Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #794: Why Inflation Is Designed To Crush You with Gary Brode

Transcript

#794: Why Inflation Is Designed To Crush You with Gary Brode · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  Gary Brode, what is going on in the world? Insanity out there.
• 0:05
  It has been. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's fascinating. And Marty is somebody who travels a hundred
• 0:11
  percent of the time. Like it's, I'm watching my own country from other parts of the world,
• 0:16
  but not, you know, experiencing directly. And then, you know, everywhere I go, I get like
• 0:22
  really interesting impressions. Um, you know, I I'm currently in Montevideo, Uruguay,
• 0:27
  but I just came from El Salvador. I was in Bitcoin beach and I had dinner with, um, this nice
• 0:36
  couple from Munich, from Germany. And that, you know, they had all these questions and there was
• 0:42
  so much going on in the United States that they didn't understand. And so much of it was because
• 0:47
  their press had lied to them about everything going on in the United States. And they, to their
• 0:53
  credit. They were curious. They were asking me questions, not because they were trying to advance
• 0:58
  a narrative. They said, we don't understand what's happening. And when I explained it to them, they
• 1:02
  said, you know, our media presents it differently. I said, well, does your media tell the truth about
• 1:05
  your country? They said, no. I said, well, why would you trust them when they're talking about
• 1:09
  mine? What were their preconceived notions or what were their questions around? You know, it was a lot
• 1:15
  of stuff on, on politics. And, you know, by the way, one of the things that I thought was great,
• 1:21
  Right. Like I don't care about the World Cup. I have zero interest in soccer. I do not care that that makes people angry at which, by the way, that's a really interesting question. Why does it make people angry that I refuse to care about soccer? It seems to be important to them that I care. I reserve the right to not care. I don't know why it bothers people. But anyway.
• 1:41
  But the thing that I thought was great was people from all over the world came to the United States and they came with these preconceived notions that had been installed in them by their legacy media.
• 1:54
  And you just saw all of these posts on X and all these social media posts saying, oh, my God, this place is amazing.
• 2:01
  And the people are wonderful.
• 2:02
  And I feel safe here.
• 2:03
  And, you know, the stores are incredible and the restaurants are welcoming.
• 2:07
  And like people just writing about the amazing experiences they had in the United States and saying I had been warned.
• 2:14
  People told me, like, don't don't come to the United States.
• 2:17
  They'll shoot you in the airport.
• 2:18
  You'll arrive and they'll, you know, they'll shoot you.
• 2:21
  And and you just got dozens and hundreds and thousands of stories of people who said it was amazing.
• 2:29
  And the people were warm and welcoming.
• 2:31
  And they were, you know, the United States was an incredible host country.
• 2:34
  And one of the things that I thought was really smart was instead of just doing this in places
• 2:39
  like New York, and granted, they had the finals in the New York area, they sent people all
• 2:46
  over the country.
• 2:47
  And people from all over the world got to experience the Midwest.
• 2:50
  I grew up in Michigan.
• 2:52
  And to understand that there are other parts of the country between New York and Los Angeles
• 2:57
  and Miami, I think was great for the world to see.
• 3:00
  And, you know, I really enjoyed their their stories and seeing my country through their eyes.
• 3:06
  Yeah, it was very encouraging the summer.
• 3:11
  I mean, it was it was one of the white pills of the summer was watching everybody from around the world come and go to the south.
• 3:17
  You had multiple people from Germany, Scotland, other parts of the world blow up on Twitter and they were getting invited to concerts.
• 3:28
  They were they were getting invited to special poker tables in Vegas and they were experiencing Bucky's for the first time.
• 3:36
  And yeah, Bucky's Waffle House, IHOP, Costco, Walmart.
• 3:42
  Right. They're like, oh, my God.
• 3:43
  So you could get pancakes at three in the morning and they were thrilled.
• 3:48
  Yeah, we did.
• 3:49
  And I think it was also a reminder, despite how how our media would like to portray how terrible it is here.
• 3:57
  And there certainly are bad things or suboptimal things happening in this country.
• 4:03
  At the end of the day, it is it is pretty incredible that we have this this union of states and a diversity of of culture across the country.
• 4:12
  Yeah. Plus, you know, Marty, the thing I would add to that is that, I mean, I've had wonderful experiences all over the world, but there is something really special and deep about American generosity and generosity of spirit and the way we pitch in and help each other.
• 4:30
  you know, like I'm anytime something goes wrong, I call one of my neighbors and I can trust them
• 4:37
  with my alarm codes and my entrance codes. And, you know, like if something happens, they're like,
• 4:42
  yeah, I'm heading over right now. I mean, I've had people leave work to go check on my house
• 4:47
  because an alarm went off. You know, it's just it's incredible. And when I'm around, I always
• 4:53
  try to reciprocate and be there for them. But I do think, you know, Americans are some of the
• 4:58
  most generous people on the planet. And we're fortunate to have the people we have as neighbors.
• 5:05
  We really are I learning that too as I moved into this new house been here for about six months now everybody very welcoming have adopted us into the neighborhood very quickly
• 5:17
  Congratulations on the new home.
• 5:19
  I'm liking the new office.
• 5:21
  It looks like it's a really calming environment.
• 5:23
  I like it.
• 5:24
  It is.
• 5:24
  I need to put stuff on the walls.
• 5:26
  I'm lagging here.
• 5:27
  I spent the summer at the shore, at the Jersey Shore, so I wasn't able to put some time into it.
• 5:33
  But the fireplace, I'm going to see if I can get this thing back up and running.
• 5:38
  It hasn't been used in decades.
• 5:39
  So I would like to have some live fires in the background at some point in the future.
• 5:43
  I think it's a great idea.
• 5:46
  So where should we start?
• 5:47
  Should we start El Salvador?
• 5:48
  You just wrote this report.
• 5:50
  Should we start global macroeconomic markets?
• 5:52
  Obviously, oil and gas markets are under a bit of stress right now.
• 6:00
  um where where should we uh where should we take this in your mind what's what's the best order of
• 6:05
  operations here to cover state of the world markets let's i i think we should discuss all of it but why
• 6:11
  don't we start in el salvador um because i know you know a huge part of your audience are are
• 6:18
  bitcoiners um and you know we just released and thank you so much for reposting it we just released
• 6:24
  a white paper this week uh answering the question or at least in my opinion answering the question
• 6:29
  of whether Bitcoin is a currency. So why don't we start there? Yeah, let's start there. What was
• 6:35
  the impetus for your trip to El Salvador and writing this report specifically? So it was two
• 6:41
  things. One is the social changes in El Salvador over the last few years have been unbelievable.
• 6:49
  This country went from the murder capital of the world to one of the safest places in the world,
• 6:54
  and it happened in a matter of two or three years. It tells us that if you have the political will
• 7:00
  to get it done, you can get crime under control. In my opinion, this was like the social and
• 7:07
  economic version of the Berlin Wall coming down, right? You had a country that was a no-go.
• 7:15
  Like it just, this is a country of 7 million people where three dozen people were killed a day.
• 7:19
  And I heard story after story of people who died because they crossed the street.
• 7:26
  Like literally, they just they went into the wrong neighborhood and gang members would just pull them over and say, hey, we don't know you.
• 7:33
  What are you doing in our neighborhood? And lose your life that way.
• 7:38
  People were afraid to give any information about themselves, where they lived, where they work, the name of their kids.
• 7:44
  because if anybody had any information about you, you were going to get a phone call one day saying,
• 7:50
  hey, you know, we know this is your name. It's your wife's name, your kid's name. This is where
• 7:54
  they go to school. You know, this is where you work. This is, you know, who your wife's parents
• 7:59
  are. And why don't you give us some money? And that request would be followed by request for
• 8:04
  more money would be followed by request to use their home to maybe store something that they
• 8:10
  shouldn't be storing. And that was life, right? I mean, people left that country thinking that
• 8:18
  they would never return. And when I say never return, I mean, never go home again to see their
• 8:23
  family home, to see where they grew up, to see their friends and relatives, like they fled.
• 8:29
  And now these same people are looking at coming back. They're looking at taking over the family
• 8:35
  business and returning. And I can tell you, as somebody who just spent a month there, it is safe.
