Chat_139 - TheGuySwann On the porch [RobbieTheFire]

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What we're seeing is the monetization of the first digital money. Every network, every bank, every token or currency you've ever used is just something in somebody else's computer where they've got a spreadsheet and they're just updating your account balance. If they turn their computer off, it's gone. If the bank. You are always, always holding counterparty risk to some central party. You're going to get screwed one way because of debts and because of inflation, or you're going to get screwed because you're just going to lose the account. Either they're going to get attacked or they're just going to decide one day that they need it more than you do. And that happens all the time. Bitcoin is the first thing where you have digital money that you can actually own. What is up, guys? [00:01:02] Speaker B: Welcome back to the show. This is Bitcoin audible. I am Guy Swan, the guy who has read more about bitcoin than anybody else. You know, I actually got to hang out with Robbie the fire a couple weeks ago. It's great to actually see him. He came in town, came into town for his porch tour and had an awesome night. Their show was hilarious. And we ended up doing a episode of run your mouth after the fact and we just kind of ranted and talked about just kind of like bitcoin big picture stuff and where we are kind of in this cycle. Also allowing me to try to talk to his audience that isn't constantly into bitcoin. Get that elevator pitch a little bit better. I think there were like a couple of things that I was like, I. I trailed off a little bit and kind of like lost my focus. But there were some things where in this that I thought. I thought I did a pretty good job of explaining. And I'm still ever trying to hone the explanation better and more succinctly and more clearly. And so I'm putting this in the feed because a for feedback. I'm curious how Yalls thoughts were on how this seemed to go and, you know, know what went well and what didn't in the explanation. And also just for people who are still new here who haven't heard the arguments and who still need convincing that bitcoin is something of value and a serious breakthrough. So hopefully, hopefully this, this short episode with Robbie and I help to paint the picture for somebody who's still fresh and just finding bitcoin audible and just finding bitcoin or, or needs that extra touch point to make it make a little bit more sense this show is brought to you by ledn. Ledn is a service that I use. They have proof of reserves. There are very few people that very few institutions that I would trust with bitcoin and luckily I can check the balances and know that that bitcoin is there. But they do bitcoin backed loans. It's a great way to if you want to avoid capital gains and you want to get access to it. 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Seriously check it out if you haven't, especially if you're a builder, this is something that you shouldn't sleep on. So check all those out. Great products and services and all stuff that I use and or follow very, very closely. All right, with that, let's go ahead and get into our conversation with Robbie the Fire. Hopefully this makes bitcoin make a little bit more sense to the people who, who need that reframe. I like to think I'm getting good at it. So we'll, we'll see. You guys be the judge. This is chat, what, 1:39 now, I think on the porch with Robbie the Fire. [00:05:45] Speaker C: What is up, everybody? Welcome to a live run your mouth podcast. [00:05:49] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. [00:05:53] Speaker C: That wasn't bad. And I'll just import other sounds. All right, Guy, sit down. [00:05:58] Speaker A: That sitcom laugh, right? [00:05:59] Speaker C: So the first question I have for you, and I do have a lot of questions, we should hang out more, but that's on me. I don't really reach out to people and you have kids, so, you know, it's what happens in life. But my first question for you is I mistakenly sold some bitcoin when it went up to about 100. So can I have some. [00:06:16] Speaker A: Sounds a bad idea. Yeah, you can go up to any exchange. You can go to river.com and you can just buy it. [00:06:24] Speaker C: It's too expensive now. It's so expensive, Guy. Why would I still buy in now? We're at all time highs. [00:06:30] Speaker A: It's just the dollar's worth less, man. [00:06:33] Speaker C: All right, that's a, that's a fair enough point. All right, so real first question I have for you is it fascinates me how much of the country has bought into centralized government control over the economy. And people seem to love the idea of essentially central planning for more U.S. manufacturing jobs. And I've taken on the idea of tariffs quite a few times on the run your mouth podcast. I've already just given over that. Listen, if you're going to threaten tariffs and you get concessions, God bless, you're gambling and winning. I can't criticize you when you win. But there are a lot of people who are just more married to and I mean, if they were consistent, they would actually be mad at Trump when he walks back the tariff policy. Because there's a lot of people that are really bought into the idea that tariffs are going to bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs and that that's important for the U.S. economy. I'm curious what the guy swan pitch is for the normies who are very bought into the idea of US Manufacturing jobs and that Lord Trump can save them and bring them back. I'm curious because I listen, I've rambled quite a bit on the Run your Mouth podcast. I've made quite a bit of arguments and I feel like for everyone that bought in, they fell on deaf ears. So I'm curious what the guy swan argument is for why these people are mistaken. [00:07:57] Speaker A: It's a misunderstanding of why we lost our manufacturing is like trying to. It's not the wrong thinking, it's not entirely the wrong framing of understanding that. The reason is, is because our the price difference for, for some reason it's cheaper to import than it is to actually pay and build and manufacture things in this country. But it's actually referred to as the Trifon dilemma. It's because we have the world reserve currency. It's because nobody else can print the dollar. Everybody