Latest / Simply Bitcoin / Lawrence Lepard | Simply Bitcoin IRL

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Lawrence Lepard | Simply Bitcoin IRL · Simply Bitcoin

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  Everybody is just scrambling for every last dollar and people
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  can't retire because they don't know if their savings are going,
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  how long their savings will last because they're going to be
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  debased. What should be the appropriate
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  Bitcoin allocation? The Bitcoin price is roughly at
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  100K. I think a lot of people were
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  anticipating it for it to be a lot higher by now.
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  People are talking about diminishing returns.
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  They're saying the cycles. What are your thoughts on that?
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  Yeah. So look, it's doing just what it
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  should be doing. The next stop is at 140.
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  People ask me, what do you think the best thing about Bitcoin is?
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  I'd say the best thing about Bitcoin is that it might end
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  wars. That's very powerful.
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  What do you could you elaborate a little bit on that?
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  Hello. We're here in Miami Beach with
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  the one the only legendary Larry Leopard's Larry congratulations
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  on her new book the big print. Thank you.
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  What happened to America and how sound money will fix it.
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  What I said last time we were speaking about this is what
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  impressed me is how fast you wrote this book.
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  We ran into each other Nashville conference and we were just
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  having a conversation. So Nico, I'm thinking about
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  writing a book and three or four months later, here we go.
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  What inspired you? What motivated you to do?
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  A little more than that. So the, the, the genesis of this
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  was looking at a TV program with my wife in the spring and
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  watching the blue team argue with the red team and getting
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  incredibly mad and frustrated that nobody was talking about
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  the core issue. Right.
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  And I hate all politicians except a few libertarians like
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  Ron Paul. And, and what I thought was, you
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  know, they're just not talking about how to really drain the
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  swamp. And the problems the country
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  faces, in my opinion, are all driven by the unsound money, not
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  all the other stuff. The other stuff is their
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  problems for sure. But that's not the core issue.
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  And I thought, you know, nobody's really explained it
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  well. And then I thought, well, no,
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  people have. I mean, book is fantastic, Lynn
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  book is fantastic. Just books.
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  But you know what? I give those to people and
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  people bog down. They seem to be a little
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  textbookie and unless you're really deep into Bitcoin and
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  this stuff, you can get lost in them.
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  And so I thought somebody ought to try and write a book that's
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  really easily understandable by any person with no financial
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  background, you know, just a common American And they know
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  one thing for sure. They know they're getting
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  screwed by inflation. Everyone in the world
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  understands that today. They go to the grocery store and
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  they say what's wrong, but they don't really understand why.
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  And a lot of times they're being gas lit by these people who are
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  saying, well, it's a greedy corporations and it's not the
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  greedy corporations, it's the Fed.
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  And so I thought, you know, I've been in this area a long time
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  pre Bitcoin was a sound money guy with gold.
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  And I'm probably kind of uniquely suited to maybe tell
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  the whole story from the beginning.
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  And so I wrote a book that I hope, I mean, my my fondest wish
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  for this book, Nico, is I want to orange build the world.
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  So I just decided I'm going to try and write a book that's easy
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  to understand, but lays it out so that a common person will go,
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  Oh my goodness, I now understand why I'm getting screwed.
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  And that's the bad news. The good news is I now
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  understand what I can do about it.
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  And so, as you know from the book, it's in two parts.
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  Part 1 is the problem, Part 2 is the solution.
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  Absolutely. And one of the things to layer
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  that that really, really impacted me is most of society
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  is still asleep, Yes, to the idea or to the problem that
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  they, they don't understand that money can exist without
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  inflation. Yes.
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  And they continue to seek a political solution.
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  Yes, where the solution is not a political one, it's fixing the
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  money itself. It's and it's related to
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  politics because the Fed controls the money and we've got
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  to end the Fed. But you're correct.
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  I mean, and I noticed that in a lot of younger people, you know,
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  they people just think, well, inflation, we always have had
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  inflation. We'll always have inflation.
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  It's a bad thing. We've just got to learn to live
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  with it. And I'm here to say, no, you
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  don't. I was around in the Sixties, 70s
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  and 80s. We had a lot of inflation, 70s.
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  But but I remember what the country was like before we got
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  as financialized and as broken as we are today.
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  And so again, you asked me what motivated me.
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  Part of what motivated me was somebody's got to explain to
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  everybody who's young now that it wasn't always this messed up,
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  you know, that there was actually a time when America had
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  other problems, but this wasn't one of them.
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  If you think about the America that existed post World War 2,
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  we were a great country. We had won the war.
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  We were, you know, widely admired.
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  You know, we didn't enter into any new wars for a while or mess
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  around in Korea. And then Vietnam came later, but
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  for quite so. And inflation wasn't a problem
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  in the 50s and 60s and 70s, early 70s.
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  And then, of course, the big event that started the whole
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  downhill roll in terms of this problem was Nixon going off the
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  gold standard in 71. One of my favorite charts in the
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  book is on page 22, where I show the history of inflation since
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  the founding of the country and then what happened in 71.
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  And of course, it's just a hockey stick, right?
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  I mean, we went off the gold standard and inflation suddenly
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  became a serious problem, and we really haven't solved it since
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  that time. Absolutely.
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  One of the things too in the book that that that really stuck
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  out to me. You sent me APDF version early
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  on, said that the founders themselves, the founders of the
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  US, they saw it as a form of counterfeiting.
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  Is that? Correct.
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  Yeah, Yeah. I mean, in fact, there was even
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  a law, and it's in the book, it talks about this.
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  There was a law that said anybody who debased and
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  counterfeited the currency would be punishable by death.
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  And Edwin Griffin, in his book The Creature from Jugger Hinde,
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  said, well, if we apply that law today, the Senate, the Congress,
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  the Treasury Department and the president would all have to be
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  executed. And I just thought that was a
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  great quote. But yes, I mean, they, they,
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  they put it in the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, where they
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  said only gold and silver sound money can be currency.
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  And of course, you know, that's based on, they did that based on
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  what happened when the first monetary default occurred, when
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  we fought the Revolutionary War, they printed something called
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  the Continental. And of course the Continental
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  hyperinflated. So they were very much aware of
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  this problem. And the book talks about that
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  entire history. And it's interesting our
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  forefathers understood this. And to be frank with you, you
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  know, the authors of the Bible understood this.
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  I mean, they talk about honest weights and measures, and
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  dishonest weights and measures are an abomination to God.
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  I mean, monetary tomfoolery, It's been going on for a long
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  time. And the people who can control
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  the monetary system, they can make themselves fabulously rich,
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  and that's what's happened. And I think that mechanism is
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  poorly misunderstood. Yes, totally.
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  There was a there was a quote you were you're quoting a
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  Rothschild, I believe it says give me control of the nation's
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  money supply and I care not who makes the law exactly.
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  Could you explain, Larry? And let's make this an
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  educational thing, right? And people are, I'm assuming a
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  lot of people are going to watch this one.
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  What is the Federal Reserve? Yeah, sure.
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  So the Federal Reserve got created in 1913, and it is the
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  body in the United States that controls the supply of money.
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  It's our Monetary Authority. It's a private corporation.
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  It's actually owned by the member banks.
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  But it's it's a funny beast. It's kind of private and public
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  because it was created by Congress and Congress
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  theoretically overseas it. I mean, if Congress decided
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  tomorrow to vote to end the Federal Reserve, they could.
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  But of course, you know, the Congress has wined and dined by
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  the Fed and the, and the Fed has convinced Congress that they're
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  absolutely essential to the well-being of the country, which
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  I would argue they're not. But the Federal Reserve controls
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  the money supply through the issuance of currency.
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  And they were theoretically formed in order to balance out,
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  you know, swings in in inflation and deflation and so on and so
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  forth. And those were occurring pre
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  Federal Reserve, but frankly, they weren't as severe or as big
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  as what happened after the Fed got created.
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  So the Fed got created in 1913. We immediately went into World
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  War One. They immediately violated their
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  charter and they started printing money to finance World
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  War One. And between 1916 and 1920, the
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  price level in the country doubled.
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  OK, so huge inflation based on paying for the war.
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  And, you know, that created a lot of societal problems.
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  We had, you know, the Ku Klux Klan came back big time.
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  We had all kinds of race riots in a number of major cities.
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  We had enormous labor strikes, etcetera.
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  I mean, imagine, you know, you're a worker in 1916 and
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  you're making a certain wage. And then, you know, basically
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  six years later, everything cost twice as much and your wages
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  haven't kept up with it, which is kind of what's going on now,
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  right? And so, so the Fed is this body
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  that controls the issuance of the money supply.
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  And as Milton Friedman said, money is always a monetary
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  phenomenon. So a society, you know, produces
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  goods and services. You know, doctors provide a
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  service. People make widgets.
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  Those are goods and the dollars that we have are those they are
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  claims against the goods and services and the price we pay
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  for them balances the claims against what's provided.
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  If you suddenly decide you're going to double the amount of
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  dollars in existence, which is what happened in World War 2,
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  the price of everything double S because the same number of
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  people, same number. You didn't double the number of
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  goods and services, you just double the number of dollars.
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  And so the price goes up. And this has been the continual
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  and recurring pattern, Nico, that basically the federal
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  government has caused American, average American people to
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  suffer because anytime the banks get in trouble, and the Fed was
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  created to backstop the banks. It was a cartel of the banks,
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  really. Anytime the banks got in
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  trouble, the Fed prints the money to bail them out.
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  And it looks like, you know, that's what they should do and
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  what they must do. Although I talk about the
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  alternatives and, and in fact, what it does is it increases the
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  cost of gasoline and it increases the cost of food.
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  So more or less we all pay for the Fed's mistakes and for the
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  bank's mistakes. And it's just, it's terribly
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  inefficient and it's terribly unfair because the bankers and
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  the, the wealthy people, there are wealthy people in this
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  country and you know, who are smart and they actually know how
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  to make inflation work for them. We call them quintillionaires.
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  And that's another whole other thing we could define.
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  But the bottom line is smart people know how to borrow money
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  cheap and buy assets that pay more.
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  And so they, and with inflation, they actually get richer,
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  whereas people who are working for a fixed wage, their wages
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  don't go up as fast and they actually get poorer.
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  And, and it's very, very unfair. And America was built on the, on
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  the concept and the promise of fairness.
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  And, and it's being violated. And it's, it's been violated for
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  a long time. And, and I think what's coming,
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  what we're coming to a head is it's now getting to be so bad
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  and so obvious that I think the book is timely, that you know
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  what I mean, that I think a lot of people are going to read it
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  and go, Oh my God, you're right. We got to fix this.
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  And that's the goal. And we're on the verge of what I
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  would call the great awakening. I think we're on the verge of
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  people really waking up. And I think, you know, some
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  signs of that. Was this recent election with
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  Trump what just happened? Can you hear me now?
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  Yeah. Exactly the complete rebuttal of
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  the legacy media. And then now we're finding out
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  that it was USAID that was funding that whole apparatus.
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  It's unbelievable. We've been gas lit and lied to
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  consistently. And the book talks about what a
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  beautiful thing the Internet is because the Internet, it's what
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  has allowed you and me to speak like this and communicate with
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  thousands and millions of people around the world.
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  It's what's allowed Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan to become
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  more important than CNN and people that the scales are
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  falling away from their eyes and they're coming to realize, hey,
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  you know what? I've been lied to and I've been
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  screwed. And the good news is we
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  outnumber, you know, the people who control this system, the
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  elites in the media, the elites in the government, you know, all
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  the people who run the system the way they run it.
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  That takes advantage of the average man.
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  We outnumber them vastly where they they've had the advantage
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  of having all the information and control of all these
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  systems, But guess what? We're taking that advantage
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  away. 100% you know the the systems are are falling apart.
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  I call it the great disintermediation.
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  Exactly. And the Internet really allowed
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  mass scale, mass scale peer to. Peer communication saved by
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  technology. Yes, as Jeff Booth says, it's
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  wonderful. It's absolutely wonderful.
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  My view is it'll happen without Larry or without Nico.
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  But I've got a limited window here.
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  You know, at age 67, I want it to happen faster, right?
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  I want to see it happen. Therefore, I wrote the book.
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  Yeah. I mean we, I mean it's.
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  Like let's accelerate this, right?
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  We all contribute and what I saw this narrative trench warfare on
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  the battlegrounds and the Internet.
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  That's exactly right. I want to ask you something,
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  Larry, because this goes down a deeper rabbit hole.
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  Sure, the Federal Reserve was established in 1913.
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  Yes, the income tax was also established in 1913.
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  Is that a coincidence? I don't think so.
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  I don't think so. I mean, and the federal
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  government exists to protect itself.
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  And there's some great charts and I'm it's fabulous to see
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  Trump and Bescent saying 18, 70 to 1913 was a really prosperous
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  period. And they're right because we
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  were on a sound money standard. The sound is money at that time,
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  which was gold. And if you go back and you look
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  at the revenues, this country didn't have an income tax pre
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  1930. This wasn't a bad country from
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  1789 to 1913. It was a pretty good country.