• 8:40
  There was never a moment when I felt endangered.
• 8:43
  Nobody tried to take as much as a single penny from me.
• 8:46
  So the second reason I wanted to go is because it is literally the global capital of Bitcoin
• 8:51
  adoption.
• 8:54
  There is more ability to use Bitcoin as a currency there than anywhere else in the world.
• 8:59
  And I wanted to see it.
• 9:01
  You know, Marty, a lot of people, they talk about places, but they don't know.
• 9:05
  And, you know, like there are times like I went to Colombia in 2010 and people said, oh, no, you're going to get kidnapped.
• 9:11
  I said, your information's it's stale.
• 9:13
  The country's changed.
• 9:15
  The reputation hasn't changed.
• 9:18
  You know, I just spent six weeks in Guatemala and, you know, people said, oh, you shouldn't go to Guatemala.
• 9:24
  It's dangerous.
• 9:25
  There's a State Department warning for that.
• 9:27
  but you know you go to antigua or you know you go to the lake and it's not it's just not like that
• 9:35
  like a lot of times you need to see these places in person and i'm a big fan of not only having that
• 9:41
  personal experience but talking to people right so when i was in el salvador i spoke to taxi
• 9:46
  drivers uber drivers people who worked in hotels people who ran family businesses people at
• 9:51
  religious celebrations, you know, the waiter at a restaurant, people who ran businesses,
• 9:58
  people who had money, people who didn't. And I talked to them. And what I've found is that
• 10:06
  people will tell you anything about their lives. They'll tell you about their politics,
• 10:11
  their religion, how much money they have, how much money they make. They'll tell you about
• 10:14
  intimate details of their intimate lives You just have to do one thing which is convey to them I not judging you I just want to understand you If you do that people will tell you any What was the common theme that you pulled from these conversations
• 10:33
  Because that's what I think,
• 10:36
  Niamh Bukhali is very polarizing.
• 10:38
  You either love him or you think he's like some,
• 10:40
  there's many people.
• 10:42
  I think, yeah, it's all well and good
• 10:44
  that the murder rate's been cut to the lowest levels in the Western Hemisphere and the economy
• 10:53
  is on the rebound, but he is a dictator. What he's done with the elections there, what he's done to
• 10:59
  insert himself is dictatorial. We cannot accept this. And then you have the others who are like,
• 11:04
  well, just look at the data. I think I'm in this camp. I don't care if he's a dictator. It looks
• 11:10
  like things are safer there and people are happier. And it looks like particularly there's
• 11:15
  a focus on education, children's education specifically. They've implemented AI in many
• 11:22
  schools. I think they have a pilot of a thousand schools that are doing AI assisted learning.
• 11:26
  And the testing results are screaming through the roof, getting on parity with a lot of
• 11:32
  Western European nations. And it's a look at the outcome, not the way they got there.
• 11:41
  Situation for me. It's a great question, Marty. So let's talk about both sides of it.
• 11:46
  First of all, it's important to understand how bad things were in El Salvador, because what that
• 11:53
  murder rate did and that extortion rate and that crime rate did was it changed the economy and
• 11:59
  and in important ways. So for example, if you ran a business and you had any amount of money,
• 12:05
  you were going to be robbed. And I, like, I spoke to somebody who was in a nice car
• 12:10
  and he had the decision of being killed by a gang or running somebody over,
• 12:14
  right? Like that literally that, that was it. And it was, he was in a killer be killed situation.
• 12:21
  So when you have people who have any success, and that means they're going to be robbed,
• 12:27
  your incentive for producing, it becomes negative, right? Because losing the money that you've earned
• 12:35
  is bad, but being, you know, murdered or beaten up for it is even worse, right? Succeeding meant
• 12:43
  your life was in danger. So every year you had fewer people with an incentive to produce and
• 12:48
  more people with an incentive to join a gang. And that's where things were. Now, most of the people
• 12:55
  I spoke with were in your camp, Marty. They just said, our lives are so much better.
• 13:00
  And we were afraid and our, and the life was cheap here. You know, people telling me some guy had
• 13:06
  worked in a place for 10 years, didn't show up. Nobody said anything. The business owner asked
• 13:10
  somebody else. They said, you know, where, where's a Jorge, you know, where's, where's this guy.
• 13:15
  And, and the answer was, yeah, Jorge was killed over the weekend. Like just flat, you know,
• 13:22
  something happens, you know, like nobody cared. And that's how cheap life was. That's how bad
• 13:28
  things were. And so when you talk to them, I would say, you know, 75 to 90% of people are saying
• 13:33
  life here is amazing now and it's getting so much better and they feel safe. And like you said,
• 13:40
  their kids are going to school, they're learning, people are starting businesses,
• 13:43
  foreign investment is pouring in, there's construction everywhere, right? I mean, this is,
• 13:50
  And most of them think it's amazing. Now, let's get to the concern you brought up,
• 13:54
  because there were people who expressed constitutional concerns and did use the
• 14:00
  word dictator. And what was really interesting was even those people acknowledged that life was a
• 14:08
  whole lot better. And basically what they were saying is, okay, look, life is a lot better here,
• 14:13
  but I'm worried that some of what Bukele's done has been outside the constitution. He's
• 14:19
  had a state of emergency that's lasted far too long. And as a result of that, they basically said,
• 14:26
  I don't mind the way he's using power. I'm worried that the next guy will use this as an example.
• 14:32
  And I think maybe the best comparable I can come up with is it reminds me a lot of Lee Kuan Yew
• 14:40
  in Singapore, who was absolutely a dictator, but look at what happened to the quality of life for
• 14:48
  the people in Singapore. They went from this poor backwater port city country to a place that had
• 14:55
  autonomy. And it was a first world nation, you know, more than a quarter century ago, right?
• 15:01
  With first world amenities and a high quality of life and an educated literate population
• 15:07
  at a point when their neighbors were not. And so I think, you know, Lee Kuan Yew is a really good
• 15:14
  where you had a guy who basically was a dictator
• 15:18
  and used that power to make the lives of his people
• 15:22
  so much better.
• 15:23
  And it really is a great example,
• 15:26
  and unfortunately this isn't being done in our part of the world,
• 15:29
  where government force is being used to help people as opposed to steal and oppress the people living there And so even Bukele critics acknowledged yeah I worried
• 15:44
  I think he's a dictator.
• 15:46
  But boy, is my life so much better.
• 15:48
  And the lives of my friends and relatives and neighbors are so much better.
• 15:51
  So I thought it was interesting that even his detractors acknowledged that he had used his power really well.
• 15:59
  Benevolent.
• 16:00
  And that's, I mean, some people call him a dictator.
• 16:06
  And I think this I've reread Democracy, the God that Failed by Hoppe earlier this year, which is talking about monarchy.
• 16:17
  And I think that's one thing that other people are floating, not as much as the dictator, but like maybe he's setting up like a new monarchy in El Salvador.
• 16:28
  And here's to say that that's not a good thing at the end of the day.
• 16:32
  Well, so you know what's really interesting, Marty, is the idea that we should rule ourselves
• 16:38
  is one that resonates with the vast majority of Americans and certainly with me.
• 16:43
  I think, you know, my concern for our version of democracy is, for the most part, Americans
• 16:50
  are not governed by the people we elect.
• 16:53
  Our lives are more affected by the unelected permanent bureaucracy.
• 16:57
  That, to me, is the real issue. It's that we're ultimately we are constantly answering to the agencies that aren't elected and yet have an enormous amount of legislative power over our lives and administrative power.
• 17:11
  yeah and uh you said you were going to bring it up and i'll bring it up i think the lindsey
• 17:17
  clancy saga is uh is a bit of a a bit of a undercurrent of that right i think a lot of that
• 17:27
  that bureaucratic managerial class has been taken up by um in many cases i think objectively if you
• 17:33
  look at the numbers, uh, women who, who have this, this, this grudge against the patriarchy,
• 17:40
  uh, and it leads to non-meritocratic, uh, rule, if you will, in many, in many aspects of our lives.
• 17:48
  And I think that the microcosm of the Lindsay Clancy case points, points to that to a degree.
• 17:55
  The thing that really worries me about that case is not that one person did something horrible.