has dollar denominated debts and so they need our currency bad enough that they will export all of their goods and services at a discount. And so the, our ability to print money and the entire rest of the world sucks it up means that it's cheaper for us to export paper than it is to actually build shit. Tariffs are like a bad, it's like a really bad way of trying to correct that imbalance, but it's not actually going to work. It's just going to end up costing us more on, on the domestic side of trying to get those, the goods from overseas you can't fix. It's like you've got liver cancer and you're like taking a pill to try to deal with a side effect. It's like you're still fucked. You're not actually solving the problem. We actually don't want the world reserve currency. It completely guts our economy. It's fucking terrible. And we've seen it since basically the 70s after we fully went off the gold standard. Like we've just completely gutted all of the manufacturing, all of the actual productive base. And we've, it's even worse. We've actually created a culture where people don't even fucking like to work. So like if you're trying to force it back into the economy, you're going to get the worst of both worlds. But yeah, it's like it a tariffs in other words a band aid on a bad on a gunshot wound. [00:09:59] Speaker C: So I'm just gonna add to what you're saying or translate a little bit what I think I'm hearing. The fact that we are the world reserve currency is what kind of allows us to run all of our social programming because we have Endless ability to essentially have people lend us money or that they want to basically hold dollars, and then we can inflate away their wealth, and not just American wealth, which is what allows us to have a large military, allows us to have large entitlement programs. And all of these things are basically social programs. And so now what you're coming forward with to try and solve that is essentially more socialism to just create jobs. And so, and just so people who like that, what's the problem with that? If we're already fully socialized and so, for example, we have all these entitlement programs and that's not going away, and we have all this large military, why isn't this at least better? Because it allows people to have jobs. [00:10:59] Speaker A: I don't think it will really allow. [00:11:00] Speaker B: People to have jobs. [00:11:01] Speaker A: I think it will just increase cost. Like you can't. Again, like if you've got liver cancer, like you. All you can do is cover up the side effect. But you're still just, you're, you're still going to have the underlying problem. Like, maybe in the short term it actually starts, it attempts to balance it back out, but I don't think in the long term it actually makes any fundamental difference. The problem is that our current, our paper, our fake paper points are too valuable around the rest of the world. And because of that, we're just gutting our economy. And we've already got something. We've already got a situation where what the Federal Reserve says, like what the central bank does and what the government does, actually has more, actually matters more in the economy than all of the actual real things that we do. We've reached the point of fiscal dominance. What the government decides about what they're going to spend has more effect on the economy than any decision to actually do a real thing. [00:12:00] Speaker C: I've talked about this a bunch, and just to once again translate the way I'm hearing it, it's like instead of going out and trying to figure out what's a good business that will create value to the marketplace, there's quicker profits of essentially figuring out what the government will fund or what the government will spend money on. So, like, for example, instead of trying to innovate new ways to process gas, this was more in the Biden administration, but it's just an easy example. Instead of trying to figure out efficient ways to process gasoline, it might be quicker profits for me to build a windmill. Even though it doesn't actually help the market, or like in the news environment, instead of telling truth and honesty, it's how do I do propaganda that will essentially be funded by the government, which might come through pharmaceutical dollars or basically manufacturing government, you know, military spending. But it's essentially like, where. Where can I have a business that's downwind from where the Fed wants to spend money more than it is products and services that actually create value in the marketplace? [00:13:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So, like, simple way to like, picture it is you've got like, 10 people in an economy, and nine of them are doing all the jobs right. You specialize. Somebody's building the car, somebody's getting the food, somebody's getting the water, somebody's building the houses, and then there's a 10th guy, and all he does is literally print money. And what actually ends up happening is that everybody technically just works for that guy because he gets the car, he gets the house, he gets the food. He doesn't actually contribute. Like, if he's printing money as opposed to trading for money, then he is the master and everybody else is a slave. And the thing is, is that what happens is that, you know, every time he prints money to buy something, he just. All he does is outbid everybody who actually did work. So the people who made, you know, enough food in order to buy the house, maybe it's like, oh, I'm gonna buy a. I'm gonna spend $100,000 on this house. Well, obviously, the guy who prints $120,000 out of thin air can just bid up the price and buy it from them. And so he gets the house. And. And here's the funny thing, is that now the dude who bought. Who actually built the house has $120,000, but he can't buy it back for 120. He has to bid up. So the motherfucker who actually built the house can't afford a house. And, like, what ends up happening is that people realize that, okay, well, I just made all this food and now I can't afford a house. Now I'm actually renting a fucking room out of the house of the guy who. Who literally is just printing money, like, not doing shit. And slowly some people start to realize that, like, this is a waste of time. I should just figure out what the guy who prints money wants. Like, oh, he wants a