there are no examples of socialism working.
I mean, you want to look at socialism, go to Venezuela, go to Cuba, you know, I mean, go to Zimbabwe.
I mean, socialism just does not work.
So but, you know, they're you know, they spin and they spin a nice tail.
and I suspect in four years or three and a half years
that the blue team is going to be offering
you know, stimmies and goodies and checks
and forgiveness of debt and, you know,
all the kinds of things to quote unquote help the people
and all it's going to do is push up the price of groceries.
Yeah, it's going to be an interesting one, mate,
because obviously, yeah, Trump has three years, right,
left at this point and that's it.
it's going to be you know it might be same party but it's going to certainly be different person
unless of course they change the laws again and you just never know you just never know
this is the problem with centralized powers yeah absolutely i mean it yes that is the problem with
centralized powers and this is why you know as bitcoiners this is why self-custody really starts
to become important you know because you know if they decide they want to take my fbtc which is in
my IRA account because I haven't taken the time to move my IRA into self-directed, fine,
that's a small piece of what I own.
But the coins I own in my head, who says I have to be an American, who says I haven't
lost those keys.
I mean, the Jason Lowry thesis that this thing makes individuals as powerful as an army with
respect to protecting wealth, it's a pretty interesting thesis.
Yeah.
All right, Lowry, we've done the past and we've touched on what's going on right now.
You kind of said something about the future that you're going to start pulling back and
enjoying retirement.
But what are you working on at the moment in Bitcoin?
You still managing a fund?
Yeah.
So I still have a fund that has a piece of its Bitcoin.
It was originally a gold and silver mining stock fund and still is.
And all my investors are relying on me to deliver them good results.
And I'm going to do that, I believe.
It has a slice of Bitcoin, about as much as I could justify.
and even when I did that, some of them left me and said,
well, I'm not doing that if you're doing Bitcoin.
I understand that.
And I will be wrapping that up sometime in the next several years
as this gold stock bull kind of continues.
I think I'll be in a position to say, hey, everybody's made good money
and time to unwind that.
I'm involved with the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund,
which is James Lavish, David Foley, Mark Moss, myself.
And I'm not really active.
They're more of an advisor.
and they're doing a lot of very interesting Bitcoin.
Venture deals are doing some of these treasury companies
where we get in cheap before they do their IPO, et cetera.
I'm trying to promote the book.
I mean, I think to me, look, the book's been successful.
I'm approaching 35,000 copies sold, which is great.
I've been told that's a big number for a new book
self-published on Amazon.
It's been out five months or something.
But, you know, to me, what I really hope, Prince, is I really want to jump the chasm into widespread adoption.
You know what I mean? I mean, the 300 million people in the United States.
I mean, Morgan Housel sold six million copies of The Psychology of Money.
I mean, you know, and so my dream is that, you know, I don't know, Elon or, you know, Tucker or Rogan or, you know, Jack Mahler.
I mean, just that some high level people, people who have a big audience read it and go, oh, my God, this is something everybody's got to read.
And we, you know, it gets viral. It gets really viral. And we got, you know, thousands of people reading it and millions of people aware of it.
And we truly get a sound money army, you know, marching around trying to fix this broken system, voting for guys like Thomas Massey, etc.
So so that's kind of, you know, and I will do anything I can to advance that cause in the next few years.
I mean, I'm doing pods and I'll go to events that I think push that forward.
But and then after that, I tend to kind of slow down and, you know, just not be as involved.
And my wife is she she claims she at one point in this whole process, she said, you know, I feel like a book widow.
Because there was a time when I wrote it in the six months and I wrote it, I was up at five in the morning and I pretty much spent all day writing it.
And and I was ignoring a lot of other stuff and I don't want to do that anymore.
So I'll be doing other things with my family.
Yeah, it gets you, doesn't it?
Once you start down these rabbit holes and a new project, yeah, it's great.
Right? I mean, we've all been there.
Everybody in Bitcoin has been there where you're just flat out
and it's absorbing all you got.
