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Peter St Onge | Bitcoin & Individualism | Simply Bitcoin IRL · Simply Bitcoin

0:07
Hello everybody, Welcome to another episode of Simply
0:10
Bitcoin IRL. Today we're honored to have a
0:13
very special guest, massive fan of his work and I'm of course
0:17
I'm talking about Peter St. Hodge.
0:19
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Check out swan.com today. All right everybody, no more
0:42
delay. Let's bring Peter up on on
0:43
stage. Hey, Peter, how are you?
0:45
Great. Not bad, Nico.
0:47
How are you? Good.
0:49
Good. We met in the flesh for the
0:51
first time in Los Angeles. That was awesome.
0:55
Yes, and it was beautiful out there.
0:57
It was a great gang. It was a really good vibe at
1:00
that conference. It was just the right size.
1:01
It was. It was fun.
1:04
You had the talk after mine, or I think it was before mine.
1:09
What was your talk about? Let's see.
1:11
I was up there with Stefan Lever and we were talking about
1:14
Austrian economics. So of course.
1:18
You were with Stefan. Yeah, right.
1:20
What else? And I've actually known Stefan
1:23
for years and years. We knew each other way back when
1:26
there was free speech on Facebook.
1:28
So that was kind of, that was like my hangout, you know, And
1:31
then I got censored because I posted something about Hunter
1:33
Biden. So that ended up being my
1:36
demise. That was back when you know you
1:38
didn't know what you weren't allowed to say.
1:40
And so you would just kind. Of say stuff.
1:42
And then, yeah, you would be surprised the next day that, oh,
1:45
apparently I can't mention, let's see, I had Hunter Biden
1:48
and China in the same sentence. And you know, they were like,
1:51
sorry, an error has occurred. And I thought, well, that's odd.
1:53
And so I kept trying to rearrange the sentence and
1:55
finally I was able to post the progeny of the Democratic
2:01
candidate and a large country in Asia neighboring Vietnam.
2:06
And OK, that they allowed me to post.
2:08
That was like as close as I could get to the statement I
2:10
intended. So anyway, so I ditched
2:12
Facebook, came over to Twitter, and then thank God for Elon.
2:17
He bought Twitter and managed to do what all of our politicians
2:21
failed, which is actually giving us some free speech.
2:25
Yeah. And in a way, like, in a way,
2:28
'cause I know, like a lot of the conservative movement was like
2:31
the ones that were getting the brunt end of the stick.
2:34
But in a way, I'm glad in hindsight that they didn't
2:38
interrupt that politicians didn't step in because at the
2:41
end of the day, from an Austrian perspective, the free market
2:45
stepped in and solved the problem.
2:47
You know, you had, of course, this was an offshoot.
2:49
You had Elon stepping in, buying Twitter, and then you had the
2:53
rise of Rumble. And I'm a huge fan of Rumble and
2:56
it that platform's been growing. We've been doing pretty good
2:58
over there. So I mean, I want to get your
3:00
take on that. Yeah, I think, you know, it was
3:06
tricky when we were talking about the censorship because so
3:09
I'm an anarcho capitalist. I don't generally look to
3:12
government for the solutions. The tricky thing here is that
3:16
you were kind of in a situation where you had to build your
3:18
entire freaking infrastructure, right, Because the activists
3:23
were going to go after your payment processors and your, you
3:26
know, your web service provider. And I mean just just the entire
3:31
thing, your landlord. And so really, it took somebody
3:36
with the kind of resources that Elon has in order to
3:39
breakthrough it, right? He could basically say, well,
3:42
fine, you know, if if PayPal doesn't want to sponsor my
3:47
platform, then I'll just build my own, right?
3:49
And that's actually a credible threat.
3:51
And so PayPal is not going to screw around with that, or at
3:53
least they haven't yet. So in a sense, we got lucky.
3:56
I mean, we got the absolute perfect person, which is
3:59
somebody so freaking rich that he could cut through that, You
4:04
know, it was, it was just like a thicket, You know, it's like
4:07
it's like if you're going through a strawberry patch that
4:09
lasts for miles and just you slash through one and there's
4:13
another and another and another. So in a sense, we got lucky.
4:18
Unfortunately it it it was solved for now.
4:24
But I think it's a very real threat in the future that you
4:27
have this unholy alliance between the tech oligarchy and
4:33
governments and largely, you know, it's kind of a protection
4:36
racket. So tech including Zuckerberg,
4:41
including Dorsey, they had been free speech absolutist.
4:44
They they had actually, early on, taken on a lot of hits over
4:48
free speech because their business plan was to get
4:51
everybody on earth spending all of our free time debating crap
4:55
on Facebook or on Twitter. And so they were actually very,
4:59
very pro free speech. But I think really Gamergate
5:02
kind of planted the seeds of this sort of ongoing protection
5:07
racket where governments can threaten all these companies and
5:11
at some point they give in, right?
5:13
Partly they hire people who are sympathetic to the government's
5:17
point of view and partly they just say it's not worth the
5:20
fight. You know, we've we've got a
5:22
trillion dollar business here. And if we stand up for free
5:25
speech, you know, if we go back to the old days where you had
5:27
the warrant Canaries and all that good stuff, if we go back
5:30
to those old days, then we risk getting completely shut down.
5:33
You know, they have a head on a Pike in the form of parlor,
5:37
right. I mean, they showed exactly what
5:38
happens to you if you screw with with the rest of them.
5:41
And so I mean really, if you're the CEO of a public company, you
5:46
can't run that risk. You have a fiduciary duty not to
5:49
run that risk. So they really created this.
5:52
The polite term is corporatist. I don't want to want to get in
5:55
any trouble with any F words, but they've really built this
5:58
corporatist alliance between government and the tech
6:02
oligarchy. And the problem is that that is
6:05
impenetrable for anybody but the richest person in the world who
6:10
has balls of steel, and we got damn lucky that he's there.
6:14
But they'll be back. Oh, they and they are back.
6:18
I mean the attack with Media Matters and attacking.
6:26
It's it's endless. The crap they go after on them.
6:29
What they just denied there was a $900 million subsidy from the
6:33
government for providing like rural broadband or something.
6:37
And Starlink, of course, was in line for that because Starlink
6:40
is better than any other solution.
6:44
And so the FCC just decided that, Nah, Nah, he's not going
6:47
to qualify for that. I mean, he's absolutely endless
6:50
with their deploying about him, which gives me some sympathy for
6:53
the other cowards in the sense that I mean really they they
6:58
will destroy you, anybody less than Elon and they would destroy
7:03
him. Yeah.
7:04
And and why do you think this is happening?
7:06
So I I have you know, and of course I'm, I'm coming from the,
7:09
from the, I've been a bitcoiner I think 1/3 of my life.