yacht. Well, I'll just stop making food for these other eight people, and I'll just start building yachts. And so every slowly but surely, the entire economy starts to move toward him. And the portion of the economy that's actually doing things and is the ones actually funding all of it. Gets smaller and smaller. But the benefit of having the world reserve currency is that you've got 50 other people who live in other countries that you're stealing the resources from. So the other five people who are getting don't feel it quite so much. So the, the scam goes on for a lot longer. But what ends up happening is locally in your economy, three people work for the, for the dude who's printing money. Then four people, then five people, then six people, then seven people. And then suddenly you don't actually have anybody doing anything of any meaning everybody's just working for the counterfeit class and we're importing all of the shit to keep the thing running from 50 other countries that are just. All of Brazil just makes coffee for the US that's all they do. They don't grow shit else. They just, they, we give them a big ass loan and we say you're going to make us coffee. [00:15:44] Speaker B: Coffee. [00:15:45] Speaker A: And so we just import all of our shit. Like this thing like you know, Dave Smith joke, this shit's made in China, I didn't check, but it's made in China. And like that, that's literally we gut, we got everything because we end up coalescing around the counterfeit class. That has nothing to do with the actual market. And the bigger and bigger it gets and the more and more we print, the more fucked we are. And like the tariff is like, oh well we should stop importing. Well, it's just going to make everything more costly. But we're still going to be working for the counterfeit class because they're not going to stop printing money. So it doesn't fix anything. It just makes it hurt in a different way. [00:16:19] Speaker C: So you might have just answered this question, but it kind of your speaking prods this in my mind is I've wondered what is the difference the economy between. I call it real capital versus fake capital. So real capital is kind of, let's say I go out and I, I, let's just go with the purest example. I plant a bunch of apple trees. Ten years later, after all that labor I did, I'm harvesting apples and I go ahead and I sell those apples. So to me, the money that I make from those apples is real capital. I did labor and for that labor I've earned money. That money that I have is now capital that I can try and put forward to a new investment that I might be able to sell a new good and service. So in my head real capital is you did something that actually generated wealth which was you traded app your labors which created apples for money. Real capital, fake capital is government just comes along and basically as you described, counterfeits money. Where for example a bank with fractional reserve banking, someone puts in $10, now they're able to lend out 90. So that to me is fake capital because it's not. There was no labor or like actual activity that represents the earnings. It's just money that was just created. So I pose it back to you. What is like the difference to an economy between kind of the earned capital of something that in my head, I don't know if this is economically accurate, but what I just see is real capital versus just money that's printed by the government. [00:17:56] Speaker A: Well, it makes the money not mean anything because the money itself is not of any use. Like the money is just a record keeping system. Like it's just keeping track of who did what. Like if I make, you know, if I go like get my, my setup and I like make sandwiches for people and every single time I do it I put you know, $4 of input and I sell the sandwich for five bucks and I have $1 left over. Well, if I literally just go through and I just make a shit ton of sandwiches and I'm just feeding people and at the end of, let's say a year, I have $100,000 in savings because I have deferred my consumption of sandwiches. I've decided like, okay, I'm going to make food for other people and I'm not going to eat myself. That $100,000 is a record of what I have put in into the economy and a proof of work that says please pay it back. It's a promise from the economy that says we will honor the fact that you have worked your fucking ass off for us. And you can eat too, because we'll give you back those resources. So it only actually means anything if it's attached to real capital. If it's not, it just means you're cooking the books. Like it just means you're cheating the record keeping system. Like if somebody prints themselves $100,000, everybody thinks it means, oh well, clearly he's fed 100,000 people. No he didn't. He just cheated. He cooked the books and now he gets to eat 100,000 sandwiches. But he didn't actually do anything for anybody. So like when you think about it, it's funny because you can actually against real simple analogies for like why it matters for money to actually be stable in supply. Because value, value is not only subjective but it's all about measuring scarcity. You know, if you have like a point system where you have like 10 chairs in your house and you're trying to allocate, okay, how many chairs should I have in this or chairs at this place, right? You're selling tickets. Well, if you only have 50 chairs and you sell 70 tickets, like you have a problem because you're selling chairs that don't exist. You've literally counterfeited 20 tokens. And you said, oh look, you can even point to it. It's like, look at all this great economic activity. Everything's. The velocity of money is way better. Aggregate demand is super good. It's like, bitch, you're selling shit that doesn't exist. And it's funny because you actually have. This is, it explains the boom and bust cycle. Like, people don't realize how simple this concept is. It's just that it's stretched out over such a long span of time because you have agreements and plans that take four years to work out, 10 years to actually work out. Imagine you had a bank and everybody is parking their car at the bank. If the bank is loaning out cars or loaning out car keys and people are making plans based on the car keys, obviously you need the bank, the garage at the bank to actually have the cars. Now what if they realize that