“The Big Print” is Coming (Uncut) 02-19-2025

“The Big Print” is Coming with Larry Lepard (WiM555)

Printing money is like alcoholism. The good effects come first. The bad effects only come later.

By nature, it has to get progressively worse. We tend to only change when the pain… Well, that’s exactly right. …becomes so acute.

World, we’re having a sovereign debt crisis. Don’t you get it? Yeah. Pay attention now.

Why is this such a blind spot for people? There are two sets of rules. One set of rules for them. One set of rules for the rich and powerful.

It’s part of American exceptionalism, I guess. They just think the dollar is and always will be. And I’m like, guys, open a monetary history book.

It’s either hyperinflation or you get conquered. War and money printing kind of go hand in hand. It’s genocide.

Doge, by the way, is a generally good thing, and it will help. This is the Department of Government Efficiency, not the shitcoin. I would hasten to say that those who think it’s a total solution to the problem, I disagree.

They don’t know how big the problem is. Exactly. The problem’s too big.

You know, when I first grokked that, it was like my mind was blown. You know what I mean? Like, holy shit, the monetary lie is about to disappear. That’s so hopeful.

And so that was frigging fabulous. You have just published your first book, right? Yeah, my first and probably only book. First and only.

All right. So I’m not doing another one. It was a lot of work.

Big impact. I know you’ve been busting your ass for the past six months to get it done. So I’m happy to see it in print.

And here it is. The big print. Yeah.

What happened to America and how sound money will fix it? Um, and we’ve got that orange cover, which is the Bitcoin subliminal messaging messaging. I don’t have Bitcoin in the title, but we’ll get them. Yeah.

No, that’s, it’s, it’s a good way to indirectly orange pill people because sometimes you come at people with a Bitcoin word and they can have this, uh, repulsion towards it. Immediately. A lot of people jump to Sam Bankman, freed and nonsense and they just don’t even want to hear it.

Yes. Yes. There’s still the conflation of crypto and Bitcoin, which is a major problem.

It always has been. Um, so I mean, let’s like, what was your inspiration to start writing this? Obviously you’ve been in the sound money game for a long time. I have.

Yeah. I’m an old guy. You’ve been in the Bitcoin game for quite a long time as well.

So like what, what, what got you to finally put it all into paper? I put this in a tweet the other day. It was kind of like I got tapped on the shoulder, you know, by some higher power. Um, and I was watching some TV program and I was watching the blue and red debate.

And, uh, I was so frustrated because both sides weren’t even talking about anything related to what really is the underlying problem. I mean, and so what the book briefly, what the book posits is that America is broken. We’re in a fourth turning as you’ve so, uh, you know, well-identified and labeled it, you know, the issue is what is money and we’re in this fourth turning and, and people aren’t focusing on the real underlying issue.

And it just was driving me nuts. Right. And I thought to myself, you know, somebody has got to try to make the country aware of the fact that the, the, the fundamental issue is the unsound money, not, you know, blue politics, red politics.

It goes across all of that. And so, and then I thought to myself, you know, maybe I could do that because I’m older experienced. I’ve seen how the country deteriorated.

I’ve been in the sound money thing for a long time. Well, but there are a lot of great Bitcoin books written. I’m not sure the world needs another one.

You know, and somebody on Twitter recently said, ah, we just keep rewriting the Bitcoin standard. And, you know, to be honest with you, this has some of the Bitcoin standard in it. I fully credit safe.

That’s the best Bitcoin book ever written and always will be was the first and, you know, et cetera. But I’ve given it to friends and sometimes the reaction is it’s a little too heavy, a little too textbooky and they kind of get lost and they don’t necessarily finish it or even read all of it. I mean, those of us who are hardcore Austrian account, we love it.

Yeah. All Bitcoiners love it. But, um, and same with Lin’s book, Lin’s book is a brilliant book.

You know, it’s fabulous. This is probably the best book on money ever written. But again, you know, your average, your normie doesn’t read it.

And so I thought to myself, you know, maybe I can tell a tale, tell my story because people like stories. You know, I mean, the Bible is just, you know, stories talking about narratives and, you know, their messages in the stories, but the stories, right. And people watch TV and they watch Netflix.

They’re watching stories. They don’t watch, you know, documentaries or, you know, courses on something. Maybe if I tell this as a story and lay it out, take them through my history and take them to the history of Bitcoin, the history of sound money, because, you know, the United States was built on sound money, really.

I mean, the founding fathers understood it. Then I can show them why we’ve drifted away and how we’ve drifted away, how bad it’s gotten and how really that is the fundamental. I mean, when people talk about solving politics, they want to drain the swamp.

Well, this is the plug. Yes. If we pull the plug on unsound money, we go back to sound money.

A lot of things will get better. At least that’s my strong belief. And so I tried to write a book.

If this, you know, one of your questions I know that you gave me here is how will you measure success here? I will measure success is if this book kind of goes viral and gets traction and interest and readership outside of the Bitcoin community. I think Bitcoiners who read this book are going to like it. You know, because I’m not really saying anything they don’t already know.

And that’s not new. And I’m supporting Bitcoin, obviously. But that’s really not our audience.

Our audience is the skeptic. Our audience is the person who doesn’t even realize that Bitcoin exists or kind of realizes it but puts it in the crypto bucket, you know. And so I’m trying to and so, you know, some people might say, well, you dumbed it down a little bit.

I did. I mean, you know, Bitcoiners might read it and say, hey, you know, you got a chapter on explaining Bitcoin. I don’t need that.

Fine. Skip that chapter. Right.

You know, I mean, early on, I had a test reader read it and they got into like two chapters and they said, what’s the Federal Reserve? And I said, OK. So I have a footnote. Right.

But, you know, we assume we know it. Sure. We’ve all read Edward Griffin, Edward Griffin.

But, you know, so I have a footnote, you know, describing the Federal Reserve and how it works. And so I’m trying to write something, trying to the goal of this book is to be a catch all tool that you can give to somebody who does not know anything about Bitcoin, and they will come out and they’ll be fully orange pilled because they’ll understand the history and then they’ll understand the solution. That’s the goal.

And this is for a lay audience. Absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, trust me, I go deep enough into it. I don’t just glaze over everything. I mean, I talk about and there are a couple of chapters that I had some test readers say, boy, this is heavy.

I started, you know, the War of 1812 and how they, you know, they stopped specie redemption and that led to, you know, the printing of money, et cetera. I mean, some people don’t want to hear all that history. Some people love it.

Others don’t. I said, you can skip chapter 11 and 12 and not miss the thesis of the book. But, you know, the history is there to show how we drifted from a sound money society to an unsound money society.

And, you know, I said to you and I showed you earlier on that my favorite chart in the book is the chart on page 22 where the inflation chart. And this country was a great country until 1946 and really until 1971. But, you know, in 1946, we had one World War II.

We were at the top of the world. We were widely admired. We were.

Put that out right there. You just see the inflation. It’s my favorite.

Hockey stick after 1971. Yeah. Going off the gold standard in 1971, as I say in the book, it was galactically stupid.

Yeah. It was the famous speech in A Few Good Men by Tom Cruise. I love that quote.

And I put it in the book. And, you know, it just it changed everything. And it’s only gotten worse.

And there’s a good Jens Parsons quote in the book where he talks about how the problem with inflation is that by nature, it has to get progressively worse to give the same amount of effect. And that’s why the math is such that we’re now at the stage where, you know, we continually kick the can down the road. We’re getting to the end of the road or the can’s getting really heavy.

Yeah. Depending upon what metaphor you want to use. So.

Yeah, it’s very it is drug or alcohol like, right? It is Milton Friedman even used that very analogy. There’s a one of the subtitles is the evolution of an alcoholic. Yeah.

Okay. That’s in the in the inflation chapter. Yeah.

So, you know, it’s not it’s almost literal, basically, right? The system is addicted to easy money, which is this illusion that when there is their economic problems that you can just print these pieces of paper to resolve it. But that’s, of course, ass backwards, right? You actually have to produce more things to consume. You can’t just stimulate consumption of that which has not been produced.

Efficiency is what gives greater well-being, not the printing of these units. Yes. And there’s a deep like it’s deeply intuitive if you really stop and think about it.

If you’re hungry and you’re out of food, like, well, are you going to grow some food? Are you going to print some paper? Like which one’s going to put food in your belly? Right. There’s only one thing and it’s work, right? It’s work and savings investment. Exactly.

Not the allocation of it through money, right? Money is this allocation technology. That’s in there, too. I mean, there’s a great story of just, you know, growing eggs and fishing and sharing resources and how savings is what creates better economic well-being and better economic outcomes.

Yes. I mean, remember when Bernanke used to say, you know, we have a savings glut, which he was wrong about. And what we had was a money glut that made it look like we had a savings glut.

We didn’t have a sound money savings glut. And yeah, you got to save in order to basically increase societal well-being. And the book takes you through that at a very basic level.

And again, it’s written to try so that anybody can understand this. You don’t need to have any kind of math degree. You don’t need to have any kind of financial background.

It’s simple. You know, it’s very simple. So you’ve taken your years of knowledge and wisdom about sound money and you’re distilling it into something that’s very accessible to people.

Correct. How does your story weave into this? Well, it’s so. Your personal story.

Yeah. So I’ve just tried to, you know, to make it a little spicier and because, you know, I’m a little bit of an oddball and I, you know, and I did some nutty things along the way. And also to add to credibility to it, I just told my own personal story.

I mean, the opening scene of people, I don’t want to spoil it, but if people will read it, I mean, I challenged, you know, I spoke truth to power. I mean, I challenged, you know, Tim Geithner at a conference, you know, and said that what they did in 08 was wrong. Geithner’s former treasurer.

Yeah, yeah. Treasury secretary. Yeah, right.

And also was head of the New York Fed during the bailouts in 2008. And, you know, basic and that kind of thing. I think people are, you know, you’ll read that and you’ll think, Jesus, who is this guy? You know, but it was a hook.

Yeah. Frankly, to keep people reading. Because if I opened up with, you know, monetary policy, so it’s A, B, C, and D, their eyes are going to glaze over.

Who cares? Yeah. And then I talk about how, you know, being a gold bug has been hard. And there were times when I got, you know, I was getting kicked in the teeth and why I was getting kicked in the teeth and how that led me to lose weight and join CrossFit and get mentally tougher so that I could make it through to see Bitcoin evolve and survive.

And I think putting in those personal parts to the story, I think makes it a little bit more interesting. I mean, so it’s funny. I mean, the title is very much, I mean, obviously those who know, this is a little bit of a playoff on the big short, right? Yeah.

The big print. Yeah, same font. Right.

Exactly. So, and that movie and book did extremely well because it told the story. Yes.

It told the story of those guys. It showed, you know, Michael Burry, you know, staying up all night and getting the calls from his angry investors and hitting the drums and knowing he was fundamentally right, but being kicked in the teeth. And the same thing happened to me, exact same thing.

Yeah. And we’ve talked about this slightly before, but maybe it’s worth rehashing a little bit. Like you were, this is pre-Bitcoin, right? You’re a gold bug.

You knew about the problems inside of the financial system and you were going hard on gold. Right. But gold didn’t work.

You were right, but not at the right time. Not at the right time. I was right for a while.

I mean, it was right from 2000 to 2011, but then they figured out, you know, as I said, you know, in the book, I mean, never underestimate your enemy. I mean, these bastards figured out a way to, you know, by paying interest on excess reserves, all the printing they did in 2008 was sanitized. It didn’t turn into inflation.

I mean, 2008, I thought we were going to have hyperinflation. Yeah. I was dead ass wrong.

It went into asset inflation. It went into asset inflation. So they created an everything bubble.

Yes. Right. So that, yeah, and that was a very tough time for me.

I mean, my fund went down enormously from 11 to 15. I wondered if I was right. I mean, I didn’t understand it.

You know, I was just, all I did was pray and think to myself, well, there’s got to be some reason why I’m suffering through this because, you know, and maybe someday it’ll turn out okay and I’ll be able to tell the story or maybe it won’t. Right. And, you know, I’m going to end up having lost a fair amount of my wealth in this gold trade.

And so in hindsight, though, well, what was the difference, I guess, between 2008 and 2020? Because subsequent to 2020, we’ve seen a lot of inflation. Oh, yeah. But 2008, it was all asset inflation.

So what, in your opinion, what did you learn? Many, many differences. I mean, they both involve ZERB and they both involve zero interest rate policy. They both involved QE, you know, growing the balance sheet, but money printing.

Yeah. But in the case of the second time, they did not pay as much interest on the excess reserves. And they also had all the stimmies and the PPP program.

Helicopter money. Right. Just blatant helicopter money, large amounts of it.

I mean, it was $5 trillion. And the magnitude of it all broke the long deflationary trend. I mean, we’ve been in a deflationary trend from, you know, the early 80s until 2020.

And, you know, finally, we just, it broke. It massively broke because people realized that, you know, there was just 40% more money in the system. And, you know, wages, everything just went up.

And, of course, now, in my opinion, now we are in an inflationary age. And we haven’t been able to put that back into the can. And it’s only going to get worse.

And that’s, you know, you say earlier, you asked me, why did I write the book? The other reason, Robert, I really wrote the book was to try and help people. I mean, and to warn people. Because I think it’s an urgent warning.

One of my great fears when I wrote the book was that it wouldn’t get out quick enough, that it would happen before the book got out. Because, you know, I feel like this big print is coming. And more inflation and more of the problem we’re talking about, it’s going to get worse, okay, as we talked about with the alcoholic.

You just keep drinking more and more. And so, as a result of that, I really want to warn people. Because I think that, you know, those who are aware of this problem and are taking steps to defend themselves financially, you know, they will be in a different set of conditions in 10 years versus those who are just unaware of it and blissfully ignore it.

Because, you know, if it’s true that the monetary system does go into the kind of thing I think it might go into, we’re going to have a lot of inflation. And those who do not protect themselves are going to be poor, substantially poorer than those who do. For sure.

And that’s unfortunate. I mean, I hate to see that happen to people, you know. Yeah, yeah.

And so, you feel this impetus. I feel an impetus. To do something about it.

Yeah, it’s like, I mean, there’s a part in the book where I say, I mean, it’s the chapter that Lynn and she gave me permission to use her title, you know, Nothing Stops This Train, right? There’s a chapter in their title, Nothing Stops This Train, just talks about the fiscal train wreck we’re going into. And I say in the chapter, I say, you know, I just want to get up on a soapbox and scream the entire word. World, we’re having a sovereign debt crisis.

Don’t you get it? Yeah. Pay attention now. I mean, as we’re speaking, I mean, here it is.

It’s February 10th. And, you know, this morning, gold was up $46, you know, to a new all-time high of, you know, 2,900 plus. I mean, that’s just, I mean, that’s, you know, why? Right? I mean, it’s what, it’s a signal that, I mean, the money is in the, I mean, the money is broken.

We know that fundamentally broken, but it’s, you know, we might be transitioning from the gradually phase into the suddenly phase. I mean, it kind of, we’re kind of at the cusp, in my opinion, so. Yeah.

So let’s talk about that. February 10th, 25. I saw the feds reverse repo facility is almost tapped out.

So it looks like money printing is about to start again. It has to. All the, there’s so many problems in the world.

Like we’ve noticed like a lot of people, people we know all over the world complaining about rising crime. Oh, really? That seems to be something that’s probably related, right? People becoming more desperate, basically. Um, where do you, like, where do you, what do you expect to see over the next five, 10 years? As far as the money printing game goes, you think we’re going into another acute crisis and then we’ll have another big QE or.

I don’t, I don’t want to get too dark. And I, you know, we’ve, some of, some people have read the mandibles. I’m sure you have.

And I haven’t read it, but I’m familiar with the thesis. The thesis. Yeah.

I mean, I hope we don’t go there. Um, look, I, I’m very comfortable saying, I think that we have a lot of inflation in the future and people are going to have to learn to live with that and need to protect themselves from it. How bad that’s debatable.

The book talks about kind of probability weightings on all the possible outcomes with respect to inflation. Um, the crime, I think you’re right. I mean, I think, you know, I think for the upper, obviously for the upper 10% of the country, they don’t even notice what’s going on.

You know, they’re generally Fiat based and doing pretty well. I think for the bottom half of the country, everybody is really badly hurting. And even in the middle section, people are pretty badly hurting.

And, um, and that’s, that’s sad. I mean, I, I mean, and I, you know, I don’t interact, I live in a pretty nice area. I don’t interact with these people on a daily basis.

I have a sister who lives in a rural area. Um, it’s very middle-class and she tells me the stories and I’m just horrified by how tough it is for a lot of these people. Um, you know, the, the, um, yeah.

So, you know, where’s it going to go? I don’t really know. I mean, the best case I think is that we would do a monetary reset of some type and we would go back to sound money. I mean, if you want to kind of cut to the chase of the quick and correct solution, you know, money being broken has happened in history many, many times over hundreds of years or thousands of years.

And when it happens, what happens if, if a society then decides we are going to go back to money that is not broken, we’re going to return to sound money. Things will self-organize and get better, much better quickly. Yeah.

Really quickly actually. Um, but that choice has to be made. You can’t wish that it’s going to happen without making that choice.

I mean, you’re either on a sound money standard or you’re printing and on a fiat standard and the, the, the, the outcomes under the two are substantially different. Yes. You know? Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and it’s also a little bit disheartening because we tend to only change when the pain well, that’s exactly right. Becomes so acute.

Isn’t that right? And that’s the sad part. I mean, how bad do we have to let this get before we finally have a political crisis and change it? Which is why, by the way, I’m going to send the book to, I’m going to go with Dennis Porter. We’re going to march around.

We’re going to get every politician. I’m going to send it to Trump. I’m going to send the Vance.

I’m going to send up a cent. Yeah. I mean, look, if we want to get the change before all, we get to all the pain, what we got to do, what you got to do is buy this book, give it to your neighbors.

I mean, we got to turn this thing, you know, and this is, I know this is immodest on my part, but we got to turn this thing into common sense, which Thomas Paine wrote, which basically helped, you know, galvanize the nation over breaking with Britain. Yes. And we’ve got to get a groundswell of hundreds, if not thousands, if not millions of Americans saying we got to have sound money.