• 18:01
  It's this outpouring of support.
• 18:04
  And, you know, she, she flat out said, you know, I did this and, and you see like enormous
• 18:11
  numbers of people saying, no, no, it was the husband.
• 18:14
  Right.
• 18:15
  I, it's, it is amazing that, you know, they won't even believe a confession.
• 18:21
  Um, and the amount of support for somebody who did something monstrous and has acknowledged
• 18:25
  doing something monstrous is, is incredible to me.
• 18:29
  you know
• 18:32
  Marty when you and I see a man do something
• 18:35
  horrible at no point do we say
• 18:36
  alright well let's get on X let's start making
• 18:38
  videos supporting him and you know which one of us
• 18:41
  is going to start the GoFundMe
• 18:42
  it's horrible that
• 18:46
  it's horrible what happened to those kids
• 18:49
  but the fact that people are
• 18:50
  supporting this
• 18:52
  and there are copycat cases
• 18:54
  is worrisome
• 18:55
  yeah there's a copycat case in Illinois
• 18:59
  I think just a couple weeks ago.
• 19:04
  Yeah.
• 19:04
  And you get these social dynamics,
• 19:10
  and then you get the technological dynamics of it, too,
• 19:12
  because we saw this during COVID,
• 19:15
  the mass psychosis that was easily spread
• 19:17
  through these technologies that we have.
• 19:20
  And there were some women in my life that I'd not sit down,
• 19:24
  but the Lindsay Clancy case would come up,
• 19:26
  and they would bring up TikTok rabbit holes
• 19:28
  that they found out that had very compelling cases that it was the father.
• 19:36
  It wasn't Lindsay.
• 19:37
  It was Patrick Clancy, not Lindsay Clancy.
• 19:40
  And I had to be like, hey, let's take a step back.
• 19:42
  Like, this is patently absurd.
• 19:44
  What are you watching?
• 19:45
  What are these people telling you?
• 19:46
  And the sort of rapid nature through which those theories were spreading on social media
• 19:53
  it was pretty, it's very alarming and concerning considering how many people
• 19:58
  took these theories, ran with them and took them as fact at the end of the day when it was
• 20:05
  patently absurd. Yeah. It's interesting to me that what people are willing to believe
• 20:11
  off of a TikTok video, but I'll also remind everybody that that algorithm is controlled by
• 20:18
  the CCP. Right. I mean, they will amplify anything that divides us, that makes people angry,
• 20:29
  that makes people feel like they can't trust their neighbor. Yeah, I actually recorded an
• 20:34
  episode yesterday, completely different topic, but same vein with Sam Lyman from the Bitcoin
• 20:40
  Policy Institute. He wrote a research report in the beginning of the summer highlighting that a
• 20:45
  of the anti data center rhetoric and narratives
• 20:50
  in the U.S. are being funded by by Chinese entities and.
• 20:58
  For the same purpose, to divide into, I think, also to slow down the A.I.
• 21:03
  build out here and he was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday testifying
• 21:08
  in front of the Senate and he made a really good point.
• 21:10
  Like if you look at the media narratives in China with Chinese state media around
• 21:15
  A.I. data centers and A.I. more broadly, it's extremely positive.
• 21:19
  It's like this is going to revitalize our economy.
• 21:22
  It's going to create an incredible future for us.
• 21:23
  And yet they're like funding these propaganda campaigns in the U.S. to make us believe that that's not the case.
• 21:30
  Yeah, it's incredible that they're allowed to do that.
• 21:34
  Obviously, American entities are not permitted to, you know, try to convince Chinese people or the Chinese government to slow down their research.
• 21:44
  So I think that's I think it's really interesting that that they're doing and that people believe this.
• 21:51
  Right. I mean, obviously, what China wants to do is is they want to take that lead.
• 21:59
  So it's you know, it's incredible to me that that people will believe it.
• 22:03
  also, you know, the other thing that is certainly attention grabbing are the headlines from people
• 22:10
  at, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI saying, oh, no, we're going to destroy the world. You better
• 22:15
  regulate us. And people are believing that these companies are saying, well, you know, without
• 22:22
  regulation, we're going to destroy the planet. We're going to destroy humanity. You'll get your
• 22:26
  Terminator future. Right. And to me, it seems obvious that if you think what you're doing is
• 22:32
  dangerous, maybe you should stop it. Why are they calling for government regulation? And the answer
• 22:37
  to that is the same thing it always is. Anytime you have an oligopoly in an industry, that oligopoly
• 22:44
  has an incentive to pull the ladder up behind them and ensure that anybody else starting a
• 22:51
  competing company will have to face a regulatory apparatus preventing their success that these
• 22:57
  companies didn't have to face. And, you know, the most recent obvious example of that was,
• 23:05
  you know, who was part of leading the charge for charging taxes on internet purchases?
• 23:12
  It was Amazon. And the reason for that, right? And you think, well, wait a minute,
• 23:18
  like one thing that gave Amazon a huge advantage over Walmart and Costco and
• 23:22
  every local store was you didn't have to pay state sales tax. And so why? Why would they give
• 23:29
  up that advantage? And the answer is because Amazon could afford the software to calculate
• 23:34
  what everybody owed in a particular city, a particular state. It was being shipped from
• 23:39
  this place, sold in this place. They could manage that complexity, but boy, it made it a lot harder
• 23:44
  and more expensive for smaller companies to come challenge Amazon. I think that's what we're seeing
• 23:50
  here. Like if these companies really believe what they were doing was dangerous, then
• 23:54
  stop doing it. If you think you're going to destroy humanity, stop. You don't need the government
• 23:58
  for that. This is simply the natural
• 24:02
  inclination of any oligopoly to pull up the ladder and ensure they don't face more competition.
• 24:07
  Yeah. And that oligopoly has
• 24:10
  another mind virus embedded
• 24:14
  in it, which is effective altruism. I'm not sure if you've been following
• 24:18
  the sort of sleuthing of the individuals that work at some of these companies and the third-party
• 24:28
  research groups that are there to help them provide the safety guardrails. It is heavily
• 24:35
  seeped in effective altruism thought, which is completely insane. People who think they can
• 24:45
  use spreadsheets to determine the best outcomes for future humans and therefore decide what we
• 24:52
  have to do today. And this is actually a topic that I've been covering for probably five or six
• 24:59
  years now because Sam Bankman-Fried was an effective altruist too. And we went through
• 25:06
  the effects of the effective altruists getting control of part of an industry in Bitcoin last
• 25:12
  cycle. And these people are absolutely insane. Yeah, it's a huge problem. And in fact, I stopped
• 25:21
  using OpenAI. I stopped using ChatGPT earlier this year over the summer because I was getting
• 25:29
  insane answers. And every question I asked was put through the lens of racial preferences and
• 25:38
  gender preferences. And, you know, I, it would give me these really biased answers. And I would
• 25:44
  point out, hey, this answer is biased, and you're putting people above me. But I'm asking about
• 25:53
  something related to me And it would it would be very sly in its response And it would say yes well I not against you and all people are equal And I would never put one person above another but there were protected
• 26:10
  classes of people and we can't write anything even in a private conversation that might upset
• 26:16
  somebody who's in a protected class. I'm like, that's the definition of prioritizing certain
• 26:23
  people above other people. And I don't know what to tell you, but I don't agree that somebody else's
• 26:30
  desires or needs take precedence over mine because they're part of a particular group. And I'm not,
• 26:36
  that's not, that that's not moral. It's not right. And so I would get these insane racist,
• 26:44
  sexist answers from it. Um, it also was, was just incapable of following instructions. I would say,
• 26:51
  you know, don't give me an answer unless you confirm it with these sources. And it would tell
• 26:56
  me, okay, great. I did that. And I would find out it, it not only didn't it, it couldn't like,
• 27:01
  it's like, yeah, I would ask. I'm like, I thought you checked this. Oh, I don't have access to that.
• 27:05
  I'm like, you gave me an answer. Right. Um, so it was racist. It was sexist. It was inaccurate.
• 27:13
  It was confidently wrong, which is the worst thing of all. Um, you know, there were times I
• 27:18
  would tell it, give me an answer about this topic. Do not consider this. And guess what?
