Latest / What Bitcoin Did / The Breakdown of the Fiat World Order | Parker Lewis
Transcript
- 0:00There will be an event. There will be a moment when confidence is lost in the currency. Stop
- 0:09using each other's currencies and adopt a neutral currency. And then the currency isn't a weapon,
- 0:18there's a much better chance of order that isn't dictated by one single power broker
- 0:24you know, being the winner of a world war.
- 0:28Bitcoin is volatile because it's difficult to understand.
- 0:33Bitcoin goes up over time because more people do.
- 0:38Parker Lewis, welcome back, man.
- 0:39Yeah.
- 0:40I think, so I read Ray Dalio's piece on Twitter the other day,
- 0:44and it feels like the most important sort of macro geopolitical story right now.
- 0:49And as I was reading it, there's no mention of Bitcoin.
- 0:51there's little mention of like what's got us to this point although it's obviously a chapter from
- 0:56his book so i think he probably lays that out earlier in the book but in the article at least
- 0:59there was no mention of how we got here and as i was reading that i was like i want to get parker's
- 1:03take on this because he's basically setting this up as the sort of breakdown of the world order
- 1:08complete loss of faith in institutions potentially heading to war um i don't know i i know you were
- 1:17going to read it. Do you agree with his take or do you think this is sort of peak doomerism?
- 1:23So, um, I want to pull something up from, I have a quote of his in my book,
- 1:32but I think that it's, it's peak doomerism. Um, it's not that it's not directionally
- 1:43on point.
- 1:48And I did go and read the whole thing.
- 1:51And it's like I'm not the closest follower of Ray Dalio,
- 1:54but I do follow him, not just on Twitter,
- 1:57but just as an investor.
- 1:58And so I'm familiar with Bridgewater and his background.
- 2:05And I'm also familiar with people
- 2:08that used to be executives at Bridgewater.
- 2:13It feels like very, to me at least, non-deep surface level thinking.
- 2:21Okay.
- 2:22Observing maybe symptoms, observing things that are happening,
- 2:29and trying to explain them at a very surface level
- 2:37without getting into cause and effect, I'd say.
- 2:43One of my takeaways from reading the piece, and I can't remember exactly how it was titled, it was like, the old world order is dead, or something like that.
- 2:54Yeah, essentially, it was like, the world order is broken down.
- 2:57Yeah, the world order is broken down, the world order is over.
- 3:02And I was like, well, what was the, in his piece, as an example, he didn't even define what the world order was.
- 3:09and so you know research that i you know did of like any i mean he talked around it but like
- 3:17didn't you know it's whenever you're talking that way of he basically said the existing world world
- 3:23order is broken down without explaining what that exactly is and just saying that we're going from a
- 3:30place of more order to disorder and and talked about big cycles but also like didn't actually
- 3:38talk about the cause and effect of why things are breaking down. And, um, and so that was just a
- 3:47high level takeaway that I had from it. Um, and, you know, we can get into specifics about the
- 3:56piece. Um, but it talked about, you know, there's various different kinds of war and, you know,
- 4:02economic or kind of leading up to physical war
- 4:10and really intimating presumably that it's like US first China,
- 4:15but didn't expressly say that.
- 4:18And he also didn't really have, did mention gold at some part
- 4:21and that bonds would deflate, again,
- 4:27without just getting into the root of what's causing it all.
- 4:30So, I mean, obviously this was one chapter of his book
- 4:34and I've not read his book.
- 4:36I've got it, but I've not read it yet.
- 4:37I wonder if there's also,
- 4:39he does some of that sort of preliminary stuff
- 4:41earlier in the book.
- 4:42But let's try and like lay out
- 4:43what the world order was or is at this point.
- 4:46Because like when I read it,
- 4:48what I took from it is it's almost like
- 4:50the post-World War Order of, you know,
- 4:52the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, the UN,
- 4:55all these institutions that have been like
- 4:57the rules-based system for such a long time.
- 4:59we're potentially transitioning away from that being as effective.
- 5:05But I guess the question that I would have is,
- 5:07when people say that things like the UN, NATO, IMF, World Bank
- 5:11are no longer working in the system that we're in today,
- 5:14what has changed since the 1940s when these institutions first came onto the scene?
- 5:21Yeah, so, I mean, one, again, my observation is just that
- 5:27What it generally means is that the US has been the dominant world power and there were alliances that existed post-World War II.
- 5:38America was, the United States was in control of everything and nobody would step out of line.
- 5:44And now we're going to a place where that power structure, and I think he might have even mentioned this in the book, or maybe I'm referencing other things where it talks about these big global shifts, is that once there's an up-and-coming power that is in conflict with an existing power, that power struggle exists.
- 6:10And once the rising power gets large enough, it doesn't, you know, the order that previously existed that came from the existing, essentially, superpower being able to threaten and win is fractured.
- 6:27again he talks about symptoms on like you know not really like expressly how to position but
- 6:35like one of the things that he didn't address at least i don't think is the currency as a causal
- 6:45piece of the order breaking down i think he like intimates that in other places
- 6:53but like one of the examples i just pulled this up from my book to like
- 6:56not set the stage, but like an example of why, like, I just generally don't think of
- 7:03Ray Dalio as a super deep thinker. Again, like not in an insulting way. It's like, there's a
- 7:10broad class of investors. Cause I would, I would say like Ray Dalio is someone who has said that
- 7:16he's, you know, allocating to Bitcoin, but nothing that he's ever said indicates that he really
- 7:22understands what's happening or how to evaluate it. He's around the hoop. He's not far off in
- 7:30terms of what I would call pattern matching of connecting things together, but also at the same
- 7:36time, not really understanding the core principle. Let me just find this. I have a few quotes in the
- 7:46book. So this goes back to 2017. This was right after for me. I'd gone down the Bitcoin rabbit
- 7:54hole in 2016. And I'm watching CNBC one morning, and I figured out both why Bitcoin is emerging as
- 8:02money. I've also figured out why they're always going to have to print money and why they have
- 8:09to print money and the problems with printing money and the problems with the fiat system
- 8:17that is inherently trust-based, two people to a trade. And if you're trading with someone that
- 8:27you're potentially a foe of, you're having to use one of, in the fiat world, you're having to use
- 8:33one currency or the other, right? So for the last 50 years, the dollar has dominated global trade.
- 8:42But if you are China or Russia, or if you're looking at what the United States did to Russia,
- 8:51kicking it off of SWIFT and functionally seizing all of their treasuries, that puts the currency
- 9:00in the center of a political fight, an economic fight,
- 9:04and potentially what he would call a military fight or a kinetic fight.
- 9:09But a root problem of the impairment of effectively trade
- 9:16as the other side of war is the money and the problem of money printing.
- 9:23If you knew that the person that you were trading with
- 9:26and whose currency you were taking was constantly printing it,
- 9:29and you owned a bunch of their treasuries because you were offsetting the debasement in the currency by the yield of the treasuries,
- 9:35but they kept printing it and they kept threatening you, well, you don't really want to continue to trade with your currency.
- 9:41And one of the things that China has been doing, and Russia really more so out of force,
- 9:46and again, getting into the details of these geopolitics is like, I am certainly not the experts of experts,
- 9:53but I can diagnose the problems of the currency is that they're all looking at the same problem,
- 10:00which is if you cut Russia off of SWIFT and now they're having to resolve that,
- 10:08then no one wants to trust the other's currency.
- 10:12Russia wouldn't want to trust China's currency.
- 10:14China wouldn't want to trust Russia's currency.
- 10:16Neither of them want to trust the United States' currency,
- 10:18even though there's talks about Russia getting back onto the dollar system.
- 10:22It's like that bell has been rung.
- 10:25And so just noting that Dalio didn't really go into the root of that problem.
- 10:33And then this was a quote from 2017.
- 10:35When I heard him say this on CNBC, I was like, I literally had to record it, rewind it, record it on my phone.
- 10:44And he said, and he's talking about the financial crisis.
- 10:48He says, there's money and there's credit.
- 10:50The only thing that matters is spending. And you can spend money and you can spend credit. And when credit goes down, you better put money into the system so you can have the same level of spending. That's what they did through the financial system, and that thing worked.
- 11:06and ever since i heard him say that then anything else that i heard him say since then
- 11:15as it relates to bitcoin or in this case of the world order breaking down which i i think that it
- 11:22is as well but if you're not able to see you know the the currency system as in and it being
- 11:32weaponized as a chief problem, then how do you, and we've come from a gold standard,
- 11:38we've come from Bretton Woods, how do you navigate through to the other side of like,
- 11:44where are we actually going and how does this play out?