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  Where did all the revenue come from the federal government
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  from, from tariffs. So, you know, people say, hey,
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  you know, Trump is tariff man. Well, it might actually make a
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  lot of sense. Let me ask you something, Larry,
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  and you were alluding this to to this earlier.
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  Did the establishment of the Federal Reserve in the United
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  States enable World War One and World War 2?
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  I think so. I think so.
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  I mean, I look, World War 2 is a different case, a little more
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  existential, you know, some bad stuff going on.
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  But yes, I think that these printing money has been used and
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  the book shows this printing money has been used to pay for
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  war since the War of 1812. I mean, this suspended species
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  redemption in 1812 to pay for that war.
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  The bottom line is war is incredibly expensive.
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  Nobody wants to pay for it. So what are you going to do?
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  If you're a government, you're going to come to your citizens,
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  say, hey, we're going to tax 100% to pay for this war.
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  Citizens are going to go, yeah, like, like hell you are.
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  We're going to revolt. So they know they can't do that.
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  But if they have a sneaky mechanism to tax you indirectly,
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  which is basically what inflation is, well, then they
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  can pay for the war, right? And that's what they've done.
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  And that, in my view, that's actually one of the most
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  positive things. People ask me, what do you think
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  the best thing about Bitcoin is? I'd say the best thing about
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  Bitcoin is that it might end wars.
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  I mean, yeah. And that's really, that would be
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  wonderful, right? The reason I answered that
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  question is it's such a powerful statement.
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  And I believe it was Ron Paul who originally said, you know,
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  it's not a coincidence. It's simple century.
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  Of course it is. Yeah.
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  It's not a coincidence of the century of central banking.
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  Is the century the the bloodiest century in human history?
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  That's it's in the book. Yeah, that's exactly right.
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  Yeah. So let me ask you something.
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  What is your take on because I, I think from a historical
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  context, right? Initially you had Trump going
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  in, in, in 2016 and he was the outsider candidate.
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  And then they did everything in their power to stop this guy.
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  You know, the law fair, the assassination, the the some that
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  election was quite interesting in 2020 to put it nicely.
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  Where are we in a historical perspective?
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  Because I know that you are a big fan in the fourth turning
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  theory us. So where are we?
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  Well, I think we're deep into it now.
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  I mean, if you if the 4th turning theory, for those who
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  don't know, is the theory that every 80 years you have a crisis
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  that gets resolved with a change of the rules.
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  The last one before this was the Depression, World War 2.
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  Before that it was 1865. The Civil War before that was
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  1776. Those were all 4th turnings.
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  We're in another one. It's 80 years, 80 plus years
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  from World War 2 right now. And I think what's going to get
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  resolved here is what Robert Breedlove says, which is we're
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  going to determine what money is.
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  If you, if you look at these 4th earnings, they tend to last
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  between 10 and 30 years. And if you look at this one, I
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  mark the start of this one as 2008.
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  So we're more than 10 years into it.
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  We're coming up on at 2028. We'll be 20 years into it.
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  So we're going to resolve this money issue, in my opinion, in
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  the next 10 or 15 years, maybe sooner.
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  And where do you think Trump fits in all this?
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  Oh, he's, you know, he's a godsend in terms of being a
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  disruptor, right? I mean, he's had the courage.
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  I mean, thank God he wasn't killed.
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  I mean, it was almost divine. That bullet didn't hit his head.
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  He turned his head at the right time.
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  And he's a disruptor of the system.
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  And honestly, he's not perfect, but he's learning and growing.
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  I mean, I sure like Trump two more than I like Trump 10.
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  He's getting more intelligent people around him.
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  I mean, some of the people on his team I love, I love Tulsi
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  Gabbard. I love RFK junior.
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  You know, he threw out Pompeo, who was a neo con.
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  You know, I, I think Trump, Trump won O he didn't really
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  fully understand what he was up against.
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  And, you know, although he might have won the 2020 election, in a
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  certain sense, it's it's poetic that he didn't the other side
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  did. They totally misplayed their
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  hand and made things much, much worse.
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  And as a result, he was able to regroup his forces and get a
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  better team around him. And I'm extremely hopeful for
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  what he can do here. Now, you know, having said that,
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  nobody's perfect, right? I mean, when I saw, and I just
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  have to say this because for the wreck, when I saw Melania coin
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  and Trump Coin, I was like, oh man, come on, dude, you're not
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  selling steak knives with the Trump with the Trump name on
• 15:59
  them. Are you you?
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  Know the the timing of it could have been better three days
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  before the inauguration, but I think.
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  A lot of look, I forgive him that, but it just wasn't great
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  in my view. No, it definitely wasn't.
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  And I think a lot of Bitcoiners are getting their first taste in
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  politics. Yeah, which is like politics is
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  the definition of the organization of power.
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  And there's a lot of. Concessions and there's
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  compromise. I mean, look, we've dragged
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  along all these crypto guys, right?
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  I mean, we've got some crypto guys hanging out in the
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  strategic reserve. It should be a strategic Bitcoin
• 16:27
  reserve, but the crypto guys want a seat at the table.
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  And I'm not wild about that. But hey, they provided a lot of
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  votes and a lot of support and they helped get him elected.
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  And so, OK, you know, if they're going to get a seat at the
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  table, fine. I mean, I think most of the
• 16:39
  other crypto is going to fail and go away.
• 16:41
  So it doesn't really matter what what I think is most important
• 16:43
  here is that Bitcoin is in the game.
• 16:45
  They understand what it is. We got the Loomis bill that
• 16:48
  might have a chance of passing. They're clearly going to hang on
• 16:51
  to the 200,000 coins they have and hopefully they're going to
• 16:53
  stack more. Absolutely.
• 16:55
  And one of the things also that that stuck out to me through
• 16:59
  this whole very historical occurrence is that if they just,
• 17:03
  and you were saying it earlier, if they just let Trump take a
• 17:07
  second term, right, I don't think that would have created
• 17:11
  this mobilization of our industry to throw our hat in the
• 17:14
  ring into politics. That might be true.
• 17:17
  Bit pointers didn't want to get into this.
• 17:19
  We were forced into this because of Operation Choke Point 2.0.
• 17:23
  Yeah. And all the hostility because of
• 17:24
  the bite administration. I think Trump and the Republican
• 17:27
  Party saw that as an opportunity to get votes, and they jumped on
• 17:30
  it. And it was great.
• 17:31
  It worked. Hey, you know, I will.
• 17:32
  Look, we'll ride that. It's good.
• 17:34
  It works. Yeah.
• 17:35
  But it's almost as if it was divine, the whole thing.
• 17:38
  Well, it really is. You're looking at this and then
• 17:39
  and then the way he moved his head, like you said, like.
• 17:43
  You know, yeah, yeah, No, I mean, I'm a little spiritual and
• 17:45
  I, I mean, I gotta tell you, when I, when I thought about
• 17:47
  writing this book, I feel like I got tapped on the shoulder and
• 17:49
  it was kinda like, hey, you know what, you should write this.
• 17:52
  Look, this is probably gonna be my 15 minutes of fame, right?
• 17:54
  I think, cuz I think this book might go viral.
• 17:56
  And if it does, you know, I'm gonna thank my lucky stars and,
• 17:59
  and more importantly, thank you know what it'll do what I think
• 18:02
  it could do for the country. And I, you know, I was just very
• 18:05
  well positioned. I mean, I've been suffering with
• 18:07
  the sound money thing for a long damn time.
• 18:09
  I think you and I've had this conversation before where, you
• 18:11
  know, being a gold bug was no fun for the last 30 years.
• 18:14
  Yeah. And then all you guys came along
• 18:15
  and it's like, holy shit, the reinforcements right here.
• 18:19
  I'm fired up. This this movement is alive and
• 18:22
  well. Alive and well.
• 18:23
  I mean, when I had 30 year olds quoting von Mises to me and they
• 18:25
  read the Bitcoin stand and I was like, all right, this is good.
• 18:28
  I mean, we, you know, we might actually end up winning here,
• 18:30
  right? You know, I got Marty telling me
• 18:32
  we're going to win, and I'm like, oh, we're going to win,
• 18:34
  right? Yeah, exactly.
• 18:35
  I mean, it's obvious we are gonna win, right?
• 18:37
  Yeah. So it's good.
• 18:38
  It's good stuff. What do you think about the
• 18:39
  strategic Bitcoin Reserve and the implications of?
• 18:42
  It, it's huge. I mean it's nation state cuz it
• 18:44
  could lead to nation state FOMO. I mean, as an example, I was at
• 18:48
  Nina, I saw Eric speak, I saw Manafort speak and I heard from,
• 18:55
  you know, the Bitcoin Policy Institute guys that basically
• 18:58
  other states are watching what we're doing that sought the
• 19:00
  Saudis, Oman and the UAE are all stacking.
• 19:04
  And they were literally saying, are you guys OK with us
• 19:06
  announcing this and response from the Trump administration is
• 19:09
  sure after we do, we just, we just want to go 1st.
• 19:12
  And so if the US is stacking coins, that becomes a strategic
• 19:17
  imperative for all the countries to consider.
• 19:19
  I mean, you now know that China has to think about it for sure.
• 19:22
  Russia has to think about it. China's pretty averse to it.
• 19:24
  I think Russia's smart enough. I mean, I think Putin gets it.
• 19:26
  I think they're probably stacking coins.
• 19:28
  It is the most as it's what Sailor says is the most pristine
• 19:31
  form of capital in the world. And it's destined to become the
• 19:35
  base layer of money in my opinion, because that it's
• 19:37
  technical superiority. And as a result of that, it's a
• 19:41
  complete first mover game. I mean, you, you know, you get
• 19:44
  it at the price you deserve. And so the sooner you figure it
• 19:46
  out and get it, the better off you are.
• 19:48
  And Max is better off than I am because he figured it out at a
• 19:51
  dollar. Trace is better off than he is
• 19:53
  because Trace figured it out at $0.50.
• 19:55
  Like take a guy like Larry Fink, right?
• 19:57
  I mean a Fiat guy, but smart enough to study it and realize,
• 20:00
  you know what, I either got to get on board this and figure out
• 20:02
  a way to make money doing it, you know, sponsoring an ETF, or
• 20:06
  I'm going to end up like the Vanguard guy and lose my job.
• 20:08
  Yep. And so, and that's kind of how
• 20:10
  it is for everybody. A lot of people I deal with now
• 20:12
  kind of come back and they say, well, yeah, that's great, Larry,
• 20:14
  but you bought a lot cheaper and how can I pay something?
• 20:17
  How can I pay this amount of money, 100,000 a coin for
• 20:19
  something you bought for 400 or 10,000?
• 20:22
  You know, I bought a lot of 50. But my response is.
• 20:25
  Here's the paradigm. It's a critical state problem.
• 20:27
  The monetary system is the Titanic and I got a lifeboat.
• 20:31
  I'm on the I paid 405,010 thousand, 50,000 for my lifeboat
• 20:36
  seats. Here it is to you.
• 20:37
  You got to pay 100,000. You want to see it or not?
• 20:39
  And you know, if I'm right, and if the system does fail, which I
• 20:42
  think it might, you're going to be damn glad you bought a seat,
• 20:44
  even if you have to pay 100,000 for it.
• 20:46
  Of course I mean. It's, I remember Jack Mahler's
• 20:49
  the way that he said it's, it's like, it's like basically saying
• 20:52
  the year is 2025 and you refuse to use the Internet, right?
• 20:55
  It's it's it's the the. Or or Manhattan real estate you
• 20:59
  know as as sailor uses and. The whole, the whole concept of,
• 21:03
  you know, I'm not going to buy because this person bought
• 21:05
  earlier than me. That's more so that's an ego
• 21:08
  test more than anything. Correct, Correct.
• 21:10
  Well, and also, as I say, the critical state thing is
• 21:12
  important because once there's some good charts in here that
• 21:15
  show adoption curves and cell phones, all kinds of things.
• 21:18
  So this is a new technology, it's being adopted.
• 21:20
  We're entering a steep part of the curve.
• 21:22
  And so do you want to be an early adopter or do you want to
• 21:24
  wait? Because the difference is going
• 21:26
  to cost you a lot in terms of price.
• 21:27
  It's a critical state issue because, you know, another
• 21:31
  analogy I like to use is the avalanche analogy.
• 21:34
  You know, at some point Fiat currency is going to fail in my
• 21:37
  belief, in my opinion. So which snowflake is going to
• 21:40
  cause the avalanche to break loose and have it fail?
• 21:43
  I don't know. But there's no, there's no do
• 21:45
  over, you know what I mean? You don't get to say, oh, you
• 21:47
  know, I'm sorry. I kind of wish I'd, you know, I
• 21:49
  wish I'd gotten out of the way before that avalanche, you know,
• 21:52
  broke loose and came down and smothered me.
• 21:53
  What does that look like, Larry? Like when Fiat fails?
• 21:56
  Cuz I feel like that that is ugly.
• 21:58
  It is ugly. It is ugly.
• 22:00
  I'm assuming you've you've heard of of the book Mandibles.
• 22:03
  It's it's in the book, right? There we go.
• 22:05
  Yeah. What does that look?
• 22:06
  Like, I hope so. It it looks a lot of different
• 22:09
  ways, Nico and it. Doesn't.