And that's great, but you can't do that forever.
Another thing that you tweet about, which I don't know,
I don't think I've ever heard you talk about on a podcast,
is your fitness regime, your love of CrossFit.
Yeah.
So how long have you been doing that
and what keeps you going back for the torture?
Yeah, it is torture at times, but it's a short form of torture.
It's generally 15 minutes or less.
So I started this over 10 years ago, probably approaching 15 years ago.
I don't know the exact date, but anyway.
There's a book I highly recommend.
So if you're 50 years old and you haven't read Younger Next Year by Crowley,
You need to read this book, okay?
Younger Next Year.
This is a seminal book.
It's really important.
And what it talks about is how when you get to be 50,
you really start to age more rapidly And if you do not commit to a regime of health and exercise the outcome when you turn 75 say pick a number or 80 whatever you know if you committed to a healthy lifestyle you going to look one way
And if you haven't, you're going to look another.
And the difference is going to be really substantial.
And so, you know, you've got to do the best you can to, you know, change your mindset.
Men particularly have a mindset of got to work and earn money and provide for my family.
and that's their highest priority as you're young and you're growing and you're thinking,
okay, that's what I got to do. When you get to be 50, you got to kind of shift your mindset a
little bit. My number one priority is to keep myself healthy so that I'm healthy at 80 or 90.
You know, not, I mean, we've all seen 70, 80, 90 year olds who are very unhealthy and
the difference in your lifestyle is huge. So what it requires is kind of a commitment to every day
doing something that's related to fitness. Now, when I started down that road, I started
researching it and I discovered that, you know, like everything else, I'm a type A. I thought,
well, okay, I want to get fit. Let's get extremely fit. Well, I looked at what Navy SEALs do and
Navy SEALs were doing CrossFit. And so I went to this Navy SEAL training program run by this guy
named Mark Devine. It was really cool. He beat the shit out of me, but it got me kind of into
CrossFit. And what, what, you know, CrossFit is that the unique insight related to CrossFit is
that if you can push yourself to your max for a very brief period of time, you don't have to do
it for long, the body remembers that and it triggers a bunch of hormones. And so think back
to the days when you were on the, we were running around with spears and animals were trying to kill
us. Tigers were trying, you didn't have to be strong all the time, but you had to be incredibly
strong for short sprints. And so it's called high intensity interval training. And so CrossFit is
like you go all out for three minutes, five minutes, eight minutes, 15 minutes, you go as
hard as you possibly can. And then you fall on the ground like a pile of sweat. And it kind of
sucks when you're doing it, to be frank. Although, you know, as my original coach said, you know,
it's like holding your head underwater. Eventually you kind of get used to it. And you do eventually
just like, okay, I know this is going to suck, but I'm just going to do it. But when you go,
when you go to a hundred percent, you're going to, you know, human growth hormone, testosterone,
you're going to fire a bunch of hormones that you just can't get by going out and jog. I mean,
jogging for an hour is great. And it's going to help build your cardio base. And that's a great
form of exercise but it's not the same as 100% effort for a brief period and so that's to me
that's the magic of hit and crossfit um and you know I mean famous people do it I mean I'm always
amused I've listened to a lot of stuff by Mick Jagger who's kind of a hero of mine he's a cool
guy and he's in his he's doing it he's doing crossfit you know I mean he's I mean he says
this is the only way I can stay in shape to do these tours at this age and you know God knows how
you know um i was i was bandmates are doing it i i don't get it but but they're doing it so
anyway um yeah i i'm i'm and so i you know probably somewhat um i don't know i i post my workouts just
to kind of say hey look this is what it's possible to do as a 68 year old you know
um doesn't matter where you start you can you can get to a point where you know you're fit and
healthy no matter what your age is and um i i just think it's it's it's another form of proof
of work um and i the re i got into it i think your daughter asked me what was the roughest time
of my period worst investment well it's gold in 2015 that was about the time i got into it so it
was about i was into a little before that but but that was when i really ramped it up so it's 10
years ago now and um you know i just figured shit i gotta be around to see the end of this game
and if I'm going to do that, I've got to be really fit to make it to 70, 80, 90.