not everybody's taking their car out at the same time, right? Like a lot of people park it for most of the time. So maybe, maybe we can counterfeit like 50% extra keys and like slowly push those out and people will still come and get cars. But as long as not everybody gets the cars at the exact same time, it's fine. And it gives this appearance. The politicians get to point at numbers. Look how many people are driving around in cars. Look how many plans. Look, look at this. They've booked vacations for this summer. They've made, put out a rental because of all the sold rentals out in the, at the beachfront properties. The restaurant has hired two new people. And then everybody's making these plans for next year, the year out, the year after that. And everybody's going to go on vacations, they're going to take trips, they're going to drive around, they're going to, they're expecting to be able to commute to work. And then at some point after this builds up over and over and over again, suddenly you realize at some point there's, there's one car missing and then there's another car missing. And then they're like, oh, Shit, I got to get my car out of the bank. And so they pull their car out of the bank and now you're, you're leveraged even worse. Like, and this cascades and suddenly you get to a point where all this, all this demand, like, oh man, we had a 20% growth, we had 30% growth. Look at all the activity that happened with all the vacations and shit. But now they're having to cancel vacations. Now suddenly 30% of the rentals that were planning on having someone travel there don't have cars. And so they're all having to shut down. And suddenly prices are collapsing. And the restaurant that thought they were going to have a whole shit ton of business because of all the planned rentals, they're having to fire two people. Even worse because they just put up a whole bunch of capital in order to hire two new people. They have to fire a third person because they thought they were going to get paid back on their investment. And the investment never actually existed. The capital wasn't there. There weren't enough fucking cars to get people where they wanted to go. The bank was lying. And craziest of all is the bank is giving out these keys as a loan. Which means that everybody who rented a car, who got car keys from the bank for cars that didn't exist, owe it to the bank now. The bank fucked them. Everybody made plans that the bank screwed them on. And then when they got screwed, they still owed the bank the car that they printed out of thin air and never existed to begin with. So the question is, why is the bank the biggest building in the city? Because they're us. It's built that way. Like. [00:23:40] Speaker C: All right, round of applause for guy explaining the economy breaking it down. 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I think their turnaround right now is like 12 hours. And I don't know why every bitcoin company doesn't do this. Everybody who's at least holding bitcoin for other people. But they do a proof of reserves so that you can confirm that your balance is there. And something that made me really happy recently is they just cut their Ethereum loans, they cut their yield product, they cut their non custody loans at lower rates. And so they now offer one simple hyper focus thing, custodied, secure, easy bitcoin backed loans. Use someone with a good track record who's done over $10 billion in loans available in over 100 countries. They do proof of reserves and they've made it through the toughest times in the market without having a single problem. There's no credit check, there's no hassle. [00:25:33] Speaker B: It's simple. [00:25:34] Speaker A: This is why Leden IO exists. Get the value of your Bitcoin without. [00:25:39] Speaker B: Having to sell it. [00:25:40] Speaker A: Remember to read up on how the collateral works. They're really good at reaching out and making sure that everything stays balanced. Remember that Bitcoin is volatile so do not overextend if you know how to use it. This could be a huge benefit to your bitcoin stack and give you optionality in accessing Fiat without it being that selling bitcoin is your only option. I've been a very happy customer. Check them out. The link and details are in the description. [00:26:04] Speaker C: All right. One of the things that's nice about podcasts is that sometimes you can not understand things and then you get experts on and you can ask them and you can learn live on air. So I had one day where I was binging through some George Reisman who I like to quite a bit and I was curious what his take was for why US has lost manufacturing over the years. And I somewhat. And by the way you can skip this question because I might not have even understood what he was saying well enough to even pose the question, but I just didn't. I read like four or five articles like I think I understand this but I was like I gotta reread all this but I'm think I'm just wondering if maybe you can explain to me what I think I understood. And amidst the picture of why we've lost manufacturing in this country is there's what you're describing of basically faulty signals because of the Fed. And then there's also the inflation, which means that we can't pay as well as other countries because they haven't inflated at the same rate. So essentially there's an issue of inflation. But what he was describing also is that there was an improper usage of capital and that because there's like, faulty signals of basically overconsumption in the market, instead of like, factories or manufacturers essentially saving capital to then, like, invest in larger projects of what might actually value, be of value in the marketplace, they're essentially using their capital for, like, current manufacturing on goods based off of, like, the faulty signals of what current consumption is. So essentially, like, we were basically just eroding our capital because of the faulty signals of, like, current consumption. [00:27:52] Speaker A: I'm not sure who this person is, but that's, that's correct. So, like, what, what I think he's, he's getting at is that you hear this, you hear this shit from government all the time that, like, consumption, if we, if we increase debt, we can grow our way out of our problem. Like, well, what they're doing is they're measuring quote, unquote