7:14
So I'm coming from the bitcoiners perspective, which is
7:20
I think we're living through this very turbulent time in
7:22
history, which I call the disintermediation of information
7:26
in the the disintermediation of money.
7:29
Disintermediation of information start happening 1st and then the
7:32
disintermediation of money is like kind of overlapping it.
7:36
And I think there's the government's had so much power
7:39
controlling the narrative for so long, but the Internet came
7:42
along and you know, people like me and you, we just have a
7:45
camera, we have a microphone and all of a sudden we can speak
7:48
directly, peer-to-peer with our audience without going through
7:51
these so-called intermediaries. And I think it freaks them out.
7:55
I think it puts the fear of God in them.
7:58
Yeah, I think you describe it perfectly.
8:00
That's exactly what happened. If we had to put a date on it,
8:03
it would be Brexit and then Trump.
8:05
So 2016, the lesson, you know, they had spent the past, really
8:10
the past 100 years just kind of leaning back and racking up
8:13
their wins. You know, they launched, it's
8:16
called the the the long March through the Institution.
8:18
So that was an explicit socialist goal to try to take
8:22
over institutions like education or media.
8:25
They succeeded wildly. And at that point, you know, if
8:30
you're in a democracy and if you own the two industries that can
8:34
shape thought, just kick back, you know, every single
8:38
generation is going to be more and more indoctrinated.
8:42
You know, This is why Republicans in Washington get a
8:46
lot of heat, including from people like me for not fighting.
8:49
But I do understand why they don't fight because every
8:52
narrative is going to go against them.
8:53
If you're talking about the debt ceiling limit, for example, that
8:56
is entirely going to be framed. You know, for 70% of voters,
9:01
that's going to be framed by the left and the left alone.
9:05
So anyway, they were living this in in this great world.
9:07
They could just kick back. They could cash the crony
9:09
profits. You know, they could just every
9:12
day they would pick up the newspaper and it's just endless
9:15
good news. Everything is getting better.
9:16
OK That was the world that they got used to for really about 100
9:20
years. And, you know, if we put a date
9:23
on it, really accelerating probably in the 1960s.
9:26
So you're talking about 50 years of just on remitting advances
9:30
and then you get Brexit followed soon after by Trump.
9:34
And you know, those were two events where they deployed the
9:37
entire fought industrial complex or sent propaganda industrial
9:43
complex towards, you know, rejecting Brexit and rejecting
9:47
Trump. And it didn't work.
9:49
And I think you're absolutely right, that freaked them out.
9:52
They started saying, wait a second, we're not actually going
9:55
to win, we're losing. And the reason was the Internet
9:58
obviously. Right.
9:59
So that allowed you to bypass the gatekeepers.
10:03
People like you or I can talk to people directly.
10:06
A lot of my videos get a million views.
10:08
This is, you know, I think that would make it the top rated show
10:11
on MSNBC anyway. You know and and what what I
10:16
shoot on an iPhone with a with a mic and anybody can do this.
10:21
Like, I've had dozens of people reach out and I've kind of
10:24
mentored them and taught them how to do it.
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And OK, you know, you got to do the sound key detail.
10:30
If anybody's listening and wants to start doing videos, don't
10:32
worry about the video. Nobody cares.
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Nobody cares about the video quality.
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I'm not actually that good looking sound.
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The sound has to be perfect, all right?
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If the sound is not perfect, people will turn it off because
10:43
it's unbearable. You yourself do this, so put
10:46
yourself in the eyes of the audience.
10:48
But at any rate, that ability to bypass the gatekeepers, right?
10:51
They'd put all their eggs in the gatekeepers, OK, they had they,
10:55
you know, in their long March through the gatekeepers and then
11:00
we just, I mean we we completely bypassed it, right?
11:03
So we did for information. Well, the Internet did for
11:06
information. Really.
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What Bitcoin does for money, right?
11:09
Just completely disintermediates, right.
11:12
It makes it a relationship, like a peer-to-peer relationship as
11:15
opposed to the sort of broadcast relationship where it can be
11:17
censored at the centre. So absolutely, they freaked out.
11:21
They put everything they had in the censorship.
11:23
They they will not give that up. It's going to take I think
11:27
ultimately the Supreme Court, Elon has been fighting, he's
11:31
been absolutely astounding. But you know, there's many
11:35
countries where this is happening.
11:36
Elon is one man. He does not have the resources.
11:39
You know, if you look at what happened in Brazil for example,
11:42
where questioning the election got people thrown in prison, I
11:44
think it was 20 year terms for questioning the election, doing
11:49
nothing further than that. So I mean the the censorship is
11:54
on the March in every country on earth.
11:57
Elon is fighting the good fight. But ultimately the Supreme Court
12:02
of the United States I think is going to be the most important
12:05
institution and what it has to do is to stand up and defend the
12:08
1st Amendment. If it can do that, then, you
12:12
know, as long as you have free speech in the USI think that is
12:15
a kernel for the rest of the world to look to.
12:18
Fundamentally, there's really only one good ruling document,
12:23
one good sort of legal system in terms of censorship.
12:28
There's only one good one in the entire Earth, and that is the
12:30
United States. Everything sucks in the rest of
12:32
the world. So a lot, I think fundamentally
12:35
is riding on the Supreme Court. I love what Elon's doing.
12:39
I think a lot of what he's doing is winning people over to our
12:41
cause. So I do think that we have more
12:44
and more converts, like more and more voters who think that
12:47
censorship is a big issue. But fundamentally, I think it's
12:50
kind of come to the Supreme Court.
12:52
You know, if if you look just a couple years ago, you had even
12:56
conservatives writing papers. I remember there was one in 2019
13:02
where they were calling it so-called censorship or, you
13:06
know, they would say people who who feel that their censor or
13:09
imagine that. And I mean it was, it was
13:11
relentless back then, right? That was long after Alex Jones
13:14
got kicked off. That was long after the the
13:16
whole witch hunt, right, Because that that really started
13:19
immediately after Trump. So they had chased all these
13:21
people off. We all had to be careful what we
13:24
were saying. You couldn't, you know, quote
13:27
Thomas Jefferson about the, you know, tree of Liberty.
13:30
That would be, you know, that would be bannable.
13:32
That's completely insane. Thomas Frickin Jefferson.
13:36
But even conservatives, you know, they were calling it
13:38
alleged and so-called and imagined.
13:41
So, you know, I think we've come a long ways now.
13:44
You know, if you talk about censorship, nobody shakes their
13:47
head and kind of looks at you like, well, maybe maybe just
13:50
nobody watches your stuff, man. OK.
13:52
People, I think widely the majority of the population
13:56
certainly on the right and I think even in the middle they
14:00
accept that there is a lot of censorship going on that this is
14:04
material in terms of public policy.
14:06
So I do think that we're advancing but but I think it's a
14:11
long road from here and hopefully the Supreme Court's
14:14
going to weigh in. They just took up a couple cases
14:16
that they might. Yeah.