• 22:11
  And what makes you so confident is going to happen?
• 22:13
  Well, I'm confident it's going to happen because of the math
• 22:15
  and because this is a superior technology and because more and
• 22:17
  more humans are adopting it and people always gravitate towards
• 22:20
  the best solution. And we've now got 15 years of
• 22:22
  evidence that it's the best, 16 years of evidence that it's the
• 22:25
  best solution. But but in terms of the how it
• 22:27
  happens, it doesn't have to be mandibles.
• 22:28
  I don't think it will be. It can, one, it'll take a bit
• 22:31
  longer. It can be more gradual, which
• 22:32
  isn't a funny way. We want it to go up faster, but
• 22:35
  in a funny way, it's a good thing if we get more people on
• 22:37
  board, get more people time to adapt.
• 22:39
  The second thing is, as I talk about in the book, this doesn't
• 22:41
  have to be a brutal total collapse.
• 22:43
  We can do a currency reset. OK?
• 22:45
  This has been done before. Roosevelt did it in 33.
• 22:48
  I mean, we can basically transition back to a sound money
• 22:51
  currency. The problem with America today
• 22:54
  is that the money is unsound and the money is broken.
• 22:57
  You know, title of Lynn's book. And therefore the solution is to
• 23:00
  just go back to a sound money system.
• 23:02
  And there have been lots and lots of societies throughout the
• 23:04
  world that have had broken money.
• 23:06
  And what happens, what you see when you study them and read
• 23:08
  about them is when they go back to sound money, they get better.
• 23:11
  Everything gets fixed, especially if you don't have a
• 23:14
  major war, You know, if we can avoid having a major war.
• 23:16
  I mean, all that's broken here is the money.
• 23:18
  And so, you know, now now, don't get me wrong it when when I'm
• 23:21
  describing a curse, there will be winners and losers.
• 23:24
  The people who don't have sound money will lose on a relative
• 23:26
  basis. The people have a lot of unsound
• 23:28
  money stored in bonds. They're going to get creamed,
• 23:31
  but that's unavoidable. I mean, that's just the way that
• 23:33
  because, you know, the bonds and the the commitments that have
• 23:36
  been made, they're not money good.
• 23:38
  They're not it's, you know, the values are fake.
• 23:40
  I mean, just like in real estate right now, I think some of these
• 23:42
  very high end real estate price, they're just fake.
• 23:44
  Yeah. I mean, people are hiding in
• 23:46
  real estate thinking that'll protect them from inflation.
• 23:48
  But, you know, do you really need a $20 million house or a
• 23:51
  $10 million or a $5,000,000 house?
• 23:53
  It's, it's ridiculous shelter, it's ridiculous and it's and
• 23:56
  it's really stolen my generation's ability to.
• 23:58
  Well, that's right. It's, it's been just complete
• 24:02
  flat out theft. Yes.
• 24:04
  And the frustration. I have friends who are extremely
• 24:07
  successful and they're renting. Right.
• 24:10
  My kids are all in their 20s and they're like, Dad, how am I ever
• 24:12
  gonna buy a house? Yeah.
• 24:14
  And it's absurd. And then that leads me to the
• 24:17
  premise of your book, which is money printing breaks
• 24:21
  everything. Yes.
• 24:22
  How does it? Well, it, it, it creates
• 24:24
  inflation and creation and inflation creates winners and
• 24:28
  losers and it makes wealth inequality really large.
• 24:31
  One of the early charts in the book shows how just out of
• 24:33
  balance the wealth inequality has gotten.
• 24:35
  And again, when I wrote the book, I thought to myself, I, I
• 24:38
  got to write this because I remember America in the Sixties,
• 24:41
  70s and 80s when I was growing up.
• 24:43
  And it had, we had problems. I mean, the Vietnam War was a
• 24:45
  big one, but, but it was a better America.
• 24:47
  There was a vibrant middle class.
• 24:49
  I mean, and one guy could work his, his, his wife could be a
• 24:52
  housewife, he could have a car, they could take vacations.
• 24:55
  I mean, it was just, it was just better.
• 24:57
  And, and now, you know, everybody is just scrambling for
• 25:00
  every last dollar And people can't retire because they don't
• 25:03
  know if their savings are going to how long their savings will
• 25:05
  last because they're going to be debased.
• 25:07
  You know, I mean, think of all the people who work their entire
• 25:09
  life up until 2020, saved up all their money.
• 25:12
  And then in two years, 40% of the money supply got printed.
• 25:15
  We just took away 40% of their labor that they'd saved for
• 25:19
  their whole life. You know, it's criminal.
• 25:21
  I mean, you think of all the people who worked for companies
• 25:24
  who had pensions, you know, and, and now and the pensions got
• 25:27
  taken over by PE firms. And then the PE firms, you know,
• 25:29
  paid out big dividends or the companies got taken over PE
• 25:32
  firms. I talk about this in the book.
• 25:34
  PE firms paid out big dividends and the people's pensions got
• 25:36
  cut. I mean, America has become an
• 25:39
  enormous criminal money grab by the people who were at the top,
• 25:44
  the rich, and the laws are written to favor them and
• 25:47
  protect them. And so when anything goes wrong,
• 25:49
  they get bailed out. Silicon Valley Bank, I mean,
• 25:52
  Bill Ackman cries like a baby. You know, that the banking
• 25:55
  system will fail because he probably had deposits at Silicon
• 25:57
  Valley Bank. And so we bail it out, which is
• 25:59
  in direct contravention of the Dodd Frank law.
• 26:02
  And that happens over and over and over again.
• 26:04
  And I document the cases in the book.
• 26:06
  I mean, it's just unfair. I mean, we used to have usury
• 26:09
  laws when I was young. My parents would get credit
• 26:11
  cards. The maximum interest rate on a
• 26:12
  credit card was 10 or 20%. The average interest rate on a
• 26:14
  credit card is 25%. I mean, the mob would blush.
• 26:17
  So if you're rich, you can borrow money at the Fed funds
• 26:20
  rate or sometimes below, but close to the Fed funds rate.
• 26:22
  If you're average. If you're a normal American,
• 26:24
  you've got to pay 25% to borrow money from the credit cards.
• 26:27
  I'm like, come on. No, it's just, you know, come
• 26:29
  on. I mean, it's just right.
• 26:31
  No, I mean no, I mean of course I mean I I feel my generation
• 26:34
  feels it. We feel it.
• 26:36
  We all feel it. My question though, is like, why
• 26:39
  don't people see the problem? Because you see a lot of
• 26:43
  politicians and I, I don't want to name which side and I think
• 26:46
  it's obvious, but a lot of politicians are saying it's the
• 26:48
  corporation, corporation, they're, they're price gouging.
• 26:52
  You know, they're taking advantage of the situation, this
• 26:54
  and this and that. Why isn't the average Joe aware
• 26:59
  of this? And I know writing this book and
• 27:01
  what we do every single day on on Bitcoin X.
• 27:04
  And I think they kind of are, I mean, I think they're getting
• 27:07
  closer and they're more average Joes that are becoming like us.
• 27:09
  So, you know, the Overton window is moving and it's absolutely
• 27:13
  it's shifting. And there are more average Joes
• 27:15
  in our camp. But, you know, it's
• 27:17
  sophisticated, right? I mean, it's and, and a lot of
• 27:20
  people, they think, well, Gee, maybe I'm doing something wrong.
• 27:22
  Maybe it's my fault. You know, This is why you have
• 27:25
  all these deaths of despair, why you have drug overdoses and
• 27:27
  alcoholism and suicides. I mean, because the game is
• 27:30
  unfair. People know it's unfair and they
• 27:33
  just, they give up. You're poor and you're working
• 27:35
  three jobs just to kind of stay, keep your head above water and,
• 27:38
  you know, keep food on the table and, you know, right.
• 27:40
  Do you have time to read books like this or to go live?
• 27:43
  You know, and, and, and even if you read it, you know, what's
• 27:45
  the problem? And do you really have time to
• 27:46
  write your congressman or go lobby the Fed?
• 27:49
  No, I mean, you're just, you're just trying to stay alive,
• 27:52
  right? But you know, you vote and you
• 27:55
  know, we get more politicians that understand this is the
• 27:58
  issue. You know, we get a Bitcoin or
• 28:00
  politician running for president.
• 28:01
  I mean, we kind of had one. I mean, Trump got pretty close
• 28:03
  to being full Bitcoiner, a libertarian, but we get it.
• 28:05
  So that there's a lot more of that fighting against the people
• 28:08
  who want to see it the other way.
• 28:09
  And guess what we're going to, we're going to gravitate and
• 28:11
  move towards a sound money standard and hopefully do it in
• 28:14
  a controlled and intelligent way so that people don't suffer, so
• 28:17
  that we don't have a mandibles kind of outcome.
• 28:20
  Yeah, and. I love how you brought up the
• 28:21
  Overton window. The Overton window has shifted
• 28:24
  in the last six months more than it has in the last decade.
• 28:28
  Right. It's amazing, isn't it?
• 28:30
  Yeah. I mean, pre January in the ETFs,
• 28:33
  I had everybody in the brother telling me, oh, yeah, that's a
• 28:35
  great dream, Larry. And I understand it.
• 28:36
  And you're, you know, you may be right about all this, but the
• 28:39
  government's never going to allow that.
• 28:40
  Well, then they allow the ETFI was blown away.
• 28:42
  I didn't think the ETF was going to get through.
• 28:43
  Yeah. Right.
• 28:44
  Larry Fink has a lot of influence.
• 28:46
  Well, that's the point, right? See, some people with money got
• 28:49
  involved and, you know, I mean, this is what's going on in the
• 28:51
  gold market right now. I mean, I think the smart people
• 28:53
  are buying gold now. They know, look, anybody with a
• 28:56
  brain that analyzes the macroeconomics of the federal
• 28:58
  government and realizes what a debt doom loop we're in must
• 29:02
  come to the conclusion that you have to have sound money or real
• 29:05
  assets or you're going to get hurt.
• 29:07
  I mean, Ray Dalio, one of the great investors of our time,
• 29:09
  runs Bridgewater. You know, he understands it.
• 29:11
  He's been talking about gold for years and he's finally becoming
• 29:13
  a bitcoiner. He's it's kind of coming to get
• 29:15
  it and everybody will come to get it eventually because it's
• 29:18
  obvious, obvious and it's compelling.
• 29:20
  I noticed that about Ray I saw I saw the I saw the news on next
• 29:23
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• 29:28
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• 29:53
  I do want to ask you about the debt doom loop.
• 29:54
  I want to, I want to double back to that.
• 29:56
  But before I get to that, I want to get your thoughts on the
• 29:58
  recent news of Elon supposedly tapping on Ron Paul to audit the
• 30:04
  federal. Reserve.
• 30:05
  God, I love that. I love.
• 30:06
  Yeah, I mean, Elon's nuts, but I but I like some of what he's
• 30:08
  doing. And wouldn't that be great?
• 30:10
  But here's the problem, you know, Elon doesn't control the
• 30:13
  Congress and the Congress. Only the Congress can audit the
• 30:16
  Federal Reserve. And I'd love to have Ron Paul
• 30:17
  look at the Federal Reserve. You can.
• 30:18
  You can bet your bottom dollar, Nico, that there is no way in
• 30:21
  hell the Fed is going to let them look at anything without a
• 30:24
  congressional act forcing it to occur.
• 30:26
  I mean, you know, you can say, hey, Ron, come on in and look at
• 30:29
  the Fed. The feds going to say F you.
• 30:31
  Did he see Jay Powell's response when when Trump was when they
• 30:35
  asked him, like, do you think Trump's going to fire you?
• 30:38
  And he says he can't fire me. Did he see his?
• 30:40
  Response. I didn't see that, but I heard
• 30:41
  that. Yeah, I heard about it.
• 30:43
  Arrogance. What?
• 30:44
  What blatant? Is this not a government agency?
• 30:47
  It is. Well, what he's what he's
• 30:49
  relying as the law, and the law says that only the Congress can
• 30:52
  fire him. And yeah, it is that is the law.
• 30:55
  That's technically the law. So so, you know, and and I mean,
• 30:58
  here's the thing, it's going to be really hard to get a Congress
• 31:00
  to vote to fire him. I mean, you know, Loomis and
• 31:03
  some, you know, there are people in Congress who would fire him,
• 31:05
  but there aren't enough of them. You know, when?
• 31:06
  I mean, just to give you an example, a good anecdote from
• 31:08
  the book, Judy Shelton is a gold person.
• 31:10
  And she's been around for a long time.
• 31:12
  She's got a pH D, She's very well known, and she advocates
• 31:15
  for going back to a gold standard.
• 31:16
  Ron Paul knows, we all know her. She's a lovely lady.
• 31:18
  And in the first Trump administration, Trump
• 31:20
  recommended that she become a member of the Federal Reserve.
• 31:23
  You should have seen the reaction.
• 31:25
  Oh my God. There was a letter with like 130
• 31:27
  signatories from the Congress, the Senate and major economists
• 31:31
  saying, you know, that her views were I'll timed, dangerous and
• 31:35
  I'll. Consider to democracy is my
• 31:37
  favorite. Yes, right.