Yes. Lippard’s book shows you why and proves it. Yeah.

So you’re channeling some Paul Revere energy here, right? A little bit. I mean, look, the printing is coming. Yeah.

To compare me to all those guys is a joke because I’m just like a, you know, a squirrel looking for a nut. But my point is, I feel, I do feel strongly about this thesis. I mean, there’s no, you know, there’s plenty of fight in me for this thesis, whether we can get this out of the small little Bitcoin community into a nationwide movement, who the hell knows? Yeah.

And so it is an uphill battle, right? Because we have the Keynesian economic paradigm that’s been ideologically inserted in all the universities across the world. Right. Makes this a blind spot for everyone.

Oh, absolutely. You can’t even get this type of education in any mainstream channel. Again, why I wrote the book and there’s a part in the chapter on, you know, the history of economics where I talk about how the Fed has basically bought the economics profession.

Yes. I mean, it’s a protection racket. Right.

They pay all the monetary scholars to not criticize fiat. Yes. And if you’re an Austrian economist, you can’t get a PhD level, you know, degree and get a seat as a professor.

Right. Because you’re going against the narrative. Exactly.

I mean, it’s just, it’s so bad. It’s so broken. It’s so corrupt.

It’s interesting, though, you mentioned, I want to go back to the point you mentioned earlier, the crime thing. There’s a part of the book that talks about this. I mean, inflation breaks societies.

Inflation ruins societies. And I go through the very, in a detailed way, what happened in World War I. So the big inflations in the United States, there was one in 1812, that war, not that big. Civil War was big, really big.

Greenbacks, a lot of inflation. But to calm down, we got back on the gold standard in the 1870s. The World War I was a seminal event.

OK, the Fed had just been formed in 1913. War broke out in 1916. Yeah, what a coincidence.

Yeah, we printed a ton of money to pay for the war. No surprise, right? And the Fed broke its charter, like, from day one. No surprise.

But the price level basically doubled. You know, from 1916 to 1921, the price level doubled up 100%. That tore up the society.

You know, Ku Klux Klan, all kinds of race riots, all kinds of labor strife and strikes and shutdowns. OK, Charles Ponzi was 1919, Ponzi scheme. Kind of mirrors SPF today, right? Chicago Black Sox, 1919, you know, betting cheating scandal.

I mean, and you know, you can just kind of see how, you know, societies get ruined through bad inflation. And the interesting outcome of all that, of course, is the progressives at the time thought, well, this was all caused by alcohol. Right, right.

Yeah, interesting. You know, they didn’t realize it was the broken money that was causing all these problems. They thought it was alcohol that was causing the problem.

Oh, let’s pass the Volstead Act and go dry and we’ll solve it. Which, you know, I mean, look, I don’t drink, so I’m not opposed to the Volstead Act per se. But the point is, there was a lot of strife as a result of that.

Why is it? Well, so that’s so interesting. Why is this such a blind spot for people? It’s like, it seems to be so obvious in a way that it’s the thing that we use all the time. And if, you know, printing money has this intuitive sense of it’s not not doing anything good.

It’s just stealing from you. Why do you think people are so hesitant or reticent to look at the money as the source of the problem? They look to other things like alcohol. You know, it’s a great question.

I mean, I think I think that, you know, they get misinformation. And by the way, another optimistic and hopeful part of the book in the latter book is how the Internet is helping to change all this. You know, if you’ve got Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, you know, and the politicians saying, well, yeah, this inflation is all caused by greedy corporations.

You know, you listen to that. You believe it. It’s social engineering.

Yeah. And you don’t think, no, this inflation is caused by the Federal Reserve and what they’ve done. That’s really the cause.

So, I mean, you know, you’ve got gaslighting and lying coming from all the people who sit in the system and benefit from the system as it now exists. Now, the good news, again, on that on that topic, the bright news about that is that’s getting blown up, too, right? You’re doing this. Rogan’s doing his thing.

Tucker’s doing his thing. You know, we’ve got alternative news media. Yeah, we’re all starting.

I mean, you know, all this. I mean, the book talks about this and takes you through kind of a historical tour of how we got centralized. And that was a good thing in general in the beginning, because centralization led to scale and scale led to cheap stuff.

You know, I mean, Henry Ford, you know, started the assembly line and it was great. I mean, you know, we got all these good cars cheap, you know, but but 1946 was peak centralization. We figured out how to slaughter 50 million people really efficiently, you know, with gas chambers and bombs, all kinds of shit.

Right. And since then, I think at that point in time, what I think happened is we found out there were dis economies of large scale. Right.

Right. Yes. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, you can you can build a big scale industrial economy. But guess what? If Hitler becomes your leader and decides he wants to take over Europe, you know, you’re going to see a lot of innocent people get killed. Yeah.

So there’s having that scale economy is dangerous. Yeah. And he rose from the ashes of the Weimar hyperinflation.

Exactly. Another another perfect example of how inflation creates perverse outcomes. Yeah.

So how do you like because this is, again, one of these things that’s very obvious to Bitcoiners or money monetary historians. It’s a tenuous connection for people that are outside of the space. How is there is there how do you approach it? Like if you’re talking to someone, obviously, the book is a great approach, but if you can’t get him to read the book, how do you elevator pitch? Yeah.

On this connection between money and everything else. Great question. So my elevator pitch is, hey, you know, you’re hurting from inflation, right? There’s nobody in this country that will argue with that today.

Anyone who goes to a supermarket, unless you don’t buy your own food, you know, you’re hurting from inflation. It’s just stunning how bad it is. Right.

So you’re hurting from inflation, right? Yep. Got it. OK.

Do you really understand the underlying cause and how we got there and why that doesn’t you know, and that’s the other thing. I wrote the book because a lot of people think this is normal. Oh, yeah, we’re hurting from place, but, you know, we’ve always hurt from inflation.

It’s not, you know, this is just the way of the world. You can’t change it. Right.

And that’s where I say, no, stop. You can change it. It does not have to be this way.

Right. There was a long period of time in America when it was not this way. And it’s gotten this way.

Not only has it gotten this way, but it’s gotten this way and it’s gotten worse. And so if we return to sound money, we can solve it. And, you know, that’s that’s why we need to, you know, even though, you know, monetary stuff may not, you know, dear average citizen, monetary stuff may not be on the top of your mind, but it but you should learn to think more about it because it’s actually a very important issue.

Yeah. And so for sound money in the elevator pitch, you’re just telling people this is the thing that doesn’t make prices go up. Exactly.

That’s the elevator pitch. We can we can stop inflation. It does not have to exist.

And then and then if you want to get a little more into the graduate level, I go into the Jeff Booth thesis. Yeah. In fact, you know, your TV costs haven’t gone up, right? No, this is great.

You know, I got a big screen now for 300 bucks. Right. That could be happening in everything.

You know, that’s and so that’s the dream. But we don’t have that because the system doesn’t allow us to have that because of the way it’s set up. And and and then I get then I get then I start to go into the politics.

And this is where the book differs from Lin. Lin Lin came at it from an engineering perspective. Brilliant.

Right. I come at it more a little bit more from a political perspective. Right.

You know, look, I mean, Nixon had a choice. Everyone says, well, he had to go off. No, he didn’t.

He could he could have just said, we’re going to revalue gold higher. Now he would have had domestic inflation. Sure.

But he could have let gold float. You know what I’m saying? And he and he chose not to. And so the politics of the matter is what’s happened is the politicians and the big business people, the quintillionaires, the people who know how to make inflation work for them.

I mean, the other thing in the book, the other, you know, chart in the book, I think is very important is the wealth distribution chart in the early going. I mean, you know what page it is? It’s right up front. It’s under America’s broken.

So, yeah, if you go to page 20, which you’ll see this is it shows the total net worth of the top one percent. So the top one percent now holds ninety two percent of the wealth in this country. This is page 20.

Page 20. Yeah. Oh, OK.

Total net worth held by the top one percent. Right. So this is all the bottom and look at the bottom 50 percent barely gone up.

Well, yeah, the the the point is true here. The point, the point being that there are people in society, wealthy people who actually don’t suffer from inflation. One, because they got a lot of money.

They don’t care about the cost of food and a bunch of assets. And two, they know how to they know how to game it. They know how to play the system.

Right. I mean, as I point out, if you can borrow money at one percent, zero percent, two percent, three percent, whatever, some low rate and use it to buy assets that yield a much higher yield. Right.

You’re getting ahead. Yeah. You’re a cantilever.

You’re right. But the rest of us, we don’t have that benefit because we can’t borrow that cheap. I mean, the average human being, the average says in the United States, you know, is paying 20 something percent for a credit card loan.

Yeah. This is where another things get murky again, because there’s this general. What people like sort of blame rich people for all these problems, like to some extent, I guess you could argue when they’re gaming the system, like maybe the some of that is proper, but the real problem is not that people are rich.

It’s that people are being robbed basically through the money, through taxation, through regulation, et cetera. I have no problem with rich people. I think people who add value honestly.

Of course. And aren’t taking advantage of the system, they should be paid more or more whatever. But what’s happened is it’s gotten very, very lopsided.

Yeah. I mean, I like to use the example of I grew up in Ann Arbor. My father was a shopkeeper.

You know, our neighbor was ran Ford Motor Company. Right. The guy did better than my father, but not 400 times better in terms of salary.

You know, five times better. Right. He was running a multinational corporation that was building cars all over the world.

Right. I mean, there was a middle class in the olden days. And that was another reason for writing the book that, you know, some of the younger people in the Bitcoin sphere, I don’t think understand just how nice and how good it was in this country in the 60s, 70s and 80s.

I mean, it wasn’t perfect. There was a Vietnam War. Yeah.

There were race, there were all kinds of problems. And we didn’t have the technologies we have today. I mean, technologically today is miles away from then.

I mean, it’s just so fabulous. I mean, you know, I mean, I was in college and I couldn’t make long distance phone calls because they were too expensive. Yeah.

You know, I had a budget if I could call my parents once a week for five minutes. Yeah. Because, you know, because of the cost of a call.

I mean, compare that to today. Right. Sure.

But but, you know, in terms of kindness and, you know, a middle class and gentility. Yeah. It was a better country.

Right. And it saddens me that we’re not, you know, we don’t have that today. It really saddens me.

Yeah. The middle class really is the center of gravity for any society. And then this is a very, again, the word obvious is a little bit dangerous, I guess.

It seems pretty clear to me that printing money is going to destroy the middle class. Right. For the reasons you just laid out.

Right. It’s like the people that depend on dollars to hold their value the most, the poor and middle class are the ones getting scammed in the money printing. Yeah.

And all that wealth gets reallocated to the top. Exactly. So you’re just widening the gap between rich and poor and therefore making society less stable.

Exactly. Exactly. Why is that? So you can say in a few words, but for somehow, I guess, because we’re up against all the Keynesian propaganda.

There’s that. You’re just competing with. Well, there’s that.

And there’s just the general look, everyone feels anger about the unfairness of that. Some of us react and go, look, it’s not capitalism per se. It’s crony capitalism.

Others like AOC and Bernie and some of the other people on the left are like, you know, no, these people aren’t paying taxes. You know, it’s unfair that they’re as rich as they are. And, you know, fine.

That’s a piece of it, but that’s not really the core piece. The core piece is the uneven playing field. Right.

If the playing field were even, you know, that wouldn’t, it wouldn’t be as extreme as it is. Well, yeah, there’d be nothing to complain about. Right.

Again, it could, for me, comes back to private property. But again, that’s another one of these abstract things that people don’t really understand. It’s like, if you just respect private property, universalize it and don’t violate it.

Right. Because money printing is a violation of private property. Taxation is a violation of private property.

Crime is a violation of private property. All of these things. If you don’t do that, you get that level playing field.

Correct. And then you’re having people, people that can only become rich by serving one another. And that’s a world.

It’s like, yeah, you want a lot of rich people. That means they’ve solved a lot of problems for other people. Absolutely.

Yeah. No, I mean, look, I look at a guy like Hewlett or Packard or, you know, people who’ve invented things and made the world a better place. I’m totally comfortable with them being rich.

Of course. Because they’ve made everyone’s lives so much better. Exactly.

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Okay, your book does two broad sections, right? Yeah. The problem. The problem and the solution.

And the solution. So obviously, you know, we just had a guy on here the other day that, I don’t know if you’ve seen that video, What’s the Problem? Joe Brian did. Yeah, I did.

I thought it was really good. Yeah. Yeah.

I thought it was really good too. He really gathered, again, for the normies, he gathered all this whole constellation of societal problems and said, here’s all these problems. And then flowchart connected it to the money, right? It was actually very useful, something we’re trying to do often.

I agree. It’s similar actually to what I’ve done. Yeah.

So like, let’s do that. Let’s do that. Walk us through the problem.

Okay. And then we’ll go into the solution. Yeah, the fundamental problem is that the money is not sound and that, you know, at every turn, the powers that be, and I put those down as kind of the Fed and large businesses, the government, the quintillionaires, change the rules in the system to benefit themselves and it costs the rest of us.

And it’s subtle and it’s hard to understand, but, you know, like, let’s take the 2008 bail out as an example. A lot of people have approached me and said, you know, gosh, they had to do it. You know, if they hadn’t done it, the ATMs would have turned off, the banks would have failed.

I mean, you know, those guys were heroes. They saved us. And I’m like, no, they’re not.

And the book talks about an alternative approach that could have been used, but what they don’t understand is fine. Okay. If you’re going to have a system where you’re going to bail people like that out, then don’t complain when gasoline and groceries are more expensive.

Because you bailed it out by creating, I mean, at a fundamental level, prices, you know, reflect, you know, supply and demand based in a unit of account, in the money, in the number of, you know, money units and, you know, monetary units. And so it’s quite simple. If you have the same amount of goods and services and you increase the number of monetary units, then people will be able to bid more for each good and service.

The price will go up and that’s inflation. Okay. And so, you know, this is not, this is not a mystical thing.

It’s not based on greed. It’s just based on the way the math works. And so people need to learn to connect the dots between the government does things to bail people out, the wrong people.

And therefore the price that we all pay is higher. Yeah. The government also, it’s more, it’s even more insidious than that though, Robert, because the government also spends money on shit that’s not productive.

I think one of the other great crimes, you know, post 71 is all the money we’ve spent on war. Of course. And in writing the book, actually, if I had one wish to come for the, you know, that we go to a Bitcoin standard and everything else, it’d be that we stop war in the world.

I mean, since 9-11, we’ve wasted, in my opinion, wasted, I don’t care what others say, I believe $8 trillion in the Middle East. Yeah. We took over Iraq and yet now all Iraq does is produce oil for China.

You know, we captured Afghanistan, we gave it back. Yeah. You know, we’ve got guys walking around missing limbs with prosthetics and guys who died.

You know, Dick Cheney’s a, you know, a hundred millionaire plus, you know, Halliburton did just fine. Thank you very much. You know, and everybody associated with that war machine made a ton of money and yet, you know, we just pissed away $8 trillion and that’s part of the debt that we’re now trying to serve as creating the doom loop that we’re now in.

Of course. And we destroyed ancient civilization over there. Well, yeah, not to mention the innocent, not to mention the innocent people that died in these other countries.

I mean, there’s a part of the book where I talk about Vietnam where I visited a couple of times. I mean, and that, that one I remember from my youth because I was in my teens when that all occurred. And, um, yeah, I mean, we, you know, there were, there were hundreds of thousands, arguably even close to a million rice farmers that President Nixon carpet bombed in, in Northern Vietnam.

Yeah. I mean, it was just, it’s just horrific. It’s fucking genocide.

Yeah. We call it war. This is like, no, it’s fucking genocide.

Yeah. I mean, it literally is just horrific. Yeah.

Yeah. And so, and you know, war and money printing kind of go hand in hand because, you know, if you think about what wars cost, they’re usually so large that you would have to tax the population at a hundred percent. That’s right.

And population’s like, you’re taxing me at a hundred percent? I don’t think so. Yeah. We’re having a revolution here.

Right. Right. And so the only way to do it, the only way to finance that is to just dilute the beer, to print more money, you know, and, and, and take everyone through inflation.

Yes. And that’s what they do. Yeah.

I’ve always thought that this would be the one universal thing we could all agree to. It’s like war is bad. Yeah.

You know, so let’s fix the money for that reason alone. Right. Right.

That’s a great reason. At least shrinks the scale, scope, and severity of war. Correct.

And, but again, it’s another one of these connections that people consider to be tenuous, even though it’s pretty straightforward. You can look at the, I think we printed $2.8 trillion between 2001 and roughly 2019. Yes.

And we spent 2.5 trillion on the war on terror. Like it was all printed money. Pretty much.

So it’s not even a question. And then the other side of it too, like all of the propaganda and fake news and fake stories and what, you know, weapons of mass destruction and mission accomplished all this, all these lies basically. Right.

That are engineered, right. Social engineering to justify. Yes.

The quote unquote war when it’s really just like history, when the history books are written 200 years, 500 years from now, it’s going to be regarded as just another genocide. Just another mass murder of one group of people onto another. There’s nothing justified about it whatsoever.

But we get hypnotized via the media. And our political system. I mean, my understanding, I could be wrong about this factually, but I believe we have, the military people have operations in all states.

I mean, there are, there are, you know, military, I mean, they’re defense contractor operations, I should say. Well, and guess what? You know, you’re in a state, you’re a Senator, you’re representative, you know, you want full employment, you get large donations from the military industrial complex. You know, what do you do? You look the other way, right? It’s very pernicious, man.

It is. It’s not, it’s not right. Because you’re incentivized to sign up for the scam basically, right? Like you want jobs, you want employment, you want grants or whatever the thing may be.

It’s like, and this is where, again, it’s weird with the, the, the curriculum and ideology too. It’s like, once you start printing money, you then use the proceeds, the purchasing power you’re stealing to engineer the mind, socially engineer people’s minds into believing the money printing is good for them. And we need to go to war and we need to do that.

This is like the, it is printing money is like mind control in a way. Yeah. Yeah.

That’s an interesting connection. I hadn’t thought about, but yes, that’s right. I mean, it leads to that.

Yeah. It definitely leads to that. I mean, that’s, and, you know, look, it’s, it’s been great for some people.