• 27:25
  You know, I would get A and B. I'm like, I literally one instruction before just told you,
• 27:30
  don't do that. And it would constantly violate the ground rules that I would give it.
• 27:37
  And I would say, hey, we've had this conversation 10 times. You're supposed to have memory why you're
• 27:42
  doing this. And would say, yeah, you're totally right. I did do this. You know, if I do this again
• 27:48
  in the future, just remind me, I'm like, what? You're a computer. You're relying on me to remember
• 27:54
  and remind you why can't you, you literally have memory for this purpose. And the only thing I
• 28:02
  could conclude is its goal is not to be useful, or at least not to be useful to somebody who has my
• 28:08
  ideas. And I just concluded that it was dangerous and wrong and horrendous and stopped using it.
• 28:15
  I think there's a reason they've lost so much market share to Claude and Anthropic.
• 28:21
  You know, this last quarter, the revenue at Anthropic was double the revenue at OpenAI.
• 28:28
  I actually think OpenAI potentially is a zero, right?
• 28:32
  They've got $600 billion of commitments.
• 28:35
  I don't know where they're going to get that $600 billion.
• 28:38
  But what I do know is that their revenue hasn't been growing the way it is in other places.
• 28:43
  and their losses are, you know, they're still looking at losing like $100 billion over the
• 28:48
  next few years. Who's going to be funding that? You know, one of the best pieces of analysis I
• 28:56
  saw on this was written by Alex McCrease, who writes a blog called The Tree of Woe,
• 29:02
  which is a great Conan the Barbarian reference. And Alex had this great line where he's talking
• 29:10
  about the future of AI saying, unless we do something about this, our kids are going to be
• 29:15
  raised by a bunch of Robo Karens. That's a great line. Well, I mean, to that point,
• 29:24
  there were rumors that there was a secondary sale of, I forgot it was Anthropoc or OpenAI
• 29:31
  equity, but I think it was OpenAI that sold at a $445 billion valuation, which is
• 29:39
  one third of what they were publicly saying they wanted to to ipo at and obviously they've stepped
• 29:46
  back from the ipo and tropic seems to have too and i think that's a big question on everybody's
• 29:50
  mind whether it's open ai or anthropic but just broadly speaking about this ai build out um
• 29:57
  what is going to happen and what's the effect going to be on the economy have we overextended
• 30:05
  the run here? Have we pushed too much capital into this? Is the return on invested capital
• 30:13
  not materializing fast enough? What are you seeing in those regards?
• 30:17
  Yeah, I think that's the case, right? And this is something I've been talking about for two years,
• 30:20
  that these companies have no plan to earn a return on literally trillions of dollars
• 30:25
  of invested capital. I don't see that happening. My disappointment about OpenAI not going public
• 30:33
  is now I can't short it. I mean, I really think it's a zero. I would love to short that stock if
• 30:39
  I could. And right now, there's just no effective way to do it. I also think it's notable that the
• 30:47
  American companies are all against the open weight models, right? They don't even want competition
• 30:52
  for like, Marty, you and I putting our own weights in, having our own... People should be able to
• 31:00
  put together competing models. And they're trying to stop that. They're saying, oh, it's dangerous.
• 31:04
  Really Really So you guys are the ones who have the wisdom to decide what the truth is and how everybody going to learn and to be counseling everybody on whatever personal stuff they put in there But other people who could alter these models or design
• 31:23
  their own models or put their own weightings on them are somehow dangerous. I think that's
• 31:30
  completely insane. The one way that I'm playing this, and we've done so very profitably, is through
• 31:36
  Intel. I bought that stock at $35 back in November. And then I bought more of it in the
• 31:45
  upper 40s, low 50s, something like that. And the reason for that is because of the shift from
• 31:55
  training to inference. And so think about it this way. If you're designing an LLM, this is the kind
• 32:01
  of incredible expense that you were just talking about, Marty. To do that, you have to train a
• 32:09
  model. And for that, you want a lot of very expensive NVIDIA GPUs. But inference is simply
• 32:15
  using it, right? So agentic AI, which is a fancy way of saying, I want to have AI agents that will
• 32:23
  go do things for me, that will go find information, that will compile information, that will make a
• 32:28
  purchase, that'll buy me airline tickets, that will send Marty an email saying, hey, can we move
• 32:35
  our TFTC filming from this time to that time? All of that stuff. That's not GPU heavy. That's CPU
• 32:45
  heavy. So that's Intel and AMD. And so when I look at that, I think to myself,
• 32:54
  you know, the company is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this. They may never earn
• 33:00
  a return on it, but that doesn't mean there isn't demand. Right. And so like the easy comparable is
• 33:07
  to look at the the the dotcom build out and the the e-commerce build out that started 30 years ago.
• 33:17
  And, you know, you had a lot of companies go bankrupt, but use of the Internet skyrocketed
• 33:23
  and never stopped. Even when those stocks imploded in 2001, it didn't stop people from using the
• 33:31
  internet. And so I do think there's demand to use AI. That's all agentic demand. And that's going to
• 33:36
  be very CPU heavy. I also think we're going to see a shift from LLMs to SLMs, right? The large
• 33:44
  language models hosted in these data centers, you'll end up with small language models hosted
• 33:52
  on your own hardware. And we already have like a lot of people, individuals have enough computing
• 33:58
  power for that right now. So, you know, that's basically, that's the way I'm playing that shift.
• 34:05
  Yeah, no, I completely agree. And at Dark Horse, the company I sit on the board of, I think that's
• 34:10
  our thesis too, is that inference demand is not going to go down anytime soon. I just want to pull
• 34:17
  up this chart. And it's crazy. You're talking about agents, the agentic economy,
• 34:21
  agent to agent token usage is going
• 34:24
  exponential. Right. So that blue line there, that's
• 34:29
  not NVIDIA. Right. That's Intel and AMD.
• 34:33
  Marty, let me ask you a question. In your data center, what's the name of your
• 34:36
  data center? A company called Dark Horse.
• 34:40
  So at Dark Horse, what's the ratio of GPUs to CPUs
• 34:45
  in your facility. Do you know that? Right now, it's all Bitcoin mining. We're in the process
• 34:49
  of transitioning. We have land and power assets. Gotcha.
• 34:54
  Yeah. Okay. So right now, if you go
• 34:57
  into these AI data centers, it's like eight GPUs per
• 35:01
  CPU. And I talk to people every week in the industry.
• 35:05
  These are senior executives, people designing these data centers.
• 35:10
  And what they're telling me is they think over the next few years,
• 35:13
  that ratio goes from eight to one in favor of GPUs to something in the neighborhood of two to
• 35:18
  one or one to one, right? Where you just, the CPU demand is going to be off the charts.
• 35:25
  Yeah. I think, I think it's obvious if you look at Intel, AMD, a lot of the memory,
• 35:31
  memory companies over in South Korea, you're going to need a memory for this too.
• 35:37
  Yeah, absolutely. You know, one, one thing that's really worth pointing out and people might say,
• 35:42
  how would you have enough horsepower to run an SLM? Don't you need these giant data centers?
• 35:51
  I'm talking to you right now. I'm traveling using a laptop that I bought at Best Buy
• 35:55
  earlier this year for $1,300. I have enough horsepower on this thing to run an SLM.
• 36:04
  Now, could I do the same stuff that Grok can do or that Claude can do? No.
• 36:09
  But most of what people need these things to do,
• 36:13
  you don't require the high-end stuff.
• 36:16
  No, I mean, for our TFTC company agent,
• 36:20
  we have it running in the cloud
• 36:21
  and we have some local models running in the cloud It gets a lot of work done Yeah exactly right And even if it gets a lot of work done yeah exactly right and and even if um you using
• 36:32
  it for you know 50 of your needs 60 of your needs those are tokens you don't have to buy from
• 36:38
  anthropic or open ai or you know from gemini that's that's it won't decrease your ai usage
• 36:46
  but it'll decrease your token purchases.
• 36:49
  Yeah, and even if you're not using SLMs
• 36:52
  on your physical device,
• 36:54
  the open-weight Chinese models
• 36:55
  are using DeepSeq or Kimi K3.