• 31:38
  Exactly. And I mean, this is a woman who
• 31:41
  just said nothing more than I want the money to be sound.
• 31:43
  I want savers not to get ripped off, and she's dangerous.
• 31:45
  So we got a ways to go before Congress is going to let anyone
• 31:49
  audit the Federal Reserve. I believe it was a Breitbart
• 31:51
  quote, but it was basically along the lines of politics is
• 31:54
  downstream from culture. So the way that we really shift
• 31:58
  the Overton window, the really the way that we really get
• 32:01
  Congress on our side is to win over the culture.
• 32:04
  And how do we do that? One book at a time, right?
• 32:07
  1X post at a time, one video at a time, really winning over the
• 32:11
  hearts and minds of individuals. Exactly.
• 32:14
  But one of the things to Larry that I found in your book that I
• 32:17
  found quite interesting that perhaps people are not aware of.
• 32:20
  I I, I would say that money printing in this Fiat system
• 32:24
  that we have today gives capitalism a bad name.
• 32:27
  Oh, absolutely. And what you describe is that we
• 32:29
  don't live in a free market society.
• 32:31
  We don't live in a capitalistic society.
• 32:33
  We live in a Keynesian state capitalistic society, also known
• 32:37
  as crony capitalism. Could you describe what that is?
• 32:39
  Yeah, sure. So the insiders in the system
• 32:43
  have an enormous advantage in two respects. 1, we get, we
• 32:48
  grant them cheap access to capital from the Fed.
• 32:51
  And two, we backstop their mistakes.
• 32:54
  It's just that simple. So that a Ken Griffin, you know,
• 32:57
  can put on the the basis trade on the S&P 500.
• 33:00
  And when his trade is tits up in March of 2020, which it probably
• 33:03
  was Ben Bernanke, who is corrupt and is an advisor to Ken
• 33:07
  Griffin, The rumor is he gets paid $20 million a year, can
• 33:09
  make a call to Jay Powell and say you got to give a swap line
• 33:12
  to Citadel or else Citadel's going to go BK.
• 33:15
  And if Citadel goes BK, the whole system will come down.
• 33:17
  And that's always been their defense.
• 33:20
  OK, I mean, Silicon Valley Bank. Too big to fail, Too big to
• 33:23
  fail. Therefore we have to print the
• 33:24
  money. And printing the money bails out
• 33:28
  the bad actors. So the banks, the backstopping
• 33:31
  the banks, which is what we originally did in 1913,
• 33:35
  basically said you guys don't have to play by the rules.
• 33:38
  You can have tails, you know, heads, heads you win, tails,
• 33:41
  tails we lose. And and so in whatever event
• 33:44
  they they do, they're going to get bailed out.
• 33:47
  And so that's crony capitalism. I mean, you know, Warren Buffett
• 33:50
  backed Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs in the GFC when he
• 33:56
  knew it was bankrupt. Everybody knew it was bankrupt,
• 33:59
  but he put in preferred stock with, you know, great conversion
• 34:01
  terms and everything else at the same time, knowing the
• 34:03
  government would bail it out. And then it got bailed out.
• 34:05
  And of course, he made a killing on it.
• 34:07
  You know, there's a story in the book that's one of my favorite
• 34:09
  stories. And people are amazed when they
• 34:10
  read this. And that's, again, something I
• 34:11
  bring because I've been around for a long time and I watched
• 34:14
  all this go down. The chairman of Morgan Stanley's
• 34:17
  wife was able to borrow during the GFC.
• 34:20
  And this is and Matt Taibbi. It's not just me saying this.
• 34:23
  Google Matt Taibbi, Real Housewives of Wall Street.
• 34:27
  OK Rolling Stone. It used to be under a behind a
• 34:29
  firewall or a paywall. It's not.
• 34:31
  You can get it for free now. It's amazing story.
• 34:32
  John Mack's wife borrowed $220 million from the Fed non
• 34:38
  recourse, non recourse at 0% interest rates to buy troubled
• 34:42
  assets. So what does that mean?
• 34:44
  That means they gave her $220 million of purchasing power
• 34:48
  where she could buy distressed assets in early 2009.
• 34:51
  And if they went up in value, she would get to keep the
• 34:54
  profits. And if they went down in value
• 34:56
  and the loan defaulted, the Fed would eat it.
• 34:58
  So, I mean, that's crony capitalism.
• 35:01
  It's nice to be John Mack's wife, OK?
• 35:03
  It's nice to be the chairman of Morgan Stanley and get that kind
• 35:06
  of a deal. You can't get that deal.
• 35:07
  I can't get that deal. But the people at the top can
• 35:10
  get that deal. I mean, this is incredibly,
• 35:12
  incredibly broken. It's financial criminal
• 35:15
  behavior. And it makes sense why it may
• 35:19
  you're telling me this and just having all these stocks going
• 35:21
  ahead. Right, it's.
• 35:23
  No, it would be. It makes sense why they resisted
• 35:26
  Trump as much as they did OF. Course they did.
• 35:28
  He's a he's a threat to their system.
• 35:30
  He knows all this. He knows all this and he wants
• 35:32
  to shut it down. I know all this.
• 35:34
  Lots of people. Ron Paul knows this.
• 35:35
  So, so lots of people know this and and what they've what
• 35:38
  they've done to date. And I'll let you finish ask a
• 35:39
  question. What they've done to date is
• 35:41
  they've thrown us into the conspiracy nut basket.
• 35:43
  You know it's not. Working so much anymore.
• 35:45
  Oh, no, it's not. Yeah, 'cause the conspiracy
• 35:47
  shit's coming true. But you know, they've, I mean,
• 35:49
  I've been called a tinfoil Hatter, all that stuff, you
• 35:52
  know? But guess what?
• 35:53
  It's turning out that we're right.
• 35:54
  Yeah, absolutely. Larry, I just want everyone to
• 35:57
  understand what is the unintended consequences of
• 36:01
  specific people getting specific deals like you just mentioned?
• 36:05
  Like what is the unintended consequence of her essentially
• 36:08
  receiving free money? Because that's the way I'm
• 36:10
  interpreting. It right it is well that that
• 36:12
  free money one adds to inflation 2 makes her rich versus
• 36:16
  everybody else and and and that inflation is why we all pay more
• 36:20
  for food and gasoline. OK, that's that's really, but
• 36:23
  it's subtle because it's, you know, it's spread out over
• 36:26
  1,000,000 of people. Yeah.
• 36:27
  So it's hard to say. Well, you know, Jilly Mac's deal
• 36:30
  cost Nico this amount of dollars.
• 36:32
  Yeah, but, but, but the pattern is there.
• 36:34
  And this is the, you know, the book lays that pattern out.
• 36:37
  It's. Insidious because the the, the
• 36:39
  number on that $100 bill does not change, right?
• 36:43
  The and you're looking at your account, the the count, the
• 36:46
  number is not changing. No, it's the.
• 36:48
  What it'll buy, Yes, it's, I mean very.
• 36:51
  Sinister. That's why eggs are 11 bucks.
• 36:53
  You know, it doesn't now or something.
• 36:54
  I mean, there are other issues with that with Berkeley, but it
• 36:56
  is very sinister. And it's gotten worse.
• 36:58
  Yeah. I mean, there's a great chart in
• 37:00
  the book that shows the wealth inequality.
• 37:02
  I mean, 1% of the country owns 92% of the wealth, right?
• 37:06
  That's crazy, 1%. So it's nice to be the rich in
• 37:09
  this country. And they, you know, they live
• 37:11
  like kings. But guess what?
• 37:13
  They've done that at the expense of everybody else.
• 37:15
  So, you know, sadly, I mean, I understand the complaints of a
• 37:18
  Bernie Sanders. I understand them there.
• 37:20
  It is an unfair system. He's right.
• 37:22
  His solution is just wrong. The solution is not to tax these
• 37:25
  people. The solution is to make the
• 37:27
  playing field level. Yeah, right.
• 37:29
  And let's talk about that, right?
• 37:30
  So it's massive wealth redistribution.
• 37:33
  Yeah, via currency debasement, Yeah.
• 37:35
  So lower middle classes get impacted the most.
• 37:38
  Yeah, because they don't have the means to save in assets,
• 37:40
  right. And the wealth?
• 37:41
  Or borrow cheaply. Or borrow cheaply and the wealth
• 37:44
  is redistributed back to the government and back to the very
• 37:47
  wealthy that do have the means to save an asset.
• 37:49
  Correct. And that's what's causing the
• 37:51
  wealth inequality now. From a historical standpoint,
• 37:55
  every time that wealth inequality reaches a certain
• 37:58
  point, something breaks. I think it's 1789.
• 38:02
  I mean, so we have two, we have to.
• 38:05
  Bring out the guillotine. Well, we had the French
• 38:07
  Revolution, which is, I believe a little bit more of a left wing
• 38:10
  revolution and then we had the American Revolution, which is a
• 38:12
  little bit more of a right wing revolution.
• 38:14
  Now the question is which way do we go?
• 38:16
  Yeah. Well, that's a lot of questions
• 38:17
  there. But but yeah, the fact, the fact
• 38:19
  is that, yeah. And yeah, the Russian Revolution
• 38:21
  as well, same, similar thing. I mean, the fact is that, yeah,
• 38:24
  when a society gets this broken, you know, bad things can happen
• 38:26
  and it could go the wrong way. Look, I mean, the left would
• 38:29
  love to, you know, just tax the hell out of everybody and issue
• 38:32
  universal basic income and make us all live at the same level.
• 38:35
  And that's not right either, because it doesn't provide the
• 38:37
  right incentives for people to work hard and to reward, you
• 38:40
  know, good behavior. The thing that I find so sad is
• 38:43
  that capitalism is a system for bestowing great prosperity on
• 38:48
  mankind. And if you study capitalism from
• 38:51
  1789 to 1913, you look at my grandparents life from 1913 even
• 38:56
  to 1970, look at how much living standards and health.
• 39:01
  And I mean, it was just so fantastic in a solid capitalist
• 39:05
  system. I mean, you know, and and I talk
• 39:08
  about everyone says, well, deflation is a bad thing.
• 39:09
  I mean, we had deflation all throughout the 19th century.
• 39:12
  And yet people got richer and people got wealthier, lives got
• 39:15
  better and the average man could afford a much better life.
• 39:17
  And and now it's the other way around.
• 39:19
  I mean, we're seeing, you know, for the first time in a long
• 39:22
  time, you know, lifespans in America are starting to short.
• 39:24
  Yep, you know, which is a sign that the size something's not
• 39:27
  right. Yeah.
• 39:27
  And that's also something that you mentioned in the book as
• 39:29
  well. There is that you mentioned that
• 39:31
  it summarizes itself. Money printing breaks
• 39:33
  everything, everything. And one of the things that you
• 39:35
  mentioned was health. Absolutely.
• 39:37
  Did you explain why that is? Well, yeah, I mean, because
• 39:40
  because poor people can't buy good food and because poor
• 39:42
  people are working three jobs, you know, and not getting a good
• 39:45
  night's sleep to try and put money on the table.
• 39:47
  And because, you know, we've got big Agra and big you know.
• 39:50
  I mean, you know, why do we have Roundup here?
• 39:51
  I mean, Roundup is a is a herbicide that makes all our
• 39:53
  bread somewhat poisoned. You know, Roundup is banned in
• 39:56
  Europe, but Monsanto's got so much power in the United States
• 39:59
  that Roundup has not been banned here.
• 40:01
  I mean This is why I have so much help for.
• 40:02
  For RFK Junior and his ability to, I mean, we were
• 40:06
  propagandized. I mean, we were told we should
• 40:08
  eat margarine, not butter. That's wrong.
• 40:09
  I mean, Ansel Keys was a person at Harvard that basically was
• 40:13
  paid by the food companies to lie.
• 40:14
  We had this whole food pyramid. Just eat a bunch of carbs.
• 40:16
  No, you're not supposed to eat a bunch of meat.
• 40:19
  I mean, read anything about the Read the Carnivore Code, which I
• 40:21
  just read. I mean, humankinds, we evolved
• 40:24
  to be who we are because millions of years ago, one of
• 40:26
  our ancestors started figuring out how to cook and eat meat,
• 40:28
  and our brains got a lot bigger than chimpanzee brains.
• 40:31
  Yeah. And so we became humans and the
• 40:33
  human machine was meant to be fed meat, period.
• 40:36
  Absolutely. And but, you know, most people
• 40:38
  don't know that. And it's just been a lot of a
• 40:41
  lot of bad, bad behavior and bad thought patterns.
• 40:44
  I mean, you know, the healthcare system is just horribly broken.
• 40:47
  And when Obamacare tripled everyone's, you know, just
• 40:50
  everything in America has become, you know, a money grab
• 40:53
  and grift. Everything I had, my dog was
• 40:55
  sick recently. I took him to a vet clinic.
• 40:58
  The vet clinic was owned by a PE firm, you know, the PE firm.
• 41:01
  They, they convinced me that by doing a bunch of expensive shit,
• 41:03
  they could save the dog. The dog was toast.
• 41:05
  I mean, it was sad, but the dog was dead.
• 41:06
  He was going to die no matter what.