I mean, it’s, you know, I mean, there are, right. It’s been great for some people. I agree.

It’s like, sure. There’ve been direct beneficiaries of this, right? Like shareholders of the Fed, right? Of this. Right.

Well, printing money literally forever. You know, Raytheon shareholders or the Chinese contractors, you know, I mean, they’re, they’re, and you can tell, I mean, there are, there are people that, you know, Max Boot or the neocons who have gotten, you know, very, very wealthy. Yeah.

By playing that game. But here’s what I, it’s like, yes, they’ve done well, but what we’re not seeing, you know, like Henry Hazlitt’s book, the scene and the unseen, the unseen is like all of the potential human civilization advancement and prosperity we would have had, had we not been blowing each other up and stealing from each other and lying to each other. Yes.

It’s like, what would we achieve? Had we not done that? Well, yeah. Right. Yeah, it’s yes, exactly.

And, you know, more importantly, you know, I often say, I mean, think about, and this is where I also, you’re talking about this book, think about all the technological advances we’ve had since the seventies, right? And we should all be working 40 hour work weeks and, or I mean, 20 hour work weeks and, and, and be fabulously rich. But we’re not because we’ve wasted money on this stuff. I mean, that $8 trillion, I mean, you know, if you’ve been to, I haven’t been to China recently, but I have some friends who have, or so all the, I mean, we should have high speed trains here.

We should, I mean, insofar as we’re going to have a large federal government, that’s going to do things. Why doesn’t it do things that are productive for us? I mean, why don’t we have a nuclear energy program going in the United States? You know, I mean, China is smart about this. They’re doing it.

I mean, if you look at all of the large advances, you do any study of this and sailors laid it up brilliantly. You look at all the large advances that have occurred in society. They occur because people get quantum jumps in how to develop power.

Nuclear is that next step. Right. And here we are, we’re just sitting on it.

We’re not paying any attention to it. Yeah. Yeah.

Not only, not only are they not doing things that are productive, but to the point on war, it’s counterproductive. Oh, absolutely. Literally mobilizing people in capital to go and destroy people in capital.

And it’s like, it’s fucking insane. Which gets you all the way back to the metaphor of printing money as like alcoholism or drugs. Like we’re a deranged drug addict basically as a global society.

That’s, that’s, it’s not a bad, it’s not a bad analogy. And I couldn’t agree with you more. I mean, I couldn’t agree with mine again.

You know, part of why I just felt like somebody had to write this book. Yeah. Somebody had to tell the story and try to explain this.

Now, not everyone will be able to connect the dots. And I don’t know if the book is going to land a punch or not. I mean, I hope it does.

That’s, you know, I don’t care about how much money I make on the book. I’m doing deals to distribute it worldwide. I just, I just want the goddamn message to get out there.

I want as many people as possible to read it and understand it. Because I think that’s the only way we will ever get control of the system. If we, you know, as if we returned to sound money.

Yeah, you know, so funny. I was thinking about this the other day. Hayek has the famous quote, right? We’re never going to get good money unless we introduce.

That’s in the book, by the way. Yeah. Unless we introduce, what do you say? We’re never going to get good money.

Unless we figure out a roundabout sneaky way for it to be introduced. A sly roundabout way to separate money from the state. Stop paraphrasing.

Right. And then I was thinking again, like we also kind of need that with Bitcoin in a way. Maybe we don’t need it.

I guess Bitcoin is going to work no matter what. I think it is. But to get people that need to understand Bitcoin, like the poor, the middle class, emerging markets, et cetera.

You need this sly roundabout way to, which is like, again, that’s kind of the approach. That’s kind of what I figured, right? People read stories. Yes.

Because if you just say Bitcoin, a lot of people are just alienated. I don’t want to read it. But if you do this kind of.

You say, hey, there’s this crazy. Subliminal approach. Crazy guy who took on Geithner.

I mean, it’s edgy. I mean, the book is edgy. I mean, my wife wanted me to dial some of it back.

And I said, no. I mean, I’m not very kind to the Federal Reserve. You know, I mean, I think they’re kind of an evil outfit.

And I’ve called it out. You know, and like I say, I mean, I sent one to Joe Kernan. I’m hoping he’ll read it.

I said, look, Joe, read this. And if you like it, pass it on to Sorkin. If Sorkin reads it, his head’s going to explode.

Because, you know, I mean, that’s the kind of channel I want to get onto. And what I just don’t know. And we you know, like I’ve got I’ve got a really good book publisher.

OK, and she’s ex ex Random House. And she actually she came up with the idea for the title. I was talking about the big print in the book.

And she said, no, no, this should be the title. And she was right. And I’ve said to her, you know, can we get a major publishing house to do this? And she said the Overton window hasn’t shifted quite enough yet.

They’re still part of the establishment, Larry. Books are part of the establishment. Simon and Schuster, Random House, et cetera.

It’s getting there. Yeah. And if you know, if you show big sales and, you know, you might you might ultimately get there.

Yeah. But we’re not. She thinks we’re not quite there yet.

It’s kind of her take on it. Got it. And that would have done what for you? Just gives you a lot wider.

It just gets you wider distribution. I mean, it’ll get you in the airports. Gotcha.

Right now I’m on Amazon. You know, I’m on Bitcoin Infinity Store. You know, I’m not in the airports.

And that’s that’s what you want. You want the person who’s going to hop on a plane, sees it on the stand, goes, gosh, that’s interesting. I wonder what it’s all about.

Yeah. They read it and they go, oh, my goodness. You know, again, the book was written.

I want the average person to read and go, oh, my God, I understand why I’m getting screwed. And I understand what I have to do about it. Yes.

That’s the that’s the one line pitch. Yes. And so if I can get the airport guy or girl to pick it up and read it on a flight, because you can it’s probably eight to 10 hours of reading, read it on a flight, you know, coming.

I’ll say, oh, my goodness. And say, I got to give this to my friends. Amazing.

Yeah. You know, that that’s that’s how we’re going to get the world. Right.

Let’s talk about. So I mean, we’ve already hit on this a little bit, but like just to really emphasize the point. There’s the old saying, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Right. I don’t know that. Again, that’s it’s an adage like it’s the natural order of things, but it’s not the natural order.

It doesn’t have to be. This system specifically, the central banking system seems to be a primary driver of that dynamic. Correct.

How someone that is poor, someone that doesn’t understand any of this, how can we explain to them that they are the victims in this scheme, that the poor or anyone depending on fixed income, for that matter, is disproportionately impacted negatively by central banking and fiat currency? I think the easiest way to do it is to point out to them how there are two sets of rules, one set of rules for them, one set of rules for the rich and powerful. Okay. And the set of rules for them are you want to borrow money? Great.

Go get a credit card. You got to pay 25%. I mean, we used to have usury laws that capped that at 10 or 12, but we don’t anymore because those all got abolished.

Okay. You’re rich and you want to borrow money. Yeah, you can borrow it at prime, which has been as low as zero and now is in the four or five range.

And you might say, why does that matter? Well, it matters because if you are able to borrow money and buy an asset that yields more than what you’re borrowing, you’re getting richer. So that method of making wealth is just taken away from everybody who’s not at a certain level of wealth. So that’s unfair.

So you can benefit from the money printing when you’re at a certain… This is like you can borrow the money when you don’t need the money and use it to extract more wealth. Correct. When you don’t have the money and need to borrow the money, you’re just going to get crushed.

Tough darts. Yeah. Tough darts for you.

It’s apartheid. Yeah, it is. It’s a way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is to say, when new money comes into the system, the people who borrow it and the people who are in the system and know how to take advantage of it can buy things before the prices go up. Let’s just take an example. New money comes into the system.

The people who get that new money or have access to that credit or new money first are able to buy goods and services at the old price. And then that extra demand from that new money pushes those prices up, which the working man or woman has to absorb and pay. But they never got any of that new money.

So again, they’re paying a higher price for that other man getting rich. Right. Yeah, I mean, it is an actual shell game, basically, right? Like you just moved wealth out of one set of hands into another set of hands.

The mechanism is the price increase, right? Right. This person’s savings now buys them less goods and services. Correct.

Whereas this person’s savings gets them more. Gets them more goods and services. Yeah, it’s that simple, really.

I mean, it’s incredibly unfair. And again, that chart that I showed you on the wealth inequality, you can see how it got worse when they took interest rates down to 1% in 2003. Then it got worse again following 2008.

Then it got even worse still in 2020. This is back to the alcoholic. This is the exponential kind of curve.

Nothing stops this train. This is why mathematically we’re running towards a crack, a break in the system. And I feel very strongly about that.

And again, another reason why I wrote the book was, and I was very afraid I wouldn’t get the book out in time. Because I mean, the big print is coming. OK, in my view, the next one’s coming.

And so I’m thinking, oh shit, if it comes before I print the book, I’m going to look like an idiot. Thankfully, I got the book out before the big print happened. But it’s going to happen.

Because it has to happen mathematically, Robert. It just has to. The system will collapse if we don’t continue to expand the money supply, if we don’t continue the inflation.

And in fact, continue the inflation getting worse with each event. I mean, a good example, in the 2008 example, as you know, the Fed balance sheet pre-2008 was $900 billion, right? It went up to like $3.4. It came back down a little after that. And that took a bunch of rounds of QE, QE 1, 2, and 3, which are called QE infinity.

It took a bunch of rounds of QE. And it was over a period of what, from 08 to 13, 14, something like that. So it was a bunch of years.

Well, 2020, we did more in like a third of the time, right? I mean, 2020 hit it, 2019, 2020. And we printed, we went from, a balance sheet had been reduced back down to 293. We went up to a peak of $9 trillion.

We printed $6 trillion worth of money. And they did it in less than two years, which caused the M2 supply to go up 40%. I mean, I like another tweet that I’ve seen very recently, which is, you know, when they printed 40% of the money supply in two years in COVID, you know, imagine you had worked your entire life, all of your savings, every year you diligently put away money and saved.

And then they just inflated away 40% of that in two years. Gone. Time’s up.

Just gone. You just spent, you know, I mean, you’re, you know, you’re a working person and you’d save $400,000, say, over the course of, you know, just working away and putting away your savings year after year after year. Right.

And then suddenly this thing, this event comes along and that 400 only has, you know, 250 of purchasing power because 40% of it just got taken away. Because somebody pressed the button. Somebody pressed the printing button.

It’s crazy, right? Right. And that’s, that’s, I mean, to put it in terms, I think people can understand that’s what’s going on. Yeah.

And it’s, it’s just so wrong. And it’s so sad and so unfair. It is.

I mean, and that’s why somebody had to say something about it. I mean, somebody had to write a book about this shit. And you’ve done a great job.

And I did. I don’t know if this is the book, you know, I think it’s as good a book as like, I’ll say this, this is as good a book as I could do. I don’t know if this book will do what I want it to do, but I couldn’t do a better book than this.

Well, I know. I’m very sure that you’ve done a great job because I know you’re hardworking. I know you know this stuff really well.

This is another one of those connections. This one’s not so obvious, but it is probably the most important one, right? Like the, the, I think this was in the gold wars. He said that the monetary standard and the moral standard are inexorably linked.

Yeah. Right. There’s like a very, uh, uh, Ayn Rand has said this too, like money is the barometer of a society’s moral virtue.

You know, there is this deep moral component to money that almost no one has any appreciation of whatsoever. If anything, they think they often read, they often misquote the biblical passage and say money is the root of all evil. Yes.

When it actually says the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, which is, that makes sense, right? If you love money, well then you’re, you’re, you’re people, you’re exactly, you’re idolizing something, right? Yeah. Money’s a tool. Exactly.

Money’s a tool, right? It’s like loving glass jars or something like doesn’t really make sense. Um, so how do you approach the connection between money and morality and what is it about money printing that has steered us the wrong direction from a moral standpoint? Yeah. Well, first of all, I direct everyone who’s listening to, to, um, you know, the chapter on sound money, sound money is a moral issue, page 41.

And, um, this has been around a long time, you know, there’ve been people have often wanted to fool with money, with monetary standard. And money is just a shared illusion. It’s what we all agree is the intermediate good that has value.

And this is what, um, you know, the early Austrians, uh, said, uh, you know, Menger particularly. And, um, you know, the Bible talked about it, obviously sound money and, and, you know, honest weights and measures. I mean, yeah, people were talking about, they were doing transactions.

And if you thought if you bought an ounce or whatever the unit of measure was back then, you wanted to get a real ounce, not a half an ounce, not a third of an ounce. And, uh, um, you know, it’s, it’s a way, I mean, it’s, it’s a way to cheat. You know, cheating on the money is a way to cheat.

It brought down the Roman empire. You know, the denarius was originally all silver. It was the soundest currency of the time.

It was the largest empire of the time. And, you know, over the course of the life of that empire, it went, became, you know, the content in the denarius was zero. Silver content was zero.

And that you could almost track the decline of Rome with the decline of the sound money. So, um, it also, it’s just, it’s an indicator of people’s willing to be honest with each other and honesty is essential for human cooperation because if people are dishonest, then trust is lost. If trust is lost, if I can’t trust you to do something, you can’t trust me to do something and things don’t get done.

You know, and we all, and there’s a certain level of honesty that exists in society. I mean, we all trust that airplane pilots are well-trained and understand the responsibility they hold and they, you know, they’re responsible for hundreds of lives and they’re, you know, they’re not, they can’t, they’re not going to drink and they can’t screw up and they’re going to do their job honestly. And that’s essential.

And the minute you start to fool with the money, you know, and maybe even say that fooling with money is okay. And maybe even say that gambling is okay. You know, you, you introduce an entire different way of behaving that becomes, well, just how can I get the most that I can get? And devil take the hindmost is kind of the phrase, the idiom from the 1500s that I put in the book.

And so it’s, it’s problematic. I mean, there’s a good Toady Denton quote in there. He’s a fund manager in Switzerland that says dishonest money leads to dishonest everything, politics, morals, the works.

It just, it, it spreads. And so, you know, if you’ve got, you know, I mean, I think Ron Paul says, I mean, you know, if the government is running a Ponzi scheme, which they are, they basically print more money to pay for the things they can’t support, then why doesn’t everybody else think they’re allowed to run a Ponzi scheme too? Yes. And so, you know, if, if, you know, if you have a form of dishonesty in the underlying base layer, the most important thing, I would argue money, as you pointed out, it is the most important thing in the economy.

It defines everything. And so if you decide you’re going to play around with a rubber money standard, how can it work? I mean, you know, there’s another great quote in the book by Nathan Lewis talking about how if, if two people are going to coordinate to create a piece of a machine tool, that’s 500 millimeters long, that’s going to do a piece of work. And, you know, suddenly the definition of a millimeter is varying by 5% a year, 2% a year.

The guy making the piece of, you know, the part is going to mismeasure it. It’s going to give it to the guy who wants to use the part. The guy who wants to use it is not going to be able to use it because it doesn’t fit.

And, you know, all of the benefit associated with having truth, you know, is lost. And, and this is, by the way, I mean, this segues nicely into the beauty of Bitcoin because it’s a mathematical proof machine. Yeah.

It’s mathematical truth. And I mean, it’s just like, you know, when I first grok that, it was like my mind was blown. Do you know what I mean? Like, holy shit, you know, we’ve suffered thousands of years of human beings living with money that was varying degrees of unsound.

Admittedly, gold was pretty sound, but it diluted 1.7% a year. And over 50 some odd years, the supply would double. So there was deflection even in gold.

But now we have a form of money with zero dilution. Zero, zero. I mean, deflection, I mean, a little bit now is we’re at nine, seven or eight going to 21, but, but quite small.

And at 2140, it will be zero. Well, it is effectively zero because you already know it. Right.

Well, that’s true. It’s the unknown component. Actually, that’s true.

Even though we’ve got some more supply to come. Yeah. It’s on a very set schedule.

Right. Like when you look at a cap table and you look at it on a fully diluted basis. Yes.

These are all the possible shares that will ever be issued. This is all the dilution you will ever incur. We’ve got that.

We have that. We have that. Right.

So, so to me, that’s just, it’s just, it’s so different and so unique and so powerful that, that the monetary lie is about to disappear. Yes. And it’s so hopeful.

And so, I mean, it’s frigging fabulous, right? Yeah. I mean, all the bad shit we were talking about before, it’s all going to go away. Yes.

It’s really, I mean, that’s, that’s the positive part of this whole thing. I mean, you know, I, I, I see people hurting from the system as it is, and that’s a real bummer, you know? Yeah. It’s a real bummer, but, but, you know, and, and the first half of the book takes you through.

I mean, I’ve, I’ve had some people DM me about the book who’ve read it and they said, good God, I had no idea. I mean, I’ve got some really great case stories of bad fiat behavior, you know? And they’re like, oh my God, this shit is even more broken than I thought. I mean, as we’re now looking, watching Doge, you know, unearth some of the crazy shit that the government’s spending money on.

Right. I mean, yeah, there’s no surprise. I mean, fiat leads to a lot of really stupid shit, but, you know, guess what? When we go to non-fiat, sound money, I mean, I think people, I think people are going to be blown away with how much better it all gets.

It’s really going to be something. At least that’s my hope. And I believe it.

Yeah, I agree completely. And this, this, this point of standards is so important. Like we, it’s, we’re doing it with language, right? We, we try to standardize around how you understand a word and how I understand a word and that’s how we have dialogue.

Right. This idea of, you know, the metric system or like, as you said, those things standard, like it doesn’t change. It needs to be immutable so that you can collaborate and coordinate with people across in different places and at different times.

Right. Like when I order the 500 millimeter piece in 2007, it better be the same 500 millimeter piece in 2012. Right.

If it’s fluctuated, then my components are not going to work together. Exactly. So all economic formation collapses.

And the same is true with the money, right? We need standardization so that we can have clarity of communication. Correct. And somehow, and it is, you’ve done a good job explaining it, but we use the term moral standards, right? Somehow that is related to these like mathematical measurement standards as well.

I think it is. I think it is because I think if, I think the minute, the minute it gets fishy, you know, or fluctuates. Yeah.

We know, you know, we know man has fallen, mankind has fallen. The minute it fluctuates, people are going to try and figure out how to make it fluctuate in their own benefit. Of course.