My dad died when he was 73 and I don't want that to happen.
And I really want to see a Bitcoin-driven world.
And so I'm kind of aiming for 90.
I don't know if that's realistic.
If cancer doesn't come in the picture, I hope I can get there.
Yeah, you'll make it, mate.
Come on, aim for 100.
We need you around.
Yeah, well, I'm hoping for that too.
But, you know, it's I think my observation from watching those around me age is that after 90, you're often getting close to being on borrowed time.
So I go to I found the local gym here at the rugby club and I go along to that and I'm inspired by the people.
I was working out with a 58 year old guy yesterday.
So he's only 10 years older than me.
But there's a guy there that's 90.
He comes along to the gym and there's other guys like in their 70s and their 80s.
and it's like right you guys are my inspiration well that's right and isn't it i mean as you look
at those guys aren't some of them really fit and you're like wow that's great you know i mean you
can do it i mean the difference between fit 70 year old or fit 80 year old and an unfit i mean
it's like night and day but there's no there really is no shortcut and the other thing i would say
that's really important is it's not about measuring it it's not about performance so many people get
in their head and like well i'm no good i'm not going to do this no no no there's only one
prerequisite for this thing and that's to keep walking through the fucking door okay in other
words that's what my first crossfit coach told me said i said i'm out of shape i was fat when i went
in there i was really out of shape i said i'm not sure i can do this yes you can i said he said the
only thing you got to do is you got to walk through that fucking door five days a week
and do the best you can even if it's nothing or something really light you'll do something
because that something will move the needle a little bit and then what happens is as a needle
starts to move you start to say gosh i could do a little more and before you know it's like a fly
wheel right and you get it going and pretty soon you're doing stuff you didn't even think you could
ever do so i highly recommend it if you're 40 50 years old you got to shift your mindset i mean
20s and 30s you're on free time you know your body's strong you can screw around do whatever
i mean the other thing that related to that that i did was in my mid-30s i stopped drinking and
that that's helped a lot um so wow yeah good for you that's yeah it's uh it's poison it's really
as max says it's a shit coin alcohol is a shit coin and max you know max says everyone knows he's
been in aa and he was an alcoholic and and uh he hasn't same same age he quit too yeah and i probably
would have you know that's where i would have gone if i hadn't quit and i'm glad i did
wow good for you mate all right larry let's wrap it up because what are we now yeah an hour and 10
minutes uh i've got to hit you with the last question sure if you had one last orange pill
left to give to somebody who would you give that to and why um i'd probably give it to
elon and not because i'm a lover of all things elon um i'm not i mean he's got some great qualities
and he's flawed in other ways but but he's very very influential and he's very very well known
and he's probably got more twitter followers than anybody else and and i and i think he's so close
to fully understanding it and i think if if he were to fully understand it and to embrace it in
his businesses and to kind of adopt a sailor-like strategy, boy, it would just be, you know,
I mean, it would force Apple and all these other corporations to think about it.
And I just, I think it would move the world.
So I think he, I think he would be a very highly leveraged, you know, orange pill if,
you know, based on the platform and the, and the followers and the, you know, that he could
connect with.
So I, I'm pretty sure I'd give it to him.
All right.
Well, there is no wrong answer.
So, you know, don't swear.
I don't got to be curious.
I mean, same question to you in the same circumstances.
Who would you give it to?
Yeah, I've gone back and forth on this one a lot.
I used to say Greta.
I would like to have given it to Greta so she can undo the damage that she's done with
with all of the climate fear mongering to, you know, young teenage kids.
That would, yeah, yeah.
But now I lean more towards just keeping it as close as I possibly can.
You know, my parents, for example, I've given them the books.
I've not given them your one yet, but they've had others
and they come back with questions.
They've watched Joe Bryan's What's the Problem?
And then they come back with questions.
So it's just a slow burn.