• 41:08
  I found that out later. But you know what, they managed
• 41:10
  to extract thousands and thousands of dollars out of me
• 41:12
  trying to keep the dog alive because we love the dog, right?
• 41:15
  I mean, I, you know, Susie Buddz is a big bitcoiner.
• 41:17
  She was in the medical or in the dental business.
• 41:19
  She said these dental practices are, they're getting bought up
• 41:22
  by PE firms and the PE firms are saying, hey, it's pretty easy to
• 41:26
  just nick that cavity a little bit and suddenly a cavity
• 41:28
  becomes a root canal and you make 3 times as much money.
• 41:31
  Why don't you guys do that? So, you know, advice to
• 41:33
  everybody listening, make sure your dentist is an independent,
• 41:36
  honest practitioner, not part of APE firm owned dental practice
• 41:41
  where they have an incentive to actually make you sicker so they
• 41:44
  can charge you more money. I mean, that's the kind of sick
• 41:45
  shit that's happening. Yeah, it's horrible.
• 41:47
  Yeah, it's absolutely horrible. It it, you know, and it reminds
• 41:51
  me of the, the whole architecture of Fiat.
• 41:53
  And something that I really appreciate about Bitcoin is
• 41:56
  Bitcoin is an aligned incentive structure system.
• 41:59
  So yes, you're holding Bitcoin. Michael Saylor's holding
• 42:02
  Bitcoin, I'm holding Bitcoin and we're all talking about, but
• 42:06
  we're all benefiting from Bitcoin going up.
• 42:09
  We're all. On the same team.
• 42:10
  And the pleb that's holding .01 BTC from a percentage basis?
• 42:15
  He's benefiting just as much as all.
• 42:17
  Of, you know, you're working for me, Michael Saylor's working for
• 42:20
  me, Jeff Booth and Lynn, they're all everybody, everybody in
• 42:22
  Bitcoin is working for everybody else in Bitcoin and there's and
• 42:25
  nobody has an unfair advantage because it's a mathematical
• 42:28
  protocol and it's fair. That's important.
• 42:31
  It's fair. Nobody has an unfair advantage,
• 42:34
  and it took a mathematical protocol and technology to
• 42:37
  create a monetary system that was fair, and that's why it's
• 42:40
  such a revolution. And that's why it's sound money,
• 42:43
  exactly because it's. Fair.
• 42:45
  Because it's fair, yes. And it doesn't matter if you're
• 42:47
  the king, president ever. You cannot create more of it.
• 42:51
  If you want to create more of it, you have to get in line.
• 42:54
  Pay for the cost, mine it like everybody.
• 42:57
  Else or provide a good or service that costs to somebody
• 43:00
  else to sell you their Bitcoin for that good or service.
• 43:02
  Yes. Gotcha.
• 43:03
  OK. I have a bit of a rabbit hole
• 43:05
  question for you, but I've I've spent a lot of time thinking
• 43:09
  about this and a lot of modern day politics are based on this
• 43:13
  idea of equality. Yes, I think in Mother Nature,
• 43:16
  equality is just people are not equal, right?
• 43:19
  There's things, there's things that you're good at.
• 43:21
  There's things that I'm good at, right?
• 43:22
  And. Well, we all have God-given
• 43:24
  gifts and and and limitations, yes, correct.
• 43:26
  Right, Some people could play basketball, some people can't
• 43:28
  play basketball. But the A lot of modern politics
• 43:33
  is based on this idea of equality and the the way that
• 43:36
  they reach equality is via wealth redistribution, right?
• 43:40
  There's two mechanisms. There's direct taxation, there's
• 43:43
  only so much you could do there. And then there is taxation via
• 43:46
  currency debasement. Right now the rabbit hole
• 43:48
  question that I have for you is does the modern left need the
• 43:52
  money printer to be a viable political philosophy?
• 43:54
  I think they do. I think they absolutely do
• 43:56
  because they buy votes effectively, they buy votes and
• 43:59
  and I think it's very important that that there are people who
• 44:02
  strive for economic equality and there will never be total
• 44:06
  economic equality. As you point out, some people
• 44:08
  are more gifted. They they earn, they, they
• 44:10
  contribute more, they earn more. But what you can, what you can
• 44:13
  get in my belief in an economic system is you can get economic
• 44:16
  fairness where the, the playing field is level.
• 44:20
  The referee is fair. The referee is not saying, Oh
• 44:23
  yeah, you're Bill Ackman. When your bank fails, we'll bail
• 44:25
  you out and cover your ass. Oh yeah, you're, you know,
• 44:27
  you're Joe, you know, lunch bucket, you know, working,
• 44:30
  working, average American. Sorry, tough shit for you.
• 44:33
  You know, you get over leveraged in the housing bubble that we
• 44:35
  blew. You can't make the payments.
• 44:36
  We're taking your house. You know we're going to
• 44:38
  Blackrock's going to own it, right.
• 44:39
  So, you know, it's a fair system that we're going after.
• 44:42
  Not an equal system. Not an equal system.
• 44:44
  But I think I think most people understand that because they
• 44:47
  they recognize it. Give me a fair game.
• 44:49
  I'll play. I'll play as hard as I can.
• 44:51
  If somebody wants, if somebody wants something for nothing,
• 44:53
  that's like saying they want to steal.
• 44:55
  Yeah, they want somebody else's labor.
• 44:56
  And that's not fair. Yeah, by definition.
• 44:58
  And, and I think also when you say fairness, that includes
• 45:01
  social mobility, what they think.
• 45:03
  Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 45:04
  All the way across. Yeah.
• 45:06
  There's no, there's no. I mean, that was that was what
• 45:08
  the American Revolution was thought about.
• 45:09
  That there is no royalty. Yeah.
• 45:11
  You know that we're all, you know, we are created equal,
• 45:14
  endowed with, you know, unable rights, a life, liberty and our
• 45:17
  pursuit of happiness. I mean, that's some of the
• 45:18
  greatest words ever written. And that's the that's the
• 45:20
  premise of Americans. What made America great.
• 45:22
  And America still is great. But we've slipped from that.
• 45:25
  Yeah. We've let this, we've let this
• 45:26
  disease get into our monetary system.
• 45:29
  And man, oh, man. I mean, it's really, it's like
• 45:31
  cancer. I mean, as as Ron Paul says, you
• 45:33
  know, what do you. I mean, if we if we end the Fed,
• 45:35
  what are you going to replace it with?
• 45:36
  And he says, well, if you cut on a cancer, what do you replace it
• 45:38
  with? The answer is nothing.
• 45:39
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  Learn more about what your BTC can do for you.
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  Check out leaden dot IO today. Larry, you're a very successful
• 46:54
  guy. You've I've got ups and downs.
• 46:56
  You've, you have very impressive, you know,
• 46:59
  credentials. Well, I went to you.
• 47:01
  I went to good school. She went.
• 47:02
  To Harvard, I believe. Yeah, Harvard.
• 47:04
  Good school. What motivates you to write this
• 47:07
  book? At 67 years old?
• 47:09
  You know you've you've succeeded in life.
• 47:11
  You've travelled the world. You're going to the biggest
• 47:14
  Bitcoin conferences, you're going to Michael Saylor's 100K
• 47:18
  party. You know you're talking to the
• 47:20
  brightest minds in the world. What motivates you?
• 47:23
  My grandmother's voice in the back of my head.
• 47:26
  That's very powerful. What do you could you elaborate
• 47:28
  a little bit on that? Just say and do what's right.
• 47:31
  OK. You know, just the, the just
• 47:35
  saying give back and do what's right.
• 47:38
  You know, she was deeply religious.
• 47:40
  And, you know, I've been given these gifts, you know, the
• 47:45
  education, the intelligence, growing up in a middle class,
• 47:48
  upper middle class family. And, you know, I've seen how
• 47:52
  broken this is, and I've seen people hurting from it.
• 47:55
  And I thought, you know, someday I'll be dead.
• 47:59
  I want my kids and my grandkids to say, hey, that guy did it
• 48:01
  right. That's very powerful.
• 48:06
  Wow. Take a moment here.
• 48:11
  Sorry about that. Generally get emotional, but you
• 48:13
  kind of you kind of hit a hot button.
• 48:14
  For me, yeah, it's wow. So let's let's talk a little bit
• 48:21
  about the middle class upbringing because I think
• 48:24
  that's something that has completely been gutted because
• 48:27
  of of this of essentially the Fiat system.
• 48:30
  How will Bitcoin bring that back?
• 48:32
  Well, you know, it provides, it'll create fairness across the
• 48:36
  board. People won't have to worry about
• 48:38
  money. People will be able to retire
• 48:40
  again. People, it's just going to be a
• 48:42
  fair world. It's going to be a better world.
• 48:44
  We're all going to benefit from this technology.
• 48:46
  There's so many great things happening in the world, Nico.
• 48:48
  I mean, think about what technology has done.
• 48:50
  I mean, imagine, think about all the benefits we've had.
• 48:52
  Think about how TV's and you know, I was saying earlier
• 48:54
  today, I remember being in college as a freshman and long
• 48:57
  distance calls were expensive. So I got to talk to my parents
• 48:59
  once every week for 5 minutes because, you know, that was all
• 49:02
  I wanted to spend on long distance phone calls.
• 49:04
  Local phone calls are effectively free anywhere in the
• 49:07
  world, right? This is the benefit of
• 49:08
  technology that's coming to all of us.
• 49:10
  So all of our lives are going to get much better as a result of
• 49:13
  the technical innovations that we're seeing right now.
• 49:16
  OK, but to make sure they're fairly distributed, we got to
• 49:19
  have a fair system or else the guys at the top are going to
• 49:22
  keep raking off. Yeah, you know, all, all all of
• 49:25
  their peace and benefiting at the expense of the rest of us.
• 49:28
  And that's what's going on. Absolutely.
• 49:30
  So I mean, I know, and I think you feel this way too.
• 49:32
  And if we talk, if you talk to Bitcoiners, I mean, I'm so
• 49:34
  hopeful and so optimistic and and so positive.
• 49:37
  I mean, I, you know, like I watched my dad retire with some
• 49:39
  money, not a lot, some money. By the time he passed, he was
• 49:42
  down, you know, in a little, it's purchasing power was gone.
• 49:45
  I mean, I have 80 year old friends, 70 and 80, three-year
• 49:48
  old friends who are still doing work.
• 49:49
  They have money. They have their houses paid for
• 49:51
  and they have savings. And they're like, well, I don't
• 49:53
  know how long I'm going to live and I might run out of money
• 49:55
  given how, you know, inflation is eating me up, right.
• 49:58
  So you can't really retire in this system safely, you know
• 50:01
  what I mean? Yeah.
• 50:02
  I mean, just having that, just knowing that your purchasing
• 50:05
  power was going to be preserved, it's a very powerful thing.
• 50:08
  Do you think, Larry, did you think that because you've
• 50:12
  identified one of the things that I appreciate about the gold
• 50:15
  bugs, right and the whole gold movement is that you guys really
• 50:18
  started this the whole. Idea sound pretty?
• 50:21
  Yeah. And you guys really identified
• 50:23
  the problems very accurately. Where do you think gold came up
• 50:27
  short? So politically, they figured out
• 50:30
  how to neuter it, I mean. How did they do that exactly?
• 50:34
  Well, paper gold going off the gold standard fractional reserve
• 50:38
  banking. I mean, it's, it's a long litany
• 50:40
  of tales. A lot of it's laid out in the
• 50:42
  book, though, so you'll get a picture of how they did it, but
• 50:44
  gold failed. I mean, it was, it's hard to
• 50:46
  verify, it's hard to transfer. It's heavy.
• 50:48
  You can, you know, you can, you can cover tungsten and gold.
• 50:51
  I mean, they've been fake out, fake gold bars.
• 50:53
  It just, it just didn't work. And we moved to a system of
• 50:56
  ledgers and credits and we moved to a, you know, a fractional
• 50:59
  reserve banking system that basically allowed the banks to
• 51:02
  create money at will. And So what happened is they got
• 51:05
  way ahead of the gold supply, and the money effectively became
• 51:09
  unsound. Now, Lynn would argue that had
• 51:11
  to happen at an engineering level no matter what, and she
• 51:14
  may be right. I would argue that there were
• 51:16
  places where politics intervened and shoved it ahead, the biggest
• 51:19
  one being 71. I mean, Nixon had it.
• 51:21
  I mean, a lot of people say, well, Nixon had to do what he
• 51:23
  did, and that's not true. Nixon could have let the gold
• 51:26
  price float. We would have had gold as a
• 51:27
  neutral reserve currency and we would not have had the inflation
• 51:30
  that we've now had. We would not, you know, things
• 51:33
  we could have maintained glass Steagall as an example.
• 51:35
  And the and the banks wouldn't have been able to pull off 2008
• 51:38
  the way they did. Yeah.
• 51:39
  I mean, so there were there was there were two pieces to it.
• 51:41
  There was politics and then there was some of this, the tech
• 51:43
  development of technology that kind of left gold in the dust.
• 51:46
  I mean, you know, once the Telegraph got developed, I mean,
• 51:48
  before that gold was shipped overseas.