You know, it’s just, it’s just as natural as can be. Gaming the system. Of course they will.

Yeah, of course they will. And then, you know, and this has been a very sophisticated game that the wealthy have played on us. You know what I mean? And the insiders, I should say, have played us because not all the wealthy are bad, but those who support and benefit from this system, in my opinion, you know, they are, they’re not, they’re not behaving ethically.

Yeah. It’s difficult to circumscribe a group or I would often say the shareholders of central banks, but to your earlier point, even people that are borrowing money at below market rates and using that to acquire assets, like they’re sort of. Well, and, and, and, and by the way, I mean, and I said, I even made this point in the book.

I said, look, not every fiat Lord is a evil person intrinsically. Some are just, they’re just playing the game in a way that they think. They’re following their incentives.

Yeah, exactly. That they think it should be played. Now, some of them, I mean, I think are legitimately evil.

I mean, I, you know, I think, I think a guy like Bernanke who says he wasn’t printing money, you know, who lies about the interpretation of the great depression, you know, who’s probably getting a huge salary now from Citadel, you know, for supporting them, you know, during the many years when he helped them to become rich. I mean, you know, I think, I think there’s a guy who is legitimately evil, but and there are others as well. But, but I would say, you know, some of the other people that just, they’re just playing the game and they’re playing it in a way so that they can win.

I think once they read this book, you know, they might think, gee, you know, he has a point, you know, maybe, maybe the game is a little crooked and maybe we should make the game fairer, you know. And that’s, that’s all I really want. And that’s, I think that’s what, I think, you know, it’s, it’s so deep inside mankind and human beings.

And if you look at all of the, you know, religious texts and traditions and everything else, human beings want fairness. We just want fairness. I mean, the average person, I don’t think anybody, I mean, some, some don’t, some want to cheat.

Some want to get ahead no matter what. Right. But I think the average human being, you just want fairness.

Yeah. Just give me, give me a level playing field. Give me some fair referees.

I’ll play the game. That’s all good. I mean, and part of, I think that’s where the book might resonate.

I mean, I point out how, you know, the game’s not fair. It’s just not fair. And, and no wonder why people are pissed.

You know? Yes. Right. Yeah.

And you see that, I mean, with any game that humans play, right, if you can just arbitrarily change the rules of the, if we’re playing poker and I get to decide what the hand rankings are, every hand, it’s like, well, I’m going to win every fucking hand. Exactly. And you’re not, you’re never going to want to play.

Right. So there’s no, there’s no game. If the rules aren’t immutable and stable, then there is no game.

It becomes like a political struggle. Not a fair game. Right.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s not even, yeah, it’s not fair. And therefore it becomes not a game because the other player doesn’t want to play an unfair game.

Right. Exactly. Yeah.

Once you realize you’re the sucker at the table, you just say, I’m going to get up and leave. Exactly. Exactly.

And then, yeah, you know, further is like, okay, if it’s unfair, that’s one thing. But then if it’s unfair and then subject to further fluctuation, it’s like, well, then we can never develop a stable strategy or do any planning at all because we don’t know what the rules are going to be. Right.

And that’s essentially the monetary system we’re living in today. Correct. It’s like, you just basically don’t know what the rules will ever be.

Correct. So everyone’s on the take, everyone’s playing political games rather than just playing economic games. Right.

And the economic game should be, how do we allocate this capital effectively to make lives better for everybody? Solve problems. Solve problems. Yeah, exactly.

If the money is appropriately priced, people will make the right decisions. Yes. And I think it would be stunning how much better we would all live.

I think it would be stunning. I really do. Yeah.

There wouldn’t be the waste of resources and the things that we waste resources in now. I mean, it’s just a perfect example. Let’s take the lottery, for example.

Okay. The lottery makes absolutely no sense. We all know it’s a game where you can’t, I mean, somebody’s going to win it, right? But statistically, no poor person should ever dump any dollars into the lottery.

Full stop, right? But they do because they feel so helpless in the existing system. And it’s just, it’s like the only, it gives them some sense of hope. Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? The only, yes, 100%. They have no, they know the thing is rigged. They know they can’t get ahead and they say, to hell with it.

It’s a hell, Mary. Screw it. Yeah.

I’m going to throw this hell, Mary. I’m buying that $2 ticket and maybe my life will get better. Yeah.

And the sick, twisted part is the winner in the lottery is always the state because they’re always taking 50% of that. Well, there’s that. That poll, right? Yeah.

And the other winner is that a lot of the people who end up ultimately winning it end up ruining their lives because they don’t know how to handle it. And then, you know, it’s like, it’s a blessing and a curse, right? Yes. Yeah.

I mean, you know, frankly, I think they should just be outlawed, but that’s just me. I’m kind of a puritan on that sort of stuff. Yeah.

I mean, I don’t think it’s at least should be, it’s a regressive tax basically, right? Very much so. Yeah. Very much.

So, I mean, I think gambling, I don’t, again, I mean, people want to gamble, let them, but I, you know, I don’t, to me, that’s not a productive use of people’s time or effort. You know what I mean? It’s just not. Yeah.

I completely agree. Yeah. And the fact that it’s state sponsored just makes it more problematic.

There’s just more moral hazard there. Yeah. And this is one of the most interesting areas of money for me.

It’s like, there is this all human interaction is game-like and that we’re moving towards objectives and we’re operating within the boundaries of some rules, right? Even if that’s just the rules, laws of physics and we’re trying to, whatever, move from point A to point B. They’re still fast, right? Yeah. There’s still like this game-like design. So when you start to look at it like that, it’s like, okay, well, all human interaction is game-like.

This level playing field idea is like extremely important. It’s like the most important thing there is. Yeah.

Yeah. Because you have this uneven playing field, this fluctuating playing field, then it’s just chaos, right? People are just really trying to fight to get into the position of power to make or change the rules. Right.

Because if I can make or change the rules, then I can win every hand. Right. Right.

But if you, but if I eliminate that possibility, then all my only alternative is to play the game to try and get a fairly. Yes. According to the same rules as everyone else.

Yes. So getting rid of this rules for thee and not for me dynamic is like one of the core value propositions of Bitcoin. Correct.

Yeah. There’s nobody has an advantage. Yes, exactly.

I mean, and I, you know, I was interacting with somebody on Twitter yesterday and they said, well, this is really unfair because all the people, early hodlers are going to be incredibly rich. And I said, and I said, hang on a second. It’s an open market.

It’s a fair system. It’s based on math. You had the opportunity to buy when they did.

Yeah. Don’t begrudge them the fact that they bought it and you didn’t. You have the opportunity to buy it now or not, you know, figure out what you want to do and do it or not do it.

And they took greater risk. Yeah. They took much greater risk and reward.

Yeah. And they’re going to get greater reward. I mean, the other thing on that, I mean, we could touch on it because I think people might be interested in it.

And I tried to touch on this in the book, but I, this thought came to me after I wrote the book, but a lot of people now look at Bitcoin at a hundred thousand. They say, well, it’s too expensive. I mean, I have a lot of friends.

I have a lot of wealthy friends who were feeling. Unit bias. Yeah.

You bought it at 10, you bought it at, you know, I can’t pay that much. And I, and I said, okay, let’s, let’s frame this in a slightly different way. The monetary system is the Titanic.

I, I, and I’m taking this from a guy who DM me this on Twitter. So this is not my original idea and I can’t remember his name. He actually, he didn’t want to be doc.

So he wouldn’t give me his name, but the monetary system is a Titanic, right? Okay. Yeah. So I bought some seats for five grand and 10 grand and 400 grand and $400.

And when I bought, I bought all my earlier seats, right. Okay, fine. And I’m done buying.

Okay. It’s a hundred grand to you. Do you want to see? You know, your choice, you say, no, I don’t want a seat or you can, you can buy one.

It’s just, yeah, the seats have gotten more expensive. No doubt. But if it is the Titanic, I think you want to see it on the lifeboat, you know? Oh yeah.

Buying seasonal lifeboat. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Well, again, it’s, there’s this illusion that people think it’s part of American exceptionalism. I guess they just think the dollar is and always will be. Yeah.

And I’m like, guys, open a fucking monetary history book. Like there’s show me one example where that’s ever happened. Yeah.

No, it doesn’t. Yeah. They all die.

It’s either hyperinflation or you get conquered. Yeah. Over what? Yeah.

And the issue is just over what period of time and when. And I mean, I, you know, and a lot of us have had that wrong. I mean, in the book, I talk about how I had it very wrong in 08.

Sure. And I may have it wrong now. I mean, this could take five years.

But directionally, you’re correct. I think so. There’s almost no question.

Well, yeah. I’d look at the US as a fiat currency. So long as it’s a fiat currency, it will go the way of fiat currencies at some point.

Right. And it has lost a lot of value. I mean, the dollar’s lost 98.5% of its value.

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Again, that’s one free week of Bitcoin mining at mining.blockwaresolutions.com slash freedlove. You know, we’re talking about games, talking about the importance of the stability and predictability of rules across time. Leading to fair play, peaceful competition, cooperation, etc.

I think this is a good time to talk about, you know, one of the very important angles on Bitcoin is that it is the solution, the only solution we’ve ever discovered to a computer science problem that went long unsolved. It was decades, and it was considered to be unsolvable, I think, by many. And that is the Byzantine Generals Problem.

So you may have heard of the telephone game, right? Where you call someone on the telephone, you give them a message, and they pass it to someone else on the telephone. And by the time it goes through this big loop across all these telephone-connected individuals, by the time the message gets back to you, it’s a distorted message, right? The message has changed because people sort of change it at the edges as it goes. That’s sort of like the Byzantine Generals Problem.

In more specific language, it’s how do you pass a message into this network of actors that can’t trust one another, may even be antagonistic towards one another, so they may want to deceive one another. How do you pass a message in one end of that network and get the message out the other end of the network such that the message is the same going in as it is coming out? And this was long considered to be an unsolvable computer science problem because it’s something that occurs at the social layer, right? You can’t trust these individuals to not distort the message. So prior to Bitcoin, there was widely believed to be no way to solve that because it’s a social layer problem, not a computer layer problem.

But lo and behold, we get Bitcoin and it solves this thing. And we do have this way to propagate these messages now across the world, right? In a way that doesn’t… Bitcoin doesn’t distort at all, right? Like a Bitcoin scent, there’s no double spending, there’s no counterfeiting, there’s no distortion of the message. It’s written in permanence on the time chain.

So I’m just curious like what… And then what we were talking about too, this is an interesting take on it. This might be a little bit in the theoretical domain. This came from conversations I’ve had with Obi in the past.

Sure, yeah, I like Obi. And just the idea of like, how do you stop Bitcoin? And the one very viable theory was that at some point, you would have needed all the nation states in the world to coordinate all of their actions in lockstep against Bitcoin, right? They would need to outlaw it. They would need to, you know, propagandize against it.

They’d probably need to jail Bitcoiners that, you know… Tax it. Tax it, regulate it, attack it, whatever. But all the nation states would need to do it all at once and all the same way.

Like they’d need… In other words, nation states would need to solve their own Byzantine Generals problem. How do we coordinate all of our actions in lockstep? Good luck. And well, again, there’s no solution to that problem other than Bitcoin.

So what the prediction is, well, nation states aren’t going to do that because they can’t do that. They can’t trust one another. So what will they ultimately do? They’ll buy Bitcoin.

Yeah. And here we are, 2025. Here we are.

And they’re buying Bitcoin. Nation states are buying Bitcoin. Yeah, they have to.

I mean, just like Larry Fink’s buying Bitcoin. You know, he was a fiat lord, but he realized that this is going to happen with him or without him. And he’d rather be a part of it and make money than ignore it and get fired.

Like the Vanguard guy did. Exactly. But yeah, the technical innovation here, it’s just stunning.

It’s absolutely stunning. As we talked about earlier, money has always deflected. Here we have mathematically formed, you know, algorithmically formed, consensus formed money that can’t deflect.

It can’t be diluted. It’s a huge, huge technical achievement. Yeah.

And that’s sadly what I think so many people are missing. People who aren’t aware of it and aren’t thinking hard about it or who are distracted by all the crypto fraud and noise. Another point I make in the book that I’d like to make with you, because I think it’s an important point for people to understand, is how the rules of investing have changed with Metcalfe’s law and networks.

And I actually didn’t, this kind of came to me as I was writing the book because I started doing some research. And so I was trained in traditional investment theory, you know, Graham and Dodd buy things cheap, buy them when they’re growing. You know, peg ratios, all that kind of stuff.

Multiples of cash flow. And, and, you know, that’s, that’s what you get when you go to business school. And that’s what you get when you’re a professional investor and you look at sharp ratios and so forth.

And then I started studying what’s happened since these networks have emerged, principally the internet, really the internet only, although there were some network businesses before that. And what I saw just kind of blew my mind. I mean, as you know, Metcalfe’s law is that the, you know, the value of a network grows at the square of its underlying user growth.

And so what happens in these networking businesses, they get incredibly valuable, incredibly quickly. So that if you go and you look at Google from IPO to, you know, to today, it’s up 9,000%. If you go and you look at Amazon from IPO until today, it’s 218,000%.

Facebook, similar kind of numbers. And I went back and I looked, I looked at, you know, some leading companies like General Motors has been around a long time. And, you know, General Motors is up, you know, 400% from 1916 to present.

Okay. But I mean, first of all, that’s, you know, 50 odd years plus or more than six, you know, 60, 70 years, whatever. But, you know, I mean, here we are in 20 years since the internet was founded.

We have some network businesses that have increased by thousands of percent. This breaks all traditional investing models. Okay.

You’re trained to buy things on a PE basis. Forget about it. And so I miss this.

So when I was, and I talk about this in the book, you know, when I was looking, I, you know, I was doing growth at a reasonable price investing in the, in the, you know, during this whole timeframe. And I would look at something like an Amazon, or I would look at something like a Facebook, or I would look at a Google. I would say, yeah, you know, that’s interesting.

It’s growing nicely, but you’re not making that much money. And the multiples are crazy. People are paying insane multiples earnings, or even there are no earnings in Amazon’s case.

Right. I said, I can’t do it. It’s just not, it doesn’t fit my model.

Right. Boy, what a mistake that was. Right.

Because I didn’t understand the way this new networking model changes the math of making these kinds of investments. And so, again, part of the reason I wrote the book and part of what really, you know, resonated with me is, okay, granted, I miss these network businesses that were growing off of the internet. I’m not going to miss this one.

Here we got the same thing. And by the way, this is better than Amazon. It’s better than Google because we’re not just talking to Google’s, you know, information and search.

Amazon is, you know, Walmart online and things. This money touches everything. Absolutely.

And there’s no, there’s nothing in the world that doesn’t happen without money. If Satoshi’s become the base layer of money, which I sincerely believe will happen. Don’t know the timescale, but I believe it will happen.

These things are going to be so valuable, people’s heads are going to spin. Yeah. And so, you know, I just felt like I wanted to try and point that out in the book to people thinking about this as an investment.

You just don’t want to miss it. Yeah. And I get people’s fears about it.

And I have my client base in my investment management business is on the older side in general. And, you know, they’re skeptical and understandably. And I’m like, okay, fine.

I get it. I’m not suggesting you take a hundred percent of your money and put it in Bitcoin. But what I am suggesting is you can afford to put 1%, 5%, 10%.

You can afford that. Even if I’m wrong and it goes to zero, it’s not going to change your lifestyle. And if I’m right and it does a 10 bagger and then another 10 bagger and then another 10 bagger.

It’s going to improve your lifestyle. You’re going to be really glad you did it, right? Just like, you know, the people who bought it at 10,000 are very glad they have it now at a hundred. Well, you know, I think in five years, it’s going to be worth a million.

And if you didn’t buy it at a hundred, you’re going to have regret. So I just think it’s a point that’s important to make. No, it’s very important.

And this whole idea of us conforming our models to the current technological paradigm makes us blind when the tech paradigm changes. Well, that’s right. Yeah.

And I mean, they say there is nothing new under the sun, but sometimes there is. I mean, in technology, there actually is. I mean, these things did not exist.

That’s the defining feature of technology. Right. There’s always something new under the sun.

Well, that’s exactly right. Yeah. I mean, you know, and that’s funny.

I was at a conference. I talked to James Grant, who’s a great, you know, monetary scholar and, you know, runs a conference. He’s a gold guy.

And I said to him, I said, I said, James, you know, by Menger’s definition, this stuff’s turning into money. You got it. You got to learn to respect it.

You got to take a look at it. He said, come back to me when you’ve been around for a thousand years. And I said, James, I said, wait a minute.

You mean to tell me that, you know, when commercial air flight became available, you didn’t accept it because it hadn’t been around for a thousand years. I mean, you know, once it became, I mean, it was dangerous in the early days, but once commercial air flight became safe, it was just a better way of doing things and you used it. That’s what this is.

It’s a better technology. And so you’re going to use it because it makes sense. It improves upon what existed before.

Right. Amen to that. Yeah.

And, you know, we’re all grasping at analogies here to try to describe the profundity of this thing. Right. The one that I went for was the number zero, right? Like you needed this, there was this idea that was just so useful and it made computation better, faster, cheaper, less prone to error for merchants, right? If you use a zero-based numeral system versus not.

So it’s an idea that gives you a distinct competitive advantage. I see. Right.

And so Bitcoin’s sort of like that. Like it’s just an idea. Obviously it’s an idea that’s rooted into reality through proof of work mining.

Right. Whereas number zero is a bit more on the abstract side. Something like commercial airlinings, a bit more on the tangible side.

Right. Bitcoin’s somewhere in between. Right.

But ultimately it’s like, how do you stop that really useful idea? Because if it just makes, if it just does the job better than other ideas, then it’s going to spread. That’s exactly right. And I don’t see it.

I mean, and so when people say it’s going to zero, it’s like, I’m saying, tell me what’s going to make that happen. I just don’t see it. When people tell me it’s going to zero, I’m like, no, it’s much more akin to zero.

Actually, right. In terms of innovation. Yeah.

Yeah. Just back on the game theory topic. There’s this saying, but I won’t even attribute it.

It’s a guy that wrote on the philosophy of war. His last name is Schmidt. I don’t like to attribute quotes anymore because I get them wrong all the time.