- 11:47If you're making comments like there's money and there's credit, and if credit goes down,
- 11:51you better put more money in.
- 11:53And by the way, quantitative easing worked, right?
- 11:56Because everything else he said is like, he says other things that are kind of on point,
- 12:01which is like, oh, we have this wealth gap and the wealth gap's a problem.
- 12:06It's like, how are you not expressly connecting these two?
- 12:09How are you not connecting the symptomatic problems you're seeing,
- 12:14just like, say, within the United States and the problem of expanding wealth caps to the currency?
- 12:18And then similarly, how are you not seeing this geopolitical breakdown of whatever
- 12:28or however they define the existing world order to the currency system, right?
- 12:34If you don't do that, you're inevitably not really maybe understanding.
- 12:39Again, I know it goes beyond currency.
- 12:41I'm not saying that everything in the world between geopolitical rivals
- 12:46or potentially rivals in war comes down to money.
- 12:51It comes down to more things than that, national resources and power.
- 12:56but money's a big power and security um but money money is the basis of trade
- 13:03so either you're going to trade with somebody for resources or trade with somebody for security
- 13:11or if if if that doesn't work then you might go to war right like in russia's case like and i'm
- 13:22not saying this is the basis of the war, but they could trade for natural gas or they could
- 13:30plunder for natural gas. If they also feel threatened at the same time for their own security,
- 13:37then when they're thinking about the calculus of war versus trade, war versus negotiation,
- 13:43it's like, well, if you were trading and you had a good, reliable trade partner,
- 13:47wars destroy capital 100 right like the the broken window theory and that that war creates
- 13:56economic activity 100 objectively false war could be profitable in the sense of like you have some
- 14:05loss but you get a gain that's larger than the loss but it 100 destroys capital if you if you
- 14:10you know drop a bomb on somebody else on a bridge say well bridge has to be rebuilt that that was
- 14:16capital. And so just noting or flagging that the money and trade, if you have a deep trading
- 14:25relationship with a partner, they're giving you something of value, you're giving them something
- 14:30else of value, there's more order in that world, and you're less likely to go to war because
- 14:36you're relying on them for something valuable. And the basis of trade is mutual. Now, all of that
- 14:44gets broken up at a foundational level if on one hand you're using one country's currency
- 14:52and on the other hand that country is both debasing it actively creating this natural
- 15:00impetus to shift away from it at the same time as being weaponized and i think that those those
- 15:06were the pieces that both are not directly in Dalio's piece of keying in on cause and effect.
- 15:15He's basically saying things are breaking down, which they are. It's just not that valuable
- 15:20because without getting to the cause and effect, you can't then really decide, well, what is the
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- 19:28In the piece, he puts five different types of war in there.
- 19:32So there's trade war, technological war, geopolitical, capital war, and military.
- 19:38And if you look through them, I think you could probably argue that we're in at least four of them already.
- 19:41I think in terms of trade war, tariffs are probably a part of that.
- 19:46Technology wars, the race for AI seems to fit that bill.
- 19:52Geopolitical, I think the stuff that Trump's done in Venezuela
- 19:54and is potentially wanting to do in Greenland, they fit there.
- 19:59And capital wars, the freezing of the Russian treasuries,
- 20:01in hindsight, and maybe even at the time,
- 20:03seems like the biggest own goal for the US
- 20:05and destroys the faith in the dollar system in a lot of ways.
- 20:10Do you think we kind of fit those four criteria and then the only one left is actual all-out
- 20:15wolves?
- 20:16Yeah I mean I think in certain cases if you look at you know the U vis Russia or China that all of those are checked
- 20:31I think that, like, you know, even on, like, the military side, it's like with Russia, you say, hey, the United States is not directly at war with Russia, and Europe is not directly at war with Russia.
- 20:40But if you're providing weapons and money, like, are you not?
- 20:46you know um and so i'd say that's another degree where um and i i read this great book i don't even
- 20:55think it's still in publication but i recommend it to people it's called a world in debt by
- 21:01i think the guy's name is tilden freeman um but he goes through all of the the different
- 21:11relationships of debt of like you know individuals debtor nation is debtor um but one of the sections
- 21:18is on debt and war and in that he provides a um like an actual logical explanation for
- 21:32what drives war and he distinguishes like he doesn't say like there's different kinds of war
- 21:41He's talking about specifically war.
- 21:44We're going to war.
- 21:45What are the motivations of it?
- 21:49Because if you're not talking about what are the motivations for an economic war, a trade war, a technological war,
- 21:59then, again, if you're looking to see, hey, are we progressing to this kinetic military war,
- 22:07you're not trying to explain things at the cause and effect level.
- 22:17Because if you're not at the cause and effect level,
- 22:19then how do you advise somebody?
- 22:23I don't know if Ray Dalio's got the ear of the Trump administration,
- 22:27but he's just saying this out into the ether.
- 22:30But he is a very powerful, extremely wealthy person.
- 22:34it's like hey if you have some insight like what what do you recommend is the path out of
- 22:41de-escalating all of these things but if you're not trying to get to the root of well what's
- 22:48motivating all the different actors and um in this book tilden freeman basically laid out like
- 22:55and this was written around the great depression um between world war one and world war two
- 23:02that the two generally accepted rational reasons for war,
- 23:08the ones that are typically said,
- 23:11hey, this is a good reason to go to war,
- 23:15is, if I remember, security.
- 23:23In securing trade lines
- 23:26and anything that your country would need to sustain itself,
- 23:32Or, and this was the one that I felt was more strange, expansionism, empire desires, or you have a growing population you need to expand.
- 23:46And so the security side would be either the security of someone else that's threatening you, or you need resources to protect your sovereignty, and maybe someone just on the other side of a border has those resources.
- 24:02Again, trade is one route. It's a more capital efficient route. But if someone is not thinking about those levels of like, well, why would China and the United States be on this collision course?
- 24:20and thinking about not just the geopolitics that come through our wavelengths
- 24:28that are propaganda on either side, but really saying,
- 24:32okay, what's driving us off this cliff?
- 24:35I don't think that it's kind of like, yeah, we all get that the shit is breaking down
- 24:40and feels crazy.
- 24:41What is the world to do about it to prevent a worse outcome?
- 24:45My explanation for that would be, hey, stop using each other's currencies and adopt a neutral currency.
- 24:57And then the currency isn't a weapon.
- 25:00The currency system isn't a weapon.
- 25:03One doesn't, you know, because I view it in two ways.
- 25:09The currency as a weapon being like, okay, we can print it and you can't.
- 25:13and we're basically exporting to you,
- 25:16taking your goods and services for money that we create out of thin air
- 25:20versus the currency system being the rails of looking and saying,
- 25:25oh, not only are we using our currency system,
- 25:27but hey, we're going to cut you off from it
- 25:29and weaponize your ability to leverage it to send money to other people.
- 25:36That would be the single greatest thing the world could do
- 25:41to put trade back in the front
- 25:46to satisfy potentially some of those needs, wants
- 25:49that various different countries feel threatened by.
- 25:52Yeah, I mean, I've got a ton of questions in that.
- 25:55But if we just start with,
- 25:57does the world need a new order?
- 26:00Because if you look at the things
- 26:02that are creating the order in the world right now,
- 26:04most of those were created post-war.
- 26:06The world is a very different place.
- 26:08Does the fiat debt-based system
- 26:11mean that at this point it's gone too far and we need a shuffle,
- 26:14we need to change things around?
- 26:15Because I guess, like, historically, if you look back over, like,
- 26:17recent history, the two changes in world order, like, the Bretton Woods
- 26:20and then potentially, like, 1971 petrodollar system.
- 26:25Yeah, but I would say more, and this is, I feel like, you know,
- 26:29what Ray Dalio was outlining was that the order shifted
- 26:35when like essentially
- 26:36there was a great war
- 26:38and a
- 26:41one power went out over the other
- 26:43and then the winning power
- 26:45essentially
- 26:46sets the rules and dictates
- 26:49it right and
- 26:51I think that
- 26:53you know it's still unclear
- 26:55whether we're
- 26:56heading down that same path because
- 26:59you could say well China's
- 27:01a rising power and the US is a declining
- 27:03power or at least
- 27:05That might be a headline. I don't necessarily ascribe to it.