growth with gdp. But GDP is measured in nominal dollars. So if you print dollars to increase gdp, you're going to increase the fucking gdp. Like, but it doesn't mean that things got better. Like, you, you literally, it's like, like you've literally devalued the thing that measures the progress in order to make it appear as if you have more progress. So, like, a good example is literally you screw with the inches on your tape measure to be smaller. Like, okay, well, we're going to squeeze more inches into this same length of tape measure, and then we're going to measure our house again. And our house grew by 10%. No, you killed 10% of your inches, and now you're just measuring with a crappier measuring stick. But it's the same house. We live in the same house. And so what you have when what he's talking about with, like, prioritizing current consumption, like, the Federal Reserve works by controlling the interest rate. It's a price control. Like, we know price controls don't work. Like, anybody with three solid brain cells and has even tried even Keynesian economics generally, outside of asking what a politician, like a politician what to do, or somebody who's in a regime that's going to say it's like, oh, well, but. [00:29:34] Speaker B: Sometimes you have to just print a ton of Money. [00:29:37] Speaker A: Otherwise they'll tell you, yeah, price controls don't work. You even learned that in the fucking textbook. Price controls don't work. If you get. If, if the price of the sustainable price of making bread is a dollar and you put price controls on it at 75 cents, what do you have? Bread disappears, you increase the demand. Whole bunch of people are buying up bread and there's not enough capital to actually reproduce that bread. And so you get empty shelves. Well, what happens if you manipulate the interest rate below the actual price? Well, the interesting thing about the interest rate is the interest rate isn't a good that exists right now. It's about the decision to use the good today so that it's not around for tomorrow. So the actual, the imbalance occurs by giving the appearance that we're really rich today. We're going to eat a whole bunch today, but we're not actually going to save anything for later. And then we're going to be a whole. It's just a hell of a lot hungrier at some point in the future. So an example is that, you know, you have a farmer and he plants a harvest and he harvests everything that's everything that's viable and sells it. And the harvest is, you know, it's like 20% yield or something. It's like, okay, it was pretty successful. Ooh. Well, he's also got a shit ton of seed and we could actually bump that 20% up to 25% if we just sold the seed as, like, bird food and fucking cashews and like, snacks and stuff. And then we'll bump 5% of our consumption and it will look like everything's way better. But guess what? We ain't got nothing to plant for next year. And that is literally what we have done over and over and over again. And we have sucked the resources from the rest of the world. Like I mentioned, it's called the Trifon dilemma. The Trifon dilemma is that because we are the world reserve currency and other people, the rest of the world has denominated most of the debt in dollars. If we don't run a deficit, if we do not print more money every single year, the demand for them to have more dollars so that they don't default, they have to pay interest, they have to pay their debts. If they don't, all that happens is that we increase the difference. They're not going to default. What they're going to do is they're just going to lower their prices. So the less we print money and the More they want to survive and don't have an economic collapse. They just sell for a discount again and again and again. So no matter what we do, because they have denominated debt in a currency that we print every single time we try to rebalance it. Tariffs are a great example, is that we're going to try to balance things out and we're going to try to. All it's going to do is they're just going to discount further. They're going to desperately do everything that they can so that they don't default because they owe obligations. [00:32:39] Speaker C: Is there more money owed to the US than we owe out based off of people that have lent money basically to the US government through Treasuries? [00:32:47] Speaker A: Wonder what the full. I would wonder what that. But you think about it like the treasury though, like we print again, we can just, we could just keep printing. So we like, we, we print in. [00:32:57] Speaker C: Order to pay our quote obligations. You're saying we're in other words, so we kind of. [00:33:04] Speaker A: The whole number. [00:33:05] Speaker C: So like in other words we got the advantage that we can inflate out of it, whereas everyone else almost has to like deflate to keep up, which is a losing game. [00:33:13] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:13] Speaker C: Okay. So just to change gears away from tariffs, you know, basically what we're describing is just essentially credit asset bubbles and the boom bust cycle of that. As government spends money in sectors, it inflates the prices because it pushes the prices up because it artificially boost demand. At some point government theoretically shouldn't have the resources to keep contributing new money to any specific sector. And then you all of a sudden realize like any Ponzi scheme, oh, there isn't new demand for this and the price starts coming down. We are currently, after all the years of the shenanigans and apparently a process of the Fed doing quantitative easing stock markets at all time highs. That was the newest news today is that we literally hit new highs. [00:33:59] Speaker A: So always will. [00:34:01] Speaker C: Yeah. So my question for you is why with all of this knowledge of the boom and bust cycle are we at current highs? Like how was that? How is it possible that we haven't kind of seen a pullback since basically the Great Recession in 08, during the. [00:34:18] Speaker A: Collapse of the Reichmark in the Weimar Republic in the 20 late teens. [00:34:27] Speaker B: The. [00:34:28] Speaker A: Everybody thought they were getting rich at first, everybody in equities and stuff. And there's actually a really interesting segment. I can't remember what book it is. I read it on the show