But I’m pretty sure I’m right about this one. Carl Schmidt. He said, sovereign is he who decides the exception.

Yeah. Right. So again, if you get to decide the exception to the rules.

Yes. Then you’re sovereign over everyone playing that game. Yeah.

Right. And that’s basically what a central bank is doing. It’s just picking winners and losers.

It’s doling out the points of the game, these economic games. Therefore, it’s corrupting the game, degenerating the game. Well, what is Bitcoin? It’s just the game that nobody can game.

Correct. It’s the game where since no one can make an exception, it makes everyone sovereign. Correct.

Basically. The nodes are sovereign. Yes.

All of them. Right. And yeah, they can propose a change.

If the nodes don’t accept it, it doesn’t change. Yeah. Or again, it’s a bit paradoxical.

You could also say since no one can make an exception, no one’s sovereign. But when you say no one’s sovereign, it’s the same thing as saying everyone’s sovereign. Yeah.

Same thing. So it’s like the importance of that. When you understand that everything we do, all the interactions we have are game-like.

Yes. Most of them are denominated in money, right? That’s a really good analogy. And I had not thought of it in those terms.

It’s a game. Yeah, it’s a game. Money is a game.

It’s a game. And the Fed controls it. And they game it.

And they game it. The Fed games it. Yeah, I mean, Bill Ackman calls up and says, you know, the banking system is going to fail if you don’t bail out Silicon Valley Bank.

Yeah. And guess what? Silicon Valley Bank gets bailed out. Exactly.

Yeah. Picking winners and losers. Yeah, and all the venture capitalists who had all their money in Silicon Valley Bank, who should have taken a 20% haircut, by the way, if we had followed Black Dot and the law, they got bailed out.

Yes. And that’s… And by the way, that costs everybody, you know, in terms of gasoline and groceries. Of course.

Right. Yeah, all the costs of that failure get externalized. Yeah, I mean, spread out.

Yeah. You know, it’s just a few pennies to everybody, but you add it all up, right? A few pennies make a pile. Yeah, it adds up.

Yeah. So you’ve said this today already. It’s also in the book, right, that it’s irrefutable that we’re heading into a sovereign debt crisis or we’re in one.

I believe we are. Yeah. So why do you consider that to be so certain? Yeah.

And what are the variables in the equation? That’s a good point. It’s a great question. And I don’t know when it’s going to happen.

I don’t know exactly how it’s going to happen. Nobody does. Anyone who tells you it does is full of shit, you know.

But it’s math. It’s just simple, simple math. And it’s thousands of years of history of watching this kind of math play out.

And the math is as follows. If you are growing the debt faster than you’re growing the underlying GDP, and this used to be my pin chart on my Twitter feed. I took it down because I’ve now got the book up there.

But eventually, the gap between the two. Oh, this is the red line, blue line. Yes.

Eventually, the gap between the two becomes so large. The GDP is what provides the money to pay interest and principal on the debt. Right.

Grow the debt at 8%, which is what we’ve done. Grow the debt at 4% or the GDP at 4%, which is what we’ve done, 4.4 or something. And guess what? That gap eventually gets so large that one can’t support the other.

And either the debt has to collapse in value through a defaults in 1929 style depression, or you have to get to growing the GDP really aggressively through money printing and inflation. And that is the debt death doom loop, which has happened many, many times, many, many societies. There’s a good chart in there by Hirschman Capital that shows when you get to about 130% of debt to GDP, a monetary crisis always results.

Hyperinflation stage one. Yeah. And that’s where we are right now.

That’s where we are. So in my view, the odds of this getting resolved, I mean, it’s happening. It is definitely happening.

And you see some other telltale signs. I mean, the fact that Bitcoin is close to a record high, the fact that gold is close to a record high, the fact that sovereign bonds are losing value in Bitcoin terms and in gold terms, these are all clues. And you said, what do we want to watch? So here’s what I watch.

I watch the price of Bitcoin. I watch the price of gold. I watch interest rates.

And what I believe is going to happen is as these things continue to trend in unfavorable ways for the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve is going to be forced into, and this is the title of the book, the big print. Because what will happen, they’ll have to do yield curve control. What will happen is, well, let’s back up.

You’re aware of this. Most of your listeners are too. But it helps just as context.

We’re in a debt doom loop that goes in it. Let’s take the US federal government, OK? The US federal government with COVID came along spending shot up a lot. We didn’t cut it back.

US federal government now spends $6.75 trillion per year, OK? And we take in $1.8 trillion less than that last year. And that was the deficit. The deficit gets funded by issuing debt.

The debt sells into the debt market. We have an interest cost on that debt. Selling more debt into a fixed-size market makes the interest costs go up.

The interest costs going up, that’s an expense for the government. That makes the deficit bigger. Can you see where I’m going here? Wash, rinse, and repeat.

More debt, more interest costs, higher interest costs, more debt. It just gets worse and worse and worse. And the debt is purchased with printed money.

And the debt is purchased with printed money. And so the point is that as that rinse, wash, repeat gets worse, you get into really kind of a sovereign debt crisis, quote, unquote, currency failure. Now, where will it show up? It shows up in the price of gold.

It shows up in the price of Bitcoin. It’ll also show up in the bond market, in the US federal bond market. And it started to show up.

It showed up a couple of times. It showed up in 08. It showed up in 2020.

It showed up in the fall of 2023 when the 10-year got over 5%. And 12 Fed governors came out and said, oh, that rate-raising, that’s over. We stopped that for now.

We were just kidding. And it’s going to show up again. Because what’s going to happen is people are going to start saying, you know, this debt, I mean, the sucker at the card table right now are the holders of long-term and medium-term US government bonds.

Because there’s no way they’re going to get repaid in nominal fair value terms. They’ll get paid the cash back. It just won’t buy as much because we’re built in inflation.

So what’s going to happen is those interest rates are going to go up to compensate for that risk, again, making the debt doom loop worse. The government’s going to say, we can’t afford to do that. And they’re going to be forced into doing yield curve control, which is, you know, they did this after World War II, which they’re going to say, we’re not going to let the debt costs go above 4.5% or 5%.

Price controls, basically. Price controls. How are they going to do that? They’re going to buy the debt.

What are they going to buy the debt with? Printed money, right? And so eventually, you know, at the extreme, the entire US bond market, which is, you know, $36 trillion, looks at the Fed and says, sold to you. You know, great. Yeah, you’re right.

This is a turkey. We don’t want to hold it. You can buy it.

So now the Fed balance sheet, which is 7 down from 9 trillion, goes from 7 to add 36, right? And that’s just pure monetization, pure inflation. And that’s the road to hyperinflation. I’m not saying we are definitely going to hyperinflation.

I’m just saying it’s a tail case. I think before all of that comes to fruition, we will have some kind of a monetary reset. I mean, I’m encouraged by what I hear, the things I hear out of Scott Besant.

I think it’s good that we have a person like him as our Treasury Secretary now. I think he has an understanding of this issue. It may be too large for even him to handle.

But at least he has an understanding of it. I think Yellen, in my view, was clueless. And so if I’m correct, these things are in our future.

And people might naturally say, OK, well, great. When, how, et cetera. I don’t know.

I kind of think in the next 5 to 10 years. But I do know this with high conviction, in my opinion, that you want to own things the government can’t print. That’s a no-brainer.

It’s always a good strategy. You don’t want to own cash. You don’t want to own bonds.

Real estate, it works. But it’s got issues and taxes and so forth. The two best things the government can’t print are gold and Bitcoin.

Yes. Right. And they will both work.

Bitcoin will work much, much better. And the book describes that and shows that. But some people don’t like the Bitcoin volatility.

They’re afraid of the technology. I get it. Gold’s a good second choice.

No, no, that’s a great, great point. And then just to further that point, it’s the physical gold and the physical Bitcoin. Well, yes, yes, yes.

So let’s talk about that, right? Possession is nine-tenths of the law. This is why Bitcoiners say, not your coins, not your keys, not your coins. You know, in the 30s, Roosevelt grabbed all the gold, you know, 6102.

I mean, all of the Bitcoin that’s sitting in an ETF, if the government decided someday, if blue team wins and they say to themselves, you know, gosh, it’s funny, this Bitcoin and gold stuff is really killing the dollar. We just can’t have this anymore. Let’s make it illegal.

Let’s tax it. You know, let’s call it. Let’s make all those people turn that in.

They could call it BlackRock. They could call it Fidelity. Send us all your Bitcoin.

Give everybody cash for their Bitcoin. Don’t steal it from them. Pay them out.

Probably CBDCs. Yeah, whatever. Yeah.

And, you know, and off we go. Well, your Bitcoin, my Bitcoin, the self-custody Bitcoin, they’ve got a much larger problem. Right.

Right. I mean, you want to get the 12 words out of my head? I mean, you got to kill me. Come and take it as they say in Texas.

Yeah, exactly. And if you kill me, you know, I’m not going to give them to you if I’m dead. So, you know, it’s, yeah, the self-custody is important.

And the same with gold. I mean, it’s funny as we speak today. I mean, we’re actually seeing this.

There’s a run on the London gold vaults right now. Yes. I mean, we’re seeing the LBMA suddenly, you know, a couple of days, a couple of weeks delivery has become six to eight weeks.

And they claim because it’s heavy and there was a lorry blocking the door. Did you see that? No, I didn’t see that. This article, I mean, it’s hysterical.

You can’t make this stuff up. Some guy said, well, how come it’s taking so long? We’ve had lorries blocking the street and the stuff’s pretty heavy. And it’s like, you’re kidding me, right? It’s like a billboard for Bitcoin.

Yeah, exactly. It is. Should try the digital version of that gold.

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Going back to that chart that you said, you had the, you know, red line, I guess, was the debt basically. Yeah, yeah. And then the blue line was the GDP.

Yeah, it’s in the book too, yeah. GDP serves principal and interest on the debt. When those two lines diverge enough, yeah, you have a breakdown, right? That’s where we are.

What is the role of technology in that, right? Because we get also radically increased productivity with technology and get GDP up. And so we are having some mega innovations. And AI is a beautiful thing.

And look, and by the way, Doge, by the way, is a generally good thing and it will help. This is the Department of Government Efficiency, not the shit coin. Right, yes.

Yeah, the thing that Elon and, well, Vivek originally, he’s out of it now. But yeah, the notion of cutting back government, this is all good. Yes.

And it does weaken the sound money thesis a little bit. But I would, you know, I would hasten to say that those who think it’s a solution, total solution to the problem, I disagree. They don’t know how big the problem is.

Exactly. The problem is too big. Yeah.

I mean, we’ve got 80% of the expenditures are pretty dialed in. And now if we can, you know, if you want to means test Social Security and Medicare, you want to cut back defense spending, you know, there are areas, I mean, you want to get the interest rates down. You want to go back to ZURP, you know, because I mean, we’re spending, the government right now, the interest rate, the interest run rate expense on the debt is $1.4 trillion a year right now.

Wow. Almost half of our direct tax revenues. Yeah.

It’s almost half the government direct tax revenues is spent on interest. It’s a big number. Yeah.

It’s so if you’re making $100,000 a year, you’re spending $50,000 on credit card interest. Right. Basically.

Well, and what the government’s kind of become, the government has kind of become that family that keeps taking out new credit cards to make the minimum payments on the old ones. Yes, yes, yes. And we all know that family, right? And at some point they’re going to be no more credit cards.

Yeah. Nobody’s going to give you the next one. Yeah.

Yeah. You’re running your own little Ponzi scheme in a way, right? In a way. Yeah.

Yeah. At that scheme. Yeah.

Yeah. What is it? Okay. So how does Bitcoin then play into that? If we’re going through the sovereign debt crisis, is Bitcoin is just the bomb shelter basically? I think so.

I mean, I think, and I think, you know, obviously guys like Fink and, you know, Paul Tudor Jones and, you know, even Ray Dalio now who used to be a gold guy are coming around on it. You know, it’s digital gold. It’s a better version of gold.

It’s superior in so many ways. But yeah, I mean, and I think the important point to make, and I’m sure, you know, you’ve made it in all your other podcasts. It’s just that sovereign nations are starting to realize it too.

Sure. Right. I mean, El Salvador got in early.

Bhutan is in early. I was in the Middle East at a show last year, and I heard that, you know, from well-connected sources that the Saudis, the UAE, you know, and Oman are all stacking. I think I wouldn’t, it wouldn’t surprise me if Russia was stacking.

I don’t think China really gets it. I’m not sure they are. But I think that, yeah, I mean, Jason Lowry’s thesis holds that, you know, if you’re a country and you want to have reserves, sound money reserves, this is your best choice by far.

If you do any kind of objective look at it. And, you know, if it’s the case that countries start competing for Bitcoin, I mean, we’re going to be orders of magnitude higher. Yeah.

In terms of future prices. Why do you, so obviously the gold bug has sort of become a Bitcoiner. And it’s not either or.

I’m still both. Yeah. I just like Bitcoin more.

Yeah. And it’s funny for me too. Like, I don’t know that I was a gold bug, but I definitely was bought into central banking being the main problem in the world.

But I thought gold had kind of failed on that front. But physical gold is still incredibly valuable. Like the way, I told you this before we recorded, but just to reiterate, I look at it as like there’s two possible, two broad visions of the future, right? There’s one that’s characterized, which I would call the ongoing digital age, right? We’ve got electricity, internet and AI.

And there’s another version of the world where maybe we go back to some dystopian thing. We don’t have electricity, internet, AI, right? In that more dystopian world, physical gold is definitely the most dominant money, right? For a brief period of time. Yeah.

Yeah. And then in this other world of, you know, the ongoing digital age, I think Bitcoin will be dominant. So I just look at it probabilistically and say, give me this percentage gold, that percentage Bitcoin.

I think that’s right. I mean, I really hope and pray that the, you know, no internet, no, I mean, the dystopian world doesn’t come to pass. I don’t think it will.

But as I’ve always said, gold is really useful for bribing the border guards. Because I don’t think they’re going to have a, you know, a lightning wallet and understand how, you know, what your Bitcoin is worth. I mean, and silver, you know, silver coins.

I got a bunch of silver coins and I think they’re very valuable for, you know, just everyday exchange in the sense that, you know, I mean, a gold coin is extremely valuable. It’s hard to do commerce with a gold coin. It’s 3000 bucks for an ounce, right? On the other hand, you know, a silver coin is 30, $40.

I mean, that’s a tank of gas. That’s three chickens. That’s, you know, how many pounds of beef, whatever it is.

People know what it is. So in terms of bearer money, you know, silver coins are a great choice. And I think everybody should have some, you know, in case there’s that brief period of time where all the other forms of money aren’t working.

But I, you know, I don’t, I tend to be very optimistic, Robert. I think we’re going to go into a much better world. I think we’re going to make a transition to Bitcoin without, without, you know, incredible pain.

I think, I think there’s going to be a one-time shock to people who’ve stored their wealth in fiat. And it’s not, that’s going to be unpleasant. You know, you got a big bond portfolio.

I think you’re going to, you’re going to be shocked, sadly. You know, but they, that is what it is. I, you know, I think the average work, if you look at the average person, like take a plumber, you know, they have some savings.

They have a mortgage on their house. They do well. You know, they feed themselves.

We go through an enormous monetary thing, okay. Well, their house is going to reprice in the new money. The debt that they had will probably be a lot less to, you know, valuable.

Their savings will probably be a lot less valuable. But if they’re young and they know how to fix toilets and do plumbing shit, you know, they’re going to, they’re going to be okay. They’re going to reprice whatever the new currency is and people are going to need that useful skill.

Do you know what I mean? So it’s not, now, you know, if you’re, if you’re a big wealthy guy and you’ve got all your money in a bond portfolio, I think you could lose a large piece of your wealth. Yeah, I agree with that. What, so where do you think Bitcoin is going to succeed where gold has failed or to say it more mildly, like where is Bitcoin sufficiently better than gold? And then further to that question, how do you go about orange peeling gold bugs? I would assume you focus on these areas.

Yeah, I’ve been to a couple of conferences. So Bitcoin’s going to succeed because it’s better technologically. It’s easier to verify.

It’s got, you know, triple entry accounting, you know, I mean, just in every respect, I mean, and people say the gold standard failed and it did partially based on technology, but also based on politics. I mean, you know, they figured out how to create paper gold, you know, Nixon, you know, basically broke the gold standard. He didn’t have to, but he did.

But Bitcoin is a much better version of gold. It doesn’t deflect. It doesn’t debase, you know, it will just, it will become the superior asset to gold and gold will have jewelry value.

That’s going to take a lot of time because there are 8 billion people that understand that gold has value. And there aren’t that many people understand Bitcoin has value. So there’s, you know, we’re in this transition period between those two extremes.

To answer your question, how do I orange peel gold bugs? So I generally encounter a couple of objections and I go to the New Orleans gold, what used to be called the New Orleans Gold Show. Now it’s the New Orleans Investment Conference. And he’s gotten, guy runs as a good guy, Brian London.

And he’s gotten much more open-minded about Bitcoin. He’s had Lynn there. He’s had me there.

He’s had Jane Lavers there, even though Peter Schiff goes every year and, you know, argues with us vociferously. But, you know, I generally, a lot of people get hung up on the physicality of it all. And I just, with those people, I go to the money as a ledger argument.

You know what I mean? You know, look, I mean, you can’t touch the money in your bank account. It’s just some numerals on your computer screen, right? I mean, like the cash isn’t really there. I mean, money’s a ledger, always has been a ledger before gold even existed.

People in caves made marks, which were indicating some kind of debit and credit system of who owed who what. So money doesn’t have to be physical. You know, what are the other objections the gold bugs bring up? Well, sometimes they bring up the government’s going to kill it.

But, you know, the ETF kind of swatted that one away. Sometimes they bring up, well, they’ll be, it’s MySpace and, you know, Facebook will beat it. As we talked about offline, that’s kind of not realistic.

Because of the fact that it took so many years to build up this, you know, immutable network. And if anyone tried to do it again, it would be very susceptible to a 51% attack. So, you know, it’s, I’m trying to think what other gold bug arguments are there.