- 27:09But if you looked at something through that lens, you'd say, well, if China won a war, then they set the world order.
- 27:20I think another way to look at it, and that would be how you would define it if you were looking maybe at the pattern matching
- 27:27or looking at the patterns that Ray Dalio had put forward.
- 27:37But in that world, it was always like one country
- 27:42or one set of allies that won a war
- 27:45then dictating the rules to everybody else.
- 27:48If all fiat systems die, then there's a neutral currency.
- 27:55Well, the way that trade occurs in the world is functionally different than it ever occurred before.
- 28:04Because ever before, practically speaking, and I'm talking about in the last 300 years, say, gold as an underlying commodity metal or silver, but leveraging various different types of currencies that were being coined by crowns or governments.
- 28:29and again even in those processes there was it wasn't a truly neutral trading balance and so
- 28:40my view of it is that there's a lot of order that will come via trade without you know again
- 28:47it's not naive it's like hey there are always you know like i don't know who said it what the
- 28:53quotes were, but like man in his natural state is, is warring and, or something along those
- 29:00lines of like, Hey, this isn't just, if we have a neutral currency, everything will be
- 29:06honky dory.
- 29:06And one man is not going to want to steal another man's oil or, um, whatever other resource
- 29:16land, you know, with, you know, rare earth metals or what, whatever is desired for whatever
- 29:23whatever the goal might be of a rising, growing nation.
- 29:31But even in that world, someone could recognize, well, if there was a greater basis for trade,
- 29:37then not just on the margin, but categorically versus how the world exists today from a trading
- 29:44perspective, there's a much better chance of order that isn't dictated by one single
- 29:53power broker being the winner of a world war.
- 29:57There could be a lot of order and a lot of bilateral relationships that are far more fruitful,
- 30:02far less antagonistic than necessarily having one side be in a controller power position.
- 30:11One of the things that this piece made me think is, if we're moving towards...
- 30:18The world is getting more chaotic, that's for sure.
- 30:21Would a move to a new world order be a preferable outcome?
- 30:28If you look at the two possibilities, I guess it's either we kind of wind this back, move
- 30:33away from all-out war, and the fiat system continues, and the institutions that we have
- 30:39today continue even though they're sort of eroded from where they used to be.
- 30:43Is that a preferred outcome or is going through the pain now to come out to something better
- 30:48on the other side a preferred outcome?
- 30:49And it is something that's quite hard to kind of balance.
- 30:54A way that I describe it would be, it's like, regardless of whether or not he's keying on
- 31:00on the right cause and effects, it's like the world for a period of time had order,
- 31:07order on a relative basis and there there is less order and that and you know again that's one of the
- 31:15reasons where i was like hey if that's what you're saying okay we all we all can generally see and
- 31:21feel that you know at different levels whether it's geopolitical nonsense whether it's within
- 31:27countries right because it's not just you know the dynamics between europe and russia and u.s europe
- 31:33and Russia or the US and China, it's in the UK, in the United States.
- 31:45And anyone, I can only speak to living in the United States because you can feel it viscerally,
- 31:55is that we're going from a period of order to disorder.
- 31:59You know, not to say they're not related, but entirely independent from a plain perspective than some geopolitical foe or threat.
- 32:13And so that's just true.
- 32:16It's like things have been ordered and they're becoming disordered.
- 32:22Now, I think it's, you know, you can say, well, the order, what was creating the order?
- 32:28Well, it was post-World War II and the United States was the superpower.
- 32:32And there was no Navy that could rival it.
- 32:37It protected the waterways.
- 32:38It protected the trade lines.
- 32:40And therefore, it called the shots.
- 32:42And a derivative of that was order.
- 32:44And another way to say it was like maybe the underlying volatility was suppressed,
- 32:50but it was always going to be there.
- 32:52And then I would look at it from the perspective of it's not like this is,
- 32:55it's something else that's absent wanting and absent in ray dalio's piece which is he doesn't
- 33:01say what the likely next order is he might not want to say it because like in his mind if he's
- 33:07just matching history it would be well there's likely going to be a world war and whoever wins
- 33:13that war is going to set the order um it's going to create the order
- 33:20In my mind, looking at it and saying more order generally is better than great disorder.
- 33:33And looking at a country like Venezuela, setting aside the United States and having Nicolas Maduro, but just from an economic perspective, it's like, man, when their currency collapsed, the country went into great disorder.
- 33:48What happens with great disorder? Wealth is destroyed and people die without a kinetic war. That's what disorder is. That's what order going to disorder from.
- 34:02and it would certainly be better even if you were heading to a path of disorder
- 34:08if the bottom of that disorder of when things start to become more ordered rather than less
- 34:17would certainly be better than an alternative where it just keeps spiraling down and down and down and down.
- 34:25um and again in my mind it's not like hey what is the order who's the ruling power
- 34:34like does the does the united states need to go to war with china and one has to win and then the
- 34:39other it's like well like you know two two people who live in a vacuum who are sycophants might
- 34:49think oh that might need to happen when anybody else sitting outside would be like certainly that
- 34:55would be worse off everybody would be worse off if that happened um but someone in the cia or you
- 35:00know some deep state thing might be like yeah this is this is we got a war game this in this way it's
- 35:05going to go and like you know iran nuts off um but it's like it's still more it's more disorder
- 35:14and it is disorder maybe in their minds with a hope of then creating order from it.
- 35:19But it's like, again, if you don't solve the, like, trade is the basis of cooperation.
- 35:25It does not sit above, you know, somebody wanting to build an empire and have, you know, need to acquire oil.
- 35:35Again, like, I'm not naive in that respect.
- 35:38but if you have the basis to trade somebody for oil
- 35:42rather than take their country over,
- 35:47that's going to leave everybody in a better place.
- 35:50If you don't really have a basis to effectively coordinate trade,
- 35:54you're more likely to have an order that's dictated by a large war being won
- 36:03and then whoever is controlling the military
- 36:06that won dictating order to everybody else.
- 36:09That might be what happens.
- 36:11That's unlikely to be good for everybody
- 36:14living on the earth at this moment in time.
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- 38:15Ray Dalio is obviously insanely influential.
- 38:18It's not like this is completely a novel take.
- 38:20People have been saying this for a long time.
- 38:22It's just he's someone that a lot of people listen to.
- 38:24Do you think gold absolutely ripping over the last 18 months
- 38:28has been the market saying that a reordering is on the horizon?
- 38:34I personally don't think so.
- 38:36Again, it would be easy to say yes.
- 38:40because all of these things are happening at the same time
- 38:47while the price of gold is rising.
- 38:52But for the last five years or three to five years,
- 38:58Russia's been accumulating gold.
- 39:00China's been accumulating gold.
- 39:02in 2022
- 39:09no I guess four years ago
- 39:12I don't know exactly when Russia was cut off
- 39:14but that war started around this time in 2022
- 39:17and Russia didn't spontaneously collapse
- 39:23they figured out a way to trade around it
- 39:27the dollar also didn't spontaneously collapse
- 39:30when Russia was able to
- 39:32to navigate off of it.
- 39:35And so I think that it's more of a symptom of the currency
- 39:43being on the brink of, like when I say being on the brink of failure,
- 39:46it's like, I'm not saying it's going to collapse next month.
- 39:50I'm saying it's heading down that path.
- 39:53And when buying gold and silver has reached
- 39:59the retail fervor that it has.
- 40:02That's like, it has Weimar Germany vibes
- 40:07because everyone is speculators
- 40:09in financial assets and derivatives.
- 40:14The distinguishment, because you say,
- 40:15well, hey, that's the same thing as Bitcoin.
- 40:17It's like, the way that I look at it is
- 40:20there's a difference between speculating
- 40:22in gold or dollars, or sorry, in gold and silver
- 40:25to get more dollars, to get more ruble,
- 40:28or to get more yen as an inflation hedge
- 40:30versus actually identifying the one thing
- 40:32that can practically be a solution.
- 40:34And I'm not closing out that there are certain people,
- 40:37I believe that Peter Schiff is somebody who looks at gold and says we going back to a gold standard But there also and he won admit this that the vast majority of people that are trading gold
- 40:50are trading to get more dollars.
- 40:54Now, an example that's not a geopolitical foe of anyone,
- 40:59or at least not today really,
- 41:01is, or I wouldn't describe it this way at all,
- 41:03but Tether was somebody.
- 41:04They bought physical gold.
- 41:05So they apparently weren't just trading in it to get more dollars.
- 41:11They actually wanted to hold the reserves.