14:19
And it and, you know, to to add to your point, but the long
14:22
walk, you know, through the institutions and I'm originally
14:25
from Venezuela, right. So I saw collectivist ideology
14:29
destroy the country. And I remember the early days of
14:33
Trump. I was like, this looks familiar.
14:35
It's almost as if America is going through a cultural
14:40
revolution light, right. I think it was Granchi that was
14:43
responsible for that. And then it was.
14:46
And then the the tactics really, they're, they're taking a cue
14:49
from Saul Alinsky and Rules for Radicals, right?
14:51
Which is whatever, Whichever way your opponent reacts, you win.
14:55
In every situation, your goal is just to get your opponent to
14:58
react. And then you just see people
15:00
walking into that trap over and over and over again, 'cause
15:03
they're just not worth versed in that philosophy.
15:07
But I I would agree with you, they were extremely successful
15:10
in this and in a way that honestly is a tragedy, right?
15:14
Which is you see my generation and the younger generation,
15:18
they're blaming capitalism for a lot of these woes.
15:20
And they're like they're asking for more collectivism, they're
15:23
asking for more government intervention.
15:25
And it's the government intervention that caused all
15:27
these woes in in in the 1st place.
15:30
Now my question to you is, and I, I I think I had the honor of
15:34
talking to Seifidine about this. I don't think that collectivist
15:37
ideologies are politically viable under a sound money
15:41
standard under Bitcoin, right. I don't think it's possible.
15:45
And the reason I say that is you take away the most effective,
15:49
what the most effective method they have of wealth, wealth
15:53
redistribution, which their ideology depends upon, which is
15:56
the wealth redistribution mechanism of inflation.
16:00
So if you take that away, what do they do?
16:03
You know, how do they, how do they pay the right people?
16:06
How do they continue to grow the administrative state that keeps
16:09
them in power in the first place?
16:11
Yeah, I mean you can certainly still do it.
16:14
The Inca empire was communist, it was totalitarian regime, you
16:20
know, and they they actually had a Fiat money, I believe.
16:25
I believe it was based on threads, but at any rate, it is
16:29
certainly possible without control of the money, but it is
16:34
certainly a lot harder, right? You've had various times in
16:37
history, even under gold standards, where countries have
16:39
nonetheless gone totalitarian. Now generally they get off the
16:44
gold standard as one of the first things they do, right?
16:46
And so you have to kind of zoom in and and see the specific
16:49
timing point is that you can get power even in a commodity
16:53
standard system. However, once you get
16:56
totalitarian power, you know, you have kind of this honeymoon
16:59
period where you know, you, you, you raid the warehouses and you
17:04
eat up and you know, everything's free.
17:06
And at that point everybody says, my God, the socialists
17:09
were right. It does work.
17:11
Look at that. Everybody's got free food.
17:13
And of course, you know, at some point you've eaten up the
17:15
warehouses. Typically you've got like a year
17:17
or two of stock just kind of lying around.
17:20
So once you've eaten up the seed corn at that point, it quote, UN
17:23
quote goes wrong. So you know, and and that's kind
17:28
of like the history of how these things work and when that
17:32
happens in a commodity system, right.
17:34
So when a commodity system goes communist, typically you'll have
17:38
that kind of grace period where everything is wonderful and then
17:41
the hungry times start hitting, they start losing public support
17:45
and that's the point that they typically go inflationary.
17:49
But having said, you know, your broader point, that money
17:53
enables the authoritarian or totalitarian regimes, I think
17:59
that's absolutely true. You know, if you sit down and
18:03
and work out the numbers, I would guess that about half of
18:07
the federal government's ability to capture power in the US has
18:12
been because of the Federal Reserve.
18:14
There's a couple mechanisms for that.
18:16
But fundamentally, if you control an organization that can
18:20
print up bidding tickets that you can use to take every single
18:25
thing in society, including to make people work for you.
18:28
OK, So you can use those, those, you know, confetti, that Fiat
18:32
money to harness all of society's resources.
18:37
It it, it's actually kind of surprising that that doesn't
18:40
automatically lead to a totalitarian outcome.
18:44
Maybe it does. Maybe it's just with a delay,
18:45
which is, you know, we are the ones who are trying to delay it.
18:49
So, you know, I think the short of it is that if you are in a
18:52
Fiat regime, you are nearly guaranteed to ultimately end up
18:57
in an authoritarian system. On the other hand, if you have a
19:01
commodity based money system, whether it's gold or Bitcoin,
19:05
you will have taken one of their main tools away.
19:08
You would have taken at least half of their power and at that
19:12
point you have a much better fighting chance.
19:14
So then you know, then we move to the next sort of question in
19:17
the equation, which is you know, the ability to control the
19:21
narrative and and and that gets into some of the Internet stuff
19:24
that we were just talking about. But for sure getting rid of the
19:27
Fiat I think radically evens up the game.
19:30
And you know if we zoom into particular moments, so if we had
19:34
to put a date on when the world started going downhill, I think
19:41
I'd put that around 19131914. So really the lead in to World
19:45
War One. I think Safety Dean has talked
19:47
about this as well and I suspect that he also tags that period as
19:52
as basically the beginning of the crisis.
19:55
And in that period, you know the, the, I mean the money
20:01
obviously was a huge enabler of that.
20:04
OK. I question, you know if we
20:07
didn't have the Federal Reserve. Would would the European allies,
20:15
France and Britain, would they have felt like they could count
20:19
on the US to enter the war, right?
20:21
Because The thing is, once you have Fiat money, you can hide
20:25
the cost of things like war, OK? People don't have to see it
20:28
because you can just print it up, right?
20:30
So you can hide the cost for long enough to the war, for the
20:34
war to go on to the point where you've got casualties.
20:37
People are angry now they're they're angry at the Huns who
20:39
are rampaging across Belgium. So in a sense, Fiat acts as kind
20:44
of a venture capitalist for a lot of these crises.
20:46
OK, so saying that, Fiat takes away half the power sketched
20:51
large. But if we zoom in to specific
20:54
episodes, like that key episode, the beginning of World War One,
20:58
I think Fiat. Without Fiat, that war would not
21:01
have happened. There's no reason for the war.
21:03
Everybody at the time said this is so weird, there's no reason
21:05
for the war. Why are they fighting over
21:08
Sarajevo? Who cares?
21:09
It was this little backwater, nothing.
21:12
Nobody really cared that much. Everybody understood that
21:14
Austria had an emotional reason why they had to do something
21:16
about it. And beyond that, it was it was
21:18
kind of like everybody wanted to pick a fight.
21:20
Why did everybody want to pick a fight?