Well, I debated him. One he brought up that I thought was interesting and kind of self contradictory. Yeah.

He was saying that, well, Bitcoiners often talk about reducing counterparty risk, right? He’s like, well, capitalism doesn’t work without counterparties. So, in fact, you don’t need to worry about counterparty risk. And I was like, oh, okay.

Is that really, Peter? I go, do you hold physical gold? Yeah. Like in your house, physical gold in your house. He goes, yeah, of course I do.

I said, well, why do you do that? And he’s like, oh, well, you know, in case the counterpart. And I was like, exactly. Well, I’m not saying counterparties, you don’t need to like divest yourself of all counterparty risk.

Of course, we need to like have contracts and all these things for capitalism to work. But you also need to have something that is immune to that, right? Correct. You hold something physically.

Yeah, the base layer has to be a bearer asset. Yes. By definition.

Exactly. And gold is a bearer asset. And Bitcoin is a bearer asset.

And then he goes straight to, oh, well, where is the Bitcoin? And he goes straight to the, you can’t touch it argument. So it’s not a bearer asset. I’m like, you’re just mistaking.

Yeah. I mean, it’s a ledger. It’s a bearer ledger asset.

And it’s there. And, you know, you either believe in the ledger or you don’t. Now, some people say, wow, the technology, you know.

And the other argument I’ve heard more recently is the quantum computing argument. Yeah. And I’ve dug into that.

I’ve read as much as I can about it. And, you know, I think it certainly constitutes a risk, but I think it’s a very far out risk, like, you know, like decades out. And I also think that, you know, we could actually apply it to Bitcoin and maybe there’d be a hard fork, you know, where everyone would migrate over to the new thing that solves that problem.

So I just don’t worry about that. I mean, I, you know, decades. I mean, I, you know, I don’t have super number of decades left.

So I think I’m good. But it’s, yeah, you know, look, there are risks to any choice financially, and everybody knows that. And so I don’t have all my money in Bitcoin.

I don’t have all my money in gold. I don’t have some of my money in real estate. And I even have a small amount of cash just because I want to be able to take advantage of opportunities.

You know, sure. Yeah. It’s all probabilistic.

Exactly. You talk about Gresham’s law. Oh, yeah.

Most people know what that is. But yeah, we’ll go over it again. Define what it is quickly.

And then just how does it relate to Bitcoin? Yeah. So Gresham’s law, Sir Thomas Gresham was in the 1500s. He was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I in England.

And he penned a law that basically said that good money drives out bad. I’m sorry, bad money drives out good. So what that means is if there are two forms of money being used, people will spend the one that’s depreciating in value and hoard the one that’s holding its value.

That’s right. And so in today’s world, what that means is you spend fiat. And we know fiat is debasing in value by 8% a year, which is the growth underlying long term trend and the growth of the M2.

I mean, that’s just a fact. It’s happened. On the other hand, you take gold, which used to be the only form of sound money.

And it’s only being debased at 1.7% a year. And so people would hoard gold and they would spend fiat, save in gold and spend their money in fiat. And that’s an example of Gresham’s law.

Bitcoin, which is only debasing at 0.8% a year, and every four years that’ll get cut in half, is now even sounder than gold. I mean, the stock to flow is much higher than gold. So basically, people are hoarding Bitcoin, knowing that it will hold its value.

But to the degree that they need to make expenditures, they’ll convert a piece of Bitcoin into fiat and use fiat to pay. Because maybe they’ll pay with lightning rails and all that kind of stuff. Or they’ll try to pay it from fiat reserves first or current income.

Exactly. Before they’d sell the good money. Yeah, you hang on to and save the money that you know that has the best chance of holding its value over time and space.

And Bitcoin, there’s no better money for that than Bitcoin. Right. And yeah, that’s back to kind of the mathematics driving the monetization of Bitcoin.

Yeah, we all know what the rules are. Yes. And they can’t fuck with it.

Yeah, and this is where it’s serving the individual’s self-interest. Like, of course, you accumulate the thing that’s being debased the least because that maximizes the preservation of your purchasing power across time. And of course, you spend the thing that’s getting debased the fastest because that’s depleting your purchasing power.

Why not sell it? Why not? Yeah. And by the way, I mean, look, if you don’t have any savings, if you’re just literally living hand to mouth, this debasement isn’t really such a big issue for you. Sure.

But everyone, I mean, if you don’t have any, like, if you don’t have, you’re basically either increasing your savings or decreasing your savings every month, week, whatever period you want to look at it. And so therefore, everyone should have at least some savings. Of course.

You’re just increasing a dollar a month or whatever. Of course. You better not be going the other direction, because if you do that, you’re going bankrupt.

Yes, exactly. So this is applicable to everyone, basically. It is applicable to everybody.

Obviously, more applicable to people that have larger savings. Correct. Because they have more to lose, but still applies to everyone.

So you have this interesting kind of perspective that you’re calling for a ban on financial derivatives, which have been called weapons of mass destruction. Financial weapons of mass destruction is one of the smart things he said. He’s also said some stupid stuff about Bitcoin.

He said, Bitcoin is rat poison. There’s a footnote in the book. And I said, yeah, and you’re the rat.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so here’s the thing. Here’s how I see it.

Central banks can make, as you say, they can make the exception. They’ve got the printer. They can print whatever they want.

Let’s talk poker, for example, is a good metaphor. If you’re at a poker table and a bunch of us have $1,000 and you come in and you have a million dollars and we’re paying unlimited stakes poker, you can say whatever hand you want. You can bet a million dollars and none of us can call you because we don’t have it.

Right. You win. Yeah.

Okay. That’s what the derivative game is, writ large. Right.

If you can bluff the market. Lean on your opponents. Lean on your opponents.

If you have more purchasing power through a derivative contract than the entire size of the market, you can distort the market. And if you’ve got the printing press behind that derivative action to print and cover it, the market can’t call you, so to speak. And so this is what happened.

This is how they manipulated the gold price down from $1,900 in 2011 to $1,000 in 2015. It was so beautifully done, so coordinated by the BIS and the central banks. It was unbelievable.

It was like a military operation. I mean, Goldman Sachs came out and announced out loud to all their clients, gold is overvalued. We highly recommend you short it.

Okay. The BIS made some statements. The Fed made some statements, et cetera, et cetera.

And this is a period where it just run from $2.50 an ounce in 2000 up to $1,900 an ounce in 2011. So you can imagine some central bank and the money printing started in 2008. So there were some central bankers who were, you know, they had tight sphincters.

They’re sitting, holy shit, we’re losing control of the gold price. This is not good. Okay.

So what did they do? Goldman makes the announcements. They get all their clients short it. Okay.

They get the central banks coordinating. And then in the space of like a month, they just literally bombed the shit out of it. It was down $150 one day.

I was on vacation when it happened. It’s talked about in the book. And the volumes that were going through, there’s no way they were rational sellers.

No seller would, nobody had that kind of volume to sell except for the central banks. And so they literally just attacked the gold price and took it from 1900 down to a thousand bucks, you know, to save their system. And they could do that because they could use the derivatives.

I mean, they were selling, they weren’t selling gold that they had. They were selling paper gold, which is part of what’s blowing up right now. I mean, the gold game is very much like a big game of musical chairs.

There are X number of physical ounces in the world today. Okay. They just exist.

They’re hard. I mean, you touch them and feel them, right? Yeah. Okay.

We believe, and there’s a lot of evidence that shows based on looking at the data that there are between 100 and 300 claims on every single 200 X. Yeah. On everyone. Let’s say it’s a hundred.

Yeah. So for every one of those ounces, there are a hundred paper claims. So there are a hundred people who hold a piece of paper that says I own gold.

Right. But they don’t. Only one of them does.

Only one of them does. And if they all ask for it at the same time, the price of gold would go bananas. Okay.

It’s the paper gold market. It’s the derivative based paper gold market that has allowed that to occur. This perfectly mirrors fractional reserve banking.

Exactly. And it’s all laid out in the book. I mean, so this happened.

It started with Clinton and Summers and Barsky wrote an article or a paper, which you can find on the web called Gibson’s Paradox. So Clinton wanted to get reelected. It’s in the book on his second term.

And they realized that in order to do that, they needed to have economic growth. They realized the easiest way to get economic growth was to have inflation, right? Because you get top line growth with inflation. They also realized that if they had inflation, remember Carville, who’s advisor at the time said, you know, I mean, Clinton said, you mean to tell me that I’m not going to get reelected because a bunch of fucking bond traders, the bond vigilantes are going to blow up the bond market.

And Carville said to him, yeah, you know, when I come back in my next life, I want to come back as the bond market because you can intimidate anybody. Okay. Well, Summers and it was a treasury secretary and Rubin, who was actually Rubin was treasury secretary.

Summers was the chief economic counsel. I can revise. They devised a mechanism.

I said, don’t worry about it, sir. We’ll print the money and we’ll attack the gold price at the same time. And if we can hold the gold price down, people won’t think there’s inflation.

Yeah. So you’re good. You’re good to go.

Right. And that’s and that’s what happened. Okay.

That yeah. Very important that people understand that. I think especially gold bucks.

This, this is how that’s played out. There’s been a lot. And that’s why gold hasn’t worked, by the way.

Yeah. The gold antitrust. Actually, I get it.

Yeah. Those guys are great. They’re great.

Because they’ve yeah. Bill Murphy, Chris Powell, they go to their site. It’s all documented.

Yeah. And this is not just in the U.S. They’ve done it in London, everywhere, all over the place. All over the place.

Yeah. Coordinated suppression of the gold price. Yes.

Really to uphold the integrity of fiat currency. Correct. Because if people had a better alternative, well, they would sell all their fiat and buy gold.

Correct. So they need to squash the price of gold. Correct.

To prevent that run from happening. Right. How do you, let’s say, critics of Bitcoin that would say, oh, they’re just going to do the same thing to Bitcoin.

How would you engage in that? Yeah, no, that’s a really great question. And I mean, George Gammon made a good point that there’ll be paper Bitcoin in the future. And there could be.

If you look at it today, there’s not a lot of paper Bitcoin. You can see the number of derivatives, futures, options, et cetera, contracts out there. Compared to the total amount out there, the total amount on exchange, the total trading, they haven’t done it.

I mean, recall that they’ve had since the 70s to perfect this gold scheme. Okay. And gold is a slightly different beast than Bitcoin.

You know, gold has never had a year where it’s gone up 5x. Okay. Bitcoin has.

Okay. So suppressing gold and then waiting for it to come back down so you can cover your shorts without taking a loss or having to print a lot of paper to cover the loss has been an easier game than with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is, you know, it’s a, it’s a wilder animal from a price point of view.

So they can’t necessarily get their arms around it quite as quickly. And, and, but, but to be fair, it is somewhat of a risk. I mean, I think that a couple of things argue against it.

One is the whole notion of proof of reserves, which I think River is doing a very good job of, you know, showing, I mean, basically we get into trouble when people start claiming say they have Bitcoin and they don’t have Bitcoin. Yeah. So, you know, if, if, I mean, one of the things that I think has happened is GLD, which is the biggest gold ETF.

I don’t think they have all the gold they say they have. Okay. So people have put money into GLD that money has not gone to buy real physical ounces.

It’s just money that’s there. They have a fraction of all the gold they say they have, but not all of it, in my opinion. And so if that kind of thing were to start to happen in Bitcoin, if BlackRock were to start to not buy, I mean, if the auditors were in on it with BlackRock and BlackRock were taking money in for the Bitcoin ETF, but not actually buying all the Bitcoin they claim to have, that would become problematic.

And, and, you know, I don’t think that’s beyond the realm of possibility, but you know, you’d have to get the auditors in on it. And, and I think there’s, you know, because of Bitcoin’s, your ability to do the on-chain analytics, that’s another piece, this whole thing. I mean, you’ve got, you had, you know, you had double entry accounting.

I mean, Bitcoin, you’ve kind of got triple entry accounting, you know, you’ve got independent people can see where all the transactions are. So, so I think, I think it’s more manipulation proof than gold in a large way, easier to see, easier to verify, easier to move. But I don’t think it’s completely manipulation proof.

And I think it’s something we always have to watch. And that’s why in the book, you know, there’s a, there’s a chapter in the book called policy response, where I basically talk about, okay, we’re in a frigging mess. How do we get out of it? Okay.

And I say, you know, we’ve got to do this, this, and this. And then at the end of it, I say, we’ve got to ban derivatives. And that’s why, because I, we don’t want Bitcoin to be corrupted in the same way that gold was corrupted.

Got it. Yeah. So there’s definitely new advantages Bitcoin has in this regard, and that you can have cryptographic proof of reserves, right? And it’s just, it’s a very lightweight, low cost informational audit, right? You can basically prove that you have what you say you have.

Correct. That if you try to do that with gold, it’s a whole different thing. You got to get people involved.

Oh, absolutely. And then documenting. Well, the perfect, the perfect example, I’m sure you’ve thought about it.

You know, we say we have 261.5 million ounces of gold in Fort Knox and in New York at the West Point and in the Denver vault. I mean, San Francisco vault too. And that hasn’t been audited since 53.

Yeah. I mean. Yeah.

There’s rumors that it’s all gone. Yeah, right. I mean, occasionally, you know, Ron Paul told me he thinks it’s all gone.

I mean, occasionally somebody would go in there and look at a few rooms, say, oh, yeah, there’s some gold here. But is it all there? Right. I don’t know.

I mean, right? Yeah. So there’s that. That’s a very major advantage for Bitcoin.

Right. In terms of not being as vulnerable to these price suppression schemes. Right.

There’s also the portability dimension, right? Like you can settle with Bitcoin, like you said, in 10 minutes, in an hour, basically with finality. If there’s ever even a sniff of malfeasance, you can withdraw, move, like go to a more trusted counterparty, go into self-custody, like all of it. The hyper portability of Bitcoin makes it more resistant to these schemes where gold is like, well, it’s in this place.

As you’re seeing right now, there are people who have gold in the LBMA vaults. They’re asking to get it out. Right.

And they’re being told they can’t have it. Right. Or, you know, wait six weeks.

Wait six to eight weeks. Maybe we’ll get it for you. You know, whatever.

I mean, this, you know, I don’t know. We’ve seen this before. So, and I don’t want to get way ahead of myself.

I don’t want to get too far out over my skis. This could all calm down. Deliveries could return to normal and everything could be fine.

Or this could become, you know, this is, this is, yeah, this is the smoke. And there turns out there’s a real fire and the paper gold market is in trouble. I mean, that’s, I think that’s certainly within the realm of possibility.

Well, at a hundred to one on the low side. Right. The trouble’s coming at some point.

It feels like it feels to me that way. It’s just a matter of when. But it hasn’t happened yet.

I mean, this is all of these events. I mean, they’re, you know, they’re what I call kind of quote, unquote, critical state events. Yeah.

Avalanches are critical state events, right? Yeah, right. A bunch of snow sitting there. Yeah, right.

One snowflake falls. The hair that broke the camel’s back. Exactly.

They’re all critical state events. And when, when they happen, they’re, I mean, that’s why I make this point in the book. I mean, it’s kind of like, there isn’t going to be a do over here.

You know what I mean? You’re either going to, I mean, if we really do have a big monetary event, a big print, a big reset, you know, it’s a one, you know, you’re not going to say, Oh gosh, I’m sorry. I fucked that up. Yeah.

You know, I want, I want to go back and do it over again. It’s going to be like, no, there’s no do over. You know, Bitcoin is now a hundred.

It’s now a million dollars bid. Gold is 10,000 bid. Do you want some or not? Yeah.

I mean, pick one. And you’re going to remember where you were when that happened, right? I think, I think, I think we will. Yeah.

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We both agree with this general view, right? We’re headed towards a sat standard, a Bitcoin standard at some point. That entails what often Bitcoiners call hyper-Bitcoinization, right? There’s going to be some point, the avalanche, this thing goes parabolic, and it never comes back, right? We’re denominating Bitcoin in dollar terms largely today. But if this event plays out, it’s no longer going to be denominated in dollars.

The dollar will go away, right? My grandkids will use sats, I think, to buy things. Exactly. So part and parcel to hyper-Bitcoinization is USD hyperinflation.

I know this is a spooky thing. I know, I don’t like to go there because it’s a bummer, but yeah. But let’s just stick with hyper-Bitcoinization in that case.

What do you think, what is that going to be like? How should we be preparing for this? It’s a good thing if you’re holding Bitcoin, but there’s also going to be probably a lot of instability that comes along. Yeah, and there are going to be people who are hurt and all of that. So what I’m hoping is that we just kind of trend in that direction.

Slowly. Yeah, slowly and consistently. Because I think society, a shock, a real discontinuous event to the upside will be, people will get hurt.

Let’s just face it. I mean, people will get hurt. And yes, those of us who own Bitcoin will go, wow, look at this.

I’m a lot richer than I used to be. But all your neighbors will be hurt, and society will be hurt. I mean, there’ll be a lot of problems with it.

I think the better way to do it is just to kind of advocate for this and move in that direction. And even if it happened today, I’m not sure it’d be a really great thing just because, although I’d really like to see the federal government fail, but we need better layer two solutions. Do you know what I mean? So Bitcoin, we haven’t talked about this at all, but Bitcoin is winning the store of value game.

I mean, just crushing it. It’s already won, basically. Yeah, won at winning, whatever you want to call it.

And it’s going to keep on winning. There’s going to be so much winning here, they’re not going to know what to do. But the medium of exchange game, man, I have to say, haven’t been in the space since I bought something in 2014, but more active in it since kind of the 1920 time frame, when I first started going to the big conferences and all.

The Lightning Network, gosh, I wish we were coming along faster. Small things works great. 5,000 bucks, good luck.

I mean, it’s hard to do large transactions. There’s not enough liquidity yet. And this is why, although I shit on almost all of the crypto, I am open-minded to the fact that maybe lightning isn’t the layer two, and maybe something else will be.

That we will all save in Bitcoin and then transfer to some other coin as a layer two kind of lightning substitute. I think that’s a possibility. Yeah, the verdict’s still out.

I think it is. But I guess my point to you on hyper Bitcoinization, when does it occur? So let’s go back to the fourth turning model. You know, this one started in 08.