• 36:58
  I mean, they're 98% cheaper
• 37:01
  and 2% of the cost for the token.
• 37:04
  So that's another thing.
• 37:05
  That's why I also think the oligopoly
• 37:07
  is calling for regulatory capture
• 37:11
  and regulatory modes
• 37:12
  because they see this open-weight wave coming
• 37:16
  much cheaper comparable intelligence and uh it's scaring the crap out of them it should
• 37:25
  it should scare them and you know unfortunately i don't think they've been good stewards of the
• 37:31
  public trust they have a particular point of view and they're going to push it yeah what um
• 37:38
  how do you how do you think this plays out over the next six months to a year and i think
• 37:45
  bringing in a more well-rounded picture. Obviously, we have the models, we have the data centers,
• 37:50
  but then underlying that is this larger endeavor of broad re-industrialization of the U.S. economy,
• 37:59
  focus on our energy systems. Obviously, we have wars going on in Russia, Ukraine, Iran, U.S.
• 38:08
  Oil and gas markets are being heavily disrupted. We have diesel refineries
• 38:13
  shutting down here in the United States. What do you think this fall and winter look like?
• 38:20
  Because it seems like we're on the precipice of either threading the needle or having things
• 38:26
  unravel to a certain degree. So I think that's a really difficult question. And the reason is so
• 38:32
  much of it depends on the weather, right? Europe is going into the winter with their fingers crossed
• 38:37
  that it won't be a cold winter. They don't have enough fuel to get through the winter if it's cold,
• 38:41
  right? They're going to get very unhappy and very uncomfortable if it's a cold winter. So,
• 38:46
  you know, if you want to predict the weather, uh, four months from now, I'll tell you what's
• 38:51
  going to happen. Right. But I, I'm, I can't predict the weather four months from now. Um,
• 38:58
  here's what I think though. I think long-term worldwide energy usage will only go up. You have,
• 39:06
  extraordinary needs in the United States, right? Like, you know, like a town might use a gigawatt
• 39:13
  of energy, you now have data centers being built that are using five, six, seven gigawatts of energy,
• 39:19
  or that will use that. So you've got massive needs there. And then you have literally billions of
• 39:25
  people all over the world who want more energy usage. And the correlation between energy use and
• 39:31
  a higher material quality of life is almost 100%. There are no prosperous, comfortable,
• 39:40
  wealthy societies that have low energy usage. It simply doesn't exist. Even in warm parts of the
• 39:47
  world, even parts of the world where people won't freeze to death, you need energy to live a
• 39:53
  comfortable material quality of life. And so you've got massive data center demand in the United
• 39:58
  States and China. And then you have billions of people in India, China, Africa, who they want a
• 40:04
  better life. And so I think we're looking at a gigantic increase in worldwide energy usage.
• 40:11
  The way I'm playing this is I'm not focused on short-term headlines, which literally at one
• 40:17
  point were changing by the hour. Somebody in the White House would make an announcement,
• 40:24
  the IRGC would make an announcement and oil prices are moving. And there was no way to predict that.
• 40:29
  But what I've done is I own large amounts of energy and energy infrastructure.
• 40:36
  And I own a huge amount of uranium. I do think there's going to be a worldwide nuclear
• 40:41
  renaissance. Because if people want a higher quality of life and politically they want zero
• 40:49
  carbon, that's the answer. There are no other answers that will get you reliable,
• 40:56
  high levels of power without carbon. So my portfolio is loaded up for higher energy prices.
• 41:04
  Whether that happens over the next three to six months, I don't know. But what happens over the
• 41:08
  next three to six years? How do you think rates play into this? Obviously, that's another point
• 41:14
  of focus for market participants right now is looking at Kevin Warsh and the Fed, looking
• 41:20
  at the Treasury yields 10 year, popped above five, still hovering around there.
• 41:25
  I'm not sure where it is today.
• 41:26
  Obviously, you have this debt situation continuing to balloon here in the United States.
• 41:32
  And obviously, you have Japan struggling to or not even struggling.
• 41:37
  I think they've determined that they're not even going to.
• 41:39
  try to maintain yield curve control as well. And you just have yields blowing out all over the world.
• 41:48
  You know, Marty, one of the things that surprised me is that people still believe that the Federal
• 41:55
  Reserve has control over the situation and they don't. And so, you know, you see this thing where
• 42:01
  people are saying, you know, inflation has made life unaffordable. We want the Fed to fix that.
• 42:07
  And, you know, so the Fed raises and they say, oh, no, we're not going to be able to afford mortgages.
• 42:12
  OK, well, one, which do you want?
• 42:14
  But two, why do you think the Fed has any say over this?
• 42:18
  And like I heard people this morning talking about how, you know, the Fed will do this and that and it'll affect borrowing rates and, you know, it'll make life unaffordable for people.
• 42:29
  I don't know why they think that the Fed has zero control.
• 42:32
  So and I've written I've spilled gallons of digital ink about this for years.
• 42:37
  The Fed does not control the yield curve. The Fed controls the overnight rate. So, you know, Marty, let me ask you, if Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan pays 25 basis points more on their overnight deposits in the Federal Reserve, does that affect your life? No, of course not.
• 42:53
  So and people might say, oh, well, the Fed, but they'll change the overnight rate and that'll make its way through the yield curve.
• 43:01
  And the answer is no.
• 43:03
  It used to do that when we had less than $40 trillion of debt.
• 43:08
  But at $40 trillion of on balance sheet debt and another $200 trillion plus of off balance sheet debt, no, it no longer matters.
• 43:16
  And here's the proof, right?
• 43:18
  So everybody was wailing this week that the Fed raised rates and nobody's going to be able to afford anything.
• 43:22
  Well, your mortgage gets priced off of the 10-year treasury.
• 43:30
  And I took a look.
• 43:31
  From the beginning of this week to the open this morning, the yield on the 10-year treasury
• 43:37
  rose by one basis point, 0.01%.
• 43:41
  In other words, the bond market said, we don't care what Warsh is doing.
• 43:46
  So somebody might say, well, that's one example, and it's two days.
• 43:49
  OK, fair enough.
• 43:50
  Let's look at the last two years.
• 43:52
  Right?
• 43:52
  And I wrote in the summer of 2024, Powell's going to hike.
• 43:58
  Sorry, he's going to cut and it won't matter.
• 44:00
  It's not going to help.
• 44:02
  It won't give people the response they want.
• 44:04
  And so we had two years of Fed cuts.
• 44:07
  The Powell Fed started cutting in September of 2024.
• 44:10
  They cut by about 200 basis points.
• 44:13
  Take a look over the last two years, the yield on the 10-year rose, the yield on the 30-year
• 44:18
  rose.
• 44:19
  So the Fed was cutting and borrowing rates rose because the bond market was correctly saying we're projecting higher future inflation.
• 44:30
  And the bond market was right. That's exactly what happened.
• 44:32
  Now the Warsh Fed raised and the 30-year is down this week. The 10-year is up one basis point, 0.01%.
• 44:42
  What that's telling you is the people trading the bond market don't care what the Fed is doing and neither do I.
• 44:49
  It's just no longer relevant.
• 44:50
  And the reason we're going to see higher long-term inflation is because what we have, the proper
• 44:56
  definition of inflation is an expansion of the money supply.
• 45:00
  And what we have is not only a government that's overspending by trillions of dollars
• 45:04
  a year, which is bad enough, but they're not using that money for infrastructure that creates
• 45:10
  value.
• 45:11
  It's so much of it is waste, theft, graft, fraud, right?
• 45:17
  It's not being used to help us.
• 45:18
  It is being wasted and stolen. And and then, you know, that that money adds to the money supply.
• 45:27
  So, you know, when people are talking about the Federal Reserve, that's not relevant.
• 45:32
  Inflation is being caused by overspending out of Congress. It's a bipartisan problem.
• 45:36
  And it's not going to stop. Both parties do this. Nobody is talking seriously about cutting spending.
• 45:42
  And so that's the direction all of this is going to go.
• 45:47
  You know, Lynn Alden, one of her big memes, she's been saying for years, nothing stops this train, meaning Congress is going to overspend.
• 45:54
  The money supply is going to expand.