- 41:14I would just say that gold rising or people turning to Bitcoin gold commodity monies with the thought process that currencies are being debased is about the currency.
- 41:26And it's less about the collapse of the world order.
- 41:30Because the world order, and I kind of hate the term, but it's just like the financial system is dollarized.
- 41:41And the dollar and the US economy, but the dollar economy globally, the cross-border trade, dwarfs any other system.
- 41:50in the event of an actual dollar collapse
- 41:56things like gold and bitcoin for a period of time will be sold every credit asset will be sold
- 42:06every equity will be sold because there will actually be a run on dollars because there's
- 42:11so much dollar debt that exists and eventually the dollar will hyper inflate and everyone will
- 42:15migrate over to Bitcoin and sell their gold.
- 42:17But I would explain it less.
- 42:20Basically, maybe Ray Dalio making this comment
- 42:24at the same time that there's fear of going to war with Iran
- 42:28and heightened tension between Europe and Russia
- 42:32and the US and China and then gold going up.
- 42:34To me, it feels like a fooled by randomness thing
- 42:38where you could pick any one of those things out
- 42:41and say, this is going up because of that.
- 42:43And at the underlying side, it's like, well, the dollar is devaluing because there's more dollar deposits.
- 42:52Even though the Fed isn't creating more base money at the moment, there's more and more dollar deposits, more and more Euro deposits, more and more Yen deposits.
- 42:59And it's the currency stupid.
- 43:01And then maybe the fracturing of the global order and the global trade systems and partnerships that existed breaking down might be underlying about the currency losing its value.
- 43:16So I'm not saying it's not related to that.
- 43:19It's just that it's coinciding at a time that's easy to stick it to.
- 43:24And it's like, but you could have said that two years ago.
- 43:29Right.
- 43:29Imagine the same thing.
- 43:30Like China's actively buying gold and Russia's actively buying gold.
- 43:35Well, why wasn't the price going up?
- 43:37Right.
- 43:38What was the was the world order not fracturing then?
- 43:42You know, so it's like, yes, gold's going up in value.
- 43:47Yes, the
- 43:49the world, the order in the world is fracturing.
- 43:54But.
- 43:56It's also just the currency is losing its value.
- 43:59It's like, is gold going?
- 44:00Yeah.
- 44:02Like you could basically,
- 44:03you could have said the same
- 44:04when the stock market went up
- 44:06because they printed, you know,
- 44:07is this a sign of
- 44:09the world order
- 44:11falling apart?
- 44:12No one wants to be in cash.
- 44:13They want equities.
- 44:15And so I just
- 44:17I think it's easy to point it to that.
- 44:19And the more logical thing is just
- 44:21people are trying to get out of the dollar,
- 44:23you know, and.
- 44:25A lot of them are doing it
- 44:27for reasons that they're struggling
- 44:29to get by and they need to speculate in something to try to stay ahead.
- 44:32And then in others, yeah, China and Russia are diversifying away from the dollar because
- 44:38they don't want to be tied to the dollar hegemony.
- 44:44And that also is rational.
- 44:48But there's something at a higher order that's dictating the fracture.
- 44:55Yeah, that makes sense.
- 44:56I've got a question for you that is pretty much impossible to answer, but I'm going to ask it anyway.
- 45:00You say that the dollar fiat is failing, which I totally agree with, but it's a process, not an event, I think.
- 45:08It's not going to fail tomorrow.
- 45:09Well, it will be an event, but it's not going to fail tomorrow.
- 45:15Okay.
- 45:16But the reason I say it's a process is because you could probably say the dollar started failing in 2008.
- 45:22You could probably pick a load of different dates, but that might be one that you could pick.
- 45:25how long do you think it can last?
- 45:28I don't know.
- 45:30Markets stay
- 45:31markets can remain
- 45:33irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
- 45:36Personally
- 45:37it's hard for me to
- 45:38believe that it goes on for another
- 45:4110 years.
- 45:44Part of the way
- 45:45that I get there is thinking about Bitcoin
- 45:47and Bitcoin adoption.
- 45:51But also
- 45:52you know
- 45:55Maybe one thing that I look at is Venezuela, like an example that I use.
- 46:01That a lot of times people want to talk about, you know,
- 46:04Venezuela hyperinflated because of sanctions.
- 46:07And that's just like totally farcical.
- 46:11Then Venezuela hyperinflated because of money printing.
- 46:16The sanctions that actually started
- 46:21cutting off Venezuela abilities to sell oil was in, I believe, 2019 or 2020.
- 46:29GM, as a company, GM, the auto manufacturer that's based in the United States,
- 46:34they had operations in Venezuela.
- 46:37And in 2013, I believe they wrote down their Venezuelan boulevards.
- 46:45Because if you think about GM's operations,
- 46:48GM had auto manufacturing in the country of Venezuela.
- 46:51They weren't just exporting cars from the United States to Venezuela.
- 46:55They were importing parts and building GM vehicles in Venezuela.
- 47:03And they were holding boulevards to be able to,
- 47:08they were accepting boulevards as cash for cars.
- 47:11They were paying out boulevards.
- 47:13And then they had FX reserves because they were having to convert boulevards
- 47:16of dollars to buy parts from largely US-based manufacturers.
- 47:26I think they first marked down their Venezuelan boulevards in 2013 by 10% or 20%.
- 47:32And then the next year, and I might have it off by one year, it might be like
- 47:3714 was the first year and 15 was the next year or 13 was the first year and 14 was next.
- 47:41In the second year, they wrote it down 100%, 99%.
- 47:44And then if you Google, when did hyperinflation start in Venezuela, it'll say 2016 or 2017.
- 47:55So multiple years before, GM wrote down all of their boulevards and literally had to leave the country because they couldn't continue to manufacture cars.
- 48:09They shut down their operations.
- 48:10And over that period of time, before Venezuela actually entered hyperinflation, their currency had devalued by 50% against the dollar over three or four years.
- 48:28and a lot of things that you need to, at least in the United States,
- 48:33that you need to purchase, particularly food,
- 48:37have over the last four to five years,
- 48:41things are more than 50% more expensive.
- 48:48And so it's like there are parallels.
- 48:51Now, I don't necessarily think that three years from there
- 48:55there's going to be hyperinflation,
- 48:56but if you're looking at data points of like,
- 48:58what types of things happen, like looking at the stock market, like an index like the Dow,
- 49:03and seeing it have this hockey stick, these incredibly mature companies, right? These aren't
- 49:09startup tech companies that have huge ramps in cash flow, but seeing their valuations start to
- 49:18mimic what might have been happening in Weimar Germany, as an example. It's like the writings on
- 49:24that wall. And then when I think forward to like, because it will be an event, like there will be a
- 49:30moment when confidence is lost in the currency. And that is likely at a point where the currency
- 49:39starts to get sufficiently volatile that it causes a bunch of businesses to go out of business,
- 49:45which then disrupts supply chains, which then causes things like food on the grocery shelves
- 49:49to start to become sparse.
- 49:52And so if you think about that as one side
- 49:55of the currency problems independent,
- 49:58and then you say, here Bitcoin is,
- 50:01yeah, it's traded down,
- 50:02but between 1.34 trillion to 2 trillion in value,
- 50:10and we go out 10 years of a world becoming more disordered
- 50:16and people trying to figure out,
- 50:18well, what's the end game here? What's the answer? Then I don't see how with two more full
- 50:25halvings in Bitcoin and just this natural survival instinct of people. Because at the end of Dalio's
- 50:30piece, he was basically like, hey, the world's going to shit. You might want to think about not
- 50:35being in bonds. It's like, maybe think about gold. But as people follow the rabbit hole of
- 50:43the cause and effect, they'll realize that gold has the same problem.
- 50:47All of this started with gold and Bretton Woods.
- 50:52And even if you went back to gold coins, one, it's incredibly inefficient, but two,
- 50:58it's coined in some country's currency that people are having to trade back and forth.
- 51:07And so they all will figure out Bitcoin.
- 51:10And again, not a doomerism.
- 51:13I don't want it to happen.
- 51:13I'm just looking out and saying, hey, if Bitcoin adoption increased by 10 times over the next 10 years, which I view to be conservative, then it becomes clearly the second largest currency system in the world.
- 51:28And once it becomes clearly the second largest currency system in the world, it's like you don't even need to become the biggest.