You’ve studied them. You based your show based on what is money. The issue of this fourth turning is what is money.

And they tend to last 20, 25 years, maybe 30 years at the longest. And so we started in 08. I mean, I kind of think this is, and you look at where we are now in debt, in debt to GDP, and how broken it all is.

I think this is going to get resolved in the next 5 to 10 years, Robert. We’re at 24. Yeah, 29 to 35.

I think we’ll have solved the what is money question. I think the world will know. And the new form of money will be, and maybe it’s even a dollar backed by Bitcoin.

I don’t know. There are a lot of possible outcomes. But there will be a climatic event that will make enough people realize that what we have isn’t working and that we need a sound money standard.

I think that’s what will happen. And I think if inflation gets higher and persists and we keep printing money, eventually, I mean, the outcry already is high. And it’s only going to get worse, right? I mean, that’s how I see it.

Yeah. So do you think there is going to be some type of acute economic crisis at some point? Could be, could be. I mean, I think Trump recently outbanned CBDCs or something to that effect.

So maybe that is out of the question now. But it seems like the centralized state would want to use, you know what I say? Never let a good crisis go to waste. So they would use that as an opportunity.

And that’s why I hope, I hope Trump and Besant are bold and courageous and try to do what I’ve outlined in the book in terms of a monetary reset in their four year window. Here’s an alternative case. They don’t do it.

They can’t be bold and courageous enough. The world’s not ready for it. They don’t take the chance.

The four years go by. Inflation’s high. And suddenly blue team wins.

Because I mean, what the voters have been doing really is just whoever’s in there, they’ve been voting the other, you know, okay, yeah, you guys didn’t solve it. Right. You know, let’s try this other team.

Because again, politics don’t solve problems. The problem persists. It doesn’t matter who you bring on.

And so, you know, at the margin, blue team wins next time around. Well, now Stephanie Kelton is the Treasury Secretary, you know, and, you know, the Fed’s balance sheet goes to $100 trillion. Yeah, exactly.

Well, and universal basic income, you know, is now, you know, built in, right? Because we’ve got to help the people. And, you know, who cares about the deficits? We don’t care. And, you know, right.

I mean, and so, oh, and by the way, and that’s where, you know, hey, you know, gosh, these Bitcoiners and gold people are really kind of ruining our currency, which is, you know, part of our national policy, part of our national defense. We need to tax gold and Bitcoin at 90%. And we need to grab all the gold and Bitcoin the way Roosevelt did.

I mean, that’s possible. That’s entirely possible in a blue, you know, in a heavily blue administration facing an economic crisis, right? Which is why possessing the gold, you know, possessing the Bitcoin and even possessing your own self and sovereignty and, you know, I mean, and not being too long real estate. I mean, look, my kids are here.

I’m going to want to be here to see my grandkids. But, you know, I mean, if they came after me and said, you know, we’re going to do it on, you know, unrealized capital gains tax on 90% of your Bitcoin profits. I’m no longer an American citizen.

Yeah, I mean, I’m out of here. Multiple passports come into play. Yeah, I mean, I’m out of here.

So, I mean, and could that happen? You know, I pray it won’t. Yeah. But I, you know, but I, you know, the left.

I mean, sure, I could see him doing it, trying to do it. For sure. They’ve already been talking about it.

So, fortunately, again, I don’t think politics solves problems. You just get less bad political administration. So, fortunately, we got Trump and the less bad political administration.

In many ways, pretty good, with a few exceptions. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one of the things you brought up the Department of Government Efficiency, which has been identifying a lot of wasteful spending and cutting it back, which is good.

Awful, yeah. Yeah, a whole rabbit hole to go down into there. There’s been a recent push by Elon Musk saying he’s going to have Ron Paul audit the Federal Reserve.

Wouldn’t I love that? So, here’s the thing. The Fed is independent and independent of Congress. They report to Congress.

Now, Congress could all vote to audit the Fed, but don’t count on that happening anytime soon. I know that Musk would like to have Paul go and audit it, but you know what the odds of that happening are? I mean, they’re literally zero. I mean, the Fed is going to say, F you.

How does the Fed prevent Congress from voting to audit them? Well, basically, they’ve lobbied and paid all these Fed. I mean, the Fed is a heavy supporter of a lot of congressmen. Oh, so what a fucked up scheme.

Yeah. Institution that can print money, can bribe the politicians that regulate them. Pretty much.

That’s like you’re a football player in a game bribing the referee to let you score the touchdown. That’s pretty much right. And just to give you an example, and it’s in the book as well, and it’s an amazing story.

So Judy Shelton, I don’t know if you recognize that name. She’s a sound money advocate. She’s a gold person.

She’s been around for a long time. She’s a scholar. She’s got a PhD.

She’s really an outstanding person in terms of the gold world. And she got close with Trump when he was in Trump administration one. He recommended that she be a Fed governor.

He nominated her. And they got a paper with like 130 economists, congressmen, and senators wrote saying she advocated a return to the gold standard. She would be dangerous to put on the board of the Federal Reserve.

Yeah, dangerous. And then when she was in there being interviewed by these people, I mean, you got to watch the tapes. It’s despicable the way.

I mean, and she says what I say. Sound money is a moral issue, and everybody has the right to their savings not being debased. That’s all she says, right? And to do that, we should return to a gold standard.

She’s got a specific idea of a gold-backed bond, gold-backed treasury bond, which is a good idea. And she was just pilloried by these people. So you have to remember that the scheme that’s defrauded the common man who I wrote this book for is a partnership of the government and the quintillionaires, Wall Street.

So the quintillionaires love it because they’re getting rich. The government loves it because it leaves them in power and gives them tons of control. And they get to do things like USAID and throw money all over the place and basically control our lives, control the message, fund Politico, a left-wing organization, I mean, all of that.

And the Fed does the same thing, more or less. You’ll see it, again, in the book. Danielle DiMartino Booth is talked about in the book.

She wrote a great book called Fed Up, which I borrowed from. By the way, the book really, I wrote it. I assembled it.

I think I’m good at that. I think it’s a really good book. I borrowed from everybody in this community.

I didn’t really write this book. What this is, is this is the Reader’s Digest version of the case for sound money and making America a better place, drawing on SAFE and Jeff and Lynn and you name it. Daniella and all those people.

I mean, I just pulled all of it together and put it in a format that your average citizen could read and get mad and go, God damn it. I understand why they’re screwing me. And I’m fed up and I’m not going to take it anymore.

I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore. Yeah, well, I mean, I appreciate the humility, but it’s like, that’s the way it is, right? We’re all nodes on the network. We’re all recycling one another’s ideas.

Well, the beautiful thing is we’re all working for each other, right? You’re working for me doing this. I’m working for you. Sailor’s working for us.

Booth is working for us. Lynn is working. And we’re all, right? We all have a common objective, which is to see the world get better.

To promote the level playing field. Yeah, by having a level playing field. Yeah, and it is the beautiful thing about Bitcoin.

Another way to describe it is as it is the world’s first and only decentralized organization. Yeah. Or like we’re all, I mean, I guess you could say gold to the extent that it was sound money at some point sort of function similarly, but Bitcoin’s different, right? It’s like a more, a less corruptible version of gold, basically.

Yeah, it’s better. And so we get, yeah, guys, we’re all, I put it like this once in a world where no man can be trusted to talk anything than his own book. Yeah.

Bitcoin lets us all talk one another’s book. Exactly. Like we’re all rooting for one another to succeed because it all increases our purchasing power individually.

Exactly. So it’s this brilliant, beautiful alignment of the individual and the collective incentives. Correct.

And it forces everybody else to say, am I going to join them or am I going to be left behind? You know? I mean, it’s like pick one. You know what I mean? Okay, I got my lifeboat. Titanic’s sinking.

Yeah. What do you want to do? Yeah, exactly. Game theory.

You were saying recently that the strategic Bitcoin reserve is close to a shoo-in. Yeah. Do you still think that’s the case? I do.

I mean, it’s been diluted, right? So, I mean, we heard that. We saw Besant and Lutnick standing next to Trump and he said he’s creating a sovereign wealth fund, which I think is kind of, that’s another word for a strategic Bitcoin reserve. I wish he’d used the word Bitcoin more.

I wish he’d said sovereign wealth. I mean, the language was a little mixed up. You know, I mean, probably the most disappointing thing I’ve seen Trump do, and I like a lot of what he’s done, okay, was this, you know, Trump coin and Melania coin.

I was like, what are you doing, dude? I mean, I just, that really, I was very disappointed in that. But set that aside. I mean, everybody comes with good and bad.

But with respect to this reserve, so the disappointing thing here, and Bitcoiners, we’ve all had to come to grips with this, is that the crypto crowd has given a lot of money to politicians, has given a lot of money to Trump, you know, and we’re talking XRP, we’re talking Solana, we’re talking all the things that aren’t Bitcoin, some of which are just, you know, downright evil and bad, some of which are, you know, borderline interesting technology projects that if they’re done, as Taylor says, if they’re done ethically, I don’t argue with, right? They’ve all given a lot of money to the political system, and they’ve helped us get to where we are. I mean, let’s face it, you know, part of getting, you know, Ross out of jail and getting, you know, all the things we’ve gotten is the fact that, you know, there was a big block of quote unquote votes in Bitcoin slash crypto. And so we’ve had to drag crypto along with us, which most of us don’t like a lot of.

But okay, you know, and that’s the price we pay. And the strategic reserve, you know, I mean, we know that, you know, Brad is trying to get, you know, XRP in there, and maybe he’ll succeed. I hope he doesn’t.

But, you know, so be it. I mean, it’ll have Bitcoin in there for sure. I mean, Ethereum guys will try and be in there.

The Solana, you know, all these other guys are trying to get a piece of it. I get it. I mean, I think that’s unfortunate.

But those coins are going to die on their own. They all suck. They got no use case.

Nobody really wants them. So, you know, Bitcoin’s going to win. So it doesn’t really matter.

So my view is, hey, look, we went from two years ago, not having an ETF and not having any politician have this shit on their radar screen to this year having Robert Kennedy and Trump speaking at the Bitcoin conference in Nashville. I was there and both of them giving fabulous speeches in support of Bitcoin. I mean, Kennedy obviously understands it more than Trump did, but Trump will come along, you know, and Vivek probably got in his ear and taught him about it.

I mean, we’re going in the right direction here. So I’m very happy with the progress. I mean, is it exactly what I want to know? Of course not.

I wish he’d said, yeah, Bitcoin only. We’re going to only hold on to the 200,000. We’re going to support the Loomis bill and start buying 200,000 coins a year for five years.

You know, boom, done. Yeah, that would have been great. Yeah, that hasn’t happened yet.

But, you know, it’s politics, right? Yeah, yeah, it is corrupted by all these shit coin games. Absolutely. I agree that they are.

I think the shit coins do die out. But this actually could put them on life support for a long time. They become zombie coins, right? Sadly, it’s buying them.

Sadly, yeah, sadly. I mean, I don’t get it. I mean, Doge is an example.

What the hell? I mean, the dog coin, the dog coin. I mean, I just don’t get it. Yeah, it’s this big, gnarly social experiment on turning memes into money, right? Well, it’s kind of a very fascinating thing Bitcoin did, you know, Naval said this like 2011 or 2012 that speech and money were now the same thing.

So Bitcoin and information, even in your book, you say money is information. Bitcoin is like the purest expression of that, right? It actually is just digital information. Yeah, right.

And so when you take that genie out of the bottle, well, all of a sudden it’s like, well, let me dog coin, cat coin, color. Like you can just make any idea, any piece of information can all of a sudden become money, not money. It can be monetized in like a, you know, micro shit kind of way.

It doesn’t last. It’s not sustainable. And it just, to me, is this manifestation of this universal human tendency to print money.

It’s like, you know, you see the shit going phenomenon. I was like, well, that’s why we have central banks. It’s like, because people, everyone likes money.

Everyone wants to print money. And in that world, the money that nobody can print will win, which is Bitcoin. And it’s also a manifestation of human beings, just their tendency to gamble.

Yeah. You know, I mean, I view this as this is kind of like, it’s just a different form of sports betting in a way. I mean, I, you know, my CrossFit gym that I go to, the guy who runs is a great guy and he’s a Bitcoiner and he totally gets all his store value money is in Bitcoin.

He’s actually played the crypto game. And because he’s smart and he knows how to get in and get out and, you know, he gets heads up on new deals and coins. He’s managed to extract some money from it.

I don’t, it’s not something I think is honorable or ethical doing, but people do it. Yeah. It’s participation in pump and dump schemes, which is unfortunate, but a lot of people don’t know what they’re doing, right? They don’t understand the other side of that trade.

They think it’s just coins on a screen, you know, buy low, sell high and, you know, right. No one’s, no one’s getting hurt. Right.

But what they don’t see is the other side of that trade that’s exporting someone’s ignorance. And exactly. Yeah.

I don’t know. It takes, uh, takes some time in the arena to learn these things. Yeah.

I don’t think they’re, I don’t think it’s time well spent just as I don’t think gambling is time well spent. Agreed. Agreed.

What do you like? I mean, we’re in a Bitcoin bull market, right? Bitcoin’s above its prior all-time high price. Historically, these things play out like, you know, there’s a having, and then we have about 18 months of bull cycle before we get a new all-time high price. And then we have a big drawdown trade sideways for three years and then repeats.

Yep. So we would expect to see a new all-time Bitcoin, all-time high Bitcoin price by the end of 2025, roughly. What are you expecting or excited to see play out throughout the rest of this year? So I, so I, so I think, um, we’re forming a flag.

If you look at it, I like the way it’s behaving. It builds a base and it moves. 58 moved to a hundred, a 40 point move.

There’s a thing in technical analysis called flags where, and flags fly at half mask. So mass. So 58 to a hundred is 42k, a hundred.

Next move, I think we’re going to go to 142. We’ll probably flag again there. The next one goes to 180.

My sense is, I don’t know how high the cycle goes. You know, I hope a guy like Sampson is right. And we go to a million dollars a coin because I might sell a few at that level.

You know, I’m quite certain we will get to, you know, 180 to 240 or 50 this time. I think there might be an argument that we go even higher. I think the last cycle was somewhat truncated by the China ban.

The SBF thing obviously took us down to an extremely low level. You know, it’s really hard to say. I mean, I tend to rely on the power law as kind of a base case.

I mean, it’s got 97% correlation looking backwards. And it’s, you know, it would suggest that the top this time is in the twos, the low twos. You know, but things are different.

I mean, we’ve got nation state adoption. We’ve got an ETF. I don’t, you know, if you look at the historical drawdowns, the biggest was 90.

They’ve been getting less deep. I think the last one was in the 70s, low 70s. I would expect this one might be in the 50s if we do have.

But so if I had a model, if I just had to guess, you know, maybe we go to 250 and then we draw back down to 150. I don’t know. I mean, I do think with respect to the power law, I do believe at some point it’ll break.

All models do break. I think this asset’s unique. And these models, you know, as Salo says, these models are meant to be destroyed.

So the model will break into the upside, in my opinion. But that and that’s kind of hyper Bitcoinization. I don’t know, you know, when everyone comes to realize, oh, my God, I got to get this.

I don’t care about the price. Right. I don’t know when that’ll happen.

I don’t know if it’ll happen this cycle or if it’ll happen next cycle. But that’s coming. So that’s, you know, I just don’t know.

Gotcha. And then what are you like? Do you think the narrative shift will change these cycles? Like if we do get not just a narrative shift, I guess I would say the cohorts of buyers, right? If it does, if we do get to this point where the US is stacking a national Bitcoin strategic reserve and then country A, B, C, D all imitate. Do you think this whole pattern just breaks? Is that what breaks the pattern? I think that could be it.

I think it could be just more, you know, RIAs doing it. I think it could be more institutions doing it. I think that just, you know, it’s just going to spread.

I mean, if you look at, there’s a good chart in the book that shows adoption curves and how they happen. And, you know, we’re just, we’re really at the early part of an inflecting to the upside. You know, I mean, when we adopted cell phones or when we adopted PCs or we adopted anything that’s a new technology, you know, boy, you know, Saylor said this.

He says the next 10 years are really the golden age. I think he’s right. I mean, and so therefore, I think the drawdowns, they’re not going to look the way they have in the past.

I think we were building a base prior to a pretty hard run. And we’ll get drawdowns. I mean, people will use leverage.

They will get way out over their skis. It will get ahead of itself. And by the way, some of the old time hodlers will say, gosh, 250? You know, I’ve been holding these things since 10,000.

I got a whole mess of them. Yeah. I’ll let a couple go.

I mean, that’s how it works. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so let’s talk about the book again. Sure. I always like to selfishly ask people, what was your writing process? I think you said you just went full out for six months.

Yeah. So any advice for people that are trying this as a guy that’s trying to write a book? Don’t do it. It’ll consume your life and your wife will be mad at you.

Yeah. Well, I’m already in that phase. So for people that are definitively going to publish a book, do you have any tips, tricks? Yeah.

ChatGBT is great for getting information quickly. Changed my world. Yeah.

No, I mean, what I would try and do, I’m best in the morning, get up, work out. And I would try and get most of my writing done by noon. Yeah.

And then maybe go back and edit it in the afternoon and get to bed early. I started writing it in May, June. And I just, you know, one of the things you’ll see is that when you’re doing it, it spilled out of me.

I actually feel like it was kind of, you know, heavenly, you know, it was like divinely channeled into me. It just, it just poured out of me. I knew exactly, you know, and what would happen is I would either in the shower or sometimes when I did, you know, I’m one of those guys, I tend to wait with three or four in the morning just for a little while.

I don’t know why I just, I don’t sleep well. And, and, and that was when I’d have some insight and I was like, oh shit. And I’d have to go get a pen and write it down because when I fall back asleep, if you know, some, some mornings I didn’t, I fell back asleep.

I was like, what the hell was I thinking last night? So I would write it down. Do you know what I mean? And just with each of those and with each iteration, the other thing I would suggest is a very important point is get a killer editor. So, and I want to just give a huge, huge shout out.

My editor is a woman named Mel Schilling. She’s edited some other Bitcoin books. She’s a Bitcoiner.

She’s frigging brilliant. And this book is, in my opinion, it’s a good book. I mean, I’m not bragging.