because I saved it. But it was a fascinating thing because it literally could have described today is everybody was getting in the stock market. Everybody's a trader. Everybody thinks they're super good at finance. And because I got in the stock market and my stock stock went up, I did a video very recently where I just tracked the. And I was, I, I literally had to pay 20 to actually get the historical information. This. I was pissed. Like, what the. But I took the stock market s P500 from like, like 1903 or some, like right when it started and tracked it over the entire period. And then I tracked the M2 money supply, which they actually stopped measuring recently because people were getting. The Federal Reserve was starting to get embarrassed because people were realizing that you actually have to track it against the money supply or you don't know what's going on. But of course, they just casually just stop reporting that number. But for the entire time, the M2 money supply measurement, the best we have for how much money is in circulation. If you make that the 0 just did this in a numbers chart. If you just make it so that you're, you're whatever your 7%, 10% annual increase in the money supply, and you make that your 0 and you chart the stock market over it. It just does this. [00:35:58] Speaker C: It just mirrors it. [00:35:59] Speaker A: It doesn't do shit. Doesn't do anything. All it does is respond first to the money printer, because when they print the money, they loan it to banks or they create it through the banks, it ends up in the hands of a bunch of giant fucking corporations. And then because their stock goes up by 4 or 5%, we're like, oh, my God, it's making a fucking return. And we stick all our retirements in it. So they get all our money too, and then they loan against it and buy back their own stock. So they're just the hedge. The entire money printing scheme is a massive subsidy for all of us to put our savings into a bunch of corporations. Corporate entities that we don't even like for no reason at all, just to make the 5 or 6% return that keeps us at zero for what we can actually retire on. [00:36:50] Speaker C: Heavy. I, I, I, I, I, you know, I'm not. [00:36:54] Speaker A: It is literally a Ponzi scheme. It's literally a Ponzi scheme and you can't taper a pon. [00:37:01] Speaker C: Right. That one I'm gonna have to re. Listen to because I don't remember enough about the M2 money supply. All right, shifting gears here. I keep hearing about countries flirting with having a bitcoin reserve. I'm curious if you can give us I guess the bullish scenario that you see at the moment for bitcoin. And what does that mean for bitcoin? If countries are starting to firstly, are they able to use a bitcoin reserve? Or does that just mean basically money's a zero sum game and government's basically admitting that bitcoin's a better currency. And so if they want to use it as reserve to somehow back their currency against the asset, they're just admitting that that's the better currency. And so it kind of, you know, really pushes forward the idea of, hey, this is the better currency than what we're working with. And so that that's why they actually need to try and bank bankroll it. I think the most recent one was India. My personal take on the US statements about it is that essentially Trump and RFK Jr and others were part of the winning coalition. And so it's the first time in my life where I'm like a part of the union essentially that we just get a free good that's actually backed by like, I'm not in the stock market, I don't own a home. [00:38:22] Speaker A: And. [00:38:23] Speaker C: And there's been a lot of assets over American history that were basically just backed by the government. And so bitcoin seems to at least at the moment, be in the preferred class of assets that they wanted. Bitcoin people on board with this administration. And so they made some good statements going the opposite direction from the Biden administration of we might hinder your ability to use this to. We're actually going to embrace it. But I'm curious because, I mean, you follow. I know that I think El Salvador was kind of the first one to go about it. Someone's got to fund those prisons. But if you could give us kind of the, give us a little bit of the storyline here of countries looking to adapt it, how widespread that is, who else is considering it and what that kind of means for Bitcoin, I. [00:39:07] Speaker A: Think it's just, it's the slow and steady, like bitcoin will be seen as a superior asset for probably quite some time before it's recognized as. And it will make more sense for them to frame it as an asset because to frame it as a money puts it in question as to whether or not it's competing with their currency. And they don't want that. What they want is something like gold, which is not very threatening to them because you can't really settle anything in gold. Gold isn't going to provide like actual sound monetary. It's not going to it's not going to put a check. You can't withdraw enough gold to like pull the rug out from underneath the fractional reserve banking system. Like the globally. Even with like jewelry and stuff, there's like maybe like $900 billion worth of gold settlement between like countries and corporations. And, and you're looking at Forex settles like 2.4 quadrillion, like 2,400 trillion literally back and forth all year long. And then Fedwire is like another 1.3 on top of that. So like gold's ability to actually provide sound money as like a reflection again, it needs to be the other side of the transaction is basically it's, it's such a. Like if you actually map out the bubbles, you almost can't see it. It looks like a little, like just a tiny little dot that doesn't even play in the game. And bitcoin, believe it or not, is actually at about $4 trillion worth of settlement. Well, the interesting thing is that it can actually scale from a trust perspective because the more people who actually get involved with it and the more people who are mining and the more people who are participating in the system, the more secure it gets because it gets more and more difficult to get all of the parties. Like again, it's just more decentralized and there's more players. The more players, the less agreement you have. The less agreement you have, the more likely nothing is ever going