21:21
That's not normal. And I think that was really Fiat
21:25
money that did that. You know, COVID, I think is the
21:28
same story. So, you know, if you sort of do
21:31
a thought experiment and you ask, all right, COVID hits, we
21:35
have a commodity system, whether it's gold or whether it's
21:37
Bitcoin. And some junior bureaucrat shows
21:41
up the planning meeting, he goes, OK, I got a crazy idea,
21:44
we're going to shut down the entire economy.
21:46
All right. Tat, I know taxes are going to
21:49
plunge, right? We might lose half tax revenue,
21:51
but that's OK because we can just lay off the government
21:53
workers. Right.
21:55
So he would have been fired, right?
21:56
That would have been it for him. He would have been exiled out
21:59
to, you know, Alaska or Guam. In fact, what they had was every
22:03
country in the world knew that they had a gigantic money
22:06
printer, and they knew that if they talked about dead grandmas,
22:09
then no central banker would have the balls to stand up to
22:12
them. And so when that junior banker
22:15
came in or that that junior advisor, they all said, well,
22:18
that's, you know, he could say let's shut down the economy and
22:21
we'll just have Jerome Powell print up the money.
22:23
And they all say, well, that's a fascinating idea.
22:26
So you know, I think if you zoom into every crisis, the vast
22:31
majority of them only became a crisis because governments had
22:35
access to Fiat money. I mean and I completely agree
22:41
and and it it if you kind of break it down and and safe he
22:44
did do a great job on this in the Fiat standard listening to
22:48
the audiobook not too long ago. But my question to you, Peter is
22:54
like and and you know, I think Michael Saylor has said this, I
22:57
said this to my girlfriend when I was super excited about
23:00
Bitcoin. I was like, it's the best money.
23:02
This is the most soundest money. And then Michael Saylor, I
23:06
remember he was asked this question and then I connected
23:09
the dots. He was asked this question on
23:10
the Coin Stories podcast. Shout out Natalie Brunell.
23:12
And Natalie asked him like, hey, what keeps you up at night?
23:17
And sailor said the exact same thing that my girlfriend now my
23:21
wife said, which is like people just don't care about sound
23:25
money. And that part worries me a
23:28
little bit. And I'm going to kind of mix in
23:31
what, you know, the recent events that's happening in the
23:33
US where Elizabeth Warren's bill that would essentially kill
23:37
Bitcoin in the United States continues to gather momentum.
23:42
And people are just kind of like they're they're distracted,
23:46
they're distracted by the bread and circuses, so to speak.
23:49
So does that worry you at all? Right.
23:51
Because, you know, Austria and Khan, I agree.
23:53
It's like we haven't figured out, you know, it's sound money.
23:55
The money's broken, but I still see so many people asleep until
24:00
the money breaks. And then you'll get a situation
24:02
like Argentina and something like that.
24:04
But the money hasn't broken yet, so therefore the incentive isn't
24:06
there for people to seek an alternative.
24:08
What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, correct.
24:10
And you know, in a way that's that that's just how it works.
24:14
You know, people don't worry about something if they can't
24:17
see it, you know? So I agree with you.
24:22
In the past couple of years we've had a lot of people wake
24:24
up to inflation. It had seemed very academic and
24:27
remote. 1970s was the last time that we had double digit
24:31
inflation. That was a long time ago.
24:33
And so I think that a lot of people have woken up, but at the
24:36
same time we're up against 12 years of indoctrination and
24:40
specifically indoctrination of children.
24:43
You know, if you look at like the Khmer Rouge, which
24:46
specifically aimed to indoctrinate children, much like
24:49
public schools do, it's it's very, very hard to break them
24:52
out of that. And generally there does need to
24:55
be some kind of crisis at, at which point, you know, that's
25:00
kind of Showtime and we see whether the frog jumps.
25:03
I believe I'm optimistic that when if a crisis comes that the
25:08
American people will jump. Many other countries have not,
25:11
unfortunately, if the crisis comes and people sleepwalk into
25:15
it or the system is too difficult to change by the time
25:18
the crisis hits, and so people get angry, but it's just kind of
25:21
dissipated. So you know, that's that's
25:24
really going to be Showtime if a crisis does hit.
25:27
My, you know, what I far prefer to do is what people like you or
25:31
I do, which is tell the frog that the water is boiling.
25:35
Put a thermometer in them and show them the thermometer.
25:38
Ask them, do you remember? Do you remember 20 minutes ago
25:41
when you felt chilly and you don't feel chilly anymore?
25:44
OK, so, you know, trying to get people to see what's coming
25:48
before the crisis actually hits because once the crisis hits,
25:52
that opens the window for governments to impose controls
25:56
that can make it difficult for people to fix it when all of a
26:01
sudden everybody wakes up. If you take Venezuela, I'm sure
26:04
that there was some point where pretty much everybody knew that
26:06
the system was broken. I'm sure the government was
26:10
talking about, you know, capitalist plots and and, you
26:14
know, US, CIA this and that. But, you know, given how bad
26:19
things got, I'm sure there was a moment where the the Venezuelan
26:22
people were ripe to hear a message that maybe they need to
26:26
reform the system. You know, the kind of message
26:27
the Argentinian people just voted on.
26:30
But I also imagine that by the time it got that far, it was too
26:34
hard to change the system, right?
26:36
It was too hard to set up a political party, arbitrary
26:39
arrests, you get all kinds of things that are pretty standard
26:42
once you get to that stage of it.
26:43
So I do think on the right, there's a lot of people who are
26:47
almost cheering for the crisis acceleration is because their
26:51
assumption is that once we get to the crisis, the frog wakes up
26:53
and then the long nightmare ends.
26:56
But I do think there's a caveat on that that, you know, there
26:59
are many, many countries where it fails and it gets worse,
27:02
Venezuela being an example. And, you know, governments will
27:06
see that coming and they will take measures to try to prevent
27:10
that. You know, I think January 6th
27:13
was essentially, you know, part of laying the groundwork for
27:16
that kind of a system where if if we get to the point where the
27:19
water is boiling, they want to have a legal infrastructure that
27:24
they can stop people from doing much about it.
27:27
Yeah. And and the the January 6th
27:29
thing was fascinating because you know and and again this goes
27:33
to I think this is the Frankfurt School which was repressive
27:36
tolerance, right. Which is you had movements
27:38
protest from you know we we we tried to stay as as politically
27:43
neutral on this show Peter. So we say collectivists, let's
27:47
say the collectivist of and I know what you, I know you know
27:51
what I'm talking about. So the collectivists, they put
27:54
on certain types of protests, but that's fine.
27:58
You guys are OK. You guys are in the capital
28:00
protesting for certain things, that's OK.
28:03
But when there is a political movement from the more
28:06
individualistic side, it's repressed, right, It's
28:10
demonized. These people are a threat to
28:12
national security, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
28:15
And it's it's almost in your face.