- 51:35people will like the writing will be on the wall enough of a consensus will happen that
- 51:39somewhere in that point of that session from like being larger than the euro and clearly being
- 51:45larger than gold which i don't really think about gold's currency system um that everyone there'll
- 51:52be a there'll be a a rapid monetization of bitcoin that happens at that time i don't try to
- 51:59exactly when it happens you know like to me it doesn't happen in 20 in 20 years great that would
- 52:06be that would be phenomenal you know i'm just explaining the cause and effect of of where
- 52:11and why it's going that way so that you know the way i think about it is survive
- 52:17surviving all seasons all weathers if you know yeah where it's going and why and why it might
- 52:23not go back to something like gold and why all of these problems that exist today started with gold.
- 52:30You really think that all these problems, if you can't think about,
- 52:36well, why did we get to the dollar as it is when it started with gold,
- 52:41then how are you not connecting?
- 52:45Well, if you just tried to go back to ground zero and start it over,
- 52:49it's like, what would you do differently?
- 52:50And isn't this the logical place that it ends?
- 52:53Anyways, right?
- 52:55And if that's the case, then you can't go back to gold.
- 52:58You have to go to something that actually solves the problem that caused the fiat system to emerge, to solve gaps in settlement, security of gold, the difficulty of transporting gold, which is part of the difficulty of settling gold.
- 53:17if you're thinking about
- 53:20the US trading with China
- 53:22and imagine you had to
- 53:24actually settle physical gold
- 53:26every time a ship
- 53:29moved across
- 53:30you could do that
- 53:31but the gold is sitting in one place
- 53:33it's sitting on one shore
- 53:35and you might say
- 53:36well we'll put it in Europe
- 53:37because we don't trust each other
- 53:40but then it's sitting in Europe
- 53:42it's sitting on someone's shores
- 53:45and moving in a vault because moving it physically between countries is too costly.
- 53:57And then what is that?
- 53:58If it's sitting in a vault, you might not need to have a fiat denomination on top of it,
- 54:04but you essentially have a fiat system, financial system built on top to do all the zeros and ones.
- 54:11And you're like, nope, we're not going back to that.
- 54:14We're going to the thing where, hey, if the U.S. is trading with China, you can send Bitcoin.
- 54:20Anybody who's trading can send Bitcoin.
- 54:22They can secure it.
- 54:23And their country, when they're ready to buy something from us or somebody else, they send it there.
- 54:29They're securing.
- 54:30You solve the problem of how gold is secured.
- 54:34Not only how gold is secured, how trade is settled.
- 54:37You have a greater basis of trade.
- 54:40Not to say it's all kumbaya.
- 54:42we're not living in utopia
- 54:44but there you have
- 54:46a better shot
- 54:48better basis of trade
- 54:50you're not likely to bomb your trade park
- 54:52or you're less likely to
- 54:53yeah so the actionable advice
- 54:56that Ray Dalio gives in the piece is
- 54:58sell debt buy gold and clearly
- 55:00gold is not the only option we think bitcoin is a better
- 55:02option but for the gold bugs
- 55:04like the Peter Schiff of the world
- 55:06he's obviously clueless on bitcoin
- 55:08but he's a smart guy
- 55:10I quite like a lot of his other takes
- 55:12Why don't you think they put enough weight
- 55:15on the sort of currency side of things
- 55:16and they don't see that if you go back to a gold standard,
- 55:18you kind of just de facto create fiat again?
- 55:22I don't know.
- 55:23I don't know.
- 55:24I mean, in Peter Schiff's case,
- 55:30I think that it's because,
- 55:35like, I don't know the guy.
- 55:37He seems like a decently fine human being.
- 55:39but when you've been so right about the problems and you've misdiagnosed the solution
- 55:51that your bias and just like overcoming the negative psychology of of it like
- 55:58the rational person would say it's a sunk cost fallacy right but um in his case which i don't
- 56:08think that is the case of the majority of people, which is why Bitcoin wins, is because he has a
- 56:14bias that's built around his own personality. He's got businesses built around it. It is not easy to
- 56:21exit a position and accumulate Bitcoin or let me just finish that thought, accumulate Bitcoin and
- 56:31then tell the entire world, hey, I was wrong about gold. Now, Larry Lepard is someone who's
- 56:36like going from the gold world and basically like, I still think you should own gold, but I think that
- 56:40Bitcoin is going to win. And, you know, in his mind, he doesn't necessarily say Bitcoin is going
- 56:44to win and gold is going to be a loser. I think that that, you know, the logical conclusion,
- 56:49not saying that, you know, Larry agrees or disagrees. But there's a difference between that,
- 56:56which I think is, is, is the rational world versus someone like Peter Schiff, who's, you know,
- 57:02not just been somebody who's advocated for gold, but has banks and businesses
- 57:08and everything tied to that end game happening.
- 57:15And there are going to be fewer of those people, right?
- 57:18Like one example I would give is when the whole world was going on the gold standard,
- 57:22China went on the silver standard.
- 57:24And so it's like people can choose wrong.
- 57:27And then they can have, you can look at it two ways.
- 57:30They can have their wealth expropriated from them, or they can have their purchasing power declined.
- 57:41There's a quote in the Bitcoin standard.
- 57:44I think it's something along the lines of, you can't insulate or protect yourself from somebody else using a harder currency than yours.
- 57:57and that's what
- 57:59we're dealing with with Bitcoin and gold
- 58:02and I'm not just talking about
- 58:04the supply
- 58:06cap
- 58:06it's the other properties that
- 58:10make it a superior
- 58:12settlement rail
- 58:13faster settlement
- 58:16like ability to
- 58:18assay
- 58:18if somebody looks
- 58:21if anybody picks up gold
- 58:23in Bitcoin and looks at them both
- 58:25and be like shit it's going to be one of these two
- 58:27and they bottom up, they end up at Bitcoin.
- 58:30That was me.
- 58:33And where I first had to understand why gold was money
- 58:37and why it had emerged.
- 58:39And then I was looking at Bitcoins through the same lens
- 58:43and you're A versus B and you stack them up
- 58:46and it becomes fairly clear fairly easily.
- 58:50And there's part of that that Safe Dean Amoose
- 58:54had a debate with Peter Schiff in El Salvador recently.
- 58:57and he talks about a number of those differences
- 59:02and I just think that the rational mind ends up there
- 59:07and someone has to choose how they're going to store each unit of value
- 59:12and you can do it in both
- 59:14but everyone is incentivized to maximize their purchasing power going forward
- 59:20so I think it's like not having the ability to see it in Peter Schiff's case
- 59:25because he's so wed.
- 59:26He was so right about the problems,
- 59:28and now he's so wed to what he was forecasting to be the solution.
- 59:33You can be wrong.
- 59:34China was wrong about going on the silver standard,
- 59:36and now they're buying gold.
- 59:39That's the other side of this.
- 59:40They're wrong again.
- 59:43That might be why they,
- 59:47if you were forecasting that there's a superpower that rises
- 59:50and that the U.S. is declining
- 59:52and China is going to be the new superpower,
- 59:53It's like maybe they're making the wrong currency bet
- 59:57and maybe that is the weakness of their whole strategy.
- 1:00:03It's almost like if you had to compare like a Peter Schiff gold bug
- 1:00:07to some fiat maxi person,
- 1:00:09it's almost more frustrating to be Peter Schiff in that situation
- 1:00:12where if we're right, Schiff has been 90% right for decades
- 1:00:16and then just got the last hurdle,
- 1:00:18just tripped at the last hurdle and didn't move to Bitcoin.
- 1:00:21Like they might end up buying Bitcoin at the same price.
- 1:00:23Why do you think Bitcoin, like if everything we're saying here is true, which I believe it to be, why do you think Bitcoin is still trading like a tech stock and we're at like $67,000 now?
- 1:00:34Like that seems deeply, deeply undervalued.
- 1:00:37Is this just like an information asymmetry between us and the rest of the world?
- 1:00:41It's not that I would say that if you look at Bitcoin and you say, hey, all these things are true.
- 1:00:46Well, they were true when Bitcoin was $8,000 and crashed to $4,000.
- 1:00:51They were true when Bitcoin was $69,000 and crashed to $16,000.
- 1:00:58They were true at and they still true today at or wherever it is And so I think that the explanation for that is like price is the scoreboard right
- 1:01:12But Bitcoin is volatile because it's difficult to understand.
- 1:01:17And I would liken this very much to when I gave a talk a few years ago about why Bitcoin is not a hedge.