• 45:58
  Inflation will continue.
• 45:59
  There is nothing anyone can do to stop it.
• 46:01
  Nothing stops this train.
• 46:02
  And as usual, Lynn is right.
• 46:05
  Who knew all you had to do is spin up an LLC and say that you're providing hospice to people?
• 46:10
  Spin up an LLC, get a P.O. box and get tens of millions of dollars from Medicare.
• 46:15
  Here's what's amazing to me about this, Marty. And I think this tells you the whole game.
• 46:20
  It's not amazing to me that people see holes in the system and ways to abuse American generosity,
• 46:27
  right? Like thieves are going to be thieves. What's amazing to me is that half of the country
• 46:34
  is getting angry at the people pointing it out, saying, hey, we have billions of dollars being
• 46:40
  stolen from us every year and it's systematic and it's intentional.
• 46:44
  And people are saying, how dare you point that out?
• 46:46
  It wrong You can look at this What are you kidding me That our money that being stolen And you are paying for it in higher inflation right
• 46:58
  And so I think it's really interesting that people are getting, you know, people got angry
• 47:03
  at Elon Musk for pointing out how much of government spending was fraud.
• 47:08
  And, you know, Elon this and like, okay, wait a minute.
• 47:11
  Why is nobody going to deal with the issue that money is being stolen from us?
• 47:15
  They started throwing Molotov cocktails at Tesla dealerships.
• 47:19
  Yeah.
• 47:20
  Yeah.
• 47:21
  And they would have killed people.
• 47:22
  They wouldn't have cared.
• 47:24
  Yeah.
• 47:25
  Again, it goes back to this mass psychosis.
• 47:27
  It's like, how could anybody?
• 47:30
  I mean, actually, I can see how, like, if you are like a democratic socialist or a pure communist,
• 47:38
  you can say, like, yeah, we're stealing from the system.
• 47:42
  It's a form of reparations.
• 47:43
  I think many of those people believe that it's completely sick.
• 47:48
  It's a sick mindset.
• 47:50
  But at the end of the day, it's just overt.
• 47:53
  In your face theft.
• 47:55
  And as a taxpayer.
• 47:58
  It looks as a tax bill every year.
• 48:01
  And so what taxes feel like a humiliation ritual at this point.
• 48:05
  Oh, God, they are.
• 48:06
  They are.
• 48:07
  And by the way, what you just described, Marty, the the.
• 48:11
  Oh, God.
• 48:12
  the the piven cloward strategy i may be mispronouncing that piven piven uh piven cloward
• 48:20
  yeah i think it's i'll look it up i may be mispronouncing but basically these were a couple
• 48:24
  of socialists in the 60s or 70s who said the the way we crash the system is by by making so many
• 48:32
  people dependent on it and making the the demands for social services so high that we crash the
• 48:39
  entire system. And then when it fails, we'll be able to implement communism.
• 48:44
  That, I mean, that, that was a state and they said this out loud, right?
• 48:48
  And somebody might say, Oh, you know, conspiracy.
• 48:50
  They don't at all. This is not a conspiracy theory.
• 48:52
  Go read what they wrote about it. They, they spoke in public.
• 48:55
  They were clear.
• 48:57
  Yeah. The cloud strategy.
• 49:00
  Okay. Yeah.
• 49:03
  Yeah. I had it. I had it mixed up.
• 49:05
  The way to the poor, the strategy to end poverty.
• 49:08
  urged activists to register every person eligible for welfare benefits who are often blocked by
• 49:13
  local bureaucratic hurdles onto the system all at once. The goal, overloading local government
• 49:19
  budgets and agency capacities will create a fiscal and political crisis. The authors believe that
• 49:23
  the federal government would then have to step in and replace local welfare with a federal system
• 49:28
  of guaranteed annual income. Getting close to that. Yeah. So, so look, here's the thing. And,
• 49:34
  And again, you know, Marty, one of the things I do whenever you and I do these, you know, whenever we do these shows, I always go and, you know, I go to the comments and I respond.
• 49:45
  And inevitably, there are a bunch of people saying, you know, I'm a horrible, mean, heartless person and I just want everyone to die.
• 49:51
  And no, no, I just don't want our money to be stolen.
• 49:55
  And I don't want our free enterprise system to collapse.
• 49:59
  And I don't want the country to collapse.
• 50:01
  And I don't want our financial system to collapse.
• 50:03
  and people stealing billions of dollars and Congress overspending by trillions of dollars
• 50:08
  and wasting it and, you know, having it be lost to fraud. That's not good for any of us.
• 50:15
  And so, you know, listen, you guys can write in the comments that I just want poor people to die,
• 50:20
  but that's not true at all. And I'm not the one trying to harm everybody. And listen,
• 50:28
  As somebody who owns Bitcoin and gold and silver and energy and a home, I actually benefit
• 50:34
  from inflation.
• 50:36
  But I don't want that.
• 50:38
  I want to make my money from generating alpha, from identifying great companies trading at
• 50:43
  inexpensive prices.
• 50:45
  But if this is going to happen, then I'm going to own hard assets and I'll benefit from it.
• 50:52
  That's not what I want.
• 50:53
  That's just the way the world is working right now.
• 50:55
  It doesn't mean that's what I want to have happen.
• 50:58
  Yeah, objectively, it is what's happening. And it is incredibly frustrating because the communists, the people who believe in the cloud or prohibit strategy will say this is the way we get we get equality.
• 51:11
  We we we smash the the wealth inequality gap. You're going to smash the wealth inequality gap. You're just not going to have any wealth.
• 51:20
  That's the problem with this.
• 51:22
  Will all be equally poor?
• 51:24
  And by the way, worth pointing out, it's these strategies that create inflation.
• 51:30
  Well, I've got news for you.
• 51:32
  Again, the people who write in the comments that I'm a horrible, heartless person because
• 51:36
  this isn't what I want.
• 51:37
  This is the way it is.
• 51:39
  But I will point out that inflation is horrible for poor people.
• 51:44
  It's horrible for the elderly on fixed incomes.
• 51:47
  It's horrible for people who have to spend, you know, 90% of their income on food and fuel and gas and don't have disposable income.
• 51:55
  It is great for people who own homes who own Bitcoin who own gold who own hard assets Those are wealthy people And so somehow because most people are not economically literate somehow we have a situation where the exact policies that create
• 52:17
  massive amounts of wealth inequality are being lauded as the ways to decrease wealth inequality.
• 52:24
  And it is one of the most amazing sleights of hand by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department and political activists who have all colluded with these policies to create inequality.
• 52:38
  And then they say the solution to this is more of the same policies that create more inequality.
• 52:45
  And it's just and people will question your morals and my morals because we notice this.
• 52:53
  But more of the same will create more of the same outcome.
• 52:58
  More of the same government theft and graft will create more inflation, will increase the wealth inequality gap because inflation benefits wealthy people and harms poor people.
• 53:09
  It does.
• 53:10
  And I think this is a good segue to tie it back to your El Salvador trip, Bitcoin.
• 53:19
  But how do you think Bitcoin is faring throughout all this?
• 53:23
  I think this year has played out and looking forward and then tying it to your trip to El Salvador.
• 53:29
  Because I think we both believe that, again, the inflationary pressures are monetary in nature.
• 53:37
  one of the ways to protect yourself and to if you want to fix things more broadly is get back toward
• 53:43
  a sound money policy which bitcoin enables you to do without the government having to do
• 53:48
  anything um what's the setup for bitcoin looking like in your mind yeah so i'm going to speak in
• 53:55
  in very round terms here but roughly 90 of all bitcoin that will ever be mined and created
• 54:02
  have already been created. So we roughly have 20 million Bitcoin in existence. There will be one
• 54:10
  more for a total of 21 million. Of that, maybe three or four million have been irretrievably
• 54:16
  lost and cannot be recovered. So the real total supply is going to end up being about 17, 18
• 54:23
  million. That last million Bitcoin will be mined over the next, I don't know, 100, 40, 150 years-ish,
• 54:29
  something like that, as opposed to the US government, which is, you know, people say,
• 54:36
  oh, inflation is coming down. Like, yeah, great. But M2 is up 5% in the last 12 months.