28:17
And unless you really kind of understudy, unless you really
28:20
understand and study the tactics as they're using, it's really
28:23
not quite obvious to you. And they're on purpose, they're
28:27
they're meant to demoralize you. They're meant to take away all
28:31
hope in order to achieve a certain, in order to achieve a
28:36
certain end goal. And and that comes in that,
28:39
that's a segue to my next question, which is I think
28:43
Bitcoin is not compatible with current US sanction policy.
28:48
I think Bitcoin is not compatible with the way that
28:52
governments worldwide have weaponized the money.
28:56
And I think that there is going to be an inevitable clash
28:59
between the two. You have an open monetary
29:01
network where you can sign up, download a wallet, you don't
29:03
need a KYC. And then you have a system where
29:07
it's completely, even though it's not really, you know, the
29:09
AML system, it's not really that effective.
29:12
So what's that clash look like to you?
29:14
You know, what's your take? Yeah, I think more than a clash
29:20
in the near term anyway. I think it's closer to lifeboat,
29:23
you know, if you sort of zoom in to the competitive situation.
29:28
So if you take sanctions for example, So the way that you can
29:32
sanction somebody with AUS dollar is that you can
29:34
effectively stop them from using the dollar.
29:37
The thing is, you know Bitcoin has a quirk where you can
29:41
identify wallets. And so assuming that there's
29:44
some real world Nexus that is ultimately exposed to the US
29:49
government, then you know if a Chinese company is exporting
29:54
product to, you know, whatever Egypt there, there tends to be
29:57
some kind of Nexus there like some some paper trail.
30:01
And so there are a lot of situations where I think that
30:04
Bitcoin directly threaten sanctions less than it might
30:08
seem on the face. Certainly for for sort of Gray
30:11
market transactions which don't leave a paper trail anyway,
30:15
that's true. But then for a lot of those
30:17
transactions, they also managed to use the dollar one way or the
30:19
other through bribes and so on. So I I don't think there's so
30:23
much a direct clash. I think it's more like we are
30:26
draining, you know the explosive out of the OR the air out of the
30:33
balloon to use less kinetic terminology where you know
30:37
you'll have a lot of commerce that will migrate over to
30:40
Bitcoin. And then if there's a large
30:43
amount of commerce in that area let's say I don't know, content
30:46
or or even export import, then you could get more transactions
30:53
making use of that in order to avoid sanctions.
30:56
But I think it's it's it's not quite as direct as it might seem
30:59
on the face. I think the larger issue and you
31:03
know the thing that has people like Elizabeth Warren in a bunch
31:08
is that sort of head on substitute or conflict between
31:14
Bitcoin and financial markets. So the financial oligarchy,
31:18
every single country on earth, if you go to the capital city
31:21
and you look for the tallest skyscrapers, chances are it's a
31:24
bank, right? Every so often you'll have like
31:26
a resource, you know, company because whatever, Malaysia or
31:30
something. But generally speaking, almost
31:33
all the skyscrapers are banks. Banks are fantastically
31:35
profitable, as you would expect in a crony Fiat system.
31:39
They have enormous power everywhere.
31:42
So more than sanctions per SE, I think that that's that's really
31:45
where the battle comes in. I think that's who Elizabeth
31:48
Warren is carrying water for. It's not doing it for the
31:50
Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve, they donate
31:53
money but they don't donate the politicians.
31:56
I think she's carrying it for the banks and that's, that's, I
31:58
think, the grand battle. Yeah, And and and it's
32:01
interesting, 'cause you would think it's an she, you know,
32:04
when the Occupy Wall Street movement was a thing, she was
32:07
like the main proponent of that. When he talks.
32:11
And now? His donations speak loud.
32:14
And they do, don't they? And then she gets Jamie Dylan.
32:17
Go ahead. Yeah.
32:19
I mean, going back to the earlier discussion of kind of
32:22
why things broke this way, I did not expect that to happen, all
32:26
right? I I did not expect the largest
32:29
companies in the world to make common cause with the
32:32
socialists, all right? I assumed that they would go
32:35
with the sort of soft socialism of the US Republican Party.
32:39
You know, we want low taxes, we want, we want light regulation.
32:43
And what what, what surprised me anyway, is that, boy, they just,
32:47
they just went all the way over. So, you know, I assume what
32:50
they're thinking is that with enough campaign cash, you can
32:53
kind of tame the beast, right? So, you know, you can put people
32:57
like AOC or, you know, you can, I don't know who are some of the
33:02
more extreme anyway, the squad. You can put them in a box and
33:05
then, you know, you can make enough friends with Elizabeth
33:08
Warren and Nancy Pelosi that you can basically disarm the
33:12
socialists from within. I assume that's what that's what
33:16
they're aiming for. But anyway, I was surprised by
33:18
that. I assumed that, you know, once
33:21
money really made its way into politics and we got this sort of
33:24
corporate corporatist union of state and company, which again
33:30
has an F word that becomes an ISM.
33:32
But we have to avoid that word. I I didn't think that they would
33:36
make common cause with the socialists.
33:39
Yeah, I mean it's it's almost. I mean, but this isn't that what
33:43
always happens though that's that's kind of, you know like I
33:47
forget what the. In 1930s Germany they went the
33:51
other direction, so they took the lesser of two evils and they
33:54
teamed up with the National Socialists as opposed to the
33:57
International Socialists. OK, OK, fine, fine.
33:59
But Peter, we all know that it's both.
34:02
It's two sides of the same coin. They're.
34:04
Almost. They're almost identical.
34:07
I have to put. Have to go full.
34:08
I have to go full screen. So if you go like all the way.
34:11
I don't know if I'm left right now, but if you go all the way
34:13
left, there's communist and then there's you go a couple steps to
34:16
the right, there's fascists and then you go all the way to the
34:19
other side, then you get like individual individualists and
34:23
libertarian and all that. So I, I, I, I and I mean and
34:26
it's in the name. It's in the name what the party
34:28
that was in power in the 30s, they put it in the name.
34:31
That word socialist. Yeah, yeah, literally, right.
34:34
So you know, if we put them like if we array them on a scale of M
34:39
cap to communism, so OK, these are random numbers.
34:43
Don't quote me on this. The German communists at that
34:47
time in the 1930s, let's call them a 60, and then the National
34:51
Socialists were like A50 in terms of their progression
34:54
towards communism. I mean, they were almost the
34:56
same freaking party. But The thing is, the
34:58
capitalists chose the lesser of two evils from their
35:01
perspective, right. The main difference being that
35:03
the National Socialists were OK with companies running their,
35:07
you know, making profits, getting nice, take home pay,
35:11
keeping the original staff. Nobody has to go up against the
35:14
wall. What they said is, look, you can
35:17
do whatever you want as long as you obey.