And yeah, I mean, everybody gets there eventually, and we all know it's inevitable, this mindset shift that we have to go through.
Because if you don't, then what's the alternative?
The alternative is just to carry on living in this world where you are being manipulated, and there is no economic signal, and you can't make true decisions.
and you're going to get pulled into all kinds of wrong areas of life
and end up living a life that you were never intended to live.
Because everything is downstream of money, as you know,
as you've explained in your book, as Seb explains,
Seb's book, The Hidden Cost of Money.
That's another great one.
Fabulous book.
I love Seb's book.
Yeah, Joe Brian, fabulous.
I mean he just put his video he turned it into a free e too and it was just out I just retweeted it It highly recommended So yeah I mean look it you know it just one one soul at a time right i mean i you know i got a nice dm the other day it on my
thread on twitter where you know young kid out in la you know said hey i saw you on robert's show
and i really appreciate what you're doing and i feel like you want to send me a book um you know
the people i live with could definitely use it and he's um in a rough area of la and i was like
yeah i'm sending you a box spread them around i mean because this is you know it look it's a good
idea and good ideas spread you know mouth to mouth you know hand to hand friend to friend
hey have you read this yet you know have you thought about this i mean and uh you know but
it's it's happening it's coming along um i forgot to ask where will you be signing more copies have
you got anything yes that's great that's a very good question um so books i uh events i know i'm
I'm not going to be going to the bigger shows as much anymore, if at all.
There's a show down in Dallas that I was invited to by Robert Kiyosaki called Limitless.
It's late July, early August.
So I have a bunch of books there and I will be signing.
And I think I'm on a panel there.
There's a show up in Montreal in Canada.
I'm not sure the exact dates.
You can Google Bitcoin Canada, Montreal.
I want to say it's October-ish kind of time frame.
And so I will go to that.
I'll be signing books there.
I haven't committed to any other shows
but I might I don't know what
what else is coming up
you know I don't know if I'll go to Prague
next year I know when Madeira
gets thrown again I'll definitely go back to that
that's 2028
people put it in your diary
little ways out but I'm definitely
going to that
yeah so I you know
but on Twitter I always talk about you know where
I'm going what shows I'm going to
so follow Larry on Twitter
everybody and reach out in his dms if you have any questions yeah yeah really great talking to
you princey it's uh it's been a long time since that discussion about sam bankman freed
years the years they just slide by quickly don't they they certainly do mate they certainly do well
thanks for coming on thanks for everything you have done in the past and continue to do for
big crowd thank you for helping spread the word for your pod and your shows i love them they're
Excellent.
And when you get this done, let me know,
and I'll retweet it to those folks who follow me
so we can spread the word.
Will do.
Thanks, Larry.
Have a good day.
You too.
Take care.
Well, there you go, everybody.
Thank you for listening,
and thank you, Larry, for coming on the show.
We did do an episode actually way back
with a mutual friend of ours, Greg Foss.
We did that live in Madeira.
You can go and find that.