to change and there's nothing you can do about it. So what ends up happening when you have like a good be monetized? The thing that ends up being the money and has always been throughout history, whether you're looking at glass beads, where you're looking at like the cooler ring and the shells, if you're looking at the monetary metals, like no matter, no matter where you go, it always ends up being the good that is in that one particular area that does the best. When it becomes valuable, when it becomes something that's more valuable than its face value for whatever you were going to use it for. The question is, does the innovation, does the ability for everybody to want more of it create more? Or is it too difficult to make? Like, is it that thing that stands up to all of our technological innovation, that stands up of all of our desires to produce alchemy? I mean like, alchemy is like a legend. Like it's like its own mythology because everybody desperately wanted to make more gold because it was so fucking valuable. And in fact like 90% of the premium is entirely monetary premium. If we just Went back to being jewelry and like, used for electronics, it'd be worth less than copper. Like, the only reason it's worth as much as it is is because everybody fucking wanted it. And nobody could make any more of it. It was still so hard to make. Bitcoin is 21 million. After we started most of our communication over digital lines, and most of our trades were settled in debts and just over. Over the electronic signal, over radio, over the Internet. Well, gold can't settle anything in that. Gold is no better than a point system in the, In a bank because it's still just held somewhere by some dude who you're just trusting that it, a, that it even exists, and B, that it's going to move because you sent a radio signal to somebody in California and nothing's going to fucking happen. It's going to stay right where it is. And so if that guy says you don't own it, you probably just don't own it. And bitcoin is the first thing. It's the first time we've actually, probably in about 200 years we've actually had something that can actually maintain a monetary assurance and be settled immediately with anybody else anywhere in the world. That is like, it's hard to explain how fundamental of a breakthrough that is when you look at the history of money. Like, just take, take the idea that you can put 12 words in your head and memorize the seed phrase for a bitcoin balance, for $2 billion in bitcoin, and you can walk naked across any border on earth and you still have all of your money. Take that one piece of information, go back to 1920 and drop that into the world, and all of history looks totally fucking different. Like, completely different. Nazi Germany does not happen the way Nazi Germany happened. Every government, every. The world wars are all about controlling capital. If you can move billions of dollars in and out of a country and nobody has a clue, none of that stuff happens the way that it happens. Regimes fall like that, massive banking imbalances and debt bubbles fall. When one person with, with, you know, $10 billion, who gets a little bit of itchy about it, like, oh, shit, this is looking bad. And, and they withdraw, the whole thing falls down because you can actually check, you actually have the monetary assurance to call their bluff. If it's all debt, nobody can withdraw, you can't withdraw a debt. You're just moving the debt from one bank to another bank. There's nothing, nothing is actually there underneath any of it. So what we're seeing is the monetization of the first digital money. Like money has never been digital before. Every, every network, every bank, every token or currency you've ever used is just something in somebody else's computer where they've got a spreadsheet and they're just updating your account balance, but they have a master key. They can do whatever they want. They can prevent you from having access. You don't have it. If, if they turn their computer off, it's gone. And if they ever they. A whole shit ton of people in Iran just found out like a couple days ago, three major banks, three of the biggest banks in the country got hacked and everything just got deleted. Like years of history, account balances, like it's all gone. It was all meaningless. If the bank you were always, always holding counterparty risk to some central party that is either going to get, you're going to get screwed one way because of debts and because of inflation, or you're going to get screwed because you're just going to lose the account. Because they're going to, either they're going to get attacked or they're just going to decide one day that they need it more than you do. And that happens all the time. Bitcoin is the first thing where you have digital money that you can actually own. The bank could be completely deleted. I don't care. Doesn't bother me a bit. I own my keys. The system is redundant. Hundreds of thousands of computers all around the world. I run a version of it in my house. If all the other ones disappeared, they could still just boot back up and connect to me and get the most recent history. It would still just be there. As long as one computer exists, we can reboot the whole thing, just bring it all back online. There is no other digital system that can actually pull that off. And when you actually own a piece of that and you own one of 21 million, nobody's going to be able to make any more bitcoin because it's just a system of rules. It's like, it's like chess. Like if somebody just decided that the queen could move four spaces forward and three spaces right and do like some zigzag thing, like you just wouldn't be playing chess with him anymore. Like you decide your rules for chess. That's how bitcoin works. It's a little bit like the second amendment, right? Is that I have my self defense. But collectively, if we all decide to defend ourselves somehow the whole country is now safe. I decide my rules. And then collectively, why would anybody. Sure, okay, make your own version of chess and go play off theirs. It's like, if I go to the store And I've got $5 worth of change because I spend $5, I give him a 10. He says, well, you only get three back. And I was like, why? He's like, well, because my math is special and you only get $3 back. He's like, well, I'm just not going to come