35:19
OK, Now the obey, you know, ultimately got real close to
35:23
communism. But anyway, so, you know, in
35:26
that grand scheme of socialism, they were slightly less
35:29
socialist from company's perspective than the communists.
35:34
And so the companies went with the lesser of two evils.
35:36
What surprised me in the US and I think really around the world,
35:40
and, you know, maybe this is the genius of Klaus Schwab, but what
35:43
surprised me was that, you know, generally the main parties in
35:47
every country are socialists. I can't think of a country at
35:49
the moment where the main party is not socialist.
35:52
They're just two flavors of socialism.
35:55
But what surprised me is that these big companies went with
35:58
the the worst of the two. They didn't go with the lesser
36:01
of two evils. They want the greater of two
36:02
evils. And I think, you know, I don't
36:06
know that they plan this out in their heads, but I think
36:08
ultimately they've put a bet that they can bribe the the, you
36:13
know, worst of two evils into at least punishing them last.
36:21
I'm trying to avoid violent words.
36:22
We used to be able to say a lot of things we can't, but anyway,
36:25
they want to be punished last by these people.
36:28
But that that really surprised me.
36:30
I assumed when the corporatists made their play to take over the
36:34
country that they would go with the soft socialists and not the
36:38
hard socialists. But of course.
36:41
See people like Elizabeth Warren I mean so far their strategy is
36:44
paying off. You know I'm I'm I'm very
36:46
impressed. It's working out just the way
36:48
they wanted where people like Elizabeth Warren are now going
36:51
from, you know anti Wall Street to you know discovering how
36:55
important it has to have a, you know stable financial system
36:58
that has no outside interference.
37:01
So I mean kudos to them boy. It's it's It's worked like a
37:04
charm so far. Yeah, it's it's it's crazy if
37:07
if, if you haven't been paying attention, if you're not, well
37:10
read on these things, you know you're it's it's to me, it's
37:13
obvious. And then perhaps it's 'cause I
37:15
immigrated and I came here and, you know, and maybe you see
37:19
things, and maybe that's why Miami-Dade County voted a
37:22
certain direction versus every other metropolitan city in the
37:26
US, 'cause you're like, I've seen this.
37:29
I I spent most of my life out of the US, so I grew up in Germany,
37:33
Japan, about five years in Mexico.
37:37
So it's the same like once once you've been outside long enough
37:42
and then you sort of see the comparisons with, you know,
37:44
places like Indonesia or Argentina, it it's really clear
37:48
what's happening. And you know, in fairness, a lot
37:51
of Americans now are waking up to it.
37:53
I think Americans imagined it could never ever happen here,
37:56
right? We felt protected partly by the
37:59
civil society, partly by the Constitution.
38:03
But the past couple of years, I think I've woken up a ton of
38:05
people. And then the economic problems
38:08
are they're waking up a lot of people who may not have been
38:12
open to the idea that we have fundamental problems, but now
38:16
they are right. They're starting to question the
38:18
system. And once you question the
38:20
system, you start listening to both sides.
38:23
And once people start listening to both sides, I say this in all
38:27
honesty, our arguments are better.
38:29
I mean across the board. You know, if you look at the
38:31
kind of just look at the kind of engagement, OK, like when CNN
38:35
does an article and it gets a lot of view because CNN has, you
38:39
know, bought audience over the years.
38:40
This is all media companies by audience.
38:44
If you do that in our gig, you're you're a fraud.
38:47
But anyway, you know the New York Times, CNN, all of them
38:49
bought their audiences. And when you look at the kind of
38:52
reaction they get when they say things, nobody's people see it
38:57
because they bought this audience, but nobody listens to
38:59
them. Nobody cares about it.
39:00
People don't sit there and debate.
39:01
I mean it's it's it's a tiny amount of engagement that
39:04
they're getting. Nobody cares about their
39:06
arguments. Even the people who are already,
39:08
like they're installed, bought, base, don't care about it.
39:11
So, you know, if you've got somebody who's politically up
39:15
for grabs, OK, they're like a political independent and
39:17
they're pissed off about the cost of living, all right.
39:20
And so they start questioning things, to start looking at
39:22
different narratives. They're going to see one article
39:25
from CNN and then they're going to see another article by the
39:29
kind of free speech people that we have on our side.
39:31
It's no competition. Of course, they're going to come
39:34
over to our side. So, I mean, we are winning
39:37
hearts and minds, but at the same time, you know, we are up
39:41
against that sense that propaganda.
39:43
You know, you've got the 12 years of propaganda, you've got
39:47
new kids running through it every single day.
39:50
You got new ones coming out who, you know, we have to deprogram
39:53
as if they're in a cult, you know, So even as we win, we're
39:59
still like, it can look like we're just treading water
40:03
because they have so many of these institutional benefits.
40:07
Yeah, 100%. And then once the, you know,
40:10
like once, like what I noticed is once they started losing,
40:13
essentially they implemented really the open border strategy,
40:17
right. So you kind of flood the system,
40:19
get people, you know, hooked so to speak, to that free, that
40:23
sweet, sweet, sweet free money. And then all of a sudden you
40:26
have a whole new block of voters.
40:29
This has been done so many times.
40:31
It's it just hasn't been done here.
40:34
So like, it's very shocking for it to happen here.
40:37
But Opti and I and my producer who's hanging in the back, we,
40:40
we've been talking about this for quite a while.
40:42
I'm really optimistic for the US for three reasons, right?
40:44
Versus the 1st Amendment, which is getting badgered.
40:48
Second is the Second Amendment and then the sovereignty of the
40:52
individual states, which creates competition between the states,
40:56
right. So yeah.
40:57
Which, yeah, yeah. You could summarize that as the
40:59
10th Amendment, which constrains the federal government to a
41:04
very, very small number of things and everything else
41:06
belongs to the states. And then the states can be the
41:08
laboratory of democracy and they can experiment with all kinds of
41:10
things. By the way, the 10th Amendment
41:12
does not give the federal government control over money.
41:15
So that would mean that both, I mean, any kind of financial
41:21
management that Treasury does is not constitutional.
41:23
That's that's that's not delegated.
41:26
And of course, the Federal Reserve would be
41:27
unconstitutional. It's not delegated according to
41:31
the 10th Amendment. If the power is not literally
41:34
listed in the Constitution, then the federal government is not
41:38
allowed to do it, and there's certainly nothing in there about
41:41
printing Fiat money. Yeah, yeah.
41:44
But they got away with it anyways.
41:45
And someone in the comments mentioned this about 1913.
41:49
They said wasn't that a federal income tax implemented?
41:52
Yes, it was implemented the same year as the Federal Reserve was
41:57
was created or you know, began. That's not a coincidence, right?
42:04
Yeah, no, that was really their moment.
42:06
I mean, that was the, you know, miracle year for socialists
42:10
really all across the West. That's when they captured it.