• 51:50
  I mean, the the Pony Express originally, you know, I mean,
• 51:53
  you know, watch Porch Cassidy. I mean, they were blowing up the
• 51:55
  trains that carried the gold with the payroll, you know what
• 51:57
  I mean? I mean, gold was money and you
• 51:58
  had to move it around to make for final settlement.
• 52:01
  Well, you had a Telegraph and suddenly you could start keeping
• 52:03
  a Ledger. So a lot of reasons gold failed,
• 52:05
  but but it did fail and it the failure accelerated a lot with
• 52:09
  the futures and with actually with Bill Clinton and Ruben and
• 52:13
  and Larry Summers. There was an article called
• 52:15
  paper that Summers Povis called something's paradox, Gibson's
• 52:19
  paradox. So in order to get reelected,
• 52:21
  Clinton figured out that if they could mask the price of gold
• 52:24
  going up, they could create inflation and not have it look
• 52:27
  inflationary. The bond vigilantes wouldn't
• 52:29
  know what was going on. And so Ruben, who was an gold
• 52:32
  trader at Goldman Sachs, figured out how to create a lot of paper
• 52:35
  gold. And so, you know, right now and
• 52:38
  what's going on as we speak is that the LBMA is having trouble
• 52:41
  making deliveries, which would maybe argue that we're close to
• 52:43
  the point at which the LBMA blows up.
• 52:46
  And and that's because those of us in the gold camp know this
• 52:49
  there we believe there are as many as 100 claims, paper claims
• 52:52
  for an ounce of gold for every oz that will exist, right?
• 52:55
  So think about that. That's a game of musical chairs
• 52:57
  where if everyone with a paper claim came and said, hey, I'll,
• 53:00
  I'll take it. Give me the I'll take.
• 53:02
  Take the oz, please. Thank you very much.
• 53:03
  The Oz wouldn't be there. It's not a division but a bank
• 53:06
  run. It's a gold.
• 53:06
  Run. It's a gold run.
• 53:07
  Yeah. And, and, and, and just to give
• 53:09
  you a sense of how much Fiat we've created, there's another
• 53:11
  good chart in the book done by my friend Brent Santiago.
• 53:13
  Really great chart. So there's a time in the 70s
• 53:16
  when you could actually take the US money supply and you could
• 53:18
  divide it by the 261 million ounces of gold that we
• 53:20
  theoretically own. And you came up with a $35
• 53:23
  reference price. That was true back then.
• 53:24
  If you did that same calculation, I've said this many
• 53:26
  times, you did that same calculation today, took all of
• 53:29
  the the money supply outstanding that they divide it by those
• 53:31
  200, it would need to be at $89,000 an ounce.
• 53:33
  OK, gold's at 2900 right now. So it's a long ways away.
• 53:37
  The point there is we've created a lot of paper gold.
• 53:40
  Absolutely. And it's also it's physical
• 53:42
  characteristics make it very difficult for you to withdraw.
• 53:45
  It's hard. I mean, yeah, you and I don't
• 53:46
  trade in gold anymore. I mean, it's, you know, it's
• 53:48
  pretty and it'll I do, I do. I have to.
• 53:51
  I have to admit though, and I'm a millennial, I do own gold
• 53:54
  bars. Good for you.
• 53:55
  And they feel really good in your way.
• 53:57
  Attavoy, you know, I got a bunch of coins and I got a bunch of
• 53:59
  silver coins. Silver has a lot of utility.
• 54:00
  It's, it's, it's stock to flow sucks and it hasn't gone up as
• 54:03
  much as gold and it's being demonetized.
• 54:04
  But I tell you, we're silver in a, in a mandible scenario,
• 54:07
  silver would be very valuable because most people know what a
• 54:10
  wild silver coin is worth. It's 30 bucks.
• 54:12
  And so, you know, there's a couple of chickens or some eggs
• 54:15
  or maybe a, maybe a tank of gasoline or whatever.
• 54:18
  I mean, if the credit cards aren't working, I'm guessing
• 54:20
  they'll be people who, you know, farmers and others who will say,
• 54:22
  yeah, you can pay me in silver. Absolutely, 100%.
• 54:25
  Does Bitcoin replace gold? Do you see it reaching the
• 54:29
  market cap of gold? Do you see it reaching the
• 54:31
  market cap of gold? Very, very quickly.
• 54:32
  Yeah, I do. I mean, it's, it's actually
• 54:34
  arguably a lot closer than people think.
• 54:36
  So the market cap of gold right now is about $18 billion.
• 54:38
  The market cap of bitcoins about two, I'm sorry, trillion
• 54:40
  dollars. My my market cap.
• 54:42
  Bitcoin, as we know is about 2 trillion round numbers.
• 54:43
  But if you think about 18 trillion of gold, really only
• 54:47
  about 1/4 to 1/3 of it is in bars and coins that you and I
• 54:51
  can buy. So about 1/4 of it's in antiques
• 54:54
  and in museums and antiquities. So you know, we're not going to
• 54:56
  go meltdown the gold in the British Museum, right?
• 54:58
  It's staying there, about 1/4 of it sitting in central bank.
• 55:02
  Thanks. Actually a little less than 1/4.
• 55:03
  And then the balance is around women's necks in really well in
• 55:07
  India and China. And here it's jewelry.
• 55:09
  And by the way, if it gets high enough, I mean, you're going to
• 55:10
  see women, you know, turning, selling their gold jewelry, I
• 55:13
  mean, $89,000 an ounce. So I'm guessing there's some
• 55:15
  bracelets that will get turned in.
• 55:18
  Absolutely. But but so my point is that to
• 55:20
  flip gold, you know, let's say the investable gold is 4 to 6
• 55:24
  trillion and the investable Bitcoin right now is, you know,
• 55:26
  2 trillion, maybe 3X from here. And Bitcoin is kind of flipping
• 55:29
  the investable gold, right? Interesting numbers.
• 55:32
  Absolutely. At the time of recording, the
• 55:33
  Bitcoin price is roughly 100. Ki think a lot of people were
• 55:37
  anticipating it for it to be a lot higher by now.
• 55:40
  People are talking about diminishing returns, they're
• 55:43
  saying the cycles. What are your thoughts on that?
• 55:45
  Yeah, so look, it's doing just what it should be doing.
• 55:48
  It's just marching up relentlessly.
• 55:50
  The the drawbacks are slow. You know, we were at the 58 K
• 55:54
  club for a while. We went to 100.
• 55:55
  It's a nice move of, you know, 42 grand.
• 55:59
  We're now building up what in technical, technical investing
• 56:01
  analysis, they call a flag between kind of 90 and 106, you
• 56:05
  know, OK, let's add another 42 to that.
• 56:07
  I think the next stop is at 140. I mean, to me, these these, you
• 56:10
  know, these flags with moves, this is very good, healthy
• 56:14
  constructive development. When we go from, let's call it
• 56:17
  1:40 to 2:50 really fast, which might happen.
• 56:21
  My sense is it's going to be ahead of itself.
• 56:23
  And that's when you might you know, I mean, I and I look, I
• 56:26
  don't know what the top of the cycle is.
• 56:28
  I mean, I look at a a lot of things, including the power law
• 56:30
  and historical cycles and how far it comes off the base feels
• 56:33
  to me like the top of the cycles between 2 and 300 and then we'll
• 56:36
  have a pullback. But I think the pullbacks are
• 56:38
  getting smaller. And I think at some point this
• 56:40
  power law models going to break to the upside.
• 56:42
  And we're just going to, we're not going to have pullbacks
• 56:44
  because at that point, this is Parker Lewis's, you know, the
• 56:47
  gradually and then suddenly, I mean, the suddenly phase sailor
• 56:50
  made this point when I was on stage with him in Madeira and he
• 56:53
  said, look, I can see what's going to happen.
• 56:54
  You know, we're going to go to 300.
• 56:55
  A lot of people think, holy shit, this has been amazing.
• 56:58
  I'm selling now, I'm getting that's going to be a mistake.
• 57:00
  You know, it's going to go to 700 and a million.
• 57:02
  They're going to be and they're not going to get back, be able
• 57:03
  to get back in. Yeah.
• 57:04
  So they're not going to be. Able to get the same amount of
• 57:06
  coins. No, I mean, I think in general,
• 57:08
  generally speaking, my view is you sell coins, don't count on
• 57:11
  getting them back. Yeah, this cycle hasn't really
• 57:14
  start. The bull part of this cycle has
• 57:16
  started, but the euphoria phase of this cycle hasn't started
• 57:19
  yet. I.
• 57:20
  Completely agree. I completely agree.
• 57:21
  And I think it comes, frankly, I think it comes in the next year.
• 57:24
  I think between what are we talking now, it's February.
• 57:26
  I think between now and February, March and next, next
• 57:29
  year, they're gonna be fireworks.
• 57:30
  Yeah, real fireworks. I completely agree.
• 57:33
  Now I have a question from you and I'm gonna pose as a Henzian
• 57:36
  economist. If there isn't inflation, won't
• 57:39
  people just hoard money? Yeah, that's bullshit and I deal
• 57:43
  with it in the book. I mean, I mean, do you not eat?
• 57:45
  Because there's. I mean, if you think steak's
• 57:47
  gonna be future cheaper in the future, you can stop eating
• 57:50
  waiting for, you know. OK, We all know your TV.
• 57:52
  Five years when I'll be cheaper than TV today you're gonna stop
• 57:54
  buying TV's. No, You wanna watch football
• 57:56
  today you're gonna buy one. It's all just horse shit.
• 57:58
  I mean, you might stop buying frivolous shit, you might stop
• 58:02
  wasting your money on gambling and doing other things to try
• 58:05
  and beat inflation, but humans have needs and you're going to
• 58:08
  pay good value for things you need.
• 58:10
  And so the notion, you know, this, this idea of a savings
• 58:13
  glut and this is all just Keynes, this is all just to
• 58:15
  support. There's just, it's a lie.
• 58:17
  It's just a total lie. Deflation is good.
• 58:20
  Deflation means that you can buy more with less dollars.
• 58:23
  I mean, look at the people from 1870 to 1913.
• 58:27
  Their lives improved in incredibly, incredibly.
• 58:31
  I mean, they went from, you know outhouses to indoor plumbing.
• 58:34
  They had no electricity. A lot of them by, you know, the
• 58:36
  20s and 30s, they had electricity.
• 58:38
  You know, they were eating better food.
• 58:39
  They, you know, Sears Roebuck came out with a catalogue.
• 58:41
  They could buy high quality goods.
• 58:43
  I mean all of it. And during that time frame,
• 58:45
  prices were falling and, and, but GDP and output, I mean, the
• 58:48
  whole idea of measuring output by GDP growth and then, you
• 58:51
  know, and then having that somehow we've got to get to a
• 58:53
  measure of output that's based on units, not on dollars.
• 58:56
  Because you know, if you're understating inflation and you
• 58:58
  say you got three 3% GDP growth, but you've got 5%, you really
• 59:02
  have 5% inflation. Well, in fact, you're actually
• 59:04
  in a recession. It's not like the, the dollar
• 59:07
  value of cars that we're selling.
• 59:09
  It's how many cars are we selling?
• 59:10
  You know, it's the number of units.
• 59:12
  So unit growth is what suggests that an economy is is
• 59:15
  benefiting, not not dollar value growth.
• 59:17
  Do you think, do you? And then my next question which
• 59:20
  you partly answered, which is can money exist without
• 59:23
  inflation? Of course it can.
• 59:25
  Of course, of course, again, it has.
• 59:27
  I mean to a degree, I mean gold always had a certain amount of
• 59:29
  inflation, but absolutely abso frigging lutely.
• 59:31
  Anyone who says it can't is just is wrong.
• 59:33
  How will how will people deal with wages, for example?
• 59:36
  Well, I mean, wages will get set in the marketplace.
• 59:39
  The fact that your wage doesn't go up will be OK because you'll
• 59:42
  have the same wage, but it'll buy more in the future and, and
• 59:45
  you'll look forward to that. And it will, it will, it will
• 59:47
  shift everyone's time preference.
• 59:49
  You know you will. You will start thinking about
• 59:51
  how do I buy things that last and how do I save for the
• 59:54
  future, and how you know you'll know that you have an
• 59:57
  alternative and a reward for being patient and for not for
• 1:00:01
  not wasting money on stupid shit.
• 1:00:03
  Yeah, I mean, you know what I mean.
• 1:00:05
  It's. A total mind.
• 1:00:06
  Shift. It's a total mind shift.
• 1:00:07
  I mean, I mean, Kane has a nice quote in the book where he says,
• 1:00:10
  you know, somewhere we shifted from valuing honesty and hard
• 1:00:14
  work to valuing consumption and consumerism.
• 1:00:17
  You know, I mean, I can see if I can foresee a time where owning
• 1:00:21
  a really snazzy car would just become, you know, viewed as
• 1:00:26
  being. It's just like a person's
• 1:00:27
  stupid. Why would they ever do that?
• 1:00:29
  You don't need that. It doesn't benefit them.
• 1:00:31
  Do you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:00:33
  I mean, I think, I think you know, and you'll want to buy
• 1:00:36
  things that last. You know, I mean, you see this
• 1:00:38
  in Bitcoin culture. Yeah, we all live below our
• 1:00:41
  means exactly. We spend.