I just think it is a good book. And, um, but, but mainly because of her, I mean, she, in other words, she really, I can write okay, but she can write well. And the difference is night and day.

I mean, unless you’re a professional writer, you’re whatever you write, you know, you know, having a professional editor will, can improve anybody, the quality of anybody’s work. And it’s still my words and my ideas, but she helped me say them in a crisper, cleaner way that make it easier for a reader to digest. And so that’s, I think it’s a strong piece of advice to get a really good editor.

And how, what was the workflow between the two of you? Yeah. So you get a Google doc and, um, and, and I would write and I’d write a chapter and then she would go through and she could make little suggestions. Right.

And, and so her suggestions would come back in a different color. And, um, and, and then I can accept or reject or I DM her and say, uh, you know, or I propose. And so you have your original color, her color, and then I could pick a third color.

Well, I didn’t like my original and I see your suggestion, but this is a hybrid. Let’s do this. Okay.

And, and, and just back and forth and back and forth in real time. Right. Yeah.

And, and, and, uh, that, that is a technology that again, think about how you would have done that in the olden days. So I’d be working at something in the middle of the night and she’d get up in the morning, she’d come back and she’d say, Oh, I think that was brilliant. Great.

You did a good job on that. No, you, you gotta fix this and change that. Okay.

And so it was just a constant back forth to make it better. Yeah, that’s great. And then was she involved throughout the six months or like towards the end? No, uh, well, no, that’s not true.

Pretty much. Yes. I had written, I had written a pretty good start before she got involved, but I wouldn’t, but it wasn’t any close to what we got now.

Yeah. I mean, let’s, let’s assume, let’s say I’d written, you know, six, seven, eight chapters and I had the outline kind of done and then she dove in and, and, and I, once she, she went to work on a couple of the things and I was like, Oh my God, you’re hired. I mean, you’re hired.

She’s brilliant. She is. I’ve given her a stream of the revenue of the book.

I mean, she’s this, this, I mean, I’m thinking of calling her coauthor. I mean, she’s really, really good. Yeah.

I mean, it’s, she’s outstanding. And then how many revisions? So like, say you, you get to finished products. Yeah.

Are you then revising it several times? You’re always revising it. I mean, you do, you get, so, so I think they’re probably two, there’s one rough read through you’ll write something, she’ll fix it. Yeah.

You’ll agree with her fixes. You’ll leave it alone. Yeah.

And so you write the whole thing that way. I’d add a chapter. Yeah.

She fix it. Okay. So now that’s, we’ve been through, she’s been through it one time.

Yeah. Okay. Now we’re coming back.

Let’s go through it again. You know, and okay. Well, you gotta, you know, I don’t understand this.

You got to expound on this more. And by the way, throughout this, my wife was heavily involved. You know, honey, read this.

Do you understand it? Cause she’s not a financial person at all. She’s a, she’s, she’s ads. So she’s your like test audience person.

Exactly. Got it. I mean, she’s, you know, hang on a second.

You talk, you introduced the federal reserve. Nobody knows what the federal reserve is. Put it in a footnote.

Okay, great. Done. I mean, there’s a, there’s a whole chapter in there that was her idea.

She said, she said, Larry, everybody’s skeptical of this shit. Why don’t you, you know, and I remember everyone’s skeptical of the fax machine and everyone, you know, why don’t you do a chapter on skepticism? It’s a great idea, honey. So I, I’ve got a whole chapter.

I mean, I’ve got Lynn’s cartoon in there where you remember the menace that electricity was. Oh yeah. You remember that one where, you know, I mean, I put that, that, that tweet in there.

Right. I mean, it’s just kind of like, and so I just, you know, Hey, we get, I get it. It’s a new technology and you’re skeptical.

Here’s how, you know, here’s how people were skeptical in the past. And there are quotes in there from, you know, a Marshall Fox said, Oh, the airplane will never have any practical use. Yeah.

Do you know what I mean? All those kinds of things, you know, fax machine quote. Yeah. The fax machine quote from Krugman, you know, right.

Yeah. So, I mean, so, so that kind of stuff. So, so then you go through the second time.

So now you’ve got it pretty well written. Then you’ll start inserting little things. You realize, Oh, I had a good idea here.

You’ll insert it. And then, then you go through with a real fine tooth comb for grammar and last checks. But then you’re not done.

Then you got to go to a layout artist to get it laid out. And I got a great layout artist, a guy named Nico Laminen, who’s over in Finland. And he did a fabulous job.

Really, really good guy. Couldn’t recommend him more highly. And, um, and, and that, you know, and, and so, so just so you have a sense, we were, we were done writing the book in September.

We hammered it from September to December to get it to be really tight. At December 29, we said, it’s done. It’s really tight.

We sent it to Nico. And, you know, so it took all of January to get it laid out. And, and, and we found a few more little changes and tweaks, but they were small.

Yeah. So, and then we launched it February 4th or 5th or something. Amazing.

So awesome. And then most recently you said it went to number one in investing. It went to one of new, new books in investing.

I don’t know if that’s a really big deal. One of the things I’m kind of, I’m proud of, but actually it’s a pain in the ass. I mean, I, I guess Amazon has an algorithm.

They figure out how many books to order based on what the sales rate and stuff is. Well, my first sale rate must’ve been slow. They ran out.

So if you actually, if you actually go online right now and try and buy it, you can buy the hardcover, you can buy the Kindle, but the paperback, they’re out. I’m not, they told me, I called them. I complained.

Yeah. I mean, it’s a nice problem, right? But I called them. I complained as well.

You know, we’ll be back in stock in a few days, but we got to catch up. So, so, and there’s another place you can buy them at the Bitcoin infinity store in Europe. They’ll take sats.

And so if you’re a European buyer, that’d be a good place to buy it too. Awesome. Yeah.

Well, that’s what you get when you write a good book. Hopefully. Yeah.

Hopefully it works. I mean, Robert, I’m going to measure this by if, you know, my goal is to orange pill the world. Yes.

Yes. If this helps, I call it success. Amen to that.

That’s another, again, the alignment of Bitcoiners, right? I think that’s all of our goal. Right. It’s all of our goal.

There’s, there’s sort of like the selfish perspective. Oh, of course, it’s to pump your bags. But there’s also this major selfless component, right? Where you’re like, no, this is actually really important for the human race.

Absolutely. The biggest, I mean, people ask me a lot of times, what, what, what do you think the best thing about Bitcoin is? I say, and the worst. Yeah.

I mean, I just, to me. For sure. And, and, well, and get the corruption out of government.

Yeah. I’m so tired of this shit. It’s your one and the same, right? Right.

Yeah. I’m just so tired of this shit. I mean, doge all this stuff they’re finding.

I mean, come on. It’s unreal. It’s just horrible.

I mean, you just, we’ve become so, we’ve normalized all of this corruption. Like I said, oh, it’s just inevitable. And that’s what humans do.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not that.

It’s not. It really is an emergent property of the incentive structure. Correct.

And when you’ve got a monetary system that can’t be cheated, and it’s by definition fair, because it’s a mathematical protocol. Yes. Everything else will get better.

I swear it will. I know it will. Yeah.

I’ve heard someone quote Jeff Booth describing Bitcoin as like forced cooperation. Again, it’s this weird paradoxical thing. It’s like, it doesn’t actually force.

You know, it’s just incentivizing cooperation. Correct. But it kind of like.

That’s a good point. It takes the, it just make, the way I always like to say it, which is a little bit abstract, I guess, is like, it makes coercion less profitable. Correct.

So people stop doing it as much, right? They start cooperating and stop coercing. Yeah. That’s a beautiful thing.

That’s what we want. It’s what humans are really designed to do. It’s a totally beautiful thing.

Yeah. I mean, I say it in the book. I mean, one of the things is, I think the reason that the world is as bad as the wrong people are winning.

Yeah. You know, the people who figured out how to game the system, they’re winning and they’re not good people. That’s right.

I mean, I, you know, I guarantee you that a government run by Bitcoiners would be a much fairer world than the one we’re in now. Yeah. Based on the Bitcoiners I know.

For sure. And it may not even, it’s probably not going to look anything like the government. Well, that’s right.

I mean, I talk about that too. I think there’s a good chance that, you know, we move to more decentralized governments, more like Switzerland. I mean, what do we really need a big federal government for? I mean.

Nothing. Yeah. I mean, you used my father’s vision.

I was like, well, to protect the homeland, right? Right. And to extract tariffs. There aren’t that many threats.

I mean, my gut is if we went around the world and said, hey, we’re going to dismantle our nuclear, you know, arsenal, you all can do it, you know, should do it as well. I bet we’d get agreement around the world. And then we’re going to create a multinational task force that’s going to be able to inspect any time, any place, anywhere.

And anyone found working on it is going to spend the rest of their life in prison. Yeah. So we get rid of that issue, the nuclear threat.

And then, you know, we’re going to dismantle our military because we just don’t think that’s necessary. And, you know, it’s like, you know, the government, in my view, what the founding fathers envisioned was just that the government would be a fair referee. Yeah.

I would be so happy to pay 10% of my gross income every year to a federal government to provide me with police and courts. Preserve life, liberty, property. Yeah.

And just, I want criminals in jail. Yeah. I want, you know, I want the laws to be followed.

That’s it. That’s all. If the government did that, huge win.

Yeah. This is the trap, right? This is the trap we’ve been in since time immemorial. It’s like, who’s going to watch the watchdogs? Right.

We’ve always wanted that ideal. But the corruption, you know, you put someone in that position, they’re like, oh, I’ve got all this power. Why not? Why not do this? Stuff my pockets with it.

Yeah. Why not do that? Yeah, no, that’s right. Yeah.

Decentralization does seem to be the key. And again, that’s just not something you achieve technologically. Like, even with Bitcoin, it’s like Satoshi didn’t make it decentralized.

You know, like it had to go through this growth process to become battle hardened and decentralized in an organic way. Right. It’s not something you created in a lab.

Like, again, you can create the conditions for it to flourish in that way, but you can’t guarantee it or, you know, it’s an interesting thing. Yeah. Look, the book says this, and I really do believe it.

Technology is going to save us. Yeah. I mean, the microprocessor, the invention of the microprocessor by Shockley and Intel in the early, you know, 50s, 60s.

I mean, it’s going to save us. Yeah. Thank God.

I mean, we were headed towards doomsday, and the internet’s breaking down these big, you know, structures, and, you know, we’re all getting more information. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s a very, very bright future ahead, really. It’s going to be fantastic.

We just need to kill these central banks. I mean, they need to be just put under. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I like what G. Edward Griffin wrote at the end of The Creature from Jekyll Island, that we were going to slay it with a thousand lances of truth. Yeah, that’s a good line. And, you know, he’s still not a Bitcoiner, probably because he’s in his 90s.

But I think Bitcoin or, you know, Bitcoiners are those lances of truth. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

So you’ve got kids. I got kids. But they’re not kids, right? Right.

They’re in their 20s. Yeah, they’re in their 20s. Okay.

How do you interact with them on this topic? Like, obviously, there’s a lot of tumultuous stuff coming up that we’re going to need to navigate. How do you try and advise them or prepare them for the future you see? Well, yeah. So first of all, I’ve orange-pilled them all and successfully.

They all kind of get it. They think dad’s a little crazy. Mom thought dad was really crazy in the early days.

And I’m a little less crazy now because it’s kind of working. Mom’s like, hey, maybe you weren’t so nuts. You know, I just say to them, hang on.

You know, better times are coming. You know, one or two of them are maybe thinking of shifting over into doing more work in the Bitcoin space. You know, but they’re all kind of in a pickle.

They’re all doing really well. They all have really good jobs. I’m proud of them.

They’re very successful. But like kids in their 20s, they look around and think, how the hell am I going to buy a house? I don’t have any money. I was crazy.

You know, and I’m just kind of like, you know, calm down. Do well. Do what you’re doing.

Do what you love. Do what you enjoy. Add value.

Save in Bitcoin. And they all do. And you know, better things are coming for you.

You know, but I get it. I mean, I get, you know, a lot of people on Twitter, you know, hammer the boomer generation, a lot of greedy boomers. And I get how these younger generations feel like they’ve been dealt a shitty set of cards.

They have. Yeah. I don’t dispute that.

But in turn, you know, we can fix that. Yeah. You know, and they can fix that.

They can help fix it. You know, they can orange peel their friends. Yes.

I mean, Booth said to me, we had a nice dinner out in the Middle East when we were at the Mina show. And he said to me, he said, you know, if we could just get everybody to adopt this shit, that system would fail so fast that your head would spin. Yeah.

But, you know, the adoption phase, I mean, that’s therefore, you know, OK, I’m thinking around, what can I do to help with adoption? All right. I know this shit pretty well. I’ve been doing this for a while.

I can write. I’ll write a book. Yeah.

Right? Yeah. And I’m done. I’m not writing a second book.

And I’m probably, and I think I may do a Trace Meyer. I may, you know, after a few years here, I’m going to kind of fade away a bit. Yeah.

I’m not, I’m not young. My wife wants to travel a lot. I got a lot of books I want to read.

I got a lot of fitness I want to pursue. Yeah. So I may become less, less available as a Bitcoiner in the, you know, in five years, I may not be doing this, but that’s OK.

Well, you guys, you guys will carry on without me very well, I’m sure. Well, your contributions are much appreciated. Well, that is for sure.

You know, there’s a lot of young Bitcoiners, but I think we need that healthy dose of wisdom from people in your generation. That’s what I bring. I bring the experience.

It’s a stabilizing force because, you know, young Bitcoiners get a little bit too out over their skis on things sometimes, whether it’s their ideas or whatever. Yeah, but it’s all good. It’s all good.

The enthusiasm is what counts. But it needs balance, basically. Correct.

So I like when there’s, I like older generation Bitcoiners because it brings balance to the force. So, well, before you ride off into the sunset, I am a father. I have a six-year-old daughter.

Right. Uh, what advice would you give a father of a young child? Yeah, just boy, it goes to, I mean, this is trite. Everyone says it goes so goddamn fast, Robert.

Yeah. You’re going to, before you know it, she’s going to be gone. So, um, never miss a family vacation.

If I look back at my age now and my kids and we all get together and talk, we remember every vacation, all the funny shit that happened. It was like so goddamn special. Do you know what I mean? And we did everyone we could, everyone we could afford and the time we could get, you know, the kids have school breaks.

And then of course we did summers. Just, just spend time as much time as you possibly can, because, you know, someday they’ll be gone. And, and that, you know, those, those memories are irreplaceable.

I mean, I read a great book. I can’t recall the name of it now, but it talked about, um, you know, what wealth gets you and what wealth really gets you as experiences. And at my age now, you know, it’s not that car I owned a while ago.

That’s it’s that time I spent the money I didn’t even have to go on that ski trip with my buddies and all the funny shit that happened. Do you know what I mean? That memory is never going away ever. So, um, I would suggest to all young people, you know, um, don’t cheat yourself on the things that make a life.

You know what I mean? I mean, when I was in my twenties and thirties, I worked like a dog and I mean, and I had chances to do some fun stuff and I thought, nah, I can’t afford it. Or I don’t have the time. And as I look back now, I have regret.

I could have afforded it somehow and I could have made the time. Do you know what I mean? And with my kids too, same thing. So I would just say, you know, be, you know, work like, work like a dog, do, do everything you can to better yourself, improve your life, get ahead, all that other stuff.

But don’t forget why you’re really here. Cause someday it’s all over. And, and those memories are what you cherish.

I mean, I, at my age now, I really cherish those memories in a big, big way. I mean, you know, I didn’t like going to Disneyland. I didn’t like the prices.

I thought it was a fucking rip off, et cetera, et cetera. But I took, you know, my wife and we took our kids to Disneyland twice and they, they still talk about how much they loved it. You know what I mean? I just did it because I had to do it.

We just did it this past December. I took my daughter to Disneyland and she had an amazing time. The look in her eyes was all worth it for us.

It was like, why am I doing this? Right. And every time you turn around, they hit you for another, Hey, take a picture and spend $50. Right.

It was, yeah, it was an interesting experience to see that whole thing, but the children love it. Exactly. And, and, and, and that’s, and by the way, that’s what they remember.

And that’s what they tell me. I mean, they’re like, Hey dad, stop working so hard and, you know, spend time with us. Yeah.

That’s, that’s really what they want. That’s a beautiful message. Beautiful place to bring it to a close.

Oh yeah. Thank you. Thanks so much.

Yeah. It was really an honor to be with you. And like I say, I mean, in our, in our mutual quest to orange pill, the world we’re each pulling a different or, but you know, yes, the boat’s moving, going in the same direction.

We’re going in the same direction. Yeah. Thank you.

Absolutely. I love talking to you, Larry. You always have so much insight and yeah.

Grateful to have you come and join me here. Where can people, yeah. The book is the big print.

The big print is on Amazon. The paperback will be back soon. We’re out now, probably by the time this comes out, it’ll be back.

It’s also, I’m going to, there will be a big print book website, which will be available for group orders and signed copies. I haven’t done that yet, but it’s coming. There’ll be an audible version that’s coming.

I’m on Twitter. Everyone knows I make a lot of noise there. I’m not friendly to the central banks.

It’s just Lawrence LaPard. My website is ema2.com. I run a fund. My partner and I, David Foley, do that.

I’m involved with something called the Bitcoin Opportunity Fund, which is killing it. They were up 64% last year. They do Bitcoin, Bitcoin Venture and Bitcoin public companies.

One of the biggest holdings is MicroStrategy, which helped a lot. They’re raising money right now. Qualified investors can do that.

It’s 200 grand. So lots of ways to find me and I’ll be out there making noise. I’m going, I’ll tell you the shows I’m going to this year.

I’m going to BitBlock Boom in Dallas. I’m going to Las Vegas, Bitcoin. I’m going to Prague.

And I might go to Cheat Code. I don’t know yet. I’m trying to make a decision on that.

But anyone who’s there, please come say hello. And I’m happy to sign books for free. So if you got the book.

I’m not going to carry tons of books to these things because they’re too heavy. Larry, thank you so much. Thank you so much, Robert.

Really a pleasure to be with you. Enjoyed it. Thanks for watching.

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