- 1:01:27like and i gave it i gave a recent talk in the same venue is that the one that went like viral
- 1:01:33on the untamed youtube it was the huge views yeah that was an awesome talk and i and i gave that talk
- 1:01:38of like explaining like hey there's inflation happening and bitcoin's coming down like isn't
- 1:01:44this isn't this contradictory and it's like no it's perfectly explained um and um and and the
- 1:01:53same thing is true now. I gave a presentation at the same venue two months ago. I wish I could have
- 1:02:05done it right now with Bitcoin at 66. Because it's the same thing. It's like, hey, the world is
- 1:02:13becoming increasingly disordered. And you're saying that Bitcoin is supposed to be the answer
- 1:02:21to that, but it's going down, it should be going up. It's like, well, you have to understand Bitcoin.
- 1:02:26You have to understand that and then have the world event happen and then buy it.
- 1:02:33And if you don't know, in the explanation of inflation, if you don't know that Bitcoin is
- 1:02:39the solution for inflation and why, the long-term one, not in the next five days or 10 days, but
- 1:02:46why it actually permanently solves the problem of money printing.
- 1:02:50And then you're going to the grocery store and shit's getting real bad for you.
- 1:02:55And you're living paycheck to paycheck and you're constantly stressed about it.
- 1:03:01You're not putting those two and two together, right?
- 1:03:04Same thing with this.
- 1:03:06World's on fire.
- 1:03:08One large war at risk after another.
- 1:03:11Well, if you don't see the connection to Bitcoin, then how do you put those things together?
- 1:03:20And that's what's happening at the highest level.
- 1:03:25But at a micro level, people are.
- 1:03:30People right now are buying Bitcoin and having the light bulb go off because four years ago,
- 1:03:37They heard somebody talking for the first time about Rush getting cut off of Swift and Bitcoin's the answer to that.
- 1:03:46And now they see this piece from Ray Dalio talking about a world becoming disordered.
- 1:03:54And they're like, yeah, he's right, but it's not gold, it's Bitcoin.
- 1:03:56And they're putting their chips on the table.
- 1:03:59And then Bitcoin will bottom at a higher place than it did before because more people will figure it out.
- 1:04:08And that doesn't mean for some technical reason that Bitcoin, I'm not saying that it already has bottomed.
- 1:04:15I'm just saying that the trend of that higher highs, higher lows, doesn't matter if in 2022 that it went through its prior high, it then went far through its higher highs.
- 1:04:28And that's a function of more people figuring it out.
- 1:04:31But two things can be true at the same time.
- 1:04:35More people are figuring it out.
- 1:04:36That's creating higher levels of equilibrium and higher highs.
- 1:04:41Very few people actually understand what's going on.
- 1:04:46You know what the evidence of it is?
- 1:04:48There is 700,000 Bitcoin that's sitting in strategy.
- 1:04:51And there's 700,000 Bitcoin that are sitting in IBIT.
- 1:04:58If you actually understood what was going on, and I'm not saying an investment in strategy or an investment in IBIT is a bad thing.
- 1:05:07The companies themselves are not bad.
- 1:05:10Nothing bad with them.
- 1:05:12But if you're not self-custaining Bitcoin or if you don't realize, say IBIT, you could just have your Bitcoin at Coinbase.
- 1:05:21You have less counterparty risk than you do if it's sitting in IBIT.
- 1:05:26You took the convenience of buying it probably because you're trading it.
- 1:05:31Like those two vehicles, IBIT more than strategy, are indicators of lack of knowledge.
- 1:05:41Not like they're good products, they're good companies, but like you could have your Bitcoin in River.
- 1:05:48You could have your Bitcoin in Unchained.
- 1:05:50You could have your Bitcoin in a cold card.
- 1:05:51You could have your Bitcoin in Strike.
- 1:05:53You'd be better off.
- 1:05:54Right.
- 1:05:55Right. And everything's good for Bitcoin, though.
- 1:06:01But I'm just saying there's a lot of people that bought Bitcoin.
- 1:06:04And from my vantage point, hosting meetups and going to conferences
- 1:06:08and talking to people that are interested, people reaching out,
- 1:06:12we never had a wave of adoption.
- 1:06:16Like there was never a fervor of individuals that were rushing in
- 1:06:21that were like chasing price.
- 1:06:25Like that didn't happen.
- 1:06:27So to think that like, you know, cycles, like cycles are not dead.
- 1:06:30Human psychology is the same.
- 1:06:32It's just fooled by randomness.
- 1:06:35You know, my explanation for this, where prices are, is, you know, reportedly, according to Galaxy, they helped somebody sell 80,000 Bitcoin.
- 1:06:43That was the local top.
- 1:06:44And if you have a bunch of people that have bought the ETF that don't have a lot of knowledge,
- 1:06:53primary knowledge about Bitcoin, about the real reason to own it or speculate in it, they sell it.
- 1:06:58You know, like it starts to go down.
- 1:07:00It's easy to buy Bitcoin when it's going up because when it goes up, psychologically, it reinforces it.
- 1:07:05You made a good decision.
- 1:07:06But if you're still sitting there with limited knowledge and it starts to go down, your first instinct is like buy a little bit more.
- 1:07:12And then when it goes down further, you start to panic and then you sell.
- 1:07:17We saw the example of the Wisconsin state pension.
- 1:07:21They bought Bitcoin when it was like about 60,000 and they bought 10 basis points.
- 1:07:26Michael Saylor has this great quote, which is, if you understand Bitcoin, there's no chance that you only own 1%.
- 1:07:32Well, the Wisconsin state pension bought a tenth of that.
- 1:07:37okay and then when it went up to 100 they sold it they they rebalanced their portfolios like
- 1:07:44they and they bought ibit did they actually ever understand bitcoin you know like i myself i was
- 1:07:51championing hey you know wisconsin state pension buys bitcoin it's great they they didn't understand
- 1:07:58it you know but then you have other markers that are they're very positive ones like um
- 1:08:03steak and shake, right?
- 1:08:07Like they get it, you know, like not, I don't know where they hold their Bitcoin.
- 1:08:13Don't really care.
- 1:08:13They don't own, at least not to my knowledge.
- 1:08:17But I also know just the fact that they're accepting it as money.
- 1:08:20They're not converting what they receive.
- 1:08:23They're buying Bitcoin on a primary basis.
- 1:08:25They're working with Fold to, you know, have a bonus for employees.
- 1:08:29They're leaning full in to Bitcoin and they're attributing their leaning into
- 1:08:33Bitcoin to their same source growing far faster than any of their peers. It's not the only thing
- 1:08:39that's driving it, but they themselves are directing it. You can look at it and say,
- 1:08:42those people figured it out sometime in the last four years.
- 1:08:47And they probably own a lot less Bitcoin than when the Wisconsin State Pension bought it. I think
- 1:08:52they bought like $160 million. They had more Bitcoin than Steak and Shake. Steak and Shake
- 1:08:59gets it and they're just going to stay humble and stack sats.
- 1:09:03And more and more people that exist like Steak and Shake, I'm not talking about
- 1:09:07businesses adopting as payments.
- 1:09:10I'm talking about people really getting it.
- 1:09:13Those are stacking and Bitcoin will find floors
- 1:09:19at a ratio relative to the number of people that actually get it.
- 1:09:26And then it's still going to be volatile because the way I would describe it is no more than one in 100 people know what's going on.
- 1:09:33How could something not be crazy volatile if only one out of 100 people get it?
- 1:09:38And one out of 100 is high.
- 1:09:41It's less than one in 100.
- 1:09:44Fewer than one in 100 companies in S&P 500 own Bitcoin in a direct way.
- 1:09:49At least if they own shares in BlackRock.
- 1:09:55I'm not talking about the ID.
- 1:09:57If they own shares in some company that owns Bitcoin, that's not exposure.
- 1:10:03Tesla owns Bitcoin.
- 1:10:06Square.
- 1:10:07Block.
- 1:10:07Yeah, Block owns Bitcoin.
- 1:10:11I don't think there's another S&P 500 company.
- 1:10:14So if five companies owning Bitcoin would be 1%, right?
- 1:10:21Yeah.
- 1:10:23Then we're not there.
- 1:10:26But also if people just check their local,
- 1:10:31their company that they work for, their family members,
- 1:10:35people don't get it.
- 1:10:38So it's just fine.
- 1:10:39People just have to learn.
- 1:10:41And it's like, if it were easy to see Bitcoin, more people would see it.