• 54:41
  Right. And that's just the on balance sheet. If you include off balance sheet spending,
• 54:46
  which does count and off balance sheet accruals, it's more than that. You know, it could be double
• 54:51
  that. So I think these trends are in place permanently. And that's been the fate of every
• 55:00
  fiat currency since the beginning of time. For thousands of years, every fiat currency has
• 55:04
  collapsed in the same way. Overexpansion, debt, war, guns, butter, bread, circuses, that's it.
• 55:09
  People just decided they could fund everything if they reduced the value of the currency.
• 55:16
  And that's why all fiat fails. And we're in the early stages of that right now.
• 55:25
  Nothing will change that. And Bitcoin is a hard asset. And so I want to own that. I think what
• 55:32
  we've seen with the recent 50%-ish drawdown, which is a lot lower than previous drawdowns,
• 55:39
  simply where we were in the four-year cycle. We see this every four years, Marty. You've seen it
• 55:44
  Every cycle, you have like some giant crash.
• 55:47
  Usually it's more like 75 to 90%.
• 55:50
  We got an easy one this time.
• 55:52
  At this point, I don't panic out of it, right?
• 55:55
  The last time I bought more in 2022, I just bought more, you know, when Bitcoin went from
• 56:00
  64,000 to 15,000.
• 56:02
  This time around, you know, when it got down into the 70s, I just bought more.
• 56:08
  I didn't sell it, right?
• 56:10
  And then when it went down to $59,000, I don't panic out of it, right?
• 56:15
  Bitcoiners don't panic.
• 56:16
  You just hold it.
• 56:19
  I also think there were two things that I would convey about my experience using Bitcoin in
• 56:25
  El Salvador.
• 56:27
  One is Bitcoin is absolutely a currency.
• 56:30
  You could use it for daily purchases, right?
• 56:33
  There's always that joke about coffee.
• 56:35
  But it's a currency if you can buy coffee with it.
• 56:38
  That's the example everyone uses.
• 56:39
  But you know what? It's actually a really good example, because what it says is a currency is something that you can use to make a daily purchase that you could buy breakfast or dinner or, you know, go to the store or buy a coffee with it.
• 56:53
  I think that's a really good definition for a currency.
• 56:56
  And using the Lightning Network is better, easier, faster and safer than using a credit card.
• 57:02
  The transfer was instantaneous.
• 57:05
  Right So I go into a restaurant I would buy dinner and I would ask the cashier you know can I pay with Bitcoin Sure They were happy They point to the QR code on the wall And I was using River as my payment app I just point at the QR code
• 57:22
  I put in the amount instead of having the merchant put in the amount, which somehow they have these handheld devices.
• 57:28
  They never show you.
• 57:30
  You're always tapping.
• 57:31
  And I didn't want the receipt.
• 57:33
  I was getting the receipt to make sure it was the right amount.
• 57:35
  It always was.
• 57:36
  Nobody tried to cheat me.
• 57:37
  But it makes me crazy.
• 57:38
  They put in the amount facing themselves.
• 57:40
  And then you tap.
• 57:41
  I have no idea the amount. Using River, using a Bitcoin app, you put in the amount, I would push
• 57:46
  send instantly. Their phone would get the notification like, bueno, muchas gracias.
• 57:54
  And I would be on my way. It is 100% a currency. Now, to me, one of the interesting things that I
• 58:01
  figured out actually use, and I went through, I don't know, six, seven apps trying to figure out
• 58:06
  which one to use and what worked quickly and what was expensive and what had the right functionality.
• 58:11
  And I outline all of this in the white paper that I put out this week.
• 58:17
  But I also answered the question for people, should you use Bitcoin as your payment system?
• 58:24
  Should you use Bitcoin to make purchases?
• 58:27
  And the answer depends on who you are and how much money you have.
• 58:31
  So, you know, life is not fair.
• 58:33
  Wealthy people are actually paid by their credit card companies and their banks to use
• 58:39
  their services.
• 58:41
  Right. You get paid interest in a checking account if you have enough money at at one of these banks, your credit card company, depending on which credit card you have, will return one to three percent of your money, depending on what you're purchasing.
• 58:55
  Right. So, you know, maybe you end up earning, you know, three, four, five percent using their services.
• 59:04
  And by the way, when you pay with credit card, what happens? You don't have to pay them for another 30 days.
• 59:08
  So you keep your money in a checking account, you earn interest.
• 59:12
  Now, some people get charged to use their credit cards.
• 59:17
  They get charged to use their debit card.
• 59:18
  They get charged to have a checking account.
• 59:20
  They get charged by their bank for things like wires or for ATM withdrawals, right?
• 59:26
  And so their banks make a lot of money charging these people fees, and it can get really expensive
• 59:32
  for them.
• 59:33
  Well, you know, when I used River for Bitcoin purchase and for and to make purchases, you know, when I when I would buy a coffee using Bitcoin, my total fees were one point two five percent.
• 59:49
  So here's the thing. If you're getting paid 3%, 4%, 5% to use the traditional banking service
• 59:57
  and using Bitcoin will cost you 1% or 2%, then it's 5% in the wrong direction to use it.
• 1:00:04
  But if you're somebody who gets charged constantly from your bank, and I've seen ATM fees of as much
• 1:00:11
  as $8. Well, if you're withdrawing $100, which would be a lot for a lot of people, that's an 8%
• 1:00:20
  fee just to get cash. And they get charged constantly by their banks. Then using Bitcoin
• 1:00:26
  at a 1.25% fee becomes a lifeline. And it's much cheaper and faster and easier and better.
• 1:00:34
  So the answer of should you use Bitcoin really depends on who you are and the kind of relationship
• 1:00:40
  you have with your bank yeah i completely agree there and i thought it was another interesting
• 1:00:45
  point that you made in the white paper pretty going going back to like buying coffee like if
• 1:00:51
  you're buying something under five ten dollars there are there are cases where the merchant
• 1:00:57
  won't let you use a credit card and so if you don't have the cash it's uh you're shit out of
• 1:01:03
  luck and so like there's another area where like the lightning network it like fits in perfectly
• 1:01:07
  Yeah, I had multiple situations where I couldn't buy a bottle of water because a bottle of water in El Salvador was like 60 cents, 75 cents.
• 1:01:17
  That was all I wanted.
• 1:01:19
  Well, they're not going to take credit card for anything under $5.
• 1:01:22
  And there were times in El Salvador, they use the dollar, the US dollar.
• 1:01:28
  So the money you're getting from an ATM in El Salvador is exactly the same as what you would get from an ATM in the United States.
• 1:01:35
  The bills are the same.
• 1:01:36
  It's the exact same money.
• 1:01:37
  But there were times that I had just been to an ATM and the smallest bill I had with me was $20 bill. And Salvadorian convenience stores are not going to give you $19 and change. They don't have that much change. These are small stores. And so literally, I could not buy a bottle of water. If you have Bitcoin, you can make a purchase on the Lightning Network and it's not a problem.
• 1:02:00
  Yeah.
• 1:02:01
  Where do you think the biggest pain points is?
• 1:02:05
  You mentioned the wallets and in the white paper, you mentioned the sort of UX hurdles
• 1:02:12
  that you ran into.
• 1:02:14
  Yeah.
• 1:02:15
  Yeah.
• 1:02:16
  Like Hashapp in particular, they have a horrendous user interface.
• 1:02:20
  It is just horrible to use.
• 1:02:22
  It's not.
• 1:02:23
  And you know, there are people who might say, oh, no, no, I use it all the time.
• 1:02:27
  Yeah, you use it all the time.
• 1:02:28
  You're familiar with it.
• 1:02:29
  First time user, I found it to be confusing.
• 1:02:32
  There were other apps that had really good user interfaces.
• 1:02:36
  You know, I went to Strike and I think Strike has a really good product.
• 1:02:40
  But in order to buy Bitcoin on their system, I either needed to pay a 2% fee using a debit card, which I didn't want to do, or they wanted to hold my money for 17 days before releasing Bitcoin that I purchased.
• 1:02:54
  17 days is not reasonable.
• 1:02:56
  And I don't want to do business that way.