• 1:00:42
  We try to spend this. Little it affects everything.
• 1:00:45
  It affects art. I mean look at the buildings
• 1:00:47
  that were built pre war in America.
• 1:00:49
  Yeah, it's still standing and they're beautiful.
• 1:00:51
  Some of the architecture is beautiful.
• 1:00:53
  Look at the buildings we're building today.
• 1:00:55
  Yeah, they're deep, they're sloppy, they fall down.
• 1:00:57
  They don't last. Yeah.
• 1:00:59
  Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean it's just it just
• 1:01:01
  change it'll change everything. It'll change the mindset to one
• 1:01:05
  of thinking about the long term. I mean, one of the one of the
• 1:01:08
  terrible things that Cain said was in the long term we're all
• 1:01:11
  dead, which is kind of like a party on Garth.
• 1:01:13
  What's you know Yeah, screw screw the seed corn, screw your
• 1:01:16
  relatives. Yeah.
• 1:01:17
  And, and in fact, you know, the right way society should work is
• 1:01:21
  for parents and and families to want their relatives to be
• 1:01:25
  better off them to want to save, to invest in their education, to
• 1:01:29
  invest in giving them a legacy, to invest in giving them a
• 1:01:31
  future. That's what's good, not not
• 1:01:34
  partying and leaving them nothing but debt.
• 1:01:36
  And you know what? We've left people now.
• 1:01:37
  Of course, fast times, right? Yeah.
• 1:01:40
  Let me ask you something. Another part where another part
• 1:01:43
  of your book, right where you brought up America's moral
• 1:01:45
  decline. Yes.
• 1:01:46
  What came first? Was it the money experiment that
• 1:01:50
  led to the moral? Because if you look at history
• 1:01:53
  and you look at the I'm an Empire, there's a lot of
• 1:01:55
  similarity. Track, they act really
• 1:01:57
  perfectly, don't they? Yeah, so.
• 1:01:59
  What came? 1st that's a chicken and egg
• 1:02:01
  question what I'm saying. Was it the degradation of of the
• 1:02:05
  money? Because I think like, what a lot
• 1:02:07
  of people forget to understand is that money plays such an
• 1:02:09
  integral part in the human. Absolutely everyone touches it.
• 1:02:12
  What happens when that money is broken?
• 1:02:14
  When that money is corrupt, you can make a very good argument
• 1:02:18
  that it breaks something spiritually about you as a.
• 1:02:22
  That's what I believe. But I think the money breaks and
• 1:02:26
  then the spirit breaks. But that that leads to, you
• 1:02:28
  know, there's each incremental step and the steps just got
• 1:02:32
  worse and worse and worse. And, you know, like as an
• 1:02:34
  example, when we're on the gold standard, I mean, they, they,
• 1:02:37
  they, you know, suspended the specie payment in 1812.
• 1:02:39
  The money broke, but they fixed it and they got back on the gold
• 1:02:42
  standard and, you know, things were OK again.
• 1:02:44
  And so, and we had a lot of experiences like that, including
• 1:02:47
  the Civil War where they printed greenbacks.
• 1:02:49
  But, you know, we kept going back to what we knew, which was
• 1:02:51
  sound money. And, and, you know, in the the
• 1:02:53
  bimetalism wars were fought over that.
• 1:02:55
  All the free silver guys wanted less sound money.
• 1:02:57
  All the gold guys wanted sound money.
• 1:02:58
  And we stayed with sound money. But then, you know, the Fed came
• 1:03:01
  along and it backs up the banks. And then, you know, and it just,
• 1:03:04
  you know, the the snowball got really, really rolling, You
• 1:03:07
  know, later on. I mean, if you look at the
• 1:03:09
  history of America, I mean, the monetary system was never
• 1:03:12
  perfect, but it was better than it is now by definition.
• 1:03:16
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:03:16
  No, it's, it's a, it's a very kind of interesting phenomenon.
• 1:03:20
  Like yeah you can. They go, they go hand in.
• 1:03:22
  Hand they go hand in hand. Yeah, I mean, it is, it is
• 1:03:24
  chicken and egg. I mean, is it good?
• 1:03:26
  And and it's kind of like each one of them is a top this.
• 1:03:28
  Do you know what I mean? I mean, you know, derivatives,
• 1:03:30
  right? For example, I mean, Phil Graham
• 1:03:32
  lobbied to change all the derivatives law, which allowed
• 1:03:34
  Enron to vaporize $78 billion worth of assets.
• 1:03:37
  Do you know what I mean? And and she was getting, she was
• 1:03:39
  on the Enron board and she was getting paid, you know,
• 1:03:41
  1,000,000 bucks a year to sit on that board.
• 1:03:42
  I mean, you know, it's just, again, insiders changing the
• 1:03:45
  rules, doing stuff to benefit themselves, breaking the money,
• 1:03:48
  right? Yeah.
• 1:03:49
  So Larry, early on in the conversation, I want to double
• 1:03:52
  back to this. You, you talked about the dead
• 1:03:55
  Doom loot. What is that?
• 1:03:56
  Yeah. OK, so let's talk about the
• 1:03:59
  federal government's finances, right?
• 1:04:01
  The federal government collects taxes and the federal government
• 1:04:03
  has expenses. And some of those expenses are
• 1:04:05
  very much locked in. You know, Social Security and
• 1:04:08
  Medicare are kind of set on autopilot and they adjust upward
• 1:04:11
  with CPI. Some of the are are more
• 1:04:13
  discretionary, like defense, but frankly, it's pretty locked in
• 1:04:15
  as well because all the defense contractors have the Washington
• 1:04:18
  by the throat. Basically, these things are, are
• 1:04:20
  costs that we endure. And by the way, one of the
• 1:04:23
  biggest wastes of, of federal spending, in my opinion, in the
• 1:04:25
  last, you know, 20 years was all the were all the wars post 911.
• 1:04:28
  I mean, we spent away 8. We wasted $8 trillion in the
• 1:04:31
  Middle East fighting, securing oil, you know, for other people
• 1:04:34
  and ourselves and, you know, grabbing Afghanistan and giving
• 1:04:37
  it back. I mean, we just wasted $8
• 1:04:38
  trillion. It's terrible.
• 1:04:39
  But Dick Cheney's rich. I mean, he's, you know, he made
• 1:04:41
  $100 million, you know, in Halliburton.
• 1:04:43
  So set all that aside. The federal government balances
• 1:04:46
  these two. And when COVID came along, the
• 1:04:48
  expenses went up a great deal and revenue didn't.
• 1:04:51
  And so the deficits really widened out.
• 1:04:53
  And one would have thought the crisis was over.
• 1:04:55
  They've cut back the expenses, but they didn't.
• 1:04:57
  And so we started running bigger deficits.
• 1:04:59
  Well, as you know, when you run a deficit, it has to be
• 1:05:01
  financed. The government has to figure out
• 1:05:03
  a way to pay for the deficit. So what do they do?
• 1:05:04
  They issue debt in order to have the cash to to make the expense
• 1:05:08
  payments that they're making. So that debt gets added on to
• 1:05:11
  the national debt, which has been growing incredibly quickly,
• 1:05:14
  as we all know. And that debt needs to be
• 1:05:16
  serviced. There's an interest cost to that
• 1:05:18
  debt. And so the bond market, which
• 1:05:20
  buys that debt, pays that interest.
• 1:05:23
  And there's only in the bond market is comprised of savers
• 1:05:26
  who want to buy debt to get an interest rate.
• 1:05:28
  You know, they're trying to conservatively save money and
• 1:05:30
  get interest on it. And So what happens is as the
• 1:05:33
  debt gets bigger and interest rates go up, the interest cost
• 1:05:36
  of the government goes up a lot. So the interest cost of the
• 1:05:38
  government five years ago was 3, $400 billion a year.
• 1:05:42
  Right now we're running at $1.4 trillion a year.
• 1:05:44
  Well, last year the deficit was $1.8 trillion.
• 1:05:47
  So a big part of the deficit is the interest cost on the debt.
• 1:05:51
  If the deficit gets bigger, what do you do?
• 1:05:53
  You sell more debt, OK, You sell the debt into a fixed size
• 1:05:56
  market. What happens?
• 1:05:57
  There are only so many buyers, they need a higher price
• 1:06:00
  interest cost in order to buy. Want to buy it.
• 1:06:02
  So the interest rate goes higher.
• 1:06:04
  So now you got 36 billion. That's not just paying $1.4
• 1:06:07
  trillion that maybe they're paying 1.8.
• 1:06:09
  Well, that's going to get added to the deficit.
• 1:06:11
  Well, how are you going to finance the deficit?
• 1:06:12
  You're going to issue more debt. Well, the issue, the more debt
• 1:06:15
  gets you see, and it becomes a doom loop, right?
• 1:06:17
  Bigger deficit, more debt issuance, more debt issuance,
• 1:06:21
  higher interest rates, higher interest rates, bigger deficit.
• 1:06:24
  Can't stop this train. Nothing stops this train.
• 1:06:27
  And I got permission from Lynn to use that as a chapter.
• 1:06:29
  I mean, there's a chapter called Nothing Stops This train, which
• 1:06:32
  a brilliant meme, you know, by Lynn Alden that that describes
• 1:06:36
  that process. And, and, and so Doge comes
• 1:06:38
  along and, you know, rightly so. And, and I applaud all of their
• 1:06:41
  efforts. They are going to try and they
• 1:06:43
  found some really stupid expenses.
• 1:06:44
  They're going to try and they will, they will cut expenses.
• 1:06:47
  But here's the thing, Nico, they've got a really, really
• 1:06:49
  hard task, Okay, The deficit is 1/8 last year and it's now
• 1:06:54
  running closer to like 2-4. If you annualized the last
• 1:06:56
  couple of months, what we're seeing is that's going to be
• 1:06:59
  really, really hard to cut because 80%, if you take Social
• 1:07:02
  Security, Medicare, defense and interest, you've accounted for
• 1:07:05
  80% of the budget. So even if you caught cut, you
• 1:07:08
  know, if you cut the less, you know, 20% to 0, which you can't,
• 1:07:11
  you wouldn't balance it. So you've got to go after and,
• 1:07:14
  and you try and cut Social Security, Medicare, that's the
• 1:07:16
  third rail. No politicians going to go for
• 1:07:17
  that defense guys, they're pretty powerful and the interest
• 1:07:19
  rates are really high. Now what they could do is they
• 1:07:21
  could do financial repression and I think that's what they're
• 1:07:23
  going to force to do. They're going to be forced to do
• 1:07:25
  yield curve control. They're going to the Fed in
• 1:07:27
  spite of inflation not coming back to 2%.
• 1:07:29
  You've seen them already calling for the some people saying,
• 1:07:31
  well, that's in the book as well.
• 1:07:32
  Well, maybe we should have an inflation target of 3 or 4%.
• 1:07:35
  They're going to be forced to keep issuing the debt and hold
• 1:07:38
  the interest rate below the net, the neutral rate.
• 1:07:40
  And that that interest rate will at least bring that 1.4 of
• 1:07:43
  interest expense down. And that'll help a little bit.
• 1:07:45
  But the point is yield curve control, How do they do that?
• 1:07:48
  That means they are buying the debt themselves, which then
• 1:07:51
  means their balance sheet is getting bigger, which then means
• 1:07:53
  the supply of money in the system is getting bigger.
• 1:07:55
  And what's that? That's inflation, OK.
• 1:07:58
  As inflation gets bigger, the bond market, you know, the bond
• 1:08:01
  market is devised to give a return over and above inflation,
• 1:08:04
  higher inflation. The bond market says, I'm sorry,
• 1:08:06
  you know, I'm not buying that unless you give me this rate.
• 1:08:08
  Eventually the Fed could be sitting there with with their
• 1:08:11
  their balance sheet saying, well, we're going to cap the
• 1:08:13
  yields at 4%. The entire bond market could
• 1:08:15
  look at it and go 4%. I don't like that.
• 1:08:18
  Sold to you, Right. And $36 trillion.
• 1:08:22
  Yeah, they could sell to the Fed, which has got a $7 trillion
• 1:08:25
  balance sheet, right? So suddenly you've just grown
• 1:08:27
  the money supply by that amount. That's hyperinflation.
• 1:08:30
  But something's got to give, Something's got to give.
• 1:08:32
  Something's got to give, Something's got to.
• 1:08:33
  But you just can't put a timeline.
• 1:08:34
  On No, you can't. You don't know how it's going to
• 1:08:36
  give. You don't know form it's going
• 1:08:37
  to take. But what we do know, Nico, is
• 1:08:39
  it's leading to the big print. There's no other way out.
• 1:08:44
  And that's why I wrote the book, because I want to get up on a
• 1:08:46
  soapbox and scream at the entire goddamn world.
• 1:08:49
  Wake up, guys. Wake up.
• 1:08:51
  This is going to happen. Yeah.
• 1:08:52
  Protect yourself now. Yeah, because there's not going
• 1:08:55
  to be a dual over. Yeah, right, if you're in.
• 1:08:57
  Bitcoin, the big print is gonna make.
• 1:08:59
  Gold to 1,000,000 bucks a coin. Yeah.