42:13
One of my favorite if you ever watched Downton Abbey, which my
42:17
wife loves it, which means that I love it, or at any rate, I
42:21
have to watch it. And what's funny about it, So
42:24
it's the series and it spans multiple years.
42:26
And you know, a bunch of the episodes are before World War
42:30
One and then a bunch of them are after.
42:32
And I think it's just, it's just great for sort of showing people
42:35
how the world changed. World War One was, I mean, it
42:40
was the most transformational. I can't think of anything,
42:43
certainly not, I don't know, maybe in a millennia, maybe not.
42:46
Since the Mongol conquest, it has been such a massive change.
42:49
Everything changed. It gutted the traditional
42:52
institutions and replaced them with government versions of it,
42:56
whether that was education, the, you know, moral suasion that
43:02
used to be handled by the church.
43:04
So that was independent from the government, OK.
43:05
It captured all these things. And fundamentally it was the
43:09
Bismarck plan, right? That was Audubon Bismarck in
43:12
Prussia. His idea was that you want the
43:15
state to take over all of these social institutions so that the
43:19
state makes itself necessary and so that, you know, individual
43:26
like people don't rise up against the state because they
43:28
need the state, right. The state is paying their
43:30
pension or they work for the state, whatever it is.
43:33
So I mean it was, it was a very intentional plan he implemented
43:36
in Prussia and then World War One was really when they managed
43:40
to implement it really across the West.
43:44
Yeah, no. And I I think you you, you hit
43:46
the nail on the head. So, OK, so we've been talking
43:49
about some dark, dark things, dark subjects, right.
43:52
You know a bit of history this collectivist take over, put it
43:56
nicely and let's talk about you know what Corey says, CEO of
44:02
Swan, the bright orange future, which I think that Bitcoin is.
44:07
Bitcoin and the Internet, both things play a very critical part
44:11
in that in that future. So how long do you think this
44:16
transition will take? I think we'll win.
44:18
The reason that I think we'll win, Peter, is because I think
44:21
bitcoins incentives are greater than than anything they have in
44:25
my opinion. I think they're going to rely on
44:26
coercion, but my money's on incentives in in, in my opinion.
44:31
So how long is this transition going to take?
44:33
Do you think bitcoins going to win?
44:34
Is it is it a foretold? Like, you know, just check that
44:38
box or do we need to fight peacefully, right YouTube Fight
44:43
peacefully. It's a metaphor.
44:46
What? What are your thoughts, Spar?
44:49
Sparring between friends. So I think there are two
44:53
dynamics. One of them is Fiat versus
44:56
commodity and the other one is gold versus Bitcoin.
44:59
OK. So if we ask is Bitcoin going to
45:02
win? I think those are the two
45:03
dynamics, and I'll take the simpler of them, which is gold
45:05
versus Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is fundamentally
45:08
superior to gold. It has actually better supply
45:12
dynamics. You know, gold is new, gold is
45:16
dug up. And so that's an inflationary
45:18
impetus. And that's pretty standard at
45:21
about a percent and a half a year, actually amazingly like
45:24
over centuries and all kinds of different technology in the
45:26
industrial revolution. All the rest of it, gold just
45:29
marches like clockwork, about a percent and a half a year.
45:32
And Bitcoin, meanwhile, you know, of course it's it's going
45:36
to have a lower inflation rate than that.
45:39
And, you know, you have different supply caveats to
45:41
gold. Like what if we find the
45:42
asteroid that's made of gold and Elon can mine it with robots?
45:48
Or, you know, what if they figure out a way to extract gold
45:51
from seawater, which, you know, it's been like a perpetual
45:54
motion machine that cranks have been trying for a long time.
45:57
But fundamentally, there's a there's a lot of gold in the
45:59
ocean just floating around. You go to the beach, you when
46:03
you come out of the water, you've got gold on you.
46:06
There's a bunch of it. And so anyway, there are these
46:08
kind of weird little quirks to gold where the supply dynamics
46:12
are not as good. And then the other one, of
46:14
course, is that Bitcoin can't be seized the way the gold can,
46:18
right? So I I love gold dearly.
46:21
But if you are talking to, like if you're a gold bug and you're
46:26
talking to a paper money bro and after you got done explaining
46:30
how amazing gold is, he's going to ask you, OK, if it's so
46:32
super, why does no country use gold?
46:35
And the simple answer is that violence is very profitable, you
46:39
know, So if you want to have a gold backed currency, then you
46:41
have to tell the world where your gold is, right?
46:44
You can't say it's backed by gold, but it's hidden because I
46:46
don't want the government to find it, all right?
46:48
So nobody's going to accept him because I can do that.
46:52
And so you actually have to prove it, right?
46:54
You have to, you have to show where it is.
46:56
You have to give the address. You have to, you know, do assays
46:59
you have to do all this. And of course, governments can
47:01
also find the address. They can look it up on Google
47:04
Maps, and then they're going to come and visit your gold
47:06
facility and they're going to have a chit chat.
47:08
So governments, you know, I mean, really gold makes it
47:12
extremely easy for governments to seize the monetary system.
47:17
You know, there's about 20 locations, even for a country
47:20
like the US, but for a smaller country, I don't know, you got
47:23
like 2-3 neighbourhoods. You could literally get a squad
47:26
of a SWAT team and split them up and seize the entire money of
47:29
the nation in one go. It's got a fundamental flaw, and
47:34
I think it's ironic that the fundamental flaw of gold is the
47:37
very fact that it's physical, right?
47:39
This is why people like gold. They say no, no, you can't drop
47:42
Bitcoin on your foot. You know gold is real.
47:45
You can bite it. You can't eat it, but you can
47:47
bite it and that turns out to be the fatal flaw of gold.
47:50
It is exceptionally easy for government to seize a gold based
47:56
system. I mean it very obligingly
47:58
actually goes out and gathers up all the gold and puts it in one
48:01
spot and then tells the government where it's located.
48:05
It's, you know, from that perspective it's it's kind of a
48:08
dodgy prospect. OK, so I think the Bitcoin is
48:11
absolutely superior to gold. The next question is Fiat versus
48:16
commodity. And there, you know, I think
48:20
that the question is timing, OK. So if the system is going to
48:23
collapse like in the next 5 or 10 years, which I think is
48:26
unlikely, then people are going to kind of go with what they
48:30
know, right? And in terms of market share,
48:32
the vast majority of people still don't understand Bitcoin.
48:37
Gold is exceptionally easy for people to understand.
48:40
Even if you've never heard of gold, like if you've been living
48:42
in the Sentinel Islands in India and you've never heard there's
48:45
such a thing as gold, I imagine it's pretty easy to explain
48:48
what's happening here. Commodity money, physical
48:51
commodity money is, is very sort of intuitive.