If you just search the Once Bitten Podcast,
you will find that yeah just search Lawrence Lippard or Greg Foss and there's a video version
up on the YouTube channel you can go and find the YouTube channel I still do have the YouTube channel
going but and the link is in the show notes but like I said at the beginning of the show here
moving completely towards Fountain App they are hosting now the the audio and the video has now
dropped so fountain app you can watch the video version of this as well if that's what you prefer
to do the video version is only on the mobile app for now and uh yeah if you're not if you're
not switching if you're a bitcoiner and you're not switching your listening habits and you're
viewing habits away from these walled gardens of spotify and apple pods then you know you're doing
it all wrong because fountain app has been built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners download the app
you'll have a wallet all lined up for you you can fund that with some sats via your own lightning
wallet and join the fun and join the fun and get over and listen to other podcasts go and listen to
bitcoin and because bitcoin and is brought to you by nunya bidness who's nunya bidness
david bennett has been in bitcoin longer than most people and he flies under the radar because
he's humble AF. He just does his thing. He gets the news that you can use every single day. He's
reading out Bitcoin articles. And look, I love me some Guy Swan on Bitcoin Audible. I do. But Dave
is bringing you like a different perspective. And it's definitely some Bitcoin content that if you've
not being exposed to before you probably should be i'll just say that so bitcoin and go listen to it
on fountain app stream stream dave some sats he helps you find bitcoiners that are selling
goods and services uh he's started something called the circle p and you can go find people
over there that are you know selling incredible stuff for bitcoin so you can spend your sats and
you can support this growing economy across this side of the pond we have a young man by the name
of chief monkey he has started plebeian dot market where you can if you've got goodness services you
want to sell for bitcoin you just need to list on plebeian dot market and you're away you are good
to go you will find people obviously you're not going to open up a ton of sales straight away this
is a long fuse we are you know this isn't going to happen in a day parker lewis gradually then
suddenly and if you've not read that book you 100 should do and you should buy that with sats from
the safe house which is safer dean amuse's publishing house and if you want to listen
to some of those chapters deep dives into those chapters just go back again go to the once bitten
podcast on the fountain app see all episodes search parker lewis you will find we've done
three or four chapters of his book you'll find it very interesting uh final shill for all of
the companies out there that are you know serving the bitcoin community and again look
do your own research i don't know which country you are listening from i do not know where your
best place is to go and buy Bitcoin. All I want you to understand is you have to buy Bitcoin
peer-to-peer or from a Bitcoin-only company. If you can't find peer-to-peer, join Orange Pill
App first. Go find people as close to you as you possibly can. Join in the local meetups,
get to the local conferences, wherever they are, find your tribe. Don't be that lonely
Bitcoiner anymore. This is time to step forward and start making Bitcoin a medium exchange.
so that's the first thing if you can't find peer-to-peer get to a trusted source find the
bitcoin only companies in your jurisdiction across europe you have relay r-e-l-a-i dot ch forward
slash bitten across the pond you have swan bitcoin.com forward slash bitten take self-custody
bitbox like i said at the beginning of the show the bitbox o2 is a bitcoin only hardware wallet
They've been around for many years in the space.
You can go straight to their website, hit the link in the show notes.
They have open source software on their devices,
and they're going to be launching something new very soon.
They're also going to be in Helsinki.
Come along to Helsinki.
Come and speak to the guys.
Come and listen to them.
The CEO is going to be there.
That's bitbox.swiss forward slash biton.
Here we are out of music again.
uh riga is literally kicking off at the time that you are listening to this most likely you've
perhaps missed it if you haven't if you want to fomo in get across to riga use the code bitten
at checkout hit the link in the show notes you'll get 10 off come to helsinki that's btc hell
again this is the first time this is being run it's going to be a great event they're expecting
anywhere between 750 to 1,000 guests to turn up a complete mix of noobs and OGs all in one place,
having fun, learning from each other, get across to one of these conferences. You have the
Bitcoin Balkans coming up in October as well. Like I say, all the time, CodeBitten, B-I-T-T-E-N.
If you can't get a discount to one of these conferences, let me know, then I can reach out
and perhaps they will be able to offer you one
to the listeners of the Once Bits and Podcast.
I think I've said it all.
Bubble, are you listening to your podcast,
your 40 hours per week?
Are you using bubble.fm, B-U-B-B-L.fm
to curate all of your topics that you want to listen to
to get up to speed?
You should be.
You can go back and listen to an episode I did with Kaz, K-A-Z.
Again, I'm going to tell you what,
fountain app
go to shows
once bitten podcast
see all episodes
search
Kaz
you will find it
I think I'm done guys
I'll catch you on the next show
if you're going to be in Riga
or Helsinki
come tap me on the shoulder
say hi
I will be selling and signing books
that's Choose Life
if you're not going to be there
you can go find Choose Life
on bitcoinbook.shop
forward slash bitten
and use the code bitten
at checkout for 10% discount
catch you on the next show guys thank you so much for listening take care