- 1:10:47And to Safe's point of the price being the ultimate arbiter is Bitcoin goes up over time because more people do.
- 1:10:55More people figure it out.
- 1:10:57And that's all that matters.
- 1:10:58It's just like, as so long as more people are figuring it out, not less, then Bitcoin goes up over time.
- 1:11:05if it ever started going down for long periods of time and consistently hitting lower lows and not making higher highs,
- 1:11:16that would be a signal that people who had previously figured it out thought that there was something broken about it.
- 1:11:25And what we're seeing today, nothing is signaling that.
- 1:11:29There's a lot of negative energy in the world of Bitcoin, but it's like more people are figuring it out, not less.
- 1:11:35Bottom line.
- 1:11:37Yeah.
- 1:11:38One of the anecdotal pieces of evidence that people are starting to take this more seriously, not necessarily understand it, but at least take it more seriously, is like every time we've had a price crash in the past, people who know what I do, when you tell them or when they ask you about the price, there's almost like a smirk in there.
- 1:11:55They kind of want to say the Ponzi is going to zero.
- 1:11:58But this time, the interesting thing is I go to a boxing gym pretty much every day, and people ask me about Bitcoin, ask me about the price and things like that.
- 1:12:06And this time, the reaction has been very different.
- 1:12:09It's been, maybe now's a good time to look into it.
- 1:12:11Maybe now's a good time to buy it.
- 1:12:12And I think that sort of skepticism around Bitcoin generally is going away.
- 1:12:17Yeah, like there are still obviously people that want to dunk like, I don't know the guy, but Keith McCullough and Bloomberg Talking Heads and Peter Schiff.
- 1:12:28It's going to zero.
- 1:12:29There are fewer of them each time because most people look at it and be like,
- 1:12:35I'm not going to do that again.
- 1:12:36I got embarrassed the last time that I did that.
- 1:12:39The majority of even the Bitcoin haters are getting wise to Bitcoin's rise and fall.
- 1:12:46But to the point, I'm experiencing the same thing.
- 1:12:49I'm not yet experiencing just person after person being like, how do I do this?
- 1:12:55But when I'm talking to people, despite the fact of Bitcoin being here, it's like, how do I get set up?
- 1:13:05Not like ribbing.
- 1:13:07You know, of course, like it's not zero.
- 1:13:10But an example, like to give another piece of the psychology, I went and bought groceries at the local grocer that got enabled by Square here in Austin.
- 1:13:19And I bought, I paid with Bitcoin.
- 1:13:22And the person working behind the counter was like, oh, that's cool.
- 1:13:25That's the first time I've been here when someone's bought in Bitcoin.
- 1:13:31She knew that they accepted it.
- 1:13:33But she made a comment along the lines of like, I just feel like I missed it.
- 1:13:40I'm too late.
- 1:13:41I'm sitting there just buying groceries and I don't want to turn into a full orange pill on the spot.
- 1:13:47I was like, look, we're super early.
- 1:13:52And I gave her my literal 30 seconds.
- 1:13:54I was like, the whole idea is that they keep printing more dollars.
- 1:13:57That's why food is getting more expensive.
- 1:13:59And the whole idea around Bitcoin is that it can't be printed.
- 1:14:04There's a lot of noise.
- 1:14:06I work on Bitcoin, but just Bitcoin, you know, like that level of conversation.
- 1:14:09I was like, you're not, you're not to, you know, you didn't miss it.
- 1:14:14You should, you know, go online and read something about it, you know, but she was interested, right?
- 1:14:20Like it wasn't the price is crashing and is it going to zero?
- 1:14:23It was like, here at 68,000, I feel like I missed it, which is also a natural side of the psychology.
- 1:14:30And then over time, people just get over that.
- 1:14:33But it's usually not like the people that are activating right now are the people that had the inclination the last time but didn't.
- 1:14:45And then were probably reinforced when it went down to 16,000.
- 1:14:49but then when it went up to 125, they were like,
- 1:14:52shit, I made a mistake.
- 1:14:53And now as it's coming down, they're like,
- 1:14:55okay, I don't need to make the same mistake.
- 1:14:59And that's just what happens.
- 1:15:02That's a combination of human psychology
- 1:15:05and following signal being price.
- 1:15:08Yeah, the thing that I always say
- 1:15:09when people ask me if they've missed it
- 1:15:10is like, I thought I'd missed it in 2016, 2017.
- 1:15:13And that's going to continue to happen.
- 1:15:16Just lastly, on this point of like,
- 1:15:17You brought up before that Bitcoin being used as money as being a really important part of this.
- 1:15:23Why do you think that is?
- 1:15:24Because there's a lot of people out there that think of Bitcoin as just a store of value
- 1:15:27and don't necessarily see it as the medium of exchange.
- 1:15:30And obviously, store of value is going to come first and has come first.
- 1:15:33But why is moving to being an actual currency so important?
- 1:15:36So the incentives of it will dictate that it will be used as currency.
- 1:15:50Imagine there's 100 people, and imagine one of them is saving in Bitcoin.
- 1:15:57Using my, you know, no more than one in 100 people understand Bitcoin.
- 1:16:02And I recognize that more than 1% have some exposure to Bitcoin at this point.
- 1:16:08It's not as high as people quote it when they say 40% of Americans own Bitcoin.
- 1:16:14It's probably something like somewhere between 3% and 5% have some material exposure to it.
- 1:16:22But the percentage of people that actually understand, like Harvard sold some Bitcoin and bought more Ethereum.
- 1:16:28They own Bitcoin. They don't get it.
- 1:16:30But let's just assume that one out of 100 people understands Bitcoin and the 99 others are fiat.
- 1:16:43How do you have a trading economy with only one out of 100 understanding Bitcoin?
- 1:16:49even if you put it to 8 billion people and go down to 80 million,
- 1:16:59which that's where I say there's not 80 million people in the world
- 1:17:02that really understand Bitcoin.
- 1:17:03But even though that's across the world,
- 1:17:07then what is the likelihood of a business and somebody understanding Bitcoin
- 1:17:12in the same place and the one that understands it is a business
- 1:17:19and they've invested in infrastructure
- 1:17:22and you come to their store.
- 1:17:23It's just the density is the biggest uphill battle.
- 1:17:27People first understanding why Bitcoin stores value,
- 1:17:30starting to store value, having some Bitcoin in a wallet,
- 1:17:32they show up to a business,
- 1:17:33oh, they accept Bitcoin, let me try this.
- 1:17:36But go out to a world where 100% of people
- 1:17:39have figured out why Bitcoin stores value.
- 1:17:43Well, who is holding the bag of the fiat currency?
- 1:17:46If 100 out of 100,
- 1:17:47all have figured out bitcoin let's not say 100 but say 90 percent you know or 80 percent
- 1:17:55then the overlaps of like oh you're you're a person that runs a business that understands
- 1:18:00bitcoin you're an individual by and large every individual that's walking through your store
- 1:18:03also understands bitcoin and has bitcoin what would be the reason for if they wanted bitcoin
- 1:18:10to force somebody to pay them in fiat to then convert it into bitcoin it's just
- 1:18:14the incentives of like, hey, everyone's storing value in Bitcoin is that nobody else is holding
- 1:18:21currencies that are shitty and lose their value. And then it's like, well, just give me, in return
- 1:18:27for my goods and services, just give me that money that's easily exchangeable over the internet.
- 1:18:31Thank you. Now, why it's so important that it evolves that way is because if it didn't,
- 1:18:39if 100 out of 100 people were holding Bitcoin,
- 1:18:43but they weren't transacting in it,
- 1:18:45the only rational explanation for that
- 1:18:47is because by some fiat decree,
- 1:18:50someone said, you can't do it.
- 1:18:52It's illegal.
- 1:18:52Now, there's also a reason why
- 1:18:53a banning of transactions with Bitcoin would fail
- 1:18:56because of a global geopolitical prisoner's dilemma.
- 1:19:04Somebody like El Salvador is a great example of it,
- 1:19:09where it's like if one defects,
- 1:19:11which there's a maximum incentive to defect
- 1:19:13from some sort of concerted effort
- 1:19:16to prevent Bitcoin from being used as payments,
- 1:19:19that the only reason why it wouldn't
- 1:19:22is because Bitcoin was too centralized
- 1:19:24to be able to prevent some sort of legal decree
- 1:19:28preventing it from being successful.
- 1:19:30And if it was, it's not just that that is a problem,
- 1:19:34It's that if Bitcoin was too centralized to allow for what otherwise should have happened by the natural economic incentives, then some outside force is setting the rules in some form or fashion.