here ever again. Like, you're fucking retarded. You know, like, that's basically the fundamentals of, like, how the rules and how the network are established. And when it comes to governments, like, they're just realizing that this is a real asset. They're realizing that it's not a toy and it's meaningful. It's got a long enough history that they're going to start buying it, but they're not going to pose it as a currency because that looks threatening. That looks like that's our game. But they don't even have a currency, really. They have points on a spreadsheet somewhere. And I think on a long enough timeline, it's just, again, you can't print any more of it. So as demand goes up, it just becomes more valuable. And every other currency in the world is going to be printed every other one. The dollar is better. It's the best of a giant pile of turds that it gets printed by the trillions, but everything else gets printed more and has a less network. And Bitcoin is just going to keep going up in value when it comes to the dollar. [00:48:54] Speaker C: All right, let me hit you with one last question. [00:48:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:56] Speaker C: All right, this is. I'm totally off topic, but Donald Trump has a significant dislike for Thomas Massie at the moment. He's already gearing up for a $1 million ad spend in. In Kentucky against Thomas Massie. [00:49:16] Speaker A: And obviously, I hope it's like a huge disaster, and that would be. [00:49:19] Speaker C: All right. Well, I was going to say, what is your prediction? Do you think Donald Trump goes all out in trying to de platform Massey campaigns down there, spends a lot of money and manages to outseat him? Or do you think Thomas Massie rises victorious against Donald Trump and then just earns way more Internet fame? Who do you think is winning this fight? What's your prediction? [00:49:40] Speaker A: I kind of think Thomas Massie. [00:49:42] Speaker C: I hope you're right. [00:49:43] Speaker A: I think Massey. [00:49:44] Speaker C: There you go. [00:49:45] Speaker A: Massey's got more attention. Massey's got more attention for this. And like, everybody who was so sick of all this shit and thought that, like, Trump was at least, like, Maybe a wild card that could like shake things up and was actually going to do something about the budget because he was so hawkish about it for so long. Everybody's like, what are you doing? Like, you just like. I mean, I've seen so many. I've seen memes from all of the people in my circles who are Trump supporters of that thing. It's like, oh, we're going to lower the budget. Well, how are you going to do that? We're going to raise the budget. And like, that's what everybody's thinking. And like Thomas Massie is the only one that actually held the line. Like, Thomas Massey's just like he's exploded. I think, I think, I think Trump is actually doing the wrong thing. He's, he's stranding. I think he's just going to make Thomas Massey. [00:50:34] Speaker C: There you go. Hey everyone. Thank you so much for hanging out. That's a lot worse. [00:50:42] Speaker B: All right, guys, hope you enjoyed that episode. You should definitely check out Robbie the Fire and I'll have a link to his stuff so that if you're, if he actually does his porch tour in your area this coming year, like, keep an eye out for that. [00:50:55] Speaker A: And I'll try to be better about. [00:50:57] Speaker B: Getting the word out beforehand because there are actually a couple people in the area. Like, dude, I would have gone. So stay tuned on that. Robbie is. Robbie kills me. He's absolutely hilarious. And his Run the Mouse podcast. [00:51:14] Speaker C: Super. [00:51:14] Speaker B: Entertaining and ridiculous in every, in every amazing way. And of course check him out on Dave Smith's part of the problem podcast. And yeah, I'll have, I'll have links. [00:51:26] Speaker A: To all that stuff. [00:51:27] Speaker B: I'm still trying to purple pill him, trying to get him on Noster so that you guys can zap him. And when I do, I'm gonna, I'm zap him like a whole bunch. We're gonna like really make him feel stupid for not getting over there sooner. I'm gonna keep working on it, so. So give me time. A shout out to our sponsors, Leden for Bitcoin backed loans as well as the HRF and their financial freedom report. And the news, this is the place for the news on how governments, corporations and institutions are encroaching upon financial freedom and sovereignty and importantly, the tools and technologies to protect it all around the world. Then pubkey and their stack, their protocol stack, they're redesigning the web for sovereignty and control at the user level. And lastly, Gitchroma co. These guys are all about light, health and getting your hormones back in balance. And making lights for designed for humans. You have a 10% discount for that as well. Check all of them out. Seriously, some great stuff. As well as a link, I have a River referral link because river is where I buy bitcoin now, and I highly recommend them. They're. They're, I think, the most sound and boring company for buying bitcoin. And that's. That's what I love about them. [00:52:44] Speaker A: They're not a sponsor. [00:52:45] Speaker B: I just, if you're recommending, I. I try to put services that people are looking for that they just like, if you're looking for a resource to do this or buy bitcoin or learn about it or whatever, I. I just want to have a bunch of options for things that. That help people out. Help people out. That's what, that's what the show's for. So thank you guys for checking out the sponsors and for using my links. It helps me out. You know, if you can leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Google Pocket, whatever their. Their Play Store or whatever it is, that would be a huge help. It really brings attention to the show. And, you know, I'll see you guys over there. Shout out to the audio knots. [00:53:26] Speaker A: Love you guys. [00:53:27] Speaker B: Got a couple new new members to the gang. And yeah, don't forget, forget to subscribe. [00:53:34] Speaker A: Share this out with everybody, you know, who wants to know something about bitcoin, because that's what we got. [00:53:39] Speaker B: We know all the things. We talk about all the things. And I'm Guy Swan and until next time, everybody take it easy. Guys. Sam.