• 1:09:01
  Gold's going to 10,000. Yeah, right.
• 1:09:04
  Yeah. I mean, it's it's nuts.
• 1:09:06
  Yeah, it's absolutely nuts. What do you think about Lummis?
• 1:09:09
  I was talking to her, yeah. She's talking to Senator Lummis
• 1:09:11
  about two weeks ago in DC. What do you think about her plan
• 1:09:14
  in the Bitcoin Act? The the bill?
• 1:09:17
  And I love the way that Senator Lummis approached it.
• 1:09:19
  She's like, look, my generation kind of really screwed you guys
• 1:09:23
  though. I.
• 1:09:23
  Fucked it up. Oh, there's no doubt.
• 1:09:25
  I agree with that totally. And I'm not saying her
• 1:09:26
  specifically. But she didn't do it.
• 1:09:28
  I didn't do it either. But but yeah, she was like.
• 1:09:30
  I want it like this Bill is a way to rectify that and she was
• 1:09:34
  making. This book is my way, right?
• 1:09:36
  Very well, perfect. Right.
• 1:09:37
  And it's like, I want to, you know?
• 1:09:38
  And the, the case that she was making is that if the Bitcoin
• 1:09:42
  Act gets passed in the United States, it's going to be kind of
• 1:09:45
  hard because the the Republicans don't have a filibuster majority
• 1:09:48
  proof in the Senate. They have 53 votes, right?
• 1:09:51
  Right. She's making the case that by
• 1:09:53
  the United States buying I think up to 1,000,000 Bitcoin, you're
• 1:09:57
  like 5%. Yeah, it was. 200,000 a year for
• 1:09:59
  five years as I remember. She can use, or better said the
• 1:10:02
  US government could use that to pay off some of the debt.
• 1:10:06
  You think that's feasible? Yes, I do.
• 1:10:08
  It's, it's it's complicated, but I do think it's feasible.
• 1:10:11
  I mean, I think we need a monetary reset, full stop, OK?
• 1:10:15
  We are in a sovereign debt crisis.
• 1:10:16
  There's too much debt, there's not enough GDP.
• 1:10:19
  We need a we need a monetary reset, OK, How that takes form.
• 1:10:23
  This is brain surgery. This is complicated, OK?
• 1:10:25
  And we don't, I don't have the answer and I don't think anybody
• 1:10:29
  has the answer. But what it does mean is it
• 1:10:31
  means you've got to go back to some form of sound money as the
• 1:10:34
  base layer. Bitcoin is the right choice.
• 1:10:36
  Gold is inferior, but it's a better choice than Fiat, OK.
• 1:10:40
  And yes, if we start buying Bitcoin, that's going to shove
• 1:10:44
  the dollar down, OK, which we need.
• 1:10:46
  That would create more exports for us and it would make our
• 1:10:49
  imports more expensive. It would harm China, but that's
• 1:10:51
  a good thing. China's taking advantage of our
• 1:10:53
  industrial Midwest. And yes, I mean, what she's
• 1:10:56
  talking about is brilliant. I think Trump and Bescent kind
• 1:10:59
  of understand this. OK, Now in the paths, there are
• 1:11:02
  1,000,000 paths as to how we get there.
• 1:11:04
  OK. And I don't know.
• 1:11:06
  And I can't foresee, but I when I invest, I don't, I don't
• 1:11:08
  invest. I'm not a trader.
• 1:11:10
  I don't invest month by month. I invest year by year.
• 1:11:12
  And I really invest, you know, five years by five years and
• 1:11:15
  decade by decade. And so I'm looking to protect my
• 1:11:18
  savings, you know, for when I'm 80 or 90 or, you know, or for my
• 1:11:21
  kids and stuff. And I just know that all roads
• 1:11:24
  lead to inflation. Yeah, they just, they all leave
• 1:11:26
  and. So they have to print.
• 1:11:28
  Nothing stops this train. Right.
• 1:11:29
  And so, so you know in what, in what form or manner I don't
• 1:11:32
  know. And by the way, by the way, it's
• 1:11:34
  going to be volatile. I mean, there's a chart in here.
• 1:11:36
  There's there's Dan Oliver's brilliant, you know, Weimar
• 1:11:38
  chart that shows the price of gold monthly during the Weimar
• 1:11:40
  hyperinflation. I mean, example, we could have
• 1:11:42
  an enormous stock market crash. OK, Let's, I mean, there's some
• 1:11:44
  people think that they're going to engineer that to hurt Trump,
• 1:11:46
  OK? We could have an enormous stock
• 1:11:48
  market crash. And you know, in 2020 when the
• 1:11:50
  stock market crash, Bitcoin got hit hard, gold got hit hard,
• 1:11:52
  right? Powell came in on a Monday
• 1:11:53
  morning, said we're going to print until our eyes bleed,
• 1:11:55
  basically. And gold took off like a rocket.
• 1:11:58
  Bitcoin took off like a rocket. But you know, if you panicked on
• 1:12:01
  that downturn, you know, you got blown out.
• 1:12:03
  So one needs, and I try in the book to explain that one needs
• 1:12:06
  to understand the nature of these assets and understand
• 1:12:08
  that, you know, and you've been in this long enough, you know,
• 1:12:10
  I've been in a long enough. I'm, I know this stuff can go
• 1:12:13
  against you. Yeah.
• 1:12:14
  You know, I mean, I, I own a bunch of these things.
• 1:12:16
  I bought them at 17,000 in 2017. And I watch them go to 10 and I
• 1:12:20
  watch them go to four. Yep and I and I bought 1 and I
• 1:12:23
  bought one at 69 K at 21 and 21. I did too.
• 1:12:27
  I did too. And it was terrible.
• 1:12:29
  I did too. I did too.
• 1:12:30
  But but you know what? I bought more at 15.
• 1:12:32
  You know in 22 when after SPF, so you got to take a long term
• 1:12:36
  perspective. I mean, the changing of a
• 1:12:38
  monetary system, which is what we're in, it's going to be a
• 1:12:40
  volatile event. Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:12:42
  But I do want to give massive kudos to Senator Lum is
• 1:12:46
  absolutely. She is like absolutely.
• 1:12:50
  She gave me hope. Absolutely gave me hope.
• 1:12:52
  And you know, running is incredible.
• 1:12:53
  Yeah, and Thomas Massie, I mean, these are forerunners and there
• 1:12:56
  will be more, you know. There will be more, I love that.
• 1:12:58
  There will be. It's like we're coming.
• 1:13:00
  I love that they're going to be more right.
• 1:13:02
  You know you're talking about investing testing earlier,
• 1:13:05
  Larry, and I think, you know the world is waking up to Bitcoin
• 1:13:08
  Strat Fi's here, right? You know that just the world is
• 1:13:11
  woken up to this nation states are here.
• 1:13:13
  If you were to give advice to your client in terms of what
• 1:13:17
  should be the appropriate Bitcoin allocation, the
• 1:13:21
  percentage terms. Depends on your age and depends
• 1:13:24
  on your risk tolerance. I said in the book, I thought if
• 1:13:26
  you didn't have at least 25% of your assets and sound money, you
• 1:13:29
  were going to experience regret. I obviously have a lot more than
• 1:13:31
  that and I think a lot of people should have more than that.
• 1:13:33
  If you're older and and you can't handle a drawdown, you
• 1:13:35
  might need the money within a five year window.
• 1:13:37
  Having 100% in Bitcoin, that doesn't make any sense.
• 1:13:39
  You could have a big drawdown and you'd have to pull it out at
• 1:13:41
  a low value. You want to do that.
• 1:13:43
  So it kind of depends on when you're going to need the money,
• 1:13:45
  right? So I think everybody has to
• 1:13:46
  figure that out for themselves. But let me make another point
• 1:13:49
  about the whole thing. And I think it's a very
• 1:13:50
  important point to make and the book makes it, but I want to
• 1:13:52
  make it here because I think it's very important people
• 1:13:54
  understand. It was funny.
• 1:13:55
  You know, when you write one of these books, you do research and
• 1:13:57
  you learn things and things pop into your head that you hadn't
• 1:13:59
  thought of before investing, you know, and, and so there are a
• 1:14:02
  lot of rules investing. They're tried and true.
• 1:14:04
  They've been around a long time. A lot of great books written in
• 1:14:06
  Graham and Dodd, you know, they're brilliant.
• 1:14:08
  There are thousands of brilliant investors.
• 1:14:09
  Millions of brilliant investors have done well over the years.
• 1:14:12
  And it's very seldom that the rules change.
• 1:14:14
  But the rules have changed. And let me describe that the
• 1:14:16
  rules have changed in the following way, Nico.
• 1:14:18
  We now have investments dominated by Metcalf's Law.
• 1:14:22
  Metcalf's Law says that the network grows in value at the
• 1:14:25
  square of the underlying number of users.
• 1:14:28
  So I was trained, you know, at Business School to invest in
• 1:14:31
  things based on multiples of cash flow and growth and PEG
• 1:14:33
  ratios and all the standard stuff, sharp ratios, all that
• 1:14:36
  stuff. And therefore, when, you know,
• 1:14:37
  when the Internet came along and I invested in the Internet and
• 1:14:40
  I, I benefited from the growth of that, But like, I was looking
• 1:14:42
  at Amazon and I was looking at Facebook and I was looking at
• 1:14:44
  Google and I could never get her past the valuations.
• 1:14:47
  I, I put valuation tests on these network businesses.
• 1:14:50
  I said they're too expensive for what they are.
• 1:14:52
  They don't have any profits to justify this valuation.
• 1:14:54
  I missed it. OK, here's what happened.
• 1:14:57
  Amazon, since its IPO, is up 218,000%.
• 1:15:01
  Yeah. Google, since its IPO, is up
• 1:15:03
  9000%. Facebook, since its IPO is up
• 1:15:06
  like 2000%. General Motors, since its IPO in
• 1:15:09
  1916, is up like 400 times. OK, It's great.
• 1:15:12
  It was a great investment. OK.
• 1:15:14
  If you held GM through all those years, you did fine.
• 1:15:15
  My point is, it's only 20 years. The Internet's really been
• 1:15:18
  active since, right in in 20 years from because I consider
• 1:15:22
  broad Internet usage was 2000, started in 95 broadly it was
• 1:15:25
  2000. So we're 24 years into the
• 1:15:27
  Internet and you've got network businesses that have gone up
• 1:15:30
  thousands of percent. Yeah, this is different.
• 1:15:33
  Yeah. This is AI mean.
• 1:15:35
  This is a really different set of rules.
• 1:15:37
  OK. That trend isn't going to stop.
• 1:15:39
  No, Yeah. So what does that tell me?
• 1:15:42
  I want to invest in network businesses.
• 1:15:44
  Well, what you know, or network things, right?
• 1:15:47
  What's the biggest network thing right now?
• 1:15:49
  Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:52
  It's just so obvious, right? I mean, it really, I think it's
• 1:15:55
  very important for people to get out of that traditional
• 1:15:58
  investing mindset and think in those terms.
• 1:16:01
  Absolutely. Final question for you.
• 1:16:03
  Yeah, Yeah. What's that?
• 1:16:03
  What are you the most excited about for the next five years in
• 1:16:07
  terms of Bitcoin? Well, I'm really excited to see
• 1:16:11
  all of us winning and I'm excited to see Bitcoiners
• 1:16:16
  winning and I'm excited to see new people coming into the fold.
• 1:16:19
  And, you know, I, I told, told some stories.
• 1:16:22
  I mean, I was in a Whole Foods in Framingham, Mass in December.
• 1:16:25
  I was walking around. There was a guy in, in
• 1:16:27
  northeastern Massachusetts, there's a office supply store
• 1:16:30
  called WB Mason. They deliver and they have
• 1:16:32
  trucks. There's a guy in there walking
• 1:16:33
  around with WB Mason uniform on. So he's a delivery man, walks up
• 1:16:36
  to me. He says, are you Larry?
• 1:16:37
  And I'm like, yeah. He says, dude, I've been
• 1:16:40
  watching your videos for five years.
• 1:16:42
  I started stacking five years ago.
• 1:16:45
  I got a pretty good stack. He gives me a big hug.
• 1:16:47
  Because you changed my life. You saved my.
• 1:16:49
  It's a guy who drives a truck. Yeah.
• 1:16:51
  And I'm kind of like, oh, man, we need more stories than yeah,
• 1:16:54
  right. I want, I want that story
• 1:16:56
  repeated 1000 times. I love that.
• 1:16:59
  You know what I mean? That's that's what I'm held for.
• 1:17:01
  The other thing I would say that my biggest and longer term, my
• 1:17:04
  biggest hope for Bitcoin is that it ends the wars.
• 1:17:06
  Yes. It's just people, and innocent
• 1:17:09
  people in faraway countries have gotten killed for no good
• 1:17:12
  reason. Fix the money, fix the world the
• 1:17:15
  world guys, go get larry's book, the big print what happened to
• 1:17:19
  America and how sound money will fix it Larry there's been an
• 1:17:23
  actual. Honor.
• 1:17:23
  Well, no, thank you so much. Sit with you.
• 1:17:25
  I really enjoyed it. Great questions.