- 1:19:53And if that's the case, then could the United States government say, oh, we're going to, you know, you miners run this software that says they're going to be 22 million.
- 1:20:02And then it becomes a fiat currency.
- 1:20:03So the natural incentives will dictate it.
- 1:20:07And I do agree, you first have to understand why Bitcoin will store value to own any Bitcoin at all.
- 1:20:12It's by and large, in most at least developed world places, easiest just to buy a little Bitcoin with fiat.
- 1:20:19Once you figure that out, you start to figure out, oh no, I need to have even more of this.
- 1:20:26Beyond there, if you're a business owner, you say,
- 1:20:28Yep, open me up.
- 1:20:32Just start paying me in this if you have it, please.
- 1:20:37That's just a process.
- 1:20:39That's a process of adoption.
- 1:20:42But as an end state, if it doesn't get to the point where people are
- 1:20:44actively just paying businesses is because of centralization.
- 1:20:48And centralization is the greatest long-term risk to Bitcoin.
- 1:20:53if it weren't to continue to get more decentralized.
- 1:20:57But naturally, again, as more people buy it,
- 1:21:00as more large competing interests,
- 1:21:02as more ends where I'm sympathetic to you.
- 1:21:06I watched your interview with Michael Saylor.
- 1:21:09By the way, there won't be a lot of Bitcoin treasury companies.
- 1:21:13They'll congregate for fundamental reasons,
- 1:21:18if they are free.
- 1:21:20But that's a side, just saying.
- 1:21:22but you know
- 1:21:24in the case of like
- 1:21:24you know
- 1:21:26even though I say you're probably lower on the education scale if you're owning IBIT,
- 1:21:32I think IBIT existing is good for Bitcoin, right?
- 1:21:38You know, you could look at the People's Bank of China and be like,
- 1:21:41ah, People's Bank of China, bad.
- 1:21:43But like if they bought Bitcoin, good for Bitcoin, you know.
- 1:21:47That's the way the world's going.
- 1:21:49Every government's going to own Bitcoin.
- 1:21:50The larger the players are that are involved,
- 1:21:55The larger the competing interest, the greater the, you know, you could look at that and say, like, Bitcoin's becoming more centralized because 600,000 or 700,000 Bitcoin are in Ibit.
- 1:22:06But, you know, if you try to get 2 million prices higher, more people are figuring it out.
- 1:22:12Ibit has now opened up the ability to take Bitcoin in kind rather than just have, you know, not everyone can show up to BlackRock and do that.
- 1:22:20But Morgan Stanley can or anybody that's a, whatever they call, certain kind of participants can.
- 1:22:30There's a natural inclination to take direct ownership over it.
- 1:22:35And the more large interests that come in, the more decentralized it gets.
- 1:22:38It's like, if IBIT comes in, well, Vanguard is going to have to get involved.
- 1:22:45If the United States government gets involved, then China is going to get involved.
- 1:22:50Russia's going to get involved and more competing interests, harder it is to change Bitcoin.
- 1:22:57And so that's why it's like, you know, the path, the risk of centralization, but everything
- 1:23:03about the incentives, even with large participants involved, drives decentralization.
- 1:23:10The larger the Bitcoin gets, the more decentralized it gets.
- 1:23:13The more companies that emerge to build wallets the more companies emerge to build custody the more companies emerge to work on payments It all flows everything is downstream from adoption of that
- 1:23:25That thing clicking that is Bitcoin is actually money, might trade like a tech stock, but
- 1:23:33it's money, it's volatile because people don't really understand it yet and they're figuring
- 1:23:36out their way.
- 1:23:37and you know while price is the ultimate arbiter i also do think like on the payment side like
- 1:23:44someone like square turning on bitcoin payments is huge for everybody working on bitcoin payments
- 1:23:49because it also will be an education for a lot of people that like a lot of people that might not
- 1:23:54have heard about zap right but who our product's better for it creates an opportunity for us but
- 1:23:59it also reinforces the store of value because some people are sitting there saying like but you can't
- 1:24:04use Bitcoin for anything. And then when they see that Square is incorporating it for payments,
- 1:24:09they're like, ah, light bulb off. I'm not. I am. But explaining to somebody else's psychology,
- 1:24:18I might not be going and paying for these eggs in Bitcoin, but somebody can. Somebody's paying
- 1:24:25this coffee shop for Bitcoin. It's possible. And that that's the end game. And understanding that
- 1:24:31That is the end game.
- 1:24:33Seeing that Bitcoin is being used as money will unlock Bitcoin as money for more people, in my mind, that will go down.
- 1:24:43For a period of time, they're still going to need to read a book, listen to podcasts, and then connect it to someone like Square doing this.
- 1:24:50That's turning on payments.
- 1:24:52But there's just only so many people that are going to be able to opt into Bitcoin without seeing that.
- 1:24:59that seeing it actually used as money is the closing of the mental loop of what this thing actually is For certain people they will be able to read a book and say ah I can see the path forward of why everyone adopts this and why in the future everyone going to accept his money Others need to see it happen and then everything else they heard about Bitcoin fall into place
- 1:25:22And for some people, it might be that. Other people, it might be Russia and Swift.
- 1:25:29Other people, it might be Ray Dalio's rapid disorder. And then it's like, well,
- 1:25:37what's the next domino to fall in the geopolitical landscape?
- 1:25:42You know, maybe somebody else merges and actually buys Bitcoin, you know?
- 1:25:46So I think it all, like it all compounds, but it's like, you know,
- 1:25:53and it is ordered and like store value in payments.
- 1:25:55The payments is the end game and payments being developed right now
- 1:25:59also accelerates people's ability to look at Bitcoin and connect it to money
- 1:26:05and start buying it.
- 1:26:07to then later be spending.
- 1:26:11I love it, man.
- 1:26:12I can hear the family in the background.
- 1:26:15We've got some wholesome kid noises going on.
- 1:26:17I'll let you get back to them.
- 1:26:19But before we close out,
- 1:26:21where can you send anyone, Mike,
- 1:26:22to find out more about your book
- 1:26:23or is that probably anything you're doing?
- 1:26:25Yeah, so if somebody's not,
- 1:26:28you know, if Bitcoin is not yet clicking,
- 1:26:30but maybe this opened up some avenues to understand,
- 1:26:35like definitely read my book go to so it's only on the same house it's the best looking bitcoin
- 1:26:42book like you killed it on the cover thanks i spent a lot of time the artist proof of paint
- 1:26:49on twitter or on x if you need a piece of bitcoin art go check him out he's amazing um
- 1:26:57but yeah if you don if you don you know if bitcoin just starting to click go read a book Go find a reliable place to buy Bitcoin and start Sack and Sats But if you already understand Bitcoin then I highly encourage you if you run a business
- 1:27:12or are a key person in a business, to make the push to open it up as a form of payment.
- 1:27:21People can look us up at zaprite.com, Z-A-P-R-I-T-E.
- 1:27:27All one word, Zaprite.
- 1:27:29if we're not the right solution for you
- 1:27:32we'll put you in the direction of the people who are
- 1:27:35we're all on the same path
- 1:27:38working on the same mission
- 1:27:39so check us out at zaprite.com
- 1:27:41and then also news on the book
- 1:27:43the audio book is in the process of being released
- 1:27:50so it's been submitted to the different platforms
- 1:27:53I was sitting on that for a good dip in price
- 1:27:55Just really, I was dragging my ass.
- 1:28:00But that's now final.
- 1:28:02I read it myself.
- 1:28:03Marty read the foreword.
- 1:28:05Will Cole read the intro and outro.
- 1:28:08And so I'm excited to finally get that out.
- 1:28:10So there's a lot of people these days
- 1:28:11that apparently don't read books anymore,
- 1:28:12but will listen to audio.
- 1:28:14And so in short order,
- 1:28:16it should be both available on safe site,
- 1:28:18but then across platforms as well, the audio book.
- 1:28:22Awesome.
- 1:28:23As someone who runs a company using ZapRite, it is the best solution.
- 1:28:28Also, we've been using it for the tickets on for cheat code,
- 1:28:31and it's so much easier than doing it the ad hoc way that we did it before.
- 1:28:36Check out ZapRite.
- 1:28:38Awesome.
- 1:28:38Thank you, Parker.
- 1:28:39This has been great.
- 1:28:40Appreciate you, Danny.
- 1:28:53Thank you.