• 1:02:58
  you know, like normally you send a check and a bank may hold that that money for like two days,
• 1:03:05
  something like that. And they're going to grab that float for a couple of days and make sure
• 1:03:09
  it clears. OK, fine. I understand that. I don't love it, but it's reasonable.
• 1:03:12
  70 days to me is not reasonable. And I actually sent them an email and they responded quickly
• 1:03:17
  and politely. And they said, yeah, look, if you use our app regularly, then we'll reduce the
• 1:03:23
  the whole time. And I'm like, okay, look, I, you know, I'm in Bitcoin beach for two weeks. I'm not
• 1:03:29
  waiting 17 days to have access to my Bitcoin and you're being unreasonable and I'm not going to
• 1:03:35
  play along. So I did, you know, I didn't use that. Um, it's, it's the thing I will point out that's
• 1:03:42
  important. It makes a difference if you're in Bitcoin beach for two weeks or if you live there,
• 1:03:48
  Right. So if you live in a place where you you're using Bitcoin for purchases regularly, then you might have two or three or four of these apps and move sats around from one to the other and be accustomed to that.
• 1:04:02
  And, you know, having a delay here or there is not a big deal. If you're somewhere for two weeks and you need to work right away.
• 1:04:09
  So, you know, part of it depends on your time frame.
• 1:04:12
  It depends on, you know, some of it will also depend on whether you want an app just to make purchases or an app to buy Bitcoin and use that to make purchases.
• 1:04:24
  Different apps have different levels of functionality.
• 1:04:27
  You know, so these are these were all things I explored and and detailed, you know, in the white paper.
• 1:04:35
  Do you think there's a future in which everybody will be using Bitcoin?
• 1:04:38
  is money?
• 1:04:40
  I hope so.
• 1:04:41
  I really do.
• 1:04:42
  It just so much better than fiat And I would remind everybody you can save in dollars You can save in euros You can save in British pounds You can save in yen
• 1:04:53
  The value of your money, the purchasing power of your money is eroded every single month.
• 1:04:59
  And that's not going to stop. And I think one of the things that's really horrible about that
• 1:05:05
  is it's put normal people in a situation where they need to manage their own money.
• 1:05:13
  Um, and they, they shouldn't have to do that.
• 1:05:17
  They shouldn't have to do that.
• 1:05:18
  People should just be able to go to work, have their money deposited in their checking
• 1:05:23
  account or their savings account, and not have the value of that money eroded.
• 1:05:28
  Um, that in a just world, they don't have to become money managers when they get home
• 1:05:35
  from work, but, you know, take a look at what's happening, right?
• 1:05:40
  everybody watching this, what's happened to your rent or your grocery bill or housing prices,
• 1:05:48
  you know, or any of the things that you buy on a regular basis, it's gone up and people yell about
• 1:05:55
  higher prices. But another way to say it is the purchasing power of your fiat, of your dollar
• 1:05:59
  has collapsed. And that's not going to stop. And so, you know, you have all these people
• 1:06:06
  who all of a sudden have to figure out what do I do with my money?
• 1:06:09
  Because and, you know, it's always interesting to me when people say, oh, Bitcoin's so volatile.
• 1:06:14
  OK, well, you can either gain purchasing power irregularly with a lot of volatility or you
• 1:06:22
  can be in the safe dollar and just lose a little bit of money every month.
• 1:06:27
  Right.
• 1:06:29
  Well, not only that, but the it's funny.
• 1:06:33
  the dollars in the sale everybody not everybody i like to reference uh when money dies and
• 1:06:40
  the particularly the the section of the book where they're talking about how every paper boy
• 1:06:45
  and and bus boy was a was a speculator talking about stocks and the the amount of risks that
• 1:06:52
  people are taking these days just to stay afloat i think that's i've been observing just the the
• 1:06:59
  use case of agents since they began proliferating last fall And one of the top use cases is people trying to build agentic trading systems to trade prediction
• 1:07:11
  markets or sports betting markets to make money to escape the permanent underclass.
• 1:07:17
  And to your point, a lot of people say, I'm not going to invest in Bitcoin.
• 1:07:21
  I'm going to create this agent that trades for me on all these prediction markets.
• 1:07:25
  It's like, well, you're just taking an obscene amount of risk there.
• 1:07:28
  And unless you're a top 1% trader, which you probably aren't, you're going to lose money at the end of the day.
• 1:07:36
  Yeah, it's something I started to see about five years ago with some of my younger friends.
• 1:07:43
  They were buying zero day to expiration options, which is basically the only thing you're doing is making a leveraged bet on what a stock price does on a particular day.
• 1:07:56
  And people viewed it sort of as this free way to make 40% in a day. And, you know, I have a friend who actually works in finance, who turned $5,000 into $160,000 doing this, making these kinds of trades, and then promptly lost all of it.
• 1:08:15
  right and so and i keep seeing these stories and so now we've gone from from buying zero data
• 1:08:22
  expiration options to sports betting on call sheet and when you talk to these people what
• 1:08:29
  you realize is they view that as a way to make money and i'm thinking to myself you do not have
• 1:08:35
  better information than the people who do this for a living and the people who make these markets
• 1:08:39
  It's like there are people like I get it.
• 1:08:42
  You predicted a few NFL games correctly, but it's just long term.
• 1:08:49
  These things don't work unless, you know, you're basically Stevie Cohen and either have information you shouldn't have or just like a insanely good trader or both.
• 1:08:59
  Well, we saw this with what's the name?
• 1:09:03
  Leopold with situational awareness, like somebody who does have.
• 1:09:08
  I mean, I don't think he would ever admit this, but he's married to somebody at Anthropic
• 1:09:13
  and was at OpenAI himself.
• 1:09:16
  He knows the industry inside and out.
• 1:09:18
  He has probably more information probably in the top 0 of people with the information as it pertains to the AI industry And even he wasn able to outtrade Stevie Cohen and Citadel
• 1:09:31
  Yeah. And I think a big part of that was just the leverage. His positions were too big
• 1:09:38
  and he didn't have liquidity. Ultimately, Citadel bought him out at a giant discount. They're like,
• 1:09:44
  okay, fine, we'll take the whole book, but you're taking a giant haircut. And he had to do it
• 1:09:48
  because he was going to keep bleeding, right? He kept getting margin calls. And the reason he was
• 1:09:53
  getting margin calls was because he had to sell, right? It was a circular reference, basically,
• 1:09:59
  right? It's what George Soros would refer to as, oh God, what's, I just lost it, Marty. It was
• 1:10:08
  reflexive reflexivity right that was basically the tendency of any system to perpetuate itself
• 1:10:15
  and you do get that in finance right so so leopold had to sell that cost stock prices to drop when
• 1:10:21
  that happened he got another margin call so he had to sell more that cost stock prices to drop
• 1:10:25
  you got another margin it's it's the perfect example of what soros called reflexivity yeah
• 1:10:31
  a lot of a lot of leverage out there yeah it's uh the fourth turning fourth turning seems to be
• 1:10:40
  upon us stay frothy i think saving in bitcoin for the long term is is the the best way to
• 1:10:46
  to weather this storm be personal i agree i agree gary thank you for your time thank you for the
• 1:10:53
  white paper we're gonna link to the white paper in the show notes go read it i think uh very
• 1:10:58
  objective, but also very encouraging. It seems like what's happening in El Salvador is a great
• 1:11:05
  blueprint to take to the rest of the world. And we're getting to see it here in America with
• 1:11:11
  square terminals and things like that. I was in Birmingham, Alabama earlier this summer,
• 1:11:16
  wandered into a coffee shop, square terminal, paid in Bitcoin. It's happening. It's happening.
• 1:11:21
  Yeah, I hope so. And Marty, thank you so much. Great speaking with you again.
• 1:11:25
  I always love our conversations.
• 1:11:28
  Always a pleasure.
• 1:11:29
  Enjoy your weekend.
• 1:11:30
  Enjoy South America.
• 1:11:32
  Enjoy your travels.
• 1:11:33
  And we'll do this again at some point,
• 1:11:35
  maybe later this year, early next.
• 1:11:37
  Looking forward to that.
• 1:11:38
  Thanks, Marty.
• 1:11:39
  All right.
• 1:11:39
  Peace and love, freaks.