48:54
So I think, you know, if the system is going to die in five
48:57
years, then most likely we're going to revert to the gold
48:59
standard that Nixon broke. There's still living memory of
49:03
that. On the other hand, if the
49:06
collapse is going to take longer than that, you know then in in
49:10
in the background because Bitcoin I think is superior
49:13
money. It's constantly winning new
49:15
converts, partly by people like us explaining what Bitcoin is
49:20
like this specific conversation we're having.
49:23
But also just age. You know a a sort of quirk of
49:26
the world is that old people are more resistant to new ideas.
49:32
You know, if you look at say Austrian economy like people who
49:38
would self describe as Austrian economists, right, Anybody over
49:41
age 60 is almost certainly a gold bug and only a gold bug
49:44
anybody underage, 40 is almost certainly a bitcoiner and only a
49:48
bitcoiner, right. There's a very, very strong age
49:52
aspect to this. So if you kind of sum that up.
49:56
So I think absolutely Fiat is doomed.
49:59
The only question is when will it take five years, Will it take
50:02
30 years? If it's closer to 30 years, then
50:05
I think the inherent superiority of Bitcoin, we'll have gained
50:10
enough mental mind share by 30 years from now that we're going
50:15
to skip gold and we're just going to go direct to Bitcoin.
50:17
If on the other hand, the collapse is coming in, you know,
50:20
five years, then I think I will certainly we go to gold and at
50:24
that point, you know, we basically live in the world we
50:27
do now where Bitcoin continues taking mind share, but in this
50:31
case it takes it from gold, not from Fiat.
50:34
Gotcha. Interesting.
50:35
Interesting. OK, so we are.
50:37
I do want to be respectful of your time.
50:39
We are getting to the top of the hour.
50:40
So my question for you, Peter, is we are heading into the year
50:44
of the halving and we're also heading into one of the most
50:47
turbulent elections in American history.
50:51
And these are some crazy, crazy times.
50:54
So what are your expectations for Bitcoin?
50:57
You know, the next couple of years if if history repeats
51:00
itself, right? Bitcoin tends to go parabolic
51:04
about a year after the halving, so 2025.
51:06
But it really starts to, you know, turn on its engines the
51:10
year of the halving and you start to see that slow crawl up.
51:14
So are you optimistic about Bitcoin's future in these
51:18
turbulent times? What's your take?
51:20
Final question. Yeah, I am.
51:24
Of course prices can do you know anything?
51:26
Who knows? It could drop 90% because
51:28
governments could try to hunt it down.
51:30
Anything could happen. However, I think that the most
51:33
likely outcome is that it will soar.
51:35
I'm not a huge fan of having as a price driver per SE.
51:39
You know, normally in statistics you need a fairly decent sized
51:43
sample and you know when we're talking about havings, what we
51:46
have what 3-4, we don't have many.
51:49
So you know, who knows. Every time it's happened in the
51:53
past, there have been various situations. 2016, the economy
51:56
had been going slow for a long time and then it it bounced back
52:00
up. 2020 was weird in many ways. You know, 20/20/12 you have the
52:05
European debt crisis. You know, you've got noise in
52:07
every one of these. So I wouldn't put a whole lot of
52:10
stock into having per SE. I mean it's fun to cheer it on,
52:14
but I think the larger issue is what you're talking about, those
52:17
those crises coming in. So, you know, inflation is very
52:20
much alive, remains alive. The progress that's been made so
52:25
far has largely been a freebie from oil coming back down.
52:28
It generally does that whenever a recession is coming.
52:30
In fact, in 2008, oil dropped 80% and other than that,
52:35
inflation has not come down very much.
52:37
So, right. I think inflation is driving it.
52:40
I think the other thing is the political instability that you
52:44
mentioned. You know, one of the things I
52:46
think that's fascinating about Bitcoin is that it was invented
52:51
for more or less bank bailouts, right?
52:54
And, you know, that was the genesis block.
52:57
But then we keep discovering, you know, there's like a sort of
53:01
the running joke where we say Bitcoin fixes this and then the
53:04
other guys are like, what is it going to, you know, is it going
53:07
to cook my bagel? What?
53:09
Bitcoin fixes everything? And the irony is that we keep
53:12
having these crises and every single one Bitcoin fixes it.
53:15
So, you know, you take Trudeau with the speech, you know,
53:19
cracking down on free speech up in Canada, you know, and you had
53:22
bitcoiners who, I mean, it was, it was fantastic, right?
53:25
You had hundreds of bitcoiners who just jumped in their car,
53:27
dead of winter, drove out to Ottawa to to, you know, help
53:31
truckers actually get donations so they could eat.
53:35
Right. You know, the inflation when
53:38
when Satoshi, you know, put out the Genesis block, you could
53:41
argue, I mean, of course inflation was back of his mind.
53:44
That's why he modelled Bitcoin on gold.
53:47
But it it's like we we we just keep discovering that every
53:51
single crisis that we keep coming into Bitcoin, you know
53:55
finds a new purpose or well, I mean Bitcoin doesn't find it.
53:58
People people discover that yes, Bitcoin does fix this and it
54:02
fixes that and it fixes the next one and so on.
54:05
So I don't know what the crisis is going to be.
54:09
You know, the in the horse race for what their next COVID is,
54:13
cyberattacks seems to be a popular one.
54:16
War, you know, of course, but I mean, you know, war is kind of
54:19
their permanent shtick. So of course they're pushing
54:22
back that. But yeah, cyber.
54:24
And you know, we have some of the smartest people on our side
54:30
and like in terms of programmers.
54:33
And you know, if you take the people who are suspicious of the
54:37
state and are interested in finding ways to go around it, I
54:40
mean, Bitcoin has like a 99% share of those kinds of heroes
54:45
on Earth. So whatever they come up with, I
54:48
am certain that Bitcoin is going to show us some awesome new
54:51
function to get around it. Beautiful, Beautiful.
54:54
I completely agree. I say personally, Bitcoin or
54:57
slavery. I think that's, you know, that's
55:01
really the two choices that we have in front of ourselves.
55:04
I do agree. I do agree with you.
55:05
We have the, you know, the best team of ours on our side.
55:09
That's fuelled by incentives, that's fuelled for, you know,
55:13
the thirst for freedom. Go ahead.
55:14
Yes. Yes, absolutely.
55:16
Yep. I'm, I'm, I'm very happy with
55:18
our team. I know that they have all the
55:20
institutions. They have all the power, they
55:22
have all the money. They they outnumber us like a
55:25
million to one. But I love our team.
55:27
I I am thrilled to be on the wall with all y'all.
55:31
Absolutely honored to be in the trenches with you too, Peter.
55:34
Peter, thank you so much for joining us on Simply Bitcoin.
55:36
IRL guys will be back with the live show tomorrow at Trophy 15
55:39
PM Eastern Standard Time. Until then, have an amazing
55:42
night. See you guys later.